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HANDBOUND

AT THE

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF

.itetature, Science, &rt, anD

VOLUME LIT.

BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

NEW YORK: 11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET

iltutrcitic ]3rccfi,
1883

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
BLIOTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY

H. 0. IIOUGUTOX AND COJtPAJJY.

CONTENTS.

PAOB

Academic Socialism Herbert Tattle 200

Along an Inland Beach E<lith M. Tliomas 380

Americanisms, Some Alleged Richard Grant White 792

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy E-lward Ireneeus Stevenson 622

Annexed by the Tsar William O. Stoddard 376

A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint Charles Egbert Craddock 544

Bermudian Days Julia C. R. Dorr 778

Bird of the Morning, The Olive Thome Miller 644

Boomtown • . Frank D. Y. Carpenter 76

Buchanan, James 707

Character in Feathers Bradford Torrey 393

Civil War in America, The 401

Couture, Thomas, Reminiscences of Ernest W. Longfellow 233

Cream- White and Crow-Black E. M. De Jarnette 470

Dix, John A 271

Dobson's Fielding 135

Economics, American 128

Emerson, Mary Moody Ralph Waldo Emerson 733

En Province Henry James .... 24, 169, 303, 453, 630

Fiction, American, by Women ^'1_.

Fiction, Recent, The East and West in ';T

Foreign Lands 831

Freedom of Faith, The 132

Glints in Auld Reekie H. H. 363

Good- By to Rip Van Winkle, A Gilbert A. Pierce 695

Hare and the Tortoise, The Sarah Orne Jewett 187

Heredity Henry W. Holland 447

Historic Notes on Life and Letters in Massachusetts Ralph Waldo Emerson 529

History of the United States, A New 266

Idealism in New England, Some Phases of O. B. Frothingham 13

In the Old Dominion . , F. C. Baylor 242

Jeannette, The Voyage of the 557

Lodge's Webster 670

Longfellow, Mr , and the Artists 826

Luther and his Work Frederic H. Hedge 806

MaenadUm in Religion Elizabeth Robins 487

Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi 406

Me'rime'e in his Letters Maria Louise Henry 388

Mr. Washington Adams in England , Richard Grant White 94

Municipal Extravagance Arthur Blake Ellis 84

Mutilation of Ancient Texts, The William S. Liscomb 516

Naval Officer, Recollections of a 835

New Departure in Negro Life, The O. W. Blncknall 680

Newport George P. Lathrop 60, 211, 348, 474, 609, 763

Noble Lady, A Maria Louise Henry 623

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch H. H. 753

Only Son, An Sarah Orne Jewett 664

Our Nominating Machines George Walton Greene 323

Oxford in Winter Harriet Waters Preston 49

Pere Antoine David Coit 498

Poets and Birds : A Criticism Harriet C. W. Stanton 329

Recent Poetry 839

Renan, Ernest, The Reminiscences of 274

Ripley, Ezra, D. D Ralph Waldo Emerson 592

Roman Singer, A F. Marion Crawford 1, 145, 289, 433, 577, 721

Rome, Recollections of, during the Italian Revolution .... William Channel/ Langdon . . 603, 658, 746

Spanish Coast, Around the Charles Dudley Warner 257

Spanish Notes, Random Charles Dudley Warner 647

Spanish Peninsula in Travel, The 408

Contents.

Study of a Cat-Bird Olive Thome Miller 253

S\l\:ui Station Caroline E. Leighton 110

P. Dtimn? 39

•I'irly Tradition, The Brooke Il-rford 158

rcliinr.-s of the Hebrew Traditions, The Brooke Herford 597

Two Journalists 411

•lies 123

Volcano Studies Harriet D. Warner 508

Hfiiry Loomix Nelson S18

i ruction Should be Given in Our Colleges? Albert S. Bolles 686

White, Mr., on Shakespeare and Sheridan 5G6

POETRT.

Charon's Fee 608 Persepolis, Frances L. Mace 469

l<-s, A. F 375 Prelude, A, Maurice Thompson 23

:tr>. The, Mrs. S. M. B. Piatt .... 232 Service, E. R. Sill 48

nit, Charles F. Lummis .... 180 Something Passes, E'lith M. Thomas 38

. The, A. F 745 Songs that are not Sung, The, John Boyle O'Reilly 703

, Oliver Wendell Holmes .... 322 To a Hurt Child, Grace Denio Litchfield . ... 210

Knowledge 515 Two Emigrants, Barbara Heaton 486

Lily of Strath- Farrar,2%omas William Parsons . 400 Venice, Christopher P. Cranch 679

Omens, Edith M. Thomas 643 World Well Lost, The, Edmund C. Siedman . . 762

BOOK REVIEWS.

Bishop's Old Mexico and her Lost Provinces . . 833

Financial History of the United States . 131

Burnett's Through One Administration .... 121

Ck'mrns's Life on the Mississippi 406

Curti.- s Life of Buchanan 707

De Long's Voyage of the Jeannette 657

De Paris' History of the Civil War in America . . 401

Dix, John Adams, Memoirs of 271

Fielding 135

Foote's The Led Horse Claim 118

Godwin's Biography of William Cullen Bryant . 411

In the Cnrquinez Woods "i'*^

Howells's A Woman's Reason 704

Latbrop's Spanish Vistas 410

I Hniel Webster 671

Longfellow's Michael Angelo 828

Longfellow's Prose Works and Later Poems . . . 827

Longfellow's Twenty Poems 828

McMaster's A History of the People of the United

States 266

Moore's Poems Antique and Modern 845

Hunger's The Freedom of Faith 132

Parker's Recollections of a Naval Officer ... 835

Kenan's Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse . . 274

Story '8 He and She; or, A Poet's Portfolio . . . 843

Synionds's Italian Byways 834

Thompson's Songs of Fair Weather sil

Very's Poems 123

Vincent's In the Shadow of the Pyrenees . . . 409

Walker's Political Economy 128

Weed's Autobiography . 414

White's Dramatic Works of Sheridan 666

White's Shakespeare 566

Whittier's The Bay of Seven Islands 840

Williams 's The Middle Kingdom 831

Woolson's For the Major 119

CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

Afflictions of Animals, 863; American Language, The, 140; Apologizer and the Apologizee, The, 422; Autumnal
•••.<•<•. The, 574; Calling Acquaintances, 424 ; Case of the " Middle-Aged Young Person," The, 854; City
- Country. 7W : Confessions of a Housebreaker, 419; Faults and Faults, 848; Fly-Trapper, The, 715;
French Words in English Novels, 285 ; From a Traveling Contributor, 428 ; Girl of the Period to the Passion-
ate Shepherd, The, 429 ; Good Inheritance, A, 855 ; Later Advice, 429 ; Law of Eavesdrip, The, 856 ; Leaflet,
A, 141; Misappropriated Traditions, 856 ; Moral Perplexity, A, 716: Nature's Music, 851 ; Neglected Accom-
plishment, A, 850 ; "Ninety in the Shade," 427; Origin of Certain Old Sayings, 849; Out of Doors with the
Poets, 424; Paris Salon, One Aspect of the, 711; Plot and Character, 282; Russian Note, A, 285; Sphinx
Family, Thn, 137 ; " Tempting Providence," 847 ; Texan Tolerance, 282 ; " The One " and " the Other,'- 575 ;
To and From, 716; Treatment of Sensitive Plants, The, 423; Tree Planting, 574; Tyranny of Stature, The,
284 ; Versus Long Deliberations, 138.

BOOKS OP TUB MONTH 142, 286, 430, 576, 718, 858

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
S #iaga$ine of literature, Science, art, ana

VOL. LII. — JULY, 1883. — No. OOCIX.

A ROMAN SINGER.

I, CORNELIO GRANDI, who tell you
these things, have a story of my own,
of which some of you are not ignorant.
You know, for one thing, that I was
not always poor, nor always a profes-
sor of philosophy, nor a scribbler of
pedantic articles for a living. Many of
you can remember why I was driven to
sell my patrimony, the dear castello in
the Sabines, with the good corn-land
and the vineyards in the valley, and the
olives, too. For I am not old yet ; at
least, Mariuccia is older, as I often tell
her. These are queer times. It was not
any fault of mine. But now that Nino
is growing to be a famous man in the
world, and people are saying good
things and bad about him, and many
say that he did wrong in this matter, I
think it best to tell you all the whole
truth and what I think of it. For Nino
is just like a son to me ; I brought him
up from a little child, and taught him
Latin, and would have made a philoso-
pher of him. What could I do ? He
had so much voice that he did not know
what to do with it.

His mother used to sing. What a
piece of a woman she was ! She had a
voice like a man's, and when De Pretis
brought his singers to the festa once
upon a time, when I was young, he
heard her far down below, as we walked

on the terrace of the palgzzo, and asked
me if I would not let him educate that
young tenor. And when I told him it
was one of the contadine, the wife of a
tenant of mine, he would not believe it.
But I never heard her sing after Ser-
afino — that was her husband — was
killed at the fair in Genazzano. And
one day the fevers took her, and so she
died, leaving Nino a little baby. Then
you know what happened to me, about
that time, and how I sold Castel Ser-
ved and came to live here in Rome.
Nino was brought to me here. One day
in the autumn, a carrettiere from Ser-
veti, who would sometimes stop at my
door and leave me a basket of grapes
in the vintage, or a pitcher of fresh oil
in winter, because he never used to pay
his house-rent when I was his landlord
— but he is a good fellow, Gigi — and
so he tries to make amends now ; well,
as I was saying, he came one day and
gave me a great basket of fine grapes,
and he brought Nino with him, a little
boy of scarce six years — just to show
him to me, he said.

He was an ugly little boy, with a hat
of no particular shape and a dirty face.
He had great black eyes, with ink-sau-
cers under them, calamai, as we say,
just as he has now. Only the eyes are
bigger now, and the circles deeper. But
he is still sufficiently ugly. If it were
not for his figure, which is pretty good,

A Roman Singer.

[July,

he could never have made a fortune
with his voice. I)..- IVetis says he could,
lint I do not believe it.

Well. I made ( 'tip come in with Nino,
and Mariuccia made them each a great
slier i.f ma-i, (1 bread and spread it with
oil, and gave Gigi a glass of the Serviti
wine, and little Nino had some with
water. And Mariuccia begged to have
the child left with her till Gigi went
back the next day ; for she is fond of
children and comes from Serveti herself.
And that is how Nino came to live with
us. That old woman has no principles
of economy, and she likes children.

" What does a little creature like that
eat ? " said she. " A bit of bread, a
little soup — macche ! You will never
notice it, I tell you. And the poor thing
has been living on charity. Just imag-
ine whether you are not quite as able to
feed him as Gigi is ! " So she persuad-
ed me. But at first I did it to please
her, for I told her our proverb, which
says there can be nothing so untidy
about a house as children and chickens.
He was such a dirty little boy, with
only one shoe and a battered hat, and
he was always singing at the top of his
voice and throwing things into the well
in the cortile.

.Mariuccia can read a little, though I
never believed it until I found her one
day teaching Nino his letters out of the
Vite dei Santi. That was probably the
first time that her reading was ever of
any use to her, and the last, for I think
she knows the Lives of the Saints by
heart, and she will certainly not venture
to read a new book at her age. How-
ever, Nino very soon learned to know
as much as she, and she will always be
able to say that she laid the foundation
of his education. He soon forgot to
throw handfuls of mud into the well,
and Mariuccia washed him, and I bought
him a pair of shoes, and we made him
look very decent. After a time he did
not even remember to pull the cat's tail
in the morning, so as to make her sing

with him, as he said. When Mariuccia
went to church she would take him with
her, and he seemed very fond of going,
so that I asked him one day if he would
like to be priest when he grew up, and
wear beautiful robes and have pretty
little boys to wait 011 him with censers
in their hands.

"No," said the little urchin, stoutly,
" I won't be a priest." He found in his
pocket a roast chestnut Mariuccia had
given him, and began to shell it.

" Why are you always so fond of go-
ing to church, then ? " I asked.

" If I were a big man," quoth he,
"but really big, I would sing in church,
like Maestro de Pretis."

" What would you sing, Nino ? " said
I, laughing. He looked very grave and
got a piece of brown paper and folded
it up. Then he began to beat time on
my knees and sang out boldly, Cornu
ejus exaltabitur.

It was enough to make one laugh, for
he was only seven years old, and ugly
too. But Mariuccia, who was knitting
in the hall- way, called out that it was
just what Maestro Ercole had sung
the day before at vespers, every sylla-
ble.

I have an old piano in my sitting-
room. It is a masterpiece of an instru-
ment, I can tell you ; for one of the legs
is gone and I propped it up with two
empty boxes, and the keys are all black
except those that have lost the ivory —
and those are green. It has also five
pedals, disposed as a harp underneath ;
but none of them make any impression
on the sound, except the middle one,
which rings a bell. The sound-board
has a crack in it somewhere, Nino says,
and two of the notes are dumb since
the great German maestro came home
with my boy one night, and insisted on
playing an accompaniment after supper.
"We had stewed chickens and a flask of
Cesanese, I remember, and I knew some-
thing would happen to the piano. But
Nino would never have any other, for

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

De Pretis has a very good one ; and
Nino studies without anything — just a
common tuning fork that he carries in
his pocket. But the old piano was the
beginning of his fame. He got into the
sitting-room one day, by himself, and
found out that he could make a noise
by striking the keys, and then he dis-
covered that he could make tunes, and
pick out the ones that were always ring-
ing in his head. After that he could
hardly be dragged away from it, so that
I sent him to school to have some quiet
in the house.

He was a clever boy, and I taught
him Latin and gave him our poets to
read ; and as he grew up I would have
made a scholar of him, but he would
not. At least, he was always willing
to learn and to read; but he was al-
ways singing too. Once I caught him
declaiming " Arma virumque cano " to
an uir from Trovatore, and I knew he
could never be a scholar then, though
he might know a great deal. Besides,
he always preferred Dante to Virgil,
and Leopardi to Horace.

One day, when he was sixteen or
thereabouts, he was making a noise, as
usual, shouting some motive or other to
Mariuccia and the cat, while I was labor-
ing to collect my senses over a lecture
I had to prepare. Suddenly his voice
cracked horribly and his singing ended
in a sort of groan. It happened again
once or twice, the next day, and then
the house was quiet. I found him at
night asleep over the old piano, his eyes
all wet with tears.

"What is the matter, Nino?" I
asked. " It is time for youngsters like
you to be in bed."

" Ah, Messer Cornelio," he said,
when he was awake, " I had better go
to bed, as you say. I shall never sing
again, for my voice is all broken to
pieces ; " and he sobbed bitterly.

" The saints be praised," thought I ;
"I shall make a philosopher of you
yet ! "

But he wouiu not be comforted, and
for several months he went about as if
he were trying to find the moon, as we
say ; and though he read his books and
made progress, he was always sad and
wretched, and grew much thinner, so
that Mariuccia said he was consuming
himself, and I thought he must be in
love. But the house was very quiet.

I thought as he did, that he would
never sing again, but I never talked to
him about it, lest he should try, now
that he was as quiet as a nightingale
with its tongue cut out. But nature
meant differently, I suppose. One day
De Pretis came to see me; it must have
been near the new year, for he never
came often at that time. It was only a
friendly recollection of the days when
I had a castello and a church of my own
at Serveti, and used to have him come
from Rome to sing at the festa, and he
came every year to see me ; and his head
grew bald as mine grew gray, so that at
last he wears a black skull cap every-
where, like a priest, and only takes it off
when he sings the Gloria Patri, or at
the Elevation. However, he came to
see me, and Nino sat mutely by, as we
smoked a little and drank the syrup of
violets with water that Mariuccia brought
us. It was one of her eternal extrav-
agances, but somehow, though she never
understood the value of economy, my
professorship brought in more than
enough for us, and it was not long after
this that I began to buy the bit of vine-
yard out of Porta Salara, by install-
ments from my savings. And since then,
we have our own wine.

De Pretis was talking to me about a
new opera that he had heard. He never
sang except in church, of course, but he
used to go to the theatre of an evening;
so it was quite natural that he should
go to the piano and begin to sing a
snatch of the tenor air to me, explain-
ing the situation as he went along, be-
tween his singing.

Nino could not sit still, and went

A Roman Singer.

[July,

and leaned over Sor Ercole, as we call
the maestro, hanging on the notes, not
daring to try and sing, for he had lost
hi-; voice, but making the words with
liis lips.

" l)io mio ! " he cried at last, " how
I wi.sh I could sing that ! "

•• Try it," said De Pretis, laughing
and half interested by the boy's earnest
look. " Try it — I will sing it again."
But Nino's face fell.

" It is no use," he said. " My voice
is all broken to pieces now, because I
sang too much before."

" Perhaps it will come back," said
the musician kindly, seeing the tears in.
the young fellow's eyes. " See, we will
try a scale." lie struck a chord. " Now,
open your mouth — so — Do-o o-o ! "
He sang a long note. Nino could not
resist any longer, whether he had any
voice or not. He blushed red and
turned away, but he opened his mouth
and made a sound.

•' Do-o-o-o ! " He sang like the mas-
ter, but much weaker.

" Not so bad ; now the next, Re-e-e ! "
Nino followed him. And so on, up the
scale.

After a few more notes, De Pretis
ceased to smile, and cried, " Go on, go
on ! " after every note, authoritatively,
and in quite a different manner from his
first kindly encouragement. Nino, who
had not sung for months, took courage
and a long breath, and went on as he
was bid, his voice gaining volume and
clearness as he sang higher. Then De
Pretis stopped and looked at him ear-
nestly.

" You are mad," he said. " You
have not lost your voice at all."

" It was quite different when I used
to sing before," said the boy.

" Per Bacco, I should think so," said
the maestro. " Your voice has changed.
Sing something, can't you ? "

Nino sang a church air he had caught
somewhere. I never heard such a voice,
but it gave me a queer sensation that I

liked — it was so true, and young, and
clear. De Pretis sat open-mouthed with
astonishment and admiration. When
the boy had finished, he stood looking at
the maestro, blushing very scarlet, and
altogether ashamed of himself. The
other did not speak.

" Excuse me," said Nino, " I cannot
sing. I have not sung for a long time.
I know it is not worth anything." De
Pretis recovered himself.

"You do not sing," said he, "because
you have not learned. But you can. If
you will let me teach you, I will do it
for nothing."

" Me ! " screamed Nino, " you teach
me ! Ah, if it were any use — if you
only would ! "

" Any use ? " repeated De Pretis
half aloud, as he bit his long black cigar
half through in his excitement. " Any
use ? My dear boy, do you know that
you have a very good voice ? A re-
markable voice," he continued, carried
away by his admiration, " such a voice
as I have never heard. You can be the
first tenor of your age, if you please
— in three years you will sing any-
thing you like, and go to London and
Paris, and be a great man. Leave it to
me."

I protested that it was all nonsense,
that Nino was meant for a scholar and
not for the stage, and I was quite angry
with De Pretis for putting such ideas
into the boy's head. But it was of no
use. You cannot argue with women and
singers, and they always get their own
way in the end. And whether I liked
it or not, Nino began to go to Sor Er-
cole's house once or twice a week, and
sang scales and exercises very patiently,
and copied music in the evening, be-
cause he said he would not be depend-
ent on me, since he could not follow my
wishes in choosing a profession. De
Pretis did not praise him much to his
face after they had begun to study, but
he felt sure he would succeed.

" Caro Conte," — he often calls me

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

Count, though I am only plain Pro-
fessore, now — "he has a voice like a
trumpet, and the patience of all the an-
gels. He will be a great singer."

" Well, it is not my fault," I used to
answer ; for what could I do ?

When you see Nino now, you can-
not imagine that he was ever a dirty lit-
tle boy from the mountains, with one
shoe, and that infamous little hat. I
think he is ugly still, though you do not
think so when he is singing, and he has
good strong limbs and broad shoulders,
and carries himself like a soldier. Be-
sides, he is always very well dressed,
though he has no affectations. He does
not wear his hair plastered into a love
lock on his forehead, like some of our
dandies, nor is he eternally pulling a
pair of monstrous white cuffs over his
hands. Everything is very neat about
him and very quiet, so that you would
hardly think he was an artist after all ;
and he talks but little, though he can
talk very well when he likes, for he has
not forgotten his Dante nor his Leopar-
di. De Pretis says the reason he sings
so well is because he has a mouth like
the slit in an organ pipe, as wide as a
letter-box at the post-office. But I think
he has succeeded because he has great
square jaws like Napoleon. People
like that always succeed. My jaw is
small, and my chin is pointed under my
beard — but then, with the beard no
one can see it. But Mariuccia knows.

Nino is a thoroughly good boy, and
until a year ago he never cared for any-
thing but his art ; and now he cares
,for something, I think, a great deal bet-
tar than art, even than art like his. But
he is a singer still, and always will be,
for he has an iron throat, and never was
hoarse in his life. All those years
when lie was growing up, he never had
a love-scrape, or owed money, or wasted
his time in the caffe.

" Take care," Mariuccia used to say
to me, " if he ever takes a fancy to some
girl with blue eyes and fair hair, he will

be perfectly crazy. Ah, Sor Conte, she
had blue eyes, and her hair was like the
corn-silk. How many years is that,
Sor Conte mio ? " Mariuccia is an old
witch.

I am writing this story to tell you
why Mariuccia is a witch, and why my
Nino, who never so much as looked at
the beauties of the geuerone, as they
came with their fathers and brothers and
mothers to eat ice-cream in the Piazza
Colonna, and listen to the music of a
summer's evening, — Nino, who stared
absently at the great ladies as they
rolled over the Pincio in their carriages,
and was whistling airs to himself for
practice when he strolled along the
Corso, instead of looking out for pretty
faces, — Nino, the cold in all things
save in music, why he fulfilled Mariuc-
cia's prophecy, little by little, and be-
came perfectly crazy about blue eyes
and fair hair. That is what I am go-
ing to tell you, if you have the leisure
to listen. And you ought to know it,
because evil tongues are more plentiful
than good voices in Rome, as elsewhere,
and people are saying many spiteful
things about him, — though they clap
loudly enough at the theatre when he
sings.

He is like a son to me, and perhaps
I am reconciled, after all, to his not
having become a philosopher. He would
never have been so famous as he is now,
and he really knows so much more than
Maestro De Pretis — in other ways
than music — that he is very present-
able indeed. What is blood, nowadays ?
What difference does it make to society
whether Nino Cardegna, the tenor, was
the son of a vine-dresser ? Or what
does the University care for the fact
that I, Cornelio Grandi, am the last of a
race as old as the Colonnas, and quite
as honorable? What does Mariuccia
care ? What does anybody care ? Corpo
di Bacco ! if we begin talking of race
we shall waste as much time as would
make us all great celebrities ! I am not

A Roman Singer.

[July,

a celebrity — I never shall be now, for
a man must begin at that trade young.
It N a profession — being celebrated —
and it h:is it? signal advantages. Nino
will tell you so, and he has tried it.
But one must begin young, very young!
I cannot begin again.

And then, as you all know, I never
bf^riii at all. I took up life in the mid-
dle, and am trying hard to twist a rope
>t' which I never held the other end. I
1'eel sometimes as though it must be the
life of another that I have taken, leav-
ing my own unfinished, for I was never
meant to be a professor. That is the
way of it ; and if I am sad and inclined
to melancholy humors, it is because I
miss my old self, and he seems to have
left me without even a kindly word at
parting. I was fond of my old self,
but I did not respect him much. And
my present self I respect, without fond-
ness. Is that metaphysics ? Who
knows ? It is vanity in either case, and
the vanity of self-respect is perhaps a
more dangerous thing than the vanity
of self love, though you may call it
pride if you like, or give it any other
high-sounding title. But the heart of
the vain man is lighter than the heart
of the proud. Probably Nino has al-
ways had much self-respect, but I doubt
if it has made him very happy — until
lately. True, he has genius, and does
what he must by nature do or die,
whereas I have not even talent, and I
make myself do for a living what I can
never do well. What does it serve, to
make comparisons ? I could never have
been like Nino, though I believe half
my pleasure of late has been in fancy-
ing how I should feel in his place, and
living through his triumphs by my im-
agination. Nino began at the very be-
ginning, and when all his capital was
one shoe and a ragged hat, and certain-
ly not more than a third of a shirt, he
said he would be a great singer ; and he
is, though he is scarcely of age yet. I
wish it had been something else than a

singer, but since he is the first already,
it was worth while. He would have
been great in anything, though, for he
has such a square jaw, and he looks so
yerce when anything needs to be over-
come. Our forefathers must have looked
like that, with their broad eagle noses
and iron mouths. They began at the
beginning, too, and they went to the
very end. I wish Nino had been a
general, or a statesman, or a cardinal,
or all three, like Richelieu.

But you want to hear of Nino, and
you can pass on your ways, all of you,
without hearing my reflections and
small-talk about goodness, and success,
and the like. Moreover, since I re-
spect myself now, I must not find so
much fault with my own doings, or you
will say that I am in my dotage. And,
truly, Nino Cardegna is a better man, for
all his peasant blood, than I ever was ; a
better lover, and perhaps a better hater.
There is his guitar, that he always leaves
here, and it reminds me of him and his
ways. Fourteen years he lived here
with me, from child to boy and from
boy to man, and now he is gone, never
to live here any more. The end of it
will be that I shall go and live with him,
aiid Mariuccia will take her cat and her
knitting, and her Lives of the Saints
back to Serveti, to end her life in peace,
where there are no professors and no
singers. For Mariuccia is older than I

am, and she will die before me. At all
events, she will take her tongue with
her, and ruin herself at her convenience
without ruining me. I wonder what
life would be, without Mariuccia ?
Would anybody darn my stockings, or
save the peel of the mandarins to make
cordial ? I certainly would not have
the mandarins, if she were gone — it is
a luxury. No, I would not have them.
But then, there would be no cordial,
and I should have to buy new stockings
every year or two. No, the mandarins
cost less than the stockings — and —
well, I suppose I am fond of Mariuccia.

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

II.

It was really not so long ago — only
one yea. . The scirocco was blowing
up and down the streets, and about the
corners, with its sickening blast, making
us all feel like dead people, and hiding
away the sun from us. It is no use try-
ing to do anything when it blows sciroc-
co, at least for us who are born here.
But I had been persuaded to go with
Nino to the house of Sor Ercole to hear
my boy sing the opera he had last stud-
ied, and so I put my cloak over my
shoulders, and wrapped its folds over
my breast, and covered my mouth, and
we went out. For it was a cold sciroc-
co, bringing showers of tepid rain from
the south, and the drops seemed to chill
themselves as they fell. One moment
you are in danger of being too cold, and
the next minute the perspiration stands
on your forehead, and you are oppressed
with a moist heat. Like the prophet,
when it blows a real scirocco you feel
as if you were poured out like water,
and all your bones were out of joint.
Foreigners do not feel it until they have
lived \vitn us a few years, but. Romans
are 'ike dead men when the wind is in
that quarter.

I went to the maestro's house and sat
for two hours listening to the singing.
Nino sang very creditably, I thought,
but I allow that I was not as attentive
as I might have been, for I was chilled
and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I
tried to be very appreciative, and I com-
plimented the boy on the great progress
he had made. When I thought of it, it
struck me that I had never heard any-
body sing like that before , but still
there was something lacking ; I thought
it sounded a little unreal, and I said to
myself that he would get admiration,
but never any sympathy. So clear, so
true, so rich it was, but wanting a ring
to it, the little thrill that goes to the
heart. He sings very differently now.

Maestro Ercole de Pretis lives in the
Via Paola, close to the Poute Sant' An-
gelo, in a most decent little house —
that is, of course, on a floor of a house,
as we all do. But De Pretis is well to
do, and he has a marble door-plate, en-
graved in black with his name, and two
sitting-rooms. They are not very large
room'-, it is true, but in one of them he
gives his lessons, and the grand piano
tills it up entirely, so that you can only
sit on the little black horsehair sofa at
the end, and it is very hard to get past
the piano on either side. Ercole is as
broad as he is long, and takes snuff
when he is not smoking. But it never
hurts his voice.

It was Sunday, I remember, for he
had to sing in St. Peter's in the after-
noon ; and it was so near, we walked
over with him. Nino had never lost
his love for church music, though he
bad made up his mind that it was a
much finer thing to be a primo tenore
assoluto at the Apollo Theatre than to
sing in the Pope's choir for thirty scudi
a month. We walked along over the
bridge, and through the Borgo Nuovo,
and across the Piazza Rusticucci, and
then we skirted the colonnade on the
left, and entered the church by the sac-
risty, leaving De Pretis there to put on
his purple cassock and his white cotta.
Then we went into the Capella del Coro
to wait for the vespers.

All sorts of people go to St. Peter's
on Sunday afternoon, but they are most-
ly foreigners, and bring strange little
folding chairs, and arrange themselves
to listen to the music as though it were
a concert. Now and then one of the
young gentlemen-in-waiting from the
Vatican strolls in and says his prayers,
and there is an old woman, very ragged
and miserable, who has haunted the
chapel of the choir for many years, and
sits with perfect unconcern, telling her
beads at the foot of the great reading-
desk that stands out in the middle and
is never used. Great ladies crowd in

A Roman Singer.

[July,

through the gate when Raimoiidi's hymu
is to be sung, and disreputable artists
make sketches surreptitiously during the
benediction, without the slightest pre-
tense at any devotion that I can see.
The lights shine out more brightly as
the day wanes, and the incense curls up
as the little boys swing the censers, and
the priests and canons chant, and the
choir answers from the organ loft ; and
the crowd looks on, some saying their
prayers, some pretending to, and some
looking about for the friend or lover
they have come to meet.

That evening when we went over to-
gether, I found myself pushed against
a tall man with an immense grey mus-
tache standing out across his face like
the horns of a beetle. He looked down
on me from time to time, and when I
apologized for crowding him his face
flushed a little, and he tried to bow as
well as he could in the press, and said
something with a German accent which
seemed to be courteous. But I was
separated from Nino by him. Maestro
Ercole sang, and all the others, turn
and turn about, and so at last it came to
the benediction. The tall old foreigner
stood erect and unbending, but most of
the people around him kneeled. As the
crowd sank down, I saw that on the
other side of him sat a lady on a small
folding stool, her feet crossed one over
the other, and her hands folded on her
knees. She was dressed entirely in
black, and her fair face stood out won-
derfully clear and bright against the
darkness. Truly she looked more like
an angel than a woman, though perhaps
you will think she is not so beautiful
after all, for she is so unlike our Ro-
man ladies. She has a delicate nose,
full of sentiment, and pointed a little
downward for pride ; she has deep blue
eyes, wide apart and dreamy, and a lit-
tle shaded by brows that are quite level
an I even, with a straight penciling over
them, that looks really as if it were
painted. Her lips are very red and

gentle, and her face is very white, so
that the little ringlet that has escaped
control looks like a gold tracery on a
white marble ground.

And there she sat, with the last light
from the tall windows and the first from
the great wax caudles shining on her,
while all around seemed dark by con-
trast. She looked like an angel ; and
quite as cold, perhaps most of you would
say. Diamonds are cold things, too,
but they shine in the dark ; whereas a
bit of glass just lets the light through
it, even if it is colored red and green
and put in a church window, and looks
ever so much warmer than the diamond.

But though I saw her beauty and the
light of her face, all in a moment, as
though it had been a dream, I saw Nino
too ; for I had missed him, and had sup-
posed he had gone to the organ loft
with De Pretis. But now, as the people
kneeled to the benediction, imagine a
little what he did ! he just dropped on
his knees with his face to the white lady,
and his back to the procession ; it was
really disgraceful, and if it had been
lighter I am sure every one would have
noticed it. At all events, there he
knelt, not three feet from the lady, look-
ing at her as if his heart would break.
But I do not believe she saw him, for
she never looked his way. Afterwards
everybody got up again, and we hurried
to get out of the Chapel ; but I noticed
that the tall old foreigner gave his arm
to the beautiful lady, and when they
had pushed their way through the gate
that leads into the body of the church,
they did not go away, but stood aside
for the crowd to pass. Nino said he
would wait for De Pretis, and imme-
diately turned his whole attention to the
foreign girl, hiding himself in the shad-
ow and never taking his eyes from her.

I never saw Nino look at a woman
before as though she interested him in
the least, or I would not have been sur-
prised now to see him lost in admiration
of the fair girl. I was close to him and

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

could see his face, and it had a new ex-
pression on it that I did not know. The
people were almost gone, and the lights
were being extinguished when De Pre-
tis came round the corner, looking for
us. But I was astonished to see him
bow low to the foreigner and the young
lady, and then stop and enter into con-
versation with them. They spoke quite
audibly, and it was about a lesson that
the young lady had missed. She spoke
like a Roman, but the old gentleman
made himself understood in a series of
stiff phrases, which he fired out of his
mouth like discharges of musketry.

" Who are they ? " whispered Nino
to me, breathless with excitement and
trembling from head to foot. " Who
are they, and how does the maestro
know them ? "

" Eh, caro mio, what am I to know ? "
I answered, indifferently. " They are
some foreigners, some pupil of De Pre-
tis, and her father. How should I
know ? "

" She is a Roman," said Nino between
his teeth. " I have heard foreigners
talk. The old man is a foreigner, but
she — she is Roman," he repeated with
certainty.

" Eh," said I, " for my part she may
be Chinese. The stars will not fall on
that account." You see, I thought he
had seen her before, and I wanted to ex-
asperate him by my indifference so that
he should tell me ; but he would not,
and indeed I found out afterwards that
he had really never seen her before.

Presently the lady and gentleman
went away, and we called De Pretis,
for he could not see us in the gloom.
Nino became very confidential and linked
an arm in his as we went away.

" Who are they, euro maestro, these
enchanting people ? " inquired the boy
when they had gone a few steps, and I
was walking by Nino's side, and we
were all three nearing the door.

" Foreigners, — my foreigners," re-
turned the biuger, proudly, as he took a

colossal pinch of snuff. He seemed to
say that he in his profession was con-
stantly thrown with people like that,
whereas I — oh, I, of course, was al-
ways occupied with students and poor
devils who had no voice, nothing but
brains.

" But she," objected Nino, — " she is
Roman, I am sure of it."

" Eh," said Ercole, " you know how
it is. These foreigners marry and come
here and live, and their children are
born here ; and they grow up and call
themselves Romans, as proudly as you
please. But they are not really Italians,
any more than the Shah of Persia."
The maestro smiled a pitying smile.
He is a Roman of Rome, and his great
nose scorns pretenders. In his view
Piedmontese, Tuscans, and Neapolitans
are as much foreigners as the Germans
or the English. More so, for he likes
the Germans and tolerates the English,
but he can call an enemy by no worse
name than " Napoletano " or " Piemon-
tese."

" Then they live here ? " cried Nino
in delight.

" Surely."

" In fine, maestro mio, who are
they ? "

" What a diavolo of a boy ! Dio
mio ! " and Ercole laughed under his
big mustache, which is black still. But
he is bald, all the same, and wears a
skull-cap.

" Diavolo as much as you please, but
I will know," said Nino sullenly.

" Oh bene ! Now do not disquiet your-
self, Nino — I will tell you all about
them. She is a pupil of mine, and I
go to their house in the Corso and give
her lessons."

" And then ? " asked Nino impatient-

ly-

" Who goes slowly goes surely," said
the maestro sententiously ; and he
stopped to light a cigar as black and
twisted as his mustache. Then he con-
tinued, standing still in the middle of

A Roman Singer.

[July,

the piazza to talk at his ease, for it
•ii|i|>c(l ruining and the air was
inni>t and MI! try, " They are Prussians,
you must know. The old ina'.i is a
colonel, retired, pensioned, everything
you like, wounded at Koniggratz by the
Austrians. His wife was delicate, and
In- brought her to live here long before
he left the service, and the signorina was
born here. He has told me about it,
and he taught me to pronounce the
name Kouiggratz, so — Conigherazzo,"
said the maestro proudly, " and that is
how I know."

" Capperi ! What a mouthful," said I.

" You may well say that, Sor Conte,
but singing teaches us all languages.
You would have found it of great use
in your studies." I pictured to myself
a quarter of an hour of Schopenhauer,
with a piano accompaniment and som<e
one beating time.

" But their name, their name I want
to know," objected Nino, as he stepped
aside and flattened himself against the
pillar to let a carriage pass. As luck
would have it, the old officer and his
daughter were in that very cab, and
Nino could just make them out by the
evening twilight. He took off his hat,
of course, but I am quite sure they did
not see him.

" Well, their name is prettier than
Conigherazzo," said Ercole. " It is Lira
— Erre Gheraffe fonne Lira." (Herr
Graf von Lira, I suppose he meant.
And he has the impudence to assert that
singing has taught him to pronounce
German.) " And that means," he con-
tinued, " II Conte di Lira, as we should
say."

" Ah ! what a divine appellation ! "
exclaimed Nino enthusiastically, pulling
his hat over his eyes to meditate upon
the name at his leisure.

" And her name is Edvigia," volun-
teered the maestro. That is the Italian
for Hedwig, or Hadvvig, you know.
But we should shorten it and call her
Gigia, just as though she were Luisa.

Nino does not think it so pretty. Nino
was silent. Perhaps he was already
shy of repeating the familiar name of
the first woman he had ever loved. Im-
agine ! At twenty he had never been
in love ! It is incredible to me, — and
one of our own people, too, born at
Serveti.

Meanwhile the maestro's cigar had
gone out, and he lit it with a blazing
sulphur match, before he continued ;
and we all walked on again. I remem-
ber it all very distinctly, because it was
the beginning of Nino's madness. Es-
pecially I call to mind his expression of
indifference when Ercole began to des-
cant upon the worldly possessions of
the Lira household. It seemed to me
that if Nino so seriously cast his eyes
on the Contessina Edvigia, he might
at least have looked pleased to hear
she was so rich ; or he might have
looked disappointed, if he thought that
her position was an obstacle in his way.
But he did not care about it at all,
and walked straight on, humming a lit-
tle tune through his nose with his mouth
shut, for he does everything to a tune.

" They are certainly gran' signori,"
Ercole said. " They live on the first
floor of the Palazzo Carmandola, — you
know, in the Corso, — and they have a
carriage, and keep two men in livery,
just like a Roman prince. Besides, the
count once sent me a bottle of wine at
Christmas. It was as weak as water,
and tasted like the solfatara of Tivoli,
but it came from his own vineyard in
Germany, and was at least fifty years
old. If he has a vineyard, he has a cas-
tello, of course. And if he has a cas-
tello, he is a gran' signore, — eh ? what
do you think, Sor Conte ? You know
about such things."

" I did once, maestro mio. It is very
likely."

" And as for the wine being sour, it
was because it was so old. I am sure
the Germans cannot make wine well.
They are not used to drinking it good,

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

or they would not drink so much when
they come here." We were crossing
the bridge, and nearing Ercole's house.

" Maestro," said Nino, suddenly. He
had not spoken for some time, and he
had finished his tune.

" Well ? "

" Is not to-morrow our day for study-

ing?';

" Diavolo ! I gave you two hours to-
day. Ilavo you forgotten ?"

" Ah, — it is true. But give me a
lesson to-morrow, like a good maestro
as you are. I will sing like an angel, if
you will give me a lesson to-morrow."

" Well, if you like to come at seven
in the morning, and if you promise to
sing nothing but solfeggi of Bordogni
for an hour, and not to strain your voice,
or put too much vinegar in your salad
at supper, I will think about it. Does
that please you ? Conte, don't let him
eat too much vinegar."

" I will do all that, if I may come,"
said Nino, readily, though he would
rather not sing at all, at most times,
than sing Bordogni, De Pretis tells me.

" Meglio cosi, — so much the better.
Good -night, Sor Conte. Good -night,
Nino." And so he turned down the
Via Paola, and Nino and I went our
way. I stopped to buy a cigar at the
little tobacco shop just opposite the Tor-
dinona Theatre. They used to be only
a baiocco apiece, and I could get one
at a time. But now they are two for
three baiocchi ; and so I have to get two
always, because there are no half baioc-
chi any more — nothing but centimes.
That is one of the sources of my ex-
travagance. Mariuccia says I am miser-
ly ; she was born poor, and never had
to learn the principles of economy.

" Nino inio," I said, as we went along,
" you really make me laugh."

" Which is to say " — He was hum-
ming a tune again, and was cross be-
cause I interrupted him.

" You are in love. Do not deny it.
You are already planning how you can

make the acquaintance of the foreign
contessa. You are a fool. Go home,
and get Mariuccia to give you some
syrup of tamarind to cool your blood."

" Well ? Now tell me, were you never
in love with any one yourself ? " he asked,
by way of answer ; and I could see the
fierce look come into his eyes in the
dark, as he said it.

" Altro, — that is why I laugh at
you. When I was your age I had been
in love twenty times. But I never fell
in love at first sight — and with a doll ;
really a wax doll, you know, like the
Madonna in the presepio that they set
up at the Ara Creli, at Epiphany."

" A doll ! " he cried. '• Who is a
doll, if you please ? " We stopped at
the corner of the street to argue it out.

" Do you think she is really alive ? "
I asked, laughing. Nino disdained to
answer me, but he looked savagely from
under the brim of his hat. " Look
here," I continued, " women like that
are only made to be looked at. They
never love, for they have no hearts. It
is lucky if they have souls, like Chris-
tians."

" I will tell you what I think," said
he stoutly ; " she is an angel."

" Oh ! is that all ? Did you ever
hear of an angel being married ? "

" You shall hear of it, Sor Cornelio,
and before long. I swear to you, here,
that I will marry the Contessina di Lira
— if that is her name — before two
years are out. Ah, you do not believe
me. Very well. I have nothing more
to say."

" My dear son," said I, — for he is a
son to me, — " you are talking nonsense.
How can anybody in your position hope
to marry a great lady, who is an heiress ?
Is it not true that it is all stuff and non-
sense ? "

" No, it is not true," cried Nino, set-
ting his square jaw like a bit and speak-
ing through his teeth. " I am ugly, you
say ; I am dark, and I have no position,
or wealth, or anything of the kind. I

A Roman Singer.

[July,

am the son of a peasant and of a peas-
ant's wife. J am anything you please,
but I will marry her if I say I will. Do
you think it is for nothing that you have
taught me the language of Dante, of Pe-
traiva, of Silvio Pellico? Do you think
it is for nothing that Heaven has given
me my voice ? Do not the angels love
music, and cannot I make as good songs
as they ? Or do you think that because
I am bred a singer my hand is not as
strong as a fine gentleman's — contadino
as I am ? I will — I will and I will,
Basta ! "

I never saw him look like that be-
fore. He had folded his arms, and he
nodded his head a little at each repeti-
tion of the word, looking at me so hard,
as we stood under the gas lamp in the
street, that I was obliged to turn my
eyes away. He stared me out of counte-
nance — he, a peasant boy ! Then we
walked on.

" And as for her being a wax doll, as
you call her," he continued, after a little
time, " that is nonsense, if you want the
word to be used. Truly, a doll ! And
the next minute you compare her to the
Madonna ! I am sure she has a heart
as big as this," and he stretched out his
hands into the air. " I can see it in her
eyes. Ah, what eyes ! "

I saw it was no use arguing on that
tack, and I felt quite sure that he would
forget all about it, though he looked so
determined, and talked so grandly about
his will.

" Nino," I said, " I am older than
you." I said this to impress him, of
course, for I am not really so very old.

" Diamini ! " he cried impertinently,
" I believe it ! "

" Well, well, do not be impatient. I
have seen something in my time, and I
tell you those foreign women are not
like ours, a whit. I fell in love, once,
with a northern fairy, — she was not
German, but she came from Lombardy,
you see, — and that is the reason why
I lost Serveti and all the rest."

" But I have no Serveti to lose," ob-
jected Nino.

" You have a career as a musician
to lose. 'It is not much of a career, to
be stamping about with a lot of figuranti
and scene-shifters, and screaming your-
self hoarse every night." I was angry,
because he laughed at my age. " But
it is a career, after all, that you have
chosen for yourself. If you get mixed
up in an intrigue now, you may ruin
yourself. I hope you will."

" Grazie ! And then ? "

" Eh, it might not be such a bad thing
after all. For if you could be induced
to give up the stage " —

"I — / give up singing ? " he cried,
indignantly.

" Oh, such things happen, you know.
If you were to give it up, as I was say-
ing, you might then possibly use your
mind. A mind is a much better thing
than a throat, after all."

" Ebbene ! talk as much as you please,
for, of course, you have the right, for
you have brought me up, and you have
certainly opposed my singing enough to
quiet your conscience. But, dear pro-
fessor, I will do all that I say, and if
you will give me a little help in this
matter, you will not repent it."

" Help ? Dio mio ! What do you
take me for ? As if I could help you,
or would ! I suppose you want money
to make yourself a dandy, a paino, to
go and stand at the corner of the Piazza
Colonna and ogle her as she goes by !
In truth ! You have fine projects."

" No," said Nino, quietly, " I do not
want any money, or anything else, at
present, thank you. And do not be an-
gry, but come into the caffe and drink
some lemonade; and I will invite you
to it, for I have been paid for my last
copying, that I sent in yesterday." He
put his arm in mine, and we went in.
There is no resisting Nino, when he is
affectionate. But I would not let him
pay for the lemonade. I paid for it
myself. What extravagance !

F. Marion Crawford.

1883.]

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

SOME PHASES OF IDEALISM IN NEW ENGLAND.

AMONG the papers of the late George
Ripley is the following list of names un-
der the head of " Transcendentalism,"
plainly intended to convey his notion of
the phases through which idealism in
New England passed during the several
passages of its career. No hint is given
of the rule adopted by the author in
making this enumeration. It was evi-
dently not the order of development in
time, for in that case W. E. Channing,
R. W. Emerson, James Walker, F. H.
Hedge, would claim mention among the
first. It was not the order of specula-
tive rank ; for in that case some who
are placed at the beginning would be
omitted entirely. The author probably
followed a classification suggested by
some conception of his own in regard to
the unfolding of ideas and their sequence
from one stage to another. It will be
observed that a few important names
are passed by altogether, as, for instance,
that of O. A. Brownson, who made ideal-
ism the basis of his speculative position,
first as a reformer, and afterwards as a
Roman Catholic ; and also that of Henry
James, an exceedingly able, eloquent,
and uncompromising writer, who applied
the Transcendental postulate to society
in a manner to terrify cautious men.
Why these were omitted does not ap-
pear ; perhaps Mr. Ripley did not take
the trouble to complete his list ; per-
haps he had in view only the philosoph-
ical aspects of the Transcendental move-
ment, and did not care to follow it be-
yond the line of recognized ideas, either
in reform or theology. Here is the list,
as existing in his manuscript : N. L.
Frothingham (1820), Convers Francis,
John Pierpont, George Ripley (1830),
F. H. Hedge, James Walker, Thomas
T. Stone, W. E. Channing, J. F. Clarke,
R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, Theo-
dore Parker. Such a grouping of itself

implies that idealism took its hue from
the temperament of those professing it ;
that it was no definite or fixed system,
but rather a mode of speculative thought
which each believer pursued according
to the bent of his mind. The first two
names suggest the literary tendency of
the new faith ; the third, its application
to specific reform ; the next four, its
bearing on the principles of philosophy ;
the two Chanuings, J. F. Clarke, and
Theodore Parker illustrate its bearing
on points of religious opinion ; while Mr.
Emerson represents idealism pure and
simple, apart from all philosophical or
sectarian beliefs, from all critical or spec-
ulative dogmas.

Only by virtue of some such general
classification can N. L. Frothingham be
ranked among Transcendentalists. He
was not a philosopher, not a man inter-
ested in abstruse speculation, not a re-
former of society as a whole or in part,
not an innovator on established ways of
thinking or living. He was a man of
letters, an enthusiastic admirer of liter-
ary form, of eloquent language, of ingen-
ious, elegant thought. His large libra-
ry contained none of the great master-
pieces of speculation, little of Plato, less
of Aristotle, next to nothing of Spinoza
or Kant, nothing of Schelling or He-
gel, but much of Heine, Schiller, Riick-
ert, and poets in either prose or verse,
whether English, French, or German.
Writers of opposite schools interested
him if they wrote brilliantly, but to pro-
found spiritual differences he was insen-
sible. He enjoyed Macaulay and Rus-
kin, Walter Scott and Dickens, Cicero
and Shakespeare. Novelties he disliked
and repelled. Wordsworth he did not
read, or Byron ; Keats he never spoke
of ; Shelley he abhorred ; the Victorian
bards he could not relish. In the Tran-
scendental reform of his time he took

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

[July,

no part, had little sympathy with Dr.
Channing, and, though personally inti-
mate with R. W. Kmersoii, F. II. Hedge,
George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and
other leaders in the new movement,
could not be persuaded to concern him-
self with it. even in its initiatory stages.
When invited to conferences, he cour-
teously declined, as one might do who
did not feel called to leave his wonted
round of pursuits. But his interest in
theological and Biblical literature was

very keen, as the books on his shelves
and his translations of Herder's Briefe
abundantly attest. It is on the strength
•of these translations, and of an article
in the Christian Examiner on The Be-
ginning and Perfection of Christianity,
evidently prepared for the pulpit, that
Mr. Ripley assigns to him a place among
the friends of Transcendentalism. This
place he undoubtedly deserved, for, al-
though averse to public demonstration,
and unoccupied with speculative issues,
topics, or discussions, his mind lived in
the spirit of the new ideas. He was at
heart an idealist. His sermons were
free from dogma, from doctrinal bias,
from controversial animosity, almost
from debatable opinion on the theolog-
ical ground. He was a friend of knowl-
edge. With him, refined reason was the
test of truth. He loved air and light,
liberty combined with law. Views that
exhilarated, books that cheered, inter-
course with expansive, joyous intellects,
charmed him especially. If hard-pushed
by antagonists, he might have called
himself an idealist, but he never was
hard - pushed. The smooth and even
tenor of his life fell in with his schol-
arly disposition, and allowed him to
pursue his favorite studies undisturbed
by polemical aggressions. He had all
the liberty he wanted. Emerson called
him an Erasmus, and he had some war-
rant for his definition. But it must be
remembered that Mr. Frothingham be-
longed to an older generation, and conse-
quently was less open than young men are

to new emotions. Had he been Luther's
contemporary he would have been more
open to criticism than he was. The
only ones of his generation who took an
active part in the new protest were Con-
vers Francis and Caleb Stetson. Dr.
Chatming was in sympathy with the
movement, but did not join it. The rest
were new men. Belonging to the most
liberal sect of Christians, while others
broached new doctrines or contended for
larger spiritual freedom, his gentle,
peace-loving spirit was contented with
the permission to read and think with-
out embarrassment. Neither Dr. Chan-
ning's earnest pleading for the dignity
of human nature, nor George Ripley's
calm exposition of the powers of the
soul, nor James Walker's vindication of
the spiritual philosophy, nor Theodore
Parker's vehement denunciation of for-
malism in religion, nor William Lloyd
Garrison's arraignment of the United
States Constitution stirred his enthusi-
asm. The numerous projects for regen-
erating society which hurtled in the air
offended him. He was not of the crowd
which followed Mr. Emerson. He never
visited Brook Farm. Like Longfellow,
he hated violence, delighting in the still
air of his books, and lacking faith in
the transforming efficacy of insurgent
ideas. His was a poetic mind, — deli-
cate, fastidious, disinclined to entertain
depressing views, averse to contention
on any field. The evils of the world did
not shroud him in gloom, or summon
him to the combat with either error or
sin. Very far from being self-indulgent,
— on the contrary, being generous, af-
fectionate, disinterested, — he was want-
ing in the vigor of conviction which
makes the champion, the reformer, or the
martyr. His conscience was overlaid
by the peradventures of critical thought.
He detested Calvinism, for in his nos-
trils it smelt of blood. He had no lik-
ing for the ordinary Unitarianism, which,
in his view, was prosaic. Idealism fas-
cinated him by its poetic beauty rather

1883.]

Some Phases of Idealism in Neiv England.

than by its philosophical truth, and drew
him towards the teachers whose steps
he could not follow. This position was
fully recognized by his friends, who read
his books, enjoyed his conversation, prof-
ited by his counsel, and were inspired
by his enthusiasm for generous thoughts,
but soon ceased to expect partisan sym-
pathy or cooperation from him. Such
a man may be called a pioneer in the
Transcendental movement, for he was
in the spirit of it, and such force as he
threw was cast in that direction ; but in
no other sense was he a leader.

The service rendered by men of his
cast was nevertheless very great at a
time when literature was so closely as-
sociated with theology as to be quite un-
emancipated. In fact, there was no
such thing as a literary spirit in Amer-
ica before Transcendentalism created
one, by overthrowing dogma and trans-
ferring the tribunal of judgment to the
human mind. A literary taste, correct,
fastidious, refined, and firm, first became
possible when all literary productions
were placed on the same level and sub-
mitted to the same laws of criticism ;
and idealism of this type supplied the
necessary conditions. One must have
been through and through pervaded by
the Transcendental principle before he
could have cast a free, bold regard on
the beauties of the pagan classics, or
on the deformities of books hitherto
looked on as above human estimate.
The services of those scholars who first
ventured to do this, who did it without
hesitation, who encouraged others to do
it, has never been appraised at its full
value. The influence of Transcenden-
talism on literature has been lasting and
deep, and that influence is shown in
nothing more signally than in this liber-
ation of the human mind from theologi-
cal prejudice. Writers felt it who would
not call themselves Transcendentalists,
but who read books which had been
sealed to them before. In Germany the
literary spirit was illustrated by minds

like Goethe, Schiller, Herder, to men-
tion only three of many names. In
France authors famed for brilliancy
made it attractive. lu England Cole-
ridge, among others, made it honorable.
In New England Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, Hedge, the writers in the Dial,
took up the tradition. For pure literary
enthusiasm, N. L. Frothingham was dis-
tinguished among his compeers. On his
library shelves all books stood side by
side. His sermons were marked by ex-
quisite felicity of expression and by ad-
mirable literary proportion. The appeal
was always made to the hearer's reason ;
the argument was in all cases addressed
to his understanding ; and the assump-
tion was that the human heart was the
final tribunal. Many things were doubt-
ed that were not disproved. Some things
were questioned in private that were not
doubted in public, the evidence not be-
ing esteemed conclusive, and official re-
sponsibility forbidding hasty utterances.
It has been conjectured that Theodore
Parker had Dr. Frothiugham in mind
in the famous discourse on the Tran-
sient and Permanent, where he vehe-
mently rebukes the preacher who said
one thing in his study and another in his
pulpit. But this could hardly have been
the case, for Mr. Parker was a man of
scrupulous honor, and Dr. Frothingham
was his personal friend. Besides, it was
not true that Dr. Frothingham said one
thing in his study and another in his
pulpit. He simply did not say every-
thing in his pulpit that he said in his
study. He was a scholar and a critic ;
he was, too, a singularly frank, convers-
able, outspoken man among his friends
and intimates. But he was likewise a
preacher, a man addressing from week
to week an assembly of people who were
neither scholars nor critics, but plain
men and women looking to him for
rational instruction in religion. There
is no reason to think that he ever pushed
outside of cardinal beliefs, or ever felt
the ground giving way beneath his Uni-

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

[July,

tarian feet. In his own mind he may
have t'!iitTtaiiH.'d speculations which, it'
can-it (1 out in all their bearings, would
have lifi-n <\< structive of the usual con-
ventionalities of faith. But he never
did carry them out in all their bearings.
In his pulpit he was a thoughtful man,
mindful of his accountabilities to the
truth. It never occurred to him to utter
all the misgivings that came into his
head. In this he was not alone. James
Walker, a more pronounced Trauscen-
dentalist than he, and a far more im-
pressive preacher, — an authority on
matters of belief ; looked up to, quoted,
followed ; a wise, deeply-inquiring man,
— said in private things more searching
than Dr. Frothingham, while his public
addresses were more conservative ; he
felt that his personal lucubrations, how-
ever interesting they might be to him,
would be quite out of place in sermons
which aimed at inculcating broad truths
and urging universal sentiments.

In a word, temperament is one thing,
philosophy is another. There was a
temporary coolness — there could not
be a long one, with two such men —
between Theodore Parker and his old
friend and benefactor, Convers Francis,
because the latter declined to compro-
mise the Divinity School at Cambridge
by preaching for him. But Mr. Fran-
cis, however much he admired Mr. Par-
ker, and however warm his personal sym-
pathy with his position may have been,
felt the pressure of organized responsi-
bilities, and postponed his private pre-
dilections to his public duty. He be-
longed to the first generation of New
England Transcendentalists. He was
a man of deep emotions, strong feelings
of personal affection, a true friend, an
ardent humanitarian, an anti-slavery
man of pronounced opinions, a dear
lover of intellectual liberty, as all Tran-
scendentalists were. But he had none
of the gifts of the popular orator ; his
voice was unmusical, his action unim-
passioned, his style of address scholas-

tic. An enthusiast in his love of natu-
ral beauty, the melodies of creation, the
singing of birds, the rustling of leaves,
the murmur of brooks did not get into
his discourse. There was dryness in
his tone and in his manner. A quality
of bookishness seemed a part of the
man. He was an enormous reader of
all sorts of books, old and new, conserva-
tive and liberal ; but his delight was in
books that emancipated the mind, wheth-
er theological, philosophical, critical, po-
etical, or simply literary. He was too
universal a reader to be a partisan of
reform. He saw the strong features of
both sides, and while holding very de-
cided opinions of his own, was respect-
ful towards the honest opinions of oth-
ers. Mr. Francis was a devoted mem-
ber of " The Transcendental Club ; "
an attendant at its initial meeting at the
house of George Ripley ; an intimate
friend of Mr. Emerson ; in close, sym-
pathetic intercourse with all the men
who favored what were known as " ad-
vanced opinions." There is no doubt
whatever that he belonged to the party
of progress. He himself never con-
cealed or disguised the fact that he did.
Nevertheless, such was the literary atti-
tude of his mind that he was asked by
the party which was not that of progress
to leave his parish in Watertown for a
professorship in the Divinity School at
Cambridge.

His teaching there, on pulpit elo-
quence, the pastoral office, with all that
it implied of history, doctrine, Biblical
criticism, was characterized by the same
temperate, impartial, truthful spirit.
Such, in fact, was his fidelity to the un-
prejudiced view that it often seemed as
if he had no view of his own. The stu-
dents tried, usually in vain, to drive him
into a corner, and extract from him an
avowal of private belief ; until at last it
was the current opinion that he had no
belief of his own. Never was there a
greater mistake. Out of the class-room t
he could be explicit enough. Nobody

1883.]

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

who conversed with him on books, men,
and doctrines could for a moment doubt
where his personal convictions were.
As one who was in the Divinity School
during his service there, I can bear wit-
ness to the singular candor of his in-
struction, and to the pleasure he took in
imparting knowledge, in stimulating in-
quiry, in extending the intellectual ho-
rizon of young men. His library, his
erudition, his thought, were open and
free to all. He was even grateful when
a scholar wanted anything he had. As
I look back over the long course of
years that has elapsed since those uni-
versity days, I can trace distinctly to
him liberating and gladdening influences,
which, at the time, were not acknowl-
edged as they should have been.

Mr. Francis was an early friend of
Theodore Parker, then a youth, teach-
ing school at Watertown. He lent him
books, gave him suggestions, encouraged
his pursuits, sympathized with his aims,
poured out his own stores of learning,
put the ambitious scholar in the way of
mental advance. And though the pupil
presently took a stand which the teach-
er could not altogether applaud, the
feeling of affectionate interest never was
diminished, nor at the last was the cor-
dial regard less than it was at the first.
The two men, so unlike, yet understood
and loved one another.

The philosophical phase of Boston
Transcendentalism was also represent-
ed by two men, — James Walker and
George Ripley. The former has al-
ready been spoken of. He was a think-
er, calm, profound, silent ; a student of
opinions, a reader of books, a friendly,
warm-hearted man, candid and gener-
ous, but in no way demonstrative or
oracular. His was a judicial mind, slow
in coming to conclusions, but clear,
close, firm, reticent ; never impatient or
forward, outspoken only when fully and
finally convinced. His tastes were not
especially literary ; his reading was se-
vere ; he did not much concern himself

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 2

with political or social reform ; was nei-
ther leader nor orator. He pondered
over Cudworth, Butler, Reid, in Eng-
land ; over Kant, Jacobi, Schleiermach-
er, in (Germany ; over Cousin, Jouffroy,
Degerando, in France. He occupied
himself with problems. In 1834, in a
discourse printed later as a tract, on the
Philosophy of Man's Spiritual Nature
in Regard to the Foundations of Faith,
he said, " Let us hope that a better phi-
losophy than the degrading sensualism
out of which most forms of infidelity
have grown will prevail, and that the
minds of the rising generation will be
thoroughly imbued with it. Let it be
a philosophy which recognizes the high-
er ^ature of man, and aims, in a chas-
tened and reverential spirit, to unfold
the mysteries of his higher life. Let it
be a philosophy which continually re-
minds us of our intimate relations to the
spiritual world," etc. The philosophy
thus commended was, it is quite unnec-
essary to say, Transcendentalism. In
1840, the same teacher, discoursing to
the alumni of the Cambridge Divinity
School, declared that the return to a
higher order of ideas had been promoted
by such men as Schleiermacher and De
Wette, and gave his opinion that the
religious community had reason to look
with distrust and dread on a philosophy
which limited the ideas of the human
mind to information imparted by the
senses, and denied the existence of spir-
itual elements in the nature of man.
This was two years after the delivery
of Mr. Emerson's famous " Address "
which brought on the controversy be-
tween Mr. Norton and Mr. Ripley. Mr.
Walker's statement was cautious, inas-
much as orthodox theologians might
maintain the existence of a spiritual
susceptibility which revelation would
develop; but at that epoch of time,
and from Unitarian lips, the declaration
was construed as a confession of faith
in the " intuitive " doctrine. There is
no evidence that Mr. Walker went be-

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

[July,

yond the opinion given above, unless an
expression used in a sermon be taken as
evidence. •• The drunkard and the sen-
snali>t," In- >:iid, "are the monsters;"
implying tliut depravity was not of na-
ture, but a violation of nature, which
was holy and divine. This, however,
may have been only another way of
saying that evil was a deprivation, and
that goodness was the normal condition
of man, — a very innocent proposition.
Mr. Walker was iu no sense a natural-
ist, a believer in instinct, an advocate of
passion, a patron of organic tempera-
ment or constitutional bias. He was a
devout Christian in every practical re-
spect, — humble, submissive, obedient.
Infidelity he ascribed to the opposite
school of speculation, and looked to the
system he espoused for a restoration of
faith. For his own part, he held fast to
divine inspiration, Christ, Bible, Church,
the established means of grace, simply
transferring the sanctions of authority
from outward to inward, from external
testimony to immediate consciousness,
from the senses to the soul, as the
deepest thinkers in all ages had done.
It was not in his thought to erect a new
tribunal, merely to remove an old one
from an exposed and precarious posi-
tion to one of absolute safety. Beyond
that he seems not to have gone. In
other words, he attributed to. the soul a
receptive but not a creative power ; an
ability to take what was given, but not to
originate ideas. Dr. Walker had great
influence over the young men of his
generation, and imparted to them an
impulse toward spiritual belief ; made
them self-respecting, high-principled, no-
ble of purpose, pure, and God-fearing,
but he made no skeptics. His last as-
severation was of a personal faith in
prayer.

The same, essentially, was the posi-
tion of George Ripley, though the more
ardent, impulsive temperament of the
man pushed him nearer to the social
confines of liberalism. Ripley was not

a slow, silent, recluse thinker, not an
original, creative mind ; but a great
reader, a student of German, a lover of
philosophy, a master of elegant English,
a careful writer, a singularly clear ex-
positor. Only in an ideal sense, how-
ever, and as democratic ideas were in-
volved in the Transcendental premises,
was he a social reformer. He took on
himself the most opprobrious names, the
more heroically as he was not distin-
guished as a worker in any of the causes
which those names represented. He
made heavy sacrifices for Brook Farm,
but his was rather a Utopian view of the
possibilities of such an institution. There
seems to have been a gulf between his
conception and his execution. He raised
his hand, but could not strike the blow.
He was convinced, yet cautious ; frank
in his persuasions, but reserved in his
expressions ; his feelings were warm,
but he kept them very much to himself.
A Transcendentalist he certainly was,
an outspoken one ; but his chief interest
was in the speculative aspects of the
faith. He perceived whither the faith
tended in times like his, and was not
sorry to see others — Parker, for in-
stance — push it to its conclusion, but
he could not do so himself. The philos-
ophy alone would not necessarily have
led to rationalism. Ripley stood mid-
way between the philosophy and the
rationalism to which it readily lent it-
self, and while standing apart welcomed
all earnest scholars in the new field.
Materialism he detested ; animalism he
feared ; criticism he never pursued.
The French school, as represented by
Cousin, Jouffroy, and Constant, was his
favorite before the German, which he
sought rather for literary stimulus,
Goethe being his model writer. It was
evident that the Transcendental system,
which was but a literal form of ideal-
ism, was running into sentimentalism,
the deification of human nature, but in
1836 that was merely a tendency. Its
real influence was conservative of estab-

1883.]

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

lished institutions and ideas. So it was
in James Walker, so it was in George
Ripley, the two men who stood for the
philosophical truth of idealism. From
thought to feeling, however, the step
was short and quickly taken, as we shall
see. •

The ethical element in Transcendental-
ism followed closely on the intellectual.
This, also, had two representatives, —
John Pierpont and Theodore Parker.
Why John Pierpont? He is the third
named on Mr. Ripley's list, and is a
good example of the indirect force of
philosophical ideas. Forty years ago
he was conspicuous as a champion of
temperance in Boston, as the hero, in
fact, of an ecclesiastical council held to
determine his relations to his parish in
Hollis Street. He was not a philoso-
pher, not a man of letters, though he
wrote verses. " Poetry is not my vo-
cation," he said, in the preface to his
published volume. It evidently was not.
With a few exceptions, his verses were
reform manifestoes, rhymed sermons,
exhortations in metrical form. He pub-
lished sermons and letters, but they
were more remarkable as specimens of
dialectics than as examples of philosoph-
ical acuteness. Apparently he was not
greatly concerned with speculative ques-
tions, not abstract, introspective, ethe-
real, but tremendously concrete. In the
ranks of the idealists he was never con-
spicuous. The lists of attendants on
the discussions of the newest phases of
thought do not contain his name. He
was a reformer of an extreme descrip-
tion, — an abolitionist, a temperance
man, a general iconoclast. But all this
he seems to have been by virtue of that
faith in the natural man which was
characteristic of the Transcendentalism
of the period. His views of Christian-
ity as a religion of humanity; of the
gospel as a proclamation of universal
good will; of the Christ as an elder
brother, saving by unfolding men and
women ; of God as a loving Father, — all

pointed in the direction of social recon-
struction. He believed in remodeling
circumstances, in obtaining liberty, in
securing better conditions of life for the
unprivileged. The agitators loved him,
the teetotalers, the come-outers, the
spiritualists, because he hit hard the lu-
crative, organized evils of the time, but
he was a thorn in the flesh of moderate
people who hated such inspiration.

The air of the period was agitated
by furious winds. Naturalism in every
shape was abroad. Meetings were held,
newspapers were printed, and "organs"
were established in advocacy of new
ideas in every direction. Temperance,
anti-slavery, non-resistance, mesmerism,
phrenology, Swedenborgianism, spirit-
ualism, antimonianism, materialism, had
all their prophets. There was a general
outbreak of protest against received
dogmas and institutions. In the heat of
this turmoil appeared the Luther of the
time, — Theodore Parker. He was a
man of prodigious intellectual voracity
united with a corresponding moral ear-
nestness ; no mystic or seraphic enthu-
siast, no idealist by native tempera-
ment, but a stout reformer in the sphere
of practical ethics, honest, faithful, cour-
ageous, uncompromising. His first di-
rection, was theological. Convers Fran-
cis stimulated his appetite for reading of
a religious character. The Divinity
School at Cambridge threw him into a
whirl of questioning, which involved
him in argument, and resulted in doubt.
The spirit of the age added fuel to the
flame. N. L. Frothingham lent him
books. George Ripley gave him the
guidance of a clear mind, of capacious
knowledge and firm convictions, not to
speak of the quickening sympathy of a
hopeful, bright spirit. The new theol-
ogy found him an easy convert, espe-
cially as led by men like Herder, Schlei-
ermacher, De Wette, in Germany ; like
Channing, Walker, Ripley, at home.
Emerson fascinated him, excited in him
the passion for liberty, animated his

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

[July,

courage, awoke his confidence iu the
soul. But after all he did not come
rapidly to his final convictions. To be
:i I'liitariaii, making reason a critic of
dogmas, was something. To be a lib-
eral Unitarian, setting reason to judge
certain records of the Bible, as well as
certain dogmas of the creed, was the
next step. To exalt reason as the final
judge of revelation was the final con-
clusion. He was critical rather than
speculative, concrete rather than ab-
stract. He became an idealist from read-
ing and personal association, but he was
not one by constitution. He preferred
Aristotle to Plato, Fichte and Jacob! to
Kant and Schelling, was more akin to
Paley than to Cudworth. His Trans-
cendentalism had a basis in common-
sense. Instead of serenely withdraw-
ing, like Emerson, from a profession he
could not follow, instead of plunging
heroically into some humane enterprise,
like Brook Farm, as his friend Ripley
did, leaving the pulpit he could not oc-
cupy with hearty conviction, he main-
tained his attitude, threw down the
glove of defiance, and took the profes-
sion to task for its shortcomings, waging
a war that lasted for years. He was
not a seer or a regenerator, but a proph-
et and a warrior, " the Orson of par-
sons," as Lowell called him. He used
idealism as a safe territory to lodge car-
dinal truths in while criticism was rav-
aging the country of historical Christian-
ity. His very idealism took practical
form. Not satisfied with the sublime
indefiniteness of Emerson, or the silent
stoicism of Ripley, he put his transcen-
dental postulates into portable packages,
doing for them what he did for Webster's
philosophy of a republic : " The peo-
ple's government, made for the people,
made by the people, and answerable to
the people." Parker turned the for-
mula over in "his mind as the sea turns
over rough stones, until finally it became
smooth and round, as thus : " Democ-
racy, that is, a government of all the

people, by all the people, for all the
people." So, unable to hold idealism
pure and simple, he condensed its ai-o-
ina into the three ultimate facts of con-
sciousness : The Existence of God ; The
Immortality of the Individual Soul ;
The Mor»l Law. When Ripley was
content, in the controversy with An-
'drews Norton, to illustrate and maintain
the excellence of the spiritual philoso-
phy, Parker, as " Levi Blodgett," con-
tended that man had a spiritual eye by
which he could look directly on specific
ideas, and obtain an immediate knowl-
edge of truths. Emerson knew Parker
incidentally only, and, while admiring
his brave independence, was too far re-
moved from him by the method of ar-
riving at convictions, as well as by the
convictions themselves, to be intimate
with him.

In a word, Parker was a reformer.
Yet, even as a reformer, he was a critic.
He saw the weak points in the argu-
ment of the total abstinence men ; he
detected the vulnerable places in the
armor of the champions for a secular
Sunday ; and he shot deadly arrows at
phrenology. Though a close personal
friend of Ripley, a minister at West
Roxbury, a frequent visitor at Brook
Farm, he would not join the communi-
ty ; once, being asked what he thought
of it, he replied : " Ripley, there, seems
like a highly finished engine drawing a
train of mud-cars." The anti-slavery
reform seems to have been the only one
to which he gave himself without re-
serve, and to this he devoted his ener-
gies with singular constancy and ex-
traordinary power. It summoned his
whole, force to combat, — his religious
zeal, his moral earnestne'ss, his scorn,
his pity, his faith in God, his confidence
in man, his trust in Providence, his be-
lief in democratic institutions, his pas-
sion for statistical proof, his love of con-
flict, his eloquence, his sarcasm. Here
was genuine, unadulterated humanity
in its most practical shape. It is hardly

1883.]

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

doubtful that multitudes were attracted
to him by this alone, — multitudes who
did not comprehend or sympathize with
his religious views, but were fascinated
by his manliness, and by the undercur-
rent of faith which sustained it. Final-
ly he became an ethical idealist. Had
he lived longer, he would probably have
thrown himself into one of the social
causes that have come up since the war.
The much meditated book on Theism
which was to have embodied his spirit-
ual ideas would have been interrupted
by the battle-cry that summoned him to
arms. The music of the spheres would
have been drowned in the din of conflict.
To Dr. Channing really belongs the
credit of transferring the evidence of
Christianity to the field of human na-
ture. He was a Christian, but a spir-
itual one. He believed in Christ as
" Mediator, Intercessor. Lord and Sav-
iour, ever living, and ever active for
mankind ; through all time, now as well
as formerly, the active and efficient
friend of the human race." He was
persuaded that all spiritual wisdom and
influence came from above. From this
persuasion he never was separated. At
the same time he had faith in the hu-
man soul as the organ through which
the divine communications were made.
" We have, each of us, the spiritual
eye to see, the mind to know, the heart
to love, the will to obey God." " A
spiritual light, brighter than that of
noon, pervades our daily life. The
cause of our not seeing it is in our-
selves." " They who assert the great-
ness of human nature see as much of
guilt as the man of worldly wisdom.
But amid the passions and the selfish-
ness of men, they see another element,
— a divine element, — a spiritual prin-
ciple." He was not afraid of philoso-
phy or criticism ; in fact, he listened to
them patiently, hopefully, as long as
they promised a nearer access of the hu-
man soul to the divine, as long, that is,
as they tended to remove obstructions

of ignorance ; beyond that he had no
interest in them. To him the panic
about Emerson's famous Divinity School
address seemed uncalled for. Parker's
positions gave him no uneasiness. But
he did not think that science or philos-
ophy or criticism were likely to solve
the problems of being, and when he per-
ceived that their energies were ex-
pended in a mundane direction, his ex-
pectation from them was at an end. " I
see and feel the harm done by this crude
speculation," he wrote in a letter,
" whilst I also see much nobleness to
bind me to its advocates. In its opin-
ions generally I see nothing to give nae
hope. I am somewhat disappointed
that this new movement is to do so lit-
tle for- the spiritual regeneration of so-
ciety."

Dr. Channing's faith in human na-
ture led him to take a deep concern in
all reforms that contained the germ of
a new life for the future of humanity, —
temperance, the education of the work-
ing classes, anti-slavery. He was one
of the inspirers of Brook Farm. To
use the language of his biographer, —
" His soul was illuminated with the idea
of the absolute, immutable glory of the
Moral Good ; and reverence for con-
science is the key to his whole doctrine
of human destiny and duty." But Chan-
ning thought as well as felt, considered
as well as burned. Hence the restrain-
ing limitations of his zeal. He desired
the elevation of the race, not of any
single class. His very idealism, there- _
fore, in proportion to its earnestness
and breadth, made him pause. He was
in communication, chiefly through let-
ters and conversation, with the current
ideas of the time, but no thought fairly
engaged him that had not an ideal as-
pect ; no reform enlisted his support
which did not hold out the prospect of
a large future for mankind. He was a
Unitarian, primarily because Unitarian-
ism seemed to him the more spiritual
form of the Christian faith. His whole

Some Phases of Idealism in New England.

[July,

view of Unitarianism was spiritual, and
that had little attraction for
his mind. The dogmatic side of it had
no charm for him ; he was not a formal-
ist in any d.-ree, and it is not probable
that lie would have advocated any sys-
tem of mere opinions which promised
nothing for the well-being of the race.

Mr. Emerson was a man of different
.-ranij) t'rom any of those mentioned.
An artist in the construction of seii-
a and the choice of words, he was
not a man of letters, for he ever put
substance before form. A student of
Plato, he was not a philosopher, for the
intellectual method was foreign to his
genius. Though foremost in every
movement of radical reform, — the anti-
slavery cause, the claims of woman, the
stand for freedom in religion, a bold
speaker for human rights, a eulogist of
John Brown, of Theodore Parker, of
Henry Thoreau, he was not a reformer,
for he avoided conventions, eluded asso-
ciations, and perceived the limitations
of all applied ethics. He was not, in
any recognized sense of the term, a
Christian. He would call no man Mas-
ter. He knew of no such thing as au-
thority over the soul. He would ac-
knowledge no mediator between finite
and infinite. He had no belief in Sa-
tan ; evil, in his view, was a shadow ;
the sense of sin was a disease ; Jesus
was a myth. " There are no such men
as we fable ; no Jesus, nor Pericles,
nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washing-
ton, such as we have made. We conse-
' crate a great deal of nonsense because it
was allowed by great men." " A per-
sonal influence is an ignis fatuus." All
his life he resisted interference with the
spiritual laws. One might call him
Buddhist as easily as Christian. lie
was the precise opposite of that, — the
purest idealist we have ever known.

But no diligent reader of his books
will doubt that Emerson was a theist of
a most earnest description ; so earnest
that he would not accept any definition

of deity. From this faith came his pas-
sion for wild, uncultivated nature, for
rude, unsophisticated men, as most like-
ly to be informed with the immanent
Spirit. From this came his invincible
optimism ; his boundless anticipation of
good ; his brave attitude of expectancy ;
his sympathy with whatever promised
emancipation, light, the bursting of spir-
itual bonds ; his love of health, beauty,
simplicity ; his serene confidence that
the best would ultimately befall in spite
of grief and loss. He was disappointed
in individuals, in groups of individuals,
in causes and movements ; but although
the looked - for Spirit did not come
down, his assurance of the justness of
his method kept him on tiptoe with
expectation. He would not call him-
self a Transcendentalist. " There is
no such thing as a Transcendental par-
ty ; there is no pure Transceudental-
ist ; we know of none but prophets and
heralds of such a philosophy ; all who
by strong bias of nature have leaned
to the spiritual side in doctrine, have
stopped short of their goal. A\re have
had many harbingers and forerunners ;
but of a purely spiritual -life, history has
afforded no example." Transcendental-
ism, he said, was but a form of idealism,
a name bestowed on it in these latter
days ; but the fact was as old as think-
ing. The notion that the soul of man
could create truth, or do anything but
meekly receive it from the divine mind,
probably never occurred to Emerson.
No virtue was more characteristic of
him than humility.

Shortly after the History of Trans-
cendentalism in New England was pub-
lished, Mr. Emerson said to the author,
that in his view, Transcendentalism, as it
was called, was simply a protest against
formalism and dogmatism in religion ;
not a philosophical, but a spiritual
movement, looking toward a spiritual
faith. And so it was in great part, un-
doubtedly, though it may be questioned
if it would have seized on minds like

1883.]

A Prelude.

Walker, Ripley, Hedge, and many be-
sides, but for Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Shel-
ling, Schleiermacher, De Wette in Ger-
many, Cousin in France, Coleridge and
Carlyle in England. Unitarianism had
lapsed into a thin, barren conventional-
ity, a poor mixture of Arianism, Armin-
ianism, Priestleyism. Consciously or
unconsciously, an arid version of Locke's
empirical philosophy was accepted by
the leaders of the sect. Materialism
was avowed and proclaimed. The lec-
tures of Dr. Spurzheim created a rage
for phrenology throughout New Eng-
land, and many a Socinian fell a prey
to what Emerson then called a doctrine
of " mud and blood." Transcendental-
ism was a reaction from this earthward
tendency, and Emerson was one of its
leaders. The young men principally
felt the new afflatus. Hedge, who was
educated in Germany, and brought the
German atmosphere home with him ;
Parker and Ripley, who read German ;
Bartol, Bartlett, D wight, Alcott, Mar-
garet Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, W.
H. Channing, Orestes Brownson, added
their genius and fiery zeal.

Thus philosophy and faith, thought
and feeling, literary and poetic fervor,
united to produce that singular outburst
of idealism which has left so deep an
impression on the New England intel-
lect. The circumstances of the time de-
termined the particular form it assumed.
As those circumstances passed away, the
fashion of speculation altered, but the
old original idealism remained, and will
remain when Channing and Emerson
are forgotten except as its interpreters.
The local and incidental phases that
have been noticed are of the remote
past. Literature has come into posses-
sion of all its rights. Philosophy sits
serenely on its throne, unvexed by its
old-fashioned controversy with mate-
rialism. Reform is no longer obliged to
be one-sided, or extreme, or anarchical,
but is taken up by reasonable men and
women. Religion is released from dog-
matism, at least in a measure, the
championship of it being left to schol-
ars of whatever denomination. And all
this has been, in great degree, accom-
plished by men who were once called
heretics.

0. B. Frothingham.

A PRELUDE.

SPIRIT that moves the sap in spring,
When lusty male-birds fight and sing,
Inform my words, and make my lines
As sweet as flowers, as strong as vines.

Let mine be the freshening power
Of rain on grass, of dew on flower ;
The fertilizing song be mine,
Nut-flavored, racy, keen as wine.

Let some procreant truth exhale
From me, before my forces fail ;
Or ere the ecstatic impulse go
Let all my buds to blossoms blow.

En Province.

[July,

If quick, sound seed be wanting where
The virgin soil feels sun and air,
And longs to fill a higher state,
There let my meanings germinate.

Let not my strength be spilled for naught,

But, in some fresher vessel caught,

Be blended into sweeter forms,

And fraught with purer aims and charms. •

Let bloom-dust of my life be blown
To quicken hearts that flower alone ;
Around my knees let scions rise
With heavenward-pointing destinies.

And when I fall, like some old tree,
And subtile change makes mould of me,
There let earth show a fertile line,
"Whence perfect wild-flowers leap and shine !

Maurice Thompson.

EN PROVINCE.

THE COUNTRY OF THE LOIRE.

WE good Americans — I say it with-
out presumption — are too apt to think
that France is Paris, just as we are ac-
cused of being too apt to think that Paris
is the celestial city. This is by no
means the case, fortunately for those
persons who take an interest in modern
Gaul, and yet are still left vaguely un-
satisfied by that epitome of civilization
which stretches from the Arc de Tri-
omphe to the Gymnase theatre. It had
already been revealed to the author of
these light pages that there are many
good things in the doux pays de France
of which you get no hint in a walk be-
tween those ornaments of the capital ;
but the truth had been revealed only in
quick-flashing glimpses, and he was con-
scious of a desire to look it well in the.

face. To this end he started one rainy
morning, in mid - September, for the
charming little city of Tours, from which
point it seemed possible to make a va-
riety of fruitful excursions. His excur-
sions resolved themselves ultimately into
a journey through several provinces, a
journey which had its dull moments (as
one may defy any journey not to have),
but which enabled him to feel that his
proposition was demonstrated. France
may be Paris, but Paris is not France ;
that was perfectly evident on the return
to the capital. I must not speak, how-
ever, as if I had discovered the prov-
inces. They were discovered, or at least
revealed, by Balzac, if by any one, and
are now easily accessible to visitors.

It is true, I met no visitors, or only
one or two, whom it was pleasant to
meet. Throughout my little tour, I was
almost the only tourist. That is perhaps
one reason why it .was so agreeable.

1883.]

En Province.

I am ashamed to begin with saying
that Touraine is the garden of France ;
that remark has long ago lost its bloom.
The town of Tours, however, has some-
thing sweet and bright, which suggests
that it is surrounded by a land of fruits.
It is a very agreeable little city ; few
towns of its size are more ripe, more
complete, or I should suppose in better
humor with themselves and less disposed
to enry the responsibilities of bigger
places. It is truly the capital of its
smiling province, a region of easy abun-
dance, of good living, of genial, com-
fortable, optimistic, rather indolent, opin-
ions. Balzac says in one of his tales
that the real Tourangeau will not make
an effort, or displace himself even, to go
in search of a pleasure ; and it is not
difficult to understand the sources of this
genial indifference. He must have a
vague conviction that he can only lose
by almost any change. Fortune has
been kind to him : he lives in a temper-
ate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the
banks of a river which, it is true, some-
times floods the country around it, but
of which the ravages appear to be so
easily repaired that its aggressions may
perhaps be regarded (in a region where
so many good things are certain) merely
as an occasion for healthy suspense. He
is surrounded by fine old traditions, re-
ligious, social, architectural, culinary ;
and he may have the satisfaction of feel-
ing that he is French to the core. No
part of his admirable country is more
characteristically national. Normandy
is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy,
Provence is Provence ; but Touraine
is essentially France. It is the land
of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of
good books and good company, as well
as good dinners and good houses.
George Sand has somewhere a charm-
ing passage about the mildness, the con-
venient quality, of the physical condi-
tions of central France : " son climat
souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes

et courtes." In the autumn of 1882, the
rains perhaps were less short than abun-
dant ; but when the days were fine it
was impossible that anything in the way
of weather could be more charming. The
vineyards and orchards looked rich in
the fresh, gay light ; cultivation was
everywhere, but everywhere it seemed to
be easy. There was no visible poverty ;
thrift and success presented themselves
as matters of good taste. The white
caps of the women glittered in the sun-
shine, and their well-made sabots clicked
cheerfully on the hard, clean roads.
Touraine is a land of old chateaux — a
gallery of architectural specimens and of
large hereditary properties. The peas-
antry have less of the luxury of owner-
ship than in most other parts of France ;
though they have enough of it to give
them quite their share of that shrewd-
ly conservative look which, in the lit-
tle chaffering place of the market-town,
the stranger observes so often in the
wrinkled brown masks that surmount
the agricultural blouse. This is more-
over the heart of the old French mon-
archy, and as that monarchy was splen-
did and picturesque, a reflection of the
splendor still glitters in the current of
the Loire. Some of the most striking
events of French history have occurred
on the banks of that river, and the soil
it waters bloomed for awhile with the
flowering of the Renaissance. The
Loire gives a great style to a landscape
of which the features are not, as the
phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye
to distances even more poetic than the
green horizons of Touraine. It is a very
fitful stream, and is sometimes seen to
run thin and expose all the crudities of
its channel ; a great defect certainly in
a river which has such serious artistic
responsibilities. But I speak of it as I
saw it last, full, tranquil, powerful, bend-
ing in large, slow curves, and sending
back half the light of the sky. Noth-
ing can be finer than the view of its
course which you get from the battle-

En Province.

[July,

ments and terraces of Amboise. As I
looked down on it from that elevation
one lovely Sunday morning, through
a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it
seemed the \ery model of a generous,
beneikvnt Mivam. The most charming
purt of Tours is naturally the shaded
quay that overlooks it, and looks across
too at the friendly faubourg of Saint
Symphorien and at the terraced heights
which rise above this. Indeed, through-
out Touraine it is half the charm of the
Loire that you can travel beside it.
The great dike which protects it, or pro-
tects the country from it, from Blois
to Augers, is an admirable road ; and on
the other side, as well, the highway con-
stantly keeps it company. A great
river, as you follow a great road, is ex-
cellent company ; it heightens and short-
ens the way. The inns at Tours are
in another quarter, and one of them,
which is midway between the town and
the station, is very good. It is worth
mentioning for the fact that every one
belonging to it is extraordinarily polite
— so unnaturally polite as (at first) to
excite your suspicion that the hotel has
some hidden vice, so that the waiters
and chambermaids are trying to pacify
you in advance. There was one waiter
in especial who was the most accom-
plished social being I have ever en-
countered ; from morning till night he
kept up an inarticulate murmur of ur-
banity, like the hum of a spinning top.
I may add that I discovered no dark
secrets at the Hotel de 1'Univers ; for
it is not a secret to any traveler to-day
that the obligation to partake of a luke-
warm dinner in an over-heated room is
as imperative as it is detestable. There
is a certain Rue Reyale at Tours which
has pretensions to the monumental ; it
was constructed a hundred years ago, and
the houses, all alike, have on a moderate
scale a pompous eighteenth-century look.
It connects the Palais de Justice, the
most important secular building in the
town, with the long bridge which spans

the Loire — the spacious, solid bridge
pronounced by Balzac, in Le Cure de
Tours, " one of the finest monuments of
French architecture." The Palais de
Justice was the seat of the government
of Leon Gambetta in the autumn of
1870, after the dictator had been obliged
to retire in his balloon from Paris, and
before .the Assembly was constituted
at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied
Tours during that terrible winter ; it is
astonishing, the number of places the
Germans occupied. It is hardly too
much to say that wherever one goes in
certain parts of France, one encounters
two great historic facts : one is the Rev-
olution, the other is the German inva-
sion. The traces of the Revolution re-
main, in a hundred scars and bruises
and mutilations ; but the visible marks
of the war of 1870 have passed away.
The country is so rich, so living, that
she has been able to dress her wounds,
to hold up her head, to smile again ; so
that the shadow of that darkness has
ceased to rest upon her. But what you
do not see you still may hear, and one
remembers with a certain shudder that
only a few short years ago this province,
so intimately French, was under the
heel of a foreign foe. To be intimately
French was apparently not a safeguard ;
for so successful an invader it could
only be a challenge. Peace and plenty,
however, have succeeded that episode ;
and among the gardens and vineyards
of Touraine it seems only a legend the
more in a country of legends. It was
not, all the same, for the sake of this
chequered story that I mentioned the
Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale.
The most interesting fact, to my mind,
about the High Street of Tours was
that as you walk toward the bridge on
the right-hand trottoir you can look up
at the house, on the other side of the
way, in which Honore de Balzac first
saw the light. That violent and com-
plicated genius was a child of the good-
humored and succulent Touraine. There

1883.]

En Province.

is something anomalous in this fact,
though if one thinks about it a little one
may discover certain correspondences
between his character and that of his
native province. Strenuous, laborious,
constantly infelicitous in spite of his
great successes, he suggests at times a
very different set of influences. But he
had his jovial, full-feeding side — the
side that comes out in the Contes Dro-
latiques, which are the romantic and
epicurean chronicle of the old manors
and abbeys of this region. And he was
moreover the product of a soil into
which a great deal of history had been
trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well
as affectedly monarchical, and he was
impregnated with a sense of the past.
Number 39 Rue Roy ale, of which the
basement, like all the basements in the
Rue Royale, is occupied by a shop-, is
not shown to the public, and I know
not whether tradition designates the
chamber in which the author of Le Lys
dans la Vallee opened his eyes into a
world in which he was to see, and to
imagine, such extraordinary things. If
this were the case, I would willingly
have crossed its threshold ; not for the
sake of any relic of the great novelist
which it may possibly contain, nor even
for that of any mystic virtue which may
be supposed to reside within its walls ;
but simply because to look at those four
modest walls can hardly fail to give one
a strong impression of the force of hu-
man endeavor. Balzac, in the matu-
rity of his vision, took in more of hu-
man life than any one, since Shake-
speare, who has attempted to tell us
stories about it; and the very small
scene on which his consciousness dawned
is one end of the immense scale that he
traversed. I confess it shocked me a
little to find that he was born in a house
" in a row," a house moreover which at
the date of his birth must have been
only about twenty years old. All that is
contradictory. If the tenement selected
for this honor could not be ancient and

picturesque, it should at least have been
detached. There is a charming de-
scription in his little tale of La Grena-
diere of the view of the opposite side of
the Loire as you have it from the square
at the end of the Rue Royale, — a square
that has some pretensions to grandeur,
overlooked as it is by the Hotel de Ville
and the Musee, a pair of edifices which
directly contemplate the river, and or-
namented with marble images of Fran-
<jois Rabelais and Rene Descartes. The
former, erected a few years since, is a
very honorable production ; the pedestal
of the latter could as a matter of course
only be inscribed with the Cogito, ergo
Sum. The two statues mark the two
opposite poles to which the brilliant
French mind has traveled, and if there
were an effigy of Balzac at Tours, it
ought to stand midway between thorn.
Not that he by any means always struck
the happy mean between the sensible
and the metaphysical ; but one may say
of him that half of his genius looks
in one direction and half in the other.
The side that turns toward Francois
Rabelais would be on the whole the
side that takes the sun. But there is
no statue of Balzac at Tours ; there is
only, in one of the chambers of the mel-
ancholy museum, a rather clever, coarse
bust. The description in La Grena-
diere, of which I just spoke, is too long
to quote ; neither have I space for any
one of the brilliant attempts at land-
scape-painting which are woven into the
shimmering texture of Le Lys dans
la Vallee. The little manor of Cloche-
gourde, the residence of Madame de
Mortsauf, the heroine of that extraor-
dinary work, was within a moderate
walk of Tours, and the picture in the
novel is presumably a copy from an orig-
inal which it would be possible to-day
to discover. I did not, however, even
make the attempt. There are so many
chateaux in Touraine that have been
commemorated in history, that it would
take one too far to look up those that

En Province.

[July,

have been commemorated in fiction.
The most I did was to endeavor to
identify the former residence of Made-
moiselle Gainard, the sinister old maid
of Le Cure de Tours. This terrible
woman occupied a small house in the
n-ar of the cathedral, where I spent a
whole morning in wondering rather
stupidly which house it could be. To
reach the cathedral from the little place
where we stopped just now to look
across at La Grenadiere, without, it
must be confessed, very vividly seeing
it, you follow the quay to the right and
pass out of sight of the charming coteau
which, from beyond the river, faces the
town — a soft agglomeration of gardens,
vineyards, scattered villas, gables and
turrets of slate-roofed chateaux, terraces
with gray balustrades, moss-grown walls
draped in scarlet Virginia creeper. You
turn into the town again beside a great
military barrack which is ornamented
with a rugged mediaeval tower, a relic
of. the ancient fortifications, known to
the Tourangeaux of to-day as the Tour
de Guise. The young Prince of Join-
ville, son of that Duke of Guise who
was murdered by the order of Henry II.
at Blois, was, after the death of his
father, confined here for more than two
years, but made his escape one summer
evening in 1591, under the nose of his
keepers, with a gallant audacity which
has attached the memory of the exploit
to his sullen-looking prison. Tours has
a garrison of five regiments, and the
little red-legged soldiers light up the
town. You see them stroll upon the
clean, uncommercial quay, where there
are no signs of navigation, not even by
oar, no barrels nor bales, no loading nor
unloading, no masts against the sky
nor booming of steam in the air. The
most active business that goes on there
is that patient and fruitless angling in
which the French, as the votaries of art
for art, excel all other people. The
little soldiers, weighed down by the con-
tents of their enormous pockets, pass

with respect from one of these masters
of the rod to the other, as he sits soak-
ing an indefinite bait in the large, indif-
ferent stream. After you turn your
back to the quay you have only to go a
little way before you reach the cathe-
dral.

ii.

It is a very beautiful church of the
second order of importance, with a
charming mouse-colored complexion and
a pair of fantastic towers. There is a
commodious little square in front of it,
from which you may look up at its very
ornamental face ; but for purposes of
frank admiration the sides and the rear
are perhaps not sufficiently detached.
The cathedral of Tours, which is ded-
icated to Saint Gatianus, took a long
time to build. Begun in 1170, it was
finished only in the first half of the six-
teenth century ; but the ages and the
weather have interfused so well the tone
of the different parts that it presents, at
first, at least, no striking incongruities,
and looks even exceptionally harmoni-
ous and complete. There are many
grander cathedrals, but there are proba-
bly few more pleasing, and this effect
of delicacy and grace is1 at its best to-
ward the close of a quiet afternoon,
when the densely decorated towers, ris-
ing above the little Place de 1'Arche-
veche, lift their curious lanterns into the
slanting light, and offer a multitudinous
perch to troops of circling pigeons. The
whole front, at such a time, has an ap-
pearance of great richness, although the
niches which surround the three high
doors (with recesses deep enough for
several circles of sculpture) and indent
the four great buttresses that ascend
beside the huge rose-window, carry no
figures beneath their little chiseled
canopies. The blast of the great Revo-
lution blew down most of the statues in
France, and the wind has never set very
strongly toward putting them up again.
The embossed and crocketed cupolas
which crown the towers of Saint Gatien

1883.]

En Province.

are not very pure in taste ; but, like a
good many impurities, they are decided-
ly picturesque. The interior has a state-
ly slimriess with which no fault is to be
found, and which in the choir, rich in
early glass and surrounded by a broad
passage, becomes very bold and noble.
Its principal treasure, perhaps, is the
charming little tomb of the two children
(who died young) of Charles VIII. and
Anne of Brittany, in white marble, em-
bossed with symbolic dolphins and ex-
quisite arabesques. The little boy and
girl lie side by side on a slab of black
marble, and a pair of small kneeling
angels, both at their head and their feet,
watch over them. Nothing could be
more perfect than this monument, which
is the work of Michel Colomb, one of
the earlier glories of the French Renais-
sance ; it is really a lesson in good taste.
Originally placed in the great abbey-
church of Saint Martin, which was for
so many ages the holy place of Tours, it
happily survived the devastation to which
that edifice, already sadly shattered by
the wars of religion and successive prof-
anations, finally succumbed in 1797. In
1815, the tomb found an asylum in a
quiet corner of the cathedral. I ought,
perhaps, to be ashamed to acknowledge
that I fouud the profane name of Balzac
capable of adding an interest even to
this venerable sanctuary. Those who
have read the terrible little story of the
Cure de Tours will perhaps remember
that, as I have already mentioned, the
simple and child-like old Abbe Birotteau,
victim of the infernal machinations of
the Abbe Troubert and Mademoiselle
Gamard, had his quarters in the house
of that lady (she had a specialty of let-
ting lodgings to priests), which stood on
the north side of the cathedral, so close
under its walls that the supporting pillar
of one of the great flying buttresses was
planted in the spinster's garden. If you
wander round behind the church, in
search of this more than historic habita-
tion, you will have occasion to see that

the side and rear of Saint Gatien make
a delectable and curious figure. A nar-
row lane passes beside the high wall
which conceals from sight the palace of
the archbishop, and beneath the flying
buttresses, the far-projecting gargoyles
and the fine south porch of the church.
It terminates in a little, dead grass-
grown square, entitled the Place Gre-
goire de Tours. All this part of the
exterior of the cathedral is very brown,
ancient,, go thic, grotesque ; Balzac calls
the whole place " a desert of stone."
A battered and gabled wing, or out-
house (as it appears to be), of the hid-
den palace, with a queer old stone pulpit
jutting out from it, looks down on this
melancholy spot, on the other side of
which is a seminary for young priests,
one of whom issues from a door in a
quiet corner, and, holding it open a mo-
ment behind him, shows a glimpse of a
sunny garden, where you may fancy
other black young figures strolling up
and down. Mademoiselle Gamard's
house, where she took her two abbes to
board, and basely conspired with one
against the other, is still further round
the cathedral. You cannot quite put
your hand upon it to-day, for the dwell-
ing of which you say to yourself that it
must have been Mademoiselle Gamard's
does not fulfill all the conditions men-
tioned in Balzac's description- The edi-
fice in question, however, fulfills condi-
tions enough ; in particular, its little
court offers hospitality to the big but-
tress of the church. Another buttress,
corresponding with this (the two, be-
tween them, sustain the gable of the
north transept), is planted in the small
cloister, of which the door on the further
side of the little soundless Rue de la
Psalette, where nothing seems ever to
pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoi-
selle Gamard. There is a very genial
old sacristan at Tours, who introduced
me to this cloister from the church. It
is very small and solitary, and much
mutilated, but it nestles with a kind of

En Province.

[July,

wasted friendliness beneath the big walls
of the cathedral. Its lower arcades have
been closed, and it has a little plot of
garden in the middle, with fruit-trees
which I should imagine to be too much
overshadowed. In one corner is a re-
markably picturesque turret, the cage
of a winding staircase which ascends
(no great distance) to an upper gal-
lery, where an old priest, the chanoine-
gardien of the church, was walking to
and fro with his breviary. The turret,
the gallery, and even the chanoine-gar-
dieu, belonged, that sweet September
morning, to the class of objects that are
dear to painters in water-colors.

in.

I have mentioned the church of Saint
Martin, which was for many years the
sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of
Tours. Originally the simple burial
place of the great apostle who, in the
fourth century, christianized Gaul, and
who, in his day a brilliant missionary
and worker of miracles, is chiefly known
to modern fame as the worthy that cut
his cloak in two at the gate of Amiens
to share it with a beggar (tradition fails
• to say, I believe, what he did with the
other half), the Abbey of Saint Mar-
tin, through the Middle Ages, waxed
rich and powerful, till it was known at
last as one of the most luxurious relig-
ious houses in Christendom, with kings
for its titular abbots (who, like Francis
I., sometimes turned and despoiled it),
and a great treasure of precious things.
It passed, however, through many vicis-
situdes. Pillaged by the Normans in
the ninth century and by the Huguenots
in the sixteenth, it received its death-
blow from the Revolution, which must
have brought to bear upon it an energy
of destruction proportionate to its mighty
bulk. At the end of the last century a
huge group of ruins alone remained, and
what we see to-day may be called the
ruin of a ruin. It is difficult to under-
stand how so vast an edifice can have been

so completely obliterated. Its site is
given up to several ugly streets, and a
pair of tall towers, separated by a space
which speaks volumes as to the size of
the church, and looking across the close-
pressed roofs to the happier spires of
the cathedral, preserve for the modern
world the memory of a great fortune, a
great abuse, perhaps, and at all events
a great penalty. One may believe that
to this day a considerable part of the
foundations of the great abbey is buried
in the soil of Tours. The two surviv-
ing towers, which are dissimilar in shape,
are enormous ; with those of the cathe-
dral they form the great landmarks of
the town. One of them bears the name
of the Tour de 1'Horloge; the other,
the so-called Tour Charlemagne, was
erected (two centuries after her death)
over the tomb of Luitgarde, wife of the
.great Emperor, who died at Tours in
800. I do not pretend to understand in
what relation these very mighty and ef-
fectually detached masses of masonry
stood to each other ; but in their gray
elevation and loneliness they are very
striking and suggestive to-day, holding
their hoary heads far above the modern
life of the town, and looking sad and
conscious, as they had outlived all uses.
I know not what is supposed to have
become of the bones of the blessed saint
during the various scenes of confusion
in which they may have got mislaid ;
but a mystic connection with his won-
der working relics may be perceived in
a strange little sanctuary on the left of
the street, which opens in front of the
Tour Charlemagne — the rugged base
of which, by the way, inhabited like a
cave, with a diminutive doorway, in
which, as I passed, an old woman stopd
cleaning a pot, and a little dark window
decorated with homely flowers, would be
appreciated by a painter in search of
" bits." The present shrine of Saint
Martin is inclosed (provisionally, I sup-
pose) in a very modern structure of
timber, where, in a dusky cellar, to

1883.]

En Province.

which you descend by a wooden stair-
case adorned with votive tablets and
paper roses, is placed a tabernacle sur-
rounded by twinkling tapers and pros-
trate worshipers. Even this crepuscular
vault, however, fails, I think, to attain
solemnity, for the whole place is strange-
ly vulgar and garish. The Catholic
church, as churches go to-day, is certain-
ly the most spectacular ; but it must feel
that it has a great fund of impressive-
ness to draw upon when it opens such
queer little shops of sanctity as this. It
is impossible not to be struck with the
grotesqueness of such an establishment,
as the last link in the chain of a great
ecclesiastical tradition. In the same
street, on the other side, a little below,
is something better worth your visit than
the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at
a high door in a white wall (there is a
cross above it), and a fresh-faced sister
of the convent of the Petit Saint Mar-
tin will let you into the charming little
cloister, or rather fragment of a cloister.
Only one side of this exquisite structure
remains, but the whole place is effect-
ive. In front of the beautiful arcade,
which is terribly bruised and obliterat-
ed, is one of those walks of interlaced til-
leuls which are so frequent in Touraine,
and into which the green light filters so
softly through a lattice of clipped twigs.
Beyond this is a garden, and beyond
the garden are tfce other buildings of the
convent, where the placid sisters keep a
school — a test, doubtless, of placidity.
The imperfect arcade, which dates from
the beginning of the sixteenth century
(I know nothing of it but what is re-
lated in Mrs. Pattison's Renaissance in
France), is a truly enchanting piece of
work ; the cornice and the angles of the
arches being covered with the daintiest
sculpture of arabesques, flowers, fruit,
medallions, cherubs, griffins, all in the
finest and most attenuated chiseling.
It is like the chasing of a bracelet in
stone. The taste, the fancy, the ele-
gance, the refinement, bring tears to the

eyes ; such a piece of work is the purest
flower of the French Renaissance ; it is
one of the most delicate things in all
Touraine. There is another fine thing
at Tours which is not particularly deli-
cate, but which makes a great impres-
sion — the very interesting old church
of Saint Julian, lurking in a crooked
corner, at the right of the Rue Royale,
near the point at which this indifferent
thoroughfare emerges — with its little
cry of admiration — on the bank of the
Loire. Saint Julian stands to-day in a
kind of neglected hollow, where it is
much shut in by houses ; but in the
year 1225, when the edifice was begun,
the site was doubtless, as the architects
say, more eligible. At present, indeed,
when once you have caught a glimpse
of the stout, serious Romanesque tower,
which is not high, but strong, you feel
that the building has something to say,
and that you must stop to listen to it.
"Within, it has a vast and splendid nave,
of immense height — the nave of a
cathedral, with a shallow choir and
transepts, and some admirable old glass.
I spent half an hour there one morning
— listening to what the church had to
say — in perfect solitude. Not a wor-
shiper entered, not even an old man
with a broom. I have always thought
there is a sex in fine buildings ; and
Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of
the masculine gender. It was that same
morning, I think, that I went in search
of the old houses of Tours ; for the town
contains several goodly specimens of the
domestic architecture of the past. The
dwelling to which the average Anglo-
Saxon will most promptly direct his
steps, and the only one I have space to
mention, is the so-called Maison de Tris-
tan PHermite, — a gentleman whom the
readers of Quentin Durward will not
have forgotten — the hangman in ordi-
nary to the great King Louis XI. Un-
fortunately the house of Tristan is not
the house of Tristan at all ; this illusion
has been cruelly dispelled. There are

En Province.

[July,

no illusions left, at all, in the good city
of Tours, with iv^trd to Louis XL His
terrible c:iNtlo of Plessis, the picture of
which scuds :i shiver through the youth-
ful reader of Scott, has been reduced to
suburban insignificance ; and the resi-
dence of his triste compere — on the
front of which a festooned rope figures
as a motive for decoration — is observed
to have been erected in the succeeding
century. The Maison de Tristan may
be visited for itself, however, if not for
Walter Scott ; it is an exceedingly pic-
turesque old fa9ade, to which you pick
your way through a narrow and tortu-
ous street — a street terminating a little
beyond it in the walk beside the river.
An elegant gothic doorway is let into
the rusty-red brick-work, and strange
little beasts crouch at the angles of the
windows, which are surmounted by a
tall graduated gable, pierced with a small
orifice, where the large surface of brick,
lifted out of the shadow of the street,
looks yellow and faded. The whole
thing is disfigured and decayed ; but it
is a capital subject for a sketch in col-
ors. Only I must wish the sketcher
better luck — or a better temper — than
my own. If he ring the bell to be ad-
mitted to see the court, which I believe
is more sketchable still, let him have
patience to wait till the bell is answered.
He can do the out-side while they are
coming. The Maison de Tristan, I say,
may be visited for itself ; but I hardly
know what the remnants of Plessis-les-
Tours may be visited for. To reach
them you wander through crooked sub-
urban lanes, down the course of the
Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incon-
gruous spot, where a small, crude build-
ing of red brick is pointed out to you
by your cabman (if you happen to
drive) as the romantic abode of a su-
perstitious king, and where a strong
odor of pig- sties and other unclean
things so prostrates you for the moment
that you have no energy to protest
against this obvious fiction. You enter

a yard encumbered with rubbish and a
defiant dog, and an old woman emerges
from a shabby lodge and assures you
that you are indeed in an historic place.
The red brick building, which looks like
a small factory, rises on the ruins of the
favorite residence of the dreadful Louis.
It is now occupied by a company of
night-scavengers, whose huge carts are
drawn up in a row before it. I know
not whether this be what is called the
irony of fate ; at any rate, the effect of
it is to accentuate strongly the fact
(and through the most susceptible of our
senses) that there is no honor for the
authors of great wrongs. The dreadful
Louis is reduced simply to an offense to
the nostrils. The old woman shows
you a few fragments — several dark,
damp, much-encumbered vaults, denomi-
nated dungeons, and an old tower stair-
case, in good condition. There are the
outlines of the old moat ; there is also
the outline of the old guard-room, which
is now a stable ; and there are other
vague outlines and confused masses,
which I have forgotten. You need all
your imagination, and even then you
can make out that Plessis was a castle
of large extent, though the old woman,
as your eye wanders over the neigh-
boring potagers, talks a good deal about
the gardens and the park. The place
looks mean and flat, and as you drive
away you scarcely know whether to be
glad or sorry that all* those bristling
horrors have been reduced to the com-
monplace. A certain flatness of impres-
sion awaits you also, I think, at Mar-
moutier, which is the other indispensa-
ble excursion in the near neighborhood
of Tours. The remains of this famous
abbey lie on the other bank of the
stream, about a mile and a half from the
town. You follow the edge of the big
brown river ; of a fine afternoon you
will be glad to go further still. The
abbey has gone the way of most abbeys,
but the place is a restoration as well as
a ruin, inasmuch as the sisters of the

1383.]

En Province.

Sacred Heart have erected a terribly
modern convent here. A large gothic
doorway, in a high fragment of ancient
wall, admits you to a garden-like in-
closure, of great extent, from which you
are further introduced into an extraordi-
narily tidy little parlor, where two good
nuns sit at work. One of these came
out with me, and showed me over the
place — a very definite little woman,
with pointed features, an intensely dis-
tinct enunciation, and those pretty man-
ners which (for whatever other teach-
ings it may be responsible) the Catholic
church so often instills into its function-
aries. I have never seen a woman who
had got her lesson better than this little
trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The
interest of Marmoutier to-day is not so
much an interest of vision, so to speak,
as an interest of reflection — that is, if
you choose to reflect (for instance) upon
the wondrous legend of the seven sleep-
ers (you may see where they lie in a
row), who lived together — they were
brothers and cousins — in primitive
piety, in the sanctuary constructed by
the blessed Saint Martin (emulous of
his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the
face of the hillside that overhung the
Loire, and who, twenty-five years after
his death, yielded up their seven souls
at the same moment, and enjoyed the
curious privilege 'of retaining in their
faces, in spite of this process, the rosy
tints of life. The abbey of Marmou-
tier, which sprung from the grottoes in
the cliff to which Saint Gatianus and
Saint Martin retired to pray, was there-
fore the creation of the latter worthy, as
the other great abbey, in the town prop-
er, was the monument of his repose.
The cliff is still there, and a winding
staircase, in the latest taste, enables you
conveniently to explore its recesses.
These sacred niches are scooped out of
the rock, and will give you an impres-
sion if you cannot do without one. You
will feel them to be sufficiently venera-
ble when you learn that the particular
VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 3

pigeon-hole of Saint Gatianus, the first
Christian missionary to Gaul, dates from
the third century. They have been
dealt with as the Catholic church deals
with most of such places to-day : pol-
ished and furnished up, labeled and
ticketed — edited, with notes, in short,
like an old book. The process is a mis-
take. The early editions had more
sanctity. The modern buildings (of the
Sacred Heart), on which you look down
from these points of vantage, are in the
vulgar taste which seems doomed to
stamp itself on all new Catholic work ;
but there was nevertheless a great sweet-
ness in the scene. The afternoon was
lovely, and it was flushing to a close.
The large garden stretched beneath us,
blooming with fruit and wine and suc-
culent vegetables, and beyond it flowed
the shining river. The air was still, the
shadows were long, and the place, after
all, was full of memories, most of which
might pass for virtuous. It certainly
was better than Plessis-les-Tours.

IV.

Your business at Tours is to make
excursions, and if you make them all
you will be very well occupied. Tou-
raine is rich in antiquities, and an hour's
drive from the town in almost any di-
rection will bring you to the knowledge
of some curious fragment of domestic
or ecclesiastical architecture, some tur-
reted manor, some lonely tower, some
gabled village or historic site. Even,
however, if you do everything — which
was not my case — you cannot hope to
relate everything, and fortunately for
you the excursions divide themselves
into the greater and the less. You may
achieve most of the greater in a week
or two ; but a summer in Touraine —
which, by the way, must be a charming
thing — would contain none too many
days for the others. If you come down
to Tours from Paris, your best economy
is to spend a few days at Blois, where
a clumsy but rather attractive little inn,

En Province.

on the edge of the river, will offer you
a certain amount of that familiar an<l
intermittent hospitality which a few
weeks spent in the French provinces
teaches you to regard as the highest at-
tainable form of accommodation. Such
an economy I was unable to practice ; I
could only go to Blois (from Tours) to
spend the day ; but this feat I accom-
plished twice over. It is a very sympa-
pathetic little town, as we say nowa-
days, and one might easily resign one's
self to a week there. Seated on the
north bank of the Loire, it presents a
bright, clean face to the sun, and has
that aspect of cheerful leisure which be-
longs to all white towns that reflect
themselves in shining waters. It is the
water-front only of Blois, however, that
exhibits this lucid complexion ; the in-
terior is of a proper brownness, as be-
fits a signally historic city. The only
disappointment I had there was the dis-
covery that the castle, which is the spe-
cial object of one's pilgrimage, does not
overhang the river, as I had always al-
lowed myself to understand. It over-
hangs the town, but it is scarcely visible
from the river. That peculiar good for-
tune is reserved for Amboise and Chau-
mont. The Chateau de Blois is one of
the most beautiful and elaborate of all
the old royal residences of this part of
France, and I suppose it should have all
the honors of my description. As you
cross its threshold you step straight into
the brilliant movement of the French
Renaissance. But it is too rich to de-
scribe — I can only touch it here and
there. It must be premised that in
speaking of it as one sees it to-day, one
speaks of a monument completely re-
stored. The work of restoration has
lie.-ii as skillful as it is profuse; but it
rather chills the imagination. This is
perhaps almost the first thing you feel
as you approach the castle from the
streets of the town. These little streets,
as they leave the river, have pretensions
to romantic steepness ; one of them, in-

deed, which resolves itself into a high
staircase, with divergent wings — the
escalier monumental — achieved this re-
sult so successfully as to remind me
vaguely — I hardly know why — of the
great slope of the Capitol, beside the
Ara Coeli, at Rome. The view of that
part of the castle which figures to-day
as the back (it is the only aspect I had '
seen reproduced) exhibits the marks
of restoration in the most vivid way.
The long fa£ade, consisting only of bal-
conied windows, deeply recessed, erects
itself on the summit^of a considerable
hill, which gives a fine, plunging move-
ment to its foundations. The deep
niches of the windows are all aglow
with color; they have been repainted
with red and blue, relieved with gold
figures, and each of them looks more
like the royal box at a theatre than like
the aperture of a palace dark with
memories. For all this, however, and
in spite of the fact that, as in some oth-
ers of the chateaux of Touraine (always
excepting the colossal Chambord which
is not in Touraine !), there is less vast-
ness than one had expected, the least
hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly
impressive. Here, as elsewhere, light-
ness and grace are the keynote ; and
the recesses of the windows, with their
happy proportions, their sculpture and
their color, are the empty frames of
brilliant pictures. They need the fig-
ure of a Francis I. to complete them —
or of a Diane de Poitiers, or even of a
Henry III. The base of this exquisite
wing emerges from a bed of light ver-
dure, which has been allowed to mass it-
self there and which contributes to the
springing look of the walls ; while on
the right it joins the most modern por-
tion of the castle, the building construct-
ed, on foundations of enormous height
and solidity, in 1635, by Gaston d'Or-
leans. This fine frigid mansion — the
proper view of it is from the court with-
in — is one of the masterpieces of Fran-
9ois Mansard, whom a kind providence

1883.] En Province.

did not allow to make over the whole
palace in the superior manner of his
superior age. This had been a part of
Gaston's plan — he was a blunderer
born, and this precious project was
worthy of him. This execution of it
would surely have been one of the
great misdeeds of history. Partially
performed, the misdeed is not altogeth-
er to be regretted, for as one stands in
the court of the castle and lets one's
eye wander from the splendid wing of
Francis I., which ia the last word of
free and joyous invention, to the ruled
lines and blank spaces of the ponder-
ous erection of Mansard, one makes
one's reflections upon the advantage, in
even the least personal of the arts, of
having something to say, and upon the
stupidity of a taste which had ended by
becoming an aggregation of negatives.
Gaston's wing, taken by itself, has much
of the bel air which was to belong to
the architecture of Louis XIV. ; but
taken in contrast to its flowering, laugh-
ing, living neighbor, it marks the differ-
ence between inspiration and calcula-
tion. We scarcely grudge it its place,
however, for it adds a price to the rest
of the chateau. We have entered the
court, by the way, by jumping over the
walls. The more orthodox method is
to follow a modern terrace, which leads
to the left, from the side of the chateau
that I began by speaking of, and passes
round, ascending, to a little square on
a considerably higher level, which is not,
like the very modern square on which
the back (as I have called it) looks out,
a thoroughfare. This small, empty place,
oblong in form, at once bright and quiet,
with a certain grass-grown look, offers
an excellent setting to the entrance-front
of the palace, the wing of Louis XII.
The restoration here has been lavish ;
but it was no more than a just reaction
against the injuries, still more lavish, by
which the unfortunate building had long
been overwhelmed. It had fallen into
a state of ruinous neglect, relieved only

by the misuse proceeding from succes-
sive generations of soldiers, for whom its
charming chambers served as barrack-
room. Whitewashed, mutilated, dishon-
ored, the castle of Blois may be said to
have escaped simply with its life. This is
the history of Amboise as well, and is to
a certain extent the history of Chambord.
Delightful, at any rate was the refreshed
fa9ade of Louis XII., as I stood and
looked at it one bright September morn-
ing. In that soft, clear, merry light of
Touraine, everything shows, everything
speaks. Charming are the taste, the
happy proportions, the color of this
beautiful front, to which the new feel-
ing for a purely domestic architecture —
an architecture of security and tran-
quillity, in which art could indulge it-
self— gave an air of youth and glad-
ness. It is true that for a long time to
come the castle of Blois was neither
very safe nor very quiet ; but its dan-
gers came from within, from the evil pas-
sions of its inhabitants, and not from
siege or invasion. The front of Louis
XII. is of red brick, crossed here and
there with purple ; and the purple state
of the high roof, relieved with chimneys
beautifully treated and with the embroi-
dered caps of pinnacles and arches, with
the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and
the festooned rope which formed the
devices of Anne of Brittany — the tone
of this rich-looking roof carries out the
mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair
windows look as if they had expanded
to let in the rosy dawn of the Renais-
sance. Charming, for that matter, are
the windows of all the chateaux of Tou-
raine, with their squareness corrected
(as it is not in the Tudor architecture)
by the curve of the upper corners,
which makes this line look — above the
expressive aperture — like a penciled
eyebrow. The low door of this front
is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly
astride of a stiffly-draped charger, sits
in profile an image of the good King

En Province.

[July,

Louis. Good as he had been, the fa-
ther of his people as he was called (I
believe he remitted several taxes), he
was not good enough to pass muster at
the Revolution, and the effigy I have
just described is no more than a repro-
duction of the primitive statue, demol-
ished at that period. Pass beneath it,
into the court, and the sixteenth century
closes round you ; it is a pardonable
Hight of fancy to say that the expres-
sive faces of an age in which human
passions lay very near the surface seem
to look out at you from the windows,
from the balconies, from the thick foli-
age of the sculpture. The portion of
the wing of Louis XII. that looks to-
ward the court is supported on a deep
arcade. On your right is the wing
erected by Francis I., the reverse of the
mass of building which you see on ap-
proaching the castle. This exquisite,
this extravagant, this transcendent piece
of architecture is the most joyous ut-
terance of the French Renaissance. It
is covered with an embroidery of sculp-
ture in which every detail is worthy of
the hand of a goldsmith. In the mid-
dle of it, or rather a little to the left,
rises the famous winding staircase which
even the ages which most misused it
must vaguely have admired. It forms
a kind of chiseled cylinder, with wide
interstices, so that the stairs are open to
the air. Every inch of this structure,
of its balconies, its pillars, its great cen-
tral columns, is wrought over with love-
ly images, strange and ingenious de-
vices, prime among which is the great
heraldic salamander of Francis I. The
salamander is everywhere at Blois —
over the chimneys, over thexdoors, on
the walls; this whole division of the
castle bears the stamp of that eminently
pictorial prince. The running cornice
along the top of the front is like an un-
folded, an elongated, bracelet. The win-
dows of the attic are like shrines for
saints. The gargoyles, the medallions,
the statuettes, the festoons, are like the

elaboration of some precious cabinet
rather than the details of a building ex-
posed to the weather and to the ages. In
the interior there is a profusion of res-
toration, and it is all restoration in color.
This has been, evidently, a work of
great science and research, but it will
easily strike you as overdone. The
universal freshness is a discord, a false
note ; it seems to light up the dusky past
with an unnatural glare. Begun in the
reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible
process — the more terrible always the
more you admit that it has been neces-
sary — has been carried so far that there
is now scarcely a square inch of the in-
terior that has the color of the past
upon it. It is true that the place had
been so coated over with modern abuse
that something was needed to keep it
alive ; it is only, perhaps, a pity that
the restorers, not content with saving
its life, should have undertaken to re-
store its youth. The love of consist-
ency, in such a business, is a dangerous
lure. All the old apartments have been
rechristened, as it were ; the geography
of the castle has been reestablished. The
guard-rooms, the bed-rooms, the closets,
the oratories, have recovered their iden-
tity. Every, spot connected with the
murder of tha Duke of Guise is point-
ed out by a small, shrill boy who takes
you from room to room, and who has
learned his lesson in perfection. The
place is full of Catherine de' Medici, of
Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of
echoes, of possible evocations and re-
vivals. It is covered with crimson and
gold ; the fireplaces and the ceilings are
magnificent ; they look like expensive
" sets " at the grand opera. I should
have mentioned that below, in the court,
the front of the wing of Gaston d'Or-
leans faces you as you enter, so that
the place is a course of French history.
Inferior in beauty and grace to the oth-
er portions of the castle, the wing is yet
a nobler monument than the memory
of Gaston deserves. The second of the

1883.] En Province.

sons of Henry IV., who was no more
fortunate as a father than as a husband,
younger brother of Louis XIIL, and
father of the great Mademoiselle, the
most celebrated, most ambitious, most
self-complacent and most unsuccessful
f.lle a marier in French history, passed
in enforced retirement at the castle of
Blois the close of a life of clumsy in-
trigues against Cardinal Richelieu, in
which his rashness was only equaled
by his pusillanimity and his ill-luck by
his inaccessibility to correction, and
which, after so many follies and shames,
was properly summed up in the project,
begun but not completed, of demolish-
ing the beautiful habitation of his exile
in order to erect a better one. With
Gaston d'Orleans, however, who lived
there without dignity, the history of the
Chateau de Blois declines. Its interest-
ing period is that of the wars of religion.
It was the chief residence of Henry
III., and the scene of the principal events
of his weak, violent, immoral reign. It
has been restored more than enough, as
I have said, by architects and decora-
tors ; the visitor, as he moves through
its empty rooms, which are at once brill-
iant and ill-lighted (they have not been
refurnished), undertakes a little restora-
tion of his own. His imagination helps
itself from the things that remain ; he
tries to see the life of the sixteenth cen-
tury in its form and dress — its turbu-
lence, its passions, its loves and hates, its
treacheries, falsities, touches of faith,
its latitude of personal development, its
presentation of the whole nature, its no-
bleness of costume, charm of speech,
splendor of taste, un equaled pictur-
esqueness. The picture is full of move-
ment, of contrasted light and darkness,
full altogether of abominations. Mixed
up with them all is the great name of
religion, so that the drama wants noth-
ing to make it complete. What episode
was ever more perfect — looked at as a
dramatic occurrence — than the murder
of the Duke of Guise ? The insolent

prosperity of the victim ; the weakness,
the vices, the terrors, of the author of
the deed ; the perfect execution of the
plot ; the accumulation of horror in what
followed it, give it, as a crime, a kind of
immortal solidity. But we must not
take the Chateau de Blois too hard ; I
went there, after all, by way of enter-
tainment. If among these sinister mem-
ories, your visit should threaten to prove
a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
removing the impression. You may
treat yourself, at Blois, to a very cheer-
ful afterpiece. There is a charming in-
dustry practiced there, and practiced in
charming conditions. Follow the bright
little quay, down the river, till you get
quite out of the town — reach the point
where the road beside the Loire becomes
sinuous and attractive, turns the corner
of diminutive headlands, and makes you
wonder what is beyond. Let not your
curiosity induce you, however, to pass by
a modest white villa which overlooks
the stream, inclosed in a fresh little
court ; for here dwells an artist — an ar-
tist in faience. There is no sort of sign,
and the place looks peculiarly private.
But if you ring at the gate, you will not
be turned away. You will, on the con-
trary, be ushered upstairs, into a parlor

— there is nothing resembling a shop

— encumbered with specimens of re-
markably handsome pottery. The work
is of the best, a careful reproduction
of old forms, colors, devices ; and the
master of the establishment is one of
those completely artistic types that are
often found in France. His reception
is as friendly as his work is ingenious,
and I think it is not too much to say
that you like the work the better because
he has produced it. His vases, cups and
jars, lamps, platters, plaques, with their
deep, strong hues, their innumerable
figures, their family likeness and wide
variations, are scattered through his oc-
cupied rooms ; they serve at once as his
stock-in-trade and as household orna-
ment. As we all know, this is an age

38 Something Passes. [July,

of prose, of machinery, of wholesale pro- plenty of time. The place makes a lit-

duction, of coarse and hasty processes, tie vignette, leaves an impression : the

But one brings away from the establish- quiet white house, in its garden, on the

meut of the very intelligent M. Ulysse road by the wide clear river, without

the sense of a less eager activity and a the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of

greater search for perfection. He has so much of our modern industry. It

but a few workmen, and he gives them ought to gratify Mr. Ruskin.

Henry James.

SOMETHING PASSES.

SOMETHING passes in the air,
That if seen would be most fair ;
And if we the ear could train
To a keener joy and pain,
Sweeter warblings would be heard
Than from wild Arabian bird :
Something passes.

Blithest in the spring it stirs,
Wakes with earliest harbingers ;
Then it peers from heart's-ease faces,
Clothes itself in wind-flower graces ;
Or, begirt with waving sedge,
Pipes upon the river's edge ;
Or its whispering way doth take
Through the plumed and scented brake ;
Or, within the silent wood,
Whirls one leaf in fitful mood.
Something knits the morning dews
In a web of seven hues;
Something with the May-fly races,
Or the pallid blowball chases
Till it darkens 'gainst the moon,
Full, upon a night of June :
Something passes.

Something climbs, from bush or croft,

On a gossamer stretched aloft ;

Sails, with glistening spars and shrouds,

Till it meets the sailing clouds ;

Else it with the swallow flies,

Glimpsed at dusk in southern skies ;

Glides before the even-star,

Steals its light, and beckons far.

Something sighs within the sigh

Of the wind, that, whirling by,

1883.]

Tompkins.

Strews the roof and flooded eaves
With the autumn's dead-ripe leaves.
Something — still unknown to me —
Carols in the winter tree,
Or doth breathe a melting strain
Close beneath the frosted pane:
Something passes.

Painters, fix its fleeting lines ;
Show us by what light it shines!
Poets, whom its pinions fan,
Seize upon it, if ye can !
All in vain, for, like the air,
It goes through the finest snare :
Something passes.

Edith M. Thomas.

TOMPKINS.

HE was a small, wiry man, about
forty years of age, with a bright young
face, dark eyes, and iron-gray hair. We
were reclining in a field, under a clump
of pines, on a height overlooking Lake
Champlain. Near by were the dull-red
brick buildings of the University of
Vermont. Burlington, blooming with
flowers and embowered in trees, sloped
away below us. Beyond the town, the
lake, a broad plain of liquid blue, slept
in the June sunshine, and in the farther
distance towered the picturesque Adiron-
dacks.

" It is certainly true," said Tompkins,
turning upon his side so as to face me,
and propping his head with his hand,
while his elbow rested on the ground.
" Don't you remember, I used to insist
that they were peculiar, when we were
here in college ? "

I remembered it very distinctly, and
so informed my old classmate.

" I always said," he continued, " that
I could not do my best in New England,
because there is no sentiment in the at-
mosphere, and the people are so pecul-
iar."

" You have been living in Chicago ? "
I remarked inquiringly.

" That has been my residence ever
since we were graduated ; .that is, for
about seventeen years," he replied.

"You are in business there, I be-
lieve ? " I questioned.

Tompkins admitted that he was, but
did not name the particular line.

" Halloo ! " he suddenly called out,
rising, to his feet, and looking toward the
little brown road near us. I looked in*
the same direction, and saw a plainly
dressed elderly couple on foot, appar-
ently out for a walk. Tompkins went
hastily toward them, helped the lady
over the fence, the gentleman following,
and a moment later I was introduced to
Mr. and Mrs. Pember, of Chicago.

Tompkins gathered some large stones,
pulled a board off the fence in rather a
reckless manner, and fixed a seat for
the couple where they could lean against
a tree. When they were provided for,
I reclined again, but Tompkins stood
before us, talking and gesticulating.

"This," said he, "is the identical
place, Mrs. Pember. Here you can see

Tompkins.

[July,

the beauties I have so often described.
Before you are the town and the lake,
and beyond them the mountains of
Northern X»:vv York; and (if you will
please to turn your head) that great
blue wall behind you, twenty miles
away, is composed of the highest moun-
tains in Vermont. The mountains in
front of you are the Adirondacks, and
those behind you are the Green Moun-
tains. You are at the central point of
this magnificent Champlain Valley ; and
you are comfortably seated here beneath
the shade, on this the loveliest day of
summer. Dear frieuds, I congratulate
you," and Tompkins shook hands with
Mr. and Mrs. Pember.

" And there, Timothy," observed the
old gentleman, pointing at the Univer-
sity buildings with his cane, " is actually
where you went to college."

" It was in those memorable and
classic halls, as my classmate here can
testify," replied Tompkins. " And here
we roamed in ' Academus' sacred shade,'
and a good deal beyond it. We went
fishing and boating during term time,
and made long trips to the mountains
in the vacations. In the mean time, this
wonderful valley was photographed upon
the white and spotless sensorium of my
youthful soul."

" Going, going, going ! " cried Mrs.
Pember, with a light, rippling laugh,
glancing at me. "That is the way I
stop Mr. Tompkins when he gets too
flowery."

Tompkins looked at me and reddened.
"I own up," he remarked, "I am an
auctioneer in Chicago."

I hastened to say that I felt sure he
was a good one, and added, in the kind-
est way I could, that I had just been
wondering how he had become such a
good talker.

" Is it a good deal of a come-down ? "
asked Tompkins, with a mixture of
frankness and embarrassment.

I replied that the world was not what
we had imagined in our college days,

and that the calling of an auctioneer
was honorable.

A general conversation followed, in
the course of which it appeared that
Tompkins had boarded at the home of
the Pembers for several years. They
evidently looked upon him almost as
their own son. They were traveling
with him during his summer rest.

" This is a queer world," observed
Tompkins, dropping down beside me,
aud lying flat on his back, with his hands
under his head. " I came to college
from a back neighborhood over in York
State, and up to the day I was gradu-
ated, and for a long time afterward, I
thought I must be President of the
United States, or a Presbyterian minis-
ter, or a great poet, or something re-
markable, and here I am an auctioneer."

Occasional remarks were made by the
rest of us for a while, but soon the talk-
ing was mainly done by Tompkins.

Said he, " Since I was graduated, I
never was back here but once before,
and that was four years ago next Au-
gust. I was traveling this way then, and
reached here Saturday evening. I was
in the pork business at that time, as a
clerk, and Had to stop off here to see a
man for theifirm. I put up at the best
hotel, feeling as comfortable aud indif-
ferent as I ewer did in my life. There
was not the fehadow of an idea in my
mind of what was going to happen. On
Sunday morning I walked about town,
and it began to come down on me."

"What, the town?" asked Mrs.
Pember.

" No ; the strangest and most unac-
countable feeling I ever had in my life,"
answered Tompkins. " It was thirteen
years since I had said good-by to col-
lege. It had long ago become apparent
to me that the ideas with which I had
graduated were visionary and impracti-
cable. I comprehended that the college
professors were not the great men I had
once thought them, and that a college
president was merely a human being. I

1883.]

Tompkins.

had been hardened by fighting my way,
as a friendless young man has to do in
a great city. As the confidential clerk
of a large pork house in Chicago, I felt
equal to ' the next man,' whoever he
might be. If a professor had met me as
I got off the cars here Saturday night,
it would have been easy for me to snub
him. But Sunday morning, as familiar
objects began to appear in the course of
my walk, the strange feeling of which I
have spoken came over me. It was the
feeling of old times. The white clouds,
the blue lake, this wonderful scenery,
thrilled me, and called back the college
dreams."

As he spoke, my old classmate's voice
trembled.

" You may remember that I used to
like Horace and Virgil and Homer," he
remarked, sitting up, crossing his feet
tailor-fashion, and looking appealingly
at me.

I replied, enthusiastically and truly,
that he had been one of our best lovers
of the poets.

" Well," continued Tompkins, " that
Sunday morning those things began to
come back to me. It wasn't exactly
delightful. My old ambition to do some-
thing great in the world awoke as if
from a long sleep. As I prolonged my
walk the old associations grew stronger.
When I came near the college buildings
it seemed as if I still belonged here.
The hopes of an ideal career were before
me as bright as ever. The grand things
I was going to do, the volumes of poems
and other writings by Tompkins, and
his marvelous successes were as clear as
day. In short, the whole thing was con-
jured up as if it were a picture, just as
it used to be when I was a student in
college, and it was too much for me."

Tompkins seemed to be getting a lit-
tle hoarse, and his frank face was very
serious.

" Timothy," suggested Mr. Pember,
"may be you could tell us what that
big rock is, out in the lake."

" Why, father, don't you remember ?
That is rock Dunder," said Mrs. Pem-
ber.

" I guess it is," said the old gentle-
man, musingly.

" Well," resumed Tompkins, " as I
was saying, on one side were Homer and
Virgil and Horace and Tompkins, and
on the other was pork. I cannot ex-
plain it, but somehow there it was. The
two pictures, thirteen years apart, were
brought so close together that they
touched. It was something I do not
pretend to understand. Managing to
get by the college buildings, I came up
to this spot where we are now. You
will infer that my eyes watered badly,
and to tell the truth they did. Of
course it is all very well," explained
Tompkins, uncrossing his legs, turning
upon his side, and propping his head on
his hand again, — " of course it is all
very well to rake down the college, and
say Alma Mater does n't amount to any-
thing. The boys all do it, and they be-
lieve what they say for the first five or
six years after they leave here. But
we may as well understand that if we
know how to slight the old lady, and
don't go to see her for a dozen years,
she knows how to punish. She had me
across her knee, that Sunday morning,
in a way that I would have thought im-
possible. After an hour I controlled
myself, and went back to the hotel. I
brushed my clothes, and started for
church, with a lump in my throat all
the while. My trim business suit did n't
seem so neat and nobby as usual. The
two pictures, the one of the poets and
the other of pork, were in my mind. I
shied along the sidewalk in a nervous
condition, and reaching the church with-
out being recognized managed to get a
seat near the door. Could I believe my
senses ? I knew that I was changed,
probably past all recognition, but around
me I saw the faces of my Burlington
friends exactly as they had been thirteen
years before. I did not understand then,

Tompkins.

[July,

as I do now, that a young man in busi-
ness in Chicago will become gray-headed
in ten years, though he might have
lived a quiet life in Vermont for quarter
of ;i century, without changing a hair."

" It is the same with horses," sug-

; Mr. Pember. "Six years on a

horse-car in New York about uses up

an average horse, though he would have

been good for fifteen years on a farm."

•• Exactly," said Tompkins. " You
can imagine how I felt that Sunday, with
my hair half whitewashed."

" You know I always said you might
have begun coloring your hair, Timo-
thy," said Mrs. Pember kindly.

"Yes," replied Tompkins, with an
uneasy glance at me ; " but I did n't do
it. There was one thing in the church
there, that morning, that I shall never
have a better chance to tell of, and I
am going to tell it now, while you are
here."

This last sentence was addressed to
me, and my old classmate uttered the
words with a gentleness and frankness
that brought back my best recollections
of him in our college days, when he
was "little Tompkins," the warmest-
hearted fellow in our class.

" Do you remember Lucy Gary ? " he
asked.

I replied that I did, very well indeed ;
and the picture of a youthful face, of
Madonna -like beauty, came out with
strange distinctness from the memories
of the past, as I said it.

" Well, I saw Lucy there," continued
Tompkins, " singing in the choir in
church, looking just as she did in the
long-ago days when we used to sere-
nade her. I am willing to tell you
about it."

Tompkins said this in such a confid-
ing manner that I instinctively moved
toward him and took hold of his hand.

"All right, * classmate," he said, sit-
ting up, and looking me in the eyes in a
peculiarly winning way that had won us
all when he was in college.

" Why, boys ! " exclaimed Mrs. Pem-
ber, with her light laugh.

Tompkius found a large stone, put it
against a tree, and sat down on it, while
I reclined at his feet. He said, —

" You have asked me, Mrs. Pember,
very often, about the people up here,
and now I will tell you about some of
them. Do you notice that mountain
away beyond the lake, in behind the
others, so that you can see only the top,
which is shaped like a pyramid ? That is
old Whiteface, and it is more than forty
miles from here. It used to be under-
stood that there was nothing whatever
over there except woods and rocks and
bears and John Brown. But the truth
is, right at the foot of the mountain, in
the valley on this side, there is a little
village called Wilmington, and it is the
centre of the world. Lucy Gary and I
were born there. It was not much of
a village then, and it is about the same
now. There was no church, and no
store, and no hotel, in my time ; there
were only half a dozen dwelling-houses,
and a blacksmith shop, and a man who
made shoes. Lucy lived in the house
next to ours. Her father was the man
who made "shoes. Lucy and I picked
berries and rambled about with Rover,
the dog, from the time we were little.
Of course you will naturally think there
is something romantic coming, but there
is not. We were just a couple of chil-
dren playing together ; and we studied
together as we grew older. They made
a great deal of studying and schooling
over there. They had almost as much
respect for learning then in Wilming-
ton as they have now among the White
Mountains, where they will not allow
any waiters at the hotels who cannot
talk Greek.

" It was quite an affair when Lucy
and I left Wilmington and came to Bur-
lington. The departure of two inhab-
itants was a loss to the town. It was
not equal to the Chicago fire, but it was
an important event. I went to college,

1883.]

Tompkins.

and Lucy came over the lake to work
in a woolen factory. There is where
she worked," pointing to the beautiful
little village of Winooski, a mile away
behind us, in the green valley of Onion
River.

"And she had to work there for a
living, while you went to college ? "
asked Mrs. Pember.

" That was it," said Torapkins. " We
used to serenade her sometimes, with the
rest ; but she seemed to think it was not
exactly the right thing for a poor fac-
tory girl, and so we gave it up. I used
to see her occasionally, but somehow
there grew up a distance between us."

" How was that ? " inquired Mrs.
Pember.

" Well, to tell the truth," answered
Tompkins, "I think my college ideas
had too much to do with it. I did not
see it at the time, but it has come over
me lately. When a young chap gets
his head full of new ideas, he is very
likely to forget the old ones."

" You did not mean to do wrong, I
am sure," said Mrs. Pember.

" The excuse I have," continued
Tompkins, " is that I had to -work and
scrimp and suffer so myself, to get along
and pay my way, that I hardly thought
of anything except my studies and how
to meet my expenses. Then there was
that dream of doing some great thing in
the world. I taught the district school
in Wilmington three months during my
Sophomore year to get money to go on
with, and I think that helped to make
me ambitious. It was the sincere con-
viction of the neighborhood over there
that I would be president of the college
or of the United States. I do not think
they would have conceded that there
was much difference in the two posi-
tions. I felt that I would be disgraced
if I did not meet their expectations. By
one of those coincidences which seemed
to follow our fortunes, Lucy made a
long visit home when I was teaching in
Wilmington. She was one of my pu-

pils. She was a quiet little lady, and
hardly spoke a loud word, that I re-
member, all winter."

" Did you try to talk to her, Timo-
thy ? " asked Mrs. Pember.

" I do not claim that I did," answered
Tompkins. "I was studying hard to
keep up with my class, and that was the
reason. But I wish I had paid more
attention to Lucy Gary that winter. I
would not have you think there was any-
thing particular between Lucy and me.
It was not that."

" We will think just what we please,"
interrupted Mrs. Pember, in a serious
tone.

" Well," continued the narrator, " it
would be absurd to suppose there was
any such thing."

There was a long pause. " You had
better tell the rest of the story, Tim-
othy," said the old gentleman, persua-
sively.

" Yes, I will," responded Tompkins.
" After I came back to college I got
along better than before I had taught.
The money I received for teaching
helped me, and another thing aided me.
The folks in Wilmington found out how
a poor young man works to get through
college. Some of us used to live on a
dollar a week apiece, and board our-
selves in our rooms, down there in the
buildings ; and we were doing the hard-
est kind of studying at the same time.
We would often club together, one do-
ing the cooking for five or six. The
cook would get off without paying. It
was one of the most delightful things
in the world to see a tall young man in
a calico dressing-gown come out on the
green, where we would be playing foot-
ball, and make the motions of beating
an imaginary gong for dinner. In or-
der to appreciate it, you need to work
hard and play hard and live on the slim-
mest kind of New England fare. But
there is one thing even better than that.
To experience the most exquisite de-
light ever known by a Burlington stu-

Tompkins.

[July,

dent, you ought to have an uncle Ja-
son. While I was teaching in Wilming-
ton, my uncle Jason, from North Elbu,
which was close by, came there. When
he found out what an important man I
was, and how I was fighting my way,
mpathized wonderfully. He was
not on good terms at our house, but he
called at my school, and almost cried
over me. He was not a man of much
learning, but he looked upon those who
were educated as a superior order of
beings. I was regarded in the neigh-
borhood as a sort of martyr to science,
a genius who was working himself to
death. I was the only public man ever
produced by the settlement up to that
date. It was part of the religion of the
place to look upon me as something
unusual, and uncle Jason shared the
general feeling. I could see, as he sat
there in the school-house observing the
school, that he was very proud of me.
Before leaving, he called me into the
entry and gave me a two-dollar bill. It
was generous, for he was a poor man,
and had his wife and children to sup-
port. It brought the tears to my eyes
when he handed me the money, and told
me I was the flower of the family and
the pride of the settlement. I felt as if
I would rather die than fail of fulfilling
the expectations of my friends. There
was great delight in it, and it was an
inexpressible joy to know that my rel-
atives and the neighbors cared so much
for me.

" To comprehend this thing fully,
Mrs. Pember, you ought to be in col-
lege, and when you are getting hard up,
and see no way but to leave, get letters,
as I did from uncle Jason, with five or
six dollars at a time in them. Such a
trifle would carry you through to the
end of the term, and save your standing
in the class. If you were a Burlington
college boy, while you might be willing
to depart this life in an honorable man-
ner, you would riot be willing to lose
your mark and standing as a student.

You would regard the consequences of
such a disaster as very damaging to
your character, and certain to remain
with you forever.

" I may as well say, while it is on my
mind, that I do think this matter of edu-
cation is a little overdone in this part
of the country. A young man is not
the centre of the universe merely be-
cause he is a college student, or a grad-
uate, and it is not worth while to scare
him with any such idea. The only
way he can meet the expectation of his
friends, under such circumstances, is to
get run over accidentally by the cars.
That completes his martyrdom, and af-
fords his folks an opportunity to boast
of what he would have been if he had
lived."

" Tell us more about Lucy," said
Mrs. Pember.

" Yes, certainly," replied Tompkins.
" Lucy had a wonderful idea of poetry
and writing. It is really alarming to a
stranger to see the feeling there is up
here in that way. The impression pre-
vails generally that a writer is superior
to all other people on earth. I remem-
ber to have heard that one of our class,
a year after we were graduated, started
a newspaper back here about ten miles,
on the bank of the Onion River. He
might just as well have started it under
a sage bush out on the alkali plains.
He gave it some queer Greek name,
and I heard that the publication was
first semi-weekly, then weekly, and then
very weakly indeed, until it came to a
full stop at the end of six months. It
would have been ridiculous anywhere
else ; but being an attempt at literature,
I suppose it was looked upon here as
respectable."

" And did you use to write poetry ? "
queried Mrs. Pember.

" Not to any dangerous extent," re-
plied Tompkins. " I do not deny that
I tried while in college, but I reformed
when I went West. I think uncle
Jason always had an idea that it might

1883.]

Tompkins.

be better for me to be Daniel Webster.
He stood by me after I left college, and
for three years I continued to get those
letters, with five or six dollars at a time
in them. They kept me from actual
suffering sometimes, before I got down
off my stilts, and went to work, like an
honest man, in the pork business."

'' I thought you were going to tell us
something about that girl," suggested
Mrs. Pember.

" Yes, I was," rejoined Tompkins.
" When I saw Lucy here, four years ago,
in the gallery with the singers, I felt as
if it would be impossible for me to face
her and talk with her. She would not
have known me, for one thing. When
I was a brown-haired boy, making po-
etry, and being a martyr, and doing
serenading, and living on codfish and
crackers and soup, I could meet Lucy
with a grand air that made her shud-
der ; but as I sat there in church, gray
and worn, I dreaded to catch her eye, or
have her see me. Although there was
not three years' difference in our ages,
yet it seemed to me that I was very old,
while she was still blooming. Then
there was the feeling that I ha^d not be-
come a great poet, or oratoiyor any-
thing really worth while. Oa the con-
trary, I was just nobody. It seemed
like attending my own funeral. I felt
disgraced. Of course it was not all
true. I had been a good, square, hon-
est, hard-working man."

" Yes, you had indeed, Timothy," as-
sented Mrs. Pember, with an emphatic
nod.

" Yes indeed, I had," repeated Tomp-
kins, his chin quivering. "It was not
the thing for a fair-minded man to think
so poorly of himself ; but I was alone,
and the old associations and the solemn
services were very impressive. There
was Lucy in the choir ; she always
could sing like a nightingale. When I
heard her voice again, it overcame me.
I did not hear much of the sermon. I
think it was something about temptation

and the suggestions of the evil one ; but
I am not sure, for I had my head down
on the back of the pew in front of me
most of the time. I had to fight des-
perately to control my feelings. One
minute I would think that as soon as
the services closed I would rush around
and shake hands with my old acquaint-
ances, and the next minute would be
doing my best to swallow the lump in
my throat. It was as tough a sixty min-
utes as I ever passed. But finally the
services were ended. I felt that it was
plainly my duty to stop in the porch
and claim the recognition of my friends.
I did pause, and try for a few seconds to
collect myself ; but the lump grew big-
ger and choked me, while the tears
would flow. Besides that, as the adver-
sary just then, in the meanest possible
manner, suggested to my soul, there
was that pork. I knew I would have
to tell of it if I stopped. But I did not
stop ; I retreated. When I reached my
room in the hotel I felt a longing to get
out of town. Fortunately, I could not
leave on Sunday. So in the afternoon
I sat with the landlord on his broad
front platform, or piazza. It was not
the person who keeps the place now,
but one of the oldest inhabitants, who
knew all about the Burlington people.
He guessed that I was a college boy;
he thought he remembered something
about my appearance. I did not mind
talking freely with a landlord, for hotels
and boarding-houses had been my home
in Chicago. I had always been a sin-
gle man, just as I am to this day. This
landlord was a good-hearted old chap,
and it was pleasant to talk with him.
While we were sitting there, who should
come along the street but Lucy, with
a book in her hand. She was on the
opposite sidewalk, and did not look up.
She would not look at a hotel on Sun-
day. I asked the landlord about her,
and he told me all there was to tell.
She was living in one end of a little
wooden cottage over toward Winooski,

Tompkins.

[July,

another factory woman occupying the
other part of the house. They made a
home together. The landlord said Lucy
WHS an excellent woman, and might
have married one of the overseers in the
factory any time she chose for years
back, but that she preferred a single
life.

•' When I got back to Chicago I kept
thinking about Lucy Gary. The old times
when we used to live in Wilmington
came back to my mind. The truth of
it was, I was getting along a little, at
last, in Chicago in the way of property,
and I found myself all the while plan-
ning how I could have Lucy Carv near
me."

" Did you want to marry her, Timo-
thy ? " inquired Mrs. Pember.

" It was not that," he replied ; " but
I wanted to become acquainted with her
again. I knew she was the best girl
I had ever seen. She always was just
as good and pious as anybody could be.
We were like brother and sister, almost,
when young ; and when I thought of
home and my folks and old Wilmington
and the college days, somehow Lucy
was the centre of it all. In fact, al-
most everything else was gone. My
folks were scattered, and Lucy and un-
cle Jason were nearly the only per-
sons up this way that I could lay claim
to. There is a kind of lonesome streak
comes over a man when he has been
grinding away in a great city for a good
many years, and comes back to the old
places, and stees them so fresh and green
and quiet/and he can't get over it. He
will cling to anything that belongs to
old times. I was strongly influenced to
write to Lucy, but finally I did not. I
determined that I would get all I could
for two or three years, and then I would
come here and face things. I would
get something comfortable, and would
have a place I could call my own in
Chicago. Then, when I had it fixed, I
would come and see uncle Jason and
Lucy, and stand the racket Of course

it was nonsense to feel shy, but it seemed
to me that I could not say a word until
I had something to brag of. They
knew, in a general kind of way, that I
was in Chicago, dealing in pork, or do-
ing auctioneering or something, and that
was as much humiliation as I could en-
dure. To be sure, it was nothing to be
ashamed of, for I had been an honest,
faithful man ; but to come back to my
friends empty-handed, without money
or fame, and gray-headed at that, was
more than I could stand. If I had had
anything, or been anything, just to take
the edge off, I could have managed it.
As it was, I looked ahead and worked.
If any man in Chicago has tried and
planned and toiled during the last three
years, I am that man. There has been
a picture before my mind of a pleasant
home there."

" And have you calculated to marry
Lucy Gary ? " inquired Mrs. Pember,
in an eager voice.

" Perhaps it was not just in that way
I thought of it," replied the narrator,
very seriously. " You know I told you
that the landlord said she preferred a
single life."

" Timfyr.hy Tompkins," exclaimed the
old lady apprehensively, " don't deny
it, — don't ! Think how dreadfully you
will feel if you know you have told a
lie ! "

" It is nothing to be ashamed of, Tim-
othy," said Mr. Pember, in a kind and
sympathetic voice.

" If you put it in that way," an-
swered my old classmate, in strangely
mournful tones, " all I can say is, there
was never anything between us, — noth-
ing at all."

"And did you come here this time
to see her ? " inquired Mrs. Pember, al-
most starting from her seat, and with
the thrill of a sudden guess in her voice.

" I suppose it was as much that as
anything," replied Tompkins doggedly,
looking down, and poking with a short
stick in the ground at his feet.

1883.]

Tompkins.

" And that is what has made you act
so queer," mused Mrs. Pember. " Have
you seen her ? "

" Let him tell the story, Caroline,"
urged the old gentleman peevishly.

Tompkins looked gloomily out upon
the lake and .the broad landscape for a
few moments ; and then, resuming his
narrative, said, —

" As I was saying, I have worked
hard, and have got a nice little pile. I
am worth thirty-five thousand dollars.
When I made up my mind to come
East this summer, the money to pay
uncle Jason for what he had done was
all ready. It made me choke to think
how long I had let it run. I figured it
up as near as I could, — the two hun-
dred that came to' me in college, and the
two hundred after that; and I put in
the simple interest at seven per cent.,
according to the York State law, which
brought the sum total up to nearly nine
hundred ; and to $x it all right I ^nade
it an even tlf J* £ dollars. The-n I
bought a new b« J* .in bag, and W Jit to
a bank in Chicago and got the iconey
all in gold. I knew that wouWand ise
uncle Jason. He once talked hie pug
to California to dig. I supposj he had
never seen a pile of the real ye low coin
in his life. I wrote to him that I was
to be in Burlington, and that I would
be ever so glad if he would come over
and see me. I met him yesterday after-
noon, as he got off the boat, down at
the steamboat landing. He knew me,
and I knew him, although we \vere both
changed a good deal. After we had
talked a little, and got used to each
other, I took him up to my rooia in the
hotel. I was in a hurry to get at the
business part of my visit with hi u first ;
for it seemed to me that it would be
better to let him see, to begin with, that
I was not exactly poor, nor such an un-
grateful cub as may be he had ' nought
I was. It was my resolve that before
we talked of anything else I would ;et
that money off my conscience. I ki) ;w

that then I could hold up my head, and
discuss our neighborhood and old times,
and it would be plain sailing for me. I
had pictured to my mind a dozen times
how uncle Jason would look with that
new yellow buckskin bag crammed with
gold on his knee, steadying it with his
hand and talking to me. So when I got
him up to my room, and seated him in
a chair, I began the performance. I
got red in the face, and spluttered, and
flourished round with the bag and the
gold ; and to tell the truth, I fully ex-
pected to make the old man's hair rise
right up. But it did not work. He got
shaky and trembled, and somehow did
not seem to want the money at all, and
finally owned how it was. He said that
he had never given me a cent ; it was
all Lucy Gary's doing. And she had
made him promise, on his everlasting
Bible oath, as he called it, that he would
not tell. She had put him up to the
whole thing ; even that first two-dollar
bill had come from her wages."

My old classmate ceased speaking.
He was becoming flushed and excited.
He gazed abstractedly at the broad blue
mirror of old Champlain, upon which
be and I had looked together so often
in the days of our youth.

Mr. Pember sat silently. Mrs. Pem-
ber was whimpering behind her hand-
kerchief.

I ventured the inquiry, " Have you
seen Lucy yet ? "

Tompkins' face quivered ; he was
silent.

Mrs. Pember's interest in the ques-
tion restored her. " Tell us, have you
seen her ? " she asked.

" I heard of it yesterday," Tompkins
'eplied huskily, with an effort.
i " Why, Timothy, what is the matter ? "
cried Mrs. Pember, rising from her seat
and coming to him, as he bent his head
anw buried his face in his hands. The
motherly woman took off his soft hat,
and stroking his hair said, " You had bet-
ter tei'l ; it will do you good." And then

Service.

she put his hat on again, and stood
wiping her eyes in sympathy, while he
struggled with himM-H'.

The storm of feeling passed away, and
Tompkius, having gained control of his
emotions, slowly lifted his face from his
hands, and sat peering out under his hat
brim, looking apparently at a boat upon
the lake. At last he said in a calm
voice, " She is dead."

It was very still after this announce-
ment. The softest breath of June scarce-
ly whispered in the pines overhead, and
the vast landscape below seemed strange-
ly at rest in the fervid brightness of the
summer noon.

My old classmate was the first to
break the silence.

" Well," said he wearily, " it must be
about time for dinner ; let us go to the
hotel."

We took the little brown road, and
walked down a long, shaded, quiet street.
Memories of college days and romantic
summer nights, with music and starlight,
and the long, long thoughts of youth
came back to me, as I looked at the
houses and gardens familiar in college
days, and chatted about ihem with Mrs.
Pember.

" Timothy always means well," said
she to me confidentially, reverting to
the subject of which we were all think-
ing, " but it was very wrong for him
to neglect that poor factory girl ; don't
you think so ? "

P. Deming.

SERVICED

FRET not that thy d'aj . is \gone,
And the task is still ^yidone.
'T was not thine, itft tLms, at all :
Near to thee it chigle lito fall,
Close enough to stir thy brain,
And to vex thy heart in vain.
Somewhere, in a nook forlorn,
Yesterday a babe was born:
He shall do thy waiting task ;
All thy questions he shall ask,
And the answers will be given,
Whispered lightly out of heaven.
His shall be no stumbling feet,
Falling where they should be fleet ;
He shall hold no broken clue ;
Friends shall uato him be true ;
Men shall love, him ; falsehood's aim
Shall not shatter his good name.
Day shall nertfj his arm with light,
Slumber sootl/s him all the night;
Summer's pe^/je and winter's storm
Help him a'-^ his wili perform.
'T is enougli of joy. for thee
His high service to foresee.

E. R. Sill.

1883.]

Oxford in Winter.

OXFORD IN WINTER.

"Merie singcn the Munechen binnen Ely
Tha Cnut Ching ren therein1;
Eoweth Cnichtes naer the land
And hear we thes Munchen saeng."

As one by one the noble array of our
compatriots, perpetually roaming this
continent in search of pleasure, health,
or aesthetic advancement, became ac-
quainted with our fixed determination
to spend the winter in England, and in
Oxford, the announcement was received
with every possible shade of anxious
pity and mild dismay. What ? With
all Italy and the Riviera wreathed in
perpetual sunshine ; with Egypt once
more ready to receive callers, and even
Athens easily accessible, — what sort
of a suicidal whim was this ? Now the
consciousness that the motives which
impelled us were almost purely senti-
mental caused us to hang our heads a
little, even in the presence of our coun-
tryfolk, who do really, as the world will
one day come to know, understand ro-
mantic purposes and unprofitable pur-
suits better than any other people in
the world. It was not until we were
called upon to answer for our eccentri-
city by the Briton at home, and to ex-
plain our motives under the stress of his
coldly questioning eye, that the blank
absurdity of our position was brought
home to us, and we were thoroughly
and distressingly cowed.

'• You know, of course, that Oxford,
apart from the colleges, is merely the
dullest of small country towns. All
that is really beautiful and notable in
the way of architecture you may see in
a day, and sleep comfortably iu London
at night."

" You understand that the country
about Oxford is totally devoid of inter-
est. It is quite the tameet landscape
that we have."

" You must not imagine that you are

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 4

going to find locomotion easy there.
The roads are far too heavy for driving
at this season, and the foot-ways are
simply under water ! "

" Ah, but, dear," put in at this point
a deprecatory and compassionate voice,
" you know we did use to have nice
walks sometimes, along the curbstones ! "

" You must be prepared for the fact,
however, that recent innovations have
quite altered the character of society in
Oxford. And really, now that the X's
are gone, and the Y's and the Z's, there
is hardly anybody there one would care
to know."

" The house you have selected is
probably the fustiest hole in all Eng-
land. And have you good introduc-
tions ? If so, you might possibly be en-
tertained at Oxford at another season
of the year ; but not otherwise, and not
now. Make no mistake."

" But what you really ought thorough-
ly to appreciate is that Oxford is the
un healthiest spot in the three kingdoms.
It reeks rheumatism, sweats typhoid,
and sows consumption broadcast."

" How can this be," we cry, in our
desperation, " when the flower of Eng-
land has flourished there so amazingly
for a thousand years ? "

" Oh ! " is the slightly irrelevant but
no less withering response (and the at-
tempt to indicate by any arrangement
of vowels the complex pronunciation
of this monosyllable would be vain to
those who know it not, and superflu-
ous to those who do), — " Oh! So you
still credit the thousand-year myth ! I
fancied that modern research had quite
established the fact that King Alfred
never founded so much as a Sunday-
school class in Oxford. The most ven-
erable of the colleges cannot count
more than six hundred years. Really,
you know, if it 's antiquity you want,

Oxford in Winter.

[July,

and that sort of thing, would n't you
have done better to stay in Rome, you
kno\v ': "

To this day I am unable to explain
why we should have held on our for-
lorn way against so tremendous a moral
pressure. Was it obstinacy ? Was it
fatalism ? I am quite sure that it was
not until long after the fact that we
perceived how mutually subversive were
several of these obstructionist argu-
ments. If the landscape was so unin-
teresting, might it not as well be under
water ? If society in Oxford had lost
its charm, what did we want with intro-
ductions ?

We drew near the goal of our dis-
honored dreams in the early twilight of
a gray January day, and the watery
prospect reminded us irresistibly of that
through which the royal Cnut must
have been voyaging, when he was ar-
rested and charmed by the lusty cho-
ruses of the monks of Ely. We too
had been alert for sacred voices from
the shore, and not wholly unmindful of
the far-off echo of monastery bells.
And indeed, for some short time after
we had landed and begun to look about
us, there was little to disturb the an-
tique severity of our illusions. Looking
back upon those dim, soft, silent days,
out of the social brightness and animat-
ing stir of the later time, we find that
they had an extraordinary charm of
their own, — a charm that we would fix,
if possible, before it fades from memory,
and if possible, also, convey.

The undergraduate world was all
away, as yet, working off the effects of
its Christmas puddings, and " some-
where out of human view " the doctor
and the don were resting from their ac-
ademic labors ; so that we roamed un-
challenged and unstayed through clois-
ter, quadrangle, and sleeping garden,
and explored many a devious and de-
lightful walk, raised high amid the misty
floods, and embowered in feathery brown
trees, whose fair anatomy was doubled

in the waveless water upon either hand,
and richly bordered with hardy and deep-
tinted winter shrubbery. Linnets dis-
coursed hopefully amid the beauteous
interlucings of the arching boughs ; blue
periwinkle blossoms peeped between
their perennial leaves ; " sweet fields be-
yond those swelling floods stood dressed
in living green ; " even at that season,
tower and gable, gray arch and timbered
house-front, all wore their warm, rich
mantles of unfading ivy, and along many
a stained and crumbling wall the blos-
soming sprays of the winter jasmine
streamed perpetual sunshine.

One is always generalizing one's rec-
ollections. It is Magdalen, I perceive,
which is really in my mind when I use
these words, and the stately tower of
Magdalen was in fact the magnet which
first attracted our wayward steps through
the fine first quadrangle and the clois-
ter, and along the broad terrace of the
second, — gazing wistfully between the
iron palings into the slumberous antiq-
uities, both animal and vegetable, of the
deer - park ; then, retracing our steps,
we descended to the river-side, and pro-
ceeded to describe the charmed circle of
Addison's walk. It is strange that, of
all the poets who belong to Oxford, the
only one who has impressed his indi-
viduality sufficiently to give a lasting
name to a locality should have been the
most staid, self-conscious, didactic, and
in truth prosaic of the tuneful choir.
The lighter and more fiery singers ap-
pear to have sprung aloft and vanished
in the ether, like the lark above the Ox-
fordshire meadows, thence to shower
over the forest of domes and spires the
music of a " sightless song." But the
memory of Addison at Magdalen suf-
ficed to set us listening for those melo-
dious voices, and led us to search, first
of all, along the dreamy Oxonian ways,
for the trail of the poets, rather than
for the more conspicuous vestiges of
prelates and of kings.

It has often been said, and the opin-

1883.]

Oxford in Winter.

ion seems somewhat widely to prevail,
that as between the two great English
universities Cambridge bears off the
pulm in the matter of poets. The truth
is that the honors of song, like the hon-
ors of the river, have been pretty fairly
divided between the two, and have al-
ternated, or oscillated, with some degree
of regularity ; remaining continuously
for a certain season with the one, and
then passing over to the other.

Going back to the time when English
poetry first began to assume the shapes
that we know and love, we find that the
author of the Vision of Piers Plow-
man was of Oxford, and Skelton, with
his laughter-bubbling song to Merrie
Margaret. Wyatt and Surrey were of
Cambridge, and Spenser ; but Sidney,
Raleigh, and the majority of the great
Elizabethan lyrists, as well as the splen-
did Cavalier singers of the succeeding
reigns, with their sanity in love, their
fervor in faith, and their gallantry in
death, down to Lovelace, who closed
the list, were Oxonians. Milton was of
Cambridge, and Dryden, as well as
Crashaw, Herbert, and the seventeenth-
century mystics generally. Addison was
of Oxford, and Collins and Shenstone
and Young and Johnson. The Lake
Poets were about equally divided be-
tween the two schools, and among the
later nineteenth-century singers, if Cam-
bridge can boast the greatest names of
all, Byron and Tennyson, Oxford can
reply with Shelley and Landor, Keble
and Newman, Arnold, Clough, and
Swinburne.

This, of course, is not an exhaustive
list. We classify the names roughly as
they occur to us, and then, still hanging
about the bosky purlieus of Magdalen,
we begin searching the memory for
echoes from those poets who have be-
longed precisely to the superb founda-
tion, just past its four hundredth birth-
day, of William of Wayuflete. John
Lyly, the euphuist, was here, and George
Wither, the manly author of

" Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman 's fair? "

Wither himself speaks with peculiar
fondness of his " happy years at Ox-
ford." His best poems were written in
youth, and published under the title of
Juvenilia ; but there is one among the
very latest having all the bright health-
fulness of tone which marks the earlier
pieces, and in which, with the memory,
he seems almost to recover the melody
of his morning hour : —

" So shall my rest be safe and sweet
When I am lodged in my grave ;
And when my soul and body meet
A joyful meeting the}' shall have.
Their essence then shall be divine.
This muddy flesh shall star-like shine,
And God shall that fresh youth restore
Which will abide forevermore."

Sir Henry Wotton was also of Mag-
dalen, — he who contributed so truly to
the moral support of all subsequent gen-
erations by his noble hymn,

" How happy is he born and taught
Who serveth not another's will! "

He too composed (one feels that com-
posed is the right word), in equally calm
and polished verse, one of the last of the
strictly chivalrous lyrics: the address,
namely, to his formally selected and of
course quite unattainable mistress, Eliz-
abeth, Queen of Bohemia : —

" You violets that first appear,

By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own,
What are you when the rose is blown ?"

How the rose looked when fully blown
one may see in the Bodleian Library,
where her majesty's pictured face hangs
among those of scholars and sages :
very handsome, certainly, faultlessly so
in a rather hard style, but not at all t
simpatica. One perceives that she took
Wotton's worship quite as a matter of
course, and does not wonder that he had
all his wits about him when he sang her
praise.

It seems a long way from Wotton to
Collins, who was likewise a Magdalen

Oxford in Winter.

[July,

scholar : it is, in fact, as far as from the
late mediaeval to the early modern world.
•• How sleep the brave who sink to
rest " is like a lyric of our own time ;
and in the beautiful Ode to Evening, of
which Swinburne says, in his graphic
way, that " Corot might have signed it
upon canvas," one finds the very feeling
of the Oxfordshire landscape : —

" For when thy folding-star, arising, shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp,

The fragrant Hours, and Elves

Who slept in buds the day,
And many a Nymph who wreathes her brows with

sedge,
And sheds the freshening dew, and, lovelier still.

The pensive Pleasures sweet,

Prepare thy shadowy car ;

Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile

Or upland fallows gray

Reflect its last cool gleam."

The laws of association know nothing
of the laws of precedence. They say of
Magdalen, nowadays, that it aspires to
be what Christ Church is ; and they say
nothing whatever of St. John's, which
nevertheless comes next to Magdalen, if
it does not surpass it, in visionary charm.
A vision, or a dream, was also the first
cause of its being. Early in the six-
teenth century, one Sir Thomas White
was admonished in the night-watches
that he should build a college " for the
education of youth in piety and learn-
ing " where he should find an elm with
three trunks issuing from the same root.
He finally discovered such an one in the
court of the decayed college of St. Ber-
nard, whose site is occupied by the pres-
ent St. John's. Anthony a Wood, the
antiquarian par excellence of Oxford,
says that the original triple tree was liv-
ing in 1677, a hundred and thirty years
later, and they speak, but not with con-
fidence, of a descendant of the same as
still flourishing somewhere among the
bowers of the exquisite gardens. The
garden front of the present college, with
its rich gables and oriels, its pictured
windows and queer gargoyles, melting
into unmeaning projections as the gray

stone crumbles, was built by Archbishop
Laud, who was a great benefactor of St.
John's, and for a number of years presi-
dent of the college. Bishop Juxon was
also president here, — he whom the king
upon the scaffold bade " Remember ; "
and they show in the Welsh College of
Jesus, hard by, a watch which was once
the property of Charles L, and which
is claimed by some as the very one
which the king gave to his faithful prel-
ate, along with that mysterious last
mandate. Charles and Henrietta Maria
were feasted by Laud in the hall to
which the right-hand oriel belongs. Do
they ever revisit the spacious window
recess, where they may have loitered in
the passive after-dinner hour, those two,
Charles and Laud ? And if so, with what
reflections, now that the doom which
was prepared for each has been so long
accomplished ? St. John's was always
intensely loyal, and orthodox to the
very verge of Romanism. It is but a
few years ago that " an oak chest, that
had long lain hid," full of gorgeous ec-
clesiastical vestments, was found in an
out-of-the-way nook of the huge and
rambling buildings. It was very shortly
after the king's execution that James
Shirley, the one poet whose name is as-
sociated with St. John's, wrote the one
verse by which he keeps his hold on the
memory of the present generation. It
is a fitting strain to recall here, the dirge
of a " lost cause," which may have de-
served to lose, but which enlisted the
very highest order of human loyalty,
and the sacrifice of nobler lives than
have often been laid down in merely
human service : —

" The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things.

The garlands wither on your brow ;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon Death's purple altar now,
See where the victor-victim bleeds.
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

1883.]

Oxford in Winter.

Worcester, too, had its one Cavalier
poet, and the sweet lawns and imme-
morial ivies of the place are wonderfully
adapted to harbor the echoes of his song.
"Who does not remember how Richard
Lovelace triumphed iu captivity '•

" Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage :
Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage.
If 1 have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above

Enjoy such liberty! "

There are several other colleges, the
airy voices in whose classic shades " syl-
lable " the name of one poet only. The
stately courts of All Souls have but a
handful of living tenants, as the world
well knows, though " fit " for the place,
undoubtedly, as the select audience of
the angel in Paradise. " We few, we
happy few," should be the motto of that
illustrious little band of brothers, as of
the heroes who fought on the day of
which All Souls is a perpetual memo-
rial ; for it was founded to secure prayers
for the souls of those who fell at Agin-
court ; and long and far lapsed from its
original intention though it be, there is
a certain suitability in the fact that its
one minstrel should have been Edward
Young, the official poet of night and
death, who rises, perhaps, to his own
highest poetic level in his half-remorse-
ful appeal to the shades of the de-
parted : —

"Ungrateful, shall we grieve their hovering

shades,

Which wait the revolution in our hearts?
Shall we disdain their silent, soft address,

Their posthumous advice and pious prayer,
Senseless as herds that graze their hallowed

graves ?

Tread under foot their agonies and groans,
Frustrate their anguish, and destroy their deaths':"'

Far different is the note of the soli-
tary singer of gray old Lincoln, — of
Sir William Davenant, the kinsman (per-
haps) of Shakespeare, who caught the
tune of the skylark more charmingly
than any other minstrel between him
and Shelley : —

" The lark now leaves his watery nest,

And, climbing, shakes his dewy wings.
He takes your window for the east,

And to implore your light he sings :
Awake! Awake! The morn will never rise
Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes! "

Close by, under the venerable tow-
ers of University, Shelley himself made
his brief, inglorious, and stormy sojourn
at Oxford. " Expelled for atheism at
nineteen." Well, if that most ethereal
of rebels ever revisits, in these days, the
glimpses of the Oxford moon, he ought
to consider himself avenged. To us,
there seems a distinct reminiscence of
the scene of his boyish defiance in those
piercing lines from the Ode to the West

Wind : —

. . . "if even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision, I wpuld ne'er have

striven

As thus, with thee in prayer, in my sore need.
I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed !
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is !
What if my leaves are falling, like its own ?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from thee a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness."

This wild cry reminds us, by a pathetic
law of contrast, of another appeal to the
airs of heaven, by quite another Oxford
poet, — by the saintly John Keble of
Oriel, who sings on All Saints Day, —
" Why blowest thou not, thou wintry wind,

Now every leaf is brown and sere,
And, idly droops, to thee resigned
The fading chaplet of the year ?
Yet wears the pure, aerial sky
Her summer veil, half drawn on high
Of silvery haze: and dark and still
The shadows sleep on every slanting hill.
How quiet shows the woodland scene!
Each flower and tree, its duty done,
Reposing in decay serene,

Like weary men, when age is won:
Such calm old age as conscience pure
And self-commanding hearts insure,

Waiting their summons to the sky ;
Content to live, but not afraid to die."

But Keble's is no solitary glory in
Oriel. Langland was here five hundred
years ago, and Sir Walter Raleigh was
here. It is not, however, so much of
the daring youth of the latter and his
middle age of storms, of his deeds of

Oxford in Winter.

[July,

high emprise and great thoughts upon
secular tilings, that we are minded, be-
neath Oriel's monumental walls, as of
the swan songs which he lifted up in
prison, and iu the immediate view of
death : —

"Go, soul, the body's guest,"
and,

" Give me my scallop-shell of quiet.
My staff of faith to rest upon ;
Mv scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation ;
My gown of glory, hope's true gage,
And thus 1 '11 take my pilgrimage.
Blood must be in}' body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given;
Wliilo my soul, a quiet Palmer,
Traveleth towards the land of Heaven."

Nevertheless, as we turn toward that
corner of the hoary quadrangle where
must inevitably lie its intensest interest
for the latter-day pilgrim, and do hom-
age in our hearts to him whom the

'• kindly light amid the encircling gloom "
led so far away from his scholarly life
in these peaceful precincts, we are re-
minded again of Sir Walter Raleigh,
and of certain words that stand written
in the History of the World ; and we
fancy for the moment that we can hear
across the silent courts and the graves
of three centuries the deep of prophetic
insight calling unto the deep of impas-
sioned self-devotion : —

" All art and care bestowed and had of
the church wherein God is to be served
and worshiped is accounted a kind of
popery, and proceeding from an idol-
atrous disposition. Insomuch as time
would soon bring to pass, if it were not
resisted, that God would be turned out
of churches into barns, and from thence
again into the fields and mountains, and
under the hedges, and the offices of the
ministry be as contemptible as their
places ; all order, discipline, and church
government left to newness of opinion
and men's fancies. Yea, and soon after,
as many kinds of religion would spring
up as there are parish churches within
England ; every contentious and igno-
rant person clothing his fancy with the

spirit of God, and his imagination with
the gift of revelation. Insomuch as
when the truth, which is but one, shall
appear to the simple multitude no less
variable than contrary to itself, the faith
of men will soon after die away by de-
grees, and all religion be held in scorn
and contempt."

So we turn to the next-door neighbor
of Oriel, — Corpus Christi, with the an-
gels bearing the Host above its gate-
way ; with its quaint little cloister, and
the elaborate sun-dial in its homely but
venerable quadrangle ; less rich in po-
etic associations than its fellow, albeit
one of the sweetest, in more senses than
one, of the Oxford legends concerns the
bees of Ludovicus Vives, a Spanish
scholar of Valencia, who was sent by
Cardinal Wolsey to be teacher of rheto-
ric here, and was one of the first Fel-
lows of the college. " He was welcomed
thither," according to that industrious
antiquary, Brian Twynne, " by a swarm
of bees, which, to signify the incompara-
ble sweetness of his eloquence, settled
themselves over his head under the leads
of his study, at the west end of the clois-
ter, where they continued about one hun-
dred and thirty years. ... In the year
1630, the leads over Vives his study be-
ing plucked up, it being then the study
of Mr. Gabriel Brydges, their stall was
taken, and with it an incredible mass
of honey ; but the bees, as presaging
their intended and imminent destruction,
whereas they were never known to have
swarmed before, did that spring, to pre-
serve their famous kind, send down a
fair swarm into the president's garden,
which, in the year 1633, yielded ten
swarms, one whereof pitched in the gar-
den, for the president; the other they
sent up as a new colony, to preserve
the memory of this mellifluous doctor,
as the university styled him in a letter
to the cardinal." Another historian of
Oxfordshire here takes up the tale.
" And there," he says, " they continued
till, by the parliament visitation in 1648,

1883.]

Oxford in Winter.

for their loyalty to the king, they were
all but two turned out of their places.
At what time, with the rest of the in-
habitants of the college, they removed
themselves, but no farther than the east
end of the same cloister, where (as if
the feminine sympathized with the mas-
culine monarchy) they instantly de-
clined, and came shortly to nothing.
After the extirpation of which ancient
race, there came, 'tis true, another colo-
ny to the east end of the cloister, where
they continued until after the return of
his most sacred majesty that now is ;
but, it not being certain that they were
any of the remains of the ancient stock
(though 't is said they removed them to
the first place), nor any of them long
continuing there, I have chose rather to
fix their period in the year 1648 than
to give too much credit to uncertain-
ties. And thus, unhappily, after sixscore
years' continuance, ended the famous
stock of Vives his bees ; where 't is pity
they had not remained, as Virgil calls
them immortale genus" The naive logic
of this last observation reminds us that
John Conington, the lamented commen-
tator and translator of Virgil, was also
of Corpus.

We have spoken of Cardinal New-
man in connection with Oriel, where he
was Fellow, and attained his first fame.
His undergraduate years were passed
at Trinity, which boasts, amid a throng
of slightly distinguished names, its trio
of more memorable poets. But what
a strange association of spirits is here !
Thomas Lodge, the friend of Lyly, a
better euphuist than his master, — the
gay, anacreontic author of "Love in my
bosom, like a bee," and " Like to the
clear in highest sphere," — Walter Sav-
age Landor, and John Henry Newman.
Can these all be creatures of the same
race ? There may be notes in some of
Landor's earlier lyrics which chord not
ill with some of Lodge's, but how is
one to measure the spiritual distance
between the tranquil and disdainful pa-

ganism of Landor's fine last word upon
himself, —

" I strove with none, for none was worth my

strife ;

Nature 1 loved, and, next to Nature, Art.
I wanned both hands before the fire of life ;
It sinks, and I am read}' to depart," —

and the soft song of the disembodied
spirit in the Dream of Geroutius : —

"Take me away, and in the lowest deep

There let me be !

And there in hope the lone night-watches keep
Told out for me! "

And yet these men were contempora-
ries. " Were," one says, and instinct-
ively applies the word to both. It is no
more Newman's patriarchal years and
sacred seclusion than his remoteness in
spiritual ascendency which leads one
perpetually to forget that he has not
yet passed the barrier of this lower life,
and to class him with the mighty dead.
It is exactly the reverse with Arthur
Hugh Clough, at Balliol, — the college
of all others whose glories are of the
present, its star rising, its interest tho
" hope of unaccomplished years." One
thinks of the author of Qua Cursum
Ventus and " Say not the struggle naught
availeth " as living yet, and engaged be-
side his kinsmen and his peers ; a trans-
figured rather than a spectral figure, —
like those of the divine brethren at Lake
Regillus. And Balliol has its ancient
glories, too, which the glow of the pros-
perous present ought not wholly to
eclipse.

Sir Edward Dyer was of Balliol, the
bosom friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who
made, with him and Fulke Greville, that
trio for whom Sidney supplied the mot-
to, —

" Join hearts and hands ! So let it be ;
Make but one mind in bodies three.''

Sir Edward Dyer has enriched our liter-
ature with at least one admirable lyric:
" My mind to me a kingdom is." In
its final stanza, there is a pride as high
as Landor's own, but of a saner and
more noble order : —

Oxford in Winter.

[July,

"Some have loo much, yet still do crave;

I little have, and -vk no mere:
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich, with little store.

They poor: I rich. They beg; I give.
They lack; I leave. They pine, I live."

Is there, or is there not (there ought
to be), one tree in the winter gardens of
Balliol beneath which, in passing, one
would always remember that Southey
also was of this college, — abundantly
endowed and unreasonably abused Sou-
they ; who must have had a stratum of
genuine humility underlying his more
obvious self-conceit, and who realized in
an old age of singular beauty the aspira-
tion, —

" And should my youth, as youth is apt, I know,
Some harshness show,

All vain asperities I, day by day,
Would wear away,

Till the smooth temper of my age should be

lake the high leaves upon the holly-tree ! "

But the spirit of Sir Philip Sidney,
once evoked, is drawing our loitering
steps at last toward Christ Church, —
Christ Church, the aristocratic and su-
perb, to which, since we did not give
it precedence over all the rest, we must
be supposed to have gradually ascended.
We can barely turn aside on our way
to the famous towered gateway, to re-
member that little Pembroke, on the
other side of the busy street, sheltered
Francis Beaumont and Shenstone and
Samuel Johnson ; the burly figure of
the latter, as might be expected, sub-
tending such an angle as effectually to
screen from view all the other worthies
of Pembroke, and its predecessor upon
the same spot, — Broadgates Hall.

The haughty person in ecclesiastical
dress, in the niche above the portal of
I Christ Church, has confronted ten gen-
erations, unmoved by the th robbings and
boomings of Great Tom of Oxford, which
hangs in the belfry above. He seems
always to be saying, curtly and grim-
ly, " It should have been called Cardi-
nal's," which would not, in sooth, have
sounded ill. It is a wonder that Hen-
ry VIIL, when he resumed and contin-

ued, on a much less magnificent scale
than was originally planned, the unfin-
ished work of Cardinal Wolsey, should
have refrained from calling the college
" King's" but happily he elected to
give it a nobler name than either, —
the name of the small but beautiful
cathedral included in the circuit of its
walls. The first Bishop of Oxford, Rob-
ert King, or Kynge, was the last abbot
of disestablished and devastated Osney,
and so the old order changed and gave
place to the new. Christ Church has
been the chosen school of royal and
titled students ever since, and of many
a renowned Anglican churchman. But
whose are the voices of singing men
that here make themselves audible,
above the chiming of bells and the clink-
ing of spurs, as we hearken toward the
past ? Philip Sidney's first, the pride
and darling of the English people, the
brightest exemplar of all youth every-
where who speak the English tongue ;
and Ben Jonson's, the honeyed singer ;
and Thomas Otway's, the stern and sad.

" A wandering bard, whose muse was crazy

grown,
Cloyed with the nauseous follies of the buzzing

town,
Came, looked about him, sighed, aud laid him

down :

'T was far from any path, but where the earth
Was bare and naked all, as at her birth,
When, by the Word, it first was made,

Ere God had said,
' Let grass and flowers and every green thing

grow,
With fruitful herbs after their kind,' — and it was

so.

The whistling winds blew fiercely round his head ;
Cold was his lodging, hard his bed.
Aloft his eyes on the wide heavens he cast,
Where, we are told, peace only is found at last ;
And as he did its hopeless distance see,
Sighed deep, and cried, ' How far is peace from

me! ' "

There was, in fact, no peace for this
wailing banshee among the bards of
Oxford until he was released, at thirty-
four, from a most painful life by a most
tragical death. A wider contrast could
not be, whether in spirit or in fortunes,
than that between the unhappy Otway

1883.]

Oxford in Winter

and the remaining two poets of Christ
Church whose names we found at home
in our recollection. With these two,
however, the chief if not the only epis-
copal poets of England, we discovered
that we were upon terms of such old
and dear familiarity that we made it
our special object, in those early days, to
gather every possible memorial of them.
It would he strange indeed if the
present writer could forget that a voice,
now silent fifteen years, used ofteuest to
pronouuce its half-humorous maternal
blessing in these words : —

" What I shall leave thee none can tell,
But all shall say, I wish thee well.
I wish thee well ; before all wealth,
Both bodily and ghostly health !
Not too much wealth or wit come to thee;
So much of either might undo thee ! "

If the temperate request of the last
couplet was as scrupulously fulfilled in
the original as in the applied case, the
cheery author of it should have been
well content. But indeed it was hardly
in his nature to have been otherwise, in
any event. Richard Corbett, the sev-
enth Bishop of Oxford, was the spirit-
ual (or perhaps temperamental) ances-
tor of Sydney Smith, — a man whose
delightful and unfailing humor irradi-
ates every tradition of him with whole-
some sunshine. He was already cele-
brated as a poet and wit, when he
matriculated at Christ Church in 1605.
Seven years later, on the death of
Henry, Prince of Wales, Corbett, then
a proctor, was deputed to pronounce
the prince's oration, and, according to
Anthony a Wood, " very oratorically
speeched it, in St. Mary's Church, be-
fore a numerous auditory." Corbett was
of Laud's way of thinking, the quaint-
est of preachers, the tersest, wittiest,
and most refreshing of correspondents.
His generosity was more than regal.
He contributed £400, an enormous sum
in those days, toward the restoration
of St. Paul's Cathedral, for which he
pleaded from his pulpit in this homely
and forcible style: "St. Paul's Church,

— one word in behalf of St. Paul ! He
hath spoken many in ours. He hath
raised our inward temples. Let us help
to requite him in the outward," etc.
Local history teems with reminiscences
of Bishop Corbett's fun. It was he
who, finding one day near the beautiful
market- cross of Abingdon, five miles
from Oxford, a dejected ballad-singer,
who had sold none of his wares, as-
sumed the dress and function of the
wandering bard, and trolled forth the
ballads in his own peculiarly rich voice,
until he had gathered a crowd about
him and sold them all. It was he who
shouted to the throng that pressed un-
comfortably near him on a confirmation
day, " Bear off, or I '11 confirm ye with
my staff ! " It was he who gave that
cruel account of the upset of his coach
in " an extraordinary deep and dirty
lane," when his fat friend Dr. Stubbins
was within : " Dr. Stubbins was up to
his elbows in mud, and I was up to my
elbows in Stubbins." It was he, and he
alone, of the Oxford poets, who ever
cared to celebrate in song the richest of
all the antiquarian treasures hereabout,

— the beautiful old German stained
glass in the windows of Fairford Church,
preserved from the ravages of Crom-
well's soldiery by so extraordinary an
act of aesthetic precaution : —

" Tell me, ye anti-saints, why brass
With you is shorter-lived than glass.
And why the saints have 'scaped their falls
Better from windows than from walls V

. . . Then, Fairford, boast

Thy church hath kept what all have lost,

And is preserved from the bane

Of either war or Puritan.

Whose life is colored in thy paint,

The inside dross, the outside saint !

I know no paint of poetry

Can mend such colored imagery

In sullen ink; yet, Fairford, I

May relish thy fair memory.

Such is the echo's fainter sound,

Such is the light, when the sun 'a drowned ;

So did the fancy look upon

This work before it was begun.1'

The genial bishop was eventually trans-

Oxford in Winter.

[July,

lated from Oxford to Norwich, where he
dit •(! in 1 ('>:'..">, ami where lie lies buried.
Our other early association with the
episcopal pools of Christ Church is a
softer and more pensive one. From a
time to which our own individual mem-
ory runneth not back to the contrary,
certain fragments of sad and tender
have been hovering there, which
the ripening judgment of maturer years
has pronounced among the most beauti-
ful elegiac lines ever written in English.
There can be no need to quote to any
true lover of old English poetry the
lament of Bishop King for his girlish
wife : —

" Sleep on, my love, in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted."

A preposterous hope sprang up with-
in us, on our first visit to Christ Church,
that the Bishop King buried in the
north aisle of the cathedral, and pictured
in glass above, might prove to be our
own Bishop King; and that the exqui-
site domestic life reflected in those
fond verses might have been lived in
the brave old many-gabled mansion
down toward Folly Bridge, which still
goes by the name of Bishop King's Pal-
ace. That hope soon demonstrated its
own absurdity, for the last abbot of Os-
ney could not well have had a wife to
lament. A very little research, however,
disclosed facts of a yet more intimate
and curious interest than the fancies
which they displaced. Henry King,
Bishop of Chichester, the author of the
elegy, was grandson to Philip King,
the favorite nephew and heir to the
wealth of Robert, first Bishop of Oxford.
The father of Henry was John King,
Bishop of London and scholar of Christ
Church, and at one time chaplain to
Queen Elizabeth. Henry King and his
brother John, three years his junior,
entered Christ Church together, and
passed through their university career
jxiriliiis pauibtu. Before they left the
college, their three younger brothers
were entered there, making five students

from one family at one time, — a fact
hardly to be paralleled in the history
of Oxford. The father, the subsequent
Bishop of London, had been dean of
Christ Church, and was vice-chancellor
of the university when his boys were
there. When they had left Oxford and
he had received his own preferment, he
began crowning their lives with riches

o o

and honor, by the frank exercise of
a natural and amiable nepotism, which
Henry rather primly calls " providing
so far as in him lay for a succession
in his blood to lay hand to the same
plow." Henry and John were made
prebendaries of St. Paul's, — the former
at twentj'-four, the latter at twenty-two ;
and the only trace we have of anything
like hostile criticism of this affectionate
arrangement is in a letter of Chamber-
lain's to Sir Dudley Carleton, in which
he says that " Henry King, the son of
the bishop, preached his first sermon at
St. Paul's Cross ; and it was thought a
bold thing of them both [that is, the
youth and his father] ; but this world,
they say, is made for the presumptuous.
He did reasonably well, but nothing ex-
traordinary, nor near his father, being
rather slow of utterance, and orator
parum vehemens." So much we can
readily believe. Vehemence of speech
and action would have been quite in-
consistent with a character which, how-
ever, had an invincible sweetness, that
well-nigh disarmed envy. His brief,
bright married life with Anne Berkeley
was passed in London, in a house near
St. Paul's yard, while he was resident
canon of the cathedral. The bride-
groom was twenty-six, when they mar-
ried ; the bride, only seventeen. In less
than seven years he wrote the lines of
our life-long love : —

" And I remember must, with tears,
Thou scarce hadst seen so many years
As day tells hours. . . .

"... My Little World !

Stay for me there! I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.

1883.]

Oxford in Winter.

And think not much of my delay;

I am already on the way,

And follow thee with all the speed

Desire can make, or sorrows breed

Each minute is a short degree,

And every hour a step towards thee ! "

Once only before that time had Henry
King emerged from the quiet scenes
of home love and literary pastime, and
the assiduous good works so congenial
to his nature, into anything like pub-
lic controversy. His devoted father
had died three years before, and imme-
diately after his decease rumors got
abroad, which appeared to rest on good
authority, to the effect that the metro-
politan bishop had been, during his lat-
est years, declining more and more to-
ward the Church of Rome, and had
even received its sacraments in his last
illness, at the hands of one Father
Preston, a Benedictine monk. It was
also said that Bishop John King had
written a letter to King James, confess-
ing the true state of his mind, which
the king, after reading, had instantly
torn in twain and thrust into the fire.
However these charges may have orig-
inated, they were explicitly and publicly
denied by Henry King in a sermon and
a pamphlet, and by Father Preston so
far as his own complicity was concerned,
on examination before the Archbishop
of Canterbury. One is surprised at the
frequent occurrence, in the annals of
the English church of the seventeenth
century, of this charge of reversion to
Rome, until one remembers that its ab-
sence would be more surprising still. A
serious and sturdy people, constant in
its affections and tenacious of its mem-
ories, does not change its heart wholly
and finally in a day, or even in a cen-
tury.

It is quite consistent with the mild
but generous character of Henry King
that he should always have been reck-
oned a moderate in politics and relig-
ion, until the gathering misfortunes of
Charles I. quickened him to a keener
loyalty. His curate in the living of

Petvvorth, which he held from Charles,
was fired upon in his pulpit by an in-
surgent in the congregation, and he
himself was driven from the see of Chi-
chester, which he had then occupied
only a few months. During the period
of exile which followed, he made some
exceedingly close and beautiful versions
from the Psalms, and his Lament for
the king's death, although inferior to
the Elegy on his wife, was noble, and
in parts impassioned. Readers old
enough to have affected Scott's Wood-
stock in their youth will certainly re-
member the effect with which young
Albert Lee, when captured by Crom-
well in the old Oxfordshire palace, is
made to confound the Protector by of-
fering him a text of Scripture for med-
itation : " Had Zimri peace, who slew
his master?" It seems highly proba-
ble, however, that Scott had in his mind,
either consciously or unconsciously, the
closing lines of Bishop King's Lament,
which are these : —

"But he whose trump proclaims Revenge is mine
Bids us our sorrow by our hope confine;
And reconcile our reason to our faith,
Which, in thy ruin, such concussions hath.
It dares conclude God doth not keep his word,
If Zimri die in peace, who slew ItU lord."

Henry King was restored to his see
by Charles II., and died in Chichester
in 1669.

So much for our greeting by the
ghosts of Oxford. There came an early
day when shadow was succeeded by sub-
stance, and the faith which had led us
thither against such formidable odds
was exchanged for " glad fruition ; "
when the hands that were extended to
us gave warm and cordial pressure, —
no longer the frustra comprensa manus
of illusive shades. The result of all
which has been to animate us by so ro-
mantic an optimism that we incline to
believe the ancient glories of Oxford to
be pale beside those of the present,
while we devoutly pray that those of
the future may outshine them all.

Harriet Waters Preston.

Newport.

[July,

NEWPORT.

" FORTY — LOVE.

AT the beginning of the Newport
season there is a gentle novelty about
the surroundings, even to those who are
most familiar with them : indeed, for
the moment, it closely resembles the
surprise of a discovery.

•• Don't you think so? " Mrs. Deering
asked her cousin Oliphant. They were
walking together through the Casino
grounds, and had just taken some chairs
on the inner lawn. " I 've always found
it so. How is it, Eugene, with you ? "

Her vivacious, rosy face, as she put
the question, made more impression on
him than her remark.

" I have no experience," he said ; " it
is so long, you know, since I was here
last, and everything was different then."
Perhaps it occurred to Mrs. Deering
that, under the term " everything," he
included many circumstances of deeper
moment than mere outward changes ;
but he went on as if these had no place
in his thoughts : " This establishment
is so recent that it can't be a very old
story even to y«u. I certainly feel the
novelty you speak of; but will it go
on ? That 's what I want to know. If
it will, I shall be very grateful to New-
port."

" Ah, now you are asking too much,"
said his cousin, bestowing upon him so
much of reproof as the sparkling con-
tentment in her young eyes would con-
sent to. " I hope you 're not going to
.begin sighing, after my advising you to
come here. Please observe that it is n't
flatti-ring to me."

" True," said Oliphant, smiling ; "you
might construe it so. Well, you sha'n't
hear a murmur. Not a drum shall be
heard, nor a funeral note escape me."

" I should trust they would n't," Mrs.
Deering exclaimed. " You really have
no cause to complain, Eugene. You are
well off; you are still young ; " and she
was considering whether to add " you
are handsome," when he cut short the
enumeration.

" Not so very youthful," he said.
" There is a great difference between
being ' still young,' and young without
any adverb. When yo» put that in,
you clap on about ten years at one
stroke."

" Well," replied Mrs. Deering, taking
advantage of the chance, " even ten
years can't make it so very bad. How
old are you, really ? "

Oliphant affected to ponder. " That,"
he said, " is one of the great mysteries
of the period. I may be able to tell
you, though, some day or other."

She knew, however, that he had prob-
ably entered his fortieth year ; and in
fact there were little glintings of silver
white here and there in the comely
chestnut hue of the thick, short, curling
hair beneath his hat-brim. The toler-
ant sun disclosing these was not more
indifferent to their presence than Oli-
phant : as for Mary Deering, she thought
they added distinction to his fine bear-
ing and strong, quiet face. So did other
people. It may be said here that, al-
though Oliphant had been for three
years a widower, women of undoubted
attractiveness had several times, with-
out his being aware of it, made him the
object of sentimental reveries. At this
very moment, his cousin, who from her
point of view as a married woman was
quite disinterested, busied herself with
a silent inquiry as to whether he had
positively decided never to wed again ;
being convinced that if he persisted in
such a decision it would be a great pity.

From where they sat they caught,

1883.]

Newport.

through the curious lattice-work of the
dark Horseshoe Gallery, a glimpse of
the clock -tower, with its gilded dial,
above the verdant, fountained quadran-
gle ; on the other side they had in near
view the brown galleries and brick front
of the theatre and racket - court, near
which, in an additional inclosure, were a
number of lawn-tennis players ; limber
young men and picturesque, — some in
white flannel, others with long scarlet
stockings, colored belts or dark sashes,
and white hats bent down towards their
ears, like the petasus of Mercury shorn
of its wings. The two listened to the
low twang of the rackets in the hands
of these players, alternating with strains
of the lightest possible music from one
corner of the balcony ; waltzes and
French opera, inspired by a witticism
and beaten up, if that were conceivable,
with white of egg. A brilliant sunlight
streamed over everything, touching the
shingle roofs with bright grays, making
vivid the summer trees that stood golden-
green side by side with heavy conifers ;
and from that portion of the building
devoted to the Casino Club a dormer ap-
peared to be winking, with a combina-
tion of mediaeval and of Yankee humor.
There was a mixture in the architec-
ture ; at all events, a hint of something
old English, something Nuremberg-like,
and something Japanese.

