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BEATEN PATHS;

OR,

A WOMAN'S VACATION

BY

ELLA W. THOMPSON.

*' It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there Is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it, as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation. Let diaries, therefore, be brought into use."

Bacon's Essays.

" But then, alas ! they've read an awful deal.

now shall we plan that all be fresh and new,

Important matter, yet attractive too ? "

Faust.

BOSTON: LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS.

NEW YORK:

LEE, SHEPARD AND DILLINGHAM.

1874.

Entered, accordingr to Act of Confess, in the year 1874,

By lee and SHEPARD,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

BTEBEOTYPED AT THB BOSTON BTEUEOTYTE FOXmDBT,

19 Spring Lane.

T4^

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATEl>

TO

MARY E. BLAIR

{-8t. Urtul*"),

WHOSE WISE FORETHOUGHT AND TENDER CARE

MADE THE JOURNEY HEREIN DESCRIBED

A TREASURE OF DELIGHT;

AND TO

THE FIVE OTHER PILGRIMS

FROM " THE ROSE-BUD GARDEN OF GIRLS,"

WHO FILLED IT WITH LAUGHTER

AND SONG.

ivi637777

Digitized by the Internet Archive'

in 2008 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/beateripathsorwomOOthomrich

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Chester 9

II. Scotland 22

III. Scotland 37

IV. From Edinburgh to London. • « • 63 V. A Walk in Westminster. • • • • 65

VI. London in Water Colors. . • . • 80

VII. Sunday in London 91

VIII. Belgium . . 104

' IX. Germany 123

X. The Rhine. . . .* . . . . 135

XL More Germany 148

XII. Switzerland. 162

XIII. Shore of Lake Leman 180

XIV. Geneva . 190

XV. Chamounix 206

XVL Paris 228

XVII. Paris 251

XVIII. Homeward Bound. . . . ' . . 267

7

BEATEN PATHS;

OR,

A WOMAN'S VACATION.

CHAPTER I.

CHESTER.

" Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

I WANT to say, to begin with, that the writer of this book is one of " the few, the imraorial few," left of her sex in America, who would rather have an India shawl any day than the suffrage ; but in dark moments, when both have seemed equally unattainable, it has occurred to her that most women's lives are passed, so to speak, in long, narrow galleries, built about with customs and conventionalities more impervious than stone. Some- times they contract to a hot little kitchen, and the owner might as well be a Vestal Virgin, and done with it, her whole life being spent in keeping up the fire ; again, like Maud Muller's, these walls " stretch away into stately halls." They may be more or less hung with pictures or padded with books, but they are walls all the same. Plenty of doors lead out of these gal- leries, but only those marked "Church," "Visits," and " Shopping," move easily on their hinges.

9

10 BEATEN PATHS, OR

Most of us, and especially those who have been nourished on the east winds of Boston, cast longing eyes at the door marked with the magical word " Europe," and it has opened freely enough when the husband said the "Open, sesame;*" it is only of late years that women have made the amazing discovery that they can say it themselves with like success, but it is well to keep the hinges well oiled, and the rubbish cleared away from the threshold. When my turn came, I felt as if I had been taken into a high mountain and been promised all the kingdoms of the earth, and had at once accepted the offer.

I joined my European fortunes, for better or worse, to six other anxious, but no longer aimless women ; seven is a fortunate and famous number, and we felt that what seven women could not do was not worth doing. We cast behind us all thought of those other seven, our prototypes in the uncomfortable times of the Bible, who all laid hold upon one man, that he might take away their reproach. We meant to have no reproaches, nor men either.

The ice once broken, the thing was so easy we won- dered we had not done it before. If you know how to read and write, you can easily procure a passport, steamer ticket, and letter of credit ; the hackraan knows where the wharf is, if you don't, and once on bonrrl, you have only to say your prayers, and eat four meals a day, till you see land again. American women, how. ever "lone and lorn," are always entreated softly by their own countrymen ; if the latter have any amiabil- ity about them, they invariably take it with them on their travels. It is a trait peculiar to them among

A WOMAN'S VACATION H

Anglo-Saxons — one of the few things that did 7iot come over in the " Mayflower ; " the Pilgrims must have picked it np in the wilderness.

There are people who actually profess to enjoy a steamer passage to Liverpool ; I always think how un- happy they must have been before they left home. The motion of a screw-steamer is like riding a gigantic camel that has the heart disease, and you do not miss a single throb.

There is nothing to do, and too many to do it with. There are no colors so fast that salt water will not fade them ; brunettes change least ; the sharp wind only makes a brighter flame burn in their cheeks ; but it is merciless to the fair, delicate faces, whose beauty de- pends on the lighter shades of pink, blue, and yellow.

There are traditions handed down from voyage to voyage, that men have fallen in love at sea. I never saw it with my bodily eyes, nor knew any one who had ; but they must have been much undermined in sense, and just ready to take the disease before they left home. Flirtation and shabbiness do not naturally go hand in hand ; they are almost as hostile as common sense and prettiness. Cleopatra herself would have looked faded in her oldest gown, and without her ear- rings; and Antony would have ceased to be her "man of men " in a flannel shirt and an unkempt beard. In the shapeless costumes of steamer life, one may gather a faint notion of how this world will look when the latest ideas of dress reformers are carried out. Men have dressed sensibly for many years; but he must be a perfect Adonis who is absolutely handsome in a straight suit of black broadcloth. When women are

12 BEATEN PATHS, OR

reduced to the same level in black silk trousers and loose blouses, then for the sake of beauty and bright- ness lying at their last gasp, men must go back to the gay fashions of the time when old Samuel Pepys took the gold lace off his wife's wedding petticoat to trim his new suit.

One cannot help perceiving at once that these long days, homeless as orphans and briny as tears, die a much easier death at men's hands than at ours. They positively seem to wring a kind of salt comfort out of this rough, scrambling, ungloved life at sea; the taste for barbarism and old coats, latent in all of them, comes to the surface. Women never can be really happy in any condition where they lose their good looks. There was a vast amount of laughter and gayety on our steamer, but I am persuaded it was but an empty show ; we were all actors and actresses, and our real, unvarnished selves would have wandered up and down the deck like the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis, hold- ing our hands on our hearts, and speaking no word to one another.

One must be very young and very joyful, or very old and very weary, to really squeeze any juice of delight out of that greenest of lemons, a steamer pas- sage across the Atlantic.

I was not seasick — that was the woe of it! to be seasick and to get over it, is a good thing for the body, if not for the soul ; but to be ineffibly miser- able, too dizzy to read or knit, or play any game, and yet able to eat and sleep, so that no one puts faith in you, is too tedious for endurance. I know nothing to compare with it for boredom, unless it be your honeymoon when you have married for money.

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 13

At the best, it is a sort of intermecliate state between death and life, not unlike the Catholic purgatory, an uneasy and nnfra grant place, in which to repent one's sins and. make good resolutions; and the last day, when the steamer plods by the Irish coast, is like the resurrection in this, that people keep coming up whom you had utterly forgotten ; and unliJce it, in that all are happy and smile real smiles at each other, instead of the mechanical grins of mid-ocean.

I know not whether the shores of the Mersey are really picturesque, and studded with lovely villas, or whether, intoxicated by the breath of the land, I should have seen beauty in the sands of the Desert, and srrace in the humps of its camels.

Liverpool is just the doorstep of England — we only stand on it lon<x enouo^h to be let into "our old home." If you take a dock and multiply it by twenty miles, the answer is Liverpool ; but only half an hour distant lies the moss-grown, ohl, Roman city of Chester, where the sums were all done, and the slate hung up, ages ago. There is a royal road for travellers, and most Americans choose it ; they stop at the kind of hotel which our countrymen have put to- gether, out of equal parts of plate-glass and ice-water, marble pavements and supercilious waiters. They travel in first-class carriages, because they have heard that the nobility do so, and scatter money about as if they were slaves to it, and were anxious to get rid of their tyrant. All their trophies are bracelets, and laces, and silks that will stand alone. Their poor re- lations who stay at home, suppose that the gates of foreign countries are closed, except to such royal prog-

14 BEATEN PATHS, OR

resses. Armies of people, especially women, yearn all their lives to look on the cathedrals and pictures of Europe, and die without the sight, because some snob has said that there is no comfort in going abroad, unless one can spend a thousand dollars a month.

An Englishman never travels, it is said, without taking all England with him, and Americans carry nearly always a swelling desire that the greatness of their country should be distinctly seen in their .single selves ; they never can realize that England is a pocket volume, and America an encyclopaedia. It is both pos- sible and delightful to strike into other roads, in the beginning, than the broad one, where the crowd is — country roads bordered with green hedges, leading to quaint old inns that have not changed their names since Chaucer's time.

Even in these places they know how to take in strangers, for Americans are fair prey everywhere in Europe ; but you get at the old stories and customs of the place, and lay up stores for winter evenings at home — memories that will do duty when moth and rust have corrupted bracelets and laces.

To travel over Europe, thinking always of bodily comfort, is equivalent to taking rooms at the best hotel in New York for the same length of time, eating and drinking, and lounging for a steady business, and inci- dentally reading guide-books.

I said all this with firm faith in its good sense, tlien^ as I say it now — " what is true anywhere is true every- where ; " and yet it did not stand by me in the hour of need. Chester hns two or three large and gorgeous hotels, in which the American eagle can flap bis wings

A WOMAN'S VACATION', 15

as boldly as if he were at home ; but it is also rich in those ancient inns, in which all the characters of Eng- lish literature have taken their ease since the English world besran.

"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn ?" said Fal- staff; and he might have taken it, pressed down and run- ning over, where we did, in the little caravansary called ** Blossom's." It was quaint, old-fashioned, and rani- bling enough to go bodily into one of Dickens's novels, without paring off* a single feature. All sorts of wind- ing passagea led to corner cupboards and unexpected bedrooms. It should have been called nothins: less than the " Red Lion," or, better still, the "Great White Horse," where Mr. Pickwick stopped when he made " the most extraordinary mistake of his life," in get- ting into the same bedroom with the lady in the yellow curl-papers. Sam Weller sliook his head doubtfully over it, but the same thing might happen at "Blossom's " every night, with nobody to blame.

A buxom Welsh girl, in a white cap, answers your bell, instead of a waiter unhappy in a white tie and a swallow-tailed coat. The narrow hall gives a glimpse of the kitchen, with great joints and shoulders of meat hanging from the ceiling, as it did in the franklin's house, in the Canterbury Tales, where, says Chaucer, —

** It rayned of meat and drinke."

Your meals are served smoking hot, in a bright, queer little parlor up stairs, and within ten minutes of your arrival your feeling is, that you have lived there before in some previous state of existence, and have only come back to your old haunts at last. Unfortu-

16 BEATEN PATHS, OR

nately "Blossom's" is cheap, so that few Americans will ever be brought to believe in it. We thought ourselves in English clover, till we met some steamer acquaint- ances at the door of the " Grosvenor," a grand hotel, built by the Marquis of Westminster, for the spoiling of the Egyptians. It was one of the Croesus party who stood on the stairs, and said, in the true Croesus tone, which makes one's blood run backward on the instant, —

"Are you quite sure you are comfortable? 'Blos- som's' is so very dingy and unprepossessing, on the outside at least."

We were well fortified with all the reasons herein mentioned for choosing an English inn, rather than a transplanted American hotel ; but we must have been more or less than Americans if this bit of deprecating patronage had not found a chink in our armor.

We w^ere not strong-minded enough to bear the thought of Mr. Croesus supposing that we chose " Blos- som's " out of poverty, for are we not all taught from our cradles that poverty is the unpardonable sin? This sort of patronage pricks sharply at first, but one learns to expect it in one's travelling countrymen as surely as beggars in Ireland, or fleas in Italy. We soon after filed into a second-class car, under fire of the Croesus party, and when we had time to take stock of our feelings, were surprised to find so few killed and wounded.

Another form of it is the absolute conviction of each party of travellers, that they, and none other, have made the perfect tour. If you have been through Scotland without visiting the Trosachs, you have made the grand mistake of your life ; or if you have studied the Trosachs, and passed Glasgow by on the other side,

A WOMAN* S VACATIOJSr. 17

the result is the same ; it is one of those rare rules that work both ways with perfect smoothness.

Chester is a "well of English undefiled;" the walls built by the Romans, when its name was Castra (camps), have been constantly kept up and restored, and now clasp the waist of the city with a red stone girdle, two miles round. They are from twelve to forty feet high, crossing over the streets on archej;, and form a broad, even* footpath, from which to gaze into all the faces of Chester.

They were built first in A. D. 61, and a daughter of Alfred the Great once mended some rents in them, which must have wofuUy used up her pocket-money. On one of the towers Charles I. stood, to watch the defeat of one of his armies^ and I suppose that solemn, haunting face of his grew even longer and peakeder than Vandyke paints it. Tliese red walls are odd and picturesque in their way ; but were Chester and her walls to be set down bodily on American soil, a new army of Irishmen and pickaxes would shortly encamp round about her, and leave not one stone upon another. The railroad has breached them, but in the olden time there were only four gates, defended by certain great lords and their followers.

The River Dee flows lazily by the city, as if loath to leave it, the same Dee which flows sorrowfully through that little song of Kingsley's : —

*' O Mary, call the cattle home, Across the sands of Dee."

The river gives a good gift to Chester in the way of salmon, and the cook at " Blossom's" folded each piece in a bit of white paper, to keep the juice in while she 2

18 BEATEN PATHS, OR,

broiled it. It is odd to peck one's breakfast out of a paper bundle, but in no other way can one reach all the possibilities contained in salmon.

The houses in many old streets, called " The Rows,'* thrust out the second story from ten to twenty feet^ and rest it on pillars, as if^ after some sudden shock (perhaps the defeat of Charles I. under the walls), they had proposed to go outside and see about it, and after malving the first step had thought better of it, and staid where they were.

The covered ways, thus secured, are excellent loafing places in a rainy climate. On one of the oldest houses, with figures of ancient saints bulging out of the front, is the inscription, " God's providence is mine inherit- ance." The population havp an easy, leisurely way of taking life, as if they had all some sort of an inherit- ance, and it would be all the same a hundred years hence whether this generation bestirred itself or not. Small boys in Chester, as in other parts of England, wear tall beaver hats, sometimes with a band of crape about them, which gives to the American eye an ab- surd intimation that they have lost their first wives.

The cathedral of Chester is a good one to begin with, since it is the oldest and plainest in England. It is about to be restored in its own style, but new stones will rather take away than add to the satisfying beauty that now clothes its broken arches. The abbey at- tached to it once embraced great tracts of fertile coun- try and many good houses, which paid tithes of mint and cumin to the fat abbots, till the time of Henry VIII. Monks knew how to be comfortable, as well as other sinful souls.

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 19

" The friars of Fail Gat never owre bard eggs or owre liard kale, For tliey made their eggs thin wi' butter And their kale thick wi' bread. And the friars of Fail, they made good kale , On Fridays, when they fasted. They never wanted gear enough As lang as their neighbors' lasted."

They served the Lord right cheerfully in CIi ester, eat- ing salmon on fast days, till the bluff king fell in love with Anne Boleyn, and trampled the Catholic Church and her monks under his feet, in order to marry her.

When the monks were driven out of their soft places, • and all the days were fast-days, they must have been good Christians, indeed, if they did not couple "anath- ema maranatha" with the woman's name who was at the bottom of it. They must have borne with great fortitude the news of her beheadino:.

The wood carvinsfs in the cathedral are more curious than beautiful. It certainly does not assist devotion to have one end of your pew guarded by an astonished griffin, and the other by a cowled monk, or to look up to a pulpit carved all over with such heads as usually confine themselves to dreams and masquerades. It is as if the old carvers had interpreted literally the com- mand that the gospel was to be preached to every crea- ture, dragons and all.

Two curious epitaphs caught my eyes in wandering about the cloisters. One praised a certain Frederick Philipse, citizen of the province of New York, a faith- ful subject of the king, who fled to England in the "late rebellion." As he died in 1783, it proved to be, not the late unpleasantness, which we call "the rebel-

20 BEATEN PATHS, OR

lion," but that earlier scrimmage which success made into a revolution.

There are many little phrases cut into the enduring English stone, touching American affairs, which force the traveller to set his thoughts back on the dial-plate of time for a hundred years or more.

A "cheap stone" sets forth that Dean Arderne, of the cathedral of Chester, " did give and bequeath all his money to the church from which he drew it (tho' he loved his family), wishing the clergy to con- sider whether it were not a sort of sacrilege to divert all their money from the church to relatives who were not needy." It would tend to edification if they had put up another "cheap stone," to tell what the rela- tives thought about it, and whether it had ever con- vinced any rich priest that blood is not thicker than water, e'en though it be holy water.

Most of the monkish lands and treasures have fallen to the share of the Marquis of Westminster, who seems to have outgrown the curse that used to attach to church lands in the hands of the laity. .i He has a park and country seat called Eaton Hall, near Chester, which is one of the show-houses of Eng- land. We could see onlv the outside, as it was under- going repairs at the rate of ten thousand pounds a week. The park is only thirty-six miles round, and has four churches within its limits. I did not hear whether the marquis went to church four times a Sun- day. The park is dotted with great oak trees, whose thickness puts likelihood at once into that old story of Charles H. being hid in an oak, unseen, while his pur- suers took counsel beneath it. American oaks would

A WOMAN'S VACAT/02V. 21

keep no man a secret. Groups of deer feed all about the park in all peace and calmness, securely fenced in by the game laws. All Chester and its visitors diive and walk freely in this estate, which is really a joint- stock affair, and possibly pays better interest to a stran- ger in a single visit, than to its owner in all his life.

The favorite vehicle on a Sunday afternoon seems to be a sort of two-wheeled cart, with timber enough in it to make half a dozen buggies, and two seats, back to back. Any number of children, from three to six years old, cling about the back seat, and nothing less than a special Providence, or an Act of Parliament, keeps them from flying off like sparks from a hot wheel.

Chester is the grand "meet" for the mighty hunters of all the country side. A certain Lord Grosvenor, brother of the marquis, is Nimrod himself; he hunts every week-day, and looks at his horses on Sunday.

1 forgot to say, what cannot be said too often of Eng- lish ways, that the first thing to do on landing is to marry an umbrella, and never to separate from it on any incompatibility whatever. Nature waters her English plants whenever she happens to think of it, without the least calculation as to when she did it last, and they repay her bounty with an intense greenness and thick luxuriance, as if every separate leaf had its own polishing. Chester is in sight of the Welsh mountains, and many of its inhabitants are buried un- der Welsh epitaphs, without a vowel in them.

The commonest name on the street signs is "Wil- liams," which has no root out of Wales. If the old Welsh saying be true, that "the way of the Williamses is always towards their duty," Chester must be a very steady-going place.

22 BEATEN PATHS. OR

CHAPTER 11.

SCOTLAND.

"Up with the bonnie blue bonnet, The dirk and feather and a' 1 "

IF one visits Scotland at all, it is well to do it early in one's tour, before the mind is jaded, and the pockets emptied, by the magnificent vanities of the continent.

The journey is easily made in a day from Chester to Edinburgh, passing the border at Gretna Green, the famous place for runaway marriages.

This sleepy little village looks innocent enough now, but it has had far more than its share of the tragedy and comedy of the world. The old blacksmith, who tied so many hard knots for distressed lovers, is long since dead and gone where he will do no more of that work, and the sweet old flavor of romance clinging about a stolen marriage is well nigh gone too. The world has grown so practical, that to marry for love, and nothing else, is become simply ridiculous.

The English country strikes one like a well-ordered room, swept and garnished, and everything put away. There seems nothing for future babies to do, but to

A WOMAiV'S VACATION. 23

lean on their hoe-handles and admire the industry of their forefathers, and all the laborers that we observed in the fields had even now begun to do it, with one accord.

The yellow broom plant {jylaiita genista^ tlie sign of the Phintagenets) brightens all the fields. After pass- ing the border, the country grows rougher; a New Hampshire woman begins to feel herself at home, but the foreiorn feelino: comes back when she sees the moors and hill-sides darkening under vast purple shadows, which prove to be heather.

Who first saw the resemblance of Edinburgh to Athens was, doubtless, a good Scotchman ; but the man who evolved, from his inner consciousness, its likeness to Boston, must have been a Bostonian of the most exalted patriotism, and. deserves a statue in the State House yard.

Edinburgh is a city set on a hill, and is so entirely a part of that hill, that it is difficult to believe that men's hands had anything to do with the beginning of it; the first impression of the "Castle" must be that it grew out of the ground, and a naked troop of Picts and Scots, seeking what they might devour, found it and took possession.

One of the guide-books says that Edinburgh may be "c?on6"in a day; that guide-book must have been written by the man who thought he could have made a better world than this in less than a week. Amer- icans draw their character and strong points so largely from the Scotch, that it behooves them to linger long and lovingly on its soil. Princes Street is well named ; the monuments of Scott and Burns keep guard at

24 BEATEN PATHS, OR

either end, and fine houses, fit for princes, line all the way.

If God made the country, and man made the town, they worked togetlier- in Edinburgh ; the great hills clasp it like arms; the air in summer is "coldly-sunny," with a flavor of mountains in it, and early in the morn- ing one is waked by the "sweet jargoning" of birds, as if each one were telling his dreams.

The first sunset walk tends naturally to the Calton Hill, the "Acropolis" of Edinburgh, dedicated to dead Scotchmen ; the Parthenon, designed in imitation of the Greek temple of that name, and in honor of those who fell at Waterloo, began and ended with one row of Corinthian pillars, " a monument of Scotland's pride and poverty;" but an iron fence marks out the space which was to have been enclosed by the temple. After all, one may count himself fortunate if, in failure, he can forever show to people what he had meant to do.

From the Calton Hill one gets the finest view of " Auld Reekie," or the clouds of smoke hanging over it, which christened it by that name.

In the valley under " Arthur's Seat" lies the old city, and the palace of Holyrood, with its familiar towers, which appear in the background of the best portrait of Queen Mary. The old Scotch gentry might as well have lived on ladders, for they built their houses four- teen or fifteen stories in height. Yet, according to their history, they were no nearer Heaven than their de- scendants. The hio^hest of these old towers have been taken down for safely, but nine and ten stories are still common. The dark alleys between them are well called " Closes."

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 25

Ev^y thing in Edinburgh reminds you of Sir Wal- ter Scott. He is the petted son of his country, whose will is still law, and that country might well be spelled Scott-land since his death. The fine drive around Arthur's Seat was built because it was his favorite haunt; he pays tribute to it in the seventh chapter of the Heart of Mid Lothian. The sun never set 60 beautifully to him as from the base of Salisbury Crags.

Nichol Muschat's Cairn, the place of lonely horror where Jeanie Deans met her sister's betrayer, has been reached and surrounded by cottages and gardens. It is just a pile of stones to mark the place of any deed of violence. One of the worst of old Scotch curses was, "May you have a caiin for your grave." To see it in the midst of rural peaceful life, stiikes one gro- tesquely, like locks of hair or any other souvenir of an old love kept for show on a centre-table.

Jeanie Deans's cottage is still a comfortable house. One looks for Dumbiedikes tumbling down the hill on his stiff-necked pony, and for the moment one is oddly conscious of living and walking iu a book instead of this present busy life.

What one sees at Holyrood is more curious and moth-eaten than beautiful. Mary Stewart was but poorly lodged in her palace; any gentlewoman (»f these latter days is better provided with space and light. The narrow winding stairs in the towers of Holyrood give a faint notion of the dark and tortuous ways of her court. It must have been very close quarters in the little supper room for Mary and her favorites, be- fore two or three of her lords, led by Darnley, her

26 BEATEN PATHS, OR

husband, stole up the winding stairs and killed ♦Rizzio while clinging to her robe. Mary's admirers protest that Rizzio was not her lover, but had found grace in her eyes, because he was a good Catholic and a better fiddler. He was dragged across the chamber and the hall of reception, and leCt all night in his blood at the head of the staircase. When the deed was done, Mary dried her eyes and said, "I will now study re- venge ; " but she put up a partition, cutting oflf a third of the hall to hide the spot on the floor.

It was odd that those of us who had long been famil- iar with Queen Mary's sorrows saw distinctly the stain of Rizzio's blood, while those who heard the story for the first time could not see it at all.

It is but barren travelling over places that men liave made famous, if one brings no m.emories to clothe them withal ; but when the old story and the reality come together, they fit like pieces of armor, joint to joint.

Mary's mirror was scarce larger than her face, but she needed no flattery that she did not find in the eyes of her courtiers.

The portraits of Scottish kings are shown by the dozen at Holyrood, kings in the dark ages, who not only never had a portrait, but many of them never existed at all, outside the brain of the Scottish chron- icler. The kingdom fell into ill luck, and the Stewart line at the same time, when Maijory Bruce married her handsome subject, Robert Stewart. When the news of Mary Stewart's birth was brought' to her father in old Linlithgow Castle, after a great defeat of his army, he turned his face to the wail and groaned,

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 27

"The kingdom came wkh a lass, and it will go with a lass."

The chapel of Holyrood, roofless and crumbling, is more lovely in its decay than it ever could have been in its early days. The stone remains where Mary knelt at her raaniage with Lord Darnley, whom she called, at first sight, "the handsomest long man she had ever seen."

It is one long climb from Holyrood to the Cistle, which must have been intended by nature solely as a nest for eagles. On the way, one walks over a square stone in the pavement, which marks the place of the old " Tolbooth," or prison of the city. It was called the " Heart of Mid Lothian," and its massive door is built into the wall of Abbotsford. The Castle has never been taken except by treachery. A young man, taught by love, had found a way to climb over the wall to see the keeper's daughter (" of course there was a woman in it"), and he showed the path to thirty others, who surprised and took the Castle. It was the custom of Scottish queens to retire to the Castle, when expecting the birth of their children ; and here, in a little room not eight feet across at the longest, w\as born James VI. of Scotland and I. of England. The chronicle of the time tells what happened next.

The young prince was ushered into the world be- tween nine and ten in the morning. Darnley cnme about two in the afternoon to see mother and child. "My lord," said Mary, "God has given us a son." Partially uncovering the infant's face, she added a pro- test that it was his, and no other man's son. Then turning to an English gentleman present, she said,

28 BEATEN PATHS, OR

"This is the son who, I hope, shall first unite Scotland and England." He replied, "Why, madam, shall he succeed before your majesty and his father?" "Alas!" answered Mary. "His father has broken to me," allud- ing to his joining the murderous conspiracy against Rizzio. "Sweet madam," said Darnley, "is this the promise that you made, that you would forget and for- give all?" "I have forgiven all," said the queen, "but will never forget. What if Fawdonside's (one of the conspirators) pistol had shot? ^ (She had felt the cold steel on her bosom.) What would have become of the child and me both?" "Madam," said Darnley, "these things are past." "Then," said the queen, "let them go!" And so ended this singular conversation.

On the wall of this little room is a prayer that no one had greater need to offer than the beautiful queen : —

" Lord Jesu Christ that crounit was with Thornse, Preserve the birth, quhais Badgie heir is borne, And send his sonne successione to reign stille Lord in this real me, if tliat it be thy will. Als grant, O Lord, quhat ever of his proceed, Be to thy Honer and Praise. Sobied."

I think there never was a woman from whom so much " proceeded " that was not to the "Honer and Praise " of God.

In the outer room is her portrait, painted in her teens, about the time she became Dauphiness of France, and before craft or misfortune had marred her face. It satisfies one's ideal of the woman whose love- liness melted even the heart of her executioner, so that he wished to kiss her hand before he did his horrible

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 29

office. Her portraits vary in everything except the arched eyebrows; but this one is said to be genuine.

Scott has drawn her picture in the Abbot with the pencil of a lover. " That brow, so truly open and regal — those eyebrows, so regularly graceful, which yet were saved from the charge of regular insipidity by the beautiful effect of the hazel eyes, w^hich they overarched, and which seem to utter a thousand his- tories— the nose with all its Grecian precision of out- line— the mouth, so sweetly formed, as if designed to speak nothing but what was delightful to hear — the dimpled chin — the stately swan-like neck, form a countenance the like of which we know not to have existed in any other character."

The Scottish crown jewels are but a modest show of gold and precious stones, but so dear to the Scottish heart, that for many years after the union of the two kingdoms they were hidden away, by the cunning of women, sometimes in the cellar of a church, and oftener in a double-bottomed bed, lest the English should car- ry them off.

They lay for a hundred years in a dusty old oaken chest in the Castle, where they were discovered by Sir Walter Scott at last, and shown without fee, by his advice. Lockhart tells, in his life, how^ his loyal soul was stirred in its depths when the old regalia came again to light. The sceptre was last used when James united Scotland and England, and the English chan- cellor laid it down with the scornful Scotch proverb, "There's an end of an auld sang."

Scottish history is rich in brave women, as they were rich in brave sons. It was a noble Countess of Buchan

30 BEATEN PATHS, OR

who claimed her husband's right, in his absence, to crown Robert Bruce, for which high crime and mis- demeanor she was hung up in an iron cage outside the walls of Stirling Gastle ; but nothing of that kind ever kills a woman. She lived to see Robert Bruce enjoy his own again, in spite of lier enemies and his.

In the Royal Institution is Jenny Geddes's stool, the identical one which she threw at the head of the prelate in St. Giles's Cljurch, when he tried to read the collect.

"(7oZ/c, said ye? The deil colic the wame [stomach] of ye! Would ye read mass at my ear?" This was the signal for the final uprising of the Scotch against the Established church, which the English were trying to force upon them.

Near the stool is the plain box of a pulpit from St. Giles's Church, in which John Knox used to preach so vigorously, that '-he was like to ding the pulpit ia splinters, and ^qq out of it."

In the same room is the "Maiden," the Scottish guillotine, in which a sharpened wedge-like stone, attached to a cord, serves for an axe. This stone was wet with the blood of Montrose, and of many solemn " Covenanters."

Tiie " Covenant," which never could have existed out of Scotland, was laid on a tombstone in Grey Friars churchyard to be signed, and many used their own blood for ink. It was a true sign of the blood shed like water which was to follow.

The Edinburgh mob has always been a fierce one, with a deadly grasp on its rights. One of the charac- ters in the Heart of Mid Lothian expresses its feeling.

A WOMAN'S VACATION.' 31

"When we had a king and a chancellor and parlia- ment, men of onr ain, we could e'en peeble them with stanes, when they were na good bairns — but naebody's naits can reach the length of Lunnon."

The hanging of Porteous in the Grassmarket by tlie Edinburgh mob so enraged Queen Caroline of England, when she heard of it, that she threatened to make Scot- land a hunting-ground.

The famous Duke of Argyle, dear to Scottish hearts, replied with a deep bow, that in that case he must take leave of her majesty and go down into his own coun- try, to get his hounds ready. It was the same Duke of Argyle who befiiended Jeanie Deans.

No one has seen Edinburgh truly who does not drive through the Canongate, the once aristocratic street of the city, built up by the nobility, when the Stewarts were in their glory. Everything was done there that makes Scotland classic. It is now crowded with the poorest of the poor, and full of ancient and fish-like smells. To Scott, it was full of ghosts, and he chal- lenged every one to stand and deliver his story. Lockhart says that "no funeral hearse crept slower up the Canongate than Scott's landau."

John Knox's house stands there still, full of gables and diamond-paned windows. The inscriptiofi over the door is, "Lufe-God-abafe-al-and-yi-nychbor-as-yi- self." One thinks of him in his black cap, striding out of that house, boiling with righteous wrath, to preach against the " Monstrous Regimen of Women." Many men, since his time, have wasted their breath in that vain crusade, and to less puipose. When Queen Mary sent for him, hoping to moderate his zeal against her

32 BEATEN PATHS, OR

by the sight of her charms, if he had the spirit of a man in him, he " knocked so hard against the bejiutiful queen's heart, that she often wept bitterly." He had the spirit of God in him, over whicli her blandish- ments had no power; but the "Monstrous Regimen of Women " hath continued unto this present, and the end of it is not yet.

A noble feature of Edinburgh is its ancient charity schools, called hospitals. Chief of these is "Ileriot's," for the children of the city ; and so well has it been mannged by the magistrates as trustees, that the fund now supports a great number oT" free schools all over the city, as well as the hospital itself

George Heriot was the famous goldsmith of James I.'s time, whom Scott puts bodily into the Fortunes of Nigel. James I. asked him what was the use of laying up money when he had no heirs, and he replied that he could never lack heirs while there were orphan children in Edinburgh.

Another of these hospitals prcrvides generously, as our guide expressed it, for "poor gentlemen's sons through no fault of their own."

I suppose no man would ever be the son of a poor gentleman through any fault of his own.

The*" National Gallery" is just large enough to give pleasure without fatigue. It is enough of a good thing; another picture would crowd it. The crown of it is a portrait of Mrs. Grahame by Gainsborough, pure and proud enough to have only the blue Douglas blood in her veins. It proves that all women are not born free and equal, if men are.

The quarrel and reconciliation of Oberon and Titania,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 33

by Sir N'oel Paton, the Scotch painter, who cannot be enticed away from Edinburgh by any bribe, are pic- tures to hang themselves in every memory, as well as two fair-haired girls, by Grcuze, intensely kissable, like all faces of his painting. In a picture of Francesca da Kimini and her lover, reading the book which tempted them, is a kiss that makes one's cheek warm and thrill for sympathy. The jealous husband creeping into the background is a blemish, suggesting sin, when in the picture and in the story there is, so far as it goes, noth- ing but innocence.

Ary Schoeffer has painted the afterclap of this pic- ture, as Dante saw these same lovers floating always together through his Inferno, and Francesca tells liini that —

**A sorrow's crown of sorrow is reraembering happier things."

A wise man said it, and perhaps it is true ; but it seems to me it would be a greater sorrow yet never to have had any happy'things to remember. An agony is better than emptiness.

In this gallery is the only authentic portrait of Burns, with the soft but brilliant black eyes, melting and fiery at once, which distinguished his otherwise ordinary face.

Burns is perhaps dearer to the Scottish heart than even Scott, on the principle of mothei-s always loving the wayward son best.

"That is Robert Burns, the poet," said the custodian of the gallery to me ; " perhaps you have heard of him ?"

" It seems to me I have seen the name before," I said. " Was he anything but a poet ? " 3

34 BEATEN PATHS, OR

" T should think that was enough for one man," he replied, and left me with scorn in his eyes.

Can it be possible that most of the Americans whom he meets in that gallery liave not heard of Robert Burns? That was my painful inference.

In every place where a portrait can hang in Edin- burgh you find the face of that James who joined England and Scotland in an unwilling marriage, after a long and stormy courtship. Nothing but royal blood could possibly excuse the uncouth face and awkward figure of this only son of a beautiful mother. His legs were so weak that he could not stand at seven years of age, and through life he was alwnys leaning on men's shoulders. If he had not been a king, no shoul- der would have consented to hold him up. The de- scendant of warriors, he must needs pad himself with a dress so thickly quilted as to be dagger proof, and he trembled at a drawn sword. His mind was thoroughly cultivated, but to so little purpose that Sully called him the "wisest fool in Europe." The Stewarts were great in love, in war, and in beauty, but the most un- lucky race that ever reigned. Of them all, James I. had good fortune, and nothing else.

To walk the streets of Edinburgh reading the signs, is like turning over the pages of the Waverley novels. Some great names have come wofully down in the world, such as Robert Bruce, Plasterer, John Knox, Baker, or James Stewart, Mercer. I praised the city to one of the Stewarts, and he said, " Yes, a fine city, with mighty little money in it. 'A penniless lass with a long pedigree." "

No one should turn his back on the "Land o' Cakes"

V

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 35

^imont tasting the porridge and oat cake that make the pvmcipal food of the country people. One must be born toSihe cakes to like them. They taste and look most like 1)he dry yeast cakes that we use at home for sraising brea^ It comes naturally to the Scotch tongue pbki'ildge in the plural, as "they are too ill take a few porridge." Another Scotch of mailnalade, which couM not be more feu<l liad been stirred into it. Johnson defined oatmeal as a kind of strain horseXi^i fingtrhid and men in Scotland. An old Scotch nqblei^an Kgreed to it, and asked where one could find such horses or such men. Sydney Smith said, many years Hgi, that it took a surgical operation to get a joke intXa^ Scotchman's head; and not until a recent anniversa^j^ of Scott's birth did it occur to a Scotchman to say th^he must have meant an English joke. If a wit tljro\vte down the gauntlet to Scotland, he had better keep Lis portcullis down and his drawbridge up f6reverntQ|^, for the enemy is slow, but sure. A diet of '^oatmeal, through all the ages, must sharpen both the\^ose and temper of a nation. The Scotch would alvvays rather fight than eat, and oatmeal is at the bottom of it.

** O, thus it was they loved them dear, And sought how to requite 'em ; And having no friends left hut they, They did resolve to fight *em."

After reading Hawthorne's exhaustive description of the Burns's country and relics, there is not much use in going over the journey, except to say that you have

36 BEATEN PATHS, OR

been there, and as Chesterfield told his son, " you can say that just as well without going."

The excursion to the Trosachs (bristled country) may be made from Edinburgh and return in a day, but it is too hasty for comfort. The shortest time con- sistent with enjoyment is three days. The Trosachs were almost an unknown country until Scott planted his verses all over it.

If you have but a few days to give to Scotland, Edinburgh deserves them all. If you want to get at the heart of a country, you will find it most surely in its capital city. Alexander Smith, the Scotch poet, whose youth promised so much more than his matu- rity performed, describes Edinburgh «a8 a lover his mistress.

"It is a reposeful place, because it has done enough. Its distinction has not to be created or kept up. It is an education in itself. Its beauty refines one like being in love. It is perennial, like a play of Shakspeare's : * Nothing can stale its infinite variety.' London is the stomach of the empire, Edinburgh its subtle and far- darting brain. It is a Weimar without its Goethe, a Boston without its nasal twang."

In our last Scotch twilight, which, in the month of June, lasts until ten o'clock, we walk down Princes Street and say " more last words " to Scott's monu- ment, which looks as if the lovely fretted spire of some Gothic church had been lifted off the roof and placed over his statue.

If ever we find a year lying about loose, in our lives, with no work laid out for it, we will spend it in Edin- burgh, and educate ourselves up to oatmeal.

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 87

CHAPTER III.

SCOTLAND.

"Up the craggy mountain,

And down the mossy glen, We canna gang a milking For Charlie and his men."

" Then view St. David's ruined pile, And home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair."

AT the " George Inn," in Melrose, the landlady, who must have been the sweetest of Scotch las- sies in her youth, gives one such a welcome as in our country we keep for relatives who are rich and child- less. It may be set down in the bill, but it is worth the money.

Abbotsford is three or four miles away, on a well- travelled road. Every reader of Lockhart's Life of Scott, in seven volumes, has helped to build this " ro- mance in stone," at least with sympathy. One has al- most seen Sir Walter, wlien one has seen the house that he built out of his own head. Looking only at the house, what a head it must have been! The place has fallen at last to Mary Monica IIoj)e-Scott, a great-

38 BEATEN PATHS, OR

granddaughter of Scott, through that daughter Sophia, who married Lockhart. And this is the end of that fine Scott family which Sir Walter hoped to found, with a yearning that was like a thirst for intensity ! — a family that should " cock up its beaver" at Abbots- ford forever and ever, in memory of him.

Miss Hope-Scott must be more Hope than Scott, since she wishes to shut up the place, and keep it wholly to herself. She is the unwilling keeper of the sacred "Black Stone " in this Mecca of tourists, and goes away in disgust to Edinburgh when the travelling season begins.

Visitors are admitted through a back gate and nar- row stairs, which belittle the approach to the house, and give an unfortunate first impression of its beauty.

Mr. Hope-Scott added a wing for the use of his own family, thus yielding up to Sir Walter's pilgrims all the rooms in which he had lived and written.

The highest interest hangs about the plain little stuc\y, with a gallery and a little staircase, down which he used to steal from his bedroom, after he had " sim- mered " his chapters in his head during the hours of dawn.

It was this habit of severe morning labor which en- abled him to keep up the Waverley mystery so many years ; his visitors, whose name was legion, could not believe that the man whom they saw nearly all day and evening was the writer of two or three novels a year.

An Oxford scholar even wrote a book to prove that the "Great Unknown" was really Sir Walter Scott, and no other. He also proved, 1 think, that Oxford

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 39

scholars have more time on theh* hands than they know what to do with, then as now.

Sir Walter was bred to Scottish law, and wrote little before he was thirty. In his office of sheriff he scoured Scottish country thoroughly. These were the years in which, as one of his old friends expressed it, " he was niakin' himseP." He said of his profession what Slen- der said of his intimacy with Mistress Anne Page: "There was no great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to decrease it on further acquaint- ance;" but it gave him the habit of steady application, which is a power of itself in the world, whether genius is tacked to it or not.

In this study, full of "small old volumes, dark with tarnished gold," the best of the Waverley novels were written ; and here the last clothes that he wore, and his walking-sticks, are kept; a little tower-room leading out of it contains only a bronze cast of his head, t;iken after death — a two-storied brain-house, with a swell front and deep-set windows.