" This is a fascinating piece of work,"
Oliphant remarked, looking around ; " a
delightful mimicry of I don't exactly
know what. There 's an affectation,
perhaps, in staining the wood to make it
look old, but the whole thing seems to
be unique ; and it 's like Newport. For
Newport has its own atmosphere, and
yet you feel that it is always imitating
something else."

" I 'm not sure you do justice either to
the building or to Newport," answered
his cousin, dissentingly. " They 're both
delightful ; so what is the use of trying
to pick some flaw ? That 's the way
we 're always spoiling our enjoyment of

things, nowadays ; or, if we don't, some
critic does it for us under the pretense
that he was born for the purpose. Are
you going to assume that role ? "

" Fate has played the critic with me,
and taught me how," was Oliphant's
reply. " When circumstances have al-
ways forced me to see the flaws in life,
how can you expect that I should n't
form the habit of looking for them a
little in everything ? "

" Oh, you are a dreadful, horrible
cynic," said his cousin, concentrating
the quick, soft lines of her small face
upon him, in an amusing glance mingled
of horror and beaming approval. " This
is just the way you talk about every-
thing."

Eugene merely laughed. " Shall I
keep silent, then ? " he asked.

"Yes," said Mrs. Deering, with des-
potic promptness.

They remained a while without speak-
ing. As water flowing against a rock
wears wave-lines into it, so a person
who has been much alone has the marks
of solitude worn into his being. Traces
of that slow erosion were discernible in
Oliphant's face when in repose, show-
ing with what force silent experiences
had wrought upon it. His light-hearted
cousin was not much inclined to analyze
what she saw there ; probably she could
not have done so if she had tried ; but as
she scrutinized him sidewise at this mo-
ment, something made her think of his
past. She remembered how he had
gone very early into a business life, and
had had to toil desperately until within
a short time ; but that was nothing :
had not Roger, her husband, done the
same ? and he was still toiling, while
Eugene, after becoming a bankrupt, had
recovered, and by a lucky hit leaped
into independence. She remembered,
further, how she had always supposed
him to be unhappy with his wife ; he
had been mis-mated. But there, again,
how fortunate ! Was he not free, with
many advantages should he wish to make

Newport.

[July,

a happier match, and well provided for
living by himself if he preferred \vh:it
she thought so regrettable a state ? Life
is so simple — when we don't have to
live it ourselves.

Grievances are noisy : griefs are little
hr.ird from. Luckily we cannot trundle
our sorrows about in plain sight, when
we go walking ; hence Mary Deering
was not made uncomfortable by know-
ing just what was in Oliphant's mind ;
and the people who kept assembling
more and more in the Casino, while
these two sat there, were able to display
themselves one to another with an un-
concern as suave as if they had bor-
rowed their minds, no less than their
trim attire, from the latest fashion-
plates. Pretty sight it was : how placid
they looked ! Eugene fondly believed
them all much happier than himself :
he was young enough for that, you see.
But Mrs. Deering was the first to re-
sume conversation, which she did by
commenting on an individual here and
there.

Eugene, having grown absent-minded,
only half heard her. He was humming
under his breath an old ballad, the words
of which that came to him, though he
did not utter them, ran thus : —

" An' I were as fair as she,
Or she were as kind as I ;
Wliat pair could have made, as we,
So pretty a synipathie ! ''

What glimmer of recollection, what
sunken hope, brought this tune into his
mind ? He was roused by his cousin's
sharper accent.

" Look, Eugene ! I want you to no-
tice these people."

" Which ? Coming along the path
here ? "

" Yes ; the lady in front is Mrs. Far-
ley Blazer." He beheld a large, stout
woman with a smoky white face, and
quietly but not well dressed, who moved
with slow grandeur, as if in her youth
she had been swan-like, and had not
quite forgotten the fact. " And the gen-

tleman is old Dana Sweetser. Does n't
look old, does he ? Those two younger
women, behind, are her nieces." The
two girls referred to, though not beyond
question pretty, evidently made great
claim to style ; and, swimming in the
wake of their majestic aunt, were trying
in their limited way to be swan-like
also.

Mrs. Deering exchanged a smile and
a bow with the group ; but as they
passed away again, she said to Oliphant,
"That woman is what I call a social
usurper. She came here years ago and
tried to impose herself on the world by
a coup d'etat. There was a bitter re-
sistance, but slowly and surely she has
borne it down, and seems to be settled
on her throne."

" And Sweetser ? " asked Oliphant,
mildly amused. u What about him ? "

" Oh, he 's good style ; good family,
and all that ; but principally he 's a sen-
timental old beau. He divides his time
between organizing societies for Pro-
moting the Importance of Members, and
falling in love. He will pass through
half a dozen rhapsodical affairs, this
summer. Poor Dana ! "

She had barely finished speaking
when they observed a slender young
man, with a single eye-glass and a long
coat, who stiffly carried a thin stick, ap-
proaching them from the racket-court.
Just as he came opposite them, a white
ball bounding from the tennis-ground
flew towards him, at an angle threaten-
ing mischief to his tall hat. He dodged
it, and it struck the sward near enough
to bounce again in the direction of Mary
Deering. The slender young man dart-
ed vainly forward, to arrest this per-
plexing missile before it should reach
her ; but though he bent down with
commendable promptness, it escaped
him and grazed her chair. At the same
instant he found himself landing on one
knee, to avoid a fall, and gazing anx-
iously towards her. He took off his
hat.

1883.]

Newport.

"Attitude of devotion ! " he exclaimed
in a subdued voice, with what was meant
to pass for well-regulated humor. Even
in these few words, however, he con-
trived to let his perfected English ac-
cent manifest itself. " Good morning,
Mrs. Deering," he added, more formal-
ly, straightening himself up again.

" Good morning, Mr. Atlee." She
made the two men acquainted, briefly.
" You could n't have done that better if
you VI been on the stage," she said.

" It hardly counts in the game, I sup-
pose," said Oliphant, picking up the
grass-stained ball, which he threw to
the players.

Atlee looked at him through his glass,
as if he hardly knew how this remark
was designed ; then he turned the pol-
ished disc inquiringly on Mrs. Deering,
who smiled with mysterious satisfaction.
" Well, no," he said haltingly. " I sup-
pose, Mrs. Deering," he recommenced,
"you are coming to the Casino dance,
to-night. On se donne le mot, you know.
Monday is to be the night, regularly."

" That will be bad for the ladies who
ride, when the meets begin," said she.
" But, of course, I shall come to-night."

Oliphant had given up dancing, and
looked upon the artificial fox-hunt with
contempt ; so he began to feel out of
place, and to wish that Atlee would go
away. But as the young man did not
vanish, our friend adopted the simple
expedient of considering him an inferior
individual, and withdrew from the con-
versation, fixing his attention entirely
on the tennis. He became oblivious to
everything but the cries of the players :
" Net ! " — " Fault." — " Thirty, love."
— " Deuce." At length these annoyed
him, too. " Do you understand the
game, Mr. Atlee ? " he asked.

" Oh, a trifle," said the young man.
" Must do what all the other fools do,
you kno'w."

" Naturally," returned Oliphant, with
zest.

" Is that the reason you asked him ? "

Mrs. Deering inquired of her cousin,
darting mischief at Atlee. " How clev-
er, when you have n't known him ! "

" That 's hard," feebly protested her
admirer. " Well, you see," he contin-
ued, addressing Oliphant with the com-
prehensiveness of an amateur lecturer,
" there are four courts, and one man
serves, and " —

"Oh, I don't want a regular expo-
sition," Oliphant interrupted, having
reached an advanced stage of unreason.
" But it would be a relief if you would
tell me what their sentimental phrase
' love ' means."

" That 's very easy," Atlee said. " It 's
only a gentle way of saying that one
side has n't won anything whatever."

" Then, according to this computation,
love is nothing."

" Exactly."

" How appropriate ! I think better
of the game : there must be some sense
in it."

" Eugene ! " cried Mrs. Deering, in
reproof. " I thought I had got you
nicely chained up. What do you mean
by breaking loose again, and barking
like that ? Mr. Atlee, my cousin is a
cynic."

Thus admonished, Atlee examined
him cautiously with his defensive eye-
glass.

" None of the other people are sitting
down," said Oliphant. " Don't you
think we 'd better be getting away from
here ? "

" Game ; forty — love," muttered At-
lee, who had again diverted his superb
attention to the nearest pair of batters.
" That 's total defeat, you know," he
volunteered for Oliphant's benefit.

Eugene could not help applying this
phraseology of the game to his own
case. His cousin had, that morning,
expatiated to him on the happiness of
some friends of hers who had married
in middle life ; and within a few mo-
ments she had questioned him as to his
own age. But love and forty made; a

Newport.

[July,

bad combination in tennis, as they might
also in :i human career ; a combination
involving absolute failure on one side.

•• We nuiv a.-; well go up on to the bal-
cony, if you want to move," Mrs. Deer-
.id, obligingly; and they all three
started in that direction.

The latticed promenade, when they
reached it, was crowded, and echoed to
a light buzz of rapid talk, salutation,
and correct laughter, as if it had been
a drawing-room. They paced up and
down its length for a few minutes ; Oli-
phant noticing that the space nearer the
music was tacitly left to those who were
not of the governing social league ; per-
sons of unfashionable appearance, many
of them passing visitors, who gazed
over at the others from a chilly border-
land of solitude, as it were, and ap-
peared to be taking the spectacle with a
good deal of seriousness, an air of mute
and mournful inquiry. Atlee slipped
away to speak to a young lady at one
side of the gallery : " Vivian Ware,"
Mrs. Deering specified to her compan-
ion. " A charming girl, from Boston.
I want you to know her, too."

Beyond doubt, Miss Ware was a most
engaging creature, even on a casual
glance. She stood by one of the turned
posts that upheld the gallery-ceiling,
leaning slightly against it and surround-
ed by several young men, — ''That is
the Count Fitz-Stuart nearest to her,"
Oliphant heard his feminine mentor say-
ing, — so that she might have been fig-
ured as at bay, making a final stand
against her pursuers. But the situation
evidently did not disturb her. Slight
without suggesting fragility, she showed
decided calm and self-possession, but
was radiant with expression, and was
talking first to one and then to another.
Oliphant not being devoid of imagina-
tion, it occurred to him that, in her pure
white dress wrought with a perfection
of skill that made it resemble a natural
growth, she might well be compared to
a fresh honeysuckle blossom.

" I should like to know her," he said ;
" but not now. For a while I will just
look."

" There '11 be plenty of time," his
pretty cousin agreed. " You 're like a
man who has been starving, and I must
be careful with you ; too much at once
might be your death."

The next instant she was accosted by
Mr. Dana Sweetser, who, of a shapely
figure, had a light but aged mustache
that lay like a withered leaf above his
lips and brushed his cheeks, the pink of
which was forcing itself out of season.
He wore a light salmon-tinted sirocco
neck-scarf, and apparently was brim-
ming over with compliments.

" A most lovely morning, Mrs. Deer-
ing," he exclaimed, poising himself art-
fully on his thin legs, that terminated
in narrow shoes adorned with buff gai-
ters. " And I assure you one sees it
better when it is reflected in a lovely
face."

" That 's a new sort of barometer,"
said she, " but not hard to find, here ; "
and she glanced around.

" Happy to make your acquaintance,"
Sweetser proceeded as elastically as be-
fore, on being presented to Oliphant.
" And you have lately arrived ? Ah,
Newport is the gem of all our watering-
places. You will find yourself unable
to leave it, Mr. Oliphant. Are you not
already charmed ? "

" I 'm trying to be," replied Oliphant ;
" and I dare say, if I 'in not it won't be
the fault of the place."

" You have only to look about you,
sir. The most delightful society — peo-
ple of leisure and cultivation, assem-
bled from the different cities that sep-
arate them in winter : Newport claims
them all, you see, by natural right. I
was about to tell you something, Mrs.
Deering," he pursued, turning to her;
and Oliphant seized the occasion to
move apart.

He had not gone many steps, before
he was arrested by the sight of a face

1883.]

Newport.

that he fancied was familiar to him. It
offered a surface epitome of character
not distinguished for refinement, but
rather forcible than coarse, in spite of
a rough-grained complexion and the ag-
gressive bushiness of brown whiskers
and a biforked beard. The man was
dressed in a bine flannel yachting suit,
as if he disdained making much conces-
sion to the custom of elaborate toilets.
Nevertheless, it was clear that he stood
well in the estimation of those around
him. He bore signs of mental power,
and possessed a cool, ample eye that
took in everything with undisturbed
comprehensiveness. We might say it
was a peculiarly noiseless eye. Indeed,
Oliphant was persuaded that it bad en-
compassed him", as it were, and had fully
identified him, an instant or two before
any light of recognition was allowed to
flash out. But when that preliminary
was over, the face became energetic
with geniality, and the individual to
whom it belonged stepped forward with
hand outstretched.

" My dear fellow ! " said he, in a
hearty, melodious voice that carried con-
viction with it. " How do you do ; and
where did you drop from ? "

" I thought it was you, Porter," Oli-
phant responded, oddly feeling that his
own heartiness, though he knew it to
be genuine, was a mere make-believe or
shadow beside the other man's ; " but
it's such a length of time. ... I was
rather hesitating."

"As the Irishman said," Porter at
once rejoined, " when they asked him
whether, as a punishment for his crime,
he would prefer to go to the gallows or
Australia. He told 'em, you know, he
would 'rather hesitate.' Well, where
have you been ? Tell me all about it?
What 's the news ? "

They began to walk the gallery at
the least crowded end, with occasional
inroads upon the more fashionable one.
It was not a place for clapping a man
upon the back ; and, for all his force,

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 5

Porter's manner was perfectly in keep-
ing with the genius of the spot. But
Oliphant felt that practically he had
been clapped upon the back, arid rather
liked it : he began to be more at home.
He noticed, also, as they passed and re-
passed, that those who had previously
been talking with Porter were now ex-
amining himself with an access of in-
terest merging into respect, as they saw
the friendly terms on which he stood
with the wearer of the blue suit. This
roused in Oliphant an internal laughter ;
but it was agreeable to find that, while
still unknown, he could thus enjoy an
indirect homage. " I have my foot on
the stair," he said to himself.

Meanwhile, two gentlemen who sat
together in the shadow, not far from the
musicians, fixed their attention on the
pair as they receded in their walk.

" Quisbrough," said one of these indi-
viduals, — grave, elderly, clad through-
out in black and wearing the long-skirt-
ed broadcloth of a departing generation,
— " is n't that man Porter ? Horatio
Porter, I mean ; commonly known as
Raish."

The speaker had a pale, smooth-shav-
en face, seamed with fine wrinkles ar-
ranged on a system which implied in
equal measure a great store of legal
acumen and much experience of dyspep-
sia.

" Yes ; that 's Raish," replied Quis-
brough. " But I thought you knew
him, Judge : thought everybody knew
him, and that you knew everybody."

" Well, you Ve hit it pretty close,"
the Judge answered, with a grim smile,
restrained by habit. " Of course I
know of him. A case in which he had
an interest came before me, in fact. But
he did n't appear but once, and I have
n't seen him since. I 'm not a brilliant
financier, and I 'm not a yachtsman, and
I 'm not a half society man, either ; so
our lines hardly cross. He certainly is
going ahead remarkably, is Raish. What
do you think of him ? " In saying this,

Newport.

[July,

he turned his eyes warily towards Quis-
broogh.

" I 've hardly formed an opinion,"
said the latter, poking one finger medi-
tatively into the side of his thick, black
beard. " lie 's a friend of old Thor-
burn's, you know."

" I see ; I see," murmured the old
gentleman. " Friend of young Thor-
burn's, too ? " he asked.

"Yes," said Quisbrough, still prod-
ding his beard. And they began talk-
ing of something else.

" Oh yes, I know the old fellow,"
Porter was saying at the same moment,
in answer to a question from Oliphaut.
"It's Judge Malachi Hixon, of New
York ; one of the old school. I admire
him as one of the few incorruptible
men on the bench ; but we have no per-
sonal acquaintance. The little man at
his side is a queer fish ; he used to be
tutor to Perry Thorburn, but has burst
the chrysalis, I believe, and become
private secretary to Thorburn senior."
Here Porter nodded informally to Judge
Hixon's neighbor, whose glance just
then met his. " Name 's Quisbrough,"
he continued as they turned their backs
and walked away once more, " and he 's
as odd as his name. You probably
think he looks dull, — so he does, — al-
ways has that fagged, sleepy air. But
bless you, that 's no more than the blur
you make on good steel, by breathing.
I tell you he 's sharp ; sharp as a ra-
zor."

"I begin to feel interested in these
people," said Oliphant. "Somehow it
is different here from other places in
America : in the others, everybody is
in such a hurry, that you need an in-
stantaneous photograph to show you
what they are like. They run about
so."

" Exactly," threw in Porter. " You
have heard of the darkey, have n't you,
who found it so hard to make out how
many hens he had. He got along very
well with counting them all — except

one ; and that one ran round so, he
could n't count it. That 's the way with
American society."

Oliphant laughed heartily. " Very
likely," he said. " But here in New-
port they have more repose : perhaps
it 's due to the drowsy, peaceful atmos-
phere."

" Isle of Peace, you know," rejoined
his friend : " that 's what the Indian
name, Aquidueck, means. The 'ile of
peace is very emollient ; you try it, and
see. This all leads back to what I was
saying — that you 'd better come and
bunk with me at nay cottage, and settle
down for a good season of it. Yes, sir,
you '11 find the genuine leisure class
here. Talk about our having none ! —
Do you remember what one of our
bright girls said to the Englishman who
complained that there were no people
of leisure in this country — people who
don't do anything ? ' Oh yes,' she said,
' we have those people, but here we call
them tramps.' I assure you, the kind
of tramps you meet in this place are
worth knowing."

" I 've a great mind," said Oliphant
with slow frankness, " to accept your
invitation. Nothing could be better, if
we can both keep our independence."

" My dear fellow, I shall insist upon
keeping mine ; and that leaves you to
take care of yourself."

" That 's fair, at any rate," the wid-
ower agreed. " But, oh ! " he added,
slightly blushing — " it seems funny to
ask — you haven't, in the interval,
gone and got married, have you ? "

" Not I," answered Porter with de-
cision. " Marriage has its good side ;
but you make me think of a man I
heard of, who got alarmed about an
earthquake that was to visit his city ; so
he sent off his two sons to a country
clergyman, to keep them safe, any way.
Well, after two or three days, the par-
sou, finding the boys lively, wrote to
him : ' Please take back your boys, and
send on the earthquake.' None of that

1883.]

Newport.

in mine, thank you ! Now tell me
when you '11 come over to the house."

" To-morrow, if that suits you. I
must go and look after Mrs. Deering,
now."

" All right ; but can't you join me,
later? There are some men here you
ought to know, and they're going to
lunch with me at one. Will you take a
plate with us ? "

"Thanks: if I can."

Hereupon they separated ; and Eu-
gene, finding that Mrs. Deering was
ready to go, extricated her from a knot
of acquaintances, and escorted her to
the spacious arched passage that gives
entrance to the grounds. As they drew
near the point of emergence on Belle-
vue Avenue, a high, polished gig stopped
at the curb, and the young man who
had been driving dismounted with alac-
rity.

" Perry Thorburu ! " Mrs. Deering
whispered, impressively.

As the youth over whom she cast the
glamour of that opulent name stood for
a moment on the sidewalk, giving some
direction to his groom, Oliphant beheld
him framed in the archway, with the
glare of the outer light upon him. He
was a tall, sinewy young fellow, clad in
a combination of gray cut with supreme
stylishness, that set off his red-tanned
face, his long neck and amber-colored
hair, in remarkable contrast. His figure,
from the great length of the arms and
legs, would have been ungainly but for
the commanding pose habitual with him.
He was not handsome, but neither was
he bad-looking ; and here again the only
half-successful contour of his features
was made respectable by the haughty
vigor that informed them. Thus much
Oliphant was able to observe while
young Thorburn stood on the pavement,
and as he passed them on his way in,
with long strides.

" So that 's the heir of his father, is
it ? " said Eugene. " He looks as if he
could spend the money, and if his en-

ergies happened to strike in, he might
make it, too. You don't know him, I
see, personally."

" Dear me, no," said Mrs. Deering.
" Confidentially, you understand, he is
way beyond us ; though I fancy his fa-
ther buys and sells in Roger's office a
good deal. Perhaps I ought to say he
is not ' of our set.' I draw the line at
the Thorburns, chiefly because I can't
draw them inside of it."

Then, begging her cousin to come
and dine with her that evening, she
nodded, got into her village-cart, and
drove away.

It was with unusual exhilaration that
he returned to the cheerful precinct he
had just left. The meeting with Porter
had enlivened him ; a new zest was
making its way into his veins. People
were now beginning to leave the spot,
and strayed by twos and threes past the
rich grass-plots, the beds of diversified
coleas, and the heavy stone base of the
Clock- Tower ; and Oliphant gazed with
satisfaction at the fresh, happy faces of
the young women amongst them. On
gaining the balcony, which was still
dotted with scraps of vivid color in the
bright morning dresses, and the parasols
of " crushed raspberry " that lingered,
he at once caught sight of Perry Thor-
burn, who was just then passing Quis-
brough. Perry gave the latter no sort
of recognition ; a fact which the tutor-
secretary took without concern ; and,
going on farther, was speedily absorbed
in conversation with a lady of very
striking appearance, in black and yel-
low, who was obviously much older
than he.

I doubt whether Oliphant could have
told why, but the sight of the arrogant,
attractive young millionaire, leaning
over and talking with unconcealed ear-
nestness to this handsome woman whom
our friend himself did not know, roused
in him a blind protest ; and forthwith
the whole scene before him underwent
a change. A moment earlier, it had

Newport.

[July,

agreeably sparkling and satisfac-
tory ; now, on the contrary, it became
shallow, insincere, and hollow. "They're
all on exhibition," he murmured to him-
self. " It 's like the opening scene of a
comedy. Bell rings; curtain is up —
bcginningof the season. In they come,
actors and audience ; and every one
si -MIIS to say, ' I 'm still on the surface,
you see, and I'm as fine as you are.
What next?' Bah!"

Taking out his watch, he discovered
that it was a quarter after one ; and
while he was closing it he heard Por-
ter saying : " Ah, there you are, Oli-
phant ! We are just going to lunch."

As they passed up-stairs, Oliphant
seemed to hear a voice repeating, " For-
ty — love ; forty — love ! "

II.

THE LIFE OF A LETTER.

The lunch was a pleasant affair, and
Porter exhibited himself in a light
which brought out his versatile capac-
ity.

Besides himself and his prospective
visitor, there were present Atlee and
Perry Thorburn ; Stillman Ware of Bos-
ton (brother of the young lady Oliphant
had seen on the balcony) ; one Ad-
miral Glines of the navy ; a retired
major in the regular army named Bot-
tick, who seemed to consist chiefly of
big, red, bald cranium and iron-gray
mustache ; and finally a college profes-
sor of great scientific repute, who hid
his celebrity under a reddish beard, an
excellent double-breasted coat, and (on
entering the room) a tall white hat,
which made him look like a rather solid
butterfly of fashion.

With these , personages Porter con-
versed in a way which showed that he
was master of their various interests ;
or could at least convince them that he
was. To Glines he talked about torpe-

does and the decline of the navy ; to
Major Bottick, of the war in Egypt,
varied by ancient club-gossip redolent
of stale tobacco smoke. Thorburn he
engaged chiefly on matters connected
with polo and yachting ; the length of
water-line in different boats ; their own-
ers, cost, and vicissitudes in sundry
races. With Ware, again, he deftly as-
sumed the cultivated tone, mingling so-
ciety and house-decoration with data
about rare editions of books.

As they took their places, " You
know," he said, quoting from some
dead-and-gone society verse, " ' Vitel-
lius's feasts cost a million ; ' but I'm not
Vitellius, and I intend giving you to-
day only the last two or three figures
of that amount."

Nevertheless, so far as it went the re-
past was delicious, and every one was
pleased. Even young Thorburn was
mollified into laying aside his unnecessa-
ry hauteur, under the influence of a par-
ticular claret called Lagrange, which
Porter recommended, and of a cigar
rather better than those which the young
man usually bought for himself. To in-
hale his entertainer's lavishuess in this
way was an enjoyment heightened by
the sense of his own superior prudence.
Oliphant being placed next to them,
they naturally fell into talk; and when
the party was breaking up, they again
found themselves side by side at one of
the windows giving on the Avenue.

" There is n't much driving yet, I sup-
pose," half inquired Eugene.

" Oh, it 's beginning," answered the
other, carelessly. " I believe there won't
be so much as there used to be. At any
rate, the people who used to drive
don't do it so much now, I 'm told."

" The set changes, then," said Eugene.
" A new dynasty — is that it ? "

Thorburn laughed : he was pleased
with the phrase. " If you like to call it
so," he said. " I 'm one of 'em, what-
ever it is. /drive. Later in the after-
noon 's the hour, you know."

1883.]

Newport.

'• This is n't your first season here, is
it?" Eugene asked.

" Well, yes, really it is," the young
man conceded. He betrayed some hesi-
tation, however, as if to admit the fact
reminded him uncomfortably of his
youth and newness. " Father only built
liis house here last fall, you know."

Oliphant liked him the better for
showing so easily what he felt ; and be-
gan to thiuk that this young fellow's
lofty mode of carrying himself did him
injustice. Then suddenly came back
the recollection of that scene on the
balcony, where the sight of Thorburn
and the lady in black and yellow had
affected him so curiously ; and he was
taken with a desire to ask who she was.
But this of course could not be done,
and he had besides, as he thought, asked
questions enough.

Just at this moment they heard a pe-
culiar sharp jingling in the street, which
attracted their attention. Perry looked
out rather eagerly, Oliphant thought, as
if he had been waiting for the sound, or
at least recognized it ; and as Oliphant's
own eyes turned in the same direction,
there passed swiftly by a light barouche,
.properly manned with a liveried driver
and groom, and drawn by small, strong
horses, bearing at the front of their
harness a close-linked steel chain, that
churned forth with rapid motion the
metallic signal which the two men had
heard. In the carriage was seated the
identical lady who had just been occu-
pying Oliphant's thoughts. She was of
small but not diminutive figure ; in a
certain way beautiful, or perhaps I ought
to say fine, without having much color
in her cheeks or any splendor of physi-
cal endowment that at once overpowered
the eye ; above all, she gave an impres-
sion of delicate energy, of a something
unusual without being obtrusive, and
of compact completeness. This it was
which made her appearance striking, as
I have said it was, when Oliphant had
first seen her. She still wore her dreas

of black, sparingly touched with yellow
in one or two places, and a small black
bonnet in which a single narrow gold-
en band likewise appeared. Whether
she saw the two gentlemen who were
looking at her, I cannot say. She was
out of sight again, in a flash ; gone like
some wonderful kind of bird that had
been startled out of her covert and had
taken a quick flight into other shelter.
That was the effect on Oliphaut: the
carriage and pair dissolved, as it were,
and he could think of nothing, for an
instant, except the sable form and the
dash of gold that had swept by him.

" Who is that lady ? " he now asked,
easily enough. " I 've noticed her be-
fore." As he spoke, the jangling of the
horses' chain was still heard faintly, and
chimed in with an emphasis bizarre and
semi-barbaric.

"A Mrs. Gifford," said Thorburn.
" Very much of a favorite here, and de-
serves it, too. She 's a bright woman."

" Ah, she 's married," Oliphant re-
joined, reflectively. " I had au idea she
was in mourning."

" Mourning ? I should smile ! Not
exactly. Did n't you see the yellow in
her dress ? "

" Yes, yes ; so there was. I noticed
it especially, too." And Oliphant was
surprised to find that the black garb,
and perhaps something in the general
appearance of the wearer, had neutral-
ized the meaning of that vivid color.

" She 's a widow, though," added
Thorburn, as if he had enjoyed holding
the fact in reserve.

" Oh," said Eugene, a little coolly,
beginning to move away. He was not
quite pleased with himself, on finding
that this information revived his inter-
est. " From New York ? " he inquired.

" No ; Baltimore. She spends part
of the winter in Washington, and comes
here in the summer."

Oliphaut now went back to Porter;
they all took their hats for departure ;
and he was soou ou his way to his hotel,

Newport.

[July,

alone. The rest of the afternoon was
occupied with sundry idle employments,
during which he gave little thought to
the various persons who had come into
his field of experience siuce the morn-
ing ; but he was destined to hear more
of Mrs. Gifford, and to make a discov-
ery which should give her a fixed and
unique place in his reflections.

Putting on his evening dress, he pro-
ceeded to his cousin's, and there met
Atlee, who was to dine with them. For
some cause, the presence of this young
man was by no means pleasant to Oli-
phant : he wondered whether Roger
Deering were aware how it looked, that
his wife should be accepting Atlee's de-
votion. True, it was the devotion of an
image, a stuffed doll. But possibly, if
Roger had to choose, he would prefer
to have the appearance of a fashionable
flirtation sustained by something of more
dignity than a doll. Atlee was in the
small parlor with Mrs. Deering and her
two children, — a boy of eleven, and
a little daughter scarcely three; they
made a very domestic group.

" And how do you like Newport,
Clarence?" Eugene asked the boy, as-
suming a cousinly air.

" First rate," said Clarence, with his
hands in his pockets. "I want to go
to the Casino hop to-night."

" What, you ? " inquired his mature
friend, in astonishment. " You 're too
young."

"No I ain't, either," declared the
boy. " Everybody goes ; but the best
people take the lead. I Ve heard 'em
say that. Ain't we the best ? "

" Clarence," said his mother, " you
must n't talk in that way."

"Well, I don't care," he remarked.
" I know what they want is young peo-
ple, to dance. I know how to dance :
have n't I been to dancing-school ? If
papa was here, he 'd let me go. Now
Mr. Oliphant, you tell mamma to let
me. Mr. Atlee ain't any good that
way, for all he comes here so much."

" Clarence," his mother repeated,
" I 'in ashamed of you ! If you go on
so, I shan't let you come in to dessert."

Atlee, who was some six feet distant
from the object of disturbance, affixed
his eye-glass, and regarded Clarence
painfully ; while the boy, in spite of his
valiant attitude, gave symptoms of cry-
ing.

" Come here," said Eugene, engaging-
ly. " I 've got something to show you."
He had, in face, provided himself with a
little present. It was an ivory puzzle-
box, of such dimensions that it could be
carried on the watch-chain which he had
noticed that his young cousin wore.
Clarence was at first much interested,
but Oliphant soon perceived that he had
miscalculated the precocious child's ca-
pacity. " Watch-chains ain't in fashion
now, you know," Clarence confided to
him in undertone. " They wear fobs.
Hullo," he continued, examining Oli-
phant's waistcoat, "you have n't got any
fob ! Why, Steve Richards has got
one, and he ain't any bigger than I am ;
and he 's got lots of other things, too.
He 's got a toy engine, and a real rifle,
and a bicycle, and — I don't see why it
is! We 're just as good as the others,
but some fellow always has more things
than I do."

Oliphant was amused, and slightly dis-
gusted ; but just at that juncture, dinner
was announced, and the children were
dismissed. Yet even in the brief mo-
ment of their leave-taking Mrs. Deer-
ing's preference for her little daughter
Effie was plainly revealed : she detached
herself from the clinging baby arms and
the gold-haired face, with a tender, pa-
thetic reluctance.

At the table, some allusion was made
to young Thorburn, and Oliphant was
prompted to say, " By the way, he seems
to be a good deal interested in that Mrs.
Gifford whom I saw at the Casino this
morning. Do you know her ? "

" Oh, yes," said Mary Deering, " I
know her. But I don't think young

1883.]

Newport.

Mr. Thorburn's interest lies especially
in that direction."

" Is that hecause you know that it
takes some other direction ? " he asked.

" I can't say positively," his cousin
answered. " But it 's generally sup-
posed that, if he has any inclination of
that sort, it is towards Miss Hobart, of
New York, you know ; Josephine Ho-
bart. You have n't seen her, have you ?
Well, she 's quite the accepted belle, at
home ; though, for particular reasons,
she does n't flourish so much here at
Newport. Don't you think I 'm right
about Perry Thorburn and Josephine,
Mr. Atlee ? "

The young man appealed to gave an
exceedingly slow and eminently Britan-
nic assent.

Eugene, however, was hardly con-
vinced. " There is something familiar,"
he resumed, " about that name of Gif-
ford. It 's not uncommon, of course ;
but it 's really a New England name.
How does it happen that she hails from
Baltimore ? "

" I believe," said Mrs. Deering, " that
her husband was a New Englander, and
came from your region, Eugene, — not
far from Springfield ; though when you
come to talk about families, it 's quite
absurd to ask me. I have enough to do
to look after my own, as I guess you
saw just before dinner. Still, I can
tell you this much, that he afterwards
moved to Baltimore, and that his first
name was Helvetius. I can always re-
member that."

" I should think you might ! " ex-
claimed Atlee, laying down his fork and
allowing a subdued hilarity to distend
his mustache. " Helvetius ! " he repeat-
ed, with condescension. " Most extraw-
d'n'ry name. I should think you might ! "
His own name was Gustavus, but he had
gradually modified it to " Augustus,"
and kept even that in the background
except on occasions when he thought it
would be effective.

" Well," said Oliphant, " I 'm not

much better off than before. I can't
' place ' the name, as they say in the
country. And yet " —

In a fit of abstraction, he ceased to
speak. " I don't think your association
with the name amounts to anything,"
Mrs. Deering asserted, with such a de-
termined closing of her lively lips that
controversy seemed hopeless. " But you
may be sure, Eugene, of one thing:
Octavia Gifford is a woman perfectly
contented as she is. She will never
marry again."

" But if that 's so," said Atlee, " why
is it that she does n't wear mourning ? "

" She does n't, exactly, it 's true," said
their hostess. " If you notice, though,
you will see that she always dresses
in black or white, with just a little of
one color scattered in. And then," she
continued, turning to Oliphant, "I un-
derstand she has a theory that it is
not quite truthful to wear black entire-
ly. The way she looks at it is this :
' I 'm happy, and I still enjoy a great
deal in life, so why should I pretend
that I don't, and shut myself up in a
dark shroud ? ' But, really, the rea-
son she holds that opinion is that she
was so thoroughly happy in her married
life."

" You 're sure of that, are you ? " in-
quired her cousin.

" Perfectly. The woman is n't living
who looks more on the bright side, so
far as that goes, than Octavia Gifford.
Her existence has been so satisfactory
to her that, in spite of her great loss,
there is a kind of radiance over every-
thing, in her eyes."

" Fortunate person," murmured Eu-
gene ; and then other topics came up,
which absorbed them until an unex-
pected noise at the front door, just as
salad was being served, interrupted the
conversation.

" There 's Roger, I declare ! " ex-
claimed Mrs. Deering, at the sound, and
she excused herself, to run out and
meet him. She came back, beaming

Newport.

[July,

more than ever ; and Roger himself fol-
. — active and semi - preoccupied
a-; UMial. witli a face that appeared ha-
bitually red, cither because of haste and
heat, or good living, and with hair cut
excessively short for summer comfort,
from the nape of his neck to the edge of
baldness rather far back from his fore-
head. He did not seem at all disturbed
by Atlee's presence.

" How do ? " he said cordially to both
the visitors, giving his hand to each in
succession. " Found I could get away
all at once, as I was just explaining to
Mary. Things rather dull on the street
and likely to stay so the next few days,
so I thought I 'd run on. Let 's have
some champagne, Mary."

The wine was sent for, and Clarence
burst prematurely into the room. " Oh
papa ! " he exclaimed ; and, after a
hearty greeting between them : " May
I go to the hop ? "

" Hop ? No. On general principles,
no. All hops excluded — except hop
into bed. What party is it ? " Mrs.
Deering explained. " Oh, go ahead,
if you want to," said the father easi-
ly. " Let him go and look on, Mary.
That 's all you could do, you know,
Clarence : you 're too young to dance
there. And you don't catch me going.
If you want to see me, you Ve got to
stay at home."

So the matter was compromised, final-
ly, by the boy's receiving a glass of
champagne and water, and remaining
with Deering. " I '11 look after him,"
said the latter, good-humoredlv, to his
wife, " if Atlee and Eugene will look
after you."

Oliphant's vague uneasiness about At-
lee had been partially allayed by Rog-
er's sudden arrival ; now he was again
made uncomfortable by the prospect of
taking Mrs. Deering away for an even-
ing of superfluous diversion, just at the
instant of her husband's return. But
as they chatted and smoked over their
coffee, while Mrs. Deering made some

preparation for the dance, he consoled
himself with the reflection that it was
foolish to apply his own secluded stand-
ard of conduct, which had never brought
about much happiness in his case, to
the affairs of the sophisticated circle in
which he now stood.

Meanwhile the Casino theatre had
been lighted up, and people were slowly
assembling in the garnished interior,
where the white and gold of the walls
and the pale-blue silver-starred panels
of the ceiling cast a reflected brilliancy
upon the polished floor. The first-com-
ers were of a staid and sober sort, chief-
ly in dark-hued habiliments ; and they
collected in the gallery, or seated them-
selves in the remotest chairs near the
lower entrances, with a solemn and ex-
pectant hush, very much as if they had
arrived at church a long time before
service. They were simply spectators,
and those who were to furnish the spec-
tacle did not straggle in until after nine.
Among these were Mrs. Farley Blazer,
Miss Ware and her brother, and young
Lord Hawkstane, whom it was supposed
that Mrs. Blazer intended to marry to
one of her nieces, after he should have
had time enough to think he had made
up his own mind about it. It was
of Lord Hawkstane that the Weekly
Eavesdropper had said : '• His gentle-
manly manner has won him troops of
friends ; " and in the next paragraph
it praised the gentlemanly head- waiter
at the Ocean House. Besides these, a
member of the cabinet, with his wife
and daughters, made his appearance ;
and a foreign minister as well as a
couple of attaches of legation at Wash-
ington were pointed out to the solemn
people in the galleries, by the more
knowing of their associates. Some
looked anxiously for Count Fitz-Stuart,
of whom they had heard as " the last
of the Stuarts ; " but he was not seen
that evening, reserving himself under
some mysterious sense of fitness, with
which the half-dollar admission may

1883.]

Newport.

have had something to do. Mrs. Thor-
buru came, bringing a judiciously small
selection of diamonds. There were oth-
er men and women who brought their
family names — names of a certain an-
tiquity in Boston or New York, — that
gave them a distinction, an impercep-
tible halo, which the unfortunate on-
lookers \vlio did not know them entire-
ly missed seeing. It was on the whole
an agreeable, informal company, differ-
ing little from the average of cultivat-
ed persons elsewhere; notwithstanding
which a local paper, the next day, lift-
ing the trump of vulgar fame, declared
that " the elite was in force, America's
best society people being re presented by
its fairest ladies and wealthiest citi-
zens."

When Oliphant came in, he met Dana
Sweetser hovering about with a ravished
expression of countenance.

" It is simply delightful," said Mr.
Sweetser. " You see so many charming
friends, with no encumbering obligation.
And the beauty ! Where can you find
at hazard so many attractive women as
you see around this room ? " As Atlee
had assumed the duty of finding Mrs.
Deering a chair, the gay old bachelor
began pointing out to Eugene the per-
sons whom he ought to observe. " But
our quota is not yet full," he wound up.
" Before the season is over we expect
to draw an Italian Count, a Russian
Prince, and " —

" No crowned heads this year ? " Oli-
phant put in.

Sweetser turned upon him a faded
reproach, which made him regret his
jest. " However, that 's not so impos-
sible in the future," resumed the ancient
Dana, agile in the recovery of good-
humor. " The throne business is so un-
certain, nowadays. There 's something
better than a crowned head to be seen
to-night, though. Josephine Hobart is
here."

" Indeed ? "

" Yes ; she has got away from her

dreadful old father and is visiting friends
in town. Enviable friends ! "

" 1 'm sorry to say I 've never seen
her," Oliphant remarked.

Mr. Sweetser looked woe -begone.
"My dear sir, you don't know what
you 've missed ! Let me present you."

This offer Eugene contrived to evade,
preferring some other approach. Before
long he discovered his cousin sitting
next to Mrs. Gifford, and was thus pre-
cipitated into a speaking acquaintance
with the widow.

" Have you ever been in Spring-
field ? " he asked, after a few prelimi-
nary nothings.

" No," she said. " But how odd that
you should happen to ask! Is that your
home ? "

" Yes. At least, it was ; but I have
wandered so much, I can hardly call it
that any more. I have been abroad,
the last three years."

"Mr. Gifford lived there," said the
widow, in the most composed and cheer-
ful way. " But he had entirely moved
his interests to Baltimore, before our
marriage, and so I never chanced to go
to Springfield. Is it a pretty place ? "

" ' Prettily placed ' would describe it
better," Oliphant said. But he was
thinking that, serene though she was, a
certain change had passed over her —
like the shadow of a sunny cloud, when
she mentioned her husband. There was
a finer light in her eye, just for an in-
stant: she looked as if she had been
thrilled through with a proud memory,
yet one that brought with it a pang.
" And you were of Baltimore yourself,"
he went on. " I know some people
there." So they began to make note of
their acquaintances, as persons must
who have little knowledge of each other.

What they said came fitfully ; slender
trains of words breaking off suddenly,
between which the soft notes of the
orchestra swept upon them in delicate
waves. Then Mrs. Deering would help
them on with a laughing remark ; and

Newport.

[July,

Oliphant began a^ain. To complete his
disL'our.-igi'meiit, Perry Thorbum strode
up. even more overtopping in his dress-
coat than he had been that morning,
and asked for a dance with Mrs. Gif-
i'ord, which she granted. At the same
moment Mrs. Deeriug began to waltz
with Atlee, and Eugene was left alone.
He watched the ewift but gentle whirl
of the dancers. For a moment every-
thing before him melted into a tremu-
lous, insubstantial glow ; a confusion of
gold and white and gaslight and rhythmic
motion. It was strange to be in such
a spot, with such companionship, while
his thoughts were straying off to guess
at the happiness so confidently asserted
of Mrs. Gilford's past, and to ask wheth-
er she had given any more for it than
he had devoted without getting a like
return. What was the secret of these
fates ? It reminded him of little Clar-
ence's problem in the distribution of
toys ; but the question went on recurring
like the throb of an endless trouble, a
refrain to the lively music now ringing
in his ears. At last Mrs. Gifford was
beside him again, swept to her place by
the breeze of the waltz, which died away
the next instant ; and the room at once
became a solid, bright interior full of
polished people ; no refrain of destiny
audible anywhere in it.

Perry Thorburn went on talking to
the widow. Suddenly, " I don't see
Miss Hobart," he said.

" That reminds me," Oliphant inter-
posed, addressing her. " Do you know
31 U-, Hobart? I have been so anxious
to see her." He had begun to catch the
accent of the place.

Mis. Gifford showed a new interest
in him. " Know her ? Why, she 's
staying with me ! "

"As an invisible spirit?" he asked,
glancing around.

" Luckily, no," was her answer, given
witli <lnc sparkle of appreciation for his
little effort. " I don't see her either,
Perry," she continued, to Thorburn.

" I Ve lost her in the waltz. And you
know," to Oliphant again, " when Jose-
phine is lost, there are so many to find
her — it 's quite hopeless for me"

" Much more so, then, for me," Oli-
phant said.

The other two looked in various di-
rections, and finally descried Josephine
at the end of the room where she had
stopped, with the music, and was de-
tained by a little group of admirers,
among them Lord Hawkstane.

"I will go over there." said Thor-
burn abruptly, after a parenthetical
glare at Oliphant.

Eugene wondered if the young man

claimed a monoply of both these ladies.

" It will be like Clever Alice," said

Mrs. Gifford. " Everybody who goes

to find her will stay."

" I venture to predict that that won't
happen in this case," he returned, scat-
tering over his remark a light powder
of gallantry which softened the contra-
diction.

" We shall see," the widow smiled.
Miss Hobart did in fact come back
almost immediately, on Thorburn's arm ;
and as Oliphant stood there he was in-
troduced to her.

" I 'm a very poor talker," he de-
clared to her, becoming still more local.
'" I hardly belong here, for I really have
nothing to say."

" That is exactly what will give you
a perfect claim," said Miss Hobart.
" You will be like the rest, then."

This beginning gave them a half-hu-
morous understanding, from which they
went on smoothly. Josephine had spok-
en quietly, softly ; neither in the tone
of satire nor in that of earnest. From
her manner, she might have been im-
parting a gentle confidence of some sort.
Evidently her power lay in her repose ;
Oliphant was struck by this. She had
large, meditative, dark-gray eyes that
moved slowly with a hidden glance side-
wise ; she appeared to be low-browed,
but only because of the breadth of her

1883.]

Newport.

forehead : altogether she was an embod-
iment of re very. Oliphant even fan-
cied a guarded sadness in her face ; and
all this seemed to him very strange in a
young woman who drew so much ad-
miration. More and more the thought
presented itself that she was the centre
of calm in the midst of the whirlpool.

If this were true, the similitude was
borne out by the fact that swiftly, sure-
Iv the idle young men in the neighbor-
hood were drawn closer and closer, and
soon were held in a semicircle around
her. Eugene felt that he was no match
for them, and hastily abandoned the con-
versation. For a while he stayed near
the other two ladies, half-silent and un-
easy, disturbed by a restlessness which
he was at a loss to account for. Then,
finding that Mrs. Deering would not
remain much longer and expected to
drive home in her carriage, he retreated
to a door by the veranda ; and, after
watching the group until he was thor-
oughly puzzled to decide whether Thor-
burn was more interested in the widow
or Miss Ilobart, he departed.

He had to repack some of his things
before removing to Porter's, and it oc-
curred to him to do this to-night ; but
when he had put on his dressing-gown,
an impulse led him into quite a differ-
ent employment. In a smaller trunk
that stood near his bed was a quantity
of papers, many of them old letters,
which had belonged to his wife. He
had brought them hither inconsistently
enough, since it was on Mary Deering's
advice to sever himself wholly from his
past that he had come to Newport.
But when he had first looked over his
wife's belongings, he had been too much
affected and too weary to complete the
task ; and he fancied that the present
summer would be a good time to review
what remained, and destroy them. The
associations of the day and bis musings
at the dance inclined him now to take a
look at these shriveled relics. He be-
gan humming again : —

"An I were as fair as she
And she were as kind as I,
What pair" —

Here he unlocked the box, and threw
back the lid. A lingering musty per-
fume stole up from the mass of old
writings. . . . Somewhere down there,
he knew, were the early love-letters.
There, too, — he shuddered as he
thought of it, — was the equally impas-
sioned but stern and bitter correspon-
dence growing out of a long absence of
hers, when she had threatened separa-
tion. He hesitated to touch any of
these : indeed, he wondered why he had
kept them at all. But there was a great
tenacity in his temperament, and he had
always wished to review his experience
as a whole, some day, and solve its un-
satisfactoriness ; so he had held on to
these documents with little care what
hands they might fall into, were he to
die before disposing of them. The same
recklessness on that head had once in-
duced him to set down, partly for relief,
partly for analysis, memoranda of the
mental anguish through which he was
passing, due to the luckless struggle into
which his married life had fallen. Upon
the little book in which he had entered
these records his hand rested first, when
he began to examine the contents of the
trunk, and he turned a few pages to see
what was there. Strange, indefensible,
even ghastly seemed the bitter things
he found ; and for the most part they
had lost their meaning ; yet he remem-
bered how dreadfully real their mean-
ing had once been — how it had scorched
his heart. One paragraph, however,
struck him, and renewed the old tur-
moil. It was this : —

" Do we love each other — Alice and
I — or detest ? I can't decide. But
when we are both hating hardest, we
cling to each other most, if only for a
better chance to stab. Yes ; as some
have said, love and hate are the same
and merely change their effect — as
strong essences may either poison to

Boomtown.

[July,

death, or el-e poison us out of disease
into healthy life."

Oliphant put down the book. " A.nd
in spite of everything." he murmured,
>• 1 >uj>|M»e I loved her! Poor child,
when she was laid in her grave . . .
O God," he went ou, looking upward,
a^ it in communion, "if forgiveness is
love, you know whether I loved ; but I
do not. I know there was too much weak-
ness and resentment and longing for
present happiness in me, to make me
deserving in the sight of the Highest."
For some time after this he remained
inert and silent, unaware of any thought
except as it might take the form of
penitence and prayer. Then he lifted
mechanically one of the packets of fold-
ed papers, untied it, and began to read.
They proved to be letters written to his
wife by various friends, some time be-
fore he had even known her ; and there
was not much in them to interest him.
Still, he continued to examine them in
a cursory way. Suddenly he gave a
start ; then he raised his eyebrows and
looked closer at the written sheet which
he was holding. After this he turned
at once to the end, on the other page,

for the signature. The ink was time-
worn, fatigued by its long waiting, but
scarcely dimmed. The name stood out
clearly": " Helvetius Gifford." Oli-
phaut was sure he had never seen this
paper before ; but there, pressed upon
it with mute emphasis, was the name
which he had heard but a few hours
since as that of Mrs. Gifford's husband !
Going back, he read the whole from
the beginning ; and now his eyes were
lifted quietly from its lamp-lit surface
to the glassy squares of his window. He
at length became aware that the dying
moon had cast a strange ashen light over
the sky. But why had he never heard
of this letter before ? Why had his
wife never told him of the matter? It
had been addressed to her, these long
years ago, by Helvetius Gifford, and
contained an offer of marriage from
him, couched in terms of adoration the
sincerity of which was unmistakable ;
Words that looked cold and rigid now,
in their parallel inky lines — but only
as lava looks black when it is cooled,
showing none the less where once the
fire of its life flowed burning away, into
the unseen.

George Parsons Lathrop.

BOOMTOWN.

IN its early days, before there were
any houses upon its streets, and when
the streets themselves were indicated
only by the surveyor's pegs, Boomtown
was known as Boom City upon the gor-
geous map which heralded its future
glory. But cities, like college graduates,
grow more modest as they grow old, and
hence its present compacter title. Not
liet the reader with a multitude of
)hical details, I will simply say
Boomtown of to-day is situated
treat Northwest. While it ia
mth of the British boundary,

it may be above the same ; for there are
thousands of our English and Canadian
friends whose hearts are so loyal that
they would rather be swindled under
her majesty's flag than grow rich on
Yankee soil. For a time their oppor-
tunities for speculation without expatri-
ation were limited to the city of Winni-
peg, in Manitoba, and it is chiefly to
this fact that the town owes its cele-
brated prosperity of 1881 and 1882.

The great Northwest is entered
through the gateway of St. Paul. There
the traveler first hears of Boomtown,

1883.]

Boomtoivn.

the " Portals of the Sunset," the " Fa-
vorite of Fortune," the " Gem of the
Great Golden Northwest," the " Love-
liest Spot in the Land of Light," the
" Plucky Pioneers' Paradise upon the
Productive Prairies." Not only are the
allurements and advantages of Boom-
town advertised in alliterative prose, but
the real-estate man also drops into po-
etry, and relates how the place has
grown : —

" From a village in a vale
To a city strong and hale,
Ere three harvests tell their tale."

In prospectus this city is the focus of
all railroads that are ever to be built,
the future capital of the future State,
the garden spot of the farmer, the sani-
tarium of the invalid, the speculator's
paradise, the laud of golden grain,
where the wheat grows in forests and
the oats in impenetrable jungles. Should
our arrival in St. Paul be opportune,
we learn that an auction sale of Boom-
town lots is one of the entertainments
of the evening, and we are sadly lack-
ing in the tourist's proverbial enterprise
if we do not attend. Bauds of music,
inviting us to the scene, play lively
tunes, calculated to intoxicate the buyer
and loosen the strings of his purse.
Like the spies sent out by Moses to re-
port upon the land of Canaan, and who
returned bearing between them that fa-
mous bunch of grapes from the brook
Eshcol, the Boomtown syndicate have
also brought with them the products of
their land, and challenge Canaan itself
to show an equal display of No. 1 hard
wheat, tastefully arranged in sheaf and
jar ; enormous potatoes, each one a din-
ner in itself ; and luscious fruit, which,
however, owing to the undeveloped state
of the country, is yet in a state of pa-
pier maclie.

The sales are made by that most lo-
quacious of auctioneers, the " Marquis
of Mud," who has fairly earned his hon-
orable title. He exhorts the people to
catch on to the Boomtown boom, which

has surely set in to stay. Then, with
the sensitiveness of the true boomer, he
corrects himself, and says that this is
not a boom at all, but a healthy and
regular growth. The people catch on.
In the fever of the moment, those buy
lots who never bought before. Some
buy in confidence, and some in fun.
Some think that kind of a lottery as
good as any other, and some invest for
the privilege which it gives them of oc-
casionally putting on the air of a cap-
italist, and referring, in careless tones,
to their real estate up in Boomtown.
They buy for that satisfaction which
the mere possession of property gives.
Where lives the man who has not bought
• a dog or a dressing-gown, an opera-
house or a newspaper, for similar rea-
sons ?

Having purchased his lot, the travel-
er feels a natural desire to look at it,
and proudly stand upon the base of his
pyramid of dirt, whose apex is at the
centre of the earth, three or four thou-
sand miles away. Since Boomtown is
an inland city, and the climate, he has
been led to believe, is just wet enough
for the farmer and just dry enough for
the consumptive, he is greatly shocked
to find that his destination is surround-
ed by a waste of waters. Only the re-
peated assurance that this is an excep-
tionally moist spring restores confidence
to his soul. The steamboat upon which
he has crossed the prairie unloads its
passengers at the veranda of the second
story of the hotel ; and when, on the
following day, the investor starts out in
a row-boat to hunt up his real estate,
he finds that he. had unwittingly sailed
across it as he came into town. The
exact location of his lot, however, can-
not be determined without a diving-bell.
The corner-stakes, which were only
waist-high, are under water, and he
hears the surveyor, who is his pilot on
this occasion, mutter to his assistant
that it will be necessary to make his
pegs as high as lamp-posts hereafter.

Boomtoivn.

[July,

The flood subsides at last, as all floods
mu-t. and then the voice of the hoomer
a-boomin^ is heard in Boomtown. This
individual, who is an optimist of the
most sanguine nature, has been the sub-
ject of many descriptions of late; but
none have been more graphic than that
which, in plain American, defines him
as a " rustler." He travels with a map
under his arm, hope in his heart, and,
to say the least, exaggeration upon his
lips. Early and late his cheerful tones
are heard prophesying great things of
the new city, and seductively offering a
few lots for sale in the most promising
part of the town. In his mind's eye he
sees paved sidewalks, street railways,
court-houses, orphan asylums, and other
city improvements dotting the barren
surface of his unsold property, and if
he is a good boomer his confidence is
contagious.

Not Paris herself is more cosmopoli-
tan in her population than Boomtown,
as witness this extract from a report of
the sheriff of that city : —

" Jail full, — three Indians, one ne-
gro, eight white civilians, and three sol-
diers. I am rustling now for a China-
man, to complete the assortment."

Social distinction is not hard to
achieve in Boomtown. Rank, talent,
and birth are of no importance there.
Money to invest is the thing. Who
would be lionized there should enter
the city with the careworn brow, light
grip-sack, and modest dress of the solid
millionaire. Let him ask a few dis-
creet questions about the prices of prop-
erty here and there ; then let him be
seen pacing off the frontage of lots
marked " For Sale," as if to determine
their extent, and let him thoughtfully
bore his cane into the soil, as if to as-
certain its fitness for foundations, and
his .success is assured. Rumor is swift
to make a magnate of him. Real-estate
agents send in their cards. The hotel
clerk transfers him to parlors on the
first floor. Newspaper reporters solicit

his opinion upon the city of their pride ;
and when he answers, in terms of ordi-
nary compliment, that its growth is won-
derful and its future metropolitan splen-
dor is beyond question, his words are
printed as oracular utterances. Com-
mittees of leading citizens call upon their
distinguished visitor, and give him a free
ride in a hack over the avenues and
boulevards which are to be ; and the
boomer tells him pretty stories, as they
sit together over club-house dinners and
champagne suppers innumerable. By
all means, the tourist to Boomtown
should affect the thoughtful air of the
capitalist with money to spend.

One hears in Boomtown the same old
jokes that have furnished amusement to
the Western traveler since the days of
Bonneville and Bridger, and he comes
at last to wonder if new witticisms are
really as rare upon the frontier as in
the minstrel show and circus ring. Fun-
ny stories that were printed in Beyond
the Mississippi and Roughing It, years
and years ago, are told as actual occur-
rences of yesterday or to-day, and the
exasperated listener is considered a stick
if he does not join in the laughter which
accompanies them. They say that the
climate of Boomtown is so healthy that
they had to shoot a man to start a grave-
yard with ; the legend and adventure of
" Pike's Peak or Bust " are adapted to
" Boomtown or Bust ; " and telling you
of the dainty Englishman who, calling
for a glass of sherry and an egg, was
given whisky in a tin cup, and made to
drink it at the revolver's muzzle, they
give local color to this thrilling incident
by describing the exact saloon in Boom-
town in which it occurred. The mail
in good clothes who travels through the
West is sure to be taken for a tender-
foot, and treated to a rehash of Western
humor. To avoid this infliction there is
perhaps no safer way than to fight fire
with fire, so to speak, and, anticipating
your companion's jokes, tell them to
him before he has a chance to begin.

1883.]

Boomtown.

Nothing so disgusts a raconteur as to be
thus dosed with his own medicine.

The enterprising newspaper, which
appropriates and retails the anecdotes
of the popular lecturer, has also made
common property of the mulewhacker's
vernacular and the scout's adventure.
A man in Arizona says a good thing,
a newspaper correspondent from New
York puts it in circulation, and in a
month all of the people of Montana are
repeating it as original material. The
tourist who is writing a book will do
well to ponder these things. He trav-
els over the same routes, employs the
same guides, hears the same stories,
sees the same scenery, and receives the
same impressions" as a dozen authors
who have gone before him ; and when
his volume appears it will be easy to
prove that it is plagiarized from the
works of his predecessors. He should
therefore, before going into print, read
all kindred existing literature, and prune
his own notes accordingly ; but such a
discipline will leave him scarcely any-
thing worth publishing.

Travelers arriving in Boomtown by
rail will observe upon the platform at
the station a person picturesquely at-
tired in buckskin, with fringes down
the legs of his pantaloons and a silver
cord around his white felt hat. His
hair is long and redolent. His mus-
tache is terrible. Mexican spurs jingle
at his heels. He is girt about with a
whole armory of pistols and knives, sil-
ver-mounted, and his whole appearance
is calculated to send the cold chills of
awe over the beholder. Being ques-
tioned, this piratical individual admits
that he is celebrated as an Indian slayer,
was General Ouster's favorite scout, and
is known to fame by some such euphonic
title as " Grizzly George," or " Sure
Pop Peter." Yes, he will condescend
to take a drink with his questioner,
from whom the death-dealing terror
borrows five dollars, at the close of the
interview. In short, he is a fraud, as

the average hunter and trapper of the
railway station is very liable to be. His
appearance is purely theatrical, and his
acquaintance with the Indian question
entirely theoretical. The genuine hero
of the plains and mountains does not oil
his hair and stand in public places await-
ing an invitation to drink. Nor is he
known by any display of scalps in his
belt, or hyperbole in his conversation.
More likely, he is a plain and silent man,
dressed in ready-made clothes, with a
stoop in his shoulder and a patch on
his knee, with no visible weapons ex-
cept a well-worn butcher-knife in his
boot-leg, and, taken altogether, not easily
distinguishable from the most unheroic
of us. This may be sad news for the
boys of America, who have constructed
a different ideal of the plainsman and
mountaineer, but nevertheless it is true.

To return to the all-absorbing topic
of this region, the tourist should be
warned that it is not always safe to buy
Boomtown real estate a la carte, or as
it appears upon the map. The enter-
prising boomer has been known to pur-
chase a tract of land some miles out on
the prairie, plot it in its true position on
the street, and then, cutting out the
broad strip of territory between his
property and the town, slide his subur-
ban addition up to the heart of the city,
and paste it there. The buyer who,
guided by this fraudulent map, selects a
lot in apparent proximity to the high
school, penitentiary, and other conven-
iences of civilized life is greatly grieved
to discover that his future home is situ-
ated somewhere out among the wheat-
fields.

Whenever the boomer meets with an
objection on the score of price, he asks
the permanent question, —

" Do you consider yourself the big-
gest fool in the great Northwest ? "

The buyer is naturally averse to plac-
ing himself at the head of the category
of great Northwestern fools.

" Then," replies the boomer, " buy

Boomtown.

this lo*. and sell it to some bigger fool,
\\lici: veil iiu't-t him. That's what I am
doing."

'• .But it is not worth the money you
ask for it," protests the cautious pur-
chaser.

k- Who cares what it is worth ? Intrin-
sic values don't count here. We don't
buy lots for what they are worth in
Boomtown. We buy them to sell again."

The investor, notwithstanding the ad-
vantages offered him, will not be long
in Boomtown before he wearies of
the hollow mockery and unsubstantial
wealth of this city in the air, and, be-
coming homesick and hungry, he is will-
ing to sell his ground at the very low
figures of its cost, namely, two hundred
dollars. He is astonished that buyers
should look askance at such a bargain,
and refuse it. His fault lies in not
charging enough. Speculators cannot
reasonably be expected to snap at land
which does not advance in value be-
tween sales.

Now mark the ways of the boomer,
who has an adjoining lot of equal value.
Going to the same group of timid in-
vestors, he offers it to them for two
thousand dollars. The audacity of the
proposal charms them into listening,
while he explains that this piece of
ground has cost him but two hundred
dollars one brief year ago. Selling it
for two thousand, as he is now doing,
he is realizing a profit of nine hundred
per cent, on his investment. There is
no reason why property should not con-
tinue to rise in value at the same rate
for at least another year, when they can
sell this lot for twenty thousand dollars.
His logic is not to be gainsaid, and there
is strife among the by-standers to secure
this very profitable bit of realty. As
the boomer closes the bargain, he is
heard to remark sententiously, " I did
not come to Boomtown for my health."

So goes the craze. Speculators ar-
rive from all parts of the world. Gas
companies are organized, and electric

lights are hung freely about the town.
Street railways are planned before there
are any people to ride. Water-works
are contracted for while whisky is yet
the staple beverage. The boomer points
to these improvements as additional in-
ducements to the honest settler, who
does not stop to realize that it is such
as he that must pay for them, and that
his share of the civic debt may be easily
greater than the value of his property.
More than one aspiring city has thus
found itself bonded for more than it was
intrinsically worth, and, if sold at auc-
tion, would not bring enough to satisfy
its creditors.

For a month, or a year, the fever
rages. The value of property is not
computed on the solid basis of its use-
fulness for building purposes or market
gardens, but on the fickle standard of
what it can be sold for to-morrow. The
world looks on in amazement, and says
the Boomtown folks are mad. But they
are not more mad than gamblers in gen-
eral. When the old Dutch speculators
bought a tulip bulb for ten thousand
florins, it was for the unaesthetic reason
that they expected to sell it soon for
fifteen thousand, and not because they
anticipated an equivalent amount of
comfort or happiness to result from its
possession. So it is with the gamblers
at Boomtowu ; and if they could only
foresee the precise date when distrust
shall take the place of confidence, tim-
idity follow boldness, and panic crush
speculation, all would be well. Unhap-
pily the time of this inevitable turn in
fortune's wheel cannot be foreseen. It
comes truly like a thief in the night.
Even while town lots in the suburban
cow pastures are auspiciously selling for
one thousand dollars a front foot, a feel-
ing of fear, coming from no one knows
where, palsies the hearts of the commu-
nity, arrests the voice of the bidder, and
the panic begins. Travelers on the rail-
way put their heads together, and tell
each other that the bottom has fallen

1883.]

Boomtown.

out of Boomtown at last. The boot-
blacks on the street volunteer the infor-
mation that something is going to drop
in Boomtown. Newspapers in distant
cities print the warning, " Stand from
under in Boomtown ! " The winds
whistle it, the brooks murmur it, and
even the golden wheat-heads on the
plain seem to nod, with a sagacious air,
" I told you so."

The history of Boomtown is repeated
in many a new settlement in the West,
which in its youth enjoys an exag-
gerated importance as a railway ter-
minus, or an outfitting camp, or a depot
for the mines. The bubble of its great-
ness is inflated rapidly to the burst-
ing point, when there is a sudden col-
lapse in values. Fortunes which were
made in a mpnth are lost in a day.
Mortgages are foreclosed without cere-
mony. The town is dead for a time, in
that stupor which follows the exhilara-
tion of drunkenness. The hosts of specu-
lators and young doctors and lawyers
decamp to other places of metropolitan
promise. After the panic comes the
enduring period of slow and healthy
growth, in which settlers come to stay,
and property is bought and sold for use-
ful purposes alone. But though they
grow a hundred years, these towns will
never again see the glory of their early
days, nor will they reap such prices for
town lots as were paid in their brief
golden age. The country is dotted with
dilapidated villages which are the wrecks
of the speculator's hopes. A brick man-
sion, a corner store, a capacious ware-
house, and a half dozen faded frame
dwellings are all the fruitage of so much
blossoming. Yet it was at one time
demonstrated beyond a doubt that each
of these villages was destined to be the
" New Chicago ; " and wiser folks than
you or I, dear reader, have believed it
to their cost, and have learned too late
that it does not profit a town to be at
the head of navigation of a river which
is not navigated, or the queen of a har-

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 6

bor which the ships do not visit, or the
agricultural centre of a district which is
not cultivated, or the shipping-point of
a mine when the deposit is exhausted,
or the gateway of a region which no-
body enters.

Sometimes there .are booms within a
boom, as there are wheels within a wheel,
and now one section and now another
of Boomtown is selected as the future
Broadway or Murray Hill of that city.
The opening of a new avenue, the build-
ing of a fine business block, the exten-
sion of a street-car line, the location of
a suburban railway station, a popular
church, or a fashionable family, are all
potent influences in the development of
a city ; and so many and powerful are
these secondary springs of growth that
the natural advantages of a town site
are well-nigh offset by them. Some-
times a first settler seizes upon the most
favorably ground of a coming city, and
holds it at an exorbitant price, under
the impression that the town must and
will have it, at any rate. Rather than
receive no profit from his property,
while awaiting its sale, he permits the
erection of such temporary structures as
saloons, Irish shanties, livery stables,
and circus tents, whose moderate rental
will help him to pay the taxes, which
are keeping him " land poor." Mean-
while the city finds room for itself else-
where. The railway builds a depot in
the swamp. The banks and business
houses perch on the side-hill, and the
fine residences seek other suburbs, while
the best natural ground of the city's site
becomes disreputable and correspond-
ingly valueless. As the Western citizen
is esteemed in proportion as he contrib-
utes to the building up of his city, it is
needless to say that this style of boomer
is never sent to Congress.

Such booms are not confined to the
West, as the people of the East doubt-
less know. When George Washington
established the city which bears his
name, it was his design that it should

he built upon the fine plateau east of
the Capitol ; but the property-holders of
that quarter, appreciating the monopoly
held by them, charged such prices that
they repelled the buyers to the unhealthy
and unfavorable localities now occupied.

One does not have to travel far, in
the West, before he meets the man whose
father or uncle was offered the ground
upon which Chicago now stands for a
pair of boots. Many are the regrets
that he wastes over his ancestor's stu-
pidity in not closing the bargain. But
if this pioneer had bought the land for
a pair of boots, and if he could have
foreseen its glorious future, he would
undoubtedly have held his property at
so high a figure — perhaps a whole suit
of clothes — that the city builders would
have selected some other spot upon the
lake-shore for their enterprise. It is
not an easy task to corral the city of
the future, although the founders of the
new town of Odessa, in Dakota, claim
to have accomplished that feat by locat-
ing it upon that narrow strait of Dev-
il's Lake to which all railways must con-
verge in order to cross.

While very few of the dealers in
Western real estate lay claim to the title
of philosopher, they do a vast deal of
solid philosophizing in attempting to de-
termine which is the coming street of
the coming city. So many and diverse
and conflicting are the causes at work
that they are obliged to confess that
luck as well as judgment plays an im-
portant part in their transactions. While
the shrewdest often go to ruin, they see
some bull-headed investor enriched by
one of fortune's freaks, and endowed
henceforth with the reputation of being
a far-seeing man. The wise boomer
" gets in on the ground-floor " at Boom-
town ; that is, he is one of the original

purchasers of the town site, and buys
the land by the ^cre or by the section.
Cutting this up into lots, he sells them
easily at a fabulous profit ; for, while we
are so constituted that a hundred dollars

Boomtown. [July,

an acre seems a handsome price for
land, the same sum for a small portion
of that acre, in the guise of a city lot,
seems very reasonable indeed.

Where the railway owns every alter-
nate section, and thus has the power of
locating its stations, with their accom-
paniments of offices, shops, and cattle-
yards, upon its own land, the boomer
may find the ground-floor closed to him ;
but he has nevertheless been doing a
flourishing business in the second story
of late, especially along the line of the
Northern Pacific. Here that migratory
city, Boomtown, almost as fugacious as
that other unstable point, " the end of
the track," which it closely follows, has
halted successively at Fargo, James-
town, Bismarck, Glendive, and Billings.
Now it rests at the foot of the moun-
tains, at Livingston, whence the branch
railway diverges to the Yellowstone
Park. Although this is the speculator's
last chance on that line, the railway,
warned by experience, cruelly appropri-
ates to itself the cream of the profits
by charging one thousand dollars a lot
before the town is begun. The boomer
sadly realizes that not the ground-floor,
but the attic, has been reserved for him
in Livingston ; but still he buys, with an
abiding faith in the enthusiasm and cash
of the young capitalists from the East,
whom the summer season is bound to
bring forth.

According to the theorists, the west-
ern bank of a navigable river, at a rail-
way crossing, is an excellent spot for a
city. They argue that every city re-
ceiving its goods from the East is the
source of supply of a fan-shaped area
lying to the westward of it ; and of
course the centre from which the leaves
of this fan radiate should, for the sake
of convenience, lie on the same side of
the river with the country which it cov-
ers. Mandan, the new city opposite
Bismarck, on the Missouri River, bases
its hopes of future prosperity on this
principle, and, in support of the same,

1883.]

Boomtown.

it poiuts to the opposing towns of St.
Louis aud East St. Louis, Minneapolis
and St. Anthony, Omaha and Council
Bluffs, Fargo and Moorhead, etc.

The presence of a rival community
near at hand has always proved a whole-
some restraint upon the city which is
undergoing the booming process. A
skeptical- editor or two across the river,
who cry " Ah ha ! " to their neighbor's
extravagant boasts of population aud
prosperity, are a check upon those ten-
dencies to exaggeration to which the
unfettered mind is prone. Otherwise,
the city would grow — upon paper —
with the rankness of Jonah's gourd.
Real-estate agents and newspaper men
vie with each other in adroit computa-
tions and estimates, in which the laws of
arithmetic and truth are alike violated,
and by which the population is shown to
be at least double its real number. In the
columns of material progress is printed
the cost of magnificent edifices which
are as yet but castles in the air, the
ground for their foundations being still
unbroken. Were it not for the period-
ical visits of that miserable pessimist, the
census-taker, who pulls the people down
from the clouds and stands them on the
solid ground of reality, there is no tell-
ing to what ridiculous extremes the
boomer might be led by this silly habit
of self-magnification. The census-taker
is the opposite of the boomer : one is a
sordid groveler among facts ; the other
is a brilliant master of imagination. The
census official is not a favorite in Boom-
town. His methods are condemned as
picayunish, the accuracy of his report is
impeached, and abuse and obloquy are
everywhere his portion.

Shall we invest our little stake in
Boomtown interests ? Well, govern-
ment bonds are just as safe, even though
they may not be so exciting. We can-
not all be boomers ; some of us, in the
language of the land, must be suckers.
The widows and orphans and dry-goods
clerks and other small capitalists of the

East will perhaps do as well to specu-
late, if speculate they must, in some
more familiar field nearer home, such
as Newport, Long Island, or the oil
regions. The world is addicted to look-
ing on the bright side of things; we
hear full reports of the great fortunes
made in Boomtown, but other fortunes,
equally great, which are lost there go
unnoticed. So far as luck is a factor in
the making of money, the chances of
the outsider are equal to those of the
native, but in judgment and experience
the latter has decidedly the advantage.
Even the infants cry for real estate,
there. You pass a group of school-boys
on the corner, but their talk is not of
marbles, bicycles, and other topics of
juvenile interest ; they are telling each
other what particular lots they would
buy if they had a hundred thousand dol-
lars apiece. You meet a trio of maid-
ens on the sidewalk, and as they pass
you hear the unmaidenly words " a hun-
dred dollars a front foot." Such a peo-
ple may be conquered, but not in a real-
estate transaction. In the old game of
spider and fly, the spider, it will be ob-
served, is always at home, while the fly
is the tourist visitor. When there is a
prize to be picked up, it is safe to con-
clude that the old resident, who has
watched the fluctuations of values for
many years, will take advantage of it.
The agent may guarantee you a thou-
sand per cent, profit on a proposed bar-
gain ; but when we .see real-estate agents
rolling in wealth, as a result of taking
their own advice, we may accept their
words as gospel truth.

Nor is the speculator from abroad wel-
comed by the solid sense of a growing
city. The builder is received with open
arms, and ground is often given him
upon which to build ; and even a hand-
some purse is made up for him if he
will erect a mill or a hotel, or in some
other manner supply the community's
needs. But woe unto the non-resident
who buys for a rise in values, aud, in

Municipal Extravagance.

[July,

the long years that he is awaiting this
advance, permits his block of ground to
become a camping-ground for the refuse
population of the city. The municipal
authorities have no mercy on the stran-
ger, but tax and assess him right and
left, for grading, paving, sidewalks, gas,
water, ami sprinkling. His property
increases in value, but not in propor-
tion to its expenses ; and when his des-
peration is such that he fain would sell

it for what it has cost him, the city
licks up the finest portion of his estate
for a park or a pleasure-drive, and as-
sesses him anew for the benefits he is
supposed to have derived from this pub-
lic improvement. They even tell the
story of a man whose lot was entirely
obliterated by a new street, and whose
benefits therefrom were computed to ex-
ceed his damages ; but this is probably
an error.

Frank D. Y. Carpenter.

MUNICIPAL EXTRAVAGANCE.

WITH the growth of a community
come the inevitable burdens arising from
the care and management of great and
ever-increasing trusts. Each genera-
tion inherits from its predecessor heavy
legacies of responsibility, for which it
is required to make proper account.
This is especially true of great muni-
cipalities, with the complicated needs
and enlargements of an advancing civil-
ization. Water- works, the care of the
streets, police and fire departments, pub-
lic schools and libraries, bridges, high-
ways, hospitals, parks, and sewerage, all
demand vast outlays of capital and labor.
As in regulating the affairs of a great
nation the only sensible course is to
apply the test of business principles, so
in considering any scheme for local ad-
vancement or improvement it is neces-
sary to be equally strict, in order to
avoid extravagant outlay. The mer-
chant who seeks to forestall the market
by forcing production may find, when it
is too late, that he is overloaded.

The subject of local taxation in Great
Britain and Ireland has recently been
discussed in a series of able essays
by members of the Cobden Club, and
the result of these inquiries shows a
lack of order and system in the manage-
ment of local affairs in those countries,

and the need of greater economy in
expenditure. " One of the most serious
points," says one of the writers, " in
connection with one question of local
taxation is the enormous indebtedness
of local authorities, and the alarming
rate at which this* has been increasing in
recent years. The burden has already
become very onerous in many places,
and the danger is that, unless something
is done to restrain the borrowing zeal
exhibited in many localities, posterity
will be mercilessly burdened, and the
prosperity of many towns will certainly
suffer." The necessity of restricting
the propensity on the part of munici-
palities to borrow of the government or
in open market is further enforced by
showing the rapidity with which ap--
parently the most useful appliances are
superseded by those more adapted to
modern uses, thereby making the former
cumbersome and expensive. Thus, in
Scotland, large sums of money were laid
out by government in the construction
of military roads, which from the first
were seldom used, and are even less so
now, since the introduction of railways.
Yet they are still maintained at the ex-
pense of the rate-payers. The same
criticism has been made in the case of
the Thames tunnel, that " gigantic piece

1883.]

Municipal Extravagance.

of folly," the cost of which was so
heavy. While it may be necessary, at
certain stages of growth, for a munici-
pality to borrow sums of money for
public improvements, it is obvious that
both in the object and the amount of
the appropriations it should be governed
by the strictest rule of economy. In
the United States the evidences of pres-
ent security, owing to the retrenching
and diminishing policy which the pros-
perous state of the national finances
makes it possible to pursue, ought to af-
ford us great encouragement. The dis-
asters attending the currency, as the re-
sults of the war, have left the govern-
ment burdened with a large but at the
same time steadily receding public in-
debtedness, with no uncertainty as to
the time of payment or the means of
redemption.

But while the national debt is thus
well provided for (to 'the amount of
nearly $100,000,000 in the last sixteen
years), the condition of our local finances
does not afford quite as much satisfac-
tion. Excessive .economy is not one of
the dangerous tendencies with which
local governments in this country or in
England have lately been threatened.
The difficulty sometimes is to avoid the
other extreme; to restrain that spirit of
indifference which does not concern itself
with public expenditure so long as the
present generation is provided for, at
the expense of the future. Until a re-
cent date, — so recent, in fact, that it is
quite within the memory of persons now
living, — New England towns were free
from debt. It is just sixty years ago
since the largest of them, on the forma-
tion of a city government, assumed a
liability of only $100,000. In 1881 the
funded debt of the city of Boston was
nearly $41,000,000. It is true that a
large part of the increase in local in-
debtedness, for which no one can be
held directly responsible, was the bitter
fruit of a civil war. But deducting the
amount of this item and all other nec-

essary charges, a heavy balance still re-
mains. One who is familiar with the
origin, growth, and development of a
New England town, and reflects on the
prosperity which sustained its progress
for nearly two centuries, may well be
startled at the enormous increase of the
financial burden within so recent a pe-
riod. The old rule would not allow any
obligation to be incurred, unless it could
be provided for by immediate payment.
The principle that children must not be
made liable for the debts of their fathers
was adhered to. If a highway was to
be laid out or altered, or a town or
school-house erected, the rates were in-
creased and the charges properly dis-
tributed. Each able-bodied person was
obliged to share the expense. Those
who were too poor to meet the demand
in the shape of money or materials were
required to " work it out." The shifts
to which a particular locality was often
compelled to resort, in order to make up
its share of the public tax, show to what
extremities it was driven for want of
cash. Thus, in 1 687, the town of Hing-
ham, Mass., was permitted to send in
its quota in the form of milk pails.
"Country pay," including live-stock,
grain, and other produce, was equally
available in such emergencies.

In spite of the destitution caused by
the issue of province bills, the disasters
attending the expeditions against Can-
ada, and the protracted war against the
French and Indians, which caused the
prices of everything to rise enormously,
property was so much more evenly dis-
tributed in those days than it now is
that no one class in the community
seemed to bear much more than its fair
share of local burdens. Each voter felt
a certain pecuniary interest in the ap-
propriations. The law, accordingly, re-
quired the assessors to levy upon the
polls, as nearly as possible, one sixth
part of the amount needed. There could
be no injustice in the method of appor-
tioning the assessment by means of a

Municipal Extravagance.

[July,

capitation or poll tax, where each one
was as good as his neighbor so far as
worldly goods were concerned ; almost
everybody having a "settling lot," an
equal right in lands held in common,
and a seat at " meeting." Even later
on, when civilization had advanced and
great improvements were in progress,
there was no inequality imposed by this
mode of raising one sixth part of the
entire assessment.

But when cities and towns began to
spring up, with the vast increase of
profits in large business adventures, and
with wealth accumulated in the hands
of a few, it was found necessary to fix a
limit ; and the poll tax, which in Massa-
chusetts from 1812 to 1822 had varied
from fourteen to twenty-seven cents,
with provisos that it should not exceed
a certain portion of the whole tax, was
placed at $1.50, and finally, in 1862, at
the present rate of $2.00. Then came
the war period, when the debt of Massa-
chusetts rose from $7,600,000 in 1861
to $21,673,695.58 in 1864, and $28,-
477,804 in 1873, and the debts of the
several cities and towns at the latter
date to 867,277,188 ; amounting in the
aggregate to 4.58 per cent, of the entire
valuation of the commonwealth.

" Undue facilities for borrowing," says
the writer of a recent article on the
subject in the Edinburgh Review, "have
encouraged extravagance, while the pow-
er to lighten the burden attendant upon
indebtedness by throwing a great part
of the responsibility upon posterity has
engendered something very like reckless-
ness, and is calculated to have a most
prejudicial effect upon the future inter-
ests of the country, unless timely care
is taken to keep it within reasonable
bounds." To show how experimental
some of our improvements are, and the
danger of running any great risks on
that account, the same writer adds,
" Our knowledge of sanitary science is
as yet far from perfect ; many of the
undertakings for which millions have

been spent are really in the nature of
experiments ; and as it is impossible to
foresee what changes future discoveries
will bring about, there is grave reason
to fear that many things we now do will
even within a near future be declared
inefficient or deleterious, and those who
come after us will have a double burden
to bear, — the responsibility of the debts
now being incurred, and the necessity
of obtaining fresh capital to meet the
wants of their own time." Substantially,
the same views were expressed by Sir
Stafford Northcote, in a debate on the
Public Loans Bill in 1878. It is for
the interest of the present generation to
look forward more than they do, and see
what burdens they are imposing upon
those who follow . after by their public
expenditure.

The temptation is strong, when it
costs us but little, to spend large sums
of money, leaving others to be account-
able for the final settlement. It is un-
doubtedly true that where public works
are of a permanent character, posterity
ought to bear a certain proportion of
the charges, and it would be unfair to
ask the present generation to sustain
the whole burden. The introduction
of a complete system of water-works, for
instance, affording a plentiful supply
for all purposes, is destined to become a
steady benefit to those who come after
us. It is only fair, therefore, that they
should contribute a portion of the ex-
pense of building the reservoir and lay-
ing the pipes. The development of a
valuable industry, even, like a rich coal
mine, is perhaps a fair subject for con-
tribution. Still, it is necessary to pro-
ceed cautiously, so as not to overcharge
posterity, or make them responsible for
extravagant schemes. Sanitary improve-
ments, as was before suggested, are des-
tined to become an important item of
expenditure in the future. Millions
must undoubtedly be spent in fruitless
attempts to cleanse our large cities. As
sanitary science progresses, the old ma-

1883.]

Municipal Extravagance.

chinery will be thrown aside as useless,
and new methods adopted, involving ad-
ditional outlays before the former in-
debtedness is canceled. "Much of the
money," it was recently said, " had been
wasted ; millions had been spent in pour-
ing the filth of towns into the rivers :
millions had now to be spent in getting
it out again."

The rapid growth of thriving towns
and manufacturing centres affords a
plausible excuse for borrowing money
whenever it is needed. With the in-
crease in current expenditures comes a
constant demand for new objects of a
permanent value. The latter are gen-
erally provided for by funding the debt
and issuing bonds. But it is a mis-
take to suppose that the taxpayer is
thus relieved of all liability for the final
redemption of these securities. Pay-
ment is provided for in some cases by
sinking funds ; and the taxpayer is rated
a certain sum each year above the cur-
rent appropriation, to meet the amount
of the loan when it comes due, and the
annual interest. It is true that the reg-
ular rate is only slightly increased, in
most cases, by such an addition, but
the difference, we 'may be sure, is al-
ways noticed. In a review of a Report
on Local Taxation in England (1874),
the writer remarks that " rates reach
everybody, and every one is interested
in their diminution. They fall heaviest
on the deserving poor who are strug-
gling to keep above pauperism. They
press with great severity upon working-
men who own and occupy their own
lands and houses." That tax is the
best tax which is the least in amount.
It is not for the protection of the rich,
but of the middle and less favored or
manual labor classes, that public expen-
diture should be carefully guarded. It
is for the interest of that class who out-
number the rest of the community three
to one to keep down expenses. Muni-
cipal extravagance imposes not only a
common burden, but one which falls

most heavily by far upon the poorer
classes. It is by no means to be in-
ferred from what has just been stated
that any man has the right to assume,
when he moves into a neighborhood,
that the conditions which he finds on
entering will remain constant. The pop-
ulation of a town or of a parish must of
course be fluctuating, both in quantity
and quality, and consequently the rates
must vary from year to year. But it
is undoubtedly true, on the other hand,
that any short-sighted extravagance is
sure to unsettle that " confidence of the
people which is the very breath of life
to local institutions." Neither the rich
capitalist nor the small tradesman will
care to reside in a community which is
steadily increasing the amount of its
mortgage upon his property. If the
public demand is not easily satisfied, in-
creased rent and fewer comforts are the
sure results for those who can ill afford
them.

While there are some persons who in-
sist upon the most rigid rule of econo-
my in local expenditure, others do not
see the slightest objection to incurring
a debt. They find in such incumbrance
nothing but the assured signs of growth
and prosperity. In a debate which
arose on the subject in the House of
Commons, recently, Mr. Chamberlain
advocated this doctrine. " He expressed
the opinion that indebtedness was a mat-
ter of congratulation rather than fear,
because it was not a debt in the ordi-
nary sense of the word, but an invest-
ment for the benefit of the whole com-
munity, bearing often very remunerative
interest." If this is the " matured opin-
ion " of a man occupying a prominent
position in the English cabinet, there is
good reason to suppose that it is shared
by others. The most fallacious doc-
trines spread a long distance. In sup-
port of his position, Mr. Chamberlain
mentioned the case of his " own bor-
ough" (Birmingham), which "had." lie
thought, "in 1875, a local debt of some-

Municipal Extravagance.

[July,

thing liko £600,000." (It amounted
.'nio,(MiD iii 1877.) "But if any
one." lu Mtys, " would take the trouble
. (iiire into the assets, it would be
found that they represented more than
that amount, and that the interest on
the total debt was more than met by
the receipts from the profitable under-
takings in which Birmingham had put
the money, namely, water, gas, and
tolls." He then attempts to give the
reasons why this indebtedness should
not be paid off at all. It would in-
deed be gratifying if we could borrow
money on this condition. But, unfor-
tunately, the time may come when, so
far from wishing to pay off what is
due, we may be obliged to incur a fur-
ther debt. The growth of civilization,
as was before remarked, and the im-
provements in the arts and sciences
constantly afford new discoveries. So
rapid is this progress, sometimes, that
ten or twenty years will suffice for a
complete revolution. But what chance
is there of obtaining a loan upon such
security as we should have to offer ?
We should either have to forego the ad-
vantages, or borrow money for their in-
troduction at ruinous rates.

At frequent intervals in the progress
of every civilized community, and in
many cases out of all proportion to its
gain in population, there has sprung up
a great variety of public and private in-
stitutions, designed to elevate the stand-
ard of morals and education and to re-
lieve the wants and sufferings of man-
kind. Enormous sums of money are
required every year, both from public
and private sources, to keep in working
order such of them as are not self-sup-
porting. The enumeration of all the
organizations of this class belonging to
a large city, with a statement of the
sums contributed to each, would be no
easy tusk to undertake ; and the results
obtained, unless they were from official
sources, would necessarily be but ap-
proximately correct. Some of the most

important items of appropriation by local
governments, however, — for instance,
those relating to public schools, asy-
lums, and hospitals, — are readily acces-
sible from public documents. In many
cases it will be found that fully one
third of the public tax is assessed for
these objects. Down to the year 1845,
the ratio of expenditure for schools and
support of the poor in Boston to the tax
assessed, during the period of the city
charter, was " 38.98, or live and one half
per cent, more than one third of the
taxes." In the year 1880-81, out of a
gross tax for the same city of $9,907,-
469.85 (of which the polls were assessed
$187,640), the amount expended on
schools alone was $1,775,037.15. There
is no reason to suppose that this large
amount was not judiciously appropri-
ated or economically handled. It is
simply referred to in order to show how
much is done to keep up the standard of
certain institutions, the care and man-
agement of which are paid for by the
rate-payers, while the benefits accrue to
the whole community. Without attempt-
ing to criticise the successful working of
a system which has always formed a
distinctive feature oflocal institutions in
this country, from the earliest times, the
suggestion is made that perhaps some
modifications may be necessary -at the
present day, in order to adjust the re-
sponsibility for its care and management
to the enormous growth in population.

In discussing our public-school sys-
tem and the free use of money expend-
ed for the education of the masses, a
Scotch writer has lately ventured to
express a qualified dissent. He says,
" The establishment of what is termed
' free education ' has advocates in Scot-
land. One or two of my correspond-
ents support free education up to a cer-
tain standard. Primary education they
would provide, at the expense of the
rate-payers or the state, as in America,
for all children, charging fees from the
middle and advanced classes. I do not

1883.]

Municipal Extravagance.

at present advocate such a change in our
educational machinery. ... I am not in-
clined to think that that system, though
we had it to-morrow, would prove of
unmixed benefit. . . . The state and
the rate-payers have already enough —
many think more than enough — to
contribute to education." Without
adopting the conclusion, it may be well
to borrow some of the caution which is
here displayed. In view of the mag-
nificent structures which are sometimes
provided for the accommodation of pu-
pils in the public schools, and the fre-
quent supply of books and other ap-
pliances, perhaps a little more economy
is needed in the care and management
of these institutions ; some modification
which, while it would not interfere with
the proper working of the present sys-
tem, might form a wholesome check to
promising schemes for " esthetic devel-
opment," by giving more attention to
the practical side of the question.

The rapid growth of a city, however
flourishing, involves some drawbacks.
Increase in population does not always
mean a proportionate gain in wealth.
The tide of immigration brings an abun-
dant supply of thoseVho are prepared
to receive rather than to give. Such
acquisitions, instead of helping on the
material prosperity of a community,
have to be provided for at the public
charge. Much the same difficulties are
experienced to-day, only on a different
scale, as in earlier stages of development.
While the accessions to the floating
classes have added largely to the bur-
den, the need of economy is still more
pressing.

Without confounding poverty with
crime, or discouraging in the least a be-
neficent spirit of liberality, which seeks
to relieve the sufferings of those who
are helplessly enfeebled by bodily or
mental ailments, no public institution
should favor pauperism. In referring
to the labors of the commission (of
which he was a member) for the treat-

ment of the poor of Boston, appointed
in 1876, Mr. George S. Hale observes,
" They were appointed to consider and
report upon the treatment of the poor,
and to ascertain what changes, if any,
were desirable in reference to their re-
lief, maintenance, and employment.
This commission submitted a report in
1878, containing statements and in-
formation in regard to the manner and
cost of poor relief. They pointed out
what seemed to them to be the defects
in the existing system, — the want of
information on important points and the
large expenditure incurred, — and rec-
ommended various changes."

The substance of these recommenda-
tions may be embodied in the text taken
from the words of the Apostle to the
Thessalonians : " If any will not work,
neither shall he eat." Making due al-
lowance for those who are incapacitated
for work, through age or bodily infirm-
ity, the requirement of manual labor as
compensation for the relief afforded
ought to be a sine qua non in every
case.

Of all accessions to modern civiliza-
tion, none are more difficult to man-
age, especially in a country where a
" receipted poll-tax bill " commands so
much respect, than what are called the
" floating classes." It is from the ranks
of this uncertain but ever - increasing
army that the hosts of tramps, paupers,
"repeaters," and vagrants are chiefly
recruited. As in the case of public im-
provements, so in the administration of
charity, reckless expenditure should be
avoided, lest there be thrown upon pos-
terity a heavy burden, more to be dreaded
than all other forms of local indebted-
ness, in the shape of inherited pauper-
ism. The utmost caution should be ex-
ercised, not only to discourage unworthy
applications and relieve deserving pov-
erty, but also to keep alive that spirit
of self-dependence which seeks to pro-
vide for its own wants.

" Admitting that a certain amount of

Municipal Extravagance.

[July,

money over current revenue is annually
needed for the expenses of a municipal-
ity, it would seem that but one of three
courses was open to its authorities : to
leave undone a necessary work, to raise
the money by taxation, or to incur a
debt. If the affairs of the municipality
are well and prudently managed, no
more money will be appropriated than
is needed. To refuse to build sewers,
to clean streets, equip a fire department,
or do any other necessary work, be-
cause the tax rate would be raised be-
yond a limit fixed in advance, would be
very poor economy. It would be worse
economy to run in debt for current ex-
penses. And the third course, to raise
what money is needed by the just de-
mand of the time, would seem to be the
only option of a community that in-
tended to do its legitimate work, and
preserve unimpaired its financial cred-
it." * But while it may be necessary
very often to- borrow money for public
improvements, some form of assessment
should be adopted which will make
every taxpayer feel a direct interest in
the amount of the appropriation. The
statistics show that in 1873 one half of
the polls in Massachusetts were assessed
in cities. In the city of Boston, in 1874,
out of a total of 84,684, there were
66,415, or more than seventy-eight per
cent., paying on polls only. This start-
ling disproportion, which is more or less
true of other cities and towns, shows the
importance of impressing this class with
a sense of direct pecuniary responsibil-
ity for their votes.

Under the present system of taxa-
tion the average poll-tax payer, if asked
for his opinion about so-called public
improvements, blinded by the delusion
that they will cost him nothing, is only
too willing to further suggestions for ad-
ditions or alterations to any extent. He
is ready, of course, to approve of any
plan of expenditure which is apparently

1 Report of the Commissioners relating to Tax-
ation (in Massachusetts) for 1875.

provided for by some one else, and does
not oblige him to count the cost. The
fire-department apparatus, the city hall,
school-houses, and the numerous other
public buildings cannot be too fine in
architecture, provided he does not incur
any expense in their construction, or
can lay the burden on posterity.

It is true that the voter has no voice
in directly furthering an appropriation ;
but his influence is felt by those who
represent him, and there seems to be
no good reason why the burden of large
expenditures should not be justly ap-
portioned among all classes. In this
way a " spirit of community " would be
fostered, which would unite the entire
body of voters in a common purpose of
keeping down expenses by creating the
feeling that they belonged to a body
" worthy of being served and honored
and obeyed." It would tend also to
raise the standard of public service to a
higher level by creating a more vigilant
supervision over the acts of local offi-
cers. The temptation to further schemes
which, to say the least, are of doubtful
issue would not press so hard. When
a poor man begins to realize that it is
his own mite which is being handled,
he will see the need of strict economy.
" He will know the reason why for
every increase."

The poll-tax has always been a fa-
vorite subject of attack by the dema-
gogue. The hardship and injustice
even of the liability, however small, are
often asserted by the popular candidate.
Such avowals, if honestly made, are
generally based upon a state of society
which never existed in this country.
They are entirely foreign to that " iden-
tity of interests of all the component
parts" which has broken down the old-
world barriers between different grades
of society. The attempt to draw a line
between rich and poor as distinct orders
of society " should be stifled at once, as
wholly false to our political institutions."

That " order of things is best for the

1883.]

Municipal Extravagance.

mass " which does not attempt any arti-
ficial distinctions, or discourage the de-
sire on the part of any class in the com-
munity to better its condition."

" The conclusion to which all these
figures point," says a recent writer, in
summing up the results of municipal
extravagance, "are: (1.) The average
net earnings or accumulations of all the
individuals of a city do not exceed ten
dollars per capita annually. (2.) The
proper annual tax for defraying the cost
of managing all the affairs of a city is
eight dollars per capita ; and a payment
of that amount is assumed as legitimate
personal expenses, to be deducted from
gross earnings in all computations to
determine the average accumulation of
the whole community." He adds this
startling proposition : " Contemplate the
probability of the city government of
New York reducing its annual expenses
to eight dollars or ten dollars per capita
(it was thirty-four dollars per capita in
1876), and then imagine the people of
the city coming to a realizing sense that
the payment of the debt alone (averag-
ing one hundred and twenty-six dollars
for every man, woman, and child of the
population) involves a contribution equal
to every dollar of their net earnings for
twelve years to come."

While the tendency of towns and cities
to incur debts and swell their liability
for local improvements has been alluded
to as most alarming, many of the lat-
ter have acquired another growth, equal-
ly constant in its development, and con-
sequent upon the increased rate of taxa-
tion. Perhaps the word "growth" is
misapplied. At all events, to avoid be-
ing misunderstood, it should be said that,
properly speaking, the growth is in the
wrong direction. The burden which is
here referred to arises from the loss,
sustained by some municipalities, of
many large owners of personal property,
who, to avoid what they deem an exces-
sive rate of taxation, are induced every
year to find a residence in the country.

Without attempting to discuss the mer-
its of this controversy, it can hardly be
said that every cause for grievance is
attributable to a spirit of illiberality.
Many complainants are doubtless hon-
estly influenced to take this course by a
proper sense of injustice.

As a matter of fact the danger exists,
and will exist so long as those who gov-
ern the rates of taxation, constituting
such a large majority of the legal voters,
are not restrained by direct pecuniary
responsibility from carrying the amount
of the yearly appropriations beyond a
fixed amount pro rata. Spasms of econ-
omy will intervene from time to time,
very often causing more harm than good,
as in the now famous case of the Tewks-
bury almshouse, but no positive and con-
tinuous effort will be made to reduce CT.»
penses.

If the subject of local taxation in
New England be examined historically,
it will be seen that the principle which
adjusted the burden for nearly two cen-
turies has been lost sight of or aban-
doned at the present time. Instead of
for a proportionate part of the entire
tax, varying in amount from year to
year, as was formerly the case, the poll-
tax payer is now assessed for a fixed
amount.

There have been two forms of growth,
thus far, to which municipal taxation
may apply. One is where the plant is
forced to depend upon the nutriment
which the soil itself contains. The
other and later development is where
it is sought to strengthen and build it
up by added sustenance. The success
of the former method depends quite as
much upon the skill in planting as upon
the nature of the soil, provided the lat-
ter is not wholly barren. " The indus-
try, thrift, and steadily increasing pros-
perity " of the New England colonies
were the natural fruits of the deep-root-
ed and wide-spreading motives of their
founders. Taxes, like religion, must
not be shirked. There was no shift-

Municipal Extravagance.

[July,

ing of a portion of the burden on to
otln-v shoulders ; no embarrassing pos-
terity with a load of public indebtedness.
The cost of needed improvements was
provided for by the early settlers on the
same economical plan as their private af-
fairs were managed. When, in course
of time, the struggling colonists were
plunged into long and distracting wars,
to provide for which they were forced
to issue bills of credit, it was always
with the condition of speedy payment.
They never deliberately borrowed money
on the credit of posterity for local im-
provements.

Every rate-payer is interested in the
proper distribution of the burdens of
local taxation. When certain individuals
of a community are taxed out of pro-
portion to others, it creates a sense of
injustice which cannot fail to react on
all classes. Where the wealthy tax-
payer is obliged to pay more than his
share of the assessment, he will contrive
some legal means, as above suggested,
of avoiding it in the future : if in no
other way, by removal to a less exact-
ing neighborhood. If personal prop-
erty was the subject of taxation where
he formerly dwelt, the increase of the
burden is all the more severe for those
who are obliged to remain. It is esti-
mated that the city of Boston has lost
from its assessment roll during the last
twelve years over a hundred million dol-
lars. The importance of some change
in the law has been frequently empha-
sized by the tax commissioners. Some-
body must bear the strain, unless it is
proposed to go into insolvency. The
question has been often asked, of late,
What is to become of our city churches,
where so many of the congregation are
out of town a large part of the year ?
Who will pay the pew-taxes ? Equally
pertinent is the inquiry, What is to be-
come of the municipalities themselves,
with a steady falling-off in the assess-
ment roll, and no reduction in public
expenditure ? The subject of taxation

in municipalities, as compared with rural
districts, is one which presents many
perplexities, from the obvious advan-
tages which accrue to the latter by low
assessments. The enormous outlays for
public improvements in the former case
must be provided for by an increase in
the rates. Who is responsible for tho
expenditure, provided it turns out to be
unremuuerative ? Changes in the law
of domicile will not apportion the loss.
Every poll-tax payer, as well as " every
owner of property now exempted,"
should, as is recommended by an Eng-
lish economist, " feel the burden of local
expenditure, and take an active interest
in its management. Without some ma-
chinery calculated to bring the matter
home to men's minds, it is feared that
no imaginable system will be free from
the greatest evils."

The fear of increasing the amount of
the poll-tax might form a wholesome
check to reckless expenditures, " by
bringing the cost of things more direct-
ly before the minds of the people," who
suffer the most by any excess. One
way to obtain more economy in the ad-
ministration of municipal affairs is to
create as wide a responsibility as pos-
sible. The poll-tax payer and every
owner of property now exempted will
then be more careful about adding to
the public burdens. Unless every class
of rate-payers in the community, wheth-
er they pay on lands, income derived
from business, or simply a poll-tax, feel
themselves individually bound by " a
community of interest " to look after
the proper management of local expen-
ditures, no attempt to establish a true
basis of economy can meet with much
success ; because without this feeling the
burden seems to fall directly upon the
rich alone. Community of interest is
necessary in taxation for the protection
of both rich and poor. Until all classes,
the poor as well as the rich, see the
necessity of more economy in local ex-
penditures, and are willing to assume

1883.]

Municipal Extravagance.

the burden, the flood of taxation will
continue, and eventually will reach the
workingman, just as surely as water
finds its level.

The Report of the commissioners, al-
ready referred to, gives in detail the
working of two plans for the further-
ance of an apportionment among all
classes of taxpayers. Either one of
them provides better security against
municipal extravagance than the system
now in vogue. Instead of being at a
fixed rate, the poll-tax would vary, like
other taxes ; to a much smaller extent,
but in the same proportion from year to
year. The person who pays a poll-tax
only would then have an interest in
keeping down expenditure. Let us ex-
amine an instance. " The system sug-
gested by the assessors of Marblehead,"
says the Report, " makes the minimum
poll-tax two dollars, and provides that
when the amount of a town tax to be
assessed exceeds one per cent, of the
valuation of the previous year, the poll-
tax shall be increased twenty-five per
cent., or to two dollars and fifty cents.
When the amount to be raised equals
or exceeds one and one half per cent, of
the valuation of the previous year, the
poll-tax shall be increased fifty per cent.,
or to three dollars ; and when the amount
to be raised equals or exceeds two per
cent, of the valuation of the previous
year, the poll-tax shall be doubled, that
is, raised to four dollars." No hardship
would be involved in a course like this,
as the amount of the yearly tax would be
entirely within the control of the small
property-holders and poll-tax payers,
and would rise or fall as they saw fit.
The amount of the increase in any case,
wla-ii apportioned among all classes of
the community, including vagrants and
paupers, would be very small ; and if
any otherwise deserving person was in
danger of losing the right of suffrage
by the extra assessment, he might be

allowed the privilege, as of old, of
" working it out." The history of the
poll-tax in Massachusetts, if not in other
States, discovers no inconsistency or de-
parture from established principles in
any arrangement like the one suggested
by the commissioners. The constitu-
tion of the State provides as follows:
" It is further ordered that in all rates
and public charges the town shall have
respect to levy every man according to
his estate, and with consideration of all
other his abilities whatsoever [what
could be broader than this clause ?], and
not according to the number of his per-
sons." Why should not every able-
bodied man who cannot pay a poll-tax,
or the slight increase which might be
necessary over and above that assess-
ment, contribute a small portion of his
labor, using the word in its broadest
and noblest sense, towards reducing the
amount of local taxation ?

The poll-tax, as we have pointed out,
never was a constant quantity in Massa-
chusetts prior to 1862. Fixed by the
legislature at a certain amount, it varied
from time to time in large proportions.
Any objections which might be raised
on constitutional grounds apply with
equal force, if at all, to the present sys-
tem. The new plan would operate in
such a way as to equalize assessments,
and thus prevent low valuations and high
rates. We should be rid of a widespread
fallacy that a popular government is al-
ways the cheapest government. Instead
of a yearly payment of two dollars sim-
ply, carrying with it the right to vote for
those who will do the most for us, every
voter would have a feeling of " self-gov-
ernment " in local affairs. Without .in-
fringing on popular government, or re-
straining in the least its healthy growth,
a system would be introduced which,
while it encouraged a community of in-
terest among all classes, would keep a
stricter guard over local indebtedness.
Arthur Blake Ellis.

Mr* Washington Adams in England.

[July,

MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS IN ENGLAND.

II.

BOREHAM was one of those coun-
try-houses, found here and there in Eng-
land, which in their time have served
many uses. Its oldest part consisted of
a small, low, square tower, built of flint
and rubble, in which a mixture of red
tiles seemed to indicate that it stood
upon the site of a yet older structure,
of Roman origin. Another part, in fine
old brick work, was shown to have been
once a religious house, by the cross fleu-
ry upon its gable and the abbot's mitre
over the principal door. It had not im-
probably been an outlying grange of
the great priory at Toppington. To
these had been added, in the latter part
of Elizabeth's reign, a long, two-story,
beam - and - plaster edifice, which con-
tained, among other rooms, the draw-
ing-room, a library, and a dining-room ;
the last bossed and gnarled with heavy
oak carving, and * having a great bay
window, large enough to hold a din-
ner-table and the chairs and guests and
servants of a goodly dinner-party. This
window looked out upon an old moat,
which had evidently some connection
with the little tower, and which, now
dry and covered with beautiful green-
sward, was still crossed by a bridge or
causeway, over which the great drive
through the park led up to the principal
entrance, which was in the Elizabethan
part of the house. An opposite window,
twice as broad as it was high, looked
out upon a square court, paved with
round stones, three sides of which were
formed by the house, and the fourth by
a wall, iu which was a door leading to
the stables. The stone pavement of the
court was pierced by two yew-trees,
which cast a gloomy shadow through
the inner windows, and over a gallery
on which the doors and windows of the

upper rooms of the Elizabethan part of
the house opened.

Having written to Sir Charles that I
should reach the nearest station by a
certain train, I found his carriage there,
and was driven across the moat about
five o'clock in the afternoon. My host
met me in the hall, and gave me a quiet
and undemonstrative welcome, which,
however, I saw and felt was a hearty
one. After a brief visit to my room, I
went to Lady Boreham's parlor, where
she was about dispensing afternoon tea.
As I entered the room it impressed me
with a sense of gloomy respectability.
It was richly and comfortably furnished ;
but although it was, and was called,
" Lady Boreham's parlor," nothing in it
told of the grace and charm of a wom-
an's presence.

My hostess received me with a sad
propriety of demeanor which was some-
what depressing, but which I found
was her general manner to all persons,
whatever their rank, from peers and
peeresses down to her own servants. As
to herself, her face was pallid and of a
pasty complexion ; her hair, a toneless
brown, and twisted at the front into
some stiff curls, that stood like palisades
before a queer little cap ; her eyes, a
dull gray ; her nose, quite shapeless ; and
from her always half-open mouth there
projected slightly two large white teeth.
She was not bony, nor even slender ; yet
a manish absence of roundness and full-
ness deprived her figure of all the grace
and charm peculiar to womanhood.
What she lacked in this respect, however,
appeared in some excess in Sir Charles.
He had, truly, changed in ten years.
He was quite two stone heavier; the
bloom that I had admired so much on
his cheek had deepened in tint and
thickened in quality ; although he was
not yet forty, his hair was thinning rap-

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

idly on the top of his head ; and his
manner had become as heavy as his per-
son. Indeed, I found, during my brief
visit, that for him life was made up of
looking after his estate, hunting, shoot-
ing, reading the London Times, and
dinner, last, not least. He did not read
the Saturday Review or the Spectator ;
but Lady Boreham hungrily gloated
upon The World, of which I never saw
him take any notice, except by once toss-
ing it contemptuously out of his way.

Three other guests at Boreham hard-
ly require mention. One, a younger sis-
ter of my hostess, was almost her mere
duplicate : two and three were a Mr.
Grimstone and his wife, as to whom I
could only discover that he was a mem-
ber of Parliament and of the Carleton
Club, and that she was apparently with-
out an idea or an emotion not connect-
ed with the Court Circular. The ladies
were entirely devoid of personal attrac-
tion, and their toilets on all occasions
were distressing. How these people
managed to live through that part of
each successive twenty-four hours dur-
ing which they were not eating and
sleeping was a mystery. They rarely
exchanged a word that was not required
by the ordinary civilities of social life,
as to which they were unexceptionably
and somewhat consciously correct and
proper. And yet there was an air of
solid respectability and good faith about
them which, although their society was
wholly without charm, even to each
other, had a value that received a con-
stant silent expression. One felt that
they were very safe people to meet in
any relation of life.

There were, of course, the customary
attendants of a great house in England.
One of these, Lady Boreham's own maid,
whom I saw on two or three occasions,
was one of the most beautiful women I
ever encountered. I could not look at
her without thinking of a June rose.
Her noble figure was just tall enough
to be a little distinguished, and she car-

ried her finely poised head with such an
air that her little cap became a coronet
of beauty's nobility. Her manners were
quite as good as Lady Boreham's ; and
her manner was as superior as that of
the so-called Venus of Milo might be to
that of the Venus of a burlesque. But
if she had been some sort of attendant
clock-work machine in petticoats, her
mistress could not have treated her with
less apparent recognition of a common
humanity. Indeed, I do verily believe
that Lady Boreham was quite uncon-
scious that here was a woman constantly
about her who, whenever she appeared,
blotted her mistress out of existence for
any man who had eyes and a brain be-
hind them. The one fact ever present
to her consciousness, as I discovered,
was that she was Lady Boreham, and
had brought her husband fifty thousand
pounds ; with which price she seemed
to think that she had bought a throne
and an allegiance from which she could
never be cast out. And she had, so far
as her husband and her guests were con-
cerned. I must give them the credit
of being, or seeming, as indifferent to
" Wilkins " — the beauty's name — as
she was herself. Wilkins was a "young
person " who performed certain need-
ful offices in an acceptable manner. It
was well that Sir Charles was not a man
of finer perceptions and a more flexible
nature.

Lady Boreham was, however, not
without curiosity ; and on my second day
at the Hall she led me to talk about so-
ciety in America, as to which her no-
tions seemed somewhat less correct and
clear than those of a Vassar College
girl might be about Abyssinian court
etiquette. Did American women like
being spiritual wives ? What was a
spiritual wife ? If Brigham Young took
the hustings to be President, would all
the women vote for him ? Would all
his wives vote for him ? What could he
do with them if they did n't ? How
many wives had he? Weren't most

.I/"/-. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

Americans Mormons, or Spiritualists, or
something ? "Was it true that American
women could get a divorce whenever
they liked ? And was it true — with
a furtive glance at the window where
Maud sat netting — that in America a
man might marry his deceased wife's
sister ? Did all Americans live at 'otels ?
And did American women come down
to breakfast in full dress and di'mon's ?

The temptation was sore to give to
these and like questions the replies
which my hostess would have been
pleased to receive ; but I refrained my-
self, and told her the simple truth, to
her astonishment and hardly concealed
disappointment. The point as to which
I had most difficulty in making my ex-
planations understood was the difference
of the laws in the several States as to
marriage and divorce. Lady Boreham
could not have been — was not, I found
— ignorant of the difficulties that might
arise in England because of Scotch mar-
riages and Irish marriages ; and yet she
could not well apprehend that a woman
might be legally married in Connecticut,
and yet her marriage be at least dispu-
table in New York, and that a divorce
would be granted in Indiana upon
grounds which would not be sufficient
in New Jersey. To her, as to most of
her sort in England, " the States " were
" America," and America was governed
by the President and Congress : the
former, a kind of political Pope; the
Idtter, a general legislative body, with
the omnipotence of Parliament.

As I was explaining to her that Con-
gress had to all intents and purposes
no power over the individual lives and
the personal relations of citizens of the
United States ; and that even murder,
unless committed on the high seas, or
in a fort or national vessel, was a crime,
not against the laws of the United
States, but against those of an individual
State ; and that debts were contracted
under state laws, so that even the Su-
preme Court, the most important and

powerful tribunal in the country, had no
jurisdiction over them, except in certain
specific cases, the member of Parlia-
ment, who was in the room, now reading
a bi^ blue book, now listening, pricked
up his ears, and said, —

" Yes ; and your Supreme Court has
made a nice mess of your national credit
two or three times ; sustaining American
repudiation of debts, — refusing to pay
money lent in good faith by British capi-
talists. Not very wise, permit me to
say, thus to make repudiation a national
characteristic, supported by your high-
est tribunal."

" I beg your pardon," I replied, " but
perhaps you know that the United States
government has incurred rather a large
indebtedness during the last twenty years.
Will you kindly inform me if you know
of the repudiation of any part of this
debt?"

"Well, no — no; not at all, not at
all ; quite the contrary, I must admit.
That debt was something quite awful ;
and it 's been acknowledged and put in
course of liquidation in a manner that
— that — why, nobody expected any-
thing of the sort."

" And why not, sir ? let me ask. Why
was it not expected ? Has the United
States government been in the habit of
repudiating its debts ? "

" Well, no — no ; not exactly the gov-
ernment of the United States, I believe ;
but Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, and
Virginia. They 're in America, are n't
they?"

" I 've heard that Turkey has also
failed to pay British creditors. Why
have you not applied to the Supreme
Court of the United States to compel
the Turks to pay the interest and prin-
cipal of their bonds ? "

" Bless my soul, sir, your Supreme
Court has no jurisdiction in Turkey!
You have n't quite annexed the Sultan
and his dominions, yet. You 're joking ;
setting up for an American humorist."

" Not at all. I should n't presume

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

to attempt so high a flight. Never was
more serious in my life. "Without go-
ing into particulars, I venture to say
that in every case which you could have
had in mind, the Supreme Court merely
decided the question of its own jurisdic-
tion ; and I venture also to suggest that
if British capitalists would not be so
blinded by the hope of getting six or
seven per cent., instead of three, as to
neglect making those inquiries as to the
ability of borrowers in foreign countries,
and as to the means of redress in default
of payment, which they make at home,
it would be wiser and more business-
like ; although I must admit that such a
course might be open to the objection of
involving some little study of so trifling
and disagreeable a subject as the polit-
ical structure and internal polity of the
United States." And after a moment of
silence I turned again to the ladies.

" Now do tell us," said the M. P.'s
wife, " how you manage society in
America. I suppose you don't manage
it at all. How could you ? You 've no
co.urt, no peerage, no county families.
I suppose everybody goes everywhere,
and visits everybody else, if they like.
It must be amusin', in a certain way ;
but do you find it agreeable ? "

My reply it is not necessary to re-
port in detail ; and when the ladies had
gathered from it that, notwithstanding
the lack of a court and a peerage, every-
body did not go everywhere in America,
and that social exclusiveness and even
social arrogance and the desire for so-
cial distinction and success were quite
as great in America as in England, they
looked at me and at each other with an
expression of weak astonishment.

"Why," said Lady Boreham, "I
thought you were democrats and com-
munists and — and that sort of thing,
and that you thought that nobody was
any better than anybody else ; although
some of you, I believe, are awfully rich."

" Democracy, madam, in America is
confined jealously to politics. As to

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 7

wealth, money has rather more brute
power in the United States, and partic-
ularly in New York, than it has in Eng-
land, — where I believe it has not a little,
— or in any other country in the world ;
and as to the effect of democracy upon
society in America, it is briefly to beget
a belief that on the one hand nobody
is any better than you are, and on the
other that very few are as good."

" Dear me, — dear me ! Then yon
have exclusive circles in America, too."

" So exclusive that people may live
in the same neighborhood, and even
next door to each other, for years, and
never speak, and hardly know each
other's names. So exclusive that often
the richer of these neighbors would be
very glad to obtain, by a considerable
sacrifice, an entrance to the entertain-
ments of the poorer."

" Dear, dear ! Quite like it is at
'ome; and I thought it was so differ-
ent."

" Very like, indeed, so far as I may
venture to have an opinion. For, strange
to say, a democratic form of government
has not yet produced in America any
very great or manifest change in men
as individuals. There still remains a
great deal of human nature in the men
and women there ; nor does there yet
appear much power in democracy to
cast it out. As to the process called
in both countries, I believe, getting into
society, I have known a woman of great
wealth, intelligence, and an untarnished
reputation push, and crawl, and bully,
and flatter, spend money like water,
be snubbed, and lie down and be trod-
den upon for years, to work her way
into a certain set, and fail utterly."

" Dear, dear ! " again bleated Lady
Boreham from under the teeth ; " just
like it is at 'ome."

" And then this woman, having, by
luck or contrivance, or both, obtained the
notice and the favor of some distinguished
person at home or abroad, was all at
once taken up by society, and flaunted it

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

grandly among the very people who a
u-w years before treated her as if they
were Brahmins and she a Pariah."

" Oh, that 's just like it is at 'ome ! "
crifd Maud, from the window. " For
don't you remember, Charlotte, how
that handsome Mrs." —

" Hush, Maud ! " said Lady Bore-
ham. " What can you know about it ? "

" Yes, ' Hush, my dear, lie still and
slumber,' " was heard from behind Sir
Charles's Times, followed by a little
rumble of laughter.

Humphreys was right. A day or two
afterward, there came from the Priory
an invitation to the Borehams to meet
some people who were to be there at
luncheon, in an informal way. "You'll
go with us, of course," said Sir Charles.
" We know the Toppinghams well, and
they '11 be very pleased to see you."

Indeed, the Borehams did know the
Toppinghams well, and Borehams had
known Toppinghams for generations.
They had been neighbors and friends,
or neighbors and enemies, almost ever
since England was England. They
had fought Duke William at Hastings,
and were among those who had been al-
lowed to retain their little estates as
vassals of one of the Conqueror's great
barons. They fought together at Agin-
court, each with his spear or two and
his dozen or score of bowmen, under
the banner of the lord of their marches.
They had fought each other in the Wars
of the Roses, when the Toppinghams
were Lancastrians and the Borehams
Yorkists. Together they had resisted
the tyranny of Charles I., and had sup-
ported Sir William Waller — fondly
called by the Parliament party William
the Conqueror — in his triumphant
march through the western counties ;
and together they had joined him in his
defection from the Parliament, when it
became revolutionary. There had been
an intermarriage or two, in olden times;
but of later years the Toppinghams
had become ambitious in this respect,

as well as in all others, while the Bore-
hams went on their steady way, as
simple English gentlemen. But such
knowledge and friendship through cen-
turies is full of meaning. There are no
shams about it, or uncertainties, or pos-
sible concealments.

The ladies and the M. P. drove over
in a pony phaeton and a landau ; but
Sir Charles and I rode, he grumbling a
little at losing a day's shooting. With
our two grooms, we made a pretty little
cavalcade on that bright, soft Septem-
ber morning ; and we delighted in our-
selves and in each other, as we trotted
gently through the noble beauty of the
grandly timbered park.

The Priory was a handsome, irregu-
lar stone pile, showing plainly its eccle-
siastical origin ; but it presented no re-
markable features to distinguish it from
many other great houses of its sort in
England. Lord Toppingham received
us in the hall with a bland but hearty
welcome, in which there was a little
spirit that was lacking even in Sir
Charles's kindliness, when I arrived .at
Boreham ; and his warm hand pressure
and " So you 've come at last," as he led
us up the great staircase, made me feel
that I had done well in accepting his
double invitation. It also relieved me
a little of my concern as to Humphreys'
project, for I had not neglected to in-
form him of our proposed visit.

Our pleasure — mine, at least — was
very much enhanced by our reception by
Lady Toppingham, a fine, elegant wom-
an of about thirty years of age, very
gentle of speech and gracious of man-
ner, but with a manifest capacity of
dash on good occasion. I suspect that
she hunted ; nor should I have objected
to see that figure, lithe with all its
largeness, in a riding habit, and on a
worthy, well-groomed horse. A certain
sense of spirit and force seemed to per-
vade the air at Toppingham, and to dis-
tinguish it from the sober, comfortable
respectability of the house that we had

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

left. I learned that Lady Toppingham's
title, although not her coronet, was hers
by birthright ; she being the second

daughter of the Marquis of A . Her

dress was in such perfect taste that it
attracted no attention ; we saw only her
grace of movement and beauty of form.

Two or three guests were in the
room with her when we entered, and
out on the terrace, upon which a large
window opened, were as many more, of
whom hereafter. After salutation and
a brief matter-of-course chat, we all
went out upon the terrace to enjoy the
air and the beauty of the park, stretch-
ing far away from the other side of a
large old-fashioned garden, formally laid
out, and planted with varied flowers in
great masses of color.

I could not but remark the bearing
of Lady Boreham and her sister to
Lady Toppingham. It might not, per-
haps, be said that they cringed to her ;
but they fawned upon her, and " dear-
Lady-Toppinghamed " her to herself
and to each other in whining adulation.
Once, as I watched this toadying, I
caught a light flash of scorn from her
glancing eye, which made her beautiful.
As to Sir Charles, he was as much at
his unconscious ease as if he were a
duke.

There were no introductions, and
after a glance at my fellow guests I at-
tached myself to a young man of un-
mistakable soldierly bearing, who was
standing apart in silence. He was a
fine-looking fellow, with a simple and
almost boyish face, whiskerless, but
with a sweeping blonde mustache, to
which from time to time he gave a pull ;
not foppish or military, but rather med-
itative. I liked these young English
officers and their fellows, who, if not
soldiers, were the stuff out of which
soldiers are made ; men who had been
taught to ride, to shoot, and to speak
the truth, and who, indeed, most of
them, knew little else. Coming from
New York, I found a sense of relief in

their mere physical repose and manly
steadiness. Their serenity seemed to
me like that which looks at us out of
the marble eyes of the old Greek stat-
ues.

I was reminded by it of a story told
me in my youth by a friend of my fa-
ther's age, who, sitting by an English
lady of rank at a ball in New York,
when he was a young man, saw that
she was scrutinizing with great interest
the young people on the floor. He
broke the silence by asking, " Well,
what do you think of them ? Not quite
equal to your lads and lasses in Eng-
land, are they ? " " On the contrary,"
she replied, "I never saw finer young
people in my life, nor better mannered.
The girls are lovely ; and as to the
stories we 've been told about their not
having good figures, it 's simply nonsense.
But I was n't thinking of the girls."
" Well, the young men ? " " They 're
fine fellows too, most of them, and well
mannered ; but, if you '11 pardon me,
as to their manner and their look " —
" Well ? " " Nothing, nothing ; but they
all look so sharp, — as if they had
their eyes out on everybody else, and
were n't quite sure of their surround-
ings. Now, with us, young fellows of
their age and breeding would n't have
the occasion to look sharp." The el-
derly friend who repeated to me this bit
of social criticism, and who must have
heard it quite fifty years ago, said that
he could not but admit its justice in re-
gard to the young New Yorkers. Were
he living, what would he say now ?
Nevertheless, that there is in some of
these young British lion-cubs the devel-
opable rudiment of a sharpness that puts
to shame the craft of a Christian Greek
or a Heathen Chinee, some of their
American acquaintances have learned,
to their sorrow.

My young friend on the terrace
proved to be Captain the Honorable
John Surcingle, of Her Majesty's 9th
Dragoon Guards, second son of the Earl

100

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

of Martingale, and ray hostess' cousin.
After :i t\-\v words, I asked him to tell
me the names of some of those around
us, other than our own party.

" 'Pon my life ! can't say. Don't
know where Toppin'em finds all his
people. Toppin'em 's vewy jolly; aw-
fully nice fellow himself, you know ;
but " — Here he stopped, and, screw-
ing his glass into his eye, looked quiet-
ly around for a few moments.

" Wather wum lot. Litwawy persons,
or something I sh'd say, most of 'em."

The captain's instincts had not misled
him. as erelong I myself discovered.
His " rum lot " included, among others
who were literary, or something, Pro-
fessor Schlamm, of the University of
Bonn, who was on his first visit to Eng-
land, to make arrangements for the pub-
lication, simultaneously, in English and
German, of his profound work, in three
volumes, 8vo, on The Unity in Duality
of the English Nation from the days of
Hengist and Horsa to those of Victoria
and Albert. Then there was Lady Ver-
ifier, the young middle-aged widow of
old Sir Duns Verifier, F. R. S. A., of
the British Museum, who was knighted
for having elaborated a stupendous plan
of cataloguing the library of that insti-
tution, which upon trial proved so ut-
terly impracticable and worthless that
the old book-mole, smitten with shame
and disappointment, went speedily to
his grave ; leaving his widow to enter
literary life by publishing Shadows of
the Soul, a poem in which art was shown
to be " the plastic form of religion."
Of the others, there was now note-
worthy only Mrs. Longmore, who was
known as the authoress of Immaculate,
a novel in which the somewhat startling
experiences of the heroine were said by
some people to be in a certain degree
autobiographical. Lady Verifier was
spare, angular, and sallow, with large
black eyes and coarse black hair, like a
squaw's ; a sort of woman less uncom-
mon in England than she is supposed

to be. Mrs. Longmore was her very
opposite: fair, plump almost to portli-
ness, with moist blue eyes and moist
red lips. There were one or two others
of their sort ; and the rest of our lit-
tle company were unremarkable folk, of
the Toppingham and Boreham class.

Erelong a servant entered, with a
card upon a salver, which he presented
to our hostess, who, after glancing at it a
moment. with a puzzled look, said, " To
my lord." On receiving it, his lordship
handed it to me, saying, " From your
friend. He sent me a letter of intro-
duction from Tooptoe at Oxford ; said
he could n't come just now himself, and
asked the favor of introducing just for
a morning visit, an American gentle-
man, in whom he felt sure I should be
interested. It 's all right, I suppose ? "
It was simply Humphreys' card, with a
line in pencil, " introducing the Hon.
Washington J. Adams."

" I don't know Mr. Adams," I said ;
" but I do know that Mansfield Hum-
phreys would give a card to no one who
might not be properly received by the
gentleman to whom it was addressed."

Here Captain Surcingle, whose atten-
tion had been arrested, and who had
heard my reply, cried out, " 'Mewican ?
Have him up, Toppin'em, — have him
up ! Those fellows are such fun ! I
always go to see the 'Mewican Cousin.
Not faw Dundweawy. Can't see what
they make such a doosid fuss about him
faw. Does nothin' but talk just like ' fel-
low at the Wag: wegla' muff. Nevah
saw such a boa. But Tweuchard 's aw-
ful fun ; good as goin' to 'Mewica with-
out the boa of goin'."

As the Honorable John began his ap-
peal, his lady cousin stepped across the
terrace to pluck a rose which peered
at us over the stone balustrade, blushing
with shame at its beautiful intrusion ;
and as she swept past him, I partly heard
and partly saw her say, in an earnest
whisper, " Jack, do be quiet ; and don't
be such a goose ! "

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

101

As she turned back with her flower,
the servant who had been sent out re-
turned, and announced " Mr. Adams ; "
and all eyes followed our host, as he
stepped forward to receive him. As un-
abashed as a comet intruding upon the
solar system, the Honorable Washing-
ton stepped into our circle, and met its
sun and his satellites. The earl offered
him his hand. He took it, and then he
shook it, — shook it well ; and to a few
of the usual words of welcome he re-
plied, " I 'm very glad to see you, my
lord ; most happy to hev the pleasure of
meeting your lordship " (looking round)
" here in your elegant doughmain and
your gorjis castle. My friend Mr. Hum-
phreys told me I 'd find everything here
fuss class ; an' I hev. Your man help
down-stairs wuz a leetle slow, to be sure ;
but don't apologize ; difference of insti-
tootions, I s'pose. Everything moves a
leetle slower here."

As Lord Toppingham led Mr. Adams
to our hostess, eyes of wonder, not un-
mixed with pleasure, were bent upon
him. He was a man of middle size,
neither tall nor slender ; but he stooped
a little from his hips, and his head was
slightly thrust forward, with an expres-
sion of eagerness, as he slouched along
the terrace. His upper lip was shaved ;
but his sallow face terminated in that
adornment known at the West as " chin-
whiskers." His hat, which he kept on,
was of felt, with a slightly conical crown.
It rested rather on the back than on the
top of his head, and from it fell a quan-
tity of longish straight brown hair. His
splendid satin scarf was decorated with
a large pin, worthy of its position ; and
the watch-chain that stretched across his
waistcoat would have held a yacht to its
moorings. His outer garment left the be-
holder in doubt whether it was an over-
coat that he was wearing as a duster, or
a duster doing service as an overcoat.
Into the pockets of this he thrust his
hands deep, and moved them back and
forth from time to time, giving the skirts

a wing-like action. Having taken Lady
Toppingham's hand, and shaken that too,
and assured her of his pleasure in meet-
ing her also, he put his own back into
its appropriate pocket, and gently flap-
ping his wings repeated, "Yes, ma'am;
very happy to hev the pleasure of meet-
in' your ladyship. Hope my call ain't
put you out any ; but I s'pose you 're
used to seein' a goodie o' company in
the surprise way."

" I am always pleased to receive any
friend of my lord's or of Dr. Tooptoe's,"
said Lady Toppingham, seating herself
upon one of the stone benches of the
terrace ; and Lord Toppingham turned
as if to lead Mr. Adams away. But
that gentleman immediately sat himself
down by her side, and, crossing his legs,
was evidently preparing to make him-
self agreeable. A slight shade of re-
serve with which she had taken her seat
deepened for a moment, and then in-
stantly gave way to a look of good-na-
tured amusement ; and I saw, to my re-
lief, that she appreciated the situation.
" You 've been in our little England
before, I suppose, Mr. Adams ? "

" No, ma'am, I hev n't. My plit'cle
dooties as a member of the legislator
of the Empire State hev pervented.
Empire State 's Noo York, as I s'pose
your ladyship knows. Motto, Ex-celsior,
an' the risin' sun ; out of Longfeller's
poem, you know."

" I do know Mr. Longfellow's charm-
ing poem. We 're great admirers of
Mr. Longfellow in England ; indeed, we
think him quite an English poet."

" Wai, ma'am, you 're 'baout right
there ; 'xcept in callin' him an English
poet. He 's a true Muh'kin ; an' he kin
beat Tennyson, an' all the rest of 'em,
at writin' poetry, any day, let 'em do
their level best. Why, he 's written more
vollums of poetry — fuss-class poetry,
too, — than any man that ever lived ;
more 'n Dr. Holland. Lives in fuss-
class style, too, if he is a poet. Should
n't wonder if there was n't a broker in

102

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

Wall Street that lives in higher style
than Longfel!

At this triumphant utterance Mr. Ad-
:un> took off his hat, and I feared he
•ibout to wave it; but the move-
ment was only one of momentary relief
to his enthusiasm, and he at once re-
<-<>tvd it to its perilous inclination.

Lord Toppingham now stepped up to
. '( ,ue a diversion in favor of his belea-
guered wife, and, standing before the
pair, asked Mr. Adams if he had been
in London while Parliament was sitting.

'• Wai, yaas, I wuz," replied the legis-
lator, keeping his seat and looking up ;
" 'n I went to see it ; 'n to tell the truth
'n the hull truth, I wuz dis'pinted.
Gladstone 's a smart man, but slow, I
shed say, — mighty slow; ain't learned
not to craowd himself, nuther ; bites off
more 'n he kin chaw. 'N' I did n't
hear no elo-quence; nobody did n't seem
to take no intrust into what was goin'
on. You hev got a powerful hansome
htiildin' fur the meetin' of your legisla-
tor ; but jess you wait 'n see the noo
Capitol 't Albany, 'n' you '11 sing small,
I — tell — you. Yes, siree."

As this conversation went on, some of
the other guests had approached, and
there was a little group around our host-
ess and Mr. Adams, who now, to the
evident horror of some of them, drew
from his pocket a gigantic knife, with a
set-spring at the back ; indeed, it was a
clasp bowie-knife. Opening it with a
tremendous click, he strapped it a lit-
tle on his shoe, and then looked at the
bench on which he sat. Evidently dis-
satisfied with the inducement which its
stone surface offered, he drew from one
of his capacious pockets a piece of pine
wood about as thick as a heavy broom
stick, and began to cut it in a meditative
manner.

" Don't git much whittlin' into your
effete old monarchies. Even the benches,
when they ain't stun, air oak, that 'd turn
the c.l^.- of any gentleman's knife; 'n'
so I carry suthin' comfortable round

with me ; " and as he spoke the light
shavings curled away from his stick, and
rolled upon the terrace floor.

Lady Toppingham was as serene as a
harvest moon, and was evidently much
amused with her visitor; and the rest
looked on with an interest and a satis-
faction which were manifest in their
countenances.

" Your lordship does suthin in this
way, I reckon. Guess all you lords arn
in the lumber line ; 'n' I seen some fuss-
class trees inter the vacant lots round
your haouse — castle, I mean. S'pose
that 's the reason you don't improve.
Much doin' in lumber naow ? "

" Not much," said our host, with a
pleasant smile. " I 'm more inclined to
keep my trees than to sell them, at pres-
ent. But let me make you acquainted
with some of my friends. Mr. Grim-
stone, member for Hilchester Towers."

" Haow do you do, Mr. Grimstone ? "
said Adams, rising ; and shifting his
knife to his left hand, he took the M.
P.'s, and shaking it vigorously said,
" Happy to hev the pleasure of meet-
in' you, sir. Don't know you person-
ally, but know you very well by reput-
tation."

As our host looked next at me, I man-
aged to convey to him an unspoken re-
quest not to be introduced, which he re-
spected ; but my friend the captain, step-
ping forward, was presented, with the
added comment that Mr. Adams would
find him well up about guns and rifles
and fire-arms of all kinds ; quite an au-
thority, indeed, upon that subject.

" Dew tell ? Why, I 'm glad to hev
the pleasure of meetin' you, sir. Look
a' here ! I kin show you suthin' fuss
class in that line ; " and putting his hand
behind him, underneath his coat, he pro-
duced a large pistol, a navy revolver,
which he exhibited in a demonstrative
way to the captain, saying, " Naow that 's
suthin' satisfactory fur a gentleman to
hev about him ; no little pea-shootin'
thing, that you might empty into a man

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

103

'thout troublin' him more 'n so many
flea-bites."

The captain looked at it with interest,
while some of the other guests shrank
away. After a brief examination, he
returned it, saying, " Vewy fine, vewy
fine indeed ; and I hear you use 'em
at vewy long distances, almost like a
wifle."

" Sartin," said Mr. Adams. " Look a'
here ! See that thar tree yonder ? " and
pointing to one on the other side of the
garden, he threw up his left arm, and
took a sight rest on it. Some of the la-
dies screamed, and the captain and Lord
Toppingham both caught his arm, the
latter exclaiming, 'k Beg pahdon, don't
fire, please ! Somebody might be passin'
in the park."

" Wai, jess 's you like, sir. You air
to hum, en I ain't. But that 's the diffi-
culty with England. Th'r'ain't no lib-
buty here. You 've allers got to be
thinkin' 'baout somebody else."

The incident certainly created a little
unpleasant excitement; yet after this
had subsided, it seemed not to have di-
minished, but rather to have increased,
the satisfaction with which Mr. Adams
was regarded. The professor came up,
and said, " Our Amerigan vrent is ferry
kiut sooch an exhipition of the manners
and gustoms of his gountry to gif. Bare-
haps he vould a var-tance bareform vor
the inztrugzion ooud blaysure off dthe
goinpany."

" No, no, Professor Schlamm," said
Lady Toppingham, smiling, " we won't
put Mr. Adams to the trouble of a war-
dance ; and we 've so narrowly escaped
one blessure that we may well be willing
to forego the other." As my hostess
struck off this little spark, I observed
that her French was not that of the
school of Stratford atte Bowe, which con-
tinues much in vogue in England even
among ladies of the prioress's rank.

Adams caught at the name as an in-
troduction. " Is this," he said, " the cel-
ebrated Professor Schlamm ? " and seiz-

ing his hand, he shook it well. " Happy
to make your acquaintance, sir. Your
fame, sir, is widely extended over the
civilized globe. Hev n't bed the pleas-
ure of meetin' you before, but know you
very well by reputtation."

The professor, who had all the simple
vanity of the vainest race in the world,
beamed under the influence of this com-
pliment, so that his very spectacles
seemed to glow with warmth and light.

" You German gen'l'men air fond of
our naytional plant," said Adams bland-
ly. "Hev a cigar? Won't you jine
me ? " and he produced from his pocket
two or three temptations.

" Dthanks ; poot it might not to dthe
laties pe acreeaple."

" No ? Wai, then, here goes fur the
ginooine article. I 'm 'baout tuckered
aout fur some." Saying this, he took
from another pocket a brown plug, cut
off a piece, and, having shaped and
smoothed it a little with his huge knife,
he laid it carefully with his forefinger
in his cheek. Then, his knife being out,
he took the opportunity to clean his
nails ; and having scraped the edges un-
til our blood curdled, he returned his
weapon, after a loud click, to his pocket.

A look of distress had come over the
face of our hostess when Mr. Adams pro-
duced his plug ; and she called a servant,
who, after receiving an order from her
in a low voice, went out. Mr. Adams's
supplementary toilet being completed,
he slouched away towards the balus-
trade ; and after looking a few moments
across the garden, he turned about, and,
leaning against the stone, he began an
expectorative demonstration. After he
had made two or three violent and very
obtrusive efforts of this kind, which,
however, I must confess, did not seem
to leave much visible witness before us,
the servant returned hastily with a spit-
toon, the fabric and condition of which
showed very plainly that it came from
no part of the Priory that rejoiced in
the presence of Lady Toppingham. This.

104

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

the footman placed before Mr. Adams,
within easy range.

" Nev' iniud," said that gentleman,
— " nev' mind. Sorry you took the
trouble, sonny. I don't set up fur style ;
don't travel onto it. I 'm puffickly will-
in' to sit down along 'th my freu's, and
spit round sociable. I know I wear a
biled shirt 'n' store clothes, — that 's a
fact; but's a graceful con-ciliation of
and deference to public opinion, con-
siderin' I 'm a member of the legislator
of the Empire State."

" Biled ? " said Captain Surcingle to
me, inquiringly (for we had kept pretty
close together). " Mean boiled ? "

" Yes."

" Boil shirts in 'Mewica ? °

" Always."

« Your shirt boiled ? "

" N-no ; not exactly. I should have
said that all our wealthiest and most
distinguished citizens, members of the
legislature and the like, boil their shirts.
I make no such pretensions."

The captain looked at me doubtfully.
But our talk and Mr. Adams's perform-
ances were brought to a close by the an-
nouncement of luncheon, and an invita-
tion from our host to the dining-room.
This midday repast is quite informal,
but, comparatively unrestrained as it is
by etiquette, rank and precedence are
never quite forgotten at it, or on any
other occasion, in England ; and there
being no man of rank present, except
our host, and Sir Charles being far down
the terrace, talking hunt and horse with
another squire, Mr. Grimstone was mov-
ing toward Lady Toppingham, with the
expectation of entering with her, when
Mr. Adams stepped quickly up, and say-
ing, " \Val, I don't keer ef I dew jine
you ; allow me the pleasure, ma'am," he
offered her his arm. She took it. Mr.
Grimstone retreated in disorder, and
we all went in -somewhat irregularly.
As we passed through the hall, and ap-
proached the dining-room, it occurred to
Mr. Adams to remove his hat ; and he

then looked about, and up and down, in
evident search of a peg on which to
hang it. A servant stepped forward,
and held out his hand for it. After a
brief hesitation he resigned it, saying,
" Ain't ye goiu' to give me no check
for that ? Haow do I know I '11 git it
agin ? Ilaowever, it 's Lord Topping-
ham's haouse, an' he 's responsible, I
guess. That 's good law, ain't it, your
lordship?"

" Excellent," said our host, evidently
much pleased that Lady Toppingham
had taken this opportunity to continue
on her way to the dining-room, where
we found her with Mr. Grimstone on
her right hand, and a vacant seat on her
left, between her and her cousin, to
which she beckoned me ; Mr. Adams,
the professor, and the two authoresses
forming a little group near Lord Top-
pingham.

" I hope," said the M. P. to me, as we
were settling ourselves at table, "that
you are pleased with your Mr. Wash-
ington Adams. I, for one, own that
such a characteristic exhibition of genu-
ine American character and manners is,
if not exactly pleasant, a very entertain-
ing subject of study."

The taunt itself was less annoying
than its being flung at me across our
hostess ; but as I could not tell him so
without sharing his breach of good man-
ners, I was about to let his remark pass,
with a silent bow, when a little look of
encouragement in Lady Toppingham's
eyes led me to say, " As to your enter-
tainment, sir, I have no doubt that you
might find as good without importing
your Helots. As to Mr. Adams being
my Mr. Washington Adams, he is nei-
ther kith nor kin of any of my people,
to whom he would be an occasion of as
much curious wonder as he is to any
person at this table."

" Oh, that won't do at all. He is
one of your legislators, — the Honorable
Washington Adams. You Americans
are a very strange people ; quite incom-

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

105

prehensible to our poor, simple English
understandings." I did not continue
the discussion, which I saw would be as
fruitless as, under the circumstances, it
was unpleasant, and indeed almost in-
admissible, notwithstanding the gracious
waiver of my hostess.

Luncheon engaged the attention of
us all for a while, notwithstanding the
presence of Mr. Adams ; but neverthe-
less he continued to be the chief object
of attention ; and ere long he was heard
saying, with an elevated voice, in evident
continuation of description of a legis-
lative scene, "The feller, sir, had the
lip to perpose to investigate me ; but I
told him, sir, that I courted investiga-
tion, and I claimed that he was no bet-
ter than a scallawag and a shyster ; and
I gripped him, sir, and skun him, —
skun him clean as an eel."

Captain Surcingle, who had been re-
garding the speaker with all the earnest-
ness that his glass admitted, turned to
me, and said, with soft inquiry, —

" Skun ? 'Mewican for skinned ? "

" Yes ; all true Americans say skun."

" Vewy queeah way of speakin' Eng-
lish ; " and he was about to subside into
silence, when all at once a bright gleam
of intelligence came into his face, and
he broke out, " Oh, I say ! that won't
do. You 're 'Mewican ; an' you don't
say skun or scallawag ; " and the good
fellow regarded me with a look of tri-
umph.

" Yes," I replied ; " but you see I 'm
not a full - blooded American, as Mr.
Adams is, — only a Yankee. Then
I 've had some special advantages. I've
been in Canada ; and that is still one of
the British possessions. Besides, I 'm
fond of reading ; and friends in England
have sent me a few London books, —
books with ' honor ' spelled with a u,
and all that sort of thing. Don't you
see ? "

" Ah, yes. Just so, just so ; quite
so." And now he was silent. But can-
dor compels me to admit that he did not

seem to be quite satisfied, and that, as he
slowly ate jugged hare, he appeared to
be wrestling with some intellectual prob-
lem that was too much for him.

Here the butler asked Mr. Adams if
he should not change his plate. " Wai,
yes, sir, ef you 'd like to. I 'm sure I 've
no 'bjecshin." Another plate was placed
before him, and he was asked what he
would have. " Wai, I guess I '11 take a
leetle more o' the same, — that thar pie
thar, 'ith the chicken fixins into it,"
pointing with a wave of his knife at a
pheasant pie, of which he had just eaten.
" I call that fuss class, I do. Does you
credit, ma'am," he said blandly, address-
ing the countess, — " does you credit. I
must get you to give me the receipt for
Mrs. Adams. You air slow here, an' a
goodie behind the lighter ; but 'baout
eatin' and drinkin' you air pooty smart,
I calklate."

Here Lord Toppingham, probably to
divert attention from Mr. Adams, look-
ing across the table at me, expressed his
surprise that so little had been produced
in American literature and art that was
peculiarly American ; that all our best
writers wrote merely as Englishmen
would, treating the same subjects ; and
that our painters and sculptors seemed
to form their styles upon those of Italy
and Greece.

" Yes, indeed," said Lady Verifier.
" Where is that effluence of the new-
born individual soul that should emanate
from a fresh and independent democra-
cy, the possessors of a continent, with a
Niagara and a Mississippi between two
vast oceans ? You profess to be a great
people, but you have evolved no litera-
ture, no art of your own. You see the
sun rise from the Atlantic, and set in
the Pacific ; and it seems to do you no
good, but to send you to Europe for your
language and to Japan for your decora-
tion."

" Lady Ferifier is fery right," said
Professor Schlamm. " Ameriga is a
gountry of brovound dizabbointment to

106

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

dtho vilozophic mind. It is pig oond
rich ; pool noding orichiual toes it bro-
tttoe."

•• Nothing that springs from the soil
and savors of the soil," said Lady Ver-
ifier.

'• Except its Washington Adamses,"
said the M. P., in a surly undertone.

" My lord," I answered, " your ques-
tion and Lady Verifier's remind me of
a paragraph that I saw quoted from a
London sporting paper, a short time
ago, about American horses." (Here
Captain Surcingle dropped his knife and
fork, and turned his glass on me.) " It
accounted for the fact that American
horses had won so many cups lately by
the other fact that the Americans had
been importing English horses, and
thus had improved their stock ; so that
in truth the cups had been won by Eng-
land, after all."

" That 's jolly good," said the cap-
tain.

" Now that is quite true. But it is
only half the truth ; for the whole truth
is that all our horses are English. The
horse is not indigenous to America.
Neither are we. We are not autoch-
thones, as by your expectations it would
seem you think us. We are not prod-
ucts of the soil. We are not the fruit
of Niagara or the prairies, which most
of us have never been within five hun-
dred miles of ; nor of the oceans, which
few of us have ever seen. We are
what we are by race and circumstances ;
not because we live on a certain part
of the earth's surface. If you want a
literature and an art that smack of the
soil, you must go to Sitting Bull and
Squatting Bear, with whom we have no
oth<jr relations than we, or you, have
with the cave-dwellers. Nor do Amer-
icans live and manage their affairs with
the purpose of satisfying the philosophic
mind, of working out interesting social
problems, or of creating a new literature
and a new art, but simply to get, each
one of them, as much material comfort

out of life and the world as to him is
possible ; a not very novel notion in the
human creature."

" And so, sir," said Mr. Adams, speak-
ing to me for the first time, in tones
which, when addressed to me, seemed
to have something familiar in them,
" that is your patriotic veoo of your
country ? And may I ask what good
thing you think is peculiar to 'Muh'ky ? "

" Food for the hungry and freedom
for the oppressed."

" Nothing else ? " asked our host.

" Nothing."

" But to the wide benevolence of an
American democrat I suppose that is
enough," said Lady Toppingham.

" Pardon me, madam, but I sometimes
think that birth and breeding in a dem-
ocratic country may make men aristo-
crats of the blackest dye ; and I go
about fancying that some of us ought
to have been guillotined forty or fifty
years before we were born, as enemies
to the human race."

" Oh, I say," cried the captain, " that
won't do ! Could n't guillotine ' fellah
b'foah he was bawn, you know."

" Nevertheless, my dear captain, I 'm
inclined to believe that it might better
have been done."

" Vewy stwange," drawled the Hon-
orable John.

Here Mr. Adams, as he was regard-
ing me with fixed and desperate eye,
drew his bowie-knife from his pocket
and opened it ; but before the horror
of an expected onslaught upon me could
well have thrilled the company, he qui-
eted all apprehensions, if not all nerves,
by picking his teeth with it in a very
deliberate manner.

Meantime the two authoresses and
the professor were talking with anima-
tion ; and I heard f ragmentarily " dear
Walt Whitman," " most enthralling of
American writers," " egsbrezzion of
dthe droo Amerigan sbirit ; " and Lord
Toppingham, looking at our end of the
table, said, " Our literary friends here

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

107

iusist that you have one truly represen-
tative author ; one who represents, not
perhaps your cultured classes, but the
feelin's and hopes and aspirations of
those people who are the true represen-
tatives of the American genius."

" Yaas," said Mr. Adams.

" As to that, I can only refer you to
Mr. Stedman, a writer whom some of
your Victorian Poets ought to know ;
and who has seen and recorded the fact
that Walt Whitman is entirely disre-
garded, and almost contemned, by our
people of the plainer and humbler sort,
who find iu him no expression of their
feelings or their thoughts ; and that he
is considered (for I cannot say that he
is read) only by the curious, the critical,
the theorists, and the dilettanti, — the
fastidious aristocracy and literary brica-
brac hunters of the intellectual world. As
to his poetry, except on some rare occa-
sions when he lapses into common sense
and human feeling, it is simply naught.
Ere long some of you in England will
be ashamed of the attention you have
given to its affectations. The merit that
it has you would have passed over with-
out notice. It is written in a jargon
unknown to us. The very title of his
book is in a language that I never heard
spoken."

" What can you mean ? "

" I was brought up in New England
and New York, and never there, nor
yet in Old England, nor in any of the
literature common to both countries, did
I hear of " leaves of grass." Grass has
not what iu English we call leaves. We
have blades of grass, even spears ; but
who ever heard of leaves ? A trifle
this ; but coming on the title-page, it
proves to be a sign of what 's with-
in."

" My very paytriotic friend," said
Mr. Adams sarcastically, " thet 'a a sort
of 'bjecshin thet ud do fur th' Sahtur-
day Reveoo ; but 't won't go daown
'th any true 'Muh'kin. Ef Muh'ky
wants leaves o' grass 'nstid o' blades,

she '11 hev 'em. I kin put all that daown
jess by readin' a piece thet I 've got into
my pocket, — one thet Walt Whitman 's
never published yet; but I kerry it
raound to read sorter b'tween whiles."

The reading was loudly called for,
and Mr. Adams, producing a sheet or
two of paper from his all-containing
pocket, read as follows : —

1 I happify myself.

I am considerable of a man. I am some.
You also are some. We all are considerable,
all are some.

' Put all of you and all of me together, and agi-
tate our particles by rubbing us up into eter-
nal smash, and we should still be some.

No more than some, but no less.

Particularly some, some particularly; some in
general, generally some; but always some,
without mitigation. Distinctly, some !

0 ensemble ! 0 quelque-chose !

2 Some punkins, perhaps;

But perhaps squash, long-necked squash,
crooked-necked squash, cucumber, beets, pars-
nips, carrots, turnips, white turnips, yellow
turnips, or any sort of sass, long sass or
short sass.

Or potatoes. Men, Irish potatoes ; women,
sweet potatoes.

3 Yes, women!

1 expatiate myself in female man.

A reciprocity treat}'. Not like a jug's handle.

They look at me, and my eyes start out of my
head; they speak to me, and I yell with de-
light ; they shake hands with me, and things
are mixed; I don't know exactly whether
I 'm them, or them 's me.

Women watch for me ; they do. Yes, sir !

They rush upon me; seven women laying hold
of one man; and the divine efflux that thrilled
the cosmos before the nuptials of the saurian*
overflows, surrounds, and interpenetrates their
souls, and they cry, Where is Walt, our broth-
er V Why does he tarry, leaving us for-
lorn?

0, mes soeurs !

As Mr. Adams read this in a voice
heavily monotonous and slightly nasal,
the whole company listened with ani-
mation in their faces. Lord Topping-
ham looked puzzled. Lady Topping-
ham smiled, a little cynically, I thought.
The M. P. sat with open, wondering
eyes. Professor Schlamm, at the con-
clusion of the first stanza, folded his
hands upon the table, putting his two
thumbs together, and leaning forward

108

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

[July,

looked through his spectacles at the
ivad(-r with solemnity. Lady Verifier
exclaimed. " A truly cyclical utterance ;
worthy to be echoed through the eternal
ajous ! " Mrs. Longmore, at the end of
the third stanza, murmured, " Divine !
divine ! America is the new Paradise."
Captain Surcingle turned to me, and
asked, " What language is it witten in,
— 'Mewican ? "

Then Mr. Adams continued : —

57 Of Beauty.

Of excellence, of purity, of honesty, of
truth.

Of the beauty of flat-nosed, pock-marked,
pied Congo niggers.

Of the purity of compost-heaps, the perfume
of bone-boiling ; of the fragrance of pig-
sties, and the ineffable sweetness of gen-
eral corruption.

Of the honesty and general incorruptibility
of political bosses, of aldermen, of com-
mon-council men, of postmasters and gov-
ernment contractors, of members of the
House of Representatives, and of govern-
ment officers generally, of executors of
wills, of trustees of estates, of referees, and
of cashiers of banks who are Sunday-
school superintendents.

Of the truth of theatrical advertisements,
and advertisements generally, of an act-
or's speech on his benefit night, of your
salutation when you say, " I am happy to
see you, sir," of Mrs. Lydia Pinkham's
public confidences, of the miracles worked
by St. Jacob's Oil, and the long-recorded
virtues of Scheidam schnapps.

58 I glorify schnapps ; I celebrate gin.

In beer I revel and welter. I shall liquor.

Ein lager!

I swear there is no nectar like lager. I swim
in it, I float upon it, it heaves me up to
heaven, it bears me beyond the stars; I
tread upon the ether; I spread m3-self
abroad; I stand self-poised in illimitable
space. I look down ; I see j'ou ; I am no
better than you. You also 8hall mouflt
with me.

Zwei lager!

Encore.

1003 O, my soul !

O, your soul! which is no better than my
soul, and no worse, but just the same.

O soul in general ! Loafe ! Proceed through
space with rent garments.

0 shirt out-issuing, pendent! tattered, flut-
tfcring flag of freedom ! not national free-
dom, nor any of that sort of infernal non-
sense, but freedom individual, freedom to
do just what you blessed please !

1004 By golly, there is nothing in this world so

unutterably magnificent as the inexplica-
ble comprehensibility of inexplicableness !

1005 Of mud.

1006 0 eternal circles, O squares, O triangles, O

hypothenuses, O centres, circumferences,
diameters, radiuses, arcs, sines, co-sines,
tangents, parallelograms and parallelopip-
edons! 0 pipes that are not parallel, fur-
nace pipes, sewer pipes, meerschaum pipes,
brier-wood pipes, clay pipes ! O matches,
O fire, and coal-scuttle, and shovel, and
tongs, and fender, and ashes, and dust,
and dirt ! O everything ! 0 nothing !

O myself ! 0 yourself !

0 my eye !

At this point of the reading the en-
thusiastic admiration of some of the au-
dience again broke silence. " That no-
ble passage," cried Lady Verifier, "be-
ginning with the eternal circles, and
ending with everything and nothing !
So vast ! so all-inspiring ! "

" So all-embracing ! " sighed Mrs.
Longmore.

" Zo univarezall," said the professor,
" zo voondameiitahl, zo brovound ! Go
on, my vreut, oond de zing-zong shant,
uud de evangel bredigate, of the noo
vorlt ; oond I zoon a vilozophy of dthe
Amerigan zoul zhall write."

Mr.. Adams resumed: —

1247. These things are not in Webster's Diction-
ary, Unabridged Pictorial ;

Nor yet in Worcester's. Wait and get the
best.

These have come up out of the ages :

Out of the ground that you crush with your
boot-heel :

Out of the muck that you have shoveled
away into the compost :

Out of the offal that the slow, lumbering
cart, blood-dabbled and grease-dropping,
bears away from the slaughter-house, a
white-armed boy sitting on top of it, shout-
ing Hi ! and licking the horse on the raw,
with the bridle.

That muck has been many philosophers ;
that offal was once gods and sages.

And I verify that I don't see why a man in
gold spectacles and a white cravat, stuck
up in a library, stuck up in a pulpit, stuck
up in a professor's chair, stuck up in a
governor's chair or in a president's chair,
should be of any more account than a pos-
sum or a wood-chuck.

Libertad, and the divine average !

1883.]

Mr. Washington Adams in England.

109

1249 I ti-ll you the truth. Saint!

I am not to be bluffed off. No, sir!

I am large, hairy, earthy, smell of the soil,
am big in the shoulders, narrow in the
flank, strong in the knees, and of an in-
quiring and communicative disposition.

Also instructive in my propensities, given to
contemplation, and able to lift anything
that is not too heavy.

Listen to me, and I will do you good.

Loafe with me, and I will do you better.

And if any man gets ahead of me, he will
find me after him.

Vale ! 1

There was a hum of admiration
around Mr. Adams as he restored the
manuscript to his pocket ; but Captain
Surcingle turned to me, and asked,
" 'Mewican poetwy ? "

" Yes, Jack," said his cousin, answer-
ing for me ; " and some of our wise
people say that it 's the only poetry that
can be called American ; but if it is, I am
content with my English Longfellow."

" And I, madam, with my still more
English Whittier."

This Mr. Adams evidently thought
would be a good time to bring his visit
to an end, and rising in his place, with
a manner as if addressing the chair, he
said, " My lord, I shall now bid your
lordship farwell ; an' in doin' so I thank
you for your elegint en bountiful hos-
pitality. It wuz fuss class, en thar wuz
plenty of it ; en I shall remember it
'z long 'z I live. En I thank your good
lady too, en feel specially obleeged to
her ladyship fur that thar pie T the
chicken-fixins into it. It wuz fuss class,
and no mistake. En now I hope you '11
all jine me in drinkin' her ladyship's
health, en long may she wave. I can't

1 Readers of the New York Albion in 1860 may
have memories awakened by these lines, but I ain

call for the hips and the tiger, seein'
there 's so many ladies present ; but
let 's all liquor up, and knock down, and
no heel-taps."

" Weal 'Mewican," said the captain,
with an air of satisfaction. "Know it
now. Was n't quite sure befoah ; but
when he said liquor up 'knew he was
weal."

The company had risen, and had
drunk Mr. Adams's toast, and now broke
up. He took, I thought, a rather hur-
ried leave. The four-wheeled cab in
which he came had remained, and was
at the door, to which some of us accom-
panied him. When he was seated he
looked out, and said, " If your lordship
ever comes to New York, jess look inter
my office. Happy to see you. Name 's
into the D'rect'ry. So long ! "

As the cab turned down the drive,
we saw Mr. Adams's boot thrust itself
lazily out of one of the windows, and
rest there at its ease.

" First time I ever saw a weal 'Mew-
ican off the stage," said the captain,
slipping his arm into mine as we entered
the hall again. "Vewy intwestin'.
Think I should n't like it as a wegula'
thing, you know."

Since my return to New York, I have
inquired in vain for Mr. Washington
Adams. Many persons seem to recog-
nize my description of him as that of a
man they have seen, but no one knows
him by name ; nor is there any such
member of the New York legislature. I
have not yet been able to ask Hum-
phreys to resolve my perplexity.

Richard Grant White.

able to insure Mr. Adams against a suit for copy-
right, or a charge of plagiarism.

110

Sylvan Station.

[July,

SYLVAN STATION.

I IIATE been reflecting upon the
wonderful spectroscope, and wishing it
could be applied to human beings. How
iiiti -nsely interesting our commonest
neighbor might suddenly become, some
bright new apparition irradiating our
vision, as the test was applied ! Every
substance in nature giving out, in suit-
able circumstances, a peculiar charac-
teristic light, how can we doubt that
there is in every human being some-
thing altogether its own, if it could only
be exhumed from the conventionalities
that overlie it, and could be induced to
reveal itself?

Accident lately disclosed veins of
gold and silver where I had all my life
been in the habit of searching for the
earliest hepaticas, without once dream-
ing that there was any other reason for
digging among the dead leaves than to
have the honor of discovering them.

The year I spent at Sylvan Station
seemed to me rich in the material for
thought that lies in common things and
humble people. We had been living
for twenty years in California, at a
place called the " Encinal," or Oak
Grove, of Alameda. We thought it a
curious coincidence that directed us to
another oak grove in Massachusetts.
We had no idea that within five miles
of Boston could still be found a place
of so much wild, natural beauty. We
welcomed with delight the oaks and the

pines. " For him who endures the
pine grows green and flourishes," and
so with the oak (robur, the strong tree).
We felt at once invigorated by their
presence, and in a fair way to recover
the lost health of which we were in
search.

After so many years without seeing
a snowflake, it was like living in a won-
derful new world to wake, on the sec-
ond morning after our arrival, and look

upon the white earth. The first great
fall of snow was in perfect silence. All
landmarks were obliterated, and we
took a new start in life on a pure white
plain. It was amusing to see each man's
estimate of his duty depicted upon it, in
the way of shoveling. Our pioneer
neighbor in the rear made a deep cut
that passed five or six houses, and
reached the main street ; our timid
neighbor on the other side dug merely
a footpath to his own door. Later in
the day, the little bride opposite came
out in slippers and a white cloud, look-
ing like a pretty snow wraith, and flour-
ished her broom about, to clear the steps
and welcome her husband home. The
station - master made little diverging
paths in all directions, to accommodate
the world and facilitate travel.

This station-master, unpretending as
he was, really did a great deal to give
its character to the place. Sometimes,
at the railroad offices, I have wondered
if it would not be just as well to have
some machinery arranged, by which one
could pass in money and take out a
ticket, so perfectly automatic has the
railroad official become. To see this
you have only to ask some question a
little out of the ordinary routine, which
it is not perhaps exactly his business to
answer, but which it concerns you very
much to know. To him travelers are
evidently mere moving masses. This
man, however, appeared to entertain
the idea that into everything which a
human being does some human element
should enter. His little rough building
he made as comfortable as possible,
out of pure good will toward the whole
human race, and evidently considered
every man that waited for a train there
as his guest. In summer, he twined
scarlet beans and morning-glories over
it, and set his old cane-seat rocking-

1883.]

Sylvan Station.

Ill

chairs invitingly outside. In winter, he
drew them round a bright fire, and
dressed the walls with hemlock.

One day, as I waited, I saw a dirt-car
stop and deposit about twenty cans, con-
taining the dinners of some laborers em-
ployed on the road. Any one who had
no particular interest in the men might
easily have omitted to take any notice of
the fact ; but it at once occurred to him
that it was pleasant to any man to have
his coffee hot, and to find a comfortable
place in which to take it ; so he hastily
carried in all the cans, and placed them
round the fire ; and then, with much ap-
pearance of kindliness, as if some choice
visitors were at hand, he began to brush
up a little, and sweep the floor. I re-
proved myself inwardly, feeling certain
that if I had been in his place I should
only have thought of sweeping it after,
and not before, such guests. Presently
a gang of men came along, — rough,
grimy - looking fellows. They stood
staring about, in a stupid, uncertain
way, till he called out in a cheery voice,
" Walk in, gentlemen, and help your-
selves." It must have been the only
time in their lives that they had been
called " gentlemen." I felt as if it might
alter their ideals for life.

Besides making his house as agree-
able as possible, he had a cordial, uncon-
scious way of offering himself, too, for
the entertainment of his guests. I heard
him, one day, consulting the assembled
company as to what would be a suitable
Christmas present for him to give a
friend ; saying that he wanted to give
something lasting, and had thought of
poetry.

Thoreau might have had such a man
as this in mind, when he said, " Here
comes such a subtile and ineffable qual-
ity, for instance, as truth, or justice,
though the slightest amount, or new va-
riety of it, along the road. It takes the
stiffness out of our joints, and makes us
supple and buoyant, when we knew not
what ailed us, to recognize any gener-

osity in man or nature." And again,
when he speaks of the man in his neigh-
borhood, " who lived in a hollow tree,
with manners truly regal."

I observed that the station-master al-
ways waved his hand, in greeting, to the
engineer of the passing train. Most men
would have thought they had enough to
do to open and shut the heavy gates, but
these little courtesies never seemed to
make his work any harder. I inclined
to suspect, even, that they made it easier,
so joyous was his ordinary mood. To
manifest a little good will toward every-
body that chanced to come in his way
was as natural to him as it is for the sun
to shine. Nor were his sympathies con-
fined to human beings, as I happened to
learn by calling one day at the door of
his dwelling-house, adjoining the station.
I saw his old mother, whom he had just
brought down from New Hampshire to
make him a visit. Beside her purred
her big cat. " Mother would n't have
built up any," he remarked, " if I had
brought her down, and left Jerry."

I noticed at the window what seemed
a little tropical forest, such a rich,
strong growth of green, with the sun-
beams striking through it. It was a
club-moss he had brought from the
woods, which throve so luxuriantly in
his hands. A neighbor who stood by
remarked to me, with a mysterious look,
"Some folks can't do nothing with
plants." I thought of Emerson's lines,
" One man can bid our bread feed and
our fire warm us." To a mere moss a
touch may be sunshine or frost.

Having very little human society, we
naturally took a lively interest in our
fellow passengers in the horse-cars, es-
pecially in the children. It was, some-
times, the event of the day merely to
sit beside one of these little creatures,
fresh from heaven. We had only one
child near us, — little Scotch Maggie.
One day, in the midst of the great snows,
we saw a small white coffin carried from
Maggie's door. It was a bright, still

112

Sylvan Station.

[July,

day, and there was no visible mourning
among the few people who followed.
As quietly as the blossoms drop from
the trees, the baby was borne to its rest.
M:r_.ri:ii! had told us with great delight
of the birth of the baby, and I wanted
to know how its death seemed to her.
Seeing her again, I inquired for the lit-
tle brother. She said, " It has gone far
off from us." I began to express some
sorrow ; but she replied, very quietly,
" We did not want it any more." I
asked, " Who takes care of it now ? "
" Its mother," she said. " And who
takes care of you ? " " My mother,"
— showing that she thought they had
both the same care, although from dif-
ferent hands. The perfect assurance
with which she spoke reminded me of
what I had heard of the Chinese — how
on special occasions they listen to the
prattle of children, and try to divine it,
as inspired language.

Maggie was three years old, and al-
ways ready with an answer to every
question asked. One day, when she came
to see us, a little girl present repeated a
Swedish poem. Maggie was astounded.
I asked her if she could recite a little
verse, knowing very well that none had
ever been taught her. Being taken by
surprise, she said " No ; " but presently,
with a cunning little smile rippling all
over her face, she improvised one, ex-
claiming, with an upward-springing mo-
tion, " Up comes the summer day ! " and
then, again and again, with the same
inerry little laugh of satisfaction with
herself, " Up conies the summer day ! "
It seemed like the uplifting of flowers
from the earth.

Being at last fairly established, we
found it impossible to postpone any
longer what, we feared, would prove a
most difficult and disagreeable undertak-
ing, — finding a suitable domestic. We
had been long absent from the East,
employing only Chinese, and in the
mean time we had heard desperate ac-
counts of how this family and that had

been obliged to resort to boarding, for
no other reason than just because it
proved so utterly impossible to find suit-
able servants. We were told that no
girl was willing to live in the country
in winter ; and that, if any one was ever
so fortunate as to find a girl who un-
derstood her work, she placed such an
extravagant estimate on herself, on that
account, and made such exorbitant de-
mands, that it was impossible to tolerate
her ; that the old-fashioned servant, who
expected to take an interest in the af-
fairs of her employers, had passed en-
tirely off the stage ; that it was a ques-
tion now only of work on one side, and
wages on the other. One of our friends
gave us, as the result of her experience,
the opinion that it was best to look for
as neutral a character as possible. Any-
thing positive, she said, was an objection.
Peculiarities were apt to clash; and
as we only wanted her to do the work,
the more she resembled a machine the
better. I only wish she could have seen
Sanna, and felt the grasp of her hand,
as she held it out to me in greeting.

We found her at an employment
office, just arrived from Sweden. As I
noticed her sunny hair and blue eyes
and strong, free step, I thought of what
some one said of Jenny Lind : that she
ought to have been called the Swedish
Lioness, rather than the Swedish Night-
ingale, from the freedom and strength
of her bearing. Not able to speak a
word of English, she sat looking at me
with such confident blue eyes that no
one could feel otherwise than kindly
towards her, when the world seemed to
her such a fair, honest place.

She held out a little book, printed in
Swedish and English, by which we were
to converse together. I looked it over,
and saw that it contained directions,
given to servants in their own country,
by which they were to conduct them-
selves. Among other things, they were
told to " step softly, move lightly, and
desire nothing."

1883.]

Sylvan Station.

113

After I came to know more of her
intensely social nature, I often wondered
how she survived the first few weeks,
when we never attempted anything
more in the way of conversation than
" cup," " plate," etc. At length, in an
outburst of desperation, she exclaimed,
" I want to talk ! " So did we, but the
difficulty was how to begin. She solved
it herself by asking if we knew George
Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
We, in return, asked if she knew Lin-
nams and Swedeuborg, to both of which
questions she replied in the affirmative,
and also recognized, with delight, a pic-
ture of Luther. After this, conversa-
tion became easy ; she was so very apt
and eager. She was soon able to give
a little account of her voyage : telling
us how she, with a hundred other girls,
came as steerage passengers, on a great
steamer; and how, in leaving, they sang
together the Fatherland Song ; and how
the passengers on the upper deck all
clapped their hands, as well they might
if the other voices were like hers. They
had great luncheon baskets ; but she lost
hers overboard, in a storm, and also
her hat. " Now I must every day say
to some one, ' Please give me a little
bread.' " In the storm she thought, " By
and by I dead." It is wonderful, the
courage of these girls, starting alone for
an unknown world. Some of her friends
in Sweden, she said, thought that to
come to America they would have to
travel through the earth. But she had
been taught otherwise at school ; taught
also to knit, embroider, crochet, and
make baskets. The dress she had on
she had not only fitted for herself, but
had made the woolen cloth for it, and
had woven her plaid shawl. She wore
generally, on her head, a little black
shawl. One day she said to me, touch-
ing it, " Every woman in Sweden all
the same."

She readily understood that we en-
joyed hearing about her country, as she
took so much interest herself in learning

VOL. LII. — NO. 309. 8

everything possible. She soon began to
tell us about the Lapps, as the most
curious little people in the world ; very
short, but wearing tall, pointed hoods,
made of reindeer skin. She always
talked with great enthusiasm about the
" rein," as she called the reindeer : said
that if a man had a thousand rein he
was rich ; that the Lapps traveled
about all the time, only lassoing some
rein and traveling on to find moss for
them, the rein furnishing them with all
their food. When they went to church
they left their babies outside in little
holes in the snow, sewed up in skins.
They themselves wore one garment of
skin. Swedish babies had a little knit
garment, that covered them all over,
arms, legs, and feet. Lapp babies were
always cold, and the Lapps were very,,
very poor. I asked, " Why not come to
Boston ? " She answered, " Oh, Lapp
say Lapland good" She mocked their
funny ways of talking, in monosyllables. .
They could not open their mouths, she
said ; it was so cold. She used to mock,
too, the peasants' walk, — stiff, ungainly:
strides ; crouching as they went along,
because it was so cold. It was very
different from reading these things in
the geography to hear them from one
who had actually seen them, and touched
the little cold Lapp babies.

Her inseparable and most congenial
companion was Blanche, the little white
kitten, who followed her out into the
yard, as she hung out the clothes, and
chased the dried oak leaves over the
frozen crust ; springing at them, and
whirling round and round; sometimes,
in her eagerness, leaping at nothing ; se-
lecting some little spot, and pouncing
again and again upon it, evidently play-
ing there was something there. She
scrambled up into the little oak bushes,
and peered out at us, with a wild light in
her eyes, and often persistently refused
to come into the house even after a
snow-storm had begun. How demoral-
ized and effeminate seemed the life of an

114

Sylvan Station.

[July,

ordinary cat, curled up beside the fire,
after seeing one in which the aboriginal
instincts had revived ! I always attrib-
uted it to Sanua's influence ; it had
such an animating effect upon us all.

The amount of her general knowl-
edge continually surprised us. It showed
how much any one might learn who had
a desire, only, without much opportu-
nity. She inquired eagerly about the
progress of Nordenskjiild, the Swedish
Arctic explorer, and spoke of the four
Swedish poets-laureate, of whom two,
Bjornson and Janson, have been in this
country.

One day she made a droll mistake. By
misunderstanding a word, she thought
she heard the master of the house spoken
of as a poet. She exclaimed with rapture
to the little daughter, " Oh, Margie, is't
you not happy, have poet-parents ? I
always thought you mamma was poet."
This idealizing of me into a poet quite
overcame me. I had been such a se-
vere task-mistress to her, and, owing to
the inevitable want of understanding be-
tween us, I felt that I had often spoken
to her in ways quite incompatible with
the idea of my being a poet. But she
had a good broad way of looking at
things, and passed by much that was
disagreeable.

Sometimes she sang the watchman's
song : —

" Klocken ar dfra slagen !
Vinden ar ost.
For svaf d ock brand,
For tjufrar's hand,
Gud bevare vart Sverige, vart land! "

" The clock strikes eleven I
The wind is east.
From sword and brand,
From hostile hand,
God keep our Sweden's land."

How primitive it seemed, watching over
these people in their sleep, and telling
them the way of the wind ! If it had
been in California, they would have
wanted to know, instead, how stocks
were.

She always spoke with so much enthu-

siasm about Sweden that we asked her
once why it was so beautiful. She said,
" Because it is so wild." I thought that
she was more contented for the little
Scandinavian landscape she could see
from her attic window. It was the edge
of the Middlesex Fells. There were
great wastes of snow, with ledges of
dark rock and pine-trees. On one of
the heights was a red-roofed tower, and
she could hear, in the distance, the
sound of a waterfall.

In thinking about her it occurred to
me that the contrast between the really
rich and the really poor is more a dif-
ference in enthusiasm than in anything
else. Some people are so much more
conscious than others that the whole
world is open to them. When her work
was done, she always sat down to sing.
As I listened to her, I said to myself,
" Can it be this beautiful bird I have
been ordering about all day, employing
in such drudgery ? " A voice so light
and soaring I had never heard. Her
consciousness of the possibilities this
fine roice might open to her finally took
her from us.

We comforted ourselves with think-
ing that we would try to find some one
else as much like her as possible. But,
as it proved, no contrast could be great-
er than that between our lively Sauna
and the demure little Feina, who tQok
her place. She was a stunted-looking
girl, with a plain face and undemonstra-
tive nature, — one of those phenomenal
beings, as we presently discovered, who
never talk, except from necessity, and
who have no desire to express them-
selves in any way. I was just about to
decline taking her, when it was as if I
caught a glimpse of her inmost nature,
and became conscious of something rare
and beautiful in her. Without making
any of the disparaging remarks I had
intended, I simply accepted her. She
made a little courtesy, and said, " Tank,"
which she always thenceforward repeat-
ed whenever anything was done for her.

1883.]

Sylvan Station.

115

Her clothes were coarse and poor,
but my eye was caught by a silken tie
on her neck, of a most rare and beautiful
shade. It struck me, afterward, that it
represented something in her entirely
unconnected with her menial condition,
and unsoiled by it. I saw, one day, her
representative in the blue succory, on
the edge of the sidewalk : like her,
fitted by nature for hard conditions, with
coarse leaves touching the earth, com-
panion to the pig-weed and the burdock ;
with clouds of dust continually sweep-
ing over it, but with heaven's own blue,
undimmed, on its soft fringed petals.

Her charm was in her perfect, uni-
form gentleness. Day after day, as I
watched her going through the same mo-
notonous routine, it seemed to me that
she was as patient as the sky or the
earth. I could explain her to myself
only by thinking of the long line of
peasant ancestors, who had transmitted
content to her, and made her so strong
in her simple virtues. I felt that ar lit-
tle bit of heaven was mirrored in every
one of her unvarying, uneventful days.

"We had found such infinite variety
in the snow, tossed by the wind and
wreathed about our dwelling, soft and
still, with pale blue shadows, or spark-
ling with infinitesimal stars, that we
were really sorry to part with it ; but as
spring drew near, we began to feel the
thrill of delight that runs through all
nature. Year after year, with the same
old dusky evergreens about us, we had
longed for the beautiful outburst of
leaves and blossoms. Only those who
have been long separated from it can
conceive the strength of desire, which
year adds to year, to see it again. When
our hope was just on the verge of ful-
fillment, a fire swept through the woods ;
great tongues of flarne appeared to lick
up and destroy everything in fierce de-
light. We thought every germ of life
must perish ; but how little we knew
of the exuberance of Nature ! Out of
the charred and devastated earth she

brought richer beauty ; the wild-grape
leaves had a deeper tinge of pink and
a more beautiful gloss. Everywhere
was the same abundance, the same lav-
ish grace. How fascinating it was to
watch the little hooded ferns uncurl,
and the opening of the leaves ; to see
the exquisite care with which they had
all been folded and packed in their cov-
erings ! What a tender touch showed
itself everywhere ! Under the pine-
tree, I saw the little white heads of
the Indian pipe thrusting themselves up
through the dead leaves. I drew one
up. What a curious little flower ! It ap-
parently had neither root nor branches,
— a mere little flower, as if the ground
itself were blossoming. I thought of a
young man, in the last stages of con-
sumption, whom we had noticed on our
journey. We heard him telling a friend
that he had been advised to go into the
country. " But then the country is so
lonesome," he said. What a pity that
one so soon to sleep in her bosom should
know so little of the motherliness of the
earth !

Through the meadow near us crept
a little sluggish stream. Every day in
summer was a high festival there. The
air was full of fragrance, and sweet with
sounds of insect and bird. The banks
were solid walls of flowers ; swift-glanc-
ing dragon-flies hovering over the wa-
ter, glittering beetles circling in mystic
dance on its surface, butterflies softly
opening and closing their wings of vel-
vet and gold, little birds rocking lightly
to and fro on the branches, — every liv-
ing creature overflowing with unmistak-
able delight.

Sometimes thoughts came into my
mind, on that sunny meadow, that seemed
to belong there only by contrast. What
place had the discords of human life in
that world of pure love and joy ? I re-
membered a funeral that I had once
attended in California, where I felt so
deeply the wretchedness of shams and
pretense. It was all the more painful

116

Sylvan Station.

[July,

that it was on so humble a scale ; there
must have been such sacrifices made all
along to keep up appearances. It was of
a woman, who had kept a little fancy
store and died gradually of consump-
tion. As I looked at her, in her coffin,
1 felt that her whole nature had been
slowly starved out. She lay in state, in
a hall, her husband belonging to some
association that owned it, and this was
supposed to give a kind of dignity to
her funeral ; but the image of starva-
tion was so impressed upon her that the
majesty and peace of death, which I had
never before seen wholly wanting on
the face of any dead person, did not ap-
pear at all. A cheap undertaker had
dressed her with artificial flowers. Her
husband was a lame man. At a signal
from the undertaker he limped forward,
to take leave of her, as part of the cere-
mony. He touched his lips lightly to
hers, and stepped aside. I noticed the
flash of a false diamond on his bosom,
and wondered if it represented what
he had within. After all was over,
he turned to a friend, and asked if he
thought due honor had been done his
wife, and remarked that his son had
won a bet at a gaming-table ; and that
was the last news they had told her,
though it was something, he said, she
never seemed much pleased to hear.

I felt as if I could not let this woman
be buried, at least I could not bury the
thought of her, until I had extorted for
myself some comfort in regard to her.
I was confident that somewhere, in the
deepest recesses of her being, known
perhaps only to God and her, was some-
thing true ; but I should have felt more
sure of it, and that she had had some-
thing of her share of the joy of life, if
she had only lived in the country. The
city is so hard in every way upon the
poor, so soul-destroying. The country
is kind to all. I think no one can ever
be wholly insensible to its sweet influ-
ences. Everything that is real is whole-
some, bitter or sweet ; but the desire to

appear what we are not is a worm that
gnaws at the heart of things. How gen-
uine all things seem in our out-door life !
I lay my head upon the earth, and feel
that I am not expected to be anything
but what is natural to me. It suits the
customs of society better that every one
should wear a mask: but the sturdy
pitch-pine is not trying to turn into a
white-pine, though the white-pine is a
more elegant tree ; it is a stout pitch-
pine, full of lusty health. It is so com-
fortable to be what one was made to
be, and everything becomes so easy if
one is only so fortunate as to slip into
the right place.

Sometimes we climbed to the top of
an immense rock that overlooked the
trees. We could never be tired of
watching them swaying in the wind, so
slender and graceful, and yet so strong.
How far from all care and trouble that
rock seemed, an island in the green sea !
One day, as I lay on the top of it, a
bird -flew close above me. He sang a
few notes, as he passed, as if he would
like to speak to me, if I could only un-
derstand. On the ledges about us grew
the pretty rock fern. Here and there
one sat, like a little householder, at the
door of a tiny cavern. Each likes to
have a house of its own, and a little roof
over it ; then it shows its satisfaction by
growing in perfect and beautiful whorls,
otherwise sending up only a few ragged
shoots.

We could hardly look in any direc-
tion without seeing something from
which it was hard to turn away our
eyes. The rock upon which we sat,
when broken into fragments, revealed
beautiful little landscapes painted upon
it. The vegetation was fern-like ; some-
times defined with the utmost distinct-
ness, then veiled in purple mist. The
backgrounds were of rich Egyptian col-
ors, orange and brown ; occasionally of
a cold, hard gray, looking like a frozen
region, — a fine feathery vegetation,
growing up closely together like little

1883.]

Sylvan Station.

117

forests ; or perhaps in tnfts, crowning
rocky heights, or drooping over them.
It was like the frostwork on the win-
dows, with the addition of the coloring.
We took some pieces of it to a mineral-
ogist, to inquire about it. He said the
impressions were made by infiltrations
of water, containing oxide of iron and
manganese; but what disposed it to as-
sume those beautiful forms he could not
tell.

After the height of the season was
over, we saw with pleasure that the few
bright stragglers left appeared to take
some notice of us, as if their curiosity
was at length awakened to know who
we were, and why we were stopping
there. Perhaps the slight chill in the
air, or the little barren look that began
to appear, woke up some social feeling
in them, as it is so apt to do in us. The
dragon-fly, in July far too airy and fleet
for us to approach him, in September
settled down upon us as readily as upon
the asters or golden-rod. We tried to
make acquaintance with our tiny neigh-
bors, and soon became convinced that
the definition of instinct which we had
learned in our school-books (the knowl-
edge of a few unvarying facts, impressed
upon creatures at birth) was an error.
As soon as we begin to observe even in-
sects we see that they meet emergencies
in ways that show individual peculiar-
ities and character . as the caterpillar
we brought home to watch through the
chrysalis stage, — one of the kind called
" wooly bears," large, strong, and shag-
gy, — who, instead of coiling himself up
quietly, after a little languid exploration,
as all our others had done, made a de-
termined resistance to confinement, and
rushed constantly to and fro with a furi-
ous air ; a miniature wild beast, search-
ing in all directions for a possibility of
outlet. We had put a glass over him,
on the side of which the former occu-
pant had made a cocoon, securely fast-
ened, half-way up, with myriad silken
threads. After spending all day, aud as

far as we could tell all night, in frantic
efforts that were not visibly connected
with any plan, all at once it became evi-
dent that an idea had popped into his
little horny head. His whole manner
changed, and he set about his work with
the calm energy of one who knows what
he is doing. It had occurred to him that
the door of his prison, which for thirty-
six hours he had constantly sought, was
obstructed by the cocoon. He knew
now what was to be done, though not yet
how to do it. He nudged and thrust at
the cocoon, but for a long time it held
firm ; finally, he hooked the end of his
body round it, and with a great jerk he
and the cocoon came down together. I
could not face his despair when he saw
that it was all in vain ; that the prison
absolutely had no door. I released this
energetic little lover of freedom, though
I lost the chance of seeing what a fine
creature he might some day have be-
come, when his wanderings were all
ended.

What we called our summer sitting-
room had been formerly the bed of a
swamp. As autumn drew near, we
moved to our upland parlor, with its rus-
set carpet of dried pine. There we sat
and listened to the soft rising and fall-
ing of the wind, and watched the glis-
tening films of light that floated in the
air and rested on the grass and the bushes.
The sumach hung out her crimson
streamers, and the poplar dropped little
showers of gold. Here and there a sin-
gle branch of maple flamed in the sun-
light, while the hills, covered with oaks,
were slowly deepening and brightening
in color. I used to think of the maple
as the glory of the autumn woods, but
here there were hardly any maples, and
it seemed as if the whole depth aud rich-
ness of the forest lay in the oaks, here
blended and there contrasted with the
dark green of the pines. Every little
weed about our feet was in festive array,
tipped and spotted with red. It was
like the red Tamahnous we saw among

118

American Fiction by Women.

[July,

the Indians, when every one was freshly
painted and wrapped in a bright blanket,
to celebrate the Feast of Love.

There were dark, still places in the
woods into which the full daylight never
entered. One day I sat down to rest
in one. There was neither sound nor
sunbeam, — absolute quiet everywhere.
A faint green light appeared to come
from the trees. There was an infinite
depth of rest there, and I did not feel
as if I were alone, although I saw no

one. What is it in these beautiful, so-
litary places that seems so near to us ?
I cannot tell how there gradually stole
upon me such a satisfying assurance of
good will from some deep, secret source ;
but somehow, in the silence, I became
conscious of it. All about the human
world, so chaotic and incomprehensible,
lies the world of nature, strong, serene,
beautiful, and harmonious, still rejoicing,
undisturbed by our disasters, as if know-
ing them to be ephemeral and unreal.
Caroline E. Leighton.

AMERICAN FICTION BY WOMEN.

IN our last review of current Amer-
ican fiction we found the three most no-
ticeable books to have been written by
men, and to have a certain common
ground on which they met. It chances
that the most noticeable novels which
have since appeared are also three in
number, but from the hands of women.
It would not be hard to find points of
comparison and contrast in the two sets
of books. To begin with, these three
women have devoted themselves to
American themes, and not a foreigner,
we believe, appears on the stage. Now
— but we spare the reader the fine gen-
eralization which we were about to
make. It is only reviewers who read
books by pairs or threes, and it is more
to the point to inquire into the individ-
ual characteristics of the novels in ques-
tion.

Mrs. Foote enjoys the doubtful ad-
vantage of being able to present her
characters both to the eye and to the
mind. Her excellent reputation for fig-
ure drawing makes one take up The Led
Horse Claim * with some curiosity to
know how far the persons described in
the pictures correspond with the persons

1 The Led Horse Claim. A Romance of a Min-
ing Camp. By MARY HALLOCK FOOTE. lllus-

characterized in the text. Ordinarily
the author and artist are different be-
ings, and when the author invests his
characters with great dignity or charm
we cannot hold him responsible for the
interpretation which the artist may put
upon his words. Mrs. Foote, however,
either repeats herself in the two forms
of representation, or gives the reader a
chance to test one form by the other.
The handsomeness of Mr. Hilgard, in
this story, is not given to the reader to
take on faith. He may know from Mrs.
Foote's pictures just how Mr. Hilgard
looked, even at the very critical moment
when he was parting from Miss Con-
rath. Miss Conrath's beauty, again, is
placed under a high light in the frontis-
piece ; and as both the manly and the
womanly beauty are important elements
in the story, one must at least admire
Mrs. Foote's courage in furnishing the
reader with cartes de visile, so to speak,
of her principal characters.

It may be straining a point, but we
cannot help thinking that Mrs. Foote's
success in her pictures prophesies the
success in her writing. The best of her
illustrations is the one entitled " She

trated by the Author. Boston : James R. Osgood
& Co. 1883.

1883.]

American Fiction ly Women.

119

doubted long," and the best of her writ-
ing is iu the characterization of the sen-
timent of this doubting girl. It is not
the masculine scenes in the story which
impress us most, but the fine yet strong
lines of a woman to whom suffering has
come at once with love. The story is a
simple one. In a mining camp in Cal-
ifornia two mines are engaged in a
struggle for victory. Mr. George Hil-
gard is the superintendent of the Led
Horse mine, and when the story opens
is in the midst of a legal warfare with
the rival Shoshone, which adjoins it and
is suspected to have encroached upon it.
The superintendent of the Shoshone is
a dissipated young fellow, Henry Con-
rath, whose sister Cecil has come to the
camp from the East, to make her home
with him. Cecil and Hilgard meet sud-
denty, and the story of Romeo and Ju-
liet begins. In the progress of affairs
a fight occurs iu the rukie, in which Hil-
gard kills Conrath, and the situation
becomes at once tragic. The task of the
novelist is to perfect the union of Cecil
and Hilgard, notwithstanding this terri-
ble cause of separation.

What we like in the treatment of
the story is the dependence of the au-
thor upon the great movements of hu-
man nature, and her indifference to exces-
sive refinement upon these movements.
Her lovers love at first sight, and they
love with an honest warmth, which the
reader accepts without requiring a close
analysis of their motives. They are
kept apart by the feud between the two
houses, but love surmounts the feud.
They are separated again by the trag-
edy, but time reinforces love, and pity
takes a part, and at length the two
young hearts find their content. We
repeat that it is a pleasure to find hon-
est sentiment so victorious.

The trouble of the young girl is a
genuine one, and it is allowed a full and
sensible development. The doubting
long, through which she went, was the
action of a pure and honorable maiden;

but the doubt in this healthy soul must
needs give way before the certainty of
love. We respect Mrs. Foote and her
art, because she has not tortured us with
imaginary and subtle difficulties in the
case, but has told an entirely probable
story as nature would have told it.
There is in the handling of the novel a
certain lack of confidence now and then,
which betrays an unpracticed hand, and
a disposition, we think, to rely a little
upon second-hand information iu some
of the interior scenes, where the figures
are men only. The whole circumstance
of the story, however, at least in the
larger part, is of rough Californian life,
and we recognize the womanly hand
which has touched it. The slight ten-
dency to an excess of sentiment which
characterizes Mrs. Foote's work is well
counteracted by the rudeness of the ma-
terial in which she has here wrought.

We took up Miss Woolson's little
book l with special interest, from a de-
sire to know what effect Anne had had
upon her. The reaction of a novel upon
its writer has not always sufficiently
been considered, and we suspect that in
her new and brief story Miss Woolson
has written with some sense of relief
from the entanglements of her long,
three - jointed novel. She has at any
rate chosen an entirely different theme,
and one which allows her the greatest
freedom from the task of describing a
love adventure. Love — that is, the love
of a young man and young woman — is
scarcely considered in For the Major ;
it is indeed too slightly treated for the
perfection of the story, since in real
life the relations of Miss Carroll and
Mr. Owen would have had a more im-
portant effect upon the development of
events. Now that we have read the
story through, and know that there is
no more, we feel so slightly acquainted
with the persons just mentioned that

1 For the Major. By CONSTANCE FENIMORK
WOOLSON. New York: Ilarper & Brothers.
1883.

120

American Fiction by Women.

[July,

we have not felt at liberty to speak of
them as Sara and Frederick.

We do, however, feel very well ac-
quainted with Mrs. Carroll and the Ma-
jor, who are the chief personages of the
book ; and an acquaintance with Mrs.
Carroll is, as Miss Woolson intended it
to be, a cumulative one, and one which
has distinct processes in it. A good
deal of ingenuity has been expended
upon Mrs. Carroll, for the obvious rea-
son that she expended a good deal on
herself. She was the stepmother of
Sara Carroll, but when the story opens
the two women had for several years seen
little of each other : the daughter being
absent for educational reasons ; the moth-
er devoting herself to Major Carroll,
with whom she is living in a mountain
village, presumably in North or South
Carolina. The geographical boundaries
of the story are not very clearly marked,
and we feel, therefore, a stronger, per-
haps unworthy, suspicion that the local-
ity and its society are highly imaginary.
It would almost seem as if Miss Wool-
son invented Far Edgerly and its neigh-
borhood in order to make it fit the high-
ly invented character of Mrs. Carroll.
For to spoil the story for any reader who
may chance now to take it up for the
first time, Mrs. Carroll is a woman well
on in years, who masquerades as a young
and childlike wife. She is helped by
her figure and general air, but more by
the extreme attention which she has
given to the subject. Her husband has
been all along under a delusion with re-
gard to her, and her stepdaughter and
all her neighbors share it. He has built
up an imaginary Mrs. Carroll, with most
respectable antecedents ; and as he has
become enfeebled in mind, it is not very
difficult for his wife to support the char-
acter, which she does with great adroit-
ness.

The reader might imagine that her
disguise was to be stripped from her
finally, and that she was to be turned
out of the story in her true character,

whereas all the disillusionizing is done
deliberately by Mrs. Carroll herself, and
it is seen that the one cause for the de-
ception is its justification ; for love was
at the bottom of it : the love first of a
woman grateful to the man who came
forward to the relief of her and her
child, and then the same love and grat-
itude taking the form of devotion to
the failing husband. The deception,
in which the daughter joins, is all for
the Major, and when the Major dies the
mask falls.

The story is a very ingenious one,
and skillfully managed. The reader, at
the critical moment when he would nat-
urally turn impatiently away from this
very artificial woman, is drawn to her
by the revelation of her redeeming qual-
ity. In fact, the reader and the step-
daughter are in much the same cate-
gory, only that the daughter is in the
secret before the reader is. It is, how-
ever, the ingenuity of the story which
makes the strongest impression upon
the mind, and thus one is led to doubt
if the whole conception be not too arti-
ficial to be thoroughly good art. We
noticed in Anne something of the same
tendency in Miss Woolson to make too
much of the machinery of her stories,
and we hope that it will not increase in
her work. With a good story, built
upon the large lines of nature, Miss
Woolson would have more leisure to
give to the realization of her characters,
and the reality would be more enduring
because more natural. Mrs. Foote has
not Miss Woolson's skill, and her story
is not so original, but on the whole it
seems better worth telling.

Mrs. Foote did not shrink from car-
rying her heroine into a miner's camp
in California, and by her own refine-
ment and womanly sensibility invested
that masculine field with a somewhat
feminine property ; Miss Woolson is
more faintly American in her scenes
from a Carolinian no-man's land, and is
feminine chiefly in her elaborate con-

1833.]

American Fiction by Women.

121

strucdon of the principal character out
of an excess of womanhood ; but Mrs.
Burnett, while more conspicuously a
woman in her dealing with life than
either of the others, has also taken a
larger canvas and essayed a more seri-
ous piece of art. It is not possible to
read her latest novel l without being
aware of the intensity of feeling and
thought which have been given to it at
times ; at times, we say, for there are
passages so sluggish in movement that
one is almost tempted to believe that the
author was either uncertain in her in-
tention, or possessed with the notion that
it was necessary to produce a four years'
effect upon the reader by a deliberate
slowing of the action of the story. As
a matter of fact, the element of time is
of very slight significance in the devel-
opment of the plot of this novel, and
indeed introduces a disturbance in the
reader's mind ; for he cannot help think-
ing that where passions are so intense
as in the lives of Bertha and Tredennis
it would be impossible to avoid an earli-
er eclaircissement. Again, the nobility
and strength of Tredennis, when given
four years' trial, would inevitably find
some solution of the problem of his life
through work ; and his love for Bertha,
which Mrs. Burnett uses as an indica-
tion of his strong character, is danger-
ously near being a sign of radical weak-
ness. So long as the lapse of time is
not emphasized by the writer, the read-
er is content to see the dramatis per-
sonce of the tale only in their immedi-
ate and frequent relation to each other;
but when he is repeatedly reminded
that year after year is rolling round, he
cannot help doubting if the tremendous
pressure which each person in the story
has on his or her neighbor would not
in the course of nature be somewhat
more relaxed. By keeping out of sight
this troublesome element of time, the

1 Through One Administration. By FRANCES
HODGSON BURNETT. Boston : James R. Osgood
& Co. 1883.

author would find it easier to persuade
us that the very trifling incidents of the
story, like the gift of a bunch of helio-
tropes, or the attitude in which people
stand or sit, must needs recur to the
memory of the characters from time to
time. In so realistic a tale as this, these
romantic incidents have a disproportion-
ate value.

We forget that we are talking about
a story which the reader may chance
not to have read. It is the story, in its
main lines, of a young woman entering
Washington society just as a young offi-
cer in the army — who if he had stayed
longer in Washington would doubt-
less have won the young woman — left
for the frontier. After eight years,
Colonel Tredennis returns to Washing-
ton, to find Bertha Herrick the wife of
a light-minded, selfish fellow, who is
drifting about. She has apparently
thrown herself into society from a love
of power and a pursuit of happiness,
but the return of the friend of her youth
is the occasion for a better knowledge of

her. She has secretly retained her love
of him, which has grown more intense
with the decline of her respect for her
husband. Through one administration
we are allowed to see the torture of
this unhappy woman. Outwardly she
is the brightest, gayest, of mortals, and
little by little these arts and charms are
made use of by her husband to accom-
plish political and corrupt ends. Colonel
Tredennis looks on in anguish. He re-
fuses to abandon his faith in her, but
that faith must rest upon recollection
and occasional glimpses of her real na-
ture ; the sight which is offered him is
of a heartless, restless woman. But this
is the mask which she wears to con-
ceal from him her fatal love. She seems
bent on destroying his faith in her, in
order to protect herself from herself.

This incessant conflict between the
real and the assumed woman is. in our
judgment, a violation of nature. We do
not deny that Mrs. Burnett has con-

122

American Fiction by Women.

structed this dualism with great subtlety
and skill, but the very means which she
has taken tends to create skepticism ; for
the reader is compelled to follow.a be-
wildering succession of dresses, attitudes,
looks, and half-uttered words in order to
realize to himself this protean shape. The
brilliant conversations which are intend-
ed to illustrate her position are so daz-
zling as to confuse the image ; and if it
were not for the recurrence now and
again to the real tragedy which is going
on, the reader would become weary of
this highly wrought woman and unable
to give her the dole of pity to which
she is entitled. Moreover, the subtlety
with which Mrs. Burnett treats this
character involves her in a singular in-
consistency. Mrs. Amory is represent-
ed as a woman* of great penetration.
She certainly has read her husband thor-
oughly ; yet after an indefinitely long
and very familiar acquaintance with the
Westoria business, this subtle woman
is overpowered by a revelation of the
central fact. It seems impossible that
she should not have known of her hus-
band's real connection with the fraud.

There are two other characters, who
act somewhat as foils to the principal
ones : Arbuthnot, an extremely refined
and sensitive man, who hovers near the
tragedy, and Agnes Sylvestre, a woman
who has suffered like Bertha, but has
found a philosophic repose. The details
of each character are drawn with scru-
pulous care and much nicety, and the
scene of their betrothal is admirably
managed. Nevertheless, clever as Ar-
buthnot is, we venture to think that
Mrs. Burnett deliberately changed her
mind about him when her story was half
done. She tries in the latter half to
persuade us that Arbuthnot was misun-
derstood by everybody, and that he was
really a fine, unselfish, and honorable
fellow. For all that, she is accountable
for the misunderstanding. She has fur-
nished certain touchstones of character
in Professor Herrick and Colonel Tre-

dennis, and gives us to understand, in
the former half of the book, that these
men profoundly distrust Arbuthnot, net
from anything which he says or does,
but from what he is. That is the way
with touchstones. Yet all this distrust
vanishes, and not through any new rev-
elation of his character. He ha| all the
make-up of a subtle villain, and the
reader accepts him in that quality, only
to discover after a while that the author
of his being has decided to make his
subtlety a subtlety of virtue.

It is, indeed, the excess of this fine-
spun web of character which weakens
the value of Mrs. Burnett's work. The
reader is required to follow the pattern
of the spiritual plot too closely. The
incidental plot is not perplexing. That
is seen clearly enough ; but the difficulty
arises from an insistence of the author
that we shall know her characters too
intimately, and it is her own fault that,
in keeping us constantly at work finding
them out, she retards the progress of
her story, and creates a sense of weari-
ness. Could we not have known Mrs.
Amory just as well through fewer inter-
views ? Must we be introduced to her
afresh whenever she puts on a new
gown ? Even her physical disabilities
come to fatigue us. She is constantly
on the verge of greater ills than befall
her, and we come to think of her as liv-
ing in a condition of arrested faintness.
This physical statement goes too far.
We object to having mysterious opera-
tions of her organization hinted at, with
an aside by the author that women will
understand what she means.

There is, however, a finer womanly
power which excites our admiration. No
man could have written the dramatic
scene where Mrs. Amory triumphs over
her adversaries at the ball, when her so-
cial doom seemed already pronounced ;
and the reader for once is really excited
by the fear that she will not have the
physical strength to go through with it.
He watches the color in her cheek with

1883.]

Jones Very.

123

real concern. There are passages, also,
which refuse to admit of reference to
sex, as that admirable one when Tre-
dennis confronts Amory and wrings his
true character from him. It is plain that
Washington society has given Mrs. Bur-
nett much food for reflection, and the
lives of the men and women who draw
their bread from official patronage are
depicted with power and earnestness.
There is much that is in protest against
corruption, and there are glimpses of po-
litical life as seen from the interior ; but
after all, the author's interest is in her
characters and their effect upon each

other. We think that if she had allowed
this interaction of the characters to take
place more positively through the inci-
dents of such society, and had depended
less upon their perpetual comment upon
each other, her book would have been a
stronger one. It is strong in patches ;
it lacks the cumulative force of a great
tragedy, because, while the plot is cu-
mulative, the crisis of the characters is
never really reached ; at any rate, there
is no coincidence between that crisis and
the crisis of the plot. The book, when
all is said, is a brilliant book. It might
have been a great one.

JONES VERY.

MR. ANDREWS has done an excel-
lent service in saving from oblivion the
name of a man and a poet unique in
his time, and singularly out of keeping
with this age of worldliness.1 In 1839,
a little volume of his writings, including
three prose essays, Shakespeare, Hamlet,
and Epic Poetry, with about sixty son-
nets in the Shakespearean form and a
few lyrical pieces, was published by Lit-
tle & Brown, at the instance of Mr. Em-
erson, who took a warm personal and lit-
erary interest in the author. This col-
lection is out of print, and has for many
years been rare. The present volume
does not contain the essays, but com-
prises twice as many poems, though still
not all that Mr. Very produced. The
essays would scarcely attract attention
now, in the altered condition of literary
estimate ; many of the poems are com-
monplace; some are but feeble repeti-
tions of sentiments that had been better
expressed before. One or two of those
here presented to the public might have

i Poems. By JONES VKUY. With an Introduc-
tory Memoir by WIU.IAM P. ANDKEWS. Bos-
tou : Houghtou, Miittin oc Co. 1SJM.

been dropped, as being tame or diluted ;
but the best give evidence of original
power, genuine feeling, and unconscious
art, if art can be said ever to be uncon-
scious. At all events, they betray a
peculiar tone of religious emotion, ex-
pressed in suitable language, always sim-
ple, often beautiful, sometimes ravish-
ingly sweet and touching. We cannot
in all cases respond to Mr. Andrews'
judgment that " Mr. Very's verse is
absolutely composed without a thought
of literary form ; " that might not be a
recommendation ; but we can say with
him that it is characterized by " a wholly
natural spontaneity, which is almost as
rare as it is conceded to be admirable."
From the little memoir, simply, mod-
estly, and charmingly written, without
fulsome laudation, yet with loving ap-
preciation of the author's claims, one
learns that Mr. Very was born at Salem,
on the 28th of August, 1813 ; that when
a boy nine years old he went to sea
with his father, who was a shipmaster ;
that he studied at the public grammar
school of his native town ; that he was
an eager student, recluse, shy, iiitrospec-

124

Jones Very.

[July,

tivi> : that, after due preparation, in
course of which he qualified himself as
a tutor in Latin, he entered Harvard
College in the last term of the Sopho-
more year, and was graduated with all
but the highest rank in 1836 ; that he
was appointed tutor in Greek, a lan-
guage he excelled in, and studied theol-
ogy in the Divinity School at the same
time ; that he was not a popular preach-
er, never had a parish, never received
a " call ; " that in 1838, including some
months of 1837 and 1839, — the height
of the so-called Transcendental period,
— he experienced a singular illumina-
tion, won the sympathies of Mr. Emer-
son and other leaders of that movement,
and was by many regarded as a great
light, by many as a candidate, along
with Mr. Emerson and others, for an in-
sane asylum ; that at the end of this
crisis, during which he wrote his finest
poems, he fell into obscurity, passed the
remainder of his days in Salem, and
died on the 8th of May, 1880. At the
time the present writer knew him, ten
years or so after his spiritual exaltation,
he was a. tall, thin man, quiet, reserved,
silent, serene, who had somewhat the as-
pect of an extinct crater. He looked
as if he belonged to another sphere.
His form was angular, his movement
shy, his speech simple, plain, direct. His
greeting was not hearty, precisely, for
it was bloodless, but gladsome, a singu-
lar smile irradiating his solemn counte-
nance like the sudden revelation of a
soul within. It came and went instanta-
neously, leaving no trace of its presence,
betraying no hint of its origin. The man
appeared and disappeared like a spectre.
His poems show a deep though calm
love of natural beauty. According to
Mr. Andrews, his fondness for flowers
was early instilled into him by his moth-
er, for whom he cherished a very tender
affection ; but, as appears from his writ-
ings, his love as well for nature as for
man was of an impersonal character, the
love of God absorbing all other, the

thought of divine manifestation alone
being of interest to him. Hawthorne
ascribed his limitations to a want of
feeling for the ludicrous. This is appar-
ent; but equally apparent is the absence
of humor in the sense of personal sym-
pathy with life. Thus in the two son-
nets, one entitled Tho Slaveholder, the
other The Slave, there is no allusion
to the human condition of either, or to
the conflict which divided the country.
The reader would not suspect that any
save spiritual considerations were of the
smallest concern.

In the days of his fame, if fame it
could be called, Mr. Very's poems at-
tracted the attention of a few eminent
judges. Emerson spoke enthusiastically
of them as " bearing the unquestionable
stamp of grandeur." " They have the
sublime unity of the Decalogue or the
Code of Menu ; and if as monotonous,
yet are they almost as pure, as the sounds
of surrounding nature." Mr. Bryant
praised their " extraordinary grace and
originality." Mr. Richard H. Dana de-
clared that they stood " apart in Ameri-
can literature ; " that they were " deep-
ly and poetically thoughtful, true in lan-
guage, and complete as a whole." Later,
Mr. George W. Curtis has given as his
judgment that they are "gems of purest
ray serene." And in a note to one of
Emerson's letters to Carlyle, wherein ref-
erence is made to the little volume of
Very's Essays and Poems, Mr. Charles
E. Norton calls it " the work of an.
exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it
contains are as if written by a George
Herbert who had studied Shakespeare,
read Wordsworth, and lived in Amer-
ica." We quote a few of the poems in
order to convey an idea of their charac-
ter. The following will be familiar to
those acquainted with religious verse :

THE PRAYER.

WILT Thou not visit me ?
The plant beside me feels thy gentle dew,

And every blade of grass I see
From thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew.

1883.]

Jones Very.

125

Wilt Thou not visit me ?
Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone;

And every hill and tree
Lend but one voice, — the voice of Thee alone.

Come, for I need thy love
More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain ;

Come gently as thy holy dove ;
And let me in thy sight rejoice to live again.

I •will not hide from them

When thy storms come, though fierce may be
their wrath,

But bow with leafy stem,
And strengthened follow on thy chosen path.

Yes, Thou wilt visit me :
Nor plant nor tree thine eye delights so well,

As, when from sin set free,
My spirit loves with thine in peace to dwell.

THE SON.

FATHER, I wait thy word. The sun doth stand
Beneath the mingling line of night and day,
A listening servant, waiting thy command
To roll rejoicing on its silent way ;
The tongue of time abides the appointed hour,
Till on our ear its solemn warnings fall ;
The heavy cloud withholds the pelting shower,
Then every drop speeds onward at thy call ;
The bird reposes on the yielding bough,
With breast unswollen by the tide of song;
So does my spirit wait thy presence now
To pour thy praise in quickening life along,
Chiding with voice divine man's lengthened sleep,
While round the Unuttered Word and Love their
vigils keep.

THE SPIRIT LAND.
FATHER ! thy wonders do not singly stand,
Nor far removed where feet have seldom strayed;
Around us ever lies the enchanted land,
In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
In finding Thee are all things round us found;
In losing Thee are all things lost beside :
Ears have we, but in vain strange voices sound,
And to our eyes the vision is denied;
We wander in a country far remote,
Mid tombs and ruined piles in death to dwell ;
Or on the records of past greatness dote,
And for a buried soul the living sell;
While on our path bewildered falls the night
That ne'er returns us to the fields of light.

CHANGE.

FATHER! there is no change to live with Thee,
Save that in Christ I grow from day to day ;
In each new word I hear, each thing I see,
I but rejoicing hasten on the way.
The morning comes with blushes overspread,
And I new-wakened find a morn within ;
And in its modest dawn around me shed,
Thou hear'st the prayer and the ascending hymn.
Hour follows hour, the lengthening shades de-
scend;
Yet they could never reach as far as me,

Did not thy love its kind protection lend,
That I, a child, might rest a while on Thee,
Till to the light restored by gentle sleep,
With new-found zeal 1 might thy precepts keep.

Some of the most characteristic pieces
are given, iu order that the reader may
appreciate their spirit : —

THE NEW WORLD.

THE night that has no star lit up by God,'

The day that round men shines who still are blind,

The earth their grave-turned feet for ages trod,

And sea swept over by His mighty wind, —

All these have passed away ; — the melting dream

That flitted o'er the sleeper's half-shut eye,

When touched by morning's golden-darting

beam ; —

And he beholds around the earth and sky
That ever real stands, the rolling shores
And heaving billows of the boundless main,
That show, though time is past, no trace of years.
And earth restored he sees as his again,
The earth that fades not and the heavens that

stand,
Their strong foundations laid by God's right hand.

MORNING.

THE light will never open sightless eyes,

It comes to those who willingly would see ;

And everj' object — hill, and stream, and skies —

Rejoice within th' encircling line to be.

'Tis da}-, — the field is filled with busy hands,

The shop resounds with noisy workmen's din,

The traveler with his staff already stands »

His yet unmeasured journey to begin; •

The light breaks gently, too, within the breast, —

Yet there no eye awaits the crimson morn,

The forge and noisy anvil are at rest,

Nor men nor oxen tread the fields of corn,

Nor pilgrim lifts his staff, — it is no day

To those who find on earth their place to stay.

THE LOST.

THE fairest day that ever yet has shone
Will be when thou the day within shall see ;
The fairest rose that ever yet has blown,
When thou the flower thou lookest on shall be.
But thou art far away among Time's toys ;
Thyself the day Ihou lookesl for in them,
Thyself the flower that now thine eye enjoys,
But wilted now thou hang'st upon thy stem.
The bird thou hearest on the budding tree,
Thou hast made sing with thy forgotten voice;
But when it swells again to melody,
The song is thine in which thou wilt rejoice;
And thou new risen 'midst these wonders live,
That now to them dost all thy substance give.

THE APOSTLES.

THE words that come unuttered by the breath,
Looks without eyes, these lighten all the globe ;
They are the ministering angels, sent where

Death
Has walked the earth so long in seraph's robe;

126

Jones Very.

[July,

See crowding to their touch the groping blind !
And ears long shut to sound are bent to hear;
Quick as they speak the lame new vigor find,
And language to the dumb man's lips is near;
Hail, sent tn u>, ye servants of high heaven!
Unseen, s.ive by the humble and the poor;
To them glad tidings have your voices given ;
For them their faith has wrought the wished-for

cure ;

And ever shall they witness bear of you,
That He who sent you forth to heal was true.

THE DEAD.

I SEE them, — crowd on crowd they walk the

earth,

Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid hare ;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare ;
No sap doth through their clattering branches

flow,

Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright ap-
pear;

Their hearts the living God have ceased to know
Who gives the spring-time to th' expectant year.
They mimic life, as if from Him to steal
His glow of health to paint the livid cheek ;
They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
That with a seeming heart their tongue may

speak ;

And in their show of life more dead the}' live
Than those that to the earth with many tears they

give.

WORSHIP.

THKRE is no worship now: the idol stands
Within the Spirit's holy resting-place!
Millions before it bend with upraised hands,
And with their gifts God's purer shrine disgrace.
The prophet walks unhonored 'mid the crowd
That to the idol's temple daily throng;
His voice unheard above their voices loud,
His strength too feeble 'gainst the torrent strong ;
But there are bounds that ocean's rage can stay
When wave on wave leaps madly to the shore :
And soon the prophet's word shall men obey,
And hushed to peace the billows cease to roar;
For He who spake, and warring winds kept peace,
Commands again, and man's wild passions cease.

Half a dozen poems should be copied
to shovr Mr. Very's fine feeling for nat-
ural beauty : —

NATURE.

THE bubbling brook doth leap when I come by,
Because my feet find measure with its call;
The birds know when the friend they love is nigh,
For I am known to them, both great and small;
The flowers that on the lovely hill-side grow
Expect me there when Spring their bloom has

given ;

And many a tree and bush my wanderings know,
And e'en the clouds and silent stars of heaven :
For he who with his Maker walks aright
Shall be their lord, as Adam was before;
His ear shall catch each sound with new delight,

Each object wear the dress which then it wore ;
And he, as when erect in soul he stood,
Hear from his Father's lips that all is good.

THE WINTER RAIN.

THE rain comes down, it comes without our call ;
Each pattering drop knows well its destined place,
And soon the fields whereon the blessings fall
Shall change their frost}' look for Spring's sweet

face;

So fall the words thy Holy Spirit sends,
Upon the heart where Winter's robe is flung ;
They shall go forth as certain of their ends,
As the wet drops from out thy vapors wrung:
Spring will not tarry, though more late its rose
Shall bud and bloom upon the sinful heart;
Yet when it buds, forever there it blows,
And hears no Winter bid its bloom depart ;
It strengthens with his storms, and grows more

bright
When o'er the earth is cast his mantle white.

LABOR AND REST.

THOU need'st not rest: the shining spheres are

thine

That roll perpetual on their silent way,
And Thou dost breathe in me a voice divine,
That tells more sure of thine eternal sway ;
Thine the first starting of the early leaf,
The gathering green, the changing autumn hue ;
To Thee the world's long years are but as brief
As the fresh tints that Spring will soon renew.
Thou needest not man's little life of years,
Save that he gather wisdom from them all ;
That in thy fear he lose all other fears,
And in thy calling heed no other call.
Then shall he be thy child to know thy care.
And in thy glorious Self the eternal Sabbath

share.

THE VIOLET.

THOU tellest truths unspoken yet by man,
By this thy lonely home and modest look;
For he has not the eyes such truths to scan,
Nor learns to read from such a lowly book.
With him it is not life firm-fixed to grow
Beneath the outspreading oaks and rising pines,
Content this humble lot of thine to know,
The nearest neighbor of the creeping vines;
Without fixed root he cannot trust, like thee,
The rain will know the appointed hour to fall,
But fears lest sun or shower may hurtful be,
And would delay or speed them with his call ;
Nor trust like thee when wintry winds blow cold,
Whose shrinking form the withered leaves enfold.

THE SABBATIA.

THE sweet-briar rose has not a form more fair,
Nor are its hues more beauteous than thine own,
Sabbatia, flower most beautiful and rare !
In lonely spots blooming unseen, unknown.
So spiritual thy look, thy stem so light,
Thou seemest not from the dark earth to grow ;
But to belong to heavenly regions bright,
Where night comes not, nor blasts of winter blow.
To me thou art a pure, ideal flower,

1883.]

Jones Very.

127

So delicate that mortal touch might mar;
Not born, like other flowers, of sun and shower,
But wandering from thy native home afar
To lead our thoughts to some serener clime,
Beyond the shadows and the storms of time.

THE INVITATION.

STAY where thou art, thou need'st not further go,
The flower with me is pleading at thy feet ;
The clouds, the silken clouds, above me flow,
And fresh the breezes come thy cheek to greet.
Why hasten on; — hast thou a fairer home?
Has God more richly blest the world than here,
That tliou in haste would'st from thy country

roam,

Favored by every month that fills the year?
Sweet showers shall on thee here, as there, de-
scend ;

The sun salute thy morn and gild thy eve:
Come, tarry here, for Nature is thy friend,
And we an arbor for ourselves will weave ;
And main- a pilgrim, journeying on as thon,
AVill grateful bless its shade, and list the wind-
struck bough.

AUTUMN LEAVES.

THE leaves, though thick, are falling: one by one
Decayed they drop from off their parent tree;
Their work with Autumn's latest day is done, —
Thou seest them borne upon the breezes free.
They lie strewn here and there, their many dyes
That yesterday so caught thy passing eye;
Soiled by the rain each leaf neglected lies,
Upon the path where now thou hurriest by.
Yet think thee not their beauteous tints less fair
Than when they hung so gayly o'er thy head;
But ratlier find thee eyes, and look thee there
Where now thy feet so heedless o'er them tread,
And thou shall see, where wasting now they lie,
The unseen hues of immortality.

These poems sufficiently express the
quality of Mr. Very's production. He
was unique and peculiar. His vein was
narrow, but deep. He had not the pier-
cing insight of Emerson, the keen ob-
servation of Bryant, the warm human
sympathy of Longfellow, the artistic
feeling of Lowell, or the hilarity of
Holmes. But he possessed a profound
sense of the reality of divine things as
symbolized in nature. He had but one
thought, that of the immanence of God.
He had but one emotion, a desire that
the Spirit might be witnessed and con-
fessed. He had but one interest, that
men should turn their eyes towards the
light. He was a mystic, but not of the
German type ; more Christian than Em-
erson, rather Greek than Latin in the

style of his devoutness. To read him is
like reading Vaughan.

In estimating Mr. Very's poetry, so
much depends on an understanding of
his spiritual mood that we venture to
borrow a passage or two from Mr. Em-
erson's diary as throwing light upon this
point. On October 26, 1838, he re-
cords, —

" Jones Very came hither two days
since. His position accuses society as
much as society names that false and
morbid. And much of his discourse
concerning society, church, and college
was absolutely just.

" He says it is with him a day of
hate, that he discerns the bad element
in every person whom he meets, which
repels him ; he even shrinks a little
to give the hand, that sign of receiving.
The institutions, the cities which men
have built the world over, look to him
like a huge ink-blot. His only guard
in going to see men is that he goes to
do them good, else they would injure
him spiritually. He lives in the sight
that he who made him made the things
he sees. He would as soon embrace
a black Egyptian mummy as Socrates.
He would obey, — obey. He is not
disposed to attack religions or chari-
ties, though false. The bruised reed
he would not break, smoking flax not
quench.

" He had the manners of a man, —
one, that is, to whom life was more than
meat. He felt it, he said, an honor to
wash his face, being, as it was, the tem-
ple of the Spirit.

" In the woods, he said to me, ' One
might forget here that the world was
desert and empty, and all the people
wicked.'

" What led him to study Shakespeare
was the fact that all young men say,
Shakespeare was no saint; yet see
what Genius. He wished to solve that
problem. When he was asked, What
was the difference between wisdom and
genius ? he replied, ' Wisdom was of

128

American Economics.

[July,

God,' — but lie hart left genius, and could
not speak of it. He was pressed fur-
ther, and said, ' Genius was the decay
of Wisdom.' He added, ' To the pre-
existent Shakespeare Wisdom was of-
fered : but he did not accept it, and so
he died away into Genius. When his
vineyard was given him, God looked
that he should bring forth grapes, but
he brought forth sour grapes.' 'But,'
said the interrogator, 'my grapes tasted
sweet.' He replied, ' That was because
you knew not the sweet. All things
are sweet, until there comes a sweeter.'

" His words were loaded with his
fact. What he said, he held, was not
personal to him ; was no more disputa-
ble than the shining of yonder sun, or
the blowing of this south wind."

" He prized his verses, he said, not
because they were his, but because they
were not"

In September, 1838, Very writes to
Emerson : —

" I am glad at last to be able to trans-
mit what has been told me of Shake-
speare ; 't is but the faint echo of that
which speaks to you now. . . . You
hear not mine own words, but the teach-
ings of the Holy Ghost. . . . My
friend, I tell you these things as they
are told me, and hope soon for a day or
two of leisure, when I may speak to
you face to face as I now write."

These poems can hardly be popular
in an age like ours, — an age fond of
change, diversion, variety, amusement,
color ; an age of external decoration,
averse to meditation, inclined to criti-
cise rather than to believe. But there
must be many devout souls who will
welcome this beautiful volume with de-
light, as expressing lofty thoughts in
musical phrase.

AMERICAN ECONOMICS.

IT has been a long-standing indict-
ment preferred against the few Amer-
ican economists that they have bor-
rowed both their methods and their doc-
trines from the English school. While
this criticism, which does not ask what
is true, but where it came from, is of
course eminently captious, still it is apt
to make us look with more than usual
interest to the appearance of any work
by our own writers. Our anxiety to sat-
isfy American pride is, perhaps, even yet
a frailty which draws us slightly from '
the strictness of scientific estimates. So
that there would seem to be a fine op-
portunity for patriotic felicitations at
finding two volumes by our own writers,
one of which covers the field of political
economy proper, and the other that of
American public finance to the break-
ing out of the late war.

But, like the long-awaited American
novel, the ideal text-book on political
economy is yet to be written. Although
General Walker l possesses in a high de-
gree the qualities for success, — long ex-
perience as a teacher, familiarity with
wide reaches of economic literature,
close acquaintance with industrial and
public affairs, and a strong hold on the
community as a man of earnestness and
ability, — yet it must be remembered
that these qualifications for larger work
do not necessarily imply success in so
adjusting an economic system that it
may be symmetrical and clear to read-
ers who have had little experience with
such questions. It is one thing to pro-
duce, quite another thing to impart ; it
requires one set of qualities in a man to

1 Political Economy. By FRANCIS A. WALK-
ER. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1883.

1883.]

American Economics.

129

grow a potato, but a very different one
to prepare it for a fastidious palate.
The style is frank and easy, but we are
confident that few persons, although
trained by previous study, can gain a
clear and definite conception, from Gen-
eral Walker's book, of such elementary
ideas as competition, cost of production,
demand for money, or value. In fact,
we have heard a dozen men, all accus-
tomed to the discussion of these ques-
tions, prejudiced in favor of the writer,
wishing only to understand him, differ
widely as to his meaning. The book,
however, must stand or fall, as regards
matters of doctrine, on the peculiar ten-
ets of the author respecting the wages
question, and that part of profits called
by him the entrepreneur's profits, but
generally known as wages of superin-
tendence. As to wages, he holds to his
former position, that they are not paid
from capital previously accumulated,
but from the product of the labor. This
has been discussed in past years, but to-
day it is probable that most students yet
concur in believing that wages are, in
any extended division of labor such as
appears in modern industrial life, neces-
sarily guaranteed and paid from wealth
previously accumulated and set aside for
production. The exceptional cases pre-
sented by General Walker, where wages
have been paid out of the finished prod-
uct, have happened where division of
labor is imperfect. Of course, the final
outcome of the crop or product is the
fund out of which rent, profits, and
wages can be paid ; and if it is generally
large, wages are high, as are profits also.
Compare, for instance, wages and profits
in England and in the United States.
The size of the final product no doubt
affects the promise of wages which the
employer makes to the laborer ; but, in
actual fact, the hirer provides from pre-
vious accumulations machinery, build-
ings (which require large advances),
materials, tools, and hats, shoes, cloth-
ing, bread, and shelter (by the payment
VOL. LIT. — NO. 309. 9

of money with which these articles are
purchased), for the laborer, and then
takes all the risks of reimbursement
from the ultimate product. It is almost
a truism to state this. Were it neces-
sary to go further iu showing that wages
are not paid out of the final result, at-
tention should be called to the fact that
wages would not be altered were the
product to fall short in any operation.
Suppose all the finished goods to turn
out unmarketable, by a change of fash-
ion during the time of production : the
laborers have been hired at stipulated
wages ; and if the employer has not at
hand the gathered store of capital out
of which labor may be paid, he will be
obliged to convert his wealth, not pre-
viously intended for investment, as his
house or horses, into such capital as will
pay the men. The failure in the re-
sult will not diminish wages. But it
may be said that reference is had to a
permanent and continuing state of af-
fairs ; that if product should be a long
time short or large, it would affect
wages in general correspondingly. This
is true, but it would modify only the
promises to give larger or smaller
amounts permanently out of previous
accumulations, for which the employer
expected to be recouped from the final
result. In short, every business man
knows that he takes all the risks, pays
his laborers wages, no matter what hap-
pens, and stands between them and un-
certainty ; he it is who gains or loses
by variations in the final product. The
employer, without doubt, but not the
laborer, is paid out of the completed ar-
ticles. If so, General Walker's theory
is not consistent with the facts of indus-
trial life, and is no argument against a
fair statement of the principle that cap-
ital is the fund out of which wages are
paid, Mr. Henry George's hallucinations
to the contrary notwithstanding.

This brings us to an examination of
the author's central idea of distribution,
and to the pivotal part of his system.

130

American Economics.

[July,

In fact, it is upon just these questions
within the field of distribution that there
is now rightly the most discussion among
economists. As we all know, the value
of the total product is the fund from
which comes the amounts to be divided
as wages, profit, and rent. The sum to
be paid as rent is determinate, and settled
by the Ricardoan formula, leaving the
remainder of the amount to wages and
profits. There is no dispute here. The
second element, profits, is separated into
(1) interest, or a payment to capital sole-
ly for abstinence ; (2) insurance, for risk
on the investment; and (3) the profits of
the entrepreneur, or manager, for wages
of superintendence. The payment for
the entrepreneur is separated from that
of the capitalist. But, says the author,
the interest and insurance are likewise
determinate, and settled by general rules,
leaving the value of the product yet re-
maining to the entrepreneur and labor-
er. Then he attempts to show that the
entrepreneur's share is also one fixed by
a general law, so that the only unde-
termined portion, which can rise with
improvements in processes, goes to the
laborer. With this position we are cer-
tainly not in agreement. The capital
objection is that it is not in accordance
with the facts of business. We have
indicated above our reasons for believ-
ing that it is the entrepreneur's share
which is variable, rising or falling with
the success or failure of production. In-
deed, in his work on the Wages Ques-
tion, when entering his objections against
productive cooperation, General Walker
pointedly urges that it is essential to
the proper temper of the entrepreneur,
or " captain of industry," that he should
gain what is gained and lose what is
lost. But this volume holds that there
are varieties of business skill, just as
there are varying grades of land ; that at
the bottom there are entrepreneurs who
gain only mere laborer's wages, while
above that their gains are fixed by their
superiority over the poorest managers,

the " no-profits entrepreneurs." In this
way, it is desired to explain that the
entrepreneur's profits from the value of
the product are fixed by a regulating
principle, and that, by a process similar
to economic rent, they form no part of
the price of commodities ; meaning that
skillful management allows the goods to
be produced cheaper in proportion to
the manager's superiority, and that the
difference between this cost and that
under the no-profits entrepreneur is the
source of profits for skill. This, how-
ever, cannot be reconciled with indus-
trial facts. To begin with elementary
law, all know that there is admitted to
be a difference between the production
of articles which can be increased in
quantity only by an increasing cost
(whenever the law of diminishing re-
turns acts) and those whose cost gen-
erally falls with larger production, and
whose supply is practically limited only
by the application of labor and capital.
Wheat and corn are examples of the for-
mer class, and cotton goods and shovels
of the latter. A great business is now
a question of fractions. Any manager
of large cotton mills would tell you that
his business depended on a small fraction
of an ounce in the weight of his thread,
or of a per cent, in the market price.
An advantage of one half a cent a yard
would allow him to undersell the market,
and add indefinitely to the production of
his mill. In brief, there is nothing in
the shape of a law of diminishing returns
to prevent him from supplying the whole
market. In actual trade it means that
his commission house offers the goods
cheaper, sells increasing amounts of
goods, and drives other firms out of busi-
ness. The greater the quantity of goods
manufactured, the greater the division
of labor and use of other economical de-
vices, and the easier to sell his goods
cheaper. But our author would hold
that the no-profits entrepreneur, who
could not produce his goods as cheaply,
would fix the market price at which the

1883.]

American Economics.

131

great managers sell their goods. It seems
hardly necessary to say that this is not
true. If we are right, then the price of
commodities which are capable of un-
limited increase depends on the cost of
production under the most skillful en-
trepreneur, and so the market price in
continuous production must tend to con-
form to this. We cannot, therefore,
agree with General Walker's treatment
of distribution, and consequently do not
think that his is a good book to be put
into the hands of beginners.

Even in the theory of rent, which the
writer accepts, of course, he would con-
vey a wrong impression when applying
it to mines. That theory points out that
rent is due to the superiority in advan-
tages of one mine to another. The au-
thor adds that mines present a special
case, in that they are ultimately exhaust-
ed, while land is not. But if this is a con-
sideration applicable to all mines, it does
not in the least affect their comparative
advantages, and it is wholly upon a com-
parison between different grades of the
same things — not the absolute advan-
tages of any one — that we arrive at the
amount of rent. The attempt, there-
fore, to amend the doctrine as applied
to mines by adding something as a pay-
ment for the destructibility of its powers
seems to us like placing an extra plank
under a whole row of soldiers in order
to determine which is the tallest.

The manly tone of General Walker's
book invites full and fair discussion, and
it will stimulate the already great inter-
est in economic problems in this coun-
try. Even in our best universities little
instruction was furnished in this depart-
ment fifteen years ago. But the impetus
given to the study of public finance by
cur late war is conspicuously seen in
every quarter. The history of our own
finances is a story of great interest.
We have committed gigantic errors,
blundered into successes, made some
capital " hits," and to-day have the abil-
ity to place bonds on the market more

advantageously than any country in the
world. It is like the history of a big
boy of genius from the back districts,
whose hair yet shows some of the hay-
seeds, but who is likely to come out
right in the end, as soon as he gains dis-
cretion and experience. Mr. Bolles,1
however, is only an annalist, and not
wholly trustworthy. He never rises
above his facts to see the principles at
work in the details ; in short, he does
not seem to be sufficiently equipped as
an economist to catch the real spirit
in operation. Perhaps the most nota-
ble failure in the book is the slight and
insufficient treatment of banking in its
connection with the finances and with
the great commercial crises. In the
chapter treating of the second United
States Bank there is a superficial state-
ment of events, but the reader would
not gain a clear insight into the oper-
ations of credit and banking which at-
tended the crisis of 1837. In short, no
serious economic study has been made of
a single crisis, either at this time or in
1857. This was the writer's opportuni-
ty ; but it was not seized. When quot-
ing Gouge's report on the sub-treasury
system in 1855, he sees that the banks
in increasing their liabilities would have
been affected by the government depos-
its ; but in another connection, in speak-
ing of the " pet banks " in 1833, he
finds the cause of this increase in " their
desire to earn fat dividends." In gen-
eral the facts given on the history of
government deposits are more satisfac-
tory than any account to be found else-
where, and have an especial value at
this time, when the treasury is so active-
ly interfering with the money market.
When we turn to his two chapters on
coinage, to glean his testimony as to the
experience of the United States in its
long experiment in bimetallism, very lit-
tle else than undigested facts confronts

1 The Financial History of the United Statet
from 1789 to 1860. By ALBERT S. BOLLES. Neyr
York: D. Appleton &'Co. 1883.

132

The Freedom of Faith.

[July,

us. No conception of principles is to
be found. There is no reference to
the culminating effect of the large silver
production since 1780 (to be compared
only with that of the sixteenth century
in its excess over gold), but mention is
made of the unfounded statement that
the change in the ratio between the two
metals in 1818 might be due to the re-
sumption of cash payments by the Bank
of England. Yet on the next page it
is said that " it was apparent, even be-
fore the war of 1812, that gold was more
desirable for exportation than silver."
If so, then the fabled " gold hunger "
in England from 1819 to 1821 had lit-
tle to do with the change in this coun-
try. That was clearly explained by a
fall in the bullion value of silver. In
fact, our coinage history is a striking
illustration of the impossibility of keep-
ing two metals in concurrent use, when
both are an unlimited legal tender ; but

the details of mint operations are more
attractive to our author than such ex-
planations. In the wider field of tariff
legislation the theory of protection re-
ceives rather inadequate treatment. Mr.
Bolles says that in the beginning of the
century " protection of American indus-
tries from foreign competition was a
principle very widely accepted ; " but
we find that the grounds of the policy
were not those which would command
universal acceptance among protection-
ists, if we read the statement on the next
page, that " home manufactures were
encouraged, not solely to get them cheap-
er, either immediately or prospectively,
but because revenge [that is, against
England] was sweet, even if purchased
at considerable cost to the avenger."
In these chapters on the history of tariff
legislation Mr. Bolles has essayed an
ambitious task, but has not treated it in
the proper historical spirit.

THE FREEDOM OF FAITH.

WHEN a clergyman puts forth a vol-
ume of sermons, he makes a tacit ap-
plication for admission into the ranks
of literature. It is true, he may so em-
phasize the sermon form in his book as
to give the impression that he is but
seeking to enlarge his parish ; on the
other hand, he may so subordinate this
form as to appear to unfrock himself.
Jn the main, however, while a volume
of sermons can scarcely escape the con-
ditions of its origin, it does, by ranging
itself with other books, acquire a certain
consideration as literature ; the very fact
that the sermons are to be read", and not
listened to, subjects them to the tests
applied to other printed books. Mr.
Hunger, in his The Freedom of Faith,1

l The Freedom of Faith. By THEODORE T.
MUWOER. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883.

has shown a singular felicity in adapting
himself to the readers of books, without
losing his proper function of a preacher
to hearers. To begin with outside im-
pressions, his book appeals to the eye
as a work of literature. It has a cheer-
ful, ruddy countenance, and its dress is
that of dignity and ease. Then the title
is a comprehensive one, which indicates
the spirit of the work, and is not drawn
from any single theme under treatment ;
the titles of the separate sermons are
bold and suggestive ; the name sermon
is scarcely obtruded ; each division of
the book has, to be sure, its heading
drawn from a passage in the Bible, but
it has also, by way of illustrative text,
a collection of passages from literature,
all of remarkable beauty and aptness.
Only once in the book do we notice a

1883.]

The Freedom of Faith.

133

sentence which requires the notion of a
listening audience to complete it.

The connection with literature which
the book has is not confined to the use
of mottoes. The reader is repeatedly re-
freshed, in following the discussion of
some high theme, by a draught from pure
literature ; the reference to poet or phi-
losopher is not for illustration only, but
for interpretation. When, for example,
Mr. Hunger is treating of Moral Envi-
ronment, he draws from the poets a fine
argument for the existence of a world
of moral and spiritual fact, which is the
theatre and condition of moral and spir-
itual culture. " Shakespeare," he says,
" almost without fail, puts every great
moral action into a framework of cor-
responding physical likeness. The tem-
pest in Lear's heart is linked to the
tempest of the elements by more than
a fancy. The moonlight sleeping on the
bank and the distant music have a log-
ical relation to the lovers' hearts. When
' fair is foul and foul is fair,' these moral
confusions ' hover through the fog and
filthy air,' and are uttered on a ' blasted
heath.' . . . Throughout, this master of
thought throws back into the physical
world the reflections of the moral acts
done within it, but on what ground, ex-
cept that in and behind the physical
there is a moral order, on which they
repose ? " In another place, when call-
ing for the testimony of men in support
of a belief in immortality, he makes the
significant statement : —

u The master-minds have been strong-
est in their affirmations of it. We do
not refer to those who receive it as a
part of their religion. In weighing the
value of the natural or instructive belief,
Augustine's faith does not count for so
much as Cicero's, and Plato's outweighs
Bacon's; Plutarch is a better witness
than Chrysostom, Montesquieu than Wes-
ley, Franklin than Edwards, Emerson
than Channing; Greg's hope is more
significant than Bushnell's faith. . . .
Wordsworth touched the high - water

mark of the literature of the century in
his Ode on Immortality, and Tennyson's
greatest poem is throughout exultant in
the hope that ' Life shall live forever
more.' "

If all this merely indicated the afflu-
ence of Mr. Munger's literary reference,
it would not go far toward demonstrat-
ing the integral literary value of his
sermons. Indeed, abundance of quota-
tion or allusion leads one to suspect the
originality of an author's mind. The
worth of the volume, upon the side of
literature, lies rather in the fact that
Mr. Munger ranges himself in his
thought with poets and thinkers, and
not distinctly with theologians. Herein
is an important discovery ; for whatever
may be the contribution which theology
makes to science, it is the contact of
theology with the conduct of life which
must determine the universality of any
theological revival. Mr. Munger pref-
aces his volume with a paper on The
New Theology, though he deprecates
that popular name, and thinks the current
movement more justly a Renaissance.
The paper is one of clearness, precision,
and breadth ; but after all, his position
is vindicated by nothing so much as by
the alliance which he is constantly mak-
ing, consciously or unconsciously, with
the common thoughts and hopes of men.
The poets in all ages have been wit-
nesses to the highest life of humanity,
and Mr. Munger as a theologian is eager
to share their position, not to make one
for preachers. The junction which he
makes with literature is not a mechan-
ical one ; it is real and vital.

There is another aspect, almost equal-
ly removed from the professional, in
which these sermons may be regarded.
A sermon usually implies not only a
hearer, b'ut a hearer who has come to
church in a more or less willing mood.
By placing himself in the congregation,
he has rendered himself liable to

looked upon by the preacher as ,''

i » A • • t t • jpheu has
" my people. A minister of P*

134

The Freedom of Faith.

[July,

sight into character has called attention
to the attitude which a pastor takes to his
hearers : " There is something in the
congregation which is not in the men
and women as he knows them in their
separate humanities, something in the
aggregate which was not in the individ-
uals, a character in the whole which was
not in the parts. This is the reason
why he can group them in his thought
as a peculiar people, hold them in his
hand as a new human unity in congre-
gation."

The relation which subsists thus be-
tween the minister and his people is ca-
pable of a wide interpretation, but it is
very apt to be marked somewhat sharp-
ly by a distinction in the preacher's
mind between those who are and those
who are not members of the church.
Mr. Munger does not make light of this
discrimination. " It is a matter of re-
gret," he says, " that to stand within or
without the church is getting to be re-
garded with indifference ; " and else-
where he leaves the reader in no doubt
of his belief in a radical distinction be-
tween a living faith and a dead selfish-
ness. Nevertheless, it is very plain that
this preacher looks upon men in a
broader and more tolerant manner than
sometimes belongs to the pulpit. There
is a figure who is apt to haunt the mind
of the preacher when he is preparing
his discourses, and to be present with a
contemptuous smile on his face in the
congregation, as the preacher looks
down upon it from his height. This
figure goes frequently by the name of
a " mere man of the world." He mas-
querades largely in pulpit discourses,
and has a baleful influence over the
minister. It is significant of Mr. Mun-
ger's attitude that he seems quite un-
conscious of the presence of this uncom-
fortable being. Perhaps it would be
more exact to say that these sermons
Ma addressed to men of the world in an

i Trifled state.
MUNGER. Aspect which Mr. Munger shows

his readers is seen in the confidence
with which he invites them to a consid-
eration of high themes, and the absence
of any concession to indifference. There
are preachers who seem anxious to strip
Sunday of any shred of sanctity which
it may possess ; to turn the pulpit into a
lecturing desk, and cover the Bible with
a newspaper. Mr. Munger is not one
of these. He thinks that the spirit of
man has eternal possessions, and that
these are worthy of the best thought
which can be given them; and when
he speaks of the life which now is, it
is with an unfailing recognition of the
heaven above the head, as well as the
earth beneath the feet. Thus he makes
his theology interpret life, but he does
not make a plow -horse of Pegasus.
One of the most striking sermons in the
volume is the one on Land Tenure ; and
if any one who is accustomed to hear
current affairs discussed in the pulpit
will read it, he will find the difference
between what is commonly called polit-
ical preaching and that which deals with
the great facts of political life in their
relation to Christianity.

We have wished simply to call atten-
tion to this volume as an addition to
literature. It takes at once a high place,
both by the largeness of its temper and
the beauty of its style, and by its fidelity
to a high ideal of the preacher's voca-
tion. The discourses are sermons, in-
stinct with a personal meaning, not philo-
sophical discussions of important themes.
The vitality of the book is to be found
in its positive, constructive theology, its
freedom from negative criticism, its full-
ness of conception of spiritual liberty.
At £he close of the sermon upon The
Christ as a Preacher occurs an eloquent
passage which is the best possible state-
ment of the quality of the power in this
book, and we give it as the keynote of
the book : —

" The main element of power in oae
who speaks is an entire or the largest
possible comprehension of the subject.

1883.]

Dobson's Fielding.

135

One may earnestly declare a truth, but
if he does not see it he will not impress
it. But whenever one sees a truth in
all its proportions and relations and
bearings, sees it with clear, intense, ab-
solute vision, he will have power over
men, however he speaks. Here we have
the key to the power with which Christ
preached. We read that the spirit of
the Lord was upon Him. He was filled
with the Spirit ; inspired, breathed upon
through and through by the divine
breath. But it was not the spirit that
spoke through the Christ, nor was the
power that of the spirit. The power
was in the Christ, whose being was set
in motion by the spirit. He was not an
instrument played upon, a divine harp
responding to heavenly winds, but an
actor, a mind that saw, a heart that felt,
a will that decided, all moving together.
He was passive only in the freedom
with which He gave himself up to be
possessed by the spirit. It was a force
behind and in his faculties, illuminating
and arousing them to their fullest action.
It is not the light that sees, but the eye
illuminated by light. Inspiration is a
mystery, and it is not a mystery. It is
not a mystery in the respect that we
know it to be a fact ; it is a mystery in
the respect that we cannot understand
it. We hear the sound thereof, but can-
not tell whence it cometh or whither it
goeth. It is the witness put into hu-
manity that it is kindred with God. We

know not what it is, but when we feel
its breath we know that it is the breath
of God. But the spirit is not the power
of Christ ; it is rather that which sets
in action Christ's own power, which lay
in his absolute comprehension of what
He said, and in a perfect comprehen-
sion of his position. He saw the mean-
ing of the Jewish system. He knew
what the acceptable year of the Lord
meant. He pierced the old system of
symbolism to the centre, and drew out
its significance. He saw that God was
a deliverer from first to last, and meas-
ured the significance of the fact. He
knew that God was the Father, and the
full force and mighty sweep of that
name. The whole heart and mind of
God were open to Him. . . . This was
the power of Christ's preaching ; He
saw God ; He understood God ; He
comprehended God ; He knew what
God had done, and would do ; the whole
purpose and plan of deliverance and
redemption lay before Him as an open
page. We cannot measure this knowl-
edge of the Christ ; we can but faintly
conceive of it. But the measure of our
conception of it is the measure of our
spiritual power over others. We speak,
we teach, we live, with power just in the
degree in which we have got sight of
God in the revealing Christ, and through
Him of the purpose and plan that un-
derlie these mysteries that we call life
and time."

DOBSON'S FIELDING.

THE current discussions upon modern
fiction might easily receive some light
from an examination of Fielding's work,
and it is a pity that Mr. Dobson, in his
careful study,1 should not have given a

1 Fielding. By At'STiu DOBSON. New York :
Harper £ Brothers. 1883.

more suggestive sketch of the novelist,
even at the risk of leaving unsettled the
date and place of Fielding's second mar-
riage. Mr. Dobson, to be sure, excuses
himself from offering any critical esti-
mate of Fielding's place in literature on
the ground that Mr. Leslie Stephen has

136

Dobson 8 Fielding.

[July,

lately done this well ; but one may fair-
ly ask that the portrait of a mau of let-
ters should bear some distinct marks of
his appearance in that character, and
not show him merely as he might be
seen by the rogues who were brought
up before the justice of Bow Street.

Mr. Dobson is so much at home in
the life and literature of the eighteenth
century that we may suspect his very
familiarity to have made him indifferent
to many matters about which his less
informed readers would be curious, and
more bent on hunting down obscure
facts than of lifting into light, by his
imagination, the commoner ones. He
has made some additions to our knowl-
edge of particulars in Fielding's life,
and he has, by the fullness of his knowl-
edge, given a sensible and reasonable
interpretation of incidents which have
been a stumbling-block to previous bi-
ographers. For so much we are grate-
ful, but Mr. Dobson makes us demand
more. We did not want from him, what
his book is, a long article for a bio-
graphical encyclopedia, where clearness
of judgment, accuracy of statement, and
directness are the sole requisites ; we
wanted an imaginative picture, which
should project Fielding from a back-
ground of his circumstances, and enable
us to see his individuality.

The book is an admirable one for
those who already enjoy a fair acquaint-
ance with the literature and characters
of Fielding's time. Mr. Dobson moves
about among the persons of his story
with so much ease that one hardly per-
ceives at first the closeness of his knowl-
edge ; one is aware only of the natu-
ralness of the book, and its freedom
from any straining after effect. Thus
the casual reflections and side remarks
which Mr. Dobson makes have a value
quite out of proportion to their appar-
ent intention ; and throughout one has
the satisfaction of putting himself un-
der the guidance of a scholar who has
been over the ground a great many

times, and is not now making the ex-
ploration with the reader.

The somewhat contemptuous tone
which Mr. Dobson takes toward Rich-
ardson is heightened by the easy justifi-
cation which he has for Fielding's ex-

cesses ; but he is right in requiring a
judgment of Fielding's novels to be
based upon the novels themselves, and
not upon the tales that are told of the'
author's youth. The present generation
of critics has done much to secure fair
play for men of letters ; the scientific
spirit which aims at an exactness of
statement is more favorable to just judg-
ment than that partisan temper which
may be found in critics who have a very
high code of ethics, and come to the
judgment seat with their minds made
up beforehand. If we are not mistaken,
the students of English literature here-
after will pay the writers of this day
the compliment of accepting with little
question the results of their investiga-
tions. It will remain for them to make
a more synthetical judgment, and one
more obedient to the imagination. The
minuteness of study to-day, which is al-
most as noticeable in literature as in
science, is both corrective and prepar-
atory. It is gently removing errors of
past judgment ; it is simplifying the
work of a future survey, and the tem-
per of these scholars is a humane one.
One might please himself long with a
reflection upon the interest which men
are taking now in the Queen Anne
period, and we suspect that the acute
critics of the next generation will en-
tertain the readers of The Atlantic with
considerations upon this revival of in-
terest. Why was it, they will ask, that
in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury Englishmen, and those Americans
who were most under English influence,
turned back to the very circumscribed
England of the former half of the
eighteenth century ? That was a period
when Pope's couplets, with their finality,
epitomized the well-defined boundary of

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

137

the world of which met) were conscious ;
but in the latter half of the nineteenth
century there was an exceeding restless-
ness of spirit, and Tennyson's In Me-
moriain was a true exponent of the
temper of the age. Well, these acute
critics will continue, the answer may be
looked for both in the reaction which
followed a spiritual quest, and in the
strong scientific tendencies of the age,
which demanded a bottom to things.
George Eliot never took any solid sat-
isfaction in the characters whom she

created except in that of Caleb Garth,
who was wont to speak of business, as
many of religion, with reverence and a
profound sense of its reality and com-
prehensive power. So it was the frank-
ness and the limitations of Fielding that
made him satisfactory to students of fic-
tion, and led them to say, Here is well-
defined art and a solid basis in human
character. We leave to these critics
many fine things which they might say.
It surely is enough to criticise a critic,
without inventing one.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

I HAVE always had a theory that
the Sphinx did not destroy herself after
CEdipus solved her riddle : there are
quite as good reasons for believing in
her continued and present condition as
in that of Le Juif Errant. Yet, grant-
ing that she did throw herself into the
abyss, as reported, she certainly left be-
hind her a long line of descendants. I
am always meeting some of the family,
for they are well distributed through all
departments of society. I do not flatter
myself when I say the encounter gives
them pleasure : it is somehow apparent
to them that I shall prove a meek and
unresisting victim ; for I could never
guess a riddle, nor put together a puz-
zle, nor pick in pieces any logical or il-
logical quiddity. From childhood, I have
been the obtuse mark of these sharp-
shooting wits. " Do you give it up ? "
was, with me, as effectual as the money-
or-life conditioning of a highway rob-
ber. I always gave it up, without the
least struggle at solution. When I wish
for a personal presentment of the type
Sphinx, I do not think of the mytholog-
ical nondescript the word suggests, but
I summon up my recollections of a cer-
tain village tinker, who, as I remember,

ministered unto the ills that time, in
the mortal shape of a clock, is heir to.
To this acquaintance of my childhood
might have been applied the famous
similitude of the interrogation mark ; he
being little, and crooked, and preemi-
nently an asker of questions. He had
withal an Ancient Mariner sort of eye,
whereby he held his youthful listener in
a condition of helpless fascination, while
propounding and expounding his favor-
ite riddles. His piece de resistance was,
" Where does the day begin ? " Again
and again — for my mind, sieve - like,
leaked all such useful information — I
bewilderedly followed his cruise for the
bright meridian, eventually bringing up
somewhere in mid-Pacific. I am re-
minded that, in the text-books of our
grandfathers' school-days, provision was
made for the nurture and development
of the juvenile sphinx. In this respect,
the arithmetics were especially admi-
rable : as a relief from the bare and un-
adorned problems of numerical quantity,
there was occasionally thrown in what
might have been termed A Handful of
Pleasant Posers, consisting of various
diverting puzzles and catches, — the
well-known three-horned dilemma of the

138

The Contributors Club.

[July,

Fox. the Goose, and the Corn being a
ipeoimeo.

To attempt a rigid classification of
flu- family Sphinx would be to go " be-
yond the scope of the present work."
Only a few of the more notable species
may be mentioned. Of such is the
mathematical genius, who devises new
short methods of extracting the roots as
well as of obtaining the powers of num-
bers, and whose cabalistic processes fre-
quently appear in print. Nearly allied
is the species that has a statistical " bee
in its bonnet," and is given to barba-
rous calculations, in which reference is
made to the tenth, twentieth, and even
hundredth part of a man. A number of
the family have studied law and the-
ology, which professions seem to have
'favored the bent of their natures. Some
have become poets (notwithstanding
poeta nascitur, non Jit), in which case
they have written sestinas and other
metrical wonders. There is yet another
species, which of all is the most famil-
iar, and perhaps the most stigmatized.
I refer to the species Punster, in which
should be included conundrum-mongers,
and all those in any wise afflicted with
paronomasia. Let us not be too swift
to pass judgment upon these unfortunate
persons ; their intent is doubtless to be
social and care-beguiling ; in any case,
they are their own worst enemies, since
the continued study and practice of fa-
cetious equivoque have a tendency to
mull the brain. It was to meet this sad
contingency, I suppose, that the Asy-
lum for Decayed Punsters was founded,
some time ago.

In one particular, to my certain knowl-
edge, the present descendants of the
Sphinx do not resemble their great an-
cestress : they have not her acute sen-
sibility ; defeat never drives them to
make their quietus ; they are never
known to throw themselves headlong
into the abyss. Perhaps their enigmat-
ical resources are not as limited as were
those of the ancient Theban bugbear ;

if they knew but one riddle (it seems
the Sphinx had no more), their grief
and mortification at having it solved
might lead them to the desperate act of
self-destruction.

With his countrymen, CEdipus may
have passed for a sage and a hero ; we
question both his sagacity and his cour-
age. He should have disposed of the
riddle by dispatching the Sphinx her-
self, and saved his wit for some ques-
tion of genuine, philosophic importance.
There is something very satisfactory in
the way in which Columbus, at the ban-
quet of old-world fogies, stood the egg
on end, and one can scarcely help ad-
miring Alexander for cutting the Gor-
dian knot, instead of wasting precious
time by trying to untie it. This is the
kind of solution that is usually given by
heroes. Says an old aphorism, " The
wrangler, the puzzler, and the word-
hunter are incapable of great actions."
This Parthian arrow we cast at our
ancient tormentor and wish him comfort
of it.

— It seems doubtful whether we have
made more mistakes by reason of rash
action than through indecision and de-
ferment. The gist of our favorite phi-
losophy is that we should deliberate
long, and act late. This conclusion
contains a certain spice of self-flattery :
fine, reckless, incendiary spirits are ours,
upon the heat and flame of whose dis-
order we find it necessary to sprinkle
cool patience. If the diagnosis covered
the case, the treatment recommended
would probably be the best one to fol-
low ; but what if it be found that the
motions of our minds are tardigrade and
timorous, characterized by infinite wind-
ings and doublings upon their track ?
Plainly, then, we need no lenitive, but a
vigorous tonic and stimulant. It is re-
quired that some one develop a new
philosophy of immediateness and spon-
taneity. We are too much in the habit
of appealing from the first impression
to the sophisticated afterthought, as

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

139

from Philip drunk to Philip sober. The
chances are that the first impression is
no nearer the condition of intelligent so-
briety than are those pompous benchers
and big-wigs of the mind, — our mature
reflections. We never suspect that they
can be muddled and heavy-headed, they
contrive to maintain such show of judi-
cial dignity in the eyes of their clients.
Why is it we so helplessly sit down to
a despotic session of pros and cons, ad-
visory of matters which the heart's elec-
tion, and not the reason's jury, should
be allowed to decide ? It is possible our
resolution is already taken, though we
do not at once recognize it, being con-
fused by the involved processes of our
Court of Equity. Let some good genius
stand beside us, arid cry out, like the
not-to-be-trifled-with lover in the old
song, —

" Withouten many words,
Once I am sure, you will or no ...
[Then] use your wit and show it so."

But if it be thought desirable to take a
thorough academic course in casuistry,
there is no better means to this end than
the accustoming ourselves to divide and
carefully test all the delicate strands of
motive and feeling leading up to any
given line of conduct. What respect
we pay to certain cautionary maxims :
Haste makes waste ; Festma lente. In
minding such guide-boards and danger-
signals, we lose sight of the fact that
there is equal jeopardy in hesitation and
debate. Possibly, we pride ourselves on
being too well disciplined to " jump at
a conclusion " (leaving such light gym-
nastic feats to what we are pleased to
term the feminine mind) ; we find it
more decorous to take the logical detour,
and arrive at our leisure. The shortness
of life shall not frighten us into dis-
patch ; when our time-lease runs out,
there is eternity for our conclusions.
Still, we may justly insist that, in many
of the dilemmas which we must meet
and overcome, the saltus, or jump, is the
only safe way to the conclusion. We

have heard something too much of that
clever apology for the unready and the
uiiinilitant, — Discretion is the better
part of valor. Let us see how it would
fit to make over the stuff of the well-
worn aphorism, thus : Valor is the better
part of discretion. The inverted maxim
tallies charmingly with the keen obser-
vation, "• One sits out as many risks as
he runs." I should not be surprised at
hearing that indiscretion belongs more
to the craven than to the rashest hero.
It does not appear that the immediate
in decision, the precipitate in action, any
oftener meet with disasters than do those
who stop at every stage to consult the
oracles, — the oracles that delight in
obscurity and contradiction ! Most un-
generously suspicious are we as to the
friendly intention of events toward us.
Often we approach what promise to be
the royal chances of life with a kind of
old-eyed mistrust and watchfulness, —
as of wary woodland creatures, that,
once having tasted the cruelty of the
trap, henceforward suspect springs and
toils wherever they go. It would argue
more magnanimity if we sometimes dis-
missed this pitiful circumspectness, and
threw ourselves upon the clemency of
the future. But we have always before
us the fear of that joyless sequel to
hasty action, — the repenting at leisure.
True, we stand in this peril ; yet we might
reflect that we can buy no certain im-
munity, with all our sacrifices to fore-
thought. In any case, the human prob-
abilities are, we shall be visited by some
form of regret. (Remember the sage's
dilemmatic reply to the young man who
sought his opinion on marriage : whether
he married or not, he would be sure to
repent.) When the cup of repentance
passes round, to drink it as the punish-
ment of generous rashness and super-
abounding faith will not be more humili-
ating than to have to drink it in spite
of all our measures to avoid the draught.
We do not need to be taught to multi-
ply considerations and reasons, Out to

140

The Contributors' Club.

[July,

focus and use those which shine upon
the current moment. What, in any en-
terprise, is so hard as the beginning it ?
Plunge us at once in mcilliis res, and we
strike out bravely enough ; instinctively
defending ourselves, and gaining strength
from opposition. But hold the enter-
prise a long time in ideal projection, and
it is ten to one the imagination drops
off sated, and leaves us out of conceit
with the original purpose. We do well
to use instantaneously any purchase we
have acquired upon our own native vis
inertia, as well as upon that of exteraal
matter.

— In The Point of View Mr. James's
Miss Sturdy, among the many shrewd
and just observations she makes, says
one thing, not original with her, which
indeed we have heard till we are quite
familiar with the remark, but which
sounds strangely coming from so sensi-
ble a person as this lady. She says that
one of the dangers attending the Amer-
ican mode of life is that we shall " cease
to speak the English language : Ameri-
can is crowding it out." So intelligent
a woman as Miss Sturdy ought to know
better than to repeat this accusation,
meaningless in its vagueness, and there-
fore eluding a fair encounter and rebut-
tal. Mr. Antrobus, from his point of
view, remarks much to the same effect
when he says that, considering the num-
ber of people who are being educated
in the country, " the tone of the people
is less scholarly than one would expect.
A lady, a few days since, described to
me her daughter as being 'always on
the go,' which I take to be a jocular
way of saying that the young lady was
very fond of paying visits. Another
person, the wife of a United States Sen-
ator, informed me that if I should go to
Washington in January I should be
quite 'in the swim.' I inquired the
meaning of the phrase." Now that Mr.
Antrobus should require to have the
meaning of a new slang phrase ex-
plained to him is not strange, being

quite in character with the slowness and
dullness of his intellect ; but that he or
any other Englishman should be sur-
prised or shocked at a free use of slang
does strike me as something extraordi-
naty. He himself and the " wife of a
United States Senator " are fictitious
persons ; but we are ready to grant to
Mr. James the possibility of an actual
person occupying such a position indulg-
ing herself in the use of a slang phrase.
We would not maintain that our Sena-
tors and their wives are invariably to be
found persons of culture and breeding,
and that only persons of culture, breed-
ing, and the best taste habitually re-
frain from such expressions. The fact
is that many people who know perfect-
ly well what is good English, and what
is not, do nevertheless, from careless-
ness or indolence, allow themselves the
use of words and phrases which their
own good taste condemns. But these
persons would be the last to defend
their own practice. Others, of less fas-
tidious feeling about the matter, use
slang, knowing it to be such, but not
careful whether that or the proper Eng-
lish expression comes first to hand. If
this habit, however, is all that is meant
by the invention of an " American "
language, the ridicule is quite misplaced,
coming from an Englishman, or any one
adopting the English point of view.
No persons employ slang more freely
in common conversation than the Eng-
lish, so far as my knowledge of them
goes. And they use it with the same
unconscious air that many Americans
have in uttering slang expressions, as
though it had become a matter of habit
to select such words in preference to
correct English. I remember a young
English gentleman speaking of a rela-
tive who had lost a wife while in a cer-
tain place, and who had never been able
to endure the sight of the spot since, be-
cause of its sad associations. " He real-
ly could n't go there again, you know :
he felt too seedy about it." I deplore

1883.]

The Contributor*' Club.

141

the use of slang. The worst effect of
its so common use is that a good many
persons, not given to thought on such
matters, lose sight of the fact that such
and such expressions are slang. I de-
plore it, that is, as much as one consist-
ently may, who at the same time con-
fesses to a relish for certain slang
phrases that seem to have something
of vivid and picturesque expressiveness
in them, or a humorous quality evident
in the turn of them. I think that, de-
cidedly, there is slang and slang. Some
of it — most of it — is vulgar beyond
pardon : it seems to me also that it is
our imported English slang that lacks
the humor and possesses the vulgar-
ity. Some slang is defiling to the mouth
that utters it ; other slang is compara-
tively innocent and excusable. But if
Miss Sturdy means by the " American "
language a language that pretends to be
English, or as good as good English,
she ought to tell us more plainly what
people it is she has heard speak it.
She says it is in use in all the newspa-
pers and schools. About the schools
I confess I don't know ; as to the news-
papers, it is true that many of them
abound in vulgarisms of speech, and no
doubt help to popularize them. But do
they differ in this respect from the jour-
nals of Great Britain ?

— The reign of the sunflower has
been a long one in the world of decora-
tive art, and it might be well to consider
its successor. It has been suggested
that we turn our attention to the beauty
of leaf forms and colors. We never
have given full credit to the satisfactory
qualities of a well-arranged bouquet of
leaves ; to tell the truth, people in gen-
eral know very little about them. It
takes a very observant eye to catch at

their details, for most of us look at trees
or bushes, or at any foliage, only in the
mass, — which is like judging flowers and
making friends with them only in solid
parterres. Appreciation of the leaves
of native and foreign plants will come
only by close study of them, and noth-
ing will forward this like their becoming
fashionable. As for the monotony of
color, it is no disadvantage, if we once
grow used to the delicate gradations of
tint.

We have already accustomed our-
selves to exquisite arrangements of
ferns, but if some reader will carry the
idea further, she will be greatly aston-
ished at its success. The leaves of the
silver poplar, with their whitish under
surface^ are most beautiful for table dec-
oration. A few sprays in clear glasses,
that show plainly the leaves that are
under water, with their clinging air
bubbles, and the outline of the stems, —
these, above the white surface, or even
colored surface, of the cloth of the tea-
table will be found surprisingly delicate
and refreshing on a hot evening, instead
of fiery geraniums, or intensely yellow
marigolds, or other flowers of the sort.
At least, while we do not underrate the
value of brilliant colors, we beg our
lady friends, who are ever on the look-
out for novelties and new effects in their
housekeeping, to try their hands at some
of these imperfectly suggested sympho-
nies in greeti. We do not imply a de-
sire simply to return to the fire-place
decorations of asparagus, beloved of our
great-grandmothers, though the use of
that sad-tinted but graceful foliage has
been grievously overlooked by the aes-
thetes and the sentimental Wilde men
and women, of languishing attitudes and
clinging draperies.

142

Books of the Month.

[July,

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

Travel an<1 Geography. Travels and Observa-
tions in the Orient, and n hasty flight in the conn-
trios nf Europe, by Walter Harriman (Lee & Shep-
anl i, is occupied chiefly with the author's expe-
rirncc in Palestine. He tells how he got there
and how he came back, but his chief interest is
in the East. Governor Harriman was an eager
traveler, but he had stayed long enough in Amer-
ica before he went to become thoroughly patriotic;
and if one wishes to know how an American looks
upon the Holy Land he will have his desire grati-
fied in this book, which is artlessly and honestly
American. "The fountain of Elisha," for in-
stance, "is a copious mill-stream. Incur coun-
try it would be utilized as such; but here, on the
plain of the Jordan, there is now neither business
nor people. So the stream runs to waste." — By
a curious coincidence, the next book we take up is
Denton J. Snider's A Walk in Hellas, or the Old
in the New. (Osgood.) Exactly why it*is the old
in the new, we do not see. Mr. Snider is the new;
but perhaps he meant to signify how Greece ap-
peared in his mind. A curious mind it is. Much
learning has made him not mad, perhaps, but it
will make his readers mad. A more cumbrous
style it would be difficult to find. Mr. Snider's
mind is like Greece, mountainous and very much
cut up ; the coast line is difficult to follow. If
Governor Harriman was a son of the soil, Mr.
Snider is equally American in the painfully meta-
physical attitude with which he stands before
Greek life and art. — The Golden Chersonese, and
the way thither, is by Isabella L. Bird, Mrs. Bish-
op, whose travels in Hawaii, Japan, and in our
own West have proved acceptable to readers. (Pnt-
nams.) The way thither in Mrs. Bishop's book
is first by an historical survey, which puts the
reader in possession of the principal facts regard-
ing the Malay Peninsula as heretofore known to
Europeans, and then by steamer from Hong Kong.
Mrs. Bishop's account of Malay is in the form of
letters, which have her own personal experience
as well as observation. She announces that the
book closes her series of travels. — A Midsummer
Lark, by W. A. Croffut, is a volume of the Lei-
sure Hour series (Holt). The writer starts from
America, and comes back to it, after covering the
customary routes in Europe. The chief difference
between this and the usual book of travels is that
the author is hopelessly bent on entertaining the
reader with rhymed prose and verse, and a weari-
some jingle of nonsense. It must be a very lei-
sure hour indeed that can extract any amusement
from the book. — A Visit to Ceylon, by Ernst
Haeckel, translated by Clara Bell (S. E. Cassino
& Co., Boston), is a narrative of travel by an
eminent naturalist. The pursuits of the author
largely determine the character of his observa-
tions, but he does not overlook humankind and
landscape. The same work, translated by Mrs.
S. E. Boggs, is published by the John W. Lovell

Co. — The Hebrews and the Red Sea, by A. W.
Thayer (Warren F. Draper, Andover), is a small,
readable, and very ingenious book, discussing the
problem which has vexed critics for so many gen-
erations. Mr. Thayer uses the familiar text with
a power derived from no merely theoretical knowl-
edge of the localities and natural agencies. The
book is 'accompanied by a map. — An American
Four-in-Hand in Britain, by Andrew Carnegie
(Scribners), is a lively and hearty account of a
coaching-party from Brighton to Inverness. The
persons in the party are reduced in the book to
single letters, but the narrative is of real people,
gentlemen and ladies, and the frolic is that of
Americans, who have no less honest admiration for
their own country that they can enjoy historic
England. — The first volume of The Wheelman,
an illustrated magazine of cycling literature and
news (The Wheelman Co., Boston), is a really in-
teresting and curious record of the enthusiasm for
the bicycle, which is the narrowest gauge vehicle
in use. To an ordinary observer the bicyclist has
full use of his faculties in keeping himself upon a
degree of longitude, but this magazine seems to
warrant the belief that he is able to look to one
side and the other, to indulge in reveries, compose
poetry, and write book reviews. — In the Shadow
of the Pyrenees from Basque Land to Carcassonne,
by Martin R. Vincent (Scribners), is a little vol-
ume of travels attractively illustrated by etchings
and accompanied by a convenient map. — Geo.
Routledge & Sons have just published a new edi-
tion of Mr. Hare's Cities of Southern Italy and
Sicily, — a very useful book. — Kashgaria, histor-
ical and geographical sketch of the country, its
military strength, industries, and trade, is pub-
lished at Calcutta, by Thacker, Spink & Co., who
are represented in London by Thacker & Co. The
work is a translation from the Russian, by Major
Walter E. Gowan. Kashgaria, the reader may
need to be told, is Eastern or Chinese Tnrkistan.

History and Biography. Outlines of the Con-
stitutional History of the United States, by Luther
Henry Porter (Holt), is designed to be a begin-
ning book for students or general readers, who de-
sire to learn something of the character and his-
tory of the Constitution of the United States. It is
not a formal analysis of the Constitution alone,
but a study of the events which led to it, and of
the application of its principles. — The Growth of
a People is a translation, by Lewis A. Stinson, of
Paul Lacombe's Petite Histoire du Peuple Fran-
cais (Holt), an admirable and suggestive little
work for any one who has already made himself
familiar with the annals of France, for it is the
explanation of the historic process. — Dissertations
on Early Law and Custom, by Sir Henry Sumner
Maine (Holt), is a continuation of the studies for-
merly published upon Village Communities, and
the Early History of Institutions. He endeavors,
as he says, to connect a portion of existing insti-

1883.]

Books of the Month.

143

tutions with a part of the primitive or very ancient
usages of mankind, and of the ideas associated
with those usages. — In Harper's Franklin Square
Library is published an Outline of Irish History
from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, by
Justin II. McCarthy, a son of the well-known au-
thor. That the author is young enough to have a
father living appears from the opening chapter.
— Mosaics of Bible History is the title of a work
in two volumes, by Marcius Willson and Robert
Pierpont Willson (Harpers), which is further de-
scribed as the Bible record, with illustrative poet-
b and prose selections from standard literature.
The editors have arranged their work by topics,
in chronological order, and, without giving the
Bible text at much length, draw upon Stanley,
Ewald, Keil, and other critics and commentators,
and upon the poets, for a paraphrastic and illustra-
tive view of the incidents. The result is a sort of
well-arranged scrap-book about the Bible. — His-
torical and Biographical Sketches, by Samuel W.
Pennypacker (Robert A. Tripple, Philadelphia),
is the modest title of a really valuable work, since
a large part of the contents is devoted to studies
among the Mennonites. Mr. Pennypacker is an
antiquarian rather than a historian, and he is a
careful one ; the materials which he has gathered
have a value which is not merely that of rarity.
The author has collected also various biographical
and commemorative papers, and a narrative of his
army experience.

Natural History and Science. The second part of
New England Bird Life (Lee & Shepard) comprises
the non-oscine passeres, birds of prey, game, and
water-birds. The book is based upon the material
gathered by Mr. W. A. Stearns, but is prepared for
the press by Dr. Elliott Coues. The illustrations are
abundant, and while not of a highly refined char-
acter of engraving are distinct and intelligible. —
Man before Metals, by N. Joly, is the forty-fifth
volume of the International Scientific series (Ap-
pleton), and is devoted to a resume of the various
evidence which has been collecting upon the antiq-
uity of the human race and the nature of primitive
civilization. It is not surprising that the author
(1 raws largely from French sources. — The Sciences
among the Jews, before and during the Middle
Ages, is a little book translated from the German
of M. J. Schleiden (D. Binswanger & Co., Bal-
timore), and devoted to a rapid survey of the sub-
ject, the purpose being to vindicate the Jews as
the repositories of learning. — Elementary Botany,
with Student's Guide to the Examination and De-
scription of Plants, by George Macloskie (Holt),
is intended as a readable sketch of Botany, fol-
lowed by a guide to work in the field and in the
laboratory. The commonest plants have been
used for investigation and illustration. The au-
thor is a professor at Princeton. — Dr. Gallon's
Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Develop-
ment (Macmillan) is a continuation of his studies
in Hereditary Genius, and consists of the contri-
butions to journals which have appeared for many
years wrought into a consistent whole. However
the reader may view the conclusions of this siiir-
g«'*fivr> writer, he cannot fail to be stimulated and
helped by the many and curious investigations

which are recorded. It is an anecdote book of the
human mind, and much more than that.

Romance and Fiction. Classic Mythology is a
translation from Professor C. Witt's work on the
subject, by Frances Younghusband (Holt), and is
introduced and endorsed by Arthur Sidgwick.
The book is a straightforward and quite simple
narrative, and is supplied with all necosary in-
dexes and glossaries. Probably the day of the
simple story has gone by, and we must settle down
to knowing just what these myths meant; but it
is to the praise of this book that the interpretation
is not mixed in with the dream. — In the Trans-
Atlantic series (Putnams), a new number is King
Capital, by William Sime, in which labor and
capital go masquerading for love. — A recent num-
ber of the Leisure Hour series (Holt) is Beyond
Recall, by Adeline Sergeant, the scene .of which
is laid in the East. If the title alarms the reader,
the last sentence will reassure him : " Paul, there
is no need. I have loved you all my life. I love
you still." — Dialect Tales, by Sherwood Bonner
(Harpers), is a collection of magazine stories, the
scenes of which are laid in the South, chiefly
among poor whites and blacks. They are lively,
and perhaps may be relied upon as reports of the
country whenever they do not yield sufficient
story. — John's Alive, and Other Sketches, by
Major Jones (David McKay, Philadelphia), is a
posthumous publication by the author of a farcical
book, Major Jones' Courtship, which had a rude,
frontier humor. This volume seems born rather
late. — The Story of Melicent, by Fayr Madoc
(Macmillan), is a tale of English life charged with
religious feeling. — Fanchette is the title of the
latest of the Round Robin series (Osgood ), in which
golden America and mysterious Russia furnish the
writer with his scenery and characters. — My
Trivial Life and Misfortune, a Gossip with no
Plot in Particular (Putnams), is an anonj'mous
novel in two parts, occupying two volumes: the
first part is Spinsterhood; the second, Meum and
Tuum. It is said to be by a plain woman, and the
plainness extends to the literature. — The Red
Acorn, by John McElroy (H. A. Sumner & Co.,
Chicago), is a realistic novel of the war. — In Har-
per's Franklin Square Library, recent numbers
are, Who is Sylvia ? by A. Price, The Hands of
Justice, by F. W. Robinson, The Storj- of Melicent,
by Fayr Madoc, No New Thing, by W. E. Norrig,
and Like Ships Upon the Sea, by Francis Eleanor
Trollope. — Whom Kathie Married is a domestic
tale, by Amanda M. Douglas. (Lee & Shepard.)
— The Macmillans have issued a very neat edition
of the Essays of Elia, with introduction and notes
by Mr. Alfred Ainger. — Mr. Cable's Old Creole
Days (Charles Scribner's Sons) appear in two
neat paper-bound volumes. The collection of sto-
ries includes Madame Delphine, previously pub-
lished separately. — The reader will have to over-
haul a great deal of nautical literature, past, pres-
ent, and to come, before he will find a more enter-
taining novel than A Sea Queen, by W. Clark
Itussdl. (Harper Brothers.)

Literary Criticism and Furnishing. Books, and
How to Use Them is the title of a neat little l»»>k,
by J. C. Van Dyke (Fords), which offers some

144

Books of the Month.

[July.

hints to those who are not familiar with books and
libraries. Hooks have become such a considerable
part of the impedimenta of modern civilization
that they seem to require hand-books and guides;
this hook assumes tin- helplessness of the general
or the average reader, and gives him good advice,
yet we cannot help wondering if people read about
bunks lift',, tv they read books themselves. — Au-
thors and Publishers (Putnam.-) is described as a
manna! of suggestions for beginners in literature,
and contains in a readable form much that is de-
sirable for a young author to know. If he would
only remember what he reads, and act upon it!
But most of the experience in such matters can be
won only, not taken in through reading. — The
English Novel and the Principle of its Develop-
ment, by Sidney Lanier (Scribners), is the posthu-
mous publication of a writer who lias won a name
since his death, which one wishes he might have
enjo\ed in his lifetime. Mr. Lanier had a sense
of art which might have led him to withhold these
lectures, in their present form, but we are glad to
get his fresh and earnest thought upon a subject
which has great interest for all students of liter-
ature. — English Style in Public Discourses, with
special reference to the usages of the pulpit, by
Austin Phelps (Scribners), is the work of a man of
scholarship, who has had much to do with mould-
ing the style of clergymen of the Congregational
order. He writes out of a full mind, and with the
command of a great storehouse of illustration.

Pot try and the Drama. D. Appletou & Co.
have issued the complete poems of Bryant, beauti-
fully printed in two volumes, uniform with Mr.
Godwin's Life and Letters of the poet. — The taste
for Gay's Fables went out of fashion with the poke
bonnet, which now threatens to come back again.
Whether a liking for Mr. Gay's neatly turned
rerses will return with it is doubtful ; but there is
no doubt touching the charm of Mr. Austin Dob-
son's introduction to the Parchment Edition of the
Fables. (Appleton.) — Oriental Legends and Other
Poems, by Rabbi H. M. Bien (Brown & Derby,
New York), is a collection of poems which have
their birthplace in America, but their ancestry in
Judea. — A Day in the Woods, by D. C. Coles-
worthy (Williams), is a poem which recites the
experience of the writer, who took his outing
among familiar scenes. He brings back a very
large collection for his poetical museum. — Joan
of Arc is one of the perennial martyrs. She was
burned once, but every generation sees her tor-
tured in verse. J. S. Foote has made a poem upon
her (Charles H. Whiting, Boston), which trots
along in a measure as short as a child's footstep ;
Mr. George H. Calvert has reproduced his poem,
originally published in 1860 (Lee & Shepard),
with corrections, but one may patiently wait for
the rubber of Time for the final revision of this
poem. — Three Score and Other Poems is another
of Mr. Calvert's volumes (Lee & Shepard), and
one cannot help feeling a reflex pleasure from Mr.
Calvert's own enjoyment of his verse. — Australian
Lyrics, by Douglas B. W. Sladen (George Robert-
son, Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide), has not
much poetry in it, but it has a good deal that is
entertaining, and some verses that have a very

contidential air about them. — Songs of Toil and
Triumph, by J. L. McOeery (Putnams), has a
notion not common in volumes of verse, namely,
little side notes to tell the reader how the idea
of the poem is getting on. — Saul, a dramatic poem,
by Algernon Sydney Logan (Lippincott), is also
a new view of Saul, who is represented as having
been chosen by the priests for a tool only to show
himself a true patriot. — Mary Magdalene, by
Mrs. Richard Greenough (Osgood), is a quiet and
careful study in smooth and often sweet verse. —
Poems, by William Cleaver Wilkinson (Scribners),
is the work of a writer who uses poetic form. —
Though the readers of epics may have passed
away, it is clear that the race of epic writers has
not become extinct. Here is Mr. Alfred Domett's
Ranolf and Amohia, A Dream of Two Lives, in
two volumes, of about four hundred closely printed
pages each. (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London.)

Relit/ion and Philosophy. The second part of
Ten Great Religions, by James Freeman Clarke
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), is a comparison of all
religions with a view to show what they all teach
on the different points of human belief. — The
Gospel of the Secular Life, by the Hon. W. IT.
Fremantle (Scribners), is a volume of sermons
preached at Oxford, with the purpose to direct
Christian thought into a new channel, " its great,
not to say paramount, concern with the general,
common, or secular life of mankind." It is thus
a criticism and survey of the thought of the times
from a Christian standpoint. — The Wisdom of
Holy Scripture, with reference to skeptical ob-
jections, by J. H. Mcllvaine (Scribners), is a vol-
ume of apologetics which seems to us perhaps bet-
ter calculated to confirm those who already believe
than to attract the thought of those who are skep-
tical. — Jesus, His Opinions and Character (George
H. Ellis, Boston) is a volume of New Testament
studies by a layman, who withholds his name.
The fable of the eagle shot by an arrow drawn
from his wings might be read to this writer. —
The Possibility of Not Dying, A Speculation, by
Hyland C. Kirk (Putnams), appears to put the
cart before the horse, by suggesting the perpetuity
of physical life as the reward of right living.

Humor and 'Curiosities. Our Choir, by C. G.
Bush (Putnams), is a piece of grotesque drawing
and versifying, with a free use of musical terms
and symbols. The fun is of a somewhat painful
order. — Games and Songs of American Children,
collected and compared by William Wells Newell
(Harpers), is a very interesting essay in a novel
direction; novel, that is, in America, where we
are not supposed to have any folk lore. — Mr. Ja-
cobs, A Tale of the Drummer, the Reporter, am!
the Prestidigitateur (W. B. Clarke & Carruth,
Boston), is a skit at Mr. Isaacs, and carries its
amusing burlesque even into the cover. — "Eu-
reka," or The Golden Door Ajar, by Asa T. Green
(A. G. Collins, Cincinnati), is a mysterious revela-
tion of the mysteries of the world, now published,
as the title-page declares, for the first time. The
reader will linger long over the lithographic por-
trait of Mr. Green and his two pails; longer than
over the text of Mr. Green's discoveries, which
do not seem so mysterious as one is led to expect.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

of Literature,, fecience^ £rt, ant)

VOL. LIL — AUa UST, 1883. — No. COGX.

A ROMAN SINGER.

III.

Now I ought to tell you that many
things in this story were only told me
quite lately, for at first I would not help
Nino at all, thinking it was but a foolish
fancy of his boy's heart and would soon
pass. I have tried to gather and to
order all the different incidents into one
harmonious whole, so that you can fol-
low the story ; and you must not won-
der that I can describe some things that
I did not see, and that I know how
some of the people felt ; for Nino and
I have talked over the whole matter
very often, and the baroness came here
and told me her share, though I wonder
how she could talk so plainly of what
must have given her so much pain. But
it was very kind of her to come ; and
she sat over there in the old green arm-
chair, by the glass case that has the ar-
tificial flowers under it, and the sugar
lamb that the padre curato gave Nino
when he made his first communion at
Easter. However, it is not time to speak
of the baroness yet, but I cannot for-
get her.

Nino was very amusii)g when he be-
gan to love the young countess, and the
very first morning — the day after we
had been to St. Peter's — he went out
at half-past six, though it was only just
sunrise, for we were in October. I
knew very well that he was going for

his extra lesson with De Pretis, but I
had nothing to say about it, and I only
recommended him to cover himself well,
for the scirocco had passed and it was a
bright morning, with a clear tramontana
wind blowing fresh from the north. I
can always tell when it is a tramontana
wind, before I open my window, for
Mariuccia makes such a clattering with
the coffee-pot in the kitchen, and the
goldfinch in the sitting-room sings very
loud ; which he never does if it is cloudy.
Nino, then, went off to Maestro Ercole's
house for his singing, and this is what
happened there.

De Pretis knew perfectly well that
Nino had only asked for the extra les-
son in order to get a chance of talking
about the Contessina di Lira, and so, to
tease him, as soon as he appeared the
maestro made a great bustle about sing-
ing scales, and insisted upon beginning
at once. Moreover, he pretended to
be in a bad humor ; and that is always
pretense with him.

" Ah, my little tenor," he began ;
"you want a lesson at seven in the
morning, do you ? That is the time when
all the washerwomen sing at the foun-
tain ! Well, you shall have a lesson,
and by the body of Bacchus it shall be
a real lesson ! Now, then ! Andiamo
— Do-o-o ! " and he roared out a great
note that made the room shake, and a
man who was selling cabbage in the

146

A Roman Singer.

[August,

street stopped his hand-cart and mira-
ii-ki'd him for five minutes.

" But I am out of breath, maestro,"
protested Nino, who wanted to talk.

" Out of breath ? A singer is never
out of breath. Absurd ! What would
you do if you got out- of breath, say, in
the last act of Lucia, so — Bell' alma
ado — Then your breath ends, eh ?
Will you stay with the 'adored soul'
between your teeth ? A fine singer you
will make ! Andiamo ! Do-o-o ! "

Nino saw he must begin, and he set
up a shout, much against his will, so
that the cabbage vender chimed in, mak-
ing so much noise that the old woman
who lives opposite opened her window
and emptied a great dustpan full of po-
tato peelings and refuse leaves of let-
tuce right on his head. And then there
was a great noise. But the maestro paid
110 attention, and went on with the scale,
hardly giving Nino time to breathe.
Nino, who stood behind De Pretis while
he sang, saw the copy of Bordogni's
solfeggi lying on a chair, and managed
to slip it under a pile of music near by,
singing so lustily all the while, that the
maestro never looked round.

When he got to the end of the scale,
Ercole began hunting for the music, and
as he could not find it, Nino asked him
questions.

" Can she sing, — this contessina of
yours, maestro ? " De Pretis was over-
turning everything in his search.

" An apoplexy on those solfeggi and
on the man who made them ! " he cried.
" Sing, did you say ? Yes, a great deal
better than you ever will. Why can
you not look for your music, instead of
chattering? " Nino began to look where
he knew it was not.

" By the bye, do you give her lessons
every day ? " asked the boy.

" Every day,? Am I crazy, to ruin
people's voices, like that ? "

" Caro maestro, what is the matter
with you, this morning? You have for-
gotten to say your prayers ! "

" You are a donkey, Nino ; here he
is, this blessed Bordogni, — now come."

" Sor Ercole mio," said Nino in de-
spair, " I must really know something
about this angel, before I sing at all."
Ercole sat down on the piano stool, and
puffed up his cheeks, and heaved a tre-
mendous sigh, to show how utterly bored
he was by his pupil. Then he took a
large pinch of snuff, and sighed again.

'• What demon have you got into
your head ? " he asked, at length.

'• What angel, you mean," answered
Nino, delighted at having forced the
maestro to a parley. " I am in love
with her — crazy about her," he cried,
running his fingers through his curly
hair, "and you must help me to see her.
You can easily take me to her house to
sing duets, as part of her lesson. I tell
you I have not slept a wink all night
for thinking of her, and unless I see
her,* I shall never sleep again as long
as I live. Ah ! " he cried, putting his
hands on Ercole's shoulders, " you do
not know what it is to be in love ! How
everything one touches is fire, and the
sky is like lead, and one minute you
are cold and one minute you are hot,
and you may turn and turn on your
pillow all night, and never sleep, and
you want to curse everybody you see,
or to embrace them, it makes no differ-
ence — anything to express the " —

" Devil ! and may he carry you off ! "
interrupted Ercole, laughing. But his
manner changed. "Poor fellow," he
said presently, "it appears, to me you
are in love."

" It appears to you, does it ? ' Ap-
pears ' — a beautiful word, in faith. I
can tell you it appears to me so, too.
Ah ! it ' appears ' to you — very good
indeed ! " And Nino waxed wroth.

" I will give you some advice, Ninetto
mio. Do not fall in love with any one.
It always ends badly."

" You come late with your counsel,
Sor Ercole. In truth, a very good piece
of advice, when a man is fifty, and mar-

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

147

ried, and wears a skull-cap. When I
wear a skull-cap and take snuff, I will
follow your instructions." He walked
up and down the room, grinding his
teeth and clapping his hands together.
Ercole rose and stopped him.

" Let us talk seriously," he said.

" With all my heart ; as seriously as
you please."

" You have only seen this signorina
once."

" Once ! " cried Nino, — " as if once
were not " —

" Diavolo ! let me speak. You have
only seen her once. She is noble, an
heiress, a great lady — worse than all,
a foreigner ; as beautiful as a statue, if
you please, but twice as cold. She has
a father who knows the proprieties, a
piece of iron, I tell you, who would kill
you just as he would drink a glass of
wine, with the greatest indifference, if
he suspected you lifted your eyes to his
daughter."

" I do not believe your calumnies,"
said Nino, still hotly. " She is not cold,
and if I can see her she will listen to
me. I am sure of it."

" We will speak of that by and by.
You — what are you ? Nothing but a
singer, who has not even appeared be-
fore the public, without a baiocco in
the world, or anything else but your
voice. You are not even, handsome."

" What difference does that make to
a woman of heart ? " retorted Nino an-
grily. " Let me only speak to her " —

" A thousand devils ! " exclaimed De
Pretis, impatiently; "what good will
you do by speaking to her ? Are you
Dante, or Petrarca, or a preacher —
what are you ? Do you think you can
have a great lady's hand for the asking ?
Do you flatter yourself that you are
so eloquent that nobody can withstand
you ? "

" Yes," said Nino boldly. " If I
could only speak to her " —

" Then, in heaven's name, go and
speak to her. Get a new hat and a

pair of lavender gloves, and walk about
the Villa Borghese until you meet her,
and then throw yourself on your knees
and kiss her feet, and the dust from her
shoes ; and say you are dying for her,
and will she be good enough to walk as
far as Santa Maria del Popolo and be
married to you ! That is all ; you see
it is nothing you ask — a mere polite-
ness on her part — oh, nothing, noth-
ing." And De Pretis rubbed his hands
and smiled, and seeing that Nino did
not answer, he blew his nose with his
great blue cotton handkerchief.

" You have no heart at all, maestro,"
said Nino at last. " Let us sing."

They worked hard at Bordogni for
half an. hour, and Nino did not open his
mouth except to produce the notes. But
as his blood was up from the preceding
interview he took great pains, and Er-
cole, who makes him sing all the solfeggi
he can from a sense of duty, himself
wearied of the ridiculous old-fashioned
runs and intervals.

"Bene," he said; "let us sing a piece
now, and then you will have done
enough." He put an opera on the
piano, and Nino lifted up his voice and
sang, only too glad to give his heart
passage to his lips. Ercole screwed up
his eyes with a queer smile he has when
he is pleased.

" Capped ! " he ejaculated, when Nino
had done.

" What has happened ? " asked the
latter.

" I cannot tell you what has hap-
pened," said Ercole, " but I will tell
you that you had better always sing like
that, and you will be applauded. Why-
have you never sung that piece in that
way before ? "

" I do not know. Perhaps it is be-
cause I am unhappy."

" Very well, never dare to be happy
again, if you mean to succeed. You can
make a statue shed tears if you please."
Ercole took a pinch of snuff, and turned
round to look out of the window. Nino

148

A Roman Singer.

[August,

leaned on the piano, drumming with his
liiiiT'Ts mill looking :xt the back of the
in:u'st:-o's head. The first rays of the
sun just fell into the room and gilded
the red brick floor.

" Then instead of buying lavender
kid gloves," said Nino at last, his face
relaxing a little, " and going to the Villa
Borghese, you advise ine to borrow a
guitar and sing to my statue? Is that
it?"

" Che Diana ! I did not say that ! "
said Ercole, still facing the window and
finishing his pinch of snuff with a cer-
tain satisfaction. " But if you want the
guitar, take it, — there it lies. I will
not answer for what you do with it."
His voice sounded kindly, for he was
so much pleased. Then he made Nino
sing again, a little love song of Tosti,
who writes for the heart and sings so
much better without a voice than all
your stage tenors put together. And
the maestro looked long at Nino when
he had done, but he did not say any-
thing. Nino put on his hat, gloomily
enough, and prepared to go.

"I will take the guitar, if you will
lend it to me," he said.

" Yes, if you like, and I will give you
a handkerchief to wrap it up with," said
De Pretis, absently, but he did not get
up from his seat. He was watching
Nino, and he seemed to be thinking.
Just as the boy was going with the in-
strument under his arm, he called him
back.

" Ebbene ? " said Nino, with his hand
on the lock of the door.

" I will make you a song to sing to
your guitar," said Ercole.

"You?"

" Yes — but without music. Look
here, Nino — sit down. What a hurry
you are in. I was young myself, once
upon a time."

" Once upon a time ! Fairy stories
— once upon a time there was a king,
and so on." Nino was not to be easily
pacified.

" Well, perhaps it is a fairy tale, but
it is in the future. I have an idea."

" Oh. is that all ? But it is perhaps
the first time. I understand."

" Listen. Have you read Dante ? "

" I know the Vita Nuova by heart,
and some of the Commedia. But how
the diavolo does Dante enter into this
question ? "

" And Silvio Pellico, and a little lit-
erature ? " continued Ercole, not heed-
ing the comment.

" Yes, after a fashion. And you ?
Do you know them ? "

'• Che c'entro io ? " cried Ercole im-
patiently ; " what do I want to know
such things for ? But I have heard of
them."

" I congratulate you," replied Nino
ironically.

" Have patience. Yon are no longer
an artist. You are a professor of liter-
ature."

"I — a professor of literature ? What
nonsense are you talking ? "

" You are a great stupid donkey,
Nino. Supposing I obtain for you an
engagement to read literature with the
Contessina di Lira, will you not be a
professor? If you prefer singing" —
But Nino comprehended in a flash the
whole scope of the proposal, and threw
his arms round Ercole's neck and em-
braced him. .

" What a mind ! Oh, maestro mio,
I will die for you ! Command me, and
I will do anything for you ; I will run
errands for you, black your boots, any-
thing " — he cried in the ecstasy of de-
light that overmastered him.

" Piano, piano," objected the maes-
tro, disengaging himself from his pupil's
embrace. " It is not done yet. There
is much, much to think of first." Nino
retreated, a little disconcerted at not
finding his enthusiasm returned, but ra-
diant still.

" Calm yourself," said Ercole, smil-
ing. " If you do this thing, you must
act a part. You must manage to con-

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

149

ceal your occupation entirely. You
must look as solemn as an undertaker
and be a real professor. They will ul-
timately find you out, and throw you
out of the window, and dismiss me for
recommending you. But that is noth-
ing."

" No," said Nino, " that is of no im-
portance." And he ran his fingers
through his hair, and looked delighted.

" You shall know all about it this
evening, or to-morrow " —

" This evening, Sor Ercole, this even-
ing, or I shall die. Stay, let me go to
the house with you, when you give your
lesson and wait for you at the door."

" Pumpkin-head ! I will have noth-
ing to do with you," said De Pretis.

" Ah, I will be as quiet as you please.
I will be like a lamb, and wait until this
evening."

" If you will really be quiet, I will
do what you wish. Come to me this
evening, about the Ave Maria — or a
little earlier. Yes, come at twenty-
three hours." In October that is about
five o'clock, by French time.

" And I may take the guitar ? " said
Nino, as he rose to go.

" With all my heart. But do not
spoil everything by singing to her, and
betraying yourself."

So Nino thanked the maestro enthu-
siastically and went away, humming a
tune, as he now and again struck the
strings of the guitar that he carried un-
der his arm, to be sure it was there.

Do not think that because De Pretis
suddenly changed his mind, and even
proposed to Nino a plan for making the
acquaintance of the young countess, he
is a man to veer about like a weather-
cock, nor yet a bad man, willing to help
a boy to do mischief. That is not at all
like Ercole de Pretis. He has since
told me he was much astonished at the
way Nino sang the love song at his les-
son ; and he was instantly convinced
tliat in order to be a great artist Nino
must be in love always. Besides, the

maestro is as liberal in his views of life
as he is conservative in his ideas about
government. Nino is everything the
most strait-laced father could wish him
to be, and as he was then within a few
months of making his first appearance
on the stage, De Pretis, who under-
stands those things, could very well
foresee the success he has had. Now
De Pretis is essentially a man of th«
people, and I am not ; therefore he saw
no objection in the way of a mutch be-
tween a great singer and a noble dami-
gella. But had I known what was go-
ing on, I would have stopped the whole
affair at that point, for I am not so weak
as Mariuccia seems to think. I do not
mean that now everything is settled I
would wish it undone. Heaven forbid !
But I would have stopped it then, for it
is a most incongruous thing, a peasant
boy making love to a countess.

Nino, however, has one great fault,
and that is his reticence. It is true, he
never does anything he would not like
me, or all the world, to know. But I
would like to know, all the same. It is
a habit I have fallen into, from having
to watch that old woman, for fear she
should be too extravagant. All that
time he never said anything, and I sup-
posed he had forgotten all about the
contessina, for I did not chance to see
De Pretis ; and when I did, he talked
of nothing but Nino's debut and the ar-
rangements that were to be made. So
that I knew nothing about it, though I
was pleased to see him reading so much.
He took a sudden fancy for literature,
and read when he was not singing, and
even made me borrow Ambrosoli, in
several volumes, from a friend. He
read every word of it, and talked very
intelligently about it, too. I never
thought there was any reason.

But De Pretis thinks differently. He
believes that a man may be the son of a
ciociaro — a fellow who ties his legs up
in rags and thongs, and lives on goats'
milk in the mountains — and that if he

150

A Roman

has brains enough, or talent enough, he
may marry any woman he likes without
ever thinking whether she is noble or
not. De Pretis must be old-fashioned,
for I am sure I do not think in that
way, and 1 know a hundred times as
much as he — a hundred times.

I suppose it must have been the very
day when Nino had been to De Pretis
in the morning, that he had instructions
to go to the house of Count von Lira
on the morrow ; for I remember very
well that Nino acted strangely in the
evening, singing and making a noise for
a few minutes, and then burying him-
self in a book. However that may be,
it was very soon afterwards that he
went to the Palazzo Carmandola, dressed
in his best clothes, he tells me, in order
to make a favorable impression on the
count. The latter had spoken to De
Pretis about the lessons in literature, to
which he attached great importance,
and the maestro had turned the idea to
account for his pupil. But Nino did
not expect to see the young contessa on
this first day, or at least he did not hope
he would be able to speak to her. And
so it turned out.

The footman, who had a red waist-
coat and opened the door with author-
ity, as if ready to close it again on the
smallest provocation, did not frighten
Nino at all, though he eyed him suspi-
ciously enough, and after ascertaining
his business departed to announce him
to the count. Meanwhile Nino, who
was very much excited at the idea of
being under the same roof with the ob-
ject of his adoration, sat himself down
on one of the carved chests that sur-
rounded the hall. The green baize
door at the other end swung noiselessly
on its hinges, closing itself behind the
servant, and the boy was left alone. He
might well be frightened, if not at the
imposing appearance of the footman, at
at the task he had undertaken.
But a boy like Nino is afraid of noth-
ing when he is in love, and he simply

[August,

looked about him, realizing that he was
without doubt in the house of a gran'
signore, and from time to time brush-
ing a particle of dust from his clothes,
or trying to smooth his curly black hair,
which he had caused to be clipped a lit-
tle for the occasion ; a very needless ex-
pense, for he looks better with his hair
long.

Before many moments the servant
returned, and with some condescension
said that the count awaited him. Nino
would rather have faced the mayor, or
the king himself, than Graf von Lira,
though he was not at all frightened —
he was only very much excited, and he
strove to calm himself, as he was ush-
ered through the apartments to the small
sitting-room, where he was expected.

Graf von Lira, as I have already
told you, is a foreigner of rank, who
had been a Prussian colonel, and was
wounded in the war of 1866. He is
very tall, very thin, and very gray,
with wooden features and a huge mous-
tache that stands out like the beaks
on the colonna rostrata. His eyes are
small and very far apart, and fix them-
selves with terrible severity when he
speaks, even if he is only saying " good-
morning." His nails are very long and
most carefully kept, and though he is so
lame that he could not move a step with-
out the help of his stick, he is still an
upright and military figure. I remem-
ber well how he looked, for he came to
see me under peculiar circumstances,
many months after the time of which I
am now speaking ; and, besides, 1 had
stood next to him for an hour in the
chapel of the choir in St. Peter's.

He speaks Italian intelligibly, but
with the strangest German constructions,
and he rolls the letter r curiously in
his throat. But he is an intelligent man
for a soldier, though he thinks talent is
a matter of education, and education a
matter of drill. He is the most cere-
monious man I ever saw ; and Nino says
he rose from his chair to meet him, and

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

151

would not sit down again until Nino
was seated.

" The signore is the professor of Ital-
ian literature recommended to me by
Signer De Pretis ? " inquired the colo-
nel in iron tones, as he scrutinized Nino.

" Yes, Signor Conte," was the answer.

" You are a singularly young man to
be a professor." Nino trembled. " And
how have you the education obtained
in order the obligations and not-to-be-
avoided responsibilities of this worthy-
of-all honor career to meet ? "

" I went to school here, Signor Conte,
and the Professor Grandi, in whose
house I always have lived, has taught
me everything else I know."

" What do you know ? " inquired the
count, so suddenly that Nino was taken
off his guard. He did not know what
to answer. The count looked very stern
and pulled his moustaches. " You have
not here come," he continued, seeing
that Nino made no answer, " without
knowing something. Evident is it, that,
although a man young be, if he nothing
knows, he cannot a professor be."

" You speak justly, Signor Conte,"
Nino answered at last, " and I do know
some things. I know the Commedia of
Alighieri, and Petrarca, and I have
read the Gerusalemme Liberata, with
Professor Grandi, and I can repeat all
of the Vita Nuova by heart, and some
of the " —

" For the present that is enough,"
said the count. " If you nothing bet-
ter to do have, will you so kind be as
to begin ? "

" Begin ? " — said Nino, not under-
standing.

" Yes, signore ; it would unsuitable
be if I my daughter to the hands of a
man committed unacquainted with the
matter he to teach her proposes. I de-
sire to be satisfied that you all these
things really know."

" Do I understand, Signor Conte,
that you wish me to repeat to you some
of the things I know by heart ? "

" You have me understood," said the
count severely. "I have all the books
bought, of which you speak. You will
repeat, and I will in the book follow.
Then shall we know each other much
better."

Nino was not a little astonished at
this mode of procedure, and wondered
how far his memory would serve him in
such an unexpected examination.

" It will take a long time to ascertain
in this way " — he began.

" This," said the count coldly, as he
opened a volume of Dante, " is the ce-
lestial play by Signor Alighieri. If you
anything know, you will it repeat."

Nino resigned himself and began re-
peating the first canto of the Inferno.
When he had finished it he paused.

" Forwards," said the count, without
any change of manner.

" More ? " inquired Nino.

" March ! " said the old gentleman in
military tone, and the boy went on with
the second canto.

" Apparently know you the begin-
ning." The count opened the book at
random in another place. " The thirti-
eth canto of Purgatory. You will now
it repeat."

" Ah ! " cried Nino, " that is where
Dante meets Beatrice."

" My hitherto not-by-any-means-ex-
tensive, but always from-the-conscience-
undertaken reading, reaches not so far.
You will it repeat. So shall we know."
Nino, passed his hand inside his collar
as though to free his throat, and began
again, losing all consciousness of his
tormentor in his own enjoyment of the
verse.

" When was the Signore Alighieri
born ? " inquired Graf von Lira, very
suddenly, as though to catch him.

"May, 1265, in Florence," answered
the other as quickly.

" I said when, not where. I know
he was in Florence born. When and
where died he ? " The question was
asked fiercely.

152

A Roman Singer.

[August,

"Fourteenth of September, 1321, at
ana."

" I think really you something of
SiLrnore AlighiiTi know/' said the count,
anil shut u;> the volume of the poet, and
the dictionary of dates he had beeu
obliged to consult to verify Nino's an-
swers. " We will proceed."

Nino is fortunately one of those people
whose faculties serve them best at their
utmost need, and during the three hours
— three blessed hours, — that Graf von
Lira kept him under his eye, asking
questions and forcing him to repeat all
manner of things, he acquitted himself
fairly well.

" I have now myself satisfied that
you something know," said the count,
in liis snappish military fashion, and he
shut the last book, and never from that
day referred in any manner to Nino's
extent of knowledge, taking it for grant-
ed that he had made an exhaustive in-
vestigation. " And now," he continued,
" I desire you to engage for the reading
of literature with my daughter, upon the
usual terms." Nino was so much pleased
that he almost lost his self-control, but a
moment restored his reflection.

" I am honored " — he began.

" You are not honored at all," inter-
rupted the count coldly. " What are
the usual terms ? "

" Three or four francs a lesson " —
suggested Nino.

" Three or four francs are not the
usual terms. I have inquiries made.
Five francs are the usual terms. Three
times in the week, at eleven. You will
on the morrow begin. Allow me to
offer you some cigars." And he ended
the interview.

IV.

In a sunny room overlooking the
great courtyard of the Palazzo Carman-
dola, Nino sat down to give Hedwig
von Lira her first lesson in Italian liter-
ature. He had not the remotest idea

what the lesson would be like, for in
spite of the tolerably wide acquaintance
with the subject which he owed to my
care and my efforts to make a scholar of
him, he knew nothing about teaching.
Nevertheless, as his pupil spoke the lan-
guage fluently, though with the occa-
sional use of words of low origin, like

O 7

all foreigners who have grown up in
Rome and have learned to speak from
their servants, he anticipated little diffi-
culty. He felt quite sure of being able
to interpret the hard places, and he had
learnt from me to know the best and
finest passages in a number of authors.

But imagine the feelings of a boy of
twenty, perfectly in love, without hav-
ing the smallest right to be, suddenly
placed by the side of the object of his
adoration, and told to teach her all he
knows — with her father in the next
room and the door open between ! I
have always thought it was a proof of
Nino's determined character, that he
should have got over this first lesson
without accident.

Hedwig von Lira, the contessina, as
we always call her, is just Nino's age,
but she seemed much younger, as the
children of the North always do. I
have told you what she was like to look
at, and you will not wonder that I called
her a statue. She looked as cold as a
statue, just as I said, and so I should
hardly describe her as beautiful. But
then I am not a sculptor, nor do I know
anything about those arts, though I can
tell a good work when I see it. I do
not wish to appear prejudiced, and so I
will not say anything more about it. I
like life in living things, and sculptors
may, if it please them, adore straight
noses, and level brows, and mouths that
no one could possibly eat with. I do not
care in the least, and if you say that I
once thought differently, I answer that
I do not wish to change your opinion,
but that I will change my own as often
as I please. Moreover, if you say that
the contessina did not act like a statue

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

153

in the sequel, I will argue that if you
put marble in the fire it will take longer
to heat and longer to cool than clay ;
only clay is made to be put into the
fire, and marble is not. Is not that a
cunning answer ?

The contessina is a foreigner in every
way, although she was born under our
sun. They have all sorts of talents,
these people, but so little ingenuity in
using them that they never accomplish
anything. It seems to amuse them to
l<-arn to do a great many things, al-
though they must know from the begin-
ning that they can never excel in any
one of them. I dare say the contessina
plays on the piano very creditably, for
even Nino says she plays well ; but is
it of any use to her ?

Nino very soon found out that she
meant to read literature very seriously,
and, what is more, she meant to read it
in her own way. She was as different
from her father as possible in every-
thing else, but in a despotic determina-
tion to do exactly as she liked, she re-
sembled him. Nino was glad that he
was not called upon to use his own judg-
ment, and there he sat, content to look
at her, twisting his hands together be-
low the table to concentrate his atten-
tion, and master himself ; and he read
just what she told him to read, expound-
ing the words and phrases she could not
understand. I dare say that with his
hair well brushed, and his best coat, and
his eyes on the book, he looked as prop-
er as you please. But if the high-born
young lady had returned the glances he
could not refrain from bending upon
her now and then, she would have seen
a lover, if she could see at all.

She did not see. The haughty Prus-
sian damsel hardly noticed the man, for
she was absorbed by the professor. Her
small ears were all attention, and her
slender fingers made notes with a com-
mon pencil, so that Nino wondered at
the contrast between the dazzling white
hand and the smooth, black, varnished

instrument of writing. He took no ac-
count of time that day, and was startled
by the sound of the midday gun and the
angry clashing of the bells. The con-
tessina looked up suddenly and met his
eyes, but it was the boy that blushed.

" Would you mind finishing the can-
to ? " she asked. " There are only ten
lines more " — Mind ! Nino flushed
with pleasure.

" Anzi — by all means," he cried.
" My time is yours, signorina."

When they had done, he rose, and
his face was sad and pale again. He
hated to go, but he was only a teacher,
and at his first lesson, too. She also
rose, and waited for him to leave the
room. He could not hold his tongue.

" Signorina " — he stammered, and
checked himself. She looked at him,
to listen, but his heart smote him when
he had thus arrested her attention.
What could he say, as he stood bowing ?
It was sufficiently stupid, what he said.

" I shall have the honor of returning
to-morrow — the day after to-morrow, I
would say."

" Yes," said she, " I believe that is
the arrangement. Good-morning, Sig-
nor Professore." The title of professor
rang strangely in his ear. Was there
the slightest tinge of irony in her voice ?
Was she laughing at his boyish looks ?
Ugh ! the thought tingled. He bowed
himself out.

That was the first lesson, and the sec-
ond was like it, I suppose, and a great
many others about which I knew noth-
ing, for I was always occupied in the
middle of the day, and did not ask
where he went. It seemed to me that
he was becoming a great dandy, but as
he never asked me for any money from
the day he learned to copy music, I nev-
er put any questions. He certainly had
a new coat before Christmas, and gloves,
and very nice boots, that made me smile
when I thought of the day when he ar-
rived, with only one shoe — and it had
a hole in it as big as half his foot. But

154

A Roman Singer.

[August,

now he grew to be so careful of his ap-
pearance that Muriuccia began to call
him tin- •• .-iunorino." De Pretis said
he was making great progress, and so I
was contented, though I always thought
it \va> a >acrifice for him to be a singer.

Of course, as he went three times
a week to the Palazzo Carmandola, he
began to be used to the society of the
contessiua. I never understood how
he succeeded in keeping up the comedy
of being a professor. A real Roman
would have discovered him in a week.
But foreigners are different. If they
are satisfied, they pay their money and
ask no questions. Besides, he studied
all the time, saying that if he ever lost
his voice he would turn man of letters
— which sounded so prudent that I had
nothing to say. Once, we were walk-
ing in the Corso, and the contessiua
with her father passed in the carriage.
Nino raised his hat, but they did not
see him, for there is always a crowd in
the Corso.

" Tell me," he cried excitedly as they
went by, "is it not true that she is
beautiful ? "

" A piece of marble, my son," said I,
suspecting nothing ; and I turned into
a tobacconist's to buy a cigar.

One day — Nino says it was in No-
vember — the contessina began asking
him questions about the Pantheon. It
was in the middle of the lesson, and he
wondered at her stopping to talk. But
you may imagine whether he was glad
or not to have an opportunity of speak-
ing about something besides Dante.

" Yes, signorina," he answered, " Pro-
fessor Grandi says it was built for pub-
lic baths ; but, of course, we all think it
was a temple."

" Were you ever there at night ? "
asked she, indifferently, and the sun
through the window so played with her
golden hair, that. Nino wondered how
she could ever think of night at all.

"At night, signorina? No indeed!
What should I go there at night to do,

in the dark ! I was never there at
night."

" I will go there at night," she said
briefly.

" Ah — you would have it lit up with
torches, as they do the Coliseum ? "

"No. Is there no moon in Italy,
professore ? "

" The moon, there is. But there is
such a little hole in the top of the Ro-
tonda " — that is our Roman name for
the Pantheon — " that it would be very
dark."

. " Precisely," said she. " I will go
there at night, and see the moon shin-
ing through the hole in the dome."

••Eh," cried Nino laughing, "you
will see the moon better outside in the
piazza. Why should you go inside,
where you can see so little of it ? "

" I will go," replied the contessina.
" The Italians have no sense of the
beautiful — the mysterious." Her eyes
grew dreamy as she tried to call up the
picture she had never seen.

" Perhaps," said Nino, humbly.
" But," he added, suddenly brightening
at the thought, " it is very easy, if you
would like to go. I will arrange it. Will
you allow me ? "

" Yes, arrange it. Let us go on with
our lesson."

I would like to tell you all about it ;
how Nino saw the sacristan of the Pan-
theon that evening, and ascertained
from his little almauach — which has all
kinds of wonderful astrological predic-
tions, as well as the calendar — when
it would be full moon. And perhaps
what Nino said to the sacristan, and
what the sacristan said to Nino might
be amusing. I am very fond of these
little things, and fond of talking too.
For since it is talking that distinguishes
us from other animals, I do not see why
I should not make the most of it. But
you who are listening to me have seen
very little of the Contessina Iledwig as
yet, and unless I quickly tell you more,
you will wonder how all the curious

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

155

things that happened to her could possi-
bly have grown out of the attempt of a
little singer like Nino to make her ac-
quaintance. Well, Nino is a great sing-
er now of course, but he was little once ;
and when he palmed himself off on the
old count for an Italian master without
my knowledge, nobody had heard of him
at all.

Therefore since I must satisfy your
curiosity before anything else, and not
dwell too long on the details — the dear,
commonplace details — I will simply
say that Nino succeeded without diffi-
culty in arranging with the sacristan of
the Pantheon to allow a party of for-
eigners to visit the building at the full
moon, at midnight. I have no doubt he
even expended a franc with the little
man, who is very old and dirty, and
keeps chickens in the vestibule — but
no details !

On the appointed night Nino, wrapped
in that old cloak of mine (which is very
warm, though it is threadbare), accom-
panied the party to the temple, or
church, or whatever you like to call it.
The party were simply the count and
his daughter, an Austrian gentleman of
their acquaintance, and the dear bar-
oness — that sympathetic woman who
broke so many hearts and cared not
at all for the chatter of the people.
Every one has seen her, with her slim,
graceful ways, and her face that was
like a mulatto peach for darkness and
fineness, and her dark eyes and tiger-
lily look. They say she lived entirely
on sweetmeats and coffee, and it is no
wonder she was so sweet and so dark.
She called me '• count " — which is very
foolish now, but if I were going to fall
in love, I would have loved her. I
would not love a statue. As for the
Austrian gentleman, it is not of any im-
portance to describe him.

These four people Nino conducted to
the little entrance at the back of the
Pantheon, and the sacristan struck a
light to show them the way to the door

of the church. Then he put out his
taper, and let them do as they pleased.

Conceive if you can the darkness of
Egypt, the darkness that can be felt,
impaled and stabbed through its whole
thickness by one mighty moonbeam,
clear and clean and cold, from the top
to the bottom. All around, in the cir-
cle of the outer black, lie the great dead
in their tombs, whispering to each other
of deeds that shook the world ; whisper-
ing in a language all their own as yet
— the language of the life to come —
the language of a stillness so dread and
deep that the very silence clashes against
it, and makes dull, muffled beatings in
ears that strain to catch the dead men's
talk : the shadow of immortality falling
through the shadow of death, and burst-
ing back upon its heavenward course
from the depth of the abyss ; climbing
again upon its silver self to the sky
above, leaving behind the horror of the
deep.

So in that lonely place at midnight
falls the moon upon the floor, and
through the mystic shaft of rays ascend
and descend the souls of the dead. Hed-
wig stood out alone upon the white circle
on the pavement beneath the dome, and
looked up as though she could see the
angels coming and going. And, as she
looked, the heavy lace veil that covered
her head fell back softly, as though a
spirit wooed her and would fain look on
something fairer than he, and purer.
The whiteness clung to her face, and
each separate wave of hair was like spun
silver. And she looked steadfastly up.
For a moment she stood, and the hushed
air trembled about her. Then the si-
lence caught the tremor, and quivered,
and a thrill of sound hovered and spread
its wings, and sailed forth from the
night.

" Spirto gentil dei sogni miei " —

Ah, Signorina Edvigia, you know
that voice now, but you did not know it
then. How your heart stopped, and
beat, and stopped again, when you first

156

A Roman Singer.

[August,

hoard that man sing out his whole heart-
ful — you in th<> light and he in the
dark ! Ami his smil shot out to you
upon the sounds, and died fitfully, as
the magic notes dashed their soft wings
against the vaulted roof above you, and
took new life again and throbbed heav-
enward iu broad, passionate waves, till
your breath came thick and your blood
ran fiercely — ay, even your cold north-
ern blood — in very triumph that a
voice could so move you. A voice in
the dark. For a full minute after it
ceased you stood there, and the others,
wherever they might be in the shadow,
scarcely breathed.

That was how Hedwig first heard
Nino sing. When at last she recovered
herself enough to ask aloud the name
of the singer, Nino had moved quite
close to her.

" It is a relation of mine, signorina,
a young fellow who is going to be an
artist. I asked him as a favor to come
here and sing to you to-night. I thought
it might please you."_

" A relation of yours ! " exclaimed
the contessina. And the others ap-
proached so that they all made a group
in the disc of moonlight. " Just think,
my dear baroness, this wonderful voice
is a relation of Signer Cardegna, my
excellent Italian master ! " There was
a little murmur of admiration ; then the
old count spoke.

"Signore," said he, rolling in his gut-
turals, "it is my duty to very much
thank you. You will now, if you please,
me the honor do, me to your all-the-
talents-possible-possessing relation to
present." Nino had foreseen the con-
tingency, and disappeared into the dark.
Presently he returned.

"I am so sorry, Signor Conte," he
said. " The sacristan tells me that
when my cousin had finished he hurried
away, saying he was afraid of taking
some ill if he remained here where it
is so damp. I will tell him how much
you appreciated him."

" Curious is it," remarked the count.
" I heard him not going off."

" He stood in the doorway of the sac-
risty, by the high altar, Signor Conte."

" In that case is it different."

" I am sorry," said Nino. " The sig-
norina was so unkind as to say, lately,
that we Italians have no sense of the
beautiful, the mysterious " —

" I take it back," said Hedwig grave-
ly, still standing in the moonlight.
" Your cousin has a very great power
over the beautiful."

" And the mysterious," added the
baroness, who had not spoken, " for his
departure without showing himself has
left me the impression of a sweet dream.
Give me your arm, Professore Cardegna.
I will not stay here any longer, now
that the dream is over." Nino sprang
to her side politely, though to tell the
truth she did not attract him at first
sight. He freed one arm from the old
cloak, and reflected that she could not
tell in the dark how very shabby it was.

" You give lessons to the Siguora von
Lira ? " she asked, leading him quickly
away from the party.

" Yes — in Italian literature, sig-
nora."

" Ah — she tells me great things of
you. Could you not spare me an hour
or two in the week, professore ? "

Here was a new complication. Nino
had certainly not contemplated setting
up for an Italian teacher to all the
world, when he undertook to give les-
sons to Hedwig.

" Signora " — he began, in a protest-
ing voice.

" You will do it to oblige me, I am
sure," she said eagerly, and her slight
hand just pressed upon his arm a little.
Nino had found time to reflect that this
lady was intimate with Hedwig, and
that he might possibly gain an oppor-
tunity of seeing the girl he loved, if he
accepted the offer.

'• Whenever it pleases you, signora,"
he said at length.

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

157

" Can you come to me to-morrow at
eleven ? " she asked.

" At twelve, if you please, signora,
or half past. Eleven is the contessina's
hour to-morrow."

" At half past twelve, then, to-mor-
row," said she, and she gave him her
address, as they went out into the street.
" Stop," she added, " where do you
live ? "

" Number twenty-seven, Santa Cata-
rina dei Funari," he answered, wonder-
ing why she asked. The rest of the
party came out, and Nino bowed to the
ground, as he bid the contessiua good-
night.

He was glad to be free of that press-
ure on his arm, and he was glad to be
alone, to wander through the streets
under the moonlight and to think over
what he had done.

" There is no risk of my being dis-
covered," he said to himself, confidently.
" The story of the near relation was
well imagined, and besides, it is true.
Am I not my own nearest relation ? I
certainly have no others that I know
of. And this baroness — what can she
want of me ? She speaks italian like
a Spanish cow, and indeed she needs
a professor badly enough. But why
should she take a fancy for me as a
teacher. Ah ! those eyes ! Not the
baroness's. Edvigia — Edvigia de Lira
— Edvigia Ca — Cardegna ! Why
not ? " He stopped to think, and looked
long at the moonbeams playing on the
waters of the fountain. " Why not ?
But the baroness — may the diavolo fly
away with her ! What should I do —
I indeed ! with a pack of baronesses ?
I will go to bed and dream — not of a
baroness ! Macche, never a baroness in
my dreams, with eyes like a snake and
who cannot speak three words properly
in the only language under the sun
worth speaking ! Not I — I will dream
of Edvigia di Lira — she is the spirit of
my dreams. Spirto gentil " — and away
he went, humming the air from the

Favorita in the top of his head, as is his
wont.

The next day the contessina could
talk of nothing during her lesson but the
unknown singer who had made the
night so beautiful for her, and Nino
flushed red under his dark skin and ran
his fingers wildly through his curly hair,
with pleasure. But he set his square
jaw, that means so much, and explained
to his pupil how hard it would be for
her to hear him again. For his friend,
he said, was soon to make his appear-
ance on the stage, and of course he
could not be heard singing before that.
And as the young lady insisted, Nino
grew silent, and remarked that the les-
son was not progressing. Thereupon
Hedwig blushed — the first time he had
ever seen her blush — and did not ap-
proach the subject again.

After that he went to the house of
the baroness, where he was evidently
expected, for the servant asked his
name and immediately ushered him into
her presence. She was one of those lithe,
dark women of good race, that are to be
met with all over the world, and she has
broken a many hearts. But she was
not like a snake at all, as Nino had
thought at first. She was simply a very
fine lady who did exactly what she
pleased, and if she did not always act
rightly, yet I think she rarely acted un-
kindly. After all, thebuon Dio has not
made us all paragons of domestic virtue.
Men break their hearts for so very lit-
tle, and, unless they are ruined, they
melt the pieces at the next flame and
join them together again like bits of
sealing wax.

The baroness sat before a piano in a
boudoir, where there was not very much
light. Every part of the room was
crowded with fans, ferns, palms, Orien-
tal carpets and cushions, books, porce-
lain, majolica, and pictures. You could
hardly move without touching some or-
nament, and the heavy curtains softened
the sunshine, and a small open ike of

158

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

[August,

wood helped the warmth. There was
also an odor of Russian tobacco. The
baroness smiled and turned on the piano
seat.

"Ah, professore ! You come just in
time," said she. " I am trying to sing
such a pretty song to myself, and I can-
not pronounce the words. Come and
teacli me." Nino contrasted the whole
air of this luxurious retreat with the
prim, soldierly order that reigned in the
count's establishment.

" Indeed, signora, I come to teach
you whatever I can. Here I am. I
cannot sing, but I will stand beside you
and prompt the words."

Nino is not a shy boy at all, and he
assumed the duties required of him im-
mediately. He stood by her side, and
she just nodded and began to sing a
little song that stood on the desk of
the piano. She did not sing out of tune,
but she made wrong notes and pro-
nounced horribly.

" Pronounce the words for me," she
repeated every now and then.

" But pronouncing in singing is dif-
ferent from speaking," he objected at
last, and fairly forgetting himself and
losing patience, he began softly to sing
the words over. Little by little, as the
song pleased him, he lost all memory
of where he was, and stood beside her
singing just as he would have done to
De Pretis, from the sheet, with all the
accuracy and skill that were in him.
At the end, he suddenly remembered
how foolish he was. But, after all, he
had not sung to the power of his voice,
and she might not recognize in him the
singer of last night. The baroness
looked up with a light laugh.

" I have found you out," she cried,
clapping her hands. " I have found
you out ! "

" What, signora ? "

" You are the tenor of the Pantheon
— that is all. I knew it. Are you so
sorry that I have found you out ? " she
asked, for Nino turned very white, and
his eyes flashed at the thought of the
folly he had committed.

F. Marion Crawford.

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF EARLY TRADITION.

OF late years an immense amount of
research has been directed to separating
the historical from the traditional ele-
ments in the ancient story of the world.
But hardly any corresponding attention
has been given to the question how
far tradition itself may have been really
historical. It seems to have been taken
for granted that written records or con-
temporary monuments are alone reliable,
and that as soon as we attempt to go be-
yond these we enter a reahn of unlim-
ited exaggeration and romance, in which
myth and fable, allegory and legend,
must necessarily be all mingled together
in such indistinguishable proportions as
to be practically useless.

This impression of the essential un-
trustworthiness of tradition has arisen
quite naturally. Tradition in our own
times is a very loose and trivial thing.
Everything which it is important to have
accurately kept in mind is carefully
committed to writing. All that is left
to tradition is the small gossip of the
neighborhood, and incidents not worth
formally recording. Thus tradition has
become a mere plaything. No wonder
that those who judge only by its opera-
tion in times of written records do not
think much of it as a means of enabling
us really to penetrate into the past.
This has been the general tone of later
historians. Niebuhr, indeed, in his great

1883.]

The Trusttvorthiness of Early Tradition.

159

Roman history, endeavored to make a
distinct use of tradition ; but, practical-
ly, he interpreted it by a sort of " brill-
iant divination," which for the time cap-
tivated the world, but could not perma-
nently hold its ground. By and by came
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who cross-
examined Niebuhr's theories and deduc-
tions like an Old Bailey lawyer, and in-
sisted that nothing must be admitted
that could not be verified by some sort
of contemporaneous record. From his
day this rigid criticism has been gen-
erally accepted as the only " historical
method."

Perhaps the most interesting applica-
tion of this stricter method, at present,
is that to the early Hebrew history.
There has been of late a marked revi-
val of interest in the Old Testament in
its historical and literary aspects. In
Holland, especially, a group of notable
scholars, with Professor Kuenen at
their head, have been almost recon-
structing the story of ancient Israel,
upon the basis of this very distinction
between written records and oral tradi-
tion. They have investigated with sin-
gular care, learning, and fairness the
question of the dates at which the va-
rious Hebrew books came into their
present shape. Their verdict is that
the very earliest of those books are
some written in the prophetic era of the
eighth century B. c. The eighth cen-
tury, then, must be the starting point of
Hebrew history. This is, in itself, quite
a respectable antiquity, but still it does
not bring us within five hundred years
of Moses and the Exodus ; while as for
Abraham, if there can now be supposed
to have ever been such a person, he lies
away back in the nebulous distances of
a thousand years. All these accounts
prior to the eighth century are mere
tradition, and Kuenen's whole treatment
of them is distinctly based upon the
principle that tradition in the ancient
world was simply what it is to-day.
Indeed, in order to show how absolutely

he regards this principle as the true one,
he gives an illustration of its applica-
tion to the Exodus : " On the mo*t fa-
vorable supposition," by his showing,
" a period of more than five centuries "
intervenes between the Exodus and the
earliest written account of it. " Yet,"
he says, " a century was a hundred years
then, as it is now ; " and to make his
meaning more unmistakable, he himself
presses a modern parallel : " The old-
est accounts of the Mosaic time were as
far removed from Israel's lawgiver as
we Dutchmen are from the beginning
of the Hoek and Kabeljauw quarrels.
Suppose that we only knew of the lat-
ter by tradition, which had never been
committed to writing up to this time :
should we have the boldness to trust
ourselves to the historian who now
wrote them for the first time, as a safe
guide ? " Further on he adds,1 " Even
before we have made acquaintance with
the contents of the narratives, we take
it for granted that they only give us
half the truth, if even so much as that."
In reality, as those who have read this
work know, he does not use them as
" half " true, hardly as having more
than the feeblest basis of truth. A
canon which should ascribe half truth
to them would preserve all the great
historical and religious features of the
ancient Hebrew traditions. But the
point at issue is, not the exact propor-
tion of truth with which such traditions
may be credited, but the whole principle
on which that proportion is to be esti-
mated. I believe it can be shown that
ancient tradition, instead of being about
the same thing as modern, hud hardly
anything in common with it ; that it
was a sacred thing, usually most care-
fully guarded and transmitted; and,
therefore, that it is not to be thrown
aside as worthless unless supported by
contemporary records, but rather to be

1 The Religion of Israel, by Dr. A. Ktienen,
vol. i. pp. 17, 18. The edition of the Theological
Translation Fund Library, Williams & Norgate.

160

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

[August,

regarded as itself a species of record,
and classed among the recognized mate-
rials of history.

There is one great fact underlying
the whole subject, which seems to have
been almost entirely lost sight of : that
tradition, before the times of writing,
had a totally different part to play from
anything required of it now. Now, as
has been said, it is an accident, the mere
fragmentary survival of things which
have not been forgotten. Then, it was
an instrument, a careful instrument for
keeping in mind those things which
needed to be remembered. Kuenen says,
indeed, " It is certain that the thirst for
reality which is prop'er to our age was
unknown to antiquity " (vol i. p. 23).
But is this so " certain " ? Some things
have to be remembered among savage
just as among civilized peoples, and
remembered accurately. Among these
necessary things are the forms of their
religion, their laws, the boundaries and
possessions of tribes and families, the
names and deeds of their great men.
Ancient tradition was not merely the
only history ; it was the only law, the
only records of succession, the only title-
deed of property. It may seem to us a
rude instrument ; but nothing is more re-
markable than the way in which, when
man has only a rude instrument, he of-
ten acquires such skill in its use that it
comes to supply his need almost as well
as the far finer appliances of civiliza-
tion. For instance, it would be a great
mistake to estimate what bows and ar-
rows might accomplish in days when
men had nothing better, by seeing what
we can make of archery, now that all
serious work is done by gunpowder and
rifles, and bows and arrows are used
only for playthings. So, again, we must
not judge of what manuscript was, as a
means of preserving and disseminating
literature, by considering how helpless
we should find ourselves if we were sud-
denly deprived of the printing-press,
and had to fall back upon copying by

hand, and that in the slipshod hand-
writing of the present day. It is just
as complete a mistake to judge of what
tradition might be in the old days, when
it was men's only instrument of record,
by what it has become now that every-
thing of serious import is perpetuated in
deeds or print. Modern tradition is mere
formless hearsay ; ancient tradition was
a shaped and formal communication.
Modern tradition is " hearsay," passed,
without responsibility, from any one to
any one else ; ancient tradition was a
formal communication, preserved, re-
cited, handed on through chosen and
responsible persons. Surely, then, an-
cient tradition must be credited with be-
ing carried down from age to age un-
changed, and therefore reliable, to an
extent of which we can form no idea
from this casual hearsay of our modem
days, which cannot pass through five
narrators without being altered or ex-
aggerated out of all recognition.

Proceeding now to consider the ele-
ments of tradition in detail, the first is
the power of memory. Is memory ca-
pable of, preserving through successive
generations the facts of history, or what-
ever else peoples are continuously in-
terested in knowing ? At first one is apt
to say " No," remembering how seldom
two people can agree in their recollec-
tion of even the briefest saying or com-
monest occurrence. But look into the
matter. Note how the power of mem-
ory differs in different people, and how
it may be cultivated, and especially how
it strengthens when systematically de-
pended on, while when little is left to it,
it weakens. It is a small fact, but not
without significance, that among the first
things which children are set to fix in
their memories, apart from any idea of
sacreduess, are long series of historical
names, dates, and events, — English
kings, American colonists and presidents,
— far exceeding in difficulty these Is-
raelitish histories which Kuenen thinks
caimot be trusted because only preserved

1883.]

Tlie Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

161

by memory. This shows that it is less
a question of the power of memory than
of how far memory is looked on as sa-
cred, and guarded so as to hand on its
contents unimpaired. As for evidence of
the power of memory, what better can
we desire than the well-known fact of
the transmission of the Iliad, with its
15,677 lines, for generations, perhaps
for centuries, before it was even writ-
ten ? Yet even that is a mere trifle
compared with the transmission of the
Vedas. The Rig-Veda, with its 1017
hymns, is about four times the length of
the Iliad. That is only a part of the
ancient Vedic literature, and the whole
was composed, and fixed, and handed
down by memory, — only, as Max Miil-
ler says, by " memory kept under the
strictest discipline." There is still a class
of priests in India who have to know by
heart the whole of the Rig- Veda. And
there is this curious corroboration of
the fidelity with which this memorizing
has been carried on and handed down :
that they have kept on transmitting in
the ancient literal form laws prohibiting
practices that have nevertheless become
established. Suttee is now found to be
condemned by the Vedas themselves.
This was first pointed out by their Eu-
ropean students, but has since been ad-
mitted by the native Sanskrit scholars.
Nothing could show more clearly the
faithfulness of the traditional memory
and transmission. It has, too, this fur-
ther bearing on the date of the so-called
Mosaic legislation : it shows that the
fact of customs existing in a country for
ages unchallenged does not prove that
laws condemning such customs must
necessarily be of later origin. But there
is more that is instructive in the trans-
mission of this Vedic literature. There
has been writing in India for twenty-five
hundred years now, yet the custodians of
the Vedic traditions have never trusted
to it. They trust, for the perfect per-
petuation and transmission of the sacred
books, to disciplined memory. They

VOL. LIT. NO. 310. 11

have manuscripts, they have even a
printed text, but, says Max Miiller,1
" they do not learn their sacred lore from
them. They learn it, as their ancestors
learnt it thousands of years ago, from
the lips of a teacher, so that the Vedic
succession should never be broken."
For eight years in their youth they
are entirely occupied in learning this.
" They learn a few lines every day, re-
peat them for hours, so that the whole
house resounds with the noise ; and they
thus strengthen their memory to that
degree that, when their apprenticeship
is finished, you can open them like a
book, and find any passage you like,
any word, any accent." And Max Miil-
ler shows, from rules given in the Vedas
themselves, that this oral teaching of
them was carried on, exactly as now, at
least as early as 500 B. c.

Very much the same was it with those
Rabbinical schools amid which the Tal-
mud gradually grew up. All of that
vast literature, exceeding many times
in bulk Homer and the Vedas and the
Bible all together, was, at any rate until
its later periods, the growth of oral tra-
dition. It was prose tradition, too, which
is the hardest to remember, and yet it
was carried down century after century
in the memory ; and long after it had
been all committed to writing, the old
memorizing continued in the schools.
Indeed, it has not entirely ceased even
now, for my friend Dr. Gottheil, of New
York, tells me that he has had in his
study a man who thus knows the entire
Talmud by heart, and can take it up at
any word that is given him, and go on
repeating it syllable by syllable,, with
absolute correctness.

In presence of such facts, surely we
must be prepared to revise our ideas
of what memory is capable of, derived
from the very limited uses for which we
usually depend upon it now. Such facts
show that memory, consolidated into tra-

1 Origin and Growth of Religion, Scribner's
edition, page 151.

162

The Trustivorthiness of Early Tradition.

[August,

dition, is perfectly competent at least to
act as an accurate instrument for trans-
mitting along many generations what-
ever men are very anxious to have re-
membered. It is simply a question of
being anxious, and of taking special care.

Here, then, we come to the second
point, — care in transmission. We have
to inquire whether, in ages and peoples
that have had to depend on tradition for
their history, we find any general anx-
iety and care to hand down their tradi-
tions, such as should lead us to ascribe
more trustworthiness to them than has
heretofore been usual.

At once we are met by one sure to-
ken of such care, in the fact that the
depositaries of tradition were almost
always a distinct and responsible class,
carefully trained for that very function
and peculiarly honored. The bards and
minstrels always ranked high in the an-
cient world. The British bards were pre-
pared by many years of discipline, and
even as late as the ninth century, when
the importance of the bardic traditions
was lessening, the bard was still eighth
in the king's household. We are apt
to think of these bards as mere singers
of religious myths or heroic deeds, such
as might naturally tend to exaggeration.
But they were much more than this.
•Just as in India the Vedic traditions in-
cluded not only hymns but the laws of
Maim in twelve books, so in Ireland tho
ancient body of jurisprudence known as
the Brehon laws had been handed down
through the bards from immemorial gen-
erations before it was written down in
the old monastic parchments. Indeed,
the various methods adopted by peoples
to keep up a permanent remembrance of
things which they needed to perpetuate
would form one of the most interesting

side-studies of sociology. Even in the
present day there still lingers in some
parts of England one of those curious
survivals which tell of the care ancient-
ly bestowed to keep up exact traditions
of matters important to be accurately

known, — I mean the custom of " beat-
ing the boundaries." In the old times
when the towns were slowly buying or
winning their freedom from baron or
abbot, it was a matter of extreme im-
portance to know and to be able to
prove the boundaries of their townships
or " liberties." There was writing, but
they distrusted it. Writing was to the
uneducated an unsafe thing, open to
fraud, liable to be tampered with ; far
less safe, they thought, than the honest
memory of common men. So year by
year the boys of each town were taken
round, in solemn procession, exactly
along the ancient bounds. Each land-
mark was scored into them, as it were.
At one place they were whipped ; where
the line crossed a stream they were
ducked ; at some other important point
cakes and ale were doled out; anything
to fix the places indelibly in the young
minds, so that even sixty or seventy
years afterwards, if need should arise,
they might be able to give evidence.
Such instances of distrust of writing,
and trust in carefully disciplined mem-
ory, might be multiplied indefinitely.
They may be small matters, but they all
tend to enhance our estimate of early
tradition ; to show how it was used dis-
tinctly as an instrument of record, and
to strengthen our trust in it as one of
the substantial materials of history.

Still this only amounts to an argument
as to what is likely to have been. We
must try to get further back, to some
sort of real evidence. Here, of course,
we are met by the difficulty that, by the
very nature of the case, traditions prior
to written history are not susceptible of
exact verification. There is, however,
a sort of approximate verification possi-
ble, through the researches of archaeol-
ogy. I may compare these archaeological
diggings into the remains of ancient
times to a sort of deep-sea soundings.
We cannot minutely examine the an-
cient times, any more than we can the
ocean beds ; but, like the deep-sea lines

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

163

of the Challenger expedition, the re-
searches of Layard and Rawlinson and
Mariette and Schliemann take us down,
as it were, here and there, into the
depths of antiquity, and yield a general
evidence as to whether the things and
people and doings of the old world
were about like what the traditions tell.

Now I think that no one who has
carefully watched the course of archae-
ological investigation during the past
thirty years can have failed to note the
way in which almost every step among
the uncovered relics of the past has af-
forded unexpected confirmation of its
traditions and stories, and tended to
prove that they have more truth in
them — not less — than used to be sup-
posed.

Herodotus was formerly regarded as
a credulous old gossip, who took in
every kind of hearsay and tradition, and
handed it on without the least regard to
truth. Gibbon sneers at him as having
written, apparently, sometimes for phi-
losophers and sometimes for children.
Yet every day's progress in the knowl-
edge of the ancient world shows that
many of his stories, once passed by as
mere hearsay marvels, were really based
upon fact ; and that sometimes, even in
their very details, he was surprisingly
near the truth. His description of an-
cient lake dwellings ; his accounts of
some of the tribes whom ancient travel-
ers had met with in Africa, such as
the tribe who have no intercourse with
traders directly, but only through the
exchange of goods left in some neutral
place, and the "people of dwarfish
stature," dwelling by the side of a great
river, whom the five Nassamonians
found after many days' journey west-
ward from Libya across the desert, —
these are fairly borne out by the discov-
eries of modern explorers. More curi-
ous yet is the corroboration of his men-
tion of the Egyptian garrison at Syene
deserting and flying to Ethiopia, and of
the Greek auxiliaries of King Psam-

mitichus being sent to bring them back.
This used to be treated as one of the
improbable stories palmed off on him.
But now, far up above Syene, in Nubia,
in the temple of Ibsamboul, on the leg
of one of the colossal statues, there has
been found an inscription, in archaic
Greek characters, carved by those merce-
naries on their return from the fruitless
expedition, and with the names of two
of them, Damearchon and Pelephus.
Quite recently, the London Academy
contained a communication from Mr.
George Dennis confirmatory of another
discredited statement of Herodotus about
the ancient water-works at Samos. The
old historian says that through a moun-
tain one hundred and fifty fathoms high
the Samians had cut a tunnel seven sta-
dia long and eight feet high by as many
wide ; and he describes how " by the
side of this there is also an artificial ca-
nal, which in like manner goes quite
through the mountain, and though only
three feet in breadth is twenty cubits
[thirty feet] deep. This, by means of
pipes, conveys to the city the waters of
a copious spring." It seemed so unlike-
ly that there should be two separate
parallel channels that it was supposed
the whole account was an exaggeration,
based upon some sort of an aqueduct ;
and some caverns with marks of excava-
tion at their opening were supposed to be
all the foundation for the tunnel story.
A few months ago, however, a Samian
priest, in unearthing some stone slabs on
the hillside, came upon the entrance of
a tunnel, and exploring it found that it
is 1270 metres in length, — only thirty
yards off the " seven stadia " of the his-
torian,— and just eight feet high by as
many wide. And, running the whole
length, along the middle of the tunnel
roadway is just such a deep, narrow
channel, barely three feet wide and
nearly thirty feet deep, almost exactly
as Herodotus had stated. The only
difference is that he, evidently writing
from hearsay, represented this channel

164

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

[August,

as having been cut by the side of the
tunnel, whereas it was really sunk along
the centre of it.

Wo have another very interesting
confirmation of ancient tradition — not
of its minute historical accuracy, but of
its fairly preserving the broad lines of
ancient life and doings — in Dr. Schlie-
manu's researches and discoveries. I
know that it cannot be proved that any
one of the buried cities, of which he
found the ruins in successive strata at
Hissarlik, was actually called Troy, and
was the scene of the exact events de-
scribed in the Iliad. So, also, there are
grave disagreements among scholars,
with a preponderance of leaning, I im-
agine, to the negative, as to whether
those curious tombs at Mycenze (of
which all traces had been utterly lost,
though tradition had clearly preserved
the fact of their having existed) can be
regarded as actually the tombs of Aga-
memnon and his companions. Yet these
discoveries have entirely verified the an-
cient traditions of such a city having
been on that mound at Hissarlik, and
of such tombs having been at Mycenae,
even if the still earlier traditions, con-
necting them with specific names and
persons, were only poetic fancies. So,
even at the lowest estimate, these dis-
coveries have given a new interest to
the Homeric poems, and a new confi-
dence that they were not mere retro-
spective myth-painting upon an unknown
past, but the real, even if idealized, tra-
ditions of the actual heroes and strug-
gles of the earlier world.

I know there is something to be said
upon the other side of all this, namely,
that a great many traditions, some even
of a quite probable kind and deeply
rooted, — such as that of William Tell,
— have been rendered very doubtful, or
even disproved, by the progress of his-
torical research. True ; but here is the
curious thing, actually in the very line
of my argument : almost every instance
of a tradition thus exploded or discred-

ited has been of some tradition that has
grown up within the period of writing,
and that refers to comparatively mod-
ern events. In fact, historical research
has acted about equally in these two
opposite directions, — in proving that
tradition prior to written history has
more in it, and tradition subsequent to
written history less than used formerly
to be supposed. Both these results
alike bring out into stronger relief what
a much more sacred and guarded thing
tradition was in that earlier world, in
which it was all that peoples had to de-
pend upon.

We are not left, however, to these
traces of what tradition was in the ear-
lier world. We are able to see what it
actually is to-day, and how it is regarded
and cared for among peoples still in the
half-savage, what we may call prehis-
toric, stage. Every advance into the
confidence whether of Indian tribes, or
of African races, or of the Polynesian
peoples, shows that they have, preserved
among their wise men and regarded as
a peculiarly sacred trust, historical tra-
ditions reaching back to an antiquity
which a few years ago would have been
considered incredible. In Stanley's hur-
ried journey " through the Dark Conti-
nent," it was only at two places that he
remained long enough to win the confi-
dence of the people. But in those places
see what he found ! At Ukerewe, on
Lake Nyanza, they gave him the names
of the fourteen ancestors of the present
king, tracing back the line to a founder
who brought his people in canoes from
another part of that great inland sea.
In the great kingdom of Uganda he
stayed a long time, and obtained not
only the names of their kings through
thirty-five generations (that is, nearly
one thousand years !), but also the tra-
ditions of their history. How do we
know that these are not all imaginary ?
By this: imagination, in evolving past
heroes, can hardly move otherwise than
along the lines of present ideas of hero-

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

165

ism. So that it is very striking to find
those thirty-five generations, beginning
with the mild, humane founder, Kintu, —
one who taught his people agriculture,
gave them laws of mercy, forbade blood-
shed, and finally disappeared, leaving
ever after imbedded in the popular heart
the belief that he would some day reap-
pear, — an utter contrast to all the ideals
and character of Uganda.

But perhaps some of the most sur-
prising illustrations of the care of ancient
peoples for their traditions, and of their
value as trustworthy memorials of his-
tory, are to be found in a quarter which
has hitherto been little studied. When
Captain Cook, a hundred years ago, dis-
covered the Sandwich Islands, with their
population of tattooed cannibals, in the
flint stage of evolution, and without
writing or records, it seemed little likely
that they would be able to contribute
much to the philosophy of history. And
yet, as I have been studying recently
some of the few works which have been
published about these islanders, they
have seemed to me peculiarly valuable
in their relation to this special subject
of tradition. For, as Europeans have
gradually won their confidence, it is
found that, though entirely without writ-
ing, they have genealogies and traditions
reaching back in orderly succession for
many centuries.

The Rev. William Ellis, many years
ago, remarked at Tahiti the marvelous
care with which the people preserved
their genealogies, — mentioning some
reaching back a hundred generations,
of which he thought thirty might be
regarded as accurate and reliable. He
had judged this from an independent in-
vestigation of them ; but it is rendered
more likely by the study of similar
genealogies in Hawaii, another group of
the same Polynesian Archipelago, by
Mr. Abraham Fornander.1 This writer

1 An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its
Origin and Migrations, and the Ancient History
of the Hawaiian People to the time of Kalakaua I.

is a gentleman who has lived for thirty-
four years in the Hawaiian Islands, for
nineteen years has held various high
offices under the government, knows al-
most every inhabitant of the group, and
has for many years been studying their
history and traditions, and comparing
them with independent researches car-
ried on in other and distant groups scat-
tered over the wide Pacific.

I can only glance at the evidence Mr.
Fornander gives of the existence among
the Hawaiians of carefully preserved
genealogies and accompanying tradi-
tions. Thus the line of the present
King Kalakaua is carried back through
forty - three generations of traceable
chiefs ; then come about fifty more,
reaching back to the supposed first man,
in which earlier series the names of
gods occurring give warning of a mytho-
logical elemen t having come.in. Those
forty-three later generations do not
stand for mere links in an impersonal
chain of successions. Even in the first
fifteen of these, which are the nearest
to mere names, certain variations from
the male to the female line in the suc-
cession are noted, and with some of the
names a few venerated altars and very
primitive stone buildings are associated.
But after these first fifteen, say twenty-
eight generations ago, begins in the tra-
ditions a time of great stir and enter-
prise, — heroes, kings, and priests, war-
like adventures, and long voyages to
distant lands. It seems to have been a
period, for several generations, of re-
markable migrations and intercommuni-
cations going on between the different
Polynesian groups, which are separated,
it must be remembered, by thousands of
miles, and when discovered had no
knowledge of each other. And this is
curiously corroborated by the genealo-
gies and traditions of the other groups.
Alike in the Tahiti group, in the Ra-

By Abraham Fornander, Circuit Judge of the Isl-
and of Miiui, II. I., Knight, Companion of the
Koyal Order of Katakaua.

166

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

[August,

ratongas, in the Marquesas, and in the
Gambier Islands, none of them nearer
to each other than about one thousand
miles, and all from two thousand to
three thousand miles from Hawaii, —
in each of these, the latest twenty-five
or thirty generations run quite distinctly
from each other up to some founder, in
each case, whom they venerate as hav-
ing first come over the sea ; while back
of these later twenty-five or thirty gen-
erations, the traditions and genealogies
become partially mixed names and le-
gends from one group appearing in the
others. Thus for thirteen generations
back of this migratory epoch the gene-
alogies of Hawaii and the Marquesas
give the same names, all but one, and in
the same order ; and even in New Zea-
land, nearly five thousand miles away,
the traditions show four generations of
chiefs and their wives, in which seven
out of the eight names are plainly iden-
tical with those of four chiefs and their
wives in ancient Hawaii. It is in this
period anterior to the great migrations
that the chief difficulties occur in the
Hawaiian genealogies, and Mr. Fornan-
der believes the explanation to be —
and it seems likely — that the great
Hawaiian chiefs of that roving period
adopted into their genealogies some of
the great names which they found es-
pecially celebrated among their distant
kinsfolk. But even if we simply take
the last twenty-eight generations of dis-
tinctly historic chiefs, we have a pretty
clear history for eight hundred years,
and that is quite sufficient to illustrate
the argument for the large reliability
of tradition when at all carefully hand-
ed down. Because, for these eight cen-
turies the names are evidently histor-
ic. Elements of mythology and miracle,
of witchcraft and sorcery, still come
in, indeed, but as a whole it is a rec-
ognizable human history. It tells of
famous warriors and famous prophet-
esses. It notes their marriages, their
children, and their deaths. It narrates

wars for love and wars for the succes-
sion ; and all through it links itself nat-
urally in, here and there, with the great
works, institutions, changes, which form
the usual landmarks of a people's life.
It tells how one great temple was orig-
inally built, thirty generations back, by
a certain high priest, who was more
powerful than his king ; and how they
passed the stones for it, hand to hand,
from the quarry, nine miles away. It
tells how the son of a famous king,
twenty-seven generations ago, cut — it
actually appears to be a natural passage
artificially deepened — the channel by
which the great estuary of Pearl River
is still navigable. It tells how, twenty-
three generations ago, the son of anoth-
er king established the great order of
Hawaiian nobility, which to this day
regulates the titles and precedence of
the chiefs with the authority and pre-
cision of a herald's college. It tells
when the road over the great mountains
was paved, a stupendous work, of which
traces still remain. Later on, it tells
how, twelve generations ago, arrived a
vessel, which was wrecked in the surf,
and from which the commander and his
sister, white people, swam ashore, pros-
trating themselves upon the beach, and
afterwards living and marrying among
the natives. Here is a point at which
it is possible to take soundings into con-
temporary European records ; for twelve
generations ago, which would be some-
where about A. D. 1520, the vessels that
would be afloat on the Pacific Ocean and
liable to be wrecked there could almost
be counted on the fingers. Mr. For-
nander has found in Burney's Discov-
eries in the South Sea that on October
31, 1527, three vessels — names and
numbers of the crews all given — left a
little port in New Spain for the Moluc-
cas, a course which would take them a
few degrees south of Hawaii. Only one
of these ships ever turned up, and it
brought word that when they had sailed
about one thousand leagues a great storm

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition.

167

arose and they parted company. " One
thousand leagues " upon that course
would leave those two ships, never after-
wards heard of, within a couple of hun-
dred miles of Hawaii, — a curious coin-
cidence, if nothing more, but at any rate
good to show that there is no improba-
bility in their tradition.

These traditions in Hawaii, as in the
other groups, are preserved in monoto-
nous chants, which remind one most of
all of Hiawatha, by the way in which
the memory is helped by the frequent
duplication of part of one line in the
next. Of these chants there are great
numbers, some of them many hundreds
of lines in length ; many bearing marks,
in their rude archaic forms of speech,
of great antiquity ; and all of them
chanted to-day, just as they have been,
certainly for generations, possibly for
centuries. At first these were guarded
with the utmost jealousy ; indeed, all
over the Polynesian groups they are re-
garded as peculiarly sacred, are made
known only to foreigners who have won
their entire confidence, and even to them
have been given to be written down
only with misgiving and trembling.

One link more is needed. How about
the formation of such traditions ? We
are able to obtain a glimpse even of this.
Mariner, in his account of the natives
of the Tonga Islands, tells how, when he
had resided among them long enough to
understand their language, he found that
they had songs about various events in
their history. These were chanted by a
special class of singers, and he describes
how when one of these, who was the
most famous, had composed a new chant
he taught it carefully, line by line, with
constant repetition, to a company of his
singer-scholars, until it was finally fixed
in their memory in the form in which
it would ever afterwards be sung and
handed down. He heard such a song
chanted describing Captain Cook's visit,
some forty years before, and except for
a little exaggeration it was tolerably

correct in its account. Here we see
such tradition in its actual formation ;
for this chant had already passed into
that permanent shape in which, like the
Iliad, it would probably be perpetuated
indefinitely. A different race these from
the ancient Brahmins, and a different
kind of tradition from the Vedas ; yet
how alike the care taken for their trans-
mission — this teaching to selected pu-
pils, line by line, repeated over and over
again, until indelibly fastened on the
mind — to that which the Vedas pre-
scribed five centuries before the Chris-
tian era, and which Max Miiller tells us
is still practiced to-day !

What, in conclusion, is the practical
point to which we are led by these va-
rious lines of indication ? For this is
what they are, — lines of indication and
suggestion, not of any absolute proof.
Some things, indeed, they prove. They
prove that memory disciplined and sys-
tematized is perfectly capable of carry-
ing and handing down traditions of any
length and any minuteness of successive
names and details. They show what
has in different ages and countries been
done in this way ; and so they demon-
strate, at least, how utterly absurd it is
to lay down any a priori canon of nar-
ratives being untrustworthy because
merely tradition. What has been ad-,
duced surely tends to show that tradi-
tion in the ancient world was not in
general lightly regarded ; was looked on
as a sacred thing ; was protected by so-
lemnities and cautions which have no
analogy whatever in the looseness of
modern hearsay and repetition, and so,
in fact, was not the mere accidental re-
siduum of what had not been forgotten,
but was worked up into a distinct sys-
tem of recording and transmitting what
needed to be remembered.

Tradition was not, of course, such a
sacred and guarded thing among all peo-
ples, nor to the same degree in all ages
even of the same people. Traditions
often bear on their very face the char-

168

The Trustivorthiness of Early Tradition. [August,

acteristics of exaggeration and elements
of miracle which cannot be received
as sober history. But so, likewise, do
many historical records and monuments.
Rameses and Sheshouk are sculptured
in the Egyptian bas-reliefs as giants
among pigmies, and sometimes figures
of the gods are at hand directing or
shielding them ; yet no one proposes, on
this account, to treat these monuments
as historically valueless. The same ten-
dency has doubtless just as naturally
magnified and surrounded with elements
of legendary marvel the heroes of the
bardic songs, the Homeric poems, and
the Hawaiian chants. Possibly the per-
plexing longevity of the patriarchs may
have been simply the Hebrew analogue
for the gigantic stature of the sculptured
Pharaohs. But these exaggerations are
usually in each case easily discerned
and easily allowed for, and ought not
in themselves to discredit the historical
value of the traditions any more than of
the monuments. Travelers say that the
Arab who will lie all day long about the
qualities or achievements of his horse
would fear a curse if he should falsify
its pedigree. Thus, while in some direc-
tions ancient traditions may often have
been magnifying myths, at the basis of
all, the peoples of the older world want-
ed reality, the facts of their past, just
as much as we do.

So, out of all the scattered lights
which we can gather on the subject, a
few helpful principles of criticism for
the practical use of tradition suggest
themselves, besides the general convic-
tion that it must be more trustworthy
than it has been usually regarded. For
one thing, it seems a fair canon of eluci-
dation that tradition is most trustworthy
among those peoples whom we can dis-
cern to have been specially- careful- in
cherishing and transmitting it. This,
again : that it may be credited with hav-
ing best retained that class of facts of
the far past about which a people have
throughout their history shown them-

selves most solicitous. A third rule
will, I think, commend itself : that tra-
ditions which have been handed down
in stereotyped forms of words are of
especial value. Moreover, from the
general qualities of human nature, I
think these supplementary distinctions
will approve themselves, that the things
which most impress themselves on a
people's memory, and are likely to per-
petuate themselves in their traditions,
are such as these : the great events
which have changed their country, their
religion, or their modes of life, and the
great personalities and places associated
with such events; while, on the other
hand, mere numbers will be the weak-
est point ; and as for dates, it is prob-
ably with the strata of tradition as with
the strata of the earth, that — to apply
a principle once given to me by Pro-
fessor Boyd Dawkins — tradition, like
geology, " knows nothing of dates, but
only of successions."

These are, however, only hints, —
suggestions of what may possibly be the
available working principles by which
to apply in historical investigations the
fundamental thought of the trustworthi-
ness of early tradition. But even apart
from such more exact applications of it,
it is a helpful thought. If there is any*
thing in these facts which I have collect-
ed, they mean at least this : that we may
take up again the discarded traditions
of the old heroic ages and of the world's
morning time with far more confidence
than has been usual of late years. Ho-
mer will be read with a new interest,
and Herodotus, and — best of all — the
old-world histories in the Bible. I know
they will not give us detailed narra-
tives, by which this or that point can
be proved, or names and dates to be
learned off as school-boy tasks. But
they will give us glimpses of the ancient
days ; pictures, here and there, of such
men and women as loved and fought in
those old buried cities of Hissarlik, or
meditated by the Gauges, or wandered

1883.]

En Province.

169

from Chaldea with Abraham, or followed
Moses out of the mighty empire of
Egypt into those wild solitudes of Sinai ;
— pictures of life ; landmarks of great

deeds, and thoughts, and worships, and
laws ; a dawn to history, not of abstract
theories, or dazzling, unreal sun myths,
but of real peoples and real men.

Brooke Herford.

EN PROVINCE.

II.

THE COUNTRY OP THE LOIRE.
V.

THE second time I went to Blois I
took a carriage for Chambord and came
back by the Chateau de Cheverny and
the forest of Russy ; a charming little
expedition, to which the beauty of the
afternoon (the finest in a rainy season
that was spotted with bright days) con-
tributed not a little. To go to Cham-
bord, you cross the Loire, leave it on
one side, and strike away through a
country in which salient features become
less and less numerous, and which at last
has no other quality than a look of in-
tense and peculiar rurality, the char-
acteristic, even when it is not the charm,
of so much of the landscape of France.
This is not the appearance of wild-
ness, for it goes with great cultivation ;
it is simply the presence of the delving,
drudging, saving peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peas-
ant's landscape ; not, as in England, a
landlord's. On the way to Chambord
you enter the flat and sandy Sologne.
The wide horizon opens out like a great
potac/er, without interruptions, without
an eminence, with here and there a
long, low stretch of wood. There is an
absence of hedges, fences, signs of prop-
erty ; everything is absorbed in the gen-
eral flatness — the patches of vineyard,
the scattered cottages, the villages, the
children, planted and staring and al-
most always pretty, the women in the

fields, the white caps, the faded blouses,
the big sabots. At the end of an hour's
drive (they will assure you at Blois that
even with two horses you will spend
double that time) I passed through a
sort of gap in a wall, which does duty
as the gateway of the domain of an ex-
iled pretender. I drove along a straight
avenue, through a disfeatured park —
the park of Chambord has twenty-one
miles of circumference — a very sandy,
scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which
the timber must have been cut many
times over and is to-day a mere tangle of
brushwood. Here, as in so many spots
in France, the traveler perceives that he
is in a land of revolutions. Neverthe-
less, its great extent and the long per-
spective of its avenues give this deso-
late boskage a certain majesty ; just
as its shabbiness places it in agreement
with one of the strongest impressions of
the chateau. You follow one of these
long perspectives a proportionate time,
and at last you see the chimneys and
pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently
out of the ground. The filling-in of the
wide moats that formerly surrounded it
has in vulgar parlance let it down, and
given it an appearance of topheaviness
that is at the same time a magnificent
grotesqueness. The towers, the turrets,
the cupolas, the gables, the lanterns, the
chimneys, look more like the spires of a
city than the salient points of a single
building. You emerge from the avenue
and find yourself at the foot of an enor-
mous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
strange mixture of society and solitude.

170

En Province.

[August,

A little village clusters within view of
its stately windows, and a couple of
inns near by offer entertainment to pil-
grims. These things, of course, are inci-
dents of the political proscription which
hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal — royal in its
great scale, its grand air, its indifference
to common considerations. If a cat may
look at a king, a palace may look at a
tavern. I enjoyed my visit to this ex-
traordinary structure as much as if I
had been a legitimist ; and indeed there
is something interesting in any monu-
ment of a great system, any bold presen-
tation of a tradition. You leave your
vehicle at one of the inns, which are
very decent and tidy, and in which every
one is very civil, as if in this latter re-
spect the influence of the old regime per-
vaded the neighborhood, and you walk
across the grass and the gravel to a
small door — a door infinitely subordi-
nate and conferring no title of any kind
on those who enter it. Here you ring
a bell, which a highly respectable per-
son answers (a person perceptibly affil-
iated, again, to the old regime), after
which she ushers you across a vestibule
into an inner court. Perhaps the strong-
est impression I got at Chambord came
to me as I stood in this court. The
woman who had admitted me did not
come with me ; I was to find my guide
somewhere else. The specialty of Cham-
bord is its prodigious round towers.
There are, I believe, no less than eight
of them, placed at each angle of the in-
ner and outer square of buildings ; for
the castle is in the form of a larger
structure which incloses a smaller one.
One of these towers stood before me in
the court ; it seemed to fling its shadow
over the place ; while above, as I looked
up, the pinnacles and gables, and even
the enormous chimneys, soared into the
bright blue air. The place was empty
and silent ; shadows of gargoyles, of ex-
traordinary projections, were thrown
across the clear gray surfaces. One felt

that the whole thing was monstrous. A
cicerone appeared, a languid young man
in a rather shabby livery, and led me
about with a mixture of hurry and de-
lay, of condescension and humility. I
do not profess to understand the plan of
Chambord, and I may add that I do not
even desire to do so ; for it is much
more entertaining to think of it, as
you can so easily, as an irresponsible
insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a wil-
derness of empty chambers, a royal and
romantic barrack. The exiled prince to
whom it gives its title has not the means
to keep up four hundred rooms ; he con-
tents himself with preserving the huge
outside. The repairs of the prodigious
roof alone must absorb a large part of
his revenue. The great feature of the
interior is the celebrated double stair-
case, rising straight through the build-
ing, with two courses of steps, so that
people may ascend and descend without
meeting. This staircase is a truly ma-
jestic piece of humor ; it gives you the
note, as it were, of Chambord. It opens
on each landing to a vast guard-room,
in four arms, radiations of the wind-
ing shaft. One of these arms served
as a theatre on the occasion on which
Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme was
played to Louis XIV. My guide made
me climb to the great open-work lantern
which, springing from the roof at the
termination of the great staircase (sur-
mounted here by a smaller one), forms
the pinnacle of the bristling crown of
Chambord. This lantern is tipped with a
huge fleur de lys in stone — the only one,
I believe, that the Revolution did not
succeed in pulling down. Here, from
narrow windows, you look over the wide,
flat country and the tangled, melancholy
park, with the rotation of its straight
avenues. Then you walk about the roof,
in a complication of galleries, terraces,
balconies, through the multitude of
chimneys and gables. This roof, which
is in itself a sort of castle in the air,
has an extravagant, fabulous quality,

1883.]

En Province.

171

and with its profuse ornamentation —
the salamander of Francis I. is a con-
stant motive — its lonely pavements, its
sunny niches, the balcony that looks
down over the closed and grass-grown
main entrance, a strange, half-sad, half-
brilliant charm. The stone-work is cov-
ered with fine mould. There are places
that reminded me of some of those quiet,
mildewed corners of courts and terraces,
into which the traveler who wanders
through the Vatican looks down from
neglected windows. They show you two
or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon
portraits, hideous tapestries from the la-
dies of France, a collection of the toys
of the enfant du miracle, all military
and of the finest make. Tout celafonc-
tionne, the guide said of these miniature
weapons ; and I wondered, if he should
take it into his head to fire off his little
cannon, how much harm the Cointe de
Chambord would do. From below, the
castle would look crushed by the redun-
dancy of its upper protuberances, if it
were not for the enormous girth of its
round towers, which appear to give it a
robust lateral development. These tow-
ers, however, fine as they are in their
way, struck me as a little stupid ; they
are the exaggeration of an exaggeration.
In a building erected after the days of
defense, and proclaiming its peaceful
character from its hundred embroideries
and cupolas, they seem to indicate a
want of invention. I shall risk the ac-
cusation of bad taste if I say that, im-
pressive as it is, the Chateau de Cham-
bord seemed to me to have altogether a
little of that quality of stupidity. The
trouble is that it represents nothing very
particular ; it has not happened, in spite
of sundry vicissitudes, to have a very
interesting history. Compared with that
of Blois and Araboise, its past is rather
vacant, and one feels to a certain extent
the contrast between its pompous ap-
pearance and its spacious but somewhat
colorless annals. It had indeed the good
fortune to be erected by Francis I.,

whose name by itself expresses a good
deal of history. Why he should have
built a palace in those sandy plains will
ever remain an unanswered question,
for kings have never been obliged to
give reasons. In addition to the fact
that the country was rich in game and
that Francis was a passionate hunter, it
is suggested by M. de la Saussaye, the
author of the very complete little his-
tory of Chambord which you may buy
at the bookseller's at Blois, that he was
governed in his choice of the site by the
accident of a charming woman having
formerly lived there. The Comtesse de
Thoury had a manor in the neighbor-
hood, and the Comtesse de Thoury had
been the object of a youthful passion
on the part of the most susceptible of
princes before his accession to the
throne. This great pile was reared,
therefore, according to M. de la Saus-
saye, as a souvenir de premieres amours !
It is certainly a very massive memento,
and if these tender passages were pro-
portionate to the building that commem-
orates them, they were tender indeed.
There has been much discussion as to
the architect employed by Francis I.,
and the honor of having designed this
splendid residence has been claimed for
several of the Italian artists who early
in the sixteenth century came to seek
patronage in France. It seems well es-
tablished to-day, however, that Cham-
bord was the work neither of Prirnatic-
cio, of Vignola, nor of il Rosso, all of
whom have left some trace of their so-
journ in France ; but of an obscure yet
very complete genius, Pierre Nepveu,
known as Pierre Trinqueau, who is des-
ignated in the papers which preserve in
some degree the history of the origin of
the edifice, as the maistre de fceuvre de
magonnerie. Behind this modest title,
apparently, we must recognize one of
the most original talents of the French
Renaissance ; and it is a proof of the
vigor of the artistic life of that period
that, brilliant production being every-

172

En Province.

[August,

where abundant, an artist of so high
a value should not have been treated by
his contemporaries as a celebrity. We
manage things very differently to-day.
The immediate successors of Francis
I. continued to visit Charnbord, but it
was neglected by Henry IV., and was
never afterwards a favorite residence of
any French king. Louis XIV. appeared
there on several occasions, and the ap-
parition was characteristically brilliant ;
but Chambord could not long detain a
monarch who had gone to the expense
of creating a Versailles ten miles from
Paris. With Versailles, Fontainebleau,
Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud within
easy reach of their capital, the later
French sovereigns had little reason to
take the air in the dreariest province
of their kingdom. Chambord therefore
suffered from royal indifference, though
in the last century a use was found for
its deserted halls. In 1725 it was oc-
cupied by the luckless Stanislaus Leszc-
zynski, who spent the greater part of
his life in being elected King of Poland
and being ousted from his throne, and
who, at this time a refugee in France,
had found a compensation for some of
his misfortunes in marrying his daugh-
ter to Louis XV. He lived eight years
at Chambord, and filled up the moats of
the castle. In 1748 it found an illus-
trious tenant in the person of Maurice
de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who,
however, two years after he had taken
possession of it, terminated a life which
would have been longer had he been
less determined to make it agreeable.

The Revolution, of course, was not kind
to Chambord. It despoiled it in so far
as possible of every vestige of its royal
origin, and swept like a whirlwind
through apartments to which upwards
of two centuries had contributed a
treasure of decoration and furniture.
In that wild blast these precious things
were destroyed or forever scattered. In
IT'.M an odd proposal was made to the
French government by a company of

English Quakers, who had conceived
the bold idea of establishing in the pal-
ace a manufacture of some commodity
not to-day recorded — possibly of soap
or of candles. Napoleon allotted Cham-
bord as a " dotation " to one of his
marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it
was converted, in Napoleonic fashion,
into the so-called principality of Wa-
gram. By the Princess of Wagram, the
marshal's widow, it was after the Res-
toration sold to the trustees of a na-
tional subscription, which had been es-
tablished for the purpose of presenting
it to the infant Duke of Bordeaux, then
prospective King of France. The pre-
sentation was duly made, but the Comte
de Chambord, who had changed his title
in recognition of the gift, was despoiled
of his property by the government of
Louis Philippe. He appealed for redress
to the tribunals of his country, and the
consequence of his appeal was an inter-
minable litigation, by which, however,
finally, after the lapse of twenty-five
years, he was established in his rights. In
1871 he paid his first visit to the domain
which had been offered him half a cen-
tury before, a term of which he had spent
forty years in exile. It was from Cham-
bord that he dated his famous letter of
the 5th of July of that year — the let-
ter, directed to his so-called subjects,
in which he waves aloft the white flag
of the Bourbons. This amazing epistle,
which is virtually an invitation to the
French people to repudiate, as their
national ensign, that immortal tricolor,
the flag of the Revolution and the Em-
pire, under which they have won the
glory which of all glories has hitherto
been dearest to them, and which is asso-
ciated with the most romantic, the most
heroic, the epic, the consolatory, period
of their history — this luckless manifes-
to, I say, appears to give the measure of
the political wisdom of the excellent
Henry V. . It is the most factitious pro-
posal ever addressed to an eminently
ironical nation. On the whole, Chambord

1883.]

En Province.

173

makes a great impression, and the hour
I was there, while the yellow afternoon
light slanted upon the September woods,
there was a dignity in its desolation. It
spoke, with a muffled but audible voice,
of the vanished monarchy, which had
been so strong, so splendid, but to-day
has become a sort of fantastic vision,
like the cupolas and chimneys that rose
before me. I thought, while I lingered
there, of all the fine things it takes to
make up such a monarchy ; and how
one of them is a superfluity of moulder-
ing, empty palaces. Chambord is touch-
ing— that is the best word for it ; and
if the hopes of another restoration are
in the follies of the Republic, a little re-
flection on that eloquence of ruin ought
to put the Republic on its guard. A sen-
timental tourist may venture to remark
that in the presence of several chateaux
which appeal in this mystical manner to
the retrospective imagination, it cannot
afford to be foolish. I thought of all
this as I drove back to Blois by the way
of the Chateau de Cheverny. The road
took us out of the park of Chambord,
but through a region of flat woodland,
where the trees were not mighty, and
again into the prosy plain of the So-
logne ; a thankless soil, all of it, I be-
lieve, but lately much amended by the
magic of cheerful French industry and
thrift. The light had already begun to
fade, and my drive reminded me of a
passage in some rural novel of Madame
Sand. I passed a couple of timber and
plaster churches, which looked very old,
black, and crooked, and had picturesque
wooden porches and galleries encircling
the base. By the time 1 reached Che-
verny, the clear twilight had approached.
It was late to ask to be allowed to visit
an inhabited house ; but it was the hour
at which I like best to visit almost any-
thing. My coachman drew up before a
gateway, in a high wall, which opened
upon a short avenue, along which I took
my way on foot ; the coachmen in those
parts being, for reasons best known to

themselves, mortally averse to driving
up to a house. I answered the challenge
of a very tidy little portress, who sat,
in company with a couple of children,
enjoying the evening air in front of her
lodge, and who told me to walk a little
further and turn to the right. I obeyed
her to the letter, and my turn brought me
into sight of a house as charming as an
old manor in a fairy-tale. I had but a
rapid and partial view of Cheverny ; but
that view was a glimpse of perfection.
A light, sweet mansion stood looking
over a wide green lawn, over banks of
flowers and groups of trees. It had a
striking character of elegance, produced
partly by a series of Renaissance busts
let into circular niches in the facade.
The place looked so private, so reserved,
that it seemed an act of violence to
ring, a stranger and foreigner, at the
graceful door. But if I hud not rung I
should be unable to express — as it is
such a pleasure to do — my sense of the
exceeding courtesy with which this ad-
mirable house is shown. It was near
the dinner-hour — the most sacred hour
of the day ; but I was freely conducted
into the inhabited apartments. They
are extremely beautiful. What I chiefly
remember is the charming staircase of
white embroidered stone, and the great
salle des gardes and chambre a coucher du
roi on the second floor. Cheverny,
built in 1634, is of a much later date
than the other royal residences of this
part of France ; it belongs to the end of
the Renaissance, and has a touch of the
rococo. The guard-room is a superb
apartment, and as it contains little save
its magnificent ceiling and fire-place and
certain dim tapestries on its walls, you
the more easily take the measure of its
noble proportions. The servant opened
the shutters of a single window, and the
last rays of the twilight slanted into the
rich brown gloom. It was in the same
picturesque fashion that I saw the bed-
room (adjoining) of Henry IV., where
a legendary-looking bed, draped in folds

174

En Province.

[August,

long unaltered, defined itself in the
haunted dusk. Cheverny remains to me
a very charming, a partly mysterious vis-
ion. I drove back to Blois in the dark,
some nine miles, through the forest of
Russy, which belongs to the state, and
which, though consisting apparently of
small timber, looked under the stars
sufficiently vast and primeval. There
was a damp autumnal smell and the
occasional sound of a stirring thing, and
as I moved through the evening air I
thought of Francis I. and Henry IV.

VI.

You may go to Amboise either from
Blois or from Tours ; it is about half-
way between these towns. The great
point is to go, especially if you have put
it off repeatedly ; and to go, if possible,
on a day when the great view of the
Loire, which you enjoy from the battle-
ments and terraces, presents itself un-
der a friendly sky. Three persons, of
whom the author of these lines was one,
spent the greater part of a perfect Sun-
day morning in looking at it. It was
astonishing, in the course of the rainiest
season in the memory of the oldest
Tourangeau, how many perfect days we
found to our hand. The town of Am-
boise lies, like Tours, on the left bank
of the river, a little white-faced town,
staring across an admirable bridge, and
leaning, behind, as it were, against the
pedestal of rock on which the dark cas-
tle masses itself. The town is so small,
the pedestal so big, and the castle so
high and striking, that the clustered
houses at the base of the rock are like
the crumbs that have fallen from a well-
laden table. You pass among them,
however, to ascend by a circuit to the
chfiteau, which you attack, obliquely,
from behind. It is the property of the
Comte de Paris, another pretender to
the French throne ; having come to him
remotely, by inheritance, from his ances-
tor, the Due de Penthievre, who toward
the close of the last century bought it

from the crown, which had recovered
it after a lapse. Like the castle of Blois
it has been sadly injured and defaced
by base uses, but unlike the castle of
Blois it has not been completely re-
stored. " It is very, very dirty, but very
curious:" it is in these terms that I
heard it described by an English lady,
who was generally to be found engaged
upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little
salon de lecture of the hotel at Tours.
The description is not inaccurate ; but it
should be said that if part of the dirti-
ness of Amboise is the result of its hav-
ing served for years as a barrack and as
a prison, part of it comes from the pres-
ence of restoring stone-masons, who
have woven over a considerable portion
of it a mask of scaffolding. There is a
good deal of neatness as well, and the
restoration of some of the parts seems
finished. This process, at Amboise,
consists for the most part of simply re-
moving the vulgar excrescences of the
last two centuries. The interior is vir-
tually a blank, the old apartments hav-
ing been chopped up into small modern
rooms ; it will have to be completely re-
constructed. A worthy woman, with a
military profile and that sharp, positive
manner which the goodwives who show
you through the chateaux of Touraine
are rather apt to have, and in whose
high respectability, to say nothing of
the frill of her cap and the cut of her
thick brown dress, my companions and
I thought we discovered the particular
note or nuance of Orleanism — a com-
petent, appreciative, peremptory person,
I say — attended us through the par-
ticularly delightful hour we spent upon
the ramparts of Amboise. Denuded
and disfeatured within, and bristling
without with bricklayers' ladders, the
place was yet extraordinarily impressive
and interesting. I should confess that
we spent a great deal of time in looking
at the view. Sweet was the view and
magnificent ; we preferred it so much to
certain portions of the interior, and to

1883.]

En Province.

175

occasional effusions of historical infor-
mation, that the old lady with the profile
sometimes lost patience with us. We
laid ourselves open to the charge of pre-
ferring it even to the little chapel of
St. Hubert, which stands on the edge
of the great terrace, and has, over the
portal, a wonderful sculpture of the mi-
raculous hunt of that holy man. In the
way of plastic art this elaborate scene
is the gem of Amboise. It seemed to
us that we had never been in a place
where there are so many points of van-
tage to look down from. In the matter

of position Amboise is certainly supreme
among the old houses of the Loire ; and
I say this with a due recollection of the
claims of Chaumont and of Loches —
which latter, by the way (excuse the
Hibernianism), is not on the Loire. The
platforms, the bastions, the terraces, the
high-perched windows and balconies,
the hanging gardens and dizzy crenela-
tions of this complicated structure, keep
you in perpetual relation with an im-
mense horizon. The great feature of
the place is the obligatory round tower
which occupies the northern end of it,
and which has now been completely re-
stored. It is of astounding size, a for-
tress in itself, and contains (instead of a
staircase) a wonderful inclined plane, so
wide and so gradual that a coach and
four might be driven to the top. This
colossal cylinder has to-day no visible
use ; but it corresponds, happily enough,
with the great circle of the prospect.
The gardens of Amboise, perched in the
air, covering the irregular remnants of
the platform on which the castle stands,
and making up in picturesqueness what
they lack in extent, constitute of course
but a scanty domain. But bathed, as
we found them, in the autumn sunshine,
and doubly private from their aerial
site, they offered irresistible opportu-
nities for a stroll, interrupted, as one
leaned against their low parapets, by
long, contemplative pauses. I remem-
ber, in particular, a certain terrace,

planted with clipped limes, upon which
we looked down from the summit of the
big tower. It seemed from that point
to be absolutely necessary to one's hap-
piness to go down and spend the rest
of the morning there ; it was an ideal
place to walk to and fro and talk. Our
venerable conductress, to whom our re-
lation had gradually become more filial,
permitted us to gratify this innocent
wish — to the extent, that is, of taking
a turn or two under the mossy tilleuls.
At the end of this terrace is the low
door in a wall, against the top of which,
in 1496, Charles VIII., according to
an accepted tradition, knocked his head
to such good purpose that he died. It
was within the walls of Amboise that
his widow, Anne of Brittany, already in
mourning for three children, two of
whom we have seen commemorated in
sepulchral marble at Tours, spent the
first violence of that grief which was
presently dispelled by a union with her
husband's cousin and successor, Louis
XII. Amboise was a frequent resort
of the French court during the sixteenth
century; it was here that the young
Mary Stuart spent sundry hours of her
first marriage. The wars of religion
have left here the ineffaceable stain
which they left wherever they passed.
An imaginative visitor at Amboise to-
day may fancy that the traces of blood
are mixed with the red rust on the
crossed iron bars of the grim-looking
balcony, to which the heads of the Hu-
guenots executed on the discovery of
the conspiracy of La Renaudie are ru-
mored to have been suspended. There
was room on the stout balustrade — an
admirable piece of work — for a ghast-
ly array. The same rumor represents
Catherine de' Medici and the young
queen as watching from this balcony
the noyades of the captured Huguenots
in the Loire. The facts of history are
bad enough, the fictions are, if possible,
worse ; but there is little doubt that the
future Queen of Scots learnt the first

176

lessons of life at a horrible school. If
in subsequent years she was a prodigy
of innocence and virtue, it was not the
fault of her whilom mother-in-law, of
her uncles of the house of Guise, or of
the examples presented to her either at
the windows of the castle of Amboise
or in its more private recesses. It was
difficult to believe in these dark deeds,
however, as we looked through the
golden morning at the placidity of the
far-shining Loire. The ultimate conse-
quence of this spectacle was a desire to
follow the river as far as the castle of
Chaumont. It is true that the cruelties
practiced of old at Amboise might have
seemed less phantasmal to persons des-
tined to suffer from a modern form of
inhumanity. The mistress of the little
inn at the base of the castle rock — it
stands very pleasantly beside the river,
and we had breakfasted there — de-
clared to us that the Chateau de Chau-
mont, which is often, during the autumn,
closed to visitors, was at that particular
moment standing so wide open to re-
ceive us that it was our duty to hire one
of her carriages and drive thither with
speed. This assurance was so satisfac-
tory that we presently found ourselves
seated in this wily woman's most com-
modious vehicle, and rolling, neither too
fast nor too slow, along the margin of
the Loire. The drive of about an hour,
beneath constant clumps of chestnuts,
was charming enough to have been
taken for itself ; and indeed, when we
reached Chaumont, we saw that our re-
ward was to be simply the usual reward
of virtue — the consciousness of having
attempted the right. The Chateau de
Chaumont was inexorably closed : so
we learned from a talkative lodge-keep-
er, who gave what grace she could to
her refusal. This good woman's dilem-
ma was almost touching ; she wished to
reconcile two impossibles. The castle
was not to be visited, for the family of
its master was staying there; and yet
she was loath to turn away a party of

En Province. [August,

which she was good enough to say that
it had a " grand genre" for, as she also
remarked, she had her living to earn.
She tried to arrange a compromise, one
of the elements of which was that we
should descend from our carriage and

trudge up a hill, which would bring us
to a designated point, where, over the
paling of the garden, we might obtain
an oblique and surreptitious view of a
small portion of the castle-walls. This
suggestion led us to inquire (of each
other) to what degree of baseness it is
allowed to an enlightened lover of the
picturesque to resort, in order to catch
a glimpse of a feudal chateau. One
of our trio decided, characteristically,
against any form of derogation ; so she
sat in the carriage and sketched some
object that was public property, while
her two companions, who were not so
proud, trudged up a muddy ascent which
formed a kind of back-stairs. It is per-
haps no more than they deserved that
they were disappointed. Chaumont is
feudal, if you please ; but the modern
spirit is in possession. It forms a vast
clean-scraped mass, with big round tow-
ers, ungarnished with a leaf of ivy or a
patch of moss, surrounded by gardens of
moderate extent (save where the muddy
lane of which I speak passes near it),
and looking rather like an enormously
magnified villa. The great merit of
Chaumont is its position, which almost
exactly resembles that of Amboise : it
sweeps the river up and down, and
seems to look over half the province.
This, however, was better appreciated as,
after coming down the hill and reenter-
ing the carriage, we drove across the
long suspension-bridge which crosses the
Loire just beyond the village, and over
which we made our way to the small
station of Onzain, at the farther end, to
take the train back to Tours. Look
back from the middle of this bridge ;
the whole picture composes, as the
painters say. The towers, the pinna-
cles, the fair front of the chateau,

1883.]

En Province,

177

perched above its fringe of garden and
the rusty roofs of the village, and fac-
ing the afternoon sky, which is reflected
also in the great stream that sweeps be-
low — all this makes a contribution to
your happiest memories of Touraine.

VII.

We never went to Chinon ; it was a
fatality. We planned it a dozen times,
but the weather interfered, or the trains
did n't suit, or one of the party was fa-
tigued with the adventures of the day
before. This excursion was so much
postponed that it was finally postponed
to everything. Besides, we had to go
to Chenonceaux, to Azay-le-Rideau, to
Langeais, to Loches. So I have not
the memory of Chinon ; I have only the
regret. But regret, as well as memory,
has its visions ; especially when, like
memory, it is assisted by photographs.
The castle of Chinon, in this form, ap-
pears to me as an enormous ruin, a
mediaeval fortress of the extent almost
of a city. It covers a hill above the
Vienne, and after being impregnable in
its time is indestructible to-day. (I risk
this phrase in the face of the prosaic
truth. Chinon, in the days when it was
a prize, more than once suffered cap-
ture, and at present it is crumbling inch
by inch. It is apparent, however, I be-
lieve, that these inches encroach little
upon acres of masonry.) It was in the
castle that Jeanne Dare had her first in-
terview with Charles VII., and it is in
the town that Francois Rabelais is sup-
posed to have been born. To the cas-
tle, moreover, the lover of the pictur-
esque is earnestly recommended to di-
rect his steps. But one cannot do every-
thing, and I would rather have missed
Chinon than Chenonceaux. Fortunate
exceedingly were the few hours that we
passed at this exquisite residence.

"In 1747," says Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, in his Confessions, " we went to
spend the autumn in Touraine, at the
chateau of Chenonceaux, a royal resi-

VOL. LII. — NO. 310. 12

dence upon the Cher, built by Henry II.
for Diana of Poitiers, whose initials are
still to be seen there, and now in pos-
session of M. Dupiri, the farmer -gen-
eral. We amused ourselves greatly in
this fine spot ; the living was of the best,
and I became as fat as a monk. We
made a great deal of music and -acted
comedies." This is the only description
that Rousseau gives of one of the most
picturesque houses in France, and of an
episode that must have counted as one
of the most agreeable in his uncomfort-
able career. The eighteenth century
contented itself with general epithets,
and when Jean-Jacques has said that
Chenonceaux was a " beau lieu " he
thinks himself absolved from further
characterization. We later sons of time
have, both for our pleasure and our pain,
invented the fashion of special terms,
and I am afraid that even common de-
cency obliges me to pay some larger
tribute than this to the architectural
gem of Touraine. Fortunately, I can
discharge my debt with gratitude. In
going from Tours you leave the valley
of the Loire and enter that of the Cher,
and at the end of about an hour you see
the turrets of the castle on your right,
among the trees, down in the meadows,
beside the quiet little river. The sta-
tion and the village are about ten min-
utes' walk from the chateau, and the
village contains a very tidy inn, where,
if you are not in too great a hurry to
commune with the shades of the royal
favorite and the jealous queen, you will
perhaps stop and order a dinner to be
ready for you in the evening. A straight,
tall avenue leads to the grounds of the
castle ; what I owe to exactitude com-
pete me to add that it is crossed by the
raihvay-line. The place is so arranged,
however, that the chateau need know
nothing of passing trains — which pass,
indeed, though the grounds are not large,
at a very sufficient distance. I may add
that the trains throughout this part of
France have a noiseless, desultory,

178

En Province.

dawdling, almost stationary quality,
which makes them less of an offense
than usual. It was a Sunday afternoon,
and the light was yellow, save under the
trees of the avenue, where, in spite of
the waning of September, it was duskily
green. Three or four peasants, in festal
attire, were strolling about. On a bench,
at the beginning of the avenue, sat a
man with two women. As I advanced
with my companions he rose, after a
sudden stare, and approached me with
a smile, in which (to be Johnsonian for
a moment) certitude was mitigated by
modesty, and eagerness was embellished
with respect. He came toward me with
a salutation that I had seen before, and
I am happy to say that after an instant
I ceased to be guilty of the brutality of
not knowing where. There was only
one place in the world where people
smile like that — only one place where
the art of salutation has that perfect
grace. This excellent creature used to
crook his arm, in Venice, when I stepped
into my gondola ; and I now laid my
hand on that member with the familiar-
ity of glad recognition ; for it was only
surprise that had kept me even for a
moment from accepting the genial Fran-
cesco as an ornament of the landscape
• of Touraine. What on earth — the
phrase is the right one — was a Vene-
tian gondolier doing at Chenonceaux ?
He had been brought from Venice, gon-
dola and all, by the mistress of the
charming house, to paddle about on the
Cher. Our meeting was affectionate,
though there was a kind of violence in
seeing him so far from home. He was
too well dressed, too well fed ; he had
grown stout, and his nose had the tinge
of good claret. He remarked that the
life of the household to which he had
the honor to belong was that of a casa
regia ; which must have been a great
change for poor Checco, whose habits
in Venice were not regal. However,
he was the sympathetic Checco still ;
and for five minutes after I left him I

thought less about the little pleasure-
house by the Cher than about the pal-
aces of the Adriatic. But attention was
not long in coming round to the charm-
ing structure that presently rose before
us. The pale yellow front of the cha-
teau, the small scale of which is at first
a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
court, at the entrance of which a massive
and detached round tower, with a turret
on its brow (a relic of the building that
preceded the actual villa), appears to
keep guard. This court is not inclosed
— or is inclosed, at least, only by the
gardens, portions of which are at pres-
ent in a state of reformation. There-
fore, though Chenonceaux has no great
height, its delicate fa§ade stands up
boldly enough. This facade, one of the
most finished things in Touraine, con-
sists of two stories, surmounted by an
attic which, as so often in the buildings
of the French Renaissance, is the richest
part of the house. The high-pitched
roof contains three windows of beautiful
design, covered with embroidered caps
and flowering into crocketed spires.
The window above the door is deeply
niched ; it opens upon a balcony made
in the form of a double pulpit — one of
the most charming features of the front.
Chenonceaux is riot large, as I say, but
into its delicate compass is packed a
great deal of history — history which
differs from that of Amboise and Blois
in being of the private and sentimental
kind. The echoes of the place, faint
and far as they are to-day, are not po-
litical, but personal. Chenonceaux dates,
as a residence, from the year 1515, when
the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public
functionary who had grown rich in
handling the finances of Normandy, and
had acquired the estate from a family
which, after giving it many feudal lords,
had fallen into poverty, erected the pres-
ent structure on the foundations of an
old mill. The design is attributed, with
I know not what justice, to Pierre Nep-
veu, alias Triuqueau, the audacious ar-

1883.]

En Province.

179

chitect of Chambord. On the death of
Bohier the house passed to his son, who,
however, was forced, tinder cruel press-
ure, to surrender it to the crown, in
compensation for a so-called deficit in
the accounts of the late superintendent
of the treasury. Francis I. held the
place till his death, but Henry II., on
ascending the throne, presented it out
of hand to that mature charmer, the ad-
mired of two generations, Diana of Poi-
tiers. Diana enjoyed it till the death
of her protector ; but when this event
occurred, the widow of the monarch,
who had been obliged to submit in si-
lence, for years, to the ascendency of a
rival, took the most pardonable of all
the revenges with which the name of
Catherine de' Medici is associated, and
turned her out-of-doors. Diana was
not in want of refuges, and Catherine
went through the form of giving her
Chaumont in exchange ; but there was
only one Chenonceaux. Catherine de-
voted herself to making the place more
completely unique. The feature that
renders it sole of its kind is not appre-
ciated till you wander round to either
side of the house. If a certain spring-
ing lightness is the characteristic of
Chenonceaux, if it bears in every line
the aspect of a place of recreation, a
place intended for delicate, chosen pleas-
ures, nothing can confirm this expres-
sion better than the strange, unexpected
movement with which, from behind, it
carries itself across the river. The earli-
er building stands in the water ; it had
inherited the foundations of the mill de-
stroyed by Thomas Bohier. The first
step, therefore, had been taken upon
solid piles of masonry, and the ingenious
Catherine — she was a rajfinee — sim-
ply proceeded to take the others. She
continued the piles to the opposite bank
of the Cher, and over them she threw
a long, straight gallery of two stories.
This part of the chateau, which looks
simply like a house built upon a bridge
and occupying its entire length, is of

course the great curiosity of Chenon-
ceaux. It forms on each floor a charm-
ing corridor, which, within, is illumi-
nated from either side by the flickering
river-light. The architecture of these
galleries, seen from without, is less ele-
gant than that of the main building, but
the aspect of the whole thing is delight-
ful. I have spoken of Chenonceaux
as a " villa," using the word advisedly,
for the place is neither a castle nor a
palace. It is a great villa, but it has
the villa quality — the look of being in-
tended for life in common. This look
is not at all contradicted* by the wing
across the Cher, which only suggests in-
timate pleasures, as the French say :
walks, in pairs, on rainy days ; games
and dances on autumn nights ; together
with as much as may be of moonlighted
dialogue (or silence) in the course of
evenings more genial still, in the well-
marked recesses of windows. It is safe
to say that such things took place there
in the last century, during the kindly
reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin.
This period presents itself as the hap-
piest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I
know not what festive train the great
Diana may have led, and my imagina-
tion, I am afraid, is only feebly kindled
by the records of the luxurious pastimes
organized on the banks of the Cher by
the terrible daughter of the Medici,
whose appreciation of the good things
of life was perfectly consistent with a
failure to perceive why others should
live to enjoy them. The best society
that ever assembled there was collected
at Chenonceaux during the middle of
the eighteenth century. This was sure-
ly, in France at least, the age of good
society, the period when it was well for
appreciative people to have been born.
Such people should of course have be-
longed to the fortunate few, and not to
the miserable many, for the prime con-
dition of a society being good is that it
be not too large. The sixty years that
preceded the French Revolution were

180

En Province.

[August,

the golden age of fireside talk and of
those pleasures which proceed from the
presence of women in whom the social
art is both instinctive and acquired.
The women of that period were, above
all, good company ; the fact is attested
by a thousand documents. Chenonceaux
offered a perfect setting to free conversa-
tion ; and infinite joyous discourse must
have mingled with the liquid murmur of
the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only
a great man of business, but a man of
honor and a patron of knowledge ; and
his wife was gracious, clever, and wise.
They had acquired this famous property
by purchase (from one of the Bourbons ;
for Chenonceaux, for two centuries after
the death of Catherine de' Medici, re-
mained constantly in princely hands),
and it was transmitted to their son, Du-
pin de Francueil, grandfather of Ma-
dame George Sand. This lady, in her
Correspondence, lately published, de-
scribes a visit that she paid, more than
thirty years ago, to those members of
her family who were still in possession.
The owner of Chenonceaux to-day is the
daughter of an Englishman naturalized
in France. But I have wandered far
from my story, which is simply a sketch
of the surface of the place. Seen ob-
liquely, from either side, in combination
with its bridge and gallery, the chateau
is singular and fantastic, a striking ex-
ample of a willful and capricious concep-
tion. Unfortunately, all caprices are
not so graceful and successful, and I
grudge the honor of this one to the false
and blood-polluted Catherine. (To be
exact, 1 believe the arches of the bridge
were laid by the elderly Diana. It was
Catherine, however, who completed the
monument.) Within, the house has
been, as usual, restored. The staircases
and ceilings, in all the old royal resi-
dences of this part of France, are the
parts that have suffered least ; many of
them have still much of the life of the
old time about them. Some of the
chambers of Chenonceaux, however, en-

cumbered as they are with modern de-
tail, derive a sufficiently haunted and
suggestive look from the deep setting of
their beautiful windows, which thickens
the shadows and makes dark corners.
There is a charming little gothic chapel,
with its apse hanging over the water,
fastened to the left flank of the house.
Some of the upper balconies, which look
along the outer face of the gallery, and
either up or down the river, are delight-
ful protected nooks. We walked through
the lower gallery to the other bank of
the Cher ; this fine apartment appeared
to- be for the moment a purgatory of
ancient furniture. It terminates rather
abruptly ; it simply stops with a blank
wall. There ought, of course, to have
been a pavilion here, though I prefer
very much the old defect to any modern
remedy. The wall is not so blank,
however, but that it contains a door
which opens on a rusty draw-bridge.
This draw-bridge traverses the small gap
which divides the end of the gallery
from the bank of the stream. The
house, therefore, does not literally rest
on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests
on one arid just fails to rest on the other.
The pavilion would have made that up ;
but after a moment we ceased to miss
this imaginary feature. We passed the
little draw-bridge, and wandered a while
beside the river. From this opposite
bank the mass of the chateau looked
more charming than ever ; and the little
peaceful, lazy Cher, where two or three
men were fishing in the eventide, flowed
under the clear arches and between the
solid pedestals of the part that spanned
it, with the softest, vaguest light on its
bosom. This was the right perspective ;
we were looking across the river of time.
The whole scene was deliciously mild.
The moon came up ; we passed back
through the gallery and strolled about
a little longer in the gardens. It was
very still. I met my old gondolier in
the twilight. He showed me his gon-
dola ; but I hated, somehow, to see it

1883.]

En Province.