The study opens into the show-library — not a work- ing-room at all, but rich in carving, and statues, and things curious as well as beautiful, in which its own- er delighted.

A hollow table, glass-covered, holds the gold snuff- boxes and jewelled daggers and miniatures, sent to Scott by other famous people.

Here is the furniture presented to him by George IV., first snob in Europe, whom his loyal spirit must needs reverence, because he was an anointed king. ,

In the drawing-room are portraits of that comfort- able old lady, Sir Walter's mother, who does not ap-

40 BEATEN PATHS, OR

pear to have been the source of her son's genius, and of his wife, a handsome, but dissatisfied-looking woman. Lockhart says no more about her in the *^ Life " than he can help saying ; but no one expects a very glowing description, from any author, of his mother-in-law. Some of the journals kept by her visitors call her " an insignificant little French woman;" but the journal of her husband, kept through many of his best years, shows that he loved her heartily while she lived, and mourned her sorrowfully when she died. A woman may be said to have a successful career if she pleases her hus- band all her life ; she would be more than mortal if she satisfied his friends.

Scott fell in love, in his youth, with a lady of higher rank than his own, like Quentin Durward and others •of his heroes, but, unlike them, he was soon and bit- terly disappointed. He took it bravely, as he took all outrageous blows of fortune, and said of himself long after, '' Broken-hearted for two years, my heart hand- somely pieced again, but the crack will remain till my dying day."

I think no woman deserved to be called " insignifi- cant" who could " handsomely piece " a heart like his. It was scornfully said, too, that she loved to be called Lady Scott; but there are few women so strong-minded that a title would not lay a flattering unction to their souls.

The famous picture of Queen Mary's head, after exe- cution, painted by one Cawood, hangs in the drawing- room, and has a weird, sorrowful beauty about it, but it is so toned down as to have nothing ghastly to the eyes, like the head of John the Baptist, passed round

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 41

in platters, in so many pictures. The dining-room is only shown to visitors when Miss Hope-Scott is away. It is hung with family portraits; one of a lovely cousin, called the "Flower of Yarrow," and another of Beardie Scott, an ancestor, who wouhl never cut his beard after Charles I. was beheaded. It was a queer old fashion to wear long hair for mourning. Scott had his bed moved into this room in bis last days, that he might listen to the ripple of the beloved Tweed, which flowed gently past the windows.

He had drank deep o/ riches, and honor, and wisdom, but his last words to Lockhart were, " Be good, my dear."

The walls of Abbotsford are lined inside and out with quaint reminders of Scotch history and heroism — the money-box of Queen Mary, which could never have had much money in it, in the best of her fortunes; the purse of Rob Roy, that had a pistol in the clasp ; and many old suits of armor, which bear the dent of good English blows, the sort that the Scotch were ever fond of. A bust of Wordsworth refines the hall, which would otherwise be all Scotch. It is told of Scotti that when he visited that brother poet at Rydal Mount, he was forced to slip away privately, at least once a day, to some secluded inn, where he sustained bis inner man with more substantial food than sufiiced for Words- worth's necessities.

" He still went on refining,

When others thought of dining."

Among the other old iron in the hall at Abbotsford is the " branks," a sort of iron bridle, with a gag,

42 BEATEN PATHS, OR

which used to be fitted to the heads of incorrigible scolds, while they were led through the streets. A chivalrous old gentleman, who had joined our party, held up this rusty bit of old tyranny.

"Time changes all things," he said; "w^omen never scold now."

"No," said his degenerate son; "they only have viewsP

The guide huriied each party through the rooms at railroad speed, rattling off the story of each faster than a monk ever told his beads. Abbotsford saw much good company in its short day; half England, and all Scotland, came to visit the most noted man of the age ; but it was never lighted, and its utmost beauty brought out from top to bottom, except once, when a ball was given to celebrate the marriage of the oldest son. Even then, the battalion of misfortunes was gathering, to break upon Sir Walter from every side, and no man ever took arms more bravely in a sea of troubles.

Carlyle says, with his savage truthfulness, which cuts deeper than any lie, that "the works of Sir Walter Scott amused the world, but did nothing to amend it." He himself smiled at his own " big, bow-wow style," as he called it ; but he put into his life all the conscience and sin)ple earnestness that were lacking in his books. When the publishing firm of which he was a member failed, he took all its debts, of more than half a mil- lion of dollars, and in four years coined two thirds of it out of his brain for the patient creditors, who had faith in him. He fought one of the great battles of peace, such as no man fought before or since, and deserved to

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 43

wear the title that Napoleon gave to Marshal Ney after the Russian campaign, " the bravest of the brave." He died in harness, dictating imaginary conversation for new heroes, after his faithful brain had failed him. He had the old-fashioned virtue of loyalty to church and state, and could never be brought to believe that all men are born free and equal ; but he did certainly amend this world by living honestly and nobly in it all his days. He is buried in Dryburgh Abbey, in St. Mary's aisle, a ruin live or six miles irom Melrose, in a direction opposite to Abbotsford. It is beautiful for situation, with just roof enough left to cover the few graves that have privilege there.

Sir Walter lies between his wife and his eldest son, second and hist baronet of the name, that well beloved son, six feet and four inches high, officer in a splendid hussar regiment, who was to found a long line of hon- orable Scotts, and on whose probable children Abbots- ford was settled on his marriage.

These "probable children," like many others men- tioned in aristocratic deeds and settlements, never ex- isted, except on paper; and the only remaining son died unmarried.

The childless wife of the elder son is still living, but never comes to Abbotsford, having no claim upon it, since she failed to provide an owner. The heathen wives of India, when they lack children, prostrate themselves before the idol of Life and Death, and be- seech him continually, with flowers and baths of holy water, to grant their desire. One tall image of Shiva, near Calcutta, has been nearly washed away by the devotion of women. I suppose their rich and titled

44 BEATEN PATHS, OR

sisters in Great Britain have often prayed like them, with tears and groanings that could not be uttered, for the " blessing of the poor." I cannot imagine a more gnawing pain for a woman, both good and proud, than to see an old title and a splendid inheritance pass to some fjir-away cousin, because Heaven has denied her children.

The bare walls of one or two rooms in old Dryburgh remain standing, the chapel and refectory; and a great rose window hung with ivy, more lovely in its last es- tate than when it bloomed with stained glass, and cast many-colored reflections in red, and yellow, and purple on the shaven crowns of the monks.

The dungeon for restive brethren, who must some- times have been bored to death with paternosters and fasting, is shown, with the holes for forcing in their hands. It is to be hoped that the ingenious brother who contrived this mode of torture had a chance to try it for himself before he left this sinful world. A modern story hangs like another cobweb to the wall of this dungeon. A young woman, who bore traces of great beauty, inhabited it for several years, coming out only at night in search of food. She had made a vow never to look upon the sun, and was found dead in her cell at last. No one knew whence she came, or what had turned her head ; but the worthy souls who kept her from starving thought that she had a disappoint- ment. "Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love," said one who knew whereof he spoke ; but he never meant it to apply to women.

They show you at Dryburgh a yew tree, seven hun- dred years old, which must remember the monks when

A WOMAN'S VACATION, \ 45

they were seeing their better days ; it keeps their secrets well, and if the guide had said it was seven thou- sand years old, I know not how we could have dis- puted him.

The village of Melrose clusters closely about its own abbey, which would be absolutely perfect as a ruin but for the remaining wall of a Presbyterian church, which w\is built within it.

The old Catholic images of the Virgin and St. Brid- get have just noses enough lefl to turn up at this dese- cration. The stout heart of Robert Bruce is buried there, and what there was lefl of the Black Douglas, after all his raids, as well as the whole body of Michael Scott, —

"A wizard of such dreaded fame, That when in Salamanca's cave Him listed his magic wand to wave. The bells would ring in Notre Dame.*

In the Lay of the Last Minstrel, William of Delo- raine is sent to open this same grave at midnight, and to take away the magical book which had taught the wizard all his tricks. Some old carvings, crumbling fast into dust, are still called by Catholic names, and remind us dimly of that pious King David of Scotland, sometimes called St. David, who endowed Melrose, and many other religious houses, so generously, that he was called "a sore saint for the crown." Nothin": remains of him but a broken head or two, high up on the arches of the abbey. He had far better, for his fame, have written psalms, like the king he was named for; a poem outlasts many temples.

46 . BEATEN PATHS, OR

A graveyard surrounds the old walls, where Scott's faithful old servants are buried; one of them — Tom Purdy by name — did so outrage his patience, that he made up his mind to send him away. *

"I am afraid, Tom, that we must part," said Sir Walter, at last.

"Where is your honor thinking of going?" an- swered Tom, with such utter trust, that his master re- pented himself, and kept him twenty years.

The guide remarked that the graveyard contained only modern graves, none earlier than 1620.

When we remembered that the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot on Plymouth Rock, and Boston was a howling wilderness in that year, we veiled our faces, and felt that we Americans were indeed a modern people, hav- ing no roots to speak of anywhere.

Next to Abbotsford in interest, and far beyond it in beauty, because Nature took a contract ages ago to beautify them, are the twin estates of Hawthornden and Roslyn. The traveller, who divides a day between them, hath great reward. If happily, poets were made, not born, the family of Drummond would all have been poets, by virtue of living, through a long pedigree, on the romantic estate of Hawthornden. Only one was born to it, however — Sir William Drummond, whose soul was so steeped in loyalty, that he could not even write of love, unless it were kingly love ; and when the news of the murder of Charles I. was broken suddenly to him, he died of the shock. His picturesque old house, which seems as much at home in the landscape as any tree in the park, is perched on a high rock, like a bird's nest. Over against it is a glorious old syca-

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 47

more, a tree of trees, christened the " Four Sisters," which sheltered the poet when his friend Ben Jonson walked all the way from London to visit him. Near the house there are curious caves dug out of the solid rock by men's hands, nobody knows when, in which the Bruce kept himself in hiding for three or four years at a time. It was a dear price to pay for being king, at last, of the poor realm of Scotland. His hacked and rusty old sword, four or five feet long, is still pre- eerved in the cave. There were giants in those days I The old entrance to the caves was over a well, so that an unexpected visitor got a wet welcome.

The River Esk makes a deep and precipitous ravine through the length of the estate. This was a famous retreat for Covenanters when the red-coats were after them ; and a projecting rock is shown where John Knox used to stand, and stay their souls with strong preaching.

The path to Roslyn lies through a posteni gate, up and down both sides of the ravine, sometimes running against a flight of rough 8tej)s, and again narrowing to a foot in width, the water on one side, and a sheer wall of rock, mossy and flower-flecked, on the other.

The flowers are the blue-bells of Scotland, not un- Hke our hyacinth in shape, but of the color of summer sky ; the ground is snowy in spots, with the blossom of the wild onion onlv fair to see.

The Esk is but a tame little brook in June, yet in some seasons it roars through its rocky prison to a very diflerent tune. The path is slippery with springs, and a spice of danger adds the last touch to its beauty. The Esk dances into many of Scott's verses —

48 BEATEN PATHS, OR

** Sweet are the paths, O, passing sweet! By Esk's fair stream that run. O'er airy steep, through copsewood deep, Impervious to the sun."

And when the young Lochinvar stole the fair Ellen from her father's house —

" He swam the Esk River, where ford there was none.

* They have fleet steeds that follow,' quoth young Lochinvar."

The path brings us at last to Roslyn Chapel, a feast of Gothic carving. It was built in the fifteenth cen- tury (ask the guide-book if I am not right), by an ancient St. Clair (or Sinkler, as the Scotch call it), who bet his head with the king that his dogs "Help" and " Hold " would bring down a certain white deer that had escaped the hunters many times. In the moment of another escape, he vowed to God to build a church for his glory ; and as he made this holy resolve, the dogs sprang on the deer, so that Lord Roslyn saved his head, and dainty Roslyn Chapel shows to this day what a tremendous value he set upon it. Not many heads are worth such a price! The old lords were buried beneath it, in full suits of armor, as if even in death they could not rest unless they were ready for the fighu.

The "'Prentice's Pillar," "foliage-bound," differs from all the others in being twined from base to top with a thick but delicate wreath of leaves and flowers. There is a tragical story clinging around it, like an- other vine. The master-mason who built the chapel could not understand this part of the plan sent to him from Rome, and while he journeyed thither to study it,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 49

with its author, one of his apprentices continued the work ; and on the master's return he was so filled with wrath and envy at sight of the exquisite pillar which had baffled his own skill, that he killed the boy on the spot.

Every square inch of the chapel is worthy of study, and has its own history. Much of the dainty elabo- ration seems wasted, but the masons and carvers of the middle ages did their work with equal pains- taking, whether men's eyes were ever to behold it or not.

They carved lovely wreaths and crosses, and shut them up, without a sigh, in dark cellars, or hid them behind walls, because, according to their motto, "God saw everything." How would they cross themselves with holy horror at the stucco-work and sham architec- ture of this century !

In one small cap to an archway in Roslyn Chapel are people practising the seven cardinal virtues — feed- ing the hungry, clothing the naked, cfcc, — with St. Petei* and his keys at the end, to let them all into heaven. On the reverse are examples of the seven deadly sins, with Satan coming out of a crocodile's mouth to gob- ble them up.

One would not notice this small stone treatise at all, if the guide did not point it out in the sing-song drawl invented by the father of all guides, for the torment of travellers.

It was a tradition of Roslyn, that when one of the family was about to die, the chapel appeared enveloped in flames; and Scott has woven it into his ballad of "JFair Rosabelle." 4

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Service is held in it every Sunday, though the owner lives at Dysart House, thirty miles away. There are velvet cushions for his using, and plain boards for the "great unwashed."

The chapel is kept in repair by the shilling fee ex- acted of every visitor; a perpetual shilling in the glove is the only talisman that carries one safe through the British empire. It levies a larger tax on our coun- try now than it ever could if we had remained its colony.

We ate a very small lunch for a very large price at the Roslyn Hotel, and were then told by a vampire, who had been permitted to take the shape of a man and a brother, that the railway station was "just round the corner." Now, the corner was half a mile away, and after we had turned it, the station fled be- fore us, as we devoured the way, for at least two miles more.

We missed our train, of course, and nothing but utter exhaustion prevented our instant return to the hotel, and the putting to death of that unworthy Scots- man, without benefit of clergy. We cherish the hope that we may some time meet him in Boston, when we will straightway beguile him into the purlieus of Dock Square, swear to him that Niagara Falls are "just round the corner," and there leave him, in serene confidence that he will never find his way out in this life.

Good society in Scotland is like that of England ; I suppose there is but one pattern for it among Saxon people ; but the inhabitants of the cottnges and the crowd on the city street are no more of one blood

A WOMAN* S VACATION, 51

with the English than they were in the dayp of the Border fights. The long, keen faces resemble the type of New England; they are disposed to question, rather than to affirm ; their minds are cast in the subiuno- tive mood ; your coachman will say, " This is John Knox's house ; you might have heard of it. Eh ? "

An intense curiosity leavens their nature; you may wander all day in English streets, and no one will give you a second look, scarcely a first one ; but in Scot- land the women will drop their first-born, and leave the porridge to burn, to run to their doors to look at a stranger.

The Scotch love old customs, such as keeping up the sanctuary for debtors about the precincts of Holyrood (there is a certain stone in the Canon- gate that marks the limit ; and if the fleeing debtor passes that line, he is safe from the sheriff) ; but they will suffer a slight change in their ways, if, after a hundred or two years of consideration, the^^ per- ceive that it will tend to their interest. Not eveh this motive seems to reconcile the English to a new wrinkle in the everlasting face of things.

The Scotch themselves would probably be' the last to claim any affinity with Americans, though they have ample chance to study them.

In the month of June four thousand travelling Americans had already passed through Edinburgh — an army which pays well for its own ravages.

Carriage hire is the one cheap thing in Scotland ; an open carriage for four will take you up hill and down for seventy-five cents an hour; but before the next American invoice of four thousand souls shall

52 BEATEN PATHS, OR

reach them, they will doubtless have amended the matter.

In the old days of Scotland, it was no disgrace, and scarcely an inconvenience, to be poor; to them, learning was most excellent, and students begged their education from door to door, thinking no shame.

A WOMAIS'S VACATION, 53

CHAPTER IV.

FROM EDINBURGH TO LONDON". "Every Englishman is an island." — Novalis.

EVERY village between Edinburgh and London tempts one to leave the train, and make it a study. The cottages of the English poor may be damp, unwholesome, poverty-stricken holes, more fit for the burrows of rabbits than for the homes of hu- manity; but at a distance, their thatched roofs and gray walls make a continual gallery of pictures. One looks in vain for the pert white cottages with green blinds, which, in America, defy the landscape, but insure health and cleanliness to the inmates.

The village churches date back to the monkish times, in many instances, and look down on all around them w^ith such superior beauty, that the first impression is of a devout community giving all their possessions to make glorious their tabernacle, like the Jews in the wilderness, content to live from hand to mouth if only their God be well served.

We chose York for our half-way house for the sake of its cathedral — an epic poem in stone, too cold and perfect for love, but filling the measure of admiration

64 BEATEN PATHS, OR

to the brim. One would be more homesick for the broken and homely arches of Chester, but Yorkshire- men may boast forever of the loveliness of their min- ster; human nature seems always to love best that which is like itself, not too perfect.

It is easy to say that York Minster is five hundred and twenty-four feet lortg, or that in the year 669 glass was first put in the windows that birds might no longer fly in and out, and defile the sanctuary — one may meas- ure but not describe it. It traces its glorious propor- tions on the memory like the images of a solemn and stately dream, that would fall down and break in the telling. There is an inscription somewhere on its walls that expresses it : — .

" As is the rose the flower of flowers, So of houses is this of ours." ^

Ruskin calls some parts of it "confectioners' Gothic;" but one can only hope that Ruskin's case may be tried in the next world, if not in this, by a jury of artists and master-masons.

The music of the boy-choir is soul-satisfying, but all the spoken part of the service might as well be the rattling of dry bones, the sound is so completely muddled by echoes. The great cathedrals are houses for praise and prayer, not for preaching.

On our way out of church, one of the seven pil- grims, who saunter through this book with me, was suddenly transfixed under the central tower, possessed with its beauty ; there she stood with head tipped back, and her face lightened with the same look that it will wear when she sees the pearly gates.

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 55

Beauty is meat and drink to her, and she might be standing tliere now but for a black-robed .verger (to whom the central tower was an every-day affair), who led her gently, but firmly, to the door, and shut her out of her paradise.

There is still a well-preserved tomb to the little son of Edward III. and Philippa, who gave five marks and five nobles a year, forever, to purchase prayers for his soul. They have ceased to pray for his soul, if they ever did it, but the sura is still paid to the dean and chapter. In England, a thousand years are as one day.

The archbishop's palace is a little out of town, but the deanery is beautiful enough for a prince.

An English clergyman holding a high office in a cathedral, after inducting four sons into fat livings, is said to have quoted the verse, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Nothing in all Eng- land so probed Hawthorne's vein of satire as the luxury of its clergy. " Every cathedral-close in turn has seemed to me the loveliest, cosieit, safest, least wind-shaken, and most enjoyable shelter that ever the thrift and selfish- ness of mortal man contrived for himself How de- lisrhtful to combine all this with the service of the temple ! "

A cultivated Englishman said to me of Our Old Home, "I know that Hawthorne received constant kindness and admiration in England; but if he had been insulted and trampled on every day of his life by Englishmen, he could not have written a bitterer book about us."

The walls of York are broken and battered to the

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ground, in many places, more by war than time, but what there is left of them is religiously preserved. In the wars of the Roses, the head of a Duke of York, with a paper crown on it, was fixed to one of the gates that "York might overlook the town of York." Coney street is the finest street of York, formerly " Conynge," the old Saxon word for Jcing^ meaning " the man who can ; " the word and the meaning are equally corrupted in these latter days, for the king is more often than not the man who can't.

In a long, vagabond walk about the city, we stumbled on the old church of St. Cuthbert, founded in 1066, soon after the coming over of William the Conqueror. The oaken doors are black as the nails that stud them, and the pathway to the entrance is paved thick with gravestones, as if the bodies beneath had not lost inter- est in the church-goers that followed them.

The people of York, like other city people, have their angles of temper and dialect well rubbed off, but the country side of Yorkshire has a language almost unin- telligible in London.

For looks, Robert Collyer says that the men of his shire resemble him in square solidity of frame, and for character, Charlotte Bronte has carved out a type in her books, which is acknowledged to be perfect.

In her part of the shire, the barren moors make all the landscape purple with heather ; and so poor is the region about Haworth, where she lived, that it has come to be a proverb in Yorkshire, when one knows not which way to turn for poverty, " You must do as they do in Haworth — do as you can." Poverty has so hardened their hearts and sharpened their wits, that

A WOMAN* S VACATION. 57

no one can overreach them in a bargain ; and so tena- cious are they of old grudges that they " will carry a stone in their pockets seven years, then turn it, carry it seven years more, and throw it at last."

We were in hot haste to reach London before " the season " should be over. It comes to an end about the first of July, with the closing of Parliament, and every one who has a house* of his own, or an invitation from a friend, goes into the country. According to fashion- able novels, London is empty; but it is no more emp- ty tlian a panful of milk- after the cream has been skimmed off.

You can see the old churches, and palaces, and by- ways at any time, —

" You never tread upon them but you set Your foot upon some ancient history, —

but in driving up and down Rotten Row in Hyde Park, you see the people who make history.

Thousands of carriages, plain or coroneted, move slowly up and down the Row, from the gates to the " Albert Memorial," one of the most tremendous tomb- stones ever raised by a disconsolate widow to the dear departed. At each corner of the foundation are co- lossal groups representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America ; then four broad flights of steps close around a marble pedestal, carved in very high relief, with fig- ures of all the most famous men in literature and art. Above them is the sitting statue of Prince Albert of Saxe Cobourg, and over all is a pointed stone canopy rising high in air, and glittering as pounds sterling

58 BEATEN PATHS, (9i?

could make it, with gilding and brilliant colors. It is a barbaric feast to the eye; tlie only discrepancy about it is Prince Albert himself; perched up above all the nobility of talent, he has the effect of an anti-climax. It is like one of the Pharaohs building a pyramid in which to bury a sacred cow. If there were to be so noble a monument to EngHsh wealth and pride, it would seem that English history could afford a more famous name to crown it than that of a handsome Ger- man princeling, who had the luck to marry a queen, to beget nine heirs to the throne, and to amuse himself with literature and art, when the jealous commons left him nothing else to do.

Authors need no princely patrons in these days; that occupation is gone from rich people.

A hundred years hence, when an English child looks at this " Memorial," and insists on knowing what Prince Albert was famous for, the only answer can be, that he won the love of the richest woman in England.

The carriages that crowd the Row between ^y^ and seven in the afternoon are usually occupied by dowagers, with now and then a pretty girl on the front seat ; but most of the young people are on horseback, in the ring fenced in for them. Every woman looks well in a rid- ing habit if there is any prettiness possible to her ; but the dowagers, the heavy artillery of English society, are nearly always built as Hawthorne painted them with his coarsest brush. "She has an awful ponder- osity-of frame. . . . When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down, it is on a gi'eat round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her."

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 59

Light silks and rich laces, and what would be called "opera bonnets" in America, are tlie rule for this after- noon drive ; yet a thoroughly well-dressed woman in the Park is rare as the phosnix among birds, for we sought her with labor and pains. To American eyes, everything is of last year's fashion ; the material is rich and costly enough in itself, but the effect is as if not one Englishwoman in a hundred had ever seen herself from head to foot in a mirror.

Evidently taste and style, which mould a costume, however varied, into an harmonious whole, are not to be bought for English money. In such matters, pounds, shillings, and pence are not legal tender. M. Taine, in his visit to England, wondered and grew sad over this lamentable English blindness to the fitness of things in dress. One lady assured him that all her dresses came direct from Paris, and his dreadful comment was, that she must have selected them herself.

The women of the middle and lower classes, whom one meets in shops and picture galleries, are so many walking hat-racks on which different articles of dress are loosely hung without any relation to each other or to the season.

The fair-haired, broad-chested Englishman is much handsomer than the same type appearing in women ; what is large and noble in a man's form and face be- comes coarse and repulsive in a woman.

Beautiful stuffs beconie corrupted in English wearing, as fine names suffer a sort of "sea chance" in Ensrlish speech ; this drive called Rotten Row was once the "Route de Roi" (the king's way) ; Charing Cross was the Cross of Chere Reine, the last halting-place of the

60 BEATEN PATHS, OR

funeral of Eleanor of Castile before her body reached Westminster Abbey; Greenwich is Grinnidge; Har- wich, Harritch ; Bohun, Boon ; Beauchamp, Beechara ; and, woi-st of all, Cholmondely, Chumley. The Eng- lishman never hurries except in pronouncing proper names.

We christened the prettiest of the ladies moving slowly past us by the names that Thackeray and Trol- lope have made familiar; not one was noble enough for Ethel Newcome, or coldly beautiful enough for Lady Dumbello, but it was easy to identify Lady Glen- cora Palliser, and Lily Dale looking up and down the Park for the faithless Crosby.

When the plot was thickest, there was a sort of mur- mur in the crowd, and policemen scattered the car- riages right and left to make way for " the princess." The liveries of the footmen were faced with scarlet; otherwise there was nothing to distinguish the equipage of royalty. The Princess of Wales and her sister, wife of the Russian Czarovitch, occupied the carriage alone. The princess sat very upright, looking right and left with an unvarying smile. She has the same fair and sweet expression which is familiar in all her pictures, but she has faded terribly since she came to England,

" Blissful bride of a blissful heir."

I fear it soon dawned upon her that these two " bliss- fuls " were only a poetical license. She looks like a woman trained in every hair and muscle to bear the gaze of strangers, and " to smile, and smile," whether her heart were light or heavy.

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 61

A woman may take some comfort in bein^ a princess, because she can set the fashions, and become the mother of kings ; but, on the other hand, she can seldom marry her true-love, or have her own way in the training of her children ; she can never prefer her friends to honor, or give a hearty snub to her enemies, for fear of losing her popularity. After all, I think, if women had their choice of position in the world before they entered it, the princess-ships would go a-begging. Alexandra wore a suit of light-brown silk, embroidered with flowers of a darker shade, and a small hat with a long, light-blue feather. She was the best dressed woman in the Park, but not so young or so pretty as her sister Dagmar, who was then on a visit to England with her Russian husband. These two lovely sisters, who grew up to- gether in the modest little court of Denmark, will come to high preferment on the thrones of England and Russia. They may be

" Perfect women, nobly planned,"

but it was their prettiness that did it. Beauty is but skin deep, and handsome is that handsome does, but fair faces will sit on thrones while men have the choosing.

It is a pretty custom to relieve the gloom of Lon- don streets with a row of bright-colored tiles across the windows filled with flowers in bloom; and flowers always rush into blossom in English air, as if they loved to do it and scorned to be coaxed.

Another lively feature is the continual emblazonment of the queen's arms over the shop doors — "The lion

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and the unicorn fighting for the crown." Shopping in London lets patience have its perfect work. Each article is put away after inspection, and often tied up in a bundle with a Gordian knot, before another is shown. The idea seems to be that " time was made for slaves," and free-born Britons have no need to save it. "There's another day coming" should be the motto of the English arms; "Dieu et mon droit" is obsolete.

One knows at once that an Enejlishman's house is his castle, when he sees that the hall doors have no handles on the outside. No one can enter without giving a previous signal ; London neighbors cannot "run in." When I first laid my hand on the spot where the handle ought to be, in any Christian door, and found only a^ blank, I stared at it as if it had played me a trick of magic; but one soon finds out that door-handles are not necessary to comfort, nor door-plates either, which are found only on those houses in which some business or profession is carried on. It is just as easy, too, to pull a spike in the fence as a regular bell-handle, when you have learned the trick of it.

Perhaps July is the month when London may best sit for its photograph; then, if ever, it wears the happy expression. After months of rain comes the "clear shining" that is so delicious in moist climates.

The dingy old markets turn poetical with moss-rose buds and scarlet mountains of strawberries. The latter are never sold in boxes, only fair on top and a snare and delusion beneath, but they are scooped up by the pound into paper bags, which never blush for their con- tents. One makes two bites of a strawberry in Eng-

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 63

land; each one is big, cnsp, and self-contained. It is the custom to serve them in their own hulls; and when eaten, each one is held by its stem, and dipped sepa- rately in sugar and cream, as it deserves. It is a lei- surely, genial way of doing thera justice, only second to picking thera off a hill-side. It makes one glad that fingers were made before spoons.

A favorite resort for Americans in London is the Langham Hotel, near to Regent Street and the best beloved shops; there you will meet your best friend and your mortal enemy, if anywhere; but the gathering of our tribes is so great that one must almost coin one's self into shillings to secure good attendance. There is a legion of other places in London where Americans can be at home for much less money, if it were not for that harrowing dread, which doth most easily beset us, of being thought poor.

Since everybody went to Europe last summer, it did not surprise me that " the Professor " should be there too. He had swept Irelstnd, and Scotland, and Eng- land with a new broom. "But in all my going up and down the earth," he said, " nothing surprises rae more than the perpetual appearance of American ladies trav- elling alone in all places of interest. From the heights of old Londonderry to the vaults of St. Peter's, they crop up everywhere, a rule unto themselves, self-pos- sessed and regnant. If they have a vulnerable spot, it is not in their heels, for no rough road turns them back." I suspect that the Professor means to put that sentence into a lecture when he goes home, and he might have dwelt on it for an hour if I had not inter- rupted him to ask, like Meg Dods, " What for no ? " I

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reminded him that there were times in every woman's life when a long journey is almost her salvation ; if she is devoured with gnawing cares, or, what is worse, with pampered indolence, there is nothing more to be desired for her than the sudden snapping of old fetters, and the stirring up of unused brain-power.

"Of what, did you say?" asked the Professor at this point.

To go to Europe with a husband or father, who will take all the trouble and share all the pleasure, is some- what like being carried about in an old-fasliioned sedan chair on men's shoulders; but to go with a party of lone women is to discover a new world. It involves self-sacrifice, sudden smothering of old prejudices, hard labor and harder patience ; but so does everything else that is worth having.

The Professor smiled paternally at me, and said, "Yes?" only yes, and nothing more. It was the *^ Boston yes" with an interrogation mark after it.

Trust me, O beloved reader, the best of men and the dearest of husbands are all Turks in their hearts! They would hide their wives behind veils and lattices if they could, while they make the "grand tour." It is hard to get on with them, but think, for a moment, how dreary it would be to get on without them. With all their faults, we love them still 1

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 65

-CHAPTER V.

A WALK IN WESTMINSTER.

** The English are a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick ingeniousness and piercing spirit ; acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to." — Milton.

"John Bull has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw." — Hawthorne.

THE guide-book quotes the saying of an old trav- eller (perhaps the Wandeiing Jew), that if he had but one day in London, he would ride up and down its famous streets and parks, and stop once — at West- minster Abbey. If I had ten days, which is the very least that London should receive from the most merci- less tourist, I would still go to the abbey, and the Houses of Parliament, on the first day, lest the world might come to an end before I could bless my eyes with them.

The abbey is the only place where tombs and me- morial tablets are cheei-ful company. The constant inscription of famous and familiar names is like the sudden meeting of friends long looked for. It is a live-

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]y imagination, indeed, which could build unto itself a finer Westminster Abbey than the reality, and the first feeling, when one stands on its worn floor, is a sort of grateful surprise, like that of the Queen of Sheba, when she came to see Solomon, and, with a sigh of pleasure, confessed that " the half had not been told her." The windows of the abbey are its crown of glory ; they make good cheer in a solemn place. They are said to do honor to certain kings and jjatriarchs, part Hebrew and part English; but to my mind they are a direct translation, into brilliant color, of certain verses in the Prayer Book, — " the glorious company of the Apostles — the goodly fellowship of the Proph- ets — and the noble army of Martyrs," who are sup- posed to praise God continually, and to pay some attention to the strivings of mortals towards a holier life.

Some of the epitaphs are peculiarly unfit for sacred walls, like much of the wicked dust buried beneath them. If the devotional feeling survives such a dog- gerel couplet as that on the tomb of Gay, —

\ "Life is a jest, and all things show it.

Once I thought so, now I know it," —

it is gone long before the daily service is finished. The careless, rattling way in which this is performed, is an early and late reproach to the dean and chapter. In the mouth of the man who read the Apostles' Greed, it might as well have been the children's rhyme, —

** Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked," —

.-^^

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 67

for all that the closest attention could make of it with- out the Prayer Book.

It is a shamefaced task to follow after Addison, and Lamb, and Washington Irving, in talking about the abbey, but that every one may find his own crumbs falling from this table of the past. The reader of Elia recognizes easily the tomb of his dear Duchess of Newcastle, lying on higher pillows than those of her husband. She came of a "good family," because "all her sisters were virtuous and her brothers valiant." It would go hard with some families if this test were applied to their goodness, and that may be the reason why every one who reads them, thinks them odd and quaint, when nothing could be more simple and true. She wrote manv books, but she had no issue. It is odd to notice how invariably, in these epitaphs, those women are most glorified who had the largest families. Napoleon crystallized the opinion of forty centuries, when he told Madame de Stael that "she was the greatest woman, who had the most sons." In York Minster, on a memorial tablet, one reads that a certain Jane Hodson, wife of the chancellor of the cathedral, gave birth to twenty-four children, and died in her thirty-eighth year. "One, that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead ! " Of course tombstones and figurf s cannot lie, and it is devoutly to be hoped that the resurrection will not come for a thousand years at least, that Jane Hodson may have a long rest. Per- haps they were all daughters — think of twenty-four daughters in one house! — think of the eleven thou- sand virgins of Cologne! and wonder not that Jane Hodson died before she was forty I

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One thinks of the old fable of the fox taunting the lioness with bringing forth only one whelp at a time, and the lioness proudly replies, "One, but a lion!^'' It seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century to discover the tremendous fact, that in children, as in precious stones, quality rather than quantity is to be desired.

An army of good women " sleep well, after life's fit* ful fever," in the abbey. Of one, it is said that her death made not only her husband, but '^virtue, worth, and sweetness, widowers." I have no doubt they all married again right speedily.

Of a certain Duchess of Buckingham, it is said "the duke and she lived lovingly and decently together, she patiently bearing the faults she could not remedy." It was a sweet old fashion of women to endure and make no sign — I fear it will have gone out altogether when they get their rights.

Another was, "Blest with two babes, the thirde brought her to this." "TViis" is .a fearfully and won- derfully carved monument, Which " Cecile, her hus- bande," built for her, "to prove his love did after death abide." He chose a material which, abides much longer than love.

One bereaved husband inscribed on his wife's tomb, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away — blessed be the name of the Lord." He was thankful for both boons, but he had the grace to put this equiv- ocal compliment into Hebrew, which she probably could not understand.

The name of Lady Russell, maid of honor to Eliza- beth, is sounded in our ears to this day by the vergers,

A WOMAN'S VACATION', 69

who take us through the chapels, because she died of the prick of a needle. It is sometimes as good a ticket, for one's passage down to posterity, to die oddly ^ as to die heroically, and it is far less trouble.

These black-robed vergers, like all other foreign guides to old churches, seem to have pickled them- selves for years in poor brandy, perhaps as a remedy against mould and damp. A blind person could easily follow them by the sense of smell.

Every one pays tribute of a smile to a certain empty place made ready for a woman, who scorned to occupy it. A worshipful earl of James I.'s time built the usual stone table, had his own effigy placed in the middle, and that of his first wife on liis right side, as was her due, leaving an equal space on his left for his second love; but this lady would have the place of honor or none, and had herself buried elsewhere.

The statue of Mrs. Siddons bears a strono: resem- blance to the present reader and actress, Mrs. Scott- Siddons. She stood on a tragic pedestal all her life, as she does now in the abbey, and she could never step down from it into common life. Sydney Smith said she always stabbed the potatoes, and she once quelled a riotous crowd by simply standing up in her carriage and saying, ^'-I am Sarah Siddons P

It is almost an invariable custom on English tombs to make the name of the survivors, who erected them, quite as conspicuous as that of the occupant, thus in- geniously blowing the trumpet of the living and of the dead at the same time.

Henry VII.'s chapel is the apex of the abbey's perfection, although some unfortunate was learned

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enough t buildinsr.

enough to see that it did not match the rest of the

" Here's an acre, sown, indeed, With the richest, royalest seed."

For many centuries no one outside of royal blood could be buried there, but the plebeians crept in at last, as they do into every kingly privilege. A king has little remaining to him now that he can really call his own but a title and a grave.

The stone carving of this chapel roof is delicate as the ivory carving of a chessman, or, better still, the lavish leafoge and flowering of a rose bush in June. In one aisle is buried Mary, Queen of Scots, and in the other her successful enemy, Queen Elizabeth. The width of the chapel divides them in death, as the great gulf between beauty and intellect divided them in life — the woman who was beautiful and knew it, and the woman who was not beautiful, but forced all the world to call her so. The chronicle says that Queen Bess questioned Melville sharply and closely whether Mary Stuart w^ere taller than herself, and extorting' an affir- mative answer, she replied, "Then your queen is too tall, for I am just the proper height."

In this chapel is a round-cheeked baby lying in a stone cradle, and well covered up from the church damp.

The seats where the monks listened to the endless services of the old religion were contrived, in case they grew drowsy and lost themselves, to give way beneath them, which must have been a lively warning to their fellow-sufferers. They managed these things better in

A WOMAN'S VACATION 71

Catholic times than in these latter days. Near by is a Bplendid tomb, built by the first Duke of Buckingham and his wife, which quite fills up the family burial-room, so that any other dead Buckinghams must be tucked into corners.

The epitaph ought to have been, "After us, the Deluge."

To English great men, Westminster Abbey is a sort of posthumous reward of merit. I never heard of but one who objected to sleep his last sleep within its walls. Sir Godfrey Kneller, a famous painter of famous faces, did not yearn for the abbey, " because they do bury fools there," but later years proved to him that they do bury fools everywhere.

The last great man buried there was Dickens, and by his own request he has no monument. His admir- ers must hope that the three-volumed epitaph, which Mr. Foster is now writing about him, has the lying quality of most epitaphs. As was said of another biographer, it would make death more terrible to think of having one's life written by such a friend. Dick- ens's ghost should haunt his pillow and quote in his ear, "I can take care of my enemies, but Heaven pre- serve me from my friends!" The old effigies lie flat on their backs, or lean comfortably on one elbow, but in the more modern monuments, the statues are too often balanced on one leg, or stand forever in some pugnacious attitude, which tires and strains the eye to look at. When marble and repose are divorced, it wrongs the fitness of things; and when sculptors learn that it is unnatural and repulsive to be always straining one's muscles in marble, as well as in the

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flesh, there will be a new and glad sunrising in their art.

The Chapter House of the monks, which long held the House of Commons, is now only the depository of curious writings, such as the certificate of the delivery of the heart of Henry HI. to a certain abbess, to whom he had promised it. I cannot imagine what a woman should want with a man's heart after he was dead. The Doomsday Book is there too, which, eight hundred years ago, made the same heart-burning that an income tax does now. The roof rises from a central pillar like the graceful branches of a palm-tree, but its sublime effect is lessened on looking into a glass case contain- ing skeletons of rats and old rags, that were found in very ancient parts of the cloister, and hence thought worthy of preservation.

** Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."

There would be some sense in keeping Caesar's clay in a glass case, if one could identify the right hole, but one must be born and bred in England, to get any satisfaction out of sacredly preserving the skeleton of the rat that made the hole.

We found our way with some trouble to the Jeru- salem Chamber, which was full of the perfume of a new cedar wainscoting. Whenever any great thing is done in England, it is sure to have a root or two springing out of this chamber. The elect doctors meet there every fortnight to compare notes of a new trans- lation of the Bible. When they have finished it, I fear some people will have to be converted over again,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 7^

the old texts will wear such different faces. Henry IV. died there. It had been prophesied to him that he should die in Jerusalem, and he had never ventured to go to the Holy Land.

King Henry. — ** Does any name particular belong

Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?" Warwick. — " 'Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord."

I asked the porter of the abbey why this room was called Jerusalem, and he said, "Because that was the name of it." I have sought far and near for a better reason, but have not found one. Near it is the dining- room of the queen's scholars at Westminster School, savory with the ghosts of departed dinners. The tables, much hacked with school-boy knives, are made of oak from the Spanish Armada.

I had reached the Jerusalem Chamber by a long de- tour, through cloisters and ancient passages, fragrant of cedar, but I left it by a little door opening directly into the abbey itself. The longest way round was, in this case, the shortest way home.

When Heinrich Heine went throug^h this home of dead Englishmen, he gave a shilling to the verger, with the remark, that he would have given him more if the collection had been complete.

In the shadow of the abbey is the old parish church of Westminster, where Cromwell was married, but I don't know that any special interest attaches to the fact. He mis^ht as well have been a bachelor all his days, since his family proved too weak to hold the kingdom that he bequeathed to them.