181

there. I don't like, as the French say,
to meter les genres. A gondola in a lit-
tle flat French river ? The image was
not less irritating, if less injurious, than
the spectacle of a steamer in the Grand
Canal, which had driven me away from
Venice a year and a half before. We
took our way back to the Grand Mo-
narque, and waited in the little inn-parlor
for a late train to Tours. We were not
impatient, for we had an excellent din-
ner to occupy us ; and even after we
had dined we were still content to sit
a while and exchange remarks upon the
superior civilization of France. Where
else, at a village-inn, should we have
fared so well ? Where else should we
have sat down to our refreshment with-
out condescension ? There were two
or three countries in which it would
not have been well for us to arrive
hungry on a Sunday evening, at so mod-
est an hostelry. At the little inn at
Chenonceaux the cuisine was not only
excellent, but the service was graceful.
We were waited on by mademoiselle
and her mamma ; it was so that made-
moiselle alluded to the elder lady, as she
uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray
mousseux. We were very comfortable,
very genial ; we even went so far as to
say to each other that Vouvray mous-
seux was a delightful wine. From this
opinion, indeed, one of our trio differed ;
but this member of the party had al-
ready exposed herself to the charge of
being too fastidious, by declining to de-
scend from the carriage at Chaumont
and take that back-stairs view of the
castle.

VIII.

Without fastidiousness, it was fair
to declare, on the other hand, that the
little inn at Azay-lc-Rideau was very
bad. It was terribly dirty, and it was
in charge of a fat megere whom the ap-
pearance of four trustful travelers — we
' were four, with an illustrious fourth, on
that occasion — roused apparently to
fury. I attached a great importance to

this incongruous hostess, for she uttered
the only uncivil words I heard spoken
(in connection with any business of my
own) during a tour of some six weeks
in France. Breakfast not at Azay-le-
Rideau, therefore, too trustful traveler ;
or if you do so, be either very meek
or very bold. Breakfast not, save un-
der stress of circumstance ; but let no
circumstance whatever prevent you from
going to see the admirable chateau,
which is almost a rival of Chenonceaux.
The village lies close to the gates, though
after you pass these gates you leave it
well behind. A little avenue, as at
Chenonceaux, leads to the house, mak-
ing a pretty vista as you approach the
sculptured doorway. Azay is a most
perfect and beautiful thing ; I should
place it third in any list of the great
houses of this part of France in which
these houses should be ranked accord-
ing to charm. For beauty of detail it
comes after Blois and Chenonceaux ;
but it comes before Araboise and Cham-
bord. On the other hand, of course, it
is inferior in majesty to either of these
vast structures. Like Chenonceaux it
is a watery place, though it is more
meagrely moated than the little chateau
on the Cher. It consists of a large
square corps de logis, with a round tower
at each angle, rising out of a somewhat
too slumberous pond. The water — the
water of the Indre — surrounds it, but it
is only on one side that it bathes its feet
in the moat. On one of the others there
is a little terrace, treated as a garden,
and in front there is a wide court, formed
by a wing which, on the right, comes
forward. This front, covered with sculp-
tures, is of the richest, stateliest effect.
The court is approached by a bridge over
the pond, and the house would reflect
itself in this wealth of water if the
water were a trifle less opaque. But
there is a certain stagnation — it affects
more senses than one — about the pic-
turesque pools of Azay. On the hither
side of the bridge is a garden, over-

182

En Province.

[August,

shadowed by fine old sycamores — a
garden shut in by greenhouses and by
a fine last-century gateway, flanked with
twin lodges. Beyond the cheateau and
the standing waters behind it is a so-
called pare, which, however, it must be
confessed, has little of park-like beauty.
The old houses (many of them, that is)
remain, in France ; but the old timber
does not remain, and the denuded aspect
of the few acres that surround the cha-
teaux of Touraine is pitiful to the trav-
eler who has learned to take the meas-
ure of such things from the manors and
castles of England. The domain of the
lordly Chaumont is that of an English
suburban villa ; and in that and in other
places there is little suggestion, in the
untended aspect of walk and lawns,
of the vigilant British gardener. The
manor of Azay, as seen to-day, dates
from the early part of the sixteenth
century, and the industrious Abbe Che-
valier, in his very entertaining though
slightly rose-colored book on Touraine,1
speaks of it as " perhaps the purest ex-
pression of the belle Renaissance fran-
foise" " Its height," he goes on, " is
divided between two stories, terminat-
ing under the roof in a projecting entab-
lature which imitates a row of machi-
colations. Carven chimneys and tall dor-
mer windows, covered with imagery, rise
from the roofs ; turrets on brackets, of
elegant shape, hang with the greatest
lightness from the angles of the build-
ing. The soberness of the main lines,
the harmony of the empty spaces and
those that are filled out, the prominence
of the crowning parts, the delicacy of
all the details, constitute an enchanting
whole." And then the Abbe speaks of
the admirable staircase which adorns the
north front, and which, with its exten-
sion inside, constitutes the principal
treasure of Azuy. The staircase passes
beneath one of the richest of porticos —
a portico over which a monumental sal-

1 Promenades pittoresques en Touraine. Tours.
1869.

amander indulges in the most decorative
contortions. The sculptured vaults of
stone which cover the windings of the
staircase within, the fruits, flowers, ci-
phers, heraldic signs, are of the no-
blest effect. The interior of the chateau
is rich, comfortable, extremely modern ;
but it makes no picture that compares
with its external face, about which, with
its charming proportions, its profuse
yet not extravagant sculpture, there is
something very tranquil and pure. I
took a particular fancy to the roof, high,
steep, old, with its slope of bluish slate,
and the way the weather-worn chim-
neys seemed to grow out of it, like
living things out of a deep soil. The
only defect of the house is the blank-
ness and bareness of its walls, which
have none of those delicate parasites
attached to them that one likes to see
on the surface of old dwellings. It is
true that this bareness results in a kind
of silvery whiteness of complexion, which
carries out the tone of the quiet pools
and even that of the scanty and shade-
less park.

IX.

I hardly know what to say about the
tone of Langeais, which, though I have
left it to the end of my sketch, formed
the objective point of the first excursion
I made from Tours. Langeais is rath-
er dark and gray ; it is perhaps the sim-
plest and most severe of all the castles
of the Loire. I don't know why I should
have gone to see it before any other,
unless it be because I remembered the
Duchesse de Langeais, who figures in
several of Balzac's novels, and found this
association very potent. The Duchesse
de Langeais is a. somewhat transparent
fiction ; but the castle from which Balzac
borrowed the title of his heroine is an
extremely solid fact. My doubt just
above as to whether I should pronounce
it exceptionally gray came from my
having seen it under a sky which made
most things look dark. 1 have, how-
ever, a very kindly memory of that

1883.]

En Province.

183

moist and melancholy afternoon, which
was much more autumnal than many of
the days that followed it. Langeais lies
down the Loire, near the river, on the
opposite side from Tours, and to go to
it you will spend half an hour in the
train. You pass on the way the Chateau
de Luynes, which, with its round towers
catching the afternoon light, looks un-
commonly well on a hill at a distance ;
you pass also the ruins of the castle of
Cinq-Mars, the ancestral dwelling of
the young favorite of Louis XIII., the
victim of Richelieu, the hero of Alfred
de Vigny's novel, which is usually rec-
ommended to young ladies engaged in
the study of French. Langeais is very
imposing and decidedly sombre ; it marks
the transition from the architecture of
defense to that of elegance. It rises,
massive and perpendicular, out of the
centre of the village to which it gives
its name, and which it entirely domi-
nates ; so that as you stand before it, in
the crooked and empty street, there is
no resource for you but to stare up at
its heavy overhanging cornice and at
the huge towers surmounted with ex-
tinguishers of slate. If you follow this
street to the end, however, you encoun-
ter in abundance the usual embellish-
ments of a French village : little ponds
or tanks, with women on their knees on
the brink, pounding and thumping a lump
of saturated linen ; brown old crones,
the tone of whose facial hide makes
their night-caps (worn by day) look
dazzling ; little alleys perforating the
thickness of a row of cottages, and show-
ing you behind, as a glimpse, the vivid-
ness of a green garden. In the rear of
the castle rises a hill which must for-
merly have been occupied by some of its
appurtenances, and which indeed is still
partly inclosed within its court. You
may walk round this eminence, which,
with the small houses of the village at
its base, shuts in the castle from behind.
The inclosure is not defiantly guarded,
however, for a small, rough path, which

you presently reach, leads up to an open
gate. This gate admits you to a vague
and rather limited pare, which covers
the crest of the hill, and through which
you may walk into the gardens of the
castle. These gardens, of small extent,
confront the dark walls with their brill-
iant parterres, and covering the gradual
slope of the hill form, as it were, the
fourth side of the court. This is the
stateliest view of the chateau, which
looks sufficiently grim and gray as, after
asking leave of a neat young woman
who sallies out to learn your errand,
you sit there on a garden bench and
take the measure of the three tall towers
attached to this inner front and form-
ing severally the cage of a staircase.
The huge bracketed cornice (one of the
features of Langeais), which is merely
ornamental, as it is not machicolated,
though it looks so, is continued on the
inner face as well. The whole thing
has a fine feudal air, though it was erect-
ed on the ruins of feudalism. The main
event in the history of the castle is the
marriage of Anne of Brittany to her
first husband, Charles VIII., which took
place in its great hall in 1491. Into
this great hall we were introduced by
the neat young woman — into this great
hall and into sundry other halls, wind-
ing staircases, galleries, chambers. The
cicerone of Langeais is in too great a
hurry; the fact is pointed out in the
excellent Guide-Joanne. This ill-dissim-
ulated vice, however, is to be observed,
in the country of the Loire, in every
one who carries a key. It is true that
at Langeais there is no great occasion
to indulge in the tourist's weakness of
dawdling ; for the apartments, though
they contain many curious odds and
ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate
interest. They are cold and musty in-
deed, with that touching smell of old
furniture, as all apartments should be
through which the insatiate American
wanders in the rear of a bored domes-
tic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry

184

En Province.

[August,

or to read the name on the frame of
some simpering portrait. To return to
Tours my companion and I had counted
on a train which (as is not uncommon
in France) existed only in the Indicateur
des Chemins de Fer ; and instead of
waiting for another we engaged a vehicle
to take us home. A sorry carriole or
patache it proved to be, with the acces-
sories of a lumbering white mare and a
little wizened, ancient peasant, who had
put on, in honor of the occasion, a new
blouse of extraordinary stiffness and
blueness. We hired the trap of an
energetic woman who put it " to " with
her own hands ; women, in Touraine
and the Blesois appearing to have the
best of it in the business of letting vehi-
cles, as well as in many other indus-
tries. There is in fact no branch of hu-
man activity in which one is not liable,
in France, to find a woman engaged.
Women, indeed, are not priests; but
priests are, more or less, women. They
are not in the army, it may be said ; but
then they are the army. They are very
formidable. In France one must count
with the women. The drive back from
Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold ;
we had an occasional spatter of rain.
But the road passes most of the way
close to the Loire, and there was some-
thing in our jog-trot through the dark-
ening land, beside the flowing river,
which it was very possible to enjoy.

The consequence of my leaving to
the last my little mention of Loches is
that space and opportunity fail me ; and
yet a brief and hurried account of that
extraordinary spot would after all be
in best agreement with my visit. We
snatched a fearful joy, my companion
and I, the afternoon we took the train
for Loches. The weather this time had
been terribly against us : again and again
a day that promised fair became hope-
lessly foul after lunch. At last we de-
termined that if we could not make this

excursion in the sunshine, we would
make it with the aid of our umbrellas.
We graspad them firmly and started
for the station, where we were detained
an unconscionable time by the evolu-
tions, outside, of certain trains laden with
liberated (and exhilarated) conscripts.
who, their term of service ended, were
about to be restored to civil life. The
trains in Touraine are provoking; they
serve as little as possible for excursions.
If they convey you one way at the right
hour, it is on the condition of bringing
you back at the wrong ; they either
allow you far too little time to examine
the castle or the ruin, or they leave you
planted in front of it for periods that
outlast curiosity. They are perverse,
capricious, exasperating. It was a ques-
tion of our having but an hour or two
at Loches, and we could ill afford to
sacrifice to accidents. One of the acci-
dents, however, was that the rain stopped
before we got there, leaving behind it
a moist mildness of temperature and a
cool and lowering sky, which were in
perfect agreement with the gray old
city. Loches is certainly one of the
greatest impressions of the traveler in
central France — the largest cluster of
curious things that presents itself to his
sight. It rises above the valley of the In-
dre, the charming stream set in meadows
and sedges, which wanders through the
province of Berry and through many of
the novels of Madame George Sand ; lift-
ing from the summit of a hill, which it
covers to the base, a confusion of ter-
races, ramparts, towers and spires. Hav-
ing but little time, as I say, we scaled the
hill amain, and wandered briskly through
this labyrinth of antiquities. The rain
had decidedly stopped, and save that
we had our train on our minds, we saw
Loches to the best advantage. We en-
joyed that sensation with which the con-
scientious tourist is — or ought to be —
well acquainted, and for which, at any
rate, he has a formula, in his rough-and-
ready language. We u experienced,"

1883.]

En Province.

185

as they say, an "agreeable disappoint-
ment." We were surprised and delight-
ed ; we had not suspected that Loches
was so good. I hardly know what is
best there : the strange and impressive
little collegial church, with its Roman-
esque atrium or narthex, its doorways
covered with primitive sculpture of the
richest kind, its treasure of a so-called
pagan altar, embossed with fighting war-
riors, its three pyramidal domes, so un-
expected, so sinister, which I have not
met elsewhere, in church architecture ;
or the huge square keep, of the eleventh
century, the most cliff-like tower I re-
member, whose immeasurable thickness
I did not penetrate ; or the subterranean
mysteries of two other less striking but
not less historic dungeons, into which a
terribly imperative little cicerone intro-
duced us, with the aid of downward lad-
ders, ropes, torches, warnings, extended
hands, and many fearful anecdotes — all
in impervious darkness. These horrible
prisons of Loches, at an incredible dis-
tance below the daylight, were a favor-
ite resource of Louis XL, and were for
the mos£ part, I believe, constructed by
him. One of the towers of the castle
is garnished with the hooks or supports
of the celebrated iron cage in which he
confined the Cardinal La Balue, who
survived so much longer than might
have been expected this extraordina-
ry mixture of seclusion and exposure.
All these things form part of the cas-
tle of Loches, whose enormous enceinte
covers the whole of the top of the bill,
and abounds in dismantled gateways, in
crooked passages, in winding lanes that
lead to postern doors, in long fasades
that look upon terraces interdicted to
the visitor, who perceives with irritation
that they command magnificent views.
These views are the property of the
sub-prefect of the department, who re-
sides at the Chateau de Loches, and who
has also the enjoyment of a garden
— a garden compressed and curtailed,
as those of old castles that perch on

hill-tops are apt to be — containing a
horse - chesnut tree of fabulous size, a
tree of a circumference so vast and so
perfect that the whole population of
Loches might sit in concentric rows be-
neath its boughs. The gem of the place,
however, is neither the big marronier,
nor the collegial church, nor the mighty
dungeon, nor the hideous prisons of
Louis XI. ; it is simply the tomb of
Agnes Sorel, la belle des belles, so many
years the mistress of Charles VII. She
was buried, in 1450, in the collegial
church, whence, in the beginning of the
present century, her remains, with the
monument that marks them, were trans-
ferred to one of the towers of the castle.
She has always, I know not with what
justice, enjoyed a fairer fame than most
ladies who have occupied her position,
and this fairness is expressed in the del-
icate statue that surmounts her tomb.
It represents her lying there in lovely
demureness, her hands folded with the
best modesty, a little kneeling angel at
either side of her head, and her feet,
hidden in the folds of her decent robe,
resting upon a pair of couchant lambs,
innocent reminders of her name. Agnes,
however, was not lamb-like, inasmuch as,
according to popular tradition at least,
she exerted herself sharply in favor
of the expulsion of the English from
France. It is one of the suggestions of
Loches that the young Charles VII.,
hard put to it as he was for a treasury
and a capital — " le roi de Bourges,"
he was called at Paris — was yet a rath-
er privileged mortal, to stand up as he
does before posterity between the noble
Joan and the gentille Agnes ; deriving,
however, much more honor from one of
these companions than from the other.
Almost as delicate a relic of antiquity
as this fascinating tomb is the exquisite
oratory of Anne of Brittany, among
the apartments of the castle the only
chamber worthy of note. This small
room, hardly larger than a closet, and
forming part of the addition made to

186

Glints of Nahant.

[August,

the edifice by Charles VIII., is embroid-
ered over with the curious aud remark-
ably decorative device of the ermine
and festooned cord. The objects in
themselves are not especially graceful ;
but the constant repetition of the figure
on the walls and ceiling produces an
effect of richness, in spite of the modern
whitewash with which, if I remember
rightly, they have been endued. The
little streets of Loches wander crookedly
down the hill, and are full of charming
pictorial " bits : " an old town-gate, pass-
ing under a mediaeval tower, which is
ornamented by gothic windows and the
empty niches of statues ; a meagre but
delicate hotel de ville, of the Renais-
sance, nestling close beside it ; a curious
chancellerie of the middle of the six-

teenth century, with mythological fig-
ures and a Latin inscription on the
front — both of these latter buildings

being rather unexpected features of the
huddled and precipitous little town.
Loches has a suburb on the other side
of the Indre, which we had contented
ourselves with looking down at from the
heights, while we wondered whether,
even if it had not been getting late and
our train were more accommodating, we
should care to take our way across the
bridge and look up that bust, in terra-
cotta, of Francis I., which is the princi-
pal ornament of the Chateau de Sansac
and the faubourg of Beaulieu. I think
we decided that we should not ; that we
were already quite well enough acquaint-
ed with the long nose of that monarch.
Henry James.

GLINTS OF NAHANT.

BEYOND the clatter of the town,

The surf-beat on the level strand,
The beds of sea-weed, dead and brown,

The ripple-etchings on the sand ;

The wee sandpipers, as they fled

Like shadows down the sandy waste^
Pursuing every wave that fled,

And fleeing every wave that chased ;

The isle, from whose lone cottage soon

The beacon light should flash aslant
Across the foam ; the pale day-moon ;

The purple headlands resonant ;

The twilight, flecked with fading ships ;

The passionate sea, that wooed the shore,
And kissed, with white and quivering lips,

Her garment's hem but could no more ;

The night, with breaths of vague perfume,

And breezes wandering fitfully ;
And ever, through the tremulous gloom.

The rhythmic thunder of the sea !

Charles F. Lummis.

1883.]

The Hare and the Tortoise.

187

THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE.

NOT many years ago, one day late in
April — That is the way the story be-
gins ; but who could take time enough
to describe either the place or the weath-
er, since one was Beacon Street in Bos-
ton, and the other, as everybody had
been saying, simply perfect ? Mary
Chester had just told the friend from
whom she had parted at the corner of
Park Street that it was the first day
when one could be really comfortable
in a spring dress. In the broad bay of
the sidewalk, always sheltered by the
high wall of the State House yard, a
great fleet of baby-carriages was riding
at anchor under a gorgeous rigging of
blankets and afghans : while a dozen
plump young persons, who had but late-
ly learned the art of walking, toddled
about and talked to each other, or else
took shelter beside their maids, where,
holding fast a hand, they surveyed the
rest ofvthe company and refused to make
acquaintances.

Miss Chester walked quickly, with
light steps. She had a pretty way of
walking, and deft and slender feet. It
was always a pleasure to see her go
along the street, she was so much less
awkward than most of her companions,
and unlike them could hurry without
its seeming unnatural, or a lately ac-.
quired kind of movement. She smiled,
and had a consciousness that the spring
dress was becoming, and she looked down
the hill ; but just then the sidewalk was
quite deserted for some distance ahead.
Two or three of the children ran to-
ward her eagerly, with pretty chatter,
and she stooped to kiss them and delayed
good-naturedly to admire their dolls.
The nurses smiled approvingly as she
spoke or nodded to several of them and
sent messages to their mistresses, who
were oftener reported as invalids than
as active persons. One bell after an-

other struck two o'clock, and presently
Miss Chester went on down the street.
She now met several grown-up acquaint-
ances, who either gave her most indul-
gent smiles, or removed their hats with
pleased alacrity. It was evident that
our heroine was a favorite with her
town's people, great and small, and also
that she must not stop to speak to any
one else, being already late to lunch.

But she found time, as she hurried, to
look across the street at the trees in the
Common, and to notice that the buds
had grown larger since she had passed
by earlier in the day. The grass was
amazingly green, both under the trees
and in the small samples of front yards
close beside her, where the crocuses and
hyacinths looked already wilted and out
of season. Some robins and bluebirds
were heard singing when there was a
space between the carriages, and the
English sparrows were squabbling as
usual in the vines on the house fronts,
and flocking down recklessly to the pav-
ing-stones.

Miss Chester bowed to an old lady
who passed by in a well-closed carriage,
and who felt a strange pang of regret
and envy at the sight of so much beauty
and such delightful youth. It seemed a
very little while since she herself had
scurried down Beacon Street, and what
was more, had had something to scurry
for ; but this envy blew over presently,
like a little gray spring cloud, since there
really was nothing which one could not
take one's time about, and Michael was
certainly a most perfect driver. " Be-
sides, the memory of my own youth is
better than anything the young people
of to-day can possibly enjoy," said Mrs.
Temple to herself consolingly ; and as
she passed the little children whom Miss
Chester had just left, she remembered
with a smile what an aunt of hers used

188

The Hare and the Tortoise,

[August,

to say ; a dear old person, whose fa-
vorite window overlooked the length of
a village street : " Every spring I see
a new crop of little children come out
to play in the sun ; they bloorn with
the flowers after the April rains, and
come out afoot to see what they thiuk
of the world, — one from this house and
another from the next. Little they
know what it all means ! "

Just as the carriage had passed, our
friend noticed a young man who came
springing up the steps from the Common
at the Joy Street gate. He was struck
by a small colored boy, who had crossed
the street at full run, and knocked back-
ward a little ; but the boy stopped civil-
ly, and the young man did not seem to
be angry, but laughed and nodded, and
then remained standing by the posts for
a minute or two, while he surveyed the
houses opposite and took a good look
up and down the street. In the' course
of this his eye fell upon Miss Chester,
who had gone too far to steal another
look at the stranger, which fact she
somewhat regretted. However, it had
been interesting enough ; she had thought
him a foreigner ; there was something
un-American about his dress, and it was
very attractive to her. He was a slender
fellow ; even his hat was not without an
artistic element ; it was of soft felt, and
there was a tip of a feather at one side
of its slightly Tyrolean crown, whereas
the young men whom she saw most were
at that time decking themselves in hard
Derbys with high round crowns, which
when removed by their wearers displayed
a crimson mark like a scar across the
forehead.

Miss Chester took her latch-key out
of her pocket at least two minutes be-
fore she reached the house to which it
belonged, and quickly sought the dining-
room, where three elderly women were
gathered about the table, and each gave
her a reproachful glance as she entered.

" I did n't know it was so late," said
the girl pleasantly ; " it struck two when

I was in front of the State House. I
wonder if our clocks are n't a little
fast ! "

" I believe they are quite right," ob-
served the lady at the head of the table.
" Will you have the soup brought
back ? "

u Oh dear, no ; it 's too hot for soup.
Have you been out, mamma ? " But
mamma shook her head deprecatingly,
as if this were no time for trivial conver-
sation.

" Would you mind removing your
bonnet, my dear?" asked aunt Sophia,
the first speaker. " I dare say I am quite
out of date, but it never seems proper to
me that young people should sit at the
table in their street clothes. It appears
like a restaurant. We shall have young
men wearing their hats within doors
presently."

'' Oh, don't mind to-day, aunty. I am
so hungry, and it takes some time to get
my bonnet on and off. And you always
go out to lunches in your own best bon-
net." . . .

" That is different," responded Miss
Duncan, after a moment's reflection, dur-
ing which her niece had helped herself
to cold prairie chicken, and Becket, the
man-servant, moved forward with the
salad from the side-board ; a very good
salad it was, of lettuce crisp and green
enough to match the day.

" Could you find some raspberry jam,
.do you think, Becket ? " inquired Miss
Anne Duncan, who was very kind and
almost entirely deaf. " Miss Mary likes it
with cold grouse, though I don't know
why," and she looked at her compan-
ions for confirmation ; and when she saw
that her elder sister wore a disapprov-
ing expression, she bowed her head over
her plate as if grace were being said.
" Sophia," she asked presently, " don't
you think grouse are a little past? It
must be getting late for them."

" They are much better with jam,"
the girl shouted gratefully across the
corner of the table. " You should be

1883.]

The Hare and the Tortoise.

189

busy in the studio all the morning, and
you would be ready to eat anything ; "
and the old lady nodded and Mary nod-
ded, and they formally renewed the se-
cret understanding of each other which
had been an unbroken satisfaction since
Mary could walk alone or tell one aunt
from the other. It was a curious house-
hold, and a most interesting one to those
who knew it well. Duncan Chester,
Mary's father, had been the orphan
ward of his aunts, and when he had
married and brought his wife home to
his pleasant house, nobody except outsid-
ers had thought of expecting the ladies
already established there to find a new
house for themselves.

Although the house had come to
Duncan by will, was it not their own fa-
ther's to begin with, and the home of
their childhood ? They recognized no
usurpers of their authority as its mis-
tresses, that is, Miss Sophia did not ; and
young Mrs. Duncan was quietly thanked
when she begged her to keep her time-
honored seat at the head of the table.
Mr. Duncan Chester frowned. He meant
to have settled tliat point in good sea-
son ; but alas, it would have made lit-
tle difference, for early in the time of
the war he died, leaving his wife and
little daughter. A young son had died
before him, and Mrs. Chester had had
a long illness afterward, and after her
husband's death she passed through a
long siege of invalidism. Aunt Sophia
was too kind and considerate, in those
sad years, to be outwardly rebelled
against, and as the true mistress of the
house slowly regained her strength she
not only saw that the chief occupation
of the elder woman's life was in her not
by any means light business of house-
keeping ; but she discovered at first
that the care of her daughter and later
on certain charitable employments were
better suited to her own mind. As for
dear Miss Anne, she was the comfort
and delight of everybody who came
within her reach. She was as cheerful

under her deafness as if it had been
blindness instead. She could hear the
conversation of people in books, at any
rate, and she was as full of sympathy
with the moods of her daily companions
as if she were the personification of na-
ture itself. She only cared not to be a
trouble, and to make people happy, while
her somewhat grim sister existed, one
might believe, to remind people of their
duties and delinquencies. The grand-
niece of these two good women had
been always scolded by one and ex-
cused by the other, but it was as impos-
sible to resist respecting and sometimes
admiring Miss Sophia Duncan as it was
petting and amusing Miss Anne.

Mrs. Chester was a quiet, sad wom-
an, who always had worn the deep-
est mourning, and who spent more and
more of her time in connection with the
work of the various charities of the city.
Her daughter had been a decided little
person, and after having had a good start
she had taken the bringing up of her-
self pretty much into her own hands,
and had dispensed with the assistance
of her relatives. Since she was a child
she had been on most intimate terms
with all three of the elders and betters
under the home roof. She listened re-
spectfully to their generous advice, and
usually followed her own instincts and
inclinations. She was really the strong-
est natured of the three, and soon gained
the highest level of authority ; though
this was quite unsuspected, especially by
her aunt Sophia, who held herself ac-
countable not only for her own doings,
but those of all the rest of the house-
hold.

Mrs. Chester asked a few questions,
and both she and the aunts remained at
the lunch table while Mary finished a
most satisfactory meal, and then all rose
together with much solemnity. Three
of the chairs proved to have cushions
at their backs. Mary smiled at the sight
of them, as she had often done before,
and wondered if she should live on in

190

The Hare and the Tortoise.

[August,

just the same fashion until her chair had
its cushion also. She spoke to Miss
Anne's unprincipled old parrot, who
lived in great splendor in the sunny
bay-window, and who gave a fierce
squawk in reply that even her mistress
heard and laughed at. This bird was a
wellspring of joy to the family. Even
Miss Duncan, who was hard to amuse,
was a pleased spectator of Polly's com-
edies.

" She caught Mrs. Temple's finger,
this morning," said aunt Anne in her
careful, deafened voice. " I was really
frightened for a moment, but the glove
was only scratched a little."

" I saw Mrs. Temple just now, on her
way down town," said Mary, snapping
the parrot's guilty beak. " Had she been
here?"

Miss Anne Duncan had turned away,
and did not know that she was spoken
to, but Mrs. Chester answered in her
place. " She was just leaving the house
as I came in. She wished to say that
she would come to dinner this evening,
instead of to-morrow, for there was al-
ready some engagement which she had
forgotten. Henry could not come to-
morrow evening, either."

" Oh, how provoking ! " said Mary
quickly ; " but I am sure I shall not stay
at home from the concert. Did n't you
say that I was going out, mamma ? "

" I hardly saw Mrs. Temple, you
know ; " and at this point Miss Duncan
reappeared from the china-closet, where
she had been holding as secret a confer-
ence with Becket as if the rest of the
family were unfamiliar guests.

" Mrs. Temple said that Henry meant
to go to the concert," she announced,
" so you can go together. He has one
of the Winterford's tickets, so it all hap-
pens very well."

" If there is anything I dislike, it is
being obliged to talk with any one in
the seat directly behind," said Mary,
not without a suspicion of pleasure in
her tone. She liked Mr. Temple well

enough, though she laughed at him a
good deal, and always took the most un-
favorable views of him when her aunts
praised him, as they often did. He was
the only son of his mother, a person of
great wealth and dignity. He was him-
self a most irreproachable young man ;
he had lately returned from a three
years' sojourn in foreign parts, which, in-
stead of stimulating him to any youth-j
ful vanities and pleasing worldliness, had)
apparently served to settle him down
more than even a residence in Boston
would have done. Instead of growing
wilder, he had become tamer and duller
than before, and his correctness, his
amiability, were unrelieved by any faults
save an occasional flicker of self-satis-
faction and conceit, which Mary Ches-
ter always pounced upon with delight,
and promptly convicted him of, so bring-
ing an excitement into an otherwise too
prosaic intercourse. It was by no means
a new idea to anybody, except perhaps
themselves, that they would in course
of time marry, and creditably represent
the time-honored families from which
they had descended. As for the aunts
and Mrs. Temple, they had many a time
spoken of this probability with delight-
ed assurance. Mrs. Chester alone had
a reserve of opinion. She had too often
noticed that " nothing is certain to hap-
pen but the unforeseen." In the mean-
time the young people saw each other
often. Mary had liked young Temple
better than she expected, when he had
returned in February, and she had not
yet grown quite used to his being at
home. He certainly talked twenty times
better than most young men, and she
was fond of new ideas, and of reminis-
cences of London and of Roman society,
which she longed for, but had never yet
seen except as a child. Miss Anne's
deafness had carried them to the Paris
physicians, and Miss Duncan's wish to
improve herself had led her to drag her
companions over various long routes at
the mercy of a rapacious courier, whom

1883.]

The Hare and the Tortoise.

191

Mary Chester had laughingly pro-
claimed ever since to be the only living
person whom her aunt feared. Mrs.
Chester had been for several years
desiring to spend at least a summer
abroad, but there had always seemed to
be some good reason for putting it off
to another season, until Mary had ac-
cused her aunt of being still afraid of
the courier, whom she was quite as like-
ly to meet if she stayed on this side of
the sea. Any day they were likely to be
swept off by Angelo to California and
the Russian possessions, or to be shipped
for Patagonia, in spite of any objections.

Dinner was to be half an hour earlier,
a great concession to the concert-goers,
and in good season Mrs. Temple ap-
peared with her son. She belonged by
birth to a noble Salem family, and was
a very handsome -and attractive woman.
She had married somewhat late, and had
spent a few years in the East Indies,
where her son was born. She was nev-
er commonplace, though not a brilliant,
woman. She knew the world of so-
ciety much better than her friends the
Duncans; beside, she was a little young-
er. They were very dependent upon her
good opinion. They wished, above all
things, — even Mrs. Chester felt this, —
to put no obstacle in the way of her sat-
isfaction with the projected marriage.
No one would have acknowledged this,
if accused of having anything to do with
such a plot, but the tide of reason and
propriety was set, as we have seen, very
strongly in that direction.

There was some very clever talk at
the little dinner. Henry Temple was
given the foot of the table, which Miss
Chester resented, since she liked her
own place, and had a feeling beside that
aunt Sophia's insistence upon this fol-
lowing out of etiquette had an inner
meaning and suggestion to which she
was not yet consenting. This evening,
however, she was much pleased by her
guest's kindness to her favorite aunt,
who sat, hearing little but smiling kindly

at everybody, on his right. He carefully
managed to keep her informed of at least
the subjects of the conversation. Once
or twice he twisted an entirely irrelevant
remark into a seemingly appropriate
one, and made her feel that she was tak-
ing an active part in most of the pleas-
ure. He had never been so quick-wit-
ted or entertaining, Mary thought. It
was possible to believe at last that he
was nearer thirty than fifty ; but he had
an elderly way with him that had made
her feel usually that she belonged to
quite another generation. She laughed
and talked with him gayly. He looked
at her a good deal, and thought she had
never been so pretty ; while he looked
very well himself, as all the ladies
thought ; a well-made man, at any rate,
with his clothes of an unmistakable
London cut. Mrs. Chester had given
him a flower, and Mary had smiled to
see him carefully take a pin from some
secret hiding-place to fasten it into its
button-hole. " I have broken the little
cord from my coat," he explained. " I
wish you would see to its being replaced,
if you remember ; " and he glanced at his
mother affectionately, as if he desired
to respond to the admiration with which
she had been watching him.

" You ought to have a little pocket-
pincushion," said Mary innocently, al-
though filled with a wicked desire to
tease him. " Ask aunt Anne to make
you one ; she would be delighted ; " and
aunt Anne, who knew her name by sight,
took on such a pleading look that no
one could have helped indulging her
with the repetition of the sentence. Mr.
Temple flushed and stuttered a little as
he said, " Miss Chester says you ought
to work me a pincushion ; " at which
everybody laughed, they hardly knew
why, and Miss Anne with the rest, though
she was much puzzled to know by what
means the conversation had suddenly
descended from the last subject of Car-
lyle's Reminiscences. It was an easy
thing to throw Henry Temple off his

192

The Hare and the Tortoise.

[August,

equilibrium, and Mary delighted in do-
in^ it. Shu often remembered things he
had said and opinions he had given, yet
it always provoked her if he managed
to keep his equilibrium by the half hour
together, and discoursed as if his deci-
sions were to be regarded as final by
all his listeners.

But he was good-tempered and inter-
ested, and his elder hostesses praised him
after he went away with Mary and Miss
Anne to the concert. He had given ex-
cellent advice about some new claret,
having lately discovered-a treasure when
buying some for his mother. He had
eaten his dinner as if he liked it even
more than usual, and Becket had treated
him with unusual deference and civility.
There were some guests for whom Beck-
et had suffered the loss of a near rela-
tive of his own in South Boston to de-
fend himself from their reception or en-
tertainment. Miss Sophia liked to avoid
unpleasantness so far as she could, but
Becket's power over her was not that
of the courier's, and he often was obliged
to suffer in silence when she had asked
company at improper seasons, though
gloom overspread his countenance at
such times, until a skeleton would have
seemed a bon-vivant and an enlivenment
to the feast by contrast. More than
once, however, when Mr. Temple had
come to dinner, Becket had set forth the
best silver and most un replaceable wine
quite of his own accord. He also thought
tjiat his young mistress was likely to
marry this welcome guest, and Becket
kept an eye to the windward, as his
personal feeling toward the young man
was kind, to begin with.

There were a few aggravating min-
utes of delay about the carriage, at which
Miss Chester fretted, and she did not re-
cover her spirits until she discovered
that they were in good season, after all.
It was a famous night of music, and the
Music Hall was filled to overflowing.
People were clustered about the doors
that led to the galleries, like little

swarms of bees. One hardly knew wheth-
er they stood or clung, and the grim
statue of Beethoven waited before the
great sculptured wall of the organ as if
it were impatient and annoyed because
of the mild confusion and delay. Miss
Anne Duncan had also excused herself
to Mrs. Temple. She was the only mu-
sical member of the family except her
grand-niece, and this was 'one of the few
pleasures that still remained to her. She
had never grown deaf to the sound of
music, thank Heaven, and one friend af-
ter another recognized her with great
satisfaction and sympathy as they passed
by to their places.

The noise was hushed as the first
notes of the violins called out loud
and clear, with a cry together, to the
other instruments. It was a fine orches-
tra to look at : the ugly little heads of
the bass viols held themselves high in
a proud, tall row, and overlooked the
crowded musicians with a certain air
of condescension, while the violin bows
rose and fell as if they were the sway-
ing bayonets of troops on the march.
Sometimes the organ made itself heard,
and dwarfed the smaller voices of the
rest of the instruments as the sea over-
powers the noises on its shore. The
trumpets glistened ; the symphony sang
itself in one fashion after another most
gloriously. We have done with mediaeval
vainglories in our New World life, for
the most part, but there is still an in-
stinct in the human breast for pomps
and ceremonies, and the quaint orderli-
ness of an orchestra, with the thousand-
year-old shapes of its wind and string
instruments, gives a pleasure that is alto-
gether independent of their sound. The
people were hushed and serious. Mary
Chester took hold of her aunt's hand, as
she had done many a time before, as
they sat beside each other in feasts or
fasts. They came very close together
in their hearts, these two. That night
it seemed to the elder woman as if the
people whom she had known and loved,

1883.]

The Hare and the Tortoise.

193

and who had passed out of her sight
and keeping, were listening to the music
with her. It was a lovely sense of com-
panionship, as if the same music could
belong to the seen world and the un-
seen, and her angels cpuld make her
certain of their presence.

When the symphony ceased there was
a gust of sighs and long breaths of de-
light. Mr. Temple leaned forward to
say that it was well played, on the
whole, but the adagio dragged, and one
of the 'cellos was very flat ; had not
they noticed it ? Mary Chester gave a
little shrug of impatience, and at that
moment she observed a young man who
was sitting with some other persons on
the stairs that led down at the side of
the organ to the stage. He was quite
still ; he did not seem to know that the
players had stopped. He was some dis-
tance away, and the space dulled his
features somewhat, but Mary recog-
nized the young stranger of the morn-
ing. He was now in evening dress. He
presently clasped his hands at the back
of his head, as if unconsciously, and
looked up at the ceiling ; then he sud-
denly came to himself, and looked about
him hastily, and came down from his
perch and disappeared. " He does n't
wish to hear another note," said Mary
to herself, with a feeling of great sym-
pathy. " I wonder who he is ! " and she
asked Henry Temple, who arranged his
eyeglasses and looked carefully at the
deserted steps, as if he could solve the
problem by a proper investigation.

The next piece on the programme
seemed trivial and uninteresting, and
our heroine commented upon it in a
way that was far from flattering. " I
wonder why the least attractive part of
the performance always follows the
best," she thought, and she was pleased
with Mr. Temple's outraged whisper
that it was injustice to give the audi-
ence such an inferior thing as this.

But aunt Anne turned to her niece
at its close with a radiant face: "It

VOL. LII. — NO. 310. 13

must be twenty years since I have heard
that. You can't think how it has carried
me back to the old days," at which her
companions forbore further criticism.

They went home together, and the
two ladies, at least, were very tired. Miss
Chester leaned back in the corner of the
carriage, and announced gravely that
she never meant to attend more than
half a concert in the future. " I like
music too much," she explained, " and a
concert of the average length is like a
dinner of too many courses, to use an
unworthy comparison. I envied a young
man who whisked himself off after the
symphony. Half a concert would be
just enough, but a whole one is too
long.".

" By the way, have you seen young
Dean ? " asked Mr. Temple. " I don't
know why I was reminded of him just
now, I am sure ; " and Miss Chester for-
got her weariness, and sat upright in an
instant to reply, " What young Dean do
you mean ? " and without waiting for
his answer she exclaimed, " Why, when
did he come home ? Of course that
was Dick Dean whom I saw this morn-
ing. It seemed to me then that I ought
to remember his face ; and again to-
night. Don't you know, I spoke of him
this evening. It was he who wished to
hear nothing after the symphony ! "
The girl was very eager as she had said
all this, and sat waiting for whatever
Mr. Temple might have to tell her.
Miss Anne looked from one to the other
with great curiosity, and wondered what
Mary was so excited about, but she did
not like to ask. The young man might
have even taken that occasion to make
his proposal, and it would b ? an ex-
tremely awkward thing for hioi to be
called upon to repeat his sentences.

" He has been at home a day or two,
at least. He came in on the Parthia. I
heard him scolding about her in the
reading-room at the club, yesterdaj
morning. I believe he is only here for
a visit to his uncle. He told me that he

194

The Hare and the Tortoise.

[August,

had lent his studio to a friend. I imag-
ine that he often does that ; he never
was to be found there when I was in
Paris;. An idle fellow, I fear, though
very well gifted by nature. It is a pity
he had uot been poor. I think he would
have been sure to achieve something
worth doing," said Mr. Temple, some-
what pompously ; and Miss Chester had
onl v time to return the assurance that
she had always remembered him as be-
ing the most clever and delightful boy
of her set-, when she discovered that she
had reached the door of her own home.
Henry Temple was very kind, and es-
corted Miss Anne Duncan up the steps
with great gallantry. He was well used
to being his mother's squire, and when
they were all in the brightly lighted
parlor again, he was certainly much to
be admired. Mary herself thought she
had never seen him look so handsome,
as when he waited beside his moth-
er's chair for her last chapter of reminis-
cence and opinion to come to its end.
The flower in his buttonhole was still
un faded. When the leave-takings were
over, Miss Duncan and Miss Anne, and
Mrs. Chester even, spoke in his praise,
and Mary herself could not say that
there was a better fellow in the world.

Next day, she went to Hovey's to do
some long-deferred errands ; for, like
many another Boston girl, she often
planned the disposal of her whole time
for a fortnight ahead. She took kind-
ly to society life ; she was making the
most of a somewhat uncommon talent
for painting ; and she joined, partly to
please her mother, and partly from her
own inclination, in various endeavors to
prevent pauperism in her native city.
She was to read German with a friend,
it being the occupation of her Friday
mornings from eleven to one, and it was
already eleven o'clock, and the friend
lived at some distance down Marlbor-
ough Street, which was discouraging to
her own habit of punctuality. She hur-
ried across the Common, for a message

must be left at the house, and she did
not notice the footsteps which were rap-
idly overtaking hers, until she looked up
suddenly to find the stranger of the day
before, picturesque hat and all, walking
alongside.

Of course it was Dick Dean, — as
eager and quick to smile as ever ! The
hat was hardly touched, he was in such
a hurry to shake hands and be sure that
he was remembered, and the first greet-
ings over they walked on together, side
by side. This old friend had grown
taller and browner, and had taken on a
fine, half-boyish manliness since Mary
had seen him last, many years before ;
indeed, they made themselves very mer-
ry because their first instinctive saluta-
tions of each other had been, " How you
have grown ! " And the girl was
touched and saddened at the sight of
him ; he was very like his younger sis-
ter, who had been her dearest friend,
and who had died when they were all
three hardly more than children. This
was the only real sorrow Mary had
known ; and Dick thought of his little
sister too, and for a minute they both
kept silent, until the remembrance of
the old grief had faded away again out
of the April day, and Mary said that
she had been puzzled the day before
when she had noticed him in. the street
and at the concert. She had been sure
that he was a foreigner on his travels.

" I feel exactly like one," said the
young fellow. " Indeed, Boston is like
meeting one's grandmother in costume
at a fancy ball. Here is all the Back
Bay for a court train to her plain every-
day gown. Was the dome of the State
House always gilded? I think that is
the best of the changes. This morn-
ing early, for a wonder, I could n't
sleep, so' I went out-of-doors to see what
things were like ; and do you know that
there is a chance for a lovely picture, if
one stands on Boylston Street, and takes
in the brown tops of the elms on the
Public Garden and the Common ; the

1883.]

The Hare and the Tortoise.

195

high gables and windowed roofs on this
street and Mount Vernon, and the dull
gold of the old dome, and a very par-
ticularly clear blue sky."

They loitered for a minute, before
Mary ran up the steps, to finish their
merry chatter, looking frankly and de-
lightedly in each other's faces all the
while. Mr. Richard Dean promised him-
self the pleasure of calling very soon. " I
have always meant to apologize to Miss
Duncan for breaking one of the front
windows with my ball, some time since,"
he said by way of parting ; and after
Miss Chester was in the hall, and had
given a message to Becket for her aunt
Anne, she thought it had been very
foolish of her not to tell her old friend
and playmate that she was going down
the street directly. She was sure he
would have been glad to wait for her ;
indeed, he had turned that way himself,
as she left him. She lingered in the hall
for a short time, however, for it would
be very foolish to follow him so soon ;
it would seem as if she had not been
able to resist going out again in quest
of him. Becket reappeared presently,
burdened with a jar of great pink roses.
" It was Mr. Temple sent them, miss,
to the ladies, a few minutes ago. I
was just filling the jar with water as
you rang." Mary thought it was very
good of Mr. Temple, and crossed the
room to pull the leaves out a little, and
to enjoy their fragrance. " Oh, I might
have known better," she told herself, a
trifle disappointed ; " these hybrid roses
are only to look at ; " and then she
caught sight of the clock, and went
away down the hill, and through the
side path of the Public Garden, and
noticed with admiration that Dick Dean
was there also, quite out of reach, but
looking about him as he strolled along ;
and once he crossed the forbidden grass
and stooped to pick something, and
placed it in his button-hole. She was
sure it must have been a dandelion,
which was her own favorite flower.

After this rthe days flew by, as the
spring days always do when there is so
much to be done in-doors and out. The
flowers are getting ready to bloom ; the
people are trying to get ready for sum-
mer also, some for their holidays and
others for their toil ; to some it means
idleness and to others business. New
clothes are brought home, new plans are
made ; the days grow longer and longer,
and the leaves of the trees come out, and
presently make a shade for the ground ;
the nurses and children take shelter un-
der their kindly branches ; one house
after another is shuttered and closed,
and as for the rest, they put out gay
awnings, like flags and banners, as if
summer were a queen, who walked up
and down Beacon Street every day at
the head of a grand procession.

Dick Dean has made his first call, and
his second and third, for that matter.
The grand-aunts and Mrs. Chester are
all delighted with him. The families
were always intimate in the old times,
and he is a most well-bred and charming
fellow. He must be asked to dinner ; but
he is placed at Miss Sophia's right hand,
and Mary keeps her post at the foot of
the table, next but one away. The
guest is vastly entertaining ; he has a
ringing, clear voice, so that Miss Anne,
who is close beside him, hears much that
he says without being specially told,
and he devotes himself to her in a way
that reminds Mary of Henry Temple's
attentions only to make them appear
patronizing and clumsy ; but she is angry
with herself for her disloyalty a moment
afterwards. Mr. Dean is able to give late
news of some friends in London. It is
proved that his studio is there now, and
that he knows Mr. Burne Jones and has
often met Rossetti, which is more than
most persons can say. The ladies have
kept themselves well informed of the
progress of art and literature, as promi-
nent Bostonians should ; they even talk
somewhat of English politics, and, to be
in keeping with the fact that their im-

196

The Hare and the Tortoise.

[August,

mediate ancestors were subjects of tho
]>riti-li crown, the elder ladies In^iii
almost unconsciously, as if from force of
habit, like their grandmothers, to gossip
about the royal family. The young
man talks eloquently about some liter-
ary persons of tender years and great
renown, of whom his listeners have not
heard ; he speaks modestly of his own
pictures and his plans, and laughingly
owns himself to be an idle fellow, who
works hard when the fancy seizes him,
and finds it terribly hard to keep himself
long in harness. " There is so much to
learn and to enjoy in London," he says.
" I can't resist spending half my time
in tramping about the country, either ;
it is lovely down in Surrey, and as for
North Devon and Cornwall, one can
never get enough of them ! I wish I
could show you the way around the
shore," he tells Mary eagerly. u And
everybody goes to the Hebrides, you
know, since Black wrote A Princess of
Thule ; " while he suddenly thinks that
it is Sheila whom Mary is so much like,
and turns to look at her earnestly, blush-
ing like a school-boy when she glances
up at him, as if to question what his
thought may be and why he has stopped
speaking. " She is like a pink hyacinth,
or a crocus, or something like that ; she
belongs to the spring flowers," he tells
himself.

Mary longs to know more of his so-
ciety life ; she has often heard of his
being a good deal of a society man. But
he returns to his pictures ; and says that
he got the idea for the best thing he
has ever done in a forlorn court-yard
in the east of London, where the river
and the old houses were kept apart by
no Thames embankment of any sort
but the most dismal. Mary wishes to
have her aunts see the water-color sketch
of his that some friends of theirs brought
home a year before, and says that she
has always liked it ; and the guest is
pleased. He means to work very hard
when he goes back ; indeed, he is going

to do one or two things while he stays
in Boston. Some one has offered him
a corner of a studio.

They talk about Newport and Na-
hant, and the changes at Harvard, and
Becket is sent away to the library for
the last copy of Punch, though if Miss
Sophia objects to anything it is to peo-
ple's reading at table ; but Dick Dean
must show them a capital caricature of
a conspicuous society person, which they
have not discovered, and Mary rear-
ranges some flowers which have begun
to droop in the heat of the gaslight, and
gives aunt Anne a sprig of her favorite
mignonette, and tosses the young man a
dark carnation for his coat. " They are
like port wine," he says. " I wonder if
the little pale pink ones with a fringe
grow in the country gardens as they
used. I made a visit in Portsmouth
every summer when I was a boy, and I
used to drive about in that lovely coun-
try the other side of the river. I hope
it has not been spoiled."

" What does he keep calling things
' lovely ' for ? " aunt Sophia said snap-
pishly, when the hall door was shut be-
hind him. " I think it is foolish enough
for girls to do it. He is very agreeable,
but he seems to me to have no distinct
purpose in life and little stability. I
like to see a young man with some dig-
nity. Henry Temple is far more to be
admired, it seems to me."

" But they are so different," said
Mary, who had spent a most delightful
evening. " I should as soon think of
not admiring Henry as of not respecting
King's Chapel. He has given his whole
attention to making himself admirable,
you know. Dick Dean is like the cham-
pagne and pate, after Henry's sherry
and soup. Lthink the dinner was very
good to-night, but why Bucket will in-
sist upon spilling something over his
gloves to begin with, I cannot under-
stand."

" He is a most faithful and devoted

1883.]

Tne Hare and the Tortoise.

197

servant," said aunt Sophia reproachful-
ly ; and Mrs. Chester laughed a little at
Mary when the others were not look-
ing. Becket had been the picture of
melancholy, and it was an omen of ill
fortune to the cheerful guest. " It is a
pity we had not asked some one to meet
him," said Miss Anne, as she rose to go
up-stairs ; " but he seemed to enjoy him-
self, and it is quite too late for din-

There is no use in wearying the reader
with details of the intercourse of Mary
Chester's two lovers ; for such they
proved to be, with herself and her fam-
ily, and with each other. It complicated
matters not a little, because the two
young men professed, or really felt, a
great friendship for each other for a
time ; but they ceased spending their
hours in each other's society after it was
first patent to everybody else, and then
to themselves, that they were in love
with the same young lady. The month
of May and the early weeks of June
sped by. On the 15th of June the Dun-
cans and Mrs. Chester and her daugh-
ter went annually to their country-place
at Beverly. It sometimes seemed late
in the season to make the change, but
this year the summer had been late in
coming, for May was cold and rainy.

It was soon known that Dick Dean
and Miss Chester had been seen two or
three times coming in from long rides
together, and among his friends he was
sometimes chaffed a little. He did not
touch one of his carefully packed box
of brushes, and the corner of the studio
which his friend had offered was left
without a tenant. He had found a cap-
ital horse to keep step with Mary Ches-
ter's, and she rode a great deal that
spring.

Aunt Sophia's insistence upon the
late date of flitting to Beverly suited
her niece very well that year. Mary
and her mother had sometimes gone
down earlier by themselves, but it was

a movement requiring immense tact and
diplomacy.

As for Mr. Temple, he at last took
fright, and determined to press his suit.
Mary Chester was still very young to
marry, and though he had looked for-
ward with increasing ardor to making
her his own, it had seemed to him best
to leave the time and season of it very
much to circumstance and to favoring
fortune. He had wished many times,
for a year past, that he were entirely
sure of her, but he felt little real un-
easiness. They were growing more and
more used to being together, and he
thought he could see that she was be-
coming more and more attached to him.
Until now he never had discovered a
rival who seemed at all dangerous, al-
though Miss Chester was much liked
and admired. It was a very difficult
thing to imagine himself pleading the
cause of his heart, as they sat together
in the parlors of either his house or
hers, in constant expectation of the ap-
pearance of his mother or her own, or
the aunts, if by any accident they found
themselves alone. Her thoughts were
not of any fashion of romance as they
talked together or met in the street by
chance, and he became more and more
in earnest and determined to have the
question settled in the minds of the
world as it already was in his own. It
seemed to him the proper thing that he
should marry, and he found Mary Ches-
ter very pleasing ; he really was fonder
of her than he ever had been of any
one in his life ; besides, it was the chosen
wish of his mother's heart that this girl
should be her daughter-in-law.

With Dick Dean the case was quite
different : he had been attracted by a
dozen girls, who had wielded one sort of
attraction or another ; but he had never
loved any one as he knew he could love.
His few years of adventure and of art-
ist life had amused and delighted him ;
he felt still as if he were beginning his
intercourse with men and things. Ho

The Hare and the Tortoise.

[August,

had been praised and flattered by some
of his friends, and scolded by others for
wasting his time ; but there was good
stuff iu him; he had lived longer already
than his friend Temple, who appeared
sometimes like an elderly man. He
had often felt that his active life had not
begun ; it seemed to him as if he were
always waiting for something, — as if
the world were a great railway station,
where he expected a belated train. He
was simply watching the people about
him, and trying to amuse himself by
reading the placards on the wall, or con-
templating the not very wide outlook
from the windows. But the train was
sure to come, and then all would be dif-
ferent. He looked at Temple with
much curiosity ; he could not understand
his satisfaction with his prosaic exist-
ence. The two men were well matched
as to their wealth and respectability ;
they were by no means partners to be '
disdained, and each said to himself at
last that he would be a single man no
longer.

For young Dean's expected train had
whistled at last, and he had fallen deep
into love, and Mary Chester knew it ;
and at first was amazed and then fright-
ened, until she undertook to resent the
state of affairs, and spent long hours
awake, when she should have been asleep,
in thinking of her two lovers, and try-
ing to make sure whom she loved best.

It was an untried and unknown life
into which she must enter with Richard
Dean, but the future with Temple seemed
plain and familiar to her ; it meant a
great deal to a conservative and home-
loving girl like herself that she should
live on in the same dear way, among the
well-known and comfortable associations.
She could not give up so sweet a cer-
tainty for an uncertainty of many risks
and dangers. All this process of thought
went on while she still simply liked both
her lovers, and was only consenting in
either case to be loved. She was very
ungracious to her family whenever the

cause of Henry Temple was mentioned,
and this her aunts took for a good sign ;
for Mrs. Chester, iu these dread days,
was paying a visit in New York. It is
true that Mary felt very lonely, and
that life seemed a great puzzle and very
hard to bear. " There is no reason why
I should marry either of them," she told
herself over and over ; but the shadow
of a great change not far beyond kept
all the sunshine from her sky — until
an evening came when she heard that
Dick Dean was to join a party of ar-
tists who were going abroad directly to
sketch in Venice and perhaps the Tyrol,
whereupon she wondered that he had
not told her himself, and suddenly the
question was decided. Nothing that was
left behind would be worth caring for
if he went away, and this was the spark
of news that kindled the great blaze of
her love. She could hardly wait to see
him again. A great faith iu the career
he was sure to have had possessed her ;
but she forgot even that now ; she looked
at his sketches only because he had
done them, and not because he had done
them well.

So at last a certain Wednesday morn-
ing dawned in the middle of June, which
was to be a day of great decisions. Dick
Dean had been spending a day and night
with a friend in Newport, and did not
reach town until toward noon. He
would not try to go to see Mary until
after lunch. She was at the painting
lesson which he had longed of late to
give her himself, and he should only take
up the time of the not very friendly old
ladies.

So he strolled along the street under
the shade of the Common elms, and
looked fondly at the house which had
always been her home. One of the maids
was giving a last polish for that season to
the brasses of the door, and he wished
to go and speak to her. It seemed to
him as if he had been in Newport a
month. Presently Mr. Temple, of all
people, was seen approaching, and Mr.

1883.]

TJie Hare and the Tortoise.

199

Dean, in a strange fit of recklessness,
stopped to propose that they should go
out riding for a long distance together
that afternoon. Mr. Temple was ill at
ease ; he looked at the sky, and finding
no excuse there at lust pleaded an en-
gagement with Miss Chester at three
o'clock. It was an awful moment to
both, but they behaved with great com-
posure, and parted serenely to outward
view : one wending his way onward to
the Union Club, and the other to the
Somerset. If poor Dick had only known
it, his rival had asked the interview at
three o'clock, which Miss Chester, for
lack of any excuse, had granted. " It
must be something about the red setter
he told me of day before yesterday,"
she tried to assure herself. " He never
could mean to say anything else at that
time in the afternoon."

Dick was more miserable than ever.
There was something very self-assured
and triumphant about Temple, who was
not a person he ever wished to see again
as long as he lived. It might be that
he could go to see Mary early, soon after
lunch, which she usually finished by half
past two. Perhaps she would go out
with him, after all, though it was such
short notice. They might have a late
afternoon walk or ride ; perhaps it would
be the last. But he must speak to her.
At any rate, he had brought some mes-
sages from Newport. . . .

It was a long time since he had taken
his hurried, early breakfast that morn-
ing, so he went straight to the dining-
room of the club ; and in spite of his
love and his woe he took a reasonable
pleasure in a salad and some other tri-
fles, and afterward, finding that it was
not much after one o'clock, he seated
himself in a comfortable chair in the
reading-room, and tried to beguile him-
self with the newspapers. He smiled at
the placid face of an old fellow who was
sleeping soundly in another chair, just
opposite. He wondered idly if he had
ever fallen in love in his day, and pres-

ently — O careless and unreasonable
Hare ! — he dropped the paper on the
floor, and went to sleep himself in the
shaded room, with the carriages and carts
outside rumbling his lullaby.

There he dreamed, not about Mary
Chester at all, but of riding to the hunt
in dark November weather in England,
and after a time he waked in great
alarm. It took him a second or two to
remember what he was so anxious about,
and then he sprang from his chair and
snatched his hat, which was a Derby
now, like other young men's, in spite of
Mary's deprecation. As he went out of
the door he found it was three o'clock
already, and his only hope was that
Temple's watch might not be right ; in
fact, he had heard him complain of it
more than once of late.

But alas ! as he hurried down the hill
he saw the punctual Temple on the op-
posite side of the way. There was an
unpleasant triumphant expression in his
very back and the way he held his head.
He was walking at his usual dignified
pace. He would not hurry, even to see
Mary, and at this thought his indignant
rival promptly overtook him. And just
as the Tortoise prepared to cross the
street the Hare ran quickly up the steps.
Becket opened the door at once, for, a
wonder ; he had happened to be stand-
ing beside it.

Our heroine was waiting in the li-
brary; she thought it was for Henry
Temple, and she wished more and more
that he would come and go away again.
The aunts had ascended the stairs, and
were making arrangements for their
afternoon naps. She heard a quick foot-
step in the hall, but instead of any
other voice it was Dick's, saying, " Oh,
Mary ! " in a wonderful sort of way,
while Temple lingered for one awful,
foreboding half minute on the edge of
the sidewalk, looking at the closed door.

For in this new version of the story
of the Hare and the Tortoise, it was the
Hare that won.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

200

Academic Socialism.

[August,

ACADEMIC SOCIALISM.

IT is a striking tribute — and perhaps
the most striking when the most reluc-
tant — to the influence and authority of
physical science, that the followers of
other sciences (moral, not physical) are
so often compelled, or at least inclined,
to. borrow its terms, its methods, and
even its established principles. This
adaptation commonly begins, indeed, in
the way of metaphor and analogy. The
natural sympathy of men in the pursuit
of truth leads the publicist, for exam-
ple, and the geologist to compare pro-
fessional methods and results. The pub-
licist is struck with the superiority of
induction, and the convenience of lan-
guage soon teaches him to distinguish
the strata of social development ; to dis-
sect the anatomy of the state ; to analyze
political substance ; to observe, collect,
differentiate, and generalize the various
phenomena in the history of govern-
ment. This practice enriches the vo-
cabulary of political science, and is of-
fensive only to the sterner friends of
abstract speculation. But it is a vastly
graver matter formally and consciously
to apply in moral inquiries the rules,
tfie treatment, the logical implements,
all the technical machinery, of sciences
which have tangible materials and ex-
perimental resources constantly at com-
mand. And in the next step the very
summit of impiety seems to be reached.
The political philosopher is no longer
content merely to draw on physical sci-
ence for metaphors, or even to use in
his own way its peculiar methods, but
boldly adopts the very substance of its
results, and explains the sacred mystery
of social progress by laws which may
first have been used to fix the status of
tl)3 polyp or the ^ray-fish.

It is true that this practice has not
been confined to any age. There is a
distinct revelation of dependence on the

method, if not on the results, of the con-
crete sciences in Aristotle's famous pos-
tulate, that man is " by nature " a polit-
ical being. The uncompromising real-
ism of Macchiavelli would not dishonor
a disciple of Comte. And during the
past two hundred years, especially, there
is scarcely a single great discovery, or
even a single great hypothesis, which, if
at all available, has not been at once ap-
propriated by the publicists and applied
to their own uses. The circulation of
the blood suggests the theory of a sim-
ilar process in society, comparative anat-
omy reveals its structure, the geologic
periods explain its stages, and the cli-
max was for the time reached when
Frederick the Great, whose logic as
well as his poetry was that of a king,
declared that a state, like an animal
or vegetable organism, had its stages
of birth, youth, maturity, decay, and
death. Yet striking as are these early
illustrations, it is above all in recent
times, and under the influence of its
brilliant achievements in our own days,
that physical science has most strongly
impressed its methods and principles
on social and political investigation. Mr.
Freeman can write a treatise on com-
parative politics, and the term excites
no protest. Sir Henry Maine conducts
researches in comparative jurisprudence,
and even the bigots are silenced by
the copiousness and value of his results.
The explanation of kings and states by
the law of natural selection, which Mr.
Bagehot undertook, is hardly treated as
paradoxical. The ground being thus
prepared — unconsciously during the
last century ; — consciously and purpose-
ly during this, for a close assimilation
between the physical and the moral sci-
ences, it is natural that men should now
take up even the contested doctrine of
evolution, and apply it to the progress

1883.]

Academic Socialism.

201

of society in general, to the formation
of particular states, and to the develop-
ment of single institutions.

Now, if it be the part of political
science merely to adapt to its own use
laws or principles which have been fully
established in other fields of research,
it would of course be premature for it
to accept as an explanation of its own
phenomena a doctrine like that of evo-
lution, which is still rejected by a con-
siderable body of naturalists. But may
not political science refuse to acknowl-
edge such a state of subordination ? May
it not assert its own dignity, and choose
its own method of investigation ? And
even though that method be also the
favorite one of the natural philosopher,
may not the publicist employ it in his
own way, subject to the limitations of
his own material, and even discover laws
contrary to, or in anticipation of, the
laws of the physical universe ? If these
questions be answered in the affirma-
tive, it follows that the establishment of
a law of social and political evolution
may precede the general acceptance of
the same law by students of the animal
or vegetable world.

At present, however, such a law is
only a hypothesis, — a hypothesis sup-
ported, indeed, by many striking facts,
and yet apparently antagonized by oth-
ers not less striking. A sweeping glance
over the course of the world's history
does certainly reveal a reasonably uni-
form progress from a simpler to a more
complex civilization. This may also
be regarded in one sense as a progress
from lower to higher forms ; and if the
general movement be established, tem-
porary or local interruptions confirm
rather than shake the rule. But flat-
tering as is this hypothesis of progres-
sive social perfection to human nature,
it is still only a hypothesis, and far
enough from having for laymen the au-
thority of a law. The theologians alone
have positive information on the sub-
ject.

If evolution be taken to mean simply
the production of new species from a
common parent or genus, and without
implying the idea of improvement, the
history of many political institutions
seems to furnish hints of its presence,
and its action. Let us take, as an ex-
ample, the institution of parliaments.
The primitive parent assembly of the
Greeks was probably a body not un-
like the council of Agamemnon's chief-
tains in the Iliad ; and from this were
evolved in time the Spartan Gerousia,
the Athenian Ecclesia, and other legis-
latures as species, each resembling the
original type in some of its principles,
yet having others peculiar to itself. Out
of the early Teutonic assemblies were
produced, in the same way, the Parlia-
ment of England, the States-General of
France, the Diet of Germany, the Con-
gress of the United States.

Yet it may be questioned whether
even this illustration supports the doc-
trine of evolution, and in regard to other
institutions the case is still more doubt-
ful. Take, for example, the jury sys-
tem. The principle of popular partici-
pation in trials for crime has striven for
recognition, though not always success-
fully, in many countries and many ages.
But from at least one people, the Ger-
mans, and through one line, the Eng-
lish, it may be traced along a fairly reg-
ular course down to the present day.
Montesquieu calls attention to another
case, when, speaking of the division of
powers in the English government, he
exclaims, " Ce beau systeme est sorti des
bois ! " that is, the forests of Germany.
But in all such instances it depends
upon the point of view, or the method
of analysis, whether the student detects
the production of new species from a
common genus, or original creation by
a conscious author.

Even this is not, however, the only
difficulty. Evolution means the pro-
duction of higher, not simply of new,
forms ; and the term organic growth

202

Academic Socialism.

[August,

implies in social science the idea of im-
provement. But this kind of progress
is evidently far more difficult to discern
in operation. It is easy enough to trace
tin- American Congress back historically
to the Witenagemot, to derive the Amer-
ican jury from the Teutonic popular
courts, to connect the American city
with the municipality of feudal Europe,
or of Rome, or even of Greece. The
organic relation, or at least the histor-
ical affinity, in these and many other
cases is clear. But it is a widely differ-
ent thing to assert that what is evidently
political development or evolution must
also be upward progress. This might
lead to the conclusion that parliament-
ary institutions have risen to Cameron
and Mahone ; that the Saxoa courts
have been refined into the Uniontown
jury ; and that the art of municipal gov-
ernment has culminated in the city of
New York.

The truth is that there are two lead-
ing classes of political phenomena, the
one merely productive, the other pro-
gressive, which may in time, and by the
aid of large generalizations, be made to
harmonize with the doctrine of evolu-
tion, but which ought at present to be
carefully distinguished from the mani-
festations ordinarily cited in its support.
The first class includes the appearance,
fn different countries and different ages,
of institutions or tendencies similar in
character, but without organic connec-
tion. The other class includes visible
movements, but movements in circles, or
otherwise than forward and upward.
Both classes may be illustrated by co-
gent American examples, but it is to the
latter that the reader's attention is now
specially invoked.

Among the phenomena which have
appeared in all ages and all countries,
with a certain natural bond of sympa-
thy, and yet without a clearly ascertain-
able order of progress, one of the earli-
est and latest, one of the most universal
and most instructive, is that tendency

or aspiration variously termed agrarian,
socialistic, or communistic. The move-
ment appears under different forms and
different influences. It may be pro-
voked by the just complaints of an op-
pressed class, by the inevitable inequal-
ity of fortunes, or by a base jealousy of
superior moral and intellectual worth.
To these and other grievances, real or
feigned, correspond as many different
forms of redress, or rather schemes for
redress. One man demands the humil-
iation of the rich or the great, and
the artificial exaltation of the poor and
the ignorant ; another, the constant in-
terference of the state for the benefit
of general or individual prosperity ; a
third, the equalization of wealth by dis-
criminating measures ; a fourth, perhaps,
the abolition of private property, and
the substitution for it of corporate own-
ership by society. But widely as these
schemes differ in degree, they may all be
reduced to one general type, or at least
traced back to one pervading and per-
emptory instinct of human nature in all
races and all ages. It is the instinctive
demand that organized society shall
serve to improve the fortunes of indi-
viduals, and incidentally that those who
are least fortunate shall receive the
greatest service. Between the two ex-
treme attitudes held toward this demand,
— that of absolute compliance, and that
of absolute refusal — range the actual
policies of all political communities.

For the extremes are open to occu-
pation only by theories ; no state can
in practice fully accept and carry out
either the one or the other. Prussia
neglects many charges, or, in other
words, leaves to private effort much
that a rigid application of the prevail-
ing political philosophy would require
it to undertake ; while England con-
ducts by governmental action a vari-
ety of interests which the utilitarians
reserve to the individual citizen. The
real issue is therefore one of degree
or tendency. Shall the sphere of the

1883.]

Academic Socialism.

203

state's activity be broad or narrow ;
shall it maintain toward social interests
an attitude of passive, impartial indif-
ference, or of positive encouragement ;
shall the presumption in every doubtful
case be in favor of calling in the state,
or of trusting individual effort ? Such
are the forms in which the issue may be
stated, as well by the publicist as by the
legislator. And it is rather by the ex-
tent to which precept and practice in-
cline toward the one view or the other,
than by the complete adoption of either
of two mutually exclusive systems, that
political schools are to be classified.
This gives us on the one hand the util-
itarian, limited, or non-interference the-
ory of the state, and on the other the
paternal or socialistic theory.

Now although this country witnessed
at an early day the apparent triumph of
certain great schemes of policy, such as
protection and public improvements,
which are clearly socialistic, — I use
the term in an inoffensive, philosophical
sense, — it is noteworthy that the tri-
umph was won chiefly by the aid of con-
siderations of a practical, economical,
and temporary nature. The necessity
for a large revenue, the advantage of a
diversified industry, the desirability of
developing our natural resources, the
scarcity of home capital, the expediency
of encouraging European immigration,
and many other reasons of this sort
have been freely adduced. But at the
~same time the fundamental question of
the state's duties and powers, in other
words, the purely political aspect of the
subject, was neglected. Nay, the friends
of these exceptional departures from
the non-interference theory of the state
have insisted not the less, as a rule, on
the theory itself, while even the excep-
tions have been obnoxious to a large
majority of the most eminent publi-
cists and economists, that is to say the
specialists, of America. If any char-
acteristic system of political philosophy
has hitherto been generally accepted iii

this country, whether from instinct or
conviction, it is undoubtedly the sys-
tem of Adam Smith, Bentham, and the
Manchester school.

There are, however, reasons for
thinking that this state of things will be
changed in the near future, and that the
new school of political economists in
the United States will be widely differ-
ent from the present. This change, if it
actually take place, will be due to the in-
fluence of foreign teachers, but of teach-
ers wholly unlike those under whose in-
fluence we have lived for a century.

It has been often remarked that our
higher education is rapidly becoming
Germanized. Fifty years ago it was only
the exceptional and favored few — the
Ticknors and Motleys — who crossed
the ocean to continue their studies under
the great masters of German science ;
but a year or two at Leipsic or Heidel-
berg is now regarded as indispensable
to a man who desires the name of schol-
ar. This is especially true of those who
intend themselves to teach. The diplo-
ma of a German university is not, of
course, an instant and infallible passport
to employment in American colleges,
but it is a powerful recommendation ;
and the tendency seems to be toward a
time when it will be almost a required
condition. The number of Americans
studying in Germany is accordingly
now reckoned by hundreds, or even
thousands, where it used to be reckoned
by dozens. It is within my own knowl-
edge that in at least one year of the
past decade the Americans matriculated
at the University of Berlin outnumbered
every other class of foreigners. And
" foreigners " included all who were not
Prussians, in other words, even non-
Prussian Germans. That this state of
things is fraught with vast possible con-
sequences for the intellectual future of
America is a proposition which seems
hardly open to dispute ; and the only
question is about the nature, whether
good or bad, of those consequences.

204

Academic Socialism.

[August,

My own views on this question are
not of much importance. Yet it will
disarm one class of critics if I admit at.
the outset that in my opinion the ef-
fects of this scholastic pilgrimage will in
general be wholesome. The mere ex-
perience of different academic methods
and a different intellectual atmosphere
seems calculated both to broaden and to
deepen the mind ; it corresponds in a
measure to the " grand tour," which used
to be considered such an essential part
of the education of young English no-
blemen. The substance, too, of German
teaching is always rich, and often use-
ful. But in certain cases, or on certain
subjects, it may be the reverse of use-
ful ; and the question presents itself,
therefore, to every American student on
his way to Germany, whether the par-
ticular professor whom he has in view
is a recognized authority on his subject,
or, in a slightly different form, whether
the subject itself is anywhere taught in
Germany in a way which it is desirable
for him to adopt.

In regard to many departments of
study, doubts like these can indeed hard-
ly ever arise. No very strong feeling
is likely to be excited among the friends
and neighbors and constituents of a
young American about the views which
he will probably acquire in Germany on
the reforms of Servius Tullius, or the
formation of the Macedonian phalanx,
or the pronunciation of Sanskrit. Here
the scientific spirit and the acquired re-
sults of its employment are equally good.
But there are other branches of inquiry,
in which, though the method may be
good, the doctrines are at least open to
question.

One of these is social science, using
the term in its very broadest sense, and
making it include not only what the late
Professor von Mohl called Gesellschat'ts-
Wissenschaft, that is, social science in
the narrower sense, but also finance, the
philosophy of the state, and even law
in some of its phases.

The rise of the new school of econo-
mists in Germany is undoubtedly one
of the most remarkable phenomena of
modern times. The school is scarcely
twenty years old. Dr. Rodbertus, the
founder of it, had to fight his cause for
years against the combined opposition
of the professors, the governments, the
press, and the public. Yet his tenta-
tive suggestions have grown into an ac-
cepted body of doctrine, which is to-day
taught by authority in nearly every
German university, is fully adopted by
Prince Bismarck, and has in part pre-
vailed even with the imperial Diet.

The Catheder-Socialisten are not un-
known, at least by name, even to the
casual reader of current literature.
They are men who teach socialism from
the chairs of the universities. It is not
indeed a socialism which uses assassi-
nation as an ally, or has any special an-
tipathy to crowned heads: it is peace-
ful, orderly, and decorous ; it wears ac-
ademic robes, and writes learned and
somewhat tiresome treatises in its own
defense. But it is essentially socialis-
tic, and in one sense even revolutionary.
It has displaced, or rather grown out
of, the so-called " historical school " of
political economists, as this in its time
was a revolt against the school of Adam
Smith. The " historical " economists
charged against the English school that
it was .too deductive, too speculative,
and insisted on too wide an application
of conclusions which were in fact only
locally true. Their dissent was, how-
ever, cautious and qualified, and ques-
tioned not so much the results of the
English school as the manner of reach-
ing them. Their successors, more cour-
ageous or less prudent, reject even the
English doctrines. This means that they
are. above all things, protectionists.

It follows, accordingly, that the young
Americans who now study political
economy in Germany are nearly certain
to return protectionists ; and protection-
ists, too, in a sense in which the term

1883.]

Academic Socialism.

205

has not hitherto been understood in this
country. They are scientiiic protection-
ists ; that is, they believe that protec-
tive duties can be defended by some-
thing better than the selfish argument
of special industries, and have a broad
basis of economic truth. The " Ameri-
can system " is likely, therefore, to have
in the future the support of American
economic science.

To this extent, the influence of Ger-
man teachings will be welcome to Amer-
ican manufacturers. But protection is
with the Germans only part of a general
scheme, or an inference from their main
doctrine ; and this will not, perhaps, find
so ready acceptance in this country. For
" the socialists of the chair " are not so
much economical as political protection-
ists. They are chiefly significant as the
representatives of a certain theory of
the state, which has not hitherto found
much support in America. This will be
better understood after a brief histor-
ical recapitulation.

The mercantile system found, when
it appeared two centuries ago, a ready
reception in Prussia, both on economic
and on political grounds. It was sin-
gularly adapted to the form of govern-
ment which grew up at Berlin after
the forcible suppression of the Diets.
Professor Roscher compares Frederick
William I. to Colbert ; and it is certain
not only that the king understood the
economic meaning of the system, but
also that the administration which he
organized was admirably fitted to carry
it out. Frederick the Great was the vic-
tim of the same delusion. In his reign,
as in the reign of his father, it was con-
sidered to be the duty of the state to
take charge of every subject affecting
the social and pecuniary interests of the
people, and to regulate such subjects
by the light of a superior bureaucratic
wisdom. It was, in short, paternal gov-
ernment in its most highly developed
form. But in the early part of this
century it began, owing to three cooper-

ating causes, to decline. The first cause
was the circumstance that the succes-
sors of Frederick were not fitted, like
him and his father, to conduct the sys-
tem with the patient personal atten-
tion and the robust intelligence which
its success required of the head of the
state. The second influence was the
rise of new schools of political economy
and of political philosophy, and the gen-
eral diffusion of sounder views of so-
cial science. And in the third place,
the French Revolution, the Napoleonic
wars, and the complete destruction of
the ancient bases of social order in Ger-
many revealed the defects of the edifice
itself, and made a reconstruction on new
principles not only possible, but even
necessary.

The consequence was the agrarian re-
forms of Stein and Hardenberg, the res-
toration to the towns of some degree of
self-government, the agitation for par-
liaments, which even the Congress of
Vienna had to recognize, and other
measures or efforts in the direction of
decentralization and popular enfran-
chisement. King Frederick William
III. appointed to the newly created
Ministry of Instruction and Public Wor-
ship William von Humboldt, the author
of a treatise on the limits of the state's
power, which a century earlier would
have been burned by the common hang-
man. In 1818 Prussia adopted a new
tariff, which was a wide departure from
the previous policy, and in its turn
paved the way for the Zollverein, which
struck down the commercial barriers be-
tween the different German states, and
practically accepted the principle of free
trade. The course of purely political
emancipation was indeed arrested for a
time by the malign influence of Metter-
nich, but even this was resumed after
1848. In respect to commercial policy
there was no reaction. That the events
of 1866 and 1870, leading to the forma-
tion, first, of the North German Confed-
eration, and then of the Empire, were

206

Academic Socialism.

[August,

expected to favor, and not to check, the
work of liheration, and down to a certain
point did favor it, is matter of familiar
recent history. The doctrines of the
Manchester school were held by the
great body of the people, taught by the
professors, and embodied in the national
policy, so far as they concerned freedom
of trade. On their political side, too,
they were accepted by a large and influ-
ential class of liberals. Few Germans
held, indeed, the extreme "non-interfer-
ence " theory of government ; but the
prevailing tone of thought, and even the
general policy of legislation, was, until
about ten years ago, in favor of unbur-
dening the state of some of its usurped
charges ; of enlarging in the towns and
counties the sphere of self-government ;
and of granting to individuals a new de-
gree of initiative in respect to econom-
ical and industrial interests.

But about the middle of the past
decade the current began to turn. The
revolt from the doctrines of the Man-
chester school, initiated, as has been
stated, by a few men, and not at first
looked on with favor by governments,
gradually acquired both numbers and
credit. The professors one by one
joined the movement. And finally, when
Prince Bismarck threw his powerful
weight into the scale, the utilitarians
were forced upon the defensive. They
had to resist first of all the Prussian
scheme for the acquisition of private
railways by the state, and they were
defeated. They were next called upon
to defend in the whole Empire the cause
of free trade. This battle, too, they lost,
and in an incredibly short space of time
protection, which had been discredited
for half a century, was fully restored.
Then the free city of Hamburg was
robbed of its ancient privileges, and
forced to accept the common yoke.
Some minor socialistic schemes of the
chancellor have been, indeed, temporarily
frustrated by the Diet, but repeated ef-
forts will doubtless break down the re-

sistance. The policy even attacks the
functions of the Diet itself, as is shown
both by actual projects and by the gen-
erally changed attitude of the govern-
ment toward parliamentary institutions.

Now, so far as protection is concerned,
this movement may seem to many Amer-
icans to be in principle a return to wis-
dom. In fact, not even American pro-
tectionists enjoy the imposition of heavy
duties on their exported products ; but
the recognition of their system of com-
mercial policy by another state undoubt-
edly gives it a new strength and prestige,
and they certainly regard it as an un-
mixed advantage that their sons, who go
abroad to pursue the scientific study of
political economy, will in Germany im-
bibe no heresies on the subject of tariff
methods. Is this, however, all that they
are likely to learn, and if not, will the
rest prove equally commendable to the
great body of thoughtful Americans ?
This is the same thing as asking wheth-
er local self-government, trial by jury,
the common law, the personal responsi-
bility of officials, frequent elections, in
short, all the priceless conquests of An-
glican liberty, all that distinguishes Eng-
land and America from the continent of
Europe, are not as dear to the man who
spins cotton into thread, or makes steel
rails out of iron ore, as to any free-trade
professor of political economy.

To state this question is to answer it ;
for it can be shown that, as a people, we
have cause not for exultation, but for
grave anxiety, over the class of students
whom the German universities are an-
nually sending back to America. If
these pilgrims are faithful disciples of
their masters, they do not return merely
as protectionists, with their original loy-
alty to Anglo-American theories of gov-
ernment otherwise unshaken, but as the
advocates of a political system which, if
adopted and literally carried out, would
wholly change the spirit of our institu-
tions, and destroy all that is oldest and
noblest in our national life.

1883.]

Academic Socialism.

207

Protection, it was said above, is not
the main doctrine of the German pro-
fessors, but only an inference from their
general system. It is not an econom-
ical, much less a financial, expedient. It
is a policy which is derived from a the-
ory of the state's functions and duties ;
and this theory is in nearly every other
respect radically different from that
which prevails in this country. It as-
sumes as postulates the ignorance of the
individual and the omniscience of the
government. The government, in this
view, is therefore bound, not simply to
abstain from malicious interference with
private enterprises, not simply so to
adjust taxation that all interests may re-
ceive equitable treatment, but positively
to exercise a fatherly care over each
and every branch of production, and
even to take many of them into its own
hands. All organizations of private
capital are regarded with suspicion ;
they are at best tolerated, not encour-
aged. Large enterprises are to be un-
dertaken by the state ; and even the
petty details of the retail trade are to be
controlled to an extent which would
seem intolerable to American citizens.

And this is not the whole, or, per-
haps, the worst.

The " state," in this system, means
the central government, and, besides
that, a government removed as far as
possible from parliamentary influence
and public opinion. The superior wis-
dom, which in industrial affairs is to
take the place of individual sagacity,
means, as in the time of Frederick the
Great, the wisdom of the bureaucracy.
Now it may be freely granted that in
Prussia, and even throughout the rest of
the Empire, this is generally wisdom of
a high order. It is represented by men
whose integrity is above suspicion. But
the principle of the system is not the
less obnoxious, and its tendencies, if in-
troduced in this country, could not be
otherwise than deplorable.

This proposition, if the German

school has been correctly described,
needs no further defense. If Americans
are prepared to accept the teachings of
Wagner, Held, Schmoller, and others,
with all which those teachings imply,
— a paternal government, a centralized
political authority, a bureaucratic ad-
. ministration, Roman law, and trial by
executive judges, — the new school of
German publicists will be wholly unob-
jectionable. But before such a system
can be welcome, the American nature
must first be radically changed.

There are, indeed, evidences other
than that of protection — which it has
been shown is not commonly defended
on political grounds — that this change
has already made some progress. One
of these is the growing fashion of look-
ing to legislation, that is, to the state,
for relief in cases where individual or
at least privately organized collective
effort ought to suffice. It is a further
evil, too, that the worst legislatures are
invariably the ones which most promptly
respond to such demands. The recent
act of the State of New York making
the canals free, though not indefensible
in some of its aspects, was an innova-
tion the more significant since the lead-
ing argument of its supporters was dis-
tinctly and grossly socialistic. This was
the argument that free canals would
make low freights, and low freights
would give the poor man cheaper bread.
For this end the property of the State is
henceforth to be taxed. A movement
of the same nature, and on a larger
scale, is that for a government tele-
graph; and if successful, the next
scheme will be to have the railways like-
wise acquired by the separate States, or
the Union. Other illustrations might
be given, but these show the tendency
to which allusion is made. It is signifi-
cant that such projects can be even pro-
posed ; but that they can be seriously
discussed, and some of them actually
adopted, shows that the stern jealousy
of governmental interference, the dispo-

Academic Socialism.

[August,

sition rigidly to circumscribe the state's
sphere of action, which once character-
ized the people of the republic, has lost,
though unconsciously, a large part of
its force. No alarm or even surprise
is now excited by propositions which
the founders of the Union would have
pronounced fatal to free government.
Some other symptoms, though of a more
subtle kind, are the multiplication of
codes ; the growing use of written pro-
cedure, not only in the courts and in
civil administration, but even in legisla-
tion ; and, generally speaking, the ten-
dency to adopt the dry, formal, pedantic
method of the continent, thereby losing
the old English qualities of ease, flexi-
bility, and natural strength.

But, as already said, the bearings of
schemes like those above mentioned are
rarely perceived even by their strongest
advocates. They are casual expedients,
not steps in the development of a sys-
tematic theory of the state. Indeed,
their authors and friends would be per-
haps the first to resent the charge that
they were in conflict with the political
traditions of America, or likely to pre-
pare the way for the reception of new
and subversive doctrines. Yet nothing
better facilitates a revolution in a peo-
ple's modes or habits of thought than
just such a series of practical measures.
The time at length arrives when some
comprehensive genius, or a school of
sympathetic thinkers, calmly codifies
these preliminary though unsuspected
concessions, and makes them the basis
of a firm, complete, and symmetrical
structure. It is then found that long
familiarity with some of the details in
practice makes it comparatively simple
for a people to accept the whole system
as a conviction of the mind.

Such a school has not hitherto ex-
isted in this country. There have of
course always beeu shades of difference
between publicists and philosophers in
regard to the speculative view taken of
the state ; and the division between gov-

ernmental patronage and private exer-
tion has not always been drawn along
the same line. But these differences
have been neither great nor constant.
They distinguished rather varieties of
the same system than different and
radically hostile systems. The most
zealous and advanced of the former
champions of state interference would
now probably be called utilitarians by
the pupils of the new German school.

It has been the purpose of this paper
to describe briefly the tendencies of that
school, and to indicate the effects which
its patronage by American youth is like-
ly to have on the future of our political
thought. The opinion was expressed
that much more is acquired in Germany
than a mere belief in the economic wis-
dom of protection. And it may be add-
ed, to make the case stronger, that the
German system of socialism may be
learned without the doctrine of protec-
tion on its economic side. For the
university socialists assert only the
right, or at most the duty, of the state
actively to interfere in favor of the in-
dustrial interests of society. The exer-
cise of this right or the fulfillment of
this duty may, in a given case, lead to a
protective tariff ; in Germany, at pres-
ent, it does take that form. But in
another case it may lead to free trade.
The decision is to be determined by the
economic circumstances of the country
and the moment ; only it is to be posi-
tive and active even if in favor of free
trade, and not a merely negative atti-
tude of indifference. In other words,
free trade is not assumed to be the nor-
mal condition of things, and protection
the exception. Both alike require the
active intervention of government in the
performance of its duty to society.

But with or without protection, the
body of the German doctrine is full of
plausible yet vicious errors, which few
reflecting Americans would care to see
introduced and become current in their
own country. The prevailing idea is

1883.]

Academic Socialism.

209

that of the ignorance and weakness of
the individual, the omniscience and om-
nipotence of the state. This is not yet,
in spite of actual institutions and pro-
jected measures, the accepted American
view.

Now I am not one of those who are
likely to condemn a thing because it is
foreign. It may be frankly conceded
that in the present temper of German
politics, and even of German social and
political science, there is much that is
admirable and worthy of imitation. The
selection of trained men alone for admin-
istrative office, the great lesson that in-
dividual convenience must often yield to
the welfare of society, the conception of
the dignity of politics and the majesty
of the state, — these are things which
we certainly need to learn, and which
Germany can both teach and illustrate.
But side by side with such fundamental
truths stand the most mischievous falla-
cies, and an enthusiastic student is not
always sure to make the proper selec-
tion.

It seems to me that in political doc-
trine, as in so many other intellectual
concerns of society, this country is now
passing through an important crisis.
We are engaged in a struggle between
the surviving traditions of our English
ancestors and the influence of different
ideas acquired by travel and study on
the continent. It is by no means cer-
tain, however desirable, that victory will
rest with those literary, educational, and
political instincts which we acquired
with our English blood, and long cher-
ished as among our most precious pos-
sessions. The tendency now certainly
is in a different direction, as has already
been discovered by foreign observers.
Some of Tocqueville's acute observa-
tions have nearly lost their point. Mr.
Frederic Pollock, in an essay recently
published by an English periodical, men-
tions the gradual approach of America
toward continental views of law and the
state. There is, undoubtedly, among

VOL. LII. — NO. 310. 14

the American people a large conserva-
tive element, which, if its attention were
once aroused, would show an uncon-
querable attachment to those principles
of society and government common to
all the English peoples, under whatever
sky they may be found. But at present
the current is evidently taking a differ-
ent course.

It would, however, be a grave mis-
take to regard this hostile movement as
a forward one. Not everything new is
reform ; but the socialist revival is not
even new. Yet it is also not real con-
servatism. The true American con-
servatives, in the present crisis, are the
men who not only respect the previ-
ous achievements of Anglo-Saxon prog-
ress, but also wisely adhere to the same
order of progress, with a view to con-
tinued benefits in the future ; while
their enemies, though in one sense rad-
icals, are in another simply the disguised
servants of reaction, since they reject
both the hopes of the future and the
lessons of the past. They bring for-
ward as novelties in scholastic garb the
antique errors of remote centuries. The
same motives, the same spirit, the same
tendency, can be ascribed to the agrarian
laws of the Gracchi, the peasant up-
risings in the Middle Ages, the public
granaries of Frederick the Great, the
graduated income - tax of Prussia, the
Land League agitation in Ireland, the
river and harbor bills in this country.
They differ only in the degree in which
special circumstances may seem to ren-
der a given measure more or less justi-
fiable.

The special consideration is, however,
this : these successive measures and
manifestations, whether they have an
organic connection or only an accidental
resemblance, reveal no improvement
whatever in quality, no progress in social
enlightenment. The records of political
government from the earliest dawn of
civilization will be searched in vain for
a more reckless and brutal measure of

210

To a Hurt Child.

[August,

class legislation than the Bland silver
bill, which an American Congress passed
in the year 1878.

It is the same with the pompous syl-
logisms on which the German professors
are trying to build up their socialistic
theory of the state. Everything which
they have to say was said far better by
Plato two thousand years ago. If they
had absolute control of legislation, they
could not surpass the work of Lycurgus.
It is useless for them to try to hide
their plagiarism under a cloud of pedan-
tic sophistry ; for the most superficial
critic will not fail to see that, instead of
originating, they are only borrowing, and
even borrowing errors of theory and of
policy which have been steadily retreat-
ing before the advance of political edu-
cation.

If the question were asked, What more,
perhaps, than anything else distinguishes
the modern from the ancient state, and
distinguishes it favorably ? the unhesi-

tating reply from every candid person
would be, The greater importance con-
ceded to the individual. We have at-
tained this result through a long course
of arduous and painful struggles. The
progress has not, indeed, been uninter-
rupted, nor its bearings always per-
ceived ; but the general, and through
large periods of time uniform, tendency
has been to disestablish and disarm the
state, to reduce government to narrow
limits, and to assert the dignity of the
individual citizen. And now the ques-
tion is, Shall this line of progress be ab-
ruptly abandoned ? Shall we confess
that we have been all this time moving
only in a circle ; that what we thought
was progress in a straight line is only
revolution in a fixed orbit ; and that so-
ciety is doomed to return to the very
point from which it started ? The aca-
demic socialism invites us to begin the
backward march, but must its invitation
be accepted ?

Herbert Tattle.

TO A HURT CHILD.

WHAT, art thou hurt, Sweet? So am I, —

Cut to the heart ;
Though I may neither moan nor cry,

To ease the smart.

Where was it, Love ? Just here ? So wide

Upon thy cheek ?
Oh, happy pain that needs no pride,

And may dare speak !

Lay here thy pretty head. One touch

Will heal its worst ;
While I, whose wound bleeds overmuch,

Go all unnursed.

There, Sweet ! Run back now to thy play ;

Forget thy woes.
I too was sorely hurt this day, —

But no one knows.

Grace Denio Litchfield.

1883.]

Newport.

211

NEWPORT.

III.

MRS. BLAZER'S DINNER.

PORTER had not shown himself at
the Casino dance, his calibre requiring
entertainments of greater weight. But
he sent his dog-cart to the hotel, next
morning, to transfer Oliphant to the
villa.

"You look tired," he observed soli-
citously, on his guest's arrival.

" I 'm all right," said Eugene. " I
was up rather late. But what a cosey
place you 've got here ! "

" Yes ; it does well enough for me.
Not mine, you know; merely taken it
for the season." Porter was addicted
to brevity of speech. " It belongs to
a man named Craig. He lives here in
winter, but during the summer he crawls
off into a boarding-house and lets the
cottage. Rent keeps him in funds for
the rest of the year, you see. Guess
he put most of his money into this
shebang, for he seems hard up. His
son has to play the organ in one of
the churches here, to eke things out.
Quite a genius by the way, that young
fellow. Justin they call him. You
fond of music ? "

*' Exceedingly."

" Well, I '11 get him to come and play
for you ; piano goes with house. I fur-
nish a good many things, though, in-
cluding turn-outs. Come, I '11 show you
your room."

The house was an attractive one,
placed near the old Green End Road,
which now — with the sham elegance of
a parvenu taste — has been rechristened
Buena Vista Street. It was supposed
to be in the style of Queen Anne ; but
had that virtuous matron made a prog-
ress in its direction, it may be doubted
whether she would have recognized it

as a leal subject of her reign in art.
The deep brown of its exterior more
naturally suggested the domestic inspi-
ration of pumpkin pie. But the room
to which Raish Porter conducted his
guest was quite to Oliphant's taste, and
was provided with a sheltered ombra
where, in the midst of flowering plants,
one could inhale the fresh air and gaze
upon the green water in front of Eas-
ton's beach, and the gently mounded pas-
tures farther off, which, as Oliphant
knew of old, rolled away into the shel-
tered vale of Paradise. On those slopes
rose a squat, comfortable-looking gray
wind-mill, past which a delicate fog was
beginning to float in from the ocean,
spreading its ghostly influence over the
land.

" Now at last I feel that I 'm in New-
port ! " Oliphant exclaimed, with satis-
faction.

" Well, my boy, make yourself at home.
This afternoon, if you like, I '11 take
you the long drive. Do as you please —
independence compact, you know. I Ve
put you down at both the clubs ; con-
venient. If you want anything, ring
that bell. And oh, by the way," he
added, looking around the door, which
he had already opened, to go out,
" there 's a little wagon entirely for
your own use. Any time you want it,
just tell James."

Without giving his friend time to
thank him, he disappeared.

When Oliphant went down stairs, a
few moments later, Porter was nowhere
to be seen. He looked out of the win-
dow ; the fog, he saw, had increased.
" This is devilish queer," he said to him-
self. " Where can Porter be ? " It
seemed to him that his host must have
vanished into the fog, and he allowed
himself to fancy that perhaps he might
not return.

212

Newport.

[August,

lie rang the bell. " Do you know,"
he asked of the servant, " whether Mr.
Porter is in ? "

" No, sir, he 's not in," said James.
" He went out a few moments ago."

" Do you expect him in presently ? "

" Can't say, sir."

There came over Oliphant an uncom-
fortable sense of being a prisoner, and
he said to the servant who still waited,
" I think I shall go down to the club —
the old club; not the Casino. If Mr.
Porter comes in, will you tell him that
I shall be back to lunch ? "

He escaped, and was ridiculously glad
to be in the free air once more. He
was conscious that the old club, the
Newport Reading-Room, was the con-
servative stronghold, and for this reason
he took his way thither, instead of to
the Casino. It occurred to him that he
had been a trifle rash in accepting Por-
ter's hospitality without ascertaining
more about his present status.

At the club, which was nearly unten-
anted, he tried to read the newspapers ;
but the letter which he had discovered
the night before kept coming into his
mind. What was he to do with it?
That was the vexatious point, for ap-
parently there was nothing to be done.
One might say that, in an honorable
sense, the document belonged to Mrs.
Gifford as much as to himself ; that she
ought to take it and dispose of it in her
own way. Yet it would never do to give
it to her. No ; that was decided : she
must not know of it, on any account.
He would burn it. Here again he was
obliged to ask himself whether he had
any right to do so ; and he could not be

sure that he had. Throwino- down the

newspaper, he saw Roger Deering, who
had just entered th^oog^ standing in
front of him. /

They dropped into a slow dialogue,
and Porter ^became the subject.

"Yes, I'm staying with him," said
Eugene. " But this sudden prosperity
of his rather bewilders me. The last

time I knew of him he was merely
traveling agent of the Magawisca Man-
ufacturing Company. He tells me now
that he 's launched out for himself ; and
he appears to be opulent. It 's a great
change, seems to me."

" So it is," Roger assented. " But I
suppose he 's entitled to it. He devel-
oped a great head for business, and
some people think he is a remarkable
financier. He certainly has made some
long-sighted operations, and is very suc-
cessful so far."

" So far, eh ? Then you doubt his
future ? "

Deering answered diplomatically :
"Why should I? I know nothing
about what he 's projecting. Only this,
Eugene : as you 're my cousin, I '11 warn
you that I 've sometimes suspected
Raish " — he lowered his voice, — " of
rather snide transactions ; and setting
that apart, I know that he is taking
great risks."

Eugene smiled. " And, as a stock-
broker, you consider that against
him ? "

" I presume, Eugene," was the re-
ply, " that your head is well settled on
the horizontal plane ; in other words,
level. You 're not a lamb, and accord-
ingly I can click the shears in your
hearing with impunity. You had your
stint of Wall Street some time ago, I
take it. But Raish Porter is even
more seductive than stock-quotations,
and I advise you to keep clear of his
schemes."

" Oh, I suppose I shall do that any
way," said Oliphant ; " but I 'm obliged
for the hint, all the same." He had an
inclination to talk to Roger about Atlee.
Roger, with his ruddy face, his short
hair, his busy, active manner, seemed so
honest, that Oliphant's dawning anxiety
with regard to the attentions of Atlee
became doubly painful. But he really
had nothing to go upon, and Roger
probably would not thank him for re-
vealiiig ifc ^ ne ^a^ '> so ^

1883.]

Newport.

213

asked a few questions about the Angli-
cized young man. Except for his for-
eign nonsense, Roger thought him one
of the best of fellows, and showed per-
fect confidence in him. Confidence, it
struck Eugene, was the broker's strong-
est trait; confidence in himself, in his
wife, in Atlee, combined with a confi-
dence that he knew the ways of the
world, and did not trust anybody too
much. Why wouldn't it be a good
idea to get his advice regarding the let-
ter ? Accordingly, Eugene put the case
to him as a supposititious one.

" What would I do ? " said Roger in
reply, casting up the pros and cons with
his chin in the air. " Well, that de-
pends on how much you are acquainted
with the lady. However, I should say
there is no doubt she ought to have, or
at least see the letter, some time. It 's
the square thing. When you know her
better, say ; or perhaps Mary could help
you."

" Oh no ; no. Don't say a word to
Mary. Please keep the whole thing
strictly to yourself. I '11 wait and see."

" All right."

Going back to the cottage, Eugene
lunched alone, Raish still not having re-
turned ; and when at last the latter
made his appearance, it was time for the
drive. " By the way," said Raish, " I
met Mrs. Blazer, and she wants us both
to dine with her on Friday."

" She 's very kind ; but I don't know
her yet, you remember."

" Oh, I '11 arrange that. I shall pre-
sent you to-morrow. There will be
some interesting people at the dinner ;
Count Fitz-Stuart, and Lord Hawkstane,
and Vivian Ware," — Oliphant contin-
ued to look dubious, — "and that fas-
cinating woman, Mrs. Gifford," Raish
concluded.

" Ah, she is to be there ? I should
like to see her again."

"And I don't blame you," said his
companion, with an off-hand familiarity
that somehow grated ou Eugene. But

they were now spinning along in the
dog-cart ; and the soft marine air, with
the prospect of soon meeting Mrs. Gif-
ford once more, speedily put him into
good humor. Porter went on fluently,
telling who lived in the various houses
along the way, and striking out witti-
cisms from whatever material offered
itself. But when they had passed out
on to the ocean road that follows the
shore to Baternau's Point and around
again to the harbor, his tone changed.

"I tell you, Oliphant," he declared
with vehemence, " that life we 've left
behind us in the town is all a sham. It
drops itself down in one of the loveliest
regions Nature can show, and just de-
votes itself to a surfeit of amusement
and artifice, to fal-lal and lah-de-dah.
I despise it ! "

"Why do you come here, then ? "

" Why do you, my dear fellow ? We
must be ' of our time,' you know." And
he continued to talk in a strain of ca-
pacious dissatisfaction ; satirizing the
superficial republicanism of American
institutions, and declaring with solid
cheerfulness that the present state of
things must eventually be swept away
and a new civilization be built up above
the ruins. But as they drew near the
outer streets again, on the homeward
stretch, he subsided into contented ac-
ceptance of the hollow present, and was
careful to show Oliphant where Mrs.
Gifford lived. It was a house with
timbers let into the walls, and raised
its high-piled gables showily above the
trees on a hill to the west of the polo-
grounds, commanding the harbor and
Narragansett Bay. " They call it High
Lawn," Porter said.

The fog had continued to hang about
the island, and it increased at nightfall ;
so that when Oliphant repaired to his
room to sleep, he was glad to see a
cheerful fire on the modern -antique
hearth. The winking flames reminded
him of his first design of burning Gif-
ford's letter. Mustering his resolution,

214

Newport.

[August,

he took the paper out of its repository
and went straight to the fire with it,
intending to drop it upon the blazing
wood ; but at the last moment his doubts
returned, and he concluded to wait.
There was a force in it, a something ap-
proaching personality, which he could
not overcome ; it began to make him
nervous ; he disliked to put it away
again and leave it — as if it might take
some action against him unawares, when
his back should be turned — for it was
no longer a passive thing. Prompted
by this unreasoning impression, he put
the letter into a safe pocket in his coat,
determined thereafter to carry it about
with him.

At the usual morning assemblage in
the Casino, the next day, he was pre-
sented to Mrs. Blazer, who made herself
agreeable, but wore a pained, abstracted
look. He noticed, too, that she con-
stantly, in moments of silence, com-
pressed her upper lip so that it became
suddenly creased with fine downward
lines, like those of hidden steel springs.

"I'm glad you will come, Friday,"
she said, relaxing this pressure and smil-
ing at him ; but it was a weary smile,
— that of a person absorbed in schemes,
all of which were perhaps not going as
she wished. Oliphant had a suspicion
that this Social Usurper, like her con-
geners in the history of thrones, must
always remain insecure.

" It is very considerate in you to ask
me," he replied, "when you have so
many to choose from here, and I am
little more than a stranger."

" My dear Mr. Oliphant," — her use
of this address savored of imperial con-
descension, — " I am delighted to enter-
tain an old friend of Mr. Porter's. Be-
sides, you are not so much a stranger."

'• No ? How is that ? "

"Mr. Sweetser has been telling me
that he knows all about you."

" He must be a magician, then."

" Oh no, he 's a very simple man ;
a delightful man, too — Mr. Sweetser.

He 's like a glass of soda-water, always
sparkling."

Oliphant caught sight of him in the
distance, at that moment, smirking to
some ladies on the balcony. " Yes," he
said ; " he seems to enjoy life thorough-
ly. But you make me curious. I
should like to hear my history from
him, because he 'd be sure to give it»a
new vivacity."

" Ah, that 's very well said," Mrs.
Blazer declared, showing her large teeth
in a heartier smile than before. " But
he only said he remembered seeing you,
or knowing of you, some years ago in
Springfield. Mr. Sweetser can remem-
ber a long time back — for a young
man."

" I don't think I remember him" said
Oliphant, reflecting.

" I dare say not ; I believe he had
known Mrs. Oliphant, when she was
Miss Davenant. But I notice your
cousin beckoning for you over there :
she wants to see you."

" Where ? " Oliphant turned, and dis-
covering Mrs. Deering, went to join her.

" I am dying to ask you one ques-
tion," said that alert little lady, when
she had drawn him apart to a quieter
spot. " Is it Mrs. Gifford? "

« It? What? And what about her ? "

" Why, I mean the letter. Is she the
widow you meant, when you told Rog-
er?"

Oliphant was thunderstruck. " Is it
possible he mentioned that to you ? " he
inquired, showing his vexation. " I
told him particularly " —

"Oh, never mind that," interrupted
Mrs. Deering, good-humoredly. " Of
course he tried to keep it to himself,
but he was so much interested, he could
n't. And do you know, I guessed right
away that it was Mrs. Gifford. Was n't
that 'cute of me ? " She gazed up at
him with such a saucy triumph, that he
was obliged to pocket his annoyance.

" I don't know that it makes any dif-
ference to me," he said. " But Mrs.

1883.]

Newport.

215

Gifford certainly has some claim. I 'm
sorry I spoke to Roger, even vaguely."

" You might trust me a little" said
his cousin, in a tone of injury. " Of
course I sha'n't allude to it to any one
else, in the faintest way. But I want
to know if you 're really going to show
her that letter."

" Of course not. How can I ? Would
you do such a thing ? "

" Decidedly not, unless I wanted to
give her a shock and make her un-
happy."

" You think, then, that it really would
make her unhappy ? "

" I 'm sure of it."

" But possibly she knows of the orig-
inal fact already, even if she never heard
of the letter."

Mrs. Deering shook her head. " I
doubt if she knows ; and even if she
did, showing her this old letter would
only bring it up in a painful, unneces-
sary way."

" So I think," he returned. " But as
long as you had been told, I thought
I 'd get your opinion."

" Well, I 've given it ; but you must
n't consider me as advising," said she,
settling her chin with the placidness of
sated curiosity.

Oliphant was exasperated at the semi-
publicity into which he had allowed his
secret to be dragged ; but he consoled
himself with the fact that husband and
wife had flatly contradicted each other's
counsel.

The day for the dinner arrived, and
at Mrs. Blazer's everything appeared
light, gay, brilliant ; but the elegance
of her big mirrors, teakwood furniture,
and huge vases was tarnished by a sus-
picion that it could not be quite genuine.

" We are just waiting for the Count,"
said the hostess, while she welcomed
Porter and his companion. She had on
a dress of cream-colored silk, plaited
and draped with the elaboration of a
bastioned fortress ; and around the tight-
ly drawn space at the bottom was spread,

like a victorious ensign, a rich applied
Turkish embroidery, full of red and
yellow.

The servant announced Count Fitz-
Stuart, and Porter whispered to Oli-
phant, " ' Positively the last ' of the
Stuarts. They don't last especially
well, eh? :'

In truth, the young Count made no
very distinguished figure : slim, habile
in form, face the color of an apricot
ripened under artificial conditions; in-
significant teeth, slightly injured ; a gen-
eral expression of light-hearted readiness
for whatever should turn up ; all this
glazed over with a thin magnificence
of manner, somewhat run down from
want of exercise.

Among the others present were Viv-
ian Ware and her brother Still man,
Perry Thorburn and Miss Hobart, and
the two Misses Blazer. Oliphant was
keenly on the lookout for Mrs. Gifford,
who greeted him with a smile that was
flattering because it seemed to premise
that, having seen him once, she was
glad to meet him again in a more inti-
mate circle. He crossed over to speak
with her.

" I did n't see you at the Casino, to-
day," he said.

" No, I go only now and then. And
to-day I — I was particularly occupied."
She looked down for an instant, and
then at him, with an almost girlish an-
ticipation of the surprise she meant to
give him. " Where do you suppose I
was ? The most romantic thing you can
imagine ! "

" If it 's romantic," said Oliphant, " I
sha'n't try to guess ; for only like knows
like."

" I don't know what makes me tell
you," Mrs. Gifford proceeded ; " I 'm
sure I don't. Well, I was down at old
Trinity Church, listening to the organ
— on a week-day, you know."

He thought this a flat conclusion, but
exclaimed with fervor, " How singular!"

" Yes," said his new friend ; " but

216

Newport.
The great point

[August,

that 's nothing at all.
is the organist."

" Ah ? Who is he ? "

" A young musical magnificence. Jus-
tin Craig is his name."

" Craig ? Why, I 've heard of him.
I 'm staying in his father's house, with
Mr. Porter. Is n't it the same ? "

" Yes, yes," cried Mrs. Gifford, alive
with enthusiasm. " Have you met Jus-
tin ? "

The gaslight appeared to Oliphant to
burn several degrees brighter, under the
influence of this sudden interest.

" No, I don't know him," he said, re-
luctantly. " You have a high opinion
of his talent, then ? "

" You shall see for yourself what it
is, Mr. Oliphant. He is coming to play
for us here, later in the evening."

" Then that is n't he over there by
the window, talking with Miss Hobart?"
Oliphant had reference to a tall young
man with a palish, elongated face, and
vaguely high-bred air, who seemed to be
uncomfortable in whatever position he
took, and had just shaken himself into
a fresh attitude before Josephine.

Mrs. Gifford returned an incredulous
gaze. " That ! Why, that 's Lord Hawk-
stane ; did n't you know ? Poor Justin
would never be invited here to dine."

Oliphant was now taken away for
presentation to Miss Blazer, the elder,
Ruth by name, with whom he was to go
in to dinner. Mrs. Blazer led with
Lord Hawkstane, and Count Fitz-Stuart
escorted Vivian Ware. The dining-
room was a rotunda, and the table was
circular, too ; so that although Oliphant
was placed between Vivian Ware and
Ruth Blazer, with Lord Hawkstane and
Tilly Blazer opposite, he had a good
view of the whole company. There
were burning candles in slim brass hold-
ers set on small circular mirrors ; red
and yellow flowers, repeating the tints
of Mrs. Blazer's embroidery, abounded ;
and trails of fern led from the central
mass to each plate, softening the glitter

of the lights, the brass, the glass, and
the flame-colored blossoms.

As the turbot a la bechamel followed
the Little Neck clams, the Count was
heard remarking to Vivian : " But this
I do not see, why they call him Little
Neck, for this feeshes has not any necks
of all."

" Next to none," Oliphant hazarded ;
whereupon Vivian gave him a merry
glance that put value into the wretched
pun.

Just then Lord Hawkstane monopo-
lized attention by what he was saying
to Miss Tilly Blazer ; a young woman,
by the way, sagacious and picturesque
after her manner, with a cultivated air
of silliness, and sleepy-looking eyes and
nose. She listened with absorption to
his account of the fox-hunt. " Yes, I
got the mask," he said. " But all this
sort of thing," he continued, in his high-
pitched, boyish voice, " is very different
to England, you know. Beastly stone
walls and all that, don't you know ; but
then it was awfully jolly w'en we came
in at the death. How'ver, on the way,
we got to one of those windmills, don't
you know, — ha, ha ! " — he burst into
a watery little laugh — " and the fox
ran in there. Yes he did, 'pon my
word."

" How mean of him ! " sighed Miss
Tilly.

"Yes," agreed his lordship, after
gulping a glass of Saute rne. " Awfully.
It was what you call here ' cussed,' don't
you know ? ' Pure cussedness.' " And
he laughed again, with gratification at
having proved himself a wit. " He was
a nahsty little fox. Well, we had to
call the hunt together, you know, and
begin again. They beat him out, and
then I got in front and had an awfully
tight pull with Thorburn, and came in.
ahead; so I got the mask, you und'-
stand."

" How perfectly lovely ! " Tilly ex-
claimed. " And the mask is the head,
is n't it ? "

1883.]

Newport.

217

" Yes."

" It sounds so awfully mysterious,
don't you know ? " she went on, bring-
ing her manner softly into accord with
his. " The mask, and the brush, and
pads ! How I wish I 'd been there."

" Why did n't you come ? " Lord
Hawkstane asked. " Miss Hobart took
the run with us, you know : she was al-
most in."

" I was afraid of those dreadful leaps,"
said Tilly. " But I should so like to see
a mask ! Do you have it to keep, all
for your own ? "

"Oh yes," said the youthful noble-
man, dallying with the enjoyment of
some unexpressed joke. " I 'm not
sure, how'ver, that I shall keep it."
(Tilly blushed, and exhibited a readi-
ness to be overwhelmed by his kind-
ness). " Rather a baw, you know :
what can one do with those sort of
things ? "

"Oh, I should think it would be so
very interesting to have," Tilly replied,
with expectant timidity.

" If you really care for it so much,"
he began, showing the energy of sud-
den munificence, " I can let you see it,
I dassay."

Mrs. Blazer observed that he here
stole a look at Miss Hobart, who was
at some distance from him ; and the hid-
den springs in Mrs. Blazer's upper lip
began to move nervously, in conse-
quence.

Oliphant made good progress with
Vivian Ware, during those intervals
when Mrs. Blazer engaged the Count.
Miss Ware was unlike • most of the
young Boston women he had known,
in that she quite threw aside the prim
reserve usually assigned to them as a
characteristic. She had been much
about the world, and there was a gay
freedom in her manner which even sub-
jected her at times to the charge of
being " fast ; " yet there lurked in her
tone, in her refined features and soft
complexion crowned with golden hair

— briefly, in her entire presence — an
unspoiled sweetness that belonged to
the flowering-time of life.

" One of the chief things," he said to
her, " when I was last in Newport, was
to go to the Fort, on Thursdays. Were
you there yesterday ? "

" Bless you, no ! " exclaimed Miss
Ware. "It 'sail out of date, now.
Last week I believe just one carriage
went. It must have felt like a fossil."

" So do I," he responded. " I see I
shall have to remodel myself. How
would you advise beginning ? Buy a
white hat ? "

" If you do that," said Vivian, " you
are lost. Black is de rigeur, this sum-
mer. And then, you must wear little
pointed shoes with cloth down the
front."

"Why?"

" Because you must. It 's supposed
to be the latest English wrinkle."

" How is it with our friend the lord,
opposite ? Does he get himself up that
way ? "

" Oh, no ; he can wear anything he
likes. He 's real, you see, and our
young men are only imitation. They
have to take great pains to pass for
even that much : the danger is, they
may turn out to be nothing, — not even
imitation."

" I 'm glad I 'm not one of the young
men," Oliphant observed, " if that 's the
way you talk about them."

" And well you may be," said Vivian
with sprightly ease. " You 'd much bet-
ter stay as you are."

Meanwhile he had opportunities
enough to glance across the flower-
strewn board at Mrs. Gifford, and the
more he contemplated her the greater
was the charm. He retraced the lines
of her delicate face ; the thin lips, the
small mouth and decisive eyebrows.
Her brown hair was of the palest that
it could be without merging into blonde,
but she had chosen to invest it with a
slight ornamentation of black lace, which

218

Newport.

[August,

though not sombre gave a hint of widow-
hood. Her dress was black and white,
with a skillful introduction of violet.
Quite to the slender throat it came ;
and the face above, having no strong
color, acquired by contrast the remote
beauty of warm-toned ivory. To see
her smile, toss back her head, drink,
look, was to feel a wondrousness about
it all, as if an exquisite work of art had
suddenly been endowed with life.

As soon as the dinner had worn its
way through numerous courses to the
cloy men t of sweets and coffee, and a
respite of smoke had been allowed, Oli-
phant hastened to rejoin her.

" I begin to think," he commenced,
" that you have held out false hopes as
to your youthful prodigy, Craig. He
does n't seem to have come."

" No," said Mrs. Gifford, plainly dis-
appointed. " Mrs. Blazer received a
note after we left the dining-room, and
it seems he won't be here."

There occurred, instead, a duet by
the Misses Blazer; after which he re-
newed the conversation. But the knowl-
edge of the letter he had discovered
hampered him at every step; he was
haunted by suspicions that she might
know all about that old courtship, and
by an uncomfortable fancy that perhaps
she knew nothing, in which case he had
her at a disadvantage. The temptation
to approach the topic indirectly became
irresistible.

"We were speaking of Springfield,
the other evening," he finally remarked,
as if by an accident of thought. " It 's
strange that I never met Mr. Gifford
there. You never heard him speak of
me, I suppose ?"

" No, I don't remember to have heard
him," said Octavia. " What makes you
think of that ? "

" Well, your name struck me as one
that I knew, when I heard it here, on
meeting you. Possibly it had come to
me in some other way. Perhaps my
wife — you see, Mr. Gifford may have

been known to her ; that is, of course,
before we were married."

The reconaissance was as clumsy as
it could well be ; but Octavia gave no
sign of apprehending his motive. " Your
wife ? " she repeated, in a hushed tone.
" As I told you, I never was in Spring-
field. What was her name, Mr. Oli-
phant, before your marriage ? "

His voice came lingeringly, as he re-
plied : " Alice Davenant."

" What a beautiful one ! " Octavia
exclaimed, sincerely, in subdued tones.
" It has the ring of poetry in it. Alice
Davenant ! I 'm quite sure, though,
that Mr. Gifford did not know her : if
he had, I should have remembered his
mentioning it."

Oliphant's doubts were thus set at
rest. He changed the topic quickly,
and availed himself of the first opportu-
nity to ask if he might call upon her.

" Why not ? " she replied. " I shall
be glad to see you. Are you to remain
some time in Newport ? "

" Probably through the season," he
answered.

" A wise resolve," said she, " in any
one who comes here. You won't re-
gret it."

I shall not deny that Oliphant attrib-
uted to these words a superstitious force
which they were not fitted to bear.
" That 's a good prophecy," he said with
vigor, after an instant's revery. "And,
since you make it, I think it must be a
true one."

When they bad all gone, Mrs. Blazer

— left alone with her swan-like nieces,

— drew a crumpled note from her pock-
et. " There ! " she cried, to Ruth. " Read
that. Read it aloud."

Miss Blazer obeyed. The note was
from Justin Craig, declining to be pres-
ent and returning the check she had
sent him. " Allow me to add," it end-
ed, " that I will not debase my art to
the amusement of people who, consider-
ing me unfit to associate with on equal
terms, would have me sit in the same

1883.]

Newport.

219

room and exhibit the beauty of some-
thing they are unable to appreciate. If
you are content with your position, so
am I with mine."

" Did you ever hear such an insult ! "
stormed Mrs. Farley Blazer, walking
swiftly about and fanning herself fero-
ciously. " After Octavia Gifford had
been at me to send for him, and I had
done it out of pure charity, too ! Well,
it 's just the same, high and low : fhere 's
a constant fight with people, even now
when I 've made them acknowledge me ;
and it 's hardly worth while to do any-
thing. And you there, Tilly, why did n't
you go to the meet? Do you know
what I 've found out ? It 's another
piece of Gifford work, getting Josephine
Hobart over here ; and I heard Hawk-
stane saying, just before he left, that he
was going to send her a memento of the
fox-hunt. Of course it's the mask,
which you 'd have got for yourself, if
you had any vim ! "

Saying which, the matron broke into
a violence of epithet that, if I were to
repeat it, would at once be pronounced
unnatural and incredible : therefore we
will leave it to be washed away by the
tears to which she gave free vent in the
midst of her tirade.

But Oliphant, wending back to the
supposed Queen Anne cottage, was
soothed by his delightful impressions of
Octavia Gifford, which like a refreshing
autumn rain had begun to lay the dust
of his arid past ; nor, if he had known of
Mrs. Blazer's explosion, could he have
guessed how it would affect his own
fate.

IV.

SOME IMPORTANT TRIFLES.

" Here 's a pretty go with young
Craig," said Raish to his visitor, the next
afternoon ; and he related the manner of
Justin's refusal, which Mrs. Blazer had
been confiding to him. " But the funny

part of it," he added, " is the rage she 's
in. She 's formed such a habit, in her
long social war, of feeling slighted that
she can't be comfortable now without
an injury. The case between Craig and
her reminds me of the eagle who re-
fused to carry off a fine plump ewe, on
the ground that the muttonish creature
would n't appreciate the honor; and
then the ewe went around complaining
that the eagle had insulted her."

" Did you tell Mrs. Blazer that ? "
Oliphant inquired.

" 'Gad, no ! " Raish exclaimed. " I
told Craig, though, when I saw him, a
little while ago : thought it would pac-
ify him."

" Well, what does he say ? "

" Oh, he 's in a sumptuous and
haughty frame of mind. It 's a pity
he behaved so, because this would real-
ly have been a good opening for him.
But I think I calmed him down a little ;
and I succeeded, according to promise,
in making him consent to come up here
and play for you — this evening."

" I 'm glad of that," said Oliphant
" This quixotic proceeding of his makes
me more anxious than ever to see him."

" The real inside reason why he
would n't accept Mrs. Blazer's offer,"
Porter volunteered, " was probably that
he has a desperate attachment for Miss
Ware, and did n't wish to appear be-
fore her in the light of an inferior."

« Good ! " rejoined Oliphant. " The
interest increases. And the attachment
is hopeless, you think ? "

" Oh, I don't know that it is. On the
face of it, you 'd think so : fact, it's ri-
diculous. Of course I 'm with him in
sympathy : smash up the cliques, 1 say
— except when you're in 'em yourself.
' Down with exclusiveness,' and so forth.
Let the genius in humble circumstances
marry the swell girl, and all that. As
I said to you recently, we must do away
with all this old humbug which is reas-
serting itself in a country that was made
for better things, and start a new order.

220

Newport.

[August,

But for the present the obstacles in
Craig's way appear insurmountable ;
enough so, any way, to make the hope-
lessness profitable. To him as a musi-
cian, you see, despair is just so much
stock in trade."

"For heaven's sake," remonstrated
the other, " don't put it that way — as
if he were carrying on a business in
emotions ! You make my blood run
cold."

Porter laughed indulgently. " It 's
true, all the same," he said. " Every-
thing is business, nowadays. The poets
and painters and musicians are all tra-
ders, but they catch the public by pre-
tending not to be. A mere financial
genius like me can succeed only by cast-
ing up the value of those things that
are assumed not to be business at all,
and making them count at the right
time. I don't suppose Craig has come
as yet to the point of seeing these things
clearly ; but he instinctively seizes on
ecstasy and despair as being in his line."

They were smoking their cigars in
the cosey bachelor drawing-room, that
evening, with black coffee in small Sat-
suina cups awaiting them on a tray,
when Justin Craig made his appearance.
Eugene had exp 'cted something eccen-
tric ; he thought the young man would
be tall, gloomy, and in all likelihood
long-haired. He was surprised, there-
fore, to find him so gentle, so inconspic-
uous, and yet so uncommonly attractive
as he proved to be.

" Did you bring any music with
you ? " he asked.

"Yes," answered Justin, nodding,
but with a reserve of humor in his eyes ;
" I 've brought some."

Then, taking his place at the piano,
he looked quietly at the keys for a mo-
ment, and, before it could well be no-
ticed that he had actually begun, was
tracing his way through the first bars
of a prelude by Chopin. As the deli-
cate, gradual tones succeeded each oth-
er, '\)liphant was strangely affected.

Something there was so pure and re-
fined in the player's touch, his begin-
ning with this perfectly simple theme
showed so true a sensibility, that the
world-worn man who listened was car-
ried back to his boyhood, and then far
away out of himself into an unknown,
sunny-misted region of fancy, where
pleasant visions floated round him. All
the while, there recurred in the melody,
which* had about it a great though heart-
broken peacefulness, some fine and slow
descending notes that brought into his
mind imperceptibly the idea of light
rain falling.

" Is life so dreary as I have thought ? "
mused Oliphant, under this spell. '' Sure-
ly, if it has room for this young fellow,
with his heart and head responding to
such sweet fantasies, it may yet hold
a possibility of genuine happiness for
me."

The piece stopped as quietly as it had
begun, and he asked what it was. " It 's
usually called The Raindrop," said Jus-
tin. " One of the best of Chopin's
things, too. Now I '11 give you some
of Raff," he continued, plunging at once
into a brilliant impromptu.

Porter, after a congenial remark or
two, took his leave, on the plea of a
business engagement. Thus left alone,
the young musician and his new friend
enjoyed an hour of rare delight, both in
discussing various composers and listen-
ing to their productions, as Justin gave
them wing upon the keyboard. Justin
had a long face ; rather a long nose ; an
expression of natural pride, which yet
had nothing domineering about it, and
was tempered with natural sweetness.
His lips were slightly drawn back at
the corners, without being strained ; and
there was a small hollow just above
the chin, caused by the firm jut of the
lower lip, so decided that, as the light
streamed over him from above, a spot
of shadow rested there. His own shadow
was thrown behind him upon the dim-
papered wall, wavering somewhat with

1883.]

Newport.

221

his firm, unexaggerated motion as his
hands changed position and grasped from
the keys the secret of their harmonies.
Altogether, that keen, unusual face, so
steady and concentrated in the midst of
shifting lights and shadows, with wave
on wave of intelligent sound rising up
and floating around it, became singular-
ly impressive.

'• I 'm sorry," said Oliphant at length,
when Craig had stopped to rest, and was
lounging in a deep chair with a cigarette
in h-is month, — " I 'm sorry we could n't
have heard you last night, at Mrs. Bla-
zer's."

Justin jumped up, letting an angry
whiff of smoke escape. " I could n't
have played there, Mr. Oliphant, — I
could n't ! " he exclaimed. " Why, my
fingers would have rebelled, even if /
had consented. Don't you see how it
is? You would n't ask me to do such
a thing, I should hope. You have too
much of the artist in you, for that, even
if you have been a business man."

" I 'm glad you think so well of me,
at any rate," smiled Eugene. " Cer-
tainly I appreciate your feeling, but " —

" Oh, ' but,' ' but ! ' " interrupted the
younger man. " There is no ' but ' about
it. Pardon me ; I did n't mean to be
rough," he added. " But if you only
knew how the snobbishness of this
whole place jars on me, and how that
incident of last night brings it all back !
Oh, it 's insufferable, it 's miserable !
Sham, sham, sham, all around : we 're
on an island of sham, with the big ocean
of reality on every side, which they 're
all afraid of being drowned in if they
once venture off ! " He curved his arras
out, downward, and swept them round
him, to describe this ocean, and went
on railing more and more. " Of course,"
he wound up at last, " I know there are
lovely people here, amiable and culti-
vated, and so forth ; but even they are
affected. I see a little of some of them
who stay during the winter ; but some-
how, except with the poor ones, I am

made to feel my inferiority. And here
is this house — our home — that we
have to abandon during the season.
Why should I feel humiliated by that
fact, if we can't help it ? But I am ;
I 'm humiliated. There 's no sense in
it, and it only shows how you can't help
breathing in this poison of the plutoc-
racy, that fills the air. I hate every-
thing and everybody in the place ! "

" Including Mrs. Gifford ? " inquired
Oliphant mildly.

"Ah, Mrs. Gifford! No; I believe
she is a good friend. Such a woman as
she is ! Perfect in herself — standing
way off from a fellow, yet so sympa-
thetic. No ; I ought n't to have said
everybody ; for there 's another — one
other " — Justin stopped short, relight-
ed his cigarette, which had gone out,
and subsided into his chair.

As he sat there, a distant look came
into his face ; the storminess of his re-
cent mood died away in an expression
of great gentleness. Oliphant knew he
must be thinking of Vivian Ware.

It was after this that, returning to the
piano, Justin played something which
startled his auditor by its crisp, clear,
bounding individuality. Coming after
so many German pieces, it was like the
scent of aromatic New England woods
and the sound of native speech, on the
return from Europe. Oliphant recog-
nized in the music something native and
original ; and it turned out to be, in fact,
Justin's own composition. He no long-
er hesitated to regard the young man
as a promising genius ; and he fore-
saw that to take him in charge and aid
him in his professional education might
furnish just the sort of motive in life
which he himself would like.

Raish did not return until late, when
Craig had been gone some time. He
appeared in more than good spirits : he
was excited, which with him was rarely
the case. His eyes glowed as if from
the reflected glare of some crucible
seething with combinations that were to

222

Newport.

[August,

yield marvelous results. " You 've lost
a great pleasure," said his guest. " I
would n't have missed it, for a good
share in the profits I suppose you 've
been figuring up."

" Do you really mean that? " queried
Raish, blandly rubbing his hands.

" Thoroughly."

The shining look passed away from
the other man's eyes, which rapidly
cooled down under pressure of the will.
" My dear fellow," said he, carelessly,
seating himself, " a tenth in one of my
operations — say my new Orbicular
Machinery Company, whose patents you
know are going to make it an enormous
success — would give, with what you
have, a really handsome fortune. But,
bah ! " he ended impatiently. " I re-
solved when you came that we should
n't talk money ; and we won't. Don't
let me forget again. Have some beer,
before bed ? "

His hand was on the bell ; but Oli-
phant declined the refreshment. Ar-
rived at his room, he suspected that Por-
ter really wanted to discuss business,
and he was glad he had escaped. As-
suredly there was something about this
man which made it hard to trust him
fully ; and it was odd that both he and
Justin, of whose sincerity Oliphant had
n't a doubt, should have taken the same
tone in criticising the Newport spirit.
If two men so opposite could agree,
there must be something in it, Oliphant
thought. This, however, was not what
he thought about chiefly, as he sat in
his ombra indulging a brief meditation,
and watching the pale stars that shot
forth their gleams in a silent rhythm.
He was brooding over Justin's enam-
ored subjection to Vivian Ware. Won-
derful must be the refined passion which
drew the young minstrel towards her.
Wonderful, too, in a world so full of
disappointments, to find a youthful heart
— so like millions of other youthful
hearts — fired with lofty enthusiasm,
lavish in scorn and unreasonableness,

and devoutly believing in love ! . . .
At last, Oliphant's revery settled upon
Octavia Gilford, and he even harbored
a wish that he also could be young, like
Justin.

Two or three days later, Dana Sweet-
ser, bestarched, perfumed, roseate of
countenance, and resplendent as to neck-
scarf, was making a morning call at
Mrs. Blazer's. Something occurred in
the conversation which led Mrs. Blazer
to tax him with being forgetful. This
was touching him in a tender spot, 'and
he became determined to show her that
his mind was still young and active.
" My dear madam," he exclaimed, " you
could n't make a greater mistake ! Ac-
cuse me of other faults, if you like, —
ah, too great a fondness for the fair sex
— he, he ! — but don't accuse my mem-
ory. Why, it 's the easiest thing to
give you proofs of its strength." Dana
was really on the verge of being in-
censed : his little thimbleful of soul was
tossing with puny indignation. It oc-
curred to him that he might tell her
how well he remembered the time when
her father was a butcher, — not a very
good one, either, — and how her husband
had begun in life as the proprietor of a
junk-shop. But it did not lie in Dana's
composition to do anything so harsh as
that ; so he punished her merely by re-
calling a quantity of dry details about
long past trivial events. Mrs. Blazer
was beginning to wince under the inflic-
tion, when he suddenly struck a new
vein. "Oh, and Mr. Oliphant, you
know ! " said he. " I was telling you I
knew about him. But I did n't get a
chance to mention the oddest thing.
What do you suppose ? "

" Can't imagine, Mr. Sweetser.
What?"

" Why," — Dana laughed, seemingly
inclined to prolong the pleasure of im-
parting, — " his wife, you know, the girl
he married " —

" Whom did he marry ? " Mrs. Bla-
zer asked, growing curious.

1883.]

Newport.

223

" Alice Davenant, — Miss Davenant,
of Springfield. But the joke is this : she
had previously jilted Gifford, the hus-
band of Mrs. Gifford the lovely, here.
Is n't that singular ? "

Mrs. Blazer's eyes glowed. "As a
coincidence, yes ; very singular. And
Octavia had n't known this Mr. Oli-
phant, do you suppose, till they met, the
other day ? "

" No," said Dana ; " I believe they
were strangers."

" Well, well, upon my life ! " Mrs.
Blazer exclaimed, smiling with peculiar
relish for the situation. " Of course
they must have known the facts, though,"
she added, contracting her glance to an
evil watchfulness.

" That I can't say," Dana rejoined,
thoroughly mellowed, and as much ex-
hilarated as if he had taken a glass of
wine. " I should think Oliphaut must
have known ; but it would n't be so cer-
tain that Mrs. Gifford did, you know :
would it ? " And he cocked his appre-
ciative eye at her, like one competent to
get the full value out of such matters,
by discussing all the minute possibilities
of doubt.

The lady of the smoky white com-
plexion humored him and suited herself,
by carrying out this process. " First
tell me all the particulars you know," she
said, " and theu I can form a judgment."

So Dana bubbled on, joyously chat-
tering out the shallowuess of his infor-
mation, with utmost generosity : it was
all he had to give, and he gave it. He
had vindicated his memory ; he had in-
terested Mrs. Blazer.

From what she had gathered, Mrs.
Farley Blazer came to the conclusion
that Octavia probably knew nothing of
that old history ; but, for purposes of
her own, she assumed just the contrary
when she next saw the widow. She
could not forgive Octavia for having
drawn down a mortification upon her,
by urging her to invite Craig to play
for hire, and so putting her into a posi-

tion to be snubbed by the youngster.
Still less could she overlook the offense
of bringing Josephine Hobart back to
Newport, to distract Lord Hawkstane's
attention from Tilly. Accordingly,
when Octavia came, to pay her dinner
call, Tilly's aunt found an apt moment
for remarking casually, "Oh, my dear,
what a queer thing it is that you two
should have met here, — you and the
man whose wife was an old flame of
your husband's ! "

Mrs. Gifford showed an amused sur-
prise. " It would be queer," she said,
calmly, " if there were any such man ;
but there is n't. What put it into your
head ? Whom do you mean ? "

Mrs. Blazer unfolded her meaning ;
but, to her chagrin, it produced no
shock. Octavia persisted in her laugh-
ing incredulity, and ridiculed Dana
Sweetser's evidence. " You may be
sure," she said, " that he has been mix-
ing us up with some other people."
And before Mrs. Blazer saw clearly
how it was done, Octavia brought in an-
other topic, and then took her leave,
completely uncrushed.

These things had happened before
Eugene, on his way to see Mrs. Gifford,
stopped in at his cousin's.

" Have you heard the news ? " she
immediately asked him.

" Yes ; Major Bottick told me at the
club," he answered.

Mary Deering's face became blank
with astonishment. " Major Bottick ! "
she exclaimed.

" Certainly ; be 's up in all these war
matters. Of course you mean about
the English and the Suez Canal ? "

" What have I said about a canal ? "
inquired Mrs. Deeriug, aggrieved.

" Oh, then you 're thinking of the
President's expected visit here ? "

" No, indeed," said his cousin, still
more reproachfully. " How dull of
you ! Do you call those things news ?
What I 'm talking about is Lord Hawk-
staue's engagement."

224

Newport.

[August,

" Hullo ! Is n't he rather ' previous ' ?
"Whom is he engaged to ? "

" Josephine Hobart."

"Well, that has the approved stamp
of news ; it 's so incredible. Have they
announced it? "

4> Not yet ; but a few of us know it.
He sent her the mask that he won at the
hunt ; had it set in a collar of gold and
surrounded with the most magnificent
flowers : just think of it ! Then he
went up yesterday to call, and, as we
suppose, offered himself. He 's been so
puffed-up and vainglorious ever since,
that hardly any one can approach him,
even to offer a congratulation. So you
see there 's no doubt of it at all : they 're
engaged. And it will be an awful blow
to Mrs. Farley Blazer ! "

" I can hardly believe it yet," said
Eugene. " I can't see why Miss Ho-
bart should take him. Have you asked
Mrs. Gifford about it ? "

" No ; I 've had no chance. But I
intend to."

Oliphant told her that he was about
to call upon the widow.

" Oh, do," urged his cousin, " and
then tell me what you find out about
the engagement. But mind you, don't
let her know of that letter."

" No danger," said he. " I have de-
cided that point." Before long he broke
out, " By the way, speaking of its being
a blow, how about young Thorburn ?
If you were right in thinking he was
in love with Miss Hobart, this will be a
bitter thing for him."

" Ah, Eugene," said Mrs. Deering,
laying her hand on his arm, " save your
compassion. I was mistaken about that :
it 's Mrs. Gifford that he 's after."

" Oh," said Oliphant, amazed at the
ease with which she changed' her view.
" Being a woman, I suppose you must
know. But don't you remember how
at the first I thought Mrs. Gifford was
his object ? "

" Yes, Eugene. It must be that you
have a sort of feminine instinct."

" Possibly," he answered, with some
dryness, and became silent. " I am
thinking," he then said slowly, " that
his courtship of the widow will leave
him as badly off as if he had been try-
ing to marry Miss Hobart ; provided
you are right as to Mrs. Gifford's being
so unapproachable. You recall what
you said, I suppose."

" Yes."

" It does n't seem to me, though, that
because she was so happy, before, is any
reason against her attempting matrimo-
ny again. I should say her former ex-
perience would work as an argument
directly in favor of renewing her hap-
piness with some other worthy person,
if she should by accident find one."

" I know," was Mrs. Deering's re-
ply. " That 's the way men would look
at it. But then — Eugene," she re-
commenced, with unwonted earnestness,
" have you noticed those clear, bright
diamonds she always wears in her
ears ? "

"I think I have, the few times I
have seen her."

" Well, they 're a kind of symbol,"
said Mrs. Deering, impressively. " /
think they are like petrified tears !
They don't attract attention, but they 're
always in sight, as silent emblems of
her loss. Yes, yes," she went on —
and it was remarkable to Oliphant how
his lively and conventional little cousin
was aroused and thrilled by her own
fantasy, — " they are talismans ! And
until a man had got them away, or per-
suaded her to stop wearing them, it
would be no use to attempt winning
her." In reaching this climax, never-
theless, Mary Deering, apparently over-
come by the absurdity of the notion,
burst into a laugh.

" That will do very well as a super-
stition," said Oliphant, smiling, although
her remark had produced no little effect
upon him.

She sat there unheeding : one would
have supposed she had not heard what

1883.]

Newport.

225

he said. She picked away with her
needle at some rosy thread which she
was stitching into a pattern, and the
light from it threw a soft reflection on
her face. Can it have been that she
had deliberately tried to incite Oliphant
to make some advance towards the
widow ?

I only know that he grew restless.
He began to think it was of the highest
importance to see Mrs. Gifford immedi-
ately, as if something of great moment
was to be settled by doing so.

" I must go along," he said, rising.
And in half an hour he was at Octa-
via's door.

A WOMAN'S AGONY.

At High Lawn, Oliphant was ushered
into an apartment so prettily devised
that it was like a fair and open counte-
nance.

He was conscious of having made a
real advance in his acquaintance with
Octavia, merely by stepping into this
dwelling-place of hers. The room was
finished in holly-wood, with a dead sur-
face, smooth like ivory, but pleasanter,
because it still had somewhat of the
freshness of a limber growth that had
once swayed in the breeze. Panels
along the walls were filled in with wine-
colored silk, upon which silver thread
and varicolored floss were embroidered
in slender lines. There were low seats
scattered about, covered with pale tints
of this wine hue and with clear sea-
green ; and the whole place looked above
all cosey and inhabited, as if its usual
occupant were not afraid of its richness
and refinement, or at all subordinated
by it, but made herself at home there
as in her native element. On a small
side-table lay some new worsted-work
and a large book, open at the page she
had last been reading. The plan of
the room was slightly irregular, includ-

VOL. LII. — NO. 310. 15

ing near one end a spacious embayed
window, the panes of which were set in
delicate wood-tracery, where the sun-
light was treasured up and some plants
grew brightly. Oliphant moved thither,
and while he was looking at the gossa-
mer threads of the embroidery on the
wall, he heard a light movement, turned,
and discovered Mrs. Gifford, who had
come into the window-space through an
unnoticed doorway. So for a moment
she stood there against a vista of lawn
slope and trees that led down to the
level, shining reaches of the bay ; a fig-
ure full of brilliancy and gladness, that
seemed to concentrate in itself all the
charm of the surroundings.

" You see I have come soon," he said,
shaking hands. " And is Miss Hobart
still with you ? "

She had motioned him to a chair, and
had taken a place for herself on a sort
of huge pale-green cushion which did
duty as a seat.

" Yes, Miss Hobart is still here, but
she has to excuse herself to-day."

Oliphant wondered whether Jose-
phine's invisibility were due to a raptur-
ous privacy consequent upon her engage-
ment. Just then his eye fell upon the
fox's head, of which he had heard so
much : encircled by a mass of flowers,
it lifted its furry nose from a table near
by.

" A little trophy," said Octavia, smil-
ing. " Lord Hawkstane sent it to Jo-
sephine. How does it strike you ? "

"I think I should like the flowers
alone better."

" I 'm glad to have you say so," she
declared. " It 's dreadfully cruel."

" The sport ? Yes, it is cruel ; and
it 's empty, — emptier than that poor
creature's head."

" Of course you mean the fox's head,"
observed Octavia, a twinkle of sarcasm
in her eyes.

" Of course," he answered, laughing.

" As to the sport," said Octavia, " Jo-
sephine followed the hounds, and that

226

Newport.

[August,

part of it does n't seem so cruel, you
know. But having the poor head served
up in flowers does strike me as rather
savage. Ilawkstane got the idea from
one of his American friends. He never
would have thought of anything so bar-
barous himself ; but it was suggested
to him as the proper way to do things
here."

" Possibly," Oliphant contended, " his
friend was right. Is n't it the spirit of
the place to be idly busy and fill up the
time with expensive nonsense ? "

" Do you really think so ? " she asked.

" I 'm not sure that I do," he re-
turned. " I really enjoy this Newport
existence. Still, I suspect it of being
what I just called the sport — empty.
What does it all come to ? There 's an
immense amount of occupation : dress-
ing, dining, driving, show. But it be-
comes a routine, and there does n't seem
to be any good reason for the thing. In
fact, I have a radical friend who de-
clares that Newport is wholly un-Amer-
ican, and ought not to exist."

" Ah, that 's the trouble with us,"
Octavia remarked. " There are so many
American things that are un-Ameri-
can."

" What 's your own opinion ? " Oli-
phant asked.

" Mine ? Oh, I glory iu Newport !
I 'm devoted to it. I don't pretend to
account for myself, in that ; but when
you love a place or a person — really
love, I mean — you like the faults as
well as the virtues, don't you know ? "

" And on that basis, if there are no
faults, it 's just so much deprivation, I
suppose," said he, enlarging on her the-
ory. " But I 'm afraid I made a mis-
take in speaking so scornfully of New-
port. You will condemn me."

" Not at all. I like candor, though
of course it need n't always be put as
Justin Craig put his to Mrs. Blazer.
What an unfortunate affair, by the
way !"

" Yes, conventionally speaking. But

don't you find it refreshing sometimes
to have people come out with exactly
what they feel, even if they are a little
crude about it ? "

" Indeed, yes." Octavia spoke quick-
ly, and as quickly added, " It depends
on who the people are. I like Justin
very much : he 's so true to himself.
But I remember your cousin saying —
and how sharp she is ! — that it 's the
same with people as with some of the
things we eat. When fish tastes too
much like fish, we don't like it, simply
because we say it 's ' too fishy.' And
so it won't do for people to be too much
themselves in society : if they are, they
're not acceptable — though a slight fla-
vor of individuality is much esteemed.
Is n't that clever ? "

" Rather so. A certain amount of
deceit is necessary."

Octavia sighed, placidly. " At our
age, Mr. Oliphant, one comes to recog-
nize that principle."

"Still," Oliphant observed, "there
must be exceptions. Now when I meet
anybody in whom I 'm likely to be in-
terested, I go for clearing away all sur-
face deceits at once : I try to get down
to a simple and straightforward under-
standing as soon as possible."

" That 's the best way in those cases,"
said Octavia. "The danger is, your
frankness may be misapprehended."

" Very possibly it may," he returned.
" But there 's an instinct that tells us
when it will be taken amiss. I imagine,
in fact I 'm pretty confident, that you,
for instance, would be careful not to
misapprehend."

She laughed, greatly at her ease : his
admission that he was likely to be in-
terested in her was so ingenuous. " I
should try to be careful," she replied.

He recognized the position in which
he had placed himself. " There," he
said, " you see how, the moment we try
to be sincere and direct, we become per-
sonal. That 's the reason people are so
afraid of sincerity : they dread being

1883.]

Newport.

227

personal. I had no intention about it,
but now I find that I 've been trying to
get this very point settled between us."

Again Octavia laughed, adding, " It
seems to have settled itself." And so,
in truth, it had : they were no longer
mere acquaintances, but had made a be-
ginning of friendship.

Oliphant now remembered his cousin's
injunction to find out something about
the engagement. Mentioning it, he
asked, "May I offer my congratula-
tions, through you ? "

" I have n't been empowered, Mr.
Oliphant, to receive them."

" Then the rumor is n't true, I in-
fer."

Octavia saw fit to be mysterious. " If
you want to know," she counseled him,
" you must go to Josephine herself, or
to Lord Hawkstane."

" I can't very well do that," he said.

Octavia's face wore an amused look,
but very soon this changed to one of
deepening interest.

" It is queer how reports get into cir-
culation," she began. " Something has
just come into my mind " — Then she
hesitated.

" Some other rumor ? " Oliphant
queried.

" Yes : a ridiculous one. But it is
n't worth mentioning."

He was wondering what it could be,
when the maid entered with a letter on
her salver. " Beg your pardon, ma'am :
the man said it was to.be given you
right away."

Octavia apologized to her caller and
broke the envelope, which bore a glow-
ing gold monogram on one side and a
dashing superscription on the other. It
was a note from Perry Thorburn, ask-
ing her to drive with him that after-
noon. " There 's no answer at present :
I will send one very soon," she said to
the maid, and laid the note in its cover
on a bracket-shelf.

" Don't let me incommode you," said
Oliphant, rising.

" Oh, no. Wait a little. I think you
are interested in Justin, and I want
to talk with you about him. Perhaps
we can get him a chance for a con-
cert which can be made fashionable, and
you may be useful in persuading him
to it."

Oliphant resumed his place ; but she
noticed, as she thought, a strange look
in his eyes, which had not been there
before the arrival of the note. The in-
cident brought freshly up in his mind
his secret concerning Gifford's letter.
He was imagining how it would be if
that letter, instead of the one with the
gilt monogram, had just come to her.

" Of course," he said, " I shall be
glad to do anything I can to assist
Craig, especially if I please you by it."

" Ah, that is very nice," said the
young widow, with almost girlish en-
joyment. Nevertheless, they were both
thinking of something else than their
words indicated. Octavia, for her part,
had been growing restless over Mrs.
Blazer's assertion of a former attach-
ment between Gifford and Miss Dave-
nant, particularly since a second rumor
had come to her ears, and was anx-
ious to controvert it. This was what
really occupied her mind while she
spoke so glibly of Craig. " It 's very
nice," she repeated, inertly, once more
becoming aware of that look in Oli-
phant's eyes. " But you seem to speak
in a different tone now. You're not
enthusiastic. Are you concealing some-
thing unfavorable ? "

He tried vainly to shake off the re-
serve which he knew was creeping over
his manner. " About Craig ? No ;
nothing."

" At any rate," said Octavia, with
unconcern, " I have no right to cross-
examine you. We were just talking,"
she went on, " about frankness. If
you 're not keeping anything back, I
confess that I am, though it has nothing
to do with Justin. That rumor I men-
tioned just now — that is what I'm

Newport.

[August,

holding in reserve ; but I think I must
tell you about it. You will see that it 's
uot quite pleasant to speak of, perhaps ;
but 1 atn annoyed by it, and want your
help."

" Well, then, there 's that much of
good in it," Oliphant answered, more at
ease.

She paused an instant ; then resumed,
in a tone of wonderful gentleness :
" You asked lately, Mr. Oliphant, if I
had known your wife's name."

A chill passed through him. What
was coming? What had she discov-
ered ? He merely bent his head assent-
ingly, and she continued : " It was a co-
incidence that you should have asked
me that question, because of something
else that came up soon afterwards."

" Indeed ? " he said, his apprehen-
siveness increasing.

Octavia exhibited embarrassment.
" Yes ; it was hinted to me that Mr.
Gifford had known Miss Davenant and
had been an admirer of hers — a de-
voted admirer, in fact, before he and I
had met." Here she smiled, perhaps only
from nervousness ; but Oliphant re-
mained gravely silent, waiting to hear
more. " Of course," she added, " as
Mr. Gifford never had spoken to me of
her, the notion seemed improbable ; but
now there has been a second rumor, and
this time it is said that you know all
about the history. I hope you will par-
don me for talking of it : you can guess
that I never would do so unless I
thought there was a duty involved. The
gossips have no right to be inventing
tales about those two who have gone. I
thought you ought to know how your
name is being used ; and really it is for
both our interests to stop such idle talk,
don't you think? "

The gentleness in her voice had in-
sensibly increased, until the words flowed
like the notes of distant music : the
tone was subdued, verging upon tremu-
lousuess. Both she who spoke and he
who listened were thrilled by one chord

of memories solemn and sweet, though
to Oliphant it brought an after-tone of
endless repining.

" Who would have thought," he mused
aloud, not answering her questions at
once, " that we who did not know of
one another's existence, a few days ago,
should so soon be speaking of things
that lie nearest to us ? I think it shows
that there ought to be confidence be-
tween us. And now iu regard to your
question, Mrs. Gifford, if you will only
place such confidence in me — I quite
agree that our interests coincide ; we
want to stop the chatterers. I suggest
that the best way is to ignore them."

" That 's easily said," Octavia object-
ed ; " but I can't do it unless you help
me. You see, they are quoting you."

She gazed at him with a certain
innocent confidence, against which a
vague inquiry contended. It was evi-
dent to Oliphant that she counted upon
him to deny the rumor, and so assist
her to a triumph ; and it gave him a
poignant regret that he could not do
this.

"What have you heard as to my
knowledge ? " he inquired, still dally-
ing.

" It 's hardly worth while to go into
that," she replied, " unless you really
know something. But tell me; there is
no truth in the report, is there ? "

Oliphant was in a pitiable dilemma.
" Are you not troubling yourself need-
lessly ? " he said, in perplexity. " I am
not responsible for all this. If you
compel me, I suppose I must admit that
there is ground for what has been said ;
but it is wiser to let it rest."

" That is impossible," declared Octa-
via, becoming imperious. "I want to
put the whole thing down ; and, in the
form which it has taken, that can be
done only by positive denial."

" I see that my doctrine of candor is
being put to a terrible test," he inter-
posed, attempting to take a light tone,
although really in consternation.

1883.]

Newport.

229

" Mr. Oliphant," said she, " I must
know whatever you have to tell me. Is
it not my right ? "

" Undoubtedly, if you choose to as-
sert it. But, after all, I have little to
tell."

" You have no disproof " — she hes-
itated — " or proof ? "

" I have a letter ; that 's all."

Octavia did not respond. She with-
drew into herself ; her eyes sank. Oli-
phant fancied that she shuddered.

"A letter from Mr. Gifford?" she
then asked, looking straight at him.

" Yes ; a letter to my wife, before
she became my wife." He ' met her
eyes, and tried to appear as if he at-
tached slight importance to his state-
ment.

" Ah," she scarcely more than whis-
pered, " it was something of that sort
that 1 heard."

" You heard of the letter, too ! " he
cried, hotly. " Then some one must
have been guilty of treachery."

" What else could you expect, if you
told any one ? " the widow inquired, as
icy as he was the opposite. But her
eyes were not cold : their luminous
depths were softened by a look of ten-
der pleading.

" I have not told. I beg you to be-
lieve " —

" I will believe nothing that you say
I ought not," she interrupted with dig-
nity.

" Very well. What has become
known is due to an accident. I cannot
even comprehend how you have been
spoken to as you have." Oliphant rose,
and, moving a pace or two, drew his
gloves impatiently through one hand,
knitting his brows in bewilderment and
vexation. " It 's wrong, it 's unfair,"
he muttered, " that this should be
brought upon me."

Octavia changed her mood as instinc-
tively as one might in improvising upon
a sympathetic instrument. u Oh, well,
we ought not to distress ourselves," she

said ; though Oliphant knew perfectly
well that she was suffering keenly.
" Why should n't Mr. Gifford have writ-
ten to Miss Davenant, if he pleased ? I
dare say it quite passed out of his mind
afterwards ; and that is what makes it
seem so odd that we should only now
be discovering their acquaintance. The
whole thing is simple enough."

" Certainly ; quite simple," Oliphant
rejoined, grasping at a chance of escape
that promised so well. He was dum-
founded by the rapid and conflicting
turns through which he was being led,
but made a manful effort to keep his
balance. " I 'm glad you don't give it
too much consequence," he ended.

" Only I shall want to see the letter,
you know," she suddenly reminded him,
with a gracious smile, but looking very
determined. Her head was bent a trifle
sidewise, and she gave him a long,
steady glance, which was like a sharp-
shooter's in taking aim.

Then Oliphant recognized that it
would be futile to hold out any longer.
"It shall be as you like," he said.
" Only let me say that no one else has
read the letter."

" So much the better. Have you it
here ? "

" In Newport ? Yes : I can send it
to you." He could not face the ordeal
of handing it to her in person.

"Thanks. Very soon, too, I hope.
Could you let me have it to-day ? You
will understand my eagerness to see
anything that my husband wrote."

" Oh, yes, I understand." He pitied
her from the bottom of his heart, as he
stood there looking down at her. Did
she see the compassion in his eyes, I
wonder ? Why could she not compre-
hend his reluctance to give her pain ;
and why could she not let him judge
what was best for her peace of mind ?

What a beautiful picture of grace
and contentment she made in that
charming room, with its embroideries

O '

and sunlight and delicate colors ! What

230

Newport.

[August,

a picture of a smiling and unruffled life
her fart.- Miggested, too ! And here
1 Hiphant compelled to bring dis-
turbance and disaster into the scene,
through no fault of his own ; knowing
well that when he next beheld her there
would be a change — that things could
iiot remain the same after she should
have seen the letter. " You shall have
it in half an hour," he said. Then, in-
stead of going at once, he paused. " I
hope you will not misjudge me in this
matter. I can explain more, perhaps,
by and by. But would you mind letting
me know who it was that brought you
the reports ? "

" 1 'd rather not, now, Mr. Oliphant.
Let us leave that till afterwards, too ;
but I will try to think that you are not
to blame."

And so, with the friendly smile she
gave him in parting, he made a barren
effort to solace himself as he drove
away, heavy at heart. AVondering how
Mary Deering could have been so reck-
less as to circulate the story of the let-
ter — for he supposed that it must have
come from her — he mechanically put
his hand into the inner pocket where
he had been carrying the vexatious lit-
tle paper burden ; but it was no longer
there ! Where to begin the search for
it he could not decide ; but as he was
near Mrs. Deeriug's he ordered the
coachman to stop at her house, resolv-
ing at least to investigate her conduct.
He reappeared in the small parlor in a
stormy mood ; questioning and accusing
his cousin, and denouncing people in
general. She persisted in asserting her
innocence ; and he went his way again
within five minutes, a dim hope that he
might have left the letter in another
coat lending haste to his movements.
Ili.s anxiety increased every instant, un-
til he reached the Queen Anne cottage,
and, dashing up-slairs, entered his room.
There, surely enough, he found the
momentous letter slumbering in a coat
which he had not had on for two days.

Not until he had inclosed it ami sent it
away by a paid messenger did the ugly
surmise enter his mind that his occult
and ubiquitous host, Ilaish, might have
played the spy, coming upon this doc-
ument during some one of his own ab-
sences from the room.

When Octavia received the long en-
velope, she was still in her pretty holly-
wood drawing-room. Not a word of
comment accompanied the inclosure,
and, tearing off the cover, she instantly
scanned the contents.

Unnoticed, the yellow sheet fell to the
floor, when she had read the last words.
For whatever purpose circumstance and
the power above circumstance had pre-
served it, it had done its work.

Octavia remained passive for some
time in her chair, gazing blankly before
her. When she finally stirred, it was as
a somnambulist might have done: she
moved from one part of the room to an-
other, unconsciously, with hands knotted
together and knuckles pressed backward
against her smooth forehead. Heat at
its utmost becomes white, like numb,
chill snow : was it by a similar trans-
formation that the burning agony in her
brain now seemed not to burn at all, but
to be freezing her into insensibility ? A
curious effect, this. She began to won-
der at it ; she had a wild inclination to
laugh ; but with that desire a clearer
sense of her misery awoke. " What
right had he to send me this?" she
moaned. " What have I done, to be so
crushed ? — and he a mere acquaintance,
a stranger ! It 's unbearable ; yes, it 's
a crime ! And I shall never, never " —
her voice sank to a whisper more omi-
nous than even the dreary wail that had
preceded — " never forgive it."

Ah, if she could have wept then !
But the fountains of her life were
choked ; a parched desert seemed to
spread itself all around her and within.

Turning away, she strayed slowly
down the room again ; this time looking
closely at one object after another : at

1883.]

Newport.

231

the opaline glass of the chandelier, at a
rotund porcelain Buddha contemplating
with his fat face a Spanish navaja six
times his own length ; and at the fox's
head, which she could almost believe re-
turned a sardonic gleam of intelligence.
Everything was strange, as if she had
never been in the room before. Finally,
she came to the table where her fancy-
work and the open book lay. The vol-
ume was a sumptuous one, suggesting
leisure, elegance, peace ; and her eye
rested on these words : —

" The Heart is a garden, and youth
is its Spring, and Hope is its sunshine,
and Love is a thorny path that springs
up and bears one bright blossom that
has nothing like it in all the world."

" Oh no, no, no ! " she said aloud, not
with protest, but with scorn. " That
is n't true. It is n't a thorny plant, but
only a weak and miserable weed, with a
black, deadly blossom. The ' heart is a
garden,' you say — but what if there 's
nothing but grave-dust in the garden ?
Oh, why do they write so of love ?
Why should we be fooled with this sort
of thing, and be brought up on it, when
it 's all a lie ! "

Again her hands were locked ; she
sank upon a couch ; she was shaken by
her rage against fate, as the air is made
to quiver with visible heat in the fur-
nace of summer.

Everything on which she had built
her happiest faiths was swept away at
one blow. She had believed that her
husband had never loved any one be-
fore ; but she could never again be sure
that he had really loved her at all.
Perhaps she had been to him only the
solace of a concealed disappointment.
Her own pride was wounded : she was
angry at her husband, impalpable shade
though he was, because he had hidden
this thing, had left her to be humiliat-
ed and to question where his heart's
deepest fealty had been given. Yet at
the same moment her pride on his be-
half was stirred up against Oliphant,

because he knew of Gifford's rejection
by another woman.

" I shall go mad, if I think of it ! "
she groaned. A spasm of unearthly
jealousy seized her: Gifford had passed
away to another world, and Alice Oli-
phant had gone thither, also. " He is
mine ! " Octavia muttered passionately,
with a force as if she were calling to
some one far away. " We were to meet
there ; because the fable is that love is
everlasting. Have they met, instead ? "
And as the shadow of her love and
wrath loomed up distorted on the mist
that veils all life beyond us, she trem-
bled for her sanity ; the prospect grew
so dark, she began to doubt of heaven
itself.

In the midst of this horrible turmoil,
she rose, crossed the floor, and mechan-
ically picked up the fallen letter. That
petty precaution brought her back to
self-control.

She was hungry for action. Some-
thing definite must be done. She must
find a relief, a compensation, for the
strain she had undergone. Should it
take the form of revenge? A plan flit-
ted through her brain, and she adopted
it instantly ; but, whatever it was, the
first steps did not suggest anything like
danger.

Ringing the bell for her maid, " Take
away that fox's head," she commanded,
" and don't let me see it again. And
come back immediately : I shall have a
note to send."

Seated at her writing-table in the em-
bayed window, she dashed off not one
note, but two. The first was to Per-
ry Thorburn, accepting his invitation to
drive, two hours later. " Mr. Oliphant
shall see, at any rate, that I am not
crushed," she declared aloud. The sec-
ond note consisted of a few lines to Ol-
iphant himself, thanking him for his
promptness in gratifying her wish, and
saying that, if he would call soon, she
would like to speak with him further.

Thereupon she consulted the lozenge-

232 The Grift of Tears. [August,

shaped mirror that hung in velvet on ing to alarm a possible observer. Yet

the wall ; and the mirror gallantly sus- any one who knew Octavia well might

tained her : instead of the lines of dis- have thought her too determined to be

tress which had so recently shown in safe ; and there was a hard glitter about

her face, it revealed a triumphant en- those symbols of her widowhood, the

ergy. No ; in all this there was noth- diamonds at her ears.

George Parsons Lathrop.

THE GIFT OF TEARS.

THE legend says, In Paradise

God gave the world to man. Ah me !
The woman lifted up her eyes :

" Woman, I have but tears for thee."
But tears ? and she began to shed,
Thereat, the tears that comforted.

(No other beautiful woman breathed,

No rival among men had he;
The seraph's sword of fire was sheathed,

The golden fruit hung on the tree.
Her lord was lord of all the earth,
Wherein no child had wailed its birth.)

" Tears to a bride ? " " Yea, therefore tears."
" In Eden ? " " Yea, and tears therefore."

Ah, bride in Eden, there were fears

In that first blush your young cheeks wore,

Lest that first kiss had been too sweet,

Lest Eden withered from your feet.

Mother of women ! Did you see

How brief your beauty, and how brief,
Therefore, the love of it must be

In that first garden, that first grief ?
Did those first drops of sorrow fall
To move God's pity for us all ?

O sobbing mourner by the dead,

One watcher at the grave grass-grown ;
O sleepless for some darling head,

Cold pillowed on the prison stone,
Or wet with drowning seas, He knew
Who gave the gift of tears to you !

Mrs. S. M. B. Piatt.

1883.]

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

REMINISCENCES OF THOMAS COUTURE.

IT was a beautiful day in the middle
of July, 1876, when we glided out of the
Gare du Nord, in Paris, on our way
to see Thomas Couture, at the little vil-
lage where for many years he passed
the summer mouths in the seclusion of
the country.

We descended, after about half an
hour's ride, at the little station of Villiers
le Bel, which seemed stranded in the
open fields, as no village was in sight.
We began to fear that we too were
stranded, and had perhaps been left at
the wrong station. However, follow-
ing the few people who, like ourselves,
had been spilled, as it were, by the now
fast-vanishing train, we passed through
the station, and found, drawn up in the
shade, an old dusty omnibus, with two
sturdy Normandy horses attached. We
were assured by a worthy in a blouse,
and with a very thick and almost unin-
telligible patois, that this would conduct
us to our destination, the village of Vil-
liers le Bel itself, and that he would
have the honor to drive us.

With a great cracking of the whip
we were soon off at a good pace, over
a well -macadamized road which led
straight out into the country, and the
little station was left deserted and quiet
till the arrival of the next train.

Before us stretched the broad, dusty
road, and on either hand, with no fence
between, were spread the fields of fast-
ripening grain, waving and rippling in
the breeze ; the great red poppies blazed
in the sun, and the whole air was mu-
sical with the larks soaring far up in the
blue sky. How strange it all seemed,
and yet how familiar ! At every step
one was reminded of pictures by Lam-
binet and Rousseau, Troyon and Dau-
bigny, but Lambinet more than the oth-
ers ; for he it is who has made this part
of France peculiarly his own, as Rous-

seau the Forest of Fontainebleau and
Daubigny the river Oise. When, at
one point, we passed some peasants at
their noonday meal under the shadow of
their cart, which was tipped up with its
shafts in the air, while the good horse,
with harness off, browsed hard by,
" Ah," I involuntarily thought, " what
a perfect Millet!" So it is that the
familiarity born of books and pictures
gives an added charm to travel.

Aside from this, the landscape in
Normandy has a special grace of its
own. The gently flowing lines of the
hills, and the wide stretch of level plain,
without fence or bound to break the
view ; the little hamlets scattered here
and there, and the groups of graceful
trees, which from the custom of trimming
the lower branches for firewood lift
themselves against the soft skies with
peculiar character in their silhouettes,
all lend themselves ready made to the
artist's hand. In the atmosphere full of
moisture from the English Channel, the
distance melts away in a soft haze, and
there is never that knock-down aspect
of things, near or remote, with which
we are so familiar in New England.

After a twenty minutes' drive across
the level plain, we reached the outskirts
of the village, nestled among its trees
at the foot, and running up the slope,
of the hill of Ecouen. As we rattled
up its little narrow paved street, amid
a salvo from the driver's whip, which
echoed and reechoed from the gray
houses on either hand like a very suc-
cessful Fourth of July celebration, loun-
gers came out from doors; and fresh
faces, framed in white caps, peeped at
us from upper windows, to give and
receive voluble sallies from our blue-
bloused driver, who was evidently in
high favor with his townsfolk. At
length we reached the little square in

234

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

[August,

the middle of the village and drew up
in front of the Bureau de Poste. Here
we alighted and looked about us.

On one side of the square rose the
little Gothic church, with its spire termi-
nating in a ridge. The inside, unhap-
pily, has been spoiled hy a thick coat of
whitewash, but the outside is quite pic-
turesque, and, dominating as it does the
little hamlet, is an attractive object from
many points in the surrounding coun-
try, and has often figured in pictures by
French and American artists. With
the assistance of an old gentleman with
a wheelbarrow, on which were deposit-
ed our few impedimenta, we set out for
the inn, along one of the streets leading
from the square. The streets of Vil-
liers, as in other French country towns,
are all paved with large square blocks
of stone ; the houses abut directly on
the street, and the sidewalk, where there
is any, is also paved, and so narrow that
in places it is quite lost, where some
obtrusive house elbows its way out of
the general line. The gutter is often in
the middle of the street and answers
for a drain as well. Being open to the
air, gases have no chance to accumu-
late ; and although you are sometimes
greeted by unpleasant odors, no fevers
are the result.

The inn proved to be also a pastry
cook's. The landlord was the cook, and
was rarely seen out of his well-ordered
kitchen, while his wife sat all day in
the shop, with her knitting, and demand-
ed exorbitant prices for the very sweet
but generally flavorless confitures in
which the French delight. No well-
regulated French household ever makes
its own puddings or pies, but sends for
them to the patisserie, which therefore
exercises an important function.

In the mean time the hotel part of
the establishment was expected to run
itself, wilh such help as it could get
from the inueh-put-upon man of all
work, who did everything, from making
the beds to washing out the court-yard.

The natural result was that between
over-work and Madame's temper, which
was none of the best, the poor garden
generally left at the end of his fi:>t
month, to be succeeded by another un-
fortunate. He in turn would be sum-
moned from his bed-making by the shrill
voice of Madame in the court-yard be-
low, to attend to some newly arrived
guest, only to be scolded back again be-
cause his rooms were not done.

AVe entered the inn through the large
green doors of the paved court-yard,
and after paying our aged conductor
waited patiently for the clanging of the
great bell, which he had set ringing, to
subside. We decided to postpone the
inspection of rooms for the more press-
ing demands of hunger ; and so ex-
pressed ourselves to the for once smil-
ing landlady. At her suggestion, a table
was spread for us in what was called
by the somewhat misleading name of
Bosquet, a sort of arbor running along
one side of the court-yard, and composed
of straggling vines on espaliers, and
sickly creepers running up the high
wall that inclosed the court on that
side. The other three sides were oc-
cupied by the house, under which, in
one part, was the stable. We felt that
now we were indeed in Bohemia, and
our alfresco repast was none the less
enjoyable from the fact that the beef-
steak was tousjh and the vin ordinaire

very ordinaire.

Omelettes and bread are always good
in France, and we found no exception
here, while later we learned that our
landlord had a very good vintage of
Beaune, if we chose to pay for it.

Our meal was shared by a cat and a
dog, the former, however, only in im-
agination, as she dared not descend from
her vantage-ground on the high wall.
The dog was a large setter in the hob-
ble-de-hoy stage of puppyhood, and had
been christened Stop by an Italian
artist at the hotel, with, I fear, rather
vague ideas of English : something as

1883.]

Reminiscences of Tliomas Couture,

235

the Japanese supposed " Come -here "
to be the English for dog, because their
masters used that phrase in calliug to
them.

Stop, this particular dog certainly nev-
er did, but went tumbling over every-
thing ; getting between the waiter's legs,
and causing no end of mischief, but all
in such a good-natured way that the
vituperations with which he was greeted
usually ended in caresses.

After lunch, while the ladies installed
themselves in such rooms as we were
able to make up our minds to accept, I
determined to take the bull by the horns
and pay my visit to Couture, to get his
consent to give me some instruction.
I had often heard him described as a
man with a very bad temper and brusque
manners, and I feared my imperfect
command of the French language might
lead me to say something to rouse his
ire, as what may be quite polite in one
language is very often rude in another.
Besides, he had for many years refused
to take pupils, properly so called, and
had only recently made exception in
favor of some American ladies. Wheth-
er he would take a male into his harem
seemed quite doubtful, and indeed he re-
fused, while I was there, to take some
Frenchmen as pupils, though after my
advent admitting other Americans and
an Italian.

It was therefore with trembling that
I sought the abode of the great man.
I was directed to a neighboring street,
where in a long, high wall, overhung
by beautiful old trees, I found the large
gate of his chateau as it was called.
Beside this gate was a smaller one, with
a grating in it about six inches square.
I pulled the iron bell-rod that hung on
one side, and immediately, as if both
bell and dog had been attached to the
same cord, there ensued a great jang-
ling and barking. Inside I heard the
clack, clack, of wooden shoes coming
across a paved court ; the slide behind
the little grating was pushed back, and

an old woman in a Brctonne cap peered
out at me. The dog, meanwhile, having
been partially suppressed, kept up a mut-
tered protest. " Dear me," I said to my-
self, " this is indeed a Blue Beard's cas-
tle ;" and the dog, who was still invisi-
ble, assumed to my imagination gigantic
proportions. In response to my inquiry
if M. Couture was at home, — my out-
ward appearance being, I suppose, satis-
factory, — I was greeted with a smiling
u Entrez, monsieur," and the drawing
back of bolts and opening of the lit-
tle gate. Somewhat reassured by the
smiles of the old lady, and finding that
the dog, although of evil countenance,
was not so very large, I entered, and
followed the Bretonne cap and wooden
shoes across the court, that Jiad once
been laid out with some care, with flow-
er beds, and a fountain in the middle,
but was now all in disorder, with a gen-
eral tangle of weeds and grasses grow-
ing up between the paving -stones.
Bringing up the rear came the dog, a
sort of mongrel mastiff, sniffing unpleas-
antly near to my trouser legs. Had I
but known, as I very soon learned, that
both dog and master were the most good-
natured of creatures, instead of the bug-
bears my imagination had painted them,
I should not have felt so like a man
going to his execution. Although I
still marched on, my French, if not my
courage, basely deserted me, and left
me to stumble through the ensuing in-
terview as best I could, and then taunt-
ed me when safely back at the hotel
with what I might have said, but did
not. The Chateau Couture, more prop-
erly a maison de campagne, was a long,
two-storied stuccoed building, without
much architectural pretense, like many
another country - house in the suburbs
of Paris. It rested so low on the ground
that one step carried you into its front
door, or through its long French win-
dows. I was ushered into a room on
the left of the entrance, used, I after-
wards learned, as the dining - room j

236

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

[August,

catching on the way, through the door
opposite, a glimpse of the kitchen, with
its large, old-fashioned fire-place and
bright array of copper saucepans, evi-
dently the pride of the Bretonne cap.
Knowing that mine host had a weakness

for Americans as more liberal patrons
of art than his own countrymen had
proved to be, to him at least, I took
care to impress on the good dame that
it was au American who wished to see
monsieur. It was an even chance
whether the disappointment of finding
that I was not a rich American amateur
would not counterbalance the supposed
advantage of my nationality ; but I
hoped for an amiable reception before
he found that out.

Nor was I mistaken. Clack, clack,
went the wooden shoes up the stone
stairs, and clack, clack, they soon re-
turned, to say that monsieur would im-
mediately descend.

The dog, all the while, had followed
close at my heels, and stood guard to
see that I did not run off with the fam-
ily spoons. He had a bloodshot look in
his eyes, that boded no good to any such
attempt, and fearing he might mistake
my Western freedom for republican li-
cense, I sat as still as I could on the edge
of my chair.

Presently, clack, clack, clack, another
pair of wooden shoes came down the
stairs, and there entered a short, stout
man, in a broad-brimmed Panama hat,
dressed in a crumpled suit of gray linen,
and with black sabots on his feet. I
rose as he entered, and the dog, after
several violent blows with his tail
against the table leg, that happened to
be in the way of this customary saluta-
tion, laid himself down in the sun with
a great flop and sigh of relief that his
duties as policeman were over for the
present.

Couture — for it was he — extended
to me a soft, pulpy, but small and white
hand, and welcomed me with much em-
pressement.

" Always charmed to see Americans.
Had many American amateurs, who had
bought his pictures," etc. Ah, I said to
myself, I feared as much ! How shall I
ever dare to undeceive him ?

Seeing my evident embarrassment in
trying to express myself intelligibly,
with great tact he suggested that we
should go for a walk in the park, as he
called it.

He rightly divined that a stroll round
the grounds would be less formal than
sitting up on chairs, and that I should
be more at my ease in the open air.
This eye to the main chance and ex-
treme sensitiveness to the feelings and
motives of others, as well as to any sup-
posed slight upon himself, I found to be
among his strongest characteristics.

His sharp little eyes read with won-
derful insight the characters of his pu-
pils ; and although he understood not a
word of English, we were often startled
to find how quick he was to interpret
some passing remark from one to an-
other, when we thought ourselves safe
behind our foreign tongue, and his
abrupt " Comment ? " would speedily
bring us back to our good manners.

Leading the way into the next room,
Couture called my attention to some
writing in charcoal on one of the panels
of the white wainscoting that reached
to the ceiling. At the time of the siege
of Paris he had written here an ap-
peal to the Prussians to spare his house
and pictures, as the home of an artist
well known in Europe, and some of
whose paintings graced the walls of the
galleries of Berlin. I wish I could re-
member the exact words, they were so
naive in their egotism, of which his hav-
ing preserved them to this day was an-
other touch.

This room, which was the principal
salon, must have been nearly thirty feet
long, and reached from side to side of
the house, with long French windows
on either hand, through one of which
we passed to a terrace overlooking the

1883.]

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

237

park. The grounds had once been laid
out with much skill, but Couture's dis-
like to spending money had allowed
them to become overgrown and out of
repair.

A broad vista of fine trees led down
to where the paved chaussee from Paris
to Ecouen terminated the estate. By
skillful planting, and the substitution of
an iron paling for the high wall that
elsewhere bordered the road, this was
quite overlooked, and the eye was led
on over smiling fields to the hills of
Montmorency, four miles away. Thus
the name of " park" did not seem alto-
gether undeserved, although there could
not have been over six acres in the
whole place.

As we wandered about among the
trees and shrubberies, I found little need
of talking ; my companion, it seemed,
liked nothing better than to hold forth.
With his arm drawn through mine, a
favorite habit of his when walking with
any one. he stumped along in his wood-
en shoes, and was the picture of good
nature and bonhomie. A short and
thick man, as I have said, with a great
shock of iron-gray hair protruding from
under his old straw hat ; small but very
bright eyes, set in a rather heavy and
puffy face, of a pale and sallow hue ;
nose large, with open and very sensitive
nostrils ; clean-shaved, save for a heavy,
drooping gray mustache, which con-
cealed a large, sensuous mouth ; finally,
a receding chin, almost lost in a thick
neck, suggestive of apoplexy, — not a
handsome man, certainly. At the same
time, despite his small stature, he gave
you a sense of power that was unmis-
takable ; there was a flash in his eyes
that revealed the sacred fire, and you
felt that he was no common man, as his
outward aspect might lead you at first to
imagine. He was ungraceful, but with
a certain old-fashioned courtesy, espe-
cially with ladies, that made up for the
want of polish that could hardly be ex-
pected from his origin.

He often made fun of his awkward-
ness, and told amusing stories of going
to receptions at the Tuileries in the
days when he was in high favor with
Napoleon ; of putting his feet through
great ladies' trains, arid committing oth-
er gaucheries, to the disgust of the more
accomplished courtiers.

I found him anything but the bear
he had been depicted, and, with the ex-
ception of extreme sensitiveness to any
imagined slight, the most good-natured
of men ; very fond of telling stories,
and quite willing to laugh at himself,
but unwilling to be laughed at ; very
sure that he was the greatest painter
living, and that all others were mere
daubers, and very sore at the ill-treat-
ment he fancied he had received at the
hands of the French government and
artists ; in a word, a childlike nature
within a rough exterior, but very lovable.
Driven into voluntary exile by the jeal-
ousy of other artists and intrigues in
high places, for ten years he did not
touch a brush. Living on the reputa-
tion made in his younger days, he could
not consent to enter the arena a second
time, and notwithstanding his love of
money he was content to remain idle,
unless spurred on to do something by
the importunity of buyers seeking him
out. I never succeeded in getting at
the right of the case in his quarrel with
the world.

The ill-treatment, the slights cast
upon him by other artists, and his break-
ing with the government when in the
midst of large commissions, because, as
he alleged, he would not give a present
to the Minister of Fine Arts for pro-
curing him these orders, may have been
in great part due to his over-sensitive
imagination. To crown all, he rashly
wrote a book. " Oh, that mine enemy
had written a book ! " All the art- world
of Paris set up a howl, and its echoes
still linger in the ateliers on either bank
of the Seine. He retired to nurse his
wrongs at Villiers le Bel, and so entirely

238

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

[August,

did he become a tiling of the past that
most lovers of art, if they thought about
him at all, thought of him as dead, and
wondered why his great painting of Les
Remains de la Decadence was not re-
moved to the Louvre, as is the custom
with works owned by the state after
the artist has been dead ten years»
"What had the poor man done ? He
had written a slight sketch of his life,
given an account of his method of paint-
ing, and dared to criticise, but perhaps
without sufficient prudence, the works of
other painters. If he had had more
worldly wisdom he would have held his
tongue.

The " methode Couture " has been a
by-word in the ateliers of Paris ever
since. Not that it was not a good-enough
system in its way and as employed by
him ; but yet it was a difficult method
to copy, especially when learned only
from his book, and like a written con-
stitution, the too exact formulation of
ideas gave a chance for cavilers to find
fault. To many, to paint by rule, and
not by inspiration, seemed absurd. His
system was either misunderstood or mis-
applied, and certainly has never been
successfully held to by any of his pu-
pils. Pupils of other men have been
allowed to follow in the footsteps of
their masters without discredit, but those
of Couture have been pursued relent-
lessly as long as any trace of the mas-
ter's method has remained.

Why this should be I cannot say.
Why bitumen used by Couture is any
more sinful than when used by others
I do not know, but so it is. His great
aim was freshness and purity of color,
which he sought to get by mixing or
stirring the colors together as little as
possible, and by placing on the canvas
the exact tint as nearly as he could
hit it. and not disturbing it afterwards.
Hatl.or than disturb it, he preferred
either to remove an unlucky touch with
the palette knife and bread, or leave it
till dry, and then repaint it.

His great maxim was to make haste
slowly. He used to say, " Give three
minutes to looking at a thing, and one
to painting it." " Make up your mind
exactly what ought to be done, and then
do it with rapidity and decision, as if it
were the easiest thing in the world." " If
a thing does not come right at first, do
not fuss over it, but go to something
else ; and if necessary, come back to it
later, when you will often find that it
is not so bad, or at least is so unim-
portant in the general result as to be
hardly worth doing over," — all of which
maxims are most difficult to beginners.

The great trouble with the methode
Couture was that, like the battle-axe of
Coeur de Lion, only the master could
wield it. To get additional brilliancy,
he liked to employ very long brushes
that took up a great quantity of paint.
This he applied in a single decisive
touch with a peculiar movement of the
hand, which none of us were ever able
to imitate, and which left the paint all
bristling and sparkling, like grass with
the morning dew fresh upon it. He
contended that when put on in this way
and varnished it would remain fresh
forever, whereas the painting over and
over resulted only in deadening the
paint and turning it dark in time. Nev-
ertheless, he was always ready, if a thing
did not please him, either to scrape it
out, or, when dry, to glaze it down and
repaint it, but always trying as far as
possible to retain the brilliant qualities
of a first painting.

By this process of glazing and re-
painting he was able, contrary to the
generally received opinion, to obtain,
when he chose, the most minute finish.
Many of his smaller pictures will bear
witness to this, and it was only in his
larger canvases that he left things in
what might seem an incomplete state.

He did not invariably work in the
same way ; but his usual method was to
put in the shadows with a very little
bitumen and light red mixed with a dry-

1883.]

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

239

ing medium, then load the lights, and
by the time the shadows had become a
little sticky from drying, drag the prop-
er colors into them, which gave a more
transparent quality than painting them
in more solidly would have done.

In his drawing he insisted on style :
every line should express character,
and every line he ever drew was full of
it. His careful study of the antique
had made him an idealist ; he could not
be a servile copyist. With a few tell-
ing strokes he would express the whole
essence of an object distilled through
the alembic of his imagination. He was
one of the last of the classical school,
and had no sympathy with the growing
realism of the age, nor it with him.

Alas for the man who is born too
late, or who outlives his proper period !
He who is ahead of his time may come
to be revered as a prophet, but he who
is behind has no one so poor to do him
reverence. The whirligig of time alone
may bring him adequate recognition.
Among modern painters, Couture is
preeminent for nobleness of conception
and design ; but in cleverness of tech-
nique he has been much surpassed. His
faults were a certain dryness in execu-
tion, from the roughness of his paint,
and a want of unity in his larger com-
positions, arising in part from his habit
of studying each figure separately, and
in part from a lack of feeling for the
just relation of values.

His fondness for subjects of a satir-
ical nature worked him harm. It is a
doubtful point how far art should be
used as a moral agent, except as it ele-
vates the mind. The satirist has his
place, but it is not the highest place,
and the noblest art is degraded if used
to point a moral too openly. In such
pictures as The Realist (a student seat-
ed upon the bust of the Venus of Milo,
engaged in drawing a pig's head), The
Love of Gold, The Courtesan, and sim-
ilar subjects, he squandered the talent
that ought to have been devoted to

higher aims. It was, I think, a perver-
sion of the intellectual quality in art.
In Les Remains de la Decadence, his
best known picture, and the one which
made his reputation, we have, however,
a lesson of the debauchery of luxury
and vice which is very powerfully told.
The utter weariness and satiety of over- .
indulgence is admirably indicated in the
attitudes and expression of the figures.
The fair cease to charm or the wine to
cheer, and the moral is not too obtru-
sively drawn in the despair of the poet
on the one hand, and the scorn of the
philosophers on the other.

As a portrait-painter he was not very
successful. He idealized the likeness
out of his sitters, and left only what he
thought they ought to be. We prefer
ourselves as our looking-glass shows us,
and not as others see us, in spite of the
old saying.

Before parting with Couture, on that
first visit, I secured his consent to my
becoming a pupil. He seemed much
less averse to my project than I had
anticipated, but confessed that he had
intended never to take another schol-
ar, although willing to criticise works
brought to him by artists. He had
broken his resolution because an Amer-
ican girl had come to him and said,
" Je veux prendre des leqons" instead
of " Je desire" which so amused him
with its maidenly imperiousness that
he yielded. Having once given way
(and, I suspect, seeing a chance for a
little money, though he did not men-
tion that), he thought he would try a
few pupils for one summer. I was to
return the next morning with my paints
and such sketches as I had with me,
that he might see how proficient I was.

I shall never forget that morning.
It was very hot. After a repetition of
the formalities of the day before at the
gate only with broader smiles on the
part of the good dame, and this time
with appropriate recognition on that of
the dog that I was henceforth a priv-

240

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

[August,

ileged person, I was shown up to the
room used for a studio. Couture, with
the inevitable straw hat, received me
warmly, and after rummaging about
among a lot of old canvases, at which
I longed to get a better look, produced
a superb study of a man nude to the
waist, which he had made years ago for
the picture L' Amour de 1'Or. This he
set me to copy. To put me a little at
my ease, he took up a book and pre-
tended to read, but I felt all the time
that he was looking with those sharp
little eyes at every stroke I made. Al-
though the perspiration started at every
pore, there was nothing for it but to go
on. Oh, how hot it was ! The flies
buzzed on the window panes, or lit on
my nose ; there was no other sound
save an occasional grunt from my tor-
mentor, whether of approval or disgust
I could not tell. After a painful strug-
gle, my task was finished. I felt that I
had done myself scant justice ; but per-
haps it was just as well, as the improve-
ment thereafter would be all the more
marked, and that would please the
teacher. With a " Not so bad," he in-
formed me that " we should soon change
all that," and that the next day I could
regularly begin. As other pupils ar-
rived soon after, he arranged a class,
which met at his house during the first
week of every month. He would either
give us something of his own to copy,
or, painting himself from a model in
the morning, make us do the same in
the afternoon. In this way we learned
how he attacked a subject, and his
method of treating it ; also gathered
many useful hints from his criticism of
our own and others' sketches. The rest
of the month we worked by ourselves
from models, or sketched in the fields,
carrying the results to him for correc-
tion.

He liked to have us come to his house
on Sunday af'^ -»ons, when he held a
sort of l«te"e^ % j under the trees in
the par/and thF^ fiune, the celebrated

dealer in bronzes, who was his most in-
timate friend, often came from Paris to
pass his Sunday, and other artists from
the neighboring Ecouen, a great centre
for genre painters, were frequent visitors
on those pleasant afternoons. Surround-
ed by his family, with a clean white
linen suit on, his best Panama on his
head, and the ribbon of the Legion of
Honor in his button-hole, he poured
forth by the hour together a stream of
racy anecdotes and amusing conceits.

The family consisted of his wife and
two daughters and the dog Didi, a very
important member. When the Prus-
sians were approaching Paris, the Cou-
ture family fled, like so many others ;
leaving the writing on the wall that I
have before mentioned, to mollify the
conquerors. But alas, on reaching Paris
Didi the cherished was missing ! He
had been left behind, and the Prussians
would surely get him. So, in face of
the whole advancing host, Couture sal-
lied forth to rescue the dog. He passed
the French lines, and advanced into the
now deserted country ; he reached Vil-
liers le Bel in safety, to find it silent
and almost uninhabited, but he found the
dog. As yet no Prussians were in sight,
and he was about to return, when sud-
denly, over the hill from Ecouen, two
Uhlans appeared; they came to a halt;
then two more appeared from another
direction ; then, silently, stealthily, like
the coming-in of the tide, from all sides,
by every alley and street, came the spiked
helmets. The village was surrounded
and occupied, and Couture a prisoner.
The officers, however, were very kind
and polite, and allowed him to return to
his family in Paris in triumph, with the
dog. History does not relate how Didi
escaped being eaten during the siege, but
he would have been a tough morsel, and
that fact probably saved him.

Couture's youngest daughter, Jeanne,
was his favorite. She was at that time
a very sweet girl of about sixteen, and
acted as her father's rapin, that is, helper

1883.]

Reminiscences of Thomas Couture.

241

in the studio. She kept his palette
beautifully clean, washed his brushes,
and always had a fresh rag or paint-
tube ready to his hand in time of need.
She spoke a little English, which she
had learned at school, but was very shy
of her accomplishment. Painting a lit-
tle herself, she took a great interest
in the work going on, and with her dark
olive skin and the bright ribbon in her
hair was always a charming picture, be-
side her rugged old father.

We passed two summers at Villiers le
Bel, working in the manner described ;
the class varying from two to nearly a
dozen, mostly of the fair sex. One day
in the second summer there came near
being an end to the whole thing through
our touching the master on his sensi-
tive spot. We had been having a model
whom we all disliked, except Couture,
who found in her beauties lost on our
duller perceptions. I suppose we re-
garded her from too realistic a stand-
point. Her good points were all rudi-
mentary, and it needed the master to
add what nature had denied her. He
used to say that he preferred a thin to
a stout model, because you could study
the structure, and could add as much as
you liked ; whereas in the other case, the
flesh hid everything from view, and you
did not know how much to take off. Be
that as it may, in this case we got very
feired of her and her want of beauty,
and without any special concert it so
happened that one fine morning all
the class stayed away, save one faithful
mortal. I had taken the day to go up
to Paris on necessary business, and the
others had similarly found something
else to do. Of course the faithful one
reported that there was a rod in pickle
for us.

The next morning we went to Cou-
ture's prepared for an outburst, and sure
enough it came.

When we assembled in the room
used for a studio, Couture had not
yet come down, and he kept us waiting

VOL. LII. NO. 310. 16

some time, which was an ominous sign.
Presently we heard his wooden shoes
stumping along through the room lead-
ing to ours. He entered with great cere-
mony, making a low bow to us all, and
not with his usual jovial salutation. He
was carefully dressed in his best, freshly
shaved (a rather rare occurrence, by the
way), with his hat in his hand instead
of on his head, and the ribbon of the.
Legion of Honor in his button-hole, —
altogether en grande tenue. Addressing
me as the oldest pupil, he made an
oration on the disrespect of our conduct,
when he gave us lessons only as a great
favor, and wound up by saying that this
rebellion had very much wounded his
feelings, and that he should - give us no
more instruction. Feeling that I was
called upon to speak for the others, I
expressed my extreme regret at what
had happened ; explained that no dis-
respect was intended, that I had been
obliged to go to town on business, and
that it was a mere accident that the
others stayed away at the same time.
Remembering that the French are more
easily influenced by an epigram than a
sound reason, I wound up by saying
that what he had thought a revolution
was nothing at most but an emeute, and
should not be regarded seriously. This
had the desired effect : the clouds cleared
away, he burst out laughing, and we all
set to work, and I never knew him more
good-natured than he was for the rest
of the day. And so the lessons went on.
The last time I saw Couture was in
Paris, in the autumn of 1878. We
were about leaving for Egypt, and in-
vited him and his daughter Jeanne to
come and lunch with us at our hotel in
the Latin Quarter. He was in a very
hilarious mood, and, like a school-boy
out for a holiday, bent on enjoying him-
self. After our repast we proposed that
we should all go to the Exposition and
look at the pictures ; thinking his crit-
icism would be both instructive and
amusing. But no ; he said, he was tired

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

of the Exposition ; he was a provincial
up from the country, and preferred to
fluner in the streets of the great city.
So off we set ; Couture in front with
my wife on his arm, and I behind with
mademoiselle.

We must have made a queer group,
and I am afraid the good people at
home would have been much scandal-
ized at our behavior. Couture acted
out to the letter the part of country-
man ; insisting on looking in all the shop
windows, as if he had never before
been in Paris ; calling loudly to Jeanne
to come and admire some object ; rush-
ing wildly across the street, to his own
and my wife's imminent peril, his hat
usually flying off in the passage, which
we behind were obliged to rescue from
under the feet of the horses or wheels
of passing cabs.

Even in Paris, where people are used
to eccentric behavior, such actions and
actors attracted a good deal of notice,
and I was glad to get him into Goupil's
on pretense of showing him one of his
own pictures which I had seen there sev-
eral days before. The young man who
conducted us to the gallery up-stairs
seemed at first inclined to treat with

much coldness such an unpromising set
of visitors, and with reluctance produced
the head I asked for. No sooner was
it placed on the easel than Couture
burst out in derisive laughter, abused it
roundly, and, although it was an un-
doubted Couture, saw fit to ridicule the
whole thing. The showman was natu-
rally much incensed, and proceeded to
point out to us the excellences of the
painting ; but Couture would not listen
to him, and continued to call it all sorts
of names, saying that they used to
make omelettes on it, and kicked it about
generally in the atelier. The man now
looked puzzled, as if he were dealing
with a madman ; suddenly a gleam of
intelligence shot across his face, as he
began to realize that this eccentric must
be Couture himself. Never was there
a greater change : he ransacked the
whole shop for pictures that would in-
terest us, and finally bowed us out with
all the obsequiousness he could muster.
It was now time for Couture and his
daughter to leave us, to take the train
for Villiers le Bel, and the flourish of
the large Panama hat from a cab win-
dow was the last I ever saw of my
worthy master.

Ernest W. Longfellow.

IN THE OLD DOMINION.

FOUR o'clock of a lovely day in the
•early autumn; a chilly wind, contra-
dicted by a hot sun ; a touch of crim-
son in the sumach bushes lining a coun-
try lane in Virginia, down which a gen-
tleman is galloping, — a fine, erect figure
mounted on a stout hack, which is care-
fully groomed, somewhat dingy in ac-
coutrement, and just now putting out its
best paces. At the mouth of the lane,
where it debouches into the high-road,
there is a glorious maple, that a month
later might well stand for the burning

bush of Moses, with its shimmering
lights, glowing and sparkling in new
and beautiful combinations of color, as
^ sunshine, cloud, and breeze make of it
alternately a tree of gold, a tree of
blood, a tree of bronze.

Already the ground at its feet is car-
peted in a way to delight the aesthetic
soul, and a girl who has been sitting
for an hour with a lap full of leaves,
which she has been admiring, arranging,
comparing, unable to decide which to
keep and which to throw away, rises,

1883.]

In the Old Dominion.

243

seizes two parcels, drops three, recap-
tures them only to drop half her leaves,
makes a triumphant swoop upon these,
and picks her way toward the horseman.
Not a lady at all ; an awkward, freckled
factory-girl, going home with the com-
ing week's work ; yet the moment he
catches sight of her, he pulls up his
horse with a suddenness that sends
streams of liquid mud flying up the ani-
mal's flanks, and as he walks past her
takes his hat off and executes a pro-
found and courtly salute, — such as Sir
Charles Grandison may have kept for the
duchesses of his acquaintance, — goes
on quietly for a few hundred yards, and
then resumes his gallop for a couple of
miles, when he reaches a shackling, low-
spirited gate, off the hinge, set in a lux-
uriant, undipped hedge of bois d'etre,
and turns into the grounds of Edge-
wood. In its day Edgewood was known
from New England to the Carolinas as
one of the colonial show-places, with a
thousand acres at its back, half as many
slaves to till its fields, stahles that ac-
commodated fifty horses, and room and
welcome for a perennial stream of guests,
— the belles, beaux, and local magnates
of the country and neighborhood, with
such distinguished foreigners as chanced
to stray that way. The house was built
of English bricks, in a pseudo-Grecian
style of architecture, with portico suf-
ficient for the Madeleine, and a noble
hall, through which one could drive a
coach-and-four : two features greatly in-
sisted npon by the Virginian gentry of
the period. It stood in a park of sev-
enty-five acres of beautiful woodland,
and was set on a knoll commanding
fine views of the surrounding country.
But the place was sadly shorn of its
past glories, and in China would prop-
erly have been regarded as a monument,
not a home, and promptly converted
into a chapel and grounds for the wor-
ship and deification of ancestors. The
lawn was ragged and unkempt, and
the grass dying, apparently, of a green

and yellow melancholy. The enormous
wooden pillars of the portico were al-
most destitute of paint, and the boards
under-foot were rotting away in various
places. In front, a weather-stained,
chipped marble fountain seemed inca-
pable of pumping up so much as a sin-
gle tear over its own bright past and
arid future, or that of its owners. Of
the original estate, only two hundred
and fifty acres remaiued, producing
chiefly blue thistles, and having no mod-
ern devices, such as phosphates, rota-
tion of crops, and improved machinery,
to stimulate its flagging cereals.

The front door was a fine old piece
of mahogany, to which time had given
a rich wine-color ; it was further adorned
with a huge brass lock and knocker,
polished by several generations of mus-
cular Africans, under the lynx-eyed
supervision of as many notable house-
wives. It stood open, revealing a sec-
tion of the hall, with its stained floor,
spindle-legged furniture, racks for hats,
whips, and fishing-tackle, family por-
traits, and a group of crossed swords
wielded by revolutionary sires, supple-
mented by two others that had belonged
to the dead sons" of the house, — two
gallant young cavalry officers, who fell
on the same day in the Wilderness.

Just outside, in a rustic arm-chair, sat
an old man of ninety, who looked as
though he would crumble at a touch ;
with long, scanty locks of white hair
hanging down on his shoulders, a face
wrinkled like a baked apple, a nose that
still insisted on being handsome amid
the wreck and ruin of all the other fea-
tures, and two bristling tufts of white
hair set above a pair of pale blue eyes,
deeply sunken in their sockets and wan-
dering in expression. He was dressed
with extreme care, in the style of the
"fine old English gentleman," in a
dark suit of some long-past period, very
long as to the waistcoat and tight as to
the coat ; wore a patched boot neatly
blacked, topped by gray gaiters, a fob,

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

and a voluminous cravat, wrapped
around his neck again and again, until
the tip of chin and ears disappeared. It
was this, combined with a trick he had
of moving his entire body, from the
waist, in turning to address one, that
gave a curious Jack-in-the-box effect
to the shining bald crown which had,
indeed, been engaged for a life-time
in trying to keep itself above water.
With one tremulous, deep-veined hand
he held a brown vellum book, from
which he was reading aloud to a gentle-
man sitting near, using the other to turn
over the yellow leaves, and pointing his
moral with a skinny forefinger as he
peered closely at the text.

" Listen to this, my boy," said he, his
cracked voice rising in shrill exultation,
as he went on with the passage from
his favorite author : " ' If New England
be called a receptacle of Dissenters,
Pennsylvania a nursery of Quakers,
Maryland the retirement of Roman
Catholics, North Carolina the refuge of
runaways, and South Carolina the de-
light of buccaneers and pirates, Vir-
ginia may justly be esteemed the happy
retreat of true Britons and true Church-
men.' " It is impossible to give an
idea of the emphasis and importance he
contrived to throw into his " Virginia."
Even in his thin tones it had a digni-
fied, Old Dominion, Mother-of-States-
and-Presidents swell to it that told its
own tale of love and pride ; it was a
roll-call of the States, in which his heart
said " Here ! " as plainly as possible to
the listening ear.

His companion had given a merely
mechanical attention, and was saying,
" You are very fortunate, Mr. Vesey,
in being able to read without your
glasses. I suffer considerable incon-
venience from the necessity I am al-
ways under of carrying them about with
me wherever I go. My carelessness and
absence of mind are such that " —

" There 's my son ! " exclaimed the
old gentleman abruptly ; " and he has

taken the chestnut out again, in spite of
my having distinctly forbidden it. A
troublesome lad, — a very troublesome
lad." Saying this for the third time,
he rose with great difficulty, and aided
by his cane limped to the edge of the
veranda, and stood there waiting for
his son to dismount.

" You have taken the chestnut again,
Wyndham, although you knew it was
contrary to my wishes. I am surprised
at your want of filial respect, sir, — sur-
prised, surprised," he called out fretful-
ly, as soon as his son came within ear-
shot. " You have three saddle-horses
of your own, sir, and had better leave
mine alone. I should think that an in-
timation of my wishes on the subject
would be all that is necessary ; but you
forget yourself, sir, — forget yourself
entirely."

Although assailed in this way, the
son did not seem at all disturbed, but
fastened his bridle-rein composedly to
a staple driven into one of the oaks ;
a substitute for the stable-boys who
used to dart out from behind the
house, by some happy inspiration, the
moment there was any need of them.
Mr. Vesey the elder was in his second
childhood, and had a fixed idea that,
with a stable full of thoroughbreds, his
son would ride his father's horses. It
was useless to argue the point, or explain
that the chestnut was the only decent
bit of horseflesh about the place ; so his
son advanced, hat in hand, made his
apologies elaborately, and was told that
" Mr. Brooke, of Shirley, had been wait-
ing for more than an hour." Now, al-
though the two men had been neigh-
bors, schoolmates, college chums, and
intimate friends all their lives, and were
moreover in the habit of meeting daily
at the same hour for a game, or games,
of backgammon, of which both were
very fond, the mere suspicion of dis-
courtesy to a guest was so intolerable
that Mr. Wyndham Vesey hastened to
go through a second set of apologies, as

1883.]

In the Old Dominion.

formal and punctilious as though they
had been meant for an entire stranger.
On examination, " the troublesome boy "
proved to be a man of sixty-five, with
gray hair and beard, and dignity and
ease of manner quite incomparable, and
a diction as clear-cut as his profile. His
friend was a year or two older, of equal-
ly good address, with a manner sugges-
tive of intense self-respect, utterly un-
tinged by self-assertion, delightfully sim-
ple and unaffected, and with that un-
spoken deference for the opinions and
utterances of others which scores so
many points for the accomplished man
of the world, especially with women.

After shaking hands, the friends stood
for several minutes making the usual in-
quiries after each other's health, and that
of each member of their respective house-
holds. It was, " I hope the ladies at
Shirley are in the enjoyment of their
usual good health to-day," and " I trust
that Miss Gertrude has quite recovered
from the extremely severe attack of
neuralgia from which she was suffering
yesterday," accompanied by repeated
bows and thanks, and so on through the
list. To have omitted anybody or slurred
over so important a ceremony would
have been considered almost indecent.
The three gentlemen took chairs, and
began a desultory conversation, which
was soon interrupted by the arrival of
the daughter of the house, Miss Ger-
trude Vesey, a smiling little lady, who
trotted out, key-basket in hand, and
greeting Mr. Brooke informed him that
she was " right glad to see him," and
" it certainly was a mighty fine day for
him to ride over : " two phrases whose
Elizabethan quaintness suited her and
her surroundings. She was so fair and
plump and rosy that, though only three
years younger than her brother, she
looked a softened fifty, and was regard-
ed by her father as a mere child. If in
consequence of her poverty she belonged
to the black-alpaca sisterhood, by vir-
tue of her ladyhood she had contrived

to take out of that dubious material all
its unpleasant shininess and suggestion
of vulgarity. Worn as Miss Gertrude
wore it, with lace at the throat and
wrists, — a miniature of an ancestress, a
court beauty of Queen Anne's reign, —
and a watch from whose chain depended
a cross made from the wood of General
Washington's coffin, it became to all in-
tents and purposes a black silk, and
could have held its own in the very fin-
est company.

Yes, Miss Vesey wore alpaca and
took boarders, who seemed to have tak-
en her, so gentle and mild was she, and
to have been the gainers by the transac-
tion. For it had come to this. The
scanty living afforded by the land had
to be supplemented by something ; and
if every helpless incapable in petticoats
and difficulties runs to boarders a« in-
evitably as a garden to weeds, it is no
wonder that a woman whose recipe for
pickled oysters had been copied in half
the cookery-books of a State where all
the housewifely arts are esteemed and
practiced, as they used to be among
English dames a couple of centuries
back, should take an impregnable posi-
tion, and, first inserting advertisements
demanding and according the " very
highest testimonials," await the result
as calmly as Napoleon before Auster-
litz. Among the family heirlooms was
a treasure, — the only one on which no
one had counted or been able to dissi-
pate,— in the shape of a small book
bound in leather, in which several gen-
erations of ladies had recorded their
domestic experiences and experiments.
Here, in faded, crabbed characters, with
a liberal use of capitals, and not always
a fanatical adherence to the rules of
spelling, were recorded recipes of every
conceivable kind. A tremendous com-
pound of honey, hyssop, licorice root,
anise-seed, pulverized elecampane, an-
gelica root, pepper, and ginger, called
" Queen Elizabeth's Cordial Electuary,"
and suid to have been " Her Maiesty's

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

favorite remedy when troubled with
straitness," which must have been pret-
ty often, if we may judge from her pic-
tures ; " The Honorable Mr. Charles
Hamilton's Method of Making Grape
Wines," which " the Duke de Mirepoix,"
presumably a judge of such matters,
" preferred to any other ; " " Dr. Ful-
ler's Chemical Snuff for Drowsy Dis-
tempers ; " an " Incomparable Method
of Salting Meat as Adopted by the late
Empress of Russia," " more expensive
than common brine," as imperial brine
has a right to be, " but promising ad-
vantages that most people would be
glad to purchase at a much higher
price," — these, with recipes for " Brag-
get," " Ink Powder," a " Grand Ptisan
or Diet Drink of Health and Longev-
ity, by a Celebrated French Physician,
who lived nearly one hundred and
twenty years," doubtless on his own
mixture, and a highly genteel " Rem-
edy for Noisome Vermin," which " if
applied with only the tip of a pin will
cause the insect to be instantly deprived
of existence," jostled each other in this
quaint record of the dark age in which
a woman was supposed to " superintend
her family arrangements, investigate
her accounts, instruct her servants, and
keep within the bounds of her husband's
income."

There was ample field for the expen-
diture of all Miss Vesey could earn ; for,
in addition to other claims, she had a
brother's widow and her two daughters
to take care of, beside a little boy, a dis-
tant cousin, who, being left orphaned
and homeless, drifted, as a matter of
right and of course, under the roof of
a fourth cousin, who felt that she was
only fulfilling a plain duty in engaging
to support and eduo***-Wm.

We will now s& necessi the company
on the ver/ carrying theaOver several
matters g°- Mv Care4h occasional

are such thresey, senior,

interrupt^

whose chau
he catches o

excoart, so that
bruptly ; " jfe aud there.

MR. BROOKE : " I saw Egerton Whar-
ton, yesterday, when I went into town *,
and it was a great source of gratifica-
tion to me to meet him again, and recall
the pleasant week we spent together at
Baltimore in the winter of '70. He has
been living out in the West for thirty
years, you know, but tells me that he
has come home to remain, and has
bought back the old place. He has been
remarkably successful in his commercial
ventures, I hear, and has achieved an
independent fortune."

MR. W. VESEY, flicking with thumb
and middle finger one of his sister's
neatest darns on the knee of his trous-
ers : "I am glad to hear it. Now that
his time is no longer monopolized by
money-making, a mechanical routine of
sordid cares, in which there is little
or no expansion of the higher faculties,
or room for more elevating pursuits, he
will be at liberty to cultivate the feel-
ings and pursue the objects that exalt
our nature, rather than increase our for-
tune. He married a Staiusforth, did he
not?"

MR. BROOKE : " Yes. I was at his
wedding, and it was a most interesting
occasion. I still remember the alacrity
with which I saluted the lovely bride,
a most bewitching young enchantress ;
a second-cousin of mine, once removed.
Her mother was a Fosbrooke, and her
grandmother a Noel."

OLD GENTLEMAN, who has slipped
down in his chair, and has been dozing,
with his head on his breast : " Eh ?
What's that?"

MR. W. VESEY : " We are saying
that Egerton Wharton's wife's mother
was a Fosbrooke, and the grandmother
a Noel."

OLD GENTLEMAN, sitting bolt up-
right : " Nothing of the sort, Wyndham,
— nothing of the sort. Her mother was
a Flower, and her grandmother was a
gentlewoman of great worth and discre-
tion, a daughter of Richard Jocelyn, of
Helstone."

1883.]

In the Old Dominion.

247

MR. W. VESEY : " I think you are
mistaken, sir. You are thinking of the
other brother."

OLD GENTLEMAN : " Nothing of the
sort, — noth-ing of-the-sort. How can I
be mistaken ? I never was mistaken in
a thing of the kind in my life, — never.
His father's place in King and Queen
marched with mine, and I knew him
when he was in long clothes. Visiting
in the West, is n't he ? "

MR. BROOKE : " He has come home,
but he is looking wretchedly ill, and tells
me the doctors give him a lease of only
two years on life ; just as he has gained
all that he hoped for. Well, ' Sunt
superis sua jura.' "

OLD GENTLEMAN, decisively: "He
had better retire to his estate to die, and
be buried among his own people."

Miss VESEY, on hospitable thoughts
intent : " Is he staying in the neighbor-
hood ? "

MR. BROOKE : " I am unable to say.
He was with Heathcote yesterday."

OLD GENTLEMAN: "That is a tide- wa-
ter name. What is he doing up here ? "
(Glancing suspiciously from son to
guest, from under his white, tufted eye-
brows, as if the fact of Mr. Heathcote's
being out of his own county required
satisfactory explanation, and was in it-
self damaging.)

MR. W. VESEY: "He has come to
settle up his aunt's property. She died
without a will, and he is next of kin."

OLD GENTLEMAN, mollified by the re-
spectable nature of his errand : " Oh,
indeed ! Fine man, his father. He was
the arbiter elegantiarum of the county,
when we were young fellows. No such
people about here. The gentleman ceases
with the oyster, in Virginia."

MR. W. VESEY, aside to his friend :
" He is talking of the grandfather. Are
you disposed to give me my revenge,
now ? If so, we may as well go inside
for our game, unless, indeed, you prefer
to woo the fickle goddess on the porch."

MR. BROOKE, rising : " Not at all ; but

may I trouble you for a glass of water,
first ? "

Miss VESEY: " Not water alone, Mr.
Brooke. You must try my raspberry
cordial."

Interval of five minutes, after which a
small African, with his wool carded out
carefully and a snow-white apron over
his every-day suit, appears in the door-
way, a sulky frown on his face, the re-
sult of being forced to make a toilette de
circonstance, and in his hand a silver
tray, bearing glasses of cordial, in which
bits of ice tinkle temptingly, flanked
by a blue India plate, full of golden
sponge-cake that clamors to be eaten.

" Ah, here is our Mercury," says Mr.
Vesey ; and after a little more conversa-
tion and liberal refreshment of the in-
ner man, both gentlemen rise, and take
their way to a large, bare room on the
right of the hall, with windows giving
on the porch. Left alone, outside, the
weary old man takes intermittent naps,
or lets his eyes wander to the white
monuments in the cemetery on the hill-
side, where the declining rays of the
sun are shining sadly upon the lonely
graves of many a gallant soul who wore
the blue or gray ; and then to the mist-
veiled mountain peaks, on which their
eyes must often have nested, too, with
God knows what longings for the dis-
tant home and friends they were never
to see again. At last sleep wins what
remains of the day. Not content with
sleeping, he snores, and presently wakes
himself up, and cries out with feeble
fierceness, " Who 's that ? " It is the
inquiry he usually makes under such cir-
cumstances, and never meets a response ;
but this time, as soon as he gets done
blinking and staring, in the general con-
fusion of his senses, he sees a dapper,
spruce-looking man coming up the steps
and approaching him. The new-comer
has not dropped from the clouds at all,
but has driven up in a smart buggy, very
like a tea-tray set on wheels, freshly
painted, glittering with varnish, and

248

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

presenting a striking contrast to the
vehicle in which Mr. Brooke was wont
to make his appearance, — a dingy,
mud-splashed, ram-shackle affair, made
up of blistered leather and black wood,
the shafts being tied up in various places
with bits of rope, and the harness three
sizes too large for the small pony it fes-
tooned. With a good deal of difficulty
old Mr. Vesey gets himself out of his
chair, and bows to the stranger ; then
sinks back, and, leaning on his cane,
peers suspiciously into the unfamiliar
face.

OLD GENTLEMAN : " Good evening to
you, sir. Take a seat " (waving him
stiffly toward a chair).

Taking the seat indicated, he lolled
back in it with breezy ease, crossed his
legs aggressively, and, running his hand
through his hair, began with breathless
volubility to explain his errand, in short,
staccato phrases, that irritated his listen-
er very much as a fusillade from a pea-
shooter might have done, though he
caught only one in a dozen.

STRANGER : " Been traveling through
your country. Very poor country, I call
it Shouldn't think it would yield twelve
bushels of anything to the acre. Going
to rack and ruin. Guess we '11 have to
buy you out and put you down in truck
farms. Convenient to markets. Raised
on a farm. Worked on it till I took to
the road. Know all about it. Got a
better thing. Always on the lively hop,
but layiu' up the circulatin' cornstant."
(In his satisfaction he here jerks up his
coat-sleeves a little way, and rubs his
hands together.) " Got a cousin down
here. Been sick, and had to stop to see
him." (Here he winked facetiously, and
laid a finger on the side of his nose.)
" Know him ? Name 's Perkins, — Oba-
diah."

OLD GENTLEMAN, shaking his head :
" I have never met the relative you
mention. There is no such name in the
county."

STRANGER : " What say ? Been livin'

five miles from here twenty years !
Spick-spanking farm on the Woodville
pike. No rags, bones, dirt, nor weeds
there, you bet. Wife and ten children,
mostly of the female gender."

OLD GENTLEMAN : " Now that I think
of it, there has been a person of that
name about here for a good while. I
trust that you are enjoying your visit,
sir." (At this moment a pretty, dark-
eyed boy of about six runs out on the
porch, and seeing the stranger shrinks
behind Mr. Vesey 's chair.)

STRANGER: " Nice little chap. Grand-
son ? "

OLD GENTLEMAN : " No, sir : a young
relative, who has been the subject of
a most afflicting dispensation of Provi-
dence, and has lost both his parents,
whose places we are endeavoring as far
as possible to fill."

STRANGER : " Fond of children. Got
two little buckets of my own, out my
way. Come here, young 'un." (Child
declines.)

OLD GENTLEMAN : " Go and speak to
the — ah " — (hesitates, and wipes his
face with an enormous red bandana, la-
boriously searched for and applied) " the
gentleman, my dear." (Child goes.)

STRANGER: " That 's right. Be polite.
It's always worth ninety cents on the
dollar. Now, tell me, who are you ? "

CHILD, as though he were announc-
ing himself a Guelph or Ghibelline : " I
am a Vesey."

STRANGER : " Oh, you are, are you ? "
(Laughing.) " How old are you ? "

CHILD : " Going on seven."

STRANGER : " Well, how do you like
it as far as you 've got ? " (Silence.)
" Now tell me what you know. Can you
read and write ? Can you say your cat-
echism ? "

CHILD : " Which one ? "

STRANGER: "How's that? How
many do you learn ? "

CHILD : " I know two : cousin Ger-
trude's and grandpa's. But I 've for-
got my duty to my neighbor."

1883.]

In the Old Dominion.

249

STRANGER : " That 's bad. Well, sup-
pose you say the other. Sail in, now."

CHILD : " I can't say it, 'less graudpa
asks the questions."

OLD GENTLEMAN : " Very well, my
son. Come here, and I will hear you.
Speak so you can be heard. What are
you ? "

CHILD : " A gentleman."

OLD GENTLEMAN : u What is a gen-
tleman, my son ? What does he do ? "

CHILD, in a shrill treble, running all
the words together : " Fears God, loves
his country, tells the truth, respects
women, pities the unfortunate, helps the
needy, and does his duty." (Old gentle-
man explains to stranger, and both laugh
heartily.)

OLD GENTLEMAN, concluding that
stranger is not quite as objectionable as
he at first thought : " May I offer you a
glass of wine ? "

STRANGER : " No, I 'm 'bliged to you.
Must be off. Smart-like chap, that.
Gets that off like it was greased. Like
to see the lady of the house." (Child
goes in search of Miss Vesey, who pres-
ently comes out, dropping a stiff courte-
sy on the door-sill to the stranger.)

STRANGER, not rising : " How are
yer, ma'am ? My name 's Bates. I 'm
down here introducin' the finest thing
of the age. Sold two thousand of 'em
since the 1st of April. Can't get 'em
made fast enough. Buckwheat cakes
don't go off no faster. Got a large
wash, ain't yer ? Done in the house ?
Now I tell yer what yer want to do. Yer
want to buy one of Baker's patent, au-
tomatic-action, self-feeding, double-cyl-
indered wringers. Have all your pet-
ticoafes and stockings out on the fence
by eight o'clock, ef yer was born deaf
and dumb and blind ! "

A faint color tinged Miss Vesey's
cheek at this " bold and indelicate allu-
sion to certain garments," as she put it
afterward, in talking over the merits of
the new invention with her sister ; but
she passed it over at the time, though

she stiffened perceptibly, and pushed her
chair back a little further from the pre-
sumptuous speaker. The family linen
weighed as heavily upon Miss Vesey as
it ever did upon Falstaff, and when got
up at home was about equivalent to a
weekly case of small-pox ; so she listened
not only with patience, but with inter-
est, to Mr. Bates's exposition of the in-
comparable advantages to be derived
from the use of his wringer, and then
went for a paper and pencil with which
to take his address, in the event of her
deciding to invest in the machine. Mr.
Vesey, with one of the changes of hu-
mor to which he was subject, had grown
more and more irritated during the con-
versation, and had interrupted it several
times with stage asides, such as, " Send
the man away, Gertrude. We shall not
sell any of the land, tell him." Wholly
mistaking Mr. Bates's mission, he had an
idea, born doubtless of much painful ex-
perience in the past, that some more of
the Edgewood acres were about to be
put into the melting-pot. When his
daughter had gone, he leaned forward,
and said with a puzzled air, " What
part of the country did you say you
lived in, sir ? "

" Bad Axe, Michigan," promptly and
proudly replied Mr. Bates.

" Good God ! What a place to come
from ! " said the old man, a look of posi-
tive horror overspreading his face ; and
getting up, he tottered into the hall with-
out another word, and shuffled slowly out
of sight, every line in his figure expres-
sive of the profoundest disgust.

It was not long after Miss Vesey had
dismissed the florid Bates that some
Washington people, staying in the neigh-
borhood, came to call, and flocking up the
steps were soon dotted about the porch
in groups of two or three, enlivening the
scene by their gay costumes and com-
ments. The other ladies of the family
were sent for, — a timid, sad-eyed widow
and her two daughters. Conversation
flourished apace, and old Mr. Vesey, com-

250

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

ing back after a while with two books
under his arm, exclaimed, " Well, I de-
clare ! " at the sight of so many visitors,
and was about to beat a retreat, when one
of the gentlemen pulled up an arm-chair,
and insisted on installing him in it. They
entered into a friendly, if on Mr. Ve-
sey's part rambling and incoherent, chat,
and the younger man was highly divert-
ed to hear his companion talk of " Tom
Jefferson " and " Tom Paine," " the
Resolutions of '98 ; " quote from " Mr.
Addison's works" and Euripides ; enter
into an ardent defense of the principles
and practices of the Whig party ; and
make a tremendous onslaught in John-
sonian periods upon foreigners in gen-
eral, and the French in particular. It
was, " 1 apprehend that the greatest
danger threatening the perpetuity of
our institutions lies in the unrestricted
powers of our Chief Executive, sir.
What does Patrick Henry say ? ' The
President of the United States will al-
ways come in at the head of a party.
He will be supported in all his acts by
a party. The day is coming when the
patronage of the President will be tre-
mendous, and from this power the coun-
try may sooner or later fall.' " Or,
" Don't talk to me of the French, sir.
I have no prejudices, but look at the
Reign of Terror ! They are a dirty
race ; they eat the Lord knows what
kind of messes and kickshaws, and you
can't believe a single word they say, sir.
I was educated in England, and the day
I left Southampton to return to my
native land I looked toward France, and
then toward England ; and I said to my-
self, ' I thank my God ttiat I sprang
from this people, and not from that.' "

Meanwhile Miss Vesey had been taken
possession of by a bright, pretty girl, of
whom she was very fond, though the
girl was as unlike as could be the ideal
model young lady whom Miss Vesey
had been trained to admire and imitate
in her own youth. " So awfully glad to
see you, dear Miss Gertrude," the girl

was saying. " Do sit right down here
by me, and let me tell you what stacks
of fun we 've been having lately."

" ' Awful ' is a very suitable word to
use when you have occasion to alludo
to the Day of Judgment, Amy ; but I
hardly think it applicable to the pleasure
we experience on meeting a friend," ob-
jected Miss Vesey. "I wish you would
try " —

" Oh, never mind, you dear old-fash-
ioned thing! Don't scold. Everything
is awful nowadays that is n't quite too
perfectly jolly. I 've been to a party
at the Seaforths', and I danced twenty-
three dances running. What do you
think of that? Weren't you awfully
fond of waltzing, too, when you were a
girl ? " asked the girl. " It 's just too
delightful for anything."

" I never waltzed in my life, my
dear," said Miss Vesey, gently patting
her young friend's hand as she spoke.
" I don't approve of it, at all, you know.
It seems to me a most indelicate pro-
ceeding, and I think that if you should
read Salmagundi you would agree with
me. I used to dance quadrilles, some-
times, but I never gave the gentleman
more than the tips of my fingers, and I
always wore gloves."

" Good gracious ! You don't mean
it ! " cried Miss Amy, amazed and not a
little amused by such a code of propri-
ety. '• How glad I am that I didn't live
then ! There was a sweet little man,
with a perfect love of a mustache, who
danced like an angel, at the party, the
other night, and how we did spin ! I
tore all the embroidered flounce off my
dress, and my hair all came down, and
I dare say I looked a fright ; but that
did n't matter."

Miss VESEY, severely, for her : " My
dear child, how can you talk of any gen-
tleman in such a shocking way ? And
alluding to his — his mustache, — it is
positively bold. It is a fault of heed-
lessness, no doubt," she went on, afraid
of having given offense, " yet it cannot

1883.]

In the Old Dominion.

251

but give rise to scandal among the gos-
sips. It is a great pity that you spoilt
so expensive a dress, dancing in that
violent way."

'* Oh, that don't matter. Popper will
give ine a dozen like it, if I want them,"
said Amy.

" But surely you can repair the in-
jury," urged Miss Vesey.

" No, I can't. I can't darn a bit, and
it would be an awful bother."

Now Miss Vesey was amazed, in her
turn. Her own needlework was exqui-
site. She had been pinned by her skirts
to the chintz covering of a mahogany
chair, at her grandmother's side, for two
hours daily, from the age of three until
such a measure was no longer necessary ;
and a child of six, at that period in
Virginia, who could not make a shirt
for her father neatly and completely was
regarded as either hopelessly stupid, or
a disgrace to her family. She could
only murmur, " Dear me, dear me ! I
never knew any one so sadly neglected.
You must not be angry with me for
saying so, my dear."

" Why, of course not. I don't mind
about not sewing. Popper 's got lots of
money, just pots of it, and he don't
care how much I spend. My shoe-bill
at school last winter was sixty dollars
for three months, and my candy-bill was
seventy-five, and Popper never said a
word."

" I think I never heard of such ex-
travagance ! " exclaimed Miss Vesey.
" It is really wicked to throw away
money in that reckless fashion. What
would you do if reverses came, my
dear ? "

" Oh, come and be housemaid at
Edgewood, you dear thing ! " replied
the warm-hearted girl, with a kiss and
pressure of Miss Vesey's hand. " There,
they are going ! I must say good-by."
And say good-by she did; and Miss
Vesey, having waited to get a last nod
and bright smile from her through the
carriage window, pulled out her knit-

ting, and clicked away briskly with her
needles in the twilight. Through the
open window close by came the rattle,
rattle, rattle, and clop, clop, of the dice-
boxes, with fragments of the conversa-
tion of the two gentlemen inside, " Ha !
Had you there, Everard." " I 've crossed
the Rubicon now." " Look out for
your laurels ! " " Ten games ahead !
Really, your hand seems to have lost
its cunning. You block your game by
heaping up men in the corners, I think."
The voices grew higher and higher,
expressing exultation on the one hand,
and much irritation on the other. Pres-
ently Mr. Vesey called out, " Sixes ! "
"That takes all your men in," ex-
claimed his opponent, in a disgusted
tone. " Sixes again, by the beard of
the Prophet ! " cried Mr. Vesey, and a
clatter of pieces taken off and dumped
down in the vacant board followed.
" Sixes again ! " he next shouted, in de-
lighted amazement. " AND AGAIN ! "
he exclaimed, in genuine astonishment.
" Did you ever hear of such luck ? "

This was more than poor Mr. Brooke
could bear, for he was of an impul-
sive temperament, and had been losing
steadily all the afternoon. " By Heaven,
it is n't fair ! It is n't fair ! " he roared,
and, getting up, seized board, dice, and
men, and threw them violently out of
the window upon the lawn.

A dead silence followed this outburst,
and then Miss Vesey, all of whose fac-
ulties had come out to hear, overheard
her brother say, in his lowest, quietest,
and most distinct tones, as he pushed
back his chair, "You have called my
honor in question, Mr. Brooke, and I
am under my own roof. Allow me to
wish you good-evening." With this he
walked up-stairs, and a moment later
Mr. Brooke bolted out on the porch,
hastily untied his horse, scrambled into
the buggy, and belaboring an astonished
pony with the butt end of his cane was
soon out of the Edgewood grounds.

Tha estrangement that followed be-

252

In the Old Dominion.

[August,

tween the two friends was one of the
most paiuful episodes either had ever
known. A most melancholy hiatus in
their relations set in. They met con-
tinually, but only to stalk past each
other fiercely, with averted looks, and
then to go home to brood over their
respective injuries.

"To think that Everard Brooke,
whom I have known, man and boy, for
fifty years, should accuse me of cheat-
ing ! Loading the dice ! A Vesey load-
ing dice ! " groaned Mr. Vesey to his
sister, throwing himself about in his
comfortable arm-chair as though it con-
tained nests of scorpions, instead of
well-stuffed cushions.

" Wyndham Vesey is too hard on
me," Mr. Brooke would say. " I met
him at the post-office this morning, and
he could not have treated me with more
contempt if I had been a tramp ! He
must know that I said what I did in an
impulse of ungovernable temper ; but I
am not going to tell him so while he
continues to assume that confounded air
of superiority."

This state of affairs continued until
Mr. Brooke, implacable, as people in
the wrong generally are, having raged
and abused and suffered his fill, came
suddenly, one morning, in looking over
an old trunk, upon a handsome silver-
mounted whip, the gift of his friend.
Forthwith habit, affection, regret, en-
forced by a conscience silenced, not
convinced, all made a united, and this
time successful, assault upon the weak-
ened citadel, and sitting down he wrote
as follows : —

THE HONORABLE WYNDHAM VESEY :
SIR, — Feeling as I do that I have
almost forfeited the right to address you
at all, it is with considerable trepida-
tion that I approach the subject of our
late misunderstanding. I cannot too

deeply deplore that in a moment of ex-
treme irritation I allowed myself to be
betrayed into a most ungentlemunly
and indeed unpardonable display of tem-
per and ill-breeding ; but at the same
time, I must be allowed to utterly dis-
claim the construction you unhappily
placed upon my hasty utterances, re-
flecting severely upon you as a gentle-
man and a man of honor, to offer you
an unconditional apology for the same,
express my profound regret at what has
happened, and assure you of the high
esteem in which I have ever held you.

With assurances of distinguished con-
sideration, I have the honor to remain
very faithfully yours,

EVERARD BROOKE.

•

If the grave, orderly, dignified Mr.
Brooke knew how to lose his temper
with a good-will on rare occasions, he
also knew how to atone for his indiscre-
tion. He got in reply an extremely
frank and cordial acceptance of his
amende honorable, and, meeting Mr.
Vesey two days later, looked so dread-
fully embarrassed, held out his hand
with such an uncertain air, and mur-
mured in such an agitated tone, " You
will shake hands with me, won't you,
Wyndham ? " that Mr. Vesey nearly
wrung it off, and they were soon going
through the usual stilted inquiries for
the ladies at Shirley and Edgewood,
with a barely perceptible additional
tinge of formality and deference. The
friendship that had withstood the shocks
of a life-time, to be imperiled, strange
to say, by four throws of a dice-box,
flowed on ever after in a current strong
as it was deep, undisturbed by the faint-
est breath of disagreement ; and every
day in the week, at the usual hour, the
two men may still be seen, deeply en-
gaged in the mysteries and intricacies of
their favorite pastime.

]?. (J. JJaylor.

1883.]

Study of a Cat-Bird.

253

STUDY OF A CAT-BIRD.

FOR more than eight months a cat-
bird lias lived in my house, passing his
days in freedom in the room where I
sit at work, and his nights in a cage not
six feet from my head.

Having spent a summer in watching
his ways in his home, and acquiring a
proper respect for his intelligence, I
now wished to test him under new con-
ditions, to see how he would adapt him-
self to our home, and I found the study
one of the most absorbing interest.

He had been caged a few weeks only,
but he was not at all wild, and he soon
grew ' so accustomed to my silent pres-
ence that, unless I spoke, or looked at
him, he paid no attention to me. By
means of a small mirror and an opera-
glass I was able to watch him closely in
any part of the room, when he thought
himself unobserved.

To the loving student of bird ways
his feathered friends differ in character,
as do his human ones. My cat-bird is a
decided character, with more intelligence
than any other bird I have observed.
The first trait I noticed, and perhaps
the strongest, was curiosity. It was
extremely interesting to see him make
acquaintance with my room, the first he
had ever been free to investigate.

Usually with birds long caged, it is at
first hard to induce them to come out.
I have been obliged actually to starve
them to it, placing food and water out-
side, and repeating it for many days,
before they would come oul freely, and
not be frightened. Not so with the cat-
bird. The moment he found that a cer-
tain perch I had just put into his cage
led into the room through the open
door, he ran out upon it, and stood at
the end, surveying his new territory.

Up and down, and on every side, he
looked, excited, as the quick jerks of
his expressive tail said plainly, but

not in the least alarmed. Then he took
wing, flew around and around several
times, and at last, as all birds do, came
full speed against the window, and fell
to the floor. There he stood, panting.
I spoke to him, but did not startle him
by a movement ; and in a few minutes
he recovered his breath, and flew again,
several times, around the room.

As soon as he became accustomed to
using his wings and learned, as he did
at about the second attempt, that there
was a solid reason why he could not
fly to the trees he could see so plainly
outside the window, he proceeded to
study the peculiarities of the new world
he found himself in. He ran and hopped
all over the floor, into every corner ;
tried in vain to dig into it, and to pick
up the small stripes on it. (The floor
was covered with matting.) That be-
ing thoroughly explored, — the lines of
junction of the breadths and the heads
el the tacks, the dark mysteries of far
under the bed and the queer retreat be-
hind the desk, — he turned his attention
to the ceiling. Around and around he
flew slowly, hovering just under it, and
touching it every moment with his bill,
till that was fully understood to be far
other than the blue sky, and not pene-
trable. Once having made up his mind
about anything, it was never noticed
again.

The windows next came under obser-
vation, and these proved to be a long
problem. He would walk back and
forth on the top of the lower sash,
touching the glass constantly with his
bill, or stand and gaze at the pigeons
and sparrows, and other objects outside ;
taking the liveliest interest in their do-
ings, and now and then gently tapping,
as if he could not understand why it was
impossible to join them. If it had not
been winter, his evident longing would

254

Study of a Cat-Bird.

[August,

have opened windows for him ; a pining
captive being too painful to afford any
pleasure.

But he soon became entirely content-
ed, and, having satisfied himself of the
nature of glass, seldom looked out, un-
less something of unusual interest at-

tracted his attention : a noisy dispute in
the sparrow family, trouble among the
children of the next yard, or a snow-
storm, which latter astonished and dis-
turbed him greatly, at first.

The furniture then underwent ex-
amination. Every chair round, every
shelf, every table and book, every part
of the bed, except the white spread, of
which he always stood in awe, was close-
ly studied, and its practicability for
perching purposes decided upon. My
desk is an ever fresh source of interest
since its contents and arrangements
vary. The top of a row of books across
the back is his regular promenade, and
is carpeted for his use, with a long strip
of paper. There he comes the first
thing in the morning, and peers over
the desk to see if I have anything for
him, or if any new object has arrived.
Here he gets his bit of apple or raisin ;
here meal worms are sometimes to be
had ; and here he can stand on one foot
and watch the movements of my pen,
which he does with great interest. Oc-
casionally he finds an open drawer, into
which he delights to go, and continue
his explorations among postage-stamps
and bits of rubber, pencils and other
small things, which he throws out on the
floor, with always the possibility of dis-
covering what is still an enigma to him,
a rubber band, to carry off for his own
use, as I will explain further on.

The walls and the furniture under-
stood, he proceeded with his studies to
the objects on the table. A mechanical
toy interested him greatly. It moved
easily, and the wind of his wings, alight-
ing near it the first time, joggled it a lit-
tle. He turned instantly, amazed to see
signs of life where he did not expect

them. For a moment he stood crouched,
ready for flight if the thing should make
hostile demonstrations. Seeing it re-
main still, he touched it gently with his
bill. The toy moved, and he sprung
back. In a moment it was still, and
he tried again ; and he did not leave it
till he had fully exhausted its possibili-
ties in the way of motion.

At another time he saw his bath-tub,
a tin dish, standing upon a pitcher. He
alighted on the edge. It was so poised
that it shook and rattled. The bird
flew in a panic to the top of a cornice,
his usual place of refuge, and closely
watched the pan while it jarred back
and forth several times. Apparently
seeing that it was a harmless motion,
he again flew down to the same spot ;
and the rattle and shake did not drive
him away till he had seen if there was
still a drop of water left for him in the
bottom of the dish.

One day, in his travels about the
floor, he found a marble. It was too
large to take up in his mouth, so he tried
to stab it, as he does a grape. The first
peck he gave sent it rolling off, and he
hastily retreated to the cornice. "When
it stopped he returned and tried it again.
This time it sprang toward him. He
gave one great leap, and then, ashamed
of his fright, stood and waited for it
to be still. Again and again he tried
to pierce the marble, till he was satis-
fied that it was not practicable, when he
abandoned it forever.

There is one mystery in the room
not yet penetrated, though it is a sub-
ject of the deepest longing : it is my
waste-basket; the contents are so va-
ried and so attractive. He will stand
on the edge, hop all around it, and view
it from every side ; but it is so deep and
narrow that he evidently does not dare
to venture further. Every day he goes
to the edge, and gazes sadly and ear-
nestly, but is never satisfied.

This interest in my doings is always
intense, and at every fresh movement

1883.]

Study of a Cat-Bird.

255

he will come down to the corner nearest
me, if in his cage, or alight on the back
of my desk, if out, and peer at me with
closest attention. One thing that seems
to amaze and confound him is my ap-
pearance in a different dress. " What
sort of a monster is this," his manner
will say, "which can change its feath-
ers so rapidly and so often ? "

If I want him to go into his cage, or
to any part of the room, I need only go
there myself and put some little thing
there, or even appear to do so ; and as
soon as I leave he will rush over to see
what I have done.

Next to his curiosity is his love of
teasing. The subject furnishing oppor-
tunity for a display of this quality is
a cardinal grosbeak, which cannot be
coaxed to leave his cage. The latter is
the older resident, and he did not re-
ceive the cat-bird very cordially. In
fact, he grew cross from the day the lat-
ter arrived, and snarled and scolded
every time he came near. The cat-bird
soon found out that his enemy never
left the cage, and since then has consid-
ered the cardinal a fit subject for annoy-
ance. He will alight on the cardinal's
cage, driving him nearly frantic ; he will
stand on a shelf near the cage, look in,
and try to get at the food dish, — all of
which is in the highest degree offen-
sive, and calls forth violent scolds and
screams of rage. Finally, he will steal
a grape or bit of fruit stuck between
the wires, when the cardinal will fairly
blaze with wrath. At one time the
cat-bird indulged in promenades across
the top of the cage, until the exasper-
ated resident resorted to severe meas-
ures, and by nipping his toes succeeded
in convincing his tormentor that the top
of his house was not a public highway.

Worse than all his other misdeeds,
however, was a deliberate insult he paid
to the cardinal's singing. This ardent
musician was one day sitting down on
his perch, as he is fond of doing, and
singing away for dear life, when the cat-

bird alighted on the window sash, close
by the cage. The singer kept his eye
on him, but proceeded with the music
till the end of the strain, when, as
usual, he paused. At that instant the
cat-bird gave his tail one upward jerk,
as if to say, " Humph ! " I noticed the
insulting air, but I was surprised to see
that the cardinal appreciated it, also.
He began again at once, in much louder
tone, rising to his feet, — which he rare-
ly does, — lifting his crest, swaying back
and forth in a perfect rage, glaring at his
enemy, and pouring out his usual song
in such a flood of shrieks and calls that
even the calm cat-bird was disturbed, and
discreetly retired to the opposite window.
Then the cardinal seated himself again,
and stopped his song, but gave vent to
his indignation in a most energetic series
of sharp " tsips " for a long time.

Quite different is the cat-bird's treat-
ment of two English goldfinches. On
them he plays jokes, and his mischiev-
ous delight and his chuckling at their
success are plain to see. One of them
— Chip, by name — knows that when
he is in his cage, with the door shut,
he is safe, and nothing the cat-bird can
do disturbs him in the least ; but the
other — Chipee — is just as flustered
and panic-stricken in her cage as out,
and the greatest pleasure of his life is to
keep her wrought up to the fluttering
point. He has a perfect perception of
the difference between the two birds.
When both are out he will chase them
around the room, from cornice to cor-
nice ; drive them away from the bath,
which they all have on a table, purely
for fun, as his manner shows. But
once caged, he pays no further attention
to Chip, while always inventing new
ways to worry Chipee. He alights on
the perch between the cages, crouches
down, with eyes fixed upon her and tail
jerking, as if about to annihilate her.
She flies in wild panic against the wires,
to his great gratification. Then he ruffs
himself up to look terrible, spreads his

256

Study of a Cat-Bird.

[August,

legs wide apart, blusters, and jerks his
body and wings and tail, making feints to
rush at her, till she is so frightened that
I take pity on her and drive him away.

One day, when she was more nervous
and he more impish than usual, I cov-
ered her cage with a towel. He came
back as soou as I had left it, and pro-
ceeded to inquire into this new screen.
After looking at it sharply on all sides,
he went around behind the cage, pulled
at the end of the towel, and peeped in.
She fluttered, and he was pleased. I
arranged it more securely, and the next
performance was to take hold with his
bill, and shake it violently. This also
remedied, his last resource was to come
down on the end of the perch with a
bounce, making much more noise than
usual ; he generally alights like a feath-
er. After each bounce he would stand
and listen, and the flutter he always
heard delighted him hugely. As long
as they lived in the same room, she
never got over her fear, and he never
tired of playing pranks around her.

If to learn by experience is a sign of
reason in an animal, the cat-bird plainly
demonstrated his possession of that qual-
ity. He learned very fast by experience.
Once or twice alighting on the cane seat
of a chair, and catching his claws, taught
him that that was not a place for him,
and he did it no more. When his claws
grew so long as to curve around an or-
dinary perch, or a book, after being
caught once or twice, he managed to
accommodate himself to this new con-
dition, and start in a different way. In-
stead of diving off a perch, as he nat-
urally does, he gave a little jump up.
The change was very marked, and he
caught his claws no more.

lie learned to ask to be uncovered in
the morning, in about three days. He
would begin his uneasiness quite early,
flying back and' forth violently in the
cage, and at last he would call. I want-
ed to see if he would learn, so the mo-
ment he called I would get up and take

off the cover which protected him from
cold at night. For two or three morn-
ings he did the same, became uneasy,
flew a while, and then called, when
I at once responded. From the third
day he called the instant he wanted to
be uncovered, showing no more restless-
ness, and calling again and again if I
did not move at once, at last giving his
most harsh cry, and impatiently scold-
ing with rage.

To beg for worms was an easy les-
son. Having two or three times re-
ceived them from a pair of tweezers on
my desk, he came regularly ; perched on
the books; looked at me, then at the
cup which had held the worms ; then, if
I did not get them, opened and closed
his bill, and jerked his tail impatiently.

His great delight and mystery is a
rubber band, of which I keep two sizes :
one hardly larger than a thread, and the
other an eighth of an inch wide and
two inches long doubled. These he is
wild to get ; and since he treats them as
he does worms, I conclude that their
softness and elasticity are deceptive, and
a mystery, like the glass, which he can-
not solve. At any rate, after beating
them on the floor as he does a worm,
he always swallows them. He will per-
sist in swallowing even the large ones,
and sit puffed out on his perch in evi-
dent suffering for hours, before he dis-
covers that he cannot digest it, and at
last disgorges it. To find a rubber band
is the desire of his heart, and to keep
him from it is the desire of mine. At
first, when he pounced upon one, he
would stand on my desk and swallow it ;
but after I tried to get it away, he
learned cunning. The instant his eye
would spy one, generally under some
paper in my drawer, he would first
glance at me, then snatch the treasure,
and instantly fly to the cornice, where I
cannot reach him. I always know by
the manner of his departure that he has
found what he knows, perfectly well, is
a forbidden object.

1883.]

Around the Spanish Coast.

257

Another thing interesting to observe
in the cat-bird is his way of hiding him-
self, when in plain sight all the time.
He simply remains entirely motionless,
and one may look directly at him, and
not see him, so well does his plain dark
dress harmonize with his usual surround-
ings. Often I come into the room and
look about for him, in all his favorite
places, — on the cornice, the desk, and
before the glass ; no bird to be seen.
As I move about to look more closely,
he will suddenly fly up almost from un-
der my hand. Still as he can keep, his
movements are rapid ; he is delibera-
tion itself in making up his mind to go
anywhere, but once decided he goes like
a flash.

When a new bird was introduced into
the room, an English song thrush, twice
as big as himself, the cat-bird was at
first uncertain how to treat him ; but
in one day he learned that he could
frighten him. The small, dark, impish-
looking fellow, rushing madly at the
big, honest, simple thrush, put him into
an uncontrollable panic. As soon as this
fact was established the cat-bird became
a tyrant. He will not allow him to en-
joy anything on the floor, drives him
away from the bath, mocks his singing

with harsh notes, and assumes very
saucy airs towards him.

The worst effect of the thrush's com-
ing, however, was to show me a new
trait of the cat-bird's character, — jeal-
ousy. The first day or two he sulked,
would not go out of his cage, would not
touch meat, and though he has gradu-
ally returned to his liberty and his meat,
he still refuses, now after two months,
to alight on my hands for his tid-bits,
as he did before.

Nothing is more interesting than to
note the variety the cat-bird will give
to the cry which at a distance resembles
the " mew " of a cat. He has many
other notes and calls, besides his exqui-
site songs, but there is hardly a shade
of emotion that he cannot express by
the inflection he will give to that one
cry. Whether he proclaims a melan-
choly word by softly breathing it from
closed bill, or jerks it out with a snap
at the end, as though he bit it off, when
he is deprived of some cherished treas-
ure, — as, for instance, a rubber band,
— from one extreme to the other, with
all the shades between, -each expresses
a meaning, and each is intelligible to
a loving and observing student of his
ways.

Olive Thome Miller.

AROUND THE SPANISH COAST.

ON the 14th of April, four days' sail
from Malta on the steamer Mizapore, we
sighted the Pillars of Hercules, two lofty
rocks, apparently some ten miles apart,
— the gateway to a new world. The
wind was west and the day showery.
These historic monuments gained im-
periousness from the thunderous clouds
that concealed their summits, and left
something of their majesty to the im-
agination. They frown at each other
across the highway of commerce and dis-

VOL. m. — NO, 310. 17

covery, a symbol of Spanish and Eng-
lish distrust. In order to command the
strait one power should hold both head-
lands. But since the English cannot be
dislodged from Gibraltar, the Spaniards
have seized the opposite rock, the high
headland of Ceuta, the Punta de Afri-
ca, fortified it and garrisoned it, and
converted it into an important military
prison. Ceuta was the point from which
the Moors embarked for the conquest of
Spain, and the Spaniards now hold it

258

Around the Spanish Coast.

[August,

in terrorem over Morocco. But the
Moors, who have little desire to recon-
struct the world, do not fret over its
occupation, as the Spaniards do over the
sight of the English flag, on Gibraltar.

The Mizapore had come from Syd-
ney, and her passengers, with a sprin-
kling of travelers picked up at Bombay,
returning East Indians, olive - skinned
nurses with heavy silver anklets, and
lithe Lascars, — just enough to add pic-
turesqueness to the ship, — were mostly
Australians, going " home " for the first
time in their lives ; loyally English, ex-
ceedingly curious to see the old coun-
try, but entirely un-English in manner
and speech, having a provincial (or was
it democratic?) manner, not agreeable,
I noticed, to the real English on board,
and wanting both the polish and the
individual assertion, amounting almost
to indifference to people not born on
the great island, — the sort of bitter-
sweet which makes the English trav-
eler usually the most interesting of com-
panions.

Statisticians could have proved that
the death-rate was high on the Miza-
pore, for we had two funerals in our
short passage. One was that of a re-
turning Indian officer, who succumbed
to consumption the night we left Malta,
and the other that of a baby. Among
the passengers was another Indian offi-
cer, who had been eager to join his wife
and child at Malta and take them home.
Mother and child were at the dock, but
the child was ill, and the happy reunion
was followed by a day of anxiety. On
the second day, the body of the child,
after a brief prayer, was pushed out of
the same funeral opening, on the mid-
dle deck, where the dead officer had
been launched, and two more were con-
tributed to the myriads who make the
smiling Mediterranean one of the most
populous of graveyards.

The isolated rock of Gibraltar, pre-
senting perpendicular points to the east
and north about fourteen hundred feet

sheer above the sea, slopes away in a
series of terraces to the west, where the
straggliug town lies, and helps, with the
opposite coast of Algesiras, to form a
small harbor, little protected by the low
hills on the west of it, open to the
southwest and the southeast, and swept
by the current of air which draws over
the flat land north of the rock, — the
neutral ground between the rock and
Spanish territory. The west wind was
blowing freshly as we rounded into the
bay, and the hundreds of vessels in the
harbor were bobbing about like corks.
It was no easy matter to get into one of
the little boats that came off to take us
to the landing, and we formed a very
poor opinion of the harbor of Gibraltar
as a place of shelter. Nor, although
we were hospitably received, and given
a ticket that permitted us to land and
remain five days on the rock, with a
warning not to be caught outside the
gates at the sundown gun, could we get
up much enthusiasm for the common-
place town. We endeavored to appre-
ciate its military position and the labor
that has been expended in cutting gal-
leries and tunnels in the rock, and
mounting big guns which peep out of
embrasures and threaten Spain. I could
not see that the strait was commanded
against the passage of vessels ; most of
the armament is on the land side, and
the rock is no doubt impregnable to
any Spanish attempt, and a perpetual
offense to Spanish pride. It looks in-
solent and dominating, both from land
and sea. From a spacious chamber
hewn out of the rock hundreds of feet
above the water, on the north side; a
chamber furnished with long, down-
slanting, wicked-looking guns, ready with
a turn of their carriage wheels to poke
their cold noses out of the embrasures ;
a chamber in which the officers of the
establishment give lunches to their lady
friends ; a cool retreat, where the ar-
tillery of love is just now more danger-
ous than that of war, because love is a

1883.]

Around the Spanish Coast.

259

repeating and revolving arm, that never
needs to be reloaded, and is often dead-
ly when it is empty, — from this ban-
queting hall, that might become lurid
with smoke and saltpetre, we looked
down upon the narrow neck of sandy
flat that separates England from Spain.
Immediately at the foot of the rock is
the burial-ground of the English troops ;
beyond that, barracks, and then a line
of British soldiers, slowly pacing for-
ward and backward ; beyond the sol-
diers, a strip of neutral sand, perhaps
three hundred yards in width ; and be-
youd that, a line of Spanish sentinels,
also pacing forward and backward in
hostile show, and behind them barracks
again, and the town of San Roque on
rising ground. And thus stand Spain
and England, in this day of grace and
Christianity, watching each other in mu-
tual distrust, while their peoples meet
in the friendship of trade and social in-
tercourse.

The most prominent object in San
Roque is the new Bull Ring, a vast
stone structure like the Coliseum, — a
sign of the progress in civilization of
the people of the Peninsula.

There are several pleasant villas nest-
led among the rocks on the southeast
exposure, and the Alameda runs along
to the southeast from the main town
through flowering gardens and sweet-
scented trees, — a cheerful promenade
and drive when wind and dust are laid.
Beyond, dwelling in caves in the east
end of the rock, is said to be a remnant
of the old and very respectable colony
of tailless and harmless apes, who obey
a leader, and seem, having discarded the
tail as vulgar, to be trying to devel-
op into citizens and voters. They have
only reached the bandit stage of civil-
ization of the region, and rob the gar-
dens by way of varying their diet of
sweet roots and the fruit of the cactus.
There seems to be here an opportunity
of encouraging the development theory,
and a tempting field for Positivist mis-

sionaries. Our scientific age is not liv-
ing up to its opportunities. Why should
we grope about in the past to prove that
men once had tails, when we have here
an almost brother, who shows by com-
ing out of the tail period that he is
waiting for the higher education ? Why
should we not take hold of him, — not
by the organ we would once have taken
hold of him, — and lift him up ?

Such thoughts come to the perplexed
traveler, as he sees and hears, in the
narrow street by the hotel, another ru-
dimentary institution, — the drum and
fife corps of Old England, piping and
pounding out that barbarous and soul-
stirring music which inspires the cour-
age of the living, drowns the cries of
the wounded, and is a requiem for the
dead. I have never heard the drum
and fife played with such vigor, vim,
exactness of time, and faith, and, let me
add, with such pride. These stalwart
musicians gloried in their profession,
and their magnificent vaunting of the
power of England and the advantage of
the trade of war seemed to me irresisti-
ble as a recruiting argument. Certain-
ly, I followed them about as long as I
could, without enlisting, and was never
tired of watching the drummers toss
their sticks in air and catch them with-
out missing a note, nor of feeling the
thrill imparted by their vigor, nor of
sympathizing with the swelling efforts
of the fifers to split the ears of the
town, nor of studying, as a scientific
problem, the elevating effect upon the
mind of well-regulated noise. This
is, surely, the perfection of martial ob-
streperousness ; and I scarcely wonder
that soldiers, for a shilling a day and
pretty girls for nothing, are willing to
follow the English drum-beat round the
world ; and I do not wonder at all at
the military prowess of the Briton.
With such incentives, it would seem to
be easy to kill a Frenchman, or an
Egyptian, or a Chinaman, or to do any-
thing except to sit on this sun and wind

260

Around the Spanish Coast.

[August,

beaten rock, and wait for the hidalgos
to come and take it.

It seems, on the map, an easy voy-
age across the sunny strait to Tangier.
The high coast of old Africa looks invit-
ing, and the distance is not more than
thirty miles. We went on board the
steam-tug Hercules at noon. Getting
on board was not agreeable, for the
exposed harbor was exceedingly rough ;
all the vessels at anchor were as active
as dancers in a jig, and the small boats
bobbed about like chips on the heaving,
chopping waves. The steam-tug, nei-
ther clean nor commodious, is a cattle
and passenger boat. A deck passage
for both is imperative, because the small
cabin in the stern is a loathsome hole, in
which the motion and smells forbid any
human being to abide. The passengers
stowed themselves about the deck seats
under the bulwarks and on the hatch-
way, and a few of the first class on a
platform raised above the engine. It
was a choice assortment of traders and
vagabonds, Moors, Jews, disconsolate
women and children, and half a dozen
English and Americans. In the teeth
of a head wind we bore away for Point
Tarifa, — a frontier fortress, which I
suppose gave us the blessed word " tar-
iff,"— now a city of crumbling walls,
and the sweetest oranges and most gra-
cious and complacent women in Spain,
— according to the guide-book. The
women wear the mantilla drawn over
the head, so as to conceal all the face
except one destructive eye, and the
place is said to retain more Moorish
characteristics than any other in An-
dalusia. In front of it is a fortified
rocky island with a lighthouse. When
we ran past this we were in the open
strait, and nobody paid much attention
to the scenery. The wind seemed to
freshen, and when the boat struck the
inward flowing current, which the cap-
tain said was seven knots an hour, she
began to climb over the waves and sink
between them, and bob about in a most

confusing manner. To meet the wind
and the current, her nose was pointed
straight out to the Atlantic, and for
weary hours we appeared to be going
to America, while we were actually
drifting nearer the African coast. In
this battle with waves and wind, the
waves had the best of it, and every few
moments spray and volumes of water
dashed aboard, drenching us all, even
the occupants of the upper platform.
It was almost impossible to keep a seat,
or even to hang on to the hatchway.
Most of the passengers gave up all ef-
fort, and sprawled about on the deck in
any position chance gave them. I was
particularly interested in a Jewish fam-
ily, a man and his wife and a boy and
girl of twelve and fourteen, who had
established themselves on the floor in
front of the cabin hatchway. The chil-
dren, rolled up in blankets and locked
in each other's arms, seemed to be sleep-
ing, regardless of the tumult. But the
quiet did not long continue. Father
and mother soon ceased to take the least
interest in their offspring, and rocked
about the deck in utter misery. The
children began to moan and writhe and
twist under their blankets, and then to
howl and kick, until they had rid them-
selves of half their clothing. Deathly
sick, and apparently enraged at such
treatment, they kicked and screamed,
but never unclasped themselves from
each other's arms. It would have been
pitiful, if the misery had not been so
nearly universal. The sun shone in
bright mockery of our calamity, the
west wind blew with fresh inspiration,
the salt water soaked and blinded us,
and the nasty little tug plunged about
like an unbroken colt. We were five
hours on this voyage of thirty miles;
and when the vessel at last floated in
calm water, behind the breakwater in
the harbor of Tangier, it seemed as if
an age separated us from Europe.

The harbor is shallow, and is open
to the northeast. We anchored some

1883.]

Around the Spanish Coast.

261

distance from the shore, and were at
once surrounded (who does not recall
the familiar oriental scene ?) by a fleet
of clumsy boats, and the usual hordes
of eager, excited boatmen swarmed on
board, — Moors in gowns and turbans,
— who seized upon our baggage as if we
had been captives, and fought for the
possession of our persons. Amid pull-
ing, hauling, shouting, screaming, swear-
ing, and wild gesticulation, we found
ourselves transferred to a small boat,
and on the way to the landing. Boats
were dashing about in all directions,
with frantic splashing of oars and reck-
less steering ; collisions were imminent ;
everybody was shouting as if crazy ;
and in all the tumult there was laugh-
ing, chaffing, and abundant good humor.
Half-way to shore our boat stuck in
the sand, and overboard went the chat-
tering crew, pushing, pulling, and howl-
ing, till we reached the landing pier,
when there was another scramble out
of the boat and a rush along the
shaky scaffolding. The most helpful
people these, — the whole population is
eager to take a hand in disposing of us ;
and the moment we touch Africa a
couple of dozen of men and boys have
seized upon our trunks, bags, and bun-
dles, and have rushed away with them
through the gate and into the city. It
looks like a robbery ; in New York it
would be ; but this is not a civilized land,
and we shall find every piece of baggage
at our hotel, with a man guarding it,
recounting the exhausting labor of car-
rying it, and demanding four times the
pay he expects to get.

The hurry is over, the tumult sub-
sides, and as we walk leisurely on there
begins to fall upon us the peace of the
Orient. At the gate sit, in monumental
calm, four officers of the customs, in
spotless white raiment of silk and linen,
who gravely return our salute. We
ascend through a straight street, rough-
ly paved and not too clean, lined with
shops displaying the tempting stuffs of

Eastern ingenuity, — the shops of work-
ers in metal, leather, slippers, horse
furniture, and bricabrac, — and emerge,
by the gate into the market-place un-
der the wall, into a scene wholly orien-
tal : groups of camels squatting in the
dust, moving their ungainly necks in
a serpent-like undulation, or standing,
weary, in their patient ugliness ; don-
keys loaded with sticks, grass, and vege-
tables ; on mats spread on the ground
heaps of wheat, beans, salads, oranges,
and all sorts of grimy provisions ; wa-
ter-sellers ; money-changers, with piles
of debased copper, and scales to weigh
it ; half-naked children tumbling about
in the dirt, negroes, stately Moors in
tattered gowns, wild-looking camel dri-
vers, women enveloped in single pieces
of white cloth, draped about the body
and drawn over the head. We make
our way, amid this swarm, up a hill gul-
lied by the water, through a narrow
lane thick-set with gigantic aloes and
cacti, to the hotel Ville de France, —
a spacious and very comfortable French
house, backed and flanked by splendid
gardens of flowers and fruit.

Outside and above the town, higher
than any part of it except the castle
hill, which is on the sea-bluff on the
right entrance of the harbor, the hotel
occupies a commanding position, and
offers a lovely prospect. On its left,
toward the north, the ground slopes
gently up to a wide grassy plain, the
level of the sea-bluff, along which are
the picturesque cottages and plantations
of the foreign embassies, lying amid
gardens in the full sun, but fanned by
the ocean breeze. From a window in
one side of the room I occupied, I looked
over the garden, blooming with roses,
geraniums, acacias, oranges, to the sandy
curve of the harbor and the blue-green
of its shallow water, and the opening
into a plain in the. direction of Tetuan ;
and from a window on the other side,
over the white town to the blue sea and
the dim mountain coast of Spain. No

262

Around the Spanish Coast.

[August,

lovelier and more restful prospect exists.
When the traveler reaches the hotel of
M. Brugeaud, opens the windows to let
in the odors of the garden, and gazes
out on the smiling prospect of land and
sea, he feels that he has come to a place
of rest. It is one of the few spots in
the world where the wanderer loses his
unrest and all desire to go further. The
' town, which is shabby enough as we
walk through it, is picturesque from this
point. It shines like silver, under the
sun ; all the whitewashed, flat-roofed
houses contrasting with the blue water
beyond; a couple of mosque towers,
green, looking as if tiled, but probably
painted ; and flags of all nations flying
here and there ou roofs that climb above
their humbler neighbors.

Sunday is the best market-day. When
I awoke at dawn I heard the throb of
the darabuka down in the place below,
and the innumerable hum of traffic ; and
when I looked out I saw that the Soko
was swarming like an ant-hill. When
we descended into the motley throng,
the business of the day was in full
blast. The beggars followed us about ;
the snake-charmers and story-tellers had
already formed rings of delighted specta-
tors : women clad in coarse white stuff,
with children slung on their backs ;
stately, handsome Moorish merchants in
cool, gauzy robes ; comely urchins in rags
begging and offering to act as guides ;
sellers of unattractive goods crying their
merchandise ; camels roaring, and don-
keys braying, and dervishes posturing,
— the picture shifted like the bits in a
kaleidoscope. Here was a fantastic der-
vish arrogating to himself the title of
Sheriff of Beggars, with a variegated
turban, his dress thickly hung with or-
naments, and four rings on each finger.
Here were the unpleasant Riffs from
the country, men in dirty embroidered
robes, with the head all shaved except
one long curl on one side, — a lock left
for Lord Mahomet to pull the wearer
up to heaven. The high civilization

and lack of self-consciousness of these
people are shown by the fact that every-
body may wear any dress he chooses, or
none, and attract no attention.

In the town it was Sunday, also, and
just as lively. The Jews form a con-
siderable portion of the population, and
are in appearance the most decent and
thrifty. We were admitted to several
Jewish houses, built with open courts,
in the Moorish style, which were ex-
ceedingly neat and comfortable. The
women, who have a reputation for beau-
ty, are of light complexion, — much light-
er than the men, — and many of them
have fine eyes, and all the national fond-
ness for jewelry. Notwithstanding their
wealth and orderly behavior, the Jews
are liked by nobody, and the Moorish
merchants, who are no more scrupulous
than other traders, always regard the
Jew as dishonest. In no oriental com-
munity does the Jew rise above this
prejudice.

On a street corner was a roulette table
in full operation, whirled by an honest
man from Malaga, who coveted our
good opinion, without expecting us to
join his game ; supposing that, as for-
eigners, we looked down, as he did,
upon these ignoble surroundings.

" You ought to be very good here,"
I said, " with three Sabbaths, — the
Moslem Friday, the Jewish Saturday,
and the Christian Sunday."

" Oh, yes," replied the devout Span-
iard, giving the wheel a whirl ; " but
Moors no keep Sunday. And " (said
suddenly, as if it were a new thought)
" Christians no keep it, neither ! Jews
must keep it ; 'bliged by their law."

We left this introducer of Christian
ways whirling his wheel and gathering
in the stray coppers. How much sin it
is to gamble with the Moorish copper
is a question. Having need to fill my
pocket with it to satisfy the beggars, I
received from a money-changer a large
bowlful of it in exchange for a peseta, a
silver piece worth twenty cents.

1883.]

Around the Spanish Coast.

263

Tangier, for climate, scenery, novel
entertainment, is a delightful winter resi-
dence. In two weeks, at any rate, we
did not tire of it, and every day became
more in love with the easy terms of ex-
istence there. The broken country in
the direction of Cape Sportel is inviting
both to the foot-pad and the horseman,
and the embassies, when they are not
paying their annual visit to Morocco,
the capital, must offer some good soci-
ety. We went one day to the plantation
of the American consul, some two miles
out on the road to Cape Sportel, which
is laid out on one side of a glen ; shel-
tered from the prevailing wind, but open
to the ocean breezes. Here in a pretty
oriental cottage, with an extensive gar-
den, blooming the winter through with
flowers of every sort, fragrant with the
orange, the banana, the pepper, and the
acacia trees, one might forget that snow
and ice and " blizzards " and politics
and all the discomforts of civilization in
the temperate zone exist.

Tangier, notwithstanding its openness
to the world, is still a place of civility
and repose. Oriental costume is the
rule ; the streets are dirty, the people
are amiable, the oranges are sweet, the
climate is lovely. The laissez-aller of the
town is attractive, and the shopmen and
beggars have something of the polite-
ness of the grave Moors. I used to be
attended often in my strolls by a charm-
ing boy, in a ragged gown, handsome,
and with the breeding of a prince. He
had picked up a little French and a lit-
tle English, broken fragments, which
were melodious in his mouth, and he
aspired to be a guide and earn a few
daily coppers. He assumed an air of
protection, and kept off the more clam-
orous beggars and the rabble of urchins
that are willing to accompany the stran-
ger all day in his walks. His gracious,
deferential, and superior manner was
guided by a sure instinct, which enabled
him to keep the narrow line between
haughtiucss and servility, and to remain

near me without compromising his dig-
nity, when he was bluntly told that his
company was no longer wanted.

" You know Mark Twal ? " he asked,
by way of scraping acquaintance, on his
first appearance.

" Yes, I know Mark Twain very well.
Do you ? "

" Yaas ; he friend to me. I guide to
him. He vely good man, Mark Twal."

" Why, you young rascal, you were n't
born when he was in Tangier, sixteen
years ago."

" Oh, yaas, born enough. Me know
him. He vely good man."

" What makes you think him a good
man ? "

" Oh, he vely good man ; plenty back-
sheesh. You go castle ? " And the hand-
some boy made a dive, and routed the
increasing throng of beggars ; and then
returned to my side, with the easy but
high - bred manner of an established
friendship, and strolled along with the
air of a citizen of the place pointing
out the objects of interest to a stranger.

To reach Cadiz from Tangier, it is
usually necessary to go to Gibraltar,
thus making two voyages on the strait.
We thought ourselves fortunate, there-
fore, when a Spanish steamer came into
port, one evening, bound for Cadiz. Pas-
sage was taken, and we were on board
at seven o'clock in the morning. The
steamer was a small tug-propeller, with
a weak engine, an inclination to roll
and pitch, simultaneously, with that pe-
culiar corkscrew motion that landsmen
loathe, and absolutely no accommodation
for passengers except a chance to lie on
deck, or sit on the hatchway and hang
on with both hands. It was a charming
day ; the wind west, the sky blue, with
scattered white clouds sailing in it, and
the coasts of Africa and Europe in sharp
outline. When we got away into the
strait, and began to feel the long swell of
the Atlantic, nothing could be more in-
viting than the fair, indented Spanish
coast, — the blue water lapping the white

264

Around the Spanish Coast.

[August,

sand ridges, the shining cities and tow-
ers, the rolling hills behind ; and yet, as
we turned to look upon receding Africa,
the green bluffs and white houses of
Tangier, the mass of mountains rising
into the snowy heights of the Atlas, we
felt reluctance to leave it. Our reluc-
tance was indulged. The dirty little
tug, discouraged by the Atlantic waves,
had no heart to drive on, but staggered
about like a footman in a plowed field,
unable to make more than five miles
an hour. All day long we loafed along
the charming coast of Spain, the sport
of the waves, which tossed us and flung
us ; laughed at by the merry breeze,
which dashed us with ' spray ; cheered
by the sun and the blue sky ; wearied
beyond endurance with trying to keep
our seats on the slauting hatchway ; di-
verted by the historic pageant, points,
bays, watch-towers, and towns famous
in wars and adventure. And we had
time to study the shore ; for " passing
a given point " was not the forte of the
little Pablo. It was often a matter of
doubt whether we, or some town or point
of which we were abreast, were going
ahead. In this way we loitered along
the low sandy lines of Cape Trafalgar,
where the dashing Nelson, at a quarter
past one o'clock on the 21st of October,
1805, received his death-wound. In-
land a few miles is the Laguna de Janda,
near which, in 711, Tarik, in a single
battle, won Spain for the Moslems. All
this coast has been fought over. Further
along to the west is the knoll of Barrosa,
where the allied English and Spaniards
barely escaped defeat in 1811. We are
long in sight of San Fernandino, which
we mistake for Cadiz, — a gay-looking
city, straggling along the shore, distin-
guished by a great observatory, the
southernmost on the continent of Eu-
rope. Abreast of it is La Isla de Leon,
an island which masqueraded under half
a dozen classic names, and is believed to
be the place where the fat cattle which
Hercules stole were fed. A different

breed of bulls is bred on it now, for
the ring. The island gets its name from
the Ponce de Leon family, to whom it
was for a time granted in the fifteenth
century. The marshes here are celebrat-
ed for the production of salt and deli-
cious small crabs, — a most obliging ani-
mal, which grows its claws again after
the epicures have torn them off and
cast the crab adrift.

We stayed here, loitering over the
waves, long enough for a crab to grow
new claws. Cadiz was at last in sight,
brilliant white over the blue sea, con-
spicuous with its hundred miradores.
We thought our long agony was over.
We drew near to Cadiz, we sailed along
it, we kept on and on and sailed by it,
and appeared to be making for another
city across the bay, which we began to
think must be the real Cadiz. But the
fact was that we were beating entirely
around the city to get into the channel
that enters the harbor on the west side.
For Cadiz is on a rocky peninsula, the
shape of a ham, curving out into the
ocean, and its harbor is on the narrow
isthmus. This peninsula rises from ten to
fifty feet above the sea, and white Cadiz,
lapped by the blue sea on every side, is
like the diamond setting of a ring in
turquoise. Nothing certainly could be
more brilliant than the coast picture as
we saw it that afternoon : the white, jut-
ting city with its strong walls and bas-
tions, the dancing, sparkling sea flecked
with lanteen sails leaning from the
breeze, and the white sand of the curv-
ing shore twinkling in the sun. It was
all life and motion.

There were ten hours of pitch and
toss before the sluggish little tug an-
chored in the inner harbor, within the
breakwater behind the town ; and we lay
there an hour longer, waiting the pleas-
ure of the lazy officials. At six o'clock
a sail-boat came off, with a health officer
and an inspector, and after we were
found to be in good health we em-
barked on the boat and sailed about the

1883.]

Around the Spanish Coast.

265

harbor for half an hour longer, tacking
back and forth, before we could make
the landing. Besides our company of
four, the only other passengers were a
Jew commercial traveler and a Tangier
Moor with a box of live chickens. We
made friends with the customs officer,
gave him an exact list of our luggage,
hand-bags and all, explained that we
had only the ordinary baggage of trav-
elers, and thought our troubles were
over when we stepped ashore. Desper-
ately tired, and hungry after fasting all
day, we inquired for hotel porters, and
thanked the officer for his courtesy. The
dock loafers picked up our luggage and
carried it across the quay a few steps,
and deposited it in a musty shed with
grated windows. We followed and en-
tered, when the polite official informed
us that we could go now. " It is finish."

" What is finish ? " we asked, in aston-
ishment.

" Finish, the baggage ; you can't have
it till morning."

" Can't have it ? We must have it.
We cannot go to the hotel without it."

" Can't help that ; too late ; inspector
gone home."

" That 's not our fault," we said ;
" you kept us waiting in the harbor an
hour ; and we must have our hand-bags
at least; — our night-clothes and brushes
and combs. You can see there is noth-
ing else in the bags. This is simply bar-
barous."

" You can have them in the morn-
ing."

" But can't we take out what we ab-
solutely need from the bags ? "

" Nothing ; " and the official turned
abruptly away, and left us amid a push-
ing, jeering crowd of Spanish specta-
tors, who were bent on exhibiting the
native courtesy to strangers. I inquired
for the American consul, and went in
search of him, leaving the ladies seated
on their baggage in the musty room,
near a grated window. The crowd in-
creased about the door and windows,

and during the hour I was absent the
ladies were the objects of the most in-
sulting remarks. I found that the cus-
toms officials had a reputation for ex-
treme incivility and no disposition to
oblige travelers. The consul was prompt
in his offers of assistance, and set out
at once to see what he could do, but
had little hope of extricating us from
our difficulties that night. But when I
returned, the appeal to the consul had
had some effect, for we were permitted
to take a hand-bag each and depart.
It was nearly nine o'clock before we
reached our hotel. To make the vexa-
tious story short, it occupied us all the
morning to get our handful of baggage
free. The inspector did not appear till
ten o'clock, and I owed our late deliver-
ance to a young English resident of the
town, who dispensed the necessary coin
to the officials and various impudent
hangers-on, who put in preposterous
claims, and got our baggage away to
the railway station. "Your troubles
have just begun," said our young friend ;
" the Spaniards hate all strangers, and
you will find little civility."

This little experience of our entry
into Spain was so contrary to my pre-
conceived notions of the behavior of
the " politest nation in Europe " that I
have departed from my usual habit in
regard to such annoyances of travel,
and set it down. We learned after-
wards that the self-conscious and pro-
vincial Spaniard has a peculiar way of
showing his superior breeding.

Cadiz, though old, looks modern in
its complete suit of whitewash, which is
spread over every building, from base-
ment to summit. Its narrow streets,
flanked by high buildings, are clean, and
it is well lighted and paved and pleas-
ing to the eye. But it does not attract
the sight-seer. We saw enough of it
from the high old tower La Torre de la
Vigia, whence we looked upon the entire
town, smokeless, dustless, whitewashed,
with its flat roofs and picturesque look-

266

A Neio History of the United States.

[August,

out towers. Indeed, the peculiarity of
the city is in these towers, or mira-
dores, of which there are hundreds rising
from the lofty roofs all around, each
one with a little turret on the side. In
the days of her commercial prosperity
the merchants of Cadiz used to ascend
these to look out for their laden galleons
returning from the West Indies. They
have the air now of being unused, and
merely ornamental ; the merchants of
Cadiz have little to expect from the
Indies, and I doubt if they often climb
into the miradores to see the sunsets.

When the traveler has walked in the
spick-span-clean streets, shaded by tall
balconied houses in endless perspective,
peeped into the patios, the centre courts
of the houses, where flowers and foun-
tains suggest family groups and the gui-
tar, and strolled about the sea ramparts
to inhale the sea breeze, he will have
little to detain him in Cadiz. It boasts
two cathedrals, both despoiled, and both
renovated and unattractive. An idle
man might sit a good while on the sea
wall and angle for red mullet with a
long cane, and enjoy it, watching mean-
time his fellow fishers the gulls. We
went to the suppressed Capuchin con-
vent to see the last picture Murillo
painted, — the admirably composed and
harmoniously colored Marriage of St.
Catherine. The artist was on a scaffold
finishing this picture — that was in 1682

— when he fell and received injuries
from which he died shortly after in
Seville. In the same chapel is another
work of this master, St. Francis receiv-
ing the Stigmata, — a charming piece.

We left Cadiz without reluctance, yet
I confess I look back upon it with some
longing ; it is so white and shining and
historically resplendent. I wish the Ro-
mans or the Phosnicians were still there,
or even the Moors. I cannot be recon-
ciled that this sea-blown, picturesque
town is not more attractive. We went
out by rail through interminable salt
marshes, where the salt is stacked up
like the white tents of encamping sol-
diers; keeping at first by the sea, and
then still over level and barren plains,
to ground slightly rolling, past Jerez,
with its great whitewashed sheds, which
are the famous botegas, or wine vaults,
where the sherry is manipulated and re-
fined ; and so on, approaching the Gua-
dalquivir over land as flat as a floor
and extensive as a Western prairie, and
as treeless, we came at evening to the
last station before reaching Seville, eight
miles distant, the poetically named Two
Sisters, embowered in great orange gar-
dens. The night was mild ; we could
see faintly the twinkle of dark shining
leaves and golden fruit, and all the air
was heavy with the perfume of the blos-
soms. It was the odor of the Spain of
our fancy.

Charles Dudley Warner.

A NEW HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

MR. MCMASTEB gives notice of the
school to which he belongs when he en-
titles his history of the United States
A History of the People of the United
States.1 The late Mr. J. R. Green was
not precisely a pioneer, but his brilliant

i A History of the People of the United States
from the Revolution to the Civil War. By JOHN

history was so conspicuous an example
of a mode of treatment which corn-
mends itself to the minds of men edu-
cated under democratic principles that
it has served to stimulate other writers,
and to make historical students take

BACH McMASTER. In five volumes. Volume I.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1883.

1883.]

A New History of the United States.

267

much more careful note than formerly
of the multitudinous life which finds ex-
pression in the varied form of human
activity, and to cease concerning them-
selves mainly with governmental devel-
opment. The rise of this school of his-
tory is a distinct witness to the new
reading of humanity which the present
century has known. The growth of
democratic ideas has given dignity to
the study of the individual ; the eman-
cipation of the intellect, which is a part
of the great renaissance of modern
times, has resulted in an intense inquiry
into the reign of law : so that the most
acceptable historian to-day, the one
most in accord with the temper of the
age, is he who is able to detect the
operation of the greatest variety of in-
dividual life, and to discover the com-
prehensive laws which govern in the de-
velopment of the nation.

A country like England, where the
idea of government by class has not
been so much overthrown by the vio-
lence of revolutions as displaced by the
greater energy of democratic principles,
offers a most attractive theme to the
historian who would disclose the under-
current of popular life and its gradu-
al emergence into the light of day. A
history of the English people is a pro-
test against an interpretation of history
which makes it the drama of kings, and
its finest success is in tracing a confessed
power back into periods when it was
dumbly, unconsciously, working out its
destiny. Dean Stanley leading a par-
ty of workingmen through Westminster
Abbey, and discoursing upon the histor-
ic monuments to which they are heirs
in common, is a fine picture of contem-
porary England; but by what steps were
the figures in the picture brought to-
gether ? To tell that is to tell the his-
tory of the people of England.

The contrasts which such a picture
suggests are abundant in English his-
tory, and they arrest the mind ; but is
there an equally suggestive theme in

American history ? Is the history of the
American people a protest against false
views of that history which once pre-
vailed ? Certainly not in 'so distinct a
degree as may be averred of English
history, although the habits of historical
writing prevalent in one country have
naturally influenced and largely deter-
mined the same habits in the other.
Nevertheless, one is aware that Mr. Mc-
Master has had a deliberate intention to
recover in his history the true note
which should be struck. " In the course
of this narrative," he says at the outset,
" much, indeed, must be written of wars,
conspiracies, and rebellions ; of presi-
dents, of congresses, of embassies, of
treaties, of the ambition of political
leaders in the senate-house, and of the
rise of great parties in the nation. Yet
the history of the people shall be the
chief theme. At every stage of the
splendid progress which separates the
America of Washington and Adams
from the America in which we live, it
shall be my purpose to describe the
dress, the occupations, the amusements,
the literary canons, of the time ; to note
the changes of manners and morals ; to
trace the growth of that humane spirit
which abolished punishment for debt,
which reformed the discipline of pris-
ons and of jails, and which has, in our
own time, destroyed slavery and less-
ened the miseries of dumb brutes. Nor
shall it be less my aim to recount the
manifold improvements which in a thou-
sand ways have multiplied the conven-
iences of life and ministered to the hap-
piness of our race ; to describe the rise
and progress of that long series of me-
chanical inventions and discoveries which
is now the admiration of the world, and
our just pride and boast ; to tell how,
under the benign influence of liberty
and peace, there sprang up, in the course
of a single century, a prosperity unpar-
alleled in the annals of human affairs ;
how, from a state of great poverty and
feebleness, our country grew rapidly to

268

A New History of the United States.

[August,

one of opulence and power ; how her
agriculture and her manufactures flour-
ished together ; how, by a wise system
of free education and a free press,
knowledge was disseminated, and the
arts and sciences advanced ; how the in-
geuuity of her people became fruitful
of wonders far more astonishing than
any of which the alchemists had ever
dreamed."

This is unquestionably a brilliant
prospectus, and the spirit with which
Mr. McMaster enters upon his task is
so generous and enthusiastic that we are
quite willing to forgive the somewhat
extravagant terms in which he forecasts
his work, especially as we find him, in the
progress of the volume, ready with his
indignation whenever the people, whose
historian he is, deviates from the straight
line which his opening paragraph almost
intimates was the historic course. It is
because of this high spirit and generous
temper that we venture to believe in a
slight falsification of the prospectus as
the work shall proceed ; for by the time
Mr. McMaster has reached the end of
his fifth volume he will have opportu-
nity to revise his judgment as to the
comparative unimportance in history of
wars, conspiracies, rebellions, presidents,
congresses, embassies, treaties, , ambi-
tions of political leaders, and the rise of
great parties. The ease with which he
sets all these aside is a mere rhetorical
burst, borrowed from the creed of the
school to which he belongs, and the
style of the master on whose heels he
treads. It is very true that in English
history there is a people in distinction
from a government ; but no one, we are
convinced, who is so honest as Mr. Mc-
Master can make an exhaustive study of
United States history without revealing
the fundamental doctrine that the peo-
ple constitutes the nation, and that there
is no political order external to it. No
doubt this truth is one which grows
clearer in the progress of the nation,
and yet the organic life of the people of

the United States has always been an
integrity ; it is merely a habit of mind
borrowed from traditional study, which
speaks of wars, presidents, congresses,
and the like as if they were something
foreign from the life of the people, or
only incidental to it. There is a radical
defect in any conception of the history
of the United States which invests the
political life and institutions and admin-
istration of government with any for-
eign property. It is a defect resident in
much of our political thought, and it is
slowly wearing away from our political
consciousness ; but it ought to be wholly
absent from the mind of a historical
teacher, and we shall be greatly disap-
pointed if Mr. McMaster does not him-
self abjure the heresy before he comes
to the end of his work.

There is, indeed, one view in which
an author, governed by such a notion, is
in danger of missing the greatness of
his subject altogether. The history 'of
a nation is scarcely worth telling if it
leave upon the mind the impression that
an improved mower, or even a public-
school system, represents its highest
attainment. There is a national life
which surpasses any individual product,
or any system which human ingenuity
has evolved. It is in the realization of
freedom, and has its record in public
acts and the deliberate registration of
the public conscience. A bill of rights
is a more admirable representation of
the life of the people than letters pa-
tent, and the organic unity of the nation
has been found to mean more to the in-
dividual member of the nation than any
well-ordered or comfortable life, how-
ever adorned by the arts and graces of
civilization. It is for this reason that
congresses and courts, proceeding from
the people and responsible to them,
may occupy the thought of an American
historian of the people with far more
just propriety than the same subjects
may engage the attention of an histo-
rian of the English people.

1883.]

A New History of the United States.

269

The survey of the country with which
Mr. McMaster opens his history gives
the reader a cross-section of popular
life immediately at the close of the war
for independence. It was in Mr. Mc-
Master's plan to give rather an external
view of the nation at that time ; and
thus, while he portrays the American in
his various phases of life, he omits alto-
gether any view of him as a political
animal. It belongs to such a survey to
make the scene vivid by contrasting the
conditions of life then with what is
familiar to us now, and there is always
danger of raising the lights and deepen-
ing the shades in the contrasted pic-
tures ; but one comes to be a little cau-
tious in accepting the colors as merely
strong, and not false, when one observes
Mr. McMaster's occasional recklessness
in handling facts. The treaty which
secured the independence of the colo-
nies did not " clearly define the region
given up by the mother country;" for
Mr. McMaster will be compelled to re-
late, further on, how near we came once
or twice to a war to determine just what
the bounds were. "In New Hamp-
shire," he tells us, " a few hardy ad-
venturers had marked out the sites of
villages in the Green Mountains ; " a
form of statement which certainly would
leave in most readers' minds the im-
pression that the Green Mountains were
to-day to be found in New Hampshire.
" In every city were to be seen women
who had fled at the dead of night from
their burning cabins ; who had perhaps
witnessed the destruction of Schenecta-
dy." This " perhaps " is a saving clause ;
but any old woman who could, in 1784,
remember the destruction of Schenectady
must have been a hundred years old.
" Faneuil Hall, the Old South, the old
State House, and a few other relics of
ancient time still exist ; but they exist
in a state of ruinous decay, and before
another generation has passed away old
Boston will be known in tradition only."
Prophecy like this may be safe, but it

should not be coupled with misrepresen-
tation of fact. We suspect Mr. McMas-
ter has not been in Boston lately, from
the off-hand manner in which he says,
in an explanatory foot-note, that " the
neck seems to have been quite a barrier
to the daily travel between Boston and
Charlestown." It is in one of his vague
generalizations, also, that he says of
the New England minister of 1784,
" Compared with Cotton or Hooker, he
had indeed made vast strides towards
toleration. He was a very different
man from the fanatics who burned
Catholics at the stake [!], who drove out
the Quakers, who sent Roger Williams
to find an asylum among the Indians of
Rhode Island, and sat in judgment on
the witches of Salem and Andover."
But the supposed vast stride is nothing
to Mr. McMaster's stretcher.

There are statements of a loose char-
acter, which irritate one because they
are just true enough to read well, and
yet do not stand for exact historical
knowledge. When Mr. McMaster says,
" New England bad been settled by the
Puritans, and there the leveling spirit,
the stern theology, the rigid and strait-
laced morality, were as unyielding as
ever" (in 1784), he is rhetorical and
conventional, and shows that he is not
acquainted with the changes in New
England life apparent upon any honest
reading of its history. When he is
drawing a picture of the industry of New
England, at the same time he is mislead-
ing by the half truth of his statement :
" New England produced scarce enough
corn /and rye for the needs of her citi-
zens. Beyond a few stately trees, suit-
able for masts for his majesty's ships
of war, the Eastern States grew noth-
ing the mother country wished to buy.
These men built ships, sailed the ocean,
caught fish, extracted oil from the blub-
ber of whales, put up great warehouses,
and kept great shops." But in belittling
the agriculture of the Eastern States,
he succeeds also in turning away atten-

270

A New History of the United States.

[August,

tion from the fisheries and commerce.
He gives the impression that books in
Boston, at that time, were a ragged regi-
ment of unreadable literature, and inti-
mates that, because many of the books
would be very dull now, they were good
for nothing then ; but the evidences
are clear that the literature of the time
was abundant in Boston then. A cir-
culating library of twelve hundred vol-
umes and a bookseller's stock of ten
thousand books could not have made a
despicable show. It is the misfortune
of such contrasts of the past with the
present that they ignore many of the
relative conditions of life. It may be a
marvelous thing that the telegraph can
now carry a message in a twinkling
from one city to another ; but before wo
commiserate our ancestors, who had no
telegraph, we need to find out how much
they required one. The same considera-
tion applies when we find Mr. McMaster
representing the New England minister
as in the depths of poverty, because Dr.
Buckminster never had more than six
or seven hundred dollars a year, and the
ordinary clergyman saw little money.
But the small salary and the absence of
money did not mean what they would
to-day, for the minister had his farm,
and the demands upon his purse were
far less than they now are : the whole
order of the society in which he moves
has changed. Mr. McMaster's wish to
make a point leads him into other sweep-
ing statements. " There did not then
exist in the country," he says, "a single
piece of architecture which, when tried
even by the standard of that day, can be
called respectable ; " and yet some of
these pieces, both in whole or in detail,
are accepted as standards to-day, and
architects study to reproduce their fea-
tures in the latest buildings which they
put up. He draws a forlorn picture of
the mechanic's life, without stove, coal,
or matches. But was the rich man of
the same day any better off ?

A carelessness in minute points makes

us a little reluctant to commit ourselves
to Mr. McMaster when we cannot veri-
fy his authorities. Twice he speaks of
Symbert when he means Smybert ; he
says that Honorius was Noah Webster's
pen name, when it was Honestus. While
the proposition to make the President's
term one of seven years is given in de-
tail, there is no hint of the change to
four years, nor of the erection of the
electoral college. So important a matter
as the treatment of slavery in the ordi-
nance of 1787 is passed over in silence.

In pursuance of his general plan, Mr.
McMaster naturally has recourse for
much of his material to the newspapers
of the day, which supply him with curi-
ous information, and especially with the
drift of public sentiment. This refer-
enqe to newspapers undoubtedly has en-
abled him to make a livelier narrative,
but the instances of carelessness which
we have noted would lead us to doubt
his caution in making use of such dubi-
ous authorities. It may be, however, —
for we do not pretend to have verified
his newspaper references, — that he de-
pends upon them rather for the embel-
lishment of his narrative, while he relies
upon more formal annals for his main
historic facts. He makes no reference,
for instance, to Minot, in his animated
account of Shays' rebellion, yet a com-
parison with Minot's history leads one
pretty definitely to the conclusion that
it furnished Mr. McMaster with a guide
through the scenes.

The spirited style of the book makes
the petty inaccuracies very irritating.
The transitions are admirably managed,
so that the reader is led dexterously
from one subject to another, and he
would like to surrender himself to so
entertaining a guide ; but when he finds
that flourishes and antithetical phrases
are made to do service for exact details
of fact, he begins to distrust his leader,
and to be uncomfortable lest he should
be receiving impressions which a more
accurate knowledge of history would

1883.]

John A. Dix.

271

show him to be false. We do not wish
Mr. McMaster to be any less pictur-
esque, but we wish he were not so eager
to make points, and that he would em-
ploy contrasts less in his pictures. Since
he has engaged upon this important
task of writing a history of the people
of the United States in five volumes,
he is not likely to be followed immedi-
ately by any one else in the same track,

and the readableness of his work will
doubtless make it a popular one fqr some
time to come. All the more is it to be
desired that he should scrutinize his au-
thorities and present his facts with accu-
racy. Few students will follow him
through the files of papers in order to
test his fidelity, and we must ask him,
therefore, to honor the trust which read-
ers will repose in him.

JOHN A. DIX.

THESE handsome volumes,1 which, be
it said in passing, are in every respect
a credit to American book-making and
to the good taste of the author and pub-
lishers, contain the memoirs of a man
who for sixty-five years, with only brief
intervals, served his country, and for a
large portion of that period filled a con-
spicuous place among the public men of
his day. Dr. Dix has written the story
of his father's life in a most simple and
attractive manner. There would be very
few persons who would dissent from
the affectionate and yet modest estimate
which he makes of his father's character,
abilities, and public services. The biog-
raphy has an individual and personal
rather than a historical quality. The
memoirs of John A. Dix would of course
be an important contribution to our his-
tory if they did no more than present
a faithful picture of their subject ; and
they do not, in fact, go much beyond
this. They do not, except in a few in-
stances, throw much light on the general
history of the time. As Dr. Dix says,
the period since the war is too recent,
and too many of the actors are still liv-
ing, to permit a full and critical discus-
sion of the affairs in which his father

i ^femoirs of John Adamt Dix. Compiled by
his son, MORGAN Dix. Illustrated. In two vol-
umes. New York : Harper & Bros. 1883.

was then engaged. But this is not true
of the long period before the war dur-
ing which General Dix was in active
public life. It might fairly have been
expected that we should learn much
that was new of the Albany Regency, of
which General Dix was a member, and
of the inside history of the democratic
party from 1830 to 1860. There are oc-
casional glimpses of the political history
of those years, which are from a new
point of view, and which have a fresh-
ness that makes the reader wish for a
more extended acquaintance with the
sources from which these suggestions
arise. But Dr. Dix seems to have been
so absorbed in the central figure of his
biography that he has ventured but lit-
tle into the wider filed of general his-
tory. This is perfectly natural and per-
haps equally wise. The result is cer-
tainly a very vivid picture of the hero
of the story. One can only say that
when so much has been so well done
there is a feeling of regret that a little
more was not attempted.

General Dix was born in New Hamp-
shire, the rugged little State which has
sent forth so many distinguished men to
seek elsewhere a more generous fortune
than was offered them among their
rocky hills. At the age of fifteen he
entered the army, and served in the war

272

John A. Dix.

[August,

of 1812 with his father, whose life was
finally sacrificed by disease and exposure
on the Canadian frontier. Then followed
sixteen years of military life, and then
came a happy and fortunate marriage
and the abandonment of the army for
law and politics. Even in the army
General Dix had given much attention
to public affairs, and exerted a consider-
able influence by writing for the news-
papers. Once released from the tram-
mels of the army, he drifted, after a
brief interval, into active politics, for
which he had great natural fitness. He
was appointed Adjutant General, and
then Secretary of State, in New York,
and in this capacity was a leading mem-
ber of the famous Albany Regency. Gen-
eral Dix, like his father, was a democrat,
and what is more a New England dem-
ocrat, which meant a good deal in the
days when democracy was synonymous
with resistance to the dominant and often
domineering federalism of that part of
the country. At the outset an admirer
of Mr. Calhoun, General Dix naturally
became, in the progress of events, an
ardent supporter of Jackson, and then
of Van Buren. For the latter gentle-
man, indeed, General Dix appears to
have had a strong affection, and his son
and biographer takes a view of the as-
tute New York manager which certain-
ly seems a little rosy. Dr. Dix writes
with much indignant warmth of the re-
jection of Van Buren by the Senate
when he was nominated for the mission
to England. It is, as Dr. Dix says, per-
fectly true that this rejection helped Van
Buren to the presidency, and was an un-
precedented proceeding. But he omits
to state that Van Buren was the first,
and we believe the last, American states-
man who in an official paper addressed
a foreign court as the representative of
a party, and not of the nation, and cast
reflections upon his predecessors for the
benefit of a foreign minister. A meaner
act of extreme partisanship could not
have been committed, and it is pleasant

to think that the Senate rebuked it as
it deserved. Dr. Dix also refers to Van
Bureu as one of the " purest " states-
men of the country. This seems hardly
the epithet to apply to a man who, what-
ever his abilities and merits, was con-
spicuous for an adroitness which often
became trickery.

The Whig victories, in 1838, forced
General Dix into retirement, from which
he soon emerged to sit in the New
York assembly, and then to represent
the State in the Senate. His career as a
senator was honorable and distinguished.
He was always an independent and fear-
less man, and although he was involved
in the contradiction of opposing the
extension of slavery, and at the same
time of sustaining the Mexican war and
the acquisition of territory without the
Wilmot proviso, he never hesitated to
differ from his party. It was this bold
and manly spirit which led Mr. Polk to
try to remove General Dix from the
Senate by sending him to England. On
the same occasion, Mr. Polk assured
General Dix that he had no idea of
conquests in Mexico. The characteristic
duplicity of which this is fresh evidence
is still further brought out by the way
in which General Dix was deluded in
regard to certain New York appoint-
ments by this same administration, de-
scribed more forcibly than politely by
one of the general's friends as " a mere
elongation of the trading, time-serving,
mongrel Tyler concern."

General Dix's differences with his par-
ty arose on the slavery question, upon
which he never bent the knee. He
was opposed to meddling with slavery
in the States, but he was still more op-
posed to the system and to its exten-
sion. He was in principle a free-soiler,
and it is not surprising that he was
nominated for governor by that party
in 1848. He ran in the election much
against his will, and yet he was in the
right and natural place. But although
never an extreme partisan except to-

1883.]

John A. Dix.

273

ward his youthful foes, the federalists,
it was an essential quality of his nature
to be very loyal to his party and his
friends. The free-soil movement having
been checked, General Dix devoted his
best energies to a reunion of the democ-
racy. To his efforts and those of his
friends this reunion and the consequent
victory were largely due. But General
Dix soon found that he had committed
the unpardonable sin. He had dared to
speak out on the subject of slavery, and
the South stood between him and all
advancement, and held back the hand
of Franklin Pierce — poor, weak crea-
ture — when, as President, he tried to do
his duty to the high-minded New York
leader. The democratic party had no
use for such a man as General Dix until
their post-office at New York was beset
with corruption, and then they called
on him to repair the mischief. It was
at this time that General Dix wrote a
letter which would serve as an admi-
rable campaign document to-day, forbid-
ding political assessments in the post-
office. He was a Jackson democrat, but
with the chief dogma of his old lead-
er, " the spoils system," he would have
nothing to do. He was a thorough-
going civil-service reformer in every re-
spect.

But while General Dix was manag-
ing the New York post-office, the coun-
try was drifting rapidly upon the rocks
of rebellion and secession. In the last
hours of Buchanan's administration,
with driveling timidity in the White
llou-e and bold treason in the cabinet,
General Di.v was called upon to take
charge of a bankrupt treasury. He
restored confidence and raised money ;
but he did more, far more, than this.
Andrew Jackson was national to the
core, and that was the essential quality
of . all his best followers, one of whom
now found himself in Washington at the
head of a great department, confronted
with panic, treachery, and a breaking
Union. Above the confused noises of

VOL. LII. — NO. 310. 18

that miserable winter, the voice of John
A. Dix rises clear and strong : " If any
one attempts to haul down the American
flag, shoot him on the spot." With char-
acteristic modesty, General Dix said
afterwards that he should be chiefly re-
membered by a " savage order, justified
by a still more savage provocation."
The truth was that he had the good
fortune and the inspiration to strike the
keynote, to say the one all-embracing
word at the very moment of a great
conflict. All else might go, but the
symbol of unity, the flag, should never
be hauled down or given up ; and that
was the war cry of the North, and
what they fought for and won. The
war revived all General Dix's old love
of military life. He was at once made
a general, and was deeply disappointed
that he was not sent to the front. But
that was the work for younger men,
who probably could not hav<^»lfilled
the delicate, difficult, and most impor-
tant duties which came to General Dix
at Baltimore and in the Department of
the East, where the rare combination
of civil and military training which he
possessed was so essential. After the
close of the war came the mission to
France, and a term as governor of New
York, — well-earned distinctions, which
closed General Dix's public career. He
lived five years longer, happy and ac-
tive, and then died, surrounded by his
family and full of years and honors.

We have touched only on the public
side of General Dix's career, but he
had many interests and many admi-
rable qualities wholly apart from public
affairs. He had a vigorous administrative
faculty, great diligence, and a marked
aptitude for business, and he never
shrank from any task when he could
render valuable services. He was a good
linguist; he had much literary taste
and skill, as is shown by his version
of the Dies Ira3 ; and he was a really
fine Latin scholar. He spoke well,
and sensibly, with great force and effect,

274

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

[August,

and was master of a strong and simple
style. Above all, he was courageous
and affectionate, with a keen sense of
humor, and manly in all his ways and
habits.

The first feeling that comes to us,
after reading these volumes, is one of
pride in the character and career of this
typical American gentleman, who was
so simple and brave, a lover of learning
for its own sake, and a modest, industri-
ous, and patriotic man. General Dix
was not one of those who sway the
course of events, and leave their individ-

ual impress on a nation's history ; but he
was a type of man of which the country
has a right to be proud, and of which
there are far too few examples in our
public life to-day. He will always be
remembered as the man who, at the
crisis of the nation's fate, put into one
short sentence the great principle which
was at stake, and to which the people
rallied and clung for four long years.
Any man may be content who has thus
succeeded in associating his name indis-
solubly with the emblem of a great and
united country.

THE REMINISCENCES OF ERNEST RENAN.

THERE has always been an element
of the magical in the style of M. Ernest
Renan — an art of saying things in a
way to make them beautiful. At the
present moment he is the first writer
in France ; no one has in an equal de-
gree the secret of fairness of expression.
His style is fair in both the senses in
which we use the word — in that of
being temperate and just, and in that of
being without a flaw ; and these Rem-
iniscences of his younger years,1 lately
collected from the Revue des Deux
Mondes, are perhaps the most complete
revelation of it. His problem here was
unusually difficult, and his success has
been proportionately brilliant. He pro-
posed to talk uninterruptedly about him-
self, and yet he proposed — or rather
he was naturally disposed — to remain
a model of delicacy. M. Renan is the
great apostle of the delicate ; he up-
holds this waning fashion on every oc-
casion. His mission is to say delicate
things, to plead the cause of intellect-
ual good manners, and he is wonder-

1 Souvenirs rf' Enfance et de Jeunesse. Par
EKXKST liKXAN, Mfinbre de 1'Institut, etc. Paris :
Calmann Levy. 1883.

fully competent to discharge it. No
one to-day says such things so well,
though in our own language Mr. Mat-
thew Arnold often approaches him.
Among his own countrymen, Suinte-
Beuve cultivated the same art, and
there was nothing too delicate for Sainte-
Beuve to attempt to say. But he spoke
less simply — his delicacy was always
a greater complexity. M. Renan, on
the other hand, delivers himself of
those truths which he has arrived at
through the fineness of his perception
and the purity of his taste with a can-
did confidence, an absence of personal
precautions, which leave the image as
perfect and as naked as an old Greek
statue. It is needless to say that there
is nothing crude in M. Renan ; but the
soft serenity with which, in the pres-
ence of a mocking world, he leaves his
usual plea for the ideal to any fate that
may await it is an example of how
extremes may sometimes meet. It is
not enough to say of him that he has
the courage of his opinions ; for that,
after all, is a comparatively frequent
virtue. He has the resignation ; he has
the indifference ; he has, above all, the

1883.]

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

275

good humor. He combines qualities
the most diverse, and, lighted up as he
is by the interesting confessions of the
volume before us, he presents himself
as an extraordinary figure. He makes
the remark that in his opinion less im-
portance will be attached to talent as
the world goes on ; what we shall care
for will be simply truth. This declara-
tion is singular in many ways, among
others in this : that it appears to over-
look the fact that one of the great uses
of talent will always be to discover
truth and present it ; and that, being an
eminently personal thing, and therefore
susceptible of great variety, it can hardly
fail to be included in the estimate that
the world will continue to make of per-
sons. M. Renan makes light of his own
talent — he can well afford to ; if he
appears to be quite conscious of the de-
gree in which it exists, he minimizes as
much as possible the merit that attaches
to it. This is a part of that constant
play of taste which animates his style,
governs his judgments, colors all his
thought ; for nothing can be in better
taste, of course, than to temper the vio-
lence with which you happen to strike
people. To make your estimate of your
own gifts as low as may seem probable
is a form of high consideration for oth-
ers ; it corresponds perfectly with that
canon of good manners which requires
us to take up a moderate space at table.
At the feast of existence we may not
jostle our neighbors, and to be consid-
erate is for M. Renan an indefeasible
necessity. He informs us of this him-
self ; it is true that we had long ago
guessed it. He places the fact before
us, however, in a relation to other facts,
which makes it doubly interesting ; he
gives us the history of his modesty, his
erudition, his amiability, his temperance
of appetite, his indifference to gain. The
reader will easily perceive the value
that must attach to such explanations
on the part of a man of M. Kenan's in-
telligence. He finds himself in con-

stant agreement with the author, who
does nothing but interpret with extraor-
dinary tact the latent impressions of his
critic.

M. Renan carries to such a high point
the art of pleasing that we enter with-
out a protest into the pleasantness of
the account he gives of himself. He
is incapable of evil, learned, happy,
cheerful, witty, devoted to the ideal,
indifferent to every vulgar aim. He
demonstrates all this with such grace,
such discretion and good humor, that
the operation, exempt from vulgar van-
ity, from motives of self-interest, M.
Renan being at that point of literary
eminence where a writer has nothing
more to gain, seems to go on in the
pure ether of the abstract, among the
causes of things and above all ques-
tions of relative success. Speaking of
his ancestors in Brittany, whom he
traces back to the fifth century, sim-
ple tillers of the earth and fishers of
the sea, he says, with great felicity,
" There they led for thirteen hundred
years a life of obscurity, saving up their
thoughts and sensations into an accu-
mulated capital, which has fallen at last
to me. I feel that I think for them and
that they live in me. . . . My incapac-
ity to be bad, or even to appear so,
comes to me from them." Many men
would hesitate to speak so freely of
their incapacity to be bad ; others, still
more of their incapacity to appear so.
But M. Renan has polished to such
clearness the plate of glass through
which he allows us to look at him that
we are quite unable to charge him with
deceiving us. If we fail to see in him
so much good as that, it is simply that
our vision is more dim, our intelligence
less fine. " I have a strong taste for
the people, for the poor. I have been
able, alone in my age, to understand
Jesus and Francis of Assisi." There is
a great serenity in that, and though, de-
tached from the text, it may startle us
a little, it will not seem to the reader

276

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

[August,

who meets it in its place to be a boast-
ful note. M. Renan does not indeed
mean to say that he has been the only
Christian of his time; he means that he
is not acquainted with any description
of the character of Jesus containing as
much historic truth as the Life he pub-
lished in 1864. The passage is curi-
ous, however, as showing the lengths to
which a man of high delicacy may go
when he undertakes to be perfectly frank.
That, indeed, is the interest of the whole
volume. Many of its pages are rare and
precious, in that they offer us together
certain qualities that are almost never
combined. The aristocratic intellect is
not prone to confess itself, to take
other minds into its confidence. M.
Renan believes in a caste of intellectual
nobles, and of course does not himself
belong to any inferior order. Yet in
these volumes he has alighted from his
gilded coach, as it were ; he has come
down into the streets and walked about
with the multitude. He has, in a word,
waived the question of privacy — a great
question for such a man as M. Renan
to waive. When the impersonal be-
comes personal the change is great, and
it is interesting to see that sooner or
later it must become so. Naturally, for
us English readers, the difference of race
renders such a fact more difficult to ap-
preciate; for we have a traditional the-
ory that when it comes to making con-
fidences a Frenchman is capable of al-
most anything. He is certainly more
gracefully egotistic than people of other
stock, though he may have more real
reserve than his style would indicate.
His modesty is individual, his style is
generic; he writes in a language which
makes everything definite, including
confessions and other forms of self-ref-
erence. The truth is that he talks bet-
ter than other people, and that the gen-
ius of talk carries him far. There is
nothing into which it carries people
more naturally than egotism. M. Re-
nan's volume is a prolonged causerie,

and he has both the privileges and the
success of the talker.

There are many things in his compo-
sition and many things in his writing;
more than we have any hope of describ-
ing in their order. " I was not a priest
in profession ; I was a priest in mind.
All my defects are owing to that :
they are the defects of the priest." The
basis of M. Reuan's character and his
work is the qualities that led him to
study for the priesthood, and the expe-
rience of a youth passed in Catholic
seminaries. " Le pli etait pris — the
bent was taken," as he says ; in spite of
changes, renunciations, a rupture with
these early aspirations as complete as it
was painful, he has remained indefina-
bly, iueffaceably, clerical. The higher
education of a Catholic priest is an ed-
ucation of subtleties, and subtlety is the
note, as we say to-day, of M. Renan's
view of things. But he is a profane
philosopher as well as a product of the
seminary, and he is in the bargain a
Parisian and a man of letters ; so that
the groundwork has embroidered itself
with many patterns. When we add to
this the high scholarship, the artistic
feeling, the urbanity, the amenity of
temper, that quality of ripeness and
completeness, the air of being perme-
ated by civilization, which our author
owes to his great experience of human
knowledge, to his eminent position in
literature and science, to his associa-
tion with innumerable accomplished and
distinguished minds — when we piece
these things together we feel that the
portrait he has, both by intention and
by implication, painted of himself has
not wanted an inspiring model. The ep-
isode which M. Renan has had main-
ly to relate in these pages is of course
the interruption of his clerical career.
He has made the history so suggestive,
so interesting, and given such a charm
to his narrative, that we have little hes-
itation in saying that these chapters will
rank among the most brilliant he has

1883.]

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

277

produced. We are almost ashamed to
express ourselves in this manuer, for, as
we have said, M. Renan makes very
light of literary glory, and cares little
for this kind of commendation. Indeed,
when we turn to the page in which he
gives us the measure of his indifference
to successful form we feel almost tempt-
ed to blot out what we have written.
" I do not share the error of the liter-
ary judgments of our time. ... I tried
to care for literature for a while only
to gratify M. Sainte-Beuve, who had a
great deal of influence over me. Since
his death I care no longer. I see very
well that talent has a value only be-
cause the world is childish. If it had
a strong enough head it would content
itself with truth. ... I have never
sought to make use of this inferior
quality [literary skill], which has in-
jured me more as a savant than it has
helped me for itself. I have never in the
least rested on it. ... I have always
been the least literary of men." The
reader may be tempted to ask himself
whether these remarks are but a refine-
ment of coquetry ; whether a faculty
of expression so perfect as M. Kenan's
was ever a simple accident. He will
do well, however, to decide that the
writer is sincere, for he speaks from the
point of view of a seeker of scientific
truth. M. Renan is deeply versed in
the achievements of German science : he
knows what has been done by scholars
who have not sacrificed to the graces,
and in the presence of these great ex-
amples he would fain persuade himself
that he has not, at least consenting-
ly, been guilty of that weakness. In
spite of this he will continue to pass
for one of the most characteristic chil-
dren of the race that is preeminent in
the art of statement. It is a proof of
the richness of his genius that we may
derive so much entertainment from those
parts of it which he regards as least es-
sential. We do not pretend in this
place to speak, with critical or other in-

tention, of the various admirable works
which have presented M. Renau to the
world as one of the most acute explor-
ers of the mysteries of early Christian
history ; we take for granted the fact
that they have been largely appreci-
ated, and that the writer, as he stands
before us here, has the benefit of all the
authority which a great task executed
in a great manner can confer. But \ve
venture to say that, fascinating, touching,
as his style, to whatever applied, never
ceases to be, none of the great subjects
he has treated has taken a more charm-
ing light from the process than these
evocations of his own laborious past.

And we say this with a perfect con-
sciousness that the volume before us is
after all, in a certain sense, but an elabo-
rate jeu d 'esprit. M. Reuan is a philos-
opher, but he is a sportive philosopher ;
he is full of soft irony, of ingenious
fancy, of poetic sympathies, of transcen-
dent tastes. He speaks more than once
of his natural gayety, and of that qual-
ity in members of the Breton race
which leads them to move freely in the
moral world and to divert themselves
with ideas, with sentiments. Half of the
ideas, the feelings, that M. Renan ex-
presses in these pages (and they spring
from under his pen with wonderful fa-
cility) are put forward with a smile
which seems a constant admission that
he knows that everything that one may
say has eventually to be qualified. The
qualification may be in one's tact, one's
discretion, one's civility, one's desire not
to be dogmatic ; in other considerations,
too numerous for us to mention. M.
Renan has a horror of dogmatism ; he
thinks that one should always leave that
to one's opponent, as it is an instrument
with which he ends by cutting himself.
He has a high conception of generosity,
and though his mind contains several
very positive convictions, he is of the
opinion that there is always a certain
grossness in insistence. Two or three
curious passages throw light upon this

278

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

[August,

disposition. " Not having amused rnyself
when I was young, and yet having in
my character a great deal of irony and
gayety, I have been obliged, at the age
at which one sees the vanity of every-
thing, to become extremely indulgent to
foibles with which I had never had to
reproach myself : so that various per-
sons, who perhaps have not behaved so
well as I, have sometimes found them-
selves scandalized at my complaisance.
In political matters, above all, people of
a Puritan turn cannot imagine what I
am about ; it is the order of things in
which I like myself best, and yet ever
so many persons think my laxity in this
respect extreme. I cannot get it out
of my head that it is perhaps, after all,
the libertine who is right and who prac-
tices the true philosophy of life. From
this source have sprung in me certain
surprises, certain exaggerated admira-
tions. Sainte-Beuve, Theophile Gau-
tier, pleased me a little too much. Their
affectation of immorality prevented me
from seeing how little their philosophy
hung together (le decousu de leur phi-
losophie)." There is a certain stiffly lit-
eral sense in which, of course, these lines
are not to be taken ; but they are a
charming specimen of what one may
call delicacy of confession. The great
thing is to have been able to afford to
write them ; on that condition they are
delightfully human and charged with
the soft irony of which I have spoken
— the element to which M. Renan
alludes in a passage that occurs short-
ly after the one I have quoted, and
in which he mentions that, "save the
small number of persons with whom I
recognize an intellectual fraternity, I
say to every one what I suppose must
give him pleasure." He says that
he expresses himself freely only with
people " whom I know to be liberated
from any opinion, and to be able to take
the stand-points of a kindly universal
irony." " For the rest," he remarks,
" I have sometimes, in my conversation

and my correspondence, d/etranges de-
foil lunces. . . . My inanity with peo-
ple I meet in society exceeds all belief.
. . . Devoted on a kind of system to an
exaggerated politeness, the politeness of
the priest, I try to find out what my in-
terlocutor would like me to say to him.
. . . This is the result of a supposition
that few men are sufficiently detached
from their own ideas not to be wounded
if you say something different from
what they think." We should not omit
to explain that what we have just quoted
applies only to M. Kenan's conversation
and letters. " In my published writings
I have been of an absolute sincerity.
Not only have I not said anything that
I do not think, but, a much more rare
and more difficult thing, I have said
all that I think." It will be seen that
M. Renan tells us a good deal about
himself.

His Reminiscences are ushered in by
a preface which is one of the happiest
pieces of writing that has ever proceed-
ed from his pen, and in which he deliv-
ers himself of his opinion on that very
striking spectacle, the democratization of
the world. He is preeminently a man
of general views. Few men have more
of them at their command ; few men
face the occasion for speech with great-
er serenity, or avail themselves of it
with more grace. His prefaces have al-
ways been important and eloquent ; read-
ers of the first collection of his critical
essays, published upwards of thirty years
ago, will not have forgotten the enchant-
ing pages that introduced it. We feel a
real obligation to quote the opening lines
of the preface before us ; from the point
of view of style they give the key of the
rest of the volume. We must add that
it is not easy to transport their exquisite
rhythm into another tongue. " Among
the legends most diffused in Brittany is
that of a so-called town of Is, which at
an unknown period must have been en-
gulfed by the sea. They show you, in
sundry places on the coast, the site of

1883.]

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

279

this fabled city, and the fishermen tell
you strange stories about it. They as-
sure you that on days of storm the tip
of the spires of its churches may be seen
in the hollow of the waves ; that on
days of calm you may hear the sound of
its bells come up from the deeps, inton-
ing the hymn of the day. It seems to
me often that I have in the bottom of
my heart a city of Is, which still rings
bells that persist in gathering to sacred
rites the faithful who no longer hear.
At times I stop to lend an ear to these
trembling vibrations, which appear to
me to come from infinite depths, like
the voices of another world. On the
limits of old age, above all, I have taken
pleasure in collecting together such
echoes of an Atlantis that has passed
away." It may have been that M. Re-
nan wrote these harmonious lines with
the same ignorance of what he was
about that characterized M. Jourdain ;
in this case he is only to be congratu-
lated the more. The city of Is repre-
sents his early education, his early faith,
a state of mind that was peopled with
spires and bells, but has long since sunk
deep into the sea of time. He explains
in some degree the manner in which he
has retraced this history, choosing to
speak of certain things and to pass in
silence over others, and then proceeds,
by those transitions through which no
one glides so gracefully as he, to sundry
charming considerations upon the pres-
ent state of mankind and the apparent
future of our society. We call his re-
flections charming, because M. Kenan's
view of life always strikes us as a work
of art, and we naturally apply to it the
epithets which we should use in speak-
ing of any delightful achievement. As
a votary of the ideal, a person who
takes little interest in the practical, a
distinguished member of that beneficent
noblesse of intellect of which we have
spoken, it would be natural that M. Re-
nan should tend to conservative opin-
ions; and he expresses such opinions, in

various later pages, with exquisite humor
and point : " In other terms, our great
democratic machines exclude the polite
man. I have long since given up using
the omnibus ; the conductors ended by
taking me for a passenger of no inten-
tions. ... I was made for a society
founded upon respect, in which one is
saluted, classified, placed, according to
his costume, and has not to protect him-
self. . . . The habit that I found in the
East of walking only preceded by a
forerunner suited me not ill ; for one's
modesty receives a lift from the appa-
ratus of force. It is well to have under
one's orders a man armed with a scourge
which one prevents him from using. I
should not be sorry to have the right of
life and death, so that I might never
put it into practice ; and I should be very
glad to own a few slaves, in order to be
extremely mild with them and make
them adore me." There is a certain dan-
dyism of sensibility, if we may be al-
lowed the expression, in that; but the
author's perfect good-humor carries it
off, as it always carries off the higher
flights of his fastidiousness, making them
seem simply a formal, a sort of cheer-
fully hopeless, protest in the name of
the ideal. M. Renan is always ready
to make the practical concession, and he
shows that it is a great thing to have a
fine taste, which tells us when to yield
as well as when to resist, and points out,
moreover, the beauty of passing things
by. " One should never write save
about what one likes. Forgetfulness
and silence are the punishment that we
inflict on what we find ugly or common
in the walk that we take through life."
This discretion helps M. Renan to feel
that, though the immense material prog-
ress of this century is not favorable to
good manners, it is a great mistake to
put ourselves in opposition to what our
age may be doing. " It does it without
us, and probably it is right. The world
moves toward a sort of Americanism,
which wounds our refined ideas, but

280

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

[August,

which, once the crisis of the present
hour is passed, may very well be no
worse than the old regime for the only
thing that matters ; that is, the emanci-
pation and the progress of the human
mind." And M. Renan develops the
idea that, in spite of all that the votaries
of disinterested speculation may find
wanting in a society exclusively demo-
cratic and industrial, and however much
they may miss the advantages of be-
longing to a protected class, their securi-
ty is greater, on the whole, in the new
order of things. " Perhaps some day
the general vulgarity will be a condi-
tion of the happiness of the elect. The
American vulgarity [sic] would not
burn Giordano Bruno, would not perse-
cute Galileo. . . . People of taste live
in America, on the condition of not be-
ing too exacting." So he terminates
with the declaration that the best thing
one can do is to accept one's age, if for
no other reason than that it is after all
a part of the past that one looks back
to with regret. " All the centuries of a
cation are the leaves of the same book."
And in regard to this intelligent resig-
nation, which fortifies itself with curi-
osity, M. Renan says several excellent
things : " There will always be an ad-
vantage in having lighted on this planet
as late as possible. . . . One must never
regret that one sees a little better." M.
Renan's preface is a proof that he pos-
sesses the good spirits which he notes
as an ingredient of his character. He
is a raffine, and a raffine" with an ex-
traordinary gift of putting his finger on
sensitive spots ; with a reasoned ideal of
the millennium. But a raffine" without
bitterness is a very harmless person.

The first chapters of this volume are
not the most vivid, though they contain
a very interesting picture of the author's
birthplace, the little dead town of Tre-
guier, a gray cluster of convents and
churches on the coast of Catholic Brit-
tany. Treguier was intensely conventu-
al, and the young Renau was, as a mat-

ter of course, predestined to the church.
" This strange set of circumstances has
given me for historic studies those qual-
ities that I may possess. The essence
of criticism is to bo able to understand
states very different from those in which
we live. I have seen the primitive
world. In Brittany, before 1830, the
most distant past was still alive." The
specimens which M. Renan gives of this
primitive world are less happily sketched
i than the general picture ; the coloring
is rather pale ; some of the anecdotes —
that of the little Noe"mi, that of the Bon-
homme Systeme — are perhaps slightly
wanting in point. He remarks some-
where, in regard to the opposition, about
which so much used to be said, between
the classic and the romantic, that, though

' ' O

he fully admits the latter, he admits
it only as subject — not in the least as
a possible form. To his mind there
is only one form, which is the classic.
And in another placo he speaks of Flau-
bert, the novelist —>- " ce pauvre Flau-
bert " — as being quite unable to con-
ceive of anything abstract. Putting
these things together, we see a certain
reason why M. Renan's personal por-
traits (with the exception of the picture
of himself) should be wanting in reality.
They are too general, too white ; the
author, wonderfully at home in the ab-
stract, has rather neglected the concrete.
" Ce pauvre Flaubert " would be re-
venged for M. Renan's allusion, if it
were possible to him to read the episode
of the Flax - Grinder — revenged (an
exquisite revenge for an artist) by sim-
ply finding it flat. It is when he comes
to dip into his own spiritual history that
M. Renan shows himself a masterly nar-
rator. In that region of abstractions,
where the most tangible thing was the
palpitating conscience, he moves with
the firmest step. The chapters on the
two seminaries in which he spent the
first years of his residence in Paris,
Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet and Saint
Sulpice, are full of the most acute nota-

1883.]

The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan.

281

tion of moral and intellectual conditions.
The little Breton seminarist moved too
fast, and, to speak briefly, very soon
transcended his instructors. He had a
passion for science, and his great apti-
tude for philology promptly defined it-
self. He traces with singular art the
process by which, young, simple, devout,
dedicated to the church from his infancy,
the object of maternal and pastoral
hopes, he found himself confronted with
the fact that he could no longer be a
Catholic. He also points out well that
it was the rigidity of the Catholic sys-
tem that made continuance impossible,
it being all of one piece, so that dissent
as to one point involved rejection of the
whole. " It is not my fault if my mas-
ters had taught me logic, and by their
pitiless argumentations had converted
my mind into a steel blade. I took se-
riously what I had learned — the scho-
lastic philosophy, the rules of the syllo-
gism, theology, Hebrew. I was a good
scholar ; I can never be damned for
that." M. Renan holds, moreover, that
little was wasted of his elaborate relig-
ious education. " I left their hands
[those of the priests] with a moral sen-
timent so prepared for every test that
Parisian levity could afterwards put a
surface on this jewel without hurting it.
I was so effectually made up for the
good, for the true, that it would have
been impossible for me to follow any ca-
reer not directed to the things of the
soul. My masters rendered me so unfit
for all temporal work that I was stamped
with an irrevocable mark for the spirit-
ual life. ... I persist in believing that
existence is the most frivolous thing in
the world, if one does not conceive it
as a great and continual duty." This
moral richness, these spiritual aspira-
tions, of M. Kenan's, of which we might
quote many other examples, pervade all
his utterances,' even when they are in-

terfused with susceptibilities which strike
us at times as those of a dilettante ; with
refinements of idealism which suggest
to us occasionally that they correspond
to no possible reality, and even that the
natural corrective for this would be that
reality, in some of the forms which we
children of less analytic race are obliged
to make our peace with it, would im-
pose itself a little more absolutely upon
our critic. To what extent M. Kenan's
nature has been reduplicated, as it were,
by his intellectual curiosity may be
gathered from his belief, recorded in
these pages, that he would have gone
much further in the exploration of the
universe if he had not taken his inspira-
tion from the historical sciences. " Phys-
iology and the natural sciences would
have carried me along ; and I may cer-
tainly say it, the extreme ardor which
these vital sciences excited in my mind
makes me believe that if I had cultivated
them in a consecutive manner I should
have arrived at several of the results of
Darwin, of which I had had glimpses.
... I was drawn [instead] toward the
historical sciences — little conjectural
sciences which are pulled down as often
as they are set up, and which will be
neglected a hundred years hence." We
know not what M. Renan may have
missed, and we know not what may be
the ultimate fate of historical conjecture
and of the hapless literary art, in both
of which he so brilliantly excels ; but
what such a volume as these mingled,
but on the whole delightful, Reminis-
cences represents in the way of attain-
ment, suggestion and sympathy is a
sum not easily to be calculated. With
his extraordinarily composite nature, his
much-embracing culture, he is a most dis-
criminating critic of life. Even his af-
fectations are illuminating, for they are
either exaggerations of generosity or
ingenuities of resignation.

282

The Contributors' Club.

[August,

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

MR. JAMES, in his entertaining pa-
per on Anthony Trollope, says that if
Trollope " had taken sides on the rather
superficial' opposition between novels of
character and novels of plot, I can im-
agine him to have said (except that he
never expressed himself in epigram)
that he preferred the former class, in-
asmuch as character in itself is plot,
while plot is by no means character."
So neat an antithesis would certainly
never have found itself between Mr.
Trollope's lips if Mr. James had not
cunningly lent it to him. Whatever
theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope
may have preached, his almost invari-
able practice was to have a plot. He
always had a story to tell, and a story
involves beginning, middle, and end, —
in short, a framework of some sort.
Of course if one had to choose between
the frame and the portrait, one would
naturally not prefer the frame. It would
depend a good deal on the portrait,
though. There have been delightful
books filled wholly with character-draw-
ing ; but they have not been great
novels. The great novel deals with
human action as well as with mental
portraiture. That "character in itself
is plot " is true only in a vague sense.
A plan, a motif with a logical conclu-
sion, is as necessary to a novel or a
romance as it is to a drama. A group
of skillfully made-up men and women
lounging in the green-room or at the
wings is not the play. It is not enough
to say that this is Hamlet and that
Ophelia. It is not enough to inform us
that certain passions are supposed to be
embodied in such and such persons :
these persons should be placed in situa-
tions developing those passions. A se-
ries of unconnected situations leading to
nothing is inadequate. There must be
a natural end to it all, else your novel

resembles a conundrum without an an-
swer, or a jest without the point.

Mr. James's charming epigram seems
to me vulnerable at both ends — unlike
Achilles. " Plot is by no means char-
acter." Strictly speaking, it is not. It
strikes me, however, that plot comes
nearer to being character than character
does to being plot. Plot necessitates
action, and it is impossible to describe a
man's action, under whatever conditions,
without revealing something of his char-
acter, his way of looking at things, his
moral and mental pose. What a hero
of fiction does paints him better than
what he says, and vastly better than
what his creator says of him. Mr.
James asserts that " we care what hap-
pens to people only in proportion as
we know what people are." I think we
don't care a snap what people are (in
fiction) when we don't know what hap-
pens to them.

— The national characteristic of the
modern Anglo-American is not self-as-
sertion, nor money-worship, nor " con-
structiveness," but tolerance. Our Brit-
ish cousins perhaps surpass us in love of
personal independence, and the French
democrats in their hatred of red-tape
pedantries ; but their national life lacks
the opportunities that have developed
the cosmopolitan forbearance and plas-
ticity of our representative men. Tol-
erance of the North American variety
implies a sort of amiable inconsistency,
and he who feels disposed to omit the
adjective would be apt to deny his na-
tionality in a border country like Texas,
where the national virtue or foible con-
trasts rather strongly with the conser-
vatism of other races.

A few years ago a party of prospect-
ing Mormons encamped at Casa Blanca,
the western terminus of the Brazos,
Santiago, and Brownsville railroad. The

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

purpose of their expedition was pretty
well known, and the French and Span-
ish settlers of the county, as well as the
native Mexicans, eyed them with a hos-
tile horror, and the Celtic proprietor of
their camping-ground made himself as
disagreeable as possible. Not so the
Yankee depot-master. When the Saints
convoked a prayer-meeting on the plat-
form of an old gravel-train, he sent the
depot-engine to bring up a train sec-
tion from an out-of-the-way switch, in
order to leave the synod undisturbed ;
and in the afternoon, when the stran-
gers put up a target at the river-shore,
the railroaders not only crowded around
their camp, but, at the invitation of the
marksmen, fetched out their own rifles,
and joined them in a shooting-match.

A few months later I visited a col-
league who superintended the grading
of the N. & H . . . ville narrow-gauge.
The contractor had hired a gang of
convicts, — " short- termers," mostly, —
who could be trusted with certain priv-
ileges, and seemed to be on quite fa-
miliar terms with their guards. They
spiced their meals with political contro-
versies, without sparing the short-com-
ings of the administration, and without
disguising their mistrust in the motives
of certain time-serving party leaders.'
Here, as in the mixed army corps, the
Caucasians and Ethiopians had separate
camps, and four or five of the white di-
vision had been assigned to the mess of
the overseer, who now and then per-
mitted them to act as " deputy black-
guards," and managed to keep them
both at work and in good humor. As
soon as the track-layers had reached the
next larger settlement, a " dummy,"
with a home-made caboose, had been
put on the road ; but one morning the
departure of the train was delayed a
full hour, in order to decide a wrestling-
match between a Scotch convict and a
mulatto athlete of local renown. One
second of the Gaelic champion acknowl-
edged his defeat, but ascribed it to the

tightness of his striped trousers, and
obtained a verdict admitting the supe-
rior " science " of his client. But af-
ter all that, I was somewhat surprised
when, at the residence of Colonel F.
(the managing contractor), I was for-
mally introduced to another contempo-
rary in striped jeans, a short-termer of
marked .conversational abilities, whose
geometrical talents had procured him an
appointment on the staff of the chief
surveyor.

A Galveston newspaper describes an
admiralty council on board of a Rio
Grande river steamer, where a heavy-
armed stranger had refused to unbuckle
his " battery " before entering the din-
ing-saloon. The committee offered to
waive their objections to his horse-pis-
tol, if he would consent to leave his
cartridge-belt in charge of the purser ;
but when he rejected that basis of com-
promise, they finally agreed to let him
keep his pistol and one extra cartridge.

Another armed stranger, the highway
robber Cortina, who had crossed the
Rio Grande during the Maximilian im-
broglio, was permitted, not only to drill
his cut-throats in the suburbs of Browns-
ville, but to enlist discharged United
States soldiers, and issue proclamations
which the Sultan of Fez and Morocco
would have been too modest to sign.

But the most characteristic instance
of Texas tolerance occurred in San . . .
County, sixty miles west of Austin.
During the confusion of a railroad acci-
dent an enterprising frontiersman had
managed to possess himself of a choice
library, packed in convenient boxes, and
awajting shipment on the platform of
the freight depot. The loss either was
not discovered, or was ascribed to other
causes, and the pirate removed his plun-
der in a " prairie schooner." He took
the Houston pike-road, and had already
traversed five counties, when his at-
tempt to dispose of a part of his booty
aroused the suspicions of the . . . ton
citizens. A deputation of representative

284

The Contributors' Club.

[August,

burghers overhauled his cargo, and the
suspect was requested to give an ac-
count of himself. This he positively de-
clined to do, but (apropos of a boxful
of Methodist text-books) mentioned that
he was a follower of John Wesley, and
advised his inquisitors not to dishonor
their faith by harassing a peaceful fel-
low-Christian. He was then put under
guard, while a committee of selectmen
retired for a private consultation. That
his freight was valuable and of illegal ac-
quisition seemed equally certain ; but af-
ter a brief debate it was decided to let
the erring brother depart in peace, on
condition that he would consent to do-
nate a portion of his cargo to the library
of the district school.

— I do not know why it should have
struck me as a pathetic case, — the fig-
ure of the overgrown boy of a dozen
years, resting his arms on the fence,
and watching with great interest the
drill of a juvenile militia. It was plain-
ly to be read in his face that paper
caps, wooden swords, and toy drums
still dwelt in his desires, and that
nothing but his unwarrantable haste
in growing tall interfered with his as-
suming command of the little troop, and
marching off in triumph at its head. I
was touched with compassion for him,
but reflected that he had plenty of com-
pany, and good company, in his discou-
solation. At all the loopholes of human
history appears the wistful face of the
overgrown boy. One does not need to
reach a very advanced age to discov-
er in the countenances of old comrades
and friends something that reminds him,
" Ah well, we were both Arcadians ! "
Our friends have lost the route to the
green country of their fond reminis-
cences, and who shall help them to find
it? One sees that they are studying
some futile plan by which they may eat
their cake, and have it too ! They are
well enough satisfied at coming into full
possession of discretionary power, at
confirming themselves in the wisdom

and policies of the world, but at the
same time they want to retain the fresh-
ness and flavor of their early feeling.
They do often congratulate themselves
upon their youthful ness of heart, — the
earnestness of their asseveration arguing

O O

their fear of the contrary ; but they can
produce no charter that shall convince
secular destiny of their right to enjoy
the delightful irresponsibility of youth.
Noblesse oblige ; but our loyalty in du-
ress cries out, —

" By my Christendom,
So I were out of prison, and kept sheep.
I should be as merry as the day is long."

Is it not strange that, masters of our
own choice (for so we account our-
selves), we do not so much hold the
position we have elected as the position
holds us, inexorably dictating our walk
and conversation, our habits, methods,
and almost the thoughts we shall enter-
tain ! May we not unbend, may we
not amuse ourselves ? The genius of
fitness and congruity keeps an eye upon
us. Nowhere, outside of China, or
some Celestial Empire, are there hap-
py old men flying kites. Had Jaques,
there in the idle Forest of Arden, under-
taken to sample the varieties of dignity
as he did those of melancholy, he would
have found food enough for meditation
and moralizing to last the longest sum-
mer day. I fancy him parceling out
the various grades : one dignity of the
legal profession, another of the clergy,
another of the schoolmaster ; one dig-
nity of the merchant prince, and another
of the honest, reputable beggar, — digni-
ty differing widely in kind, but equally
strenuous, equally binding, with all.

Rank imposes obligation, we have
heard. There are those who obtain the
patent of nobility by undertaking obliga-
tion. Such are not likely to be heard
complaining because they sit alone,

" And hear the nations praising them far off,
Too far!"

They have expected nothing otherwise,
having beforehand been advised : " In

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

285

what concerns you much, do not think
you have companions ; know that you
are alone in the world."

— England need not be seriously
alarmed by the inroads of American
fiction while she has a novelist who can
write such charming stories as The
Ladies Lindores. Mrs. Oliphant has
given us an admirable novel, with char-
acter, dramatic action, and plot. With-
out the last, indeed, the second is im-
possible. Mrs. Oliphant has also a neat
wit of her own, which here and there
lights up the page, as when, for ex-
ample, she makes Lord Millefleurs say
that Americans " are more piquant than
any other foreigners." " French," he
observes, " has become absurd and Ital-
ian pedantic; but it is amusing to talk
a foreign language which is in English
words, don't you know." Millefleurs,
by the way, is a poor and inadequate
name for an Englishman, and illustrates
the author's fondness for French words.
Every chapter is spotted with them.
On two or three occasions we are told
that Mr. Torrance has " eyes a fleur
de tete" when an English equivalent
would have been three times as easy and
twice as sensible. In an English novel
such words and phrases as plante la,
Jletri, dessous des cartes, faire valoir,
epanchemcnts, etc., are ludicrous to the
reader who understands French, and
perplexing to the reader who does not.
They moreover give one a vague sus-
picion that the writer is under the
glamour of a slight or a recent acquaint-
ance with the alien language drawn
upon. It is needless to say that Mrs.
Oliphant's French is very good, and
so is her English. Her English is so

excellent, indeed, that when she writes
who for whom, or falls into so barba-
rous a tautology as "from whence," the
reader pays her the handsome compli-
ment of being astonished.

— I desire to correct a statement
which is made in a recent number of the
Club, — in the June number, I think.
It is there said that the name Saint
Petersburg is a misnomer, and that the
capital city is named Petersburg after
Peter the Great, and not St. Petersburg
after the celestial gate-keeper.

I have, as I write, official documents,
business cards, and letters stamped with
the postmark of that city. In every
instance the name is St. Petersburg.
During a residence extending over some
four years I never heard it or saw it
otherwise. The name Peterbourg is
applied only to a suburb of the Russian
capital situate to the northeast of the
great fortress.

Your article on the misspelling of
geographical names is very timely, how-
ever. The French have misled us more
than once in the matter of Russian
names. They continually inject a w
into Russian or- Polish proper names,
whether geographical or personal, and
we blindly follow their lead. This is
the more comical because the w is nei-
ther in the Russian nor French alpha-
bet. Thus Warsaw should be Vars-
hoff, and Moscow should be Moskoff.
We discard the French spelling in
Gortschakoff, which they spell Gortscha-
kow. Another blunder is in the word
czar, which is now almost obsolete in
Russia, and which we perversely con-
tinue, not only to use, but to misspell.
It should be tsar.

286

Books of the Month.

[August,

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

Literature. The series of the Riverside Haw-
thorne (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is completed by
the publication of the last four volumes, American
Note-Books, French and Italian Note-Books, The
Dolliver Romance and allied romances and tales,
and Tales and Sketches and other papers. The
last of the twelve contains some novel matter, a
storv rescued from an annual, and Hawthorne's
Life of Franklin Pierce, which will be read now
solely on Hawthorne's account. Mr. Lathrop's
biographical sketch is reserved, yet satisfactory, as
enabling one to trace the incidents of Hawthorne's
career. The etchings and vignettes, with occasion-
al exception, have been admirably conceived and
executed. — The complete series of Dr. Holmes's
works, up to the present date, is closed by a vol-
ume to which he gives the title Pages from an Old
Volume of Life. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) It is
a collection of essays, some of which have been
collected before, while some are for the first time
brought forth from their lurking-places in period-
icals. — A Breeze from the Woods, by W. C. Bart-
lett (The California Publishing Co.), is a collec-
tion of papers which takes its title from the first
of the number. Mr. Bartlett is editor of the San
Francisco Bulletin, and his book has the quality
of California air in it, clear, racy, sharp, — one
thinks of many adjectives, but scarcely of mellow.
The papers are largely of out-door life, and are
well worth reading for the freshness of their inci-
dent and comment. — An Inland Voyage, by Rob-
ert Louis Stephenson (Roberts), ought fairly to
come under the heading of Literature ; for though
the inland voyage is made by Mr. Stephenson
and a friend in two canoes on Belgian rivers, it is
as the light and airy pleasuring of an agreeable
writer that the book will be read. It is a vacation
in itself to read the pages, even though one may
think the writer a harmless egotist. — Recollec-
tions of my Youth, again, by Ernest Renan, trans-
lated by C. B. Pitman (Putnams), belongs here
rather than under Biography. The English
scarcely retains the flavor of the original, but we
suspect that the best translator would easily fall
into despair in such work. — Surf and Wave, the
Sea as Sung by the Poets, edited by Anna L.
Ward (Crowell), is a full collection, containing
besides what one would naturally expect many
obscure pieces; but some which are obscure are not
necessarily worthless.

Social and Political Philosophy. Land and La-
bor in the United States, by William Godwin
Moody (Scribners), is an attempt at a survey of
the industry and idleness of the nation. It is a
humane census, made after recourse to a variety of
individual testimonies, and aims at an inquiry
into the conditions of life here and the influences
affecting them. The writer struggles to find a
way out for the workingman from the meshes
which modern life casts about him, and is clear in
his mind chiefly on one point, that the free-trade

gospel of England is a very bad spell indeed. —
Dynamic Sociology is the title of a work in two
volumes, by Lester F. Ward (Appleton), which is
further described on the title-page as Applied So-
cial Science, as based upon Statical Sociology and
the less Complex Sciences. Mr. Ward accounts
for everything except man's consciousness, and .-o
gets on cheerfully by standing on a carefully
built false bottom. He builds up the man whom
he sees to-day in an elaborate process, which re-
flects great credit upon the ingenuity of the. maker.

— The first number of Topics of the Time
(Putnams), edited by Titus Munson Coan, is de-
voted to Social Problems, and consists of eight es-
says, by English and French writers, upon World-
Crowding, Secret Societies in France, the Nation-
alization of the Land, and other topics. Since
some of the most vigorous writing in contempo-
rary periodicals is expended upon these problems,
the editor is enabled to offer an effective selection.

— Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors among the
Poor is compiled and arranged by the Charity Or-
ganization Society of New York ( Putnams ), one
of the associations which the social condition of
our great cities and the multiplication of indepen-
dent charitable agencies have brought into useful
being. This little book will be serviceable to any
one who deals with the poor, and contains besides
general suggestions hints on domestic economy
and .sanitary and legal suggestions.

Biography. How to Get on in the World as
demonstrated by the life and language of William
Cobbett, to which is added Cobbett's English
Grammar, with Notes, by Robert Waters (James
W. Pratt, New York), is the title-page of a vol-
ume which ought to do something toward reviving
the knowledge of a man who was a curious com-
pound of virility and meanness. Mr. Waters's bi-
ography is somewhat in the nature of an apology,
but it is readable, for Cobbett was not the man to
inspire dullness. The grammar is rather a curiosity
than a practical hand-book, and we should like to
ask if Mr. Waters got his use of demonstrated
from it?

History. The second volume of the revised edi-
tion of Mr. Bancroft's History of the United
States (Appleton) contains the third part of the
subdivision, History of the Colonization of the
United States of America. It takes tip the history
after the English Revolution, and carries it forward
to the overthrow of the colonial system, which Mr.
Bancroft makes to agree with the subjugation of
New Erance. Some of Mr. Bancroft's rhetoric
reads curiously to us now more accustomed to the
dry style of scientific historians ; but if one resigns
himself to the author he may have the pleasure of
being philosophical without much effort. By the
bye, a question arises which may be merely a quib-
ble but does not Mr. Bancroft jeopardize his copy-
right property by using a form of entry different
from that prescribed by statute V — Brook Farm to

1883.]

Books of the Month.

287

Cedar Mountain, by George H. Gordon (Osgood),
is the first of a series of three volumes, the latter
two of which had already appeared, in which Gen-
eral Gordon relates the history of the rebellion so
far as his division was engaged. His volumes
form an important part of the material from which
the history of the rebellion will be written, all the
more important that they were tested in portion by
a prior reading to his old companions in arms. —
The twelfth and closing volume of Scribner's val-
uable Campaigns of the Civil War is General A. A.
Humphreys's The Virginia Campaign of '64 and
'65, including the operations of the Army of the
Potomac and the Army of the James. It is there-
fore a narrative of Grant's army and the events
which brought the wa? to a close. It is a compact
military history, free from criticism or comment.
— A supplementary volume in the same series is
a Statistical Record of the Armies of the United
States, by Frederick Phisterer. It comprises the
numbers and organization of the armies, a chron-
ological record of engagements and battles, and
a Record of the General Officers. If accurate, it
can scarcely fail to be a most useful hand-book.

Travel and Geography. Germany Seen With-
out Spectacles is the title of a volume in which
Mr. Henry Ruggles, who spent two years there,
records his observations on various subjects. (Lee
& Shepard.) He means by his title to convey the
notion that his report is that of a clear-eyed man,
who sees things as they are ; and he writes with a
hearty interest in what he saw which carries him
over what might otherwise be dull places. The
book tells in a plain, direct fashion many facts
omitted from other books of travel. After all,
however, spectacles sometimes help vision. — Sin-
ners and Saints, by a gentleman who announces
himself as Phil Robinson, leaving us in doubt if
he is Philip, Philemon, or Philander, is the record
of a tour across the States and round them, with
three months among the Mormons. (Roberts.) The
States is Anglican for the United States. Pre-
cisely how the author went round the States is not
told, but after one leaves the speculation-irritating
title-page behind he finds himself in the company
of a practiced^and agreeable traveler, who extracts
a great deal of sunshine from cucumbers, and la-
bors industriously at giving the Mormons a first-
class ticket to heaven. — Italian Rambles, Stud-
ies of Life and Manners in NewaiH Old Italy, by
James Jackson Jarves (Putnams), is an agreeable
volume of essays drawn from a long and varied
experience and study. Mr. Jarves is at home in
Italy; and he is at home there not merely as an
antiquarian, but as one who is genuinely inter-
ested in the development of art as an expression
of civilization: he has much, therefore, to say
which is applicable to conditions in America, and
he has many pointed observations upon current
phases of artistic life. — The Yellowstone National
Park, by Henry J. Winser (Putnams), is a manual
for tourists, being, as the title-page further ex-
plains, a description of the mammoth hot springs,
the gej'ser basins, the cataracts, the cafions, and
other features of the park. It has twenty-four il-
lustrations, a plan of the upper geyser basin, and

route maps, with various other information desir-
able by the tourist.

Art. Mr. C. B. Curtis's historical and descrip-
tive catalogue of the works of Velasquez and Mu-
rillo (J. W. Bouton) is so much more than a cata-
logue that the term inadequately describes it. It
is not simply a list of the paintings, but an elabo-
rate and authentic account of them, involving the
story of their conception, vicissitudes, and present
condition. Many of the facts given are exceed-
ingly curious, and throw much light on various
points hitherto unsettled. Mr. Curtis deals with
two hundred and eighty-one canvases of Murillo,
and two hundred and forty-seven of Velasquez.
To ascertain the present ownership and location
of these was certainly a task which can be fully
appreciated only by a collector. Mr. Curtis has
been fortunate enough to trace all but forty-seven
of Murillo's works, and twenty-one of Velasquez's.
England, it appears, is richer than Spain in Ve-
lasquezs and Murillos, possessing nearly one half
of their authenticated pictures. Seven examples
of each of these great masters are owned in the
United States. Brief biographical and critical
sketches of the chief disciples and imitators of the
two artists constitute an interesting and valuable
feature of the book, which is unexceptionable in
typography, and contains four etchings printed by
M. Salmon, of Paris. Admirers of the Spanish
school of painting owe a special debt to the author
for the careful index with which he closes his
volume. — The Catalogue Illustre" du Salon for
1883 (J. W. Bouton) contains three hundred pic-
tures reproduced by process from designs prepared
by the artists. The possession of this work is ab-
solutely necessary to those who wish to keep them-
selves posted in French art. — The current volume
of L'Art contains its usual variety of etchings, en-
gravings, and letterpress. Several of the etch-
ings are quite worthy of framing. Among the
wood-cuts, the portraits of Herkomer and Don*
may be pronounced admirable. The literature of
L'Art is always admirable. — Pianoforte Music,
its History, with Biographical Sketches and Crit-
ical Estimates of its Greatest Masters, by John
Comfort Fillmore (Townsend MacCoun, Chicago),
is a fresh and interesting work which is marked
by a studious spirit and a thoroughness and rea-
sonableness of treatment. The writer has not at-
tempted impossible things, but he has done well
what he set out to do, and the book will be found
very acceptable to hearers as well as to players
of the instrument which furnishes his theme. —
Some of JJsop's Fables, with modern instances,
shown in designs by Randolph Caldecott (Mac-
millan), is a clever book, in which modern and
ancient satire are harmoniously disposed about
the same theme. The pictures are in admirable
taste; the antique ones being rendered with a
pleasant modern humor, and the modern ones fla-
vored with an antique grace.

Theology and • Morals. Meditations on Life,
Death, and Eternity (Houghton, Miffiin & Co.) is
the reissue of a work which appeared in two suc-
cessive parts shortly after the death of Prince Al-
bert of England. It is a translation from the Ger-

288

Books of the Month.

[August.

man of Zschokke, though we believe the author
never really put his name to the work. It was
lifted into special notoriety at the time from its
connection with the Prince Consort, who had a
great admiration of the original. The meditations
have not the mystic character of those of Tauler,
but rather represent the practical, evangelical
school of German piety, and while a little old
fashioned now, will come to many with the force
of plain sense. — Herbert Spencer's The Data of
Ethics (Appleton) has been issued in a cheap form
in paper, with a long introduction, in which Mr.
Spencer answers his critics, especially Goldwin
Smith. — The Doom of the Majority of Mankind,
hv Samuel J. Barrows (American Unitarian Asso-
ciation, Boston,), is an arraignment of evangelical
denominations upon the subject of eternal punish-
ment. When one considers the full meaning of
the subject, and the profound movement now go-
ing on in evangelical churches, the book scarcely
seems to be the work of a friend. There is a time
to hold one's peace, as there is a time to speak.

Education and Text-Books. Swin ton's Readers
(Ivison) consist of the orthodox series of five. We
wish they were confined to three, and that teachers
and pupils were then advised to use the skill ac-
quired in reading upon books of continuous litera-
ture. We wish too that in the earliest books more
attention had been paid to the purity of the Eng-
lish and less to carrying out the author's theory.
— The Reading of Books, its Pleasures, Profits,
and Perils, by Charles F. Thwing (Lee & Shep-
ard), is a sensible little book, which takes up some
of the obvious truths regarding education by mis-
cellaneous reading, and presents them in a direct,
intelligible manner.

Science and Medicine. Plant Life, by Edward
Step (Holt), is a series of chapters, of a popular cast,
on the phenomena of botany. It is an English
work, which has been supplemented by a scheme
of the Cryptogamia, compiled from the writings ef
De Bary, Farlow, Eaton, and others. — A revised
edition has been published of James Orton's Com-
parative Zoology, Structural and Systematic.
(Harpers.) The book was originally published in
1876. Professor Orton has since died, and it is now
revised by Professor Birge, of the University of
Wisconsin, who has mainly confined himself to
such changes and additions as the advance in the
science required. — Tobacco, its Effects on the Hu-

man System, by Dr. William A. Alcott (Fowler &
Wells), is a reprint of an old tract, with notes and
additions by Nelson Sizer. It has the misfortune
of similar works of paying no attention to the
other side. — The Natural Cure of Consumption,
Constipation, Bright's Disease, Neuralgia, Rheu-
matism, Colds, etc., by C. E. Page (Fowler &
Wells), is an attempt at impressing common-sense
views of preserving and restoring health.

Fiction. Tiger Lily and other stories, by Julia
Schayer (Scribners), is a collection of five stories
of dramatic and sentimental nature. They show
a vigor of feeling, and if crude in color are not
without force and aim. — Hot Plowshares, by Al-
bion W. Tourge'e (Ford, Howard & Hulbert), is, in
chronological relation to the well-known political
novels of this writer, the first in the series: the
scene opening in 1848, and closing with the Har-
per's Ferry affair. — In the Frankliu Square Libra-
ry (Harpers), the latest numbers are Mongrels, by
T. Wilton, and Honest Davie, by Frank Barrett.

Books for Young People. Nan, by Lucy C.
Lillie (Harpers), is a small novel of a small girl,
who had her childish troubles, but was triumph-
ant]}' honest and misunderstood.

Humor. The famous New Guide of the Conver-
sation in Portuguese and English comes to us in
two forms. It has been reprinted "verbatim et
literatim," with an introduction by Mark Twain
(Osgood), and in an abridged form under the title
English as She is Spoke, or a Jest in Sober Earnest,
with an introduction by James Millington. (Apple-
ton.) One naturally wants the whole of this pre-
cious work. — Co- Education is a mildly satirical
poem by Josephine Pollard, with illustrations by
Walter Satterlee, which lose some of their excel-
lence by the commonplaceness of the reproduc-
tion and printing.

Politics and Biography. Underground Russia,
by Stepniak. formerly editor of Zemlia i. Volia
(Scribners), is a rather difficult book to classify.
It presents a vivid and interesting statement, from
the Nihilistic point of view, of the revolutionary
situation in Russia, supplemented by a series of
rose-colored sketches of several distinguished —
and we may say extinguished — Nihilists, who fig-
ure as dreamy saints and poetical martyrs. The
historical parts read like romance, and the roman-
tic parts like history. The whole is well worth
reading. *

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

of Literature, Science, art, ana

VOL. LII. — SEPTEMBER, 1883. — No. 00 CXI.

A ROMAN SINGER.

NINO was thoroughly frightened, for
he knew that discovery portended the
loss of everything most dear to him.
No more lessons with Hedwig, no more
parties to the Pantheon — no more
peace, no more anything. He wrung his
fingers together and breathed hard.

" Ah, signora ! " he found voice to ex-
claim, " I am sure you cannot believe it
possible " —

" Why not, Signor Cardegna ? " asked
the baroness, looking up at him from un-
der her half-closed lids with a mocking
glance. " Why not ? Did you not tell
me where you lived ? And does not the
whole neighborhood know that you are
no other than Giovanni Cardegna, com-
monly called Nino, who is to make his
debut in the Carnival season ? "

" Dio mio ! " ejaculated Nino in a
hoarse voice, realizing that he was en-
tirely found out, and that nothing could
save him. He paced the room in an
agony of despair, and his square face
was as white as a sheet. The baroness
sat watching him with a smile on her
lips, amused at the tempest she had cre-
ated, and pretending to know much
more than she did. She thought it not
impossible that Nino, who was certainly
poor, might be supporting himself by
teaching Italian while studying for the
stage, and she inwardly admired his

sense and twofold talent, if that were
really the case. But she was willing to
torment him a little, seeing that she had
the power.

" Signor Cardegna " — she called him
in her soft voice. He turned quickly,
aud stood facing her, his arms crossed.

" You look like Napoleon at Water-
loo, when you stand like that," she
laughed. He made no answer, waiting
to see what she would do with her vic-
tory. " It seems that you are sorry I
have discovered you," she added pres-
ently, looking down at her hands.

" Is that all ! " he said, with a bitter
sneer on his pale young face.

" Then, since you are sorry, you must
have a reason for concealment," she
went on, as though reflecting on the sit-
uation. It was deftly done, and Nino
took heart.

" Signora," he said in a trembling
voice, " it is natural that a man should
wish to live. I give lessons now,*until
I have appeared in public, to support
myself."

" Ah — I begin to understand," said
the baroness. In reality, she began to
doubt, reflecting that if this were the
whole truth Nino would be too proud
— or any other Italian — to say it so
plainly. She was subtle, the baroness !

" And do you suppose," he continued,
" that if once the Conte di Lira had an
idea that I was to be a public singer he

290

A Roman Singer.

[September,

would employ me as a teacher for his
daughter ? "

" No, but others might," she ob-
jected.

" But not the count " — Nino bit his
lip, fearing he had betrayed himself.

"Nor the contessiua," laughed the
baroness, completing the sentence. He
saw at a glance what she suspected, and
instead of keeping cool grew angry.

" I came here, Signora Baronessa, not
to be cross-examined, but to teach you
Italian. Since you do not desire to study,
I will say good-morning." He took his
hat, and moved proudly to the door.

" Come here," she said, not raising
her voice, but still commanding. He
turned, hesitated, and came back. He
thought her voice was changed. She
rose, and swept her silken morning-
gown between the chairs and tables, till
she reached a deep divan on the other
side of the room. There she sat down.

" Come and sit beside me," she said
kindly, and he obeyed in silence.

" Do you know what would have
happened," she continued, when he was
seated, " if you had left me just now ?
I would have gone to the Graf von Lira
and told him that you were not a fit per-
son to teach his daughter f that you are
a singer, and not a professor at all ; and
that you have assumed this disguise for
the sake of seeing his daughter." But
I do not believe that she would have
done it.

" That would have been a betrayal,"
said Nino fiercely, looking away from
her. She laughed lightly.

" Is it not natural," she asked, " that
I should make inquiries about my Ital-
ian teacher, before I begin lessons with
him ? And if I find he is not what he
pretends to be, should I not warn my
intimate friends ? '.' She spoke so rea-
sonably that he was fain to acknowl-
edge that she was right.

" It is just," he said sullenly. " But
you have been very quick to make your
inquiries, as you call them."

" The time was short, since you were
to come this morning."

" That is true," he answered. He
moved uneasily. " And now, signora,
will you be kind enough to tell me what
you intend to do with me ? "

" Certainly, since you are more rea-
sonable. You see I treat you altogeth-
er as an artist, and not at all as an Ital-
ian master. A gVeat artist may idle
away a morning in a woman's boudoir ;
a simple teacher of languages must bo
more industrious."

" But I am not a great artist," said
Nino, whose vanity — we all have it —
began to flutter a little.

"You will be one before long, and
one of the greatest. You are a boy
yet, my little tenor," said she, looking at
him with her dark eyes, "and I might
almost be your mother. How old are
you, Signer Nino ? "

" I was twenty on my last birthday,"
he answered, blushing.

" You see ! I am thirty — at least,"
she added, with a short laugh.

" Well, signora, what of that ? "
asked Nino, half amused. " I wish I
were thirty myself."

"I am glad you are not," said she.
" Now listen. You are completely in
my power, do you understand ? Yes.
And you are apparently very much in
love with my young friend, the Contes-
sina di Lira" — Nino sprang to his
feet, his face white again, but with rage
this time.

" Signora," he cried, " this is too
much ! It is insufferable ! Good-morn-
ing," and he made as though he would

g°-

"Very well," said the baroness; "then

I will go to the Graf and explain who
you are. Ah — you are calm again in
a moment? Sit down. Now I have
discovered you, and I have a right to
you, do you see? It is fortunate for
you that I like you."

" You ! You like me ? In truth, you
act as though you did ! Besides, you

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

291

are a stranger, Signpra Baronessa,«and
a great lady. I never saw you till yes-
terday." But he resumed his seat.

" Good," said she. " Is not the Signo-
rina Edvigia a great lady, and was there
never a day wheu she was a stranger
too?"

" I do not understand your caprices,
signora. In fine, what do you want of
me?"

" It is not necessary that you should
understand me," answered the dark-
eyed baroness. " Do you think I would
hurt you — or rather your voice ? "

" I do not know."

" You know very well that I would
not ; and as for my caprices, as you call
them, do you think it is a caprice to
love music ? No, of course not. And
who loves music loves musicians ; at
least," she added, with a most enchant-
ing smile, " enough to wish to have
them near *one. That is all. I want
you to come here often and sing to me.
Will you come and sing to me, my little
tenor ? "

Nino would not have been human had
he not felt the flattery through the sting.
And I always say that singers are the
vainest kind of people.

" It is very like singing in a cage,"
he said, in protest. Nevertheless, he
knew he must submit ; for, however nar-
row his experience might be, this wom-
an's smile and winning grace, even when
she said the hardest things, told him
that she would have her own way. He
had the sense to understand, too, that
whatever her plans might be, their ob-
ject was to bring him near to herself,
a reflection which was extremely sooth-
ing to his vanity.

" If you will come and sing to me, —
only to me, of course, for I would not
ask you to compromise your debut, —
but if you will come and sing to me, we
shall be very good friends. Does it seem
to you such a terrible penance to sing to
me in my solitude ? "

" It is never a penance to sing," said

Nino simply. A shade of annoyance
crossed the baroness's face.

" Provided," she said, " it entails
nothing. Well, we will not talk about
the terms."

They say women sometimes fall in
love with a voice : vox et pr&terea nihil,
as the poet has it. I do not know
whether that is what happened to the
baroness at first, but it has always
seemed strange to me that she should
have given herself so much trouble to
secure Nino, unless she had a very
strong fancy for him. I, for my part,
think that when a lady of her condition
takes such a sudden caprice into her
head, she thinks it necessary to maltreat
the poor man a little at first, just to sat-
isfy her conscience, and to be able to say
later that she did not encourage him. I
have had some experience, as everybody
is aware, and so I may speak boldly. On
the other hand, a man like Nino, when
he is in love, is absolutely blind to other
'women. There is only one idea in his
soul that has any life, and every one out-
side that idea is only so much landscape ;
they are no better for him — the other
women — than a museum of wax dolls.

The baroness, as you have seen, had
Nino in her power, and there was noth-
ing for it but submission ; he came and
went at her bidding, and often she would
send for him when he least expected it.
He would do as she commanded, some-
what sullenly and with a bad grace, but
obediently, for all that ; she had his des-
tiny in her hands, and could in a mo-
ment frustrate all his hopes. But, of
course, she knew that if she betrayed
him to the count, Nino would be lost
to her also, since he came to her only
in order to maintain his relations with
Hedwig.

Meanwhile, the blue-eyed maiden of
the North waxed fitful. Sometimes two
or three lessons would pass in severe
study. Nino, who always took care to
know the passages they were reading,
so that he might look at her instead of

292

A Roman Singer.

[September,

at his book, had instituted an arrange-
ment by which they sat opposite each
other at a small table. He would watch
her every movement and look, and carry
away a series of photographs of her, —
a whole row, like the little books of Ro-
man views they sell in the streets, strung
together on a strip of paper, — and these
views of her lasted with him for two
whole days, until he saw her again. But
sometimes he would catch a glimpse of
her in the interval, driving with her fa-
ther.

There were other days when Hedwig
could not be induced to study, but would
overwhelm Nino with questions about
his wonderful cousin who sang ; so that
he longed with his whole soul to tell
her it was he himself who had sung.
She saw his reluctance to speak about
it, and she blushed when she mentioned
the night at the Pantheon. ; but for her
life she could not help talking of the
pleasure she had had. Her blushes
seemed like the promise of spring roses
to her lover, who drank of the air of
her presence till that subtle ether ran
like fire through his veins. He was
nothing to her, he could see ; but the
singer of the Pantheon engrossed her
thoughts and brought the hot blood to
her cheek. The beam of moonlight had
pierced the soft virgin darkness of her
sleeping soul, and found a heart so cold
and spotless that even a moon ray was
warm by comparison. And the voice
that sang " Spirto gentil dei sogni miei "
had itself become by memory the gen-
tle spirit of her own dreams. She is
so full of imagination, this statue of
Nino's, that she heard the notes echoing
after her by day and night, till she
thought she must go mad unless she
could hear the reality again. As the
great solemn statue of Egyptian Mem-
non murmurs sweet, soft sounds to its
mighty self at sunrise, a musical whis-
per in the desert, so the pure white mar-
ble of Nino's living statue vibrated with
strange harmonies all the day long.

Ope night, as Nino walked homeward
with De Pretis, who had come to sup-
per with us, he induced the maestro to
go out of his way at least half a mile,
to pass the Palazzo Carmandola. It
was a still night, not over-cold for De-
cember, and there were neither stars
nor moon. As they passed the great
house Nino saw a light in Hedwig's sit-
ting-room — the room where he gave
her the lessons. It was late, and she
must be alone. On a sudden he stopped.

" What is the matter ? " asked De
Pretis.

For all answer, Nino, standing in the
dark street below, lifted up his voice
and sang the first notes of the air he al-
ways associated with his beautiful con-
tessina. Before he had sung a dozen
bars, the window opened, and the girl's
figure could be seen, black against the
light within. He went on for a few
notes, and then ceased suddenly.

" Let us go," he said in a low voice
to Ercole ; and they went away, leaving
the contessina listening in the stillness
to the echo of their feet. A Roman
girl would not have done that ; she
would have sat quietly inside, and never
have shown herself. But foreigners are
so impulsive !

Nino never heard the last of those
few notes, any more than the contessina,
literally speaking, ever heard the end
of the song.

" Your cousin, about whom you make
so much mystery, passed under my win-
dow last night," said the young lady the
next day, with the usual display of car-
nation in her cheeks at the mention of
him.

" Indeed, signorina ? " said Nino calm-
ly, for he expected the remark. " And
since you have never seen him, pray
how did you know it was he ? "

" How should one know ? " she asked
scornfully. " There are not two such
voices as his in Italy. He sang."

" He sang ? " cried Nino, with an af-
fectation of alarm. " I must tell the

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

293

maestro not to let him sing in the open
air ; he will lose his voice."

" Who is his master ? " asked II ed-
wig, suddenly.

"I cannot remember the name just
now," said Nino, looking away. " But
I will find out, if you wish." He was
afraid of putting De Pretis to any in-
convenience by saying that the young
singer was his pupil. " However," he
continued, " you will hear him sing as
often as you please, after he makes his
debut next month." He sighed when
he thought that it would all so soon be
over. For how could he disguise him-
self any longer, when he should be sing-
ing in public every night? But Hed-
wig clapped her hands.

" So soon ? " she cried. " Then there
will be an end of the mystery."

" Yes," said Nino gravely, " there
will be an end of the mystery."

" At least you can tell me his name,
now that we shall all know it ? "

" Oh, his name — his name is Cardeg-
na, like mine. He is my cousin, you
know." And they went on with the
lesson. But something of the kind oc-
curred almost every time he came, so
that he felt quite sure that, however in-
different he might be in her eyes, the
singer, the Nino of whom she knew
nothing, interested her deeply.

Meanwhile he was obliged to go very
often to the baroness's scented boudoir,
which smelled of incense and other East-
ern perfumes, whenever it did not smell
of cigarettes ; and there he sang little
songs, and submitted patiently to her
demands for more and more music.
She would sit by the piano and watch
him as he sang, wondering whether he
were handsome or ugly, with his square
face and broad throat and the black
circles round his eyes. He had a fasci-
nation for her, as being something ut-
terly new to her.

One day she stood and looked over
the music as he sang, almost touching
him, and his hair was so curly and soft

to look at that she was seized with a
desire to stroke it, as Mariuccia strokes
the old gray cat for hours together.
The action was quite involuntary, and
her fingers rested only a moment on his
head.

" It is so curly," she said, half play-
fully, half apologetically. But Nino
started as though he had been stung,
and his dark face grew pale. A girl
could not have seemed more hurt at a
strange man's touch.

" Signora ! " he cried, springing to
his feet. The baroness, who is as dark
as he, blushed almost red, partly be-
cause she was angry, and partly because
she was ashamed.

" What a boy you are ! " she said,
carelessly enough, and turned away to
the window, pushing back one heavy
curtain with her delicate hand, as if she
would look 9ut.

" Pardon me, signora, I am not a
boy," said Nino, speaking to the back of
her head as he stood behind her. '' It
is time we understood each other bet-
ter. I love like a man and I hate like
a man. I love some one very much."

" Fortunate contessina ! " laughed
the baroness, mockingly, without turn-
ing round.

" It does not concern you, signora, to
know whom I love, nor, if you know,
to speak of her. I ask you a simple
question. If you loved a man with
your whole soul and heart, would you
allow another man to stand beside you
and stroke your hair, and say it was
curly ? " The baroness burst out laugh-
ing. " Do not laugh," he continued.
" Remember that I am in your power
only so long as it pleases me to sub-
mit to you. Do not abuse your advan-
tage, or I will be capable of creating
for myself situations quite as satisfac-
tory as that of Italian master to the
Signoriua di Lira."

" What do you mean ? " she asked,
turning suddenly upon him. "I sup-
pose you would tell me that you will

294

A Roman Singer.

[September,

make advantages for yourself which
you will abuse, against me ? What do
you mean ? "

" I do not mean that. I mean only
that I may not wish to give lessons to
the contessiua much longer." By this
time the baroness had recovered her
equanimity ; and as she would have been
sorry to lose Nino, who was a source of
infinite pleasure and amusement to her,
she decided to pacify him, instead of
teasing him any more.

" Is it not very foolish for us to quar-
rel about your curly hair ? " said she.
" We have been such good friends, al-
ways." It might have been three weeks,
her " always."

" I think it is," answered Nino grave-
ly. " But do not stroke my hair again,
Signora Baronessa, or I shall be angry."
He was quite serious, if you believe
it, though he was only twenty. He
forthwith sat down to the piano again
and sang on. The baroness sat very si-
lent and scarcely looked at him ; but she
held her hands clasped on her knee, and
seemed to be thinking. After a time
Nino stopped singing, and sat silent also,
absently turning over the sheets of mu-
sic. It was warm in the room, and the
sounds from the street were muffled and
far away.

" Siguor Nino," said the lady at last,
in a different voice, " I am married."

" Yes, signora," he replied, wonder-
ing what would come next.

" It would be very foolish of me to
care for you."

" It would also be very wicked," he
said calmly ; for he is well grounded in
religion. The baroness stared at him
in some surprise, but seeing he was per-
fectly serious, she went on.

" Precisely, as you say, very wicked.
That being the case, .1 have decided not
to care for you any more — I mean, not
to care for you at all. I have made up
my mind to be your friend."

" I am much obliged to your lady-
ship," he answered, without moving a

muscle. For you see, he did not be-
lieve her.

" Now tell me, then, Signor Nino, are
you in earnest in what you are doing ?
Do you really set your heart on doing
this thing ? "

"What?" asked Nino, annoyed at
the persistence of the woman.

" Why need you be afraid to under-
stand me ? Can you not forgive me ?
Can you not believe in me, that I will
be your friend ? I have always dreamed
of being the friend of a great artist.
Let me be yours, and believe me, the
thing you have in your heart shall be '
done."

" I would like to hope so," he said.
B.ut he smiled incredulously. " I can
only say that if you can accomplish
what it is in my heart to do, I will go
through fire and water at your bidding ;
and if you are not mocking me, I am
very grateful for the offer. But if you
please, signora, we will not speak any
more of this at present. I may be a
great artist, some day. Sometimes I
feel sure that I shall. But now I am
simply Giovanni Cardegna, teacher of
literature ; and the highest favor you can
confer on me is not to deprive me of
my means of support, by revealing to
the Conte di Lira my other occupation.
I may fail hopelessly at the outset of
my artistic career, and in that case I
shall certainly remain a teacher of lan-
guage."

" Very well," said the baroness, in a
subdued voice ; for, in spite of her will
and willfulness, this square-faced boy
of mine was more than a match for her.
" Very well, you will believe me another
day, and now I will ask you to go, for I
am tired."

I cannot be interrupted by your silly
questions about the exact way in which
things happened. I must tell this story
in my own way, or not at all ; and I
am sacrificing a great deal to your taste
in cutting out all the little things that
I really most enjoy telling. Whether

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

295

you are astonished at the conduct of the
baroness, after a three weeks' acquaint-
ance, or not, I care not a fig. It is just
the way it happened, and I dare say she
was really madly in love with Nino. If
1 had been Nino, I should have been in
love with her. But I would like you
to admire my boy's audacity, and to re-
view the situation, before I go on to
speak of that important event in his
life, his first appearance on the boards
of the opera. At the time of his debut
he was still disguised as a teacher of
Italian to the young contessina. She
thought him interesting and intelligent,
but that was all. Her thoughts were
entirely, though secretly, engrossed by
the mysterious singer, whom she had
heard twice, but had not seen, as far
as she knew. Nino, on the other hand,
loved her to desperation, and would
have acted like a madman had he been
deprived of his privilege of speaking to
her three times a week. He loved her
with the same earnest determination to
win her that he had shown for years in
the study of his art, and with all the
rest of his nature besides, which is say-
ing much — not to mention his soul, of
which he thinks a great deal more than
I do.

Besides this, the baroness had appar-
ently fallen in love with him, had made
him her intimate, and flattered him in a
way to turn his head. Then she seemed
to have thought better of her passion,
and had promised him her friendship, —
a promise which he himself considered
of no importance whatever. As for the
old Conte di Lira, he read the German
newspapers, and cared for none of these
things. De Pretis took an extra pinch
of his good snuff, when he thought that
his liberal ideas might yet be realized,
and a man from the people marry a
great lady by fairly winning her. Do
not, after this, complain that I have left
you in the dark, or that you do not
know how it happened. It is as clear
as water, and it was about four mouths

from the time Nino saw Hedwig in St.
Peter's to the time when he first sang
in public.

Christmas passed by, — thank Heaven,
the municipality has driven away those
most detestable pifferari, who played on
their discordant bagpipes at every cor-
ner for a fortnight, and nearly drove
me crazy, — and the Befana, as we call
the Epiphany in Rome, was gone, with
its gay racket, ana the night fair in the
Piazza Navona, and the days for Nino's
first appearance drew near. I never
knew anything about the business ar-
rangements for the debut, since De
Pretis settled all that with Jacovacci,
the impresario ; but I know that there
were many rehearsals, and that I was
obliged to stand security to the theatri-
cal tailor, together with De Pretis, in
order that Nino might have his dress
made. As for the cowl in the last act,
De Pretis has a brother who is a monk,
and between them they put together a
very decent friar's costume ; and Mariuc-
cia had a good piece of rope, which Nino
used for a girdle.

" What does it matter ? " he said,
with much good sense. " For if I sing
well, they will not look at my monk's
hood; and if I sing badly, I may be
dressed like the Holy Father, and they
will hiss me just the same. But in the
beginning I must look like a courtier,
and be dressed like one."

" I suppose so," said I ; " but I wish
you had taken to philosophy."

VI.

I shall never forget the day of Nino's
first appearance. You may imagine
whether we were in a state of excite-
ment or not, after all these years of
study and waiting. There was much
more trouble and worry than if he had
written a great book, and was just to
publish it, and receive the homage of
all the learning and talent in Europe ;

296

A Roman Singer.

[September,

which is the kind of debut I had hoped
he would make in life, instead of put-
ting ou a foolish dress, and stamping
about on a stage, and squalling love
songs to a packed house, making panto-
mime with his hands, and altogether be-
having like an idiot, — a crowd of peo-
ple ready to hiss him at the slightest
indication of weakness, or to carry him
on their shoulders if they fancied his
voice to their taste.

No wonder Nino was sad and de-
pressed all day, and when he tried his
voice in the afternoon thought it was
less clear than usual, and stared at him-
self in the looking-glass, wondering
whether he were not too ugly altogether,
as I always told him. To tell the truth,
he was not so ugly as he had been ; for
the months with the coutessiua had re-
fined him singularly, and perhaps he
had caught a certain grace of manner
from the baroness. He had grown
more silent, too, and seemed always pre-
occupied, as well he might be ; but he
had concealed his affair with the Lira
family from me until that day, and I
supposed him anxious about his appear-
ance.

Early in the morning came De Pretis,
and suggested that it would be better
for Nino to take a walk and breathe
the fresh air a little ; so I bade him go,
and I did not see him again until the
afternoon. De Pretis said that the
only cause for anxiety was from stage
fright, and went away taking snuff and
flourishing his immense cotton handker-
chief. I thought a man must be a fool
to work for years in order to sing, and
then, when he had learned to do it quite
well, to be afraid of showing what he
knew. I did not think Nino would be
frightened.

Of course, there was a final rehearsal
at eleven, and Nino put off the hour of
the lesson with the contessina to three
in the afternoon, by some excuse or
other. He must have felt very much
pressed for time, having to give her a

lesson on the very day of .his coming
out ; and besides, he knew very well that
it might be the last of his days with her,
and that a great deal would depend on
the way he bore himself at his trial.
He sang badly, or thought he did, at the
rehearsal, and grew more and more de-
pressed and grave as the day advanced.
He came out of the little stage door of
the Apollo theatre at Tor di Nona, and
his eyes fell upon the broad bills and
posters announcing the first appearance
of " Giovanni Cardegna, the most dis-
tinguished pupil of the Maestro Ercole
De Pretis, in Verdi's opera the Favo-
rita." His heart sank at the sight of his
own n%me, and he turned towards the
Bridge of Sant' Angelo to get away
from it. He was the last to leave the
theatre, and De Pretis was with him.

At that moment he saw Hedwig von
Lira sitting in an open carriage, in front
of the box office. De Pretis bowed
low ; she smiled ; and Nino took off
his hat, but would not go near her, es-
caping in the opposite direction. He
thought ^she looked somewhat surprised,
but his only idea was to 'get away, lest
she should call him and put some awk-
ward question.

An hour and a half later he entered
her sitting-room. There she sat, as
usual, with her books, awaiting him per-
haps for the last time, a fair, girlish
figure with gold hair, but oh, so cold !
— it makes me shiver to think of how
she used to look. Possibly there was a
dreaminess about her blue eyes that
made up for her manner ; but how Nino
could love her, I cannot understand.
It must have been like making love to
a pillar of ice.

" I aoi much indebted to you for al-
lowing me to come at this hour, signo-
rina," he said, as he bowed.

" Ah, professore, it looks almost as
though it were you yourself who were
to make your debut," said she, laughing
and leaning back in her chair. " Your
name is on every corner in Rome, and I

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

297

saw you coming out of a side door of
the theatre this morning." Nino trem-
bled, but reflected that if she had sus-
pected anything she would not have
made so light of it.

" The fact is, signorina, my cousin is
so nervous that he begged me earnest-
ly to be present at the rehearsal this
morning ; and as it is the great event of
his life, I could not easily refuse him. I
presume you are going to hear him,
since I saw your carriage at the thea-
tre."

" Yes. At the last minute, my father
wanted to change our box for one nearer
the stage, and so we went ourselves.
The baroness — you know, the lady
who went with us to the Pantheon —
is going with us to-night." It was the
first time Hedwig had mentioned her,
and it was evident that Nino's intimacy
with the baroness had been kept a se-
cret. How long would it be so ? Me-
chanically he proceeded with the lesson,
thinking mournfully that he should
never give her another. But Hedwig
was more animated than he had ever
seen her, and often stopped to ask ques-
tions about the coming performance.
It was evident that she was entirely ab-
sorbed with the thought of at last hear-
ing to its fullest extent the voice that
had haunted her dreams ; most of all,
with the anticipation of what this won-
derful singer would be like. Dwelling
on the echo of his singing for months
had roused her interest and curiosity to
such a pitch that she could hardly be
quiet a moment, or think calmly of
what she was to enjoy ; and yet she
looked so very cold and indifferent at
most times. But Nino had noticed all
this, and rejoiced at it ; young as he was,
however, he understood that the dis-
covery she was about to make would be
a shock that would certainly produce
some palpable result, when she should
see him from her box in the theatre.
He trembled for the consequences.

The lesson was over all too soon, and

Nino lingered a moment to see whether
the very last drops of his cup of happi-
ness might not still be sweet. He did
not know when he should see her again,
to speak with her ; and though he de-
termined it should not be long, the fu-
ture seemed very uncertain, and he
would look on her loveliness while he
might.

"I hope you will like my cousin's
singing," he said, rather timidly.

" If he sings as he has sung before,
he is the greatest artist living," she
said calmly, as though no one would
dispute it. " But I am curious to see
him, as well as to hear him."

" He is not handsome," said Nino,
smiling a little. " In fact, there is a
family resemblance ; he is said to look
like me."

" Why did you not tell me that be-
fore ? " she asked quickly, and fixed
her blue eyes on Nino's face, as though,
she wished to photograph the features in
her mind.

"I did not suppose the signorina
would think twice about a singer's ap-
pearance," said Nino quietly. Hedwig
blushed and turned away, busying her-
self with her books. At that moment
Graf von Lira entered from the next
room. Nino bowed.

" Curious is it," said the count, " that
you and the about-to-make-his-appear-
ance tenor should the same name
have."

" He is a near relation, Signer Conte,
— the same whom you heard sing in
the Pantheon. I hope you will like his
voice."

"That is what we shall see, Signor
Professore," answered the other severe-
ly. He had a curious way of bowing,
as though he were made only in two
pieces, from his waist, to his heels, and
from his waist to the crown of his head.
Nino went his way sadly, arid wonder-
ing how Hedwig would look when she
should recognize him from her box in
the theatre, that very evening.

298

A Roman Singer.

[September,

It is a terrible and a heart-tearing
thing to part from the woman one loves.
That is nothing new, you say. Every
one knows that. Perhaps so, though I
think not. Only those can know it
who have experienced it, and for them
no explanations are in any way at all
necessary. The mere word " parting "
calls up such an infinity of sorrow that
it is better to draw a veil over the sad
thing and bury it out of sight, and put
upon it the seal on which is graven
"No Hope."

Moreover, when a man only supposes,
as Nino did, that he is leaving the wom-
an he loves, or is about to leave her, un-
til he can devise some new plan for see-
ing her, the case is not so very serious.
Nevertheless, Nino, who is of a very
tender constitution of the affections,
suffered certain pangs which are always
hard to bear, and as he walked slowly
<down the street he hung his head low,
and did not look like a man who could
possibly he successful in anything he
might undertake that day. Yet it was
the most important day of his li£e, and
had it not been that he had left Hedwig
with little hope of ever giving her an-
other lesson, he would have been so
happy that the whole air would have
seemed dancing with sunbeams and an-
gels and flowers. I think that when a
man loves he cares very little for what
he does. The greatest success is indif-
ferent to him, and he cares not at all
for failure, in the ordinary undertakings
of life. These are my reflections, and
they are worth something, because I
once loved very much myself, and was
parted from her I loved many times, be-
fore the last parting.

It was on this day that Nino came to
me and told me all the history of the past
months, of which I knew nothing ; but,
as you know all about it, I need not tell
you what the conversation was like, until
he had finished. Then I told him he was
the prince and chief of donkeys, which
was no more than the truth, as every-

body will allow. He only spread out
his palms and shrugged his shoulders,
putting his head on one side, as though
to say he could not help it.

" Is it perhaps my fault that you are
a little donkey ? " I asked ; for you
may imagine whether I was angry or
not.

" Certainly not, Sor Cornelio," he
said. " It is entirely my own doing ;
but I do not see that I am a donkey."

" Blood of Bacchus ! " I ejaculated,
holding up my hands. " He does not
believe he is a great stupid ! " But
Nino was not angry at all He busied
himself a little with his costume, which
was laid out on the piano, with the
sword and the tinsel collar, and all the
rest of it.

" I am in love," he said. " What
would you have ? "

" I would have you put a little giu-
dizio, just a grain of judgment and
common sense, into your love affairs.
Why, you go about it as though it were
the most innocent thing in the world to
disguise yourself, and present yourself
as a professor in a nobleman's house,
in order to make love to his daughter !
You, to make love to a noble damigella,
a young countess, with a fortune ! Go
back to Serveti, and marry the first
contadina girl you meet; it is much
more fitting, if you must needs marry
at all. I repeat it, you are an ignorant
donkey ! "

" Eh ! " cried Nino, perfectly un-
moved, " if I am ignorant, it is not for
lack of your teaching ; and as for being
the beast of burden to which you refer,
I have heard it said that you were once
in love yourself. Meanwhile, I have
told you this, because there will per-
haps be trouble, and I did not intend
you to be surprised."

"Surprised?" said I. "I would
not be surprised at anything you might
fancy doing, now. No, I would not
dream of being surprised ! "

" So much the better," answered Nino

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

299

imperturbably. He looked sad and
weary, though, and as I am a prudent
man J put my anger away to cool for a
little while, and indulged in a cigar un-
til it should be time to go to the thea-
tre ; for of course I went with him,
and Mariuccia too, to help him with his
dress. Poor old Mariuccia ! she had
dressed him when he was a ragged little
boy, and she was determined to put the
finishing touches to his appearance now
that he was about to 'be a great man,
she said. His dressing-room was a
narrow little place, sufficiently ill lighted,
and there was barely space to turn
round. Mariuccia, who had brought the
cat and had her pocket full of roasted
chestnuts, sat outside on a chair until
he was ready for her ; and I am suro
that if she had spent her life in the pro-
fession of adorning players she could
not have used her fingers more deftly in
the arrangement of the collar and sword.
Nino had a fancy to wear a mustache
and a pointed beard through the first
part of the opera ; saying that a courtier
always had hair on his face, but that he
would naturally shave if he turned monk.
I represented to him that it was need-
less expense, since he must deposit the
value of the false beard with the theatre
barber, who lives opposite ; and it was
twenty-three francs. Besides, he would
look like a different man — two sepa-
rate characters.

" I do not care a cabbage for that,"
said Nino. " If they cannot recognize
me with their ears, they need not trouble
themselves to recognize me at all."

" It is a fact that their ears are quite
long enough," said Mariuccia.

44 Hush, Mariuccia ! " I said. " The
Roman public is the most intelligent
public in the world." And at this she
grumbled.

But I knew well enough w.Ly he
wanted to wear the beard. He had a
fancy to put off the evil moment as
long as possible, so that Hedwig might
not recognize him till the last act, — a

foolish fancy, in truth, for a woman's
eyes are not like a man's ; and though
Hedwig had never thought twice about
Nino's personality, she had not sat op-
posite him three times a week for near-
ly four months without knowing all his
looks and gestures. It is an absurd
idea, too, to attempt to fence with time,
when a thing must come in the course
of an hour or two. What is it, after all,
the small delay you can produce ? The
click of a few more seconds in the
clock-work, before the hammer smites
its angry warning on the bell, and leaves
echoes of pain writhing through the
poor bronze, — that is Time. As for
Eternity, it is a question of the calculus,
and does not enter into a singer's first
appearance, nor into the recognition of
a lover. If it did, I would give you an
eloquent dissertation upon it, so that you
would yawn and take snuff, and wish
me carried off by the diavolo to some
place where I might lecture on the in-
finite without fear of being interrupted,
or of keeping sinners like you unneces-
sarily long awake. There will be no
hurry then. Poor old diavolo ! he must
have a dull time of it among all those
heretics. Perhaps he has a little variety,
for they say he has written up on his
door, " Ici 1'on parle francais," since
Monsieur de -Voltaire died. But I must
go on, or you will never be any wiser
than you are now, which is not saying
overmuch.

I am not going to gjve you a descrip-
tion of the Favorita, which you may
hear a dozen times a year at the theatre,
for more or less money — but it is only
a franc if you stand ; quite enough, too.
I went upon the stage before it began,
and peeped through the curtain to see
what kind of an audience there was. It
is an old curtain, and there is a hole in
it on the right-hand side, which De Pretis
says was made by a foreign tenor, some
years ago, between the acts ; and Ja-
covacci, the impresario, tried to make
him pay five francs to have it repaired,

300

A Roman Singer.

[September,

but did not get the money. It is a bet-
ter hole than the oue iii the middle,
which is so fur from both sides of the
house that you cannot see the people
well. So I looked through, and there,
sure enough, in a box very near to the
stage, sat the Contessina di Lira and the
baroness, whom I had never seen be-
fore, but recognized from Nino's descrip-
tion ; and behind them sat the count
himself, with his great gray mustaches
and a white cravat. They made me
think of the time when I used to go to
the theatre myself and sit in a box, and
applaud or hiss, just as I pleased. Dio
mio ! what changes in this world !

I recognized also a great many of
our noble ladies, with jewels and other
ornaments, and it seemed to me that
some of them were much more beauti-
ful than the German coutessiua whom
Nino had elected to worship, though she
was well enough, to be sure, in white silk
and white fur, with her little gold cross
at her throat. To think that a statue
like that, brought up with all the pro-
prieties, should have such a strange
chapter of life ! But my eye began to
smart from peering through the little
hole, and just then a rough-looking fel-
low connected with the stage reminded
me that, whatever relation I might be to
the primo tenore, I was not dressed to
appear in the first act ; then the audi-
ence began to stamp and groan because
the performance did not begin, and I
went away again.to tell Nino that he had
a packed house. I found De Pretis giv-
ing him blackberry syrup, which he had
brought in a bottle, and entreating him
to have courage. Indeed, it seemed
•to me that Nino had the more courage

of the two ; for De Pretis laughed and
cried and blew his nose, and took snuff
with his great fat fingers, and acted al-
together like a poor fool ; while Nino
sat on a rush-bottomed chair and watched
Mariuccia, who was stroking the old cat
and nibbling roasted chestnuts, declaring
all the while that Nino was the most beau-

ful object she had ever seen. Then the
bass and the baritone came, together,
and spoke cheering words to Nino, and
invited him to supper afterwards ; but
he thanked them kindly, and told them
that he was expected at home, and would
go with them after the next pe'rformance
— if there ever were a " next." He
thought he might fail at the last min-
ute.

Nino had judged more rightly than I,
when he supposed that his beard and
mustaches would disguise him from
Hedwig during the first two acts. She
recognized the wondrous voice, and she
saw the strong resemblance he had
spoken of. Once or twice, as he looked
toward her, it seemed indeed that the
eyes must be his, with their deep circles
and serious gaze. But it was absurd to
suppose it anything more than a resem-
blance. As the opera advanced, it be-
came evident that Nino was making a
success. Then in the second act it was
clear that the success was growing to be
an ovation, and the ovation a furore, in
which the house became entirely demor-
alized, and vouchsafed to listen only so
long as Nino was singing — screaming
with delight before he had finished what
he had to sing in each scene. People
sent their servants away in hot haste
to buy flowers wherever they could,
and he came back to his dressing-room,
from the second act, carrying bouquets
by the dozen, small bunches and big,
such as people had been able to get, or
had brought with them. His eyes shone
like the coals iu Mariuccia's scaldino. as
he entered, and he was pale through
his paint. He could hardly speak for
joy ; but, as old habits return uncon-
sciously at great moments in a man's
life, he took the cat on his knee and
pulled its tail.

" Sing thou also, little beast," he said
gravely ; and he pulled the tail till the
cat squeaked a little, and he was satis-
fied.

" Bene ! " he cried ; " and now for the

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

301

tonsure and the frock." So Mariuccia
was turned out into the passage while
he changed his dress. De Pretis came
back a moment later, and tried to help
him ; hut he was so much overcome
that he could only shed tears and give
a last word of advice for the next act.

" You must not sing it too loud, Nino
mio," he said.

" Diavolo ! " said Nino. " I should
think not ! "

" But you must not squeak it out in a
little wee false voice, as small as this ; "
the maestro held up his thumb and
finger, with a pinch of snuff between
them.

" Bah ! Sor Ercole, do you take me
for a soprano ? " cried the boy, laugh-
ing, as he washed off the paint and the
gum, where the beard had stuck. Pres-
ently he got into his frock, which, as I
told you, was a real one, provided by
Ercole's brother, the Franciscan — quite
quietly, of course, for it would seem a
dreadful thing to use a real monk's frock
in an opera. Then we fastened the
rope round his waist, and smoothed his
curly hair a little to give him a more
.pious aspect. He looked as white as a
pillow when the paint was gone.

"Tell me a little, my father," said
old Mariuccia, mocking him, " do you
fast on Sundays, that you look so pale ? "
Whereat Nino struck an attitude, and
began singing a love song to the an-
cient woman. Indeed, she was joking
about the fast, for she had expended my
substance, of late, in fattening Nino, as
she called it, for his appearance, and
there was to be broiled chickens for
supper that very night. He was only
pale because he WJTS in love. As for
me, I made up my mind to stand in the
slides, so that I could see the contessina ;
for Nino had whispered to me that she
had not yet recognized him, though she
stared hard across the footlights. There-
fore I took up a good position on the
left of the stage, facing the Lira box,
which was on the right.

The curtain went up, and Nino stood
there, looking like a real monk, with a
book in his hand and his eyes cast down,
as he began to walk slowly along. I
saw Hedwig von Lira's gaze rest on his
square, pale face at least one whole
minute. Then she gave a strange little
cry, so that many people in the house
looked toward her ; and she leaned far
back in the shadow of the deep box,
while the reflected glare of the foot-
lights just shone faintly on her features,
making them look more like marble than
ever. The baroness was smiling to her-
self, amused at her companion's sur-
prise, and the old count stared stolidly
for a moment or two, and then turned
suddenly to his daughter.

" Very curious is it," he was probably
saying, " that this tenor should so much
your Italian professor resemble." I
could almost see his gray eyes sparkle
angrily across the theatre. But as I
looked, a sound rose on the heated air,
the like of which I have never known.
To tell the truth, I had not heard the
first two acts, for I did not suppose
there was any great difference between
Nino's singing on the stage and his
singing at home, and I still wished he
might have chosen some other profes-
sion. But when I heard this, I yielded,
at least for the time, and I am not sure
that my eyes were as clear as usual.

" Spirto gentil dei sogni miei " — the
long sweet notes sighed themselves to
death on his lips, falling and rising
magically like a mystic angel song, and
swaying their melody out into the world
of lights and listeners ; so pathetic, so
heart-breaking, so laden with death and
with love, that it was as though all the
sorrowing souls in our poor Rome
breathed in one soft sigh together. Only
a poor monk dying of love in a monas-
tery, tenderly and truly loving to the bit-
ter end. Dio mio ! there are perhaps
many such. But a monk like this, with
a face like a conqueror, set square in its
whiteness, and yet so wretched to see

302

A Roman Singer.

[September,

in his poor patched frock and his bare
feet; a monk, too, not acting love, but
really and truly ready to die for a beau-
tiful woman not thirty feet from him,
in the house ; above all, a monk with a
voice that speaks like the clarion call
of the day of judgment in its wrath,
and murmurs more plaintively and sad-
ly in sorrow than ever the poor Peri
sighed at the gates of Paradise — such
a monk, what could he not make peo-
ple feel ?

The great crowd of men and women
sat utterly stilled and intent till he had
sung the very last note. Not a sound
was heard to offend the sorrow that
spoke from the boy's lips. Then all those
people seemed to draw three long breaths
of wonder — a pause, a thrilling tremor
in the air, and then there burst to the
roof such a roar of cries, such a huge
thunder of hands and voices, that the
whole house seemed to rock with it, and
even in the street outside they say the
noise was deafening.

Alone on the stage stood Nino, his
eyes fixed on Hedwig von Lira in her
box. I think that she alone of all
that multitude made no sound, but only
gripped the edge of the balcony hard in
her white hands, and leaned far forward
with straining eyes and beating heart
to satisfy her wonder. She knew well
enough, now, that there was no mistake.
The humble little Professor Cardegna,
who had patiently explained Dante and
Leopardi to her for months, bowing to
the ground in her presence, and apolo-
gizing when he corrected her mistakes,
as though his whole life was to be de-
voted to teaching foreigners his lan-
guage ; the decently clad young man,
who was always pale, and sometimes
pathetic when he spoke of himself, was
no other than Giovanni Cardegna the
tenor, singing aloud to earth and heaven
with his glorious great voice — a man on
the threshold of a European fame, such
as falls only to the lot of a singer or a
conqueror. More, he was the singer of

her dreams, who had for months filled
her thoughts with music and her heart
with a strange longing, being until now
a voice only. There he stood looking
straight at her, — she was not mistaken,
— as though to say, " I have done it
for you, and for you only." A woman
must be more than marble to feel no
pride in the intimate knowledge that a
great public triumph has been gained
solely for her sake. She must be colder
than ice if she cannot see her power
when a conqueror loves her.

The marble had felt the fire, and the
ice was in the flame at last. Nino, with
his determination to be loved, had put
his statue into a very fiery furnace, and
in* the young innocence of his heart had
prepared such a surprise for his lady as
might have turned the head of a hard-
ened woman of the world, let alone an
imaginative German girl, with a taste
for romance — or without; it matters
little. All Germans are full of imagina-
tion, and that is the reason they know
so much. For they not only know all
that is known by other people, but also
all that they themselves imagine, which
nobody else can possibly know. And if
you do not believe this, you had better
read the works of one Fichte, a philoso-
pher.

I need not tell you any more about
Nino's first appearance. It was one of
those really phenomenal successes that
seem to cling to certain people through
life. He was very happy and very
silent when it was over ; and we were
the last to leave the theatre, for we
feared the enthusiasm of the crowd. So
we waited till every one had gone, and
then marched home 'together, for it was
a fine night. I walked on one side of
Nino, and De Pretis on the other, all
of us carrying as many flowers as we
could ; Mariuccia came behind, with the
cat under her shawl. I did not discover
until we reached home why she had
brought the beast. Then she explained
that, as there was so much food in the

1883.]

En Province.

303

kitchen, in anticipation of our supper,
she had been afraid to leave the cat
alone, in the house, lest we should find
nothing left to eat when we returned.
This was sufficiently prudent, for a scat-

ter-brained old spendthrift like Mariuc-
cia.

That was a merry supper, and De
Pretis became highly dramatic when
we got to the second flask.

F. Marion Crawford.

EN PROVINCE.

III.

FROM BOURGES TO LA ROCHELLE.

I KNOW not whether the exact limits
of an excursion, as distinguished from
a journey, have ever been fixed ; at any
rate, it seemed none of my business, at
Tours, to settle the question. There-
fore,, though the making of excursions
had been the purpose of my stay, I
thought it vain, while I started for
Bourges, to determine to which category
that little expedition might belong. It
was not till the third day that I returned
to Tours, and the distance, traversed for
the most part after dark, was even great-
er than I had supposed. That, how-
ever, was partly the fault of a tiresome
wait at Vierzon, where I had more than
enough time to dine, very badly, at the
buffet, and to observe the proceedings of
a family who had entered my railway car-
riage at Tours and had conversed, un-
reservedly, for my benefit, all the way
from that station — a family whom it
entertained me to assign to the class of
petite noblesse de province. Their noble
origin was confirmed by the way they
all made maigre in the refreshment-
room (it happened to be a Friday),
as if it had been -possible to do any-
thing else. They ate two or three om-
elettes apiece, and ever so many little
cakes, while the positive, talkative moth-
er watched her children as the waiter
handed about the roast fowl. I was des-

tined to share the secrets of this family
to the end ; for when I had taken place
in the empty train that was in waiting
to convey us to Bourges, the same vigi-
lant woman pushed them all on top of
me into my compartment, though the
carriages on either side contained no
travelers at all. It was better, I found,
to have dined (even on omelettes and
little cakes) at the station at Vierzon
than at the hotel at Bourges, which,
when I reached it at nine o'clock at
night, did not strike me as the prince of
hotels. The inns in the smaller provin-
cial towns in France are all, as the term
is, commercial, and the commis-voyageur
is in triumphant possession. I saw a
great deal of him for several weeks af-
ter this ; for he was apparently the only
traveler in the southern provinces, and
it was my daily fate to sit opposite to
him at tables d'hote and in railway trains.
He may be known by two infallible
signs : his hands are fat, and he tucks
his napkin into his shirt-collar. In spite
of these idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me
a reserved and inoffensive person, with
singularly little of the demonstrative
good-humor that he has been described
'as possessing. I saw no one who re-
minded me of Balzac's " illustre Gaudis-
sart ; " and indeed, in the course of a
month's journey through a large part of
France, I heard so little desultory con-
versation that I wondered whether a
change haft not come over the spirit of
the people. They seemed to me as silent
as Americans when Americans have not

304

En Province.