Just across the square, where one may, perhaps, meet

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a black gowned lawyer witK his gray wig put on awry, are the Houses of Parliament. If the dress of English lawyers was intended to inspire respect, it is effectually banished by their careless way of wearing it.

There are few more ludicrous sights than a red head in a gray wig that is too small for it.

The noblest entrance to the Houses of Parliament is by the great hall, in which Charles I. and Warren Hastings came to grief, and where, in the small court- rooms leading out of it, smaller sinners are daily get- ting their deserts.

At this time the Tichborne trial drew a crowd every day to see the " claimant " come out of court. He is thie very picture of a butcher. He could not look more like one, if he had been pre-ordained to that trade from the beginning of the world. The only thing going on in the hall during our visit was the manual exercise of a troop of bare-legged Highland- ers. There were hundreds of men in it, but such was the immensity of the hall that they were in nobody's way. The countless rooms and galleries of this vast talking-place of the nation are almost too gay and modern for English taste. It must be a satisfaction to them to see that the stone, of which it is built, is already beginning to crumble, as if ashamed of its newness.

The way to the "Ladies' Gallery" in the House of Commons is a straight and narrow path, and i^v^ there be that travel it. By means of a powerful letter of in- troduction, which did set us forth to be very remark- able women indeed, we softened the heart of Mr. Moran, the hard-working secretary of the American

A WOMAN'S VACATION' 75

legation, who, for fifteen years, has had the training of our ministers to their court duties, and were ad- mitted to the gallery between three and four in the afternoon. The session often lasts all night, but there is a tacit law, that no vexed questions shall be brouglit on the floor after midnight. The Ladies' Gallery is tucked under the very ceiling of the room, and closed in with brass lattice-work, like that from which Turk- ish beauties look down on their lords' pastimes without being seen. It is evident enough that women were of very small account in English politics when Parliament was first established, while large,* open galleries sur- round the hall for male visitors. The members of the House wear their hats, except when speaking, which may be a relic of the time when government work was done out of doors, or it may be a delicate English way of intimating that the Commons are lords of crea- tion— whatever good reason they had at first, they evidently wear their hats now because the room is so crowded there is no other place to keep them.

The two generals of government and opposition, Mr. Gladstone and Disraeli, remain uncovered all the time. No one in the galleries may wear his hat, not even the Prince ef Wales himself.

Some "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft" for the guidance of forlorn women must have led us to choose that day of all others.

When we first looked down through the lattice, a tall man, in a coat of miraculous fit, was speaking in a careful monotone, with every sentence rounded like a ball. He seemed at a loss for an occupation for his hands, and maltreated his pockets a good deal at first;

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but this restlessness soon passed away, while the quiet of the room was intense. An upward turn of his head showed the features of Disraeli. It was a long-ex- pected speech on the abolishing of intermediate courts of judicature in Scotland and Ireland. He paid many- studied compliments to the government, and the only restless listener was Mr. Gladstone (divided from him by the width of a table), who fidgeted about his seat, made notes on a bit of paper, and sometimes whispered a word in the ear of his neighbor. Mr. Gladstone replied to him, point by point, with a swift, clear utter- ance, that was music to ears strained by listening to Mr. Disraeli's thick voice and measured j^eriods. He called his opponent's argument " an inverted pyramid without any reason, he might say, with not a rag of reason in it." He answered a slisjht slur on Scottish brains by saying that he had always looked on Scot- land as "an exporting country, having too many brains through all time for her own market," which called forth great applause from certain sandy-haired and sharp- featured members, whom I took to be Scotchmen.

When these two lions had done roaring, and smaller I ones began to free their minds, the decorous stillness changed to perfect confusion ; the members began to write letters and talk to their neighbors, while not a few composed themselves to sleep. Mr. Disraeli, as he listened, did so discharge his face of every particle of expression, that he looked as if he heard only the lull- ing sound of rain on the roof.

Times are grown into joint for him since, as a young man making his maiden speech, he was forced by coughs and hisses to sit down. He yielded then, say-

A WOMAN* S VACATION'. 77

ing calmly, " I will sit down now, but the time will come when you shall hear me." Mr. Disraeli can com- pel English attention, which, in itself, is a labor of Hercules, and he can write "Lothair," but he can lever make himself an Englishman. When he was taunted with his Jewish descent, he retorted instantly, "When your ancestors were squalid savages digging in the earth for roots, mine were princes in the Temple." An Englishman, in like case, would have put up his eye- glass and stolidly glared down his enemy without a word. He is said to have been deeply attached to that ancient wife, who loved him like a mother, and this was his first speech since her death.

The crowded House of Commons is perhaps as good a place as any to look for the type of English gentle- men. There is a certain family resemblance between them, as there would be in the most heterogeneous gathering of tribes after they have eaten and drunken and slept together long enough, with the one exception of Mr. Disraeli. I think no twin is possible for him. "Nature made him, and then broke the mould."

Is it not Holmes who says that one test of a gentle- man is not to say "haow"and not to eat with the knife? In bank, and street, and shop, in England, T constantly heard the flat sound given to words having ou in them. Even in the House of Commons some one said "paound" and "haouse." Since "haow" has reappeared in this well of English undefiled, we may perhaps soon teach our children to eat with their knives. Gail Hamilton lays down the law that the talisman of gentlemanhood lies in the finger-nails. An old English court decided that he was a gentleman

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who kept a gig. But James Hannay settled it forever for Englishmen, ''No one could be a gentleman unless his ancestors wore chain-armor in the thirteenth cen- tury." It behooves Americans to look for other tests.

A swell young Englishman with a cousin in the baronetage, being suddenly challenged by one of our party to stand and deliver his definition of a gentle- man, replied that " he was one whose father and grand- fiither had never worked for a living;" but he waa routed horse and foot, with great slaughter, by the re- joinder, that there were plenty of people in America whose father and grandfather had never worked for a living. In fact, the habit ran in the family, but they were usually maintained in the poorhouses of their re- Bpective parishes.

The House of Lords is an intensely stupid place to a stranger. The bishops are so smothered in their wigs and gowns, that they hem and ha, and have a very apoplectic time of it, getting oat what they want to say. In fact, it seems to be a fixed belief among Eng- lish people that rapid talkers must of neces5>ity be rather giddy-headed, and that what is dug out of the mind with most difficulty must be of most value. Mr. Gladstone, however, talks like a running brook with sparkling ripples of wit. In the ante-room of the House of Lords one reads the names under the hat pegs, D. Somerset, E. Clanricarde, L. Powis, as if it were David, £dward and Luke, instead of Duke, Earl and Lord.

We went gayly home in a hansom after our first dip in EInglish politics, scorning to notice the pain in our necks firom straining them up to that brass lattice for two mortal hours. We were full of pity for the

A WOMAN* S VACATION, 79

•braTC hidj^ oar coaDtrywaman, who bearded Mr, Moran in lus den that same afternoon, vrith noduog bat her open coantenanee to reoomniend her, and de- manded skc tidtets for the Ladies* Gallery. She waa sent airajr empty-handed and sonowfol; but we are nradi nuatakoi hi oar eoaotiTWoman, if Mr. Moran Imm aeoi the hat of hen

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CHAPTER VI.

LONDON IN WATER-COLORS.

" On the Thames, Sir Roger de Coverley made several reflec- tions on the greatness of the British nation, — as that one Eng- lishman could beat three Frenchmen ; that the Thames was the noblest river in Europe ; that London Bridge was a greater piece of work than any of the seven wonders of the world, — with many other honest prejudices which naturally cleave to the heart of a true Englishman." — Addison.

HTTP to this time, I have been only skirting about \J London, in what were once villages, at some dis- tance from it ; but the neighboring monster grew and grew till it swallowed them all up, and called them by its own name. King James I., in his wisdom, thought he could keep people in the country by imposing a fine on those who moved to London ; but any woman could have told him that he had only added one more fasci- nation to city living. A man will die for a forbidden thing, and more martyrs have gone to the stake for the sake of their own way than for religion.

The real London is inside of Temple Bar — a dark, huge, old archway, which once served to hold up the heads of traitois, but has no use now except to ob- struct the street. So tenacious was the old city of its

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 81

rights, that the king in his chariot could not pass this Bar without pausing to receive permission from the mayor.

In "the city," used now only by business and pov- erty, all the great English joys and sorrows have come to pass. A tall monument tells how it was burned up by the "great fire," so rare a thing then that they looked for no minor causes, but called it a "judgment of God " on their sins ; the earthquake cracked their china vases, and sent all the chief sinners out of town; and in 1666 "the plague" left only the tenth person alive. "The people die so," says Pepys, "that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the night not sufficing to do it in."

The dome of St. Paul's draws all feet towards it; it is venerable enough on the outside, but within, it is as cheap and modern as whitewash, and stucco, and gild- ins: can make it. Dickens insisted that it was nobler than St. Peter's at Rome, but he was the most bigoted of Englishmen, and a truth that has been sifted through English prejudice must be of very tough fibre if there is anything left of it.

The strenojth of St. Paul's is not wasted on carvincj or stained glass; the lower part is too light and the dome too dark — only the distances are magnificent. The eflfect is not of being in a church at all, but of being out of doers in a cloudy day with no trees in sight. Its real beauty is best seen from the whispering gallery running round the dome, whence the overpower- ing depth and height marry each other, and silence all carping criticism : one's love of beauty is stilled in one's respect for simple bigness. Nelson and Welling- 6

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ton are buried in state in the cellar, with candles burn- ing before them as if they were altars ; plenty of other quiet folks keep them company, and among them Sir Christopher Wren, who desired no other monument than St. Paul's itself, which he designed and built ; and the unlucky Dr. Donne, who made an epigram on his marriage, with more truth than poetry in it, —

** John Donne — Anne Donne — undone," —

and had to depend on the charity of friends all his life for house-room in which to bring up his twelve children " Children," says Loid Bacon, " raitigjite the remem- brance of death." They must have made poor Dr. Donne actually in love with it. His jioem of " The Shipwreck " makes one's flesh creep.

Out of a white army of statues in the body of the church, that of Dr. Samuel Johnson strikes one with pity ; a man so wedded to a full-bottomed wig, and voluminous garments, that he seemed to have been born in them, is sculptured to stand half naked, through all time, in St. Paul's. It is worse than his voluntary penance of standing an hour in the market-place of Uttoxeter, where he was born, for some disobedience to his parents committed fifty years before.

It was a rather touching and romantic thing to do, and to think of afterwards; but it reads like pure silli- ness in a man, who spoke "Johnsonese," and drank seventeen cups of tea at a sitting. Sculptors have a terrible passion for nudity; they would have forbidden poor Eve her fig-leaves; but to strip a man who wrote a dictionary (the "Hippopotamus of Literature," as

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 83

Mrs. Jameson called him) of his clothes, is going too far for decency.

Passing by the Mansion House where the lord mayor exists, chiefly to give good dinners, we come, after many windings among crooked streets, Jews, and evil odors, to the Tower^ whose stones have been wet with so much innocent blood, for little or no reason but the will of the king. We have certainly improved on those old days, in that no man can now behead another without an uncommonly good reason for it. If kings are going out of fashion, there are still some compen- sations. All the lachrymals in the British Museum would not hold the tears that have been shed within these thick walls. The " Queen's Beef-eaters " lie in wait, within the gates, in a fantastic uniform of many colors, to take a shilling, and its owner, up stairs and down stairs, and in the ladies' chamber, where Lady Jane Grey wrote her name and her resignation on the wall, with those of other unhappy prisoners. We looked into the little room built in the wall, where Sir Walter Raleigh slept, when he .whiled away his long imprisonment with writing a History of the World. I have seen worse rooms at summer watering-places, but nowhere else. In the outer room is an effigy of gaunt Queen Bess on horseback, in a velvet gown cov- ered with eyes and ears ; if it was there in Raleigh's time, he must have smiled bitterly to himself as he remembered the day when he laid his cloak in the mud that the maiden queen might not soil her shoe.

Great store of arms are arransred in the form of lilies and passion-flowers, and heavy suits of mail show how much stronger men and horses must have been in the

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old days, even to have carried them to the edge of battle.

The sweetest old romance about the Tower is the story of James I., of Scotland, the poet-prince, who was kept there, as a hostage for his father's good faith, by the English king. He fell in love with Joanna Beaufort, a noble maiden whom he used to see from his window walking in her garden. His love blossomed into a poem that would read well if one had never heard that a king wrote it. When he came unto his own, he married the lady of his window-love. To be a king and a happy husband was too much joy for one man, and he was soon assassinated in his own palace, in presence of his wife and Lady Catharine Douglass, who kept out the conspirators by bolting the door with her arm, and holding it there until they broke the bone. His wife's arm would have been a little more poetical instead of one of the Douglasses, "tender and true" though they were. Some one has painted a tender and true picture of the scene for one of the galleries of the Houses of Parliament.

The crown jewels and gold dishes kept in the Tower are so very splendid, that they are almost vulgar; an old woman hurries one in and out of the room as if she wanted to cry, " Thieves, thieves ! " instead of the the names of the treasure.

The "Kohinoor " is about as brilliant as a clean glass salt-cellar. I had longed to look in the face of this queen of diamonds, and was consoled in my disappoint- ment with the intimation that I had only seen a fac- simile, the real stone being hidden in a safer place, so that it might as well have remained in the bowels of

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 85

the earth. The water gate of the Tower opens no more to criminals coming privately by the river, that the popula-ce need not attempt a rescue ; few people go to prison now whom the public do not condemn as heartily as those in authority. The Thames is but a muddy and insignificant stream, t6 have watered so great space in English history and fiction. There are few English books that do not, in some form, pay trib- ute to it- I am inclined to say " amen " to Sir Roger de Coverley's opinion of London Bridge ; it is one of many gray old structures dotted over England, which seem to have come into being with the ground they stand on, to serve as patterns for men to build from. Ghastly memories lurk under its arches; the opaque water has often closed over

" One more unfortunate, Rashly importunate, Gone to her death; '*

but it bears on its surface an abundant and busy life, that gives small thought to the sorrowful sights below it. Plenty of gay little steamers, like the one we boarded at the bridge, ply up and down the river all day, carrying deck loads of passengers, for there is no cabin accommodation. Londoners shed rain as easily as a flock of ducks; if they always went in when it rained, they would stai/ i?i most of their lives. We pass over, without knowing it, that tremendous bore, the Thames Tunnel, and gradually leave behind us the dingy walls and disreputable suburbs, which most do congregate on the banks of rivers in a city.

After a while the river begins to clear its charac-

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ter from the stains of man's imperfections, and the peculiarly bright-green grass of this climate slopes down on either bank to meet its caresses. Greenwich must find favor in ail eyes approaching it from the water.

The Hospital rears a noble front close upon the river, and on a hill beyond rises the Observatory where lon- gitude begms. An Englishman accompanied us whom we looked upon as an excellent guide, till it came out, as we landed, that this was also his first visit to Green- wich. Knowing he could see it at any time, he had never seen it at all; like the old farmer whom Lowell found among the White Hills, who had always lived w^ithin a mile of the "Old Man of the Mountain," and had never cared to look towards it. We went first into a grand entrance hall hung round with portraits of naval heroes; the ceiling was one vast fresco on some mythological subject, which I was content to be- lieve a miracle of art, rather than to break my neck in studying it. This hall opens into the "Painted Cham- ber," having one whole side covered with an allegorical picture of those Hanoverian despots, the Georges. The painter, not content with his name in a corner, has intro- duced a full length of himself, and is the finest-looking man in the picture. Here are shown the coat find vest, with a bullet hole through them, that Nelson wore w^hen death found him at Trafalgar. Here, too, are the relics oT Sir John Franklirrs expedition, found among the Esquimaux — forks and spoons, coins, a jack-knife, and a little book which must have looked to the Esquimaux the most useless thing that ever was made. Nelson is made a sort of demigod at Green-

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 87

wich by statues, busts, 'and portraits; but the stubborn ugliness of his features has defied the skill of every artist to soften them.

It must be a cross,- grievous to be borne by brethren of the brush and chisel, that homely men so often insist on being lieroes.

One small room is wholly devoted to Nelson pictures; in one called his '^immortality,'' he is being carried to the upper world by fat little cherubs, who seem actually to puff over their work ; one of them carried a scroll with the words, " England expects every man to do his duty;" and the whole picture is a conglomerate mass of angels and tritons tugging at one heavy man. One IS sorry to find the name of Benjamin West in the corner.

The chapel is rich in wood carving and marble pave- ment, but the seats are only wooden benches; the old men would never miss a fluted pillar or two, while cushions would be a great luxury to them. It seems • to me that in nearly all hospitals and asylums, and other stow-away places for cast-off humanity, the archi- tects provide so largely for the souls of the inmates that there is very little left for their bodies ; whereas, in reality, they are all body, and no soul worth men- tioning.

The domestic part of this Hospital is in the old royal palace of the Stuarts ; the great hall, once the ball-room of Charles II., that merry and worthless king, —

** Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one," —

is now divided into bedrooms for the pensioners ; the

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doors were all open, displaying such little knick-knacks as sailors love to collect.

There is nothing about the room to reraind one of the time when virtue went clean' out of fashion under the Stuarts. The walls must often have looked down on the neglected queen, Catharine of Braganza, least of all women in the eves of her husband, who forced her to treat courteously the courtesans who had sup- planted her. At the end of this great room is a statue of the everlasting Nelson, and on the pedestal lay a small, dirty bundle, which proved to be a pair of stock- ings worn by him on some remarkable occasion.

If the shades of the departed ever revisit the earth, the ghost of Nelson must wear a bitter sneer over the hero-worship which could give a place of honor to his stockings, and leave his beloved Lady Hamilton to die of want !

From the hall we went dpwn to the old men's smok- • ing-room, without which no sailor could be happy. A long row of them were puffing away at their pipes, a weather-beaten but chirruping old company.

Long tables and benches, scoured to snowy white- ness, were ranged along an immense dining-room ; an old negro, the only one we met among the pensioners, did the honors of his kitchen with a pompons affability never to be reached by a white man. His hair and beard were snow-white, as if he had been standing uncovered in a snow-storm.

The great tanks for tea and cocoa sent forth a goodly savor, and a bowl was filled with tea for us to taste. We found it very good. The allowance to one brew- ing is three and a half pounds for four hundred men.

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 89

I know not if this is the same computation on a large scale as that supj)Osed to have been established by the first old maid: "Two tea-spoonfuls for each person and one for the teapot."

Most of these veterans have lost a leg or an arm, or bear other honorable scars from their country's service. They must have served fourteen years in the navy, or have been wounded in an action with the enemy, before they can be admitted as pensioners. Many of them have wives outside, and draw their rations to be shared with them. It has long been a vexed question whether women should be included in the hospital charity, but nothing has been done about it, and it would seem to be the first axiom in the study of womankind, that no great number of them can live together in peace.

The quiet comfort of the Hospital seems to renew the lease of life usually given to men. One lean and withered old fellow hopped after us on his wooden leg, through several roon\g, chirping out like a supe^rannu- ated cricket, that "he was ninety-two, and his wife eighty-eight, and they never missed their rations." Everywhere, on doorsteps and lying on benches in sunny spots, we came upon these battered old hulks, safely moored at last ; an air of garrulous contentment hung about them all, only one thought he did not have * tobacco enough ; but who ever saw an old sailor who could be satisfied in that particular?

The necessary order and discipline of so large an establishment cannot oppress them, for they have been used to it all their lives on shipboard. In the grounds is a full-rigged ship of war, in which a school of boys, children of the pensioners, is taught the rules of the naval service.

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Late in the afternoon we took steam again for Lon- don, full of admiration for this noble charity. The English do a thing well if they do it at all, and one cannot but cherisli a warmer feeling towards a nation which holds out such kindly arms of protection to the old age of its servants.

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CHAPTER YIT.

SUNDAY IN LONDON.

Hamlet, — *' Why was he sent into England? "

Clown, — ** Why? Because he was mad ; he shall recover his

wits there, or if he do not, 'tis no great matter, — there the men

are as mad as he/* — Shakspeare.

IF you haye but one Sunday in London, it is a diffi- cult matter to cut it up to advantage. Ten years ago, all strangers and sojourners in London went to see and hear Mr. Spurgeon ; but he is no new thing under the sun, and is said to live largely on the income of liis reputation. People no longer pay a shilling for a seat in his Tabernacle.

The gayest and most ritualistic church service is at St. Andrew's, Welles Street, where the Protestantism is so very "/u^A" as to be clean out of sight. In ut- ter contrast is the straight-backed old church where Whitefield preached, the mnn who was said to put so much pathos into the word "Mesopotamia " as to bring tears to the eves of his hearers.

John Wesley, who was so tremulously good, that he could never be quite certain that he had been really con- verted, preached there too, but the mantle of neither of these prophets of Methodism has fallen on the present shepherd. Across the way from this church is tlie bury-

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ing-groiind of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan rests from his " progress."

The Temple Church ought to have a fraction of your Sunday. A bit of Norman architecture, the head- quarters of the Knights Templars, whose religious vow hound them to fight the enemies of the church, and whose inclination made them find enemies wherever there were revenge and plunder.

Their meek symbols of the cross and the lamb dot the church all over, and their effigies, in armor, lie dead enough in the porch. What a fall was there, when they " decayed through pride," and these war- like precincts were given over to lawyers, though it may be they fight harder in a quiet way than the Templars.

In a sunny nook beside the church "lyes Oliver Goldsmith." His lack of common sense led him a hard life in the body, but his sim|)licity and wisdom may serve in the other world to make his spirit re- spected. A gate, opening into a still, funereal square, leads to the Temple Gardens, a sweet green spot in the w^ide waste of London streets. The wars of the Roses, when the English must needs fight each other, having tired out their enemies, have a root in this gar- den. When the lords were too loud in the Temple hall, the garden was " more convenient."

Somerset » — '* Let him that is no coward «or no flatterer, But dare maintain the party of the truth, Pluck a red rose from off this thorn, with me.**

War^wick. — "I love no colors ; and without all color Of base, insinuating flattery, I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet."

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Plantagenet, — *' Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset? " Somerset. — *' Hath not thy rose a thorn, Phmtagenet? "

Here Charles and Mary Lamb lived, and made puns in upper chambers, and were visited by famous friends. We found the Very fountain where John Westlock and Ruth Pinch stood, when they looked in each other's eyes and found love there ; one of the prettiest love scenes ever put together by Dickens or another.

But if you want to be thrilled by the sweetest music this side heaven, you will go to a service at the Found- ling Hospital, and hear an anthem sung by four hun- dred orphan children. Their orphanhood may not affect the music, but it will affect your feelings, which amounts to the same thing. If the pearly gates do not open then, and show a gleam of the white-robed crowd within, you must be hard-hearted indeed.

The hospital was founded by Captain Thomas Coram for exposed and deserted children, of whom he had been one. From the unaccountable perversity, com- mon to all trustees, that no testator once' safe under ground, should ever have his own way, the hospital has been changed to a receptacle for illegitimate children whose mothers are known^ whereas Captain Coram's object was to provide for those little miserables, whose mothers had deserted them because they did not wish to be known. One misrht leave a fortune to charitable purposes with a serene mind, if one were sure of com- ing into the world about once in every fifty years to look after it. The foundation is a very. rich one, but no stranger can pass its door without dropping a bit of silver (copper will not do) into the plate held there for the purpose.

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When any modern Job is given over to the adver- sary to be tempted, I have no doubt that the first step is to get him elected as trustee of an orphan asylum.

The girls at the "Foundling" wear a picturesque costume of brown stuff frocks, with white aprons, and three-cornered handkerchiefs over the shoulders, and a little Normandy cap with high crown, an exceed- ingly becoming fashion, revived for girls in the year of our Lord 1873.

Illegitimate children are, for obvious reasons, hand- somer, as a rule, than the offspring of poor and lawful parentage, and many of the boys and girls at the Foundling are " not Angles, but angels."

Any mother might be proud to call them hers. The children are trained to make the responses musically, and if they cannot understand the sermon, they can rest their eyes with looking at the lovely picture, by Ben- jamin West, of " Christ blessing little children." The effect is very pretty at one point in the service, when they all bury their faces in their aprons for a moment ; they look like a multitude of little widows. Dickens came often to this church, and used it more than once in buildincr his books.

After service we went through the crowded but spotless bedrooms, and into the long dining-rooms, where the children filed in, the little ones led by the elders, to eat their Sunday dinner of cold beef and let- tuce, cut up in little hills on the plates of the younger fry. They made some little exchanges of provender while the nurses looked another way.

One little girl, with great dreamy, blue eyes and gold- en hair, a child made on purpose for a Sunday school

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book, and sure to die young, was a picture to study. She might have sat for a cherub, without altering a hair. She ate with indifference, as the spiiitual sort always do, until a neighbor laid violent hands on her cup of water; then my cherub gave the hand a good scratch, and made up a face at her enemy, that destroyed my angelic theory in a breath. It seems to be a notion born with us, that fair hair and blue eyes imply sweetness in their owner ; an old-fashioned heroine was sure to be a blonde, and the villain was dark, to a dead certainty. My little orphan at the Foundling was a Tartar, but people will be deluded by her all her life long. The hospital is made a weekly show, but the children seem to enjoy it as much as their visitors, and Captain Coram would not have objected to anything that made them happy.

In the old town of Middleboro', Mass., I liave seen a Bible hoarded like miser's gold, which was given to Margaret Hutchinson " by her friend, Thomas Coram," before the Revolution — a stout old Bible, once thrown into the street when Governor Plutchinson's house was sacked by a Boston mob, but doing good service yet, like this other noble charity of the giver.

When we came out on the porch, the rain poured down in torrents ; it could not have rained harder on the day when Noah launched the ark, and the wicked ones began to think he meant business after all.

The hospital stands far back from the street ; no cab was to be had for love or money in the neighborhood, and our feminine souls shrank from a long scout in search of one.

For two mortal hours we stood helpless in that

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porch, reflecting on the equality of the sexes, while husbands and fathers made distant sallies, bringing back cab after cab to their waiting flocks. We prayed ear- nestly to these cabmen to return for us, but tlieir fires must have lived at Land's End or John o' Groat's house, for " they went on their way, and we saw them no more."

One weighty old Englishman had engaged a cab to come back for him ; but when it arrived a quick-witted and unscrupulous little widow, with a troop of chil- dren all dressed in mourning, after the British fashion (which would give a bereaved dog a black blanket), hurried into it, and it was just starting when the old gentleman brought up his rear guard of dowagers to take it. The widow regarded him sadly, yet serenely, as widows have a habit of doing, and nevei* budged ; he grew so purple in the face, that he would have had a fit on the spot, if the rain had not cooled him ofll

The cabman drove away like Jehu, son of Nimshi, before he could recover his breath, and John Bull came back to the porch with both fists doubled up, and saying over and over, in a subdued roar, " If it had not been for the children ; if it had not been for the children " —

But for them, the little widow would evidently not have survived long enough to marry again.

" If we were only widows ! " sighed Juno, as we saw her triumph. "If I ever come abroad again," said Minerva, *'I will come with a friend and her husband. A gentleman in the party is absolutely necessary to comfort in travelling."

"Friend's husband!" said Juno, scornfully; "I will come with a husband of my own, and neither borrow

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nor lend." Juno had already made one dive into the storm, after a cab, and was now a " very damp, moist, unpleasant body," indeed. At last the rain held up, — a most unlikely thing for English rain to do, — and we waded home, sadder and wiser women.

Some time since, the Prince of Wales set the fashion of going to "the Zoo" (which is short English for Zoological Gardens) on a Sunday afternoon. You can see the wild animals at any time ; but since the royal visit, if you want to study men, women, and monkeys at the same time, it is best done on Sunday afternoon.

Another favorite haunt of Cockneys on Sunday is the palace of Hampton Court, which Wolsey built and gave to Henry VIII., who had a habit of rolling a greedy eye upon whatever his courtiers held most dear, whether it were wives or liouses.

The approach through Bushy Park is as lovely as ancient oaks and shadow-flecked grass, tame deer, and mossy old fountains can make it. One might almost envy Nebuchadnezzar his punishment, if he were to suffer it in Bushy Park. The palace is more or less inhabited in corners, by half-pay officers, aristocratic widows who have seen better days, and other poverty- stricken gentry, who have a little blue blood in their veins, and some claim on the regard of the crown. I wish the queen would let in another regiment of them, and shut up a few of the endless galleries where one asks for bread and gets only pictures, long before the last room is reached. The majority of the pictures are like Dean Swift's country house, —

'* Too bad for a blessing, too good for a curse ; I wish from my soul it were better or worse.**

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One or two heads, by Titian, gleam out of darkness, but the specimens of the old masters are but the sweep- ings of their studios. The room where one lingers longest is perhaps the one containing the portraits of the beauties of Charles II.'s court, painted by Lely, and Vandyke, and Kneller.

They were a graceless set, and they look as if they gloried in the fact, and would not have it otherwise if they could.

Nell Gwynne, who boasted herself "the Protestant mistress " (as if those two words could ever live to- gether ! ), looks unfit to sell oranges at a theatre door, or to do any other honest business. The one exqui- site face, a lily among passion-flowers, is the Countess of Richmond, for whose charms Charles II. would have divorced the childless Catharine, if Clarendon (who "wished to secure the succession of his own daughter to the throne) had not manoeuvred her into a marriage with the old Duke of Richmond. She is grudgingly acknowledged to have been good, when it was the all- prevailing fashion to be bad.

One other portrait among ten thousand, keeps house in my memoiy, a head of Madame de Pompadour, by Greuze, who always painted women's heads, as if he were in love with every one of them. If you cover the lower part of her face, the rest is intellectual in the highest degree ; but if you hide the upper part, it is only voluptuous. She caught the king with her mouth and chin, but she held him with her eyes and forehead.

When I look back on Hampton Court, it seems to have been haunted chiefly by Queen Charlotte and her fifteen children. One of them, the Duchess of Glouces-

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 99

ter, always accounted for the misfortunes of her family by saying, " There were too many of us — too many of us!"

They line. broad walls, the queen looking intoler- ably self-satisfied; and the whole fifteen, if they were " summed up and closed " in one, would not have had grace enough to be worth painting.

The gardens of Hampton Court are the loveliest part of it ; the giant grape vine, planted by Mary Stuart, has thriven better than any other seed of her planting^ and tlie fragrant darkness of the Lady's Walk is worthy of her tread.

The half-pay officers and the aristocratic widows are in clover here ; they must have been well ofl^, indeed, if they have seen better days than they find in this palace. Five cartoons of Raphael, made familiar to us by engravings, used to glorify Hampton Court, but they have been removed to the museum at South Ken- sington.

In that museum is everything in the way of gold, and precious stones, and china, and wrought work, that it ever entered a woman's heart to desire ; but the collec tion is so inhuman in its vastness, that one tires of it at last, and longs to balance it by a week in a wigwam, WMth clam-shells for spoons.

The same feeling of satiety, the Apollyon of travel- lers, clutches us before we^ have even glanced at all the rooms of the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. There are no pictures there, however, that one can feel a comfortable contempt for. I only wish that some of the hard, old virgins painted in the dark ages, whose facial angles could be demonstrated like a pri)pojsitioii

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in Euclid, might be burnt, for the credit of the women- kind who lived at that date.

Here an altar is set up for Turner, the one god of English art, and Ruskin, his prophet. I longed to ad- mire his pictures, but I could only admire Ruskin, that he had eyes to see the beauty hidden from me. Now and then he has a landscape, sunlit and restful as a Claude, but for the most part he has gone color-mad.

In a picture called (I believe) " Rain, Wind, and Speed," he must have rubbed together with his thumb all the colors on his palette, and then copied the result on canvas. After severe study, I thought he meant to make a locomotive driving through a stormy night; but very likely it was something altogether different.

We greet Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode" as an old friend ; but like all broad satire, there is small com- fort in looking at it ; it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

There are one or two portraits by Gainsborough, who either had the luck to paint very noble and pure-look- ing women, or the genius to make them look so on can- vas. f\ don't know which would be the greater boon, to have beauty and suffer the fading of it, or to look like common folks in the flesh, and receive an immor- tality of loveliness in a portrait by Gainsborough.J

There is a group of baby angels by Sir Joshua Rey- nolds, in whom every mother must trace a look of her own treasures ; and out of a crowd of better and famous pictures looks a wonderful woman's head, with black eyes, and a crown of gold hair, by Paris Bor- doni. It made me seize the catalogue ravenously, and alter all it was only " An Italian Lady." If you iind a

A WOMAN 'S VACA TION. 101

head in any gallery that tells you some bewildering story, the catalogue is sure to call it " Portrait of a Lady," or " Head of a Gentleman." You knew that be- fore, and straightway christen it for yourself. This gold-haired splendor, whom I alone bowed down to, should have had a dagger in her hand, and been called ^A Woman Undecewedr

There are clouds of angels, and great companies of martyrs, each with a face of his own, no two alike, by that rare artist, Fra Angelico, who never painted any- thing until he had first seen it in a vision of prayer.

One or two pictures by Rubens, in violent contrast, seem to have been painted in a vision of lust.

Your worn-out enthusiasm will revive again, as you stand before a " Holy Family," by Mui illo. Joseph looks good and reliable, as Joseph ought to look ; and the child is maturely beautiful, a divine baby ; but the Virgin herself is that sure triumph of art, in a woman's face, which unites sense with beauty. Other virgins have been pretty or pious, sometimes both, and some- tii^es neither; but this one hns the mildness of the dove and the wisdom of the serpent, a woman to be admired by her own sex, which implies vastly more than beauty. Take away all the accessories, leaving her alone in the picture, and she would make a perfect Puritan maiden, like Priscilla, as she sang the hun- dredth psalm to the sound of her spinning-wheel.

Two pleasant lounging-places, for an empty forenoon in London, are the British Museum and the Royal Academy, though the immensity of the former is too oppressive for comfort. The headless marbles are per- haps the most satisfying part of it, because one can fit

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better heads to them in imagination, than the sculp- tors did.

The young men and maidens who come to make sketches from them, are not much overawed by their grandeur; their behavior pLainly indicated that draw- ing and flirtation are kindred arts.

We were a very serious party till the gold ornament room enabled us to throw off the accumulated solem- nity of these stony halls. Any householder in London can give you a ticket to read in the great " Reading Room," but it is so intolerably large and lofty, that the atmosphere seems to press harder than fifteen pounds to the square inch. One would not dare to ask for any lighter book than Buckle's History of Civilization./ ,^:>

The Royal Academy is the yearly expression of modern English art. The pictures are so gay-colored and brisijht that it warms the cockles of one's heart to look at them, after a long course of the "funeral baked meats " of the middle ages in other galleries. This is the prevalent feeling, for we saw one or two suburban families who meant to make a day of it, and l^ad brouglit their luncheon. They ate it with much relish, as English people always eat, and then attacked the pictures with renewed strength.

In the National Gallery there is scarcely a room in which some St. Sebastian, stuck all over with arrows, as if he were a pin-cushion, would not take away one's appetite for vulgar food. f^ To me the picture of the year was " Eve seeing a Snake after leaving the Garden." Nobody else seemed to care for it, but I suppose every picture, as well as every woman, has one admirer. | She carries one fair

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child on her shoulder, and the little black -browed Cniu is killing: the snake. It seemed to me the artist must have been a woman himself in some previous state of existence, to have mingled with the beauty of her face go much sorrow, deprecation, and loathing.

The strength of this exhibition lies in its portraits, from royalty downward; and I understand that the English nobility looks better ou canvas than any- where else.

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CHAPTER VIIL

BELGIUM.

"There was a sound of revelry by night. And Belgium's capital liad gathered there Her beauty and her chivalry."

E Americans like to stay in England as we like to visit our grandmother. Everything is ar- ranged about her precisely as we saw it last, and will be so to the end of her days. She is " set as the ever- lasting hills;" but in the hurries and worries of Amer- ican life it is good to think of one settled thing in the world, an island where it is " always afternoon." She is too old to change, even if she were not convinced that the old ways are best. She builds her rail cars like carriages, because they will be more private, and half the people must ride backwards, whether it agrees with them or not. She has never travelled in Amer- ica, and has no idea that there is more privacy in sixty people sitting with their backs to each other in one car, than in four staring into the eyes of another four through all her carriages. The animals in the ark had no checks for their baggage, and it has never occurred to her that any of their descendants would need tliem.

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She calls all the new words, thnt we coin as easily as we breathe, slangy and useless; there were words enough before. She is certain that we all talk through our noses, and when one of us writes a good book, or becomes otherwise distinguished, she puts on her spec- tacles and eyes us from head to foot, just as our grand- mother would, saying in effect, " Bless me, how you have grown ! "

She is tedious sometimes, but to leave her decorous house for the dark ways of the Continent is like a second farewell to home.

Travelling is comparatively easy where people speak some sort of English (if not the best), but for women taking their lives in their hands, the wolf is waiting at every foreign corner. It is true you can always disarm him with p, piece of money — if your money holds out, there is no fear of wolves 6r anything else in Europe.

There is no pleasant way of getting out of England, and the manners, of travelling English indicate plainly that Providence never intended them to leave their island. It is just a choice of evils, and every one is sure that he has chosen the worst.

Our way lay through Harwich, and thence by steamer to Antwerp. The German Sea is always as uneasy as if it had not half room enough to spread itself, and sometimes it is rough and bearish, as the nation which gives it its name ; but this route is not a favorite, and there is alwa^'s half a chnnce to lie down in the little cabin and to be as miserable as one likes: in the crowded ) boats between Dover and Calais there is no room even to pile up agony. ]\

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I _ • _ ■

Our own sufferings were greatly mitigated (since

"we have always fortitude to bear -the misfortunes of

others ") by watching the rise and fall of rage in a

handsome young woman at being separated from her

husband and forced to lie on a mattress on the floor of

the cabin. Her diamond earrings and travelling: suit,

fearfully and wonderfully made, suggested a bride. ^

Angry passions are becoming to some pretty women

— they give brilliancy to the gray-eyed, neutral-tinted

sort- — but the face of this one clouded over, and

actually blackened like summer sky before a sudden

tempest.

The quiet, sensible-looking man who had evidently taken her for better or worse, and was rapidly finding it worse, put in a word of deprecation now and then in vain, and finally listened in sileiice till the storm was over.

I have no doubt they kissed and made up afterwards, but, when they went off the boat, the husbnnd cast a lingering and dubious look behind him, as if, perad ven- ture, he had lost in the night some cherished illusion of the sweetness of matrimony that he would never find again. I fear we women shall never know how many funerals of sweet old beliefs men go to in the first year of their married life.

The steamer flounders through the w^hole night, and arrives at Antwerp any time in the forenoon. There is no hurry in this latitude; one day is as good as another.

The examination by the custom-house officers, like that in all foreign places, amounts to nothing. You have only to open your possessions with alacrity, and

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tliey will be more eagar than yourself to close them up and have done with it. They cannot bore you half so much as you apparently bore them.

At the Hotel de FEurope we rejoiced in stately halls on the ground floor, but all was not gold that glittered. Dante could not have contrived a worse place in his Inferno for keeping people awake. A paved driveway tunnelled the house, and ended in a court-yard, where all the business of the liouse was carried on. There all the bells ring, all the water is pumped out of the bowels of the earth, and all the dishes are washed, far into the small hours of the nisfht. Horses and carts are drawn up at your bedroom door, as if there were a cholera patient to be taken out under cover of dark- ness. In the morning a great calm settled on that court-yard, daylight brought "a poultice to heal the blows of sound ;" but we shook the dust of Antwerp off our feet, and fled into another city before the day was over.

Women and dogs have apparently taken a contract to do all the work in Antwerp, and it is hard to tell which of them have the most hairorard faces. Of all animals, hard labor seems to be least becoming to these two; they were meant to exist more for ornament than use, and when they are galled with harness, it outrages a natural law.

The cathedral, the pride of Antwerp, is free to visit- ors until noon, when the pictures are unveiled and shown for a franc. This is one of the sharp and pious tricks of the Catholic churches to make heretics pay tithes to them. The great picture is Rubens's "De- scent from the Cross," or rather Christ's '' Descent from

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the Cross," for the startling reality of the scene makes one forget Rubens and his picture altogether.

* The small side-pieces attached to it, of Elisabeth greeting Mary, and the Virgin presenting the young child to Simeon, take away from the unity of the centre. One picture should tell but one story.

This is almost the only picture by Rubens that does not give me the impiession of being painted by the pound. His Virgins and Sabine women are so intoler- ably fat as to be a burden to themselves and everybody else. Hidden behind a pillar there is a famous head of Christ, painted on a block of marble by Leonardo da Vinci. It is tlie face of a man, handsome, refined, and sad, but scarcely divine — a sort of Unitarian Clirist, beautiful enough for love and imitation, but scarcely powerful enough to save.

The cathedral at Antwerp is a bright, cheerful place, a church to take comfort in as well as to worship, not cold and gray like the York Minster, and other Protes- tant churches.

One could take one*'s knitting and gossip away an afternoon under the bedizened fissure of the Virmn and in the light of lier candles — she is only another woman — without the least sense of disrespect to the church ; and this is the chief reason, I think, why the Roman Catholic fiiith holds the ignorant mind with so tenacious a grasp. The churches are always open,' with gay colors and processions to enliven them, and BO weave religion into the dailv life that Protestantism seems to offer in exchange only a dry abstraction, that one can scarcely understand, much less believe in, till he has learned to read and write. The women run in

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 109

with market baskets on their arms, kneel for a moment, and mutter a prayer as fiimiliar to them as breathing, while at the same time they take note of every stran- ger that passes them. They offer the prayer as Hindoo women offer a flower to their god, and think no more about it. The one thinks it no more necessary to give all her attention to her prayer, than the other to ana- lyze her flower botanically. To such a woman it looks like hard work to be a Piotestant, and make her own prayers.

There is an old and young Antwerp. The high- peaked Spanish houses date back to the time when the grim Duke of Alva and his soldiers ravaged Belgium; the gay, light houses and boulevards of the new town mark the coming in of French fashions.

The Museum, a famous gallery of old pictures, is a weary procession of saints, and martyrs, and virgins, in greater or less agony. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now !

Every thorn, and gaping wound, and drop of blood must be plainly visible — these old artists lefl notliing to the imagination. If they could have painted the groans of the martyrs, they would have been happy. In one picture John the Baptist's head is not only offered to Herodias on a charger (we are used to that, and don't mind it), but the. dripping neck, from which it has just been severed, thrusts itself out of the pic- ture into your face, to make material for bad dreams forevermore.

A very good butcher was spoiled in many of these old Flemish painters. Now and then a black-eyed girl by Rembrandt, or a sweet St. Catharine disputing with

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the philosophers, breaks the sad monotony ; and there is one, " Adoration of the Magi," in which a tall camel ^ overlooks the scene with a benevolent smile — it is the one cheerful face of the gallery.

The deadly materialism of Catholic art is nowhere so plain as in the freedom with which these old paint- ers lifted the veil which, the Bible says, cannot be lilted even by angels, and attempted to paint God him- self. In a famous picture of the dead Christ, a vener- able old man looks down on him from the clouds ; and it gives the mind a certain wrench to realize that this is meant to be the first person of the Trinity, whom no man shall look upon and live.

Some of the heathen are more reverent, sitting for days to meditate on the sacred name, and never daring to utter it.

Among the other copyists, surrounding famous pic- tures to repeat better men's work, is an armless man, Mr. Felu, who does easily with his toes all that other people do with their fingers. His manner is so natural that 1 passed him again and again without noticing Lis peculiarity. He holds his palette with the big toe of one foot, and his brush with the other, and his copies are not to be distinguished for nicety from the oriojinals.

To go from the Museum to the small private gallery "Nottebohra," at No. 3 Rue de Fagot, is like step- ping from the chapel of a monastery in the middle ages into the brightest salon of Paris. The pictures are full of the home-like thoughts of to-day. You have not the labor of setting your thoughts back like the hands of a clock. Lovers of Ary Schoeffer may here

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. HI

bow down to his Faust and Margaret. There have been many Margarets, bat this is the true one, more sinned against than sinning. On Faust's chair leans the conventional devil, with leering eyes and claws, a creature who could never tempt any one to sin, charm he never so wisely. If there be a personal devil, Jas some people believe, I do not doubt he is the hand- somest man in the world ; otherwise he would not be fit for his work. "The devil is a gentleman," said King Lear.

To paint him with a tail and claws, and a mean countenance, is to show men more foolish in yielding to him than they naturally are. Milton gives him a terrible beauty, but artists nearly always give him a face that sinners as well as saints would run away from.

Schoeffer treats the " Four Ages of Man " in the soft, delicate way peculiarly his own, two little chil- dren playing together, a youth whispering in a maiden's ear, a man and woman looking lovingly at the play of the little ones, and a white-haired couple resting hand in hand on the cottage bench after the journey of life.

He paints that other hackneyed subject, the "An- nunciation," like no one else. All other pictures of the Annunciation must needs have a hill-side, with a star rising over it, and small bundles of clothes lying on their faces, which are supposed to be shepherds; but this picture is just a group of impassioned faces of men and women really drinking in "glad tidings of great joy."

In Antwerp we first ran against that curious fashion of fastening looking-glasses outside of ipverj' window,

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that the lady sitting within can see the street panorama without any trouble but that of raising her eyes. It gives the passer-by an odd sensation to look into re- flected faces in these glasses; it is a temptation to wink or to smile at them, to make sure whether they are reality or only pictures. I saw some very pretty and smiling faces so framed outside of German win- dows, prettier there than anywhere else.

They make a rare black silk in. An twerp, a silk that will stand alone — a dress for a lifetime. In a thrifty family it might go down to the third and fourth gener- ation ; but who wants a dress to last forever?

The country between Antwerp and Brussels is so flat that it must have been ironed out in the creation. The fields are tilled almost entirely by women, whose faces are as wooden as their shoes.

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, wears a clean and finished look, deeply grateful to the eye; not a city put gradually together by necessity and circumstance, but each part fitting into the others as if calculation and good taste had been invited to the birth, and not called in when it is too late. All its beauties were foreseen facts, not afterthoughts. The parks are in the heart of the city, as parks ought to be. A city with all its breathing-places outside of it is like a human body with lungs that may be put off* and on like a garment.

The names of its streets are so well selected as to be an oddity — the Royal Street, the Street of Indus- try, of Science, of Arts, and of Long Life. I could not find out whether the last was the abode of all Bclglc patriarchs or not.

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 113

The carved, lace-like front of the aged Hotel de Ville looks down on the old city, where all the great deeds of its history were done. In the square now used as a market, crowded with women and vegetables, there is a double statue of Counts Egmont and Horn, who were executed on that spot, and the Duke of Alva thrust liis ugly head out of an upper window above it to see the thing. well done.

This Count Ei^mont was a Catholic noble, but he joined the cause of the Protestants because he did not approve of their being persecuted. He became their ambassador with Count Horn to Philip II., and put faith in the kind reception of the king. When AVil- liam the Silent and his Protestants fled before the Duke of Alva, Egmont could not be persuaded to run away with them, though the phlegmatic William be- souG^ht him with tears.

"Adieu, prince sans terre" (without land), said Eg- mont when they parted. "Adieu, count sans tete" (without a head), retorted William. And one of the first events of the campaign was the execution of Egmont and Horn ; whence sprang the old proverb about Philip 11., that "the king's dagger is close be- hind his smile." In Schiller's play Egmont is repre- sented as an interesting bachelor, but he really had a wife and nine children, a very respectable condition for real life, but not so useful for poetry.

Behind the Hotel de Ville is a curious statue, called "the Spitter," a Tiiton leaning out of a wall, with a stream of water pouring from his mouth.

At the corner of St. Catharine and De TEtuve Streets (a needle in a haystack would have been more easily

8

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found) is the " oldest citizen of Brussels," its palladium, a little black statue of a boy, who is also a fountain. It is called the "Manikin," and has eight suits of clothes for holiday occasions. Louis XVL bestowed on hira the order of St. Louis, and an old maid of Brussels left him a legacy of a thousand florins.

Popular delight in him has invented more than one legend of his stepping down from his. basin and going to the aid of his friends.

There is one gallery of pictures in Brussels so unique in character, that they w^ill stay in the memory when better things have faded out. This is the Wiertz Museum.

The great picture is the struggle for the body of Patroclus. It don't matter who Patroclus was, except that he looks very dead indeed ; but the point of the picture is the awful strain of two sets of men, both bound to conquer- or die in the attempt. It is like looking on at a duel, when you sympathize with both sides. There is passion enough in it for the whole battle of Waterloo. This is almost the only picture into which the artist has not infused as much oddity and bitterness as genius. The oppression of earthly authority is grandly shown in a giant grinding a woman's shoulder between his teeth, and treading helpless mortals under foot. Perhnps the most curious idea is expressed in the "Man of the Future," an en- larged and noble figure of a man, holding in his big hand, and regarding with a pitying smile, the baubles that have been most valued by mankind — coins, flags, orders, gems, and fire-arms. Two angels look on with him in sympathetic wonder.

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 115

ITear this is a figure of Napoleon in the flames of hell, while his victims hold out broken limbs to him as the trophies of his career. A bitter hatred of Napo- leon and French despotism runs through the whole gallery ; and yet the artist, against his will, has given to Napoleon a face so sad and noble that the sympathy of the beholder cleaves to him, and not to those who suffered by him. Wiertz was a wonderful flesh paint- er. Some of his nude "figures of women remind one of Lady Mary Montague's conclusion when she saw Turkish women in a bath.

" I was here convinced of the truth of a reflection that I have often made, that if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed, and many noted beauties would have to abdicate their thrones."

Every contrivance is resorted to, to keep up the illu- sion of reality. One looks through a knot-hole in a board-fence, into a charnel-house, where a woman, too soon buried in cholera time, is just forcing up her cofiin lid, and realizing the horror of her situation. Through another hole is seen a mother, driven mad[ by starvation in Napoleon's campaigns, who is cutting up her child to boil it in a kettle. The curve of the little cheek, half covered in her apion, is the only soft- ening touch in the terrible picture.

But not all these fantasies arc horrible. In a corner, a painted girl smiles at you, through a crack in a painted door, so naturally that you smile back to her before you can realize that she is only a picture. In another, more lovely than words can tell, a mother, just arrived in heaven, recognizes the child that had gone before.

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Wiertz was low-born and poor, and the iron early entered his soul, to reappc^ar in his pictures, which are full of scorn and bitterness towards all the world that called itself superior to him. He is as vulgarly self- conscious in his art, as Byron was in his poetry. He was of that order of genius wliich, in literature, has produced Frankenstein, and Vathek, Poe's stories, and some of Hawthorne's novels — a select few, out of all humanity, who are under a sort of opium influence from their birth. They love the world no better than the world loves them.

Sunday is the gayest day of the week in Brussels. Between one and two o'clock, all the world goes to promenade in the park; there are concerts all day, and balls in the evening. On our Sunday, there was a grand military and religious procession in honor of a church festival. Hundreds of gorgeous banners were carried through the streets, and troops of little girls in white carried flowers and wreaths before the Virgin. When the "Hpst" was carried by, under a canopy, by a group of priests, all the women fell on their knees in the dusty street as suddenly as if struck down by an invisible hand. The men were mindful of the knees of their trousers, and merely crossed themselves.

Nearly all the shops were open, and the parks were thickly dotted with family groups, who have never conceived of a devouter way to spend Sunday than to say their prayers in chui'ch early in the morning, and then to enjoy music, and dancing, and gossip in the parks all the rest of the day, No one who sees them can doubt that their ignorance is bliss. But this is the right side of the tapestry ; the knots and roughnesses

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 117

are all behind it. The irreverence which makes Sun- day a day of pleasure to the rich, makes it also only another working day to the very poor. In a Saturday evening walk about the city, one of us, oppressed by the heat, bethought herself of a linen travelling dress, ready made ; but not finding one, the shop-woman in- sisted that she would have one made to order and delivered at sunrise Monday morning ; but a Puritan bringing-up outweighed the heat of the weather and the convenience of this arrangement. " And besides," said Minerva, after her pious decision, "you know nothing wears well that is sewed on Sunday."

Half a franc (ten cents) gives entrance to a brightly- lighted garden, where one may sit at a little table and sip ice-cream, listen to the music of the band, and take cold, all at the same time, with delightful ease.

One of the most harrowing chapters of Villette has this concert-garden for its scene. In that book, Char- lotte Bronte dissects Brussels and its people as coldly as an old physician does his work in the hospital. She found handsome women there, models for Rubens.

" With one of those beauties," she says, " I once had the honor, and rapture, to be perfectly acquainted. The inert force of the deep-settled love she bore her- self was wonderful. It could only be surpassed by her proud impotency to care for any other living thing." If Madame Beck be still living, she must have a ner- vous feeling of sitting for her portrait to every pale- faced, English governess that teaches in her school.

In the Place Royale is a noble statue of Godfrey de Bouillon, with banner uplifted, the defender of the holy sepulchre, who, when the other crusaders would

118 BEATEN PATHS, OR

have made liira king of Jerusalem, refused "to wear a crown of gold where his Savior had worn a crown of thorns." It looks down the Rue de la Madeleine, one of the most fascinating streets in the world to women. Money burns in your pocket the moment you enter it. The shops are small, and their contents might sink forty fathoms deep without taking away one jot or tittle from the use or comfort of the world ; but beauty would suffer a cruel loss. Every second window is full of films and cobwebs into which lace-makers have wrought many lifetimes. The woman who invented lace (I am sure it was a woman) must have caught her idea from frost-work on a window ; there is no other pattern on earth to make point lace by. The alternate windows are full of jewels (not jewelry, which is apt to mean wrought gold), but jewels^ in which the value and lustre of the stones quite subdue the setting, and reduce it to its right place, the frame to the picture. But there is no greater mistake than to suppose that the prices corresj)ond with the size of the shops. The first American lady who passed that way held up both hands with astonishment, and said, " Haw cheap ! " and the Bruxellois have been laboring ever since to abate her astonishment.

The English say that Americans, with their lavish ways, have spoiled "the Continent" for shopping.

Ten miles away from Brussels lies the Field of Waterloo, "the grave of France," where all Europe fought one man, and got the better of him at last by accident.

In an open carriage, we drove through the Forest of Soignios, that has stoo<l for ngos, nnd been bn?ught

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 119

ft

to the very perfection of a forest. Byron calls it the Forest of Ardennes, where Roman legions were be- wildered. It was in the forest of Arden, in As You Like It, that the exiled duke found —

** tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

We went into such ecstasies over its shadowy beauty, that our stolid old coachman asked us " if we had no such forests in our own country ;" and we said, " O yes, plenty," hoping thot the recording angel would drop a tear on our patriotic answer and blot it out, when he set it down to our account. The trees stand close together like the serried ranks of an army, compact and self-contained, till they reach the upper air, and then breaking altogether into a lusty growth of dewy greenness that makes a cool twilight at their feet.

** To sbarae the temples decked By skill of earthly architect, Nature herself, it seemed, would raise A minster to her Maker's praise."

The village of Waterloo was Wellington's head- quarter from the 17th to the 19th of June, 1815, the days of the battle. Here the guides waylay you like bandits. We took one whose father had fought on the French side (I cannot swear that this is not a peculiarity of all their fathers), and who described the battle with French enthusiasm. At Waterloo, a woman came out of the inn with a pail of water, squeezed a wet sponge on the foreheads and washed the feet of the horses.

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The latter looked much finer animals than the crowd of men who stood about, holding up the door-posts, while a woman did their work. On the way to the "Field" they show you a pretentious monument, erected by Lord Anglesea to a leg that he lost in the battle. On his plan, one might fill up a grave- yard, and yet keep one's head above ground. Such men should have lachrymals to keep their tears in. The great plains of Belgium seem made on purpose for the manoeuvres of hostile armies, giving advantage to neither side. The monument, in^the shape of a cir- cular mound, one hundred and fifty feet high, is raise d on the spot where the Prince of Orange was wounded. It is surmounted by a lion, cast from the French can- non taken by the allies ; but no one ever really sees that lion, for it is too high up to be distinctly visible from the plain, and too near when one has scaled the mound. A wiry little Scotch-looking woman keeps the " Museum Hotel," where a great treasure of skulls and sword-blades is shown ; and she does so bewilder and obfuscate the minds of her visitors with accounts of her uncle's. Sergeant Cotton, behavior in the battle, that I am not certain to this day whether it was Ser- geant Cotton or the "Iron Duke" who said, "Up, guards, and at them ! " The French army was so g'orious in failure, that it lays balm to the national heart to this day. When Napoleon would have fought at the head of the " Old Guard," Marshal Soult turned back his horse's head with the protest, " Sire, the enemy have been fortunate enough already." All lov- ers of Napoleon must deeply regret this little mistake of Marshal Soult's. The great man should have died,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 121

but never surrendered. The epic of his life would then have been rounded with a true French period, instead of six years of snarling decay on the rock of St. Helena.

Many reasons have been given for the fall of Napo- leon ; only this one is dear to me — "a poor thing, sir, but mine own." He compassed a throne easily enough, but had not eyes to see the power that is always behind it. Through life he needlessly and wantonly affronted the self-love of women. He found fault with the dresses of the ladies of his court — an insult that some women take more to heart than a slur on their beauty or reputation. He drove away Madame de Stael when she would have adored him, and so secured an enemy always fighting under cover. He outraged the whole sex by divorcing Josephine, and when he married a princess of the house of Austria, counting on her influence with her father, the simplest of women could have told him that it was useless, when she had a step-mother. And he suffered Maria Louisa to offend that step-mother by outshining her in diamonds, and other magnificence, when he held a review of royalty at Dresden. His minister Talleyrand, whose career is nearly as wonderful as his own, always heartily despised women, but never overlooked their influence. At Se- dan, six miles from Waterloo, was a French failure of another color. There, the third Napoleon would have been almost as deeply indebted ^s his uncle to a friend- ly bullet in his back.

Byron has fought the battle over again in poetry in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Victor Hugo in prose in Les Miserables. Victor Huoro was on the French

122 BEATEN PATHS, OR

•

Bide, the gallant, desperate side, and Byron wrote on his own side, w^hich was neither French nor English. Thackeray makes some " copy " out of it too, in his Vanity Fair, when all the English people were fleeing for their lives out of Brussels. *

In the Museum at South Kensington, near London, there is a picture, by Sir Edwin Landseer, of a green, flat bit of country, and in the foreground are two figures on horseback. The tall, martial, old man with high cheek-bones and Roman nose is the Duke of Wellington, pointing out to the pretty woman with him the spot where the "red rain" fell fastest, and the motto on the frame is Southey's line, —

** But Hwas a famous victory."

The whole of Belgium has the serene and prosperous air of that picture. It is peaceful as a great establish- ment with a good housekeeper at its head; no mean economies, and yet nothing wasted. Leopold L was a housekeeper both good and wise. Had not his first w^ife. Princess Charlotte of England, died, and made room for Victoria on the throne of England, he might have lounged his life away as Prince Consort, and never developed his talent for reigning.

In 1848, when the ferment of French revolution again stirred all Europe, he did a very rare and won- derful thing. He put his kingship to vote among his subjects, and was triumphantly elected to a "second term."

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CHAPTER IX.

GEBMANY.

** Thou knowest the story of lier ring, How, when the court went back to Aix, Fastrada died ; and how the king Sat watching by her, night and day. Till, into one of the blue lakes That water that delicious land, They cast the ring drawn from her hand; And the great raoftarch sat serene And sad beside the fated shore, Nor left the land forevermore."

A MORNING train from Brussels to Cologne gave US two or three afternoon hours in Aix-la-Cha- pelle, or Aachen, as the Germans call it, where the Ger- man emperors were crowned for ages. Charlemagne loved it well even before " Fastrada died ; " and he was buried there, sitting in a golden chair, clad in his royal robes, and holding a sceptre in his hand.

The ancient chronicles make out Charlemagne to have been a genial old fellow, a good friend to have in any century. He dabbled in literature, compiling the first French grammar, somewhat as Solomon built the temple — for his fingei's were so stiff with holding the sword that he could never learn to write, but signed

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his flecrees by dipping his sword hilt in ink and press- ing it on the paper.

He had an uncommon love for his daughters, who took advantage of it, as daughters always do. His English secretary, Eberhard, had fallen in love with one of them, named Emma, and made secret visits to her bower, climbing in through the window. One night, while the lovers held sweet converse, there was a light fall of snow in the court-yard, and the footsteps of Eberhard would be sure to be tracked from Emma's window. Kings' daughters were broad-shouldered and strong women in those days, and Emma carried her lover on her shoulders, safe out of harm's way. Char- lemagne was sitting at a window which overlooked this little by-play, and it opened his fatherly heart into con- sent to their marriage. Such stories, cropping out of those warlike times, like the white "edelweiss" out of sterile mountain tops, show that changes may come in clothes and manners, but never to the hearts of young men and maidens.

Once in seven years, they show to adoring crowds in Aix-la-Chapelle the dress that the Virgin wore when Christ was born, and the swaddling-bands of the infant. These are among the best-attested relics of the Roman Catholic church, having been given by the Patriarch of Jerusalem to Charlemagne ; but if the Virgin was the thrifty woman, in poor circumstances, that I take her for, those clothes must have been cut up for the younger children long before the patriarch was ever heard of. They do not show them oftener for fear of wearing them out. Many cures have been wrought by merely touching this blessed trash, I suppose the

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 125

• elderly priests become so used to playing their parts in these little Romish theatricals, that it is second nature ; but the younger ones must suflfer torture from sup- pressed laughter when they hold up these sacred rags for the adoration of the crowd. It is said the Roman augurs could not perform their rites in their own com- pany, because they laughed in each other's faces ; and nothing makes the Catholic mummeries respectable but the vast numbers who believe in them. A small and persecuted sect, who cherished such nonsense in its midst, would be borne down and wiped out by the de- rision of all the world.

Cologne comes from the Roman name "colonia;" and if cleanliness be next to godliness, it is very far off from both. The beauty of its cathedral gives credit to the diabolical legend that hangs about it. It is said the architect sold his soul to Satan for the plan of the church ; but he took so much time in building it, that his creditor waxed impatient, and claimed his due be- fore the work was done ; so that the cathedral, begun in 1248, has never been, and can never be finished. A more practical reason is, that there has never been money enough forthcoming for the purpose. " Church work is slow — church work is slow," said Sir Roger de Coverley.

It has been said that the cloisters are too low for the nave, thus making a certain disproportion ; but I verily believe there are people who would carp at the "golden streets," because they were not paved with dianK)nds.

One could half believe that it came straight from heaven as a free gifl to worshipping souls, if the smell of candles, and the tawdry images of the Virgin dressed

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« up with spangles, did not prove it a very human piece of work after all. In the heart of it is a little jewelry shop, otherwise the golden shrine of the "Three Kings,'* or Magi, " Caspar, Melchior, and Baltasar," who came to worship the infant Jesus, bringing frankincense and myrrh.

The skeletons were brought from the East by the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. The skulls are bound with diamonds, and the whole shrine is stud- ded thick with glowing rubies, and sapphires, and all manner of precious stones. It must forever touch the feminine heart to see such glorious things wasted on a box of bones (which may have belonged to three Arab camel-drivers), when they might be wrought into brace- lets and necklaces. The treasury is rich in jewelled crosses, and gold vases, used in rare ecclesiastical pa- geants. A little box studded with great pearls, which, one can see with half an eye, were intended by nature for ear-rings, holds a thorn of the true crown ; but the choicest things in the collection are two links of the chain that bound St. Peter at Jerusalem when the angel released him out of prison. They do not tell you (perhaps heretics are unworthy to hear it) whether the angel or St. Peter himself preserved them as a souvenir of his deliverance.

In a little chapel behind the high altar is a picture of the adoration of the Magi, so old that no man can guess at the name of the artist; but still so beaming with genius, that his name ought to be a household word. Goethe called it "the axis of the arts;" but I hope my readers will know better than I do what he meant by it.

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Through many narrow streets, like a network of sewers, with a new smell waiting for us at every cor- ner, we sought the Church of St. Ursula, that luckless Scottish princess, who, returning from her pilgrimage to Rome, with a modest train of eleven thousand vir- gins, was here set upon and slain by the heathen Huns.

The legend is that, while high mass was being cele- brated by the Archbishop of Cologne, a white dove flew down three times to one spot, and when the ground was opened, the bones of a great multitude were found, with inscriptions showing sufficiently to devout minds that they were the remains of St. Ui'sula and her train. These bones are now an*anged inside the walls of her church, two feet deep, and may be reverently peeped at through small gratings.

In stiff old pictures, St. Ursula and her betrothed walk hand in hand along a river bank strewn with heads and arms, cut off by the Huns, and they are themselves skewered by two heathen swords; but being together and true lovers, they don't seem to no- tice such small inconveniences in the least ; let a picture be ever so stiff and ill-painted, this bit of love and pa- thos would condone it!

Sceptical Protestants dare to laugh at this sweet old story, because some of the bones are those of men, and others of animals; but the legend expressly says that some of the train were soldiers; the word virgin has no gender, and St. Paul made no distinction. Sir Gala- had was a "maiden knight" —

** I never felt the kiss of love. Nor maiden's hand in mine, So keep I fair through faitli and prayer, A i\.(jirt IicMit ii^ worl: :m(l ulil."

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Touching the bones of animals found with the others, many of the elderly virgins may have had lap-dogs. So pretty and sad a story ought not to be wiped out of history for want of a trifle of probability.

In a little room, that one enters for a sixpence, the bones are artistically arranged in all sorts of figures and arabesques, and rows of skulls are set on shelves, done up in red needle-work, as if every virgin of them had died of the toothache. Here, too, is one of the identical jars in which water was turned into wine, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. It is of alabaster, much stained and battered, as anything or anybody naturally would be, after being knocked about for eighteen hundred years. There are some old boxes of trinkets, beads, and the like, found with the bones, and a tooth belonging to St. Apollonia. Being a hollow one, she was well rid of it.

If I made any distant allusion to any of the seventy- two smells which Coleridge counted in Cologne, in the hearing of our guide, he always muttered something about its being a Roman city, as if that august people had left all these evil odors behind them, when they declined and fell. Many sins have been laid to their charge, but none so heinous as this. This guide pro- fessed to speak English, but he very appropriately pro- nounced it "anguish." It was anguish to hear him. It is an instance of the law of compensation, and also of the meeting of extremes, that in this tainted city is to be found the true Farina cologne. There are about forty shops, each one of which is the sole and only place where it is sold. Johann Maria, himself, pro- fessed to live at " No. 4 Inlichplatz ; " and so sinister

<4

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 129

was the droop in his left eye, as he surveyed our sevea innocent'countenances, that we were fain to take what- ever he gave us, asking no questions.

After a reeking forenoon in Cologne, it was like " the shadow of a great rock in a weary land" to find our- selves on a steamer on the Rhine, that "exulting and abounding river," which Germans love so well that they name it "Father Rhine." Tourists who think they waste time if they are not always seeing something, usu- ally make the journey by rail to Bonn, and take boat there, as the scenery called "^?ie" does not begin till one has passed that place ; but they make a great mistake.

An afternoon of plain sailing, with a cool wind blow- ing in my face, gave my strained enthusiasm time to rest after the glories of Cologne Cathedral. It was >i eager as ever when we landed at the little village of "" Koenigswinter, and challenged the first sentinel of the enchanted garden of the Rhine, the " castled crag of

Drachenfels."

«

We took refuge from the white glare of heat in the first hotel we could find ; but the place of places to S spend the night, and see the sun rise, is at a little "^ bird's nest of an inn on the crag itself. The royal way of ascent is by carriage ; but for an equal measure of ^ hard work and pure fun, there is nothing like a donkey- j J; ride, and the total depravity of a donkey-boy. ^

The view from the Drachenfels (dragon-rock) is not c^ so rarely beautiftil as from others of the Rhine heights; but to us' it was the first, and the first draught of delight is always the sweetest. . The first child, to a mother, is always the handsomest, and one's first love can never be improved upon. •--'

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Travellers often go down the Rhine, beginning with Its heights, and following it until it flattens into Dutch placidity; but w^e began at the lowest step, and went up the stairs of its beauty till our last look was in the face of its perfection. It was old Plato's notion that, when one was moved by loveliness, the wings of the soul begin to swell; and yet the ancient owners of this castle founded on a rock had no corner in their souls that swelled for anything but plunder. The fields that used to smoke under their ravages, now stretch away in little right-angled patches of many-shaded green. It has reminded some one of a patchwork bed-quilt ; but to me it was like a vast mosaic of green stones, emerald, and chrysoprase, and beryl, with now and then a sere and yellow agate.

In pagan days a horrible dragon, breathing fire and smoke, lived on the Drachenfels (one sees his cave, coming up), to whose rapacity the people offered hu- man victims. A young girl, whose beauty had made a quarrel between two knights, was offered to the dragon by way of settling the matter. As she was tied trem- bling to a tree, and the dragon rushed at her, she held up a crucifix, which so affrighted him, that, with a great hissing, he plunged over the precipice, and so made an end of himself.

This miracle made good Christians of all the heathen in the neighborhood ; and whether the girl married one or both of the knights the legend saith not. We man- age these things better in the nineteenth century.

Two maidens are prone to quarrel over one knight, who straightway marries another woman, who does not love him, but wants a home, so that it is the man who is given to the dragon after all.

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The Drachenfels is a spur of the Siebcngebirge, or " Seven Mountains," which were the scene of the Nie- belungenlied — the Iliad and Odyssey of Germany. It is a vast mine of poetry only partially \vorked. / Wil- liam Morris, in his Earthly Paradise, has sunk the Latest shaft in it. The story of the '•Niebelungen," in very short hand, is somewhat like this. Seigfried, the hero, kills a dragon ; and, being bathed in its blood, is rendered invulnerable except in one small spot on liis back, where a leaf fell during the bath. He marries Chrimhilde, fairest among women, and having gone over, body and soul, to his wife's family, as most men do who love their waives, he goes wuth Gunther, his brother-in-law, to Iceland, to help him court a princess called Brunehaut. This young woman is one of the strong-minded women of that period, and will marry no one who cannot overcome her in single combat. She has slain many suitors, but Seigfried puts on his magic cap, which makes him invisible, and gives him the strength of twelve men ; with liis aid Gunther gets the victory and marries the princess. But Bruneliaut has not got over the love of fighting; and when she has only her husband to deal with, easily binds him with cords, and hangs him on a nail against the wall.

Gunther must have been greatly more or less than a man and a descendant of Adam, if he did not make haste to lay the blame of Brunehaut's first defeat on Seigfried.

^y way of retaliation Brunehaut bribes an old war- rior named Hagen, who is in Chrimhilde's confidence, to find out from her where Seigfried is vulnerable. On the plea of guarding him from all perils, Hagen per-

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suades Cbrimhilde to embroider a leaf on liis doublet over the fatal spot. Then Hagen seizes his opportu- nity, when Seigfried is stooping to drink at a spring, and plunges a dagger through the leaf. Tlie widowed Chrinihilde now gives her v^ays and nights to revenge^ and finally marries the king of the Huns on condition of I lis assisting her in her great object. After years of wailing, Gunther and Brunehaut (who has been some- what "weeded of her folly"), Ilagen, and all her fol- lowers, come to make Chrinihilde a friendly visit, and the poem ends with a grand slaughter of all concerned. The moral of all this seems to be (though it is not set down in the book), that no ^vise man will ever let his wife know where his weak spot is.

A little below the Drachenfels is the castle of Ro- landseck and the island convent of Nonnenworth, held together by the airy bridge of a little love story, sad as it is sweet.

Roland fell in love w^ith the fair Hildegunde, but this did not hinder his going to the wars. News came of his death, and the maiden fled, in ber despair, to the convent of Nonnenworth. The day after she had taken the veil, Roland returned safe and well, and afterwards wasted his life in watching the convent be- low his tower, that hid his treasure.

" Gazing downward to the convent, Hour on hour he passed, Watching still his lady's lattice, Till it oped at last."

One day be saw a funeral procession wind among the trees of the island, and the sixth sense — that only

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 133

lovers have — told him that Hildeguncle was dead, and his watching was soon over.

** There a corse they found him sitting Once when day returned ; Still liis pale aiui placid features To the lattice turned."

This story demonstrates the superior comfort of the Protestant way of living and thinking. If Hildegunde had had no convent to flee to, in her despair she would have wrung her hands and torn her liair in her lather's house until Roland came home; and it' he had never returned, the worst that would have befallen her woukl have been to be an old maid, and bring up her nieces and nephews. It was a sorrowful choice of evils those Catholic maidens had, in the middle ages, to marry or to go into a convent. It is not the least of the bless- ings of Protestantism, that it opened another road for women to travel in, if they prefer it.

As we sail past Oberwinter, the "Seven Mountains" pose themselves for one long picture —

** A blending of all beauties, streams, and dells, Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine."

The Rhine has set up an altar there on which to offer his first fruits.

Farther up is the ruined castle of Hammerstein, named from Charles Martel, the Hammer. Henry IV. of Germany made a great fight against that most over- beaiing of popes, Gregory VII. ; and when he brought himself to ask forgiveness, he was kept waiting three days, clothed in sackcloth, before he received it. This was overdoing it, according to papal habit in all ages;

v_

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the war broke out again, and Henry took refuge and long held out against bis enemies in this now roofless castle of Haramerstein.

Andernach has a tall watcb-tower and a volcanic foundation. The people live by their quarries, one of which gives millstones; another, the water cement used by the Dutch to give solidity to their dikes; and a third, a stone for coffins, which absorbs the moisture of the body. The Romans called these coffins " sarcoph- agi," flesh-consumers.

Neuwied has a look of home with its clean white- painted houses. The Moravian Brethren have settled here in great numbers ; they live somewhat after the fashion of Shakers in America, except (a great except) that marriage is permitted, and, on withdrawal, two years' frugal support is allowed; a member is never received a second time ; under this rule, it is almost unheard of in the history of the community that any one should leave them.

They have a curious and fascinating custom of draw- ing lots in any emergency, and trusting to Providence for the event. 1 suppose it meets that yearning for moral stimulant which other people satisfy with gam- bling. Not far from Neuvvied is the monument to Hoche, a young French general, who was thought to show more promise than Napoleon himself. Byron wrote for him the most perfect of epitaphs, —

** His mourners were two hosts — his friends and foes," —

unless that to Marceau, also buried on the Rhine shore,

may rival it, —

" He had kept The whiteness of his soul, and thus men wept for him."

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CHAPTER X.

THE RHINE.

•

** O, the pride of the German heart in this noble river ! By Heavens, if I were a German, I would be proud of it, too ; and of the clustering grapes that hang about its temples as it reels on- ward through vineyards, in a triumphant march, like Bacchus, crowned and drunken. " — Longfellow's Hyperion,

IT was on the Rhine steamer, after leaving Cologne, that our St. Ursula fell among thieves, worse heathen than their ancestors, who were satisfied with taking life ; but these modern Huns would have our money, too. They never knew when they had been fairly paid ; and when St. Ursula would have en- lightened them in plain English, and good French, and scholarly German (I am not sure that she did not try them with "small Latin and less Greek"), they fell back on stupidity and Low Dutch ; and yet these same men, when she ordered anything to eat, were perfect polyglots of language. The story of the build- ing of Babel is a mythical matter at home, but in Eu- rope, where good English scolding is a waste of breath, it seems an affair of yesterday when every man asked his neighbor for a hammer or a nail, and found no one to understand him.

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In Dr. Rimmer's picture of the master builder of the Tower of Babel, which once sounded so outlandish, the traveller in Germany descries a man and a brother.

German money is a conundrum that one may as well give up, to begin with. Heine said it was a great help to an education to be born to those nouns that make their accusative in wm, and the same thing applies to the groschen and kroitzers of his national money. In one province a groschen is three cents, in another more, and in another less ; that is, a groschen is not al- ways a groschen, and great quantities of small coin are just nickel buttons, with no inscription at all. It takes the faith that will remove mountains to believe that they have any value.

The buyer may say, " It is naught, it is naught," but travellers must go by what the seller says, and the sell- er is sure to cheat in giving change. The only remedy is to spend as little as possible on German soil. The careful phrases culled out of German grammars are of very little use in withstanding or understanding the villanous patois spoken by guides and porters.

Our second day on the Rhine landed us at Coblentz. One does not need to be told that the name comes from the Latin word "confluentia," the confluence of the Rhine and the "blue Moselle." Every wind that blows over it tells us that the Romans have been there before us. There is no need of olfactory nerves in these old walled towns. A little girl once said she ^'' heard a smell;" and you can Aear,- and taste^ and almost 8ee those evil odors.

When Dr. Wayland laid down the law that you could not imagine a smell, he meant those of Cologne

A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 137

and Coblentz. The Queen of Prussia has a palace there, and the "Queen's Gardens " make a fringe of loveliness along the river bank. On the way, the coachman shows you a stone sarcasm, in the shape of a piHar, erected before the disastrous Russian campaign of Napoleon, with an inscription in which French suc- cess is taken for granted. When the Napoleonic tide turned the wrong way in this very campaign, — for Fate does not like being anticipated, — the Russian com- mandant of Coblentz let the pillar stand, merely adding to the inscription a " Seen and approved," with his signature, as if he had vised a passport. Everybody crosses the bridge of boats to visit Ehrenbreitstein, " the broad stone of honor," the Gibraltar of Germany. Nature and men have worked together to make it the most tremendous scowl that the face of one coun- try can wear towards another. It has seen worse days, but never better ones than now. The French had pos- session of it once,

** And laid those proud roofs bare to summer rain, On which the iron shower had poured in vain."

The garrison can only be reduced by starvation, and it once held out so long that cat flesh was twenty-five cents a pound. The dungeons and other secrets of the fortress used to open to a fee; but since the last war nothing is shown for love or money, except the view from the battlements. French eyes are now so sharpened by wrath and shame, that they would al- most penetrate a stone wall to find out a weak spot in this rock of defence.

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The German soklicrs seem rather small men, but well-built and miraculously drilled, with more intelli- gent faces than one sees in the English army. A little below Coblentz is Stolzenfels (proud rock). The Coblentzers long offered it for sale for seventy thalers, and finally made a present of it to the crown prince, who restored it to its first estate. The great paint- ing on the outside, visible from the steamer, chronicles the visit of an English princess, who was entertained there. One of its wings was long inhabited by a party of alchemists, who sought for the philosopher's stone, and the elixir of life, long after other people had given them up for lost. After this, villages lie " thick as leaves in Vallombrosa" along the edge of the river^ pleasant places to be buried in.

Every one has its castle and its legend of the lovely maiden, whom somebody loved or did not love; the end is sure to be tragic enough in either case. Long- fellow has told the story of "The Brothers" Sternberg and Liebenstein, in Hyperion. It sings itself in the mind like an old ballad.

Rheinfels is the most imposing ruin on the river, but not the most graceful or romantic. In 1692 a French marshal promised it to Louis XIV. for a Christmas present ; but this old French brag, like many later ones, came to nothing.

Then comes the rock of the " Lorelei," four hundred and forty-seven feet high, the old home of a siren, with a star on her forehead and a harp in her hand, who lured men to destruction in her whirlpool, and then chanted their death-son ^.

The rock was said, in the old time, to echo fifteen

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 139

times ; bnt men are grown hard to lm*e, and the Lorelei is tired of it: her rock now sends back but one echo. It has been tunnelled, too, by the railroad ; even "Ma- riana" would have found it hard work to be romantic in the " moated grange," if a train of cars had passed through the cellar of it. Hood says the echo is now, "Take care of your pocket ; take care of your pocket." Oberweisel, the Roman Vesalia, is said to be a pleas- ant place to lose a day in, if one has them in plenty. The' castle of Schoenberg crowns it, and in the river at its feet are groups of rocks called the " Seven Sisters." Some one has put the legend into lively verses, in this wise : —

** The castle of Schoenberg was lofty and fair, And seven countesses ruled there ; Lovely, and noble, and wealthy, I trow; Every sister had suitors enow. Crowned duke and belted knight Sighed at the feet of these ladies bright; And they whispered hope to every one, While they vowed in their hearts they would have none.

Gentles, list to the tale I tell ; 'Tis many a year since this befell ; Women are altered now, I ween. And never say what they do not mean.

At the castle of Schoenberg, 'twas merriment all ; There was dancing in bower, and feasting in hall ; They ran at the ring in the tilt-yard gay. And the moments flew faster than thought away; But not only moments, — the days fled too. And they were but as when the first came to woo; And spoke they of marriage or bliss deferred. They were silenced by laughter and scornful word.

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Gentles, list to the tale I tell; *Tis many a year since this befell ; And ladies now so mildly reign, They never sport with a lover's pain.

Knight looked upon knight with an evil eye ; Each fancied a favored rival nigh; And darker every day they frowned, And sharper still the taunt went round, Till swords were drawn, and lance in rest, And the blood ran down from each noble breast; While the sisters sat in their chairs of gold. And smiled at the fall of their champions bold.

Gentles, list to the tale I tell ; 'Tis many a year since this befell ; Times have changed, we must allow ^ Countesses are not so cruel now.

Morning dawned on Schoenberg's towers,

But the sisters were not in their wonted bowers ;

Their damsels sought them the castle o'er,

But upon earth they were seen no more.

Seven rocks are in the tide,

Oberweisel's walls beside,

Baring their cold brows to heaven :

They are called * The Sisters Seven.'

Gentles, list to the tale I tell ; *Tis many a year since this befell ; And ladies now may love deride. And their suitors alone be petrified."

The Falz, a castle in the middle of the river, stands like a sentinel with presented arms. It was built to challenge and demand tribute of every boat that passed it.

It was an old custom that the wives of the Counts

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 141

Palatine must pass some time in this castle, previous to becoming mothers. The reason for this custom it is difficult to fathom, unless there were not wars and rumors of wars enough to keep up their spirits in their mountain castles.

Near Bacharach is a rock that is only seen when the river is very low. The peasants hold a high fes- tival when it appears, for it is the unfailing signal of a noble vintage on that year.