[September,

been "introduced," and infinitely less
addicted to exchanging remarks in rail-
way trains and at tables d'hote than the
colloquial and cursory English; a fact
perhaps not worth mentioning were it not
at variance with that reputation which
the French have long enjoyed of being
a preeminently sociable nation. The
common report of the character of a
people is, however, an indefinable prod-
uct ; and it is apt to strike the traveler
who observes for himself as very wide
of the mark. The English, who have
for ages been described (mainly by the
French) as the dumb, stiff, unapproach-
able race, present to-day a remarkable
appearance of good-humor and garru-
lity, and are distinguished by their facil-
ity of intercourse. On the other hand,
any one who has seen half a dozen
Frenchmen pass a whole day together
in a railway-carriage without breaking
silence is forced to believe that the tra-
ditional reputation of these gentlemen
is simply the survival of some primitive
formula. It was true, doubtless, before
the Revolution ; but there have been
great changes since then. The question
of which is the better taste, to talk to
strangers or to hold your tongue, is a
matter apart; I incline to believe that
the French reserve is the result of a
more definite conception of social be-
havior. I allude to it only because it is
at variance with the national fame, and
at the same time is compatible with a
very easy view of life in certain other
directions. On some of these latter
points the Boule d'Or at Bourges was
full of instruction ; boasting, as it did, of
a hall of reception in which, amid old
boots that had been brought to be
cleaned, old linen that was being sorted
for the wash, and lamps of evil odor
that were awaiting replenishment, a
strange, familiar, promiscuous household
life went forward. Small scullions in
white caps and aprons slept upon greasy
benches ; the Boots sat staring at you
while you fumbled, in a row of pigeon-

holes, for your candlestick or your key ;
and, amid the coming and going of the
commis-voyageurs, a little sempstress
bent over the under-garments of the
hostess, the latter being a heavy, stern,
silent woman, who looked at people
very hard.

It was not to be looked at in that
manner that one had come all the way
from Tours ; so that within ten min-
utes after my arrival I sallied out into
the darkness to get somehow and some-
where a happier impression. How-
ever late in the evening I may arrive
at a place, I cannot go to bed without
an impression. The natural place, at
Bourges, to look for one seemed to be
the cathedral ; which, moreover, was the
only thing that could account for my
presence dans cette galere. I turned out
of a small square, in front of the hotel,
and walked up a narrow, sloping street,
paved with big, rough stones and guilt-
less of a footway. It was a splendid
starlight night ; the stillness of a sleep-
ing ville de province was over everything ;
I had the whole place to myself. I
turned to my right, at the top of the
street* where presently a short, vague
lane brought me into sight of the cathe-
dral. I approached it obliquely, from
behind ; it loomed up in the darkness
above me, enormous and sublime. It
stands on the top of the large but not
lofty eminence over which Bourges is
scattered — a very good position, as
French cathedrals go, for they are not
all as nobly situated as Chartres and
Laon. On the side on which I approached
it (the south) it is tolerably well ex-
posed, though the precinct is shabby ; in
'front, it is rather too much shut in.
These defects, however, it makes up for
on the north side and behind, where it
presents itself in the most admirable
manner to the garden of the Archeveche,
which has been arranged as a public
walk, with the usual formal alleys of the
jardin franqais. I must add that I ap-
preciated these points only on the fol-

1883.]

En Province.

305

lowing day. As I stood there in the
light of the stars, many of which had
an autumnal sharpness, while others
were shooting over the heavens, the
huge, rugged vessel of the church over-
hung me in very much the same way
as the black hull of a ship at sea would
overhang a solitary swimmer. It seemed
colossal, stupendous, a dark leviathan.
The next morning, which was lovely, I
lost no time in going back to it, and
found, with satisfaction, that the day-
light did it no injury. The cathedral
of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge,
and if it is a good deal wanting in light-
ness and grace it is perhaps only the
more imposing. I read in^the excellent
handbook of M. Joanne that it was pro-
jected " des 1172," but commenced only
in the first years of the thirteenth cen-
tury. " The nave," the writer adds,
" was finished tant bien que mal,faute de
ressources ; thefagade is of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in its lower
part, and of the fourteenth in its up-
per." The allusion to the nave means
the omission of the transepts. The west
front consists of two vast but imperfect
towers ; one of which (the south) is im-
mensely buttressed, so that its outline
slopes forward, like that of a pyramid,
being the taller of the two. If they
had spires, these towers would be pro-
digious ; as it is, given the rest of the
church, they are wanting in elevation.
There are five deeply recessed portals,
all in a row, each surmounted with a
gable ; the gable over the central door
being exceptionally high. Above the
porches, which give the measure of its
width, the front rears itself, piles itself,
on a great scale, carried up by galleries,
arches, windows, sculptures, and sup-
ported by the extraordinarily thick but-
tresses of which I have spoken, and
which, though they embellish it with
deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not
improve its style. The portals, espe-
cially the middle one, are extremely in-
teresting ; they are covered with curi-
VOL. LII. — NO. 311. 20

ous early sculptures. The middle one,
however, I must describe alone. It has
no less than six rows of figures — the
others have four — some of which, no-
tably the upper one, are still in their
places. The arch at the top has three
tiers of elaborate imagery. The up-
per of these is divided by the figure of
Christ in judgment, of great size, stiff
and terrible, with outstretched arms.
On either side of him are ranged three
or four angels, with the instruments of
the Passion. Beneath him, in the second
frieze, stands the angel of justice, with
his scales ; and on either side of him is
the vision of the last judgment. The
good prepare, with infinite titillation
and complacency, to ascend to the skies ;
while the bad are dragged, pushed,
hurled, stuffed, crammed, into pits and
caldrons of fire. There is a charming
detail in this section. Beside the angel,
on the right, where the wicked are the
prey of demons, stands a little female
figure, that of a child, who, with hands
meekly folded and head gently raised,
waits for the stern angel to decide upon
her fate. In this fate, however, a dread-
ful big devil also takes a keen interest ;
he seems on the point of appropriating
the tender creature ; he has a face like
a goat and an enormous hooked nose.
But the angel gently lays a hand upon
the shoulder of the little girl — the
movement is full of dignity — as if to
say, " No, she belongs to the other side."
The frieze below represents the general
resurrection, with the good and. the
wicked emerging from their sepulchres.
Nothing can be more quaint and charm-
ing than the difference shown in their
way of responding to the final trump.
The good get out of their tombs with a
certain modest gayety, an alacrity tem-
pered by respect ; one of them kneels
to pray as soon as he has disinterred
himself. You may know the wicked, on
the other hand, by their extreme shy-
ness ; they crawl out slowly and fear-
fully ; they hang back, and seem to say,

306

En Province.

[September,

" Oh, dear ! " These elaborate sculptures,
full of ingenuous intention and of the re-
ality of early faith, are in a remarkable
state of preservation ; they bear no su-
perficial signs of restoration and appear
scarcely to have suffered from the centu-
ries. They are delightfully expressive ;
the artist had the advantage of knowing
exactly the effect he wished to produce.
The interior of the cathedral has a great
simplicity and majesty, and above all
a tremendous height. The nave is ex-
traordinary in this respect ; it dwarfs
everything else I know. I should add,
however, that I am, in architecture, al-
ways of the opinion of the last speaker.
Any great building seems to me, while I
look at it, the ultimate expression. At
any rate, during the hour that I sat gaz-
ing along the high vista of Bourges, the
interior of the great vessel corresponded
to my vision of the evening before. There
is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infin-
itude, about such an edifice : it soothes
and purifies the spirit, it illuminates the
mind. There are two aisles, on either
side, in addition to the nave — five in
all — and, as I have said, there are no
transepts ; an omission which length-
ens the vista, so that from my place
near the door the central jeweled win-
dow in the depths of the perpendicular
choir seemed a mile or two away. The
second, or outward, of each pair of
aisles is too low, and the first too high ;
without this inequality the nave would
appear to take an even more prodigious
flight. The double aisles pass all the
way round the choir, the windows of
which are inordinately rich in magnifi-
cent old glass. I have seen glass as fine
in other churches ; but I think I have
never seen so much of it at once.

Beside the cathedral, on the north, is
a curious structure of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century, which looks like an
enormous flying buttress, with its sup-
port, sustaining the north tower. It
makes a massive arch, high in the air,
and produces a very picturesque effect

us people pass under it to the open gar-
dens of the Archeveche, which extend
to a considerable distance in the rear
of the church. The structure support-
ing the arch has the girth of a larg-
ish house, and contains chambers with
whose uses I am unacquainted, but to
which the deep pulsations of the cathe-
dral, the vibration of its mighty bells
and the roll of its organ-tones, must be
transmitted even through the great arm
of stone. The archiepiscopal palace,
not walled in as at Tours, is visible as
a stately habitation of the last century,
now in course of reparation in conse-
quence of a fire. From this side, and
from the gardens of the palace, the nave
of the cathedral is visible in all its great
length and height, with its extraordina-
ry multitude of supports. The gardens
aforesaid, accessible through tall iron
gates, are the promenade — the Tuile-
ries — of the town, and, very pretty in
themselves, are immensely set off by the
overhanging church. It was warm and
sunny ; the benches were empty ; I sat
there a long time, in that pleasant state
of mind which visits the traveler in for-
eign towns, when he is not too hurried,
while he wonders where he had better
go next. The straight, unbroken line
of the roof of the cathedral was very
noble ; but I could t see from this point
how much finer the effect would have
been if the towers, which had dropped
almost out of sight, might have been car-
ried still higher. The archiepiscopal gar-
dens look down at one end over a sort
of esplanade or suburban avenue which
lies at a lower level, on which they
open, and where several detachments of
soldiers (Bourges is full of soldiers)
had just been drawn up. The civil pop-
ulation was also collecting, and I saw
that something was going to happen.
I learned that a private of the Chas-
seurs was to be " broken " for stealing,
and every one was eager to beheld the
ceremony. Sundry other detachments
arrived on the ground, besides many of

1883.]

En Province.

307

the military who had come as a matter
of taste. One of them described to me
the process of degradation from the
ranks, and I felt for a moment a hideous
curiosity to see it, under the influence
of which I lingered a little. But only
a little ; the hateful nature of the spec-
tacle hurried me away, at the same time
that others were hurrying forward. As
I turned my back upon it I reflected
that human beings are cruel brutes,
though I could not flatter myself that
the ferocity of the thing was exclusively
French. In another country the con-
course would have been equally great,
and the moral of it all seemed to be that
even the military should n't steal.

II.

The cathedral is not the only lion of
Bourges ; the house of Jacques Coeur is
an object of interest scarcely less pos-
itive. This remarkable man had a very
strange history, and he too was " bro-
ken," like the wretched soldier whom I
did not stay to see. He has been re-
habilitated, however, by an age which
does not fear the imputation of paradox,
and a marble statue of him ornaments
the street in front' of his house. To
interpret him according to this image —
a womanish figure in a long robe arid a
turban, with big bare arms and a dra-
matic pose — would be to think of him
as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore
the dress of his period, but his spirit
was very modern ; he was a Vanderbilt
or Rothschild of the fifteenth century.
He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII.
with money to pay the troops who, under
the heroic Maid, drove the English from
French soil. His house, which to-day
is used as a Palais de Justice, appears
to have been regarded at the time it
was built very much as the residence of
Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded, in New
York, to-day. It standg on the edge of
the hill on which most of the town is
planted, so that, behind, it plunges down
to a lower level, and, if you approach

it on that side, as I did, to come round
to the front of it you have to ascend
a longish flight of steps. The back,
of old, must have formed a portion
of the city-wall ; at any rate, it offers
to view two big towers, which Joanne
says were formerly part of the defense
of Bourges. From the lower level of
which I speak — the square in front
of the post-office — the palace of Jacques
Cosur looks very big and strong and
feudal ; from the upper street, in front
of it, it looks very handsome and deli-
cate. To this street it presents two
stories and a considerable length of
facade; and it has, both within and
without, a great deal of curious and
beautiful detail. Above the portal, in
the stonework, are two false windows, in
which two figures, a man and a woman,
apparently household servants, are rep-
resented, in sculpture, as looking down
into the street. The effect is homely,
yet grotesque, and the figures are suffi-
ciently living to make one commiserate
them for having been condemned, in so
dull a town, to spend several centuries
at the window. They appear to be
watching for the return of their master,
• who left his beautiful house one morn-
ing, and never came back. The history
of Jacques Coaur, which has been written
by M. Pierre Clement, in a volume
crowned by the French Academy, is
very wonderful and interesting, but I
have no space to go into it here. There
is no more curious example, and few
more tragical, of a great fortune crum-
bling from one day to the other, or of the
antique superstition that the gods grow
jealous of human success. Merchant,
millionaire, banker, ship-owner, royal fa-
vorite and minister of finance, explorer
of the East and monopolist of the glit-
tering trade between that quarter of the
globe and his own, great capitalist who
had anticipated the brilliant operations
of the present time, he expiated his pros-
perity by poverty, imprisonment, and
torture. The obscure points in his career

308

have been elucidated by M. Clement,
who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid
picture of the corrupt and exhausted
state of France during the middle of the
fifteenth century, lie has shown that
the spoliation of the great merchant was
a deliberately calculated act, and that the
king sacrificed him without scruple or
shame to the avidity of a singularly vil-
lainous set of courtiers. The whole story
is an extraordinary picture of high-hand-
ed rapacity — the crudest possible asser-
tion of the right of the stronger. The
victim was stripped of his property, but
escaped with his life, made his way out
of France, and, betaking himself to Italy,
offered his services to the Pope. It is
proof of the consideration that he en-
joyed in Europe, and of the variety of
his accomplishments, that Calixtus III.
should have appointed him to take com-
mand of a fleet which his Holiness was
fitting out against the Turks. Jacques
Coeur, however, was not destined to lead
it to victory. He died shortly after the
expedition had started, in the island of
Chios, in 1456. The house at Bourges,
his native place, testifies, in some degree
to his wealth and splendor, though it
has in parts that want of space which
is striking in many of the buildings of
the Middle Ages. The court, indeed, is
on a large scale, ornamented with tur-
rets and arcades, with several beautiful
windows, and with sculptures inserted
in the walls, representing the various
sources of the great fortune of the own-
er. M. Pierre Clement describes this
part of the house as having been of an
" incomparable richesse " — an estimate
of its charms which seems, slightly ex-
aggerated to-day. There is, however,
something delicate and familiar in the
bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, lit-
tle scenes of agriculture and industry,
which show that the proprietor was not
ashamed of calling attention to his har-
vests and enterprises. To-day we should
question the taste of such allusions, even
in plastic form, in the house of a " mer-

En Province. [September,

chant prince " (say in the Fifth Ave-
nue). Why is it, therefore, that these
quaint little panels at Bourges do not
displease us ? It is perhaps because
things very ancient never, for some
mysterious reason, appear vulgar. This
fifteenth-century millionaire, with his
palace, his autobiographical sculptures,
may have produced that impression on
some critical spirits of his own day.

The portress who showed me into the
building was a' dear little old woman,
with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face
' — a little white, aged face, with dark,
pretty eyes and the most considerate
manner. She took me into an upper
hall, where there were a couple of cu-
rious chimney-pieces and a fine old oak-
en roof, the latter representing the hol-
low of a long boat. There is a certain
oddity in a native of Bourges, an inland
town if there ever was one, without
even a river (to call a river) to encour-
age nautical ambitions, having found his
end as admiral of a fleet ; but this boat-
shaped roof, which is extremely grace-
ful and is repeated in another apart-
ment, would suggest that the imagina-
tion of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding
the waves. Indeed, as he trafficked in
Oriental products and owned many gal-
leons, it is probable that he was person-
ally as much at home in certain Medi-
terranean ports as in the capital of the
pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at
the ceilings of his mansion, he saw his
boats upside down, this was only a sug-
gestion of the shortest way of emptying
them of their treasures. He is present-
ed in person above one of the great
stone chimney-pieces, in company with
his wife, Macee de Leodepart — I like
to write such an extraordinary name.
Carved in white stone, the two sit play-
ing at chess at an open window, through
which they appear to give their atten-
tion much more to the passers-by than
to the game. They are also exhibited
in other attitudes ; though I do not rec-
ognize them in the composition on top

1883.]

JEn Province.

309

of one of the fire-places, which repre-
sents the battlements of a «astle, with
the defenders (little figures between the
crenelations) hurling down missiles with
a great deal of fury and expression. It
would have been hard to believe that
the man who surrounded himself with
these friendly and humorous devices had
been guilty of such wrong-doing as to
call down the heavy hand of justice. It
is a curious fact, however, that Bourges
contains legal associations of a purer
kind than the prosecution of Jacques
Cosur, which, in spite of the rehabili-
tations of history can hardly be said yet
to have terminated, inasmuch as the
law-courts of the city are installed in
his quondam residence. At a short dis-
tance from it stands the Hotel Cujas, one
of the curiosities of Bourges and habi-
tation for many years of the great ju-
risconsult who revived in the sixteenth
century the study of the Roman law,
and professed it during the close of his
life in the university of the capital of
Berry. The learned Cujas had in spite
of his sedentary pursuits led a very wan-
dering life ; he died at Bourges in the
year 1590. Sedentary pursuits is per-
haps not exactly what I should call
them, having read in the Biographic
Uuiverselle, sole source of my knowl-
edge of the renowned Cujacius, that his
usual manner of study was to spread
himself on his belly on the floor. He
did not sit down ; he lay down ; and the
Biographic Universelle has (for so grave
a work) an amusing picture of the short,
fat, untidy scholar dragging himself
a plat ventre across his room, from one
pile of books to the other. The house
in which these singular gymnastics took
place, and which is now the headquar-
ters of the gendarmerie, is one of the
most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapi-
dated and discolored, it has a charming
Renaissance front. A high wall separates
it from thastreet, and on this wall, which
is divided by a large open gateway, are
perched two overhanging turrets. The

open gateway admits you to the court,
beyond which tb^e melancholy mansion
erects itself, decorated also with turrets,
with fine old windows, and with a beau-
tiful tone of faded red brick and rusty
stone. It is a charming encounter for a
provincial by-street ; one of those acci-
dents in the hope of which the traveler
with a propensity for sketching (whether
on a little paper block or on the tablets
of his brain) decides to turn a corner at
a venture. A brawny gendarme, in his
shirt-sleeves, was polishing his boots in
the court ; an ancient, knotted vine, for-
lorn of its clusters, hung itself over a
doorway and dropped its shadow on the
rough grain of the wall. The place was
very sketchable. I am sorry to say, how-
ever, that it was almost the only " bit."
Various other curious old houses are sup-
posed to exist at Bourges, and I wandered
vaguely about in search of them. But
I had little success, and I ended by be-
coming skeptical. Bourges is a ville de
province in the full force of the term,
especially as applied invidiously. The
streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have
very wide cobble-stones ; the houses for
the most part are shabby, without local
color. The look of things is neither
modern nor antique — a kind of medi-
ocrity of middle age. There is an enor-
mous number of blank walls — walls of
gardens, of courts, of private houses —
that avert themselves from the street,
as if in natural chagrin at there being
so little to see. Round about is a dull,
flat, featureless country, on which the
magnificent cathedral looks down. There
is a peculiar dullness and ugliness in a
French town of this type, which, I must
immediately add, is not the most fre-
quent one. In Italy everything has a
charm, a color, a grace ; even desolation
and ennui. In England a cathedral-city
may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to
be mellow. In the course of six weeks
spent en province, however, I saw few
places that had not more expression than
Bourses.

310

En Province.

I went back to the cathedral; that,
after all, was a feature. Then I re-
turned to my hotel, where it was time
to dine, and sat down, as usual, with the
coinmis-voyngeurs, who cut their bread
oil their thumb and partook of every
course ; and after this repast I repaired
for a while to the cafe, which occupied a
part of the basement of the inn and
opened into its court. This cafe was a
friendly, homely, sociable spot, where it
seemed the habit of the master of the es-
tablishment to tutoyerhis customers, and
the practice of the Customers to tutoyer
the waiter. Under these circumstances,
the waiter of course felt justified in sit-
ting down at the same table as a gen-
tleman who had come in and asked him
for writing-materials. He served this
gentleman with a horrible little portfo-
lio, covered with shiny black cloth and
accompanied with two sheets of thin pa-
per, three wafers, and one of those instru-
ments of torture which pass in France
for pens — these being the utensils in-
variably evoked by such a request ; and
then, finding himself at leisure, he placed
himself opposite and began to write a
letter of his own. This trifling incident
reminded me afresh that France is a
democratic country. I think I received
an admonition to the same effect from
the free, familiar way in which the game
of whist was going on just behind me.
It was attended with a great deal of
noisy pleasantry, flavored every now
and then with a dash of irritation. There
was a young man of whom I made a
note ; he was such a beautiful specimen
of his class. Sometimes he was very
facetious, chattering, joking, punning,
showing off ; then, as the game went on
and he lost, and had to pay the " con-
sommation" he dropped his amiability,
slanged his partner, declared he would
n't play any more, and went away in a
fury. Nothing could be more perfect or
more amusing than the contrast. The
manner of the whole affair was such as,
I apprehend, one would not have seen

among our English-speaking people ;
both the Jauntiuess of the first phase
and the petulance of the second. To
hold the balance straight, however, I
may remark that if the men were all
fearful " cads," they were, with their
cigarettes and their inconsistency, less
heavy, less brutal, than our dear Eng-
lish-speaking cad ; just as the bright
little cafe, where a robust materfamilias,
doling out sugar and darning a stock-
ing, sat in her place under the mirror
behind the comptoir, was a much more
civilized spot than a British public-house,
or a " commercial room," with pipes
and whisky, or even than an American
saloon.

in.

It is very certain that when I left
Tours for Le Mans it was a journey and
not an excursion ; for I had no intention
of coming back. The question, indeed,
was to get away ; no easy matter in
France, in the early days of October,
when the whole jeunesse of the country
is going back to school. It is accompa-
nied, apparently, with parents and grand-
parents, and it fills the trains with little
pale-faced lyceens, who gaze out of the
windows with a longing, lingering air,
not unnatural on the part of small mem-
bers of a race in which life is intense,
who are about to be restored to those big
educative barracks that do such violence
to our American appreciation of the
opportunities of boyhood. The train
stopped every five minutes ; but fortu-
nately the country was charming, hilly
and bosky, eminently good-humored,
and dotted here and there with a smart
little chateau. The old capital of the
province of the Maine, which has given
its name to a great American State, is
a fairly interesting town, but I confess
that I found in it less than I expected
to admire. My expectations had doubt-
less been my own fault ; there is no par-
ticular reason why Le Mana should fas-
cinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed —
a much better hill than the gentle swell

1883.]

En Province.

311

of Bourges. This hill, however, is not
steep in all directions ; from the rail-
way, as I arrived, it was not even per-
ceptible. Siuce I am making compar-
isons, I may remark that, on the other
hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an
appreciably better inu than the Boule
d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a
small market-place which has a certain
amount of character and seems to be
slipping down the slope on which it
lies, though it has in the middle an ugly
halle, or circular market-house, to keep
it in position. At Le Mans, as" at
Bourges, my first business was with the
cathedral, to which I lost no time in di-
recting my steps. It suffered by jux-
taposition to the great church I had
seen a few days before ; yet it has some
noble features. It stands on the edge
of the eminence of the town, which
falls straight away on two sides of it,
and makes a striking mass, bristling be-
hind, as you see it from below, with
rather small but singularly numerous
flying buttresses. On my way to it I
happened to walk through the one
street which contains a few ancient and
curious houses ; a very crooked and un-
tidy lane, of really mediaeval aspect,
honored with the denomination of the
Grand' Rue. Here is the house of
Queen Berengaria — an absurd name,
as the building is of a date some three
hundred years later than the wife of
Richard Cceur de Lion, who has a se-
pulchral monument in the south aisle
of the cathedral. The structure in ques-
tion — very sketchable, if the sketcher
could get far enough away from it —
ia an elaborate little dusky faqade, over-
hanging the street, ornamented with
panels of stone, which are covered with
delicate Renaissance sculpture. A fat
old woman, standing in the door of a
small grocer's shop next to it — a most
gracious old woman, with a bristling
mustache and a charming manner —
told me what the house was, and also in-
dicated to me a rotten-looking brown

wooden mansion, in the same street,
nearer the cathedral, as the Maisou
Scarron. The author of the Roman
Comique, and of a thousand facetious
verses, enjoyed for some years, in the
early part of his life, a benefice in the
cathedral -of Le Mans, which gave him
a right to reside in one of the canonical
houses. He was rather an odd canon,
but his history is a combination of odd-
ities. He wooed the comic muse from the
arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same
position — he was unable even to go
down on his knees — prosecuted that
other suit which made him the first hus-
band of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was
to be the second. There was little of
comedy in the future Madame de Main-
tenon ; though after all there was doubt-
less as much as there need have been in
the wife of a poor man who was moved
to compose for his tomb such an epitaph
as this, which I quote from the Biog-
raphic Universelle : —

"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
Fit plus de pitie" que d'envie,
Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
Avant que de perdre la vie.
Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eVeille,
Car voicy la premiere nuit,
Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."

There is rather a quiet, satisfactory
place in front of the cathedral, with
some good " bits " in it ; notably a tur-
ret at the angle of one of the towers,
and a very fine, steep-roofed dwelling,
behind low walls, which it overlooks,
with a tall iron gate. This house has
two or three little pointed towers, a big,
black, precipitous roof, and a general
air of having had a history. There are
houses which are scenes, and there are
houses which are only houses. The
trouble with the domestic architecture
of the United States is that it is not
scenic, thank Heaven ! and the good
fortune of an old structure like the tur-
reted mansion on the hillside of Le
Mans is that it is not simply a house.
It is a place, as it were, as well. It

312

En Province.

[September,

would be well, indeed, if it might have
communicated a little of its expression
to the front of the cathedral, which
has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, un-
finished, this front has a Romanesque
portal, but nothing in the way of a
tower. One sees from without, at a
glance, the peculiarity of the church —
the disparity between the Romanesque
nave, which is small and of the twelfth
century, and the immense and splendid
transepts and choir, of a period a hun-
dred years later. Outside, this end of
the church rises far above the nave,
which looks merely like a long porch
leading to it, with a small and curi-
ous Romanesque porch in its own south
flank. The transepts, shallow but very
lofty, display to the spectators in the
place the reach of their two clere-story
windows, which occupy, above, the whole
expanse of the wall. The south transept
terminates in a sort of tower, which is
the only one of which the cathedral can
boast. "Within, the effect of the choir
is superb ; it is a church in itself, with
the nave simply for a point of view.
As I stood there, I read in my Murray
that it has the stamp of the date of the
perfection of pointed Gothic, and I
found nothing to object to the remark.
It suffers little by confrontation with
Bourges, and, taken in itself, seems to
me quite as fine. A passage of double
aisles surrounds it, with the arches that
divide them supported on very thick
round columns, not clustered. There
are twelve chapels in this passage, and
a charming little lady-chapel, filled with
gorgeous old glass. The sustained
height of this almost detached choir is
very noble ; its lightness and grace, its
soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to
places in the air from which it is slow
to descend. Like Tours, like Chartres,
like Bourges (apparently like all the
French cathedrals, and unlike several
English ones), Le Mans is rich in splen-
did glass. The beautiful upper win-
dows of the choir make, far aloft, a

sort of gallery of pictures, blooming
with vivid color. It is the south transept
that contains the formless image — a
clumsy stone woman, lying on her back
— which purports to represent Queen
Berengaria aforesaid. The view of the
cathedral from the rear is, as usual,
very fine. A small garden behind it
masks its base ; but you descend the
hill to a large place de foire, adjacent
to a fine old public promenade which
is known as Les Jacobins, a sort of
miniature Tuileries, where 1 strolled
for a while in rectangular alleys, des-
titute of herbage, and received a deeper
impression of vanished things. The
cathedral, on the pedestal of its hill,
looks considerably farther than the fair-
ground and the Jacobins, between the
rather bare poles of whose straightly-
plauted trees you may admire it at a
convenient distance. I admired it till I
thought I should remember it (better
than the event has proved), and then I
wandered away and looked at another
curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-
Couture. This sacred edifice made a
picture for ten minutes, but the picture
has faded now. I reconstruct a yellow-
ish-brown facade, and a portal fretted
with early sculptures ; but the details
have gone the way of all incomplete
sensations. After you have stood a
while in the choir of the cathedral, there
is no sensation at Le Mans that goes
very far. For some reason not now to
be traced, I had looked for more than
this. I think the reason was to some
extent simply in the name of the place,
for names, on the whole, whether they
be good reasons or not, are very active
ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken,
has a sturdy, feudal sound ; suggests
something dark and square, a vision of
old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had
been unduly impressed by the fact, ac-
cidentally revealed to me, that Henry
II., first of the English Plantagenets,
was born there. Of course it is easy to
assure one's self in advance, but does it

1883.]

En Province.

313

not often happen that one had rather
not be assured ? There is a pleasure
sometimes in running the risk of dis-
appointment. I took mine, such as it
was, quietly enough, while 1 sat be-
fore dinner at the door of one of the
cafes in the market-place, with a bitter-
et-curagao (invaluable pretext at such
an hour) to keep me company. I re-
member that in this situation there
came over me an impression which both
included and excluded all possible disap-
pointments. The afternoon was warm
and still ; the air was admirably soft.
The good Manceaux, in little groups
and pairs, were seated near me ; my
ear was soothed by the fine shades of
French enunciation, by the moulded
syllables of that perfect tongue. There
was nothing in particular in the pros-
pect to charm ; it was an average French
view. Yet I felt a charm, a kind of
sympathy, a sense of the completeness
of French life and of the lightness and
brightness of the social air ; together
with a desire to arrive at friendly judg-
ments, to express a positive interest.
I know not why this transcendental
mood should have descended upon me
then and there ; but that idle half hour
in front of the cafe, in the mild October
afternoon, suffused with human sounds,
is perhaps the most definite thing I
brought away from Le Mans.

IV.

I am shocked at finding, just after
this noble declaration of principles, that
in a little note-book, which at that time
I carried about with me, the celebrated
city of Angers is denominated a " sell."
I reproduce this vulgar term with the
greatest hesitation, and only because it
brings me more quickly to my point.
This point is that Angers belongs to
the disagreeable class of old towns that
have been, as the English say, " done
up." Not the oldness, but the newness,
of tlie place is what strikes the senti-
mental tourist to-day, as he wanders

with irritation along second-rate boule-
vards, looking vaguely about him for
absent gables. " Black Angers," in
short, is a victim of modern improve-
ments, and quite unworthy of its admira-
ble name — a name which, like that of
Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes,
a highly picturesque value. It looks
particularly well on the Shakespearean
page (in King John), where we imagine
it. uttered (though such would not have
been the utterance of the period) with
a fine old English accent. Angers fig-
ures with importance in early English
history : it was the capital city of the
Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey
of Anjou who married, as second hus-
band, the Empress Maud, daughter of
Henry I. and competitor of Stephen,
and became father of Henry II., first of
the Plantagenet kings, born, as we have
seen, at Le Mans. These facts create
a natural presumption that Angers will
look historic ; I turned them over in my
mind as I traveled in the train from Le
Mans, through a country that was really
pretty, and looked more like the usual
English than like the usual French
scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges
and a considerable rotundity in its trees.
On my way from the station to the
hotel, however, it became plain that I
should lack a good pretext for passing
that night at the Cheval Blanc ; I fore-
saw that I should have contented myself
before the end of the day. I remained
at the White Horse only long enough
to discover that it was an exceptionally
good provincial inn, one of the best that
I encountered during six weeks spent
in these establishments. " Stupidly and
vulgarly modernized " — that is another
phrase from my note-book, and note-
books are not obliged to be reasonable.
" There are some narrow and tortuous
streets, with a few curious old houses,"
I continue to quote ; " there is a castle,
of which the exterior is most extraordi-
nary, and there is a cathedral of moder-
ate interest." It is fair to say that the

314

En Province.

[September,

Chateau d'Angers is by itself worth a
pilgrimage ; the only drawback is that
you have seen it in a quarter of an hour.
You cannot do more than look at it, and
one good look does your business. It
has no beauty,' no grace, no detail, noth-
ing that charms or detains you; it is
simply very old and very big — so big
and so old that this simple impression is
enough, and it takes its place in your
recollections as a perfect specimen of
a superannuated stronghold. It stands
at one end of the town, surrounded by
a huge, deep moat, which originally con-
tained the waters of the Maine, now di-
vided from it by a quay. The water-
front of Angers is poor — wanting in
color and in movement ; and there is al-
ways an effect of perversity in a town
lying near a great river and yet not
upon it. The Loire is a few miles off,
but Angers contents itself with a meagre
affluent of that stream. The effect was
naturally much better when the huge,
dark mass of the castle, with its seven-
teen prodigious towers, rose out of the
protecting flood. These towers are of
tremendous girth and solidity ; they are
encircled with great bands, or hoops, of
white stone, and are much enlarged at
the base. Between them hang vast cur-
tains of infinitely old-looking masonry,
apparently a dense conglomeration of
slate — the material of which the town
was originally built (thanks to rich
quarries in the neighborhood), and to
which it owed its appellation of the
Black. There are no windows, no aper-
tures, and to-day no battlements nor
roofs. These accessories were removed
by Henry III., so that, in spite of its
grimness and blackness, the place has
not even the interest of looking like a
prison ; it being, as I suppose, the es-
sence of a prison not to be open to the
sky. The only features of the enor-
mous structure are the blank, sombre
stretches and protrusions of wall, the
effect of which, on so large a scale, is
strange and striking. Begun by Philip

Augustus, and terminated by St. Louis,
the Chateau d'Angers has of course a
great deal of history. The luckless Fou-
quet, the extravagant minister of finance
of Louis XIV., whose fall from the
heights of grandeur was so sudden and
complete, was confined here in 1661,
just after his arrest, which had taken
place at Nantes. Here, also, Huguenots
and Vendeans have suffered effective
captivity. I walked round the parapet
which protects the outer edge of the
moat (it is all up hill, and the moat
deepens and deepens), till I came to the
entrance which faces the town, and
which is as bare and strong as the rest.
The concierge took me into the court ;
but there was nothing there to see.
The place is used as a magazine of am-
munition, and the yard contains a multi-
tude of ugly buildings. The only thing
to do is to walk round the bastions for
the view ; but at the moment of my
visit the weather was thick, and the bas-
tions began and ended with themselves.
So I came out and took another look at
the big, black exterior, buttressed with
white-ribbed towers, and perceived that
a desperate sketcher might extract a
picture from it, especially if he were to
bring in, as they say, the little black
bronze statue of the good King Rene
(a weak production of David d'Angers),
which, standing within sight, ornaments
the melancholy faubourg. He would do
much better, however, with the very
striking old timbered house (I suppose
of the fifteenth century) which is called
the Maison d'Adam and is easily the
first specimen at Angers of the domestic
architecture of the past. This admira-
ble house, in the centre of the town,
gabled, elaborately timbered, and much
restored, is a really imposing monument.
The basement is occupied by a linen-
draper, who flourishes under the auspi-
cious sign of the Mere de Famille ; and
above his shop the tall front rises in
five overhanging stories. As the kouse
occupies the angle of a little place, this

1883.]

En Province.

315

front is double, and the black beams and
wooden supports, displayed over a large
surface and carved and interlaced, have
a high picturesqueness. The Maison
d'Adam is quite in the grand style ; and
I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
history attaches to its name. If I spoke
just above of the cathedral as " moder-
ate," I suppose I should beg its pardon ;
for this serious charge was probably
prompted by the fact that it consists
only of a nave, without side aisles. A
little reflection now convinces me that
such a form is a distinction ; and, indeed,
I find it mentioned, rather inconsistent-
ly, in my note-book, a little further on,
as " extremely simple and grand." The
nave is spoken of in the same volume
as " big, serious, and Gothic," though
the choir and transepts are noted as very
shallow. But it is not denied that the
air of the whole thing is original and
striking, and it would therefore appear,
after all, that the cathedral of Angers,
built during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, is a sufficiently honorable
church ; the more that its high west
front, adorned with a very primitive
Gothic portal, supports two elegant ta-
pering spires, between which, unfortu-
nately, an ugly modern pavilion has been
inserted. •

I remember nothing else at Angers
but the curious old Cafe Serin, where,
after I had had my dinner at the inn, I
went and waited for the train which,
at nine o'clock in the evening, was
to convey me, in a couple of hours, to
Nantes : an establishment remarkable
for its great size and its air of tar-
nished splendor, its brown gilding and
smoky frescoes, as also for the fact that
it was hidden away on the second floor
of an unassuming house in an unillumi-
iiated street. It hardly seemed a place
where you would drop in ; but when
once you had found it, it presented it-
self, with the cathedral, the castle, and
the Maison d'Adam, as one of the his-
torical monuments of Angers.

If I spent two nights at Nantes, it
was for reasons of convenience rather
than of sentiment ; though, indeed, I
spent them in a big circular room which
had a stately, lofty, last-century look —
a look that consoled me a little for the
whole place being dirty. The high, old-
fashioned inn (it had a huge, windy
porte-cochere, and you climbed a vast
black stone staircase to get to your
room) looked out on a dull square, sur-
rounded with other tall houses and oc-
cupied on one side by the theatre, a
pompous building, decorated with col-
umns and statues of the muses. Nantes
belongs to the class of towns which are
always spoken of as " fine," and its po-
sition near the mouth of the Loire gives
it, I believe, much commercial move-
ment. It is a spacious, rather regular
city, looking, in the parts that I trav-
ersed, neither very fresh nor very ven-
erable. It derives its principal charac-
ter from the handsome quays on the
Loire, which are overhung with tall
eighteenth-century houses (very numer-
ous, too, in the other streets) — houses
with big entresols marked by arched
windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails
of fine old ironwork. These features
exist in still better form at Bordeaux ;
but putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is
quite architectural. The view up and
down the quays has the cool, neutral
tone of color that one finds so often in
French waterside places — the bright
grayness which is the tone of French
landscape art. The whole city has
rather a grand, or at least an eminent-
ly well-established, air. During a day
passed in it, of course I had time to go
to the Musee ; the more so that I have a
weakness for provincial museums — a
sentiment that depends but little on the
quality of the collection. The pictures
may be bad, but the place is often curi-
ous ; and, indeed, from bad pictures, in
certain moods of the mind, there is a de-

316

En Province.

[September,

gree of entertainment to be derived. If
they are tolerably old, they are often
touching ; but they must have a relative
antiquity, for I confess I can do nothing
with works of art of which the badness
is of recent origin. The cool, still, emp-
ty chambers in which indifferent collec-
tions are apt to be preserved, the red
brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty
odor, the mementoes around you of
dead fashions, the snuffy custodian in a
black skull cap, who pulls aside a faded
curtain to show you the lustreless gem
of the museum — these things have a
mild historical quality, and the sallow
canvases after all illustrate something.
Many of those in the museum of Nantes
illustrate the taste of a successful war-
rior, having been bequeathed to the city
by Napoleon's marshal, Clarke (created
Due de Feltre). In addition to these
there is the usual number of specimens
of the contemporary French school,
culled from the annual Salons and pre-
sented to the museum by the state.
Wherever the traveler goes, in France,
he is reminded of this very honorable
practice — the purchase by the govern-
ment of a certain number of " pictures
of the year," which are presently dis-
tributed in the provinces. Governments
succeed each other and bid for success
by different devices ; but the " patronage
of art " is a plank, as we should say
here, in every platform. The works of
art are often ill selected — there is an
official taste which you immediately rec-
ognize — but the custom is essentially
liberal, and a government which should
neglect it would be felt to be painfully
incomplete. The only thing in this par-
ticular Musee that I remember is a
fine portrait of a woman, by Ingres —
very flat and Chinese, but with an inter-
est of line and a great deal of style.
There is a castle at Nantes which re-
sembles in some degree that of Augers,
but has, without, much less of the im-
pressiveness of great size, and, within,
much more interest of detail. The

court contains the remains of a very
fine piece of late Gothic, a tall, elegant
building of the sixteenth century. The
chateau is naturally not wanting in
history. It was the residence of the
old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought,
with the rest of the province, by the
Duchess Anne, the last representative
of that race, as her dowry, to Charles
VIII. I read in the excellent hand-
book of M. Joanne that it has been vis-
ited by almost every one of the kings of
France, from Louis XI. downward ; —
and also that it has served as a place of
sojourn less voluntary on the part of va-
rious other distinguished persons, from
the horrible Marechal de Retz, who, in
the fifteenth century, was executed at
Nantes for the murder of a couple of
hundred young children, sacrificed in
abominable rites, to the ardent Duchess
of Berry, mother of the Count of Cham-
bord, who was confined there for a few
hours in 1832, just after her arrest in
a neighboring house. I looked at the
house in question — you may see it
from the platform in front of the cha-
teau — and tried to figure to myself
that embarrassing scene. The duchess,
after having unsuccessfully raised the
standard of revolt (for the exiled Bour-
bons), in the Legitimist Bretagne, and
being " wanted," as the phrase is, by
the police of Louis Philippe, had hidden
herself in a small but loyal house at
Nantes, where, at the end of five months
of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold,
to the austere M. Guizot, by one of her
servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.
For many hours before her capture she
had been compressed into an interstice
behind a fireplace, and by the time she
was drawn forth into the light she had
been ominously scorched. The man
who showed me the castle indicated also
another historic spot, a house with lit-
tle tourelles, on the Quai de la Fosse, in
which Henry IV. is said to have signed
the Edict of Nantes. I am, however, not
in a position to answer for this pedigree.

1883.]

En Province.

317

There is another point in the history
of the fine old houses which command
the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may
be tolerably sure ; that is, their having,
placid as they stand there to-day, looked
down on the horrors of the Terror of
1793, the bloody reign of the monster
Carrier and his infamous noyades. The
most hideous episode of the Revolu-
tion was enacted at Nantes, where hun-
dreds of men and women, tied together
in couples, were set afloat upon rafts
and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
The tall, eighteenth-century house, full
of the air noble, in France always re-
minds me of those dreadful years — •
of the street-scenes of the Revolution.
Superficially, the association is incon-
gruous, for nothing could be more for-
mal and decorous than the patent ex-
pression of these eligible residences.
But whenever I have a vision of pris-
oners bound on tumbrels that jolt slow-
ly to the scaffold, of heads carried on
pikes, of groups of heated citoyennes
shaking their fists at closed coach-win-
dows, I see in the background the well-
ordered features of the architecture of
the period — the clear gray stone, the
high pilasters, the arching lines of *the
entresol, the classic pediment, the slate-
covered attic. There is not much archi-
tecture at Nantes except the domestic.
The cathedral, with a rough west front
and stunted towers, makes no impres-
sion as you approach it. It is true that
it does its best to recover its reputation
as soon as you have passed the thresh-
old. Begun in 1434 and finished about
the end of the fifteenth century, as I
discover in Murray, it has a magnificent
nave, not of great length, but of extraor-
dinary height and lightness. On the
other hand, it has no choir whatever.
There is much entertainment in France
in seeing what a cathedral will take
upon itself to possess or to lack ; for it
is only the smaller number that have
the full complement of features. Some
have a very fine nave and no choir ;

others a very fine choir and no nave.
Some have a rich outside and nothing
within ; others a very blank face and a
very glowing heart. There 'are a hun-
dred possibilities of poverty and wealth,
and they make the most unexpected
combinations. The great treasure of
Nantes is the two noble sepulchral mon-
uments which occupy either transept,
and one of which has (in its nobleness)
the rare distinction of being a produc-
tion of our own time. On the south
side stands the tomb of Francis II., the
last of the Dukes of Brittany, and of
his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erect-
ed in 1507 by their daughter Anne,
whom we have encountered already at
the Chateau de Nantes, where she was
born ; at Langeais, where she married
her first husband ; at Amboise, where she
lost him ; at Blois, where she married
her second, the "good " Louis XII., who
divorced an impeccable "spouse to make
room for her, and where she herself
died. Transferred to the cathedral from
a demolished convent, this monument,
the masterpiece of Michel Colomb, au-
thor of the charming tomb of the chil-
dren of Charles VIII. and the aforesaid
Anne, which we admired at Saint Ga-
tien of Tours, is one of the most brill-
iant works of the French Renaissance.
It has a splendid effect, and is in per-
fect preservation. A great table of
black marble supports the reclining fig-
ures of the duke and duchess, who lie
there peacefully and majestically, iu
their robes and crowns, with their heads
each on a cushion, the pair of which are
supported, from behind, by three charm-
ing little kneeling angels ; at the foot of
the quiet couple are a lion and a grey-
hound, with heraldic devices. At each
of the angles of the table is a large fig-
ure in white marble of a woman elab-
orately dressed, with a symbolic mean-
ing; and these figures, with their con-
temporary faces and dothes, which give
them the air of realistic portraits, are
truthful and living, if not remarkably

318

En Province.

[September,

beautiful. Round the sides of the tomb
are small images of the apostles. There
is a kind of masculine completeness in
the work, <ind a certain robustness of
taste.

In nothing were the sculptors of the
Renaissance more fortunate than in be-
ing in advance of us with their tombs:
they have left us nothing to say in re-
gard to the great final contrast — the
contrast between the immobility of
death and the trappings and honors that
survive. They expressed in every way
in which it was possible to express it
the solemnity of their conviction that
the marble image was a part of the per-
sonal greatness of the defunct, and the
protection, the redemption, of his mem-
ory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is
a skeptical affair ; it insists too little on
the honors. I say this in the face of
the fact that one has only to step across
the cathedral of -Nantes to stand in the
presence of one of the purest and most
touching of modern tombs. Catholic
Brittany has erected in the opposite
transept a monument to one of the most
devoted of her sons, General de Lamo-
riciere, the defender of the Pope, the
vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble
work, from the hand of Paul Dubois,
one of the most interesting of that new
generation of sculptors who have re-
vived in France an art of which our
overdressed century had begun to de-
spair, has every merit but the absence
of a certain prime feeling. It is the
echo of an earlier tune — an echo with
a beautiful cadence. Under a Renais-
sance canopy of white marble, elabo-
rately worked with arabesques and cher-
ubs, in a relief so low that it gives the
work a certain look of being softened
and worn by time, lies the body of the
Breton soldier, with a crucifix clasped
to his breast and a shroud thrown over
his body. At each of the angles sits a
figure in bronze, the two best of which,
representing Charity and Military Cour-
age, had given me extraordinary pleas-

ure when they were exhibited (in the
clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are
admirably cast, and they have a certain
greatness : the one, a serene, robust
young mother, beautiful in line and at-
titude ; the other, a lean and vigilant
young man, in a helmet that overshadows
his serious eyes, resting an outstretched
arm, an admirable military member,
upon the hilt of a sword. These figures
contain abundant assurance that M.
Paul Dubois has been attentive to Mi-
chael Angelo, whom we have all heard
called a splendid example but a bad
model. The visor-shadowed face of his
warrior is more or less a reminiscence
of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'
Medici at .Florence ; but it is doubtless
none the worse for that. The interest
of the work of Paul Dubois is its pecul-
iar seriousness, a kind of moral good
faith which is not the commonest fea-
ture of French art, and which, united as
it is in this case with exceeding knowl-
edge and a remarkable sense of form,
produces an impression of deep refine-
ment. The whole monument is a proof
of exquisitely careful study ; but I am
not sure that this impression on the
part of the spectator is altogether a
happy one. It explains much of its
great beauty, and it also explains, per-
haps, a little of a certain weakness.
That word, however, is scarcely in place ;
I only mean that M. Dubois has made a
visible effort, which has been most fruit-
ful. Simplicity is not always strength,
and our complicated modern genius con-
tains treasures of intention. This fath-
omless modern element is an immense
charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois.
I am lost in admiration of the deep aes-
thetic experience, the enlightenment of
taste, revealed by such work. After
that, I only hope that Giuseppe Gari-
baldi may have a monument as fair.

VI.

To go from Nantes to La Rochelle
you travel straight southward, across

1883.]

En Province.

319

the historic bocage of La Vendee, the
home of royalist bush-fighting. The
country, which is exceedingly pretty,
bristles with copses, orchards, and
hedges, and with trees more spreading
and sturdy than the traveler is apt to
deem the feathery foliage of France. It
is true that as I proceeded it flattened
out a good deal, so that for an hour there
was a vast featureless plain, whieh of-
fered me little entertainment beyond the
general impression that I was approach-
ing the Bay of Biscay (from which, in
reality, I was yet far distant). As we
drew near La Rochelle, however, the
prospect brightened considerably, and
the railway kept its course beside a
charming little canal, or canalized river,
bordered with trees, and with small,
neat, bright-colored, and yet old-fash-
ioned cottages and villas, which stood
back on the further side, behind small
gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches
of turf. The whole effect was Dutch
and delightful ; and in being delightful,
though not in being Dutch, it prepared
me for the charms of La Rochelle,
which from the moment I entered it I
perceived to be a fascinating little town,
a most original mixture of brightness
and dullness. Part of its brightness
comes from its being extraordinarily
clean — iu which, after all, it is Dutch ;
a virtue not particularly noticeable at
Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. When-
ever I go southward, if it be only
twenty miles, I begin to look out for
the south; prepared as I am to find the
careless grace of those latitudes even in
things of which it may be said that they
may be south of something, but are not
southern. To go from Boston to New
York (in this state of mind) is almost
as soft a sensation as descending the
Italian side of the Alps ; and to go from
New York to Philadelphia is to enter a
zone of tropical luxuriance and warmth.
Given this absurd disposition, I could
not fail to flatter myself, on reaching
La Rochelle, that 1 was already in the

Midi, and to perceive in everything, in
the language of the country, the carac-
tere meridional. Really, a great many
things had a hint of it. For that mat-
ter, it seems to me that to arrive in the
south at a bound — to wake up there,
as it were — would be a very imperfect
pleasure. The full pleasure is to ap-
proach by stages and gradations ; to ob-
serve the successive shades of difference
by which it ceases to be the north.
These shades are exceedingly fine, but
your true south - lover has an eye for
them all. If he perceive them at New
York and Philadelphia — we imagine
him boldly as liberated from Boston —
how could he fail to perceive them at
La Rochelle ? The streets of this dear
little city are lined with arcades — good,
big, straddling arcades of stone, such as
befit a land of hot summers, and which
recalled to me, not to go further, the
dusky porticoes of Bayonne. It con-
tains, moreover, a great wide place
d'armes, which looked for all the world
like the piazza of some dead Italian
town, empty, sunny, grass-grown, with
a row of yellow houses overhanging it,
an unfrequented cafe, with a striped
awning, a tall, cold, florid, uninteresting
cathedral of the eighteenth century on
one side, and on the other a shady walk,
which forms part of an old rampart. I
followed this walk for some time, under
the stunted trees, beside the grass-cov-
ered bastions ; it is very charming, wind-
ing and wandering, always with trees.
Beneath the rampart is a tidal river,
and on the other side, for a long dis-
tance, the mossy walls of the immense
garden of a seminary. Three hundred
years ago La Rochelle was the great
French stronghold of Protestantism ;
but to-day it appears to be a nursery of
Papists.

The walk upon the rampart led me
round to one of the gates of the town,
where I found some small modern forti-
fications and sundry red-legged soldiers,
and, beyond the fortifications, another

320

En Province.

[September,

shady walk — a mail, as the French
say, as well as a champ de manceuvre —
on which latter expanse the poor little
red-legs were doing their exercise. It
was all very quiet and very picturesque,
rather in miniature ; and at once very
tidy and a little out of repair. This,
however, was but a meagre back-view
of La Rochelle, or poor side-view at
best. There are. other gates than the
small fortified aperture just mentioned ;
one of them, an old gray arch beneath a
fine clock-tower, I had passed through
on my way from the station. This pic-
turesque Tour de 1'Horloge separates
the town proper from the port ; for be-
yond the old gray arch the place pre-
sents its bright, expressive little face to
the sea. I had a charming walk about
the harbor, and along the stone piers and
sea-walls that shut it in. This indeed,
to take things in their order, was after
I had had my breakfast (which I took
on arriving) and after I had been to the
hotel de ville. The inn had a long, nar-
row garden behind it, with some very
tall trees ; and passing through this gar-
den to a dim and secluded salle a man-
ger, buried in the heavy shade, I had,
while I sat at my repast, a feeling of
seclusion which amounted almost to a
sense of incarceration. I lost this sense,
however, after I had paid my bill, and
went out to look for traces of the fa-
mous siege, which is the principal title
of La Rochelle to renown. I had come
thither partly because I thought it would
be interesting to stand for a few mo-
ments in so gallant a spot, and partly
because, I confess, I had a curiosity to
see what had been the starting-point of
the Huguenot emigrants who founded
the town of New Rochelle, in the State
of New York, a place in which I had
passed certain memorable hours. It was
strange to think, as I strolled through
the peaceful little port, that these quiet
waters, during the wars of religion, had
swelled with a formidable naval power.
The Rochelais had fleets and admirals,

and their stout little Huguenot bottoms
carried defiance up and down. To say
that I found any traces of the siege
would be to misrepresent the taste for
vitid whitewash by which La Rochelle
is distinguished to-day. The only trace
is the dent in the marble top of the ta-
ble on which, in the hotel de ville, Jean
Guiton, the mayor of the city, brought
down his dagger with an oath, when
in 1628 the vessels and regiments of
Richelieu closed about it on sea and
land. This terrible functionary was the
soul of the resistance ; he held out from
February to October, in the midst of
pestilence and famine. The whole epi-
sode has a brilliant place among the
sieges of history ; it has been related a
hundred times, and I may only glance at
it and pass. I limit my ambition, in
these light pages, to speaking of those
things of which I have personally re-
ceived an impression ; and I have no
such impression of the defense of La
Rochelle. The hotel de ville is a pretty
little building, in the style of the Re-
naissance of Francis I. ; but it has left
much of its interest in the hands of the
restorers. It has been " done up " with-
out mercy ; its natural place would be
at Rochelle the New. A sort of bat-
tlemented curtain, flanked with turrets,
divides it from the street and contains a
low door (a low door in a high wall is
always felicitous), which admits you to
an inner court, where you discover the
face of the building. It has statues set
into it, and is raised upon a very low and
very deep arcade. The principal func-
tion of the deferential old portress who
conducts you over the place is to call
your attention to the indented table of
Jean Guiton ; but she shows you other
objects of interest besides. The inte-
rior is absolutely new and extremely
sumptuous, abounding in tapestries, up-
holstery, morocco, velvet, and satin.
This is especially the case with a really
beautiful grande salle, where, surrounded
with the most expensive upholstery, the

1883.] En Province.

mayor holds his official receptions. (So,
at least, said my worthy portress.) The
mayors of La liochelle appear to have
changed a good deal since the days of
the grim Guiton, but these evidences of
municipal splendor are interesting for
the light they throw on French man-
ners. Imagine the mayor of an Eng-
lish or an American town of twenty
thousand inhabitants holding magisterial
soirees in the town - hall ! The said
grande salle, which is unchanged in form
and in its larger features, is, I believe,
the room in which the Rochelais debated
as to whether they should shut them-
selves up, and decided in the affirmative.
The table and chair of Jean Guiton have
been restored, like everything else, and
are very elegant and coquettish pieces
of furniture — incongruous relics of a
season of starvation and blood. I be-
lieve that Protestantism is somewhat
shrunken to-day, at La Rochelle, and
has taken refuge mainly in the haute
societe and in a single place of wor-
ship. There was nothing particular to
remind me of its supposed austerity, as,
after leaving the hotel de ville, I walked
along the empty porticoes and out of
the Tour de 1'Horloge, which I have
already mentioned. If I stopped and
looked up at this venerable monument,
it was not to ascertain the hour, for I
foresaw that I should have more time
at La Rochelle than I knew what to
do with ; but because its high, gray,
weather-beaten face was an obvious sub-
ject for a sketch.

The little port, which has two basins,
and is accessible only to vessels of light
tonnage, had a certain gayety and as
much local color as you please. Fisher
folk of picturesque type were strolling
about, most of them Bretons ; several
of the men with handsome, simple faces,
not at all brutal, and with a splendid
Jbrownness — the golden-brown color, on
cheek and beard, that you see on an
old Venetian sail. It was a squally,
showery day, with sudden drizzles of

VOL. LII. NO. 311. 21

321

sunshine ; rows of rich-toned fishing-
smacks were drawn up along the quays.
The harbor is effective to the eye by
reason of three battered old towers
which, at different points, overhang it,
and look infinitely weather-washed and
sea-silvered. The most striking of
these, the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big,
gray mass, of the fifteenth century,
flanked with turrets and crowned with
a Gothic steeple. I found it was called
by the people of the place the Tour des
Quatre Sergents, though I know not.
what connection it has with the touch-
ing history of the four young sergeants
of the garrison of La Rochelle, who
were arrested in 1821 as conspirators
against the government of the Bour-
bons, and executed, amid a general in-
dignation, in Paris, in the following
year. The quaint little walk labeled
Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends
from beside the Grosse Horloge, leads
to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and
passes under it. This walk has the top
of the old town-wall, toward the sea,
for a parapet on one side, and is bor-
dered on the other with decent but ir-
regular little tenements of fishermen,
where brown old women, whose caps
are as white as if they were painted,
seem chiefly in possession. In this
direction there is a very pretty stretch
of shore, out of the town, through
the fortifications (which are Vauban's,
by the way) ; through, also, a diminu-
tive public garden or straggling shrub-
bery, which edges the water and carries
its stunted verdure as far as a big
Etablissement des Bains. It was too late
in the year to bathe, and the Etablisse-
ment had the bankrupt aspect which be-
longs to such places out of the season ;
so I turned my back upon it, and gained,
by a circuit in the course of which there
were sundry waterside items to observe,
the other side of the cheery little port, *
where there is a long breakwater and a
still longer sea-wall, on which I walked
a while, and inhaled the strong, salt

322 King's Chapel. [September,

breath of the Bay of Biscay. La Ro- est provincial society ; and, putting aside
chelle serves, in the months of July and the question of inns, it must be charm-
August, as a station de bains for a mod- ing on summer afternoons.

Henry James.

, KING'S CHAPEL.

Is it a weanling's weakness for the past

That in the stormy, rebel-breeding town,
Swept clean of relics by the levelling blast,
Still keeps our gray old chapel's name of " King's," —
Still to its outworn symbols fondly clings,
Its unchurched mitres and its empty crown ?

Poor harmless emblems ! All has shrunk away
That made them gorgons in the patriot's eyes ;

The priestly plaything harms us not to-day ;

The gilded crown is but a pleasing show,

An old-world heirloom, left from long ago,

Wreck of the past that memory bids us prize.

Lightly we glance the fresh-cut marbles o'er ;

Those two of earlier date our eyes enthrall :
The proud old Briton's by the western door,
And hers, the Lady of Colonial days,
Whose virtues live in long-drawn classic phrase, —

The fair Francisca of the southern wall.

Ay ! those were goodly men that Reynolds drew,

And stately dames our Copley's canvas holds,
To their old Church, their Royal Master, true,
Proud of the claim their valiant sires had earned,
That " gentle blood," not lightly to be spurned,
Save by the churl ungenerous Nature moulds.

All vanished ! It were idle to complain

That ere the fruits shall come the flowers must fall ;
Yet somewhat we have lost amidst our gain,
Some rare ideals time may not restore, —
The charm of courtly breeding, seen no more,

And reverence, dearest ornament of all.

— Thus musing, to the western wall I came,

Departing : lo ! a tablet fresh and fair,
Where glistened many a youth's remembered name
In golden letters on the snow-white stone, —
Young lives these aisles and arches once have known,

Their country's bleeding altar might not spare.

1883.] Our Nominating Machines. 323

These died that we might claim a soil unstained,

Save by the blood of heroes ; their bequests
A realm unsevered and a race unchained.
Has purer blood through Norman veins come down
From the rough knights that clutched the Saxon's crown

Than warmed the pulses in these faithful breasts?

These, too, shall live in history's deathless page,

High on the slow-wrought pedestals of fame,
Ranged with the heroes of remoter age;
They could not die who left their nation free,
Firm as the rock, unfettered as the sea,

Its heaven unshadowed by the cloud of shame.

While on the storied past our memory dwells,

Our grateful tribute shall not be denied, —
The wreath, the cross of rustling immortelles ;
And willing hands shall clear each darkening bust,
As year by year sifts down the clinging dust

On Shu-ley's beauty and on Vassall's pride.

But for our own, our loved and lost, we bring

With throbbing hearts and tears that still must flow,

In full-heaped hands, the opening flowers of spring,

Lilies half-blown, and budding roses, red

As their young cheeks, before the blood was shed
That lent their morning bloom its generous glow.

Ah, who shall count a rescued Nation's debt,

Or sum in words our martyrs' silent claims?
Who shall our heroes' dread exchange forget, —
All life, youth, hope, could promise to allure
For all that soul could brave or flesh endure?

They shaped our future ; we but carve their names.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

OUR NOMINATING MACHINES.

THE test question which decided the control of his own party machinery,

political supremacy of William M.Tweed, Whenever it was possible, — and with

and gave him for a time absolute mas- the resources at his command few

tery of the first municipal government things of the sort were impossible for

in America, arose in 1870, over the pro- him at that time, — his henchmen ob-

posed new charter for the city of New tained access to the Republican district'

York. Tweed owed his victory to his associations, which held, as they hold

secret manipulation of the Republican to-day, full disposition of the party

senatorial caucus even more than to his nominations in the city, and elected del-

324

Our Nominating Machines.

[September,

egates who were pledged to do the bid-
ding of the Democratic boss.

The vast otlicial " patronage " which
lay at his disposal, the by-ways and
back lanes to means of money-makiug
aliunde of which he held the keys, were
all used by him to accomplish what to
fail of, he had declared, would be his
ruin. Ostensibly active Republicans and
ardent party men depended for their
daily bread upon the salaries which, at
a word from him, could be cut off. In
one Republican association alone, sixty-
three " workers " held office under Tam-
many Hall, whilst of the Republican
general committee in 1870 thirty mem-
bers out of one hundred and fifty-nine
received pay from offices subject to the
disposition of the Democratic chief. At
the primaries of that year the " Tam-
many Republicans " massed their forces,
Tweed sent for the Republican district
leaders, and plied them with every
inducement to sell out in his 'favor.
Ex-Governor Cornell, chairman of the
Republican state committee in 1871,
declared that members of the general
committee of the city of New York ac-
knowledged that they had received large
sums of money to place their committee
under the secret control of Tammany.
Men who were holding federal offices,
the " gift " of some Republican politi-
cian, or the " reward for good Repub-
lican work," were " given " much more
lucrative positions under the municipal
government controlled by the Tammany
sachem. The Republican convention
was actually " run " by a Democratic
minority, who packed the hall before the
hour , of meeting. The entrance was
guarded by policemen, who, acting un-
der instructions from Democratic head-
quarters, rejected or admitted delegates
without the slightest regard to their cre-
dentials. So intolerable became the
abuses in these little " nocturnal gather-
ings," where six thousand voters arro-
gated to themselves exclusive control of
the nominations which fifty thousand

Republicans were held bound to ratify,
that the state committee were forced to
step in and manage the local campaign
itself. Yet, in spite of their efforts, it
was found, after the election, that in
certain districts the presidents of Repub-
lican associations had issued and " ped-
dled " the straight Democratic ticket all
day long. But Tweed did not content
himself with his control of the Repub-
lican organization of the city of New
York alone. His next move was a
conception of genius. He determined
to extend his power to the Republican
senatorial caucus as well, so as to se-
cure the votes not only of those who
were paid to do his bidding, but also of
those who, however opposed to his mas-
tery, would not dare fail to respond to
the crack of the party whip. With
rare humor and cynical frankness, the
old man told the story of his shrewd-
ness. It is a suggestive story, and well
worth the study of him who claims that
under any circumstances to bolt is a
crime : —

" I suggested the caucus, and suggest-
ed that the Republicans should resolve
in caucus to support me in this measure.
I said, ' Here is a way of getting over
it if money matters are mentioned. If
you go in caucus, and if the resolution
is arrived at, you can say, I was gov-
erned by the caucus, 'and had to do it
because the caucus did, and I person-
ally went against it.' . . . The result
was, the caucus did pass the resolution
that they would stand by the charter
and agree to the caucus determination." l

The purchase of the Republican sen-
ators whose votes carried the Republican
caucus cost Mr. Tweed, he declared on
oath, at a time when it was less to his
interest to lie than to tell the truth,
some forty thousand dollars apiece ; an
amount agreed upon after much skillful
haggling and neat diplomacy. And all
through these delicate negotiations, he

1 Testimony taken before a Committee of New
York Aldermen, 187T. Page 86-

1883.]

Our Nominating Machines.

325

said his trusted counselor, adviser, and
go-between was the editor of a leading
Republican journal ! But disclosure
came at last, and with disclosure one of
those periodical convulsions which we
have come to depend upon as the only
means of purifying the disorders of our
body politic. The honest element of
both parties united to shake off the
incubus, and when the work was done
genuine Republicans began to bestir
themselves for a real " reform within
the party." The reorganization was
entrusted by the state committee to
Horace Greeley and William Orton ; the
place of the former, on his declining to
serve, being filled by Jackson S. Schultz.
Some idea of the abuses which they
were called upon to correct may be in-
ferred from what follows, for which
vouchers could be given if space al-
lowed : —

The sub-committee appointed to cor-
rect the roll of one district found it so
hopelessly filled with non-residents, bo-
gus names, and dead men that it was
not capable of correction, but had to be
cast aside, and a new one made. Of
the seven hundred and fifty-one names,
twenty-two, as the roll itself showed,
lived out of the district ; and of the rest,
only two hundred and seventy -nine
could be found by the census-taker. In
another district two hundred and forty-
seven of the alleged members were
either Democrats, or unknown or ficti-
tious persons ; and this district was
claimed to be " rather 'exceptionally free
from irregularities " ! It was proved
by sworn testimony that at the Repub-
lican primaries, at the preceding elec-
tion, some of the polls were taken pos-
session of by policemen, who refused
many prominent Republicans admit-
tance, while they allowed Democrats to
enroll, and vote upon the selection of
delegates.

The reorganizing committee produced,
as the result of their labors, the organ-
ization which has developed into the ex-

clusive political machine, which to-day
dominates the party in the city of New
York. The crying evil which the
framers of the new system were called
upon to meet was temporarily sup-
pressed. Their scheme expressly pro-
vided (Art. XIV.) that no person hold-
ing office under Democratic control
should be a member of the organization,
and that all votes cast for such should
be null and void. The gentlemen who
undertook the work of reform either
saw but one side of the great evil of
" patronage," or did not feel called upon
to denounce it, save where it bore heav-
ily against their own party. That a
Republican politician should hold office
at the will of a Tammany sachem
seemed an intolerable abuse ; but that
the same worker should be dependent
for his living upon the nod of a Repub-
lican boss appeared to be only another
bond to strengthen the party discipline.
The new plan had but a temporary suc-
cess. Indeed, its framers never claimed
anything more for it. It was urged by
many, at the time, that the evils had not
been wholly rooted out, and that the
seeds of the old abuses would in time
sprout again. The condition of the
organization to-day has justified their
declarations. Mr. George Bliss, who in
1876 insisted that the fair expression
of opinion was seldom prevented at the
primaries and caucuses of the Repub-
lican party, and confidently declared
that no abuse had failed of prompt cor-
rection, upon proper appeal in the man-
ner provided, announced in 1879 that
the system, for at least a year past, had
been fairly honeycombed by a dry rat.
" The rolls," he declared, in an open
letter to President Arthur, then chair-
man of the Republican state committee,
" are utterly deceptive." No annual re-
vision was had, as the constitution re-
quired. Mr. Arthur's own association
contained the names of many non-resi-
dents ; in another district, out of six
hundred names, the post-office officials

326

Our Nominating Machines.

[September,

had been unable to reach more than one
half ; and of the thirteen thousand three
hundred and thirty-five members on the
rolls of the twenty -four associations, over
half should have been stricken off. In
1878, it was claimed that the associations
were again full of avowed Democrats,
whilst good Republicans, who had an
absolute right to become members, were
refused admittance, either by direct re-
jection, or by referring the nominations
to committees which never reported ;
" leaving no course but an appeal to the
central committee, which is sure not to
act against the henchmen." Elections
conducted " with conspicuous unfair-
ness," fraudulent enrollment, arbitrary
exclusions, unfair expulsions, and other
abuses as bad were the charges brought
against the system which to-day controls
the Republican party machinery of the
great city of New York, by the gentle-
man who three years before was its
warm advocate. Although it was not
until 1879 that Mr. Bliss felt bound to
demand a reform, yet Mr. Schultz him-
self asserted, as early as 1876, that the
primary had come to be no place for
any one but the professional politician ;
and it was generally admitted even then,
and tacitly conceded by those who
" ran " the machine themselves, that the
district associations were very far from
representing the great majority of the
party. The Union League Club, as-
suming to speak for the educated and
public - spirited element, resolved that
the national convention, in considering
candidates for the presidential election
of 1876, should avoid selecting any man
whose affiliations might suggest a rea-
sonable doubt of the purity of his polit-
ical methods. That resolution, though
couched in the most temperate language,
and backed by the highest public opin-
ion of the city and State, gave offense
to the arrogant masters of the machine,
who would brook no suggestion of in-
terference with their sovereignty; and
within ten days these little evening

clubs, at which one tenth of the party
assumed to speak with absolute author-
ity for the other nine tenths, answered
to their master's call, and all of them
returned their quota of delegates to the
state convention, pledged to his control.
" This," said Mr. Cornell, in his dispatch
to Senator Conkling, as one of Caesar's
lieutenants might have reported to his
general the crushing of some barbarian
revolt, — " this is the answer of the Re-
publicans of New York to the impudent
declarations of the Union League Club."
But if matters were bad then, they are
worse to-day. " Not over one in three
of the presidents of the twenty-si^: Re-
publican associations," said the New
York Times, after a recent election of
officers, " is a man of ordinary capacity
for public affairs, or even of ordinary
education ; sixteen of the twenty-six
hold city, state, or federal office ; and of
the remaining ten, one is said to have
been selected for an office under the
general government, and two are mere
figure-heads for office-holders behind
them. . . . From alderman to judge of
the supreme court, no name appears on
the party ticket which has not been se-
lected by some of this band of office-
holders and office-seekers. They send
the delegates who assume to speak for
the eighty thousand New York Repub-
licans at a state convention, and save
for the casual jurisdiction of the state
committee, there is no authority in the
party which they cannot set at defiance.
Their representatives in the board of
aldermen must do their bidding, under
penalty of expulsion from the charmed
circle. Republican members of the leg-
islature take their cue from them in all
matters pertaining to the government of
the city. There is no power which has
to dispose of public patronage, from the
police board or the petty courts to the
President of the United States, that can-
not be made to feel the pressure of the
organizations which regulate at its head
the flow of the fountain of political

1883.]

Our Nominating Machines.

327

action in the first city of the United
States."

Such is the development of the ma-
chine system of political nominations in
the metropolis of America. The facts
regarding one party are matched by
those in another ; and in any large city
of the United States, a history of the
evolution of the caucus from its proto-
type the " town meeting," of years gone
by, consists simply of a wearisome repe-
tition of similar details. In Baltimore
it is the Democrats who have " run "
their primaries with such shameful in-
difference to the protests of respectabil-
ity that the intelligent element of the
party have refused to attend and lend
their countenance to the fraud and trick-
ery by which the reckless and unscrupu-
lous minority always carry the clay. In
Philadelphia, again, the Republican pro-
fessional politicians have engaged for
years past in dishonest practices, which
the respectable majority have been ab-
solutely powerless to prevent. Again
and again the candidate who happened
to secure control of the temporary chair-
man of a convention has, through the
latter's aid, succeeded in ousting duly
elected delegates by simply referring,
under the rules, all questions relating to
contested seats to the suitable committee
packed in his interests. So that the
nomination has come to depend far more
upon " fixing " the temporary chairman
than upon the mere question of a ma-
jority of duly elected delegates. To
Philadelphia as well as New York may
be applied what Mr. Bliss said in 1879 :
" It is the constant remark of the hench-
men, ' What 's the use of his fighting ?
We 've got the inspectors.' " In Brook-
lyn, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, In-
dianapolis, Milwaukee, and San Fran-
cisco, the primary system operates with
precisely similar results ; and even in
England, if we choose to go abroad for
illustrations, the caucus, in the form of
the " Birmingham six hundred," or the
" Bradford three hundred," comes to the

same thing, — a development of the
very abuses under which we labor here.
The " Birmingham Model," which has
been set up in Birmingham, Bradford,
the metropolitan boroughs of Maryle-
bone, Southwark, and Greenwich, and in
many large towns, either preserves or
has developed the essential features of
our primary methods. The ward com-
mittees elect a general committee, which
elects an executive committee, which
elects a managing sub-committee. This
machine selects candidates for Parlia-
ment and the school board. The out-
and-out party men naturally praise it as
an admirable means of massing and cen-
tralizing the party power. Mr. Cham-
berlain's laudation of the system has an
oddly familiar sound to American ears,
used to the stock arguments of the pro-
fessional politician, to whom a " scratch-
er " or a " bolter " is more hateful than
the Beast. The success of the liberals
in Bradford, he argues, "would have
been impossible to any but a strong and
united party. . . . The only merit of
the caucus is that it has enabled the
party to develop its full strength. . . .
Since the formation of the association,
no man calling himself a liberal has
ever been excluded from its meetings,
or denied a voice and vote. . . . The
only controlling force in our organiza-
tion is the good sense of its members,
who see that if the common cause is to
be successful there must be some willing-
ness to keep purely personal preferences
in the background, and to subordinate
petty details to great principles." But
the " discipline " has already begun to
tell, and more than one intelligent Eng-
lishman has felt the weight of a system
which makes as little as possible of his
individual voice and vote. No member
who has failed of a nomination can offer
himself as an independent at the hust-
ings ; and the committees already de-
mand that the nominee shall submit his
opinions to their dictation. Because of
his course on the government education

328

Our Nominating Machines.

[September,

bill in 1878, the Bradford liberal com-
mittee attempted to " discipline " Mr.
Forster, a notoriously stiff-necked man ;
but he set them at defiance, and was
elected with the aid, it is said, of some
Tory votes. At the next general elec-
tion he was offered the Bradford nomi-
nation, provided he would bind himself
by "Rule 15," which prescribed that
the nominee should in all things submit
to the decisions of the committee, —
a pledge which Mr. Forster refused to
take. " Assessments," as a matter of
course, follow in train. In 1878, the
local politicians began to complain that
the members of public boards did not
contribute liberally enough to the asso-
ciation, and at one meeting it was de-
manded, with unmistakable emphasis,
that the defaulters be " interviewed."
How little these committees differ from
the district associations of Brooklyn and
New York, or the ward committees of
Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore,
may be seen from the following descrip-
tion from the pen of an observant and
intelligent Englishman : —

" It simulates an elective system, and
pretends to the authority derived from
popular majorities. In theory every
liberal elector has a right to be enrolled
•on the ward lists, and when enrolled to
take part in the ward meetings which
choose the representatives which make
up the central committees. . . . But as
a matter of fact the semblance of pop-
ular election is of the slightest kind.
... At the ward meetings which choose
the representatives on the central com-
mittee . . . there is no keen excitement.
. . . Yet when the thing is done the
necessity of yielding to the principles of
representation is urged, and any signs
of troublesome independence are re-
pressed by the argument that those who
failed to carry their candidates at the
ward meetings, and so find themselves
unrepresented on the committee, must
be in a minority. . . . These meetings
fall inevitably into the hands of the

professional politicians. A few ener-
getic persons, who know what it is to
pull the wires effectively, appear at these
gatherings with a sufficient contingent
of followers, and obtain the sanction of
popular election for the ' tickets ' they
promptly propose. Politics are thus
made prominent in municipal affairs,
and Englishmen now ask, "Why should a
body chosen to give expression to the
political voice of the borough meddle
with the selection of representatives,
whose duty it is to decide between rival
schemes of drainage and lighting, or to
appoint school-masters and school-mis-
tresses, or to strike an equitable balance
between indoor and outdoor relief ? "

It is folly for us to talk about the
duty of the patriotic and intelligent cit-
izen to attend the caucus of his party,
and insist by his presence and his vote
that only proper candidates shall be
nominated. With the absence of legal
safeguards, the polls of the primary of
to-day are absolutely at the mercy of
the dishonest minority.

It pays the professional politician to
give his whole time to the work of
" running his district." He has a " stake "
in the work ; it means to him his bread
and butter. " Practical " politics re-
quire practiced hands ; so he makes it
his business ; and as Fisher Ames is said
to have declared long ago, " one man
making a business of politics can have
more influence than half a dozen who
do not." With ten thousand municipal
offices in the city of New York subor-
dinate to the elective offices, and whose
salaries aggregate over ten million dol-
lars, it pays a Democratic " heeler " to
know his district, and to " run " it at any
cost and by any means. With the fed-
eral patronage of the same city dividing
up two and a half millions of dollars
among two thousand five hundred offices,
it is easy to understand why " Barney "
and " Jake " and " Tom " and " Mike "
aspire to be district leaders, and why
they invariably beat the honest gentle-

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

329

men who innocently fancy that a numer-
ical majority is any obstacle to a deter-
mined minority who know what they
want and are bound to get it by hook
or by crook. What chance has an hon-
orable man, who would not stoop to the
tricks of the machine to secure his ends,
with patriotism and perhaps a laudable
ambition to distinguish himself in public
service as his only motives, against men
whose business is to " fix " primaries
and " pack " conventions by stuffing bal-
lot boxes and ejecting duly elected del-
egates ? No ; the remedy is not to be
found at the caucus of to-day. The
present primary system is, and so long
as it lasts always will be, subject to the
control of the worst element in each
party. But the patient people have
stood it about long enough. We have
at last begun to fret against gross mis-
representation. The civil service re-
form bill was the result of public opin-
ion as expressed in the state elections ;
it was not left for a national contest to
put life into that issue ; and in the States
where the caucus has been most abused
are to be heard those mutterings of dis-
content which to the observant student
of American public affairs mean so
much. Within a short time the people

of Pennsylvania have demanded, and
secured, laws regulating their primary
elections. The people of Maryland
have made the same demand, and will
get what they ask. The " leaders " on
one side of the game of New York pol-
itics have begun to hold out offers of
" reorganization " as a sop to allay the
effects of their refusal in the past to
permit the passage of such a law, while
their opponents have recently been
forced by an insistent public opinion to
extend the provisions of a local stat-
ute controlling primaries in the city of
Brooklyn to other cities in the State.

But beyond the enactment of statutes
which shall protect the primary as fully
as the general election, the people have
begun to insist that the State, as well as
the nation, shall take its offices out of
politics, so as to make it pay as little as
possible for the political " worker " to
" fix " things at the caucus. We are
beginning to understand that so long as
we allow official patronage to lie at the
disposal of this leader or that, as a re-
ward for " controlling his district," for
just so long we shall furnish a corrup-
tion fund for him to draw upon to pay
for the dirty work by which he wins and
holds his place.

George Walton Green.

POETS AND BIRDS: A CRITICISM.

"Plato, anticipating the reviewers,
From his Republic banished without pity
The Poets."

The Birds of Killingworth.

THE author of three articles recently
published. The Poets' Birds (Atlantic
Monthly, June, 1882), Foreign Birds
and English Poets (Contemporary Re-
view, October, 1882), and Our Birds
and their Poets (Harper's Magazine,
February, 1883) brings against British
poets the charge that they are almost

entirely destitute of that " universal
kindliness toward the speechless world,"
that " sympathy co-extensive with na-
ture," which he " finds common to all
the poets of America." This is proved,
he says, by their ignorance of ornithol-
ogy, their injustice to birds, and their
general neglect of the bird-world.

For any one to be justified in making
this charge, he must himself have a
knowledge of ornithology sufficient to
enable him to approach accuracy in the

330

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

statement of scientific facts, great famil-
iarity with the poets, and a standard of
criticism which should be clearly de-
fined in his own mind, and which he
should' be able to make fairly intelligi-
ble to his readers.

An examination of these articles will
enable us to judge to what extent the
author's statements and opinions are en-
titled to consideration.

•' There are," he says, " known to
science more than three thousand spe-
cies of birds." But Sclater and Salvin
make over three thousand and five hun-
dred in the neotropical region alone, in-
cluding South America, the West In-
dies, and Central America. And this
is less than half the number represented
in the private collection of Count Tu-
rati, who recently died in Milan, which
consisted of specimens belonging to
seven thousand two hundred species
(Count Salvador! in The Ibis, October,
1881) ; while Gray's Hand-List, the
latest published (1871), contains the
names of over eleven thousand then
known to science.

Again, our author says, " The poets
have wasted some two thousand exotic
birds," and names six that they have
" utilized." So, of the more than three
thousand known to science, he reckons
as belonging to Great Britain about one
thousand, or one third of the whole.
But the number of British species, ac-
cording to Harting's Handbook (1872),
is only three hundred and ninety-five
(including one hundred and thirty-five
rare and accidental visitants), or less
than one twenty-eighth of the number
recorded by Gray. The writer also
gives a " complete list," seventy-six in
all, of the species of British birds found
in the eighty poets "carefully exam-
ined " by him. A " curious list " he
calls it, and a curious list it is. The
very first bird which it contains, the al-
batross, is not a British bird ; nor is the
booby ; nor are the cock and the pea-
cock, for they are domesticated fowls

of nearly all civilized countries, and are
not included by British ornithologists
among British birds. " Only seven sea-
birds," he says; but in his own enu-
meration he makes ten. After naming
seven, and exclaiming, " Such are the
ocean-birds of the poets ! " he imme-
diately thinks of "sea-mews and sea-
pies." Then he adds : " Not another
bird is mentioned ! " but soon after re-
members the " stormy petrel." But
why not also include swans, ducks, and
geese, many of which are as really sea-
birds as loons and cormorants, and some
of the gulls ? Why not count the sand-
lark as well as the sea-pie ? Both of
them are shore-birds, and both some-
times found inland.

According to Newton, Harting, Coues,
and others, the order Raptores, birds of
prey, contains three families : Vulturi-
dce, or Cathartidce, vultures ; Strigidee,
owls ; and Falconidce, eagles, the os-
prey, falcons, hawks, kites, buzzards,
and harriers.

Of these three great divisions, the
writer classes as birds of prey only one
family, the Falconidas. In his first
article he speaks of the condor and
the lammergeyer as " wondrous birds
of prey ; " but in the next article he
declares that vultures are not birds of
prey, apparently unaware of the fact
that the condor and the lammergeyer
are vultures, although they are the most
distinguished species of the vulture
family.

In his first article, our author gives
a list of the foreign birds of the poets :
the ostrich, the bird of paradise, the
pelican, the flamingo, the ibis, and the
vulture, — six besides cage-birds. The
second, being on foreign birds, he re-
vises the list, and adds to it the con-
dor, the humming-bird, the stork, and
the crane. Now ibis, vulture, stork, and
crane are generic names, and British
ornithologists have recorded one or
more species of all these birds among
the rare or accidental visitants in Great

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

331

Britain. Naturalists do not agree about
the crocodile bird of Herodotus, as to
whether it is the sic-sac plover, as this
writer thinks, or the black-headed plov-
er. But since he quotes several poets
who have mentioned the bird, why not
include it in his enumeration of foreign
birds ?

Still another list shows our author's
unique system of classification, that of
the " fearful wild-fowl " from the " bird-
land of fable," with which the " poets
eke out their stock," namely, "the
simurg and roc, gryphon and phoenix,
popinjay, heydegre, martlet, and alle-
rion." The simurg, the roc, the phoenix,
and the alleripn are fabulous birds. Pop-
injay and the diminutive word martlet
are names of real birds. The gryphon
is a fabulous animal, a winged quadru-
ped. It is hardly possible that any of
the poets can have called it a bird.
Spenser compares the red-crosse knight
encountering his enemy to a " gryfon "
encountering a dragon, but speaks of
neither the gryfon nor the dragon as a
bird. Nor does Milton, in his compari-
son of the Fiend's course to that of a
gryphon, call the latter a bird.

The list, then, contains names of four
instead of eight fabulous birds, one im-
aginary animal not a bird, two names of
real birds, and the word " heydegre." I
have hesitated about calling heydegre
a word, for to my mind it conveys no
meaning. I have consulted a number
of the latest and best etymological and
other dictionaries for a little help, but
in vain ; and I am forced to believe
that its occurrence in poetry cannot
have been general enough to warrant
any conclusions as to the poets.

The poets, according to the writer,
" sing mysteriously to modern ears of
ernes, gleads, and so forth." Why mys-
teriously ? Erne and glead are the
more common names of the sea-eagle
and the kite in some parts of Great
Britain ; they are in use in good prose,
and by some of the best ornithological

writers are the names first given iri
describing the birds. Glead, allied to
Anglo-Saxon glidan, to glide, and sup-
posed to have been given to the bird on
account of its beautiful sailing motion,
is certainly a more poetical word than
kite.

The author of these articles is appar-
ently as unfamiliar with poetry as with
ornithology. " It is," he thinks, " a
poor compliment to the fable of the
bird of paradise, that it sleeps on the
wing, to stretch the same privilege, as
Cowper does, to the swallow." Cowper
nowhere intimates that the swallow
sleeps on the wing. He translated a
little poem by Madame Guyon on the
swallow, in which we find this stanza : —

" It is on the wing that she takes her repose,
Suspended and poised in the regions of air;
'Tis not in our fields that her sustenance grows,
It is winged like herself, 't is ethereal fare."

I have not seen the original, but I
infer from the translation that Madame
Guyon herself does not mean to say
that the swallow sleeps on the wing,
but simply to allude to this bird's re-
markable powers of flight, which en-
able it not only to take its winged food
on the wing, but to sustain long-con-
tinued exertion in flying, without fa-
tigue.

The writer also tells us that Thom-
son calls Alexander the Great a vul-
ture. But it is Philip, not Alexander,
to whom Thomson refers as "the Mace-
donian vulture " that

"marked his time,
By the dire scent of Chaeronea lured,
And, fierce descending, seized his hapless prey."

A little further on we are told that
Gray makes the vulture a prey-hunter.
Gray makes no allusion to the vulture
in connection with its prey. In one of
his translations from Propertius, this
line occurs : —

" Or drive the infernal vulture from his prey."

Even here the bird is not called a prey-
hunter.

332

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

In his last article, our author says,
" The owl and vulture might be quke
as ' obscene ' in Evangeline or Mogg
Megone as they are in Wordsworfti or
Cowper."

Those not familiar with Cowper and
Wordsworth will be surprised to leara
that there is absolutely nothing in the
poems of either of them to suggest
such a thought. Cowper has only two
references to the owl. One is merely
an allusion to the roosting of owls in
Yardley Oak. The other shows his kind-
liness of feeling towards this bird : —

" Nor these alone, whose notes
Nice-fingered Art must emulate in vain,
But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime •
In still repeated circles, screaming loud,
The jay, the pie, and e'en the boding owl
That hails the rising moon, have charms for
me."

Wordsworth has numerous allusions
to the owl, and they show his careful
and appreciative observation of it, but
in none of them does the epithet " ob-
scene " occur, or any word which could
be forced into meaning that.

As to the vulture, Cowper nowhere
refers to it in his original poems ; in his
translations from other poets this bird
is spoken of, but even in these it is not
called obscene. Wordsworth mentions
it only once. In The Excursion, the
fekeptic asks, —

"Why

That ancient story of Prometheus chained
To the bare rock, on frozen Caucasus,
The vulture, the inexhaustible repast
Drawn from his vitals? "

It will be readily seen from this that
the vulture is no more " obscene " in
Wordsworth than in Evangeline, or than
in the Prometheus of Longfellow or the
Prometheus of Lowell. I think this
extract is a fair example of the way the
old fable of Prometheus and the vul-
ture has been treated by the poets.

The following references to the poets
may not be quite as obviously, but are
just as really, misrepresentations. In
the article on foreign birds we find a
quotation from Milton.,

"Part, more wise,

In common, ranged in figure, wedge their way,
Intelligent of seasons, and set forth
Their airy caravan ; high over seas
Flying, and over lands, with mutual wing
Easing their flight: so steers the prudent crane,"

with these comments : —

"This 'embody'd flight' of the mi-
grating crane is a poetical image as old
as the Iliad, and therefore older; but
it is one to which many besides Milton
have recourse, as a simile from nature
for discipline and mutual reliance. It
is a pity that the ' mutual wing ' should
be a fiction, for the idea that each bird
rests its head on the back of the bird
before it, in flight, is a charming one."

The method of the cranes in flight is
not a " poetical image ; " it is a fact of
natural history. Homer alludes to the
flight of the crane in migrating only
once, and then it is merely to compare
the battle-cry of the Trojans to the cry
of the cranes. He nowhere makes any
allusion to the method of the flight.
The " embodied flight " of Pope is, in
every case, wholly gratuitous.

It would be hard to find a more com-
prehensive and truthful description in
five lines than Milton has here given of
the crane. The passage, however, is
purely descriptive. It contains no "sim-
ile for discipline or mutual reliance."
Still, the mutual wing is not a fiction ;
and it is a misrepresentation of the poet
to attribute to him the absurd opinion
which some of the ancients are said to
have entertained, that each crane, in
flying, rests its head on the back of the
one before it. The explanation of the
phrase "'mutual wing," so simple and
natural, may be found in actual fact.
It is well known that cranes, when mi-
grating, fly in two lines, which meet in
front in an acute angle. One of the
number takes the lead. " It may be
readily observed," says Lloyd (Scan-
dinavian Adventures), " that when this
individual becomes fatigued with being
the first to cleave the air, it falls to the
rear, and leaves the next in succession

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

333

to take its post." Brehm, in his inter-
estiug chapter on migration, gives a sim-
ilar account. Thus it is that they arc
seen " with mutual wing easing their
flight."

Speaking of the vulture, the writer
says, " Longfellow knows the bird as it
is," and one couplet from Evangeline,
he thinks, " goes a long way towards re-
futing the hideous prejudices of our own
poets, who never saw a vulture." What,
pray, was there to prevent Byron or
Shelley from seeing a vulture ? Vul-
tures have not disappeared from the
land of Homer and .^Eschylus, or from
that country the foundation of whose
capital is associated with the " omen of
the twelve vultures." They are found
in all the countries bordering on the
Mediterranean.

Afterwards we find mention of the
vultures " so admirably described in
Longfellow's well-known passage," and
are told that " Longfellow's vultures are
condors" Longfellow may have seen
vultures, but there is no reason to sup-
pose that he was familiar with any spe-
cies of this bird. Vultures are not more
common in Boston and Cambridge than
they are in London. If Longfellow
ever saw a condor, he probably saw it
in the Zoological Gardens in London.
He certainly did not see it in its native
haunts, for he never visited South Amer-
ica. But Longfellow's vultures are not
condors. The turkey buzzard is the
vulture that frequents "the wonderful
land at the base of the Ozark Moun-
tains," with the description of which the
writer seems so much pleased.

In Hiawatha the vulture is used as
an illustration, merely. But a vulture
whose " quarry in the desert " is a " sick
or wounded bison " cannot be a condor,
for the condors belong to South Amer-
ica, where there are no bisons. And
which of Longfellow's passages describ-
ing the vulture " so admirably " is the
one " well known " ? Can the couplet
from Evangeline, which is misquoted iu

the second of these articles, be the pas-
sage referred to ?

The writer quotes from the poets
many expressions, — the " vulture of
trouble," " vulture revenge," " vulture
oppression," " vulture destruction,"
" vulture folly," " vulture greed," and
in connection with them two passages
in which Shelley has compared " de-
spair," " hate," " famine," " blight,"
" pestilence," " war," " earthquake," to
vultures, adding this note : " Many of
these images, probably all, are as old
as poetry itself. See Homer and Lu-
can."

Truth is as old as the universe, and
real likenesses between material and im-
material things have existed as long as
the things themselves ; but for likenesses
to become poetical images, they must
have a definite form. Poetry is the ex-
pression of thought and feeling ; and
•Homer did not give a form to most of
these likenesses, or even to one of them,
in the sense implied by the writer.

Homer represents Sarpedon and Pa-
troclus as rushing against each other to
fight, as vultures fight, screaming. Of all
the allusions to the vulture iu Homer,
this is the nearest approach to one of
" these images." Yet here it is not the
character of the warriors, nor even the
state of mind causing the fight, which i»
compared to that of vultures. It is the
action. • The word here translated vul-
tures occurs six times, and is similarly
used every time. Persons are compared
to vultures as to their appearance or as
to what they do : thus when Ulysses
and Telemachus meet, they weep more
forcibly than vultures cry at the loss of
their young.

When Hector said to the dying Pa-
troclus, " Vultures shall devour thee,"
he did not call attention to the vulture
as a symbol of greed, but to the dis-
grace which Patroclus would suffer if
he should not receive funeral rites ; and
his mention of the vulture was only
an allusion to the well-known fact that

334

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

bodies lying exposed in that country be-
came the vultures' prey. The word here
rendered vultures occurs seven times,
and is employed every time with this
meaning and in just this way, — never
figuratively. But Homer's reference to
birds as preying upon dead bodies is not
confined to vultures. More frequently,
when alluding to this, he uses a general
term meaning birds or birds of prey.
Fourteen out of eighteen times that I
find the word, it is used only with refer-
ence to the fact that birds prey upon
the dead. The other four times, as the
context shows, the word does not refer
to the vulture. Many of the most accu-
rate translators of Homer never render
it by the word vulture, though Pope has
sometimes done so.

And why is Lucan associated with
Homer as one of the oldest representa-
tives of poetry ? Homer probably lived
a thousand years before Lucan. Ac-
cording to Herodotus, it must have been
more than nine hundred. All the great
poets of Greece had been dead four
or five hundred years when Lucan was
born.

This critic of the poets is not only in-
accurate in the statement of facts and
unfamiliar with the poets, but he has no
standard of criticism. He condemns all
the British poets except Tennyson as
untrue to nature and unsympathetic.
Then one, and another, and another, of
those whom he has most severely con-
demned is made a standard of excel-
lence. For instance, he quotes in sup-
port of his general charge of the poets'
ignorance and want of sympathy ex-
pressions designed to show their injus-
tice to the vulture, among which are
some from Keats and Marvell (not call-
ing the poets by name, however). But
he mentions both these poets in such a
way as to disprove his own charge, thus :
" When a Marvell actually went out
into the fields and observed what he af-
terward wrote, the world obtained not
only poetry, but poetry from the life ;

or when a Keats translates into words
his own intuitive and tender sympathy
with the out-of-doors about him, the re-
sult is the poetry of Nature herself."

Nay, more. In the article designed
to show the greater " tenderness toward
the speechless world " and greater " fidel-
ity to Nature " of the American poets,
he actually makes British Keats and
British Shelley standards of excellence
by which the American poets are to be
judged, thus: "They [the American
poets] are as gentle always as Keats,
while in their more general passages
they show all Shelley's appreciation of
the harmonious unity in nature." Now
I think there is not another poet whose
expressions have been so frequently
quoted by our author in support of his
general accusation as those of Shelley,
although the poet has not always been
named.

Again, the writer condemns in Brit-
ish poets what he commends or ignores
in American poets. For example, he
finds the latter " attributing melancholy
to the notes of birds, as if in recognition
of that pathos with which Nature bal-
ances so beautifully her great antipho-
nies;" and "complaints "and "wailing"
are appropriate terms for describing the
part of the birds in maintaining this
balance. But the same terms employed
by British poets are indicative of the
" undeserved contumely " bestowed on
the bird by his unsympathetic calumni-
ators, the abusive poets. Holmes's cen-
sure of duck-shooting is recognized as
genuine sympathy, but British poets'
condemnation of partridge-shooting is
sneered at as sentimentalism.

When Aldrich speaks of a "thiev-
ing robin-redbreast," or Lowell of that
"devil-may-care, the bobolink," or
Whittier of " robber crows " and of the
" foul human vulture," or Emerson of
" ostrich - like forgetfulness," or Bret
Harte of the sea-bird as a "careless
vagabond," or Celia Thaxter of the
sea-gulls' "boding cry ; " or when Holmes

1883.]

Poets and Birds :' A Criticism.

335

calls the bobolink " crack-brained " and
"crazy," and the sea-gull a "gentleman
of leisure, not good for much ; " or when
Longfellow speaks of the " fateful
crows," and of the

" wondrous stone, which the swallow
Brings from the shore of the sea to restore the
sight of its fledgelings,"

calling him lucky

" who found that stone in the nest of the swal-
low,"

or when he compares the ecstatic out-
burst of the mocking-bird to the " revel
of frenzied Bacchantes," we find the
writer expressing no disapproval, but
sometimes quoting with approbation
these very passages. Yet these expres-
sions are of the same nature as those
which he censures in British poets.

The writer also charges British poets
with being untruthful, but really he of-
ten censures them most severely because
they are truthful. The charge of in-
justice, he thinks, might be considered
substantiated from the poets' reference to
birds of prey and sea-fowl alone. The
only value of symbols to the poet is in
their appropriateness. As a class, the
birds of prey have characteristics which
render them fit symbols of cruelty,
greed, robbery, and violence ; and while
the poets have not depicted the unlove-
ly side atone of these birds, it is true
that unlovely things do exist. "War is
unlovely, and all forms of oppression and
wrong, and poetry has not ignored them.
But the world cannot spare Homer, or
Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dante, or one
of its genuine poets. The poets' rec-
ognition of the real characteristics of
birds of prey is justice, not injustice, to
the bird-world. It is no evidence of a
want of a " perfectly healthy sympathy
with nature." A very striking illus-
tration of this truth is Kingsley's A
Thought from the Rhine, in which
eagles are compared to the " great de-
vourers of the earth." The poet rouses
your compassionate indignation against
the great devourers of the earth with-

out lessening your admiration for the
eagle.

But our interest is with the poets and
their relations to the birds. It is not
the mission of the poets to investigate
and establish scientific facts. Ignorance,
like knowledge, is only relative. We
call Aristotle, Newton, and Franklin
wise ; yet the school-boy of to-day is per-
fectly familiar with many facts unknown
to them. LinnaBus named a species of
the birds of paradise " apoda" footless.
We happen to know that these birds
have feet, but is it for us to speak of
the great naturalist as ignorant ? A
poet's knowledge of natural history
ought to be estimated with reference to
the advancement of this science in his
own age. An examination of British
poets will show that their knowledge
of natural history has not been derived
from classical and other myths and from
heraldry, as our author asserts, but that
it has fairly kept pace with that of scien-
tists, and that more recently it has been
to a great extent the result of personal
observation. It will show, moreover,
that the British poets have found in the
birds an inexhaustible source both for
themes and for illustrations.

Poetry partakes of the spirit of the
age in which it is produced. Even
the masterpieces which delight every
age show this. There were among the
earlier poets careful observers and gen-
uine lovers of nature. There was
Chaucer,

" whose fresh woods
Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year,"

" who," says Charles James Fox, " of
all poets seems to have been fondest of
the singing of birds ; " and of whom
Longfellow writes, —

"And as I read

I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead."

We do not forget

" The music of days when the Muse was breaking
On Chaucer's pleasance in song's sweet prime."

336

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

For the earlier poets, then,

" let English Chaucer intercede;

Think how he rose from bed betimes in spring,
To hear the nightingale and cuckoo sing."

1 Lirting, the author of The Ornithol-
ogy of Shakespeare, says that " it is im-
possible to read all that Shakespeare
has written in connection with ornithol-
ogy without being struck with the ex-
traordinary knowledge which he has
displayed for the age in which he lived."
Spenser has made use of birds as illus-
trations very effectively.and with much
truth to nature. The not numerous but
very fine passages in Milton relating to
birds could not have been \vritten by an
indifferent observer of nature. Marvell
shows in some .of his poetry the suscep-
tibility to nature's influences that is so
marked a characteristic of Wordsworth
and Emerson. Two hundred and thirty-
five years ago, Herrick thus introduced
his Hesperides : —

" I sing of brooks, of blossomes, birds and bow-
ers,"

But the poets of nature are for the most
part, undoubtedly, modern poets, going
back scarcely one hundred years. If
American poets have been more accu-
rate in their observations and more in
sympathy with nature than British poets,
as a whole, the chief reason is obvious,
and it is strange that it should not have
been mentioned. A large majority of
the British poets, even of those quoted,
wrote before there were any distinctive-
ly American poets. Bryant, the earliest
by several years of the American -poets
named, published his Thanatopsis less
than seventy years ago.

How utterly regardless of the consid-
eration of time our author has been
may be seen from this paragraph re-
specting foreign birds : " We find only
six, and even these are only utilized
to perpetuate half a dozen of those
' pseudoxia ' which Sir Thomas Browne
tried to demolish two centuries ago.
The ostrich is still, with the poets, ' the

silliest of the feathered kind, and formed
of God without a parent's mind ; ' the
bird of paradise, not having recovered
its legs, yet sleeps on the wing, and
hatches its eggs in mid-air ; the ibis still
brandishes its ' spiral neck at snakes ; '
the pelican goes on ' opening to her
young her tender breast ; ' and the vul-
ture continues to ' spring from the cliff
upon the passing dove.' " One must in-
fer that these poets are our contempo-
raries. On the contrary, Cowper, the
poet of the ostrich, who was nearest to
our own time, wrote these lines ninety-
nine years ago. Garth, the poet of the
ibis, was a contemporary of Sir Thomas
Browne himself, the author of the
Pseudoxia ; while Savage, the poet of
the vulture and the pelican, died only
twenty-five years after Garth. And yet
Savage is actually quoted in proof that
poets now perpetuate errors about the
pelican, in utter disregard of the fact
that Montgomery, the author of The
Pelican Island, the beauty and accuracy
of which the writer is constrained to ac-
knowledge, lived a century later than
Savage. The poet of the bird of para-
dise is not named, and we are really
curious to know what British poet is so
ignorant of natural history, and so ut-
terly devoid of common sense, as to in-
timate that any bird " hatches its eggs
in mid-air" especially as, according to
the writer, the poet belongs to our own
time.

But the statement itself is a whole-
sale misrepresentation of Sir Thomas
Browne. The opinion that the pelican
feeds her young by opening her own
breast is, of all mentioned in the para-
graph, the only one that is referred to
in the Pseudoxia.

Again, we are told in regard to the
poets' mistakes about the ostrich that
" it was reserved for Lovelace to con-
dense their animadversions into a quat-
rain of errors." Reserved by whom ?
Not by Cowper and Montgomery, who
are also quoted on the ostrich, for Cow-

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

337

per lived a century and a half and Mont-
gomery two centuries after Lovelace.

There are poems which give their
authors a specific claim to be noticed in
an essay on the poets' birds, as Gra-
hame's Birds of Scotland, which pre-
sents a series of graphic pictures of in-
dividual birds, rivaling, it has been said,
those of Alexander Wilson ; and Bish-
op Mant's British Months, which con-
tains descriptions, often of great beauty,
of nearly twice as many birds as our
author found in his eighty poets, — the
book which Christopher North wanted
to put in his pocket when he should
"go a bird-nesting;" and Courthope's
Paradise of Birds, suggested, as its au-
thor intimates, by a Greek classic, The
Birds of Aristophanes, but a most de-
lightful book to every genuine lover of
birds and their poets, however British
and howeve^ modern he maybe. Many
of the most beautiful of Charles Tenny-
son Turner's sonnets are devoted to birds.
To these poets, and to several other
especial poets of the birds, our author
has made not the slightest reference.

More remarkable than such omissions
is the treatment of Wordsworth and
Cowper. Examples of the misrepre-
sentations of their poetry have been al-
ready noticed. In the case of Words-
worth these misrepresentations do not
occur in the article on the birds of Brit-
ish poets, for in that his very existence
is not so much as hinted at. This si-
lence might have been interpreted as
pardonable reverence for the " very
high priest of nature," if it had not been
for the attempts to belittle him in the
succeeding articles. Wordsworth has
been dead but little over a quarter of a
century, and yet one of his latest bi-
ographers says that his poems have al-
ready furnished more of the phrases
which have long been familiar as house-
hold words than those of any other poet,
except Shakespeare and Milton. South-
ey's remark that " he might as well at-
tempt to crush Skiddaw " (referring to

VOL. LII. — NO. 311. 22

Jeffrey's criticism of Wordsworth) would
now be superfluous of even a Jeffrey.

But what apology can be invented
for any one so utterly insensible to
Cowper's sweet and simple nature, to
his " large and tender heart," to his
"scrupulous truthfulness," as to char-
acterize as " lip-service " that love for
animals which was so great a solace of
his life ?

Since the writer has thus disregarded
the poets of nature and of the birds, did
he limit his examination to the familiar
poems of well-known poets? Not at
all. A familiarity with Shakespeare's
King Lear, Goldsmith's Deserted Vil-
lage, Tennyson's Maud, Edwin Ar-
nold's Light of Asia, Jean Ingelow's
High Tide on the Coast of Lincoln-
shire, or even Burns's Flow Gently,
Sweet Afton, would have enabled him
to increase his list of birds.

And not only are poets of birds thus
ignored, but the birds themselves, — the
very birds which have been acknowl-
edged favorites of the poets.

The first of these birds to suggest it-
self is the skylark. " There is hardly
a poet," says Yarrell, " who has not
made it his theme." Yet in an essay
on the birds of British poets, the sky-
lark is not alluded to, except as one of
seventy- six of these birds ; nor the rob-
in, nor the cuckoo, nor the swallow, —
except in the passage in which Cowper
is accused of saying the swallow sleeps
on the wing, — nor the nightingale.
But in his chapter on foreign birds the
writer intimates that British poets know
little of their own nightingales. There
is a published list, as I am informed, of
one hundred and seventy-eight adjec-
tives which the poets have applied as ep-
ithets to this bird. I have not seen the
list, but I recall more than eighty Brit-
ish poets who have written of the night-
ingale, and I have no hesitation in say-
ing that one hundred and seventy-eight
falls far below the number of such ad-
jectives. This may not disprove the

338

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

charge of ignorance, but it surely dis-
proves another of this writer's accusa-
tions against the poets, that they " have
laid themselves open to the charge of
a monotony in error almost amounting
to plagiarism."

The swan is mentioned thus : " The
real beauty of the swan's life is almost
ignored ; the imaginary beauty of its
death is hackneyed to absurdity." " A
sterile majority of our bards see in it
only the fowl that sings before death."
" So pressed for similes of beauty are
the poets that they have all of them to
turn again and again to the peacock's
tail, the turtle's neck, and the swan's
breast."

Not only are these charges ground-
less, but I do not think there is a single
object in nature which has been more
beautifully described by British poets
than the swan. Out of more than nine-
ty poems and poetical extracts referring
to the swan, taken at random, I find
fourteen which allude to the bird's sing-
ing at death. The most noted of these,
I need scarcely say, is The Dying Swan
by Tennyson, in regard to which the
author of The Bird World says, " We
can hardly regret the existence of a
fiction which has led to the enrichment
of our literature with so fine a piece of
word-harmony." Tennyson, it will be
remembered, is the only poet excepted
by the writer from his general accusa-
tion.

In Wordsworth's numerous passages
relating to the swan, there is only one
reference to its singing at death. In
the sonnet suggested by the Pha3do of
Plato, he speaks of hearing

"(Alas! 'twas only in a dream)
Strains, which as sage antiquity believed
By waking ears have sometimes been received."

the " most melodious requiem " of the
swan. Even a child could not think he
accepts the fable as a fact.

Shakespeare illustrates by the swan
in fifteen passages, five of which refer
to the death-song. Of the seven pas-

sages remaining, three are from Shelley,
from whom I have taken eight extracts.
This leaves four of these allusions to
this bird's death-song, which I have
found in nearly eighty poems and ex-
tracts taken from more than thirty
different poets. Is this what the author
means by " a sterile majority " ?

I find the bird spoken of as " noble,"
" stately," " kingly," " most graceful,"
the " very type of rural elegance."
The " jetty eyes," the " ebon bill," the
" snowy plumage," the " black legs,"
the " oary feet," the " nesting among
the reeds," the " young dusky cygnets,"
the " cygnet's down," the manner of
protecting the young, and the manifes-
tation of parental affection even to the
point of self-sacrifice are all mentioned.
Keats evidently intends to class wings
of swans among the most delightful of
material things when he asks what is

"More strange, more beautiful, more smooth,

more regal,

Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-
seen eagle ?"

Wordsworth describes the neck as

" An arch thrown back between luxuriant wings
Of whitest garniture, like fir-tree boughs
To which, on some unruffled morning, clings
A flaky weight of winter's purest snows! "

The " haughty neck," the " sinuous neck
elate," the " neck of arched snow," are
some of the poets' designations of the
swan's neck. Tennyson's Lancelot
means no disparagement to it when he
presents jewels to the queen, of which
to make a

" Necklace for a neck to which the swan's
Is tawnier than her cygnet's."

The motions of the swan are char-
acterized by " grandeur," " majesty,"
"grace," and " majestic grace."

" O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune ! "

says Coleridge.

Nor has the breast been neglected in
the poet's descriptions of the swan ; but
only twice in the ninety and more
poems and extracts do I find it used as

1883.]

Poets and Birds: A Criticism.

339

the object of comparison. So much for
this " simile of beauty." The " wild-
clanging note " and the picturesqueness
of the swan in flight have not failed of
notice.

Whether or not Wordsworth saw

"The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow,"

he often saw that vision of beauty in
his own region of lakes. More than
one of his descriptions he particularly
mentions as taken from the daily op-
portunities he had of observing the hab-
its of two pairs of swans of an old mag-
nificent species, which divided between
them the lake of Esthwaite and its in-
and-out-flowing streams.

Spenser, in his poem written on the
marriage of the Earl of Worcester's
daughters, makes use of swans as an il-
lustration in a passage which for beauty
can hardly be surpassed in his poems.

A poet of less note than these,
Thomas Wade, has described a beauti-
ful landscape, including the sea, on
which a thousand swans are sailing, and
over which more are flying; but woods
and sky and sea, he says in conclusion,

" seem but humbly tributary
To the white pomp of that vast aviary."

The following stanzas from The Swans
of Wilton are by an anonymous British
poet : —

" Oh, how the swans of Wilton

Twenty abreast did go !
Like country brides bound to the church,

Sails set and all aglow :
With pouting breast, in pure white dressed,

Soft gliding in a row.

" Adown the gentle river

The white swans bore in sail,
Their full soft feathers puffing out

Like canvas in a gale ;
And all the kine and dappled deer

Stood watching in the vale.

" The stately swans of Wilton

Strutted and puffed along,
Like canons in their full white gowns,

Late for the even-song,
Whom up the close the peevish bell

In vain has chided long.

" Oh, how the swans of Wilton
Bore down the radiant stream !

As calm as holy hermits' lives,

Or a play-tired infant's dream.
Like fairy beds of last j'ear's snow

Did those radiant creatures seem."

We are also told that " the swan
might, for all the American poets say,
never have been Leda's lover or Ve-
nus's wagoner." Not once in the more

than ninety poems and extracts is the
swan spoken of as " Venus's wagoner ; "
and only once is the bird mentioned in
connection with Venus. Wordsworth
speaks of

" These swan-like specks of mountain snow,
White as the pair that slid along the plains
Of heaven, when Venus held the reins ! "

Twice only is the swan alluded to as
the lover of Leda, once by Shakespeare
and once by Spenser.

Since these passages were not selected,
but taken at random, the result is surely
an indication whether nature or fable
has been the source of inspiration in re-
gard to the swan of the British poets.

In connection with his remarks on
the swan, the writer asks, " Is there no
poetry in the contemporary kingfisher,
that it should never be anything but
the brooding halcyon of the past ? " I
offer on the part of a British poet this
reply : —

"The halcyon flew across the stream,
And the silver brooklet caught the gleam;
The glittering flash of his dazzling wings
Was such as the gorgeous rainbow flings,
In broken rays through the tearful sky,
On a sunny eve in bright July:
His radiant sheen the trees between,
Like the spangled scarf of a fairy queen,
Was rich to the view as the gayest hue
Of the brightest flower that ever grew."

The explanation is very simple of the
comparatively few poems on this " gor-
geous blaze," this "jeweled beam of
emerald light," this "sapphire-winged
mist," this " little hermit, azure-winged,
ablaze with jewels," this " little gay
recluse," as he is variously designated
by British poets ; and it has been given
by the poets themselves.

" The kingfishers retiring hide
Their head's and wing's resplendent sheen
Of ' turkis blue and emerald green.' "

MANT.

340

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

" Thy splendid livery thee might well befit

As page to some fair Naiad of the tide ;

But yft, approached, thou soon thy perch dost quit,

And wilt not let thy beauty be descried.

Mo.-t strange it seems that Nature should bestow

Plumage so rare on bird so rarely seen."

COCHRANE.

Coleridge pictures a " wild and desert
stream," " gloomy and dark " from the
crowded firs on its shores and stretch-
ing across its bed, on whose steep banks
the '" shy kingfishers build their nest."
Browning also describes a retreat of the
'• glossy kingfisher," where

" the river pushes
Its gentle way through strangling rushes."

In all this we have no hint of the
" brooding halcyon of the past ; " but
we do not find it difficult to pardon
Longfellow for this allusion to the fable
of Alcyone : —

" On noiseless wing along that fair blue sea
The halcyon flits, — and where the wearied storm
Left a loud moaning, all is peace again ; "

or a British poet for a similar allusion.

In regard to the eagle, the writer ac-
knowledges that the British poets " have
indeed done splendid justice to this
splendid bird, but unfairly, and at the
expense of others." Without stopping
now to inquire in what respect splendid
justice differs from justice, or whether
justice can be done unfairly, we simply
ask what the American poets can do
more than justice ; for if there is any
force in this paragraph, it is in the im-
plied comparison in favor of American
poets : " The eagle is neither the eagle
of Rome, Assyria, Persia, nor France ;
. . . nor any of the other eagles that fly
in mythology, heraldry, and fable. . . .
It is simply the best in the sky — Ke-
neu, the great war-eagle ; and just as it
was the totem of the red man when he
was lord of America, so now it is the
totem of the white men who have dis-
possessed him."

But what is the great war-eagle ? Not
a simple winged object in nature, but a
symbol of power and conquest, alike to
the Roman, to the Frenchman, and to

the red man. And not only had the
eagle this general symbolic signification
to the Indians as a people, but some-
times also, as it appears, it was a house-
hold symbol, and the figure of an eagle
was one of the ancestral totems, the coat-
of-arms of some noble Indian family.
This does not make the eagle of Amer-
ican poetry the " best in the sky," for,
according to Longfellow, the figure of
a turtle was also a totem ; nor does it
make it the " totem of the white men ; "
but it does seem to give it a claim to be
considered an eagle of heraldry. The
particular eagle here referred to, " Ke-
neu, the great war-eagle," is emphat-
ically an eagle of fable. Originally
a man, he passed through more meta-
morphoses than any of Ovid's heroes,
before he was finally changed "to an
eagle, — to Keneu, the great war-eagle."
The writer gives a list of birds which
he says are unpopular with the poets.
The owl is one of these most abused
birds. Epithets are quoted by the dozen
which " the bards have slung at the
owl," the first of which is "silent."
Well, " silence is golden," especially
on the part of a bird which " shrieks "
and " gibbers," and whose shriek is often
frightful, as even American poets know.
The little Hiawatha was frightened,

" When he heard the owls at midnight:
' What is that? ' he cried in terror."

And his good grandmother had to soothe
him by explaining,

" That is but the owl and owlet,
Talking in their native language,
Talking, scolding at each other."

And this answer of Nokomis is the very
passage quoted by the writer to show
that the owl of American poetry is not
an object of terror.

According to an English poet, Eng-
lish mothers soothe their children in the
same way : —

" I Ml teach my boy the sweetest things, —
I '11 teach him how the owlet sings."

And sometimes children are delighted
with this screaming of the owl. Words-

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

341

worth's fine passage descriptive of the
boy who " blew mimic hootings to the
silent owls, that they might answer him,"
and of the mirth that followed, will be
readily recalled.

Another of these abusive epithets is
" gray." Not a bad color, and owls of
several species are gray. But one may
be suited even as to color. The poets
of Great Britain also speak of owls as
" white " and " mottled " and " tawny "
and " brown."

But we are told that the owl of Brit-
ish poetry " salutes the moon with im-
propriety." I am afraid the manners
of American owls are no better, or seem
no better to American poets, for Long-
fellow speaks of one that " greeted the
moon with demoniac laughter." By a
singular coincidence this line occurs in
one of the very passages referred to by
the writer to illustrate the American
poets' pathetic treatment of birds in re-
lation to night. I need not say that
this line is not quoted.

If British poets have called the owl
" dire " and " unholy," it is also British
poets who have called him " precious,"
" wise," a " sage and holy bird." Chau-
cer puts into his mouth " Benedicite,"
and Byron heard him singing his anthem
at Newstead Abbey.

The owl is a bird of night and asso-
ciated with gloom and darkness, as well
as with quiet and peacefulness. Neither
British nor American poets have been
cognizant of the gloom alone.

As to (he magpie, the poets are ac-
cused of " insisting " that it is a " dis-
agreeable adjunct to the landscape, and
nothing better than

An impudent, presuming pye,
Malicious, ignorant, and sly.' "

On the contrary, Wordsworth most
agreeably associates this bird with the
brightness and beauty of spring : —

" The valley rings with mirth and joy;
Among the hills the echoes play
A never, never ending song,
To welcome in the Ma}-.
The magpie chatters with delight."

Again, we find it joining in the general
joy manifested after a night of storm :
" The birds are singing in the distant woods ;
Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods ;
The jay makes answers as the magpie chatters ;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of
waters."

The magpie is noted for its inge-
nuity in nest -making, and also for its
adroitness in appropriating to its own
use whatever it fancies, without regard
to ownership. The poets' mention of
any distinguishing trait of this bird is
not unjust.

" But of his ways however ill
We deem an d justly, yet for skitt
To build his dwelling few can vie
In talent with the artful pie; "

and

u In early times, the story says,

When birds could talk and lecture,
A magpie called her feathered friends
To teach them architecture."

The beauty of the bird, its ability to talk,
and its usefulness in protecting crops
are all recognized by British poets.

Another of the unpopular birds is the
jackdaw. But one has only to recall the
most familiar of the Ingoldsby Legends,
The Jackdaw of Rheims, and Cowper's
translation of Vincent Bourne's poem
on the Jackdaw, to be convinced that
this bird has received signal honor at
the hands of at least three British poets.

Of the bittern the writer says, " The
bittern, one of the most strangely poet-
ical of birds, is found useful only as a
synonym for discordance and desolation ;
and if it had not been for its making
strange noises, would not probably have
been mentioned at all."

But is there no poetry in sound?
Why, then, have the poets with such
unanimity found this bird's " strange
noises " so suggestive ? These and his
loneliness are what have impressed
American as well as British poets.

" The bittern booms," says Thoreau.

" While scared by step so near,
Upspringing from the sedgy brink,
The lonely bittern's cry will sink
Upon the startled ear."

HOFFMAN.

342

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

" Sometimes we heard a bittern boom,
Sometimes a piping plover."

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFOED.

Our author, by insisting that poets
should know the birds of which they
write, has effectually answered his own
charge against the British poets of neg-
lecting foreign birds. But that is no
reason that they should be discredited
in respect to what they have written
even of foreign birds.

Among the foreign birds that are un-
popular are the parrot and the ostrich.
" The parrots," he says, " poor wretches,
find no friend or even apologist." Has
the author of this charge never read
Campbell's poem on the parrot, founded,
it is said, on a real incident, which
Campbell learned from the family to
which the parrot belonged ? Or could
he not recognize in the poet a friend
of the parrot ? In that case, it is not
surprising that he failed to see in Words-
worth an apologist for this bird : —

"But, exiled from Australian bowers,

And singleness her lot,
She trills her song with tutored powers,
Or mocks each casual note."

" The ostrich," he claims, " is, next
to the goose, one of the very wisest of
birds. It takes a good horse and a
good man to make one Arab of the
desert, and it takes three Arabs of the
desert to hunt one ostrich — and then
they do not kill it as a rule. ... It is
also one of the most careful of parents."
He says, moreover, " The ostrich is
still, with the poets, the silliest of the
feathered kind, and formed of God with-
out a parent's mind."

The " poets " in this case, it will be
remembered, are Cowper. The passage
reads thus : —

"The ostrich, silliest of the feathered kind,
And formed of God without a parent's mind,
Commits her eggs, incautious, to the dust,
Forgetful that the foot may crush the trust."

Cowper 's idea of the ostrich could not
have been gained from personal obser-
vation, and the works on natural history

then extant would have furnished but
little information on this bird ; but he
was familiar with a description of the
ostrich written three thousand years be-
fore, which seems to have escaped the
notice of this writer, in which it is stated
that she " leaveth her eggs in the earth,
and warmeth them in dust, and forget-
teth that the foot may crush them, or
that the wild beast may break them.
She is hardened against her young ones,
as though they were not hers ; her labor
is in vain without fear ; because God
hath deprived her of wisdom, neither
hath he imparted to her understanding.
What time she lifteth up herself on
high, she scorueth the horse and his
rider."

Now the author of these lines was
familiar with the bird. Among the
chief characteristics of the ostrich are a
" small head," a " long and muscular
neck," a " robust body," and " extreme-
ly muscular thighs and stout tarsi and
feet." (Moseuthal and Harting's Os-
triches and Ostrich-Farming.)

The brain of the ostrich is small ; the
neck, body, and limbs very powerful.
This physical structure indicates not wis-
dom by which it can outwit its pursu-
ers, but great strength and swiftness ;
and by means of these it is that " she
scorneth the horse and his rider." Liv-
ingstone speaks of the " folly " of the
ostrich in madly rushing into danger,
and calls it for this a " silly bird." Can-
on Tristram says that " stupidity is uni-
versally ascribed to the ostrich by the
Arabs," and that " it deserves, on the
whole, the Arab reproach, ' stupid as
an ostrich.' "

In regard to its parental instinct, he
says, " Several hens deposit their eggs
in one place, — a hole scraped in the
sand. The eggs are then covered over,
and left during the heat of the day."
(" Which leaveth her eggs in the earth,
and warmeth them in dust," says the
Old Testament poet.) "But the os-
trich," says Canon Tristram, " lays an

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

343

immense number of eggs, far more than
are ever hatched, and round the cov-
ered eggs are to be found many dropped
carelessly. ... It is from this habit,
most probably, that the want of parental
instinct is laid to the charge of the os-
trich. At the same time, when surprised
by man with the young before they are
able to run, the parent bird scuds off
alone, and leaves its offspring to their
fate. To do otherwise," he continues,
" would be a self-sacrifice."

But parental instinct does prompt to
self-sacrifice on the part of birds and
other animals, for the sake of their
young.

Livingstone says, " The ostrich be-
gins to lay her eggs before she has fixed
on a spot for a nest, and solitary eggs
are thus found lying forsaken all over
the country, and become a prey to the
jackal."

In the late Charles John Andersson's
work on Lake Ngami, there is an ac-
count of the capture of some young os-
triches, which the editor of Cassell's
Book of Birds has quoted as illustrative
of the " affection occasionally displayed
by the ostrich for its little family." As
we compare these descriptions with that
of the Hebrew poet, we are not sur-
prised at the accuracy of Cowper's lines,
and understand Emerson's expression,
" ostrich-like forgetfulness."

" Greedy is a favorite ostrich-epithet
in poetry." Well, who can say it is not
well deserved by a bird that will swal-
low almost any substance, whether a
bunch of keys, bullets hissing hot from
the mould, or a whole brood of duck-
lings ?

The writer thinks it " almost a pity
that the poets did not know the tradi-
tion that the ostrich hatches her eggs
simply by looking at them." Southey's
reference to this tradition in his Thai-
aba shows that it has not been wholly
unknown to the poets. " Beyond al-
luding to these popular delusions about
this wonderful bird, the poets," we are

told, " can find no use for the ostrich,
no opportunity for a compliment."
This, like so many similar statements of
the writer, is not correct. For instance,
Mary Howitt's poem describing the
bird and the desert, where

" like armies for war,

The flocks of the ostrich are seen from afar,
Speeding on, speeding on, o'er the desolate plain,
Whilst the fleet-mounted Arab pursueth in vain,"

contains no reference to these popular
delusions, and is at least as worthy of
mention as any of the extracts quoted
by him.

So also are these lines by a poet who
lived several years in Africa :

" And the fleet-footed ostrich over the waste

Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste,

Hieing away to the home of her rest,

Where she and her mate have scooped their nest,

Far hid from the pitiless plunderer's view,

In the pathless depths of the parched karroo."

In the first article, the humming-bird
is only one of " some two thousand ex-
otic birds," which the " poets have
wasted." But it occupies the first place
on the list of those of the two thousand
species which our author mentions as
having been " all wasted alike." Soon,
however, the writer makes discoveries.
The humming-bird can no longer keep
its conspicuous position at the head of
those two thousand birds. It has been
found to be not wholly, but only in
part, wasted ; and in the second of these
remarkable essays we read that as a
bird of beauty, the humming - bird is
wasted, while regard is canvassed for it
on the fictitious virtue of its song ; "
and that " the silent flash of a humming-
bird, if once seen, can never be forgot-
ten, nor ever heard."

True enough, the silent flash of a
humming-bird cannot be heard. But
does the writer mean to imply that the
humming-bird is a silent bird ? What,
then, of the buzzing noise which has
given to these birds their English name ;
" to which," observes Martin, " they
owe the epithets of ' murmures,' ' boar-
dons,' and 'frou-frous,' given them by

344

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

[September,

the Creoles of the Antilles and Cay-
enne ; " and which the authors of the ex-
tensive French work on humming-birds,
recently published, compare to the buzz
of a spinning-wheel and the purring
of a cat ? Can that be heard ? Gosse
(Birds of Jamaica) speaks of hearing
this whirr before seeing the bird. But
this is not all. Mr. Gosse and others
describe the note of the humming-bird,
which is sometimes very curious. Belt,
in his interesting account of these birds
in Nicaragua, says it was not until he
could distinguish the notes of the dif-
ferent species that he found out how
full of humming-birds the woods were :
he sometimes heard the different chirps
of more than a dozen individuals with-
out being able to get a glimpse of one
of them. The bird, then, is sometimes
" more heard than seen," and it is not
the poet who says so that is incorrect,
but his critic who denies it. More than
this, we cannot disbelieve the testimony
which we have that some of the hum-
ming-birds really sing. Gosse speaks
of the song of the Vervain humming,
bird as a very sweet melody, contin-
ued for ten minutes at a time. Gould,
in his Introduction to the Trochilidae,
quotes Mr. Bell, of New York, as say-
ing that he had heard the " little pyg-
mornis of Panama sing beautifully a
soft, shrill, and pretty song." Other
species also are mentioned as having a
song.

Without doubt songsters among hum-
ming-birds are rare, as are also the po-
ets' allusions to the song. It will be
remembered that when he wrote the
first of these essays, the author did not
know that a single British poet had
mentioned the humming-bird. Perhaps,
when he wrote the second, he was hard-
ly qualified to judge whether there was
" little or no beauty in the poets' treat-
ment " of the bird. Evidently, when he
ventured this statement he had not read
all that British poets had written on
the humming-bird. I recall numerous

poems which should not have been in-
cluded in this adverse judgment; and at
least, poets who were perfectly famil-
iar witli the bird (as were Wilson and
Chapman) are entitled to have their
poems read before they are condemned.

Again, we are told that the poets
describe this bird as part bee, or part
fly, or part butterfly. Rogers calls it
half bird, "half fly." The French
name for humming-birds is " oiseaux-
mouches," fly-birds. Naturalists con-
stantly make use of flies, bees, and but-
terflies as objects of comparison for
them.

Bates (Naturalist on the Amazons)
says that he often shot the humming-
bird hawk-moth for the humming-bird,
which it resembles so much in appear-
ance, in the manner of flight and of
poising itself before a flower, that it re-
quired many days' experience to enable
him to avoid the mistake.

The writer has given more space to the
vulture than to any other bird. He be-
gins by calling it " unlovely," and closes
with a description which fully justifies
the use of this word, and a request to
the poets to " love him or leave him
alone." We find too a panegyric on the
vulture, some general charges against
the poets, and many quotations from
them, all with the professed design of
showing the injustice of British poets
towards the vulture. " The poet's in-
stinct," the writer thinks, " should be
towards a universal tenderness." This
he defines as a " perfectly healthy sym-
pathy with nature, which refuses under
any circumstances to call vultures ' loath-
some.' " But this universal tenderness,
as he explains it, may be inconsistent
with truth, and telling the truth about
the vulture is no more injustice in poetry
than in prose.

" The poets' vulture," we are in-
formed, " has three aspects, — as a bird
of prey (which it is not), a bird of ill-
omen (which it was not), and a bird
of general horror." It has been shown

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

345

that the vulture is a bird of prey. If
the writer means to assert that it does
not attack living animals, this is a mis-
take. There is abundant testimony to
show that it does. According to Coues
the American vultures attack and over-
power live animals, and the turkey buz-
zard kills young pigs and lambs. The
author of Bible Animals says that the
Egyptian vulture kills and devours rats,
mice, and other pests of hot countries.
Thomas Rhymer Jones informs us that
some of the vultures prefer killing their
own game ; that the lammergeyer, which
drives animals over the edge of some
cliff, and then devours the shattered re-
mains, is terribly destructive, not only
to the flocks that pasture in the Alpine
valleys, but to the chamois and other
wild quadrupeds ; that children have be-
come its victims ; and that man himself
is not safe, if he should incautiously ap-
proach their wild retreats. The very
name of this bird, lammergeyer, (Ldm-
mer-geier^ lamb-vulture), indicates its
destructiveness to flocks. Any one who
has watched the sheep and goats feeding
on the Alpine precipices will have no
difficulty in imagining them on cliffs of
the Himalayan range, within reach of
the prey-hunting lammergeyer. Milton
might have represented the vulture as
" ravaging the flocks grazing on the hill-
sides," as the writer of these articles
says he did ; but he did not. This is
what he said : —

" As when a vulture, on Imaus bred,

Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,

Dislodging from a region scarce of prey,

To gorge the flesh of lambs or .yeanling kids

On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the

springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes."

There is no intimation that the lambs
and yeanling kids were attacked while
alive. It seems even more probable
that they were already dead from a fall,
or from exposure on that " abode of
snow."

The next aspect of the poets' vulture
is " as a bird of ill-omen." Our author

has not attempted to substantiate this
except by placing -the word "ominous"
first on a list of objectionable epithets
applied by the poets to the vulture.
Ominous means both " auspicious " and
" inauspicious ; " and if there is one ad-
jective which vultures can claim as pe-
culiarly theirs, it is " ominous." " Old
Rome consulted birds," and the vulture
was one of the birds which '; gave au-
guries." But after objecting to the
word " ominous," the writer inconsist-
ently claims respect for this bird on the
very ground of the " omen of the twelve
vultures which the destinies of Rome
irresistibly obeyed." But Romulus did
not lay the foundations of Rome on the
Palatine Hill because he saw vultures.
His brother was the first, by twelve
x hours, to see vultures, — six of them ;
and though each claimed the augury in
his own favor, the decision was for the
brother who saw twelve vultures instead
of six. In this very instance, vultures
were ominous to both brothers ; inau-
spicious to one of them,- auspicious to
the other.

Again, the poets' vulture is a "bird
of general horror." Under this head
of general horror is included, I suppose,
everything expressed by "loathsome,"
"greedy," "cruel," and so forth. To
see whether such expressions are " all
injustice, because out of sympathy with
nature," let us examine very briefly a
few only of the historians of these birds.
We are told by Colonel Irby (Ornithol-
ogy of the Straits of Gibraltar) that the
" Egyptian vulture is probably the foul-
est feeding bird alive." Canon Tristram
describes it as a " despicable scavenger,"
and as " most disgusting in habits, odor,
and appearance on a close inspection."
" Their disgusting though useful habits,"
says Major Jerdon (Birds of India)
" render them objects of loathing." In
Bishop Stanley's Familiar History of
Birds, we find it stated that, from the
nature of their food, they are very dis-
gusting in various ways ; that some idea

346

Poets and Birds: A Criticism.

[September,

of their voracity may be formed when
we are assured that -at one meal a vul-
ture contrived to devour a whole alba-
tross. Rev. J. G. Wood (My Feathered
Friends) thinks the vulture's " demean-
or is precisely such as would seem suit-
able to its food," and speaks of its " cruel
eye " and " groveling " and " crouching "
attitude. So far from being the result
of " hideous prejudices," the poets' epi-
thets often seem to show exact knowl-
edge.

Note a few examples of their accu-
racy in those passages quoted in proof
of their abuse of these birds. Shelley
associates vultures with other carrion
eaters " in horrid truce to eat the dead."
Dr. Adams (Wanderings of a Natural-
ist in India) describes the congregating
around the carcass of a horse of " tawny
eagles, Indian and Egyptian vultures,
crows, and pariah dogs."

" The hope of torturing him, smells like a heap
Of corpses to a death-bird after battle,"

quotes the writer, still again from Shel-
ley. Canon Tristram says that on great
battle-fields vultures congregate in a few
hours, even where the bird was scarce
before, and that in the Crimean war
the whole race from the Caucasus and
Asia Minor seemed to have collected to
enjoy the unwonted abundance. This
recalls another striking passage from
the same poet : —

" The death-birds descend to their feast
From the hungry clime."

The death-bird of Shelley, our author
claims, is the vulture. He has no means
of knowing this, except that from its
well-known habits the poet could have
substituted " vulture " for " death-bird."
If anybody has been unjust to the vul-
ture here, it is not the poet, for he did
not name it. However, it is by no
means certain that vultures alone are
the death-birds of Shelley. Canon Tris-
tram also speaks of watching at one
time, " close to a recent battle-field," a
" steady stream of carrion eaters, which
had scented the battle from afar, — all

the vultures, kites, and ravens of North
Arabia rushing to the banquet."

Once more, we are told by naturalists
that this bird's plumage is not " mat-
ted together with the odious substances
constantly coming in contact with it,"
because the " nature of its feathers is
such that when it shakes them extrane-
ous matter falls off."

Shelley very concisely says

"Its wings rain contagion."

The poets, then, are not unjust to call
the vulture a " bird of prey," or " omi-
nous ; " even " loathsome " seems not
to be too strong a term.

The author's own description of the
vulture, the " shabby-looking fowl of
dirty white plumage," the "poor dust-
and-dirt bird," the " dull-lived vulture,"
" solemn and shabby and hungry," is, as
far as it goes, a description of the Egyp-
tian vulture, or Pharaoh's chicken ; and
he implies that the vulture of his pan-
egyric, entitled " from its traditions
alone " to a " place of dignity," and in
" actual nature undeniably majestic," the
" eagle of Holy Writ," is also Pharaoh's
chicken. What species of vultures have
originated the various traditions referred

to, I do not know. In flight many of
the vultures are majestic. As for the
eagle of Scripture, it is believed to be
not merely " as often as not," but in-
variably, the vulture ; not Pharaoh's
chicken, however, but the griffon vul-
ture. The mere fact that this bird is
the eagle of Scripture does not change
its character, and is pertinent to the
subject of the present inquiry only from
the fact that British poets have also
noted some of the same traits in the
vulture which are spoken of in Scrip-
ture. To. discover this, we need not go
beyond the passages quoted in these ar-
ticles. One of the characteristics is the
care bestowed on the young. In the long
extract quoted from Montgomery's The
Pelican Island, there is an allusion to
the parental tenderness of the vulture.
Again, the eagle is represented in Scrip-

1883.]

Poets and Birds : A Criticism.

347

tare as " making her nest on high."
The author of Bible Animals says that
nothing bat the highest and most in-
accessible spots will satisfy the griffon
vulture as a place for nesting. Both
this and the bearded vulture inhabit the
Himalayas, the Imaus of the ancients ;
and Milton, two hundred years ago, ac-
curately designated this highest moun-
tain range on the globe as the birth-
place of the vulture.

But the most frequent scriptural al-
lusions to the bird are in connection
with its prey, and the poets' treatment
of the bird hi this respect has already
been spoken of.

In the last article, it is claimed that
" the punctuality with which religious
associations are availed of " is " in a
large measure special to American
verse," and some quotations are given
from American poets, mostly from Long-
fellow, illustrating this " predilection for
the religious." But this is no proof
that British poets are without this predi-
lection, or, by giving similar quotations
from them, we might just as easily prove
American poets destitute of it. Those
familiar with British poetry know how
common are such illustrations : of praise,
as in Milton : —

" Join voices, all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,

That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,

Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise ; "

of teaching, as in Wordsworth : •

" How blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher; "

and George Macdonald calls the lark

" The voice of all the creature throng,"
as

"He sings the morning prayer."

Since Donne named the birds "heav-
en's choristers," more than two hundred

and fifty years ago, the poets have not
ceased to record how they have " mat-
tens seyd " or " chirped," and " sung their
anthems " and " thankful hymns ; " how
they " chant their Te Deum " and " ves-
pers ; " and how

" the thickets ring
With jubilate from the choirs of spring."

The very birds, the mention of which
by Longfellow seemed to make such
an impression upon our author, taught
their lessons to English poets long be-
fore there were any American poets.
More than two centuries ago Herrick
was reminded of St. Peter and admon-
ished by the crowing of the cock; and
Vaughan, remembering the prophet of
old, said

" If I Thy servant be,
The swift-winged raven shall bring me meat."

As we read that " the raven, taunted
with its conduct towards Noah and
robbed of the credit of nourishing Eli-
jah, has little to thank British bards for,"
we ask where the writer has found his
poets. In examining the works of a large
number of British poets since Vaughan,
including Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper,
and Wordsworth, I have found mention
of the raven in illustration of the watch-
ful care of Providence ten times at least
to one allusion to the bird as the mes-
senger of Noah.

In concluding, our author speaks of
" American poetry as he reads it." This
reminds us of the remark of Mr. Bur-
roughs that " the poets are the best nat-
ural historians, only you must know how
to read them."

The nature of the errors and misrep-
resentations contained in these essays
on poets and birds has been perhaps
sufficiently indicated.

Harriet C. W. Stanton.

348

Newport.

[September,

NEWPORT.

VI.

DEWDROPS AND DIAMONDS.

THE weather was delicious ; brilliant
yet soft, and full of that vague, lulling
enchantment which is the peculiar vir-
tue of the Newport air. The sun shone,
but not in a downright, uncultured way,
such as might be obnoxious to polite
sensibilities : you were conscious of it
rather as a diffused exhalation of pale
golden mist, a celestial form of the
grosser golden mist that was floating
about in the minds of the people who
moved under its radiance, in the hol-
iday part of the town. I have no
doubt the wealthy ones among them
were gratified that the sun so well un-
derstood its place and behaved with
such very proper deference ; others,
whose slender purses enabled them
only to cling to the edge of the show,
dilated their chests and absolutely en-
joyed a passing illusion that they were
rich. It was one of those days when
a southwest breeze, streaming over the
island in a steady succession of bluff
gusts, makes you feel as if you were
standing on a quarter-deck — a deck
neatly carpeted with verdant lawns, em-
bowered in trees, and thickly encum-
bered with villas, a few of which are
more like small palaces. Yes, the wind
pats your face in a vigorous, compan-
ionable manner that flatters you with
the idea that you are an old salt, and
know all about it, and can stand any
amount of exposure — as long as the
grass is dry and your nice clothes are
not spoiled, and your pleasant club is
near at hand. You even murmur to
yourself something about " The Bay of
Biscay, 0 ; " and then you think of dis-
tant places, all the balmy and romantic
coasts and islands from which this

breeze has come, and the name of far
Cathay forms itself lazily on your lips.
At least, this was the case with OH-
phant, when he came out into the air
again, to fulfill an engagement he had
made. He had accepted a maternal sort
of invitation from Mrs. Farley Blazer,
to drive with her. This poor old ogress
was rather lonely in her splendor ; and
as the girls were driving with other peo-
ple that day, she wanted a companion.
Besides, she may have had some faint
design of marrying Oliphant to the el-
der niece, if nothing better could be
done. Her foreign policy had had in
view alliances with England and France,
or possibly Italy : if such an interna-
tional concert could be established, her
own position would be made more
secure. But she was discouraged, just
now, as to Tilly's capturing Lord Hawk-
stane, unless the reported engagement
with Miss Hobart should come to noth-
ing ; and there was beginning to be
some danger that Ruth would not get
married at all ; in which event even so
humble a match as Oliphant might be
worth considering. Of course he had
no suspicion of such an absurdity ; and
as I have said, he thought of far Ca-
thay, while the breeze wafted aside his
troubled mood regarding Octavia. He
surrendered himself to the scented in-
dolence and poppied ease of Newport,
as being more easily attainable than
Cathay, and in all likelihood pleasanter ;
meanwhile rolling along in Mrs. Blaz-
er's chariot, which was like a huge bath-
tub on wheels.

Morning at Newport is a disorganized
period, in which the general gathering
at the Casino about midday is the most
definite incident. Strangers wander
about uneasily ; now and then a dash-
ing equipage speeds along Bellevue
Avenue, or a hired victoria creeps Ian-

1883.]

Newport.

349

guidly through that thoroughfare. The
coachmen and footmen attached to the
dashing equipages glide rigidly onward
in their appointed places ; the grooms
jump up or down, open doors, and fold
their arms, with all the precision of
trained monkeys ; their yellow-topped
boots, many-buttoned liveries and " bug"
adorned hats increasing the likeness.
There are also a good many young men
on the street who bear a close resem-
blance to these hired attendants : their
dress, though different, is just as artifi-
cial, and they are just as much bound
to conduct themselves according to an
arbitrary fashion. It is the height of
luxury for human beings who have the
requisite means to distort other human
beings who take care of their horses
and carriages, — on the same principle
that once made it the fashion at Euro-
pean courts to keep dwarfs, who had
been specially stunted and twisted to
meet the demand. The young men of
the avenue, finding no one else to dis-
tort them, have to do it for themselves.
They are debarred from becoming lack-
eys, but they enjoy all the appearance
of being employed on salaries to make
themselves absurd. There they go,
trotting about in their small, tight-waist-
ed cutaways, or hi long-tailed Incroy-
able coats, that give them a playful like-
ness to moths of an exaggerated size.
Their shoulders are held awkwardly
forward ; they lift their tight little legs
and stamp their small, uncomfortable
shoes down on the pavement with stud-
ied over-earnestness, producing a start-
ling imitation of persons who really
have a purpose in going somewhere.
They cling each one to a small cane,
with a certain desperate tenacity that
makes you suspect it is a sort of perch,
to which they have grown accustomed
in the cage where they served their ap-
prenticeship. But what are we talking
about? Are not these little creatures
men ? Most assuredly they wear that
painful look of experience so carefully

assumed by an order of animals nearly
approaching man ; and we must give
them the benefit of the doubt.

During the forenoon large covered
wagons, with romantic names sprawled
along their sides, — the Amarintha, the
Margarita, the Madeline, — had proud-
ly caracoled through the streets, car-
rying a motley freight of people still
ignorant and innocent enough to ride
down to Easton's Beach for a surge-
bath ; but now these lordly vehicles,
their brief hour of triumph having
passed, withdrew into obscurity, giving
way to the veritable curule aristocracy.
The little creatures, also, with their
tight legs and tiny sticks and slender
coat-tails, made haste either to get
places in the driving throng, or to en-
sconce themselves on the reading-room
veranda or in the Casino Club windows,
where they could view the procession
with placid superiority.

Gradually the soft crushing of wheels
and the tapping sound of delicately
stepping horses, which had at first been
intermittent, merged into a continuous,
subdued whirr : the main part of Belle-
vue Avenue and broad, old-time Kaye
Street, with its sober mansions and re-
tired-looking cottages, were filled by an
unbroken stream of moving carriages.
The sunlight glinted on the polished har-
ness metal and abundant varnish of til-
burys, dog-carts, landaus, gigs ; and even
basket-wagons were to be seen here and
there, swimming along in the black,
glittering tide. Quisbrough and Judge
Malachi Hixon, sitting democratically
on the long piazza of the Ocean House,
— the Judge with his hat and chair both
tipped comfortably back and his feet en-
tangled in the railing, — observed the
procession. Mary Deering was out in
her village- cart, driving Atlee, who sur-
veyed the scene with such perfection of
acquired gravity that his very eye-glass
seemed to cast a shadow over every-
thing. Soon afterwards they saw Con-
gressman Overblow jolting along on the

350

Newport.

[September,

back seat of a T-cart, while his enor-
mous spouse occupied a place in front
beside the hook-nosed gentleman who
was directing the horse. Overblow
smoked a very large cigar and appeared
to think that he was in the height of
the style. On went the cavalcade.
Vivian Ware had chosen to make her-
self conspicuous by appearing on horse-
back, attended by Count Fitz-Stuart ;
and Justin Craig, who was strolling along
the sidewalk in his loose, dowdy apparel,
on the lookout for her, did not even re-
ceive a nod from the fair face under
the tall hat. Josephine Hobart flashed
by in company with a young man who
appeared to be greatly devoted to her,
but left on the minds of spectators, as
he skimmed the edge of the crowd, only
the impression of a long red mustache
flying through the air. There was no
occasion for remark in her being with
him, for everybody knew him as Roland
De Peyster, whose ambition it was to
secure for his tilbury more pretty girls
in the season than should fall to the lot
of any other young bachelor ; but he
had no intention of lavishing his great
fortune on any single damsel. " I can't
marry, you know," he would sometimes
say. " It would turn the head of the
best girl I could pick ; so I try to pre-
serve them in all their perfection as they
are."

There were many lovely women in
the procession, and many bows and
smiles were exchanged ; but there were
likewise hidden animosities and heart-
burnings lurking under the gay cos-
tumes and flowers of the women and
the reticent coats of the men. Sundry
youths of the most eligible pattern had
failed to secure desirable partners for
the course, and drove in solitary grand-
eur. Raish Porter was also alone, but
he looked the personification of con-
tentment ; his penetrating eyes took in
everything, but his bearded, hearty face
gave him the air of an indulgent master
of the ceremonies, a person who watched

the machinery and helped to keep it
going for the benefit of others. Quis-
brough pointed out to Judge Hixon
Mrs. Ballard Mole, a devoted church-
woman, who was airing the Bishop of
Alaska in a heavy barouche, presided
over by two servants in deep black, with
wrinkled black gloves and equally
wrinkled visages, doleful as those of
hired mourners. But just as he had
done so, the inane tooting of a horn was
heard ; and the four-in-hand of Colo-
nel Clancy lumbered into view, bear-
ing on its high back a large party who
appeared to have fled to that eminence
in order to escape some threatened in-
undation. They were closely pursued
by the Baron de Huyneck, the Austrian
ambassador ; and a stout individual not
far behind, who might have been taken
for a prosperous old-clothes dealer from
Chatham Street, turned out to be Rus-
tuffi Bey, representative of the Sublime
Porte. It was natural enough that Mrs.
Farley Blazer should happen to pass at
about the same time with the other di-
plomatists ; but it may be imagined how
insignificant Oliphant must have felt
in such a train. Still, he was permit-
ted something of that awful joy which
small boys on the outside of a circus ex-
perience in peeping under some lifted
fold of the tent. He knew he had not
paid his share for the performance, but
he was getting' the benefit of it, all the
same. Millions of dollars, and various
things besides, had been contributed by
the others. Trade, law, religion, social
ambition, politics, honor, — possibly dis-
honor, — thrift and idleness, were all in
that stream ; and those who stood for
such diverse interests had probably sac-
rificed a good deal in order to join the
rout. What power was it, mightier than
horses' legs, that drew them on, and
whither were they drifting ? That was
what the atom Oliphant inwardly in-
quired ; and in the thickest part of the
press he was suddenly reminded of an
engraving after Boulanger, which he

1883.]

Newport.

351

had noticed in the house of a friend. It
depicted the Appian Way crowded with
chariots and litters, fleet Nubian slaves
and fashionable idlers and beautiful
women, at the time of Rome's greatest
luxury, before the fall. No doubt the
architecture and the costumes were very
different, but there was an element of
sameness in the pictured scene and this
real one : here, too, were the reigning
beauties and the handsome, selfish young
men and the slaves — the last from
Britannia and Hjbernia, instead of Nu-
bia, and wearing more than the simple
waist-cloth that satisfied Rome. And
might not Overblow, with his big cigar,
take the place of Boulanger's bull-
necked senator ? Oliphant laughed at
the burlesque truth in his fancy. What
he saw before him, after all, was only a
parody upon the Roman scene ; a mod-
ern comic opera, mounted at great ex-
pense and ridiculing the old notion that
luxury implies decadence.

" What are you laughing at ? " Mrs.
Blazer asked, coming out of a brief pre-
occupation. " Oh, I see," she add-
ed, immediately : " you recognize your
friends."

In fact, as she put her question, Oli-
phant was taking off his hat to Octavia,
who, enthroned upon a high seat with
Thorburn, swept by them in the neigh-
boring line of carriages, going the other
way. Her face was radiant, and she
gave him an enchanting smile and bow.
Then he saw her no more.

" No," said Oliphant, becoming al-
most grave ; " I was laughing at an an-
cient joke — a joke at least two thou-
sand years old."

" Ah," said the matron, " that was
before my time. What can it be ? "

" The joke of thinking society is se-
rious."

" I wish I could see the fun in that,"
Mrs. Blazer observed.

" So do I," returned Oliphant ; " for
if you did you might be happier." And
the smile came back to his lips.

We need not be deceived by his tone.
At that instant he was by no means in
a jocose mood ; and, in fact, if he and
Octavia had leaned from their carriages
as they passed, and had wounded each
other with rapiers, the encounter could
not have been more startling than it
proved for both of them.

He was amazed to see her abroad at
all ; especially to see her so apparently
contented. Although he had not wanted
her to suffer, it shocked him that she
should so easily surmount the pain she
must have felt ; and possibly he was
thwarted in some unconscious scheme
of acting as a consoler. Add to this
that her being with Thorburn, and the
possibility that the heavily gilded youth
might be making headway in his suit
for her hand, quickened the sentiment al-
ready smouldering in Oliphant's breast.
From the ashes in his heart an impas-
sioned envy, a new hope, broke like a
spurt of flame.

Octavia, in turn, was horrified that he
should openly parade in Mrs. Blazer's
company. What did all his protesta-
tions of strict concealment amount to,
weighed against his presence there with
the woman who had first hinted to her
the gossip concerning Gifford's former
attachment to Miss Davenant ? Octa-
via believed strongly in feminine intu-
itions, particularly when she was con-
structing an opinion of her own. She
saw it all, now ; she was positive that
Oliphaut had weakly allowed Mrs. Bla-
zer to extract the whole history from
him. The bitterness of this thought,
stinging her mind even as she bowed to
him, had a peculiar result : it caused
her to throw additional sweetness into
her smile.

" Who is that Oliphant, any way ? "
inquired the blonde young Croesus at
her side, as they drove along. " Seems
to me, if any man could reasonably
claim the right to be jealous about you,
there would be some cause for alarm,
just now. I think Mr. Oliphant will be

352

Newport.

[September,

falling in love with you in about two
twos from the present moment — or say
in one shake of a ram's tail."

'• Perry," said Octavia, " if you ex-
pect to talk with me, you really must
correct your slang. But what makes
you think that about Mr. Oliphant ? "

" Oh, the way he looked at you.
How can I tell what makes me think it,
anyhow ? Let 's talk about Josephine.
You say that her father really insists on
her going back to Jamestown. How
soon ? "

" In a few days, at the outside. He 's
inexorable."

The young man looked meditative.
" Well, what am I to do ? " he began,
after a pause. " I hardly dare to ven-
ture on speaking to her so soon. Would
you advise me to ? "

" My friend," said Octavia, " is any
one ever old enough to advise in such
matters ? Besides, you know " — here
the young widow slightly tossed back
her head and laughed aloud, so that the
short white veil that scarcely touched
her lips was shaken by the merriment
— " she 's supposed to be engaged to
Lord Hawkstane ! "

People in the neighboring carriages,
though they could not distinguish what
she said, heard her laugh ring out, and
turned to look at the white throat, swell-
ing like a song-bird's, at the trim figure,
the dainty costume, the roses blooming
in her corsage.

" The devil ! " exclaimed Thorburn.
" I beg pardon ; but that 's hardly slang,
because — because the devil is eminent-
ly the proper thing nowadays. Is it
positively true, though, about Josephine
and Hawkstane ? "

I regret to say that the clatter of har-
ness and hoofs and the crunching of
wheels made Octavia's reply inaudible,
so that it cannot be given here.

By this time, Mrs. Blazer and Oli-
phant were far away in the opposite di-
rection, and were entering upon the
road that leads to Castle Hill ; but they

had continued to converse about the two
people we have just been listening to.

"You knew Mrs. Gifford before, I
believe," remarked Mrs. Blazer.

" Before when ? No ; I never saw
her until I came to Newport."

" But Mr. Gifford was acquainted
with your wife, I hear."

"What!" cried Oliphant "You
have found it out, too ? I wonder if
there is anybody left in Newport who
has n't been told of that interesting cir-
cumstance."

" I imagine it is known to very few,"
said Mrs. Blazer quietly, with a rather
wicked glimmer in her weary eyes, peer-
ing out from the dull, white face.

" Seriously, then," he resumed, " will
you tell me from whom you learned
it?"

Mrs. Blazer attempted pleasantry.
" You were just saying, Mr. Oliphant,
that it 's foolish to take society au se-
rieux"

" Well, I suppose it is. But I 'm not
a society man ; and this is not a public
matter, you assure me, though it had
begun to seem like one when you men-
tioned it."

" Don't you remember," she resumed,
"that I told you how Mr. Sweetser
knew all about you ? "

" Ah, it was from him, was it ? But
he could n't have known of the " — Ol-
iphant was on the point of saying " the
letter." He made a new approach.
" One question occurs to me : have you
spoken of this to Mrs. Gifford, at all ? "

" Mrs. Gifford ? Why, that would be
the most natural thing in the world,
would n't it ? Yes, I think I did say
something." How artlessly Mrs. Blazer
answered !

" I 'm exceedingly sorry. I don't
think you should have done it," said he,
biting his lip.

" If I had had any idea it could an-
noy you," the lady replied, benignly.
" of course I would n't have uttered a
word."

1883.]

Newport.

353

" Do you consider it strange that I
should be annoyed? Perhaps it isn't
necessary for me to go into the reasons
why I am. But I really shall have to
ask you how much you may have said
to Mrs. Gifford."

" What a singular question ! You
seem to be disturbed, Mr. Oliphant.
Well, I '11 tell you : I hardly said more
to Mrs. Gifford than I have to you."

" Your answer is as strange as my
question," said Oliphant. He was at a
loss to guess how Octavia had been ap-
prised that there was a letter, if it had
not been through Mrs. Blazer. Then,
reverting to the possibility that Raish
had found out something, '• Did your
information," he inquired, "come only
from Mr. Sweetser ? "

" From whom else should you im-
agine ? " Mrs. Blazer retorted. " Of
course he was my informant."

" The only one ? " Oliphant fixed his
eyes upon her.

His companion shifted the position of
her parasol by a point or two, and bowed
in her grand manner to the Baron de
Huyneck, who had made a turn and
was coming back. " Dear me," she re-
plied, languidly, " I know very little
about this affair. I only mentioned it
because it happened to come into my
head. T thought it might make conver-
sation."

" And so it did," Oliphant answered.
" I have been put in a disagreeable posi-
tion of late, by this very thing, because
some one has spoken of what I had sup-
posed was to be guarded sacredly. You
will greatly oblige me if you will give
me a direct reply."

" I 'm sorry to refuse," said Mrs.
Blazer, " but I cannot see why I should
be mixed up with it, any way."

Oliphant's suspicion was strengthened
by her behavior. The conviction that
it was Mrs. Blazer who had carried
everything to Octavia, and the belief
that she had purposely inveigled him
into public companionship with her,

VOL. LII. NO. 311. 23

mortified and enraged him. He laid his
hand on the lever of the carriage door.

" What are you going to do ? " de-
manded the owner of the carriage, in
alarm.

" I 'm going to take my leave, and
walk back," said he. •

" Oh. don't ! don't ! " she exclaimed.
" You will kill yourself ! Wait a mo-
ment. Andreas," she called to the coach-
man, " stop here : we are going to
turn."

" Thanks," said Oliphant. " You
must n't inconvenience yourself ; I pre-
fer to get down." He already had the
door open, and, as Andreas reined in
the horses, he placed his foot on the
step. " You have nothing more to tell
me ? " he queried, looking up at her
with hostile fixity.

" Nothing," declared Mrs. Blazer, and
firmly contracted those uneasy lips of
hers. At this, Oliphant sprang to the
ground.

" Drive on, Andreas," Mrs. Blazer
commanded. And, while Oliphant lifted
his hat with grim ceremony, the impres-
sive bath-tub on wheels started forward
again, its occupant settling herself to
face the sea-breeze alone.

He strode along the highway in a
fierce temper. All the soft serenity of
the afternoon did not avail to soothe him ;
and when he regained the sidewalk of
Bellevue Avenue, where the well-bred
rumble and clatter of the polished turn-
outs were still going on, the sight of that
respectable pageant redoubled his dis-
gust. " What a fool I am," he muttered,
" to care about all this ! Why do I bother
myself about Mrs. Gifford, and why can't
I just look on and amuse myself with
the mock-Roman Newport holiday ? Or
else, why don't I get away from here
at once, and leave the whole thing be-
hind me ? " But something tpld him he
could not go ; it was too late ; he had
been trapped, fascinated, he hardly knew
how. The rest of the world looked
strangely empty, as he imagined him-

354

Newport.

[September,

self going out into it again. Desolate
though it had been to him before, he
hud not conceived until this instant that
it could seem quite so vacant.

All at once Octavia appeared before
him a second time, not as a vision, but
as a delightful reality. Thorburn had
decided to take the Ocean drive, and
they had changed their direction accord-
ingly. Away they flew, and Oliphant
had only time enough for a glimpse of
her. Pie thought her absorbed in con-
versation with Perry ; too much so, in-
deed. He did not know that they were
still talking more or less directly about
Josephine Hobart ; nor was he aware
that they had both observed him and
exchanged comments at his reappear-
ance on foot, so soon after they had
seen him with Mrs. Blazer.

" I swear ! " observed Perry. " Came
back on purpose to see you"

" Nonsense," said Octavia. " He has
forgotten something he had to do ; or
perhaps Mrs. Blazer only took him up
by chance, for a little way."

Her heart fluttered, though she saw
no reason for its doing so ; and, bend-
ing her head as if to keep the wind off
her face, she avoided meeting Oliphant's
gaze. As for him, he proceeded on
his way still more disconsolately ; and
when he came opposite the Casino en-
trance, the desire to get out of sight and
be quiet moved him to pass into the
deserted inclosure.

Another unhappy lover had gone in
there, just a little before — in fact, our
friend Justin Craig ; and the two met,
not many paces from the Clock-Tower.
Oliphant observed that the young mu-
sician looked peculiarly excited, as he
came forward. " See here, what I have
found ! " cried Justin, stretching forth
his hand.

As Oliphant had passed the ticket-
taker's window, he had caught sight of
a white paper on the wall, announcing
the loss of a lady's diamond pin, for the
recovery of which a large reward was

offered. What Justin now disclosed in
his artistic palm was apparently the very
jewel described.

" You 've found it, eh ? " said the
widower. " Ah, you rascal, to take ad-
vantage of seeing the notice before I
did ! That was what brought you in,
I suppose — hunting for this thing."

Justin's face grew pink. "I did n't
see any notice at all," he said, rather
gruffly. " Where ? "

Oliphant pointed towards the small
spot of paper. " At any rate, my boy,"
said he, "you're five hundred dollars
better off than you were before you
stepped in here : that 's the reward.
And I 'in glad of it. But how did you
happen upon the discovery ? "

" Well, the fact is, I felt blue, I — I
don't care to explain why ; and so I got
reckless and spent half a dollar to come
in here — half a dollar is a good deal to
me, you know. I was mooning around,
looking at the grass and the flowers, and
trying to be unconscious of those swell
waiters over in the cafe windows : there
were two of them laughing at my clothes,
I know they were." Justin's manner
here became quite ferocious, and he
glared disdainfully at the restaurant side
of the building. " There 's one com-
fort," he said : " the wretches are forced
to wear dress-coats in the day-time ; so
they 're as much out of fashion as I am.
Well, I was looking into that flower-
bed close by the balcony, when I saw a
twinkle and flash in the dark earth. I
thought it was a dewdrop, at first; it
threw out that same sort of gleam. Do
you know how beautiful the dew is,
Mr. Oliphant ? I often walk out very
early in the morning to see it on the
fields ; it is so glorious. You 'd think
gems had been scattered there over night
— rubies and emeralds and topazes and
beryls and the rest of 'em ; but there 's
no pride or envy connected with them.
Ah, it 's one of my greatest pleasures ! "

"But the diamonds," Oliphant re-
minded him, quietly amazed at his young

1883.]

Newport.

355

friend's indifference. " You 're forget-
ting about those."

Justin looked down at the shining
cluster in his hand. " Oh," he said,
smiling, " I thought I had explained.
Of course there could n't be any dew at
this time of day : it turned out to be
these diamonds, almost buried in the
mould. They probably slipped from
some lady's dress, as she was standing
on the balcony above. Now, there 's
a nice idea, to think how horribly she
must feel about it, and how happy she '11
be when she gets them back ! "

Oliphant laughed, his amazement
turning to pleasure. " Upon my word,"
he declared, " I believe, if it were n't for
that idea, you 'd be sorry they were
diamonds, instead of dewdrops. You
don't seem to think anything about the
reward."

" The reward ! That 's true : I sup-
pose it 's fair to take it, if it 's worth
the sum to her to get them back."

" Of course it 's worth that much and
more. The stones must have cost four
or five thousand, Justin ; and five hun-
dred " —

" Did you mean that ? " Justin broke
in, grasping his arm. " I thought you
were joking. Five hundred dollars in
a lump ! Why, it 's a fortune to me !
I can do all sorts of things ; I can go
to Germany and study." He held his
breath for an instant. " But then I
should have to leave " — He stopped.

" Of course you 'd have to ' leave,' if
you were going. Leave what ? "

" Home," said Justin shyly. " Some-
thing else, too — a great deal more to
me than that."

" Oh, I see," said his companion.
" I wonder who the lady is."

" That I sha'n't tell you," Craig re-
torted, presenting a warlike front. He
saw his mistake, however, instantly.

" I meant the lady who lost the jew-
el," Oliphant told him ; and they joined
in a laugh of good understanding.

"I hardly like this idea, though,"

Craig resumed, " of accepting money
for restoring what is n't mine. It seems
to put one in a false position."

" Not in your case," argued his friend.
" I think it would be wrong for you to
refuse. You must consider the money
as a tax levied by Providence for the
encouragement of art."

They proceeded in a very cheerful
humor to the superintendent's office ; for
the incident of the finding had tempo-
rarily driven off Oliphant's agitations
concerning Octavia, and had almost
made Craig forget the misery of having
been met by Vivian Ware without rec-
ognition.

" I see," he began, to the clerk, " that
a diamond brooch has been lost. Can
you tell me the name of the owner ? "

The clerk looked up at him with ex-
perienced insolence. " See here, young
man," said he, "do you' think I'm
fresh ? "

" No," said Craig. " I should think
you were particularly faded. Does that
suit you any better ? "

The official youth was ' surprised at
such audacity in a mere citizen, badly
dressed. He looked closer at the two
gentlemen, and saw that Oliphant's
costume and appearance were deserving
of respect. " I thought you were a
newspaper chap," he remarked some-
what apologetically to Craig, " picking
up items. Do you know anything about
that brooch ? "

" I should like to know something
about it, because I 've found one here."

" You have, hey ? " returned the
clerk, becoming briskly companionable.
" That 's all right, then. You 're in for
the reward, I guess. Well, the lady
that lost it is Mrs. Chauncey Ware.
Know her ? "

A change came over Craig's man-
ner. He stiffened, glanced quickly at
Oliphant, and then back at the clerk.
" There is the brooch I found," he
said, holding it up for the man's inspec-
tion. " I shall not take any reward."

356

Newport.

[September,

The clerk suppressed a whistle of as-
tonishment, and put his hand forward
to receive the diamonds.

"Just wait a minute," interposed
Oliphant. " This is a matter for one
of the governors. You need n't de-
liver the pin here, Craig. Besides," he
continued in a lower tone, "I protest
against your declining the reward."

Craig was pale and rather agitated.
" Do you know," he returned, with a
cold gleam in his eyes, " who Mrs.
Ware is ? She is the mother of Vivian
Ware ; and if I had to starve first, I
would never accept a dollar from her,
under any circumstances."

They had stepped away a little, so
that the clerk behind the desk should
not hear. " Take a little time, my boy ;
think," said Oliphant, with a hand on
his shoulder. " You will find my name
down," he added, to the clerk, " as a
subscriber ; and I will be responsible
for the delivery of this brooch. Or
you can send for one of the governors,
and we will wait up-stairs. Here 's my
card."

" All right, sir," said the companion-
able clerk.

" No, we won't wait at all ! " thun-
dered Craig, vehemently. " I 've found
the brooch, and I '11 have nothing more
to do with it. Mr. Oliphant, you ought
to understand me ! " And as he spoke,
he brought to bear upon his friend the
ardor and the softness of his fine eyes,
in which could be read a confession of
his love for Vivian, and all the piteous
struggle of his wounded pride and so-
cial disadvantage. " There ! " he wound
up ; " take the pin, and manage it as
you prefer. I don't wish my name men-
tioned ; and I 'm going."

Oliphant looked at him reproachfully,
but Craig thrust the precious object
into his hands and stalked quickly away,
making for the street. " At least, Craig
— look here!" called his friend. "I
want you to dine with me at seven,
here in the Casino. Will you come ? "

Craig halted. "In these clothes?"
he inquired sarcastically.

" In anything — a bathing-suit, if you
like."

Justin's magnificence broke down at
this. " I '11 be with you," he said, emit-
ting a short, pleased laugh. But, hav-
ing done that much, he continued on his
way, and disappeared.

Oliphant waited until he could see
the superintendent and assure him of
the safety of the brooch ; and after
that he hastened to the house of Mrs.
Chauncey Ware. He found her en-
gaged, but Stillman, whom he had met
at Raish's lunch, received him. Still-
man Ware, who was about twenty-eight,
looked forty years old : he had a wrin-
kled brow and black hair which was
alarmingly scant on the crown of his
head ; and he wore mild, unobtrusive
little shiny shoes. There was a general
air about him as if he had been finished
in patent leather ; he also bore his pre-
mature aging with the imperturbableness
of a trained gentleman ; indeed, with
something of pleasantry, as if conscious
that he had got a good deal of fun out
of life, even though he had drawn heav-
ily on his principal to pay for it. He
accepted the news of Justin's refusal to
take the reward with a kind of sweet
annoyance. He was very gentle, but
very much provoked.

"Mr. Craig," he said, "may be an
excellent person, but I don't see why
he should assume the tone of a man of
wealth. I am told he is quite strait-
ened as to his means. And it is scarce-
ly fair for him to insist on placing us
under an obligation which we can't re-
pay."

" Will you dine with me this even-
ing, and meet him ? " Oliphant asked.
" I think you would like him, and you
might talk it over."

" Thanks ; I am engaged for dinner.
However, my mother or I will perhaps
see him to-morrow. There is a particu-
lar reason why we cannot accept a favor

1883.]

Newport.

357

of this kind at his hands. It 's all
wrong. He must allow us to recom-
pense him."

" And the particular reason ? " Oli-
phant began. " I suppose I ought not
to inquire what it is."

" I would rather not say," answered
Ware. " Perhaps you have some ink-
ling of it already."

This was the gist of their interview,
which soon came to an end. In the
evening, Justin professed annoyance
that Oliphant should have disclosed his
name as that of the finder ; but this
wore off, and the result of their session
at dinner was a long walk together un-
der the starlight, and a talk in which
Oliphant made his way to Justin's con-
fidence.

" I stand alone in the world, Craig,"
he said to him, " and if you will make
a friend of me I shall be in your debt
for giving me a new interest. With me
the best of life is over, but perhaps I
can help your cause with Vivian ; and if
you succeed in music through any pass-
ing assistance I may lend, don't you see
how great my pleasure would be in that
success ? "

They were pausing, about to part,
by the mysterious Old Mill, or Norse-
man's .Tower, in Touro Park. The
carriages, coaches, and phaetons which
had filed past it so numerously a few
hours before had now utterly disap-
peared ; there was no more tramping of
horses ; not a trace of the pageant re-
mained. A village quiet, in fact, reigned
over Newport, broken only at the mo-
ment by the meagre, sharp, and grating
notes of a chorus of tree-toads. Elec-
tric lights, however, suspended on high
poles, threw a weird illumination down
upon the dew-damp street, or across and
under the muffling foliage of the trees,
in wide splashes and long, jagged
streaks, as if the radiance were a liquid
that had undergone icy crystallization.
In this cold light the face of Justin
shone for an instant with responsive

gratitude : he seemed to accept the po-
sition of a younger brother towards his
companion.

'' Your sympathy and fellowship are
help enough," he said, pressing Oli-
phant's hand.

Then the lighted face turned and
passed away down the dark street, and
Oliphant's eyes rested on the dim tower
which confronted him like a ghost of
gray stone, looking as if it had a warn-
ing to utter. But what of that ? Faces
come and go around the old tower, or
vanish forever from its presence, while
it remains unaltered, a perpetual enigma
of the past. And are not the faces
enigmas, just as much? And has not
love its gray ruins, that loom up in the
night and seem on the point of warning
us ? But no one would heed the warn-
ing, even if.it ever came to speech.

VII.
LORD HAWKSTANE'S JUST PRIDE.

Mrs. Chauncey Ware was a woman
of high social position in Boston ; she
had abundant wealth ; she was attend-
ed by a train of obsequious ancestors
and gubservient living personages. Her
face was colorless except for a linger-
ing brown tinge, and was all quilted
over with fine lines that seemed to have
been arranged by a pattern; so that
you might have fancied for a moment
that it was itself an heirloom, some kind
of a sampler or old piece of stitching,
carefully preserved until -it had grown
rather dingy. Further reflection would
convince you that the surface was hu-
man, after all, but that peculiar influ-
ences slowly working upon it had im-
parted a strangeness and imperviousness
that made it appear unreal.

It was a comfortable, satisfied coun-
tenance, as well it might be, for the
prevailing superstition in the three-hilled
city attributed to its possessor an amount

358

Newport.

[September,

of visiting-list and old-family wisdom
never surpassed by any other conserva-
tor of society. Mrs. Ware always ex-
hibited two cylindrical puffs of grayish
hair on her temples; minute sibylline
scrolls, one might say. Somehow, in
those two puffs, which were like insignia
of her high office, she appeared to have
coiled up the experience of a life-time ;
and Raish Porter had once alluded to
them as the steel-gray mainsprings of
her existence.

It may easily be imagined how such
a person, knowing in a distant and aus-
tere way that Craig cherished a pre-
posterous sentiment for her daughter,
must have felt with regard to his ob-
stinacy about the reward. " I entirely
agree with Stillmau," she said, the next
morning, at breakfast. " The young
man should be made to take it."

She regarded her son with instructive
gravity, as if it were he whom she de-
sired to convince, instead of her daugh-
ter. The gently polished Stillman, who
had stayed out late the night before,
gambling heavily, seemed to have be-
come indifferent on the subject.

" ' Made to take it,' mamma ? " said
Vivian. " One would almost suppose
he had committed an offense by finding
your pin and sending it to you. /think
he has a right to refuse, if he wante to
— the right that any gentleman would
have."

" Is he any ? If so, how many ? "
her brother asked, trying to relieve the
tedium of the discussion.

" Stillmau, I fear for your mind,"
said Vivian. . " Don't you think it is tot-
tering just a little bit?" She contem-
plated him with a pretty, unconcerned
scorn, then devoted herself wholly for
the moment to a rye-and-Indian roll.

" I shall believe it is tottering, my ex-
cellent sister," he replied, " when I find
myself convinced by you."

His savageness did not humiliate her,
but she tried a pathetic appeal, quite
as if she had actually been humiliated.

" You would n't like to take money
yourself, in that way, would you?" she
demanded, bending earnestly forward,
and giving him a look for which Craig
would have walked fifty miles.

" Would n't I ? " returned the patent-
leather cynic, unmoved. " Just let moth-
er try offering it to me. I dropped
twice that sum at roulette, last night."

" Stillman," said Mrs. Ware, in a tone
of conventional grief, " I wish you
would n't allude to those things."

He smiled, complacently. " You
know, mother, I never make any secret
of my amusements. It is only serious
things that one cares to conceal."

" That is quite epigrammatic," his
sister observed, thinking it best to flat-
ter him. " But, mamma, why not just
thank Mr. Craig, and let the whole thing
go?"

" Or," suggested Stillman, attempting
an extreme of sarcasm, " you might in-
vite him to your party to-night."

" Not a bad idea, either," Vivian com-
mented.

" What absurdity ! " exclaimed her
mother.

" Oh, I 've no doubt Vivian is long-
ing to have him here. She is greatly
interested in him, beyond a question."

" So is Mrs. Gifford," Vivian retorted.
"And why shouldn't I be ? "It was
she who first made me acquainted with
him ; don't you remember ? "

" I wish she had been in Guinea ! "
affirmed Mrs. Ware, in a large geograph-
ical spirit. " A strange freak of hers,
that was : and your allowing him to call
here, Vivian, was still stranger. But
then, I long ago learned that I need n't
expect you to be judicious. You will
never outgrow your girlhood, my child."

Vivian, who had at that instant con-
veyed a dainty morsel to her lips, was
seized with something like a choking
fit. When this threat had been averted,
she was seen to be laughing. " I assure
you, mamma," she cried, " you almost
made me swallow my fork ; and then

1883.]

Newport.

359

what would you have done ? Outgrow
my girlhood ? I hope I shall not. I
mean always to be young. Dear me,
this is too funny ! " Mrs. Ware's wis-
dom-curls appeared to wind themselves
tighter than ever, in view of a levity
so abandoned ; but Vivian, still afflict-
ed with laughter, rose from her place
and turned — hep gayly colored baptiste
gown making a graceful sweep — to
the bird-cage in the window behind her.
" Poor little canary," she murmured,
" you have n't had your morning bath
and your fresh chickweed, have you?
And all this time we are talking about
trivial matters." Here she cast a swii't
glance at her mother again, and re-
marked tersely, " As if I were in any
way responsible for Mr. Craig ! You
may count me out."

" Stillman, will you go down to see
him ? " Mrs. Ware asked, in a confi-
dential tone, ignoring Vivian.

'; I 'm sorry, mother, but I have so
much to do about our affair this even-
ing, you know."

" Then / shall go," she announced.
"It is proper that the young man should
be thanked, at any rate, if he won't ac-
cept more."

Go she did, accordingly. Justin was
summoned from an abstruse piece of
counterpoint on which he was laboring,
to confront the undecipherable face and
the gray puffs, which had emerged from
the Ware chariot just drawn up at his
humble boarding - house door ; and at
first his visitor endeavored to give their
meeting a briefly business-like turn. " I
am very much obliged to you," she said,
" for recovering an ornament that I
value especially for its associations, and
I have come in person to hand you the
sum we had named as the reward, be-
cause I wanted to have the opportunity
of thanking you for your service."

" It was no service," said Justin ;
" only an accident. But I appreciate
your kindness in thanking me."

He spoke so simply, and in a tone

so engaging, that Mrs. Ware began to
be impressed. " Then, will you allow
me " — she continued, hesitating slight-
ly, as she touched the spring of the
seal-skin portemounaie she carried.

Justin was naturally somewhat dra-
matic in his movements. He raised
one hand, with a gesture of forbidding.
" No, indeed ! " he responded vigorous-
ly. " I thought Mr. Oliphant had made
that clear to you."

" May I ask," inquired the lady, her
gloved fingers still hovering over the
portemonnaie, " why you are so resolute
in declining this very proper return for
your favor ? "

" I hardly think," he replied, calmly,
" it would do any good for me to go into
the reasons. I really can't see that I
have done anything to be rewarded, and
you have more than paid me with your
thanks."

Mrs. Chauncey Ware secretly ad-
mired his reserved and politic attitude ;
she felt that it lifted him up almost to
her own plane. " Pardon me," she re-
joined, " I do not know much of young
men of your class, but I must say I
was n't prepared for this sort of feeling
in one of them."

There was great danger of combus-
tion in Justin's mind, at this instant,
but he managed to prevent it. " You
surprise me," he said. " If we have
any such thing as distinct classes in this
country, I should have thought that it
was precisely with mine that you would
be best acquainted."

" At all events," she returned, quite
unperturbed, " it is a great satisfaction
to arrive at so good an understanding."
Still, Mrs. Ware had sense enough to
see that she had got the worst of it, and
tact enough to be conscious that there
was but one way of recovering her lost
ground. Besides, I believe she had a
certain amount of humane sympathy left
in her, which caused her to pity Justin's
poverty, and to value his independence.
'• We will eay no more about this er-

360

Newport.

[September,

rand on which I came," she continued,
44 if you prefer ; but it shall be on one
condition : that is, that you coine to-
night to a reception which I have ar-
ranged at my house."

Justin's heart leaped with the pleas-
urable thought of such an invitation.
He was perfectly aware that the sleeves
of his dress-coat were very ragged in-
side ; but no one is richer than he who,
being without money, can afford to re-
fuse it ; and for the time being he felt as
opulent as possible. To meet Vivian
in this way, in her own house, on equal
terms with all her friends, and espe-
cially the Count Fitz-Stuart ! It was
something not to be foregone. He did
not betray his emotion ; he did not
spring into the air ; he did not give vent
to the triumphant cry that clamored
within him. " I shall be very happy,"
he said, with exemplary self-control ;
but that short phrase covered a great
deal of meaning.

And thus it happened that Stillman
Ware's extravagant suggestion became
within an hour's time sober reality,
through the action of that unimpeach-
able authority, his mother.

" I don't know what we shall come
to, if this is the sort of thing that 's go-
ing to be done," he complained, when
she told him of it ; " which means that
I do know, exactly. Vivian, whose
sense of humor can't be depended on,
will fall in love with that young piano-
pounder, and never see the absurditv
of it."

" Well, my boy, Vivian is erratic, at
the best : she will be wild, whatever is
done. Do you know what she did only
yesterday ? She called across the street
to Colonel Clancy, who was passing, and
made him go into the Casino to lunch
with Roland De Peyster and herself
and the Richards girls. I wonder you
had n't heard, for it came to me soon
enough, I can tell you. But it's no
use talking to her. And as for this
Craig, now that he has called here he

may as well be recognized. If we try
to keep him out, she will think all the
more of him. Besides, I had to do
something to throw the obligation upon
his side."

Mrs. Ware had found her son on the
lawn at the back of the house, superin-
tending the placing of some lanterns.
" Very well," he said, when she finished.
" I see that it 's settled ; but I shall
have to make some changes in my plan,
now : it will be necessary to put lan-
terns in the arbor."

'• Why, what has that got to do with
Craig ? "

" I '11 tell you," said Stillman, re-
signedly. " That arbor was to be left
dark ; I had just told the men so. It
was a little experiment of mine — a
trap in which I expected to catch a few
song-birds. Off in that quiet corner
under the trees, you see, some of the
sentimental young people would be sure
to make for it, if it were dark. Now
that Craig is coming, though, I shall il-
luminate it brilliantly : no tete-a-tete
there for him, with Vivian, if I can help
it ! But you 've spoiled my fun, this
time."

Oliphant was delighted with the news
of Justin's invitation, but it was not the
only surprise of the day, for him. At
the club, about noon, he fell in with
Dana Sweetser, who, chirping gayly
of current incidents, spoke of the gos-
sip concerning Lord Hawkstaue's en-
gagement.

" Amazingly lucky fellow ! " he ex-
claimed, reviving for the occasion an
ancient tremor of the voice which had
once, no doubt, been capable of convey-
ing real emotion. " On her part, how-
ever, it seems to me a mistake to accept
him so early in the season. She should
have waited until September. It dimin-
ishes the interest, you know : she won't
be sought after as much. But do you
know, Mr. Oliphant, that I am r.early
heart-broken over this thing ? You
may not have been aware that I had

1883.]

Newport.

361

a particular admiration for Miss Hobart
— a tender admiration, I may say.
And now I must stifle all that, sub-
due myself to a cold and distant re-
spect, and even take an interest in the
young nobleman's triumph." All this
Mr. Sweetser delivered with so close an
imitation of pathos that Oliphant would
have been quite prepared to see a natu-
ral tear roll down his autumnal cheeks.
But the stricken gallant went on with-
out pause : " Fortunately, Miss Loyall,
the young beauty from Albany, is here,
and I think her presence may console
me in part. Ah, she too is very charm-
ing ! I have written her some little

verses to-day, which I will show you
by and by."

" Indeed ? But how is it possible,
Mr. Sweetser, a man with such diverse
interests, that you find time to write
poetry ? I thought you were absorbed
now by the Alaska and British Colum-
bia Inlet Excavation. By the way,
what are its prospects ? "

" Excellent," replied Dana, instant-
ly, as Oliphant had hoped, forgetting
about his heart-break and his verses.
The scheme referred to was a gigantic
undertaking : nothing less than the
scooping out of a considerable territory
north of the United States, so that a
large inlet from the Pacific Ocean might
be formed, which should modify and
greatly improve the climate of this
country. " You know how rapidly the
stock was taken up, based on grants of
land which will come into demand for
farms and cities so soon as the Inlet
is completed. Well, we are beginning
work now. A good many laborers
were frozen to death at first, but it
was a valuable lesson to us, as well as
to them, and we have now provided
against that. I have another matter in
hand, though, for which you must inter-
est yourself : it is the .Drainage Associa-
tion."

" What is the object ? "

"To improve the drainage of New-

port — very much needed, you know.
The conditions are frightful, here. Do
you appreciate, sir, that we are walking
in constant peril ? The whole place is
threatened with an unborn pestilence —
think of it ! — doomed, perhaps. I 'm
going to agitate, and there must be an
Association."

Oliphant 'found himself in another
sort of peril from Sweetser's enthusi-
asm ; but Sweetser, catching sight of
Lord Hawkstane, who had just entered
the next room, abandoned his subject
and his listener, and went to offer the
Englishman his congratulations. So,
at least, Oliphant inferred from his ef-
fusive manner and wreathed smiles.

Hawkstane appeared embarrassed, but
not displeased. Oliphant imagined that
he was making some negative protes-
tation ; but Sweetser evidently thought
this an excellent joke, looked very
shrewd and sly, and then, with a brief
gurgle of rejuvenated laughter, went
off towards the writing-room. Hawk-
stane began to approach the place where
Oliphant sat ; but on the way he was
stopped a second time ; for Atlee, com-
ing in from the veranda, held him with
his glittering eye-glass, as if he had been
an improved species of Ancient Mari-
ner.

"Good mawning," said Atlee, in
much the same tone he might have
used had he been talking in his sleep.

".How]oo do ? " said Lord Hawk-
stane.

" Ah — ah ; fine day," Atlee con-
tinued.

" Uncommonly, for this country. If
you would n't have it so beastly hot,
you know ! "

Atlee assumed the helpless look
which he believed to be a token of the
highest breeding. He let it be under-
stood from his manner that climate was
controlled by an inferior order of forces,
with which he had no connection. After
an interval of sympathetic vacancy, he
resumed intellectual exercise.

362

Newport.

[September,

" Have n't had the chance to offer
my congratulations befoah, rnelord. Al-
low me to do so now."

" W'y does every one congratulate
me ? " inquired Lord Hawkstane, po-
litely.

" Haw, haw," said Atlee, with funereal
hilarity. "Because they envy you so
howibly, I dare say. Don't you think
you ought to be ? "

" Oh, I 've no objection ; not the least
in the world. I suppose I 've got on
better than most men." Hawkstane
looked very complacent, but adjusted
his shirt-collar with one finger, as if his
satisfaction needed propping. " You
mean Miss Hobart ? " he ended.

" To be sure," Atlee answered.
" You ought to be ve'y happy."

" Thanks, yes ; I am very happy,"
said his lordship, promptly. " I don't
mind it ; not the least in the world."

The spurious Englishman sounded
his doleful laugh once more. " I should
think not," he said, carefully preserving
the somnolent tone — "I should think
not."

His mental resources having appar-
ently been exhausted, he turned to the
newspapers, and Hawkstane spoke to
Oliphant.

" Is it true, then," Oliphant asked
immediately, " that you 're engaged to
Miss Hobart?"

The young man colored. ' En-
gaged ? " he repeated. " What makes
you think that ? "

" You must excuse my bluntness,"
Oliphant replied. " I thought that was
what you were just speaking of. It 'a
the general opinion, I believe."

" Hang it, no ! I 'm not engaged,"
Lord Hawkstane declared with some
energy, recovering his natural pallor.

Atlee dropped his newspaper, and
looked over at him with a faint, em-
barrassed grin, at the same time reduc-

ing his facial aspect to a complete
void.

" You 're not ! " exclaimed Oliphaut.
" Good heavens, why did n't you tell us
that before ? "

" Wy ? You 're the first man who
has asked me anything about it, Mr.
Oliphant. And have n't I told you, di-
rectly you asked ? I thought everybody
knew Miss Hobart turned me off."

" But," protested Atlee, " you — you
allowed me to congratulate you." (In
his excitement he forgot to slur the
«r.")

" My dear fellah," said Lord Hawk-
stane, " that was what you wanted,
was n't it ? 'Pon my word, too, I think
it was right enough. Wen you think
how many men admire her, and how
hard she is to come at, you know, I
think it 's a good deal to get so far as I
did. 'Pon my word, now, I accept your
congratulations for having been hon-
ored by a refusal. That 's more than
you '11 ever be, Atlee. Is n't it, Mr.
Oliphaut?"

Whether the young aristocrat had de-
feated his American friends on their
own ground as a sad humorist, or
whether he really meant what he said,
Oliphant was unable to determine ; so
he held his peace, and looked wise.

" I beg pahdon, you know — awfully
stupid in me — pahdon," Atlee said,
disjoin tedly.

" Hang it ! " Lord Hawkstane again
ejaculated. " I mean it, you know.
I 'm proud of it. ' Gad, it 's a feather
in my cap."

Meanwhile Sweetser, unable long to
resist the attraction of a title, had come
back from the writing-room, and had
overheard the whole disclosure from the
threshold. Without delay he left the
Club, and in a singularly brief space of
time, what he had gathered was spread
through the town.(

George Parsons Lathrop.

1883.]

Glints in Auld Reekie.

363

GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE.

As soon as one comes to know Edin-
burgh, lie feels a gratitude to that old
gentleman of Fife who is said to have
invented the affectionate phrase " Auld
Reekie." Perhaps there never was any
such old gentleman ; and perhaps he
never did, as the legend narrates, regu-
late the hours of his family prayers, on
summer evenings, by the thickening
smoke which he could see rising from
Edinburgh chimneys, when the cooking
of suppers began.

" It 's time now, bairns, to tak the
beuks an gang to our beds, for yon-
der's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on
her nicht-cap," are the words which the
harmless little tradition puts into his
mouth. They are wisely dated back to
the reign of Charles II., a time from
which none now speak to contradict;
and they serve as well as any others
to introduce and emphasize the epithet
which, once heard, is not forgotten by a
lover of Edinburgh, remaining always
in his memory, like a pet name of one
familiarly known.

It is not much the fashion of travelers
to become attached to Edinburgh. Rome
for antiquity, London for study and stir,
Florence for art, Venice for art and
enchantment combined, — all these have
pilgrims who become worshipers, and re-
turn again and again to them, as the de-
vout return to shrines. But few return
thus to Edinburgh. It continually hap-
pens that people planning routes of trav-
el are heard to say, " I have seen Edin-
burgh," pronouncing the word " seen "
with a stress indicating a finality of com-
pletion. Nobody ever uses a phrase in
that way about Rome or Venice. It is
always, " We have been in," " spent a
winter in," " a summer in," or " a month
in " Rome, or Venice, or any of the rest :
and the very tone and turn of the phrase
tell the desire or purpose of another

winter, or summer, or month in the re-
membered and longed-for place.

But Edinburgh has no splendors with
which to woo and attract. She is " a
penniless lass ; " " wi' a lang pedigree,"
however, — as long and as splendid as
the best, reaching back to King Arthur
at least, and some say a thousand years
farther, and assert that the rock on which
her castle stands was a stronghold when
Rome was a village. At any rate, there
was a fortress there long before Edin-
burgh was a town, and that takes it back
midway between the five hundredth and
six hundredth year of our Lord. From
that century down to this it was the
centre of as glorious and terrible fighting
and suffering as the world has ever seen.
Kingly besieged and besiegers, prison-
ers, martyrs, men and women alike he-
roic, their presences throng each door-
way still ; and the very stones at a touch
seem set ringing again with the echoes
of their triumphs and their agonies.

To me, the castle is Edinburgh. Look-
ing from the sunny south windows of
Prince's Street across at its hoary front
is like a wizard's miracle, by which dead
centuries are rolled back, compressed
into minutes. At the foot of its north
precipices, where lay the lake in which,
in the seventeenth century, royal swans
floated and plebeian courtesans were
ducked, now stretches a gay gardened
meadow, through which flash daily rail-
way trains. Their columns of blue smoke
scale the rocks, coil after coil, but never
reach the citadel summit, being tangled,
spent, and lost in the tops of trees,
which in their turn seem also to be
green-plumed besiegers, ever climbing,
climbing. For five days I looked out
on this picture etched against a summer
sky : in black, by night ; in the morning,
of soft sepia tints, or gray, — tower,
battlement, wall, and roof, all in sky

364

Grlints in Auld Reekie.

Ikies ; below these the wild crags and
precipices, a mosaic of grays, two hun-
dred feet down, to a bright greensward
dotted with white daisies. Set steadily
to the sunrise, by a west wind which
never stopped blowing for the whole five
days, streamed out the flag. To have
read on its folds, " Castelh-Mynyd-Ag-
ned," or " Castrutn Puellarum," would
not have seemed at any hour a surprise.
There is nowhere a relic of antiquity
which so dominates its whole environ-
ment as does this rock fortress. Its
actuality is sovereign ; its personality
majestic. The thousands of modern
people thronging up and down Prince's
Street seem perpetrating an imperti-
nent anachronism. The times are the
castle's times still ; all this nineteenth-
century haberdashery and chatter is an
inexplicable and insolent freak of inter-
ruption. Sitting at one's Prince's Street
windows, one sees it not ; overlooks it
as meaningless and of no consequence.
Instead, he sees the constable's son,
in Bruce's day, coming down that two
hundred feet of precipice, hand over
hand, on a bit of rope ladder, to visit
the " wench in town " with whom he
was in love ; and anon turning this love
lore of his to patriotic account, by lead-
ing Earl Douglas, with his thirty picked
Scots, up the same precipices, in the
same perilous fashion, to surprise the
English garrison, which they did to such
good purpose that in a few hours they
retook the castle, the only one then left
which Bruce had not recovered. Or,
when morning and evening mists rise

o o

slowly up from the meadow, veil the
hill, and float off in hazy wreaths from
its summit, he fancies fagots and tar
barrels ablaze on the esplanade, and the
beauteous Lady Glammis, with her white
arms crossed on her breast, burning to
death there, with eyes fixed on the win-
dows of her husband's prison. Scores
of other women with " fayre bodies "
were burned alive there; men, too, their
lovers and sons, — all for a crime of

which no human soul ever was or could
be guilty. Poor blinded, superstitious
earth, which heard and saw and per-
mitted such things ! Even to-day, when
the ground is dug up on that accursed
esplanade, there are found the ashes of
these martyrs to the witchcraft mad-
ness.

That grand old master gunner, too, of
Cromwell's first following : each sunset
gun from the castle seemed to me in
honor of his memory, and recalled his
name. " May the devil blaw me into
the air, if I lowse a cannon this day !"
said he, when Charles's men bade him
fire a salute in honor of the Restoration.
Every other one of Cromwell's men in
the garrison had turned false, and done
ready service to the king's officers ; but
not so Browne. It was only by main
force that he was dragged to his gun,
arid forced to fire it. Whether the gun
were old, and its time had come to burst,
or if the splendid old Puritan slyly over-
weighed his charge, it is open to each
man's preference to believe; but burst
the gun did, and, taking the hero at his
word, " shuites his bellie from him, and
blew him quyte over the castle wall,"
says the old record. I make no doubt
myself that it was just what the master
gunner intended.

Thirty years later, there were many
gunners in Edinburgh Castle as brave
as he, or braver, — men who stood by
their guns month after month, starving
by inches and freezing ; the snow lying
knee deep on the shattered bastions ;
every roof shelter blown to fragments ;
no fuel ; their last well so low that the
water was putrid ; raw salt herrings the
only food for tlie men, and for the
officers oatmeal, stirred in the putrid
water. This was the Duke of Gordon's
doing, when he vowed to hold Edin-
burgh Castle for King James, if every
other fortress in Scotland went over to
William. When his last hope failed,
and he gave his men permission to
abandon the castle and go out to the

1883.]

Grlints in Auld Reekie.

365

enemy, if they chose, not a man would
go. " Three cheers for his grace," they
raised, with their poor starved voices,
and swore they would stay as long as
he did. From December to Juue they
held out, and then surrendered, a hand-
ful of fifty ghastly, emaciated, tottering
men. Pity they could not have known
how much grander than victories such
defeats as theirs would read, by and
by!

Hard by the castle was the duke's
house, in Blair's Close ; in this he was
shut up prisoner under strict guard. The
steps up which he walked that day, for
the first time in his life without his
sword, are still there ; his coronet, with
a deer hound on either side, in dingy
stone carving, above the low door. It is
one of the doorways worth haunting, in
Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of
Gordon have trodden its threshold, from
the swordless hero of 1689 down to the
young lover who, in George the Third's
day, went courting his duchess, over in
Hyudford's Close, at the bottom of High
Street. She was a famous beauty, daugh-
ter of Lady Maxwell ; and thanks to one
gossip and another, we know a good deal
about her bringing-up. There was still
living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an
aged and courtly gentleman, who recol-
lected well having seen her riding a
sow in High Street; her sister running
behind, and thumping the beast with a
stick. Duchesses are not made of such
stuff in these days. It almost passes be-
lief what one reads in old records of
the ways and manners of Scottish no-
bility in the first half of the eighteenth
century. These Maxwells' fine laces
were always drying in the narrow pas-
sage from their front stair to their draw-
ing-room ; and their undergear hanging
out on a pole from an upper window,
in full sight of passers-by, as is still the
custom with the poverty-stricken people
who live in Hyndford's Close.

On the same stair with the Maxwells
lived the Countess Anne of Balcarres,

mother of eleven children, the eldest of
whom wrote Auld Robin Gray. She
was poor and proud, and a fierce Jac-
obite to the last. To be asked to drink
tea in Countess Anne's bed-chamber
was great honor. The room was so
small that the man-servant, John, gor-
geous in the Balcarres livery, had to
stand snugged up to the bedpost. Here,
with one arm around the post, he stood
like a statue, ready to hand the tea-ket-
tle as it was needed. When the noble
ladies differed about a date or a point
of genealogy, John was appealed to, and
often so far forgot his manners as to
swear at the mention of assumers and
pretenders to baronetcies.

There is an endless fascination in go-
ing from house to house, in their old
wynds and closes, now. A price has to
be paid for it, — bad smells, filth under-
foot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald
abuse from gin-loosened tongues right
and left and high up overhead ; but all
this only emphasizes the picture, and
makes one's mental processions of earls
and countesses all the livelier and more
vivid.