** At Bacharach, on tlie Rhine, At Hochheim, on tlie Main, And at Wurzberg, on the Stein, Grow the three best kinds of wine."

We are now among the old robber castles, thirty^ ttco of which used to demand tribute of every passing boat. A mercliant of those days must have been a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. On a lit- tle green island that the steamer turns out for, stands the "Mouse Tower." An inhuman bishop, named Hatto, bought up all the wheat, in order to sell it dear, and w^hen the people complained, he enticed them into a barn, and burnt them up,

"I* faith, *tis an excellent bonfire," quoth he, ** And the country is greatly obliged to me, For ridding it in these times forlorn, Of rats that only consume the corn."

But out of the ashes of his victims came swarms of rats, that chased him from one place to another, un- til he fled to an island in the Rhine, and built the Mouse Tower; but the rats swam over after him.

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** Down on his knees the bishop fell, And faster and faster his beads did he tell, As louder and louder, drawing near. The saw of their teeth without he could hear.

And in at the windows, and inat the door,

And through the walls in thousands they pour,

And down through the ceiling, and up through the floor,

From the right and left, from behind and before.

From within and without, from above and below,

And all at once to the bishop they go.

They have whetted their teeth against the stones. And now they pick the bishop's bones ; They gnawed the flesh from every limb, For they were sent to do judgment on him."

At Bin gen the river is supposed to have broken the mountain chain that once bound it, as there are signs that it was once a great lake, stretching even to Basle. Poetry has made Bingen famous, with its poor soldier dying in Algiers. It is one of the " oldest inhabitants" of reading books. After Bingen, the vil- lages grow rare, and the hills more steep, but the vine- yards never cease. They date back to Charlemagne, who found that the snow melted sooner on these hill- sides than anywhere else. There is a legend that his favorite vineyards were at Winkel, and that he visits them once every year, and blesses them.

** And then from the home that he still loves so well,- He returns to the tomb that's in Aix-la-Chapelle, There to slumber in peace till the old year is over, And the vineyards again woo him back like a lover.**

The huge basaltic rocks, that seem to have grudged the passage of the river, have terraces built on their

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 143

steep sides, where only a lean goat would care to climb, and sometimes holes are blasted into them, that will hold just soil enough to nourish a vine. This soil is carried up in baskets, chiefly on the backs of women; and when a hard rain washes it down, the work has all to be done over again. Woman's work is never done anywhere. These Rhenish peasant women are strong, straight-limbed beasts of burden, nothing more nor less. Where all the men are trained to be soldiers, all the women must perforce be slaves. Byron will have it,

that —

** Peasant girls, with deep-blue eyes, And hands which offer early flowers, Walk smiling o'er this paradise."

They have blue eyes, it is true, blue as turquoises ; but they are tanned a red brown by the sun, and even turquoises set in copper lose all their beauty. I have never seen a German woman who would " shake the saintship of an anchorite," or of any other man; but travelling poets must be poetical, if truth is put to the sword.

Bismarck is not a favorite with German women. In the late war he made a burnt-offering of one hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, and left desolate the same number of widows and maidens. A man who takes the responsibility of making old maids by the hun- dred thousand, must be brave indeed. Our landlady at Coblentz, a buxom little widow, whose husband was killed at Sedan, said, with a long-drawn sigh, " Bis- marck will die some time, please God ! "

The Johannesberg grapes are not gathered until dead ripe, and those that fall on the ground are picked up

144 BEATEN PATHS, OR

with little wooden forks, made for the purpose. The wine was not particularly famous until the Rothschilds got possession of the vineyard, and with Jewish acute- ness, sold only a limited quantity every year, while they hired clever pens to write up its virtues.

Near Mayence we met one of those enormous rafts — water-villages — made from the mountain timber, and floated down to Holland. Boatmen and their families, cattle and fowls, live on them, sometimes to the num- ber of three or four hundred.

Mayence has a great cathedral, a favorite of fire, hav- ing been burned and restored six times; but it is chiefly famous as being the city where Gutenberg brought to perfection the art that makes men immortal, and print- ed his first Bible. He beggared himself, and led the usual hard life of inventors; but after death it was made up to him in statues.

I think it was here that, while one of his Bibles was in type, a woman substituted the word "narr" (fool), for "herr" (lord), in the verse about husband and wife, which says, " And he shall be her lord," so that it read, "and he shall be her fool." I wonder if the op- pressed creature thought that the Bible's saying so would make it so. The mistake was discovered in time, and the woman came to German grief, which must be more poignant than any other.

Mayence was the home of Frauenlob, a Minnesinger, who spent his whole life in singing the praises of wo- men, and when he died his body was borne to the tomb by six lovely maidens. His motto was, " He who possesses the love of a noble woman will hold all vice iu scorn."

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 145

The Mastersingers flourished in Mayence, too — a queer guild of "butchers and bakers, and candlestick- makers," who put vei*ses together over their work, and insisted on naming it poetry. They are to the Minne- singers as cuckoos and owls to nightingales.

*' As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme. And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anviFs chime.'*

We left the Rhine at Mayence, though we caught a glimpse of it afterwards in Basle. The Germans have covered their beloved river with poetry, like a misty veil, which adds to its beauty, like a bit of lace over the face of a fair woman. Two English prose-poems have been laid on its shrine, Longfellow's Hyperion, and the Pilgrims of the Rhine, by Bulwer.

The first is like a bunch of sweet-smelling flowers, dewy and fresh, as if the blessing of the morning were still on them ; but the latter is like the same bunch, imitated afler the best French method of makins: arti- ficial flowers, lovely perhaps, but scentless and dry.

It is but an, hour's journey fronr Mayence to Frank- fort, the old capital of the German empire.

The " Hotel do Bruxelle*' treats one perhaps as well as one deserves; but the "Roman Emperor" hath a more royal way with him.

All its old glories are but the setting to Dannecker's "Ariadne on the Panther." One enters a small museum of classical figures, evidently sculptured before the fashion of clothes, or even ^g leaves, had ever been heard of, a room to make eveiy man and woman look 10

146 BEATEN PATHS, OR

in each other's eyes, as Adam and Eve did when they found themselves naked, and were ashamed.

It is not to be supposed that the traveller pene- trates as far as Frankfort without being introduced to whole armies of nude statues ; but the nakedness of these figures was so aggressive, that they ought to have been arrested by a policeman. The "Ariadne" is by herself; in a little room with scarlet walls, which cast a pink glow over her figure. She is naked, too, but she is so clothed upon with loveliness, that one no more thinks of noticing it than would the happy panther that bears her. Ariadne's story is shadowed forth in her face.

She was a king's daughter, who saved the Greek Theseus from danger, because she loved him. He j)er- suaded her to elope with him, and perhaps she loved him better than the manly heart can bear, for he soon wearied of her, and when she lay asleep one day on an island, he deserted her. After great despair, she suf- fered herself, like a sensible woman, to be comforted by the god Bacchus (which does not mean that she took to drink), and hence comes the panther, which was an animal sacred to Bacchus.

The sculptor has wrought into her fjjce the expres- sion of a woman scorned, and yet triumphant. She has but one desire more on earth, and that is to meet Theseus and cut him dead. The miniature Ariadnes, in parian and plaster, that adorn American mantels, are very decent copies of the panther, but the real Ari- adne never leaves her rose-tinted home in Frankfort.

The hall of the Kaisers, lined with full-length por- traits of all the German emperors who ever reigned,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 147

was not a comfortable place to visit. One felt that one ought to know something of ail those high colored Ot- tos and Ludwigs, whom they married, or what famous heads they had cut off; but they were all strangers. Only the husband and father of Maria Theresa were anything like old acquaintances. In the great street of Frankfort, called " Zeil," every woman is on her native heath. Her soul may have swelled and budded on the Rhine, but amid the ravishing china and dainty embroidery that line this street, she is herself again. Frankfort is a sort of outpost of Berlin in worsted work, and if she wants to buy a drab-colored Moses on a sky-blue giound, or a shower of golden butterflies just alight on a sofa-pillow, or any other bit of work that is " red with the blood of murdered time," now is her opportunity.

Frankfort was the birthplace of Goethe, the "many- sided one," who taught that virtue was one of the fine arts, which one might cultivate or not, as one had time or talent. The man who wrote Elective Affinities ought to have been stoned to death by his country- women.

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CHAPTER XI.

MOEE GERMANY.

" At intervals the wind of the summer night passed through the ruined castle and the trees, and they sent forth a sound as if Nature were sighing in lier dreams ; and tlien all was still save the sweet, passionate song of the nightingales, that nowhere sing more sweetly than in the gardens of Heidelberg Castle." — Long- fellow.

WE reached Heidelberg on the eve of the birth- day of its aged university, and the town buzzed with young people come to celebrate it, like a hive of bees about to swarm.

The ruined castle, which broods over the town like an anxious mother over her baby's crib, burst into a blaze of red light at ten o'clock, which showed every little scroll and leafy capital on its carved front. It renewed its princely and brilliant youth, like a gray old actress suddenly inspired by a memory of early triumph, and then it sank into quick darkness and old age, and all the people, gathered on the river in crowds to see the glory of a moment, went home to drink to the health of the university.

The castle loses nothing when one climbs to it by daylight. The view from the battlements is a rest to

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 149

the weary, and the hill-side is threaded all over with shady paths, ending in dark little nooks, where an army of lovers might wander all night and never hear of each other.

This palace of a castle was six centuries in building, and for some years it was the home of Elizabeth, the ill-fated Queen of Bohemia, who sacrificed everything for the empty title of queen, and came to utter poverty in her old age. She was grand-daughter of Mary Queen of Scots, and, like most of the Stuarts, early found herself on the wrong side of fate. The noble ladies who were borne into this castle must have spent their summer days on the esplanade, embroidering ban- ners for brothers and lovers, and seeing every Sir Laun- celot that rode up the river bank below them; if they were crossed in love, they had only to leap off the bat- tlements in the small hours of the night, with the cer- tainty of having their names embalmed forever in German song and story. With all these materials for happiness, what could a woman ask more?

The walls of the castle are, in many places, twenty feet thick: Time would have grown old and lost his teeth before he could have gnawed them away, if he had not been assisted by French gunpowder.

A guide is ready for you and your fee, and leads you through a dusty labyrinth of old rooms and passages, while you wish yourself under the trees of the hill-side; he finishes with the "Great Tun," which held three hun- dre<l thousand bottles of wine. The journey through the castle is a snare and a delusion, and one can see the Great Tun at any time with a common hogshead and a magnifying glass.

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The famous university is a very insignificant- cluster of buildings, as one looks down at it from the*' Phi- losopher's Walk," a long avenue planted with vine- yards, on the opposite side of the river ; at the foot of it is an inn and a court-yard where the students fight their duels, and mar the little beauty given them by nature. Duelling began in the reign of Henry II. of France, who asked his courtiers, impatiently, "Why do you come to me for justice when you wear that at your side with which you can do yourselves justice ? " whereupon the first challenge w^as sent. Perhaps a Heidelberg student will send the last. The wrongs of all dogs in other German cities are here made up to a few; many of the students lead about very handsome ones, and it is said that after a drinking bout, the dogs often lead their masters, being the nobler animal of the two. The university was born in the fourteenth century, and even in its babyhood had half a thousand students, learning by heart versified rules of grammar, and endless commentaries, darkening wisdom that was dark enough in the beginning. "Truly, I do not won- der," says Longfellow, "that the pupils of Erigena Sco- tus put him to death with their penknives. They must have been driven to the very verge of despair." There is a large colony of young Americans at Heidelberg, and it is a vexed question there, as everywhere else, whether women shall be admitted to the benefits of the university.

One young lady from Boston has just gone through a course of ethics and philosophy, the only woman among two hundred and fifty young men; her thirty years and her high aim (she destines herself for the

A WOMAN'S VACATIOISr, 151

practice of law) brought her unscathed through the ordeal.

Musicnl instruction is excellent and cheap, and good board maybe found for ^VQ francs (a dollar) a day; but it is a place full of soriows for a girl, who has no friends to receive and make a backcjround for her. She may come irom America, full of hope and courage, with her heart set solely on a good musical education, but the weight of German opinion will slowly and surely bear down her good cheer. She has to breathe air thick with suspicion, and in every German girl's eyes, she reads the pharisaic rejoicing that they are not as she is.

She may keep up her spirits for awhile with a liearty scorn of their prudery, but in the end, if she cares for society, she must yield to its limitations. One young American girl got on very well by always wearing a wedding ring, and behaving as if she had lost every friend she had in the world.

A lonely girl cannot be happy without being im- proper, at least in the eyes of female Ileidelbergera; and I suppose men here, as at home, must think as their wives do. Women have a silent legislation in the realm of propriety none the less binding that it is not found in statute-books.

In the slight glimpses that the traveller catches of German family-life in the lower and middle classes, w^hich is, of course, the majority, the wife is no better than his dog, nor nearer than his horse, to her husband. He comes home to eat and to sleep, speaking none but necessary words to his wife, who hastens to fill him up with his favorite dishes.

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To a guest or a boarder he may address a sentence or two of courtesy, but never to his wife, and then he hurries away (if a German ever hurries) to a beer-gar- den to spend his evenings. He seems to suspect some- thing effeminate in an American, who prefers to sit down with his wife and children at home.

A German woman's motto seems to have been writ- ten for her long ago by old Chaucer : —

** She saith not once * nay,' when he saith * yea ; * * Do this,' saith he; * All ready, sir,' quoth she."

I say that this is the outward a})pearance of German family-life; but no one can have studied womanly char- acter anywhere without discovering that total submis- sion would soon exterminate the sex. Famine and pestilence would not be so sure. To have her own way is to a woman the breath of life ; and it must be confessed that German women do not look so miserable as they ought. I doubt not they have found a way to lead their husbands without letting them see the string; and if one had time to study their back-stairs politics, they might not be found to differ very widely from those of America.

Two hours' travel through a fertile country and home-like villages lies between Heidelberg, the place of study, and Baden-Baden, the place of pleasure.

The whole air of Baden is full of rest and leisure, as if no one who came there brought any shadow of work or business with him. Once it was the scene of a perpetual tragedy, in which men and women threw away their money, and their happiness, openly and without shame. Lookers-on held tlieir breath as they

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 153

would at the racinc: of bloorl-horses. Since the cjam- bling-houses have been suppressed, Baden has lost its morbid charm. It is as if Lord Byron, in the height of his profligacy, had "experienced religion;" he would still be noble, handsome, and poetic, but not half so interesting:.

The Conversation-house and gardens are light as day every evening, and elegantly-dressed crowds walk up and down, looking at one another, and eating ices under the trees, while the air palpitates to the music of the Strauss waltzes. People only kill time in Baden now, not their own souls. The place is lovely as ever, a gem of price set in a circle still more precious in the shape of environs ; but nothing in natural scenery can be so fascinating to men and women as the exhibition of their own passions.

A young Dutch lady travelling with us, for the first time out of her own flat country, could not And words strong enough, in her scanty English, to convince us of its dcliciousness. "Heidelberg was good," she said, with a final efl'ort; "I loved the hill and its castle; but Baden, O, Baden, I said, I will never leave it!"

Next to Naples, Baden is most addicted to carved coral. It is dear, as arc all beautiful things every- where outside of heaven, but not so dear as in America.

From Baden we went round a corner to Strasbourg, which has lately dropped out of French into German hands; but like a slave sold late in life, it is too old to change its character or habits. There is ait air of solidity and time-worn custom about it, as if it ha'l stood from the beginnins: of the world. Even the Romans found it a goodly town, and added nothing

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but fortifications. The cathedral tower is so high and light, it might be the only pinnacle left of the tower built by the giants to scale heaven. In the first French revolution, this great height was considered to insult the principle of equality, and was only saved from destruction by the Strasbourgers hastening to put the red cap of liberty on it. That red cap, made of tin, is now preserved in the city, a monument of French idiocy.

The cathedral-front is dainty as a bit of point-lace; it was brought to perfection by three generations of Steinbachs, chief among whom is remembered Sabina Von Steinbach, one of the few women who have ap- prenticed themselves to the trade of architecture, which Madame de Stael calls "frozen rriusic." In the intericrr, one pillar, called the '-Pillar of the Angels," is espe- cially hers, and one of a group of Apostles holds a scroll with these words on it in Latin : —

"May the grace of God fall to thy share, Sabina, Whose hands have formed my image out of this hard stone."

Some of the grace of man also fell to her share, for when she went to the cathedral to see this group ar- ranged, the archbishop came to meet her, and placed a laurel wreath on her head.

There is in many of the sculptures and ornaments of the Strasbourg Cathedral, a varying richness and deli- cacy that I have not seen in any other; like the over- flowing, of a pure woman's thoughts. The famous clock in one corner draws a greater crowd than all the carved memories of Sabina. It calculates almost every- thing but the end of the world. Near the top is a ^g-

A WOMAN'S FA CAT/ON'. 155

ure of Time with a scythe: at the first quarter of the hour, the figure of a child passes before him; at the second, a youth ; at the thii'd, a man of middle age ; and on the hour, a graybeard bowed with age. Above is a figure of Christ, and at noon the twelve apostles walk around him, each one turning and bowing as he passes. These figures are all about a foot high ; and to close the puppet-show, a cock of life-size crows hoarsely three times. The clock calculates the times of ecclesiastical festivals, many of which are movable. This part of the machine is said to require a thousand wheels, and at the begiiming of the new year they all turn round and arrange themselves for a new start.

The town is rich in high-peaked houses of Spanish memory, favorite haunts of the sacred bird, the stork, which struts about the streets and makes nests on the chimneys as if it were the real landlord of the town, and the inhabitants mere tenants at will. They have names, like children of the fiimily ; and it is looked on as an unfailing sign of coming misfortune when the storks desert a house where they have long lived, and make a nest on another chimney. When Van Arte- velde takes on him the dangerous headship of the rebellious citizens of Ghent, Clara, his sister, dissuades him with this potent argument : —

** Roger was esteemed The wisest stork in Ghent, and flew away But twice hefore ; — the first time in the night Before my father took that office up Which proved so fatal in the end, and then, The second time, the night before he died."

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Strasbourg is the headquarters of that epicurean dish "Pates de foie gras," made from the livers of geese that are fattened in a hot place. Who would be a goose in Strasbourg?

The women of Alsace, of which this old city is the capital, wear for head-gear an enormous black ribbon bow, which flares out from the back of the head like wings. It is inexpressibly odd in its effect, yet not un- graceful, if it make a dark background to a pretty face.

In front of the cathedral I think we met very nearly, if not quite, its youngest, citizen — a choleric-looking baby submerged, all but its head, in a padded and ruffled calico bag. The nurse tried to convey to us its age in broken French and crumbly German, and some of us, who knew more of languages than of babies, thought she said ''ten days;" but I am persuaded she meant ten hours, and that it is one of the time-honored customs of the city to show the cathedral to its babies, or the babies to the cathedral, on the very first day of their arrival in Strasbourg.

As we turned our faces towards Basle and the Alps, we had frequent reason to hope that old father Oi igen's doctrine is a true one, namely, that at the judgment day all women are changed into men. There must be a warm sympathy between the women of this region and the other lower animals, where a woman and a cow are sometimes harnessed tosjether to draw the plough, and a donkey cannot drag his load up hill with- out a woman to pull with him.

" 1 am a woman, woe is me ! Born to grief and irksome care."

A WOMAN'S FA CAT/ON'. 157

Later we saw a woman and a donkey drawing a cart along a stony road, with a raan in the cart fast asleep ; and when she passed a steep place with a pile of stones at the bottom, her spirit had been so dulled by long oppression that she passed it by, and never perceived her opportunity to tip out her lord and master, and pretend it was an accident. She was more stupid than the donkey.

Near Brussels two women were spreading a load of manure on a field, barefooted and bareheaded in the blazing sun, —

** Women they. Or what had been those gracious things."

"We never see such a thins: in America. Tt is a happy place for women," we said to our stolid old coachman, for want of any other foreign audience to hear our little brag.

"And unhappy for men?" was his instant question, as if one implied the other.

"I don't know; I never asked them," I said, with a sudden doubt; but Juno scorned my uncertainty.

"You have no need to ask them; wherever women are happy, men are in Paradise!" She said it in Eng- lish, but that old coachman shrugged his shoulders all the same. Later in the day we took up this stitch where we had dropped it.

" It only looks barbarous to us because it is unfa- miliar," said St. Ursula, who would find excuses for a cannibal. "Perhaps these peasant women have a hap- piness of their own, and would not change with us. They have never known anything better, and don't

158 BEATEN PATHS, OR

mind it. I have seen refined and delicate women in AiYierica drudging all day over a hot cooking-stove, when it would have been better for their souls and bodies to work in the fields with their husbands."

"I cannot think so," I said, rushing to take up St. Ursula's gauntlet. "A woman's temple is in her home; anything that takes her out of it makes that temple desolate just so long as she stnys away. A house with- out a mistress in it, is a body without a soul. When she voluntarily leaves it to lecture, or to preach, or to till the ground, or to do anything that lays bare her sacred seclusion, and places her on the same level with men, she stoops to do work lower than that which is divinely appointed to her to do in her own sphere. She may do it better than men ; but it is degradation, nevertheless._ She sells her birthright for a mess of pottage, that nourishes neither herself nor anybody else. A refined and delicate woman hanging over a cooking-stove does not move me to pity as would the same w^oman (supposing that one refined and delicate ever did such a thing) if she cut off her long hair, her glory, dressed herself in two shades of light silk, with train, and over-dress, and ruffles, and gold ornaments, and round tires like the moon, and went up on a plat- form to work herself into a white heat of indignation because women are not permitted to vote. One may boil and bake all day, and not be so hot and panting as I have seen a famous woman-lecturer, after an hour's vigorous scolding at the oppressive man of straw who will not give women the suffrage. To the best of my belief, women have voted from the beginning of the world. Nothing good, bad, or indifferent ever hap-

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 159

pcnecl that they had not a hand in it. And of all the sex, for an American woman to disturb herself about her rights, is like an old lady searching for her spec- tacles when they are on her nose all the time."

"I have no desire to lecture," said St. Ursula, "nor to wear 'two shades of light silk;' but I still think that an immense amount of womanly eloquence, and poetry, and power has gone up the kitchen chimney in our happy country."

" It may be so ; but it might have been equally wasted on a platform. I knew a woman — 'we ne'er shall look upon lier like again' — who did the drudging work of a farmer's wife, in a low-roofed cottage, all her life, and brought up ten children to be noble and worthy men and women, always standing ready, and keeping their powder dry, to serve their country when it needed them. She lived to see three of her sons in Congress at the same time ; to see them governors, and generals, and ambassadors, healing foreign as well as home wounds, and all of them rose up and called her blessed.

" She never had a more intimate friend than her fire- place; she was forced to stick to it closer than a brother for a score of years, in order to fill her children's mouths; but when she could find no other moment in which to keep up with the history of her country, she would have one of the boys read to her, at the breakfast table, the speeches made by Webster, and Clay, and Calhoun, who were then in their glory.

"In her triumphant old age, she was like the mother of kings. When she asked me if I liad read the last speech of this son or that son, I felt that she was show- ing me the crown jewels. She seldom stirred fifty feet

160 BEATEN PATHS, OR

from her kitchen, and yet she marie herself a power in the earth. If she had lived in cities, and held a weekly reception of the most gifted people in the land, or had crowded all her heart and brain into a book of poems or a novel, which should touch the soul of the whole nation, she might have had more of the semblance of fame, but not a tithe of its substance that came to her as she sent forth one after another of her worthy workers in her Lord's vineyard."

"You forget," said St. Ursula, "that neither kitchens nor children enter into the lot of some women, to be made glorious, if they are ever so willing and able. You forget the old maids."

"Never! May my right hand forget its cunning when I forget them. They are the bone and sinew, the reserve guard of the country ; but I maintain that no woman has a right to be an old maid."

" She may have no choice."

"I deny it. Every woman has the choice at least once in her life. Take our own party, and try the argumentum ad foeminam (if there is such a thing). We are, at this present, ten women of all ages, from seventeen to fifty, matrons and maidens; but might we not all have married at some time in our lives, if we would ? " A conscious smile mounted into twenty eyes and a little flush of color brightened some cheeks, as my foolish words brought up some sad, or sweet, or triumphant memory out of the dead past.

"Of all women's rights, you would say," said St. Ursula, " the only one really worth fighting for, is the right to love and to be loved ? "

"And to refuse love," suggested Juno. "The poorest

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and forlornest of women have that right; not St. Paul nor the legislature can take it from them. I suppose it is this, with a generous allowance of beer and cab- bage, which keeps the German women in such good condition."

11

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CHAPTER XII.

SWITZERLAND.

"What pleasure lives in height — In height and cold, the splendor of the hills?**

AT Basle, the hotel of "The Three Kings" swal- lowed us bodily, and never thought of us again. It is a caravanserai, very gorgeous in its appointments, fit to entertnin "Caspar, Melchior, and Baltasar" theni- Belves; but any visitor of lower rank than a king must fight valiantly to secure any attention at all. It was here, too, that we put our collective foot down on the "candle fraud." At every continental hotel, each vis- itor is charged for a whole candle, even if he stay but one night, and does not light it at all. If four people use one room, they pay for four candles, and the ser- vant rushes ahead of you to light them all, with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. Next day the candles are ingeniously whittled down to represent new ones to the next comer. At Basle we made a mild protest against paying for seven candles, none of which had been lighted, for fear of mosquitos.^

If the clerk had been born and bred in an American hotel, he could not- have crushed us more superciliously with his, "You had the chance to light them; you

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 163

must pay for that." We did pay for it (thoy are not afraid of women's wrath in that country), and solemn- ly rolled up our seven candles in the heart of our bag- gage, and went forth from his house like a tallow- chandler with six ilpprentices.

We did not find Basle wonderful in any way, except that an evening on the balcony overhanging the Rhine will probably remain in the memory, when many statues and pictures have wiped each other out. The river is swift, and careless, and relentless as Fate. Men have put a "thus far, and no farther," to it with stone edges, and thrown out a balcony here and there, from which to watch it go by, and that is about all men can do with their Fate.

It was here in the darkness that I heard a loud voice say, "What do I care for these little spouting Swiss waterfalls, when I have seen Niagara?" as who should say, " Why do I care to look at any other woman, when mine eyes have beheld Barnum's fat lady, who weighs six hundred pounds?" More than one on the balcony groaned inwardly, "O my country, may you not be judged by your travelling children!"

On the way from Basle to Lucerne, the sweet breath of the mountains begins to cool the air, and snow caps appear in the distance, with the Jungfrau in the midst, like a noble lady ministered to by her hand-maidens.

We pass the lake and battle-field of Sempach, where the Swiss conquered their old enemies, the Austrians, by the example of one hero.

The foe had adopted a new military tactic of fight- ing in a square with pikes outward, and believed them- selves impenetrable; but Arnold von Winckelreid, a

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man of immense strength, saw his opportunity as they advanced, and calling out to his followers, " Country- men, remember my wife and children," gathered liis arms full of pikes into his own breast, and so broke the square. The Swiss struck into the breach so made, and routed the Austrians.

**This patriot's self-devoted deed

First tamed the lion's mood, \

And the four forest cantons freed From thraldom by his blood."

Many poems have been built out of it, but no one seems to know whether the "women-folks" of this hero were properly remembered or not by his country- men. I cannot imagine a more uncomfortable position for a woman than to be the wife of a real working hero or philanthropist. She is sure to be offered up as a sacrifice on one altar or another.

Heroism used to be its own reward; but since the age of scepticism has set in, and learning has been stalking about Switzerland to prove that no such man as William Tell ever existed, it is pretty certain that Arnold von Winckelreid's days of f'lme are numbered.

A bright, green river, like a melted emerald, comes rushing out of Lucerne to meet the traveller. This river Reuss springs out of the green lake that lies lov- ingly about the feet of Lucerne, and pillows on its breast the mountain shadows.

The town is perfect for situation ; mountain and lake can no farther go! It is like turning over an illus- trated book, in which the pictures are far better than the text, and even the railway station, with its carved

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 165

gables, serves for a frontispiece. There are plenty of views in Switzerland more grand and solemn, but Lu- cerne Las just enough beauty for human nature's daily food. It keeps one cheerful without the wear and tear of enthusiasm.

In its quaint old church is a famous organ, played in the twilight of every day. It ended with a storm- piece beginning in distant rumbling and pouring rain, which made every one instinctively glance up at the windows ; then came a mighty rushing wind and thun- der, so sharp and rattling that the lightning seemed to strike the seat in front of us ; there was water running down the roofs and in the streets, and birds chirping out of wet branches, and long blasts of the Alpine horn, with half a dozen echoes more and more distant. At last the rain grew lighter and softer, and the sun came out with a great burst of shine, and the wholo earth was glad of the rain. People turned pale and red, and some young girls cried from excitement. It was a great surprise to go outside and find dust blow- ing in the streets, as if nothing had happened.

All around the church is a curious covered cemetery, ornamented with pictures, and statues, and artificial flowers. The lowest line on every tombstone was "K. I. P.," which sounded better when we bethought us to magnify it into "Reqiiiescat in Pace."

Every one goes to see the " Lion of Lucerne," carved out of the stone face of an everlasting hill, in memory of the Swiss guards who defended the Tuileries in the first insanity of France. Louis XVI. and Marie An- toitiette had fled to the Assembly for safety, and these Swi^is guards died, man by man, to the number of Q.\Q

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hundred and sixty men and twenty-six officers at the hands of the mob. The lion, designed by Thorwaldsen, lies in a niche in the wall of rock, over a pool of still water, and shaded darkly by trees. His face has more nobility than that of most men, and he clasps in death a shield bearing the lilies of France. Lucerne is a walled town, with watch-towers, and has some queer old painted bridges, which ought to be looked at in the brightest part of the day.

In one of them is the '-Dance of Death," which makes one scene in Longfellow's Golden Legend.

Elsie, — " What are these paintings on the Avails around us ? " Prince Henry, — " The Dance of Death :

All that go to and fro must look upon it,

Mindful of what thcj shall be.

The grim musician

Leads all men through the mazes of that dance.

To different sounds in different measures moving;

Sometimes he plays a lute, sometimes a drum,

To tempt or terrify."

The ascent of Mount Rhigi, one of the easiest of all the Swiss mountains, is made from Lucerne betw^eeu eight in the morning and six at night ; but the liivorite visit is for the night, for which a telegram must be sent up in advance, on account of the rush of people. There is no certainty, however, of seeing either sunset or sunrise, and th^ journey is often made wholly in cloudland. On a clear day, one counts a dozen lakes from the summit, and the passion which most people have to be taken into a high mountain, and shown all the kingdoms of the earth, is gratified. The railway is like all others, except for a broad central rail with

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 167

teetb, in which a cogged wheel under the engine turns. The passenger car is always in fi'ont, and may be stopped almost instantly. Timid people go up on horseback, and the absolute cowards on foot.

Mount Pilatus is another favorite of aspiring souls near Lucerne. It signifies "capped mountain;" and wlien the cap of fog stays on through the morning, it means fine weather. People use it for a barometer.

*' Overhead, Shaking his cloudy tresses loose in air, Rises Pilatus, with his windy pines."

There is a legend that Pontius Pilate was banished to this mountain, and, driven by remorse, threw him- self over one of its cliffs. It is uncertain whether he suggested the name, or the name suggested him. The Swiss mountains have been trimmed and made over as much as possible ; but there is plenty of material afforded in these days for new and tragical legends.

While we tarried at Lucerne, a young Englishman went up Mount Pilatus to look for rare ferns and Alpine flowers. Not coming back at night, his father and mother took it for granted that he had gone on by- boat to Interlachen, and when they arrived there, they learned that his broken body had been found at the foot of a precipice.

The fashion of offering up human sacrifices will never die out while people ascend mountains just for the sake of saying they have been there.

It is noticeable that the climbing passion is pecu-

;liar to long and lean persons having a hungry look

like Cassius. Plump, round, easy-going souls are con-

168 BEATEN PATHS, OR

tent to sit at the feet of Nature, without scalinsr her heights.

The cream of all the day's journeys that may be made from Lucerne is the sail on the lake to Fluelen and " Tell's Chapel." It is said to be built on the spot where Tell leaped ashore and shot Gessler. It was consecrated only thirty years afler his death, in the presence of more than a hundred people who had known him in the body, which would seem a sufficient answer to the doubts which have been thrown on the existence of any such man as William Tell. Mr. Baring-Gould, in a book called Myths of the Middle Ages, has tried to undermine the truth of Tell's story, on the strength of having found half a dozen similar legends in the literature of Persia and Norway, Den- mark and Iceland.

Tell did a most heroic thing ; but others have done the same thing in a similar way; therefore no such per- son as Tell ever existed, except in poetry. Women are said to be incapable of a syllogism, and I rejoice that no woman was guilty of this one. It seems to me a thing to be desired that men should shoot apples off their sons' heads in a noble cause through all the ages, if heroism happens to take that form. The authors, who try to blot out of history its most in- spiring passages, are worse than the old image-breakers who knocked off the noses of statues in the Catholic churches. They thought they were doing God service ; but Mr. Baring-Gould's book served neither God nor man.

The Golden Age of any literature has been long dead and buried before the age of criticism sets in.

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 169

"Do you know who are the critics?^ says Mr. Dis- raeli in Lothair. ''They are those who liave failed in literature and art." Of all Mr. Disraeli's arrows, — and he hath his quiver full of them, — perhaps not one has a sharper point than this.

All the mountain-guardians of Lucerne had their caps on, when we crossed the lake at seven in the morning to Alpnach and took carriages for the Brunig Pass. There is a flavor in mountain air, that goes to one's head hke new wine.

" We were gay together. And laughed at little jests. "

for an unsuspicious hour or two, rolling through the most beautiful scenery in the world. Long tradition, if not experience, might have taught us that it was too sood to last. Too much comfort is not consistent with this world's scheme of government. The old monks might have known better than to wear hair shirts and flaorellate themselves through the night hours. That sort of thing will always be done for us in the course of nature if we wait long enough. Happiness is not found in nuggets ; it has to be dug out of life with labor and pains. Our caravan of twelve carriages came to a sudden stop without any visible cause, and an English- man came to our door, announcing, in the unmoved way common to his nation, that the mountain torrents had washed away the road, and made it impassable for car- riages for five or six miles. He had no doubt that such a difficulty would be at once overcome in his country, because every one would make an effort ; but "these peo- ple" (the Swiss) never made efforts. Bags and valises

170 BBATEN PATHS, OR

might be carried over on men's slioulders, but trunks must be left behind. Ah ! tlien and there were partings to wring one's heart, for women can be divorced from anything more easily than from their clothes. J

They retired into dark corners with their baggage, bending over it long and lovingly, and coming back with large bundles done up in newspapers and shawl- straps. Some of our party had mourned for their / trunks (which liad been left in London) as for the flesh-pots of Egypt; but we were all converted into carpet-baggers from this time forth. There was an Italian duke in the party, with a train of servants and a daughter lovely enough for another Juliet; but mountain torrents are no respecters of persons.

The Englishwomen, in the company of fifty that straggled over the mountain on that brilliant morning, girded up their loins, and got over the ground as if they had done the same thing every day of their lives ; but "les Americaines" puffed, and panted, and turned white, and did the last mile or two on their minds rather than on their feet.

One old couple (English, of course), sixty-five and seventy years old, led the van, and scorning to take the diligences when they came to meet us, walked on ten miles more to Brienz; and when we joined them on the boat at that place, the old lady looked as fair and unflushed as when she started. At home we should put such a feat in the newspaper, and no one would believe a word of it.

For two mortal hours, we weaker vessels struggled over long stretches of loose stones, and yellow mud, and rushing water, with no soul left in us to admire the

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 171

waterfalls that festooned the gray mountain walls like white ribbons. To us, they were not bridal favors, but so many taunts and jeers at our forlorn condition. Some one remembeied a cheerful story of a young man and his sister walking over a Swiss road, torn up like this one, and the brother, turning his foot on a loose stone, slipped and fell over the edge, going down hundreds of feet in the current of the fall. An- other added that this young man had all the money of the family in his pocket, so that his sister was left pen- niless. Still another had later news of the sister, whose grief did so scatter her wits, that she threw herself over the next precipice. Thus did we cheer our souls with anecdote along the rugged way.

Two or three p(5ople came back in their tracks, and reported that it was impossible to go on ; we must cer- tainly turn back and spend Sunday at Lucerne. When we declined their advice with thanks, and pushed on, they wished us "bon voyage" with a mingling of sor- row and contempt, which made us renew our strength like eagles. One can do anything, upheld by a contrary J mind.

At Lagnau we were fed and comforted with eight or ten courses of Swiss cookery, and the American wrecks were packed into other diligences for the last ten miles. The Brunig Pass is full of beauty, pressed down and running over; but our admiration was, for that day at least, tempered with awe. The way winds and winds like a spiral staircase, and comes out many times in- view of the same waterfall. It creeps under an overhanging rock which "baptizes by sprinkling" every one who passed under it. This water comes from hidden springs,

172 BEATEN PATHS, OR

which must some time slice off this rock as with a knife; and when it falls, the end of the world will come for those who now live placidly at its feet in the valley.

A muddy stream rushes angrily through the ravine, as if it resented the stone walls that keep it so narrow, when it might flood a dozen villages as well as not. The lake shore, when we take steamer again for Inter- laken, is studded with villas and carved cottages, and the Geissbach Fall makes a final plunge into the lake, after all its amorous dalliance with the mountain-side. The cottages all over Switzerland wear their roofs far over the walls, like broad-brimmed hats; and under tliis shelter it is common to write texts and bits of poetry in large letters, that he who runs may read. On one near Geissbach is the line, in German, "Dear friend, love more and see clearer in every man a brother."

Interlaken lies between the lakes, as its name implies, but it should be called a village of hotels. A circle of steep wooded hills stands all around it, like sentinels, not grimly, but as if it were a favorite prisoner. A green river clasps it like an arm about its waist. Be- tween two low mountains, the Jungfrau looks down on the village like a maiden just risen from sleep, parting her curtains to look over the hills and far away for her lover. Interlaken is always crowded in the season; but there is little to see there, except the people and the Jungfrau.

All nations meet together in peace, as it will be in the millennium, '-Jew and Gentile, bond and free," not to mention dusky Creoles from the isles of the sea, and bushy Russians, whose names are best pronounced by a sneeze.

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 173

Its great charm lies in its restfulness. When the grasshopper is a burden, the only reraedy is to sit down in a still place and wait for hope and interest to spring up again. Multitudes find this still place at Inter- laken, and use it to repair damages in soul and body.

Large parties are happiest in foreign hotels, because they need not die of silence; but solitary travellers wander about like lost spirits on the' Stygian shore, looking importunate, but speaking to no one.

American girls are pretty and plenty at Interlaken. Their distinguishing mark in '73 lay in the tower of braids which made each one a "turret-crowned Cybele." It may be only patriotism which leads every American to rejoice in the superior beauty of his countrywomen abroad. Foreigners think so too, if a prolonged and exhaustive scrutiny be any proof. Staring among for- eign gentlemen is cultivated as a fine art. They look at a pretty American girl as Adam must have looked at Eve, when he woke from his long sleep and met her eyes for the first time. The gaze is at first curious, as of one who had never seen a woman before, and melts at last into an intense satisfaction. A young girl who has endured a season in a foreign hotel, going to table d'hote every day, is safe to run any gantlet of eyes that will ever be bent on her at home. The old maxim, that " it takes two to make a stare," does not hold good in Europe.

There is no class on foreign soil that corresponds to American girls. At home they have their own way, and it makes even the plain ones piquant and stylish, full of gay talk and laughter. There is no other recipe so certain to develop a woman's beauty. It is the

/

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young married women and mothers in America who are subdued, reserved, and cumbered with much serv- ing; but in Europe, the two positions are exactly reversed. " If my lot were to be cast in this latitude," said Juno at last, " I should pray to be born married." 'A cultivated Frenchman, after long observation of New York life, declared that he could not see why Amer- ican girls should desire to marry, for they had under their fathers' roof all that a French husband looks on as material wherewith to secure a wife's love and hap- piness, namely, jewels, freedom, and importance. He hud not perceived that the love of change will out- weigh all these. Even when there is no love worth mentioning, an American girl goes into marriage to seek her fortune with the same zest and interest with which a young man seeks his in a new country.

A young Spanish architect, who had studied life and books in Germany, France, and America, asked us if there was any law in our country, as there is in Ger- many, compelling a wife to go with her husband into a new country, whether she wished to go or not. We had never heard of such a law, or conceived the need of one, because a wife would naturally desire to go with her husband. " Certainement," said the Spaniard, "'unless she liked some other man." "For married women in America," we answered with scorn, " there is no ' other man^ " He answered me only with a shrug of his shoulders; and this is how foreigners always have the last word. They seem to believe that the price of a virtuous woman is so far above rubies, that there are none in the market.