Some of these wynds are so narrow
and dark, that one hesitates about plung-
ing into them. They seem little more
than rifts between dungeons : seven,
eight, and nine stories high, the black
walls stretch up. If there is a tiny court-
yard, it is like the bottom of a foul well ;
and looking to the hand's-breadth of sky
visible above, it seems so far up and so
dark blue, one half expects to see its
stars glimmering at noonday. A single
narrow winding stone stair is the only
means of going up and down ; and each
floor being swarming full of wretched
human beings, each room a tenement
house in itself, of course this common
stairway becomes a highway of con-
tentions, the very battle-ground of the
house. Progress up or down can be
stopped at a second's notice ; a single
pair of elbows is a blockade. How se-
dan chairs were managed in these cork-

366

Glints in Auld Reekie.

[September,

screw crevices is a puzzle ; yet we read
that the ladies of quality went always
in srdan cliaii-s to balls and assemblies.

In the Stamp Oifice Close, now the
refuge of soot-vendors, old-clothes deal-
ers, and hucksters of lowest degree,
tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts,
still is locked tight every night a big
carved door, at foot of the stair down
which used to come' stately Lady Eglin-
toune, the third, with her seven daugh-
ters, in fine array. It was one of the
sights of the town to see the procession
of their eight sedan chairs on the way
to a dance. The countess herself was
six feet tall, and her daughters not much
below her ; all strikingly handsome, and
of such fine bearing that it went into
the traditions of the century as the
" Eglintoune air." There also went into
the traditions of the century some de-
tails of the earl's wooing, which might
better have been kept a secret between
him and his father-in-law. The second
Lady Eglintoune was ailing, and like to
die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy ar-
rived in Edinburgh, with his stalwart
but beautiful daughter, Susanna. She
was much sought immediately ; and Sir
Archibald, in his perplexity among the
many suitors, one day consulted his old
friend Eglintoune.

" Bide a wee, Sir Archy," replied the
earl, — " bide a wee ; my wife 's very
sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Su-
sanna became Countess of Eglintoune.
It would seem as if nature had some in-
tent to punish the earl's impatient faith-
lessness to his sickly wife ; for year after
year, seven years running, came a
daughter, and no son, to the house of
Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a
readiness to ignore marital obligations
at which his third countess need not
have been surprised, bluntly threatened
to divorce her if she bore him no heir.

Promptly the spirited Susanna re-
plied that nothing would please her bet-
ter, provided he would give her back all
she brought him.

" Every penny of it, and welcome ! "
retorted the earl, supposing she referred
to her fortune.

" Na, na, my lord," replied the lady,
" that winna do. Return me my youth,
beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me
when you please : " upon which the mat-
ter dropped. In the end, the earl fared
better than he deserved, three sons be-
ing given him within the next five
years.

For half a century, Lady Eglintoune
was a prominent figure in Scottish so-
cial life. Her comings and goings and
doings were all chronicled, and handed
down. It is even told that when John-
sou and Boswell visited her at her coun-
try place, she was so delighted with
Johnson's conversation that she kissed
him on parting, — from which we can
argue her ladyship's liking for long
words. She lived to be ninety-one, and
amused herself in her last days by tam-
ing rats, of which she had a dozen or
more, in such subjection that at a tap
on the oak wainscoting of her dining-
room they came forth, joined her at
her meal, and at a word of command
retired again into the wainscot.

When twenty-first century travelers
go speiring among the dingy ruins of
cities which are gay and fine now, they
will not find relics and traces of such
individualities as these. The eighteenth
century left a most entertaining budget,
which we of to day are too busy and
too well educated to equal. No chiel
among us all has the time to take gos-
sip notes of this century ; and even if he
did, they would be dull enough in com-
parison with those of the last.

Groping and rummaging in Hynd-
ford's Close, one day, 'for recognizable
traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had
the good fortune to encounter a thrifty
housewife, of the better class, living
there. She was coming home, with her
market basket on her arm. Seeing our
eager scenting of the old carvings on
lintels and sills, and overhearing our

1883.]

Glints in Auld Reekie.

367

mention of the name of the Duchess of
Gordon, she made bold to address us.

" It waur a strange place for the no-
beelity to be livin' in, to be sure," she
said. " I 'm liviu' mysil in ane o' the
best of 'im, an' it's na mair space to 't
than ud turn a cat. Ye 're welcome
to walk up, if ye like to see what their
dwellin's waur like in the auld time.
It 's a self-contained stair ye see," she
added with pride, as she marshaled us
up a twisting stone stairway, so nar-
row that even one person, going alone,
must go cautiously to avoid grazing
elbows and shius on the stone walls, at
every turn. " I couldna abide the place
but for the self-contained stair : there 's
not many has them," she continued.
" Mind yer heads ! mind yer heads !
There 's a stoop ! " she cried ; but it was
too late. We had reached, unwarned, a
point in the winding stair where it was
necessary to go bent half double ; only
a little child could have stood upright.
With heads dizzy from the blow and
eyes half blinded by the sudden dark-
ness, we stumbled on, and brought out
in a passage-way, perhaps three feet
wide and ten long, from which opened
four rooms : one the kitchen, a totally
dark closet, not over six feet square ; a
tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in
the wall, where the servant slept, were
all its furniture. The woman lighted a
candle to show us how convenient was
this bunk for the maid " to lie." Stand-
ing in the middle of the narrow passage,
one could reach his head into kitchen,
parlor, and both bedrooms without
changing his position. The four rooms
together would hardly have made one
good - sized chamber. Nothing but its
exquisite neatness and order saved the
place from being insupportable ! Even
those would not save it when herring
suppers should be broiling in the closet
surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller,
narrower crevice in the wall led a second
" self-contained stair," dark as midnight,
and so low roofed there was no stand-

ing upright in it, even at the beginning.
This led to what the landlady called the
" lodgers' flairt." We had not courage
to venture up, though she was exceed-
ingly anxious to show us her seven good
bedrooms, three double and four single,
which were nightly filled with lodgers,
at a shilling a night.

Only the " verra rayspectable," she
said, came to lodge with her. Her hus-
band was "verra pairticular." Trades-
people from the country were the chief
of their customers, " an' the same
a-comin' for seven year, noo." No doubt
she has as lively a pride, and gets as
many satisfactions between these nar-
row walls, as did the lords and ladies of
1700. Evidently not the least of her
satisfactions was the fact that those
lords and ladies had lived there before
her.

Nowhere are Auld Reekie's antithe-
ses of new and old more emphasized
than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was
an elegant suburb. The city walls even
then extended to inclose it, and it was
eloquently described in an old divine's
writings as "the place " ubi nihil est hu-
mile aut rusticum, sed omnia magnifica."

In one of its grassy lanes, the Earl
of Galloway built a mansion. His
countess often went to pay visits to her
neighbors, in great state, driving six
horses ; and it not infrequently hap-
pened that when her ladyship stepped
into her coach, the leaders were stand-
ing opposite the door at which she in-
tended to alight.

Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous
" Tarn o' the Cowgate," Earl of Had-
dington, boon companion of King James,
who came often to dine with him, and
gave him the familiar nickname of
Tarn. Tarn was so rich he was vulgar-
ly believed to have the philosopher's
stone ; but he himself once gave a
more probable explanation of bis wealth,
saying that his only secret lay in two
rules : " never to put off till to-morrow
that which could be done to-day," and

368

Glints in Auld Reekie.

[September,

" never to trust to another what his
own h:ind could execute."

To-day there is not in all the world,
outside the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, so
loathly wretched a street as this same
Cow<fate. Even at hiwh iioou it is not

o o

always safe to walk through it; and
there are many of its wyuds into which
no man would go without protection of
the police. Simply to drive through it
is harrowing. The place is indescriba-
ble. It seems a perpetual and insatiable
carnival of vice and misery. The misery
alone would be terrible enough to see,
but the leering, juggling, insolent vice
added makes it indeed hellish. Every
curbstone, doorsill, alley mouth, window,
swarms with faces out of which has is
gone every trace of self-respect or de-
cency : babies' faces as bad as the worst,
and the most aged faces worst of all.
To pause on the sidewalk is to be sur-
rounded, in a moment, by a dangerous
crowd of half- naked boys and girls,
whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and
fighting. Giving of an alms is like pour-
ing oil on a fire. The whole gang is
ablaze with envy and attack : the fierce
and unscrupulous pillage of the seven-
teenth century is reeuacted in miniature
in the Cowgate every day, when an inju-
dicious stranger, passing through, throws
a handful of pennies to the beggars. The
general look of hopeless degradation in
the spot is heightened by the great num-
ber of old-clothes shops along the whole
line of the street. In the days when
the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the
citizens were permitted by law to ex-
tend their upper stories seven feet into
the street, provided they would build
them of wood cut in the Borough For-
est, a forest that harbored robbers dan-
gerous to the town. These projecting
upper stories are invaluable now to the
old-clothes venders, who hang from them
their hideous wares, in double and treble
lines, fluttering over the heads and in
the faces of passers - by : the wood of
the Borough Forest thus, by a strange

irony of fate, still continuing to harbor
dangers to public welfare. If these
close-packed tiers of dangling rags in
the Cowgate were run out in a straight
single line, they would be miles long ; a
sad beggars' arras to behold. The pre-
ponderance of tattered finery in it adds
to its melancholy : shreds of damask ;
dirty lace ; theatrical costumes ; artifi-
cial flowers so crumpled, broken, and
soiled that they would seem to have been
trodden in gutters ; there was an inde-
finable horror in the thought that there
could be even in the Cowgate a woman
creature who could think herself adorned
by such mockeries of blossoms. But I
saw more than one poor soul look at
them with longing eyes, finger them,
haggle at the price, and walk away dis-
appointed that she could not buy.

The quaint mottoes here and there in
the grimy walls, built in when the Cow-
gate people were not only comfortable,
but pious, must serve often now to
point bitter jests among the ungodly.
On one wretched, reeking tenement, is :
" Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and
let us exalt his name together. 1643."
On another, " All my trist is in ye
Lord."

A token I saw in the Cowgate of one
life there not without hope and the ca-
pacity of enjoyment. It was in a small
window, nine stories up from the ground,
in a wynd so close that hands might be
clasped from house to house across it.
It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on
it with as much relief as on a rift of
blue sky in a storm : it was a little green
fern growing in a pot. Outside the
window it stood, on a perilously narrow
ledge. As I watched it I grew fright-
ened, lest the wind should blow it down,
or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It
seemed the brave signal flying of a for-
lorn hope, of a dauntless, besieged soul
that would never surrender, and I shall
recollect it long after every other pic-
ture of the Cowgate scenes has grown
dim.

1883.]

Glints in Auld Reekie.

369

The more respectable of the pawn-
brokers' or second-hand-goods shops in
Edinburgh are interesting places to
rummage. If there were no other rec-
ord of the slow decay and dwindling
fortunes of the noble Scottish folk, it
could be read in the great number of
small dealers in relics of the olden time.

Old buckles and brooches and clan
badges ; chains, lockets, seals, rings ;
faded miniatures, on ivory or in mosa-
ics, of women as far back as Mary's
time, loved then as well as was ever
Mary herself, but forgotten now as if
they had never been ; swords, rusty, bent,
battered, and stained ; spoons with for-
gotten crests ; punch ladles worn smooth
with the merry-makings of generations,

— all these one may find in scores of lit-
tle one-roomed shops, kept perhaps by
aged dames with the very aroma of the
antique Puritanism lingering about them
still.

In such a room as this, I found a
Scotch pebble brooch with a quaint sil-
ver setting, reverently and cautiously
locked in a glass case. On the back of
it had been scratched, apparently with
a pin, " Margret Fleming, from her
brother." I bore it away with me tri-
umphantly, sure that it had belonged to
an ancestor of Pet Marjorie.

Almost as full of old - time atmos-
phere as the pawnbrokers' shops are
the antiquarian bookstores. Here one
may possess himself, if he likes, of well-
thumbed volumes with heraldic crests
on title-pages, dating back to the ear-
liest reading done by noble earls and
baronets in Scotland ; even to the time
when not to know how to read was no
indelible disgrace. In one of these
shops, on the day I bought Margret
Fleming's brooch, I found an old torn
copy of Pet Marjorie. Speaking of
Dr. Brown and Rab to the bookseller,

— himself almost a relic of antiquity, —
I was astonished and greatly amused to
hear him reply, —

" It 's a' a feection. . . . He can't

VOL. LIT. NO. 311. 24

write without it. ... I knoo that darg.
... A verra neece darg he was, but
— a — a — a" — with a shake of the
head, " it 's a verra neece story, verra
neece. . . . He wrote it up, up ; not
but that Rab was a verra neece darg.
I kuoo the darg wull."

Not a word of more definite disclaimer
or contradiction could I win from the
canny old Scot. But to have hastily
called the whole story a lee, from be-
ginning to end, would hardly have
shaken one's confidence in it so much
as did the thoughtful deliberation of his
" He was a verra neece darg. I knoo
the darg wull."

One of our " cawdies," during our
stay in Edinburgh, was a remarkable
fellow. After being for twenty years
a gentleman's servant, he had turned
his back on aristocracy, and betaken
himself to the streets for a living ; driv-
ing cabs, or piloting strangers around
the city, as might be. But his earlier
habits of good behavior were strong in
him still, and came to the surface quick-
ly in associations which revived them.
His conversation reminded us forcibly
of somebody's excellent saying that
Scotland would always be Scott-land.
Not a line of Scott's novels which this
vagabond cawdie did not seemingly
know by heart. Scottish history too he
had at his tongue's end, and its most fa-
miliar episodes sounded new and enter-
taining as he phrased them. Even the
death of Queen Mary seemed freshly
stated, as he put it, when, after sum-
ming up the cruelties she had expe-
rienced at the hands of Elizabeth, he
wound up with, " And finally she be-
headed her, and that was the last of
her," — a succinctness of close which
some of Mary's historians would have
done well to simulate.

Of Jeanie Deans and Dumbiedikes
he spoke as of old acquaintances. He
pointed out a spot in the misty blue
distance where was Dumbiedikes' house,
where Jeanie's sweetheart dwelt, and

370

Glints in Auld Reekie.

[September,

where the road lay on which Jeanie
went to London.

" It was there the old road to Lon-
don lay ; . and would n't you think it
more natural, sir, that it was that way
she went, and it was there she met
Dumbiedikes, and he gave her the
purse? I'll always maintain, sir, that
it was there she got it."

Of the two women, Jeanie Deans and
Mary Queen of Scots, Jeanie was evi-
dently the vivider and more real in his
thoughts.

The second day of our stay in Edin-
burgh was a gay day in the castle. The
71st Highlanders had just returned
from a twelvemonths' stay at Gibral-
tar. It was people's day. Everywhere
the bronzed, tired, happy-looking fel-
lows, in their smartened uniforms, were
to be encountered, strolling, lounging,
sitting with sweethearts or wives, —
more of the former than the latter. It
struck me also that the women were less
good looking than the men ; but they
were all beautified by happiness, and
the merry sounds of their laughter, and
the rumble of skittles playing filled all
the place. Inside the castle, the room
in which the regalia were on exhibi-
tion was thronged with country people,
gazing reverently on its splendors.

" Keep yer eye on 't, as ye walk by,
an' mark the changes o' Jt," I heard
one old lady say to her husband, whose
wandering gaze seemed to her neglect-
ful of the opportunity.

A few gay-dressed women, escorted
by officers, held themselves apart from
the soldiers' sweethearting, and were
disposed, I thought, to look a little
scornfully on it. The soldiers did not
seem to mind the affront, if they saw it ;
no doubt, they thought their own sweet-
hearts far the better looking, and if
they had ever heard of it would have
quoted with hearty good will the old
ballad, —

" The la«?es o' the Canongate,
Oh, they are wondrous nice :

They wirma gie a single kiss,
But for a double price.

" Gar hang them, gar hang them,

Hie upon a tree ;
For we '11 get better up the gate,
For a bawbee! "

Most picturesque of all the figures to
be seen in Edinburgh are the Newhaven
fishwives. With short, full, blue cloth
petticoats, reaching barely to their an-
kles ; white blouses and gay kerchiefs ;
big, long-sleeved cloaks of the same
blue cloth, fastened at the throat, but
flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown
on in haste ; the girls bareheaded ; the
married women with white caps, stand-
ing up stiff and straight in a point on
the top of the head; two big wicker-
work creels, one above the other, full of
fish, packed securely, on their broad
shoulders, and held in place by a stout
leather strap passing round their fore-
heads, they pull along at a steady,
striding gait, up hill and down, carry-
ing weights that it taxes a man's strength
merely to lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's
boast that she will run with a weight
which it takes two men to put on her
back. By reason of this great strength
on the part of the women, and their im-
memorial habit of exercising it ; perhaps
also from other causes far back in the
early days of Jutland, where these cu-
rious Newhaven fishing folk are said to
have originated, it has come about that
the Newhaven men are a singularly doc-
ile and submissive race. The wives
keep all the money which they receive
for the fish, and the husbands take what
is given them, — a singular reversion
of the situation in most communities.
I did not believe this when it was told
me, so I stopped three fishwives one
day, and, without mincing matters, put
the question direct to them. Two of
them were young, one old. The young
women laughed saucily, and the old
woman smiled, but they all replied un-
hesitatingly, that they had the spending
of all the money.

1883.]

Glints in Auld Reekie.

371

" It 's a' spent i' the hoos," said one,
anxious not to be thought too selfish, —
" it 's a' spent i' the hoos. The men, they
cam home an' tak their sleep, an' then
they '11 be aff agen."

" It 'ud never do for the husbands to
stoop in tha city, an' be spendin' a' the
money," added the old woman, with se-
vere emphasis.

I learned afterward that, on the pres-
ent system of buying and selling the
fish, the fishermen do receive from their
labor an income independent of their
wives. They are the first sellers of the
fish, — selling them in quantity to the
wholesale dealers, who sell in turn at
auction to the " retail trade," repre-
sented by the wives. This seems an
unjust system, and is much resented by
both husbands and wives: but it has
been established by law, and there is no
help for it. It came in with the intro-
duction of the steam trawlers. " They 're
the deestrooction o' the place," said one
of the fish women. " A mon canna go
oot wi' his lines an' mak a livin' noo.
They just drag everything ; they tak
a' the broods ; they 're doom' a worrld
o' harrtn. There 's somethin' a dooin'
aboot it in the House o' Commons, noo,
but a canna till hoo it wull go. They
ull be the deestrooction o' this place, if
they 're na pit stop to," and she shook
her fist vindictively at a puffing trawl-
er, which had just pushed away from
the wharf.

Whoever would see the Newhaven
fishwives at their best must be on the
Newhaven wharf by seven o'clock in the
morning, on a day when the trawlers
come in and the fish is sold. The scene
is a study for a painter.

The fish are in long, narrow boxes,
on the wharf, ranged at the base of the
sea wall ; some sorted out, in piles, each
kind by itself : skates, with their long
tails, which look vicious, as if they could
kick, hake, witches, brill, sole, floun-
ders, huge catfish, crayfish, and herrings
by the ton. The wall is crowded with

me,n, Edinburgh fishmongers, come to
buy cheap on the spot. The wall is not
over two feet wide, and here they stand,
lean over, jostle, slip by to right and
left of each other, and run up and down
in their eager haste to catch the eye
of one auctioneer, or to get first speech
with another. The wharf is crowded
with women, — an army in blue, two
hundred, three hundred, at a time;
white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting,
shrill voices crying, fiery blue eyes
shining, it is a sight worth going to
Scotland for. If one has had an affec-
tion for Christie Johnstone, it is a de-
lightful return of his old admiration for
her. A dozen faces which might be
Christie's own are flashing up from the
crowd ; one understands on the instant
how that best of good stories came to
be written. A man with eyes in his
head and a pen in his hand could not
have done less. Such fire, such hones-
ty, such splendor of vitality, kindle the
women's faces. To spend a few days
among them would be to see Christie
Johnstone dramatized on all sides.

On the morning when I drove out
from Edinburgh to see this scene, a
Scotch mist was simmering down : so
warm that at first it seemed of no con-
sequence whatever ; so cold that all of
a sudden one found himself pierced
through and through with icy shivers.
This is the universal quality of a Scotch
mist or drizzle.

The Newhaveu wharf is a narrow
pier running out to sea. On one side
lay the steam trawlers, which had just
unloaded their freight ; on the other
side, on the narrow, rampart-like wall
of stone, swarmed the fishmonger men.
In this line I took my place, and the
chances of the scramble. Immediately
the jolly fishwives caught sight of me,
and began to nod and smile. They
knew very well I was there to " speir "
at them.

" Ye '11 tak cauld ! " cried one moth-
erly old soul, with her white hair blow-

372

Glints in Auld Reekie.

[September,

ing wildly about, almost enough to lift
the cap off her head. *' Com doon !
Ye '11 tak cauld."

I smiled, and pointed to my water-
proof cloak, down which, it must be ad-
inittfd, the " mist " was trickling in
streams, while the cloak itself flapped in
the wind like a loose sail. She shook
her head scornfully.

" It 's a grat plass to tak cauld ! " she
cried. " Ye '11 doo wull to com doon."

There were three auctioneers : one, a
handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed young
fellow, was plainly a favorite with the
women. They flocked after him as he
passed from one to another of the dif-
ferent lots of fish. They crowded in
close circles around him, three and four
deep ; pushing, struggling, rising on tip-
toes to look over each other's shoulders
and get sight of the fish.

" What 's offered for this lot o' fine
herrings ? One ! One and sax ! Thrip-
pence ha'! Going, going, gone!" rang
above all the clatter and chatter of the
women's tongues. It was so swift, that
it seemed over before it was fairly be-
gun ; and the surging circles had moved
along to a new spot and a new trade.
The eyes of the women were fixed on
the auctioneer's eyes ; they beckoned ;
they shook forefingers at him ; now and
then a tall, stalwart one, reaching over
less able-bodied comrades, took him by
the shoulder, and compelled him to turn
her way ; one, most fearless of all, lit-
erally gripped him by the ear and pulled
his head around, shrieking out her bid.
When the pressure got unbearable, the
young fellow would shake himself like
a Newfoundland dog, and, laughing
good-naturedly, whirl his arms wide
round to clear a breathing space ; the
women would fall back a pace or two,
but in a moment the rings would close
up again, tighter than ever.

The efforts of those in the outer ring
to break through, or see over, the inner
ones were droll. Arms and hands and
heads seemed fairly interlinked and in-

terwoven. Sometimes a pair of hands
would come into sight, pushing their
way between two bodies, low down, —
just the two hands, nothing more, break-
ing way for themselves, as if in a thicket
of underbrush ; presently the arms fol-
lowed ; and then, with a quick thrust of
the arms to right and left, the space
would be widened enough to let in the
head, and when that was fairly through
the victory was won. Straightening her-
self with a big leap, the woman bounded
in front of the couple she had so skill-
fully separated, and a buzzing " bicker "
of angry words would rise for a mo-
ment ; but there was no time to waste in
bad temper where bargains were to be
made or lost in the twinkling of an eye.
An old sailor, who stood near me on
the wall, twice saved me from going
backwards into the sea, in my hasty ef-
forts to better my stand-point. He also
seemed to be there simply as a specta-
tor, and I asked him how the women
knew what they were buying ; buying,
as they did, by the pile or the box.

" Oh. they '11 giss, verra near," he
said ; " they 've an eye on the fish, sense
they 're bawn. God knows it 's verra
little they mak," he added, " an' they '11
carry 's much 's two men o' us can lift.
They're extrawnery strang."

As a lot of catfish were thrown down
at our feet, he looked at them with a
shudder, and exclaimed, " I 'd no eat
that."

" Why not ? " said I. " Are they not
good ? "

" Ah, I 'd no eat it," he replied, with
a look of superstitious terror spreading
over his face. " It doesna look richt."
A fresh trawler came in just as the
auction had nearly ended. The excite-
ment renewed itself fiercely. The crowd
surged over to the opposite side of the
pier, and a Babel of voices arose. The
skipper was short and fat, and in his
dripping oilskin suit looked like a cross
between a catfish and a frog.

" Here, you Rob," shouted the auc-

1883.]

Glints in Auld Reekie.

373

tioneer, " what do you add to this fine
lot o' herrin' ? "

" Herring be d— — d ! " growled the
skipper, out of temper, for some reason
of his own ; at which a whirring sound
of ejaculated disapprobation burst from
the women's lips.

The fish were in great tanks on the
deck. Quickly the sailors dipped up
pails of the sea -water, dashed it over
them, and piled them into baskets, in
shining, slippery masses : the whole load
was on the pier, sorted, and sold in a
few minutes.

Then the women settled down to the
work of assorting and packing up their
fish. One after another they shouldered
their creels and set off for Edinburgh.
They seemed to have much paying back
and forth of silver among themselves,
one small piece of silver that I noticed
actually traveling through four different
hands in the five minutes during which
I watched it. Each woman wore under
her apron, in front, a sort of apron-like
bag, in which she carried her money.
There was evidently rivalry among
them. They spied closely on each oth-
er's loads, and did some trafficking and
exchange before they set off. One poor
old creature had bought only a few cray-
fish, and as she lifted her creel to her
back, and crawled away, the women
standing by looked over into her basket,
and laughed and jeered at her ; but she
gave no sign of hearing a word they
said.

Some of them were greatly discon-
tented with their purchases when they
came to examine them closely, especial-
ly one woman who had bought a box
of flounders. She emptied them on the
ground, and sorted the few big ones,
which had been artfully laid on the top ;
then, putting the rest, which were all
small, in a pile by themselves, she
pointed contemptuously to the contrast,
and with a toss of her head ran after
the auctioneer, and led him by the sleeve
back to the spot where her fish lay.

She was as fierce as Christie herself
could have been at the imposition. She
had paid the price for big flounders, and
had got small ones. The auctioneer
opened his book and took out his pencil,
to correct the entry which had been
made against her.

" Wull, tak aff saxpence," he said.

" Na ! na ! " cried she. " They 're
too dear at seven saxpence."

" Wull, tak aff a saxpence ; it is writ-
ten noo, — seven shillin'."

She nodded, and began packing up
the flounders.

" Will you make something on them
at that price ? " I asked her.

" Wull, I '11 mak me money back,"
she replied ; but her eyes twinkled, and
I fancy she had got a very good bargain,
as bargains go in Newhaven ; it being
thought there a good day's work to clear
three shillings, — a pitiful sum, when a
woman, to earn it, must trudge from
Newhaven to Edinburgh (two miles)
with a hundred pounds of fish on her
back, and then toil up and down Edin-
burgh hills selling it from door to door.
One shilling on every pound is the auc-
tioneer's fee. He has all the women's
names in his book, and it is safe to
trust them ; they never seek to cheat,
or even to put off paying. " They 'd
rather pay than not," the blue-eyed auc-
tioneer said to me. " They 're the hon-
estest folks T the warld."

As the last group was dispersing, one
old woman, evidently in a state of fierce
anger, approached, and poured out a
torrent of Scotch, as bewildering and as
unintelligible to me as if it had been
Chinese. Her companions gazed at her
in astonishment : presently they began
to reply ; and in a few seconds there
was as fine a " rippet " going on as
could have been heard in Cowgate in
Tarn's day. At last, a woman of near
her own age sprang forward, and ap-
proaching her with a determined face
lifted her right hand with an authorita-
tive gesture, and said in vehement indig-

374

Glints in Auld Reekie.

[September,

nation, which reminded me of Christie
again, —

'• Keep yersil, an' haud yer tongue,
noo ! "

" "What is she saying ? " I asked.
" What is the matter ? "

" Eh, it is jist nathin' at a'," she re-
plied. " She 's thet angry, she does na
kuaw hersil."

The faces of the Newhaven women
are full of beauty, even those of the
old women : their blue eyes are bright
and laughing, long after the sea wind
and sun have tanned and shriveled
their skins and bleached their hair.
Blue eyes and yellow hair are the pre-
dominant type ; but there are some faces
with dark hazel eyes of rare beauty and
very dark hair, — still more beautiful,
— which, spite of its darkness, shows
glints of red in the sun. The dark blue
of their gowns and cloaks is the best
color-frame and setting their faces could
have ; the bunched fullness of the petti-
coat is saved from looking clumsy by
being so short, and the cloaks are in
themselves graceful garments. The
walking in a bent posture, with such
heavy loads on the back, has given to
all the women an abnormal breadth of
hip, which would be hideous in any
other dress than their own. This is so
noticeable that I thought perhaps they
wore under their skirts, to set them out,
a roll, such as is worn by some of the
Bavarian peasants. But when I asked
one of the women, she replied, —

" Na, na, jist the flannel ; a' tuckit."

" Tucked all the way up to the belt ? "
said I.

"Na, na," laughing as if that were
a folly never conceived of, — "na, na; "
and in a twinkling she whipped her
petticoat high up, to show me the under
petticoat, of the same heavy blue cloth,
tucked only a few inches deep. Her
massive hips alone were responsible for
the strange contour of her figure.

The last person to leave the wharf
was a young man with a creel of fish on

his back. My friend the sailor glanced
at him with contempt.

" There 's the only man in all Scot-
land that 'ud be seen carryin' a creel o'
fish on his back like a woman," said he.
" He 's na pride aboot him."

" But why should n't men carry
creels ? " I asked. " I 'm sure it is very
hard work for women."

The sailor eyed me for a moment,
perplexedly, and then, as if it were
waste of words to undertake to explain
self-evident propositions, resumed, —

" He worked at it when he was a
boy. with his mother ; an' now he 's no
pride left. There's the whole village
been at him to get a barrow ; but he '11
not do 't. He 's na pride aboot him."

What an interesting addition it would
be to the statistics of foods eaten by
different peoples to collect the statistics
of the different foods with which pride's
hunger is satisfied, in different coun-
tries ! Its stomach has as many and op-
posite standards as the human digestive
apparatus. It is, like everything else,
all and only a question of climate. Not
a nabob anywhere who gets more daily
satisfaction out of despising his neigh-
bors than the Newhaven fishermen do
out of their conscious superiority to this
poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket
on his back like a woman, and has " na
pride aboot him."

If I had had time and opportunity to
probe one layer farther down in New-
haven society, no doubt I should have
come upon something which even this
pariah, the fish -carrying man, would
scorn to be seen doing.

After the last toiling fishwife had
disappeared in the distance, and the
wharf and the village had quieted down
into sombre stillness, I drove to The
Peacock, and ate bread and milk in a
room which, if it were not the very
one in which Christie and her lover
supped, at least looked out on the same
sea they looked upon. And a very
gray, ugly sea it was, too ; just such an

1883.]

Chrysalides.

375

one as used to stir Christie's soul with
a heat of desire to spin out into it, and
show the boys she was without fear.
On the stony beach below the inn a
woman was spreading linen to dry. Her
motions as she raised and bent, and
raised and bent, over her task were
graceful beyond measure. Scuds of
raindrops swept by now and then ; and
she would stop her work, and straighten-
ing herself into a splendid pose, with
one hand on her hip, throw back her
head, and sweep the whole sky with her
look, uncertain whether to keep on with
her labor or not ; then bend again, and
make greater haste than before.

As I drove out of the village I found
a knot of the women gossiping at a
corner. They had gathered around a
young wife, who had evidently brought
out her baby for the village to admire.
It was dressed in very " braw attire "
for Newhaven : snowy white, and em-
broidery, and blue ribbons. It was but
four weeks old, and its tiny red face was
nearly covered up by the fine clothes.

I said to a white-haired woman in the
group, —

" Do you recollect when it was all
open down to the sea here, — before
this second line of newer cottages was
built?"

She shook her head and replied, " I 'm
na so auld 's I luik ; my hair it weutit
white " — After a second's pause, and
turning her eyes out to sea as she
spoke, she added, " A' 't once it wentit
white."

A silence fell on the group, and
looks were exchanged between the wom-
en. I drove away hastily, feeling as
one does who has unawares stepped
irreverently on a grave. Many grief-
stricken queens have trod the Scottish
shores ; the centuries still keep their
memory green, and their names haunt
one's thoughts in every spot they knew.
But more vivid to my memory than all
these returns and returns the thought
of the obscure fisherwoman whose hair,
from a grief of which the world never
heard, " a' 't once wentit white."

H.H.

CHRYSALIDES.

NIGHT-BLUE skies of thine,

Egypt, and thy dead who may not rest,

Who with wide eyes

Stand staring in the darkness of the mine !

Thy woman, Egypt, with her breast

Two cups of carven gold ;

And hands that no more rise

In praise, or supplication, or to sound

The timbrel in the dance !

White is thy noontide glare,

But no keen glance

Of yet created sun

Can pierce the deeps and caverns of thy dead.

They are overspread

With a new earth, where new men come and go,

And sleep when all is done ;

While far below,

376 Annexed by the Tsar. [September,

Shut from the upper air,

These stirless figures, bound

Iu awful cereiueuts, must forever wait.

There is another land,

Where in a valley once the god Pan slept,
Under the young blue sky, between two peaks ;
And here, a hero, running as one seeks
For fame, with ardor which his strength outstepped,
Fell dying in the stillness ; slow-breathing lay
The rounded marble limbs in the green grass.
An eagle, pausing on his fiery way,
Down swooped. Lo, as he soared, alas !
Nearing his awful steep,
Where only the dews weep,
And bearing in his clutches that bright form,
He heard the hero's voice :

" Eat, bird, and feed thyself ! This morsel choice
Shall give thy claws a span ;
This courage of a man
Shall bid thy pinions swell,
And by my strength thy wings shall grow an ell."

A. F.

ANNEXED BY THE TSAR.

HE was a huge dog, and he stood by Tsar made no audible remarks, but

the kennel, in old Dr. Gorham's back there was no difficulty at all in divining

yard, in an attitude of deep meditation, his meditations.

There was one subject for dog-thought " They have fed me an hour before

lying right before him, and another lay sundown, for some reason, and now

only a yard or so beyond the first. they 've gone off and neglected me. No

The one was an empty " muzzle " that muzzle, no chain, no master around,

lay upon the grass, close by a couple and all the country left open to me. It

of well-picked bones. The second was is a state of affairs to which I am not

an equally empty steel collar, with a accustomed at this time of day. If there

strong chain attached. The end of the were another bone with meat on it, I 'd

chain was hooked into a staple at the know exactly what to do."

side of the kennel door. He put out a great paw and turned

Tsar was a dog to look twice at. His the muzzle over. Then he walked for-

father had been a Siberian bloodhound ward and smelled of the helpless collar,

and his mother an English mastiff, and Then he peered solemnly into the ken-

Dr. Gorham would have trusted him to nel. There was a mystery about the

pull down a wild bull or to ring a church whole matter, and it seemed to suggest

bell, if he could once have seized with a visit to the front gate. That too was

his massive jaws the nose of the one or wide open, as a witness to the haste re-

the ringing-rope of the other. quired by the summons of the last pa-

1883.]

Annexed by the Tsar.

377

tient. and Tsar could therefore walk out
and look up and down the shady road
for an explanation of his own case. He
could not see any, at first, for there was
nothing to be learned from a flock of
geese, three hens, and one stray calf.
The very pig that was rooting under
the walnut-tree paid him no manner of
attention.

Tsar shrugged his broad shoulders to
make sure about the collar, pawed his
nose for a moment in memory of his
muzzle, and turned for a look at the
gate. There it was, with a very dingy
old tin sign on one post, whose faded
letters read " Dr. Heber Gorham," and
with a very new tin sign on the other
post, whose bright, fresh gilding an-
nounced " Dr. Heber Gorham, Jr.," as
also ready for patients.

That was all right, and it occurred to
Tsar that a walk would be good for his
health. He acted on the suggestion
promptly enough, but with dignity, as
became a dog of his size ; and no voice
from the house recalled him, as he
marched away down the road towards
the sea. A sniff of salt air would be
just the thing for his digestion, after
the hearty dinner he had eaten at the
kennel.

The sun was getting very low to-
wards the horizon, and yet, away down
there on the rock at the head of the
cove a curly-headed young lady of nine-
teen, or thereabouts, was still seated,
bending over a portfolio spread across
her lap. From time to time she cast
anxious glances from the lines she
traced upon the sheet of Bristol board
under her hand to the more and more
shadowy island, out there in the mouth
of the cove.

" That will do," she said. " It looks
bigger than the boat, now, but it is n't
big enough for the tree. I must make
the tree smaller ; the cow's back, too,
— it 's half as long as the island. There
is always something dreadful the matter
with my waves." She worked at the

waves for a few minutes. " If I had
time, I 'd try to put in the sunset. Dear
me, how late it is ! It will be almost
dark when I get home. It gets dark so
quickly, nowadays, after it once begins."

She rose a little hastily, but she gave
the island a very long last look, as she
closed her portfolio, — long enough for
a bystander to have read her name, in
gilt letters, on the leather cover, —
" Percie Lee." But no one was there
to read, for a lonelier spot than that
it would have been hard to find, how-
ever well adapted it might be for the
making of marine sketches.

Percie was in the road in half a min-
ute more, and she could but see that the
shadows were lengthening rapidly. She
reflected : " It is lonely for a little way
beyond Dr. Gorham's, but I won't mind
it from that to the village. I do hope
I shall not meet Heber Gorham. I
will not speak to him, if I do. I won't
even see him. He has not called since
he came back from Europe and I hope
he never will again.' I detest him."

She said it with needless energy, and
then she began to walk briskly onward.
She tried hard, too, to persuade herself
that she was only wondering whether,
in her sketch, she had made the horns
of the cow bear a proper proportion to
the upper branches of the tree on the
island. She was really almost thinking
sincerely about the cow, and the cow
alone, when she suddenly felt called
upon to exclaim, —

" Oh, that dog ! "

To be sure, that dog. Tsar was on
the other side of the road and he did
not seem to be taking any particular
notice of her, but thus Percie truly re-
marked of him !

" He is perfectly enormous ! "

She forgot about the cow in an in-
stant, but she did not speak her opinion
directly to the dog. Neither did she
think of sketching him, although he was
certainly worth it. She seemed hardly
to care to look at him.

378

Annexed by the Tsar.

[September,

Tsar, on his part, had taken a good
look at Percie Lee. lie was not mis-
taken about her for one moment.

" Very nice girl. Well dressed. Pret-
ty, too ; but she 's out late. Most likely
her family are friends of Dr. Gorham.
I must have an eye on that young lady.
It is getting dark."

That eye was what startled Percie so
dreadfully, a moment later ; for she hap-
pened to look behind her, and there
was that vast creature solemnly stalking
after her.

" He is following me ! " she exclaimed.

Not a doubt of it, and the fact that
he stopped or went on just when she
did hardly seemed to help the matter.
It was getting darker and more shad-
owy every moment, and Percie would
have been almost willing to run, if she
had not feared that if she did the dog
would run too. He appeared larger and
larger, every time she glanced behind
her, until she was afraid to look again,
and her breathing grew a little hurried.

" Nobody 's any business to have such
a dog ! " she gasped, in a whisper.
" It 's awful."

" She seems to be scared about some-
thing," thought Tsar. " Girls are apt to
be timid. Ah, I see ! It 's those ragged
rascals, coming down the road. Vil-
lainous-looking vagabonds. If there is
anything in this world that I hate, it is
a tramp."

That is a universal sentiment, among
dogs of Tsar's social standing ; but the
three ruffians who were now approach-
ing were either ignorant of that fact, or
did not know that such a doar was so

very near.

" Dreadful men ! " had been the un-
spoken thought in the mind of Percie
Lee, and it was followed by a doubt as
to whether she should ever airaiu dare

to come down to the cove.

" I must sketch the island," she said,
" but I will come in the forenoon."

The three men were walking abreast,
now, and they were plainly determined

not to turn to the right hand or the left
for Percie Lee. She had just time
to grasp that terrible idea and to feel
her heart jump, when one of them act-
ually spoke to her.

She never knew what he said, and her
only reply, as she retreated a few steps
was an altogether unintended little
scream. It was not a loud one, and
there was more surprise in it than fear,
but it was followed by remarkable con-
sequences.

Tsar had quickened his lordly pace,
full twenty seconds earlier, and, for some
reason of his own, he had advanced a
little under the shadow of the fence ; but
his eyes had not wandered from the hu-
man beings in the road before him. His
head and tail were raised a trifle, and
there was a very peculiar expression on
his broad, hairy face. There was no
love of tramps in it at all.

" Oh now, we hain't hurt you. You
need n't squall."

That was what the second of those
three ruffians began to say, when an aw-
ful, wrathful, roaring growl, as of warn-
ing, sounded from some deep-jawed cav-
ern among the shadows at the right of
Percie Lee. It was followed, in one
long, elastic, power-expressing bound,
by a huge dark form that in one second
more was crouching in front of her.

The first and second tramp upset the
third, and tumbled over him, so sudden
was the retreat they made, while Tsar,
for their special 'benefit and more at
length, repeated his growl, with a sup-
plementary snarl that sounded fearfully
like the announcement of another spring
forward.

The remarks made by all of those
vagabonds, as they scrambled to their
feet, were in a manner complimentary to
Tsar, although not intended to be so.

Percie Lee stood behind her protec-
tor, and she could not see, as they did,
the white rows of gleaming teeth and
the fierce green light in the threatening
eyes. She could perfectly understand,

1883.]

Annexed by the Tsar.

379

however, that there was an enormous
amount of very good dog between her
and any further approach of ruffianly
insolence. She was almost astonished
at the sudden feeling of security which
came upon her and at the entire ease
with which she began to breathe again.

Tsar did not spring. He did but
crouch in that picturesque attitude until
the nearest tramp was fifty yards away,
on a steady run ; and then he stood erect,
sending after his enemies one deep, so-
norous " Woof-oof," to keep them com-
pany.

" Good dog ! good fellow ! "

" Ur-r-r-r," was the gentle response
of Tsar, and he even wagged his tail,
moderately, but he did not condescend
to look around. He walked slowly on
up the road, and it was now Percie's
turn to follow him.

" I do not think I had better leave
her," said Tsar to himself ; " not even
when we get to our house."

It was not until they reached the turn
of the road, away beyond Dr. Gorham's,
that he at last stood still. Percie wished
very much to pat him, but she could
hardly muster courage, and while she
was hesitating there came a sound of
wheels, and a light buggy pulled up in
the middle Df the road.

" Dr. Gorham ! "

" Percie Lee ! Is that you ? I de-
clare ! Miss Lee — and that great
brute — it 's all my fault. Did he scare
you much, Percie — Miss Lee ? "

" Is it your dog, Heber — doctor ? "

" Tsar ! Come here, sir ! "

" Oh doctor, don't scold him. He has
been taking care of me. There were
three of them."

" Dogs, Miss Lee ? "

" No, sir ; tramps. Dreadful-looking

— they spoke — he is a splendid dog,

— beautiful."

" He ? Ah, — well, — it 's a good
thing he did n't take hold of one of
them. There 'd have been a fine sur-
gical case prepared for me, in no time.

But how did he happen to be out ? Un-
muzzled, too. I remember, now. All
my fault."

" I guess he must have been left out
to take care of me, doctor."

" Ain't I glad of it, though ! Now,
Miss Lee, you must step right into my
buggy, and let me carry you home.
Tsar, go home, sir ! "

He turned to obey, but a small, white
hand was on his head as he did so.

" Good dog, Tsar ; thank you, sir."

It was odd, indeed, but something in
that remark seemed aimed at the dog ;
and it must have hit him, too, by the
proud way of his walking off; but
some of it went further. The young
physician assisted Percie into the buggy,
and drove away ; and it was quite a dis-
tance around the corner of the main
road that they passed a dimly discernible
and quite breathless group that leaned
against a fence. Nobody going by in a
buggy could have heard them mutter, —

" Tell ye what, boys, that was the
awfullest dog I ever seen."

" Guess we won't try that there road
agin to-night. He 's loose."

" All them sort o' dogs has got to be
killed off, or the roads won't be safe."

Perhaps, but at that moment Tsar was
reentering his own yard, for he went
straight back to his quarters. He stood
for a moment turning over his empty
muzzle with his paw, and then lay heav-
ily down. He thought he understood
the entire matter, now.

" Heber Gorham knew that that
young lady would be in need of me.
It 's all right, but I doubt if I did my
whole duty. Unmuzzled, too. A lost
opportunity ! "

As to the tramps, yes, but not as to
all other parts of his performance. He
hardly knew how it afterwards came to
pass, but before long he discovered that
he had formed a habit of going down
to the cove with Percie Lee, to see her
take sketches of islands, trees, waves,
cows, and other matters and things, and

380

Along an Inland Beach.

[September,

of remaining till Heber Gorham, Jr.
M. D., came to take his place, with or
without a buggy. lie failed fully to
understand the business until another
sort of day arrived, when he found him-
self called upon, first, to attend a wed-
ding, by special invitation of Percie

Lee ; and then to recognize her as a per-
manent addition to his own household
at the old Gorham homestead. He
agreed to it. He had liked that young
woman from the first time he saw her.
And so, to tell the truth, had his mas-
ter.

William 0. Stoddard.

ALONG AN INLAND BEACH.

OP all those who extended and
widened the path of Columbus, I have
always thought that Vasco Nunez, " si-
lent upon a peak in Darien," fronting
an unknown ocean, was the most fa-
vored. I can only wonder at the sordid
presence of mind with which he hastened
to inform the new-found sea of its vas-
salage to the crown of Castile. It would
seem that in such elemental prospect
there could be small suggestion of hu-
man supremacy. No configuration of
the land, neither the majesty of moun-
tains nor the airy spaciousness of plains,
so moves us as does the sea, with its
sublime unity and its unresting motion.
What is true of the sea, as regards this
exalted first impression, may as justly
be claimed for any body of water which
the vision is unable to span, — may be
claimed for Erie, which, as well as its
companion Great Lakes, fully deserves
to be called a " fresh-water sea." For
the hundredth time beholding it, I feel
the thrill of discovery, and drink in the
refreshing prospeci as with thirsty Old
World eyes. " Who poured all that
water out there ? " a child's question
on first seeing the Lake, best embodies
the primitive wonderment and pleasure
which the sight still retains lor me. I
am not chagrined as I reflect that, of this
inland water system, this Broad River
traveling under many aliases, Erie is
reckoned the shallowest : if its depth
were greater, would it not hinder the

present experiment ? It is already deep-
er than my sounding-line is long.

I fall on paradox in saying that or-
dinarily I am not within sight of the
Lake, though quite constantly residing
upon one of its beaches. It is proper to
state that this beach is at present four
good miles from highest water-mark ; that
at a very early period it was abandoned
by the Lake; was dry land, clothed
with sward and forest, a very long time
before any red settlement, to say noth-
ing of the white, was established here-
abouts. A great stone bowl or basin
the master mechanic Glacier originally
scooped out to hold this remnant of the
ancient continental sea. Its successive
shrinkings are plainly marked on the
sides of the bowl in continuous lines of
rilievo, which, according as they are
slight or bold, the geologist terms ridges
or terraces. That these are the Lake's
old beaches is now generally accepted.
That this region was once swept by the
waves is evident from the frequency of
sand and gravel beds and other earthy
deposits, which may be reckoned the
impedimenta dropped and left behind
in the Retreat of Erie's Ten Thousand.
East and west roads follow the ridges ;
from which at various points the travel-
er most fitly sights the far-retired water.

In approaching the Lake, long before
the blue ribbon that binds the northern
horizon appears above the laud verge,
you should know by the quick, spring-

1883.]

Along an Inland Beach.

381

ing breeze that you are nearing some
great gathering of waters. You should
infer who holds sway yonder by that
three-forked sceptre thrust sharply up
against the sky, — though it is possible
that you may see nothing but the
crabbed form of a tall dead tree : from
long familiarity I have learned its true
purport. Observe how the landscape
avails itself of the Lake as a favorable
foil. This field of ripe wheat, — how red
is its gold when displayed against the
azure distance ! Never looked Indian
corn more beautiful than here, floating
its green blades on the wind, and hold-
ing whispered parley with the water.
If we walk along, having this field be-
tween us and the Lake, we shall still
catch glimpses of its heavenly face down
all the vistas formed by the rows. Thus,
we play hide and seek a while before
coming face to face with our friend.

The characteristic summer coloring of
the Lake is, for some distance out, a
tawny white or pale lava tint ; midway,
green with slashes of deep purple, which
one might fancy to be narrow rifts open-
ing into a profounder, sunless deep;
beyond, the pure ultramarine of far-
thest eye - range, in which the ridging
of the waves becomes indistinguishable.
The clarity and the swift interchange
of these purples and greens have often
reminded me of the same colors sport-
ing in a particularly choice soap-bub-
ble. Sometimes I look, and behold !
a multiform animate jewel, liquid sap-
phire and emerald, cut in a hundred
transient facets, over which seethes and
sparkles a deflagrating diamond. The
term " glassy sea " should be in good
acceptation. This faithful looking-glass,
this old friend of the sky, gives instant
warning of every flaw or beauty-spot of
a passing cloud seen upon its face. The
Lake reflects itself, also, and in this
wise : the white foam vertex of each
wave is mirrored in the porcelain blue
of the concave floor between it and the
preceding wave. The prevailing sum-

mer wind is from the west ; hence, of ten-
est from that quarter, as from illimi-
table watery pampas or Tartary plains
comes the stampede of wild white horses.
Fancy makes her choice, and throws a
lasso, determined to bring a steed to
shore ; but the protean creature so
changes, each instant raising a new head
and tossing mane, that there is no sin-
gling it out from the common drove,
no telling when it reaches the beach.

It is not a difficult matter, any morn-
ing, to take the Lake napping (for it
holds no arrogant views on the subject
of early rising). At sunrise, its only
sound is the soft lapping of the ripples
along the sand, a sweet and careless lip-
service. One would say that the kil-
deer's sharp wing left a distinct mark
upon the surface. As the bird rises
higher, its shadow, slim and elongated
in the water, seems to be diving, — a
shadowy bird for striking shadowy fish.
The interval between the faint swells
has the gloss and smoothness of the
mill-stream slipping over the edge of
the dam. While in this slumberous
condition, the Lake well merits the char-
acterization of The Big Pond, given it
by one who is frequently with me upon
the beach.

" Often 't is in such gentle temper found
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it some time fell
When last the winds of heaven were unbound."

At evening, when the Lake breeze is
dropping off to sleep, this wide spread
of misty blue looks not unlike a fine
lawny curtain, or tent-cloth, tacked at
the horizon, free at the shore, and here
and there lifted by a light wind under-
neath. At such time, to cast in a peb-
ble were, seemingly, at the risk of mak-
ing an irreparable rent in an exquisite
fabric. Where, inland, does the day
so graciously take leave ? Not that the
color pageant is here especially remark-
able, but that the water has the effect
of a supplemental heaven, repeating and
emphasizing the tenderness and beauty

382

Along an Inland Beach.

[September,

of the evening sky. On these two can-
vases, how many pictures, both lovely
and grotesque, have been painted ! How
often the trail of crimson light over a
moderately rough surface showed me
the outline of a monstrous lake-serpent,
whose head was at the down-going of the
sun, and whose tail reached to the oozy
sand at my feet, — that tail, sure to
writhe till the very last beam had de-
parted ! Once watching the sun sink
through a light mist, I saw what ap-
peared a globe slowly filling with water,
as though the Lake had risen in it by
force of capillary attraction. At an-
other time, a strip of dark cloud, lying
across the sun, threw up the profile of
a tropical island, palm grove, coral reef,
and lagoon : a graven land of the sun,
with the golden disk for a sunset back-
ground. One memorable evening there
was a rainbow, of which one base rested
upon the Lake. The seven-hued seal
laid upon that spot hinted that the tra-
ditional treasure coffer of the heavenly
arc had been sunk in the water for
greater security. Far away from land,
might not a rainbow, with its shadow
upon the waves, vaguely indicate a pris-
matic circle, through which a sailing
ship might seem to pass to uuimagined
regions of romance ?

If 'you have time to kill, try this
chloroforming process : Sit on the beach,
or the turfy bank above, and watch the
passing of ships. Hours will have
elapsed before the sail, which dawned
red with the sunrise, will have traversed
the rim of this liquid crescent and dis-
appeared at its western tip. Often a
steamer stands in so near that with the
naked eye you can distinguish the fig-
ures of the crew and their movements.
Or you see the clue which binds the
toilsome, fuming steam-tug with its list-
less followers. In bright, still weather,
whatever goes over the deep is unwont-
edly etherealized. That distant ship,
with motionless sunny sails, might be an
angel galaxy, — wings drawn together

above some happy spirit of mortal ripe
for translation.

For you or me, the beach is a place
of idleness, but for another it is a field
of busiest enterprise. Might we not
have more confidential relations with the
Lake, more official knowledge, if we tried
to get our living therefrom ? The sand-
piper has this advantage over us. He
runs like a fly along the wet sand, his
line of travel a series of scallops bound-
ed by the coming and receding of the
waves. Sometimes, " for fun," he lets
the water overtake and wash around his
slender legs. He runs well, but cannot
maintain a graceful standing position ;
for he seems to have the centre of grav-
ity misplaced, always nodding and sway-
ing (tip-up, teeter), as though shaken
by the wind, or troubled with a St. Vi-
tus's dance. He frequently visits in-
land, up the marsh stream, when, by his
phantomy, noiseless flight as well as by
his colors, mixed black, white, and brown,
I am put in mind of the dragon-fly.
Should we not know something worth
knowing of the Lake if we fished from
its waters — not with line or seine, as
the manner of some is, but as the eagle !
That bird's flight ! it is subdued exalta-
tion ; steady sails, with the least use of
the oars ; no petty movement, nothing
for gymnastic display. This aquiline
old inhabitant — such surprise to me as
the roc to Siubad — has his habitation
in a high tree-top overlooking the wa-
ter ; a feudal castle, no doubt, in eagle
annals.

By contrast with the sound and mo-
tion of the waves, the land sinks to in-
anition before our eyes. It no longer
looks to be terra firma, but an illusory
coast, a painted piece of summer mi-
rage. The breeze may be bending the
grain and swaying forest branches, but
no report is brought to our ears ; the
ineffectual soughing is lost in the mani-
fold noise of waters. A little distance
back in the fields or woods, and all is
changed : the land wakes ; the Lake is

1883.]

Along an Inland Beach.

383

a dream ; its voice comes soothingly,
like the pleasant sound of a storin gone
by. From the bank, listening in the
direction of a certain shallow bay, I can
always hear a faint canorous vibration,
distinct from the hollow murmur of the
waves. What wonder if I come to think
that the " singing sands " are to be found
not so very far away ? Or if I credit
the sweet air to a shoal of dolphin, ly-
ing in the hazy sunlight and humming
over some old Arion melody, may I
not be pardoned the vagary ? The suc-
cession of breaking waves is an endless
verse, yet not without the ictus and cse-
sural pause ; for all waves do not beat
with like emphasis, and the interval
varies. Listening to the pulses of any
great water, the final impression gained
is not of inconstancy, but of change-
lessness throughout all change. When
was it otherwise than now ? When
were these waves not coursing their way
to the shore, or when shall they cease
coming? If any one understands the
anatomy of the melancholy which over-
takes us here, it is not I. After the
novelty has worn off, there is something
haunting and burdensome in this cry
of the waves. I cannot think it mor-
bidity that opens this sombre vein ; for
the most healthful souls have not re-
mained unaffected. Some time or other,
every walker on the beach has heard
the " eternal note of sadness ; " and

" Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the yEgean."

In this melancholy, hearing is reinforced
by sight : we see the wave approach
and break upon the shore ; see it, spent
and refluent, lost in the vast unindivid-
ual body. It is no comforting parable
we hear spoken upon the beach. The
hurl and headiness of our endeavors are
mocked at, apparently. Are we such
broken and refluent waves along the
shore of the eternities?

It is doubtless well known that the
level of the Lake is not uniform from year
to year, or even from season to season.

Early emigrants from Buffalo to Cleve-
land were favored somewhat as were
the ancient Israelites : the water was
unusually low, permitting them to travel
by the beach, with the advantage of a
free macadamized road. From the rec-
ord of observations made at intervals
during the present century, it appears
that the Lake was at its lowest level
in 1819, at its highest in 1838, — the
difference in level amounting to six feet
eight inches. The greatest inconstancy
noted as occurring between seasons is
two feet, though the average difference
is considerably less. The Lake attains
its greatest annual height during the
month of June, its volume having been
steadily increased by the discharge of
its tributaries, swollen with the spring
rains. Some of Erie's old neighbors —
who live next door, and might be
thought to be best acquainted with his
incomings and outgoings, who have a
notched stick in their memories — main-
tain that seven years, alternately, see
the Lake at its minimum and maximum
height. Seven is a prepotent number.
Seven is climacteric: everybody knows
that within this period the human sys-
tem undergoes a complete change. Pos-
sibly, the Lake's being is governed by a
similar law. While these secular and
annual variations are accounted for with
little difficulty, there is another class
of oscillations which offers a perennial
problem to the men of science as well
as to the old neighbors. I speak of the
remarkable changes of level, the rapid
advances and recessions of the water,
for which apparently the wind cannot
be held to account. These inconstan-
cies have suggested to some the.hypoth-
esis of a lake-tide, however careless and
indefinite in keeping its appointments.
But the tide theory, it has reasonably
been objected, does not elucidate that
prime mystery of the Great Lakes, —
the so-called " tidal wave." By how
much is Erie wilder and freer thaii
ocean itself ! Unlike the servile sea, it

384

Along an Inland Beach.

[September,

observes no stated periods of ebb and
flood, performs no dances up the beach
under the nod and beck of the moon ;
but when it listeth (not frequently, for
peace and law-abidingness are its nor-
mal mood), it throws up a great billow,
like, but mightier than, that with which
Scamander signaled his brother river.
Out of a calm lake, without other
warning than a sudden shifting of the
gentle breeze and a low, thundery rum-
bling, rises a moving ridge of water, ten,
fifteen, or even twenty feet in height.
It hurls itself upon the shore, very sea-
like and outrageous in its action ; rush-
ing over piers, snapping the hawsers
of vessels at dock, and dashing up the
mouths of its astonished tributaries.
Almost immediately it retires, some-
times to be followed by one or two mi-
nor surges ; after which all is tranquil as
before, and the gentle breeze epiloguizes,
having resumed its former post. The
most striking instances of these tidal
waves occurred in 1830, 1845, and the
last as lately as 1882. The theory now
generally received is that " unequal at-
mospheric pressure " is the causal force
in these strange agitations of the water.
There are those who, in the tidal wave
of the last year, saw an effort made by
the Lake to swallow a cyclone. This
it most certainly achieved, if there was
any cyclone in the case, since no vio-
lence of wind was felt upon the land.
Another theory, until now privately en-
tertained, is that these great waves are
the Lake's sudden, wrathy resolutions
to strike once more for its ancient
beaches, and sink the innovating land
forever. If that be the intention, the
outcome, I grant, is wholly insignificant.
Yet it may be that Erie will become
the great real-estate owner, land specu-
lator and devourer, hereabouts. The ti-
dal wave may be nothing to the point,
but this slow, patient erosion under the
banks, very perceptible in its effects
after the lapse of a generation, — does
it count for nothing? The places

where the gnawing is most furious
may be protected by " cribs " (rectan-
gular framework of heavy timbers bal-
lasted with stones) ; but the security
thus afforded is only temporary. The
road used by the early inhabitants of the
shore is not now practicable: it is in-
deed a lost road, lying either in air or
upon the water beneath; and many a
•homestead and garden have slid off into
the bosom of the Lake. Of the last to
go some vestiges yet remain : tufts of
dooryard shrubs and plants, lilac bushes,
or a gay knot of corn lilies flaunting
light farewell before disappearing over
the crumbling verge. As we walk along
the ragged bank, we might sketch the
wasted landscape upon the airy void,
filling it in with visionary lines, like the
faint dotted lines of hypothesis in a ge-
ometric diagram. Whether the Lake
henceforth will advance or retreat, who
can tell ? Once — so runs a fairy tale of
science — this Erie communicated with
La Belle Riviere, Ohio the Beautiful
(but that was long before the stormy
Niagara path had been beaten out) ; if
at some time it should decide to renew
its southern acquaintance, would it be
able to find its way through the old
" water gaps," which have been choked
up with drift during unknown cycles ?

From its softening influence upon
the climate, the Lake might be char-
acterized as an inland gulf-stream. In
summer it is a well-spring of grateful
coolness ; a constant breeze by day flow-
ing landward, replaced at night by a
breeze from the land. In the winter its
effect is — to compare great things to
small — like that of the tub of water
set in the cellar to take the edge off the
frost. At this season, the mercury
stands several degrees higher in shore
thermometers than in those some miles
inland. If the ice, with which the Lake
parts so slowly, churning back and forth
between its shores, retards the spring,
the disadvantage is fully atoned for in
the prolonged fine weather of autumn.

1883.]

Along an Inland Beach.

385

Due might venture to set up the claim
that Indian summer is here seen at its
brightest and best. Such is the quiet
geniality beaming in the face of this
water during the fall months that I
half expect to see " birds of calm "
brooding upou its surface, their inviola-
ble nests placed somewhere under the
dry, warm bank.

To have come a long journey, to have
arrived within sight of home, and then
to suffer detention, — this is what has
happened to our creek of many wind-
ings. Here it halts, scarcely two rods
from the tossing spray, a bar of sand
across its mouth. It has not force
enough to overcome the difficulty, and
so it settles back in sleek, sunshiny con-
tentment, toying with Nymphaea and
Nuphar ; beloved of the pickerel-weed,
the arrowhead, and the floating utricur
laria. It sets back into a dense field of
sedge and cat-tail, over whose soldierly
lances the rosy oriflamme of tb% marsh-
mallow holds sway. Late in the sum-
mer, noisy flocks of blackbirds assemble
here. Like an entertainment planned
by a wizard are the two prospects : on
one hand, the hurrying " white caps "
and shouting waves ; on the other, the
still indifference of the halted stream.

How shall we regard this considera-
ble piece of unfenced common, with the
unclaimed properties we may chance to
find upon it ? If Neptune write us a
letter in substantial sort, shall it be law-
ful for any to intercept the contents ?
Having consigned to us certain flotsam
and jetsam, thus writes Neptune : That
which I send you, scruple not to accept;
it has been so long in my possession
that all previous right and title there-
to are annulled. The dwellers on any
coast are always receiving such letters
from the blue-haired autocrat ; and it is
scarcely to be wondered at if they ac-
cept his gifts and assurances without
questioning his authority. It would
seem that a sort of wrecking epidemic
is bred from every large body of water,

VOL. LII. — NO. 311. 25

whether salt or fresh. I confess to a
feeling of expectancy, when on the
beach, that the Lake will bring me some-
thing, although I do not imagine it will
be in any solid merchantable shape, or
that you would care to dispute the prize,
or that the owner would think it worth
while to redeem the property by paying
me salvage. I do not go so far as do
some, who trustingly regard the Lake as
a kind of sub-Providence acting in their
behalf. In winter, the rescue of lumber
sent adrift by the fall freshets receives
considerable attention along shore, and
is carried on at whatever risk of frozen
extremities or rheumatic retribution.
The wrecking laws are sometimes sharp-
ly disputed. Doubtless, there is more
need of stringency now than formerly,
when the lumber traffic was less exten-
sive. The waves work in the interest
of the shore, yet they were not always
to be depended upon. There was the
case of the old-time inhabitant, — faith-
ful patroller of the beach in the early
mornings after nights of storm : to one
who asked him why he had not " built
on an addition," he replied that h'e had
intended to do so ; but, somehow, the
Lake had n't been kind to him that year,
— had not furnished the requisite tim-
bers. There was also a good dame, to
whom Neptune sent a quilt; a not in-
comprehensible present, when we reflect
that it must have seen service upon the
" cradle of the deep." Many years ago,
a vessel making a last voyage for the
season was kept out of port, and finally
hemmed in by the fast-forming ice ; her
captain and crew going ashore in Can-
ada. Though she was a long distance
out, the people of the southern coast
spied her, and proceeded over the solid
ice to visit her. She carried a miscel-
laneous cargo of unusual value. Firm-
ly held in abeyance, she was in no im-
mediate danger ; but the landsmen did
not see the situation in this light, — on
the contrary, resolving to give the bene-
fit of their wrecking services. Accord-

386

Along an Inland Beach.

[September,

ingly, they lightened the ship as fast as
possible, each taking what seemed to
him the most valuable. Silks, velvets,
and broadcloths were the chief objects
of rescue, though I have heard that one
man selected a sheaf of umbrellas (that
article which on all occasions invites
sequestration), while another devoted
himself to the safe transportation of an
" elegant family Bible," the character of
the freight perhaps giving a religious
color to the proceeding. My chronicler
records that, while engaged in this sal-
vation of property, the participants sus-
tained life by making free use of the
ship's provisions. On their return jour-
ney, the ice parting compelled some to
remain out over night, exposed to very
bitter cold ; others were extremely glad
to reach shore empty-handed, having
consigned their booty to the Lake, which
was afterwards seen flaunting in silks
and velvets. The impromptu colpor-
teur was of all the company most un-
fortunate ; both his feet having been
frozen in their evangelical progress, and
permanent lameness resulting. He is
reported to have made the following
plaintive statement of his case : " Al-
ways went in the very best society, be-
fore I got my feet froze ; but now it 's
different, and I 'm sure I don't see why."
The owners of the vessel subsequently
brought suit against these misguided
wreckers, who constantly maintained
that their sole purpose in the expedition
had been to save property. The moral
of this coastwise episode is to be found
in the fact that the actors were possessed
of the average probity, or, at least, while
on land would never have committed
the smallest larceny. Nothing but the
theory of a wrecking epidemic can ac-
count for their deflection from the right
line of conduct. A few winters since,
a schooner with iron ore from the up-
per lakes foundered off our coast. The
water washing upon the ore acquired
for rods around a dark red flush, — as
though a mighty libation of wine had

been offered. Of this wreck a farmer
on the shore preserves a relic most ab-
surdly framed, " Jane Bell " (the name
of the sunken vessel) now serving as a
legend over his barn door. It strikes
me, he ought not to complain if, having
thus dedicated his property to the nau-
tical powers, he should some morning
find it had deserted its site, and gone
a-sailing, from barn converted into ark.

Tame as this shore appears, it has
nevertheless received its tragic deposi-
tions from the waves. Voyagers, whose
bearings were forever lost, have lain on
its pebble-strewn beach ; it has even
happened to them to be manacled with
ice, — as though their estate were not
already cold and sure enough. In my
wrecking experience, such as it has been,
nothing ever came more serviceable than
the finding of a piece of ship timber,
half sunken in the sand, but still dis-
playing the horse-shoe which had been
nailed upon it — for luck ! What luck
had they met with, who had so striven
to procure the good will of fate ? Sure-
ly, here was the most effective silent
sermon ever preached against the use of
charms and phylacteries !

If we closely observe the sand left
bare by the receding wave, we shall see
occasional perforations, from which the
escaping air drives a little jet of water,
— minute pattern of a geyser. Such
perforations are probably caused by the
sinking of fine gravel. If we have no
business more pressing, it may be worth
our while to make an inventory of the
various articles that lie on this curiosity
shelf, the beach. There is, first, the
driftwood : judging from the bone-like
shape and whiteness of the ligneous
fragments with which the Lake strews
its margins, we might suppose it to have
a taste for palaeontology. More than
one fossil-resembling model of nameless
ancient beast, as well as the originals of
all the nondescripts in heraldry, shall
we rescue from the sand. It would be
curiously interesting to follow the vary-

1883.]

Along an Inland Beach.

387

ing fortunes of yonder tree, which, lately
uprooted by the wind, lies prone upon
the water, its leafage unconscious of
destiny, still being nourished with sap ;
how long will it take the great planer
and turner to convert this tree into ef-
fects as fantastic as those we have rioted
in the drift? This artificer, the Lake,
abhors angles, and strives to present
the line of beauty in whatever it turns
out of its laboratory. Here, among
those least bowlders, crystalline pebbles
from the far north, is a lump of coal,
worn to an oval contour, well polished,
and hinting of cousinship with the dia-
mond. Here, beside the abundant peri-
winkle, are thin flakes of clam-shell, iri-
descent and beautiful ; trinkets made
from the spines of fish; the horny gaunt-
lets of the crab ; a dragon-fly ; the blue
and bronze plates of large beetles not
seen inland; and the fluttering, chaffy
shells of the " Canada soldiers," short-
lived myrmidons of the shore. And
here is a tithe of last year's hickory
and butternut mast ; the burs of vari-
ous rough marsh plants ; a lock of a
lake -maid's hair (or is it only a wisp
of blanched rootlets from some distant
stream side ?) ; ah ear of corn, half
buried, its kernels, with mustard-seed
faith, pushing up green blades through
the lifeless, unstable sands. Now and
then you see the feather of a gull or
other water-haunting bird, a plume in
your cap if you find a quill of the eagle !
I have just picked up an arrowhead,
which I would fain believe has lain here
ever since an Indian hunter shot it at
a stag that had come down to drink at
sunrise. Heaven saved the mark and
frustrated the hunter ; for which I can-
not be sorry. This missile may have
been carved out at the arrowhead ar-
mory, the site of which a farmer thinks
he has found in one of his fields. This
is a piece of rising ground, where, be-
fore successive plowings had entirely
changed the surface, the spring yield of
flints was unusually large. As most of

these were imperfect, and mixed with a
great proportion of shapeless cbippings,
they were supposed to be waste and re-
jected material, such as always accumu-
lates around a workman's bench. Here,
then, in the days that have no historian,
sat a swarthy Mulciber, plying his trade
with the clumsiest tools, either alone, or
the centre of a group of idle braves and
story-telling ancients. More verifiable
is the tradition of an aged and solitary
Indian, living at some distance back in
the forest ; a red man of destiny, by
his tribe doomed to perpetual exile for
some capital offense, of which he had
been found guilty. Of the great nation
whose name is borne by this water
(Lake Erie, Wildcat Lake!) only the
meagrest account has been transmitted.
The Eries were gone long enough be-
fore this region owned the touch of civ-
ilization.

We frequently speak of the Lake as
" frozen over," but this is a mistake ;
there is always a central channel of free
water. The glassy quay that builds out
from shore remains immovable the en-
tire winter, but the ice bordering that
open mid-stream is greatly subject to
the pleasure of the wind, — sometimes
driven southward, sometimes far to the
north ; in the latter case, the dark line
of moving waters is visible from our
coast. Frozen, the Lake seems pos-
sessed of a still but strenuous power, as
though, after the habit of water on a
cold winter night, it might crack the
great bowl in which it was left standing.
The arrested waves are raised against
the shore as if in act to strike: the
blow will never be dealt ; they will not
lower all at once, but, as the winter
relaxes, the sun will turn away their
wrath and they w,ill go down from the
shore assuaged. It is no miracle to
walk the waves, when the waves are
firm as marble ; yet in so doing you
feel a strong sense of novelty. Along
their projecting edges, rows of icicles,
like the stalactite trimmings of a cave,

388

MSrimee in his Letters.

[September,

are formed. In the thawing weather
of early spring, it is rather strange and
decidedly pleasing to hear the tinkling
fall of the little streams that are crau-
nyiug the ice. For the moment you
might think it a place of rocks abound-
ing in springs, being helped to that
fancy by the masses of frozen gravel
as well as by the musical sounds from
the melting ice. The charm to the ear
is in the contrast drawn between this
slender melody and the remembered
din of the waves. What we hear is the
old Lake waking up with infantine prat-
tle and prettiness, not yet alive with the
consciousness of power.

I am aware that the Lake is not the
ocean : its waves are shorter, running
not so high ; and though it is occasion-
ally heard to boom, it has not the deep,
oracular voice of the sea. Its beach is
not the spacious beach of ocean, yet, —
and I note the fact with interest, — its
sands support the sea-rocket (Cakile
maritima) and the beach-pea (Lathy-
rus maritimus), plants that will thrive
under kisses more pungent than those
of fresh-water spray. When I am prais-
ing the Lake, I should not forget that,
after tarrying long upon its shore, I be-
come conscious of a serious lack in its
nature : can it be salt that is wanting ?
Edith M. Thomas.

MERIMEE IN HIS LETTERS.

THERE is an interest belonging to
Merimee's personality as well as to his
literary work. In Taine's brief memoir
are to be found a few lines descriptive
of the appearance and manner of the
author of La Double Meprise, Colomba,
and Carmen which bring him very dis-
tinctly before us ; so that in reading the
volumes of his correspondence, to which
this biographical sketch is prefixed, we
have always present to the mind's eye
the man himself, "tall, erect, pale," who,
"except for his smile, had an Eng-
lish air, — at least that cold and distant
manner which repels in advance all fa-
miliarity ; " who even among intimates
was never otherwise than impassive,
calm-voiced, without glow or sparkle.
It is a manner that some men affect,
and one may perhaps be inclined to sus-
pect Merimee, who had it so perfectly,
of a partial affectation, until one hears
him speak for himself in the Letters
that follow, and which belong to such an
extended period of his life. Men some-
times reveal themselves most openly
when least aware of it, and it happened

so with Me'rimee in these communica-
tions, intended only for her to whom
they were addressed. Not that he had
need to conceal aught of his life and
character from the world's eye ; and if
there had been anything to conceal he
would have disdained to cover it, as one
soon comes to know. He was not frank,
but he had the sincerity that is born of
a deep pride.

We read the correspondence, given
to the world after his death, for the
sake of the self-sketched portrait of the
writer it contains, to the interest of
which is added the spice of an ungrati-
fied curiosity concerning the recipient
of the letters and the relation of the
two. Merimee's feeling for his corre-
spondent appears in the beginning hard-
ly more than a sentiment, gentle and
refined, — a matter of the head as much
as of the heart ; and though with some
fluctuations, some rising tidal waves of
emotion, the lover seems never to find
too great difficulty in keeping it within
bounds. So far, at least, as shows here,
there is nothing like an outspoken fer-

1883.]

MSrimee in his Letters.

389

vency of passion. Doubtless there was
more in it than any demonstration here
proves, for it was the man's nature to
detest the display of any kind of feel-
ing. It all ended, as Taine says, in a
true and lasting friendship ; the tone of
gallantry and sentiment of the earlier
letters changes almost imperceptibly to
one of gentle familiarity and friendly
confidence. Little or nothing is discov-
erable about the unknown friend : the
reader is permitted to approach her only
at a respectful distance, the correspond-
ence having prob'ably been revised for
that purpose. If we did not know its
true character, we might easily take the
letters of the first quarter of the initial
volume for an admirably composed fic-
tion ; they are so polished, graceful, —
just what they should be for the opening
chapters of a romance. Coming from
Merimee, they could not fail of a charm-
ing style; the finished man of letters
shows throughout the whole correspond-
ence. They are always in one strain,
embellished with a number of light and
pleasing variations. Each letter resem-
bling as it does the preceding, the won-
der is how unwearied we find ourselves
with the repeated theme ; how gratified
with the little details of his life and
work which the writer records for us ;
how charmed with the brief glimpses into
his mind, the occasional reflections and
aphorisms he indulges in. He has the
art of never saying too much, of touch-
ing and letting go, of never being tire-
some. We are amused from time to
time with satirical descriptions of per-
sons and things he meets in the world.
In a letter from London he tells of a
visit to the newly-built House of Com-
mons, which he calls a frightful mon-
strosity, and adds, " You have no idea
what may be done with a complete want
of taste and two million pounds ster-
ling." And in another : " I begin to
have enough of this country. I am tired
of perpendicular architecture, and the
equally perpendicular manners of the

natives. ... I gave a half-crown to
a black-coated person who showed me
the cathedral, and then asked of him
the address of a gentleman to whom I
had a letter from the dean. He found
it was himself to whom the letter was
addressed. We both looked foolish ;
but he kept the money." Merimee is
always as ready to mock at what seems
to be pretension in himself as in an-
other. He tells his friend that on the
14th of March his fate will be decided,
meaning the question of his election to
the French Academy. " In the mean
time, I conscientiously make visits. I
find people very civil, accustomed to
their parts, and taking them very seri-
ously. I do my best to take mine grave-
ly also, but it is difficult. Does it not
seem to you ridiculous to say to a man,
' Monsieur, I think myself one of the
forty cleverest men in France. I am
as good as you,' and such-like face-
tiae ? I have to translate that into terms
variously polite, according to the per-
sons." After Merimee has attained the
academic dignity, he is present at a ban-
quet at Caen, at which his health is
proposed, with allusion to his titles to
honor as senator, man of letters, and
savant. " There was only the table be-
tween us, and I had a great desire to
throw a plate of rum jelly at his head.
While he was speaking I meditated my
reply, and could not find a word. When
he ceased I comprehended that it was
absolutely necessary to speak, and I be-
gan a phrase without knowing how I
should go on. I talked in that way for
five or six minutes, with great self-pos-
session, and with very little idea of what
I was saying. I am assured that I was
extremely eloquent." He laughs at the
gemiithlich Germans, who made a lion of
him at Vienna. " I was as amiable as
possible. I wrote sublime thoughts in
albums, and made sketches ; in a word,
I was perfectly ridiculous." Once in a
while this smiling satirist changes his
tone to one of undisguised contempt for

390

MSrimee in his Letters.

[September,

his species. We should prefer not to
take him quite at his word when he
suys, '' There is nothing I despise, and
even detest, so much as humanity in gen-
eral. Nevertheless, I should like to be
rich enough to avoid the sight of indi-

O O

vidual sufferings." Such remarks, to be
just, are rare with him ; if not genially
benevolent, or humorously tolerant, he
is at least sufficiently gentle mannered.
There is nothing in him of the bitter-
ness of a selfishness that finds itself
matched against a selfish world. We
have every disposition to credit him
when he says, " It rarely happens to me
to sacrifice others to myself, and when
it does happen I experience all possible
remorse." Nor is it an overweening
self-esteem that prompts his satire or
feeds his contempt for the intelligence
of the mass of men. We should indeed
take a little conceit for a healthy sign
in him : but Merimee has absolutely
no vanity, personal or literary ; only a
pride, far from ostentatious, yet unable
at all times to avoid self-betrayal.

To his refinement of thought and
sentiment he added an extreme fastidi-
ousness of personal liking and habit.
Yet in spite of the drawbacks to such
society, his curiosity led him, as he tells
us, to seek the companionship of the
muleteers of Spain. He admired the
Andalusian peasantry for their grace,
and commended their native tact. On
the other hand, his expressions of dis-
• taste for his provincial countrymen are
frequent ; he is infinitely wearied by
the necessity of official intercourse with
them. In one letter he remarks that
he has lately been introduced to some
hitherto unknown members of his fam-
ily, living in the provinces, and adds that
he does not like relatives. " One is
obliged to be familiar with persons one
has never seen, because they happen to
be children of one's grandfather." In
all things and at all times Merimee
shows the temper of a social and intel-
lectual aristocrat.

Some traits of his remind us of Fre-
deric Chopin. A certain air of distinc-
tion belonged to the composer and the
man of letters alike in their individual
characters and in their artistic and lit-
erary products. No single word is so
descriptive of Chopin's music — or so it-
seems to the amateur — as " elegance,"
that quality of combined delicacy and
brilliance, which is not the superficial
veneer of a cheap and common sub-
stance, but the admirably adorned dress
in which a master presents his original
conceptions. One feels' sure that no one
has ever played Chopin's music as he
himself played it, with his " fingers of
steel shod in velvet." We fancy that
the musician may have concealed a ten-
derer nature than Merimee's behind the
mask of his gravely courteous reserve ;
but with more of difference, perhaps,
than of resemblance, there was some-
thing common to the two men. In both
there was a fund of melancholy, infect-
ing their lives : in Chopin, a more gen-
tly pensive strain, native to his disposi-
tion and lodged there in retirement : in
Merimee, a morbid affection, from which
he might possibly have freed himself if
he could have found the will for vigor-
ous effort. This melancholy was so con-
stantly recurrent that he seems hardly
ever to have risen from under the pres-
sure of it. " Je me trouve bien triste
aujourd'hui; " " Je m'ennuie horrible-
• ment il y a deux jours," — such phrases
appear upon every other page of the
correspondence. He employs English
idioms, and says that he is out of spir-
its and in the grip of the blue devils.
But it is not from lack of occupation
that he is thus besieged. He is always
traveling from place to place, in pur-
suance of his historical researches, or
commissioned by some learned society
as archaeological investigator ; he is
writing official documents or engaged in
the composition of his fictions, for all
which variety of labor he assumes little
importance : it is his metier, and every

1883.]

Merimee in his Letters.

391

man must have one. He likes poring
over ancient and precious relics, Etrus-
can gems, this, that, and the other anti-
quarian curiosity, as well as anything
in life, but even this not too well ; while
meetings with fellow archaeologists are
apt to prove a weariness to the spirit,
and the exchange of compliments with
them the undergoing of a mild martyr-
dom. There is ever a fatal tendency
to ennui. In short, Merimee is not a
happy man ; he seems not to know what
it is to enjoy fully or to care deeply for
many things or for one thing. Much
of this incapacity for taking a frank in-
terest or pleasure in life we are glad to
attribute to a low physical condition.
He often speaks of his maladies, though
without querulousness or self-pity. " Je
souffre beaucoup ; " " Le froid qu'il fait
me desespere ; " " Je ne dors plus du tout,
et je suis d'une humeur de chien," —
expressions like these occur as frequently
as the ventings of his melancholy hu-
mor ; and in the later letters the signs of
increasingly acute nervous disorder be-
come abundant, as also of the lung diffi-
culty which ultimately caused his death.
We cannot fail to perceive, however,
another reason for Merimee's joyless-
ness than this obvious one of his frail
health. The deeper, underlying cause
was his lack of faith, — by which is not
meant simply a definite religious belief.
In a passage of one of the letters he
says, " Vous me demandez si je crois a
1'ame. Pas trop. Cependant, en re"-
flechissant a certaines choses, je trouve
uu argument en faveur de cette hy-
pothese, le voici : Comment deux sub-
stances inanimees pourraient-elles don-
iier et recevoir une sensation par une
reunion que serait insipide sans 1'idee
qu'on y attache ? Voila uue phrase bien
pedantesque pour dire que lorsque deux
gensqui s'aiment s'embrassent ils sentent
autre chose que lorsqu'on baise le satin
le plus doux. Mais 1'argument a son
valeur." We take such words, of course,
only as seriously as Mdrimee means

them. But if not a materialist, he had
felt the infection of the least curable of
moral diseases, indifferentism. Speak-
ing of an attack of illness which seemed
about to lead him into the kingdom of
shades, he adds that he experienced
some " ennui " at the idea of entering an
unknown world ; " mais ce qui me sem-
blait encore plus eunuyeux c'etait de
faire de la resistance. C'est par cette
resignation brute, je crois, qu'on quitte
ce monde non pas parceque le mal vous
accable, mais parcequ'on est devenu in-
different a tout et qu'on ne se defend
plus." Such expressions in Merimee's
mouth are quite sincere, and his indiffer-
ence was a more permanent condition
than with most of us, who experience it,
as a rule, only for endurable periods.
It is not fair to take passing expressions
too literally, yet we cannot but see some
meaning in the frequent recurrence of
such as the following : " J'ai grand be-
soin de vous pour prendre la vie en pa-
tience. Je trouve qu'elle devient tous
les jours plus ennuyeuse. Le monde
est par trop bete." To understand Me-
rimee, it is not enough, as I have said,
to note the fact that he was not a good
Catholic or a good Protestant. In con-
trast with him we cannot avoid think-
ing of Shelley, refusing adherence to
the creed of Christendom, yet not with-
out faiths that were a refuge to him
from any such overcoming depression.
Shelley was in many respects a man as
little fitted for life in this every -day
world as any that has found himself in
it ; nevertheless, he contrived to live
therein without giving himself or the
world over to despair. He had a re-
ligion ; he believed, that is, in the real
existence of spiritual ideas, which in
his verse may appear to some readers as
the emptiest abstractions, — the ideas
of beauty, truth, and love. It was be-
cause of his faith in and pure devotion
to these high-placed ideals that he found
courage to live among men with whom,
in general, he had small sympathy, in a

392

in his Letters.

[September,

world which he thought was moving on
altogether wrong lines. It is not so out
of joint as Shelley fancied it, and there
have been men of the purest ideals who
have been able to discern amid all that
is amiss in the actual order of the uni-
verse the slow working out of a right-
eous idea. To be in harmony with this
'ideal order of righteousness, and yet to
accommodate ourselves to the imperfec-
tion of the actual, is the problem for
each man. Merimee, as Taine says,
could not give away his heart to any-
thing, could not devote himself wholly.
The critical spirit in him, which made
clear to him the imperfection of all
earthly achievement, would not let him
work without an arriere pensee on the
futility of such expense of energy. This
variously accomplished gentleman found
no thorough satisfaction in his chosen
pursuits ; nothing in life that made him
really reconciled to it, but only resigned,
tant bien que mal. It is a mood of
mind, a view of existence, that comes
at times to any thinking person: but
few of us are content to let it stay with
us ; we get rid of it in one way or an-
other. A genuine and stable affection
often saves from it, or is the cure of it.
Unfortunately, it did not happen so with
Merimee. It was with him, at least in
a measure, as it is with other men, —
what begins by disgusting us with life
ends by endearing it to us. Cares and
anxieties make precious our times of
peace, and pain and suffering our inter-
vals of ease ; and we even come to think
that we have not properly appreciated
joys that were once within our grasp.

In the letters of the second volume,
comprised between 1857 and 1870, we
see that, as the years go on, his health
fails more and more. He discusses the
political situation in France and in Italy
with very pronounced expressions of
opinion on men and measures. He
shows a livelier interest in the affairs of
the Academy, and speaks much oftener
and more frankly of his own literary

compositions. His physical sufferings
are at times pitiable, and he pretends
no stoicism in the endurance of them.
There is something really pathetic in
this brief bulletin he sends his friend :
" Chere amie, j'attendais pour vous
ecrire que je fusse gueri, ou du moins
un peu moins souffrant ; mais malgre le
beau temps, malgre tous les soins pos-
sibles, je suis toujours de meme, c'est a
dire fort mal. Je ne puis m'habituer a
cette vie de souff ranee, et je ne trouve
en moi ni courage ni resignation."

Many of the letters are dated from
Cannes, where it was necessary for him
to pass the winter months of every year.
Others bear the date of Compiegne or
Biarritz, where he is frequently invited
to attend the empress. He does not like
court life over well, but becomes wonted
to it, and always praises the kindliness
of " la chatelaine la plus gracieuse du
monde" At Cannes he reads and writes
as his health permits, botanizes, sketches,
and pets a favorite owl. At times he
travels, and recounts his journeys for his
friend, and advises her about her own
itineraries. If she is absent from Paris,
he tells her the latest social on dit, and
whether or not crinoline is still worn.
He talks of the books he reads, suggests
others to his correspondent, and does
not omit to be severe and satirical on
contemporary writers : " Have you read
Kenan's Vie de Jesus ? Probably not.
It amounts to little, and yet to a good
deal. It is the blow of an axe at the
edifice of Catholicism. The author is
so terrified at his own audacity in deny-
ing the divinity that he falls into hymns
of admiration and adoration, and has no
philosophical sense left to judge of doc-
trine. Nevertheless, it is interesting."
" Have you read Victor Hugo's speech ?
"\Yhat a pity that a fellow who has im-
agination should not have an atom of
common sense, nor the modesty .to re-
frain from uttering platitudes unworthy
of a reasonable man ! . . . Have you
read his last volume of verse ? Tell me

1883.]

Character in Feathers.

393

if you see any difference between it and
his former poems. Has he suddenly
turned fool, or has he always been one ?
The latter, to my way of thinking."
Writing from England, he says, " Peo-
ple here are so different from us that it
is hard to understand how, at ten hours'
distance, unfeathered bipeds can resem-
ble Parisian ones so little. Mr. Glad-
stone I did not find entertaining, but in-
teresting. There is in him the child,
the statesman, and the enthusiast." In
1865 he writes from Paris, " Another
person, M. de Bismarck, pleased me very
much. He is a big German, very cour-
teous, and not naif. He has an air of
being entirely without gemtith, but full
of brains. He has made a conquest of
me." The later letters are full of dis-
content with the course of political af-
fairs, and, since things do not go as to
his mind they should, Merimee expresses
unmeasured contempt for the stupidity
of mankind. The last letter, dated from
Cannes, September 23, 1870, was writ-
ten two hours before his death, which
he knew was impending, though igno-
rant of how suddenly it was to come.
He begs his friend to take from among
his books Madame de Sevigne's Letters
and a Shakespeare as a memento of
him. " Dear friend, I am very ill ; so
ill that it is a hard matter to write. Yet
I am a trifle better. I hope soon to
write to you more at length. Adieu.
Je vous embrasse."

Taine sums up his account of Meri-
mee's career in the words, " For fear
of being duped, he was distrustful of
life, of love, in science, in art, and he
was the dupe of his distrust." That is
an extremely pointed and expressive
phrasing of the truth. The biographer
ends, however, with the saying, " We
are always the dupes of something, and
perhaps it is best to resign ourselves in
the beginning." That, too, is cleverly
put, but we object to it that it is not
true. We almost suspect Taine of add-
ing it as much by way of a rounded pe-
riod to his sketch as from sincere con-
viction. It is so much the vogue among
clever Frenchmen to dispense with a
superfluity of convictions that we are
sometimes tempted to judge hastily that
they have none at all.

It often happens that the moral of
the lives of estimable, and even in some
respects admirable, men is as well worth
finding as the more patent one of lives
openly vicious, which has become a com-
monplace to our ears. We judge of
Merimee from the record of his own
hand, bearing in mind at the same time
that it is but a partial record. Taking
him as he appears in the Letters to an
Unknown, it is difficult not to regard his
as une vie manquee ; it seems to us that
he was miscalled Prosper, if the name
were taken as significant of a success
very well worth having, or one that
satisfied himself.

Maria Louise Henry.

CHARACTER IN FEATHERS.

IN this economically governed world
the same thing serves many uses. Who
will take upon himself to enumerate the
offices of sunlight, or water, or indeed of
any object whatever ? Because we know
that a thing is good for this or that, it
by no means follows that we have dis-

covered what it was made for. What
we have found out is perhaps only some-
thing by the way ; as if a man should
think the sun were created for his own
private convenience. In some moods it
seems doubtful whether we are yet ac-
quainted with the real value of anything.

394

Character in Feathers.

[September,

But, be that as it may, we need not scru-
ple to admire so much as our ignorance
permits us to see of the workings of this
divine frugality. The piece of wood-
land, for instance, which skirts the vil-
lage, — how various are its ministries to

O '

the inhabitants, each of whom, without
forethought, takes the benefit which is

O *

proper to himself ! The poet saunters
there as in a true Holy Land, to have
his heart cooled and stilled. Mr. A. and
Mr. B., who hold the deeds of the
" property," walk through it to look at
the timber, with an eye to dollars and
cents. The botanist has his errand
there, the zoologist his, and the child
his. Oftenest of all, perhaps (for bar-
barism dies hard, and even yet the min-
isters of Christ find it a capital sport to
murder small fishes), — oftenest of all
comes the man, poor soul, who thinks
of the forest as of a place to which he
may go when he wishes to amuse him-
self by killing something. Meanwhile,
the rabbits and the squirrels, the hawks
and the owls, look upon all such persons
as no better than intruders (do not the
woods belong to those who live in
them ?) ; while nobody remembers the
meteorologist, who nevertheless smiles
in his sleeve at all these one-sided no-
tions, and says to himself that he knows
the truth of the matter.

So is it with everything ; and with all
the rest, so is it with the birds. The in-
terest they excite is of all grades, from
that which looks upon them as items of
millinery, up to that of the makers of
ornithological systems, who ransack the
world for specimens, and who have no
doubt that the chief end of a bird is to
be named and catalogued, — the more
synonyms the better. Somewhere be-
tween these two extremes comes the
person whose interest in birds is friend-
ly rather than scientific ; who has little
taste for shooting, and an aversion from
dissecting; who delights in the living
creatures themselves, and counts a bird
in the bush worth two in the hand.

Such a person, if he is intelligent, makes
good use of the best works on ornithol-
ogy; he would not know how to get
along without them ; but he studies
most the birds themselves, and after a
while he begins to associate them on a
plan of his own. Not that he distrusts
the correctness of the received classifica-
tion, or ceases to find it of daily service ;
but though it were as true as the multi-
plication table, it is based (and rightly,
no doubt) on anatomical structure alone ;
it treats birds as bodies, and nothing
else : while to the person of whom we
are speaking birds are, first of all, souls ;
his interest in them is, as we say, per-
sonal ; and we are none of us in the
habit of grouping our friends according
to height, or complexion, or any other
physical peculiarity.

But it is not proposed in this paper to
attempt a new classification of any sort.
I am by no means qualified to make
even a beginning in that direction. All
I am to do now is to set down a few
studies in such a method as I have indi-
cated ; in short, a few studies in the tem-
peraments of birds.

Let our first example be the common
black -capped titmouse, or chickadee.
He is, par excellence, the bird of the
merry heart. There is a notion current,
to be sure, that all birds are merry ; but
that is one of those second-hand opin-
ions which a man who begins to observe
for himself soon finds it necessary to
give up. With many birds life is a hard
struggle. Enemies are numerous, and
the food supply is too often scanty. Of
some species it is probable that very
few die in their beds. But the chicka-
dee seems to be exempt from all fore-
bodings. His coat is thick, his heart is
brave, and, whatever may happen, some-
thing will be found to eat. " Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof " is his
creed, which he accepts, not " for sub-
stance of doctrine," but literally. No
matter how bitter the wind or how deep
the snow, you will never find the chicka-

1883.]

Character in Feathers.

395

dee, as we say, under the weather. It
is this perennial good humor, I suppose,
which makes other birds so fond of his
companionship ; and their example might
well be heeded by persons who suffer
from moods of depression. Such unfor-
tunates could hardly do better than to
court the society of the joyous tit. His
whistle and chirps, his graceful feats of
climbing and hanging, and withal his
engaging familiarity (for, of course, such
good-nature as his could not consist with
suspiciousness) would most likely send
them home in a more Christian frame.
The time will come, we may hope, when
doctors will prescribe bird-gazing instead
of blue-pill. To illustrate the chicka-
dee's trustfulness, I may mention that a
friend of mine captured one in a butter-
fly-net, and, carrying him into the house,
let him loose in the sitting-room. The
little stranger was at home immediately,
and seeing the window full of plants,
proceeded to go over them carefully,
picking off the lice with which such
window-gardens are always more or less
infested. A little later he was taken
into my friend's lap, and soon he climbed
up to his shoulder ; and after hopping
about for a few minutes on his coat-col-
lar, he selected a comfortable roostiug-
place, tucked his head under his wing,
and went to sleep, and slept on undis-
turbed while carried from one room to
another. Probably the chickadee's na-
ture is not of the deepest. I have never
seen him when his joy rose to ecstasy.
Still his feelings are not shallow, and
the faithfulness of the pair to each other
and to their offspring is of the highest
order. The female has sometimes to
be taken off the nest, and even to be
held in the hand, before the eggs can be
examined.

Our American goldfinch is one of the
loveliest of birds. With his elegant plu-
mage, his rhythmical, uudulatory flight,
his beautiful song, and his more beauti-
ful soul, he ought to be one of the most
famous ; but he has never yet had half

his deserts. He is like the chickadee,
and yet different. He is not so ex-
tremely confiding, nor should I call him
merry. But he is always cheerful in
spite of his so-called plaintive note, from
which he gets one of his names, and
always amiable. So far as I know, he
never utters a harsh sound ; even the
young ones, calling for food, use only
smooth, musical tones. During the pair-
ing season his delight often becomes
rapturous. To see him then, hovering
and singing, — or, better still, to see the
devoted pair hovering together, billing
and singing, — is enough to do even a
cynic good. The happy lovers ! They
have never read it in a book, but it is
written on their hearts, —

" The gentle law, that each should be
The other's heaven and harmony."

The goldfinch has the advantage of the
titmouse in several respects, but lacks
that sprightliness, that exceeding light-
heartedness, which is the chickadee's
most endearing characteristic.

For the sake of a strong contrast, we
may mention next the- brown thrush,
known to farmers as the planting-bird
and to ornithologists as Harporkynchus
rufus ; a staid and solemn Puritan, whose
creed is the Preacher's " Vanity of van-
ities, all is vanity." No frivolity and
merry-making for him ! After his brief
annual period of intensely passionate
song, he does penance for the remainder
of the year, — skulking about, on the
ground or near it, silent and gloomy.
He seems always to be on the watch
against an enemy, and, unfortunately for
his comfort, he has nothing of the reck-
less, bandit spirit such as the jay pos-
sesses, which goes to make a moderate
degree of danger almost a pastime. Not
that he is without courage ; when his
nest is in question he will take great
risks ; but in general his manner is dis-
pirited, " sicklied o'er with the pule cast
of thought." Evidently he feels

" The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world: "

396

Character in Feathers.

[September,

and it would not be surprising if he
sometimes raised the question, " Is life
worth living ? " It is the worst feature
of his case that his melancholy is not of
the sort which softens and refines the
nature. There is no suggestion of saint-
liuess about it. In fact I am convinced
that this long-tailed thrush has a consti-
tutional taint of vulgarity. His stealthy,
underhand manner is one mark of this,
and the same thing comes out also in
his music. Full of passion as his sing-
ing is (and we have hardly anything to
compare with it in this regard), yet the
listener cannot help smiling now and
then ; the very finest passage is followed
so suddenly by some uncouth guttural
note, or by some whimsical drop from
the top to the bottom of the scale.

In neighborly association with the
brown thrush is the towhee bunting, or
chewink. The two choose the same
places for their summer homes, and, un-
less I am deceived, they often migrate
in company. But though they are so
much together, and in many of their
ways much alike, their habits of mind
are very dissimilar. The towhee is of
a peculiarly even disposition. I have
never heard him scold, or use any note
less good-natured and musical than his
pleasant cherawink.1 I have never de-
tected him in a quarrel such as near-
ly all birds are once in a while guilty
of, Dr. Watts to the contrary notwith-
standing ; nor have I ever seen him hop-
ping nervously about and twitching his
tail, as is the manner of most birds, when,
for instance, their nests are approached.
Nothing seems to annoy him. At the
same time, he is not full of continual
merriment like the chickadee, nor occa-
sionally in a rapture like the goldfinch.
Life with him is pitched in a low key ;
comfortable rather than cheerful, and
never jubilant. And yet, for all the
towhee's careless demeanor, you soon

1 The goldfinch is the only other bird of whom
I could say so much. A year ago I should have
put the bluebird into the same category, but since

begin to suspect him of being deep. He
appears not to mind you ; he keeps on
scratching among the dry leaves as
though he had no thought of being driv-
en away by your presence ; but in a
minute or two you look that way again,
and he is not there. If you pass near
his nest, he makes not a tenth part of
the ado which a brown thrush would
make in the same circumstances, but
you will find half a dozen nests of the
thrush sooner than one of his. "With all
his simplicity and frankness, which puts
him in happy contrast with the thrush,
he knows as well as anybody how to
keep his own counsel. I have seen him
with his mate for two or three days to-
gether about the flower-beds in the Bos-
ton Public Garden, and so far as ap-
peared they were feeding as unconcern-
edly as though they had been on their
own native heath, amid the scrub-oaks
and huckleberry bushes ; but after their
departure it was remembered that they
had not once been heard to utter a
sound. If self-possession be four fifths
of good manners, our red-eyed Pipilo
may certainly pass for a gentleman.

We have now named four birds, the
chickadee, the goldfinch, the brown
thrush, and the towhee, — birds so di-
verse in plumage that no eye could fail
to discriminate them at a glance. But
the four differ no more truly in bodily
shape and dress than they do in that in-
scrutable something which we call tem-
perament, disposition. If the soul of
each were separated from the body and
made to stand out in sight, those of us
who have really known the birds in the
flesh would have no difficulty in saying,
This is the titmouse, and this the towhee.
It would be with them as we hope it will
be with our friends in the next world,
whom we shall recognize there because
we knew them here ; that is, we knew
them, and not merely the bodies they lived

then I hare heard from him a note which expressed
displeasure, or at least anxiety.

1883.]

Character in Feathers.

397

in. This kind of familiarity with birds
has no necessary connection with orni-
thology. Personal intimacy and a knowl-
edge of anatomy are still two different
things. As we have all heard, this is an
age of science ; but, thank fortune, mat-
ters have not yet gone so far that a man
must take a course in anthropology be-
fore he can love his neighbor.

It is a truth which is only too patent
that taste and conscience are sometimes
at odds. One man wears his faults so
gracefully that we can hardly help fall-
ing in love with them, while another,
alas, makes even virtue itself repulsive.
I am moved to this commonplace reflec-
tion by thinking of the bluejay, a bird
of doubtful character, but one for whom,
nevertheless, it is impossible not to feel
a sort of affection and even of respect.
He is quite as suspicious as the brown
thrush, and his instinct for an invisible
perch is perhaps as unerring as the cuck-
oo's; and yet, even when he takes to
hiding, his manner is not without a dash
of boldness. He has a most irascible
temper, also, but, unlike the thrasher, he
does not allow his ill-humor to degener-
ate into chronic sulkiness. Instead, he
flies into a furious passion, and is done
with it. Some say that on such occa-
sions he swears, and I have myself seen
him when it was plain that nothing
except a natural impossibility kept him
from tearing his hair. His larynx would
make him a singer, and his mental ca-
pacity is far above the average ; but he
has perverted his gifts, till his music is
nothing but noise and his talent nothing
but smartness. A like process of dep-
ravation the world has before now wit-
nessed in political life, when a man of
brilliant natural endowments has yield-
ed to low ambitions and stooped to un-
worthy means, till what was meant to
be a statesman turns out to be a dem-
agogue. But perhaps we wrong our
handsome friend, fallen angel though he
be, to speak thus of him. Most likely
he would resent the comparison, and I

do not press it. We must admit that
juvenile sportsmen have persecuted him
unduly ; and when a creature cannot
show himself without being shot at, he
may be pardoned for a little misanthro-
py. Christians as we are, how many of
us could stand such a test ? In these
circumstances, it is a point in the jay's
favor that he still has, what is rare with
birds, a sense of humor, albeit it is humor
of a rather grim sort, — the sort which
expends itself in practical jokes and un-
civil epithets. He has discovered the
school-boy's secret : that for the expres-
sion of unadulterated derision there is
nothing like the short sound of a, pro-
longed into a drawl. Yah, yah, he cries ;
and sometimes, as you enter the woods,
you may hear him shouting so as to be
heard for half a mile, " Here comes a
fool with a gun ; look out for him ! "

It is natural to mention the shrike in
connection with the jay, but the two
have points of unlikeuess as well as of
resemblance. The shrike is a taciturn
bird. If he were a politician, he would
rely mostly on what is known as the
" still hunt," although he too can scream
loudly enough on occasion. His most
salient trait is his impudence, but even
that is of a negative type. " Who are
you," he says, " that I should be at the
trouble to insult you ? " He has made
a study of the value of silence as an in-
dication of contempt, and is almost hu-
man in his ability to stare straight by a
person whose presence it suits him to
ignore. His imperturbability is wonder-
ful. Watch him as closely as you please,
you will never discover what he is think-
ing about. Undertake, for instance, now
that the fellow is singing from the top
of a small tree only a few rods from
where yoij are standing, — undertake to
settle the long dispute whether his notes
are designed to decoy small birds within
his reach. Those whistles and twitters,
— hear them ! So miscellaneous ! so
different from anything which would be
expected from a bird of his size and

398

Character in Feathers.

[September,

general disposition ! so very like the
notes of sparrows ! They must be im-
itative. You begin to feel quite sure of
it. But just at this point the sounds
cease, and you look up to discover that
Collario has fallen to preening his feath-
ers in the most listless manner imagina-
ble. " Look at me," he says ; " do I act
like one on the watch for his prey ? In-
deed, sir, I wish the innocent sparrows
no harm ; and besides, if you must know
it, I ate an excellent game-breakfast two
hours ago, while laggards like you were
still abed." In the winter, which is the
only season when I have been able to ob-
serve him, the shrike is to the last degree
unsocial, and 1 have known him to stay
for a month in one spot all by himself,
spending a good part of every day
perched upon a telegraph wire. He
ought not to be very happy, with such
a disposition, one would think ; but he
seems to be well contented, and some-
times his spirits are fairly exuberant.
Perhaps, as the saying is, he enjoys him-
self, in which case he certainly has the
advantage of most of us, — unless, in-
deed, we are easily pleased. At any
rate, he is philosopher enough to appre-
ciate the value of having few -wants ;
and I am not sure but that he antici-
pated the vaunted discovery of Teufels-
drockh, that the fraction of life may be
increased by lessening the denomina-
tor. But even the stoical shrike is not
without his epicurean weakness. When
he has killed a sparrow, he eats the
brains first ; after that, if he is still hun-
gry, he devours the coarser and less sa-
vory parts. In this, however, he only
shares the well-nigh universal inconsis-
tency. There are never many thorough-
going stoics in the world. Epictetus de-
clared with an oath that he , should be
glad to see one. To take everything
as equally good, to know no difference
between bitter and sweet, penury and
plenty, slander and praise, — this is a
great attainment, a Nirvana to which
few can hope to arrive. Some wise man

has said (and the remark has more mean-
ing than may at once appear) that dying
is usually one of the last things which
men do in this world.

Against the foil of the butcher-bird's
stolidity we may set the inquisitive, gar-
rulous temperament of the white-eyed
vireo and the yellow- breasted chat. The
vireo is hardly larger than the gold-
finch, but let him be in one of his con-
versational moods, and he will fill a smi-
lax thicket with noise enough for two
or three cat-birds. Meanwhile he keeps
his eye upon you, and seems to be invit-
ing your attention to his loquacious abil-
ities. The chat is perhaps even more
voluble. Staccato whistles and snarls
follow each other at most extraordinary
intervals of pitch, and the attempt at
showing off is sometimes unmistakable.
Occasionally he takes to the air, and flies
from one tree to another ; teetering his
body and jerking his tail in an indescrib-
able fashion, and chattering all the
while. His " inner consciousness " at
such a moment would be worth perus-
ing. Possibly he has some feeling for
the grotesque. But I suspect not ; prob-
ably what we laugh at as the antics of
a clown is all sober earnest to him.

At best, it is very little we can know
about what is passing in a bird's mind.
We label him with two or three sesqui-
pedalia. verba, give his territorial range,
describe his notes and his habits of nid-
ification, and think we have rendered an
account of the bird. But how should
we like to be inventoried in such a style ?
" His name was John Smith ; he lived
in Boston, in a three-story brick house ;
he had a baritone voice, but was not a
good singer." All true enough ; but do
you call that a man's biography ?

The four birds last spoken of are all
wanting in refinement. The jay and the
shrike are wild and rough, not to say
barbarous, while the white-eyed vireo
and the chat have the character which
commonly goes by the name of oddity.
All four are interesting for their strong

1883.]

Character in Feathers.

399

individuality and their picturesqueness,
but it is a pleasure to turn from them
to creatures like our four common New
England ffylocic/tlce, or small thrushes.
These are the real patricians. With
their modest but rich dress, and their
dignified, quiet demeanor, they stand for
the true aristocratic spirit. Like all gen-
uine aristocrats, they carry with them
an air of distinction, of which no one
who approaches them can long remain
unconscious. When you go into their
haunts they do not seein so much fright-
ened as offended. " Why do you in-
trude ? " they seem to say ; " these are
our woods ; " and they bow you out
with all ceremony. Their songs are in
keeping with this character ; leisurely,
unambitious, and brief, but in beauty of
voice and in high musical quality, excel-
ling all other music of the woods. How-
ever, I would not exaggerate, and I have
not found even these thrushes perfect.
The hermit, who is my favorite of the
four, has a habit of slowly raising and
depressing his tail when his mind is dis-
turbed — a trick of which it is likely he
is unconscious, but which, to say the
least, is not a mark of good breeding;
and the Wilson, while every note of his
song breathes of spirituality, has never-
theless a most vulgar alarm call, a petu-
lant, nasal yeork. I do not know any-
thing so grave against the wood thrush
or the Swainson ; although when I have
fooled the former with decoy whistles, I
have found him more inquisitive than
seemed altogether becoming to a bird of
his quality. But character without flaw
can hardly be insisted on by sons of
Adam, and, after all deductions are
made, the claim of the Hylocichlce to
noble blood can never be seriously dis-
puted. I have spoken of the four to-
gether, but each is clearly distinguished
from all the others ; and this, I believe,
is as true of mental traits as it is of de-
tails of plumage and song. No doubt,
in general, they are much alike ; we may
say that they have the same qualities ;

but a close acquaintance will reveal that
the qualities have been mixed in differ-
ent proportions, so that the total result in
each case is a personality strictly unique.

And what is true of the Hylocichlce
is true of every bird that flies. Anat-
omy and dress and even voice aside, who
does not feel the dissimilarity between
the cat-bird and the robin, and still more
the difference, amounting to contrast,
between the cat-bird and the bluebird ?
Distinctions of color and form are what
first strike the eye, but on better ac-
quaintance these are felt to be superfi-
cial and comparatively unimportant ; the
difference is not one of outside appear-
ance. It is his gentle, high-bred man-
ner and not his azure coat, which makes
the bluebird ; and the cat-bird would be
a cat-bird in no matter what garb, so
long as he retained his obtrusive self-
consciousness and his prying, busy-body
spirit ; all of which, being interpreted,
comes, it may be, to no more than this,
" Fine feathers don't make fine birds."

Even in families containing many
closely allied species, I believe that
every species has its own proper charac-
ter, which sufficient intercourse would
enable us to make a due report of.
Nobody ever saw a song-sparrow mani-
festing the spirit of a chipper, and I
trust it will not be in my day that any
of our American sparrows are found
emulating the virtues of their obstreper-
ous immigrant cousin. Of course it is
true of birds, as of men, that some have
much more individuality than others.
But know any bird or any man well
enough, and he will prove to be him-
self, and nobody else. To know all the
birds well enough to see how, in bodily
structure and mental characteristics,
every one is different from every other
is the long and delightful task which is
set before the ornithologist.

But this is not all. The ornithology
of the future must be ready to give an
answer to the further question how
these divergences of anatomy and tern-

400 Lily of Strath-Farrar. [September,

perament originated. How came the We judge that the chickadee, from the

chickudee by his endless fund of happy peculiarity of his feeding habits, is more

spirits ? Whence did the towhee derive certain than most birds are of finding

his equanimity, aud the brown thrush a meal when he is hungry ; and that, we

his saturnine temper? The waxwing are assured from experience, goes a

and the vireo have the same vocal or- long way towards making one content-

gans ; why should the first do nothing ed. We think it likely that the brown

but whisper, while the second is so loud thrush is at some special disadvantage in

and voluble ? Why is one bird bellig- this respect, or has some peculiar en-

erent aud another peaceable ; one bar- emies warring upon him ; in which case

barous and another civilized ; one grave it is no more than we might expect that

and another gay ? Who can tell ? We he should be a pessimist. And, with all

can make here and there a plausible our ignorance, we are yet sure that

conjecture. We know that the behav- everything has a cause, and we would

ior of the bluejay varies greatly in dif- fain hold by the brave word of Emerson,

ferent parts of the country, owing to the " Undoubtedly we have no questions to

different treatment which he receives, ask which are unanswerable."

Bradford Torrey.

LILY OF STRATH-FARRAR.

MY lady comes of knightly race;
Her forbears oft on many a field,

Ere arms to merchandise gave place,
With life's best drops their honour sealed.
She beareth lilies on her shield ;

The flower-de-luce is her device ;
And on the roll of her degree

Crosses are blazoned twice and thrice.

Some served their king on foreign strands ;
One yeoman fell to make us free ;

One, at his country's high commands,
Helped build the country that you see :
What wonder that his child to me

Seems of that life a precious part,
Or that I render her in rhyme

The constant service of my heart ?

I know mine age forbids to me
More than a distant lover's doom;

To worship still and dream that she
Some day may wander to my tomb
And haply hang a clover-bloom

Upon my marble cross, in sign
That she remembers me with love,

Though always cold and never mine.

Thomas William Parsons.

1883.]

The Civil War in America.

401

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

THIS handsome book 1 comprises the
fifth and sixth volumes of the French
edition, without abridgment. It is ed-
ited with care by Lieutenant-Colonel
John P. Nicholson, a gentleman well
known as a careful student of the war
of the rebellion. Its typographical ex-
ecution is very good. We wish it had
been possible to reproduce more of the
excellent maps which illustrate the orig-
inal edition.

In this volume the author treats of
perhaps the most interesting and im-
portant incidents of the war. He gives
us a narrative of the operations in Vir-
ginia for the entire year 1863, embrac-
ing Hooker's miserable failure at Chan-
cellorsville and Meade's great victory
at Gettysburg. He describes Grant's
masterly campaign against Vicksburg
and Banks's siege of Port Hudson. All
these operations are treated of with
great fullness of detail, and in a fresh
and natural manner. The count's style
is animated, and the most involved mil-
itary movements are never allowed to
weary the reader.

The arrangement of the topics is,
however, in our judgment, in some re-
spects objectionable. The count has
given to each chapter a name, as if
the chapter related solely or mainly to
the matters summarized in that name.
Some of them, however, contain a great
deal that is altogether foreign to the
name. And as the count has rejected
the aid of a running title and of mar-
ginal notes, it is sometimes very dif-
ficult to find what one is in search of.
Thus, in the chapter headed Suffolk,
not only do we have the operations near
that town detailed at rather unnecessary

1 History of the Civil War in America. By the
COMTE DE PARIS. Published by special arrange-
ment with the author. Volume HI. Philadelphia :
Porter & Coates.

2 Curiously enough, the American draughtsman

VOL. ni. — NO. 311. 26

length, but we have to look here for all
that the count has to say about the
naval attacks upon Charleston, about
the capture of the Atlanta, about the
doings of the Alabama, about the de-
struction of the Hatteras. Finally, at
the end of this same chapter, we are
taken up, as it were in a balloon, from
the ocean, and carried to West Virginia,
to witness the capture of Philippi by
General Jones ! In like manner, it is
in the chapter entitled Port Gibson, a
name which is identified with the Vicks-
burg campaign, and with that only, that
we are to look for an account of Rose-
crans's operations in Tennessee, Mar-
maduke's in Arkansas and Missouri,
and Banks's in Louisiana. To say that
this is confusing is certainly to keep
within bounds. It may, of course, be
impossible to give an adequate descrip-
tion of campaigns like Chancellorsville,
Gettysburg, or Vicksburg in a single
chapter, and we are not disposed to
criticise the count for giving, as he does,
different names to the chapters which
contain the continuous narrative of these
campaigns. We ourselves think that
it is hardly worth while to call one
chapter DowdalPs Tavern, and the next
chapter Chancellorsville ; to call one
Oak Hill,2 and the next Gettysburg.
But this is immaterial. What we com-
plain of is this : that in those chapters
where more than one subject is treated
of, sufficient information of their con-
tents is not given to the reader. The
book has no index. It has, to be sure,
a full table of contents ; yet this is not
printed (as it should be) with a refer-
ence after each topic to the page where
it is treated of, as in the histories of

has omitted to print the words " Oak Hill " on the
map which faces the title-page. By referring to
the French map these words will be found just
1 east of the Mummasburg road, between the houses
of Hoffmann and Forney.

402

The Civil War in America.

[September,

Ilallam, Lord Mahon, Macaulay, and
others, but all the subjects are grouped
en masse, the only reference to the page
being to that on which the chapter be-
gins. This is not enough. A history,
especially a military history, is eminent-
ly a book of reference, and no pains
should be spared in the way of tables of
contents, indices, running titles, mar-
ginal notes, or anything else, to render
the contents easily available to the stu-
dent.

The count has not preserved in his
narrative of the Western campaigns that
continuity of treatment which renders his
narrative of the campaigns of the army of
the Potomac so interesting and so valu-
able. The operations against Vicksburg
were simply successive attempts to solve
the same military and naval problem ;
and they should have been, in our judg-
ment, given in a connected narrative.
Instead of this, we find the story inter-
rupted by accounts of the doings of
Rosecrans and Forrest and others in
Kentucky and Tennessee ; so that there
is an interval of seventy-four pages be-
tween Grant's arrival at Hard Times
on the 28th of April (page 217) and
his crossing the Mississippi on the 30th
(page 291). It would have been bet-
ter, as it seems to us, to have refrained
religiously from interrupting a narra-
tive so striking and dramatic as that of
Grant's campaign against Vicksburg, and
to have relegated the accounts of the
cavalry operations and of the operations
in other departments to some other por-
tions of the book.

Making all due allowances, however,
this third volume of the count's history
is a very interesting and useful work.
He has tried to be impartial as between
the two contesting parties ; and, in
our judgment, he has succeeded. A
more difficult thing by far — the due
apportionment of praise and blame
among the different officers — the count
has no doubt also honestly tried to do.
Here, of course, there is room for in-

finite difference of opinion. We may,
nevertheless, point out a few character-
istics of the count's method in arriving

at an estimate of the characters and
capacities of the actors in his history.

In the first place, the count is always
polite, — nay, more, he is always con-
siderate. He dislikes to blame any one,
and rarely does so in express terms.

Secondly, while he is, of course,
obliged here and there to censure officers,
he is always willing to praise them, if
on other occasions they may deserve
it.

Thirdly, he rarely, if ever, indulges
in the elaborate summings-up of char-
acter, which have generally furnished
such an irresistible attraction to histo-
rians.

Accordingly, the reader will find it
no easy work to get at the count's real
notion of the persons of his drama. He
will find many statements apparently
inconsistent with each other, and no at-
tempt at reconciling them. For in-
stance, on page 4, he will find General
Stoneman spoken of as " this excellent
officer," 'and on page 19 he will find
him described as " an experienced lead-
er," as " always master of himself, al-
though very zealous, endowed with a
clear and discriminating mind, prompt
and just in his decisions ; " so that he will
be surprised at learning on page 27 that
" Stonemau aggravated the blunder of
his chief by giving to his operations
the character of a guerrilla expedition,
and by scattering his forces, instead of
concentrating them, in order to destroy
the communications of the enemy." So,
again, we learn on page 456 that
" Hooker no lounger inspired the army
with the same confidence as before
Chancellorsville ; " l so that we are not
prepared to find on page 522 that " the
confidence with which he inspired the
soldiers was of itself a power for his
army." These are specimens of the
count's method; and while, no doubt,

1 This statement is certainly within bounds !

1883.]

The Civil War in America.

403

some of these discrepant estimates are
caused by accidental oversight, and oth-
ers are capable of being reconciled, it
still remains that we are without those
careful summaries of capacity and char-
acter which would add greatly to the
value of the count's work.

In the same way, the count speaks
of many matters in respect to which it
would seem that we were entitled to
have his deliberate opinion. His words
are generally carefully chosen, but they
seem often to be chosen with the inten-
tion of avoiding an explicit decision.
For instance, speaking of the appoint-
ment of General Meade to the command
of the army, he says, —

" For the second time within the
space of a year President Lincoln had
selected the worst possible moment for
making a change in the chief command
of this army. This change might have
been reasonable on the day following
the battle of Chancellorsville ; it was
singularly inopportune at present, when
the two armies were about to be en-
gaged in a decisive conflict.

" Far from justifying it, the manner
in which Hooker had handled his army
for the last fortnight deserved nothing
but praise," etc.

That it was extremely unwise to de-
fer the supersession of Hooker till the
28th of June may be readily admitted.
But it having been deferred till then,
was it unwise to remove 1 him then ? To
this question the count would seem at
first sight to give an affirmative answer.
But we are inclined to think that he
means merely to express his opinion of
the folly of deferring the change so
long, and at the same time to give Gen-
eral Hooker the credit he is entitled to
for his manoeuvres during the preceding
fortnight. We do not believe that the
couut would maintain that it would have
been prudent, or even safe, for the gov-
ernment to have allowed the army to

i Strictly speaking, General Hooker was not re-
moved, but he was virtually forced into resigning

fight another great battle under General
Hooker. And these are our reasons : —
General Hooker had lost in the early
part of the preceding month the battle
of Chancellorsville. In this battle he
had an immense superiority of numbers,
he had a most favorable start, he had a
perfectly plain course to pursue. He
completely threw away his advantages
by deliberately renouncing the initia-
tive, and by intrenching his army in a
tangled wilderness. When disaster came,
he lost all heart. Beyond personally
exerting himself from time to time to
restore order, which he certainly cour-
ageously did, he did nothing. He seems
to have relied on Sedgwick to help him,
with 75,000 men, fight Lee, with 45,000
men. In fact he did not even engage the
whole of his army. Two corps were nev-
er put in. Nothing but the weakness of
the enemy saved our army, under the
command of this helpless and pusillani-
mous chief, from a most disastrous de-
feat. What would have happened to us
at Gettysburg if Hooker had been our
leader ; if it had devolved upon him in-
stead of upon Meade to decide whether
to concentrate the army upon Gettys-
burg, when the First and Eleventh corps
had been routed, and the Fifth and
Sixth corps were many miles away, or
to risk the demoralization attending on
a retreat following immediately upon
the severe losses of the 1st of July, let
those answer who recall the insistence of
Hooker upon a retreat across the Rap-
pahannock, when our army was still
largely superior to that of Lee, when
we had plenty of fresh troops to oppose
to his exhausted and decimated battal-
ions, and when every instinct of a res-
olute man bade us fight it out. What
would have been the result if it had been
for Hooker to restore the left of our
line at Gettysburg, on the afternoon of
July 2d, when the enemy, taking advan-
tage of the false position which Sickles

by General Halleck's course in regard to Har-
per's Ferry.

404

The Civil War in America.

[September,

had assumed, came in like a flood, and
threatened to carry everything before
them, let those say who recollect how
this same Sickles had exhausted in vain,
on the 3d of May, every means to ob-
tain from Hooker ammunition and rein-
forcements, and had gallantly maintained
his position till lack of the ample sup-
plies and reserves which were within
Hooker's reach compelled its abandon-
ment.

That the Comte de Paris is perfectly
cognizant of Hooker's wretched failure
at Chancellorsville is plain. He speaks
of Hooker's having " doomed himself,"
by going back into the forest, " to pow-
erless immobility ; " thereby permitting
Lee- " to venture upon a manoeuvre
which it would have been impossible to
execute in any other locality," namely,
the flank march of Jackson so as to at-
tack our right. No doubt the count
entertains for General Hooker the re-
spect and admiration which he deserved
as an excellent brigade, division, and
corps commander ; but none the less
does he consider him to have made an
absolute failure as an army commander.
Speaking of the battle of Sunday morn-
ing, he says (page 87), "The Confeder-
ates have not a battalion left that is
available ; they have not a man who has
not been in action. Is Hooker similar-
ly situated ? . . . Without counting the
Eleventh corps, which has not yet fully
recovered from its disaster, he has the
First and Fifth corps under -his control,
that is to say, nearly thirty-five thou-
sand men, who have not yet fired a shot,
with not a single enemy in front of
them." But there is no need that
we should quote further. Nowhere is
the battle of Chancellorsville better de-
scribed, and the causes of our miserable
failure analyzed, than in the pages of
the volume before us.

Why then do we find that doubtful
utterance about the inopportuneness of
relieving Hooker, to which we have just
called attention ? Partly because the

count wishes to dismiss Hooker with a
word of praise for his recent manoeuvres ;
and partly, we suspect, and we regret to
say so, because the count has fallen un-
der influences hostile to General Meade.
We surmise this partly from certain in-
dications, such as the very high terms
in which certain officers, of whose dis-
like of General Meade we have abun-
dant evidence in their testimony before
the committee on the conduct of the
war and in their published writings, are
uniformly spoken of ; and partly from
the very measured terms in which the
count intimates his approval of those
acts and doings of General Meade's of
which he does approve. We may, per-
haps, be mistaken as to this ; still, we
•think that we cannot be wrong in say-
ing that the reader will find that, for
some reason or other, Hooker has, and
Meade has not, the sympathy of the
author ; and that, while the grievous
faults of the one are made as little of as
justice will permit, the imagination of
the reader is encouraged to frame an
hypothetical test of Meade's conduct by
dwelling on what Meade might, or rath-
er on what some people thought that
he might, have accomplished, had he
done on certain well-known occasions
something else than what he did do.

The inconsistency of human nature
is surely never more clearly and more
painfully exhibited than in such a dis-
position as this. Let it be granted that
the army of the Potomac ought to have
attacked the enemy, if possible, after the
repulse of Pickett's division : that is only
the first step in arriving at a conclusion
that General Meade was to blame for
not ordering such an attack. The army
had been weakened enormously by two
or three days of hard fighting ; several
of its best and bravest generals, Rey-
nolds, Hancock, Sickles, and others, had
been killed or wounded ; three of our
corps had been very severely handled,
many of our best officers placed hors de
combat. We are not going to argue the

1883.]

The Civil War in America.

405

matter one way or the other; we sim-
ply say that it was by no means a plain
question, and that the decision arrived
at on the spot by the general who, tak-
ing command of the army on Sunday,
has by Friday afternoon won such a
protracted, obstinate, and terrible battle
as Gettysburg ought not be lightly com-
plained of. It may, of course, be re-
examined, but only with great care, and
•with every disposition to do justice to
the man who has had the responsibility
of the decision.

And this brings, us to another remark
on the count's history, which is this :
that he does not, like Napier in his Pe-
ninsular War, or Chesuey in his Water-
loo Lectures, devote a certain space in
each of his chapters, well marked off, to
the criticising of men and operations,
but he throws his remarks in anywhere.
This has the merit of avoiding anything
like a lecture, and it takes the reader,
as it were, into the author's confidence ;
for it is extremely difficult to resist the
force of conclusions which are arrived
at and stated in the course of the count's
charming and animated narrative. But
it has its disadvantages, nevertheless.
It masks the force of certain arguments,
and enhances the force of others. It
enables the writer to make a great many
suggestions about the course of conduct
he is describing, every one of which
may have some weight ; and, as he does
not give himself the trouble of summing
up these suggestions and arriving at and
enunciating his conclusion, it is quite
possible for him to avoid the charge
of having expressed an opinion on the
question ; while, at the same time, the
suggestions thrown out by him on the
side of the question on which his sym-
pathies lie would naturally and almost
inevitably outweigh those on the other.
The result is that the reader's mind is
unconsciously impressed by the prepon-
derating weight of the suggestions on
that side of the question which the au-
thor would like to favor. And yet, it

is perfectly possible that, were the writ-
er to impose upon himself the duty of
weighing the evidence and arguments,
he would be forced to adopt an opinion
entirely contrary to this, and so to in-
struct his readers. The propriety of
the removal of Hooker from the com-
mand of the army, of which we have
already spoken, is an instance in point.
The wisdom of General Meade's decis-
ion not to take the offensive at Get-
tysburg, and of that not to attack the
enemy at Williamsport, are others.
These questions we should like to have
seen discussed in a more systematic man-
ner, and the facts and arguments on both
sides carefully weighed.

The appendix contains, besides ros-
ters of both armies, President Lincoln's
most characteristic note to General
Hooker (page 851), on placing him at
the head of the army. It is not gener-
ally known, and it is one of the wisest
and best letters that Mr. Lincoln ever
wrote.

There is also (page 911) a very val-
uable itinerary of the different corps of
the army of the Potomac in June and
July, 1863, compiled, under the direc-
tion of Adjutant - General Drum, by
J. W. Kirkley, Esq., of that office.

The count has also given us some
additions and corrections to his former
volumes, of which the most important
begins on page 859, and relates to the
second battle of Bull Run and the case
of General Porter. We would call at-
tention to a misprint on page 860, line
two from the bottom, where " His," the
first word in the line, should be " Kemp-
er's." The new matter contains a re-
tractation of any opinions unfavorable
to Porter expressed in the previous vol-
ume. The count, in his statement of the
events of the 29th of August, falls into
a very unnecessary error, though not a
very material one. He states that on
the morning of that day McDowell, with
King's division of his corps, was with
Porter's column, " while Ricketts, at

406

Mark Twain 's Life on the Mississippi. [September,

the head of the second division of Mc-
IXnvrll's corps, had borne more to the
right, and was to strike the turnpike
north of Groveton " [sic] ; that Mc-
Dowell " sought to deploy " King's di-
vision to the right of Porter " in order
to assist Ricketts, and thus form a con-
tinuous front of attack ; " but " the im-
penetrable thickets which covered the
cround on that side rendered such de-

ployment impossible, and McDowell
. . . determined to bring King back to
the rear, in order to overtake Ricketts
and operate with his whole corps in a
less eccentric fashion against Jackson's
right wing." We are sorry to say that
this explanation of McDowell's course

is incorrect, inasmuch as Ricketts's di-
vision, which had on the morning of the
29th arrived at Bristoe at the same
time that King's division had reached
Manassas Junction, remained in rear of
it throughout the day. King's division
led in the march up the Sudley Springs
road in the afternoon of the 29th, and
this division only was engaged on that
day. General McDowell expressly
states in his report that " Ricketts's di-
vision, coming on in the rear of King's,
was taken up the Sudley Springs road,"
— that is, was not turned into the War-
renton turnpike, as King's had been, —
" north of the Warrenton pike, and held
as a reserve for the time, in front."

MARK TWAIN'S LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

OF the first fifteen chapters of Mr.
Clemens's book,1 twelve are reprinted
from The Atlantic ; but they are so full
of entertaining and instructive matter
that they will repay a second reading.
In the three introductory ones which
precede these, the physical character of
the river is sketched, and brief reference
is made to the early travelers and ex-
plorers of the stream, — De Soto, Mar-
quette, and La Salle ; these latter be-
longing to the epoch of what Mr. Clem-
ens quaintly calls "historical history,"
as distinguished from that other uncon-
ventional history, which he does not
define, but certainly embodies in the
most graphic form. There are some
good touches in this opening portion ;
as where the author refers to " Louis
XIV., of inflated memory," and, speak-
ing of the indifference which attended
the discovery of the Mississippi, remarks,
" Apparently, nobody happened to want
such a river, nobody needed it, nobody

1 Life on the Mississippi. By MARK TWAIN,
author of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, etc.

was curious about it ; so, for a century
and a half, the Mississippi remained out
of the market and undisturbed. When De
Soto found it, he was not hunting for a
river, and had no present occasion for
one ; consequently he did not value it, or
even take any particular notice of it."
We are also presented with a chapter
from an unpublished work by the writer,
detailing the adventures of a Southwest-
ern boy a quarter of a century ago, which
places before us in vivid colors the
rough, hilarious, swaggering, fighting,
superstitious ways of the bygone rafts-
men. Rude, sturdy, unflinching, and raw
though the picture is, it is likely to
stand a long while as a wonderful tran-
script from nature, and as a memorial
of the phase of existence which it de-
scribes that will not easily be surpassed
in the future. The chapter on Racing
Days is perhaps a little disappointing,
although suggestive. Then there comes
a short autobiographic summary of Mr.

With more than three hundred Illustrations. Bos-
ton: James R. Osgood & Co- 1883.

1883.]

Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.

407

Clemens's life after he had ceased to
be a pilot and several other things, and
until he" became a New Englander ; fol-
lowed by an account of the trip which
he made down and up the Mississippi,
twenty-one years from the time when
he last sailed upon it in charge of a
steamer's course. At St. Louis he found
a steamer which was to stop at the old
French settlements sixty milea below
St. Louis. " She was a venerable rack-
heap, and a fraud to boot ; for she was
playing herself for personal property,
whereas the good honest dirt was so
thickly caked over her that she was
righteously taxable as real estate. There
are places in New England where her
hurricane deck would be worth a hun-
dred and fifty dollars an acre. The soil
on her forecastle was quite good ; the
new crop of wheat was already spring-
ing from the cracks in protected places.
The companion-way was of a dry, sandy
character, and would have been well
suited for grapes, with a southern ex-
posure and a little subsoiling. The soil
of the boiler-deck was thin and rocky,
but good enough for grazing purposes."
He finally concluded not to take this
boat, but another, called the Gold
Dust, upon which he was subsequently
anxious to make the return trip from
New Orleans ; but luckily he was pre-
vented by circumstances from doing so,
for the Gold Dust was blown up on her
way back to St. Louis, during the voy-
age he had intended making with her.
The material offered by observations on
the journey is various beyond enumera-
tion, and much of it is extremely amus-
ing. Hoaxes and exaggerations palmed
off by pilots and other natives along the
way upon supposed ignorant strangers ;
stories of gamblers and obsolete robbers ;
glimpses of character and manners ; de-
scriptions of scenery and places ; sta-
tistics of trade ; Indian legends ; ex-
tracts from the comments of foreign
travelers, — all these occur, interspersed
with two or three stories of either hu-

morous or tragic import, or of both to-
gether. One of the tales thus interpo-
lated — Ri tier's Narrative — is not only
complicated and ingenious in plot, but
bears witness also to its author's start-
ling power of weird imagination ; and
a perhaps still more remarkable thing
about it is the manner in which at last
it is given a sudden turn, which carries
the reader away from one of the most
ghastly situations imaginable with a sen-
sation of amusement and of humorous
surprise. At the same time, the story,
with consummate skill, is made tribu-
tary to the main current of the book,
and of the river with which it deals.
Mr. Clemens is never tired of noting
the extraordinary changes which take
place in the course of the Mississippi and
the conformation of its banks ; the ap-
pearance and disappearance of islands ;
the sudden action of the mighty flood
in making new " cut-offs," which play
havoc with state boundary-lines, and
playfully transfer towns from one river-
bank to the other. The general read-
er stands in some peril of finding these
observations wearisome ; but just as he
is on the brink of fatigue, Mr. Clemens
enlivens him with a dry remark like
this : " We dashed along without anxi-
ety ; for the hidden rock which used to
lie right in the way has moved up stream
a long distance out of the channel ; or
rather, about one county has gone into
the river from the Missouri point, and
the Cairo point has ' made down,' and
added to its long tongue of territory cor-
respondingly. The Mississippi is a just
and equitable river ; it never tumbles
one man's farm overboard without build-
ing another farm just like it for that
man's neighbor. This keeps down hard
feelings." The peculiarities of local
speech occasionally draw down severe
condemnation from the author, who
appears to be sharply on the lookout
for offenses against grammar, — some-
thing that savors of ingratitude in one
who has profited so well by the collo-

408

The Spanish Peninsula in Travel.

[September,

quial crudities upon which lie now turns.
In considering the cemetery at New Or-
leans, which is kept in very fine order,
"If those people down there," at the
levee or iu the business streets, says Mr.
Clemens, " would live as neatly while
they are alive as they do after they are
dead, they would find many advantages
in it/' Of the memorial wreaths : " The
immortelle requires no attention ; you
just hang it up, and there you are. Just
leave it alone ; it will take care of your
grief for you, and keep it in mind better
than you can." He declares himself in
favor of cremation, and considers un-
justifiable the old form of burial, which
preserves disease germs to such an ex-
tent that even " a dead saint enters upon
a century-long career of assassination
the moment the earth closes over his
corpse." All this is in keeping with
that grimness which is a constituent of
the author's humor. There is a good
deal of grimness and soberness in the

book, underlying the surface of fun
and incident and panoramic diversity of
scene. There is also a good deal of
solid sense and of information. What
the future investigation — if people of
the twentieth century have any time
left for investigating the past — will
conclude concerning the life depicted
in these pages we can conjecture only
from our own impression ; which is that
the Mississippi has developed prosperity
and misery in about even measure, and
that the type of character most frequent
along the line of its flow has combined
with great hardiness and practical dex-
terity a Greek love of skillful lying and
a peculiarly American recklessness of
personal safety. Meanwhile we are very
sure that Mr. Clemens has given us the
most thorough and racy report of the
whole phenomenon which has yet been
forthcoming, and that much more sig-
nificance is contained in it than we are
'able to concentrate in these few words.

THE SPANISH PENINSULA IN TRAVEL.

THERE are signs of a rediscovery of
Spain by Americans. We are so greatly
indebted to that peninsula for our own
continent that there has always been a
disposition to make some return. In
spite of the antagonism between Eng-
lish and Spanish history, perhaps be-
cause of the picturesque contrasts, Amer-
ican men of letters have been drawn to
Spain for subjects, and have done much
toward familiarizing readers with as-
pects of the life there. Irving and Pres-
cott led the way, both in historical and
descriptive literature. Hay followed with
a book of singular felicity, which re-
produced the atmosphere of Spain as
Howells's Venetian Life did that of Ven-
ice ; and now that the tide of travel
sets in that direction, we may look for

many reports of the country, varying
in their character according to the taste
and interest of the reporter.

For certainly one must be very lim-
ited in the range of his nature who
failed to find in Spain a field for the
exercise of his favorite hobby. The
lover of the picturesque, the student in
art, the historical student, the philol-
ogist, might each claim the country as
a museum arranged for his special de-
lectation ; and the restless traveler, in
search of novelty, is not likely to be
driven out of Europe for a long time to
come if he will but haunt this corner
of it.

As an instance of the variety of oc-
cupation which a traveler may find, we
have only to take up two recent books

1883.]

The Spanish Peninsula in Travel.

409

of travel, which have little in common
except a general field of observation.
Dr. Vincent,1 to be sure, does not spend
all his time in Spain ; he flits back and
forth across the Pyrenees, remaining
most of the time by the Biscayan coast,
but shooting off also nearly to the Gulf
of Lyons. Yet his book connects itself
in the reader's mind with Spain, and by
its treatment, as well as by the region
which it covers, serves very well as an
introduction to travel in Spain proper.
Indeed, one might learn a lesson in
travel in any region, from this agreeable
little book. The leisurely manner in
which the author hovers about the en-
trance to the country which he proposes
to explore, the genuine interest which
he takes in the historic apparatus of
his work, and the good-natured indiffer-
ence which he shows to the petty dis-
comforts of travel all mark him as a
sensible companion ; while the simplicity
of his descriptions and the absence of
any obtrusive rhetoric or profound phil-
osophic speculations give one a confi-
dence in his honesty as a reporter. He
is not conspicuously a humorist in his nar-
rative, but he is always good-tempered,
and often has a playful touch which
makes the reader attached to him ; as
where, in describing the bathing at San
Sebastian, he remarks how " some small
boys, who know well that they are on
forbidden ground, surreptitiously strip
under the shadow of the balcony, and
scamper, like frightened snipe, to hide
themselves in the water."

The thorough enjoyment which this
writer takes in his little excursion, and
the absence of all hurry and the busi-
ness of travel, have an influence upon
the book greater, we suspect, than the
author himself knows. It is impossible
for a reader not to be strongly affected
by the mood of his traveling compan-
ion, and he quickly learns whether his
guide is of an anxious or of a genial

1 In the Shadow of the Pyrenees from Basque-
Land to Carcassonne. By MARVIN R. VI.N< IM.

turn of mind. Dr. Vincent's enjoyment
of his journey is that of an educated
man, who likes all the by-play of travel,
but gives his serious thought to that
which demands thought. He does not
weary the reader with his speculations
regarding the Basques, nor with his re-
flections upon Lourdes or Loyola, but
he recognizes the kind of interest which
all intelligent readers will take in such
subjects, and does not belittle them by
flippancy. How well he can succeed in
giving his impressions may be seen by
his words after describing the monastery
of Ignatius Loyola : —

" With all the stony splendors of the
church, and the elaborate and costly
adornments of this chapel, the effect
was more than tawdry and vulgar. It
went deeper than that to one who knew
the history of the remarkable order
which it represented. It carried with
it the sense of a strong, pitiless hand
laid upon the breast. To a man fresh
from the robust contact of men and the
healthful clash of opinion ; to one with
the free breath of the glorious moun-
tains yet in his nostrils and the salt
of the ocean spray scarce gone from
his lips, this place was like a prison
and a baby-house combined. The sub-
tle, passionless, inexorable policy of the
order seemed to have infused itself into
the atmosphere. Though no warden
appeared, and no attendant followed the
visitor through the desolate halls, one
might well feel as though a wary eye
saw every movement from some secret
spying-place, and that. the very walls
conveyed each word to a practiced ear."

The last chapter in the book is an
agreeable account of Carcassonne, that
precious bit of medievalism, which
ought to be put under a glass cover and
preserved for our unhappy descendants
to turn to when they are discontented
with modern civilization. The etchings
by Smillie, Gifford, and Yale add much

D. D. With etchings and maps. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1883.

410

The Spanish Peninsula in Travel. [September,

to the pleasure one gets from this little
book, and the maps and plans inter-
spersed give one the satisfied feeling
that he has been treated with respect
and liberality.

The trigness of Dr. Vincent's vol-
ume and the modesty of its aim find an
interesting antithesis in Mr. Lathrop's
and Mr. Reiuhart's book of travel in
Spain proper.1 From Dr. Vincent's
sketches we get the impression that he
was on a vacation jaunt ; Spanish Vis-
tas suggests a more deliberate, pictur-
esque tour, undertaken for the purpose
of working up a good subject, and mak-
ing a special literary and pictorial re-
port The result, though of a different
sort, leaves an equally agreeable impres-
sion of truthfulness and thoroughness.
Whatever other use Mr. Lathrop or Mr.
Reinhart might have made of their stud-
ies in Spain, they have given the reader
in this handsome volume no merely des-
ultory notes, but a succession of clearly
defined pictures of Spanish life. They
entered Spain at Burgos ; went thence to
Madrid, and then to Toledo ; from To-
ledo to Cordova, and thence to Seville,
Granada, and the Alhambra ; they struck
down to Malaga on the sea-coast, and
there taking to the sea, cruised along
the southern and eastern shores of the
peninsula to Barcelona, where they bade
good-by to Spain.

The effect of a succession of pictures
is enhanced by the absence of detail in
traveling from one point to another, and
by the contrasts which Spain herself
presents, as one .shoots from city to city,
leaving a place at dark, and waking at a
new and strangely different place. The
conglomerate character of the kingdom
is well shown in the change from Gas-

tile to Andalusia, to Granada, and to
Aragon, when each stride in the journey
brings to light some new and strange
grouping.

i Spanish Vistai. By GEORGE PARSONS LA-
THROP. Illustrated by CHARLES S. KEINHART.
New York : Harper & Bros. 1883.

Mr. Lathrop's strength is in his ar-
tistic sense of what is essential to a com-
plete picture, and he employs words to
reproduce the scenes in so decorative a
manner that one is affected by the rich-
ness and suggestiveness of the phraseol-
ogy. When, for example, in speaking
of the people of Burgos, he says, " The
splendidly blooming peasant women
showed their perfect teeth at us, and
the men, in broad-brimmed pointed caps
and embroidered jackets, whose feet
were b'rown and earthy as tree-roots,
laughed outright," the grotesque sugges-
tion gives a distinct touch to the picture
over and above the clear description.
There is indeed a constant exuberance
of fancy, which serves to heighten the
artistic quality of the work. The sights
which are depicted are less likely to call
out Mr. Lathrcp's ethical reflections
than his purely fanciful constructions.
" As I looked," he says, when approach-
ing the Alhambra hill, " at the rusty
red walls and abraded towers palisading
the hill, the surroundings became like
some miraculous web, and these ruins,
concentring the threads, were the shat-
tered cocoon from which it had been
spun."

It is primarily as an artist that Mr.
Lathrop views Spain ; yet he has the in-
terest also of a student in history and
society, and very possibly, if he were to
go again and stay longer, he would more
frequently ask and answer questions.
He gives, as he is bound, a faithful de-
scription of a bullfight; but with a juat
sense of effect, he uses low tones in his
picture, and trusts to the severity of
his lines. Part of this is due, doubtless,
to resolution, and part to the impression
which such scenes make upon a self-pos-
sessed man of slight sympathy with mere
animal excitement. The cold blood of
the thing, he says, impresses him, — the
business-like manner in which the bru-
tality is carried to its conclusion ; and
he turns away from the spectacle with
this curious bit of information : " The

1883.]

utter simple-mindedness with which
Spaniards regard the brutalities of the
sport may be judged from the fact that
a bull-fight was once given to benefit the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals ! "

It is, however, the picturesqueness of
Spain which appeals chiefly to this writ-
er, and the reader is not called upon to
take more than a superficial view of the
country. There is thus an evenness of
merit in the work and a singleness of
aim which render it exceedingly satis-
factory. The pictures by Mr. Reinhart
admirably agree with the spirit and tem-
per of the narrative, and often enrich it
in an unexpected manner. Indeed, when
the text and the picture describe the
same scene, each seems complete by it-
self, yet each often embroiders the other.
In Toledo, Mr. Lathrop was amused by
the drowsiness of humanity : " Men and
boys slumber out-of-doors, even in the
hot sun, like dogs ; after sitting medita-
tively against a wall for a while, one of

Two Journalists.

411

them will tumble over on his nose, — as
if he were a statue undermined by time,
— and remain in motionless repose
wherever he happens to strike." Mr.
Reinhart saw the same group which may
have suggested the description, and his
humorous treatment is cleverly realistic,
while his sly parenthesis is in a recum-
bent statue in a niche of the wall
against which two of the figures are ly-
ing. The pictures throughout the book
are vigorously drawn, and richly en-
graved. They harmonize, as we have
said, with the text, and altogether the
general effect of the book is so satisfy-
ing that the reader stops to consider
what a happy conjunction it was which
brought these two travelers together ;
for each saw and pictured the same sub-
jects, the one with pen, the other with
pencil. Had Mr. Lathrop also drawn,
or had Mr. Reinhart also written, we
please ourselves with thinking that there
would not have been so fine a diverse
unity.

TWO JOURNALISTS.

THE common ground on which Mr.
Bryant and Mr. Weed may be said to
meet seems at first sight merely conven-
tional. Both had a long and contempo-
raneous career as editors of influential
journals; but Mr. Bryant, in the eyes
of most people, was a poet, and Mr.
Weed a political manager. The occupa-
tions which they followed were their
means of livelihood ; the real lives which
they led, and for which they will be
remembered, were widely remote and
distinct. Nevertheless, each was too
individual a man for any mechanical
separation between his vocation and his
occupation, and the biography of each

• l A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with
Extracts from his Private Correspondence. By

offers an interesting opportunity for a
comparison which may help to bring out
both the common qualities of the men
and their peculiarities.

It is a great pity that Mr. Bryant's
autobiography should have been a mere
fragment, introducing the completer nar-
rative of his life,1 which his son-in-law
has provided ; for although Mr. Godwin
has probably made a fuller and more
methodical record than Mr. Bryant
would have cared to furnish, he has also
divested the record of that personal
quality which constitutes the charm of
autobiography, and of which we have a
glimpse in the delightful chapters con-

PAUKF. GODWIN. In two volumes. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. 1883.

412

Two Journalists.

[September,

tributed by Mr. Bryant. The mellow-
ness of this autobiographic fragment, its
playfulness and serenity, are the true
notes of a reflective old age, and had
the strain been continued the work
would have been a notable one. It is
not difficult to understand why Mr. Bry-
ant left a fragment only ; he might well
have carried the narrative a little farther
along; yet the reserve of his nature
would infallibly cause him to feel a
growing disinclination as he moved away
from that period of childhood and youth,
and the contemplation of those figures
of the past, which to an old man may
easily seem properties of another world
and another person.

This reserve has doubtless controlled
the biographer, partly through a force
of personality, which would deter one
who knew Mr. Bryant well from indulg-
ing in too curious observation ; partly
through the necessary obscurity attach-
ing to Mr. Bryant's life. There was no
mystery about his career, or his judg-
ments of men and events ; but what one
man knew every one might know, and
the sum of knowledge has left the world
still unacquainted with Mr. Bryant. It
is possible, indeed, that his was one of
those natures so classic in form and
style that their grace is impenetrable
because wholly open ; we are so wonted
to the romantic conception of human
life, which demands deep shadows and
yields to subtle analyses, that when we
come to apply our habits of mind to
more rigidly classie models we set aside
too lightly, as thin and superficial, a cast
of human nature which is rarely fine in
outline and firm in form.

Certainly, a careful reading of Mr.
Godwin's Life of Bryant does not add
to the impression which has already
been formed of a man so long in the
public eye. The image created by his
poems and public utterances is not es-
sentially enriched or modified by the
extracts given from his private corre-
spondence. Here and there are glimpses

of a tenderness of nature which might
not be apparent otherwise to any but
a very close reader of his poetry ; but
the general result is to deepen those
familiar lines of passionless fidelity to
elemental properties in literature, poli-
tics, religion, and society which have
conspired to make Mr. Bryant's person-
ality one respected and admired rather
than enthusiastically loved. Enthusi-
asm, indeed, did follow him ; but it was
wrested from a long-indifferent public
by the accumulation of sentiment, as
the severe figure of the poet held with
unswerving integrity the same charac-
teristics in old age which had marked
it in youth. It was impossible to with-
hold hearty applause from so venerable
and sturdy a product of American de-
mocracy, and the public seemed to re-
gard Mr. Bryant finally as a sort of hu-
man mountain.

. The more one studies Mr. Bryant's
career, the more do his poetry and his
profession display their essential unity.
The subjects of his verse were not the
subjects of his editorial articles, but the
man behind each was the same, and the
two modes of expression have a common
origin and end. Simplicity, love of truth,
and a lofty conventionalism character-
ized both poems and political leaders.
Now and then there was a verse in his
poetry which had the flight of a bird in
the highest ether, and occasionally in
his political precepts he rose to a noble
strain of patriotic fervor; but in the
main there was an evenness of tone
which expressed the dignity of his life
and thought. There was a constant
reference in his mind to certain large,
elemental conceptions of nature and
society ; so that while he could not be
called a doctrinaire in politics, he was
apparently indifferent to the personal
element, and moved on his way with a
confidence in his political views which
was born of a confidence in the order of
things. Other men might look at the^
clock to see what time it was, but he

1883.]

was satisfied with the sidereal system
for a timepiece. At the outset of his
career as a journalist he had something
to say of the profession which might
stand as a tolerable expression of his
professional creed.

" The class of men," he said, " who
figure in this country as the conductors
of newspapers are not, for the most
part, in high esteem with the communi-
ty. ... The general feeling with which
they are regarded is by no means favor-
able. Contempt is too harsh a name
for it, perhaps, but it is far below re-
spect. Nor does this arise from the in-
siucerity or frivolousness of their com-
mendation or their dispraise in the
thousand opinions they express in mat-
ters of art, science, and taste, concern-
ing all of which they are expected to
say something, and concerning many of
which they cannot know much ; as from
the fact that, professing, as they do, one
of the noblest of sciences, that of pol-
itics, — in other words, the science of
legislation and government, — they too
often profess it in a narrow, ignorant,
ignoble spirit. Every journalist is a
politician, of course ; but in how many
instances does he aspire to no higher
office than that of an ingenious and dex-
terous partisan ? He does not look at
political doctrines and public measures
in a large and comprehensive way,
weighing impartially their ultimate good
or evil, but addicts himself to considera-
tions of temporary expediency. He in-
quires not what is right, just, and true
at all times, but what petty shift will
serve his present purpose. He makes
politics an art rather than a science, —
a matter of finesse rather than of phi-
losophy. He inflames prejudices which
he knows to be groundless because he
finds them convenient. He detracts
from the personal merits of men whom
he knows to be most worthy. . . . Yet
the vocation of the newspaper editor is
a useful and indispensable and, if right-
ly exercised, a noble vocation. It pos-

Two Journalists.

413

sesses this essential element of dignity :
that they who are engaged in it are
occupied with questions of the highest
importance to the happiness of mankind.
We cannot see5> for our part, why it
should not attract men of the first tal-
ents and the most exalted virtues. Why
should not the discussions of the daily
press demand as strong reasoning pow-
ers, as large and comprehensive ideas,
as profound an acquaintance with prin-
ciples, eloquence as commanding, and a
style of argumept as manly and elevated
as the debates of the senate ? "

In the exercise of journalistic du-
ties, Mr. Bryant acquired a somewhat
more flexible style of writing. Yet the
grave, formal English in which he was
trained was so expressive of his nature
that the above passage fairly represents
the serious attitude which he always
maintained toward journalism. He did
not ignore personal politics, and he used
a direct and forcible form of attack
when engaged in political warfare ; but
after all, he fought constantly from be-
hind those intrenchments of political
philosophy which he believed were most
necessary to defend, and most efficient
bulwarks of democratic liberty. It must
be remembered that journalism, when
this was written, — that is, when Mr.
Bryant had just succeeded to the prin-
cipal editorship of the Evening Post, —
was of a pretty acrimonious order ; and
though it may be doubted if Mr. Bryant
had as great an influence upon the de-
velopment of journalism in the country
as some of his contemporaries, it is quite
certain that the cool temper and even
tone of his paper had a conservative
power not to be despised. Mr. Bryant's
democracy was of a somewhat ideal or-
der, and more inflexible than the de-
mocracy of the party which bore the
name. It was, indeed, somewhat re-
gardless of historical movements, but, as
we have intimated, was saved from the
unwisdom of mere theory by its integral
consistency with the whole tone of Mr.

414

Two Journalists.

Bryant's mind. His democratic faith
was a part of the severe principle which
extended to the most mechanical routine
of his daily life, and so lofty was it that
it becomes impossible to give it a party
significance. Who would ever think
of calling Mr. Bryant a war democrat !
Like Wordsworth's cloud,

" Which moveth altogether, if it move at all,"
Mr. Bryant's nature comprehended pro-
fessional duty, poetic inspiration, and re-
ligious faith within one consistent, large,
and simple whole.

Just when Mr. Bryant was assuming
full control of the journal with which
his name is identified, Mr. Thurlow
Weed was engaged, with the assistance
of friends, in establishing the Evening
Journal at Albany ; and although he re-
linquished his editorial duties earlier
than Mr. Bryant, the careers of the two
men were substantially synchronous.
We are not so ill off in our knowledge
of the details of Mr. Weed's life as we
were in the case of Mr. Bryant. The
distaste which the poet had for a mi-
nute record of his experience gives place
to a hearty and genial review1 of his
career by the political manager. Mr.
Weed's autobiography shows, as Mr.
Bryant's fragmentary sketch does, how
significant and interesting to an old man
are the incidents of early life and the
circumstances out of which his education
has come. Mr. Weed dwells with affec-
tionate and lingering concern upon the
sterile ground of his boyhood, and with-
out much moralizing presents a very
clear picture of the local scenes among
which he moved. Both Mr. Bryant
and Mr. Weed were country boys : but
with Mr. Bryant the country, as a rec-
ollection, was chiefly nature ; with Mr.
Weed it was rustic humanity. Indeed,
Mr. Weed remained to the end of his
days a countryman. Not that he was
wanting in the civility of cities, and

l The Autobiography of Thurlow Weed. Ed-
ited by his daughter, HARRIET A. WEED. Bos-
ton : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883.

engaged in the companionship of men
of the world, but he was always at
home with the farmer and the le<nsla-

tor from the country districts. There
was a homeliness in his nature which
appeared in the strong local attach-
ments which he manifested, and in his
minute acquaintance with a wide range
of life.

The autobiography was written at dif-
ferent times, under different impulses,
and it bears the marks of leisureliness
and of indifference to complete form.
Names of men who have figured in
New York politics, but are only vil-
lage Hampdeus to the general reader,
fall from Mr. Weed's pen as if he were
sitting in his editorial office, and talk-
ing uninterruptedly with friends who
had been with him in interminable polit-
ical contests. He is an old soldier tell-
ing over his battles, and he recites cata-
logues of heroes who are as real and as
valiant as Homer's are to him. Mr.
Weed is as minute in his political history
of New York as Gilbert White in his
Natural History of Selborne. There is
the same absence of perspective, the
same delightful parochialism. There is
not much attempt at individualizing the
persons who crowd these pages ; but they
are so real to Mr. Weed, and the cir-
cumstances which he relates are so vivid
in his memory, that he leads the reader
on and on simply by the force of his
own energetic companionship.

To Mr. Weed a journal was a polit-
ical instrument, and politics was a most
interesting and absorbing occupation, re-
quiring a minuteness of knowledge of
men and affairs to be compared only
with the detailed acquaintance which a
stock-broker has with the market. The
time when Mr. Bryant and Mr. Weed
were most deeply engaged in journal-
ism was one when politics in America
was a passion. It was the one excite-
ment which overbore all other occupa-
tions, once in every four years at least.
As we look back upon those days, we

1883.]

Two Journalists.

415

are able to see that there was a ground
swell of real political movement, and a
superficial froth and fume which were
thrown off by the wind and current of
present feeling. It was a time when a
rapidly growing nation was fitting itself
not only to the land which it occupied,
but to the political principles which were
its birthright ; when men were learning
the use of that most delicate instrument
of modern civilization, the ballot. It
was a time, also, when the order of
society was ruder and simpler, and the
passions of men had freer play. If the
ballot was a weapon, it was also a toy ;
and in the absence of those resources
which a more complex society offers,
politics was the opera-house, the theatre,
the club, the library, the music-hall, the
ball, the picture - gallery, the foreign
tour, the summer sport, the dinner-party,
the institute, and one may almost say
the church.

Let any one acquaint himself with
the circumstances of the " campaign "
of 1840, and he will understand this.
How it appeared at the time to our two
journalists illustrates the difference in
the two men. Mr. Bryant, to be sure,
was on the losing side ; but one does not
need that fact to explain the contempt
which he had for the wild nonsense of
the Whig party. Mr. Godwin, in de-
scribing his work at this time, says,
" Mr. Bryant was at first disposed to
treat this immoral tomfoolery, which the
most respectable classes promoted by a
personal participation in it, with serious
and indignant argument. But he soon
saw that he might as well attempt to
reason against the northwest wind or
the tides of the sea. The only answer
would have been a hurrah and a horse-
laugh ; and so he took the times in their
own spirit, and flung at them the keen-
est shafts of banter and ridicule. On
no other occasion were his humorous
powers so frequently called into play ;
and his hits at the muzzled candidate,
the mouthing orators, the immense pa-

rades, and the junketings, though in-
effective, were among the best sallies of
his pen."

Mr. Weed, on the other hand, in re-
calling the time, recounts eagerly the
political incidents both in state and na-
tional affairs, and if we had room we
should like to quote the whole of the
naive narrative which relates the coup
d'etat by which New York State was
wrested from the democratic party on
the eve of election. The political change
was effected, according to Mr. Weed,
by the judicious use of money paid to
him by New York gentlemen, whose
names are given. They brought pack-
ages of bank-notes of various denomi-
nations, amounting to eight thousand dol-
lars, and stood ready to draw checks for
as much more as might be required.

" The election," says Mr. Weed, " was
to commence on Monday morning, and
to terminate on Wednesday evening. I
informed them that it would be quite
impossible, in so short a time, to use any
such amount of money, and, after ex-
plaining what I thought might be ac-
complished in the brief interval before
the election, took $3000, $1500 of which
was immediately dispatched by messen-
gers to Columbia, Greene, Delaware,
and Rensselaer counties ; $1500 was re-
served for Albany. . . . Thus a mem-
orable coup d'etat, completely revolu-
tionizing the State, was effected, on the
very verge of the election, by the
thoughtfulness and liberality of a few
zealous politicians in the city of New
York. The secret was well kept, for
until now no whisper of it has ever been
heard."

The circumstance is related chiefly to
give opportunity for telling an amusing
u blind," by which the politicians of the
other side were hoodwinked, when the
news got abroad of the appearance at a
strange hour of a steamboat at Albany ;
for the zealous politicians of New York
had chartered a steamer for their pur-
pose. All this is very well ; but the

416

Two Journalists.

[September,

critical reader will notice that Mr. Weed
does not explain to him, however care-
fully he may have explained to the New
York gentlemen, just what was done
with three thousand dollars in twenty-
four hours to effect a change in political
sentiment or principle in the doubtful
district. Are we then hastily to accept
the conclusion that the money was used
corruptly ? Familiarity with recent po-
litical operations would go far toward
justifying one who should take such a
view ; but while, in the absence of fuller
information, we are tfhable to settle the
question conclusively, the real evidence
is all the other way.

That is to say, the book before us is
so frank, and the incidents of Mr. Weed's
career are related with so much minute-
ness and fullness, that the reader has no
great difficulty in forming a tolerably
consistent conception of a man of sin-
gular force of character. Mr. Weed
had great astuteness, but it is impossible,
in the face of the full revelation which this
book affords, to believe him a man of
low cunning, least of all a man capable
of glorying in such cunning. On the
contrary, his very faults had the air of
noble defects. He tells with evident
gusto how he once " got even " with
Mr. Everett, who had treated him with
cool civility in London, and one begins
to think him a vindictive man ; but the in-
cident, taken with others, leads one final-
ly to regard him as a man of spirit, of
long memory, and extremely jealous of
his rights. To be sure, these qualities
are not of the highest order : they made
him an enemy to be feared, but they
also made him an unflinching friend.
The persistency with which he pursued
his object in the extraordinary Morgan
affair was a persistency which made his
enemies helpless ; and while, in all his
political and journalistic career, he was
capable of working in the dark, of keep-
ing his own counsel, and of meeting
subtlety with subtlety, his strength lay
not in his adroitness, but in his steadfast-

ness and unflagging zeal. The autobiog-
raphy abounds in entertaining incidents,
illustrative of this quality, and illustra-
tive also, by the way, of the circumstances
of journalistic and political life at the
time.

" There used to be a sharp rivalry,"
says Mr. Weed, " between the Argus
and the Evening Journal to obtain the
earliest news. The earliest copy of the
President's annual message to Congress
was the occasion of much solicitude.
Such messages were usually received
about the close of the season of naviga-
tion. On one of these occasions I went
to New York to obtain the earliest pos-
sible copy of President Jackson's mes-
sage. Mr. Obadiah Van Benthuysen,
one of the proprietors of the Argus,
went to New York on the same boat
and on the same errand. Colonel J.
Watson Webb, one of the editors of the
Courier and Enquirer, had been favored
with a copy of the message in advunce
of its delivery to Congress. No other
New York paper had it. Colonel Webb,
then in political accord with the Argus,
promised Mr. Van Benthuysen the first
copy printed of the Courier, while I was
to receive the second. The steamboat
De Witt Clinton, Captain Sherman, by
an arrangement which Mr. Van Ben-
thuysen had made with the agent, was
to delay her departure from five o'clock,
p. M., until Mr. Van Benthuysen came
on board, should he be able to do so by
eleven o'clock.

" My friend Captain Sherman advised
me of this arrangement, adding that his
orders were to have everything in read-
iness and cast off his lines the mo-
ment Mr. Van Benthuysen could get on
board ; expressing the hope that I might
also get there before the boat was out
of the dock. We both passed the even-
ing at the office of the Courier and En-
quirer, with hacks in waiting at the door.
Towards ten o'clock the first proof im-
pression of the message was taken, and
handed to Mr. Vau Benthuysen, who

1883.]

Two Journalists.

417

instantly made his exit. There was a
delay of nearly two minutes before I
obtained my copy. In descending tln-ee
flights of stairs I found the lights extin-
guished, and was compelled to grope my
way down. In this way I lost another
minute, in consequence of which I
reached the wharf to find the steamer
under way about twenty feet from the
dock. I learned from an acquaintance,
who was standing on the dock, that a
freight steamer would leave early the
next morning. Proceeding to the dock
of that steamer, I induced the agent to
fire up and get under way at as early an
hour as practicable. We were off in two
hours after the departure of the De
Witt Clinton, and reached Poughkeep-
sie, where both boats were detained by
the ice an hour or two, after Mr. Ben-
thuysen had departed in the mail stage
for Albany. I found Bally, a well-
known and active livery-stable man, who
assured me that he could overtake the
stage before it reached Albany. In a
very few minutes, therefore, I was seat-
ed in a cutter (for the sleighing was
good) and off, express to Albany. Bally
was as good as his word ; for in ap-
proaching Greenbush the stage was in
sight, scarcely a quarter of a mile ahead
of us. Mr. Van Benthuysen and my-
self ran a foot-race across the river on
the ice, and the Journal and the Argus
issued the message in an extra simulta-
neously."

A paper like the Albany Evening
Journal probably offered a better ful-
crum for a political manager then than
it would now. At any rate, Mr. Weed
seated in the editor's chair was a pow-
er behind the throne, and his narrative
gives abundant illustration of the activ-
ity with which he exercised his power.
He believed heartily in the newspaper,
and he used it vigorously as a means to
an end. In 1841, while in Washington,
he learned privately that there was a se-
cret understanding in the Senate, under
the lead of the South Carolina senators,

VOL. LII. — NO. 311. 27

by which the nomination of Everett as
minister to England was to be rejected.
This information Mr. Weed received
when calling, one Sunday evening, upon
Senators Mangum, of North Carolina,
and Morehead, of Kentucky. He had
with him Mr. Christopher Morgan, and
all four gentlemen were agreed that such
a proceeding would wrong the Whig par-
ty. The senators had been under a
pledge of secrecy, but had revealed the
secret to the other two.

" Both senators," Mr. Weed naively
says, " then became disembarrassed, and
a plan to avert this evil was arranged.
Messrs. Mangum and Morehead said
that they would either prevent an exec-
utive session on Wednesday, or, failing
to do soj would get the question on Mr.
Everett's confirmation postponed for a
week. Meantime, Morgan and myself
were to arouse a strong popular senti-
ment against the 'deep damnation ' of
rejecting the nomination of the most
distinguished citizen for a position to
which his eminent talents and charac-
ter entitled him. We repaired to Mor-
gan's apartment, and set ourselves to
work writing ' correspondence ' for Whig
journals in Raleigh, N. C., Richmond
and Winchester, Va., Wilmington, Del.,
Louisville, Ky., Baltimore, Philadel-
phia, Trenton, New York, New Haven,
Providence, Boston, Albany, etc., fol-
lowed by brief letters to influential
Whigs, asking them to write to all Whig
members of Congress with whom they
were acquainted, protesting against the
contemplated rejection. This labor was
completed at sunrise, just in season to
get our letters off by the morning mails.
The question of Mr. Everett's rejection
was laid over for a week. Meantime,
indignant ' public opinion ' poured in
through journals and letters from so
many quarters, and with, such telling
effect, that Mr. Everett's nomination
was confirmed, nearly all the Whigs and
two or three Northern Democratic sen-
ators voting for it. No one except

418

Two Journalists.

[September,

Messrs. Morehcad, Mangum, Morgan,
and myself knew what had caused that
' great commotion.' "

There are many disclosures of polit-
ical secrets in the volume, but the most
interesting of all is the general revela-
tion of that species of political manip-
ulation which found its most complete
exponent in Mr. Weed, and its most
perfect apparatus in the partisan press.
The greater part of the volume is a
more or less conscious exhibition of this ;
and no student of our political life can
fail to find interest in the story, for it is
a personal narrative of a regime which
is fast becoming historical and obsolete.
Political manoeuvring has been bolder
and coarsfir since Mr. Weed's day, and
the changes which have taken place in
society and government render exactly
such" a career as his no longer possible.
There is an element of picturesqueness
in the personal politics of his day which
redeems it from grossness, and an indi-
vidual value in leadership which was in
part a tradition from the early days of
the republic, when leaders and led were
farther apart than they are now.

As the autobiography passes into the
later years of Mr. Weed's life, it grows
more desultory, but it also deals with
larger, more vital subjects. We no long-
er are confronted by a host of New
York village politicians, but by the
names of men of historical significance.
Very interesting is the whole of Mr.
Weed's report of his interviews with
Mr. Lincoln ; the report, also, of his
diplomatic journey to Europe, of his
shrewd dealings with Mr. Bennett, when
Mr. Lincoln sent him to convert the
New York Herald ; and the judgments
which he passes upon the men who were
in affairs are valuable and sometimes
surprising. We are a little disappointed
at the brief mention of Mr. Greeley;
but perhaps this is due ia part to the
fact that some of the latter portion ap-
peared in the form of letters to The
New York Tribune.

The reader rises from this most inter-
esting autobiography with an impression
of the growing power of the man whose
life is told in it. The polemic character
' of the early part of the book gives place
in the conclusion to the broad, catholic
judgment and charity of a man whose
years had mellowed him. What was it,
we ask, in Mr. Weed's disposition and
education which enabled him to pass the
test of an active politician's career, and
issue unimpaired in conscience and in-
tegrity ? If a single word can cover the
answer, it would be " patriotism." In
these later days, we have become used
to thinking of the word in connection
with the ordeal of battle ; but a life like
Mr. Weed's shows very clearly what a
passion patriotism was in the days when
the nation was gathering itself together.
We do not think this power of patriotism
has been sufficiently recognized in tak-
ing account of the national forces forty
years ago. The country was not so
large ; the memory of the men who had
established its order was still alive ; the
parties which strove in conflict had no
geographical lines ; there were fewer
distractions in life, and a keener inter-
est in public affairs. Mr. Weed was a
patriot. He believed in his country
heart and soul ; and while he was a thor-
ough partisan, his party, in his mind, was
the servant of the nation. This passion
for his country ennobled his political en-
ergy and gave it bent and direction. It
caused that, after having been a Warwick
in New York, he could go to Washing-
ton and show himself something more
than merely a friend of Mr. Seward.
His counsels in the -critical time after
Mr. Lincoln's first election were the
wise counsels of a patriot, and it is en-
tirely just to revise one's judgment of
his early career by a reading of his later.
No man could have brought the wis-
dom which Mr. Weed brought to gov-
ernment whose life had been one of
political chicanery, for that warps and
twists a man's judgment.

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

419

How strangely different were the two
journalists ! Yet they meet on this com-
mon ground of patriotism, after all. In
a crisis, they were found on the same
side ; in the movements which led to the
crisis they were often opposed. Their
modes of working were very different :
3Ir. Bryant contented himself with the
exposition and insistence of a few strong
ideas ; Mr. Weed was forever working at

his ends through men. The former has
more classic dignity, the latter more hu-
man picturesqueness. In a great pro-
fession like journalism there is room for
both characters ; and while journalism
could not hold the poet, neither could it
limit the politician. Later times will
furnish other types of journalists, but
we doubt if there will ever be more
marked contrasts in the types.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

THIS confession differs from that of
most criminals who are classed under
the same head ; for whereas house-
breakers usually break into houses, I
broke out. It was not a difficult exit,
for there was no glass to be broken,
or any occasion for a burglar's tool-box.
The truth is that one night, lately, I
could not sleep, and when the eastern
sky began to show a tinge of light I
seated myself by the window ; and by
the time the clocks and bells of the
neighborhood struck three, I became
possessed by a desire to go out-of-doors
to watch the coming of the June morn-
ing, and to see the world before the sun
himself, and to hear the matins of the
birds from beginning to end, because I
had been at best an unpunctual wor-
shiper at this service. An occasional
early waking or late falling asleep had
given me a fragment of the music ; but
it was much like the way a foreign
tourist saunters idly in at the door of a
cathedral while mass is being performed.

So after I had leaned out of my east-
ern window for a few minutes longer,
and I had heard one sleepy note from
the top of an elm not far away, I dressed
myself hurriedly, and took my boots in
my hand, and prepared to escape. It
was no easy matter, for I belong to a
household of light sleepers, who are

quick to hear an untimely footfall. I
stole carefully by the open doors and
down the stairs, remembering fearfully
that one was apt to creak, and I hardly
took a long breath until I found myself
out in the garden.

It was startlingly dark under the trees,
and the alarmed shadows appeared to be
hovering there as if to discuss the next
move, and to find shelter meanwhile.
A bat went by me suddenly, and at that
I stood still. I had not thought of bats,
and of all creatures they seem most
frightful and unearthly, — like the flut-
ter of a ghost's mantle, or even the wave
and touch of its hand. A bat by day-
light is a harmless, crumpled bit of stu-
pidity ; but by night it becomes a crea-
Jture of mystery and horror, an attend-
ant of the powers of darkness. The
white light in the sky grew whiter still,
and under the thin foliage of a great
willow it seemed less solemn. A bright
little waning moon looked down through
the slender twigs and fine leaves, — it
might have been a new moon watching
me through an olive-tree ; but I caught
the fragrance of the flowers, and went
on to the garden. I went back and
forth along the walks, and I can never
tell any one how beautiful it was. The
roses were all in bloom, and presently I
could detect the different colors. They

420

The Contributors' Club.

[September,

were wet with dew, and hung heavy
with their weight of perfume ; they
appeared to be sound asleep yet, and
turned their faces away after I had
touched them.

Some of the flowers were wide awake,
however. One never knows the grace
and beauty of white petunias until they
have been seen at night, or, like this,
early in the morning. It is when the
dew has fallen that this delicate flower
and mignonette also give out their best
fragrance ; and if one is lucky enough
to be able to add the old-fashioned hon-
ey-suckle his garden is odorous indeed.
Roses need the sunshine to bring out
their full beauties, though when 1 held
my face close to the great wet clusters it
seemed to me that I had taken all their
store of perfume for the coming day in
one long, delicious breath. The white
flowers looked whiter still in the pale
light, and the taller bushes were like
draped figures ; and suddenly I was re-
minded, nobody knows why, of a long
walk with some friends through the
damp avenues of Versailles, when the
leaves were beginning to fall, and the
garden of the Little Trianon was gay
with blossoms. I remembered most
vividly how warm the sunshine was
upon the terraces ; how empty and silent
the pathetic holiday rooms ; how we
strained our eyes to catch sight of the
ghosts who must be flitting before us,
and trying to keep out of sight, lest one
of us might be a seer of spirits, and
might intrude upon their peaceful exist-
ence. If there were a little noise in the
court-yard, I thought it was the merry
servants of a hundred years ago, busy
with their every-day duties. The scent
of the petunias and geraniums and mig-
nonette was filling all the air. We were
only stealing in while the tenants of the
house were sleeping, or were away in
Paris ; we had not even a fear or suspi-
cion of the sorry end. It was a strange
jumble of reminiscences, personal and
historical, that flitted through my mind,

as I went walking slowly up and down
my own New England garden, among
the roses, in the middle of the night.

I could not say it was the middle of
the night, or still less the dead of night,
and have any respect for myself as a
truth-teller. It had suddenly become
morning. I sat down on one of the gar-
den benches, and watched and listened.
A pewee began his solo somewhat de-
spairingly and without enthusiasm, and
the song-sparrows tried to cheer him,
or at least to make him hurry a little.
The bobolinks tuned up, and the golden
robins; and presently the solos were
over, and the grand chorus began. One
joyful robin, who had posted himself on
the corner of a roof where I could see
him, seemed to have constituted himself
leader of the choir, and sang and sang,
until I feared for his dear life ; one
would have thought he had reached bird-
heaven before his time. It must have
been the dawn of a long-looked-for day
with him, at any rate, he was so glad to
have it come at last. I remembered the
young English soldier whom Howells
saw at daybreak in Venice, and like him
I hoped that I should know in another
world how my robin liked the day's
pleasure, after all.

I became very neighborly with a so-
ber-minded toad, that gave an eager
scramble from among the flower-de-
luces, and then sat still on the gravel
walk, blinking and looking at me, as if
he had made plans for sitting on the
garden bench, and I was giving him
great inconvenience. He was a philos-
opher, that fellow ; he sat and thought
about it, and made his theories about
me and about the uncertainty of tem-
poral things. I dare say he comes out
every morning, and looks up at the bench,
and considers his ambitions and the ad-
verse powers that thwart them, in com-
mon with many of his fellow creatures.

The colors of the world grew brighter
and brighter. The outline of the trees,
and of some distant fields even, became

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

421

distinct ; yet it was a strange, almost un-
canny light, — it was more like looking
through clear water, — and I still ex-
pected something out of the ordinary
course to happen. I was not continu-
ing my thoughts and plans of the day
before, though abruptly I became con-
scious that one of my friends was awake,
and an understanding between us sprang
up suddenly, like a flame on the altar
to Friendship, in my heart. It was
pleasant, after all, to have human com-
panionship, and it was difficult to per-
suade myself that the mysterious tele-
graph that was between my friend and
me measured so many miles. I thought
of one and another acquaintance after
this, but only the first was awake and
watching at that strange hour ; the rest
slept soundly, and with something ap-
proaching clairvoyance I could see their
sleeping faces and their unconsciousness,
as I looked into one shaded room af-
ter another. How wonderful the cour-
age is which lets us lie down to sleep
unquestioningly, night after night, and
even wait and wish for it ! We have
a horror of the drugs that simulate its
effect ; we think we are violating and
tampering with the laws of nature, and
make the false sleep a last resource
in illness or a sinful self-indulgence.
But in the real sleep, what comes to
us ? What change and restoration and
growth to the mind and soul matches
the physical zest which does us good
and makes us strong? He giveth to
his beloved while sleeping, is the true
rendering from the Psalms.

No wonder that in the early days a
thousand follies and fables and legends
were based 0:1 the dreams and myster-i
ies of sleep. No wonder that we gain
confidence to approach the last sleep of
all, since we find ourselves alive again
morning by morning. And as for the
bewildered state into which some of us
fall in our later years, is not that like
a long darkness and drowsiness, from
which the enfeebled mind and body can-

not rouse themselves until the brightest
of all mornings dawns ?

The ranks of flowers in my garden
took on a great splendor of bloom, as
the light grew clearer. After having
watched them fade in the grayness of
many an evening twilight, it was most
lovely to see how the veil was lifted
again at daybreak. It seemed as if the
quiet June morning ushered in some
grand festival day, there were such
preparations being made. After the
roses, the London pride was most gor-
geous to behold, with its brilliant red
arid its tall, straight stalks. It had a
soldierly appearance, as if the flower
were out early to keep guard. Twice
as many birds as one ever sees in the
day-time were scurrying through the air,
as though they were late to breakfast, at
any rate, and had a crowd of duties to
attend to afterward. The grand chorus
was over with, though a number of song-
sters of various kinds kept on with their
parts, as if they stayed to practice a while
after service, though the rest of the
choristers had thrown off their surplices
and hurried away.

I had a desire to go out farther into
the world, and I went some distance up
the street, past my neighbors' houses ;
feeling a sense of guilt and secrecy that
could hardly be matched. It had been
one thing to walk about my own garden,
and even to cross the field at the foot
of it to say good-morning to a row of
elm-trees and the robins in their tops, of
which incident I forgot to speak in its
proper place. But if any one had sud-
denly hailed me from a window I should
have been inclined to run home as fast
as my feet could carry me. In such
fashion are we bound to the convention-
alities of existence !

But it Seemed most wonderful to be
awake while everybody slept, and to
have the machinery of life apparent-
ly set in motion for my benefit alone.
The toad had been a comfort, and the
thought of my friend even more, if one

422

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[September,

will believe it ; and besides these, I had
become very intimate with a poppy,
which had made every arrangement to
bloom as soon as the sun rose. As I
walked farther and farther from home
I felt more and more astray, and as if
I were taking an unfair advantage of
the rest of humanity. In one house
I saw a lamp burning, the light of it
paling gradually, and my glimpse of the
room gave me a feeling of sadness. It
was piteous that no one should know
that the night was over, and it was day
again. It was like the flicker of the
lamp at a shrine, — an undying flame
that can lighten the darkness neither
of death nor of life ; a feeble protest
against the inevitable night, and the
shadows that no man can sweep away.

A little child cries drearily in a
chamber where the blinds are shut, — a
tired wail, as if the night had been one
of illness, and the morning brought no
relief. A great dog lies sleeping sound-
ly in the yard, as if he would not waken
these three hours yet. I know him
well, good fellow, and I have a tempta-
tion to speak to him. to see his surprise ;
and yet I have not a good excuse. He
would simply wonder what made the
day so long afterward ; and I turn to-
wards home again, lest some other house-
breaker might go in where I have come
out. A belated pewee, who appears
to have overslept himself, sets up his
morning song all by himself, and the
pigeons, who are famous sleepy-heads,
begin to coo and croon, as if they are
trying to get themselves asleep again.
The cocks crow again once or twice
apiece all over town, and it is time to go
home. The spell of the dawn is lifted ;
and though I cannot resist leaping the
front fence instead of opening the gate
for myself, I am a little dismayed af-
terward at such singular conduct, and
take pains to look up and down the
street, to make sure there are no star-
tled passers-by.

The house is still dark, and it seems

hot after the dew and freshness of the
out-of-door air; but I draw tho bolts
carefully, and take off my shoes and
steal up-stairs. The east is gorgeous
with yellow clouds ; the belated pewee
is trying to make up for lost time. I
hear somebody in the next room give a
long sigh, as if of great comfort, and I
shut out the dazzling light of the sun,
and go to bed again. Presently I hear
the mill-bells up and down the river
ring out their early call to the tired
housekeepers, and I think it is a reluc-
tant rather than a merry peal ; and then
I say to myself something about to-
morrow — no, it is to-day — yes — but
this was daylight that was neither to-
morrow's nor yesterday's. And so I fall
asleep, like all the rest of the world, to
wake again some hours later, as much
delighted and puzzled with my morning
ramble as if it had been a dream.

— I have been considering the rela-
tions of the apologizer and the apolo-
gizee (if this strange verbal coinage will
pass), and I find that my sympathies go
out decidedly towards the latter. I do
not envy him his momentary ground of
vantage, though he certainly has an op-
portunity of displaying the rarest tact.
It depends very greatly upon him wheth-
er the effort at reparation of which he
is the involuntary object shall result in
graceful accomplishment or in ungrace-
ful contretemps. If the apologizer hesi-
tate, or become involved in his emotions,
it seems to be expected that the apolo-
gizee will haste to the rescue, and save
the dignity of the occasion. His atti-
tude should never be merely passive
and receptive ; it should be graciously
adjusted between gentle remonstrance
and reluctant assent. He should not
remain silent ; he should not appear to
recall with circumstantial accuracy the
matter of offense ; nor should he seem
to have forgotten it wholly, as to do so
places the apologist under the painful
necessity of re-stating the case. It will
not do for the apologizee to take high

1883.]

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423

stoical ground, and affirm that where no
injury is felt no injury exists ; for what
is this but arrogating a calm and invul-
nerable self -superiority ? He should
show himself to have been sufficiently
hurt to find comfort in the apologizer's
kindly offices ; and it will be the height
of generous art if he contrive to make
the apologizer feel that it is himself
who has acted with the utmost magna-
nimity,— himself who now deserves a
handsome acknowledgment. Should I
ever meet the genius who wrote the
Book of Etiquette, I shall suggest his
inserting in the next edition some re-

marks designed to illustrate the duties
and responsibilities resting upon the
apologizee. I confess I would be re-
joiced to see the apology dropping into
desuetude. In most cases, its use is
but an aggravation of the original in-
jury,— is, in a measure, "adding in-
sult to injury." It undoubtedly affords
considerable relief to the offender to an-
ticipate judgment, to plead guilty, and
pronounce sentence for himself ; but
this is a species of selfishness. If one
be heartily sorry for having given offense,
surely there will be enough vitality in
his persistence to hit upon some terser
form of expression than that to be found
in words. By the exercise of a little
patience and watchfulness, he will at
length make his conduct speak intelli-
gible and perfect amende. There is some-
thing — perhaps we ought to respect it
— which, when we would make verbal
acknowledgment of our fault, and crave
pardon therefor, goes against the grain
»f nature. It is a curious fact that
I" never indulge in apology without
straightway feeling the need of apolo-
gizing for my apology.

— Some months ago a contributor
gave an account of the sensitive plant,
its nature and habits ; but as this ac-
count did not include directions as to
treatment, it may not be amiss to offer
a few suggestions on this head. In our
experience, — and we have had several

species under observation at different
times, — we have found the tenderness
of the plant to be directly increased by
any access of tenderness in the care be-
stowed upon it ; on the other hand, we
have seen plants rendered wonderfully
hardy through a little salutary neglect
on the part of the gardener. What, in-
deed, can you expect of a tenderling,
that is kept sheltered as much as possi-
ble from all vexing contact, — that the
noon sun and stormy elements are not
allowed to reach? Perceiving that you
expect it to shrink at your touch, while
you cry out with admiration of its ex-
treme delicacy, the plant determines
never to disappoint your expectation.
If its phenomena were uniformly passed
by unremarked, such treatment, we be-
lieve, would go far towards modifying
its unhappy nature. This is one of the
instances in which clemency is cruelty ;
since to humor your sensitive friend is
to help confirm him in the error of his
ways. If you follow our advice, when
the plant exhibits signs of agitation
you will not protest that you spoke or
acted with the best intention in the
world ; you will not dwell upon the
fact of your continued esteem and af-
fection for the injured one, nor will you
denounce yourself for a miserable blun-
derer. On the contrary, if you can bring
yourself to the point of behaving with
crispness, — nay, even with some bar-
barity, — do so, and deserve credit for
your courage and candid benevolence.
Tell your friend that he is not a sensi-
tive plant, but a nettle, whose irritable
papillae both wound and are wounded,
whoever ventures near. If your pa-
tient has a right constitution, he will
thrive under this heroic treatment, and
be grateful, by and by, for the rigor
practiced by his physician. The man
who labored under the delusion that he
was glass, on being restored to sanity,
ought not to grumble over the contu-
sions given him in order to dispel his
vitreous theory.

424

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— I believe that lam not without the
sympathy of many friends when I say
that there should be a reform in the
custom of making calls. The pleasant
fashion of paying an afternoon visit,
or spending half an hour of the morn-
ing with some friend whom one really
wishes to see and to be with, has fallen
into sad disgrace. In nine cases out of
ten, the people who come to see us do
it simply out of ceremony. We wait
until our conscience cannot longer bear
the thought of the length of the list of
society debts, and then start out to strike
as many names as possible from the
list ; feeling that fortune has favored us
when we discover that our acquaintances
have also chosen that afternoon for be-
ing abroad, and that, instead of having
comfortable little talks with three or
four friends, we have been able to leave
our cards at a dozen or fifteen doors.

It is a pity that we do not make this
custom a wholly ceremonious one, and
conduct it by means of cards. Even
with the appointment of one day in a
week we find ourselves little helped,
though that is much the most sensible
way of avoiding the evil of having one's
time broken in upon ruthlessly and need-
lessly every afternoon in the week. A
most wise and sympathetic woman was
once heard to cry out in despair that she
thought nobody had a right to steal her
time any more than her money ; and that
people should no longer come without
excuse to stay with her for an hour or
two, and with excuse there should be
some sort of permission given or ap-
pointment made.

If a lady goes much into society, and
does her part in receiving guests in her
turn, there will inevitably occur some op-
portunity or other, in the course of the
season, when she will meet, either in
her own house or in the drawing-rooms
of her friends, most of her acquaintances.
Those who are not met in this way will
either be invalids or busy souls who can
spare but little time to pleasure. There

is one other class, — those who are never
met except in the exchange of ceremo-
nious visits. Now this seems quite idle,
— that we should feel bound to carry
on the time - squandering fashion of a
mock friendship. We either know peo-
ple, or we do not ; we are either asso-
ciated and linked with them in some
useful and purposeful way, or we are
simply feigning it.

The present writer would be the last
person to overlook the delights and sat-
isfactions of intercourse with friends,
even of stray interviews with our fel-
low creatures, which give us an oppor-
tunity to see the workings and the in-
ner trials and purposes of their lives.
Such talks are most helpful and delight-
ful, and may give us a chance of help-
ing and pleasing in our turn. Country
life is the better for seeing everything
one can of the outside world and of one's
associates and neighbors ; else it becomes
narrowed and selfish. City life should
be as much sheltered and keep as much
privacy as it can ; else it becomes broken
and purposeless and unsatisfactory, and
at the mercy of idlers and of the thou-
sand demands of every-day life which of
necessity assail it. A great deal of our
fancied duty to our neighbor and our
recognition of her existence can be done
by cards, at any rate. There is exact-
ly time enough for those things which
are really our duty. We ought to be
quick-witted enough to know them as
they come, and sensible enough not to
fret at the occupations which must be
pushed aside.

— It is on a day like this that a poet
should come into the world. To be born
under such a sky, to open the eyes to
such a light, and to draw in with the first
breath an air like this, it seems, should
be enough to gift and consecrate a soul
for the poet's lifelong dream of beau-
ty and of love. It is almost enough to
make poets of us who have had no short
experience of the rude prose of earthly
existence. The memory of the burden

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

425

and heat borne through sad and toilsome
days is charmed away, and we feel our-
selves new born, as it were, into some
happier sphere, and rebaptized with a
spirit of fresh delight. It cannot but be
believed that one source of the joy of
the divine life must lie in the exercise
of the creative energy that has made
and is forever making the beauty of the
earth. We human beings have intima-
tions of the same, — poets and painters,
I mean, and all who live to express,
even imperfectly, what they see and feel
of the natural beauty surrounding them,
and their imaginative conceptions of the
beauty we call ideal. Biographers tell
us that poets and painters are no hap-
pier than the rest of mankind ; that some,
indeed, have been far less blessed than
commoner men. Surely it was not in
virtue of their artistic endowment that
they were unhappy, but in spite of it.
No doubt a finer sensibility is a two-
edged sword, opening opposite ways to
pleasures and to pains. The same thing
is true of all men according to the meas-
ure of their susceptibility ; yet what but
this capacity for receiving impressions
of supersensuous things makes the life
of the civilized man more worth having
than that of the savage ? To have de-
sires after the higher joys, though often '
ungratifiecl, is better than to exist as the
beasts. For a like reason, it is not al-
together a pain to feel on such a day
as this the stirrings of soul which for
the real poet are the prelude to a burst
of song, but which for the great major-
ity of the ungifted mean nothing more
than to let us know that we are of
kin, though far off, with him. The long-
ing to express ourselves, to utter our
thoughts, our feelings, — it may be it is
not always the restless movement of
vanity ; who knows but it is the sign of
an inner struggle toward the light of an
embryonic sense or faculty yet to be de-
veloped somewhere, at some time ?

The reason why one would be grate-
ful for the gift of artistic utterance on a

day like this is the sense of its beauty
as a fleeting thing, that one longs some-
how to hold and keep for one' s self and
others. Summer will be a joy forever
to man while the earth endures, but
each beautiful day of it is short-lived.
The serene blue of the sky, made love-
lier by quiet clouds of silver and faint
gray ; the clear, sweet light and mellow
shades ; the big bright bees, — it is easy
to catalogue these things, but that is not
to make them seen and felt. .A land-
scape painter who had the skill to put
into his picture the true atmospheric
quality of the scene could reproduce a
part of it, but he could not give the shift-
ing of the shadows on the hill slopes and
the river, nor the passing into one an-
other of the luminous grays and pearly
whites of the cloud-heaps. A poet could
describe it better; a musician could fill
us with the sentiment of the whole. I
remember a bit of music of Schumann's,
" Mai, lieber Mai," a haunting little mel-
ody, which at any moment will bring
up all the sweet, half-melancholy longing
of early spring. And there are lines,
or even single epithets, of the poets that
take us out-of-doors at once, and make
us feel the air and sunshine, and give us
definite vision of place, season, and hour.
Here are two clear pictures in half a
dozen of Browning's lines : —

" Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,

Miles and miles,
On the solitary pastures where the sheep,

Half asleep,
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight."

" The gray sea and the long black land,
And a yellow half-moon, large and low."

There is a beautiful series of such
word pictures in Tennyson's Palace of
Art ; his verse, indeed, is everywhere full
of them.

The birds, their flights and their sing-
ing, are a part of to-day's deliciousness.
I think that hardly even Shelley has
sung a bird-flight as it ought to be sung.
Is there anything more fascinating than
to watch that free, swift taking of the

426

The Contributors' Club.

[September,

whole wide air ? I positively envy the
little creatures, though it is likely their
enjoyment of the actual sensation no
more than equals our imagination of it.
I would like to be a sea-gull, or au ea-
gle, or any bird that visits the high
places of the earth, where the barriers
and bounds of space seem to be done
away with. In reading the poets I like
to come on passages that give broad out-
looks and large suggestions ; they are
rarer than pictures of detail. Brown-
ing, greatest of modern masters, has
them both. If he were a smaller poet,
— to utter a commonplace, — he would
appear larger in the eyes of many ; but
when his constant readers note what he
can do iu certain directions, they under-
stand that if he does no more on those
ways it is only because he does not
choose ; he cares for so many more
things than mere picture-making. Oth-
ers can paint as well as he, but who
better than he does sometimes ? Take
the little song in Paracelsus, beginning,

"The river pushes
Its gentle way thro' strangling rushes."

That is one manner ; in another and
larger one is the passage of the same
poem,

" From the east, fuller and fuller
Da}', like a mighty river, is flowing in; "

and this from Two on the Campagna :

" The champaign, with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere !

Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air, —

Rome's ghost since her decease."

There is no lack of companions for
our out-of-door excursions, and we may
choose them to suit our taste. There is
Chaucer, cheerful as the sunshine, ready
to enliven the way with tale-telling ;
Cowper for those who like his wild so-
ciety ; and Wordsworth for those who do*
not object to his sermonizing tendency.
There are our own hearty Lowell and
Emerson and Whittier, who can tell us
secrets of out-door nature as well as of
the nature of humankind. It is said of
Rossetti by his friend Mr. Watts that he

had no genuine affection for the natural
world, — a strange want in a poet who
nevertheless has sometimes noted natu-
ral effects with a keen perception and a
fine and firm reproductive touch. Mr.
Watts, it seems to me, must be right in
ascribing to this defect in Rossetti's na-
ture some part of his morbid melan-
choly. It is a rather curious affiliation
that some have found between this poet
and Keats, who loved Nature, though
with small opportunity for knowing her.
To digress a little, I lately read an es-
say on The Grand Style in poetry,
in which notably fine examples of this
style were given from Milton, Matthew
Arnold, — whose verse, by the way, has
at times a fine out-door quality, — and
others. Rossetti might have furnished
the writer with one or two noteworthy
instances, as in the little poem of The
Sea Limits and the sonnet called Retro
me, Sathana. It seemed strange that
Browning, too, should not have been
cited in this connection, since his poetry
assuredly contains passages which would
have illustrated the writer's theme.
Browning's manner is often wanting in
the composure which is one of the
marks of the style called " the grand,"
but for the reason that he is common-
' ly speaking not out of his own per-
sonality, but dramatically, through that
of a fictitious character. .The writer
denied to Shelley the possession of a
grand style, except in one or two in-
stances, such as the .closing lines of
Alastor. However that may be, Shel-
ley, too, is an out-of-door poet, in his
own peculiar fashion. He spent much
of his time, we know, among woods and
waters, that often furnished the direct
inspiration of his verse. His poetry
would seem to show that he had more
affinity with the elements of the natural
world than with humanity ; not that his
love for his kind was not both genuine
and deep, but in his verse human nature
is treated always in the large, and more
in the abstract than the concrete. As

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

427

he writes in one of the letters lately col-
lected in a volume of the Parchment
Library, " As to real flesh and blood, you
know I don't deal in those articles ; you
might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg
of mutton as expect anything human or
earthly from me." He is speaking here
in reference to his Episychidion, but
what he says applies more generally.
To go abroad with Shelley is somewhat
like getting into a balloon for an excur-
sion in mid-air, or being invited to
climb with him to some tremendous ele-
vation, whence he will show us all the
kingdoms of the world, ancient and new.
Since he will probably begin straight-
way to declaim against these and pour
shame on all their glory, some of us
may not care to undertake these more
formidable expeditions in his company ;
in which case, we can suggest his lead-
ing us instead to the hidden abode of the
beautiful Witch of Atlas, or taking us
with him in his boat for a sail upon the
Serchio.

— It promised to be a hot day, when,
having waked half breathless at a very
early hour, I looked out at the sky. A
still, noontide heat (painted dark) per-
vaded the air. Those old associates
of the long winter nights, the Pleiades,
Taurus, and Orion, seemed strangely
astray in that sultry heaven. Not a
frosty shaft or piercing eye-glance from
any of the troop ; instead, I thought of
hot coals dully glowing through ashes,
or of " seeds of fire " sown in smoke.
There was little heralding of the morn-
jug on the part of the birds ; only a
faint voice here aud there, listlessly pro-
testing at the prospect of heat. The
trees were as motionless in all their
branches as though an enchanter's wand
were held over them. The sun came
up so fiercely thirsty that all the dew
scarcely availed to slake his very earli-
est beams. But before long, more than
one flower had drooped its devoted
head, like another Hyacinth wounded
by the golden quoit. Even the brave

and hardy grass appeared to lose vital
color, and to shrink under the steady
glare.