I cannot help thinking that the beauty of German

A WOA/AN'S VACATION. 175

girls is undermined by the perpetual drinking of beer and the sour Rhenish wine. Yenus de Medici would succumb to it at last, and grow fat and sallow. The wife of old Richard Baxter said she did not find' him so sour as she expected ; but nobody ever said that of " vin ordinaire," which takes the place of our- beloved ice-water. There are institutions in Germany called " Wine-Cures," where the patients are fed entirely on these sour wines. They must be salutary, since one would hasten to get well or die, to escape the torture. So many Americans have come, and seen, and been conquered in Swiss hotels, that there has come to be a certain home-likeness about them. Only the waxed floors, and stone staircases, and perhaps a fuchsia stick- ing up in the butter, make a little rim of strangeness in the most familiar things. The waiting-maids wear the picturesque costume of their nation in the hotels, because travellers demand it of them ; but their Sun- day gowns are made after French fashions. There will never be anything prettier than the bright plaid skirt and velvet jacket, looped with silver chains, and opening on a snowy bodice ; but it will soon have dis- appeared from the face of the earth. Swiss women would rather look like other people than to be odd and pretty. Many of them have a rich color in their cheeks, like the sunny side of a -peach, which is going out of fashion in other countries.

The people of the mountain villages are lank and tall, with high cheek-bones and narrow foreheads, as if they had stretched themselves with continual climbing. They are set among their fine scenery like groups of exclamation points.

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I forgot the sunset on the Jungfrau, when I said there was nothing to see in Inteilaken. The "young maiden" does not blush every night; she has to be watched and waited for; but when the air is peculiarly clear and dry, the snow-peaks turn rose-pink under the last glance of the sinking sun, just as some pale faces put on a mask of beauty with a sudden blush.

One evening we went on the lake with the crowd to Geissbach, to see the fall illuminated with colored lights, which is a good deal like painting the lily, and gilding refined gold.

The walk is severe up the side of the mountain to a point near the hotel, where the water takes a long tumble down stairs, several flights of which are visible at once. Airy little bridges are thrown over them, and the most romantic walks wind about them.

Switzerland would be the loveliest place for lovers if so many had not already found it out. You can scarcely find a shady place in the whole country where you will not interrupt some conscious couple in their love-making. My window in the hotel commanded a little rustic seat, otherwise hidden from view, and it comforted my soul to count the young men and maid- ens that found their way to it in the course of a long summer day. It proved that love was not gone out of fashion, as I have sometimes feared.

Hundreds of people had gathered on the Geissbach terrace, just to see the water run green and red for one little minute over the rocks. It was beautiful beyond words while it lasted, and yet it was taking an im- pertinent liberty with the real moon-lit romance of the scene, and painfully suggested the "Black Crook,"

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 177

The long wailing and breathless attention of so many idle people reminded me of a fashionable wedding, brought to pass by montlis of hard labor, which, after all, lasts about as long as this Geissbach show. When the sudden light turned night into day on the crowded terrace, an army of braided heads rose up from broad- cloth shoulders as if pulled by one wire. Then there was a great rush down the hill for places on the steamer, and a solemn sort of sail for an hour in the moonlight, shut in by black walls of rock. The in- fluence was so depressing, that I kept making inward responses, "Good Lord, deliver us, miserable sinneis !" I think there must always be a certain grave and sombre twist in the mind of one brought up among mountains.

Next day we rode to the Grindelwald, a valley frowned down by bald-headed and hoary mountains, with two glaciers wedged forever between them in an awful depth of green ice. They looked very near, as if one could almost lay a hand on them ; and St. "Ursula, whose ambition nothing can quench, walked and walked for more than an hour straight towards them, and they were just as fir oflf as ever.

A white stieam and a dark one, like a blonde and brunette, two daughters of one mother, flow out of the glacier, and tear through the valley as if they never could get there in time. When we crossed the little carved bridges that span them at frequent intervals, the narrow current of chilly air always rising from the water struck our faces like an ice-cold hand. This was a breath from the frozen heart of the glacier.

Wherever there is a bit of greensward on the 12

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mountain -side, some times so high up as to be almost out of sight, there are sure to be a shepherd's hut and shelter for cattle. A bit of land will be cultivated where it looks as if a man would have to be let down by a cord in order to hoe it. Not a bad place to make way with an enemy, but the worst in the world for remorse.

The prettiest daughter of Switzerland in the shape of a waterfall is the Staubbach (brook of dust), where the desperate water throws itself off a cliff, and does not touch bottom for so long that it is all fretted into such a cloud of dust as rises around carriage wheels in a dry day. Its gala-time is in the early morning, when the new sunshine stripes it with rainbows. On the way we pass through the valley of Lauterbrunnen (nothing but springs). Longfellow calls it the " Val- ley of Fountains-Only," where the rocks are piled up so high that one looks twice to see the top. They are in the shape of forts and castles, that look hand-made, but by the hands of giants. We were caught in a thunder-storm, in which not only the springs, but the very fountain heads were broken up and poured upon us. We heard the giants play at ninepins down the gorges, as Rip Van Winkle did in the Kaatskills. Sometimes a cloud of mist hid the bases, and great masses of rock seemed to roll towards us, as if they hung in mid-air.

It was a " fierce and fair delight " for the spirit, if the flesh had not been w«ak. What \vith the light- ning, and the floods, and the fast driving over break- neck places, we never repented of so many sins in so short a time in our lives.

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Some people get up an intimacy with mountains at first sight ; but I can never overcome their awfulness. The Swiss scenery is most lovely to me where the Swiss people have lived and died bravely to defend it.

The great bald-headed mountains, with snow five hundred feet deep about their peaks, hiding an occa- sional skeleton, do no good to anybody. They are just useless masses of raw material left over when the world was made.

Some one watching through a glass a party of guides and travellers creeping up the side of the Jungfrau, like a company of ants, saw a small white cloud de- tach itself from above and float lazily downward like a handkerchief, settling on the black specks. The place where they had been was all white, and the valley knew them no more.

On the way home we saw a ruined tower, which is said and sworn to have been the identical castle of Bluebeard, where Fatima took the fiital key, and threw daylight on the other wives, while Sister Anne kept her post on the tower and looked for clouds of dust.

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CHAPTER XIII.

SHORE OP LAKE LEMAN,

** How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, And the big rain comes dancing to the earth ! And now again 'tis black, — and now, the glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth

As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth."

Byron.

ANEW thing under the sun carried us out of Interlaken — rail-carriages made like those in America, with seats on top and an awning overhead. A cool and royal road through Swiss scenery, the track skirts the lake so closely that we seem to have faith enough to roll along the water itself. Then the steamer waited for us on the Lake of Thnn, which doubles the endless vineyards in its bosom, and is too lar from the sharp and snowy " Horns " to be depressed by them. The shore is studded with country-seats, so rich in iflowers that whole hedges of them are crowded over its edge, and trail along the water in indolent wealth.

"Do you see that very picturesque young man who has just come on board?" said Psyche to Juno.

" No ! Where ? " said Juno.

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" O, never mind ; I see he isn't mentioned iu the guide-book."

At Thun we took cars again, and crept on at a snail's pace — a habit of all the railroads in Switzerland, out of deference to the fine views. It is taken for granted that no one can possibly be in a hurry, and the train nearly always forgets something and goes back for it at every station. At Fribourg, a grand gymnastic fete for all the Swiss cantons was just over, and the station bloomed with the party-colored ribbons of the wrestlers. The winner of the second prize — a wreath of painted oak leaves — wore it on his uncovered head, and was warmly congratulated by his friends. The young men, as a rule, looked more healthy than handsome.

In the distance, the famous suspension bridge of Fri- bourg looked like quivering braids of black hair thrown across the r.ivine from rock to rock.

Berne is the Swissest of all Swiss towns; the best part of it is built on a natural terrace far above the roofs of the lower houses, so that it stands like a lady on her balcony, looking down at the green river, so fir below her feet, that it seems to stop its flow to look up again at her.

They have rows of little booths down the middle of the main streets, where women with snowy handker- chiefs on their heads sell evervthino: to all other women. The business looks more cheerful than profitable; but having no rent to pay, it need not lie heavy on their hearts.

Every fountain has a row of devotees in the busy washerwomen ; and the oddest statue among many is an ogre copied out of a fairy tale, having a baby's head

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and shoulders in his mouth, with the chubby legs hang- ing out, and other fat morsels in the shape of children stuck in his pockets and belt.

The sidewalks are arcaded, which give forth a faint reminder of sweet old English Chester; it is a fashion, however, which cannot fail to undermine the industry of a town, making loafing-places for people that would otherwise exert themselves to go in when it rained.

The houses of parliament are so much like all others in second-rate countries, that it is hardly worth getting out of one's carriage to visit them. In the Chamber of Assembly every speech is translated into German, French, ^nd Italian, which must have an exasperating effect on the maker of the speech, but gives to other folks an opportunity to study languages.

In the cathedral is a great organ, of which the Bernese

are almost as proud as the Bostonians of theirs: it

... • ^

plays the day to sleep every night in a twilight concert.

The cathedral, like all others which were once Catholic and have seen the error of their ways, looks a little bare and lonely for want of its pictures and images of the Mother and Child. The charm of it lies now in the old churchyard, converted into a garden, where nurses and children play over the bones of their fore- fathers.

Berne is the headquarters of Beardom. Everything that can be done by man is imitated by bears in stone, and wood, and metal. It is not difficult to imagine that the population have a bearish turn to their noses.

The curious bear-dance, painted by Beard, which looked odd and quaint in Boston, is a very good picture of Berne. It is one long bear-dance, on every gate-post,

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 183

to the den \vhere several live bears are kept at the ex- pense of the city ; they attract a constant crowd, that feeds them with carrots and fruit. Baedeker, the apos- tle of guide-books, says that an English officer once fell into the den, and after a terrible fight with the bears, was torn in pieces. It seems to me that when the history of the world is summed up by the last man, it will be found that whatever was not done by an Eng- lish officer or an American woman, was not worth doing at all. The irrepressible conflict will at last lie between these two.

The best-conducted coachman that ever drove seven women, put the whole of Berne into a two-hours' drive, bears and all, and drew up just at noon in front of the old clock on the watch-tower. On the stroke of twelve a troop of tiny bears, dressed like men, on/oot and on horseback, travel round old Time in the middle, and a main in armor in the belfry beats the time on a bell; the inevitable rooster on one side flaps his wings and crows faintly three times.

No one can forget the ride from Berne to Lausanne, because of the sudden and complete revelation of the Lake of Geneva just after passing through a long tun- nel. You go into it with no suspicion of anything about to happen, and you shoot out of pitchy darkness into the sweet light of heaven, and " clear, placid Le- man " lies at your feet. It is one of Mother Nature's surprises ; the ineflTable glory of the lake bursts on the senses like glad news after a stretch of anxiety, or like heaven after a wasting sickness. Lausanne has crept well up the hill, and has a cleanly, reserved air, like English people, with whom it has always been a favorite

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town. The houses keep one another at arm's length, and there is no suspicion of the Roman fragrance in its streets.

The Hotel Gibbon and its terrace look on the lake, and just below it, in the garden, is the same summer- house, or its successor, in which Gibbon wrote the last sentences of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- pire. He was sent to Switzerland in his youth to complete his studies, and regain the Protestantism that he had somehow lost, and there fell in love with Made- moiselle Curchon ; but, his father threatening to disin- herit him if he married her, he dutifully and selfishly gave her up. She married M. Necker, minister of Louis XVI., and became the mother of Madame de Staiil. In these matronly days Gibbon met her again, basked in \\^x bright society, and wondered, man-like, that M. Necker was not in the least jealous.

If the portraits of Gibbon do him justice, no one need wonder at M. Necker's tranquillity ; but there was another reason equally apparent to the student of wo- man-kind. I suppose one may have wit enough to fol- low the Roman empire down hill, and yet not enough to perceive that no husband of a fine woman has any cause to fear an old suitor, who once preferred his in- heritance to her lov^.

On the terrace at the Hotel Gibbon, two Spanish ladies, with all the dark and glowing beauty of their nation, sat through the twilight smoking fat little ciga- rettes till they veiled themselves in a halo of smoke. They had their rights in a way that American women have forgotten to fight for ; and they got more comfort out of it than Miss Anthony ever did in addressing a convention.

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 185

The Hotel Gibbon has his portrait below, and in the bedrooms a placard urgmg travellers to keep Sunday piously, and to remember that they have special need of divine care in their wanderings. Gibbon spent his whole life

"Sapping a solemn creed with solemn 'sneer,'*

and saw no beauty in Christianity that any one should desire it.

The port of Lausanne is Ouchy, where Byron wa§ once weather-bound, and wrote the Prisoner of Chil- lon. The third canto of Childe Harold and Manfred were also written on the shore of Lake Leman, " com- posed," as he says, in a letter, " when I was half mad between mountains, metaphysics, lakes, loves unquench- able, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies ; " quite material enough for a vol->» ume of poetry.

The castle of Chillon, a lion whose roar would never have been heard out of Switzerland but for Byron's poem, is much lovelier in pictures than in the solid stone and mortar. Byron's prisoner was an imaginary one, as he had not then studied the life of Bonnivard ; he said afterwards that he would otherwise have digni- fied the poem with patriotic allusions ; but sorrow and captivity have dignity enough of their own. A little bridge connects the castle with the main land, and it was long the torture-house of the Duke of Savoy (ancestor of Victor Emanuel) for Swiss prisoners. The dun- geons are lighted only by slits in a wall twenty feet thick. Bonnivard, a famous patriot among men who were all patriots, was chained to a pillar five years, and his rest-

186 BEATEN PATHS, OR

less feet wore a visible welt in the stone, like a scar on flesh.

** My very chains and I grew friends."

The poem speaks of " a little isle that smiled on him " through the hole in the wall, but it was only by climb- ing the pillar that he could see it at all. The "seven pillars of Gothic mould'* are all there. Byron's poetry is often as good as a guide-book.

The guide lights a match to show the rough stairway down which prisoners were brought to exeeution, and the beam to which they were hung. The air was thick with memories of the many unhappy souls that had dropped the body in that spot, and gone up "to appeal from tyranny to God." Farther on is the hole to which prisoners were led blindfold, and promised their liberty; they went down three or four steps, and then came a plunge of eighty-four feet into the waters of the lake. They got their liberty forever; but let us hope that when the Duke of Savoy serves out his term of punish- ment hereafter, it may be well peppered with sarcasms.

One author, named Simond, says, " It grieves me to contradict poets or sentimental travellers, but really the dungeon of Chillon is not under water, and besides, is absolutely a comfortable sort of dungeon enough, full forty feet long and fifteen feet high, with several narrow slits in the thick wall, above reach, but admitting air and light, and even some rays of the sun !"

Where could this man Simond have been brought up? Was he born in the cellar of a tenement-house in New York, which might occasionally be under water? and was his maturity spent in stone-cutting in state

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 187

prison ? No other experience could have given a com- fortable air to Bonnivard's dungeon. The long-suffer- ing Swiss took the castle at last, and in their joy they freed all the prisoners, and placed over the door the inscription,," Blessed be all who come in and go out." Afterwards, when this island prison was found too tempting a convenience for keeping some prisoners of their own, they erased the inscription for the sake of consistency.

The shore of the lake, on the way from Chillon to Vevay, is dotted with villages that have long been the adopted children of poetry.

** Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love,"

was the home of the " divine Julie," Rousseau's heroine in his Nouvelle Heloise — the most voluptuous book that it ever entered even a Frenchman's head to con- ceive. It has been supposed that Rousseau chose Clarens as the scene of his novel more for the beauty of its name than anything else, as it is scarcely so beau- tiful as its neighbors. " A pity 'tis, 'tis true," that poets have their necessities as well as others.

Cleanliness is farther from godliness in Switzerland than with us, since Thursday seems to be their wash- ing day. On this particular Thursday, the lake shore was lined for miles with snowy linen spread to dry in the sun after having been washed in the lake. The washerwomen anchor their great tubs just in the edge of the lake ; then they put themselves in the tub and the soiled clothes in the lake. The farther one goes from home, the more one sees the commonest things turned inside out, and begun at the other end. No

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wonder that the first traveller who wrote of what he saw was called the " father of lies."

Vevay is another half-way house for travellers, full of hotels and pensions, like Interlaken ; it is a colony of foreigners, with a rich sprinkling of Americans. That treasure to his travelling countrymen, an Ameri- can dentist, has been long settled there, and a little experience with foreign artists in that profession gives emphasis to the remark of a German to us — "The Americans give strength to dentistry."

The Hotel Monnet, or " Three Crowns," was as de- lightful as flowers, and gilding, and summer-time could make it. In the airy dining-room, opening on the lake, furnished with white and gold, we saw our travelling dresses, which had sustained three months' ravages, reflected in the eyes of our jewelled and furbelowed countrywomen, and were ashamed. "The body is the shell of the soul ; the apparell is the huske of that shell, and the huske often tells you what the kernel is," says old Quarles. It is a feeling worse than neuralgia, and akin to seasickness, when hundreds of feminine eyes are judging your soul by a dusty and weather-stained alpaca "huske." The fitness of things demanded in such a place that we should wear rainbow silks, and feed only on nightingales' tongues and peacocks' brains. One may travel comfortably with only a bag, and stay one's soul with common sense for ninety-nine days out of a hundred ; but on the hundredth, one is sure to go to some Aladdin's palace, where even religious princi- ple is not so sustaining as a well-made dress.

We arrived just after a wedding in church between an American girl and a German baron, and the wed-

A WOMAN *S VACATION. 189

ding breakfast was going on with all the flutter that a wedding creates in every country under the sun. I cannot help thinking that if there is no raaiTying or giving in marriage in the next world, what a stupid place it will be for women ! Everybody had been to the wedding, and bore testimony that the bride cried till her nose was red ; the bride's mother cried too, and the bridegroom's father cried hardest ^f all. As it is said to be a pure love match, with no money on either side, the old gentleman may have had the best reason to cry.

It is a long sail from Yevay to Geneva ; the moun- tains on one side hold their skirts far back from the shore, and the lake lies a perpetual smile on Nature's face, pure and grand near Lausanne, but only good- natured till we approach Geneva, and Mont Blanc heaves its ice-peaks into sight like a great white cloud that has been anchored forever in one spot in the sky.

Lake Leman is just as lovely as Byron said it was; he is always to be depended upon in the way of adjec- tives ; but it is too perfect to be altogether interesting, like people whose character is above criticism. Defects in a landscape are like small faults in our friends, a sort of milestones on which to measure our admiration.

Coppet, seen from the lake, was Madame do Stael's refuge when Napoleon banished her from her beloved France.* She amused herself well, however, by marry- ing a young man for love in her middle age.

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CHAPTER XIV.

** The bent of civilization is to make good things cheap.*'

GENEVA is mistress of her lake. Its waters, striped with many shades of blue, make another sky beneath her feet ; at night the city lights on the bridges, shining far down into the clear water, seem to disclose hollow caves where water-nymphs and mer- maids toss about the rings and bracelets which delight the eyes of mortals in the daytime ; every shop win- dow has a fringe of ladies hanging about it as if it held their household gods.

One window of a plain little shop on the Grand Quai would beguile the strongest-minded woman that ever had a mission, or addressed a convention ; pearls, and diamonds, ^nd emeralds lie about loosely, as if they might be had for the asking, — a delusion speedily dissi- pated when one does ask ; there are diamond ear-rings that would be like carriage lamps on a woman's head in the darkest night ; turquoises such as Shylodi would not have parted with ''for a wilderness of monkeys;" and rubies glowing with such a fiery radiance that one could almost believe, with the ancients, that they could feel impending misfortune and grow dull in sympa- thy. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia, only children and

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 191

criminals were permitted to wear jewels, in order that no one need, desire them ; but it seems to me that his wisdom overreached itself, since many foolish souls would have become criminals for the sake of obtaining their hearts' delight.

It was an old superstition that the emerald, with cold and clear green light, preserved chastity, and drove off evil spiiits; it specially belongs to those born in June, and changes color with the moods of its owner. An old Persian writer says, " He who dreams of green gems will become renowned, and find truth and fidelity." The sudden fall of an emerald from its set- ting portends great loss; a large emerald fell from the English crown at the coronation of George III., and when America seceded in his reign some old woman remembered the emerald. Opals are like expressive faces which never look twice alike, and, like some char- acters, owe all their beauty to a defect in their organ- ization ; it has been well called "a pearl with a soul in it." The turquoise means self-sacrificing love, and reconciles quarrelsome couples; which would seem to recommend it as a betrothal ring. It draws approach- ing trouble into itself, growing dull and apparently worthless till the danger is past ; but this trait only belongs to it when given, not when bought. The topaz heightened wit, and strengthened the intellect — fables pretty in themselves, and showing that pre- cious stones have always exercised a weird influence on the imaorination.

One may resolve to rise above the fascination of such earthly dross and tinsel, just as one may resolve against the toothache, or seasickness, or love, or any other of

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the torments of this world ; and the resolve holds good till one's time comes.

** For not to desire, or admire, if a man could learn it, were more Than to walk all day, like a sultan of old, in a garden of spice."

Lord Byron lived at Geneva for a few weeks, and complains bitterly that, though he lived a virtuous life, he got no credit for it ; to him virtue was never its own reward.

Calvin, the head saint of the Genevan calendar, lived a virtuous life, and got too much credit for it ; when the people drove out the Roman Catholic bishop, and bowed their necks to Calvin's yoke, they fell out of the frying- pan into the fire, or off of Scylla into Charybdis, ac- cording as one is housewifely or classical. The bishop occasionally made a bonfire of a heretic, but he gave the survivors plenty of cakes and ale to make up for it. Calvin burned heretics too, but without the cakes and ale. His old chair, hard and straight-backed as his doctrine, is still standing in the cathedral. He ruled the city with a paternal (one might say with a step- paternal) severity. He laid every Genevese soul on his own Procrustean bed, and cut it off or stretched it out till it came to his measure. His throne was his pulpit, and his code of laws finally crystallized into that spiky old creed, against which tender souls bruise themselves to this day. As religious wars are always the bloodiest, so religious rule is the most tyrannical. Men are never so outrageously wicked as when they think they have God's warrant for it.

Calvin was perpetually hurling inkstands at the devil, but he resembled him in that he made Geneva thq

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 193

hottest place for sinners that the world has evCr seen. He was not one of those who preach

** With about as much real edification As if a great Bible, bound in lead, Had fallen and struck them on the head ; '*

his words pierced between bone and marrow, and he weeded the city, for his hfetime, of all unrighteous- ness ; it sprang up again, of course, after his death, but moraHty is. still the fashion in Geneva.

The Canton of Geneva is the smallest in Switz;erland, — only fifteen miles broad, — and its arch-enemy, Vol- taire, said, "When I shake my wig, I powder the whole republic;" but it has always made a prodigious noise in the world. Voltaire lived there like a prince, and coined a new sarcasm every day for the scathing of the pious city. He had a look of the eagle and the monkey, sensitive, irritable, sarcastic, and yet benevo- lent. Pope crystallized him in an epigram : —

** Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, At once we think thee Milton, death, and sin."

Rousseau was another thorn in Calvin's flesh ; he sits placidly enough, a very mild-looking man,* on his pedestal on the little island in the lake called by his name, while Calvin was too lofly in his humility to per- mit even a tombstone to bear his name.

It was given to Rousseau to put forward the pre- posterous idea, for the first time, in a book called the Social Contract, that there was a mutual obligation constantly incurred between the aristocracy and the

194 BEATEN PATHS, OR

people ; with this fact established, it was easy to see that the nobility of all Europe were teriibly in arrears. Calvin burned the book for its infidelity, which hurt nobody, while its politics sowed broadcast the red seeds of the French Revolution.

It must have been a good thing for an author to have an obnoxious book burned in the market-place ; for, of course, the crowd who had not heard of it before, made haste to read it at once. Rousseau wrote " Emile," a famous treatise on education, in which he insists on teaching by experience ; the child should be allowed to find out that fiie is hurtful by burning himself, and that glass will cut his flesh by driving his fist through the window in a fit of temper. He does not go so far as to say that he should find out the danger of a ju'ecipice by throwing himself over it, though that would be the natural inference. In these latter days, Mr. Herbert Spencer and others have revamped this theory, and made it look actually presentable, but it would gradu- ally eliminate mother-love from the training of children. V^oltaire said of it, " When I read your treatise, I desire to creep on all-fours."

Rousseau knew best, perhaps, of all word-artists who ever lived, how to paint every shade of love and senti- ment, and yet dropped his own children into the basket of the Foundling Hospital as soon as they were born.

The chief apostle of Geneva, just now, is Father Hyacinthe, otherwise the Rev. Charles Loyson (Hya- cinthe being his monkish name, assumed on taking the vows). He preaches in a dingy old hall, formerly a library, founded by Bonnivard, and used by Calvin ; it is filled with hard beaches without backs, and a large

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 195

proportion of the audience is always American. It was evident that many of them could not understand his words, but if one had been born deaf, one could still follow a dim meaning through the eloquence into which he coins his fiery heart. He makes one " hear with eyes." He wore a white robe embroidered with silver, and a broad chasuble, white and crimson, with a shining cross on it; he would be a distinguished-look- ing man anywhere, but in white, and silver, and crim- son, he is very noble indeed, having that two-storied head of which Sir Walter Scott's was a type.

The mass was much shorter than in other Catholic churches, and was performed with so much devotion and earnestness that one saw only the service, and not the priest, till the sermon began. The burden of it was charity. He began with an urgent appeal in be- half of some poor families who had been burned out in Geneva the night before, and lost their all. "We have prayed to God to give us charity; let us look to it that we do not shut our heart's door in the face of the answer to our i)rayer when it comes." Afterwards he urged that all true religion was founded on charity in the sense of love.

Tiie Protestant faith says, "Only believe," which is a partial and sometimes dangerous truth, for it may end in a mere sentimental tenderness that serves neither God nor men; the Catholic church lelies on works which may end in rites and superstitious observances ; but the "Old Catholic" creed is founded on our Lord's immediate teaching, embodied in this rule: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength," &c., "and thy neighbor as thyself." One could obey

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the first commanc! without the second, but one could never arrive at the second without the first. There are two doors into heaven, love and faith ; St. John opens the first, and St. Paul the second. Father Hya- cinthe preferred to go in by St. John's door.

lie has a dark, oval face, somewhat too overladen with flesh, until he waxes earnest, and the hidden fire of his deep-set black eyes flames out. It did so many times, as he dwelt on his love for the mother church that had nourished him in its bosom, and on the abuse now poured out on him by his old brethren. One of them had called liim, in a Catholic journal, " a misera- ble foreign apostate."

"It is true," he said, "T am most miserable, not only for my sins, as others are, but for my sufferings." It must be a tremendous change to him from preaching in the "Madeleine," in Paris, to the most sj^lendid con- gregation in Europe, followed by adulation of the most delicious kind, and now standing in the face of slander to preach a doctrine despised by all his old friends, and listened to chiefly by strangers and aliens out of curi- osity. I suppose, however, there is a sweetness in vol- untary martyrdom only known to those who try it, and I hope the tender arms of his baby-son ward oflf many evil strokes. Madame Loyson has a sweet, motherly face, but is not handsome. She was a rich American widow when Father Hyacinthe married her, but became poor in the failure of Bowles Brothers, a stroke follow- ing close upon his marriage, which made a sweet morsel under the tongues of his enemies.

From this mo;lest "upper chamber" we went over the hill to the Russian church, a square stone building

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surmounted by 1[iwe large balls, gilded and glittering in the sun ;' -these balls signify the world, and on them rests the crescent, with crosses rising triumphantly above them, showing that the Christian religion has overcome that of Mahomet. The interior is glorious with pictures and precious stones. The audience stands through the service, which is never long, as there is no sermon. A single bench runs along the side for strangers. Only one lady occasionally used a camp- chair. She was dressed entirely in white, a long cash- mere robe, and fleecy Shetland shawl, with a bonnet and long veil of white crape; two great diamonds hung from her ears like drops of dew ; her face was fair and peaceful, and every few minutes she sank grace- fully on her knees, and bent her forehead to the floor in a great snowy heap. The Russians use black for mourn- ing, as we do; but on the occasion of a birthday of the- one whom they mourn, or for a wedding, they have this lovely fashion of putting on pure white. No instru- ment of music is permitted in the Greek church, and the hymns were sung by four men. Two golden screens, with paintings of the angel holding out a branch of lilies to the Virgin, shut in the altar-room and the priest from the gaze of the people ; but after a time these doors were opened, and the priest came out muttering prayers over and over, and swinging a cen- ser. In the Greek churches, the service of the com- munion is performed by the priest alone, out of sight, and the bread and wine are only shown to the people. He wore a gorgeous robe of blue and gold brocade, and did his part with an impressive seriousness; but his audience were at one moment striking their foreheads

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on the ground and crossing themselves, and at the next shaking hands with one another and walking about from friend to friend. The best-conducted person on the premises was a baby about two years old, prema- turely draped in jacket and trousers, who might have been an example to us all in devout manners. At the last, the [)riest brought out a cross, and all the men, women, and children crowded about him to kiss it. It seemed to bring the whole multitude, rich and poor, refined and sordid, suddenly on a level; and against my will, I felt a Protestant disgust.

The broad steps on which the priest stood were car- peted with worsted-work, and on each side stood tall banners of velvet and gold, studded with gems; the service was in the Sclavonic language, nowhere spoken at this time except in church, but all Russians learn it. The air was heavy with incense, and the brilliant colors reminded one of the temple that Solomon built after God's own pattern — there was no lack of solemnity and prostration, but, somehow, one kept wondering how one got in without a ticket.

The priests of the Russian or Greek church cannot be priests until they are married, nor can they have but one wife; when she dies they become monks; hence it follows, that the wives of Greek priests are nearly as well treated as the wives of good Americans. A trav- eller in Russia found a priest doing the family washing to save his wife's bones. A similar rule, if it could be introduced among the Protestant clergy, would prolong the life of many a feeble w^oman who is now cumbered with much serving. .It is founded on that text about a bishop's having one wife ; but on the other hand, a

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Russian priest, outside his church, has no position, nor can exact any deference. Among the best families, his place is " below the salt," as the fashion was in the old English time when the parson and the lady's maid were thought a good match. The peasants pay him no re- spect, and his best protection is to carry the sacrament on his person; he then becomes sacred, and even a noble who should abuse him would be doomed to Si- beria. Since Peter the Great humbled the patriarch by taking church appointments into his own hands., Russian veneration has been spent on religion itself, and not on its ministers, so that they can never split on the rock of anybody's infallibility, as the old and new Catholics have done lately.

The Russian ladies, in the little Genevan church, had peculiarly intelligent faces, many of them of great deli- cacy of profile. As I watched them, my thoughts went back to that first Christian woman of their race in the twelfth century, the Grand Duchess Olga, to whom they owe their beautiful service. That famous old rajah, who always asked, "Who is she?" when anything bad happened, was right as far as he went; but the ques- tion is equally pertinent when good things come about strangely.

This Christian Olga could not convert her husband, nor her son ; but the seed fell on good ground, at last, in her grandson, Vladimir, who wearied of paganism, and sent embassies to Mecca, Constantinople, and Rome, to look into other folks' religions, and bring home the best. The Greek form found favor in their eyes from its magnificent ceremonies — the rude Rus- sian visitors actually mistook some of the white-robed

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priests for angels, and were not undeceived by their entertainers. Vladimir and all his subjects were straightway baptized ; and so difficult was it to find Christian names for such multitudes that whole squad- rons received one name, thus creating a thousand Johns and Peters in a moment. No woman coidd ask a nobler monument through all time than a great Christian na- tion, but other honors are constantly paid to her name ; in the Russian royal family there is always a Grand Duchess Olsja.

The " arrowy Rhone " throws itself, all dusty and travel-stained from its mountain journey, into Lake Leman, at Bouveret, and rushes out again at Geneva as if it were tired to death of stillness and placidity, but it comes out pure and clear as an Alpine crystal. It is so terribly clear, so utterly transparent, that there is no temptation to drown one's self, or anybody else, in its waters; one can almost 'count the blades of grass on the bottom of the lake.

Rows of women in the washing-sheds, which are built into the middle of the stream, beat it all day with their linen, and fret its headlong course a little ; one will be wringing a blue blouse, and the next below her an em- broidered handkerchief, but no drop of water stays long enough to be used twice ; they have no need, either, to blue their clothes ; nature has done that for them in the sapphire color of the river. It never ceases its hurry till it meets the Arve, and they join hands in a loveless wedding, the blue stream and the muddy one running side by side for a long distance, till at last the whole soul of the Rhone is corrupted, the two rivers become one, and that one is the dirty Arve.

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" Thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay, As tlie husband is, the wife is : thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down."

The meeting of thesd two rivers is such an obvious example of evil communication corrupting good man- ners that the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot help reading the lesson; and as a large proportion of way- farers are clergymen, the Arve and the Rhone have moistened many a dry sermon. Pitt made them flow through one of his most famous speeches, comparing them to a cabinet formed of good and bad ministers, which finally became unanimously bad.

A few miles out of Geneva, one of the Barons Roths- child has a country-seat w^hich must certainly be an im- provement on the Garden of Eden, in its view of the lake and the distant mountains. The Rothschild family always make a good bargain even with Nature, so that in this perfect place. Nature has contributed at least half the perfection.

The hotels of Geneva are always crowded in the season with Americans. They really come abroad to see each other, and every second face in the street is that of one's countrywoman. Every one of them buys a watch, and pays any price that the shopman has the face to ask; such reckless shopping would spoil the most pious market that ever was trained by Calvin.

They have brought America with them to Geneva in the shape of elevators and rocking-chairs. As the twi- light fell softly on the lake, I saw a familiar shape among the flowers and fountains of the hotel garden. I ap-

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proached it slowly, fearing an optical delusion, but it was actually a rocking-chair, the first one I had seen for three long months, and I settled softly into it as one clafeps an old friend. A lady who made a long sea-voyage told me that she could never (lecide which she missed most, ice-water or society — in European travel, the great dearth is ice-water and rocking-chairs.

After a day or two in a hotel full of Americans, we sought and took possession of a " pension " on the lake, kept by a French family, who spoke no English, and at last felt ourselves abroad. It had the air of an old French chateau, shut into large grounds by ample gates, and its lawn bounded by a semicircle of orange trees in green tubs. It was on this lawn that a fea&t of fat things was spread for. the " Arbitrators," and all other Americans then in Geneva, on the last fourth of July before the dolorous failure of Bowles Brothers. Juliet might have been at home on the little rustic bal- cony, with a pane or two of stained glass, which gave my uncarpeted and prosaic little room a most poetical air. There is no French liabit so fascinating as that of making common things pretty at small expense ; when we have imported so many French fashions, 'tis a pity we have left that out.

In our time there were in the house Spaniards, Rus- sians, Greeks, Italians, Japanese, French, Swedes, and Americans. Our gathering at table must have resem- bled the-first meals of our ancestors after the confusion of tongues, except that we could all speak more or less French ; it was considerably less than more in the case of the solitary Japanese, who could barely ask for coffee and bread, and so keep himself from starvation. He

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had the finest teeth in the world, and he would smile and smile at us, out of his loneliness, with true Eastern courtesy, but he never spoke. What a bottled-up state a man's mind must be in whose communication is liter- ally, as the apostle recommended, "Yea, yea," and " Nay, nay 1 " I suppose fermentation would come sooner to a woman.

Of all these foreigners, the most foreign was Mr. H., the head-centre of Spiritualism — for the others were only alien in birth and language, while his career had put him a little outside of all other humanity. One cannot be in the same house with him for a day with- out perceiving that he is a mere bundle of nerves, and capable of going into a trance more easily than other people go to sleep.

He calls himself a relative of the historian Hume, since a pedigree of some sort is a usefid thing to have in European courts ; he has a talent for mimicry, and a memory so wonderful, that he might have made an honorable fame with half the labor that he has spent on notoriety. He was suffering from paralysis at this time, induced, no doubt, by excess of nervous exertion; and he had the hunted, uneasy look in his eyes of one who is liable to be brought to bar at any moment, and can never relax his watch upon his enemies. He was banished from Rome, — an episode in his eventful life of which he could not be more proud if he had been a martyr for preaching the gospel, — and he found favor in the eyes of the Russian emperor, who was glad tc» hear any new thing under the sun ; and what was more to Mr. H.'s purpose, paid him in great diamonds, as an emperor should.

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Ho had a beautiful Russian wife, whom he had con- verted to Spiritualism, like Mahomet, who took pains to convince his w^ife Fatiraa of the divine origin of the Koran before he tried anybody else. Mrs. H. was so lich in jewels that she wore pearls to breakfast, and might have dissolverl one or two in her wine, like Cleo- patra, and never missed them. Her husband assured us that she was as perfect as a woman could be, with- out being an idiot.

He had with him two tall sons of a Russian baroness, and they all kissed each other affectionately on parting for the night. It is said that masculine appreciation of women kissing one another is of the slightest; but two mustaches twining together in a manly embrace, is a sight, from which gods and women would turn away their eyes !

One leaf in Mr. H.'s laurel wreath is his supposed conversion of Mrs. Browning to Spiritualism. Her husband embalmed him in a long satirical poem, under the name of Mr. Sludge, which seems to me much like pieserving flies in amber. Poets have a wasteful habit of using the wine of their genius in which to pickle their enemies, not seeing, in their blind anger, that they bestow a gift of immortality that their happy victims would never obtain of themselves.

A famous sinner, who had made his home in Genev^a for many years, died there, during our stay, and was buried in great state by a rejoicing city ; this was the rich and wicked Duke of Brunswick, who took his wickedness with him, and left his riches to Geneva. They began to lay out their schools and hospitals be- fore he was cold ; but there was one little worm-hole

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in the fair apple of their content ; a lawsuit was one item of their legacy.

It would have rejoiced the soul of Calvin, and curled the lip of Voltaire, to liave read the newspaper com- ments on this piece of luck; and how exultantly they looked their gift-horse in the mouth, and praised the wise generosity of the giver, wniie maintaining a dead silence on all his other qualities !

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CHAPTER XV.

CHAMOtJNIX.

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains ;

They crowned him long ago On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,

With a diadem of snow. — Byron.

MONT Blanc is as changeable as a woman, some- times sharp and white, as if it never could alter, then getting gray and hoary, as if old age had suddenly fallen' on it like a blight, and again disappear- ing altogether, so that for hours there is no Mont Blanc at all, as far as Geneva is concerned.

Chamounix and its belt of hills are the real recep- tion-rooms of the monarch. In a nearer approach one pays back more or less of the enchantment that distance lent the view, as one sometimes loses reverence for famous people by becoming too intimate with them. One may lift the snowy veil that makes Mont Blanc the Madonna of mountains; but it is at the price of much sub.stance, both of body and purse, and after all there is no beauty like the unapproachable. A veiled nun is romantic and stimulating to the imagination, when in reality she may be of the roughest Hiberuiaa clay, and marked with the small-pox.

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A woman is never so lovely to her lover as in the distance. When parents stood jealously between daughters and their suitors, how stately and angelio were all the heroines of novels and poetry, cold as ice- peaks, and only melting to love seven times heated ! but since young women have stepped down from the old pedestal, and banished father and mother to the back parlor, the whole tone of fiction and society is, " Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad."

So the royalty of Mont Blanc, when it was reserved and inaccessible, could not be made glorious enough. Coleridge bowed down to it like a divinity in his Hymn to Chamouny, —

** Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven ; '*

but since it has been ascended by armies of lean trav- ellers, and its deepest mystery photographed, everybody speaks lightly of it, as of a next-door neighbor.

Thackeray comments on Swiss scenery as he would speak of a dinner party of intelligent people who did not wholly live to eat. "It is delightful to be in the midst of Alpine scenes — the ideas get generous reflec- tions from them. It is keeping good company. It is keeping away mean thoughts."

Our journey from Geneva to Chamounix lay through forty miles of rain, a steady <lown-pour, as if the moun- tains and valleys were having one of those tri-monthly washings, which put a German family under water for a day or two. The road made safe by Napoleon is said to have been wonderfully picturesque by birth- right; but I -ask no one to take luy word for it. I was

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enclosed in a mass of twenty people, dripping about the edges and damp in the middle. It was an open carriage by nature, with a canvas awning over it, con- trived solely with a view to dry scenery. The rear was weighed down with a party of middle-class Eng- lish, who sat and glowered at one another as only English can, till they were stayed with food and com- forted with wine at the little half-way house, and then their heavy British wit began to roll around the car- riage like thunder among mountains. Opposite to us were a couple from Uruguay, with their little negro servant, "God's image cut in ebony," the only one of the company to whom rain and shine were equally a satisfaction. Who ever saw a negro look worried? One would almost consent to be black with that com- pensation. On one side were Beauty and the Beast ('tis amazing how often they go on their travels), in the shape, this time, of an "ancient mariner" and his fair, soft little wife, who looked as if she had never put her foot to the ground for delicacy. They had a small but troublesome family, consisting of a Scotch terrier, so minute that it was carried in a hand-basket in its mistress's lap, and it seemed to me that their journey was conducted chiefly for the education of the terrier. If the curtains were lifted for a moment to view a waterfall or a rocky defile, the cover of the basket was lifted too, that the dog might have the benefit. A child would have flourished like a green bay tree on half the attention that was wasted on this little beast !

Nothing is more amazing in human nature than the devotion of middle-aged women to dogs —-women,

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who think themselves fortunate that they have had no children. A dog is never anything but a dog, if you keep him twenty years, whereas the comfort and joy of a child increase at compound interest, and no two years of its life are alike. On the other side was a Spanish mystery, shaped like a man, who looked strnight before him for forty miles, holding an un- lighted cigarette between his lips, always at the same angle. Na one saw him get out or in. To this day I think he was a wax figure provided by the diligence company to fill up an empty seat.

The real martyr of the ride was a guide in a blue blouse, who sat on the bottom of the carriage, swing- ing his legs over the wheels, and soaking in rain all day like a sponge. He sat at the feet of a passenger with an aureole of flame-colored hair and beard about his face, who, with the touch of cruelty, which seems innate with that temperament, amused himself with making minute streams of water run off his umbrella down the neck of the luckless guide, who could not escape, turn which way he would. It was the old story of the boy and the frogs. We had nothing to do but to study each other, and make laughter keep out rheumatism.

*'I think," said the "ancient mariner," "that these people from Uruguay have probably got rich keeping a groggery, and having a married daughter in Europe, came over to see what it was like." The people from Uruguay were looking straight in his face when he pronounced sentence on them, but they were none the wiser. It is a perilous pleasure to abuse people to their faces in another language, but not one to be 14

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practised with impunity. When the abused person an- swers unexpectedly in the same language, then we are ready to call on the rocks to fall down and cover us. Mrs. Mariner dreaded this result, and tried to hush her reckless husband; but all in vain. He was wholly de- voted to her in tuckinfj her in from the rain and secur- ing for her every possible morsel of comfort, at the sacrifice of his own. He was ready to be her foot- stool ; but he would not take her advice. She had the semblance of power without the substance, "love and cherishing" with "honor" left out.

I don't think that little word "honor" in the mar- riage promise has ever had its due. There is a great fuss made about the " obey ; " but if it were truly wedded to " honor," they are a couple that would pull well together forever and ever. It is sweet to be physically beloved, to have cloaks laid down over muddy places like a queen, and to be screened from every wind of heaven like a first-born baby; but sweeter far is it to be listened to and heeded, though one must walk in rubber boots, and bear with a cold shoulder now and then. " Strike, but hear me," is not the worst motto in the world for a wife's flnsf.

The flapping curtains of our carriage parted between whiles that we might. look at some mountain torrent tumbling superfluously over the rocks, not seeing that its occupation was gone, since all heaven was a water- fall. Rarely we met a woman paddling through the flooded fields —

*' Alone, unfriended, melancholy, slow."

It was always a woman — the men were all in-doors, as

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became those superior beings. There is but one bit of work in Switzerhind not performed by women ; they are never guides — perhaps because there is money to be made by it. They carry burdens bigger than themselves up the ladder-like sides of their mountains, but they do not lead travellers. In the mountain vil- lages, hundreds of men live by whittling^ making every mortal thing out of wood that that material will sub- mit to. Whole villages also will be devoted to making over and over one wheel or one spring of a watch, which are carried to Geneva and fitted to other springs and wheels that have travelled down from other moun- tains — a watch bought there may have been thin- spread all over Switzerland.

Until this wet ride my eyes had been mercifully withheld from seeing the national curse — the goitre; but when the diligence stopped for lunch, an old woman came to the side with a terrible growth under her chin, at least a foot long, as of a bunch of beets or carrots dragged out of the ground with earth clinging to them. A sight for a nightmare ; and yet the old crea- ture looked as if she had a sort of pride in it, the vegetable outgrowth of ages of filth and bad air. Was there ever a curse so black that conceited hu- manity would not wring a secret drop of comfort out of it?

The next morning the Chamounix Valley was sweet and fresh as a lusty baby after a bath, and we found "a thing to do" right speedily — to cross the Mer de Glace, the cast-off garments of Mont Blanc, which have fallen between two lower heights, and lie frozen there in hundreds of feet of gieen ice shining like chrysoprase.

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We mounted our mules at the hotel door and rode, single file, up the rocky stairs of' the Mon tan vert, a wooded hill which serves as a footstool from which to look in the face of Swiss royalty.

My mule had grown near-sighted in his old age, and insisted on climbing the very edge of the precipice, either to see his home in the valley better, or to be certain where the edge was. With the exception of this litlle weakness, he was all that one could desire in an intimate friend among mules. With a stout pair of eye-glasses he would have been perfect.

If one has any faith left in man, the idiosyncrasy of the Swiss mule don't matter much, as a guide leads each one by the bridle. These Swiss guides are a class by themselves, a serious, woithy, wrinkled set of men, fed upon danger from childhood, as it had been bread and butter.

St. Ursula made long discourses with them in her best French, — she would draw out a Hottentot's views of politics and religion, — and these were her results. The province of Savoy, in which Chamounix is situat- ed, having passed from Italian to French rule within a few years, these men did highly approve the change, since taxes were lower. Furthermore, they preferred to guide Americans rather than other travellers, be- cause they were so lavish of their money. They had been known to give as much as ^\Qi francs to a guide for his dinner. I know not whether all their ideas and opinions had roots in their pockets; but these two were enough to make them men and brethren.

We were already blest in this Chamounix journey with six feet of manly escort, brimful of true American

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kindness to his lonely countrywomen, which ought to have been enough for us, since we had fought our own battle so long. However, it never rains but it pours, and just here we fell in with the " Fairy Prince." According to Tennyson, he had broken the hedge, waked the sleeping princess with a kiss, and earned her "across the hills and flar away" with him ages ago; but here he was again, as young as ever.

** He travels far from other skies — His mantle glitters on the rocks — A fairy prince with joyful eyes, And lighter-footed than the fox."

He wore a suit of brown knickerbockers instead of a glittering mantle, and he presented his card like other

people — of course it was only plain Mr. ; but

that was his disguise, as other princes of royal biith call themselves mere count or baron on their travels. He bestrode his mule as if it had been a "fiery, un- tamed steed of the desert," and he ordered impossible dinners on little shelves of the rock, which nevertheless came to pass in due season as by magic. He had the true fairy talent for making arrangements, so that his companions seemed to slide down an inclined plane to the desire of their hearts. It was a great blow to some of us when he spoke of his wife — why did I at once think of Mahomet's father, who was so handsome that on his wedding day two thousand virgins made an end of themselves in their despair? — for it proved that he had already found the princess and made that little journey "across the hills and far away," like his ancestor.

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We broke the news gently to Juno, but — **the subsequent proceedings interested her no more."

It is odd how instantly some women lose interest in a man when they discover that he is married. It is almost the sole exception to the rule that only the unattainable is w^orth having. To me, there is a troublesome uncertainty in the manner of a bachelor, as if he never quite knew where his feet might carry him ; but a married man can call his soul his own with no sort of misgiving how anybody will take it. In our case the princess was indeed far away — at least three thousand miles — taking care of the heir to the throne, and for two endless summer days her prince went across the hills with us.

The blackness of desolation is a familiar phrase; but looking down from the Montanvert on the ancient ravages of the glacier, that "frozen hurricane," and its two cold arms, the Arve and the Arveiron, reaching out of the valley to cool the rest of the worid, one begins to learn the meaning of the whiteness of desola- tion. We leave our mules here for a season, those for- tunate animals not being able to walk on ice, and after scrambling down the rocky wall that was intended by Nature to fence in her ice treasure from all human meddling, we draw on knitted shoes and begin our walk over fathomless ice under the midsummer sun. Our feet touch the frigid zone and our head the torrid. Steps are cut along a winding path, and there is no danger if one could resist looking over the edge of the yawning cracks, into which one drops a stone and hears it rebound aojainst the oreen walls of ice long after it

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is out of sight. These crevasses have an uncomfort- able habit of breaking out in a new spot sometimes; but the ice groans and lieaves long enough beforehand to warn people away from its neighborhood.

The glacier is more beautiful in a picture, because Nature is not a good housekeeper, never wiping the dust of ages off its face. It was evidently intended to be looked at from a distance, and the black specks in water-proof cloaks crawling over it all summer are an impertinence to its grand loneliness. It ought to be let severely alone. One seems to be looking on about the evening of the third day of creation, when the waters were gathered together in one place and the dry land appeared ; but there were yet twenty-four hours before "the grass and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind," had been heard of. It may well be the place where all the waste material left over, after that six days' work, was thrown to get it out of the way, " the fret-work of an earth- quake." It bears down small talk and travelling jokes like a death in the house ; only those whose souls habitually walk "on the heights" retain their cheer- fulness without an effort.

• Crossing the ice is nothing ; it is but the first skirmish of the battle. After such scrambling as makes one take back some old strictures on the Bloomer costume, one creeps, and jumps, and almost writhes along the side of a perpendicular rock, like drunken flies on a wall. There is nothing above us but rock and sky, and nothing below but more rock added to the glacier and destruction — the downward look is the most in- teresting. An iron railing has been welded into the

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path. With one hand clutching this, and sticking closer than a brother to my guide, I passed over the Mauvais Pas, or "Bad Step." If there are worse steps, I desire never to take them. It is not a bad type of the return journey from "facilis descensus Averni." I knoWnothing of the scenery along this perilous walk, but I can tell the number of threads in my guide's coat-collar, to which I nailed my dizzy eyes; but there is no "bad step" in the world for some people. One of us in a trailing skirt skimmed over this danger like a young and fool-hardy chamois.

. Nothing demonstrates the superior strength of the female body over that of man (however much it may impugn her common sense) than to see a woman wrapped in heavy and clinging skirts do easily what men find difficult without that drawback. A woman gives them several points in the matter of clothes, and often wins after all. * Sir John Mandeville says he never felt so devout as when he was passing through the Dangerous Valley. It may not be difficult to be an infidel on smooth ground, but on the "bad steps" of this world, a stout belief in the " everlasting arms," and angels standing around, "lest thou trip thy foot against a stone," is a handy thing to have about one. ' There was one flying leap from one little stone bracket to another, after which, had I been a good Catholic, I would have vowed a candle to the Virgin at least five feet long.

Only the day before our visit, the Bad Step had its latest tragedy, with a comic edge to it, as most trage- dies have. In the pouring rain a party left the hotel at Chamounix for the Mer de Glace, and coming up on

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the other side, took the Bad Step first. The sweetest of little old ladies, a mere dot of a woman, with her doctor of divinity, were among them, and went on over the slippery rock made doubly dangerous by the rain, because once started there was no turning back. She dragged the pounds on pounds of wet water-proof cloth clinging about her feet to the little oasis, where people rest and gird up their loins before crossing the ice. Here she threw herself prone on the ground, and was still as an ink blot. When the others started, her husband tried to rouse her. " No," she said ; " you may all go on. I want nothing. I will die here!" It was the calmness of despair; women often threaten in certain contingencies to '•'give up;'''* but the thing is rare as snow in August. When it happens, the family machine stops and desperate remedies are applied. This w^oman did the thing without the threat, also a rare thing in her sex; and was ever doctor of divinity in such a plight before? He had lived with her forty years, and she yet had power to surprise him. He had seen her endure years of wasting sickness without los- ing cheerfulness. He had seen her go down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and come back smiling with a baby in her arms; but now at last she had "given up." He offered to carry her down the rocks and across the ice — he who had come abroad for Iiis health ; but she answered him only, " Go with the rest. I will die here!" like the refrain of a dirge. The doctor must have scolded at this point, if he were not more than mortal; but it did no good, and finally he "wrapped the mantle of his thoughts about him, and sat down in the rain to meditate a new chapter on the

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woman question. The other people went on, and the two kept solitary watch on the Mer de Glace like two gray-headed eagles in an eyrie. At ihe end of a silent half liour, in which the doctor discovered what very liard-working people those are who "only stand and wait," she rose up, walked over the ice, mounted her mule, and reg;)ined the hotel*. She had broken the main-spring of hope, and it took Nature just half an hour to mend it.

We found a little box of a restaurant at the end of the Bad Step, clinging to the rock as if it had rolled down the mountain side and lodged there. We would not have scorned the "dinner of herbs;" but we had the "stalled ox" and "contentment therewith." In a bottle of enthusiasm, which went by another name in the bill, we drank to those we loved, and again to those who loved us. Some hasty people might think they were one and the same ; but every discriminating mind perceives that they are two very different drinks.

" Now they all sat or stood To eat and to drink, And every one said

What he happened to think," —

as they did at the wedding of Cock Robin and Jennie Wren, and I know no surer test of the enjoyment of any company.

Our last toast was, " Our enemies, may God forgive them ! "

"For we never will," added the Fairy Prince; and then we found our mules, and rattled our bones over the stones back to the hotel. Juno ran a mule-race

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with the prince, and her guide assured her that she had "the habitude of a horse." All the rest of us trailed far behhid them, looking as if our dolls were stuifed with sawdust, and we did not care who knew it. It had been a day of days, and it " died of its own glory," transmuting Mont Blanc by sunset alchemy into a solid mass of burnished gold. This is called the "After-glow," and in a few minutes the mountain fades again into a cold white cloud. This change is like a sudden blinding gleam of delight which fades out as if it had never been, when the twilight of com- mon sense settles on it.

The region of Mont Blanc has a wonderfully biblical effect — mountainous texts float uppermost in the mem- ory. That splendid psalm in the prayer book which calls on every created thing, "stars and wnnds, ice and snow, mountains and hills, to praise the Lord and magnify him forever," keeps chanting itself in every mind that is familiar with it. Mont Blanc is a great white hand on the guide-board of the sky, pointing to the fact more easily forgotten than any other, "Be ye sure that the Lord he is God ; it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves." All the funerals in the world could not put a sharper point upon it.

The Swiss are a pious and God-fearing race. Their mountains continually do preach to them like Evan- gelists, anr] they are converted in spite of themselves.

Anybody can make a flat country by filling in a bay — Boston made miles of it, and thought no more about it ; but among high mountains their Maker seems to be still walking where Moses spoke with him. Mr. Beecher says he never realized how much work it was

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to put the world together until he tried to make a hill four feet high.

In the early morning we were packed into springless wagons drawn by mules for a drive of twenty-four miles over the Tete Noire (Black Head) pass to Mar- tigny. I saw the last of Chamounix in the shape of my near-sighted mule. I bowed to him, but he took no notice — Ae may have forgotten our short friend- ship, but I never shall.

The breath of a Swiss morning is sweet and sharp as the flavor of a pine-apple. It cheers and inebri- ates too. The mountains are black and bleak beyond telling; but they are not so unnecessarily high as Mont Blanc and the other snow-peaks. A cheerful little stream, white with foam, bathes their roots, and now and then, high up on the side, nestles a broad- brimmed village like a cluster of birds' nests on a tree- top. Frisky waterfalls that have never been sobered by the' drudgery of turning a mill-wheel plunge reck- lessly down the mountain, and break into a shower of emeralds and rubies in the rays of that great jeweller, the sun. Some French savant calls mountains only the wrinkles on the face of the old earth, and Parsees say that they are the heads of the long pins that hold the world down in its place. The road winds along like a serpent, hedged in by a rickety fence (wherever there is no danger)^ but it always gives way at the steepest places, and rolls down into the valley, out of deference to the view. In very sharp descents, one mule is fastened behind the carriage, on the safe prin- ciple that a mule will always pull backwards when he gets a chance. The road seems to be built with a view

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to all the travel setting one way, from Charaounix to Martigny. One solitary wagon and a mule, very small of its age, came the other way, and found out its mistake. It turned out for us, and in the act went backward down the hill-side, dragging the mule with it. The descent was gi-assy, but steep, for about a hun- dred feet, and ended in a rushing stream full of sharp rocks. When I looked over the edge I expected to see a mule in pieces ; but about half way down, a pro- jecting stone had wedged itself into the wagon and held it till it could be secured. The bewildered mule was dragged up the bank, and set upon his feet, and from the tip of his bruised nose to the end of his tail he wore the exact expression of Sterne's famous don- key, which seemed to say, "Don't beat me; but if you \ will you may ! " A mule is almost as hard to kill as a "^i woman! The wagon had contained nothing but an / elderly carpet-bag, and the hill-side was strewn with combs, and brushes, and shirts. A few rods faither on, and out of sight of the late catastrophe, we came upon the owner, sitting on a stone in the broiling sun with note-book in hand, and a tall hat on his head,' which looked as foreign to the scene as anything could. Bret Harte says that a stove-pipe hat on any one but a clergyman or a gambler in the mountains of California in the early days would have justified a blow. In this man, one recognized the Yankee as distinctly as if the American postage-stamp had been on his forehead, and his hollow cheeks and well-preserved black suit seemed to mark the minister from Cranberry Centre, whom a lucky bronchitis had sent abroad for cure. I suppose he thought he left his wagon to study the fine view,

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all unconscious that his guardian angel had put it into his head in order to avoid the coming overturn. American tourists can never feel quite at home in Al- j)ine scenery, because they miss *' Plantation Bitters" and "Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer "in large letters on every salient point, as they have them in their native wilds. The "effete monarchies" manao:e these thinofs better. As we approach the summit of the pass, the plot thickens, and the gloomy mountains draw their heads nearer together, like conspirators.

The Black Head is a stubborn mass of rock that leans over the valley with a scowl. It has been tun- nelled, since there is no getting around it; and we went in at one ear in France and came out at the other in Switzerland. In the long, down-hill jolt describing an endless row of acute angles, we were in sight of Martigny for miles; but the village seemed to flee be- fore us. When we reached it we were still alive, but in the condition of that army which would be ruined by such another victory.

However, a night's sleep and the breath of the mountains miraculously "knit up the ravelled sleeve of care," and the better part of us were ready next morning to mount into the region of eternal snow, where the brethren of Mont St. Bernard slowly freeze to death in the service of God and his poor.

Our mules trotted cheerfully over the splendid road built by Napoleon, nodding their heads continually as if in token of approval of such travelling. The Alpine pictures, in their azure frame of sky, unrolling them- selves one after another as we climb hio^her and higher, are so many health-giving draughts to our weariness.

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The human figures in the landscape are its only draw- back. In the filthy little village, where we stopped for luncheon, there is everything to take away one's appe- tite. The government seems to be administered by pigs that do shamefully tyrannize over the other in- habitants. We were forced to drive through a sty, long drawn out. St. Peter is doubtless ashamed of his namesake. The people were just lumps of animated dirt, and yet they might be clean if they thought of it; there is water enough always going to waste down the side of the mountain. When we left St. Pierre another mule joined company with us, a portentous addition, of which we soon found the meaning. The mountain g\ 3W so steep that the carriage-road shrunk to a foot-path, and leaving the wagon behind, we mounted the mules. As we climbed in single file the rugged way with a sack of hay strapped on behind, and our own modest traps hung on each side like the saddle-bags of a doctor in the olden time, we looked not unlike an old picture of the "Flight into Egypt." There is a chilly flavor of snow in the air long before we pass the first patches of it lying on the grass like bits of white linen put out to dry.

When the Hospice comes into sight, after twelve hours of climbing, the gaunt old dogs rush out at us with a loud welcome, and a troop of beggars creep out of their holes in the ground, for they are too filthy ever to have had any other home. The dogs are weather-beaten old heroes; but these beggars, who cumber the earth by the charity of the brethren, are so evidently below the level of brutes, that they ought to break themselves of the habit of living.

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We go up the steps of a gray stone building, and ring a bell, which brings a brother to the door. A pale, handsome man is this monk, with vivacious black eyes never tamed by conventual rule or everlasting cold. He leads us up stairs, along a stone corridor with many wooden doors, numbered and unpainted, leading out of it, and leaves us in a little room with three narrow beds in it, and as many small wash-hand stands. The floor and walls are of unpainted wood ; but the beds would rejoice the heart of the neatest of Yankee housewives. They ar.e high-posters with white canopies and valences, and for coverlet there is a fat feather-bed cased in white. As we looked out of the little window into the sky, a few flakes of snow float lazily downward, and it is only the middle of August. In the dining-room a welcome wood-fire blazes in the wide ^rate, a piano stands open, and our black-eyed host makes good cheer for us in French, which, in its very sound, is more lively than English ever can be. It was a fast-day of peculiar strictness for the brethren, and we saw no others. The dinner was served in this warm room, and we sat down with half a dozen other travellers, who had come up from the Italian side. There were also three or four mature- looking Frenchwomen, who had an undefinable air of being at home. It did not appear whether they had retired to the Hospice to do penance for their sins, or to comfort the lonely brethren with some semblance of home life ; but there they were.

A fast-day dinner in a monastery is by no means the meagre and starveling affair that one might suppose. First came a mild sort of soup, with savory bits of

A WOMAN'S VACATION, 225

bread in it; then a course of codfish and potatoes, deli- ciously cooked; then macaroni, with the Italian flavor; then a pyramid of flaky rice rising out of a pond of stewed prunes; and the dessert consisted of all man- ner of dried fruit and nuts. Red wine flowed freely. The brother pressed every dish on his guests with the warmest hospitality, and when we left him for the night, he urged us to come to mass in the morning at five o'clock. How the cold did nip nnd pinch us in that little wooden bedroom ! Not the northernmost spare chamber in a country house at home, that had not been slept in for a score of winters, could equal the cruel chill, as with chattering teeth we crept be- tween our two feather-beds. We felt ourselves sand- wiched in the eternal snows, and the brethren would have to send the dogs to our rescue before midnight.

It could be no worse; but it was scarcely better when we crept out again in the small houra of the morning and found our way to the chapel. A gor- geous mass was going on, and whatever may be the personal privations of the monks of St. Bernard^ they certainly spare no splendor to the service of God. The lace on the priests' robes is as deep as in any cathedral in the land. The black-robed martyrs come in slowly, prostrate themselves for a prayer or two, and go out again. The ragamuffins, whom we saw .first, come in too, and are very devout indeed ; but it would seem that the dogs might understand the ser- vice as well as they. ' Afterwards we munch the usual French breakfast of a roll and a cup of coffee, and, still shivering, we go out of doors to look up at the snowy peaks that keep watch and ward over the Hospice. 15

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A wooden cross marks the dividing line from Italy, and we rush with a sudden hot thrill in our veins to set our feet on its classic ground.

" Italia, O Italia, thou that hast the fatal gift of beauty ! " -—

if we never see thee nearer, at least we have touched the hem of thy garment!

Then the brother takes down a key from the outer wall, and with a solemn countenance opens a myste- rious door. It is the "Morgue," or home of the dead, who have been found frozen on the mountain by the dogs. The dry air withers and preserves them in the same attitude in which they were found. In the dim, vault-like room, shadowy forms lean against the wall, with hollow eye-sockets turned towards the door, and nearest to us is the body of a mother holding her baby on her arm. She is wrapped in a sheet, for when she was found she had stripped herself to keep the child warm. Shq is just another verse of that sweet old poem of mother-love that will keep on singing itself while the world lasts, and cannot be surpassed in mel- ody even by the angels. This roomful of the dead is kept always the same, that any surviving friends who may come in search of them can have the opportunity to identify them. The thing has come to pass even years after death. A haunting horror clings about this silent company ; but it is so faint and dim in its effect, that in five minutes after the door was shut I was almost sure that it did not really exist, and I had only dreamed it.

The courtesy of the black-eyed brother clung to us

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 227

to the last; but when we ventured to offer him money, he shrank from it as if it would contaminate him, and led us to the little box in the chapel. Here we meek- ly dropped in our Napoleons, said the last words in broken French, and turned the heads of our mules towards Martigny and warm weather.

228 BEATEN PATHS, OR

CHAPTER XVI.

PARIS.

" There is only one Paris ; and out of Paris there is no sal- vation for decent people." — ** The Baron," in Hyperion.

MOST people bridge the gulf between Geneva and Paris by a night journey ; but it is an inhuman way of doing penance for one's sins, and must have been invented by the great enemy of mankind. The surest recipe for making night hideous is to sit through the weary hours, ironically called " small," staring in the faces of four other unfortunates, distorted by the glimmer of a shaking lamp overhead.

Crossing the Styx is nothing to it. We made the journey luxuriously in two days, stopping a night in Macon, noted as the birthplace of Lamartine, the " literary Don Juan," whose books are to other litera- ture like French kickshaws to solid beef and mutton. Lamartine's career would have abundantly glorified a short life; but he had the bad taste to live too long, and to become a sort of poor relation to the French government. His chateau in Macon has come down, in its old age, to be used for wine cellars and a b6ard- ing-school for girls. We literally drove into the pleas- ant hotel at Macon in an omnibus, and pulled up in the

A WOMAN'S VACATION ^ 229

court-yard, which is the heart of a French house. All its business converges to that centre. It is a French- man's castle — he buys a bit of land and builds a house all around it.

Here was first served up to us a flower of Gallic cookery, so folded in mystery that we tasted and tasted, and could not christen it. We had eaten strange compounds before — unaccountable meat and nameless vegetables smothered in witch-broth, "thick and slab." Only to taste of them was a triumph of faith ; but this dainty dish was a delicious riddle without an answer. Halves of large tomatoes, with the contents scooped out, served for baking dishes ; these were filled with mystery, chopped fine and browned over. The beauty of it was, that it never tasted twice alike. It was oys- ters, chicken, sweet herbs, eggs, cheese, bread-crumbs, pickles, sardines, lemons — "everything by turns, and notliing long."

The French country, as we saw it, was flat and fer- tile, commonplace and restful, after the extravagances of Swiss scenery. Was it Talleyrand who said no one would appreciate the comfort of marrying a "s^^^/)^cZ" unless he had associated with intellectual women all his days?

It is on this principle that the dull rows of poplar trees that serve in the [)lace of fences find favor in our eyes, though, looked at merely as a tree, it is a vege- table failure. A Lombardy poplar is just a wood-cut of an elderly sj)inster of the scrawny type, holding up her skirts, and picking her way over the puddles in a wet day — a tree nipped in the bud, reluctant to give shade, like a character frozen by early neglect. If

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men harl invented trees, their first attempt must have looked like a poplar.

On French railways travellers are treated like express packages, "to be kept this side up with care;" but nothing is left to their discretion. They are fastened into pens till the train is ready, and any question about the journey is received by an official with much the same expression that must have come over Balaam's face when his ass spoke to him.

On French soil, except in the matter of shopping, one does not need more than half his wits — there is such a surplus among the natives.

On the frontier our passports were demanded for Ihe first time. The train was remorselessly emptied, even to hand-bags and shawl-straps, and the w^hole herd passed through a strait gate, under the eyes of four men in cocked hats, to the baggage-room. The first comers had their passports examined and compared with their faces ; but custom-house officers are mortal, after all, and having verified a score or two of "me- dium " noses and chins, they relaxed their severity, and passed without a word the shrinking rear-guard, who had no passports at all. Three or four dingy trunks, helonsjinor to a distracted little German milliner, w^ere opened, and found to be nearly or quite empty; but not Abiaham himself, when he tried to pass his beautiful Sarah in a wooden chest through the Egyptian custom- house, could have made more fuss about it. The moral of travelling with empty coffers seemed to be that tak- ing full trunks to Paris would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. We had been travelling to this point with a solid old German couple, and my last sight of

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 231

them makes the frontispiece to all my German memo- ries: she carried four leather bags, and he carried — • his cane.

"Tills is the patient, gentle, unprovoked, And unprovoking, never-answering she."

The first impression of Paris, as one leaves the train in the great depot, is thnt the whole city is held in the hollow of a powerful hand, that would regulate even its breathing. The cheerful and distracting bustle of our home railway stations, where nobody has any rights except hackmen, is replaced by an orderly stilhjess, de- piK^ssing to a traveller who lias braced himself for a hand-to-hand fight over his baggage, and is at least sure of one who is glad to see liim. Every cabman is seated on his vehicle, as in a funereal cortege. Not one can stir until the chief of the omnibiises has had the fiist chance. The baggage is handed out slowly and carefully — you give your word of honor that it contains neither tobacco nor spirits — a man in uni- form makes a cross on it — and the omnibus driver, selected by the chief, takes possession of it and its owner. It is so painfully systematic, that one feels like a convict going to prison. This effect is not lessened on arriving at a hotel, when little blanks are handed in by the police to be filled up with one's name, birth- place, last stop I ling-place, and occupation. The last item was a little difliicult to define: one of us was a teacher ; all the rest were time-killers, and nothing more.

London is like a collection of towns, one over against another — it may be studied and absorbed in pieces; but Paris is one and indivisible, not to be learned in a

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lifetime. One can only describe little tags and edges of it ; and that is why all the world conies, and comes again, to look at the beauty of its sphinx-like face, and make another guesa at its meaning. There must be great poverty, and suffering, and crime in Paris; but they do not flont on the surflice so brazenly as in Lon- don. Louis Napoleon has made misery half ashamed of itself in his broad, white streets, where Parisians can no longer throw up a barricade of paving-stones and fight out a campaign in a night. There is no old dirt or dim relimous licrht anvwhere. The sidewalks are often thirty feet wide, and one never sees a crowd so dense as in the x\merican cities, where the sidewjflk looks, afar off, like a moving hank of many-shaded and bright-colored worsted.

The Bonaparte dynasty has wrought a great "'N" into so many stony places, an\l hung it Avith such delicate sculptures, that, for the sake of what goes with it, even a Bourbon would hesitate to erase it. The outrages of the Communists are like so many gaping wounds in a fair body. The broken walls of the Hotel de Ville will scarcely rise up before the Parisian crater belches fire again. This was Lamar- tine's battle-ground — for three days he stood on a balcony of the Hotel de Ville, and threw down little sops of oratory to appease the raging Cerberus of the mob that filled the court-yard. When a savage cry for his head reached him, he said h.e wished that every one of them had his liead on their shoulders, which moved the crowd to a grim mirth and dispersed it. The hungriest French stomach can always be staid with a bou mot.

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The Column Vendome, twined with Napoleon's vic- tories, and crowned with his statue, broke into four pieces when it fell. It is to be set up again, and the cracks smoothed over, till another Commune lays it low. Napoleon's son, who came so gorgeously into the world, and went so lamely out of it, wrote in the album of a French count about returning to Paris, " Tell the Column Yendome that I die because I can never see it!" The French lay all defects in their present state at the door of the Commune, as islanders in tiie tropics attribute everything that goes wrong to the last hurricane.

On every public building is written up, in large let- ters, the favorite cry of the mob, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," as if it were possible for either of these three thins^s to be realized in France. This was done in Louis Phillipe's time to ward off the desecrat- ing fury of the mob. They should have written —

** A change — my kingdom for a change ! "

or, better still, the favorite maxim of Jonathan Wild, "Never to do any more mischief than was necessary to the effecting his purpose, for that mischief was too 2)recious to be thrown away."

Part of the brightness of Paris streets radiates from the white ruffled caps of the women, who seem to have most of the business of the city on their minds.

The French type of face is much more like the American than any other — they look equally keen- eyed, alert, and quick-witted. 1 constantly mistook one for the other. Market women in white frilled caps

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look up witli the same set of features that one may see on New England doorsteps in the twilight — sharp-cut faces with early wrinkles, and not an ounce of flesh to spare. It confirms the theory that Nature makes faces by the dozen, in the same mould, and just scatters them broadcast without distinction of nation. There is an- other reason, however, for the pervading American tinge in Paris streets. There is a permanent popula- tion of twenty thousand Americans ; and in September all those who have been summering in Europe come back to Paris fur more last words, and to spend all the dollars they have left. In this September, Paris gave wet welcome lo her devotees. It rained every day for three weeks, with a chilling wind worse than east, which made furs comfortable, and brought a golden crop to cabmen. Boston, in ils most abnndoned month, was never guilty of such a "spell of weather."

Speaking of cabmen, their tariff is sternly fixed for them by law; but they creep out of it by asking for a morsel of drink-money, which you must pay or hear a volley of "sacr-r-r-s" rolling after you like big stones. After one of them had pulled his horse up from a fall, he got down from his seat and kissed him on the nose — a touching little attention to the animal's feelings, which should be added to the regulations of the "Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals."

The great stones on the bridges and edges of the Seine are numbered in staring: fiu^ures. I could not learn for what reason; but they must be convenient for making appointments. Servant girls who live in families where no followers are allowed, probably meet them at such a number on the river bank.

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 235

The shops are scarcely as brilliant as in the large American cities; but they are dedicated poetically to "spring-time," or to "a coquette," or to "thoughts," with a pansy for a trade-mark on their cards. One shop, for selling only velvet cloaks, is dedicated to "the Child Jesus." Americans are received in French shops as to their mothers' arms. Nothing is too good for them, and nothing can equal the price they are expected to pay. After the lofty indifference of home shopmen, the obsequiousness of French clerks seems almost ironical. The perfumed essence of all Parisian shopping is in the Palais Royal, where one finds the luxuries of life in profusion, and cares no longer for its necessnrics — real jewels, such as the Shah of Persia/ lately bought for himself^ and mock jewels, such as he^^ bought for his wives — precious boxes in silver, porce- lain, and Russia leather, for holding things still more precious — china, rare without being ugly, for it is only in England that ugliness brings a high price. It was once the palace of Louis XIII. , and ornaments, such as now lie on satin in the shop windows, then shone on the white bosoms of beautiful women.

Ninon de I'Enclos lived near it — the woman who came nearest to discovering the elixir of youth since Time forgot her — and she lived to fascinate three generations of Frenchmen, father, son, and grandson, in turn. It seems to me she must have besjun to fade from the moment that her unconscious son made love to her, and, when she broke the truth to him, fled into the g.irden and killed himself.

Not far off lived Madame de Sevigne, whose love letters to her daughter were so daintily affectionate, so

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whipped into the cream of worship, that one would have thouo^ht mother-h)ve a new thinor under the sun. These letters are full of history seen through feminine and aristocratic prejudices, which do somewhat turn it inside out; but it is the rare devotion of one woman to another that " makes one love the very ink that wrote them."

If the Evil One had a second Eve to tempt in these latter days, he would no longer climb a tree and hold out a paltry apple ; but he would gently lead her round the Palais Royal, secure that if her principles had a price they would find it there.

We drove one day through the "Rue Adam." "I wonder," said Juno, "if there is a *Rue Eve.'" "No," said St. Ursula. " We all rue Eve bitterly enough, without posting it on a street corner." The "Rue 4^°^*^ Se})tembre " suggests a bright idea to street namers, as there are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year to choose from.

French housekeeping is easy as breathing, compared with the hard work we make of it. One gives a little party, or the party makes itself, and the "entertain- ment," as some people oddly call the supper, consists of a bit of cake, and a cup of tea, and a glass of wine, and everybody is satisfied. In America, the four quar- ters of the globe must be ransacked to furnish forth the feast. In the city a caterer takes possession of one's house like a pillaging army; and in the country, if a lady can give one large party a year, and live through it, it is all that her friends expect of her. "I could not endure the slavery of housekeeping in Bos- ton," said a lady, who had revisited her old home after nine years in Paris.

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It is no wonder tliat French matrons can talk well — then* thoughts are not stretched on a gridiron worse than St. Lawrence's. In the old English country- houses, a passage-way often led from the family pew in the chapel into the kitchen, so that the lady of the manor, between her prayers, might see that the game was roasted to a turn. How can an American house- wife, with three or four Irish heathen in her kitchen, sit with hands crossed on a satin lap and discourse calmly of "predestination and foreknowledge abso- lute," after tlie French fashion, in the last critical lialf-hour before a dinner party? "The gravy alone is enough to add twenty years to one's age, I do assure you." American women do the thing every day, but it fades and bleaches them before their time. No French family makes its own bread ; the bakers do it for them, and do it well. Tall narrow loaves, nearly a yard long, stand about in corners like so many utnbrel- las ; and you meet men going about with round loaves, having a hole in the middle, strung the whole length of their arms, and if any mother-earth cleave to the bread from the coat-sleeve, so much the worse for the eater thereof; it is apparently no concern of the buyer or seller. The first meal of the day is a roll and a cup of coffee taken in one's chamber, and the real break- fast of .meat and eggs w^aits till noon. Americans must always associate with French mornings a terrible feehng of goneness. A very little food goes a great way in a French dinner; but it is truly gluttonous in clean plates. The interstices are expected to be filled up with bread. It is always the same tune with varia- tions. First a colored and flavored water called soup —

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this implies a great deal of bread; then "a portion" of fish, then a dish of gravy with inscrutable contents, then a lonely vegetable, like cauliflower or beans. This habit of serving one insignificant weed (often it is artichokes) with a flourish of clean plates, and noth- ing for a background, was to me a perpetual anti- climax— "in the name of the Prophet — tigs!" After this sustaining morsel conie's the great gun of the din- ner, slices of meat or fowl with lettuce. Afterwards there is nothing worth mentioning. Compared with our custom, the French dessert should be spelled with one 5.

A bird of passage in Paris must see so many things that there is no time left to study the people. One cannot verify at a glance the tradition of grace and exquisite manner which have been the birthright of French women through all time. At this time there was a comedy playing in a Paris theatre showing up the free manners of American society, in one scene of which a young lady at a party rushes up to a man and kisses him at first sight; but there was in our hotel a young couple that might have gone bodily on to our stage as French caricatures, witliout altering a thread about them. Monsieur X. had a hair-dresser attend him daily, and his chief occupation was gently manipulating his Hyacinthine locks with an exquisitely- kept white hand, as one sees actresses express their feelings and settle their wigs at the same time; but Madame X.! she might have been set up in a milli- ner's window for a wax figure, and no one would ever have discovered the mistake. She was to her fellows- boarders like a bird of paradise among brown wrens.

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She Imd orange-colored hair (so intense in color that pea-green or sky-blue would have been equally natural) laid up on her bead in loose j)ufFs that looked as if each one had been made separately, and stuck in its right place. In shady nooks behind her ears, this resplendent color changed to a dull brown, which was doubtless its first estate.. She rouged her cheeks and tinted her lips, pencilled her eyebrows, and darkened the lids, made her veins blue with "azurene," and whited the whole sepulchre with pearl-powder. If she could have lived and died by gas-light, she would never liave lost her beauty; but the garish and impertinent morninir sun would show where one color left off and another began.

After a toilet of four solid hours, she came to a little soiree, robed in three or four shades of purple silk relieved with white satin, and we held our breath to look at her; but she would have been^very unsafe to kiss. She danced laboriously, like most foreigners, swinging her skirts high from the floor, and her part- ner mopped his face, after it was over, as if he had been in a hay-field in midsummer.

The Americans on the same floor danced so sub- duedly to the same music, that they seemed to be doing an entirely different thing. When a Frenchman dances with a young girl, he is expected not to exchange a word with her from the moment that he takes her from her chaperon's side till he brings her back again. Monsieur X. went away for a week's hunting, leaving two thick books for his wife's reading, with the injunc- tion not to leave her room unnecessarily. Her con- jugal rendering of this command was to practise an

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affectionate little comedy with a handsome young jour- naliist, who had frequented the house for some time under cover of visiting a sick aunt — never was aunt so tended before ! At this very time, Madame X. was shocked and horrified by an American girl sitting on a sofa with a young man whom she had known from childhcod, and who brought news of her family. Mon- sieur X. came Ijome a day before his time, as men all over the world have an uncomfortable habit of doing, and brought her iniquity to light. He sent for his hair-dresser immediately; but I know not what was her penance. One could not help wondering if these two artificial people, being reduced to their lowest terms, would recognize each other. The lady could not have been more than twenty-two. Time, the avenger, had scarcely laid a finger on her; but a woman of seventy could not have labored harder to hide his ravages. If such things are done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry? But to know all French women by these presents, is as unjust as to judge all American women by those who lecture on Woman's Rights. They have no beauty that one should desire them; but Madame X. was a work of art whose shades and perspective I was never tired of studying.

The Paris houses are high and spacious. Everything is on a grand scale, except the bowls and pitchers in the bedrooms. These aie mere cups and saucers, com- pared with English ones. Travelling Frenchmen are always surprised at the profuse arrangements for bath- ing among Anglo-Saxons. M. Taine wondered over the waste of towels in English country-houses^ as a pig

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might turn np its eyes at seeing a cat wash her face, or a sober-minded hen contemn the frequent ablutions of a duck. Living in Paris is not so preternaturally cheap as one commonly supposes. One may hire a modest flat of perhaps six small rooms for about sixty dollars a month, and one may be barely comfortable in a hotel for two dollars a day. French reception rooms have their sofa^ often in the middle of the room, which gives a cosy, talkative air to them even when empty. The shining waxed floors are much cleaner than woollen carpets; but the perpetual clicking of boot-heels and the necessity of taking perpetual heed to one's steps, as if every floor was a pond frozen over, condemn them. The servants polish these floors with brushes fastened to their feet.

The favorite night for French parties is Saturday, that they may make Sunday a day of rest, according to the commandment. A good Catholic sees no harm in dancing in the sacred hours, and scorns the scruples of over-strict Protestants, as David scorned the pru- dishness of Michal, daughter of Saul, when she reproved him for dancing before the ark. The races begin on the first Sunday in September, and divide Catholics and heretics like sheep from the goats. All the ])leas- ures of life are crowded into a French Sunday. The Fourth of July is a fast-day to it. The shops are nearly all open, and if one is closed, the notice is put up in large letters, as who should say, "I am more righteous than my neighbors."

Parisians who shut up their shops on Sunday bear the same relation to their fellow-sinners that we, who go to church three times, besides Sunday school, do to 16

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those who believe in one sermon a dny and a drive in the afternoon. An American minister went to call on a French brother " of the cloth " on a Sunday evening, and after talking about the state of the church, the Frenchman proposed a season of prayer, to which the other readily acceded; but in the midst of it he jumf)ed up and excused himself, as he had forgotten an appointment with a lady to go to the opera on that evening.

Our Urst Sunday in Paris was a very pious one, if going to church oiten be a proof of it. We went first to Notre Dame, w^here all the French grandeur that required a mixture of religion has been consummated. My choice of all its pageants would have been the coronation of Josephine — there was "richness;" and yet Madame Junot tells us that Napoleon found time to observe her black velvet dress and tell her it was too sombre for the occasion. His own crimson robe, studded with golden bees, is still kept among the treasures of the church. Notre Dame lacks the dim, shadowy beauty of the German cathedrals. It is so light, and white, and cheerful, that nobody doubts for a moment that it was built by men and Frenchmen. There is no loneliness so complete as that of a heretic in a Catholic church. The glory of its bigness biings reverence, and the organ floats the thoughts upward on great weaves of sound. One cannot follow the un- familiar service, and one goes easily out of the body into the region of day-dreams — the clear voice of a child-chorister, rising like a flute above a whole orches- tra, mingles with them — priests moving to and fro do not disturb them; day-dreams in which old mistakes

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right themselves, and lost friends come to life again — the spell remains when the music ceases, but it vanishes as we go down the aisle and see an old man holding out to us a brush, precisely like the paste-brush used by paperers. It is wet in holy water, and every Catho- lic touches it with a gloved finger and makes the sign of the cross. I think I never stumbled so suddenly down the step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Notre Dame blossomed into a rare flower garden, with walls carpeted with Gobelin tapestry, when the young prince, Eugenie's son, was christened.

"It was not half so fine then as it will be when he comes to his own again," muttered the guide. " When will that be?" asked St. Ursula, as if the day were already set; and the answer is the universal shrug of the shoulders, which never could have been invented in a free country. It needed an iron despotism to pro- duce something which should mean more than speech, and yet never be told again, and the French shrug is the result ; the Bastile and the guillotine were its god- fathers. Americans will never import it, because they have no use for it.

In the red-hot time of the Commune, much vitriol and kerosene were set apart for the destruction of Notre Dame; but the saints preserved it. Perhaps St. Denis, who is believed by the pious to have walked through the streets of Paris with his head under his arm, had an eye to it, or sweet St. Genevieve, who began life as a little shepherdess on the hills, and grew into such faith that she prayed away the heathen Huns, who were coming to sack the city; but these were lambs compared with the wolfish Communists.

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St. Genevieve takes care of Paris, and has her. hands full; but the patron saint of all France is Clotilde, wife of Clovis, wlio converted her husband and all his subjects to Christianity tlirough great tribulation, and a very bellicose kind of a Christian he was, after all. When the touching story of the crucifixion was read to him, he grasped his sword and cried out, "If I had only been there with my brave Franks, I would have killed all those wicked Jews ! " The French relitifion must have a deal of killing in it, to make the nation happy.

The church of the "Madeleine," where Father Hya- cinthe preached before he was cast out, is built like a Greek temple. The benutiful altar-piece of white mar- ble, and the purity of the whole interior, scarcely fitted the gaudy pomp of the high mass that was going on when we entered. It was the feast of the Virgin, and a group of women, veiled in white from head to foot, made part of the procession that followed the "Host" down the aisle. The priests about the altar kicked out their scarlet trains, as I have seen rural brides do as they posed themselves for marriage with their backs to the company. The audience was exceedingly well dressed, and we remained seated, like obstinate heretics as we were, studying the latest style in bonnets, until an old lady near us, who shook with palsy so that she could scarcely hold her prayer-book, spoke to the sex- ton about us; and after that we rose and fell with the crowd. It was a bit of the old delusion that Catholics ) have bought the only road to heaven and fenced it in. Every one of them would be a persecutor, if he could ; even the palsy could not shake that spirit out of them ;

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anfl yet the Catholic church is a motherly refuge to its children, working hard to save them against their will, comforting their souls with absolution, and putting a stone on their heads that they may never grow to be anything but children. " It would be one of the most perfect engines ever put together," says Hawthorne, "if it only had angels to run it."

From the Madeleine we strayed into the church of St. Augustine, so bright and gay in its pictures that it would serve for a lady's sitting-room. There a hand- some young piiest was going through with the weary ceremony of a christening with salt and oil, and all that nonsense, which any right-minded baby will scorn as it deserves. This one roared as if it had heretic blood in its veins, and would not uphold the papacy on any terms.

Afterwards, in a long vagabond walk, we came upon the Pantheon, once a church, and then dedicated to the great men of France after the nation had voted God out of their councils. In the dome-pictures, the artist has represented Glory, and Patriotism, and Death, and other intimate friends of Napoleon, in the guise of handsome and dishevelled women ; but he needed to add no touch of beauty to the figure of Napoleon in his youth that he did not already possess. By way of mitigating the extreme grandeur of the interior, the altar screen is made of painted and gilded paper, like the side scene of a theatre. Then we wandered into the old-fishioned gardens of the Luxembourg palace — eighty-five acres of flowers, and fountains, and statues, where whole families take their lunch and their sewing, and spend Sunday out of doors. Of the men, some

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are playing ball, or cards, or drinking at little tables, while the band plays by the hour. Many of the chil- dren were handsome, with eyes that looked as if they had been deepened about the edges with India ink. It is the southern sun that tints them. They are rare- ly seen among Anglo-Saxons. I never heard a French child cry; but life cannot be all gardens to them.

The palace has been changed to a gallery of modern French art. I don't think I ever could have realized what an intolerable old hag Queen Elizabeth was, if I had not seen De La Roche's picture of her death in one of those three thousand rich dresses that made her wardrobe. Rosa Bonheur's "Ploughing with Oxen" was so rarely natural, that one could almost smell the balmy breath of the soft-eyed brutes. Another was a "Beggar Girl," with such real tears dropping down her cheek, that, hung in a sitting-room, it would shortly bring a whole family to green and yellow melancholy. Why will people jDam^ tragedies when we can haidly keep up with the real thing that is always going on ? Another solemnity in oils i» Count Eberhard weeping over his dead son. In the thirty years' war, when he was pressing on to conquest, he saw his son suddenly struck down, and the soldiers paused ; but he urged them on, saying that duty came before grief. When the battle was over, they found him weeping, as in the picture. The father has a wonderfully noble face, and the son is very dead indeed. In the hall of statuary the air grows suddenly pure and cold, like marble. Here is a young girl whispering her first secret into the ear of a statue of Venus; another has just lifted a smiling mask from her sad face; all young girls might

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do that sooner or later in their lives. The everlasting "Mother of the Gracchi" is here too, with her boys; and the sculptor has given to one of them the head of the young Augustus, which was quite unnecessary, since a mother's pride does not depend on the quality of her children ; they are always her jewels, though paste to everybody else.

The Luxembourg has been the scene of many old French attempts to invent a new sin. "Brave men and fair women "played deep for money and honor within its walls. They dug some of the first trenches of the Revolution ; but the palace has taken to virtue in its old age, and looks down peacefully enough on crowds of nurses and children, who have taken the place of gentlemen in powdered wigs and ladies in long trains.

The Parisians pursue pleasure with an infinite zest^ but I doubt if they really clasp it, because pleasure is never the garment of life, but only the fringe that trims it, so narrow with some, so broad with others. To seek pleasure only is like walking up to a bed of migno- ^ nette, with malice aforethought, to take in all the ^ perfume in one great sniff: it is always a disappoint- A^ ment ; but come upon it unawares, and a little breeze brings one a great wave of fragrance, that makes the senses reel in a sweet drunkenness.

Parisians live in a crowd all their days, and are buried in a crowd at last. "Pere La Chaise" is a city of the dead that needs a Louis Napoleon to widen its narrow streets. Avenues of little shops full of cofiins and funeral wreaths make guide-boards to it long be- fore we see the gate. Each family has a little tomb,

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about six feet by eight, in the shape of a miniature temple, which is more or less ornamented with statues and artificial flowers. The coffins are let down through the floor, one above another, the lowest one in time giving way, so that it is never full. The French econ- omize every inch of space, after death as well as before. Many of these vaults are sold only for ten years — quite time enough to forget anybody, according to French ideas. Some are filled with wreaths of yellow "immortelles," brought there on biithdays by friends.

We had been looking all day for lodgings in a French family for the winter, and we gladly sat down to rest on the step of a tomb, while St. Ursula went in search of a guide. She was gone long enough to buy one for life. " Do you suppose," said Juno, " that she can be looking for apartments here? We want them very ^juiet, you know, and where the inhabitants would speak no English." She appeared at last with a guide, so small and withered, that she ought in conscience to have got him at half price.

In the Jewish quarter we found the tomb of Ra- chel, queen of the French stage, scribbled all over with names of foreign visitors. No such bad taste springs out of French soil. Perhaps Rachel's acting has never been so well translated into words as in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, under the name of " Vash- ti." The Rothschilds have a tomb as plain as any Israelite of them all. French epitaphs are often quaint in their simplicity. "To a lady of a noble heart." "Here lies the good mother of a family." "I think," said St. Ursula, "that I would rather be the mother of a good family." Marshal IsTey has a little enclosure

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in an iron fence by himself, as in our home burial- places, and his only monument is a mound of scarlet geraniums, as if his generous blood had colored them. He was made of the fine clay set apart for heroes; but he had "a strong temptation to do bravely ill," and he yielded to it. In the Russian campaign, which Talley- rand called "the beginning of the end," he would charge a legion at the head of four men as readily as if he had an army at his back. He promised to bring Napoleon to the Bourbons in a cage, but at tha last moment packed his old uniform to take with him, and went over to his old friend at sight. The pride or the shame of his family give him a nameless grave.

Moliere and La Fontaine lie side by side. The lat- ter has a fox on his tomb, and the former should have an old woman, since he kept one, while alive, to criticise his poetry. La Fontaine's oddity would have made him famous without his fables. He met a young man in society with whom he was much pleased, and being told that it was his son, he coolly replied, " I am glad of it — I like him."

The story of Madame Lavalette is told in bas-relief on her monument. She saved her husband's life by changing clothes with him, and remaining in prison in his ])lace. If there is a spot in P^re La Chaise which may be called cheerful, it is the region set apart for the poor. They lie close together under little wooden crosses and a coverlet of wreaths ; but they have only a three years' lease of even these close quarters. After- wards their bones are mingled together in pits digged for the purpose.

Abelard and Heloise lie side by side in stony and

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mildewed state under a canopy. They "gave all for love, and thought the world well lost." There is noth- ing like true love for embalming a story ; heroes and martyrs have no such chance with posterity as your faithful lover. Ileloise had beauty and intellect, a strong mind and a weak heart, and between the two, her teacher, Abelard, brought hdf to grief. They were both forced into convents, one by her relatives, and the other by contumely; but they loved to the last. In Abelard's lonely convent by the sea, he fought with his hunting and carousing monks, who retorted on him his own sins, and would have poisoned him in the commu- nion wine. From under his abbot's cowl, he groans to a friend of his youth, "I have not yet triumphed over that unhappy passion. In the midst of my retirement I sigh, I weep, I pine, I speak the dear name Heloise, and am pleased with the sound."

The peculiarity of this sad love story is, that the great retribution fell on the man. No woman need be utterly wretched, if she knows that her lover is faithful unto death. She may keep her heart up under any cross but another woman.

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CHAPTER XVII.

PARIS.

" The nooks and corners of great cities have a double popula- tion of inhabitants and recollections."

IN "Dame Europa's School," the French boy, Louis, had the finest playhouse of all, and the German Fritz casts envious eyes upon it.

Paris, in these republican days, is like a grand prop- erty in which the owner has just died, leaving no chil- dren, and the estate is not yet settled ; every one is waiting for the coming of the heir. The president's proclamations have a deprecatory strain, as who should say, " We will try to hold things together till some- thing turns up."

A republic in France resembles Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid ; the imperial tricks and manners will crop out in spite of the disguise. The nation began in barbarous magnificence, when its earliest kings were waited upon at table, on their coronation feast, by their nobles on horseback, and it can never break itself of royal habits.

One of these is the manufacture of Gobelin tapes- try, used only for French palaces, and for presents to princes. It keeps right on, while Paris amuses itself

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with democracy, and will have some gay trappings really for the heir when he comes.

It has arrived at such perfection, that its woollen pictures are richer and softer than any painting in oils.

The carpets do not differ much from so-called velvet ones, except that their pile is thicker. The workmen sit in a row before the web, putting in loops wdth hun- dreds of little shuttles, wound with different shades of yarn ; the painted pattern unrolls above their heads as they need it. As it is all done by hand, a carpet is often the work of five or ten years.

Very common looking men do this work, but it is only a talented artist who can deal with the tapestry ; they sit behind their work as the Fates sit behind our lives, and their pattern, painted in oils, is behind them. In one of these yarn-pictures, a splendid woman pick- ing oranges from a tree, was so life-like, that the rounded arm looked as if one could pinch it. Their portraits are absolutely perfect; and when one thinks that a few stitches, with their wooden needles, too far to right or left, w^ould spoil a whole face, it appears how entirely the beauty of the work depends on the skill of the artist, and not at all on the material. A single piece has been valued at thirty thousand dollars, but it can often be bought second, or forty-second, hand, more or less old and faded. In the early days of its manufac- ture, it was woven in little pieces and sewed together; the noses and chins were often a miraculous fit.

On the way home, we wandered into the ancient enclosure of the University of Sorbonne, whose doc- tors used to take in all the old European tangles to be straightened out. The respondents cume into court at

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six in the morning, and remained until six at night, without partaking of food : the arguments must have waxed personal in tlie last hour or two. The divorce of Henry YIII. from Catharine of Arragon, and his marri nge with Anne Boleyn, were sat upon for many days; the doctors disagreed, but the royal Mormon soon settled it for himself. When they had nothing else to do, they sharpened their wits on such whet- stones as these; How many angels could dance on the point of a fine needle? or, Can an angel go from one point to another without passing over the intermediate space ?

The heart of Paris is the Place de la Concorde — it has had many names, and Place de la Discorde woidd have suited it best of all. Once an equestrian statue of Louis XV. adorned it, with figures of Justice, Pru- dence, &c., at the base, which provoked the bon mot that all the virtues were trampled under foot by Vice on horseback. Afterwards the guillotine was set up on the same spot, and three thousand inaocent heads rolled on the ground, because the sins of the fathers had come down to the third and fourth generation. The French Revolution was nobly born ; it had for its ances- tors the finest aspirations of human nature, and it made itself respected till it meddled with women ; then all the world turned against it.

Every male head in France might have been in dan- ger, without much foreign outcry, if they had let the mothers alone; but when they shot the white limbs of the Princess Lamballe out of a gun, and gave a woman her father's blood to drink, before they shed her own, human nature got under arms.

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Looking at it from the royal point of view, and re- flecting on the inconvenience of losing one's head in the prime of life, the taking off of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette appears the concentrated essence of all brutality; but wlien one considers their loose ways of wasting money on their pleasures, knowing that the nation was bankrupt, and the people starving, it would seem that cutting them into inch pieces, or roasting them at a slow fire, would scarcely meet their deserts. They were buried without a prayer; but when their sorrowful daughter came back with the other Bourbons, she was comforted by seeing an " Expiatory Chapel " built over their bones, where mass is performed every day, so that at last they have funeral enough to atone for the temporary loss.

The guillotine has been replaced by an Egyptian obelisk, brought from Luxor at an immense cost ; the mate to it was given, by the Pacha of Egypt, to the English government, but it still guards the tomb of Rameses. The English have too many royal children to portion off to afford obelisks.

Two generous fountains spout water all day on the old blood-stains, and the statues of eight cities of France keep guard about the square.

Strasbourg sits there still, though she has gone over to Germany.

" I suppose that name will be crossed out," I said to a Frenchman, as we passed it.

" No, madam, we shall take it again. Strasbourg has only gone on a visit. Her home is in France."

Frenchmen will never forget how to fight while they can go to mass on a Sunday noon in the Hotel des In

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valides — Napoleon's hoQie for old soldiers. The service is nearly all music — so grand and inspiriting that it would make a war>horse paw the ground. The old sol- diers, gray-liaired in honor and wounds, come stumping in, and little drummer-boys take the place of choristers ; tattered flags taken in battle hang from the roof, though the original flngs taken in the first victories of Napo- leon were needlessly burned by his brother Joseph, when he heard of his flight from Waterloo. Beyond the church, and under the gilded dome, lies the tomb of Napoleon, — another expiatory chapel, this time for English outrage. It may be that his spirit has rest on the banks of the Seine, where his ashes may mingle with that of his olcf lovei*s.

Of all men who ever lived, he was, perhaps, the most beloved of his own sex. Leaning over his tomb, one wishes, more than ever, that the battle of Waterloo had gone the other way. If only Grouchy had come up instead of Blucher! But there is no stumbling- block like an if ; the world is more crowded with ifs than with people. Pascal hit upon an odd one — " If Cleopatra's nose had been half an inch shorter, it would have changed the history of the world."

The dome of the Invalides was gilded "because," said Napoleon, '' the Parisians must have something to look at."

In this paramount necessity of French happiness, "something to look at," he never fniled them. It seems to me that the secret of French fickleness and ferocity lies in the simple fact, that they look for their pleasure outside the walls of home. An Englishman may be a perfect bear in his business, but the best part of him is

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sure to flower out at home; while a Freiichmnn wastes no sweetness on the desert air of his own house. It is a French fashion that never goes out of vogue, to be devoted to one's chjjdren ; for their sake, the father and mother will do anything but love each other, or permit them to love where they will. It is the universal cus- tom for parents in France to select husbands and wives for their children with the proper amount of dowry. It is part of their devotion not to see them make beg- gars of themselves. Their marringes are not merce- nary, but suitable. Madame de Sevigne had great difficulty in "settling" that beloved daughter, for whom no one was good enough. Her final choice was a mature marquis, who had been tv^ice married already, which certainly proved that other women had thought him worth having. " He is a very good man," she writes, " and very gentlemanly — ■ has wealth, rank, holds a high office, and is much respected by the world. What more is necessary ? "

Nothing, O, nothing, sweet Madame Sevigne, but a grain of true love to leaven the whole lump.

Life is not worth having to a French girl till she is married ; her love affiiirs begin then, which necessarily introduce a vile and polluting influence into the light literature of the nation, since the heroine must always be a married woman, and the hero, not her husband.

"It is to be feared," said old Fuller, "that those who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marrv." If men take the disease of love in the natural way, and cure themselves by marrying their choice, even if the marriage prove unhappy, the mem- ory of it softens and chastens all their lives; but

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love turned inward on itself, becomes a fierce yearning for some change in condition or estate, since one can- not change wives.

I once heard a gnarled old sea captain, who had sailed all the waters of the globe, and made up his opinions of men and things on every shore, lay down the law on this matter. His brothei', seventy years old, and a bachelor, had asked his advice about marry- ing a lady known to both. "If you like the gal, and she's willin', take her, and say no more about it. It's the only safe rule to go by in getting married." French people Ibllow all rules except this one, and it makes them " unstable as water."

The Communists burned part of the Tuileries, and the remainder is used for offices in the business of th6 Btate; but they did not commit the unpardonable sin — they spared the Louvre. Royalty and despotism were as necessary to the existence of the Louvre as to that of the Pyramids; and I would have cried, "Vive le Roi " with the rest of them till it was finished.

The Louvre reminds me of Tasso's moon : " Every- thing was there that is to be met with on earth, except folly in the raw material, for that is never exported." Its two great shrines are the Venus de Milo, and the Immaculate Conception by Murillo. The Venus stands alone and stately, with her broken arms, in a room by herself It seems a glaring mistake to call her a Venus at all ; it looks far more likely that she is the statue of " Wingless Victory," which stood in one of the Athe- nian temples, and was hidden in the island of Melos for safety.

In the Vienna Exposition of 1873, some one has 17

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made a copy of her and finished it with arms — one hand holds a raiiror, into which she is gazing. There is no need to ask if a man did it; a woman would have known better. If the inexperienced sculptor had ever seen a lovely woman looking in her mirror, to see if her hair is parted evenly, or if her looks have fallen off since she looked last, he would never have created such an anachronism. The face is wholly earnest, with not a conscious or vain line in it. She may be handsome, but it is no fault of hers. She is a woman to be listened to, not looked at; a Minerva, rather than a Venus. She might be the noble head of an ideal " Woman's College," like Tennyson's "Princess." She has just uttered some high-born thought; the thrill and glow of it is yet in her eyes, and her expression is, "If this be treason, make the most of it."

No picture can be placed in the Louvre until the artist has been dead ten years — long enough to break the influence of coteries, which, through personal preju- dice, might pave the way to poor pictures, or shut out good ones.

The Louvre is the paradise of cherubs — they can- not be much more numerous in heaven. They are never more daintily fashioned than in two old pictures of the "Flight into Egypt," where they play with the child Josus, feeding him with fruit and trimming him with roses. In another, they are cooking a dinner for a saint, w^ho is so rapt in devotion, that he takes no heed to his earthly wants. They seem much at home among the pots and pans.

Rubens has a gallery of his own in the Louvre, and I would have made it a dark one ; he never paints a

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woman to weigh less than two hundred pounds, forget- ting that a fat woman is as unpicluresque as a bony cherub. He is guilty of a heavy and naked procession in honor of "Religion and Virtue," wliich might be called the "Dance of Luxury and Vice," without an- other stroke of the brush. He is unsurpassed in paint- ing rear views of babies and cherubs, the only creatures to whom curves of unlimited fat are becoming.

Murillo's pictures are always lovely while he deals with virgins and saints; but when his genius stoops to beggar-boys looking for fleas, — which one must admire partly because Murillo painted it, and partly because it is so natural, — it goes against the stomach of my sense. Neither fleas nor beggai-boys should have any encouragement to repeat themselves. I count it no credit to those old Dutch artists, that they could paint an old woman's wrinkles, or a brass kettle, well, when those things have no right to be painted at all. Only beautiful things should be made immortal; merely to be natural is a thing to be avoided, since it is as often disgusting as attractive.

Rembrandt's pictures have an odd fascination ; one keeps looking at them as at faces with deep-set eyes. Webster ought to have been painted by the ghost of Rembrandt, and he would have looked through all time, as he did in life, wiser than any man ever was.

Hazlitt quotes Milton's line of his style —

** He stroked the raven plume of darkness till it smiled."

It somehow fits the subject of his criticism, but it is an unusually trying metaphor, if Milton did mix it. Wo- men may smile at handsome sable plumes, but it re- quires a strong imagination to see them smile back.

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We carried a catalogue as thick as a family Bible, and mounted a sort of art-staircase, the pictures grow- ing better and better until the crown room is reached ; here is the "Tmmaeulnte Conception" — "a woman clothied with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." In the in- numerable copies, the cherubs are done very well, but no one catches the right look from the Virgin ; only the original looks into heaven.

RaphaeFs "Beautiful Gardener" is fresh and brilliant as when he laid the last soft touch on her drooping eye- lids, and set her up to dry against the wall of his studio. In the same room is the famous " Monna Lisa," wlio turns the heads of all artists. She was the wife of a Florentine noble, and Leonardo da Vinci worked on this portrait four years, and then pronounced it unfin- ished. In life she is said to have possessed an inde- finjible chaim that drew men to her against their will ; when their fancy was once tangled in the wonderful cornel's of her mouth, they could never escape. But the uneducated eye sees little comeliness; one learns to admire iier by continual tasting, as one learfis to like olives. The first look reminds one of an Indian squaw; she is wholly free from ornament; she has no weapons but her face and hands, and a certain assured calmness, as of one who had fathomed this life, and could afford to smile at it. Only men can tell why they make a fuss over faces in which women see no beauty, and many have tried to tell the secret of their worship of the Monna*Lisa.

All the sweetest words in the language, stirred to a froth with the spoon of artistic fancy, are yearly offered

^ A WOMAN'S VACATION. 261

upon her altar. "Whoever has seen the Monna Lisa smile," says Grimm, " will be followed forever by that smile as by Lear's fury, Hamlet's melancholy, and Mac- beth's remorse."

A woman-artist had studied the Monna Lisa till she had made a perfect copy about six inches square. She only asked three hundred gold dollars for it. I hope that the Monna Lisa, wherever her spirit w^anders, knows that her copied head brings such a price three hundred years after her death ; a woman must appre- ciate that if she were ever so dead. It would be one of the comforts not " scorned of devils."

The famous pictures have all a row of copyists before them, like devotees before an altar; and some of them spend their whole Jives in repeating one picture over and over. It seems like dull music ; but, then, every- body's music is dull except our own.

The Louvre inspires the fear that the world will get too full of works of art, and some time, in the next thousand years, there will be a bonfire of pictures and statues, by general consent, to give room for new genius to spread itself.

New and endless rooms spring up as by magic, and give one at last that ache of the mind which is woi-se than any bodily strain. When I could endure no more it relieved me to look at a gigantic face in bas-relief, which has its mouth stretched in a perpetual yawn. It was a marble criticism that agreed with me.

The foirest Venus ceases to be fair when the eye is clogged with innumerable Venuses. Aphrodite parting her shell, and rising from the waves, must have been the loveliest sight in the world ; but when she does it every half hour, one wishes she had been drowned in the act.

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The crowd constantly passing through the galleries is well sprinkled with white caps and blue blouses — it is a free Art-school to them.

We inquired for the Museum of Sovereigns, contain- ing relics of all the French kings; but the guide as- sured us that it existed no longer. "France, being a republic, does not wish to be reminded that she has ever- had a king." We groaned over our disappoint- ment, and the guide said, "Come next year," with the inevitable shrug which means everything and nothing. Only a silver statue of Napoleon, in a room studded with golden bees, marks wh-ere his collection was placed; the cradle of the King of Rome is hidden under a dingy cloth. The rooms of the ancient kings are covered with an oaken wainscoting, delicate as hice; and the only furniture remaining are vases so large that a couple of life-size babies serve for handles, andvmight be drowned in them.

My last day in Paris was given to Versailles, a palace of such gilded and painted perfection, that no creature made of the dust of the earth could ever feel at home in it.

It is the monument of Louis XIV., built by himself, as some ostentatious souls cannot trust their relatives' estimate of them, and buy their own tombstone. It is a type of his life in its splendid halls and galleries, and its little back passages and secret stairs. He called and believed himself a "Grand Monarch;" but his friends found him cruel, sneaking, and mean. He set the fashion of worshipping himself, and conferred dishonor as it had been high favor. He was specially cruel to women ; but it must be confessed that, first and last,

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they led him a hard life, as they do every man who puts himself in their power. We can feel a respectable emotion towards only two of them, the first and the last — pity for Mademoiselle de Valliere and respect for Madame de Mnintenon.

" She was ashamed of being a mistress — of being a mother — of being a duchess," says Madame Sevigne of the former; "never shall we see the like of her again." She was not a perfect beauty by any means; she halted in her walk, her mouth was too large, and she was marked with the small-pox ; but she had a look so tender and modest withal, that one could not help lov- ing her at first sight. She was the queen, for whom Versailles was made so splendid a throne. She alone loved the king for himself^ but she was always ashamed of it ; and when Bossuet came to tell her of the death of her son, she cried out, *' Why must I mourn his death, when I have never ceased to mourn for his birth?"

The real queen of France looked on the gilded and evil doings of her court, and her husband, with a seared indifference. When she was told that the king had taken a new mistress, she said that was the old one's business — not hers.

Perhaps Madame de Maintenon was equally to be pitied in that she had to bear with the querulous old age of Louis ; he was the most unamusable of men, and she had to provide him with conversation ; but he could give her power, and that was all she lived for. She had been so intimate with misery in her yoiith^ that she wore it as easily as an old garment.

Versailles heard all these feminine secrets, and keepa

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them still, written in invisible ink on its walls ; only the student of French history makes them stare through the gilding. The most important one was the private marriage of Madame de Maintenon to the king, and her wearing disappointment when no blandishments of hers could induce him to acknowledge it publicly.

His confessor, Pere La Chaise, with her help, per- suaded the king to revoke the edict of Nantes, which let loose fire and sword on the best part of his subjects, the Huguenots, who carried their sober industry into other countries, like the Pilgrims of New England. It is but poetic justice that the great cemetery of Paris, the gathering-place of corpses, should be named for this Jesuit father.

After the Revolution, when Napoleon came to look at what was left of Vei*sailles, he regretted that the mob had not wholly ruined it ; but he repaired it for a national show, never living in it himself. In the great Hall of Battles, he quite wipes out the obsolete glory of Louis XIV., who won his victories by proxy.

It is a little surprise to American eyes to see the sur- render of Yorktown reckoned among French successes, and Washington playing second fiddle to Count Ro- chambeau.

In this gallery I counted twenty-eight priests moving about in the crowd, whispering into its ears the anti- dote to the Napoleonic fever, inflamed by these pictures. They were working in the interest of the Bourbons ; but the Count Chambord, with his white flag, is a dull old king to conjure with, compared with Napoleon wav- ing the tri-color out of the canvas.

The town of Versailles seems to grovel at the feet

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of the palace, as all France did at the feet of its builder. The garden avenues and vistas are so contrived that there seems to be nothing in the world but the palace of Versailles. Even the chapel was so planned that the king's seat looked down on the preacher's desk. At the funeral of Louis XIY., Massillon proclaimed "God is great, my brethren, a/z J God alone^ which, in that place, had the effect of a piece of news.

The guard demanded our passports to enter the chapel, but a franc answered the same purpose.

We were allowed to see the state cairiages, used at coronations, on a forbidden day, because we were Amer- icans ; it is as good as a season ticket all over France to be an American.

We wandered about the lovely gardens of Marie Antoinette's farm of the Little Trianon, and came una- wares upon the dairy and thatched cottage where she made believe to be happy in humble life ; but it was a kind of fiirming which obliges the owner to do some other business to 8U23i)ort it, wheiens Louis XVI. never could do anything well except locksmithing. He was the prince of hesitaters; and the bright, haughty Marie Antoinette must have been teriiblv tried with him. He had not even sense enough to fall in love with her till they had been seven years married.

Napoleon established Maria Louisa, his second wife, in the Little Trianon, an ill-omened place to Austrian archduchesses ; she must sometimes have put a steady- ing hand to her head, when she was reminded of the fall of her aunt, who had lived there before her.

It is said that Maria Louisa cared for nothing but horseback rx(M-cise and four nie.ils a d y ; e\\ \\ lu^r

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son did not interest her. How tedious must her society have been to Napoleon, after the charming Creole ways of Josephine ! They had the same dress- makers, but Napoleon never ceased wondering why Josephine had always made so much more elegant an appearance. "Josephine had lost all her teeth," says Madame Junot, " but she still had the loveliest smile in the world."

Fair France would lose half its fairness to Americans if the reign of Napoleon were crossed out of it. Ver- sailles was too magnificent, even for him, and he gave it to the nation with a grand air, as if they had not owned it before.

These old palaces, too gorgeous for a liome, but not for treasure-houses, are a lovely possession to have in a country: it is like having an extravagant grandmother, who ruins herself in diamonds ; her weakness may have made great havoc in the family at the time, and nearly brought the grandfather to think of divorce ; but when the old folks are dead, the diamonds remain an unspeak- able treasure and distinction to their descendants.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

HOMEWARD BOUIS^D.

" O, thrice happy are they wlio plant cabbages ! Wlien they hare one foot on the ground, the other is not far off." — Rabelais.

MY guardian angel must liave been "asleep, or gone a journey," when she permitted me to cross the English Channel, without a friend to groan to, by way of Dieppe and Newhaven. Only two hours' sail divides Dover and Calais; but the misery is so concentrated that all who travel that way are certain, as was Queen Mary of bloody memory, that Calais will be found, after death, written on their hearts. I had a vain conceit that the torture would be somewhat diluted in a whole night's passage between Dieppe and Newhaven ; but to err is human. In the former, one dies but once ; in the latter, one does it over and over. The little cabin might have been a box of sardines for the close packing of its contents. The stewardess did her best, and "an angel could no moie;" but it is the stillness of despair, not content, that finally settles down on us like a pall. Stranded among us is a baby, two months old, very red in the face, and wild in the eyes, but not otherwise aggressive. The wretched nurse

268 BEATEN PATHS, OR

hns just strength enough left to aim at its mouth a long rubber tube with a bottle of milk at the other end. The baby catches it by a miracle, and then we all fall back into a sort of heaving silence.

"That child is drawing in nothing but air; it don't get the milk at all," says my next neighbor, in a deep whisper. "I've had eight, and brought them all up by hand, and I hnow^

"Ah, well," I say, brutally, "it isn't our baby."

" No ; but it will be our torment when the child be- gins to howl."

The mother of eight was right, and outraged nature revenged itself in less than an hour.

"I told you so," said my neighbor; and the comfort of having her prophecy come to pass sustained her through the tempest that followed; but I was driven on deck, where a crowed of hopeless men lay about loosely, like bundles that were waiting to be claimed by the owner. In the palace of the Luxembourg there is a picture of Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx in a boat, wdiich is surrounded by swarms of lost spirits. I did not notice it much at the time ; but the agony of those distorted faces came back to thicken the air as I assisted at this orgy of seasickness. What a comfort it is to hear even swearing in one's native language as the boat rubs against English ground ! We are like a train of ghosts as we file into the station. The baby is pale, but composed, which convinces me that it is a girl — a boy-baby, under such abuse and neglect, would have committed suicide before morning.

As we roll along towards London in a softly-cush- ioned cnr, an Englishmnn begins to "speer at" us in a

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 269

general wfiy about our president and his "third term ;" but we have ceased to be Americans — we are only human beings. General Grant may live and die at the White House, and be buried under the piazza, for aught we care. We even smile at him when he says, "How much more stable and respectable your govern- ment would be if you would remodel it into a limited monarchy, like the English one, and invite one of our peers — Lord 'Darby,' for instance — to rule over you! He would never take the office, though ! "

"No, he never would," we repeat faintly, and the Englishman gives us up.

It is good to look at the heavy, stolid English nav- vies, as they lean on their pickaxes along the line of railroad. They are soaked through and through with beer, and the very stones must needs cry out at them before they will see that their government does not recoo^nize their risrht to be men and brethren with the rest of their world. Thei/ are perfectly content to have their thinking done for them; but the French laborers are wiry and temperate, and give you slanting glances out of eyes that seem sharpened to a point, as if they might have a small store of vitriol at home, or a polished dagger waiting for an occasion.

Then comes the swift journey from London to Liver- pool through a long flower-garden, which makes one wonder how so small a country could have made such a prodigious noise in the world. We are again on the doorstep of the old world, and the door will soon be shut in our faces. In the last interview, as in the first, it is the rule to buy an umbrella. " I cannot see," says my landlady, "what your people can want of so many

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umbrellas. It never rains in your country without let- ting you know a week beforehand."

The homeward passage across the Atlantic is a trifle worse — a lower depth, a night without stars — than the voyage out. It is then that faithful Memory bestirs herself, and rakes up from forgotten hoards every collision and fire at sea and bursted boiler that has ever come within her range. When Mr. Jefferson said, " How much have cost us the things that never happened!" he must have had home voyages in his mind. As I go down to my little inside room, secured at the last moment, I fear to look in the face of the strange woman who is to share it with me ; but I per- ceive at once, in her deprecating air, that she is equally afraid of me. "Which berth do you prefer?" I ask, in my mildest tone. " Very well, I thank you," she replies, and I do not pursue the subject; in fact, I never pursue any subject with her, unless I desire to communicate my views to the whole ship's company; and I put it to the sympathizing reader who has fol- lowed me thus far, w^hether, in a windowless room with a deaf room-mate, I might not as well have been a monk of La Trappe, who takes a vow of perpetual silence, and sleeps in his coffin eyery night.

As I could have no "feast of reason or flow of soul " in my own room, it followed that I took a deep interest in my neighbors. On the other side of a thin partition were two old men, who had more to say, and said it oftener, than any two w omen that I ever knew. One was a widower, and I devoutly wished the other had been so too. Day and night his cry was, "If I could only see my wife once more, I should be happy."

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 271

When remimJed that she was much better off where she was, he would desperately declare that he did not want her to be better off than himself, and I wondered whether this was a universal masculine sentiment, or something peculiar to him.

In the deadest part of a rough night I heard him moaning over the profanity of the sailors, lest it should bring us to shipwreck; but his room-mate comforted him and me with the certainty that no ship ever was, or will be, worked without hard swearing — nothing else will straighten a wet rope.

These old men, with others of that ilk, kept the clos- est accounts of the days and the distance; but no two ever came out alike. The women were never so far gone in boredom as to be beguiled into arithmetic. They have a fatal habit of telling the contents of their trunks, and boasting of their bargains, when they know well that the passenger who sits muffled in his shawl at their backs may be an officer of customs in disguise. Going over, the air was full of hope and expectation; coming back, it is heavy with retrospection, more or less tinged with disappointment.

The only pnrty over whom contentment brooded like a dove was a company of five mature maidens, who had chosen single blessedness as the better part, and were inclined to look down on those imperfectly consti- tuted women, who cannot be happy without a husband and children. They were more akin to the oak than to the ivy. They had not been beautiful in their best estate; but so serene, resolute, and self-poised were they, that it seemed this world had no more to give them. Their lives are full-orbed with culture and

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travel. How superior they are to a lonely young mother, who had been sent abroad to recruit from her family cares, and was now going home paler than when she went away ! All Europe had been to her but a line of post-offices, in which she might learn that the baby had a double-tooth, or that scarlet fever was sus- pected in the neighborhood of her treasures. She often held an open book before her, but she never turned a leaf; and any one curious in the matter might catch a glimpse over her shoulder of a photograph of two moon-ficed children, while the single sisters read inde- fatigably in every language but their own. They were as little moved by seasickness as by the other ills that feminine flesh is heir to. One of them knitted for eleven days on a bit of green wool through all weathers, and as I watched this bilious piece of work grow long, I seemed to see a time, far off, but approaching, when it shall be a matter of course for this sort of women to select and marry gentle, timorous, unsophisticated men, and guide them safely through the perils of this world. Longfellow speaks as one having authority when he

says,—

" It is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is

speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence ; '*

but in that day, when women have ceased to " wait," these verses, with a thousand other harpings on the same string, will sound like the fancies of a distem- pered brain. The old poets will have to be weeded of their follies.

Only once did this pioneer band show the weakness

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 273

of their sex. Four of them were sitting at breakfast, and the youngest and comeliest remained in her room. My next door neighbor looked along the line atten- tively. "Where's the pretti/ one of your party?" he asked — and if looks could slay, he would never again y have beheld the wife he yearned for.

The]/ lay unmoved in their beds when a great wave poured down through the sky-lights into the state- rooms, and set everybody's boots afloat like a fleet of boats. Neither did they scream when the father of all rats walked down the passage to see what had hap- pened. It was a positive comfort to hear the shrill voice of the old-fashioned sort of woman crying out for her shoes. "O, we are all going to the bottom — give me my shoes — I must have my shoes!" and the grave voice of ker husband replying, "Isabella, recol- lect yourself! . People who are going to the bottom have no need of shoes." In the hereafter, when our children go abroad and the watei*s overwhelm them, it will be the woman, who will turn out to rescue the floating shoes, and calmly advise her nervous husband to recollect himself.

The long lane turns at last. There comes a white morning when all our world goes on deck to see the great steamer pull up at the wharf, like an animal guided by reins. It is like that other resurrection at Liverpool, save that a certain sense of responsibility lengthens every woman's fice, a liaunting thought of • pearl, and coral, and carved work, and shining silk, which were things of beauty in the buying, and will be joys forever in the wearing, unless the custom-house 18

274 BEATEN PATHS.

swallows them uj^, leaving only a great remorse in their place.

At the last moment I go down once more into the depths, and I hear my ancient neighbor say, as he puts a fee into the hands of the steward, "Make a good use of it, my boy; don't waste it;" and that is the last I know of him for this world.

An inundation of friends pours over the side, and the pale mother rapidly dissolves into tears of joy ; but the ^\Q Vestals, who are pledged to tend forever the sacred fire of literature, walk on shore as calmly as they sailed the sea. They have brought home great store of wisdom, which they will air at their clubs and sift through magazines; but the mother, from all the cathedrals and pictures of the old w^orld, has drawn but two great convictions'that will never depart from her. First, that Raphael must have known children like hers, when he painted the two cherubs that lean on their elbows out of heaven, in the Sistine Madonna; and second, that when the Psalmist said, "Mark the perfect man," he foresaw the American husband.

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