On such a day the birds are silent,
yet there is no lack of musicians to fill
up the rests. Chief among these sub-
stitutes is the harvest-fly (often called
locust).

" He takes the lead

In summer luxury ; he has never done

With his delights."

I should not wonder, indeed, if this be
the very insect which Anacreon hailed
as " happy ; " it is certainly " fleshless "
and " bloodless," and has its habitation
in a tree, in which particulars it cor-
responds with the subject of the ancient
ode. Just at the climax of its harsh
roundelay, the harvest-fly throws in a
few notes imitating the chirp of the
smallest and shrillest of the sparrow
tribe. I could fancy the fervid, inces-
sant sound had a heating effect upon the
atmosphere ; that, as the insect mounts
his scales, the thermometric current
rises accordingly. The tremolo to the
ear is repeated to the eye in the con-
stant quivering seen above distant fields,
the air seeming to be pierced through
and through with keen stilettos of
sound.

Insect life asks only for a sunshine
holiday ; no hour so hotly shining that it
cannot be improved. From my place in
the shade, I watch with lazy interest
the career of a large butterfly, — a rich
Ethiopian, with gorgeous decorations.
In the parched and discouraged gar-
den, only one flower offers him any at-
traction : this is a poor, stunted, crim-
son verbena, about which Sir Butterfly
hovers for an instant, and then is off
on a zigzag tour of the garden. Wher-
ever he goes, he always returns to keep
tryst with the flattered verbena, as who
should say, " I find nothing so sweet as
you ; you are indeed my none-such."
Also, as I sit under my favorite tree, and
look up at its goodly canopy, studying
its scalloped and pointed border, I be-

428

The Contributors' Club.

[September,

come curiously interested in the company
of flies hovering under the branches.
These insects appear to be ranged along
an imaginary barrier, and to be beaten
back whenever they attempt to cross it ;
or one might suppose they are each held
by an invisible string, which pulls them
iu check when they have gone its full
length. I would like much to know the
purpose of these mysterious hoverings,
which the observer finds after a while
to be exceedingly sleep-inducing.

At noon, when our tent of shadows
has contracted to the utmost, and when
all nature seems to be patiently endur-
ing, how still is the world about us, or
through what a somnolent medium all
sounds reach us ! The cicada chorus
has become pleasantly droning and con-
fused ; " that flying harp, the honey-
bee," passes us with a lulling air ; as
in a grotesque dream, we find ourselves
listening to the conversational tones of
the poultry, and discovering a wonder-
ful likeness to human parley in the
sotto voce remarks exchanged by chan-
ticleer and partlet over their noonday
meal. Or perhaps in the distance we
hear the moaning of a threshing-ma-
chine ; a sound which is like the wind
breathing through a crevice, a first fore-
runner of autumn, a good accompani-
ment for a Lityerses or Linus song, or
other lament at the passing of the sea-
son. It is a still world to the eye, also,
no wind stirring grass or foliage ; any
moving object far away in the fields be-
ing quickly remarked. The whisking
of tails, where the cows are fighting
flies in yonder pasture, is rather absurd-
ly conspicuous, in the utter quiet of the
landscape.

Ninety in the shade ! The birds
ought long ago to have retired to the
densest woodlands they know of, the
fish to the deepest root-roofed recesses
of the creek, and the crab to the very
bottom of his damp cellar. Are they
all under shelter ? It is well ; there
was no time to lose.

" Hither rolls the storm of heat ;
I feel its finer billows beat*
Like a sea which me infolds."

Thus sings the poet of all serenity. I
may some time have questioned crudely
the fitness of the storm figure, but do so
no longer ; for I am convinced the dy-
namic marks were well put in.

— In this country, where traveling is
not always interesting, especially in the
Western country, where the day's jour-
neys are like reading one page of a
book over and over, it is a good plan to
consider a comfortable method of spend-
ing one's time. Reading is the first and
best way of occupying the mind ; but
many persons cannot read in the fast-
moving and jarring railway train with-
out serious damage to their eyesight.
Everybody does not find games with
cards agreeable. I for one hold that
nothing can possibly be duller. I al-
ways get thinking of something else, and
have to be reminded when it is my turn
to play.

Sometimes I take it upon myself to
name all my fellow travelers, and this
is no such trifling undertaking as one
might suppose it to be. There is al-
ways a certain correspondence between
a man and his name. He grows to re-
semble it more and more. It is not
that one learns to associate the two ; for
it is sometimes possible to guess what
the name is, after a careful survey and
consideration of the person's appearance.
Whether christening is a greater re-
sponsibility than has been believed, and
a name is a sort of rudder which steers
us through life, is, to say the least, an
unsettled question. It is very good fun
to try to recall some former journey,
and follow one's self through its succes-
sive stages ; but many persons only find
amusement in looking out of the win-
dows, and idly taking note of the scen-
ery and inhabitants. Some one once
invented a railway game at which two
can play together, or several persons
can take sides. It is certainly a good

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

429

way to beguile a weary hour for impa-
tient children. One chooses one side
of the railway, and one the other, and
counts two for a red cow, two for a
spotted one, three for a horse, and four
for a dog, and so on, with high numbers
attached to improbable beasts or birds.
It is needless to say that it is an excel-
lent sum in addition, and that the one
who gets the highest number in an hour
wins the game. It really grows excit-.
ing toward the last, for the one who is
ahead may be hindered by an unpop-
ulated waste of water, alongside the
track, and during the passing of it his
opponent 'catches up triumphantly.

My own favorite diversion is trying
to see a freight car marked with a cer-
tain number. I have never succeeded
in finding it, after several years of search.
I do not know why I chose 4711, which
is the well-known number of a brand of
cologne water ; but having once done so,
I shall never spend even a half hour
on the railroad without hoping to see it.
Once, in London, I saw the mystic fig-
ures on a hansom cab, and it gave me
great satisfaction. I think all the 4711
freight cars have found me out, and
have escaped together to Texas, or
some far corner of the country, where
I am not likely to go.

— Not long ago, after reading Kit
Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to
his Love, I turned to The Nymph's
Reply, by the Philosophic Muse of Ra-
leigh, and read that also. While medi-
. tating the two, I became aware that a
third voice, light, inconsequent, and yet
not without its note of sincere regret,
had joined the musical dialogue. The
voice and the mood it uttered ; the
troublous self-consciousness ; the desire
yet inability to return to first princi-
ples ; the wistful regard toward Arcadia,
crossed by a humorous sense of having
outgrown the prime conditions of Ar-
cadian life, — all seemed strangely fa-
miliar, and I have since concluded that
what I heard must have been

THE REPLY OF THE NINETEENTH CEN-
TURY TO THE PASSIONATE SHEP-
HERD.

ACROSS the ages, blithe and clear,

I hear thy song, 0 shepherd dear !

Thy suit I hear, and sigh, alas,

That words so sweet must vainly pass.

I cannot come and live with thee, —

Shepherd, thy love I cannot be :

For thou art constant, plain, and true;

I, fond of all that 's strange and new, —

Exotic gardens, gems of price,

And trappings rich and skilled device,

And speed that vies with winged winds,

Yet runs too slow for vanward minds !

Soon would I drain thy promised joys,

Soon would despise tin' country toys ;

In each thy gifts would find some flaw :

A posied cap, a belt of straw,

A lamb's-wool gown, a kirtle fine,

Not long would please such heart as mine.

Thy trilling birds would soon become

So irksome I should wish them dumb,

And in the tinkling waterfall

I 'd hear but vexed spirits call.

With Gorgon looks I 'd turn to rocks

Thy merry fellows and their flocks.

Shouldst thou a bed with roses strew,

And line it with the poppy, too,

Thy tenderest care would never do, —

Some hateful thorn would still prick through !

In riddles I would ever speak,

And puzzle thee with whim and freak.

I am distrustful, veering, sad ;

With subtle tongue I 'd drive thee mad :

And so, for very love of thee,

Shepherd, thy love I will not be !

— While the veteran reader of news-
papers scans with satisfaction the bris-
tling column of telegraphic news, does
he ever reflect that, since his paper was
issued, other dispatches, some of them
quite contradictory to previous ones,
have been arriving ; and that even as
these were being communicated by the
wires decisive events were " transpir-
ing," soon to be reduced to telegraphic
terms, and startle the world with their
novelty and unexpectedness ? 'T is not
probable that the reader of newspapers
troubles himself with any such absurd
speculation, making the printed sheet
stale while still damp from the press.
Yet the . thoughtful subscriber to the
Times and the Eternities habitually
reads with this cautious reservation ; in-
terpreting relatively, not absolutely, the
engaging caption " latest dispatches."

430

Books of the Month.

[September,

- Every hour adds unto the current
arithmetic, which scarce stands a mo-
ment." Every hour brings fresh intelli-
gence, compared with which the bulletins
of an hour ago seem trivial asd irrele-
vant. The commissioner may make a
faithful but not an exhaustive report on
any given subject ; one comes after him
who has made more recent investigation,
or whose eye was opened to see what he
could not see. Later advices are always
arriving. Our after-thoughts are an in-
finite series. Just as we think we have
made a complete inventory of our cog-
itations, and are about to submit the
list, comes up something pat and close
related, which we cannot afford to count
out. It is a lame result that gives a
remainder greater than the divisor. I
suppose that the writer of an elabo-
rate volume might subscribe FINIS with
as haunting a sense of the incomplete-
ness of his work as he might have
who had treated the same subject in a

single brief essay. These later advices
are very insistent. The naturalist can-
not write the biography of a flower, a
bird, or an insect, but the next day some
of the creature's neighbors will be drop-
ping in with bits of interesting gossip
about the biographee ; or, worse yet,
with denials of certain statements con-
tained in the history. Long after he
had finished the poem, the poet heard the
muses singing " complemental verses,"
which, to have heard before in their
proper sequence, he would have given
all his laureate hire. Condense as we
may, there are always some volatile and
delicate atoms of philosophy or of fancy
that escape the condensing process. Sub-
limated in some mysterious way, they
afterwards fall in clear crystalline grains,
but too late to serve our special purpose.
It scarcely becomes us to treat contempt-
uously half-truths, when we get all our
truths in fractional remittances at un-
certain intervals.

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

History. The series of The Navy in the Civil
War (Scribners) is continued by The Atlantic
Coast, by Rear-Admiral Daniel Ammen, and The
Gulf and Inland Waters, by Commander A. T,
Mahan. The former naturally treats of the two
great centres on the Atlantic, Port Royal and the
North Carolina coast ; and Admiral Ammen had
the advantage of commanding a vessel in the bat-
tle of Port Royal, and also of being present in the
two bombardments of Fort Fisher. Commander
Mahan's volume treats of the Mississippi Valley,
the battles of New Orleans, Vicksburg, Grand Gulf,
and Mobile, and also of operations on the Texas
shore and on the Red River. — From Gettysburg
to the Kapidan, by Brigadier-General Andrew A.
Humphreys (Scribners), was intended originally to
form ;i portion of the author's volume in the Cam-
paigns of the Civil War, but was omitted because
of the bulk of that volume. It is a compact nar-
rative, with almost no coniment. — English Towns
and Districts is the title which Mr. E. A. Freeman
gives to a volume in which he has collected about
thirty papers, contributed originally to the Satur-
day Review and other journals and magazines.
(Macmillan.) They are special studies illustrative

of early English and Welsh history, and are of
archaeological interest chiefly. There are several
illustrations from Mr. Freeman's own drawings
and from photographs. — Mr. George Meade is-
sues through Porter and Coates a pamphlet upon
the question, Did General Meade desire to retreat
at the Battle of Gettysburg 'I which is a vigorous
reply to the assertions which have their latest
presentation in General Doubleday's volume, in
the Campaign series. — The Brooklyn Bridge is a
reprint, in Harper's Franklin Square Library, of
historical and descriptive papers previously pub-
lished in Harper's periodicals. — The Puritan Con-
spiracy against the Pilgrim Fathers and the Con-
gregatijnalist Church in 1624 is a pamphlet, by
John A. Goodwin (Cupples, Upham & Co., Bos-
ton), which treats of Lyford and Oldham, and
their underhand attempts to capture the Plymouth
Colony.

Poetry. An Idyl of the War, The German Ex-
iles and other Poems, by Ellw'ood L. Kemp (Pot-
ter, Philadelphia), draws chief inspiration from
the Pennsylvania Germans. We should like the
author to try the effect of printing his Idyl of the
War as prose, and see what minute changes only

1883.]

Books of the Month.

431

would be required. It could be read aloud with-
out creating any suspicion that it was blank verse.

— Pedantic Versicles, by Isaac Flagg (Ginn, Heath
& Co.), is a little volume of verse by a student in
the ancient classics, who has sometimes amused
himself, sometimes touched his lyre with more
serious intent. We doubt if he sets a high value
on \\isjeux d'esprit, but he would have a right to
linger a little, as we have done, over his first song
of Eros. —Poems Antique and Modern, by Charles
Leonard Moore (John E. Potter, & Co., Philadel-
phia), has all the attractiveness of print and bind-
ing which an author can well desire. It is made
agreeable to the eye and hand, and the smooth-
ness of the verse agrees with the externals. Even
the taste gets its satisfaction, as in the line,

"And jellied treasures of some summer task."

— Poems, Songs, and Ballads, by X. Y. Z., is a
quarto pamphlet, printed by Frank N. Pettit at
Jarvis, somewhere in Canada, apparently. While
looking for the poetry we came across some good
advioe to parents as to their treatment of chil-
dren : —

"And should another in a plight,
Caused by a tumble or a fight,
Startle you with a gory nose,
And soiled and even tattered clothes,
Chastise him not with hand or cane,
For he has quite sufficient pain."

— Catiline, an historical play in three acts, and
The Rival Runners, a farce in one act, by Arthur
J. O'Hara, are published in a little pamphlet, by
Stephen Mearns, New York. — Poems of History
(M. W. Ellsworth & Co., Detroit) is an anthology,
chosen and annotated by Henry A. Ford, in which
are collected poems by the most famous poets of
all ages, relating to most notable nations, eras,
events, and characters of the past, from the time of
Adam to the year 1883. So reads the title-page.
The design is a good one, but in trying to cover
all the period from Adam to Peter Cooper the
compiler has sometimes sacrificed his idea of se-
curing the most famous poets.

Biography. In the series of English Philoso-
phers (Putnams) the latest volume is Shaftesbury
and Hutcheson, by Thomas Fowler. The close re-
lation of the writings of the two men is the reason
for treating them in a composite volume. The
Author recognizes the secondary place which they
occupy in a history of philosophy, but justly con-
tends that secondary men have played too impor-
tant a part in the development of special phases of
philosophy to be left in neglect. — Twelve Amer-
icans, their lives and times, is a volume of bio-
graphical sketches, by Howard Carroll (Harpers),
of men eminent in various professions, when the
biographies first appeared in the columns of the
New York Times. Mr. Carroll appears to have fol-
lowed his own taste in collecting sketches of Sey-
mour, C. F. Adams, Cooper, Hamlin, Gilbert,
Schenck (not the Bitters Schenck), Douglass, Al-
len, Thurman, Jefferson, E. B. Washburne, and
Stephens. From the nature of the work it is neces-
sarily somewhat eulogistic in tone, as well as
limited by the fact that the subjects were living
when their lives were written ; but the style is ani-

mated, and Mr. Carroll supplies the reader with
many suggestive facts. — In the serial Topics of
the Time (Putnams), the second number is de-
voted to Studies in Biography, and contains seven
papers from English reviews, upon Gambetta,
Swift, Miss Burney, Wilberforce, George Sand,
and other topics. The editor might do good ser-
vice by making up his numbers from obscure jour-
nals, special pamphlets, and small books, more
commonly found in England than here. — George
Sand, by Bertha Thomas, is the third in the
series of Famous Women. (Roberts.) There is
added also a paper by Justin M'Carthy, reprinted
from The Galaxy. Miss Thomas does not trouble
herself to use much discrimination in her eulogy.
— The Life of Schiller, by Heinrich Duntzer,
translated by Percy E. Pinkerton (Macmillan), is a
full and orderly biography, abundantly illustrated
by wood-cuts, and is every way acceptable ; for
English readers as well as German have lacked
the completeness of knowledge about Schiller
which they have had about Goethe.

Literature and Criticism. Studies in Litera-
ture is the title of a number of the Serial Topics of
the Time (Putnams), which contains half a dozen
papers drawn from English reviews upon Ameri-
can Literature in England, — The Bollandists, The
Humorous in Literature, and other subjects. — A
second editition has been published of W. Y. Sel-
lar's work on Virgil (Macmillan), which was de-
signed originally as one of a series of the Roman
Poets of the Augustan Age, but has never been fol-
lowed by a Horace, although, as our readers know,
the author has published a most acceptable work
on the Roman Poets of the Republic. This volume
is a critical and biographical work on Virgil, the
critical element greatly predominating, and occa-
sion is taken to discuss freely other aspects of
Latin literature. — Two volumes of Essays, by F.
W. H. Myers, have been published (Macmillan):
one devoted to classic subjects, and treating of
Greek oracles, Virgil, and Marcus Aurelius An-
toninus; the other to modern subjects, which are
chiefly literary, although theology and history are
incidentally treated in a paper on Ecce Homo and
Mazzini. Mr. Myers is always a thoughtful and
earnest writer, and the reader of these essays will
be made to perceive the character of the best con-
temporary criticism in England. — The Greek
and Latin Inscriptions on the Obelisk-Crab in the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, is a monograph
in scholarship by Augustus C. Merriam, adjunct
professor of Greek in Columbia College. (Har-
pers.) It is in the form of a report to President
Barnard.

Travel. From the Pyrenees to the Pillars of
Hercules is a volume of observations on Spain, its
history and people, by Henry Day (Putnams),
who carries to Spain no special equipment for
bringing back the best which Spain offers. There
is a commonplaceness about the work which
seems unnecessary in these days of really good
travel-writing.

Theology, Philosophy, and Morals. The Lamb
in the Midst of the Throne, or the History of the
Cross, is an octavo volume of five hundred pages,
by James M. Sherwood. (Funk & Wagualls, New

432

Books of the Month.

[September.

York.) It is the work of an old clergyman, no
longer in pastoral service, who was once editor of
Hours at Home, and undertakes to pass in review
the philosophy of redemption. Mr. Sherwood
sees everything in literature and art around him
going wrong ; he believes in a future redemption
of the world, but somehow fails to discover any of
the redemptive process now going on, simply be-
cause his own traditional conception of the re-
demptive power is not so generally accepted as
he could wish. But a theology which has the
remoteness of Mr. Sherwood's interpretation does
not seem a ground of immediate hope.

Social Economy. Handbook for Hospitals,
(Putnams) is an issue by the State Charities Aid
Association, and is intended to give in compact
form the latest and most sensible hints regarding
the structure and care of hospitals, with special
reference to the needs of small towns and villages.
The book will do good, and we hope it may help
to establish a preference for small hospitals in the
place of great caravanseries. — The Engineering
News Publishing Co. of New York has issued
Statistical Tables from the history and statistics of
American 'water- works, compiled by J. J. R.
Cross, consisting of an alphabetical list of towns
which have a public water supply, with the number
of population, date of construction of works, by
whom owned, source and mode of supply, cost of
works, bonded debt, rate of interest, and officers of
works. — The Control of Defective Sight on Land
and Sea, with especial reference to the subject of
color-blindness, is a re'sumd of what has been done
in this countrj' and abroad toward arriving at
proper legislative action. It is a pamphlet issued
from the office of The Railway Review, Chicago,
and containing the editorial articles which have
appeared in that journal upon the subject. The
editor urges legislative action, and insists that the
railways are powerless without it.

Text-Books and Education. Mr. Rolfe has ac-

companied his school Shakespeare with two vol-
umes upon the same plan, devoted, one to the
Sonnets, the other to the Poems. It can hardly
be said, however, that they belong to a school edi-
tion, for he has published Venus and Adonis
and the Rape of Lucrece without change. — Two
Shakespeare Examinations, with some remarks on
the class-room study of Shakespeare, by William
Taylor Thorn (Ginn, Heath & Co.), is a most in-
teresting volume, illustrative of work done by
young women in a Southern college, and full of
suggestion to teachers and students. The book
has also apathetic interest, delicately hinted at by
the author and editor. — A Robinson Crusoe for
schools has been edited by W. H. Lambert. (Ginn,
Heath & Co.) The editing has been in the omis-
sion of some parts and condensation of others, as
well as in the expurgation of gross terms and al-
lusions. These last, however, are exceedingly few.
We should treat with more suspicion the editor's
statement that '• the long and involved sentences
which characterize the writers of the age of De-
foe have been cast into a simpler form, while the
diction of the author has been carefully pre-
served ; " but we welcome so good an addition to
school-books as a cheap Robinson Crusoe.

Fiction. In the No Name series (Roberts), the
latest volume is Princess Ame"lie. which is in the
form of an autobiography; the scene being laid in
the French Revolution. — In the Round Robin
series (Osgood), His Second Campaign is a story
of North and South: the first campaign having
been of war, the second of love. — Those Pretty
St. George Girls (Peterson) is a silly story of
so-called English society. — In the Transatlantic
series (Putnams), Her Sailor Love, by Katharine
S. Macquoid, may be commended on the score of
the author's name. — X. Y. Z. is a detective stonr.
by Anna Katharine Green (Putnams), wherein
a mystery is propounded, deepened, and solved in
less than a hundred pages.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
;fHaga$ine of Literati^ Science, art, ana

VOL. LIL— OCTOBER, 1883. — No. CCCXIL

A ROMAN SINGER.

VII.

ON the day following Nino's debut,
Maestro Ercole de Pretis found him-
self in hot water, and the choristers at
St. Peter's noticed that his skull-cap was
awry, and that he sang out of tune ; and
once he tried to take a pinch of snuff
when there was only three bars' rest in
the music, so that instead of singing C
sharp he sneezed very loud. Then all
the other singers giggled, and said, " Sa-
lute ! " — which we always say to a per-
son who sneezes — quite audibly.

It was not that Ercole had heard any-
thing from the Graf von Lira as yet;
but he expected to hear, and did not
relish the prospect. Indeed, how could
the Prussian gentleman fail to resent
what the maestro had done, in introduc-
ing to him a singer disguised as a teach-
er ? It chanced, also, that the contessina
took a singing lesson that very day in
the afternoon, and it was clear that the
reaping of his evil deeds was not far off.
His conscience did not trouble him at
all, it is true, for I have told you that
he has liberal ideas about the right of
marriage ; but his vanity was sorely af-
flicted at the idea of abandoning such a
very noble and creditable pupil as the
Contessina di Lira. He applauded him-
self for furthering Nino's wild schemes,
and he blamed himself for being so reck-
less about his own interests. Every

moment he expected a formal notice
from the count to discontinue the les-
sons. But still it did not come, and at
the appointed hour Ercole's wife helped
him to put on his thick winter coat, and
wrapped his comforter about his neck,
and pulled his big hat over his eyes, —
for the weather was threatening, — and
sent him trudging off to the Palazzo
Carmandola.

Though Ercole is stout of heart, and
has broad shoulders to bear such bur-
dens as fall to his lot, he lingered long
on the way, for his presentiments were
gloomy; and at the great door of the
palazzo he even stopped to inquire o£
the porter whether the contessina had
been seen to go out yet, half hoping
that she would thus save him the morti-
fication of an interview. But it turned
out otherwise : the contessina was at
home, and De Pretis was expected, as
usual, to give the lesson. Slowly he
climbed the great staircase, and was ad-
mitted.

" Good-day, Sor Maestro," said the
liveried footman, who knew him well.
" The Sign or Conte desires to speak
with you to-day, before you go to the
signorina."

The maestro's heart sank, and he
gripped hard the roll of music in his
hand as he followed the servant to the
count's cabinet. There was to be a
scene of explanation, after all.

434

A Roman Singer.

[October,

The count was seated in his great
arm-chair, in a cloud of tobacco smoke,
reading a Prussian military journal. His
stick leaned against the table by his
side, in painful contrast with the glit-
tering cavalry sabres crossed upon the
dark red wall opposite. The tall win-
dows looked out on the piazza, and it
was raining, or just beginning to rain.
The great inkstand on the table was
made to represent a howitzer, and the
count looked as though he were ready
to fire it point-blank at any intruder.
There was an air of disciplined luxury
in the room, that spoke of a rich old
soldier who fed his fancy with titbits
from a stirring past. De Pretis felt
very uncomfortable, but the nobleman
rose to greet him, as he rose to greet
everything above the rank of a servant,
making himself steady with his stick.
When De Pretis was seated he sat down
also. The rain pattered against the
window.

" Signor De Pretis," began the count,
in tones as hard as chilled steel, " you
are an honorable man." There was
something interrogative in his voice.

" 1 hope so," answered the maestro
modestly ; " like other Christians, I have
a soul " —

" You will your soul take care of in
your leisure moments," interrupted the
count. "At present you have no lei-
sure."

" As you command, Signor Conte."

" I was yesterday evening at the thea-
tre. The professor you recommended
for my daughter is with the new tenor
one person." De Pretis spread out his
hands and bowed, as if to deprecate any
share in the transaction. The count
continued, " You are of the profession,
Signor De Pretis. Evidently, you of
this were aware."

"It is true," assented Ercole, not
knowing what to say.

" Of course is it true. I am there-
fore to hear your explanation disposed."
His gray eyes fastened sternly on the

maestro. But the latter was prepared,
for he had long foreseen that the count
would one day be disposed to hear an
explanation, as he expressed it.

" It is quite true," repeated De Pre-
tis. " The young man was very poor,
and desired to support himself while he
was studying music. He was well fitted
to teach our literature, and I recommend-
ed him. I hope that, in consideration of
his poverty, and because he turned out
a very good teacher, you will forgive
me, Signor Conte."

"This talented singer I greatly ap-
plaud," answered the count stiffly. " As
a with - the - capacity-and-learning-requi-
site- for -teaching -endowed young man
deserves he also some commendation.
Also will I remember his laudable-and-
not - lacking - independence character.
Nevertheless, unfitting would it be,
should I pay the first tenor of the opera
five francs an hour to teach my daughter
Italian literature." De Pretis breathed
more freely.

" Then you will forgive me, Signor
Conte, for endeavoring to promote the
efforts of this worthy young man in sup-
porting himself ? "

" Siguor De Pretis," said the count,
with a certain quaint geniality, " I have
my precautions observed. I examined
Signor Cardegna in Italian literature
in my own person, and him proficient
found. Had I found him to be igno-
rant, and had I his talents as an operatic
singer later discovered, I would you out
of that window have projected." De
Pretis was alarmed, for the old count
looked as though he would have car-
ried out the threat. " As it is," he con-
cluded, "you are an honorable man,
and I wish you good-morning. Lady
Hedwig awaits you, as usual." He rose
courteously, leaning on his stick, and
. De Pretis bowed himself out.

He expected that the contessiua would
immediately begin talking of Nino, but
he was mistaken ; she never once re-
ferred to the opera or the singer, and

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

435

except that she looked pale and trans-
parent, and sang with a trifle less inter-
est in her music than usual, there was
nothing noticeable in her manner. In-
deed, she had every reason to be silent.

Early that morning Nino received by
a messenger a pretty little note, writ-
ten in execrable Italian, begging him to
come and breakfast with the baroness
at twelve, as she much desired to speak
with him after his stupendous triumph
of the previous night.

Nino is a very good boy, but he is
mortal, and after the excitement of the
evening he thought nothing could be
pleasanter than to spend a few hours in
that scented boudoir, among the palms
and the beautiful objects and the per-
fumes, talking with a woman who pro-
fessed herself ready to help him in his
love affair. We have no perfumes, or
cushions, or pretty things at number
twenty-seven, Santa Catarina dei Funari,
though everything is very bright and
neat and most proper, and the cat is
kept in the kitchen, for the most part.
So it is no wonder that he should have
preferred to spend the morning with
the baroness.

She was half lying, half sitting, in a
deep arm-chair, when Nino entered ; and
she was reading a book. When she
saw him she dropped the volume on her
knee, and looked up at him from under
her lids, without speaking. She must
have been a bewitching figure. Nino
advanced toward her, bowing low, so
that his dark curling hair shaded his
face.

"Good-day, signora," said he softly,
as though fearing to hurt the quiet air.
" I trust I do not interrupt you ? "

" You never interrupt me, Nino," she
said. " except — except when you go
away."

" You are very good, signora."

" For heaven's sake, no pretty
speeches," said she, with a little laugh.

" It seems to me," said Nino, seating
himself, " that it was you who made the

pretty speech, and I who thanked you
for it." There was a pause.

" How do you feel ? " asked the bar-
oness at last, turning her head to him.

" Grazie — I am well," he answered,
smiling.

" Oh, I do not mean that, — you are
always well. But how do you enjoy
your first triumph ? "

" I think," said Nino, " that a real
artist ought to have the capacity to en-
joy a success at the moment, and the
good sense to blame his vanity for en-
joying it after it is passed."

" How old are you, Nino ? "

" Did I never tell you ? " he asked,
innocently. " I shall be twenty-one
soon."

" You talk as though you were forty,
at least."

" Heaven save us ! " quoth Nino.

" But really, are you not immensely
flattered at the reception you had ? "

"Yes."

" You did not look at all interested in
the public at the time," said she, "and
that Roman nose of yours very near-
ly turned up in disdain of the applause,
I thought. I wonder what you were
thinking of all the while."

" Can you wonder, baronessa ? " She
knew what he meant, and there was a
little look of annoyance in her face
when she answered.

" Ah, well, of course not, since she
was there." Her ladyship rose, and
taking a stick of Eastern pastil from
a majolica dish in a corner made Nino
light it from a wax taper.

" I want the smell of the sandal-wood
this morning," said she ; " I have a
headache." She was enchanting to look
at, as she bent her softly-shaded face
over the flame to watch the burning
perfume. She looked like a beautiful
lithe sorceress making a love spell, —
perhaps for her own use. Nino turned
from her. He did not like to allow the
one image he loved to be even for a
moment disturbed by the one he loved

436

A Roman Singer.

[October,

not, however beautiful. She moved
away, leaving the pastil on the dish.
Suddenly she paused, and turned back
to look at him.

" Why did you come to-day ? " she
asked.

" Because you desired it," answered
Nino, in some astonishment.

" You need not have come," she said,
bending down to lean on the back of a
silken chair. She folded her hands, and
looked at him as he stood not three
paces away. " Do you not know what
has happened ? " she asked, with a smile
that was a little sad.

" I do not understand," said Nino,
simply. He was facing the entrance to
the room, and saw the curtains parted
by the servant. The baroness had her
back to the door, and did not hear.

" Do you not know," she continued,
" that you are free now ? Your appear-
ance in public has put an end to it all.
You are not tied to me any longer, —
unless you wish it."

As she spoke these words Nino turned
white, for under the heavy curtain, lifted
to admit her, stood Hedwig von Lira,
like a statue, transfixed and immovable
from what she had heard. The baroness
noticed Nino's look, and, springing back
to her height from the chair on which
she had been leaning, faced the door.

"My dearest Hedwig!" she cried,
with a magnificent readiness. " I am
so very glad you have come. I did not
expect you in the least. Do take off
your hat, and stay to breakfast. Ah,
forgive me : this is Professor Cardegna.
But you know him ? Yes ; now that I
think, we all went to the Pantheon to-
gether." Nino bowed low, and Hedwig
bent her head.

" Yes," said the young girl, coldly.
" Professor Cardegna gives me lessons."

" Why, of course ; how bete I am ! I
was just telling him that, since he has
been successful, and is enrolled among
the great artists, it is a pity he is no
longer tied to giving Italian lessons, —

tied to coming here three times a week,
to teach me literature." Hedwig smiled
a strange, icy smile, and sat down by
the window. Nino was still utterly as-
tonished, but he would not allow the
baroness's quibble to go entirely uncon-
tradicted.

"In truth," he said, "the Signora
Baronessa's lessons consisted chiefly" —

" In teaching me pronunciation," in-
terrupted the baroness, trying to remove
Hed wig's veil and hat, somewhat against
the girl's inclination. " Yes, you see
how it is. I know a little of singing,
but I cannot pronounce, — not in the
least. Ah, these Italian vowels will be
the death of me ! But if there is any
one who can teach a poor dilettante to
pronounce them," she added, laying the
hat away on a chair, and pushing a foot-
stool to Hedwig's feet, " that some one
is Signer Cardegna."

By this time Nino had recognized the
propriety of temporizing ; that is to
say, of letting the baroness's fib pass for
what it was worth, lest the discussion of
the subject should further offend Hed-
wig, whose eyes wandered irresolutely
toward him, as though she would say
something if he addressed her.

" I hope, signorina," he said, " that
it is not quite as the baroness says. I
trust our lessons are not at an end ? "
He knew very well that they were.

" I think, Signor Cardegna," said
Hedwig, with more courage than would
have been expected from such a mere
child, — she is twenty, but Northern
people are not grown up till they are
thirty, at least, — "I think it would
have been more obliging if, when I
asked you so much about your cousin,
you had acknowledged that you had no
cousin, and that the singer was none
other than yourself." She blushed, per-
haps, but the curtain of the window hid
it.

" Alas, signorina," answered Nino,
still standing before her, " such a con-
fession would have deprived me of the

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

437

pleasure — of the honor of giving you
lessons."

"And pray, Signor Cardegna," put
in the baroness, " what are a few paltry
lessons, compared with the pleasure you
ought to have experienced in satisfying
the Contessiua di Lira's curiosity ? Re-
ally, you have little courtesy."

Nino shrank into himself, as though
he were hurt, and he gave the bareness
a look which said worlds. She smiled
at him, in joy of her small triumph, for
Hedwig was looking at the floor again,
and could not see. But the young girl
had strength in her, for all her cold
looks and white cheek.

" You can atone, Signor Cardegna,"
she said. Nino's face brightened.

" How, signorina ? " he asked.

" By singing to us now," said Hed-
wig. The baroness looked grave, for
she well knew what a power Nino wield-
ed with his music.

" Do not ask him," she protested.
" He must be tired, — tired to death,
with all he went through last night."

" Tired ? " ejaculated Nino, with some
surprise. " I tired ? I was never tired
in my life, of singing. I will sing as
long as you will listen." He went to
the piano. As he turned, the baroness
laid her hand on Hedwig's, affectionate-
ly, as though sympathizing with some-
thing she supposed to be passing in the
girl's mind. But Hedwig was passive,
unless a little shudder at the first touch
of the baroness's fingers might pass for
a manifestation of feeling. Hedwig had
hitherto liked the baroness, finding in
her a woman of a certain artistic sense,
combined with a certain originality.
The girl was an absolute contrast to the
woman, and admired in her the qualities
she thought lacking in herself, though
she possessed too much self-respect t0
attempt to acquire them by imitation.
Hedwig sat like a Scandinavian fairy
princess on the summit of a glass hill ;
her friend roamed through life like a
beautiful soft-footed wild animal, re-

joicing in the sense of being, and some-
times indulging in a little playful de-
struction by the way. The girl had
heard a voice in the dark, singing, and
ever since then she had dreamed of the
singer ; but it never entered her mind

O '

to confide to the baroness her strange
fancies. An undisciplined imagination,
securely shielded from all outward dis-
turbing causes, will do much with a voice
in the dark, — a great deal more than
such a woman 'as the baroness might im-
agine.

I do not know enough about these
blue-eyed German girls to say whether
or not Hedwig had ever before thought
of her unknown singer as an unknown
lover. But the emotions of the previ-
ous night had shaken her nerves a lit-
tle, and had she been older than she
was she would have known that she
loved her singer, in a distant and maid-
enly fashion, as soon as she heard the
baroness speak of him as having been
her property. And now she was angry
with herself, and ashamed of feeling any
interest in a man who was evidently tied
to another woman by some intrigue she
could not comprehend. Her coming to
visit the baroness had been as unpre-
meditated as it was unexpected, that
morning, and she bitterly repented it ;
but being of good blood and heart, she
acted as boldly as she could, and showed
no little tact in making Nino sing, and
thus cutting short a painful conversa-
tion. Only when the baroness tried to
caress her and stroke her hand she
shrank away, and the blood mantled
up to her cheeks. Add to all this the
womanly indignation she felt at having
been so long deceived by Nino, and you
will see that she was in a very vacillat-
ing frame of mind.

The baroness was a subtle woman,
reckless and diplomatic by turns, and
she was not blind to the sudden repulse
she met with from Hedwig, unspoken
though it was. But she merely with-
drew her hand, and sat thinking over the

438

A Roman Singer.

[October,

situation. "What she thought, no one
knows ; or, at least, we can only guess
it from what she did afterwards. As
for me, I have never blamed her at all,
for she is the kind of woman I should
have loved. In the mean time Nino car-
oled out one love song after another.
He saw, however, that the situation was
untenable, and after a while he rose to
go. Strange to say, although the bar-
oness had asked Nino to breakfast, and
the hour was now at hand, she made no
effort to retain him. But she gave him
her baud, and said many flattering and
pleasing things, which, however, nei-
ther flattered nor pleased him. As for
Hedwig, she bent her head a little, but
said nothing, as he bowed before her.
Nino therefore went home with a heavy
heart, longing to explain to Hedwig
why he had been tied to the baroness,
— that it was the price of her silence
and of the privilege he had enjoyed of
giving lessons to the contessina ; but
knowing, also, that all explanation was
out of the question for the present.
When he was gone, Hedwig and the
baroness were left together.

" It must have been a great surprise
to you, my dear," said the elder lady
kindly.

" What ? "

" That your little professor should
turn out a great artist in disguise. It
was a surprise to me, too, — ah, another
illusion destroyed. Dear child ! You
have still so many illusions, — beautiful,
pure illusions. Dieu ! how I envy you ! "
They generally talked French together,
though the baroness knows German.
Hedwig laughed bravely.

" I was certainly astonished," she said.
" Poor man ! I suppose he did it to sup-
port himself. He never told me he gave
you lessons, too." The baroness smiled,
but it was from genuine satisfaction this
time.

" I wonder at that, since he knew we
were intimate, or, at least, that we were
acquainted. Of course I would not

speak of it last night, because I saw
your father was angry."

" Yes, he was angry. I suppose it
was natural," said Hedwig.

" Perfectly natural. And you, my
dear, were you not angry too, — just
a little ? "

" I ? No. Why should I be angry ?
He was a very good teacher, for he
knows whole volumes by heart ; and he
understands them, too."

Soon they talked of other things, and
the baroness was very affectionate. But
though Hedwig saw that her friend was
kind and most friendly, she could not
forget the words that were in the air
when she chanced to enter, nor could
she quite accept the plausible explana-
tion of them which the baroness had so
readily invented. For jealousy is the
forerunner of love, and sometimes its
awakener. She felt a rival and an en-
emy, and all the hereditary combative-
ness of her Northern blood was roused.

Nino, who was in no small perplex-
ity, reflected. He was not old enough
or observant enough to have seen the
breach that was about to be created
between the baroness and Hedwig.
His only thought was to clear himself
in Iledwig's eyes from the imputation
of having been tied to the dark woman
in any way save for his love's sake. He
at once began to hate the baroness with
all the ferocity of which his heart was
capable, and with all the calm his bold,
square face outwardly expressed. But
he was forced to take some action at
once, and he could think of nothing bet-
ter to do than to consult De Pretis.

To the maestro he poured out his
woes and his plans. He exhibited to
him his position toward the baroness and
toward Hedwig in the clearest light.
He conjured him to go to Hedwig, and
explain that the baroness hud threat-
ened to unmask him, and thus deprive
him of his means of support, — he dared
not put it otherwise, — unless he con-
sented to sing for her and come to her

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

439

as often as she pleased. To explain, to
propitiate, to smooth, — in a word, to
reinstate Nino in her good opinion.

" Death of a dog ! " exclaimed De
Pretis ; " you do not ask much ! After
you have allowed your lady-love, your
innamorata, to catch you saying you are
bound body and soul to another woman,
— and such a woman ! ye saints, what
a beauty ! — you ask me to go and set
matters right ! What the diavolo did
you want to go and poke your nose into
such a mousetrap for ? Via ! I am a
fool to have helped you at all."

" Very likely," said Nino calmly.
" But meanwhile there are two of us,
and perhaps I am the greater. You will
do what I ask, maestro; is not true?
And it was not I who said it ; it was the
baroness." •

" The baroness — yes — and may the
maledictions of the inferno overtake her,"
said De Pretis, casting up his eyes and
feeling in his coat-tail pockets for his
snuff-box. Once, when Nino was young-
er, he filled Ercole's snuff-box with soot
and pepper, so that the maestro had a
black nose and sneezed all day.

What could Ercole do ? It was true
that he had hitherto helped Nino. Was
he not bound to continue that assist-
ance ? I suppose so ; but if the whole
affair had ended then, and this story
with it, I would not have cared a but-
ton. Do you suppose it amuses me to
tell you this tale ? Or that if it were
' not for Nino's good name I would ever
have turned myself into a common story-
teller ? Bah ! you do not know me. A
page of quaternions gives me more pleas-
ure than all this rubbish put together,
though I am not averse to a little gos-
sip now and then, of an evening, if peo-
ple will listen to my details and fancies.
But those are just the things people
will not listen to. Everybody wants
sensation nowadays. What is a sensa-
tion compared with a thought ? What
is the convulsive gesticulation of a dead
frog's leg compared with the intellect

of the man who invented the galvanic
battery, and thus gave fictitious sensa-
tion to all the countless generations of
dead frogs' legs that have since been the
objects of experiment ? Or if you come
down to so poor a thing as mere feeling,
what are your feelings in reading about
Nino's deeds compared with what h'e
felt in doing them ? I am not taking all
this trouble to please you, but only for
Nino's sake, who is my dear boy. You
are of no more interest or importance
to me than if you were so many dead
frogs ; and if I galvanize your sensations,
as you call them, into an activity suffi-
cient to make you cry or laugh, that is
my own affair. You need not say
" thauk you " to me. I do not want it.
Ercole will thank you, and perhaps Nino
will thank me, but that is different.

I will not tell you about the interview
that Ercole had with Hedwig, nor how
skillfully he rolled up his eyes and
looked pathetic when he spoke of Nino's
poverty, and of the fine part he had
played in the whole business. Hedwig
is a woman, and the principal satisfac-
tion she gathered from Ercole's expla-
nation was the knowledge that her friend
the baroness ha'd lied to her in explain-
ing those strange words she had over-
heard. She knew it, of course, by in-
stinct ; but it was a great relief to be
told the fact by some one else, as it al-
ways is, even when one is not a woman.

VIII.

Several days passed after the debut
without giving Nino an opportunity of
speaking to Hedwig. He probably saw
her, for he mingled in the crowd of dan-
dies in the Piazza Colonna of an after-
noon, hoping she would pass in her car-
riage and give him a look. Perhaps she
did ; he said nothing about it, but looked
calm when he was silent and savage
when he spoke, after the manner of pas-
sionate people. His face aged and grew

440

A Roman Singer.

[October,

stern in those few days, so that he seemed
to change on a sudden from boy to man.
But he went about his business, and sang
at the theatre when he was obliged to ;
gathering courage to do his best and to
display his powers from the constant suc-
cess he had. The papers were full of
his praises, saying that he was absolutely
without rival from the very first night
he sang, matchless and supreme from
the moment he first opened his mouth,
and all that kind of nonsense. I dare
say he is now, but he could not have
been really the greatest singer living, so
soon. However, he used to bring me
the newspapers that had notices of him,
though he never appeared to care much
for them, nor did he ever keep them him-
self. He said he hankered for an ideal
which he would never attain ; and I told
him that if he was never to attain it he
had better abandon the pursuit of it at
once. But he represented to me that
the ideal was confined to his imagination,
whereas the reality had a great financial
importance, since he daily received offers
from foreign managers to sing for them,
at large advantage to himself, and was
hesitating only in order to choose the
most convenient. This seemed sensible,
and I was silent. Soon afterwards he
presented me with a box of cigars and
a very pretty amber mouthpiece. The
cigars were real Havanas, such as I had
not smoked for years, and must have
cost a great deal.

" You may not be aware, Sor Corne-
lio," he said one evening, as he mixed
the oil and vinegar with the salad, at sup-
per, " that I am now a rich man, or soon
shall be. An agent from the London
opera has offered me twenty thousand
francs for the season in London, this
spring."

" Twenty thousand francs ! " I cried
in amazement. " You must be dreaming,
Nino. That is just about seven times
what 1 earn in a year with my profes-
sorship and my writing."

" No dreams, caro mio. I have the

offer in my pocket." He apparently
cared no more about it than if he had
twenty thousand roasted chestnuts in his
pocket.

" When do you leave us ? " I asked,
when I was somewhat recovered.

" I am not sure that I will go," he
answered, sprinkling some pepper on
the lettuce.

" Not sure ! Body of Diana, what a
fool you are ! "

" Perhaps," said he, and he passed me
the dish. Just then, Mariuccia came in
with a bottle of wine, arid we said no
more about it ; for Mariuccia is indis-
creet.

Nino thought nothing about his riches,
because he was racking his brains for
some good expedient whereby he might
see the contessina and 'speak with her.
He had ascertained from De Pretis that
the count was not so angry as he had
expected, and that Hedwig was quite
satisfied with the explanations of the
maestro. The day after the foregoing
conversation he wrote a note to her,
wherein he said that if the Contessina di
Lira would deign to be awake at mid-
night that evening she would have a
serenade from a voice she was said to
admire. He had Mariuccia carry the
letter to the Palazzo Carmandola.

At half past eleven, at least two hours
after supper, Nino wrapped himself in
my old cloak, and took the guitar under
his arm. Rome is not a very safe place
for midnight pranks, and so I made him
take a good knife in his waist-belt ; for
he had confided to me where he was go-
ing. I tried to dissuade him from the
plan, saying he might catch cold ; but he
laughed at me.

A serenade is an every-day affair, and
in the street one voice sounds about as
well as another. He reached the palace,
and his heart sank when he saw Hed-
wig's window dark and gloomy. He did
not know that she was seated behind it
in a deep chair, wrapped in white things,
and listening for him against the beat-

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

ings of her heart. The large moon
seemed to be spiked on the sharp spire
of the church that is near her house,
and the hlack shadows cut the white
light as clean as with a knife. Nino had
tuned his guitar in the other street, and
stood ready, waiting for the clocks to
strike. Presently they clanged out
wildly, as though they had been waked
from their midnight sleep, and were an-
gry ; one clock answering the other, and
one convent bell following another in
the call to prayers. For two full min-
utes the whole air was crazy with ring-
ing, and then it was all still. Nino
struck a single chord. Hedwig almost
thought he might hear her heart beating
all the way down in the street.

" Ah, del mio dolce ardor bramato
ogetto," he sang, — an old air in one of
Gluck's operas, that our Italian musi-
cians say was composed by Alessandro
Stradella, the poor murdered singer. It
must be a very good air, for it pleases
me ; and I am not easily pleased with
music of any kind. As for Hedwig, she
pressed her ear to the glass of the win-
dow that she might not lose any note.
But she would not open nor give any
sign. Nino was not so easily discour-
aged, for he remembered that once be-
fore she had opened her window for a
few bars he had begun to sing. He
played a few chords, and breathed out
the " Salve, dimora casta e pura," from
Faust, high and soft and clear. There
is a point in that song, near to the end,
where the words say, " Reveal to me
the maiden," and where the music goes
away to the highest note that any one
can possibly sing. It always appears
quite easy for Nino, and he does not
squeak like a dying pig, as all the other
tenors do on that note. He was look-
ing up as he sang it, wondering whether
it would have any effect. Apparently
Hedwig lost her head completely, for
she gently opened the casement and
looked out at the moonlight opposite,
over the carved stone mullious of her

window. The song ended, he hesi-
tated whether to go or to sing again.
She was evidently looking towards him ;
but he was in the light, for the moon
had risen higher, and she, on the other
side of the street, was in the dark.

" Signoriija ! " he called softly. No
answer. " Signorina ! " he said again,
coming across the empty street and
standing under the window, which might
have been thirty feet from the ground.

" Hush ! " came a whisper from
above.

" I thank you with all my sonl for
listening to me," he said in a low voice.
'• I am innocent of that of which you
suspect me. I love you, ah, I love you ! "
But at this she left the window very
quickly. She did not close it, how-
ever, and Nino stood long, straining
his eyes for a glimpse of the white face
that had been there. He sighed, and
striking a chord, sang out boldly the old
air from the Trovatore, "Ah, che la
morte ognora e tarda nel venir." Every
blind fiddler in the streets plays it,
though he would be sufficiently scared
if death came any the quicker for his
fiddling. But old and worn as it is, it
has a strain of passion in it, and Nino
threw more fire and voice into the ring
of it than ever did famous old Boccarde,
when he sang it at the first performance
of the opera, thirty and odd years ago.
As he played the chords after the first
strophe, the voice from above whispered
again : —

" Hush, for Heaven's sake ! " Just
that, and something fell at his feet, with
a soft little padded sound on the pave-
ment. He stooped to pick it up, and
found a single rose ; and at that instant
the window closed sharply. Therefore
he kissed the rose and hid it, and pres-
ently he strode down the street, finish-
ing his song as he went, but only hum-
ming it, for the joy had taken his voice
away. I heard him let himself in and
go to bed, and he told me about it in
the morning. That is how I know.

A Roman Singer.

[October,

Since the clay after the debut Nino
hud not seen the baroness. He did not
speak of her, and I am sure he wished
she were at the very bottom of the Ti-
ber. But on the morning after the sere-
nade he received a note from her, which
was so full of protestations of friend-
ship and so delicately couched that he
looked grave, and reflected that it was
his duty to be courteous, and to answer
such a call as that. She begged him
earnestly to come at one o'clock ; she
was suffering from headache, she said,
and was very weak. Had Nino loved
Hedwig a whit the less, he would not
have gone. But he felt himself strong
enough to face anything and everything,
and therefore he determined to go.

He found her, indeed, with the man-
ner of a person who is ill, but not with
the appearance. She was lying on a
huge couch, pushed to the fireside, and
there were furs about her. A striped
scarf of rich Eastern silk was round her
throat, and she held in her hand a new
novel, of which she carelessly cut the
pages with a broad-hafted Persian knife.
But there was color in her dark cheek,
and a sort of angry fire in her eyes.
Nino thought the clean steel in her
hand looked as though it might be used
for something besides cutting leaves, if
the fancy took her.

" So at last you have honored me with
a visit, signore," she said, not desisting
from her occupation. Nino came to
her, and she put out her hand. He
touched it, but could not bear to hold it,
for it burned him.

" You used to honor my hand differ-
ently from that," she half whispered.
Nino sat himself down a little way from
her, blushing slightly. It was not at
what she had said, but at the thought
that he should ever have kissed her fin-
gers.

" Signora," he replied, " there are
customs, chivalrous and gentle in them-
selves, and worthy for all men to prac-
tice. But from the moment a custom

begins to mean what it should not, it
ought to be abandoned. You will for-
give me if I no longer kiss your hand."

" How cold you are ! — how formal !
What should it mean ? %>

" It is better to say too little than
too much," he answered.

" Bah ! " she cried, with a bitter little
laugh. " Words are silver, but silence
— is very often nothing but silver-plated
brass. Put a little more wood on the
fire ; you make me cold." Nino obeyed.

" How literal you are ! " said the bar-
oness petulantly. " There is fire enough,
on the hearth."

" Apparently, signora, you are pleased
to be enigmatical," said Nino.

" I will be pleased to be anything I
please," she answered, and looked at
him rather fiercely. " I wanted you to
drive away my headache, and you only
make it worse."

" I am sorry, signora. I will leave
you at once. Permit me to wish you a
very good-morning." He took his hat
and went towards the door. Before he
reached the heavy curtain, she was at
his side with a rush like a falcon on the
wing, her eyes burning darkly between
anger and love.

" Nino ! " She laid hold of his arm,
and looked into his face.

" Signora," he protested coldly, and
drew back.

" You will not leave me so ? "

" As you wish, signora. I desire to
oblige you."

" Oh, how cold you are ! " she cried,
leaving his arm, and sinking into a chair
by the door, while he stood with his
hand on the curtain. She hid her eyes.
" Nino, Nino ! You will break my
heart ! " she sobbed ; and a tear, per-
haps more of anger than of sorrow, burst
through her fingers, and coursed down
her cheek.

Few men can bear to see a woman
shed tears. Nino's nature rose up in
his throat, and bade him console her.
But between him and her was a fair,

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

443

bright image that forbade him to move
hand or foot.

" Signora," he said, with all the calm
he could command, " if I were conscious
of having by word or deed of mine giv-
en you cause to speak thus, I would
humbly implore your forgiveness. But
my heart does not accuse me. I beg
you to allow me to take leave of you.
I will go away, and you shall have no
further cause to think of me." 'He
moved again, and lifted the curtain.
But she was like a panther, so quick and
beautiful. Ah, how I could have loved
that woman ! She held him, and would
not let him go, her smooth fingers fas-
tening round his wrists like springs.

" Please to let me go," he said be-
tween his teeth, with rising anger.

" No ! I will not let you ! " she cried
fiercely, tightening her grasp on him.
Then the angry fire in her tearful eyes
seemed suddenly to melt into a soft
flame, and the color came faster to her
cheeks. " Ah, how can you let me so
disgrace myself ! how can you see me
fallen so low as to use the strength of
my hands, and yet have no pity ? Nino,
Nino, do not kill me ! "

" Indeed, it would be the better for
you if I should," he answered bitter-
ly, but without attempting to free his
wrists from her strong, soft grip.

" But you will," she murmured pas-
sionately. "You are killing me by
leaving me. Can you hot see it ? "
Her voice melted away in the tearful
cadence. But Nino stood gazing at
her as stonily as though he were the
Sphinx. How could he have the heart ?
I cannot tell. Long she looked into
his eyes, silently ; but she might as well
have tried to animate a piece of iron, so
stern and hard he was. Suddenly, with
a strong, convulsive movement, she
flung his hands from her.

" Go ! " she cried hoarsely. " Go to
that wax doll you love, and see whether
she will love you, or care whether you
leave her or not ! Go, go, go ! Go to

her ! " She had sprung far back from
him, and now pointed to the door, drawn
to her full height and blazing in her
wrath.

" I would advise you, madam, to
speak with proper respect of any lady
with whom you choose to couple my
name." His lips opened and shut me-
chanically, and he trembled from head
to foot.

" Respect ! " She laughed wildly.
" Respect for a mere child whom you
happen to fancy ! Respect, indeed, for
anything you choose to do ! I — I —
respect Hedwig von Lira ? Ha ! ha ! "
and she rested her hand on the table be-
hind her, as she laughed.

" Be silent, madam," said Nino, and
he moved a step nearer, and stood with
folded arms.

" Ah ! You would silence me now,
would you ? You would rather not hear
me speak of your midnight serenades,
and your sweet letters dropped from the
window of her room, at your feet ? "
But her rage overturned itself, and with
a strange cry she fell into a deep chair,
and wept bitterly, burying her face in
her two hands. " Miserable woman that
I am ! " she sobbed, and her whole lithe
body was convulsed.

" You are indeed," said Nino, and he
turned once more to go. But as he
turned, the servant threw back the cur-
tain.

" The Signor Conte di Lira," he an-
nounced in distinct tones. For a moment
there was a dead- silence, during which,
in spite of his astonishment at the sudden
appearance of the count, Nino had time
to reflect that the baroness had caused
him to be watched during the previous
night. It might well be, and the mis-
take she made in supposing the thing
Hedwig had dropped to be a letter told
him that her spy had not ventured very
near.

The tall count came forward under
the raised curtains, limping and help-
ing himself with his stick. His face

444

A Roman Singer.

[October,

was as gray and wooden as ever, but
his mustaches had an irritated, crimped
look, that Nino did not like. The count
barely nodded to the young man, as he
stood aside to let the old gentleman
pass ; his eyes turned mechanically to
where the baroness sat. She was a
woman who had no need to simulate pas-
sion in any shape, and it must have cost
her a terrible effort to control the par-
oxysm of anger and shame and grief
that had overcome her. There was
something unnatural and terrifying in
her sudden calm, as she forced herself
to rise and greet her visitor.

" I fear I come out of season," he
said, apologetically, as he bent over her
hand.

" On the contrary," she answered ;
" but forgive me if I speak one word
to Professor Cardegna." She went to
where Nino was standing.

" Go into that room," she said, in a
very low voice, glancing towards a cur-
tained door opposite the windows, " and
wait till he goes. You may listen if
you choose." She spoke authoritatively.

" I will not," answered Nino, in a de-
termined whisper.

" You will not ? " Her eyes flashed
again. He shook his head.

" Count von Lira," she said aloud,
turning to him, "do you know this
young man?" She spoke in Italian,
and Von Lira answered in the same lan-
guage ; but as what he said was not ex-
actly humorous, I will spare you the
strange construction of h^s sentences.

" Perfectly," he answered. " It is
precisely concerning this young man
that I desire to speak with you." The
count remained standing because the
baroness had not told him to be seated.

" That is fortunate," replied the bar-
oness, " for I wish to inform you that
he is a villain, a wretch, a miserable
fellow ! " Her anger was rising again,
but she struggled to control it. When
Nino realized what she said, he came
forward, and stood near the count, fac-

ing the baroness, his arms folded on his
breast, as though to challenge accusa-
tion. The count raised his eyebrows.

" I am aware that he concealed his
real profession so long as he gave my
daughter lessons. That, however, has
been satisfactorily explained, though I
regret it. Pray inform me why you
designate him as a villain." Nino felt
a thrill of sympathy for this man whom
he had so long deceived.

" This man, sir," said she in measured
tones, " this low-born singer, who has
palmed himself off on us as a respect-
able instructor in language, has the au-
dacity to love your daughter. For the
sake of pressing his odious suit, he has
wormed himself into your house, as into
mine ; he has sung beneath your daugh-
ter's window, and she has dropped let-
ters to him, — love-letters, do you un-
derstand ? And now," — her voice rose
more shrill and uncontrollable at every
word, as she saw Lira's face turn white,
and her anger gave desperate utterance
to the lie, — " and now he has the ef-
frontery to come to me — to me — to
me of all women — and to confess his
abominable passion for that pure angel,
imploring me to assist him in bringing
destruction upon her and you. Oh, it
is execrable, it is vile, it is hellish ! "
She pressed her hands to her temples as
she stood, and glared at the two men.
The count was a strong man, easily pet-
ulant, but hard to move to real anger.
Though his face was white and his right
hand clutched his crutch-stick, he still
kept the mastery of himself.

" Is what you tell me true, madam ? "
he asked in a strange voice.

" Before God, it is true ! " she cried
desperately.

The old man looked at her for one mo-
ment, and then, as though he had been
twenty years younger, he made at Nino,
brandishing his stick to strike. But
Nino is strong and young, and he is al-
most a Roman. He foresaw the count's
action, and his right hand stole to the

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

445

table, aud grasped the clean, murderous
knife ; the baroness had used it so in-
nocently to cut the leaves of her book,
half an hour before. With one wrench
he had disarmed the elder man, forced
him back upon a lounge, and set the
razor edge of his weapon against the
count's throat.

" If you speak one word, or try to
strike me, I will cut off your head," he
said quietly, bringing his cold, marble
face close down to the old" man's eyes.
There was something so deathly in his
voice, in spite of its quiet sound, that
the count thought his hour was come,
brave man as he was. The baroness
tottered back against the opposite- wall,
and stood staring at the two, disheveled
and horrified.

" This woman," said Nino, still hold-
ing the cold thing against the flesh, " lies
in part, and in part tells the truth. I
love your daughter, it is true." The
poor old man quivered beneath Nino's
weight, and his eyes rolled wildly,
searching for some means of escape.
But it was of no use. " I love her, and
have sung beneath her window ; but I
never had a written word from her in
my life, and I neither told this woman
of my love nor asked her assistance.
She guessed it at the first ; she guessed
the reason of my disguise, and she her-
self offered to help me. You may speak
now. Ask her." Nino, relaxed his
hold, and stood off, still grasping the
knife. The old count breathed, shook
himself and passed his handkerchief over
his face before he spoke. The baroness
stood as though she were petrified.

" Thunder weather, you are a devilish
young man ! " said Von Lira, still pant-
ing. Then he suddenly recovered his
dignity. " You have caused me to as-
sault this young man, by what you told
me," he said, struggling to his feet.
" He defended himself, and might have
killed me, had he chosen. Be good
enough to tell me whether he has spoken
the truth, or you."

" He has spoken — the truth," an-
swered the baroness, staring vacantly
about her. Her fright had taken from
her even the faculty of lying. Her
voice was low, but she articulated the
words distinctly. Then, suddenly, she
threw up her hands, with a short, quick
scream, and fell forward, senseless, on
the floor. Nino looked at the count,
and dropped his knife on a table. The
count looked at Nino.

" Sir," said the old gentleman, " I
forgive you for resisting my assault. I
do not forgive you for presuming to
love my daughter, and I will find means
to remind you of the scandal you have
brought on my house." He drew him-
self up to his full height. Nino handed
him his crutch-stick civilly.

" Signor Conte," he said, simply, but
with all his natural courtesy, " I am
sorry for this affair, to which you forced
me, — or rather the Signora Baronessa
forced us both. I have acted foolishly,
perhaps, but I am in love. And per-
mit me to assure "you, sir, that I will
yet marry the Signorina di Lira, if she
consents to marry me."

" By the name of Heaven," swore the
old count, " if she wants to marry a
singer, she shall." He limped to the
door in sullen anger, and went out. Nino
turned to the prostrate figure of the
poor baroness. The continued strain on
her nerves had broken her down, and
she lay on the floor in a dead faint.
Nino put a cushion from ^the lounge
under her head, and rang the bell. The
servant appeared instantly.

" Bring water quickly ! " he cried.
" The signora has fainted." He stood
looking at the senseless figure of the
woman, as she lay across the rich Per-
sian rugs that covered the floor.

" Why did you not bring salts, co-
logne, her maid — run, I tell you ! " he
said to the man, who brought the glass
of water on a gilded tray. He had for-
gotten that the fellow could not be ex-
pected to have any sense. When her

446

A Roman Singer.

[October,

people came at last, he had sprinkled
her face, and she had unconsciously swal-
lowed enough of the water to have some
effect in reviving her. She began to
open her eyes, and her fingers moved
nervously. Nino found his hat, and,
casting one glance around the room that
had just witnessed such strange doings,
passed through the door and went out.
The baroness was left with her servants.
Poor woman ! She did very wrong,
perhaps, but anybody would have loved
her — except Nino. She must have
been terribly shaken, one would have
thought, and she ought to have gone to
lie down, and should have sent for the
doctor to bleed her. But she did noth-
ing of the kind.

She came to see me. I was alone in
the house, late in the afternoon, when
the suu was just gilding the tops of the
houses. I heard the door-bell ring, and
I went to answer it myself. There
stood the beautiful baroness, alone, with
all her dark soft things around her, as
pale as death, and her eyes swollen sad-
ly with weeping. Nino had come home
and told me something about the scene
in the morning, and I can tell you I
gave him a piece of my mind about his
follies.

" Does Professor Cornelio Grandi live
here ? " she asked, in a low, sad voice.

" I am he, signora," I answered.
*' Will you please to come in ? " And
so she came into our little sitting-room,
and sat over there in the old green arm-
chair. 1 shall never -forget it, as long
as I live.

I cannot tell you all she said in that
brief half hour, for it pains me to think
of it. She spoke as though I were her
confessor, so humbly and quietly, — as
though it had all happened ten years
ago. There is no stubbornness in those
tiger women when once they break
down.

She said she was going away ; that
she had done my boy a great wrong, and
wished to make such reparation as she

could, by telling me, at least, the truth.
She did not scruple to say that she had
loved him, nor that she had done every-
thing in her power to keep him ; though
he had never so much as looked at her,
she added pathetically. She wished to
have me know exactly how it happened,
no matter what I might think of her.

"You are a nobleman, count," she
said to me at last, " and I can trust you
as one of my own people, I am sure.
Yes, I know : you have been unfortu-
nate, and are now a professor. But
that does not change the blood. I can
trust you. You need not tell him I
came, unless you wish it. I shall never
see him again. I am glad to have been
here, to see where he lives." She rose,
and moved to go. I confess that the
tears were in -my eyes. -There was a
pile of music on the old piano. There
was a loose .leaf on the top, with his
name written on it. She took it in her
hand, and looked inquiringly at me out
of her sad eyes. I knew she wanted to
take it, and I nodded.

" I shall never see him again, you
know." Her voice was gentle and
weak, and she hastened to the door ;
so that almost before I knew it she
was gone. The srun had left the red-
tiled roofs opposite, and the goldfinch
was silent in his cage. So I sat down
in the chair where she had rested, and
folded my hands, and thought, as I am
always thinking ever since, how I could
have loved such a woman as that; so
passionate, so beautiful, so piteously
sorry for what she had done that was
wrong. Ah me ! for the years that are
gone away so cruelly, for the days so
desperately dead ! Give me but one of
those golden days, and I would make the
pomp of emperors ridiculous. A greater
man than I said that, — a man over the
seas, with a great soul, who wrote in a
foreign tongue, but spoke a language
germane to all human speech. But even
he cannot bring back one of those dear
days. I would give much to have that

1883.]

Heredity.

447

one clay back, when she came and told
me all her woes. But that is impossible.
When they came to wake her in the
morning — the very morning after that
— she was dead in her bed ; the color
gone forever from those velvet cheeks,

the fire quenched out of those passionate
eyes, past power of love or hate to re-
kindle. Requiescat in pace, and may
God give her eternal rest and forgive-
ness for all her sins. Poor, beautiful,

erring woman

F. Marion Crawford.

HEREDITY.

MR. FRANCIS GALTON'S new book
of inquiries into the constitution of the
human faculties reminds us afresh of
the remarkable contribution which this
powerful thinker has made to positive
philosophy.

In the quietest way, without any
flourish of trumpets or pretensions to
cosmic knowledge, he has laid down
laws which profoundly affect not only
science, but practical morality. And it
has all been done with so little assump-
tion that we have not resented it, or
even been quite conscious of the injury.
Like the rival smith upon whom Sieg-
fried tried his thrice-forged sword, we
do not realize the wounds in our old be-
liefs, until they fall suddenly to pieces
before our eyes. And in the present ar-
ticle we shall try to develop more fully
than he has done the^consequences which
must follow from this new law.

Many persons have tried to over-
throw portions of the theory of evolution,
and in the several forms which Spencer,
Darwin, and Haeckel gave it it has cer-
tainly had some severe blows ; but the
contribution of Mr. Gallon to this the-
ory was so cautiously and solidly pre-
pared that no one has pointed out any
serious flaw in it, and few have been
able to add much to it. Mr. George
Darwin, the late Mr. R. L. Dugdale,
and Mr. F. M. Holland (not Hollond,
as Mr. Galton misspells the name) have
carried the investigation a little further,
but most of the works on the subject

are little more than collections of an-
ecdotes and fancies ; and in its main
aspects it stands as Galton shaped it, a
simple and modest theory, but bearing
consequences to humanity much more
important than those suggested by Dar-
win or Spencer. Of the rhythmic in-
tegration of the latter we hear nothing
from Galton. To him, as to most other
investigators, cosmism has proved a bar-
ren fount. The fierce struggle for exist-
ence described by Darwin takes a modi-
fied and gentler form in Gallon's hands,
for his conclusions go only to changes
in mankind, and do not affect the lines
separating the several species. Within
these narrower bounds his work is very
impressive ; for it seems to prove that
the qualities of men are usually hered-
itary, not accidental, anjl that life is a
prolonged ^'iriculture, in which progress
depends more upon marriage customs
and birth-rates than upon .the institu-
tions on which we are wont to plume
ourselves. This new view brings ethics
almost within the circle of the physical
sciences. Our culture has, indeed, he
thinks, already gotten ahead of our brain
capacity, so that only a small minority
has the mental ability to profit by the
advances which the leaders of thought
have made. Thus, the question of fur-
ther progress is not as to collecting more
intellectual material so much as to prof-
iting by what we already have. We
have the arms of Ulysses, but how few
of us can string his bow !

448

Heredity.

[October,

la this volume Galton examines the
several human faculties in some detail,
in reference to the possible improvement
of mankind, with his former ingenuity
and care, and brings out many curious
facts not at all in accord with common
opinion. For instance, comparing the
sensitivity of different classes of persons
in numerous experiments, he finds that
" men have more delicate powers of dis-
crimination than women ; " that blind
persons do not have any increased acute-
ness of the other senses ; and that there
is no foundation for the reputed keeii-
sightedness of sailors and savages ; the
apparent advantage being due in each
case not to perceiving more, but to more
skillful interpretation of what is per-
ceived. A curious power which he thinks
might be improved by education is that
of calling up at will before the eye
pictures of past scenes, — a power that
few pay any attention to, but which
must be very delightful to all, and very
valuable to great painters and to im-
aginative artists. Spenser, Hawthorne,
and Victor Hugo would not have been
what they were without it. Gallon's
examination into the singular forms in
which many people visualize numbers,
whenever they think of them, and see
them arranged in shapes and even color
with such axiomatic regularity that they
cannot conceive of the potsibility of
doing otherwise, throws new light upon
innate mental peculiarities, and also
upon the danger of using inconceivabil-
ity as a test of truth. His experiments
show plainly the enormous mental dif-
ferences with which we enter the world ;
and if his investigations into the char-
acteristics of twins are to be trusted,
education can do little to alter them.
On this point the answers to his inqui-
ries seem too few and too exaggerated
for quite so sweeping a conclusion ; but
it is all in accord with his main argu-
ment of the necessity of breeding better
men, if we would make a further ad-
vance.

What the future man will be Galton
seeks to determine by his ingenious com-
posite photographs, in which a series of
portraits are merged in one in such a
manner as to give a portrait showing
the common characteristics of all of the
group, freed from the diversities of its
component members. He takes as rep-
resentative of the best English type of
our day some two dozen young men
from the Royal Engineers, and gets a
composite picture of them, very different
from the beefy, heavy British type which
we usually figure to ourselves. The
earnest, straightforward eyes, the strong,
energetic mouth and jaw, seem as much
American as English. This question of
type is especially interesting to him, be-
cause he afterwards argues that future
development must take place in the di-
rection of the best present type of each
race, and that there would be a fright-
ful waste of vital power in trying to ap-
proach a dissimilar one. This national
type is not fixed. Galton thinks that
the English one has changed much with-
in a few generations. u The features of
men painted by and about the time of
Holbein have usually high cheek-bones,
long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank,
dark hair ; " while statistics show that
the English are now a fair and reddish
race, with blue or gray eyes and brown
hair. The tendency to obesity which
appeared early in this century has les-
sened, but the improvement in physique,
he thinks, extends only to the better-
cared-for classes. And similar evidence
could be produced of an analogous
change in New England.

Gallon's experiments in calling ideas
into consciousness support the theory
of unconscious cerebration of Hamilton
and others. Consciousness lights up only
a small part of our mental habitation,
he thinks ; and beyqnd it lies an ante-
chamber filled with ideas, ready to enter
the audience chamber when occasion
offers. Sometimes they crowd in so
quickly that consciousness cannot keep

1883.]

Heredity.

449

track of them all, and loses sight of
part in following the others ; and some-
times the guiding will which marshals
their order grows weak, and they flit
back and forth in dreamy disconnection
with any external world ; while at other
times no effort can make them enter.
As Lowell says,

" Hopeless my mental pump I try :
The boxes hiss, the tube is dry."

But when we are at our best the ante-
chamber of the ready talker is full of
stories and witticisms ; that of the sci-
entist is crowded with facts and theories
in his specialty, and the artist's with
images of beauty. Here again we touch
these inborn mental powers. We may
pack the antechamber with memorized
facts and open wide the doors, but only
innate ability can keep them alive and
fruitful. It is their growth and multi-
plication out of sight upon which origi-
nality depends.

When the court of conscience is held,
the precedents which guide it come from
these remote chambers, — ancestral heir-
looms whose force it is painful to dis-
pute. This view of conscience as a sort
of common law court, determined by the
customs of our forefathers, seems more
natural to an Englishman than to a
foreigner, who demands an authorized
code. This hereditary conscience, which
both the positivists and evolutionists
accept, seems, however, entirely insuffi-
cient to many thinkers. Frances Power
Cobbe, in a recent magazine essay, com-
plains that it makes conscience " a
crowned and sceptred impostor ; . . . the
echo of the rude cheers and hisses . . .
of barbarous forefathers, who howled
for joy round the wicker images where-
in the Druids burned their captives, and
yelled under every scaffold of the mar-
tyrs of truth and liberty ; . . . the shift-
ing sand heaps of our ancestral impres-
sions, — uay, rather let us say the men-
tal kitchen-middens of generations of
savages." Miss Cobbe is very eloquent,
but Gallon would not admit her logic.

VOL. LII. — NO. 312. 29

It would be as just to call the common
law the refuse heap of savages as to
apply that description to inherited con-
science ; for each represents (and the
latter far more justly) the best that
former generations were able to appro-
priate from the teachings of life. And
there are even some advantages in the
positive view, for it sanctions growth,
and looks to science for correction.

Mr. Galton is not blind to " the re-
ligious significance of the doctrine of
evolution." He sees clearly that it in-
volves a new moral law and a new at-
titude toward heaven. His invariable
laws do not agree with miraculous an-
swers to prayer, and he pauses to ap-
ply statistics to show that such answers
are not given. The future man which
his teaching aims at producing is not at
all the timid, toothless, hairless, slow-
moving creature which a lively essayist
has recently described as our destiny.
Such a violation of the law of natural
selection would speedily fall back be-
fore a more vigorous rival. The type
that Galton's viriculture aims at com-
bines the beauty of an athlete with the
mental brilliancy of a Greek and the
indomitable energy of a Norseman, but
it is more pagan than Christian.

"The sunburnt world a man will breed,"

says Emerson ; but he will be readier, if
Galton is right, to face nature and hu-
man nature sword in hand than throw
himself for help

" Upon the great world's altar stairs,
Which slope through darkness up to God."

This new attitude of science will have
to be faced. It is no trifling over de-
tails, like the length of the days of the
Mosaic creation, nor does it soar into
abstruse metaphysics. It goes directly
to the root of that brotherhood of man
and self-surrender to God which have
ever been the glory of Christianity.
The morality with which it replaces it,
in spite of some evident practical ad-
vantages, is often shocking to our high-
est instincts. It is a matter of immense

450

Heredity.

[October,

and indeed vital importance ; for, if Gal-
ton is right, the progress of civilization
turns upon our decision. If the Teu-
tonic race, frotn which modern civiliza-
tion radiates, should decay, as other no-
ble races have done in the past, it may
be centuries before another is produced
that can fill its place.

We must bear clearly in mind that
if Gal ton's arguments are to be trusted
two things are necessary, in order that
civilization may move steadily forward :
there must be a selection of the best,
and a transmission of their qualities to
their descendants. Neither of these is
of much use without the other, and they
seldom go on properly together. Where
selection works, as it often does at this
day, to attract the most vigorous to the
great cities, aud reward them with suc-
cess, accompanied with desires, cares,
and vices, which delay their marriage
and prevent their having children, it is
positively injurious to the community.
There is some immediate gain, more
money made or books written ; but the
next generation is drawn from poorer
sources, and, if the process goes far
enough, decay must set in. We must
remember how often great nations have
begun to rot in the height of their pros-
perity. We see Athens full of men of
marvelous genius ; but they do not mar-
ry, and at last their places are filled by
slaves, retaining the Pyrrhic dance with-
out the Pyrrhic phalanx. We see Rome,
with a greater vitality, rising to be the
mistress of the world, but after a time
her close family ties are sapped by lux-
ury, and the same decay sets in. Her
farms are depopulated and her fields
unfilled. She calls in barbarians to fill
her ranks, and falls before them from
sheer exhaustion. The Ottoman em-
pire has gone through the same changes;
and the danger is a threatening one to
us to-day. In Australia and our own
great West the English race multiplies
apace ; but in New England the old fam-
ilies are dying out, and it is plainly fall-

ing back before the more prolific Celt;
and in the South the blacks are multi-
plying nearly twice as fast as the whites,
so that in another century, instead of
being only half as numerous, they will
have become two to one. Galton in-
sists that the sole way to move forward
without an enormous waste of life is to
quietly replace the feebler race by the
better one, and it will not do for us to
do the opposite. To raise the weak to
the height of the stronger could only be
accomplished by a frightful sacrifice of
life in the necessary dark ages of selec-
tion ; and the process would be terribly
wasteful if successful, since the same
forces, if applied to the better material,
would produce a better result without
this misery. It is not a question of edu-
cation, but of stock. Churches, colleges,
and art galleries are the signs of in-
tellectual power. They ornament and
train it, but they do not produce the
raw material. Physical decay is little
affected by religion or art ; and the in-
stitutions of a nation are often at their
best after it has passed its prime.

The necessary natural selection no
longer, however, requires the merciless
starvation and slaughter involved in its
operation upon the lower animals. We
must have that free competition in which
the stronger win the commanding posi-
tion which is their due ; but if we can
insure the fertility of the better portion,
and the comparative sterility of the
meaner part, of a community, it is no
longer essential to destroy the deformed
or diseased, or embitter their existence
by hardships, for in the course of time
their strains will die out. Galton does
not dispute the much-discussed pressure
of population upon the means of sub-
sistence which Mai thus urged, but the
question takes a new shape to him ; for
the misery, rightly understood, is the
path of progress. He does not at all
accept that philosopher's remedy of de-
laying marriage until late in life, be-
cause the argument would appeal only

1883.]

Heredity.

451

to the more intelligent class, and the
restriction would therefore be applied
where multiplication is desired, while
the unfortunate increase of the lower
class would be unchecked.

Even in this mild and modified form,
however, it is still a relentless struggle
for existence. It is utterly opposed to
cooperation or communism, for the sift-
ing process of individual competition is
the only efficient mode of recruiting the
leading class. The object of the better
part of the community must be the ele-
vation of their own family and race ; and
this at the best is a broadened egotism,
never reaching Christian altruism.

If we are convinced that the only
way of upraising a race is by securing
the success of its best elements in the
remorseless contest in which the strong-
er shall prosper and hand down their
traits to the next generation, while the
weaker perish without leaving a trace,
then the birth-rate becomes the most
important test of progress, the pulse-
beat of national health ; while in broad-
er issues the war-cry of the races will
echo with fiercer fury. The primitive
passions for kindred and race are exalted
again to the highest dignity ; and thus
we call to our aid two powerful emo-
tions, which the last century frowned
upon, but which are yet among the most
potent that sway mankind, — family
pride and patriotism. With Spartan
firmness we are told to revive some-
what of Spartan principle, and consider
in our laws the inheritance of disposi-
tions as well as estates. This is no
scheme of liberty, equality, and fraterni-
ty. Personal freedom is fettered with
new duties to the community, universal
brotherhood is replaced by the narrow
tie of blood, and equality must yield to
claims of birth. It has indeed a strong
savor of aristocracy, though it is the
aristocracy of inherited worth, not tradi-
tion or wealth.

It is not difficult to find striking in-
stances of dangt-rous violations of this

law. Gallon dwells upon the evils of a
celibate priesthood, which long sterilized
the most intellectual element in the com-
munity ; and he attributes to this much
of the midnight blackness of the dark
ages. He points out that the restric-
tions upon marriage which until lately
encumbered the English college fellow-
ships were equally bad. Indeed, his ar-
gument points at bestowing them only
upon heads of families ; and perhaps the
same principle might apply to all gov-
ernment offices. He urges the impor-
tance of charities giving dowries to de-
serving unportioned girls, and would
look with severe reprobation upon our
custom of helping sons to establish them-
selves in business, while daughters re-
ceive very little, in proportion, when
they marry. He would no doubt think
it a plain duty for parents to make sure
of homes for their children, and would
frown at the current morality which
makes marriage a mere matter of indi-
vidual fancy or passion, and shrinks
from the clutch of baby fingers. The
man of health and ability who does not
become a father is little better than a
wrong-doer, from Gallon's point of view,
though ignorant, perhaps, of the barren-
ness of his buried talent : and the whole
burden of his scheme is strongly against
the American ideal of home life, with
its independent members so slightly
bound to each other.

Equally iraporlanl inferences may be
drawn as lo the treatment of criminals.
The class is generally infertile, but such
instances as the Jukes family, with its
five prolific generations of criminals and
paupers, show the danger. Imprison-
menl for life, or exile to a penal colony,
where there is no intermixture of the
sexes, would often be necessary ; for crime
becomes a disease, to be stamped out
like the cattle plague. Pauperism would
have much of the same character, and
indiscriminale charity would acquire a
new degree of wrongfulness. Indeed, the
whole field of private charity and out-

452

Heredity.

[October,

door relief would be much restricted,
with a corresponding extension of the
poorhouse system. The reception of
paupers and criminals from abroad be-
comes a wrong to the next generation,
whose patrimony is squandered. The
Chinese may increase our wealth, but
wealth is not the object of living. It
sounds fine in a Fourth of July oration
to talk of America as the asylum for
the oppressed of all nations, but it is
wicked folly from this scientific point of
view. These conclusions must appear
harsh to those who would foster the
negro and Indian ; for Gallon's law is
squarely across their path, and the soon-
er they die quietly out the better : and
to assist them to multiply becomes as
wrong as the keeping the filthy and ef-
fete Turk in Europe for the sake of en-
feebling Russia. In order to insure the
triumph of the superior race, war will
sometimes be a moral duty, and a stand-
ing army can hardly be avoided, either
by the victor, or by those inferior races
who object to being too hastily hustled
out of the way. Such an army, if it took
away from home life the flower of the
people, might be a frightful curse, even
if its career were a series of victories
like those of the great Napoleon. On
the other hand, a uniform conscription,
from which, after service of a year or
two, all persons who had the average
amount of health and ability were trans-
ferred to a reserve corps called out only
in emergencies, might be a spur to na-
tional progress, though the morale of
the permanent part of the army would
of course be very low.

Imperfect as this brief sketch is of the
new psychology and the consequences
which seem justly to flow from it, it is
pretty plain tliat it involves a new eth-
ical code, and a very militant and posi-
tive one. We are not prepared to go
quite as far as the speaker in a late Eng-
lish magazine dialogue, who says, I am

emancipated and elevated by positivism,
" but I have not yet attained to being a
hypocrite ; of daring to pretend to my
own soul that this belief of ours, this
truth, is not bitter and abominable, arid
and icy, to our hearts." This aridity and
iciness which seem so abominable to
Vernon Lee come mainly from the relig-
ious belief or unbelief associated with
heredity in the minds of most positiv-
ists. It is not necessary, however, that
the followers of Galton should accept the
pantheism which their teacher avows;
and an investigation which shows us
how to elevate mankind can never be
really opposed to religion. Separating
it from religious views, upon which it is
not dependent, we can see that this new
eugenic code is a definite, practical, and
fertile one, which avoids the extremes
which threaten life most, the fiery com-
munism below and the frigid indiffer-
ence above. It is intensely alive in a
proud English way. It is not a religion,
but it might be a banner to fight under
and conquer by.

But with all this we must confess that
it is bitterly opposed to our most cher-
ished instincts, our purest aspirations.
For eighteen hundred years our warm-
est sympathies have been given to the
weak and down-trodden, and we look
ever upward for relief from the bloody
conflict in which they have been over-
thrown. Instinctively we turn to coop-
eration and charity for aid, and cry out
against the remorseless strength that re-
fuses' mercy to the vanquished in the
bitter struggle of life. The beatitudes
are still our creed, and still we look for
relief from all this turmoil and sorrow
in the tender care of a father who never
forgets the weakest of his children. But
there is no sanction for this alleviating
providence in Gallon's remorseless law.
It claims to be only common sense, but
its terrible VCR victis is a knell of utter
destruction to all but the victor race.
Henry W. Holland.

1883.]

En Province.

453

EN PROVINCE.

VI.

FROM POITIERS TO CARCASSONNE.

IT is an injustice to Poitiers to ap-
proach her by night, as I did some three
hours after leaving La Rochelle ; for
what Poitiers has of best, as they would
say at Poitiers, is the appearance she
presents to the arriving stranger who
puts his head out of the window of the
train. I gazed into the gloom from
such an aperture before we got into the
station, for I remembered the impres-
sion received on another occasion ; but
I saw nothing save the universal night,
spotted here and there with an ugly
railway-lamp. It was only as I depart-
ed, the following day, that I assured
myself that Poitiers still makes some-
thing of the figure she ought on the
summit of her considerable hill. I have
a kindness for any little group of towers,
any cluster of roofs and chimneys, that
lift themselves from an eminence over
which a long road ascends in zigzags ;
such a picture creates for the moment a
presumption that you are in Italy, and
even leads you to believe that if you
mount the winding road you will come
to an old town-wall, a mass of creviced
brown ness, and puss under a gateway
surmounted hy the arms of a mediaeval
despot. Why I should find it a pleasure,
in France, to imagine myself in Italy
is more than I can say ; the illusion has
never lasted long enough to be analyzed.
From the bottom of its perch Poitiers
looks large and high ; and indeed, the
evening I reached it, the interminable
climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had
selected, which I found at the station,
gave me the measure of its commanding
position. This hotel, " mngnifique con-
struction oruee de statues," as the Guide-

Joanne, usually so reticent, takes the
trouble to announce, has an omnibus,
and, I suppose, has statues, though I
did n't perceive them ; but it has very
little else save immemorial accumula-
tions of dirt. It is magnificent, if you
will, but it is not even relatively proper ;
and a dirty inn has always seemed to
me the dirtiest of human things — it
has so many opportunities to betray
itself.

Poitiers covers a large space, and is
as crooked and straggling as you please ;
but these advantages are not accom-
panied with any very salient features or
any great wealth of architecture. Al-
though there are few picturesque houses,
however, there are two or three curious
old churches. Notre Dame la Grande,
in the market-place, a small Roman-
esque structure of the twelfth century,
has a most interesting and venerable ex-
terior. Composed, like all the churches
of Poitiers, of a light brown stone with a
yellowish tinge, it is covered with primi-
tive but ingenious sculptures, and is re-
ally an impressive monument. Within,
it has lately been daubed over with the
most hideous decorative painting that
was ever inflicted upon passive pillars
and indifferent vaults. This battered
yet coherent little edifice has the touch-
ing look that resides in everything su-
premely old : it has arrived at the age
at which such things cease to feel the
years ; the waves of time have worn its
edges to a kind of patient dullness ; there
is something mild and smooth, like the
stillness, the deafness, of an octogena-
rian, even in its rudeness of ornament,
and it has become insensible to differ-
ences of a century or two. The cathe-
dral interested me much less than Our
Lady the Great, and I have not the
spirit to go into statistics about it. It
is not statistical to say that the cathe-

454

En Province.

[October,

dral stands half-way down the hill of
Poitiers, in a quiet and grass - grown
place, with an approach of crooked lanes
and blank garden - walls, and that its
most striking dimension is the width
of its fa$ade. This width is extraordi-
nary, but it fails, somehow, to give no-
bleness to the edifice, which looks with-
in (Murray makes the remark) like a
large public hall. There are a nave
and two aisles, the latter about as high
as the nave ; and there are some very
fearful modern pictures, which you may
see much better than you usually see
those specimens of the old masters that
lurk in glowing side-chapels, there be-
ing no fine old glass to diffuse a kindly
gloom. The sacristan of the cathedral
showed me something much better than
all this bright bareness ; he led me a
short distance out of it to the small
Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most
curious object at Poitiers. It is an
early Christian chapel, one of the earli-
est in France ; originally, it would seem,
that is, in the sixth or seventh century,
a baptistery, but converted into a church
while the Christian era was still com-
paratively young. The Temple de Saint-
Jean is therefore a monument even
more venerable than Notre Dame la
Grande, and that numbness of age which
I imputed to Notre Dame ought to re-
side in still larger measure in its crude
and colorless little walls. I call them
crude, in spite of their having been
baked through by the centuries, only
because, although certain rude arches
and carvings are let into them, and they
are surmounted at either end with a
small gable, they have (so far as I can
remember) little fascination of surface.
Notre Dame is still expressive, still pre-
tends to be alive ; but the Temple has
delivered its message, and is completely
at rest. It retains a kind of atrium, on
tlu; level of the street, from which you
descend to the original floor, now un-
covered, but buried for years under a
false bottom. A semicircular apse was,

apparently at the time of its conver-
sion into a church, thrown out from the
east wall. In the middle is the cavity
of the old baptismal font. The walls
and vaults are covered with traces of
•extremely archaic frescoes, attributed, I
believe, to the twelfth century. These
vague, gaunt, staring fragments of fig-
ures are, -to a certain extent, a reminder
of some of the early Christian churches
in Rome ; they even faintly recalled
to me the great mosaics of Ravenna.
The Temple de Saint-Jean has neither
the antiquity nor the completeness of
those extraordinary monuments, nearly
the most impressive in Europe ; but,
as one may say, it is very well for Poi-
tiers.

Not far from it, in a lonely corner
which was animated for the moment by
the vociferations of several old women
who were selling tapers, presumably for
the occasion of a particular devotion, is
the graceful Romanesque church erected
in the twelfth century to Saint Radegon-
de ; a lady who found means to be a saint
even in the capacity of a Merovingian
queen. It bears a general resemblance
•to Notre Dame la Grande, and, as I re-,
member it, is corrugated in somewhat
the same manner with porous-looking
carvings ; but I confess that what I
chiefly recollect is the row of old women
sitting in front of it, each with a tray of
waxen tapers in her lap, and upbraiding
me for my neglect of the opportunity to
offer such a tribute to the saint. I
know not whether this privilege is oc-
casional or constant; within the church
there was no appearance of a festival,
and I see that the name day of Saint
Radegonde occurs in August, so that
the importunate old women sit there
always, perhaps, and deprive of its pro-
priety the epithet I just applied to
this provincial corner. In spite of the
old women, however, I suspect that tha
place is lonely ; and indeed it is perhaps
the old women that have made the deso-
lation.

1883.]

En Province.

455

The lion of Poitiers, in the eyes of
the natives, is doubtless the Palais de
Justice, in the shadow of which the
statue -guarded hotel, just mentioned,
erects itself ; and the gem of the court-
house, which has a prosy modern front,
with pillars and a high flight of steps,
is the curious salle-des-pas-perdus, or
central hall, out of which the different
tribunals open. This is a feature of
every French courthouse, and seems
the result of a conviction that a palace
of justice — the French deal in- much
finer names than we — should be in
some degree palatial. The great hall
at Poitiers has a long pedigree, as its
walls date back to the twelfth century,
and its open wooden roof, as well as the
remarkable trio of chimney-pieces at
the left end of the room as you enter,
to the fifteenth. The three tall fire-
places, side by side, with a delicate- gal-
lery running along the top of them, con-
stitute the originality of this ancient
chamber, and make one think of the
groups that must formerly have gath-
ered there — of all the wet boot-soles,
the trickling doublets, the stiffened fin-
gers, the rheumatic shanks, that must
have been presented to such an incom-
parable focus of heat. To-day, I am
afraid, these mighty hearths are forever
cold ; justice is probably administered
with the aid of a modern calorifere, and
the walls of the palace are perforated
with regurgitating tubes. Behind and
above the gallery that surmounts the
three fireplaces are high gothic windows,
the tracery of which masks, in some
sort, the chimneys ; and in each angle
of this and of the room to the right and
left of the trio of chimneys, is an open-
work spiral staircase, ascending to — I
forget where ; perhaps to the roof of
the edifice. This whole side of the
salle is very lordly, and seems to ex-
press an unstinted hospitality, to extend
the friendliest of all invitations, to bid
the whole world come and get warm.
It was the invention, of John, Duke of

Berry and Count of Poitou, about 1395.
I give this information on the authority
of the Guide-Joanne, from which source
I gather much other curious learning :
as, for instance, that it was in this build-
ing, when it had surely a very differ-
ent front, that Charles VII. was pro-
claimed king, in 1422; and that here
Joan of Arc was subjected, in 1429, to
the inquisition of certain doctors and
matrons.

The most charming thing at Poitiers
is simply the promenade de Blossac —
a small public garden at one end of the
flat top of the hill. It has a happy look
of the last century (having been arranged
at that period), and a beautiful sweep of
view over the surrounding country, and
especially of the course of the little river
Clain, which winds about a part of the
base of the big mound of Poitiers. The
limit of this dear little garden is formed,
on the side that turns away from the
town, by the rampart erected in the
fourteenth century, and by its big semi-
circular bastions. This rampart, of great
length, has a low parapet ; you look over
it at the charming little vegetable-gar-
dens with which the base of the hill ap-
pears exclusively to be garnished. The
whole prospect is delightful, especially
the details of the part just under tho
walls, at the end of the walk. Here
the river makes a shining twist, which
a painter might have invented, and the
side of the hill is terraced into sev-
eral ledges, — a sort of tangle of small
blooming patches and little pavilions
with peaked roofs and green shutters.
It is idle to attempt to reproduce all
this in words ; it should be reproduced
only in water-colors. The reader, how-
ever, will already have remarked that
disparity in these ineffectual pages,
which are pervaded by the attempt to
sketch without a palette or brushes. He
will doubtless, also, be struck with the
groveling vision which, on such a spot
as the ramparts of Poitiers, peoples it-
self with carrots and cabbages rather

456

En Province.

[October,

than with images of the Black Prince
and the captive king. I am not sure
that in looking out from the promenade
de Blossac you command the old battle-
field ; it is enough that it was not far
off and that the great rout of French-
men poured into the walls of Poitiers,
leaving on the ground a number of the
fallen equal to the little army (eight
thousand) of the invader. I did think
of the battle; I wondered, rather help-
lessly, where it had taken place ; and I
came away (as the reader will see from
the preceding sentence), without finding
out. This indifference, however, was a
result rather of a general dread of mil-
itary topography than of a want of
admiration of this particular victory,
which I have always supposed to be one
of the most brilliant on record. In-
deed, I should be almost ashamed, and
very much at a loss, to say what light
it was that this glorious day seemed to
me to have left forever on the horizon,
and why the very name of the place had
always caused my blood gently to tingle.
It is carrying the feeling of race to
quite inscrutable lengths when a vague
American permits himself an emotion
because more than five centuries ago,
on French soil, one rapacious French-
man got the better of another. Edward
was a Frenchman as well as John, and
French were the cries that urged each
of the hosts to the fight. French is the
beautiful motto graven round the image
of the Black Prince, as he lies forever
at rest in the choir of Canterbury : a la
mort ne pensai -jemye. Nevertheless,
the victory of Poitiers declines to lose
itself in these considerations ; the sense
of it is a part of our heritage, the joy of
it a part of our imagination, and it filters
down through centuries and migrations
till it -titillates a New Yorker who for-
gets in his elation that he happens at
that moment to be enjoying the hos-
pitality of France. It was something
done, I know not how justly, for Eng-
land, and what was done in the four-

teenth century for England was done
also for New York.

If it was really for the sake of the
Black Prince that I had stopped at
Poitiers (for my prevision of Notre
Dame la Grande and of the little temple
of St. John was of the dimmest), I ought
to have stopped at Angouleme for the
sake of David and Eve Sechard, of Lucien
de Rubempre and of Madame de Barge-
ton, who when she wore a toilette etudiee
sported a Jewish turban ornamented with
an Eastern brooch, a scarf of gauze, a
necklace of cameos, and a robe of " paint-
ed muslin," whatever that may be ; treat-
ing herself to these luxuries out of an
income of twelve thousand francs. The
persons I have mentioned have not that
vagueness of identity which is the mis-
fortune of historical characters ; they are
real, supremely real, thanks to their
affiliation to the great Balzac, who had
invented an artificial reality which was
as much better than the vulgar article
as mock-turtle soup is than the liquid it
emulates. The first time I read Les
Illusions Perdues I should have refused
to believe that I was capable of passing
the old capital of Anjou without alight-
ing to visit the Houineau. But we never
know what we are capable of till we are
tested, as I reflected when I found my-
self looking back at Angouleme from
the window of the train, just after we
had emerged from the long tunnel that
passes under the town. This tunnel
perforates the hill on which, like Poitiers,
Angouleme rears itself, and which gives
it an elevation still greater than that of
Poitiers. You may have a tolerable look
at the cathedral without leaving the rail-
way-carriage ; for it stands just above
the tunnel and is exposed, much fore-
shortened, to the spectator below. There
is evidently a charming walk round the
plateau of the town, commanding those
pretty views of which Balzac gives an
account. But the train whirled me away,

1883.]

En Province.

457

and these are my only impressions. The
truth is that I had no need, just at that
moment, of putting myself into commu-
nication with Balzac ; for opposite to me
in the compartment were a couple of
figures almost as vivid as the actors in
the Comedie Humaine. One of these
was a very genial and dirty old. priest,
and the other was a reserved and con-
centrated young monk — the latter (by
which I mean a monk of any kind) be-
ing a rare sight to-day in France. This
young man, indeed, was mitigatedly mo-
nastic. He had a big brown frock and
cowl, but he had also a shirt and a pair
of shoes ; he had, instead of a hempen
scourge round his waist, a stout leather
thong, and lie carried with him a very
profane little valise. He also read, from
beginning to end, the Figaro, which the
old priest, who had done the same, pre-
sented to him ; and he looked altogether
as if, had he not been a monk, he would
have made a distinguished officer of en-
gineers. When he was not reading the
Figaro he was conning his breviary or
answering, with rapid precision and with
a deferential but discouraging dryness,
the frequent questions of his companion,
who was of quite another type. This
worthy had a bored, good-natured, un-
buttoned, expansive look ; was talkative,
restless, and almost disreputably human.
He was surrounded by a great deal of
small luggage, and had scattered over
the carriage his books, his papers, the
fragments of his lunch, and the contents
of an extraordinary bag, which he kept
beside him — a kind of secular reli-
quary— and which appeared to contain
the odds and ends of a life-time, as he
took from it successively a pair of slip-
pers, an old padlock (which evidently
did n't belong to it), an opera-glass, a
collection of almanacs, and a large sea-
shell, which he very carefully examined.
I think that if he had not been afraid
of the young monk, who was so much
more serious than he, he would have
held the shell to his ear, like a child.

Indeed, he was a very childish and de-
lightful old priest, and his companion
evidently thought him most frivolous.
But I liked him the better of the two.
He was not a country cure", but an
ecclesiastic of some rank, who had seen
a good deal both of the church and of
the world ; and if I too had not been
afraid of his confrere, who read the
Figaro as seriously as if it had been an
encyclical, I should have entered into
conversation with him.

All this while I was getting on to
Bordeaux, where I permitted myself to
spend three days. I am afraid I have
next to nothing to show for them, and
that there would be little profit in lin-
gering on this episode, which is the less
to be justified as I had in former years
examined Bordeaux attentively enough.
It contains a very good hotel — an
hotel not good enough, however, to
keep you there for its own sake. For
the rest, Bordeaux is a big, rich, hand-
some, imposing commercial town, with
long rows of fine old eighteenth-century
houses overlooking the yellow Garonne.
I have spoken of the quays of Nantes
as fine, but those of Bordeaux have a
wider sweep and a still more architec-
tural air. The appearance of such a port
as this makes the Anglo-Saxon tourist
blush for the sordid water-fronts of Liv-
erpool and New York, which, with their
larger activity, have so much more rea-
son to be stately. Bordeaux gives a
great impression of prosperous industries
and suggests delightful ideas, images of
prune-boxes and bottled claret. As the
focus of distribution of the best wine
in the world, it is indeed a sacred city
— dedicated to the worship of Bacchus
in the most discreet form. The country
all about it is covered with precious
vineyards, sources of fortune to their
owners and of satisfaction to distant
consumers ; and as you look over to the
hills beyond the Garonne you see them,
in the autumn sunshine, fretted with the
rusty richness of this or that immortal

458

En Province.

[October,

clos. But (he principal picture, within
the town, is that of the vast curving
quays, bordered with houses that look
like the hotels of fanners-general of the
last century, and of the wide, tawny riv-
er, crowded with shipping and spanned
by the largest of bridges. Some of
the types on the water-side are of the
sort that arrest a sketcher — figures of
stalwart, brown-faced Basques, such as
I had seen of old in great numbers at
Biarritz, with their loose circular caps,
their white sandals, their air of walking
for a wager. Never was a tougher, a
harder, race. They are not mariners,
nor watermen, but, putting questions of
temper aside, they are the best possible
dock-porters. " II s'y fait un commerce
terrible," a douanier said to me, as he
looked up and down the interminable
docks ; and such a place has indeed
much to say of the wealth, the capacity
for production, of France — the bright,
cheerful, smokeless industry of the won-
derful country which produces above all
the agreeable things of life, and turns
even its defeats and revolutions into
gold. The whole town has an air of
almost depressing opulence, an appear-
ance which culminates in the greatplace
which surrounds the Grand-Theatre —
an establishment in the grandest style,
encircled with columns, arcades, lamps,
gilded cafes. One feels it to be a mon-
ument to the virtue of the well-selected
bottle. If I had not forbidden myself
to linger, I should venture to insist on
this, and, at the risk of being consid-
ered fantastic, trace an analogy between
good claret and the best qualities of
the French mind ; pretend that there
is a taste of sound Bordeaux in all the
happiest manifestations of that fine or-
gan, and that, correspondingly, there is
a touch of French reason, French com-
pleteness, in a glass of Pontet-Canet.
The danger of such an excursion would
lie mainly in its being so open to the
reader to take the ground from under my
feet by saying that good claret does n't

exist. To this I should have no reply
whatever. I should be unable to tell him
where to find it. I certainly did n't
find it at Bordeaux, where I drank a
most vulgar fluid ; and it is of course no-
torious that a large part of mankind is
occupied in vainly looking for it. There
was a great pretense of putting it for-
ward at the Exhibition which was going
on at Bordeaux at the time of my visit,
an " exposition philomathique," lodged
in a collection of big, temporary build-'
ings in the Allees d'Orleans, and re-
garded by the Bordelais for the moment
as the most brilliant feature of their
city. Here were pyramids of bottles,
mountains of bottles, to say nothing of
cases and cabinets of bottles. The con-
templation of these shining embank-
ments was of course not very convinc-
ing ; and indeed the whole arrangement
struck me as a high impertinence. Good
wine is not an optical pleasure, it is
an inward emotion ; and if there was
a chamber of degtistation on the prem-
ises I failed to discover it. It was not
in the search for it, indeed, that I spent
half an hour in this bewildering bazaar.
Like all " expositions," it seemed to me
to be full of ugly things, and gave one
a portentous idea of the quantity of
rubbish that man carries with him on
his course through the ages. Such an
amount of luggage for a journey after all
so short ! There were no individual ob-
jects ; there was nothing but dozens and
hundreds, all machine-made and expres-
sionless, in spite of the repeated grimace,
the conscious smartness, of " the last
new thing," that was stamped on all of
them. The fatal facility of the French
article becomes at last as irritating as
the refrain of a popular song. The poor
" Indiens Galibis " struck me as really
more interesting — a group of stunted
savages who formed one of the attrac-
tions of the place, and were confined in
a pen in the open air, with a rabble of
people pushing and squeezing, hanging
over the barrier, to look at them. They

1883.]

En Province.

459

had no grimace, no pretension to be new,
no desire to catch your eye. They
looked at their visitors no more than if
they had been so many sunbeams, and
seemed ancient, indifferent, terribly
bored.

in.

There is much entertainment in the
journey through the wide, smiling gar-
den of Gascony ; I speak of it as I took
it in going from Bordeaux to Toulouse.
It is the south, quite the south, and had
for the present narrator its full measure
of the charm he is always determined
to find in countries that may even by
courtesy be said to appertain to the sun.
It was, moreover, the happy and genial
view of these mild latitudes, which,
heaven knows, often have a dreariness
of their own ; a land teeming with corn
and wine, and speaking everywhere
(that is, everywhere the phylloxera had
not laid it waste) of wealth and plen-
ty. The road runs constantly near the
Garonne, touching now and then its
slow, brown, rather sullen stream, a sul-
leuness that incloses great dangers and
disasters. The traces of the horrible
floods of 1875 have disappeared, arid
the land smiles placidly enough while
it waits for another immersion. Tou-
louse, at the period I speak of, was up
to its middle (and in places above it) in
water, and looks still as if it had been
thoroughly soaked — as if it had faded
and shriveled with a long steeping. The
fields and copses, of course, are more
forgiving. The railway line follows
as well the charming Canal du Midi,
which is as pretty as a river, barring the
straightness, and here and there occu-
pies the foreground, beneath a screen of
dense, tall trees, while the Garonne
takes a larger and more irregular course
a little way beyond it. People who are
fond of canals — and, speaking from the
pictorial stand-point, I hold the taste to
be most legitimate — will delight in this
admirable specimen of the class, which
has a very interesting history, not to be

narrated here. On the other side of the
road (the left), all the way, runs a long,
low line of hills, or rather one continu-
ous hill, or perpetual cliff, with a straight
top, in the shape of a ledge of rock,
which might pass for a ruined wall. I am
afraid the reader will lose patience with
my habit of constantly referring to the
landscape of Italy, as if that were the
measure of the beauty of every other.
Yet I am still more afraid that I cannot
apologize for it, and must leave it in its
culpable nakedness. It is an idle habit,
but the reader will long since have dis-
covered that this was an idle journey
and that I give my impressions as they
came to me. It came to me, then, that
in all this view there was something
transalpine, with a greater smartness
and freshness and much less elegance
and languor. This impression was oc-
casionally deepened by the appearance,
on the long eminence of which I speak,
of a village, a church, or a chateau,
which seemed to look down at the plain
from over the ruined wall. The per-
petual vines, the bright -faced, flat-
roofed houses, covered with tiles, the
softness and sweetness of the light and
air, recalled the prosier portions of the
Lombard plain. Toulouse itself has a
little of this Italian expression, but not
enough to give a color to its dark, dirty,
crooked streets, which are irregular
without being eccentric, and which, if it
were not for- the superb church of Saint
Sernin, would be quite destitute of mon-
uments.

I have already alluded to the way in
which the names of certain places im-
pose themselves on the mind, and I
must add that of Toulouse to the list
of expressive appellations. It certain-
ly evokes a vision — suggests some-
thing highly meridional. But the city,
it must be confessed, is less pictorial than
the word, in spite of the Place du Cap-
itole, in spite of the quay of the Ga-
ronne, in spite of the curious cloister of
the old museum. What justifies the

460

En Province.

[October,

images that are latent in the word is not
the aspect, but the history, of the town.
The hotel to which the well-advised
traveler will repair stands in a corner of
the Place du Capitole, which is the
heart and centre of Toulouse, and which
bears a vague and inexpensive resem-
blance to Piazza Castello at Turin. The
Capitol, witli a wide modern face, occu-
pies one side, and like the palace at Tu-
rin looks across at a high arcade, under
which the hotels, the principal shops,
and the lounging citizens are gathered.
The shops are probably better than the
Turinese, but the people are not so
good. Stunted, shabby, rather vitiated
looking, they have none of the personal
richness of the sturdy Piedmontese ;
and I will take this occasion to remark
that in the course of a journey of sev-
eral weeks in the French provinces I •
rarely encountered a well-dressed male.
Can it be possible that republics are un-
favorable to a certain attention to one's
boots and one's beard ? I risk this some-
what futile inquiry because the proportion
of neat coats and trousers seemed to be
about the same in France and in my
native land. It was notably lower than
in England and in Italy, and even war-
ranted the supposition that most good
provincials have their chin shaven and
their boots blacked but once a week. I
hasten to add, lest my observation should
appear to be of a sadly superficial char-
acter, that the manners and conversa-
tion of these gentlemen bore (whenever
I had occasion to appreciate them) no
relation to the state of their chin and
their boots. They were almost always
marked by an extreme amenity. At
Toulouse there was the strongest temp-
tation to speak to people, simply for
the entertainment of hearing them re-
ply with that curious, that fascinating
accent of the Languedoc, which appears
to abound in final consonants, and leads
the Toulousains to say bien-g and mai-
son-g, like Englishmen learning French.
It is as if they talked with their teeth

rather than with their tongue. I find
in my note-book a phrase in regard to
Toulouse which is perhaps a little ill-
natured, but which I will transcribe as
it stands. " The oddity is that the place
should be both animated and dull. A
big, brown-skinned population clattering
about in a flat, tortuous town, which
produces nothing whatever that I can
discover. Except the church of Saint
Sernin and the fine old court of the
Hotel d'Assezat, Toulouse has no ar-
chitecture ; the houses are for the most
part of brick, of a grayish-red color,
and have no particular style. The brick-
work of the place is in fact very poor

— inferior to that of the north Ital-
ian towns, and quite wanting in the rich-
ness of tone which this homely material
takes on in the damp climates of the
north." And then my note-book goes
on to narrate a little visit to the Capi-
tol, which was soon made, as the build-
ing was in course of repair and half
the rooms were closed.

IV.

The history of Toulouse is detestable,
saturated with blood and perfidy ; and
the ancient custom of the Floral Games,
grafted upon all sorts of internecine
traditions, seems, with its false pastoral-
ism, its mock chivalry, its display of
fine feelings, to set off rather than to

O *

mitigate these horrors. The society was
founded in the fourteenth century, and
it. has held annual meetings ever since

— meetings at which poems in the fine
old langue d'oc are declaimed and a blush-
ing laureate is chosen. This business
takes place in the Capitol, before the
chief magistrate of the town, who is
known as the capitoul, and of all the
pretty women as well — a class very
numerous at Toulouse. It was impos-
sible to have a finer person than that
of the portress who pretended to show
me the apartments in which the Floral
Games are held : a big, brown, expansive
woman, still in the prime of life, with a

1883.]

En Province.

461

speaking eye, an extraordinary assur-
ance, and a pair of magenta stockings,
which were inserted into the neatest and
most polished little black sabots, and
which, as she clattered up the stairs be-
fore me, lavishly displaying them, made
her look like the heroine of an opera-
bottffe. Her talk was all in w's, </'s, and
d's, and in mute e's strongly accented,
as autre, theatre, splendide — the last
being an epithet she applied to every-
thing the Capitol contained, and espe-
cially to a horrible picture representing
the famous Clemence Isaure, the reput-
ed foundress of the poetical contest,
presiding on one of these occasions. I
wondered whether Clemence Isaure had
been anything like this terrible Toulou-
saine of to-day, who would have been
a capital figure-head for a floral game.
The lady in whose honor the picture I
have just mentioned was painted is a
somewhat mythical personage, and she is
not to be found in the Biographie Uni-
verselle. She is, however, a very grace-
ful myth, and if she never existed her
statue does, at least ; a shapeless effigy,
transferred to the Capitol from the so-
called tomb of Clemence in the old
church of La Daurade. The great hall
in which the Floral Games are held was
encumbered with scaffoldings, and I was
unable to admire the long series of busts
of the bards who have won prizes and the
portraits of all the capitouls of Toulouse.
As a compensation I was introduced to
a big bookcase, filled with the poems
that have been crowned since the days
of the troubadours, a portentous col-
lection, and the big butcher's knife with
which, according to the legend, Henry,
Duke of Montmorency, who had con-
spired against the great cardinal with
Gaston of Orleans and Mary de' Medici,
was, in 1632, beheaded on this spot by
the order of Richelieu. With these ob-
jects the interest of the Capitol was ex-
hausted. The building, indeed, has not
the grandeur of its name, which is a
sort of promise that the visitor will find

some sensible embodiment of the old
Roman tradition that once flourished in
this part of France. It is inferior in
impressiveness to the other three famous
Capitols of the modern world — that of
Rome (if I may call the present struc-
ture modern), and those of Washington
and Albany !

The only Roman remains at Toulouse
are to be found in the museum, a very
interesting establishment, which I was
condemned to see as imperfectly as I
had seen the Capitol. It was being re-
arranged, and the gallery of paintings,
which is the least interesting feature,
was the only part that was not upside
down. The pictures are mainly of the
modern French school, and I remem-
ber nothing but a powerful though dis-
agreeable specimen of Henner, who
paints the human body, and paints it
so well, with a brush dipped in black-
ness ; and, placed among the paintings,
a bronze replica of the charming young
David of Mercie. These things have
been set out in the church of an old
monastery, long since suppressed, and
the rest of the collection occupies the
cloisters. These are two in number; a
small one, which you enter first from
the street, and a very vast and elegant
one beyond it, which with its light
gothic arches and slim columns (of the
fourteenth century), its broad walk, its
little garden with old tombs and statues
in the centre, is by far the most pic-
turesque, the most sketchable, spot in
Toulouse. It must be doubly so when
the Roman busts, inscriptions, slabs and
sarcophagi are ranged along the walls ;
it must indeed, to compare small things
with great, and as the judicious Mur-
ray remarks, bear a certain resemblance
to the Campo Santo at Pisa. But these
things are absent now ; the cloister is a
litter of confusion, and its treasures have
been stowed away, confusedly, in sun-
dry inaccessible rooms. The custodian
attempted to console me by telling me
that when they are exhibited again it

462

En Province.

[October,

will be on a scientific basis, and with an
order and regularity of which they were
formerly innocent. But I was not con-
soled. I wanted simply the spectacle,
the picture, and I did n't care in the
least for the classification. Old Roman
fragments, exposed to light in the open
air, under a southern sky, in a quadran-
gle round a garden, have an immortal
charm simply in their general effect, and
the charm is all the greater when the
soil of the very place has yielded them
up.

My real consolation was an hour I
spent in Saiut-Sernin, one of the noblest
churches iu southern France, and easily
the first among those of Toulouse. This
great structure, a masterpiece of twelfth-
century Romanesque, and dedicated to
St. Saturninus — the Toulousains have
abbreviated — is, I think, alone worth
a journey to Toulouse. What makes
it so is the extraordinary seriousness
of its interior ; no other term occurs
to me as expressing so well the charac-
ter of its clear gray nave. As a gen-
eral thing, I do not favor the fashion of
attributing moral qualities to buildings ;
I shrink from talking about tender por-
ticoes and sincere campanili ; but I
find I cannot get on at all without im-
puting some sort of morality to Saint-
Sernin. As it stands to-day, the church
has been completely restored by Viol-
let-le-Duc. The exterior is of brick,
and has little charm save that of a tower
of four rows of arches, narrowing to-
gether as they ascend. The nave is of
great length and height, the barrel-roof
of stone, the effect of the round arches
and pillars in the triforium especially
fine. There are two low aisles on either
side. The choir is very deep and nar-
row ; it seems to close together, and
looks as if it were meant for intensely
earnest rites. The transepts are most
noble, especially the arches of the sec-
ond tier. The whole church is narrow
for its length, and is singularly complete

and homogeneous. As I say all this, I
feel that I quite fail to give an impres-
sion of its manly gravity, its strong pro-
portions, or of the lonesome look of its
renovated stones as I sat there while
the October twilight gathered. It is
a real work of art, a high conception.
The crypt, into which I was eventually
led captive by an importunate sacristan,
is quite another affair, though indeed
I suppose it may also be spoken of as
a work of art. It is a rich museum
of relics, and contains the head of St.
Thomas Aquinas, wrapped up in a nap-
kin and exhibited in a glass case. The
sacristan took a lamp and guided me
about, presenting me to one saintly rem-
nant after another. The impression
was grotesque, but some of the objects
were contained in curious old cases of
beaten silver and brass ; these things,
at least, which looked as if they had
been transmitted from the early church,
were venerable. There was, however,
a kind of wholesale sanctity about the
place which overshot the mark ; it pre-
tends to be one of the holiest spots in
the world. The effect is spoiled by the
way the sacristans hang about and offer
to take you into it for ten sous — I was
accosted by two and escaped from an-
other — and by the familiar manner in
which yoii pop in and out. This episode
rather broke the charm of Saint-Sernin,
so that I took my departure and went
in search of the cathedral. It was
scarcely worth finding, and struck me
as an odd, dislocated fragment. The
front consists only of a portal, beside
which a tall brick tower, of a later pe-
riod, has been erected. The nave was
wrapped in dimness, with a few scat-
tered lamps. I could only distinguish
an immense vault, like a high cavern,
without aisles. Here and there, in the
gloom, was a kneeling figure ; the whole
place was mysterious and lopsided.
The choir was curtained off ; it appeared
not to correspond with the nave, that
is, not to have the same axis. The only

1883.]

En Province.

463

other ecclesiastical impression I gathered
at Toulouse came to me in the church
of La Daurade, of which the front, on
the quay by the Garonne, was closed
with scaffoldings ; so that one entered
it from behind, where it is complete-
ly masked by houses, through a door
which has at first no traceable connec-
tion with it. It is a vast, high, modern-
ized, heavily decorated church, dimly
lighted at all times, I should suppose,
and enriched by the shades of even-
ing at the time I looked into it. I per-
ceived that it consisted mainly of a large
square, beneath a dome, in the centre
of which a single person — a lady —
was praying with the utmost absorption.
The manner of access to the church
interposed such an obstacle to the outer
profanities that I had a sense of intrud-
ing, and presently withdrew, carrying
with me a picture of the vast, still
interior, the gilded roof, gleaming in
the twilight, and the solitary worshiper.
What was she praying for, and was
she not almost afraid to remain there
alone ?

For the rest, the picturesque at Tou-
louse consists principally of the walk be-
side the Garonne, which is spanned, to
the faubourg of Saint-Cyprien, by a stout
brick bridge. This hapless suburb, the
baseness of whose site is noticeable, lay
for days under the water at the time
of the last inundations. The Garonne
had almost mounted to the roofs of the
houses, and the place continues to pre-
sent a blighted, frightened look. Two
or three persons, with whom I had some
conversation, spoke of that time as a
memory of horror. I have not done
with my Italian comparisons ; I shall
never have done with them. I am
therefore free to say that in the way in
which Toulouse looks out on the Ga-
ronne there was something that re-
minded me vaguely of the way in which
Pisa looks out on the Arno. The red-
faced houses — all of brick — along the
quay have a mixture of brightness and

shabbiness, as well as the fashion of the
open loggia in the top-story. The river,
with another bridge or two, might be
the Arno, and the buildings on the other
side of it — a hospital, a suppressed con-
vent— dip their feet into it with real
southern cynicism. I have spoken of the
old Hotel d'Assezat as the best house
at Toulouse ; with the exception of the
cloister of the museum, it is the only
" bit " I remember. It has fallen from
the state of a noble residence of the six-
teenth century to that of a warehouse
and a set of offices ; but a certain dig-
nity lingers in its melancholy court,
which is divided from the street by a
gateway that is still imposing, and in
which a clambering vine and a red Vir-
ginia-creeper were suspended to the
rusty walls of brick and stone.

The most interesting house at Tou-
louse is far from being the most striking.
At the door of number 50 Rue des Fila-
tiers, a featureless, solid structure, was
found hanging, one autumn evening, the
body of the young Marc-Antoine Galas,
whose ill-inspired suicide was to be* the
first act of a tragedy so horrible. The
fanaticism aroused in the towns -folk
by this incident ; the execution by tor-
ture of Jean Galas, accused as a Prot-
estant of. having hanged his son, who
had gone over to the church of Rome ;
the ruin of the family ; the claustration
of the daughters ; the flight of the wid-
ow to Switzerland ; her introduction to
Voltaire ; the excited zeal of that incom-
parable polemist, and the passionate per-
sistence with which, from year to year,
he pursued a reversal of judgment, till
at last he obtained it, and devoted the
tribunal of Toulouse to execration and
the name of the victims to lasting won-
der and pity — these things form part
of one of the most interesting and touch-
ing episodes of the social history of the
eighteenth century. The story has the
fatal progression, the dark rigidity, of
one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks.
Jean Galas, advanced in life, blameless,

464

En Province.

[October,

bewildered, protesting his innocence, had
been broken on the wheel, and the sight
of his decent dwelling, which brought
home to me all that had been suffered
there, spoiled for me, for half an hour,
the impression of Toulouse.

VI.

I spent but a few hours at Carcas-
sonne ; but those hours had a rounded
felicity, and I cannot do better than
transcribe from my note-book the little
record I made at the moment. Vitiated
as it may be by crudity and incoherency,
it has at any rate the freshness of a
great emotion. This is the best qual-
ity that a reader may hope to extract
from a narrative in which "useful in-
formation " and technical lore even of
the most general sort are completely ab-
sent. For Carcassonne is moving, be-
yond a doubt, and the traveler who, in
the course of a little tour in France, may
have felt himself urged, in melancholy
moments, to say that on the whole the
disappointments are as numerous as the
satisfactions must admit that there can
be nothing better than this.

The country, after you leave Toulouse,
continues to be charming ; the more so
that it merges its flatness in the distant
Cevennes on one side, and on. the other,
far away on your right, in the richer
range of the Pyrenees. Olives and
cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces
on the roofs of houses, soft, iridescent
mountains, a warm yellow light — what
more could the difficult tourist want ?
He left his luggage at the station, warily
determined to look at the inn before
committing himself to it. It was so
evident (even to a cursory glance) that
it might easily have been much better
that he simply took his way to the town,
with the whole of a superb afternoon
before him. When I say the town, I
mean the towns ; there being two at
Carcassonne, perfectly distinct, and each
with excellent claims to the title. They
have settled the matter between them,

however, and the elder, the shrine of
pilgrimage, to which the other is but a
stepping-stone, or even, as I may say,
a humble door - mat, takes the name
of the Cite. You see nothing of the
Cite from the station ; it is masked by
the agglomeration of the ville - basse,
which is relatively (but only relatively)
new. A wonderful avenue of acacias
leads to it from the station — leads past
it, rather, and conducts you to a little
high-backed bridge over the Aude, be-
yond which, detached and erect, a dis-
tinct mediaeval silhouette, the Cite" pre-
sents itself. Like a rival shop, on the
invidious side of a street, it has " no con-
nection "with the establishment across
the way, although the two places are
united (if old Carcassonne may be said
to be united to anything) by a vague
little rustic faubourg. Perched on i(s
solid pedestal, the perfect detachment
of the Cite is what first strikes you.
To take leave, without delay, of the
ville-basse, I may say that the splendid
acacias I have mentioned flung a sum-
merish dusk over the place, in which
a few scattered remnins of stout walls
and big bastions looked venerable and
picturesque. A little boulevard winds
round the town, planted with trees
and garnished with more benches than
I ever saw provided by a soft-hearted
municipality. This precinct had a warm,
lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the peo-
ple sat out-of-doors a great deal, and
wandered about in the stillness of sum-
mer nights. The figure of the elder
town, at the"se hours, must be ghostly
.enough on its neighboring hill. Even
by day it has the air of a vignette
of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor
Hugo. It is almost too perfect — as if it
were an enormous model, placed on a
big green table at a museum. A steep,
paved way, grass-grown like all roads
where vehicles never pass, stretches up
to it in the sun. It has a double cnciente,
complete outer walls and complete in-
ner (these, elaborately fortified, are the

1883.]

En Province.

465

more curious) ; and this congregation
of ramparts, towers, bastions, battle-
ments, barbicans, is as fantastic and ro-
mantic as you please. The approach I
mention hero leads to the gate that
looks toward Toulouse — the Porte de
1'Aude. There is a second, on the other
side, called, I believe, the Porte Nar-
bonnaise, a magnificent gat" flanked
with towers thick and tall, defended by
elaborate outworks ; and these two ap-
ertures alone admit you to the place —
putting aside a small sally-port, pro-
tected by a great bastion, on the quarter
that looks toward the Pyrenees. As a
votary, always, in the first instance, of
a general impression, I walked all round
the outer enceinte ; a process on the
very face of it entertaining. I took to
the right of the Porte de 1'Aude, with-
out entering it, where the old moat has
been filled in. The filling-in of the
moat has created a grassy level at the
foot of the big gray towers, which, rising
at frequent intervals, stretch their stiff
curtain of stone from point to point.
The curtain drops without a fold upon
the quiet grass, which was dotted here
and there with a humble native, dozing
away the golden afternoon. The na-
tives of the elder Carcassonne are all
humble, for the core of the Cite has
shrunken and decayed, and there is little
life among the ruins. A few tenacious
laborers, who work in the neighboring
fields or in the ville-basse, and sundry
octogenarians of both sexes, who are
dying where they have lived, and con-
tribute much to the pictorial effect —
these are the principal inhabitants. The
process of converting the place from an
irresponsible old town into a conscious
" specimen " has of course been attended
with eliminations; the population has,
as a general thing, been restored away. I
should lose no time in saying that res-
toration is the great mark of the Cite.
M. Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will
upon it, put it into perfect order, revived
the fortifications in every detail. I do
VOL. MI. — NO. 312. 30

not pretend to judge the performance,
carried out on a scale and in a spirit
which really impose themselves on the
imagination. Few architects have had
such a chance, and M. Viollet-le-Duc
must have been the envy of the whole
restoring fraternity. The image of a
more crumbling Carcassonne rises in the
mind, and there is no doubt that forty
years ago the place was more affect-
ing. On the other hand, as we see it
to-day, it is a wonderful evocation, and
if there is a great deal of new in the
old, there is plenty of old in the new.
The repaired crenelations, the inserted
patches, of the walls of the outer circle
sufficiently express this commixture. My
walk brought me into full view of the
Pyrenees, which, now that the sun had
begun to sink and the shadows to grow
long, had a wonderful violet glow. The
platform at the base of the walls has a
greater width on this side, and it made
the scene more complete. Two or three
old crones had crawled out of the Porte
Narbonnaise, to examine the advancing
visitor ; and a very ancient peasant, ly-
ing there with his back against a tower,
was tending half-a-dozen lean sheep. A
poor man in a very old blouse, crippled
and with crutches lying beside him, had
been brought out and placed on a stool,
where he enjoyed the afternoon as best
he might. He looked so ill and so pa-
tient that I spoke to him ; found that
his legs were paralyzed and he was
quite helpless. He had formerly been
seven years in the army, and had made
the campaign of Mexico with Bazaine.
Born in the old Cite, he had come back
there to end his days. It seemed strange,
as he sat there, with those romantic
walls behind him and the great picture
of the Pyrenees in front, to think that
he had been across the seas to the far-
away new world, had made part of a
famous expedition, and was now a crip-
ple at the gate of the mediaeval city
where he had played as a child. All
this struck me as a great deal of history

466

En Province.

[October,

for so modest a figure — a poor little
figure that could only just unclose its
palm for a small silver coin. He was
not the only acquaintance I made at
Carcassonne. I had not pursued my
circuit of the walls much further when
I encountered a person of quite another
type, of whom I asked some question
which had just then presented itself,
and who proved to be the very genius
of the spot. He was a sociable son of
the ville-basse, a gentleman, and as I
afterwards learned au employe at the
prefecture — a person, in short, much
esteemed at Carcassonne. (I may say
all this, as he will never read these
pages.) He had been ill for a month,
and in the company of his little dog was
taking his first airing ; in his own phrase
he was amoureux-fou de la Cite — he
could lose no time in coming back to it.
He talked of it, indeed, as a lover, and,
giving me for half an hour the advan-
tage of his company, showed me all the
points of the place. (I speak here al-
ways of the outer enceinte ; you pene-
trate to the inner, which is -the specialty
of Carcassonne, and the great curiosity,
only by application at the lodge of the
regular custodian, a remarkable func-
tionary, who, half an hour later, when I
had been introduced to him by my friend
the amateur, marched me over the forti-
fications with a tremendous accompani-
ment of dates and technical terms.) My
companion pointed out to me in particu-
lar the traces of different periods in the
structure of the walls. There is a por-
tentous amount of history embedded in
them, beginning with Romans and Visi-
goths ; here and there are marks of old
breaches, hastily repaired. We passed
into the town — into that part of it not
included in the citadel. It is the queer-
est and most fragmentary little place in
the world, as everything save the forti-
fications is being suffered to crumble
away, in order that the spirit of M.
Viollet-le-Duc alone may pervade it,
and it may subsist simply as a magnifi-

cent shell. As the leases of the wretched
little houses fall in, the ground is cleared
of them, and a mumbling old woman
approached me in the course of my cir-
cuit, inviting me to condole with her on
the disappearance of so many of the
hovels which in the last few hundred
years (since the collapse of Carcassonne
as a stronghold) had attached themselves
to the base of the walls, in the space
between the two circles. These hab-
itations, constructed of materials taken
from the ruins, nestled there snugly
enough. This intermediate space had
therefore become a kind of street, which
has crumbled in turn, as the fortress has
grown up again. There are other streets
beside, very diminutive and vague, where
you pick your way over heaps of rub-
bish and become conscious of unexpected
faces, looking at you out of windows as
detached as the cherubic heads. The
most definite thing in the place was a
little cafe, where the waiters, I think,
must be the ghosts of the old Visigoths ;
the most definite, that is, after the little
chateau and the little cathedral. Every-
thing in the Cite is little ; you can walk
round the walls in twenty minutes. On
the drawbridge of the chateau, which,
with a picturesque old face, flanking
towers and a dry moat, is to-day simply
a bare caserne, lounged half a dozen sol-
diers, unusually small. Nothing could
be more odd than to see these objects
inclosed in a receptacle which has much
of the appearance of an enormous toy.
The Cite and its population vaguely re-
minded me of an immense Noah's ark.

VII.

Carcassonne dates from the Roman
occupation of Gaul. The place com-
manded one of the great roads into
Spain, and in the fourth centui-y Ro-
mans and Franks ousted each other from
such a point of vantage. In the year
436, Theodoric, king of the Visigoths,
superseded both these parties, and it is
during his occupation that the inner en-

1883.]

En Province.

467

ceinte was raised upon the ruins of the
Roman fortifications. Most of the Visi-
goth towers that are still erect are seat-
ed upon Roman substructions which ap-
pear to have been formed hastily, prob-
ably at the moment of the Frankish
invasion. The authors of these solid
defenses, though occasionally disturbed,
held Carcassonne and the neighboring
country, in which they had established
their kingdom of Septimania, till the
year 713, when they were expelled by
the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an
unillumined period of four centuries, of
which no traces remain. These facts I
derive from a source no more recondite
than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc
— a very luminous description of the
fortifications, which you may buy from
the accomplished custodian. The writer
makes a jump to the year 1209, when
Carcassonne, then forming part of the
realm of the viscounts of Beziers and
infected by the Albigensian heresy, was
besieged, in the name of the Pope, by
the terrible Simon de Montfort and his
army of crusaders. Simon was accus-
tomed to success, and the town suc-
cumbed in the course of a fortnight.
Thirty-one years later, having passed
into the hands of the king of France, it
was again besieged by the young Ray-
mond de Trincavel, the last of the vis-
counts of Beziers ; and of this siege M.
Viollet-le-Duc gives a long and minute
account, which the visitor who has a
head for such things may follow, with
the brochure in hand, on the fortifica-
tions themselves. The young Raymond
de Trincavel, baffled and repulsed, re-
tired at the end of twenty-four days.
Saint Louis and Philip the Bold, in the
thirteenth century, multiplied the de-
fenses of Carcassonne, which was one
of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the
Spanish quarter ; and from this time
forth, being regarded as impregnable,
the place had nothing to fear. It was
not even attacked, and when, in 1355,
Edward the Black Prince marched into

it, the inhabitants had opened the gates
to the conqueror before whom all Lan-
guedoc was prostrate. I am not one of
those who, as I said just now, have a
head for such things, and having ex-
tracted these few facts had made all the
use of M. Viollet-le-Duc's pamphlet of
which I was capable.

I have mentioned that my obliging
friend the amoureux-fou handed me over
to the door-keeper of the citadel. I
should add that I was at first committed
to the wife of this functionary, a stout
peasant-woman, who took a key down
from a nail, conducted me to a postern
door, and ushered me into the presence
of her husband. Having just begun his
rounds with a party of four persons, he
was not many steps in advance. I added
myself perforce to this party, which was
not brilliantly composed, except that two
of its members were gendarmes in full
toggery, who announced in the course of
our tour that they had been stationed
for a year at Carcassonne and had never
before had the curiosity to come up to
the Cite*. There was something brilliant,
certainly, in that. The gardien was an
extraordinarily typical little Frenchman,
who struck me even more forcibly than
the wonders of the inner enceinte ; and
as I am bound to assume, at whatever
cost to my literary vanity, that there is
not the slightest danger of his reading
these remarks, I may treat him as pub-
lic property. With his diminutive stat-
ure and his perpendicular spirit, his
flushed face, expressive, protuberant
eyes, high, peremptory voice, extreme
volubility, lucidity, and neatness of ut-
terance, he reminded me of the gentry
who figure in the revolutions of his na-
tive land. If he was not a fierce little
Jacobin he ought to have been, for I
am sure there were many men of his
pattern on the Committee of Public
Safety. He knew absolutely what he
was about, understood the place thor-
oughly, and constantly reminded his au-
dience of what he himself had done in

468

En Province.

[October,

the way of excavations and reparations.
He described himself as the brother of
the architect of the work actually go-
ing forward (that which has been done
since the death of M. Viollet-le-Duc, I
suppose he meant), and this fact was
more illustrative than all the others. It
reminded me, as one is reminded at
every turn, of the democratic conditions
of French life : a man of the people,
with a wife en bonnet, extremely intelli-
gent, full of special knowledge, and yet
remaining essentially of the people, and
showing his intelligence with a kind of
ferocity, of defiance. Such a personage
helps one to understand the red radical-
ism of France, the revolutions, the barri-
cades, the sinister passion for thrones.
(I do not, of course, take upon myself
to say that the individual I describe —
who can know nothing of the liberties
I am taking with him — is actually de-
voted to these ideals ; I only mean that
many such devotees must have his qual-
ities.) In just the nuance that I have
tried to indicate here, it is a terrible
pattern of man. Permeated in a high
degree by civilization, it is yet untouched
by the desire which one finds in the
Englishman, in proportion as he rises
in the world, to approximate to the fig-
ure of the gentleman ; on the other
hand', a nettete, a faculty of exposition,
such as the English gentleman is rarely
either blessed or cursed with. This
brilliant, this suggestive warden of Car-
cassonne marched us about for an hour,
haranguing, explaining, illustrating, as he
went : it was a complete little lecture,
such as might have been delivered at
the Boston Music Hall, on the manner
in which a first-rate place forte used to
be attacked and defended. Our pere-
grinations made it very clear that Car-
cassonne was impregnable ; it is impos-
sible to imagine, without having seen
them, such refinements of immurement,
such ingenuities of resistance. We
passed along battlements and chemins
de ronde, ascended and descended tow-

ers, crawled under arches, peered out
of loop-holes, lowered ourselves into
dungeons, halted in all sorts of tight
places, while the purpose of something
or other was described to us. It was
very curious, very interesting, above all
it was very pictorial, and involved per-
petual peeps into the little crooked,
crumbling, sunny, grassy, empty Cite.
In places, as you stand upon it, the
great towered and embattled enceinte
produces an illusion ; it looks as if it
were still equipped and defended. One
vivid challenge, at any rate, it 11 ings
down before you ; it calls upon you to
make up your mind on the matter of
restoration. For myself, I have no
hesitation ; I prefer in every case the
ruined, however ruined, to the recon-
structed, however splendid. What is
left is more precious than what is added ;
the one is history, the other is fiction,
and I like the former the better of the
two ; it is so much more romantic.
One is positive, so far as it goes ; the
other fills up the void with things more
dead than the void itself, inasmuch as
they have never had life. After that I
am free to say that the restoration of
Carcassonne is a splendid achievement.
The little custodian dismissed us at last,
after having, as usual, inducted us into
the inevitable repository of photographs.
These photographs are a great nuisance,
all over the Midi. They are exceeding-
ly bad, for the most part ; and the worst,
those in the form of the hideous little
album panorama, are thrust upon you
at every turn. They are a kind of tax
that you must pay ; the best way is to
pay to be let off. It was not to be de-
nied that there was a relief in separating
from our accomplished guide, whose
manner of imparting information re-
minded me of the energetic process by
which I have seen mineral waters bot-
tled. All this while the afternoon had
grown more lovely ; the sunset had
deepened, the horizon of hills grown
purple ; the mass of the Canigou became

1883.]

Persepolis.

469

more delicate, yet more distinct. The
day had so far faded that the interior of
the little cathedral was wrapped in twi-
light, iuto which the glowing windows
projected something of their color. This
church has high beauty and value, but
I will spare the reader a presentation of
details which I myself had no opportuni-
ty to master. It consists of a Roman-
esque nave of the end of the eleventh
century, and a gothic choir and tran-
septs of the beginning of the fourteenth;
and, shut up in its citadel like a pre-
cious casket in a cabinet, it seems — or
seemed at that hour — to have a sort
of double sanctity. After leaving it
and passing out of the two circles of
walls, I treated myself, in the most in-
fatuated manner, to another walk round

the Cite. It is certainly this general
impression that is most striking — the
impression from outside, where the
whole place detaches itself at once from
the landscape. In the warm southern
dusk it looked more than ever like a
city in a fairy-tale. To make the thing
perfect, a white young moon, in its first
quarter, came out and hung just over
the dark silhouette. It was hard to
come away — to incommode one's self
for anything so vulgar as a railway-
train ; I would gladly have spent the
evening in revolving round the walls of
Carcassonne. But I had in a measure
engaged to proceed to Narbonne, and
there was a certain magic in that name
which gave me strength — Narbonne,
the richest city in Roman Gaul.

Henry James.

PERSEPOLIS.

HERE is the royalty of ruin : naught
Of later pomp the desert stillness mars ;
Alone these columns face the fiery sun,
Alone they watch beneath the midnight stars.

Forests have sprung to life in colder climes,
Grown stalwart, nourished many a savage brood,
Ripened to green age, fallen to decay,
Since this gray grove of marble voiceless stood.

Not voiceless once, when, like a rainbow woof
Veiling the azure of the Persian sky,
Curtains of crimson, violet, and gold
In folds of priceless texture hung on high !

And what have sun and shadow left to us ?
What glorious picture in this marble frame
Ever, as soundless centuries roll by,
Gives this lone mount its proudest, dearest fame ?

The sculptured legend on yon polished cliff
Has lost its meaning. Persia, gray -and old,
Upon her bed of roses sleeps away
The ages, all her tales of triumph told.

470

Cream-White and Crow-Black.

[October,

But here Queen Esther stood ; and still the world,
In vision rapt, beholds that peerless face,
When, with the smile which won a throne, she gave
Joy to her king and freedom to her race.

Frances L. Mace.

CREAM-WHITE AND CROW-BLACK.

THERE is a rattle and a rush and a
roar; then a rough little home-made
wagon rolls into sight. The rude wheels
are cut out of plank, with holes in
the middle screeching for axle-grease;
a long white-oak sapling serves for a
tongue, to which are harnessed, with odd
pieces of chain and hickory bark, four
little kinky-headed negroes. Perched
upon the precarious seat of honor sits
a bare-legged, freckle-faced, bright-eyed
boy, cracking a knotty leathern whip,
and shouting like mad. In a cloud of
dust, bouncing along, pattering, puffing,
snorting, blowing, this cart clatters up to
the gray stone steps of a great, squatty,
gable-roofed house, bristling with snub-
nosed dormer windows, and porch-room
enough to seat the Virginia legislature.

Backward ! turn backward a few
decades, O Time! and this freckle-faced
boy may be George Washington return-
ing from a raid on the chincapin thick-
ets of Westmoreland ; Thomas Jeffer-
son with a string of eels and catfish
from the muddy Rivanna at Shadwell ;
a learned professor of the University of
Virginia ; or any one of those fine-look-
ing, gray-headed old gentlemen you are
certain to encounter in the streets of
Charlottes ville.

The small driver leaps off at the front
door, while the equipage rattles off to
the rear, and the foaming chargers are
expected to unhitch themselves and wait,
while Mars' Tom partakes of his eleven-
o'clock lunch of hot ash-cake and butter-
milk, and rests from his arduous labors
of the morning.

" Ain't mammy got my lunch ready
'n' I 'm hungry as a bear 'n' me 'n'
Joe 'n' Jake 'n' Jessie started up a
old har 'n' found a settinhennes' 'n' all
of 'm was rotten 'n' killed a snake 'n'
had mo' fun 'n' nuff 'n' we all was settin'
in th' bacca patch playing mumble-peg
'n' up come ole Dick th' overseer's son
'n' he reckon we all better stop scratchin'
in th' bacca patch 'n' Jake he hollered out

" ' Ole Mister Dick,
Stick stet stick,
Highboy lowboy,
Skinny-head Dick,'

'n' ole Dick he bet he was n't goin' to
stan' no nigger sassin' him like that 'n'
throwed a rock 'n' like to bust Jake's
head open 'n' me 'n' Joe jumps on 'n'
we all had it a roll in' 'n' a pitchin' 'n'
where 's mammy with my lunch 'n' I 'm
hungry as a bear." All this rigmarole
with never a stop or a punctuation mark ;
and yet such boys learned to talk after
a while, and won for themselves name
and fame.

It is Virginia's proud boast to have
produced Patrick Henry, the tongue ;
Thomas Jefferson, the pen ; and George
Washington, the sword of the Revolu-
tion; but, undoubtedly, as boys, they
played with the little " niggers," dom-
ineered over them, talked the same
lingo, and held the rules of grammar
in very low esteem.

Presently, " mammy," who is crow-
black, in a bright red turban dotted
with squares of yellow spots, comes
with a brown pitcher of foaming fresh
buttermilk and platter of hot brown ash-

1883.]

Cream -White and Crow-Black.

471

cakes, to call the children to their mid-
day repast ; with some difficulty prevail-
ing upon impatient Mars' Tom to wash
from his grimy hands and face the river
mud and odor of catfish and fishing-
worms.

" No, honey, youse not a gwine to
eat none of dis milk, — not wid dem
hands ; not if I knows it. Youse a dis-
grace to your brudders and sisters, wid
der hands and faces like lilies." Rather
brown lilies are the faces and hands of
Kitty and little Nan, Roger and Rupert,
but they shine by comparison ; and Mars'
Tom meekly laves in the tin pan, and
wipes on the roller towel, which hangs
in the back porch from one year's end
to the other.

There was no "going back on mam-
my." Papa was apt to be reading the
Whig, and if you broke rules laughed,
and said, " Boys will be boys." Mamma
was hearing Lettie play her music lesson,
and must not be disturbed. So it fell to
mammy's lot to see to the manners and
customs of the children of the family.

Dear old mammy ! Had she not
washed, dressed, scolded, nursed, and
domineered over every one of them,
from pretty Lettie down to the baby in
arms ?

Black mammy, tall and straight, as
only " totiu' water from the spring "
can make one (and she could " tote "
one bucket ou her head, filled to the
brim, and one in each hand, up the long
hill, without spilling a drop) ; always
with a bright turban, a long white
apron, a straight, short gown of striped
cotton — grown, spun, and woven on the
plantation — for summer wear, and gay-
colored woolen plaid in winter. No
goring of mammy's dresses, no ruffles, no
flounces, — only a good wide sensible
tuck, to allow for shrinkage ; no fancy
bonnets or hats for mammy, so that
one can scarce tell mistress from maid.
There was always a big pocket to mam-
my's dress, out of which, as from a con-
jurer's bag, she could produce at will

unlimited peanuts, moist, sticky pepper-
mint drops, hickory nuts, boiled eggs,
sweet potatoes, and popcorn. She kept
a supply of soft rag ready to tie up a
cut finger or " stumped toe " at a mo-
ment's notice ; could find lost articles,
from the " scissors " up to old marster's
keys, which he was constantly losing
or forgetting, and could pick out splin-
ters without hurting a bit.

That was mammy. Little Nan, shin-
ing like a lily blossom in her bath-tub,
puts up two chubby hands to the kind
old mahogany face, and lisps, " Mammy,
you ith tho thweet, you ith tho lubly."

Very close were the bonds of affec-
tion between mammy and her foster-
children. Many a childish fault she con-
doned, and many a wild escapade ex-
cused, spurring their flagging ambition
by the pride and interest she took in
their attainments. " Dar now, Miss Let-
tie, your cousin Sarah played a longer
chune than a'er one you kin play ! Larn
your books, childen, larn your books !
I clar, I 'se mortified to death if see toth-
er folks' childen wid' farrer skins and
larnin' bigger books and playin' longer
chunes than mine. Larn de books, and
war your bonnets, and keep freckles off
your faces ! " Mammy never approved
of her young ladies putting their hands
in the dough, or performing any house-
hold labor that might harden their skin
or injure their beauty. She had a fa-
vorite story she used to tell about a cer-
tain princess who refused to " hold her
hands like a lady," but insisted on learn-
ing to spin ; and although she only spun
the purest gold, " it made her thumb
broad." The moral of this story was
that if a lady turned the door-knobs it
spread her hands ; if she handled the
tongs, it would harden her fingers ; and
a brown skin was far too suggestive of
" po* white trash " to suit mammy's aris-
tocratic ideas.

The office of " mammy " in a South-
ern family was often hereditary ; little
mammy, that is to be, beginning her

472

Cream-White and Crow-Black.

[October,

profession as playmate, and theu wait-
ing-maid, of pretty Miss Mary. But
when young mistress goes off to board-
ing-school for the finishing touches the
maid rises a step iu rank. " Old miss"
promotes her to the task of holding
hanks, winding brooches of cotton, and
teaches her to knit yarn socks for the
'• hands." She also becomes exceedingly
expert at finding old miss's spectacles,
sees company coming a long way off,
keeps the key-basket in place, gets water-
melons out of the ice-house when called
for in a hurry, and not infrequently
finds a pleasant solace as well as gentle
mental stimulus in the " b-a-t-s " and
44 c-a-t-s " of the First Reader. Higher
learning than this, mammies did not as-
pire to ; being satisfied with having
their love-letters written by proxy, when
Miss Mary came home for the holidays,
instead of, as is the present custom,
" taking pen in hand at this present op-
portunity," to let the beloved one know
" that she is enjoying good health, and
hopes these few lines will find him the
same," as ninety-nine hundredths of the
colored folks' letters begin.

At the close of the war, it so hap-
pened that one of these incipient mam-
mies applied for service to a bustling,
strong-minded woman, one of King
Solomon's paragons, " who riseth while
it is yet night and giveth meat unto
her household." Well pleased with
the girl's honest dark face, Mrs. Allen
asked her name.

" Alcinthy Fitzallen de Montague,
marm."

"Well, Cinthy, I suppose you can
cook ? "

" Oh, no, marm ! Aunt Melindy was
de cook at our house."

" Can you wash and iron ? "

" Me wash and i'on ! Law, no,
marm ! Aunt Big Tildy, she did de
washing and i'ning."

" Can you attend to the table ? "

" He ! he ! Dat was nobody's busi-
ness but Uncle Solomon's, and he did n't

'low no childen to fool long o' his clinin'-
roorn."

" Can you make up beds and attend
to the chambers ? "

" In course not, marm ! Little Tildy
and Cousin Pat was de house gals, and
dey did n't want nobody to ten' to der
business."

" Then what under the sun was your
occupation? "

" I did keep flies off old miss"

Only fancy a woman who " looketh
well to the ways of her household, and
eateth not the bread of idleness," who
" considereth the field and buyeth it,"
and turneth off such a lot of spinning ;
that busy, energetic housekeeper, who
scarcely sits still long enough for a fly to
light on her, — imagine such a woman
hiring a half -grown girl to keep flies off
her!

It was a matter of course that mam-
my should marry the butler, who,
dressed in old marster's cast-off clothes,
walked like him, talked like him, looked
after the carriage horses, and was con-
sidered quite the " upper crust " by the
field hands of the plantation. By dint
of catching up the table conversation
and parlor manners of the guests of the
house, this functionary was given to
great elegance of language and long dic-
tionary words, and was very high-toned
indeed. He was called, through respect,
" Uncle " Peter or " Uncle " Solomon,
as the case might be, by all the rising
generation, and considered an oracle of
wisdom. In those days, though,

" The butcher, the bak^r,
And candlestick-niaker "

all dwelt together in unity, there were
nevertheless many grades of gentility,
and it would have been quite a mesal-
liance for mammy to have married any
other than Uncle Solomon. As Uncle
Solomon waxed in years he would be-
come very fervent in preaching and ex-
horting, though to his dying day he
would claim Noah as " one of de twelve
apostles."

1883.]

Cream-White and Crow-Black.

473

Uncle Solomon said things now aod
then well worth repeating. Being en-
gaged as head-waiter by an ambitious
young officer at a banquet far beyond
his means, " Uncle Sol " was called on,
at the close of the feast, for a sentiment.
" Gentlemen," he said, " in proposing
the health of your very persequeutial
host, I shall call to my remembrance
and rickolect what I remember, and se-
lect my text from the midst of Revolu-
tions. May the scissors of experience
cut the wings of extravagance."

During the trying period of the war
there were innumerable instances of the
fidelity and affection subsisting between
master and servant. When Sheridan
swept through the South on his cele-
brated raid, it was mammy who " plant-
ed " the hamper of silver plate in the
old burying-ground, and made a baby-
grave mound over it, headstone and all,
while Uncle Solomon lay groaning, like
one possessed, on a rickety bed in the
darkest corner of his cabin. Had the
raiders thought of searching under him,
they would have been astonished to find,
instead of "nothing but old clo'," piles
of tobacco, bags of meal, flour, coffee,
sugar-cured hams, and other delicacies,
tempting enough to soldiers on the
march.

When young Mars' Tom, glowing
with patriotism, volunteered in the
army, no one was deemed so trust-
worthy as Uncle Solomon for looking
after his welfare. But a very few days
of the shelling around Fredericksburg
sent the old man hurrying home.

" Marster," he said solemnly, " send
for the boy to come home, and quit
sech foolishness ! Them balls and shells
comes a fizzin' and bustin' and explor-
ing along, and it 'pears to me had jest
as soon hit Mars' Tom as not. It is
onpossible for me to be 'spousibility of
the chile in such a pernickety associa-
tion."

But when at last the Northern troop-
ers swept down upon Stonewall Jack-

son's men, and left young Thomas with
his face to the stars and a bullet through
his heart, Uncle Solomon, his gray head
bowed in sorrow, returned alone.

" When hame cam' the saddle a' bloody to see,
Hame cam' the guid steed,
But hame never cam' he,"

there was not one in that grief-stricken
household who yearned more lovingly
than mammy for her foster-child, and
" refused to be comforted, because he
was not."

Mammy loved dearly to sing hymns.
She would lay down her corn-cob pipe,
the constant use of which had worn a
groove in her front teeth, and clasping
baby Nan in her arms rock back and
forth, singing in a high, cracked voice,

" Nobodj' knows the troubles I 've had,
Nobody knows but Jesus ;
Nobody knows the troubles I 've had,
Sing glory hallelujah!

" What makes the debble love me so ?

Oh yes, Lord,

He hilt me in a chain of woe,
King Jesus sot me free.

" Sometimes I 'm up, sometimes I 'm down,

Oh yes, Lord,

Sometimes I am upon the groun',
Oh yes, Lord.

" Nobody knows the troubles I've had," etc.

But when mammy was " up " she was
perfectly triumphant in

" I 'm a goin' up to heaven !

Bright mansions above,
Where my Jesus went before me,

Bright mansions above,
To argue with the Father,

Bright mansions above,
To chatter with the sun,

Bright mansions above,
To talk about the world,

Bright mansions above,
That I just came from,

Bright mansions above.

" I know you want to go,
I see a cloud a rising,
Ready for to rain,
But it 's not a gwine to snow,
Catch the eagle wing,
Fly away to heaven.

" Silver slippers in the heaven,
Don't you want to put them on?

474

Newport.

[October,

Long white robe,

Briglit Marry crown,

Try 'ciii on, they'll fit you well,

Bright mansion* above."

Farewell, good old mammies ! With
the institution of slavery they have
passed away, but very pleasant is the
remembrance of them. Simple and faith-

ful iu their lives, they have passed into
the presence of the great Master, who
alone can disintegrate the evil from the
good, to receive the reward of faithful
servants, and, wearing the " long white
robe," with " starry crown," may stand
waiting to receive their foster-children
in the " bright mansions above."

E. M, De Jarnette.

NEWPORT.

VIII.

HALF LIGHTS.

OLIPHANT could not at once muster
his courage to call upon Octavia, in re-
ply to her note ; and it was with no lit-
tle trepidation that he prepared to go to
Mrs. Ware's party, although he had a
trembling pleasure in the prospect, also.
This was to be their first interview since
the critical one at her house. How,
then, would she treat him ? Was she
angry ; did she suspect his judgment or
sincerity, because of his appearing on
the drive with Mrs. Blazer ? Or would
she prove lenient ?

With such queries he tortured him-
self as diligently as if he had been a
boy of twenty, and she a capricious
maiden of the same age. When at last,
after floating about some time in the
perfumed crush of the large villa draw-
ing-rooms, he saw her at a distance, it
seemed to him that there was a shadow
of forbidding, at least a lack of cordi-
ality, in her mute greeting. But how
could so lovely a form of womanhood
be cruel or unkind ? Oliphant would
not believe it, and hastened to make
his way towards, her. At that instant
Roland De Peyster, by the piano, was
sending out a volume of baritone voice
from under his waving red mustache,
singing, —

" I know not when the day shall be,

I know not where our eyes may meet,
What welcome you may give to me,

Or will your words be sad or sweet ;
It may not be till years have passed,

Till eyes are dim. and tresses gray :
The world is wide, but, love, at last,

Our hands, our hearts, must meet some day."

(L'istesso tempo.) " Some day, some day" —

and so on. It was nothing less than
sardonic in De Peyster to regale the
company with this sentiment, consider-
ing the -number of young ladies who
were ready to meet him, not " some
day," but any day ; yet the performance
stirred Oliphant deeply. It was with a
resonance of feeling in his tone that he
began to speak to Octavia.

" I must apologize," he said, " for not
responding immediately to your kind
note. I was really planning to call to-
day, but " —

" Oh, it does n't matter, Mr. Oli-
phant." She appeared much more gra-
cious, now that he was near her. " I 'm
afraid," she added, " I was rather hasty
in sending that note. At the time, I
thought we 'd better meet soon ; but, to
tell you the truth, I changed my mind,
afterwards."

A light gust of air from some open
window blew in upon Oliphant's face,
while she was replying, and brought a
faint tang of the sea to mingle with the
odor of the flowers around them. He
could not tell whether it was this breath

1883.]

Newport.

475

of the lonely waters, or a lurking chill-
ness in her manner, that touched him
with momentary foreboding. " I hope
no oversight or any act of mine was the
cause of your change," he returned.

Octavia raised her face and smiled,
looking off towards the chandelier ;
then said, gently, " I have no fault to
find."

" Because you have found one al-
ready ? " he inquired. " I know what
you must be thinking of ; but I can ex-
plain it. I have found out who told you
of the matter we were speaking about,
the other day ; and I must assure you,
if I had known before, I never should
have appeared publicly with " —

" Hsh ! " said Octavia, lifting her
gloved hand a little, in warning ; and
Oliphant discovered that Mrs. Blazer
was in the act of gliding by them, on
the arm of Baron Huyneck. She barely
inclined her head, as she passed, and
Oliphant gave the slightest possible sal-
utation in return.

" Would you mind going out on the
terrace ? " Octavia asked. " It is sti-
fling here." While they moved away
together, she said half archly, " Have
you been taking Mrs. Blazer to task for
telling tales ? She has put you on her
black list, evidently."

" It was n't my fault," he answered,
" that we did n't quarrel outright."

Octavia made no concealment of her
pleasure, though "It was wrong for you
to risk that" she said. " Why should
you quarrel on my account ? "

" Why ? " echoed he. " Merely be-
cause I value your regard — or the
chance of it — too much to risk losing
it even for something much better than
Mrs. Blazer's good will."

There was a sweet, lulled look upon
Octavia's face, as she listened ; a look
which to Oliphant, albeit he hardly
dared to think he was right, seemed
like one of trustful surrender. " Thank
you," she murmured, not too seriously.
" You are chivalrous, I see. But tell

me how it was that that woman came
to hear of the circumstances."

" I have n't the faintest idea," Oli-
phant said ; and he frankly detailed the
whole history of the letter, including
even his half-formed suspicion of Raish.
" I questioned Porter, this afternoon,
without telling him what the letter was ;
and he did n't seem to know a thing.
He faced me squarely, and said, ' It 's
very puzzling, and I can't help you out
at all. Don't ask me to investigate, be-
cause I make it a rule never to inquire
into such things; they lead to so much
trouble.' "

" I can't fully trust your friend," said
Octavia ; " but I believe I trust you.
At any rate, it is all over, now. At
first I was bewildered and thought some-
thing must be done ; so I was anxious
to see you. Besides, I felt so alone,
don't you know. It was a strange mo-
ment. I wanted some one to — to " —

" Advise with ? " he suggested.

"Yes." Octavia's voice sank to an
enticing whisper.

" I wish I could have done anything
for you," Oliphant rejoined. " I 'm bit-
terly sorry for the whole affair, so far
as my share in it goes, if it caused you
pain."

Octavia gave him a glance of grati-
tude for his sympathy. They were stand-
ing on the terrace, now, in the subdued
light from one of the drawing-room win-
dows. " I 'm sorry, too," she said, very
softly, " for you. It is a very hard posi-
tion that you 've been placed in."

" So you acquit me, and forgive
me?"

"Why shouldn't I, Mr. Oliphant?
You could hardly have done otherwise
than you did."

" Still," he said, " I was afraid. But
if it is all right, won't you give me a
little token, — one of those roses ? "

A few Marshal Niel buds hung richly
upon the black of her low-cut dress.

" You don't need it," Octavia lightly
assured him. " I '11 give you my baud ;

476

Newport.

[October,

I mean I '11 shake hands, if you like.
But the rose would be sentimental, and
-sentiment, yon know, is hardly for us,
at our time."

She looked away from him into the
night, a little sadly. Out beyond the
terrace were the many-colored glow of
lanterns, the thick dusk of waving tree-
t >ps. and the forms of guests wander-
ing about the grounds, as indistinct in
the dim light of lanterns and st^s as
the shapes in an old tapestry. Involved
in a web of radiance from the window,
which was crossed by dark lines from
the curtains and a spray of palm inside,
she was more beautiful than ever, with
her pale brown hair, her dark dress,
and the gleams of white " illusion " at
the bosom.

" Nonsense ! " said Oliphaut. " For
you, at least, it 's an anachronism to
take that tone ; and there 's some hope
even for me, so long as Dana Sweetser
keeps up his youth. Have n't you ob-
served hjm talking devotedly to Miss
Loyall, this evening ? "

" No, I did n't see him. But there
go two young people who are better
worth noticing." She nodded towards
the terrace steps, where Perry Thor-
burn and Josephine, who had come out
of the house, were moving down into
the shadowy region of the lawn.

" Oh, that reminds me. How strange
about the false report of Lord Hawk-
stane being engaged ! " Octavia began
to laugh, but she ceased on his asking
immediately, " Is it really young Mr.
Thorburn who ought to have been ru-
mored about, instead ? "

She divined his motive. With a
downcast face, as if making confession
on her own behalf, she answered, " Mr.
Thorburn is greatly interested in Jose-
phine. But you 're not to mention it ;
he confides in me."

It was indeed a confession, for it
explained everything to Oliphant ; it
showed him that Perry's attentions to
Octavia were simply in the interest of

his attachment for Josephine, and it set
him free to think of Octavia as his fan-
cy, in its most sanguine mood, might
urge. Did she know the full force of
this admission ? Did she guess what
unpremeditated scheme and infatuated
louging it aroused in Oliphant ? He
could not tell, nor did he wish to inquire,
but was content to yield himself to the
fascination of that which he imagined
might be possible. And so he paced
around, and smiled and chatted and
sighed, and allowed various expressions
to master his countenance, like other
meu who were present that evening ;
never suspecting that the women with
whom he conversed — among them this
charming lady, who had suddenly be-
come for him the one apart from all the
rest — were so many packages of emo-
tional dynamite, artfully encased in silk,
and set by invisible clock-work of the
heart to explode at a given time.

Justin, meanwhile, had been fairly
well received. He brought for Vivian
a bunch of grasses and flower-de-luce
and late June roses, gathered specially
for her, which was so unlike everything
else in the rooms that it gained a dis-
tinction and charm of its own ; and she
took it with a candid little burst of
thanks and friendliness. Mrs. Ware
met him with haughty benevolence, and
Stillman yielded him a reluctant courte-
sy. All had gone well, yet Justin was
not happy ; for Count Fitz-Stuart had
appropriated Vivian, and her younger
lover grudged the moments which she

O O

was now squandering on that fragment
of misdirected royalty in the lamp-lit
walk.

" Have you succeeded in entertaining
yourself, count ? " Vivian asked, as they
strolled together.

" No, mademoiselle. I find your as-
sembly charming, but when not until
now have I had two words with you,
sail you expect me to be content ? "

"Why not? There are surely a
great many pleasant people for you to

1883.]

Newport.

477

talk to here. Still, no ; I should think
you would be tired of this country."

" Not of at all. How often, mademoi-
selle, must I persuade you ? I find New-
port very agreeable — quite at the man-
ner of Europe ; seulement un peu plus
simple, savez-vous ? more — more rus-
tique."

"Then really, count, are you not
longing to return home ? "

" Mats — why do you think ? "

" Because, as you 're the last of your
family, you must be lonesome without
relatives, and I should imagine you
would feel it all the more among stran-
gers."

" No, not that," said Fitz-Stuart, with
gravity. " Even if I were prince, I
think I would become republican, to be
near where you are."

" It would be a great pity, though,"
said Vivian. " We should n't care half
as much about you, then. We Amer-
icans just adore the nobility. I 'm sure
/ do. There ! "

The count displayed his peachy little
smile. " To be adored is ravishing," he
remarked, complacently.

" Ah, but I don't say," laughed Viv-
ian, impelled by a sense that she was
engaged in one of those international
encounters which have assumed such
importance of late, — "I don't say that
I adore you, you know. It 's only the
nobility as an institution, a class. I
adore them all at once, don't you see ? "

" That is too many," he said, method-
ically. " I prefer if you like only me."

" Oh, yes, I know. You have told
me so several times."

" Ah, Mademoiselle Ware," Fitz-Stu-
art began with pathos, " why can you
not reconsider ? " As they were con-
stantly passing other pairs, he thought it
prudent to speak in French. " I have
your brother's consent ; I still place my-
self at your feet — my title, my illus-
trious race, everything but fortune."

Vivian assumed alarm, and stopped
him. " Don't, don't speak French'! "

she exclaimed. " Every one here knows
French. Talk in English, and they will
never understand you."

" Ah, these young girls of America ! "
murmured the count, shrugging his
shoulders. " You tell me this, when
my race should be upon the English
throne ? "

" They would have been there, too,"
Vivian hastened to say, " if James the
Third, or somebody, had n't refused to
give up Catholicism, and preferred the
French language. He was an ancestor
of yours, was n't he ? "

The count put on the most regal man-
ner at his disposal. " Yes, my friend,"
was his reply. " His majesty would
not surrender his belief of religion.
Does it not prove he was good man ? "

" I 'm not certain," she returned. " It
proves that he thought he was good.
Perhaps you think you 're good, too,
Monsieur le Comte ; but I never will
marry a Catholic."

" Mademoiselle," said he impressively,
" what my ancestor has refused to aban-
don for the sake of a kingdom, I will
sacrifice if I can win your hand."

The speech was so magnificent that
Vivian blushed with pride in spite of her-
self ; but she answered gayly, " You 'd
better not forsake your religion to-night.
Wait just a few days. I am sure I can't
agree to what you ask — certainly not
now. But I '11 tell you what I will do.
If I can't consent to marry, I '11 promise
to ride with you to the polo-match to-
morrow, as you proposed this morning."

Fitz-Stuart contemplated her mourn-
fully. " Mees Ware," he said, " you
have no sentiment. But I submit my-
self."

As they regained the terrace, Vivian
paused, and with a deep breath, looking
up to the sky, she murmured, " How
beautiful the stars are to-night ! "

Again the count regarded her, thought-
fully, as if he could not make out what
was passing in her mind. At length he
said wearily, himself glancing at the

478

Newport.

[October,

firmament, " Yes, yes ; the stars. But
they are so old! "

" Monsieur le Comte," said Vivian,
soberly, "you luive no sentiment ! "

It was after this that Justin had his
chance for a short interview with her.
Stillmau, patrolling the house and the
illuminated portion of the grounds, was
especially pleased with the lighted arbor,
which was to prevent any conference
between his sister and Craig ; but while
he was sauntering along by it, with his
uncovered bald head showing in the
radiance like a very large pink wafer,
Vivian innocently wandered away with
Craig into the dark and deserted space
lying on the other side of the house,
along the sea-front.

" It 's pleasanter here," she said. " I
want to get rid of that babble of voices
for a little while, and listen to the waves
instead."

" I don't care so much for the waves,"
Justin answered, significantly ; " but one
voice is better than many. The last
time I saw you, I began to think I
should n't hear much more of it."

" When ? And what do you mean ? "

" Why, yesterday, on the avenue.
You rode by without noticing my exist-
ence."

" You foolish boy ! You can't ex-
pect that I should be recognizing people
all the time. If I were, I should n't be
able to do anything else."

Vivian treated him to a glance of
pretty disdain, which was lost in the
darkness.

" There are some of the other things
which I 'd just as soon not have you
do," said Justin.

" What, are you going to criticise
me?"

" No, not you ; but I might criticise
the life you 're leading. I don't like it.
You 're throwing yourself away, and it
makes me very uncomfortable, besides."

" Ah, I see ; there 's the trouble.
Men never can bear to be uncomforta-
ble."

" You know you 're not in earnest,
Miss Ware, when you say that about
me. But are you always going to
plague me so ? "

" ' Always ' is a long time. Perhaps
we shan't know each other always."

" Perhaps not," said Craig, in a tone
that blended with the sombreness of the
night around them. " We hardly know
each other now ; I see you so seldom.
I have to creep about in my obscure lit-
tle world, and even when we meet you
are surrounded by people who look
down upon me. There 's that count,
with whom you spend so much time."

" Oh, he makes you uncomfortable,
too, I suppose. But what do you im-
agine he would say, if he knew of my
being out here with you ? The count
insists upon it that I ought to marry
Jam."

" I was sure of it ! " Craig exclaimed,
bitterly.

" Just fancy," Vivian pursued, " how
wonderful it would be to marry into a
royal line — or on to the end of it, rath-
er ! We should n't have any court or
any kingdom, but I Ve no doubt he
would give me a real throne — if I paid
for it."

" Well, with such an .inducement as
that, you '11 probably accept him," said
Justin, scornfully, but without the least
conviction.

" Oh," she retorted, " you have formed
a high opinion of me ! "

" Vivian ! " he groaned, most unex-
pectedly. " Don't you know ? Why
do I come here ? Why do I wait around
in places, trying to see you ? Why am
I miserable ? Don't you know I 'm in
love with you ? "

She held her breath for an instant.
" Well," she observed, " that 's a nice
effect for love to have — to make you
miserable ! "

" Pshaw ! " muttered Justin. " You
understand well enough. I should n't
be miserable at all, if you only told me
tfcat you loved me, too."

1883.]

Newport.

479

" Really ? " Vivian uttered a peal of
laughter, that seemed to Justin like the
beginning of a new composition. " Do
you think, then, that you 'd be able to
endure it? "

" I aon't dare to think of it," said
Justin, " except when I am alone. That
is, I have n't dared to, until now. But
— do you love me ? "

" Justin, you 're not in earnest. How
can I fall in love with a poor young mu-
sician, when I have counts and all sorts
of rich men dancing about me ? Do
you think it possible ? "

The poor boy was shaken with the
strength of his passion, and aghast at
his own temerity in declaring it so ab-
ruptly. " Oh, I don't suppose it 's pos-
sible," be answered. " You know noth-
ing of what it is to really feel : you
can't be serious."

" Well, let 's see if I can't," he heard
her saying, without being able clearly
to see her face through the night.
" Why do you insist upon asking me
whether I love you ? "

" Because," he replied, innocently
enough, " it 's the only way to find out.
I can't go on, without settling this ques-
tion."

" Oh, that makes a difference," said
Vivian, who must have had a micro-
scopic eye for distinctions imperceptible
to men. " Well, then, will you listen
if I tell you a great secret ? " Craig
said nothing, but groped for her hand
and found that she allowed him to take
it in his, unguarded. " Do you know,"
she continued, " I think — if I were to
try — I might like you a great deal."

" Thank Heaven ! " he breathed ; and
the spirit of a man awoke within him.
He drew her close to him.

The cool dark, the sweet odors of
earth and grass, and the soothing rustle
of wind and sea enveloped them with
sympathy. The delicate perfume of her
hair floated round him, as if she had in-
deed been a flower.

" How wonderful it is ! " he mur-

mured. " I can scarcely believe it ; and
yet it is just what I have believed, for
a long time, ought to happen. But why
do you think you can love me, Vivian ? "

" Because you are the only true and
simple man in the world," said Vivian.
The reason appeared to be conclusive.
" And what can you find in me ? " she
asked, in her turn, looking fondly up
through the dusk, over his shoulder.

" It will take me all my life to ex-
plain," he said, touching his lips to her
forehead. " But I must tell you," he
added, " I did n't mean to speak so soon.
I 'm only a beginner, you know. I have
nothing, and I must make my way,
still."

"What does that matter?" Vivian
answered. " I am well off in my own
right : I shall be rich enough for both."

Both ! How delicious the word
sounded ! But Justin felt it incumbent
upon him to be austerely firm. " No,"
he said ; " it can't be left so. I will
claim nothing until I can do so fairly.
Now that we are united in spirit, I won't
ask you to promise : I simply trust to
you. Only, see how much you can sep-
arate yourself, for me, from this gay
and frivolous life in which you are
placed. That 's all I ask."

" Oh, you are very generous," Vivian
exclaimed, moving away haughtily ;
" very generous, indeed ! But I think
I should like you all the better if you
were a little — well, a little meaner"

" I shall never be mean enough," he
hotly rejoined, "to take an unjust ad-
vantage. If I let you engage yourself
to me now, it would make you lots of
trouble. Besides, think what your peo-
ple would say of me ! "

" Yes, that 's it," Vivian was quick to
say. " You care more for your pride
t!;an for me. It 's very fine, this talk-
ing about love ; but I 've always noticed
that there is n't much in it, compared
with other considerations ; and now I
find that you 're like all the rest. Yes,
I was a goose ; it 's a humbug."

480

Newport.

[October,

" I quite agree with you," Justin
declared, becoming superbly frigid.
" \YonuMi can't appreciate a manly mo-
tive. They are till self-willed and hasty,
and I bitterly deceived myself in think-
ing you were different."

"Very well," she continued; "you
wish me to be free, and I am free. 1
was going to make a great, great sac-
rifice for you, Mr. Craig ; but now I
shan't. I will keep my promise to the
count, to ride with him to polo, to-mor-
row."

"Just as you please," Justin said.
And they were able to return to the
house in a state of polite ferocity that
completely allayed Stillman's rising sus-
picions.

It is true, Justin played for the com-
pany, at Mrs. Ware's request, though it
was not seconded by Vivian ; and he
had never played better, with greater fire
or with profounder depth, mystery, and
sentiment. " But if they only knew,"
he reflected, amid the ensuing applause,
" how ragged my coat-linings are, and
that my heart is all in tatters ! "

And for a number of days afterwards
it was noticed by their particular friends
that both Craig and Vivian took every
opportunity to point out, with convin-
cing cynicism, the uselessness of build-
ing hopes upon the loves of men and
women.

Before Oliphant went away that
night, Octavia, lightly draped with a
wrap that encircled her head like a hood,
met him again in the hall, and, dis-
covering that he would like to witness
the polo games, invited him to lunch
with Josephine and herself at High
Lawn and drive to the grounds. He
was exceedingly grateful for her courte-
sy ; but the mutual relation that had
sprung up between them was not yet
quite clear to -him. He had expected
that some constraint would trammel
them, after the disclosure of the letter ;
but, to his astonishment, there had re-
sulted an increased freedom and intima-

cy, notwithstanding which, he suspect-
ed that they actually stood farther apart
than before. She now treated him, he
was aware, with more art. "• Still," he
assured himself, " that is only because
she feels the difficulty of putting me at
my ease. Yes, yes ; she 's a generous
woman."

IX.

POLO, AND CERTAIN POSSIBILITIES.

Half an hour before the time for
polo, the next afternoon, Perry Thor-
burn issued from a street near the
Cliffs, driving his trap solemnly down
Narragansett Avenue, accompanied by
a groom with arms discreetly folded.
Perry had already indued his tight-fit-
ting riding costume, but it was entirely
concealed by his long Newmarket over-
coat, which allowed only the yellow-
bordered boots, that projected below, to
betray his errand. He held the reins,
however, with peculiar gravity ; he was
conscious of his exalted mission ; you
might easily have supposed him a vol-
unteer victim going to some heathen
sacrifice, for the good of the community
at large. Roland De Peyster, who was
captain of the opposing side, the reds,
made his entry upon the polo field from
another quarter, with equal state. Peo-
ple in carriages, on horseback, and on
foot kept assembling, until the immense
inclosure within the high board fence
was thickly fringed with a brilliant con-
course. Bannerets fluttered from the
marquees in one corner, and a band dis-
persed brazen melodies through the
wide, warm air ; there was a great ar-
ray of pretty costumes, and waving rib-
bons, and lovely, expectant faces: the
scene was festal, yet the fashionable
crowd was under the spell of a subdued
propriety which threw a tinge of solem-
nity over the scene. Solemnly, too, the
eight players came out from the tents,
and the blues rode down to the lower

1883.]

Newport.

481

end of the field. Then, at a given sig-
nal, Thorburn and De Peyster charged
for the centre crease, where the ball lay
awaiting them.

For a few seconds nothing was heard
except the dull, rapid pounding of the
ponies' hoofs on the thin sward. Thud,
thud, thud, they went : every one was
breathless, waiting to see who should
get the first stroke ; but De Peyster's
pony was the swiftest, and with a sharp,
nervous click he sent the ball flying, be-
fore Thorburn could reach it, a good
half-way toward the enemy's goal. In-
stantly Thorburn wheeled, and all the
other players closed in. They made
a queer sight, dressed in tight flannel
shirts, with fantastically patterned or-
nament of stripes, bars, and spots, and
wearing round, flat-topped caps. They
appeared like so many imps starting
into sudden action, flying hither and
thither, wheeling abruptly, bending for-
ward, and skimming the ground with
their long, unwieldy mallets that scur-
ried after the ball with the agile in-
consequence of kittens, yet in deadly
earnest ; and never uttering a sound ex-
cept a few short, sharp cries now and
then, which came to the spectators as in-
articulate bursts. The silence of the
whole proceeding was what struck Oli-
phant : the punctilious, much-dressed as-
sembly was silent, and so were the gen-
tlemen on horseback, erratically career-
ing about in the centre. The blues
gained a temporary advantage, but not
enough to save them ; and with a few
more judicious plays the reds drove the
ball between the enemy's pennants, in
little more than three minutes.

There was a very slight applause
from a few gloved hands ; the brass
instruments blared again ; and after a
six minutes' interval the second game
opened. Both this and the third went,
like the first, against Thorburn, although
his men performed some excellent feats.
Once, the ball was driven out of bounds,
and a remarkably correct young man,

VOL. LII. — NO. 312. 31

who had Miss Loyall on the box with
him, ordered his groom to throw the small
object of contention back; whereupon
the players began to whack at it fierce-
ly, until Colonel Clancy, who was act-
ing as umpire, stopped them, and riding
down to the boundary rope called out
to the correct young man : " Don't you
know any better than to throw the ball
in like that ? "

"Oh — aw, beg pahdon," said the
culprit ; and his accent was received as
making entire amends.

" It strikes me," said Oliphant to the
ladies, " that that 's rather rough — ad-
dressing a gentleman in that style."

" Oh, no," Josephine assured him.
" They have to bo very strict. Why,
they won't let anybody go inside the
ropes, whatever happens."

Oliphant had dismounted, and stood
beside the carriage, so as to get a nearer
view. He also had a better- view of
Octavia and Josephine, who were re-
markably effective that day ; the former
sitting beneath a small gold and violet
dome of parasol, through which the
light streamed softly, and Josephine re-
ceiving a peculiar glory from her crim-
son shelter.

In the fourth game a prolonged strug-
gle began. It would have decided the
day, if it had gone for the reds ; but for-
tunately Thorburn had reserved his best
pony until now, and in his desperate
efforts to turn the tide, his blue and
white shirt, his sunburned face and am-
ber hair, seemed to be in all parts of the
field at once. The crisis came when
Richards, of the reds, delivered a clever
blow from under his pony, and sent
the ball rattling towards the blue flair^.
amid a good deal of applause. Th«»r-
burn darted after it like lightning, with
both sides in full chase ; then, with a
neat back stroke, he reversed its direc-
tion, whirled around, and carried the
crowd with him. Young Chiseling,
however, of De Peyster's party, had
hung back to keep the red goal ; and

482

Newport,

[October,

seeing the hall go free, a little on one
side, he horo down to strike it. Thor-
burn quickly noticed this move, and had
already urged his pony with nervous
leaps towards the same spot. He came
shooting by, only a few yards from
where Oliphant stood; and the next in-
stunt the two riders had clashed together
and were thrown. They lay upon the
grass slightly stunned, but the astonish-
ing thing about the accident was that
the two ponies had straddled : Thor-
burii's, his fore feet forced up into the
air by the shock, had attempted to leap
over Chiseling's, but had been unable to
carry his hind legs clear, and so re-
mained caught, with two hoofs on the
ground.

There were ineffectual little shrieks
from some of the ladies, and Clancy
shouted, " Pull them apart, before they
get to kicking ! "

But he himself reined in at a safe dis-
tance, and the players were gyrating in
a knot, close to the red goal, wholly
absorbed. Chiseling rose and walked off
with a false and dazed attempt at self-
possession, but Thorburn could do no
more than sit up. The' ponies were
restive. Without stopping to reflect,
Oliphant bent under the rope and rushed
out to the point of danger.

" Get off the field ! " thundered the
umpire. The onlookers echoed him with
warning shouts and murmurs. But Oli-
phant paid no attention : his blood was
up. He grasped Thorburn's pony by
the bridle, pulled with all his force, and
compelled him to spring. This freed
the animal ; the other, turning sharply,
trotted away and was caught by Clancy.
The next thing was to lift Thorburn,
who was soon able to move towards the
tent : at the same moment, luckily, the
ball was driven through by the blues,
who thus retrieved their honor.

A double demonstration of approval
greeted these performances ; for, al-
though Oliphant promptly retired to his
previous obscurity, he was received with

the warmest acknowledgments. There
was quite a general clapping of hands
in the neighborhood of Mrs. Gifford's
carriage; and even Clancy came canter-
ing in pursuit, to thank Oliphant for his
service, while warning him that the in-
terference was against all rules of the
game. Atlee and Roger Deering. who
were not far away, hastened up, to con-
gratulate the hero of the hour. " By
Jove, you know," said Atlee, glassing
him all over, "it was — er — 'm —
really fine, you know."

" Atlee means you 're A 1," Roger
remarked, grinning, and shaking his
cousin's hand.

All this was nothing to Oliphant,
compared with the homage that Octa-
via bestowed upon him. She gave him
the full depth of her eyes, and smiled
entrancingly as she said, " Bravo, Mr.
Oliphant ! I 'm really proud of you ;
and I 'm so glad you came with us, be-
cause we can share in your glory."

Josephine said nothing, but she, too,
smiled ; and there was a quality in her
long, slow, fascinating look that pene-
trated Oliphant, — stirred him in fact
so profoundly that he experienced some-
thing like alarm. Was it involuntary
with her, or did it have a meaning ?

Thorburn was not seriously hurt, but
he found himself unable to sit his horse
firmly, and had suffered a sprain in one
wrist; accordingly, it was impossible to
go on with the games. Octavia and
Josephine took pains to drive over to
the tent and inquire about his injuries,
with a captivating appearance of being
agitated ; and yet Oliphant could see
that he himself, although he had not
undergone the slightest damage, was an
object of far more interest to them. The
flattery was like a bath of perfumes to
him ; no sort of discontent could trouble
him now; he wished that he might go
on living, for the rest of his term, in
Newport and in the sight of Octavia.
He drove with the ladies, and then
stopped at High Lawn a few minutes,

1883.]

Newport.

483

before leaving them. Josephine at first
disappeared, giving him an opportunity
to speak with Octavia alone ; and he
improved it by telling her the singular
episode with Vivian Ware, which it
seems that Justin had recounted to him.

" You observed her at the grounds,
did n't you," he asked, " riding with
the count ? She means to discipline our
young friend, I judge."

" That is, torture him," said Octavia,
with compassionate warmth. " It 's too
kid — too bad! Mr. Oliphaut," she
added, utilizing all the charm of her
most confiding manner, " we must bring
those two young people together — you
and I!"

" With all my heart," he said, stum-
bling over the word, and wondered why
she did not think that they themselves
might also be brought together.

Josephine then came back; to whom,
since she was about departing for James-
town, he made his farewell. " Good-
by," she responded, as she let her hand
sink into his. " If you have n't been
to Conanicut, you must come over and
see us. My father, I 'm sure, would
be glad to meet you."

Again he felt the power of her steady
and controlling gaze, to which Octavia
was not blind, either; for Oliphant, who
had the temerity to possess intuitions as
quick as a woman's, saw that Octavia did
not approve of the fascination her friend
was deploying for his benefit. Well, he
rather liked this : it was one more drop
of flattery.

The days that followed gave him many
meetings with Octavia — at dinners, at
dances, at picnics of a stately, cham-
pagne-flavored kind near Paradise, or
among the beeches and box-hedges and
bay-bushes of the Glen, with its idle,
mossy old grist-mill. He also came once
or twice to High Lawn. Having made
acquaintance with some delightful peo-
ple who lived in a great house on Ocean
Avenue, out of the Newport whirl, he
found himself one of a party invited to

spend a day there ; and, Octavia being
present, he strayed with her down a
path in the rock, which stopped at the
sheer edge of an undermined point,
called by a picturesque terrorism The
Pirate's Cave. Here they were invisi-
ble to the rest of the company. There
had been a mirage all the morning,
which threw Block Island up on the
horizon as an inverted shape of tower-
ing sandy-tinted cliffs, in which the sails
of becalmed ships made vertical white
rifts ; and this dim vision had haunted
Oliphant with a hint of expectancy.
But now it had vanished ; and the sea,
from being green compared with the
sky, or pale blue beside the grass, was
a deep blue everywhere.

" A change of color is an event here,"
said Oliphant. " It seems almost to
change one 's own mood."

" What is your mood, then ? " asked
Octavia.

"I could hardly tell you," he an-
swered. " A while ago I was looking
forward ; and now I 'm retrospective."

" Ah," said she, with a little frown,
" it is n't good to be thinking of your

" I 'm not : I 'in thinking of yours ! "

"Why?"

" Because that is where you seem to
keep yourself. I continually catch a
look in your eye which shows that you
are wandering there. Why don't you
live in the present?"

" But what is the present ? " she re-
plied. " Does n't it dissolve at the touch
of a memory or a hope — the past or
the future?"

" I wish it could," he exclaimed fer-
vently, " at the touch of a hope ! "

A huge wave rolled into the cavern,
as he spoke, and exploded there with a
muffled sound like a knell.

" You 're dissatisfied, then, with things
as they are ? "

" In one sense, very much so ; in an-
other, not at all. But I can imagine
something better."

484

Newport.

[October,

" There 's where we differ," Octavia
rejoined. "I 'm very well content now;
but my past was so complete and so
sunny that there could hardly be any-
thing better."

"Well, you've heard me hint often
enougli that mine was a dreary fail-
ure. I gave my life up to one woman,
and" — He checked himself, promptly.

" Yes," said Octavia ; " it seems as if
one had to be punished for too absolute
a surrender. I gave myself up, too : I
was happy, as I 've said, but — that let-
ter, Mr. Oliphant, that letter ! That
has been my punishment." It was the
first time she had openly referred to it
since the evening at Mrs. Ware's. " I
should ^iot say this to you," she added,
" except that you have spoken frankly
to me."

" I understand," he answered, ap-
preciatively, more and more drawn on
to speak from his heart. " But if it is
possible for even the happiest career to
be shadowed by a little thing, why
should people let one experience settle
the problem ? Is n't it permitted to try
again ? "

" No, no ! " she cried, in strange,
unforeseen excitement. " You must n't
say that, Mr. Oliphant. It 's sacri-
lege!"

And as she turned upon him, he felt
the flame of her resentment ; but he an-
swered quietly : " You ought to be more
indulgent to poor, irrepressible human
nature. It has been ascertained that
hope, like truth, when crushed, granu-
lated, or powdered, will rise again."

She laughed faintly, and for a brief
space they sat gazing out upon the wa-
ters, which passing clouds had suddenly
softened to gray, seamed with many
creeping wave-lines ; a blind-looking
ocean, yet watchful, as if waiting and
preparing for some particular event.
Then Octavia's glance came back to Ol-
i pliant, who in his gray suit appeared
like a part of the lichened rock against
which he was propped ; his face, too,

like the sea's, patient, prepared, but
stronger.

There was a complete transformation
in her when she resumed the talk. " Do
you believe," she dreamily inquired,
" that if a true love has once been given,
it can ever be given again, — the same
kind, I mean."

The hollow echo of an inrolling wave
once more resounded upon their ears.
" Perhaps not the same," Oliphant re-
turned ; " but there 's always a ques-
tion as to which is the best kind. It 's a"
hard lesson to learn that the first concep-
tion, however exalted, may not be the
wisest."

Octavia had a secret sense that there
had been a lack in her first love ; it had
not welded into itself the substance of
sorrow. Perhaps the love which should
exist in spite of disappointment or doubt
was the better developed sort — as shad-
ows prove an object to be rounded.
Fortifying herself against this suspicion,
she said, " Love is a mistake, and mar-
riage is a mistake, I fear. Looking back
upon it, from our point of view, as some-
thing which is over for us, does n't it
strike you as strange that we should all
be brought up to expect success in a mat-
ter so difficult ? People ought to look
to friendship, instead, which is the most
unselfish affection."

" I doubt that. But as for friendship,
I thought it was exhausted, too, until I
met you, Mrs. Gifford. I fancied my
life was a desert, and that my heart was
turned to stone ; but all at once, here 's
a fresh fountain springing out of the
rock."

"Be careful!" Octavia interposed.
"You're growing poetic, and you mu-t
remember we've reached the age of
prose."

" Well, even prose will do for ex-
pressing belief. I wish you would be-
lieve, Mrs. Gifford."

« In what ? "

" In the possibilities of the future."

She let her parasol droop, saying with

1883.]

Newport.

485

dejection, "I should be glad if there
were any such buoyancy in me. But
hope and happiness have gone, Mr. Ol-
iphant. See how Justin and Vivian,
who really have any quantity of faith,
assume to be skeptical ; while I, who am
a skeptic, do my best to believe, and
can't."

" Did n't you say, though, a few min-
utes since, that you were content ? "

" That was a conventional statement,
a comparative one : I 'm giving you the
ttnconventional truth, now. Indeed, I
shall never be contented again."

Oliphant rose to his feet, and stood
before her on the narrow ledge. Be-
hind him was the slowly chafing sea ;
a light wind brought up the scent of
shell and weed ; the tide boomed sullen-
ly in the deep recesses. There was Oc-
tavia, crouched against the granite wall,
like another Andromeda, and Oliphant
wished that he were Perseus.

" I shall never be content, myself,"
he said, with his hand on the iron rail
along the verge, " except in one event."

A sparkle came from her eyes, rapid
and keen as the light from her diamonds.
" What one thing could have so much
power ? " she asked, with a half-trem-
ulous smile that disintegrated his calm-
ness.

" To see you happy," he exclaimed,
" and to have some share in making you
so!"

For an instant, Octavia was dis-
mayed. Her hand, with jeweled rings
upon it, sought the rough stone sur-
face, for aid in rising ; but Oliphant was
quick to lend her his help, and she ac-
cepted it.

" You are very kind, to care so much
about it," she said. " But are you not
caring too much ? Let me warn you in
time." She spoke in haste, ^uneasily ;
yet all the while a subtle pleasure played
around her lips* intoxicating Oliphant
with the conviction that she did not real-
ly wish to repel him.

" No, no, Mrs. Gifford ; I can't heed

any warning; I can't take one. We
have been thrown together strangely, by
a fate that we could n't control. Do
you suppose I can control my interest
in you, either ? And would you be will-
ing to take from me the one thing that
makes life valuable to me now? "

" How can I take that away ? " she
asked, in a whisper ; but he could hear
it through the beating of the breeze.

" By denying me your companion-
ship," he returned earnestly. " J want
to be near you constantly, to do some-
thing for you ; to be your reliance."

" Oh, it 's impossible," murmured Oc-
tavia, shrinking slightly towards the
high rock. " How can you expect that,
Mr. Oliphant? What are you dream-
ing of?"

" Ah, if that 's the way it strikes
you," said Oliphant, " it is all useless ;
yes, it 's only a dream ! You need noth-
ing ; you are really happy enough, and
my wish is a selfish one."

She made the slightest perceptible
gesture of remonstrance, and seemed
impelled to start towards him. " It is
not selfish," said she, in melting tones.
" I thank you for your generous feel-
ing ; indeed, I do. But you know peo-
ple can't form such companionships :
there is no room in this world for the
finest impulses."

Scintillant reflections from the water
chased each other over the granite sur-
face behind Octavia, and dazzled Oli-
phant ; but the conflicting moods that
flitted across her face dazzled and be-
wildered him still more. She seemed
alternately a coy girl unwilling to be
won ; a woman recognizing with devout
joy the dawn of love ; a shape of dis-
tant perfection, wholly unattainable.
Through it all, he held to the one
thought that he desired her more than
anything on earth, and, however mad
the scheme, was determined to win her.

*' You told me," he said, growing bold
as he grew agitated, " that friendship is
the best affection. But if there 's no

486

Two Emigrants.

[October,

place for our friendship, there may be
for something else."

Octavia started, -but she made no
sharp protest. Instead, she gazed at
him meditatively for a moment, and he
discerned in her large inquiring eyes a
womanly sense of the devotion which
he offered — a tenderness blended with
pity and pride. She, however, raised
one finger to her lips in admonition.

" It 's time for us to be interrupted,
Mr. Oliphant, if you have come to that.
Shall we interrupt ourselves ? "

" Are you going to joke me ? " he
asked, with pain. " Surely you see how
much in earnest I am. You will listen
and consider ? "

She detected the transfiguring light
upon his features, as he leaned nearer
towards her. "I — I did n't mean to
joke," she said, with seductive contri-
tion. Oliphant believed then that she
would yield to his entreaty that she
should hear him. Suddenly there came
a shock of change ; apprehension seemed
to have assailed her ; she clasped her
hands, and cried out, " No, I cannot lis-
ten ! Don't ask me to, — don't ask me."

An undertone as of sobbing rang in
that cry, and Oliphant's forehead grew
white and wrinkled with anxiety. "Why
do you look at me so, Mrs. Gifford ?
What have I done ? "

" Look ? How am I looking ? "

" You seem angry, as well as pained.
I should think that you hated and de-
spised me for this."

At that instant a gull came wheeling
through the air above them, with a
weird, vibrating scream ; and the hollow
rock was filled again with the baffled
roar of a retreating billow.

Octavia's eyes fell, and she said very
slowly, " No, I do not hate you."

He recovered hope at once. " Then
you forgive me." he concluded buoyant-
ly ; " and you will let me speak, some
time. Will you think of what I have
said ? "

The wildness of her outburst had
died away, and the indescribable smile
mingled of coquetry and undisguised
emotion, which Oliphant had already
noticed, resumed its sway, as she an-
swered, " At least, I shan't be likely to
forget it."

George Parsons Lathrop.

TWO EMIGRANTS.

HE left his staff, his scrip, his shoon,
And in the first gray dawning light,

When dropped the weary, waning moon,

He said, " Farewell ! " and passed from sight.

We watched him go, and held his hand

To the last lonely point of land.

There came to us, one winter night,
A stranger from an unknown land :

He had no staff, no scrip, no shoon, -,
No word that we could understand;

A traveler without a name,

Who could not tell us whence he came.

Barbara Heaton.

1883.]

Mcenadism in Religion.

487

M^NADISM IN RELIGION.

literally means the pe-
culiar madness of the initiated in the
mysteries of Dionysos. Relatively, it
signifies all intoxicating, will-destroying
excesses of religious fervor in which
" the multitude " have taken part. The
word is here used in this latter signifi-
cation. It is a remarkable fact in the
history of religion that men of widely
differing creeds and countries have
agreed in attaching a spiritual value to
hysteria, chorea, and catalepsy on the
one hand, and to a frenzy of cruelty arid
sensuality on the other. Diseased nerves
and morals have often been ranked as
the highest expression of man's faith
and devotion. The individual in the
superexalted mental and physical state
becomes a prophet, a Pythoness, an ec-
static, or a " medium," according to the
age in which he or she lives. When the
exaltation is still further heightened by
the sympathetic force of numbers, it
leads to Bacchantic revels, Oriental or-
gies, and nervous epidemics, than which
there is nothing stranger in the records
of human feeling. The distinction be-
tween the various phases of Maenadism
is less in the actual demonstrations than
in the interpretation given to them.
The African feticheeress, or voudoo,
and the Turkish dervish, during their
mystic ceremonies, both fall into convul-
sions. But one thinks thereby to attain
magical ascendency ; the other hopes to
see God face to face. The Bacchante
and the mediaeval Christian both danced,
like the Arab Zikr, in frantic fury until
their strength deserted them. But while
by the dance the former voluntarily hon-
ored a divinity, the latter involuntarily
obeyed a devil.

Maenadism in the beginning was the
outgrowth of that desire for excitement
which is instinctive in human beings.
When Victor Hugo declares that a hell

where one is bored is more terrible than
a hell where one suffers, he expresses in
definite language that which has been
vaguely felt by all men, savage or civil-
ized ; and indeed even by beasts and in-
sects, who manifest a susceptibility to
the feeling of ennui and a necessity to
indulge in superfluous activity. Ants
interrupt their labors to engage in
sham battles. Birds occasionally sing
and flutter, as if in an ecstasy of de-
light. Horses, dogs, and cats romp
like children, aud the fiercest wild ani-
mals have been seen to race and strug-
gle in evident play. In man the in-
stinct is still stronger, because the loss
of liberty entailed by social life limits
his occasions of gratifying it, thus add-
ing to its original force that of restrained
emotion. As striving after knowledge
of the unknown gives the impetus to
scientific study, so it seems as if the de-
sire for something beyond ordinary relax-
ations is a stimulus to elevate human
ideals of pleasure. Religion at first
provides for both these cravings. Myths
and doctrines are the result of the in-
tellectual need, and sacred feasts of the
emotional. The majority of men, sheep-
like, accept without questioning the be-
liefs and amusements supplied for them.
Greek Dionysiacs, Roman Saturnalia,
Hindu Holi, and mediaeval Fetes des
Fous have been sufficient outlet for
those who only need a Bacchanalia of
fun in order that, according to Schlegel,
" once the fit is over, they may for the
rest of the year apply themselves to se-
rious business." But there are a few
independent individuals who, because
they will not be led, but must lead them-
selves, push inquiry to its extreme and
exhaust emotion in all its possible va-
riations. With them the general fes-
tival is exchanged for the special orgy,
just as occultism replaces the doctrines

488

Mcenadism in Religion.

[October,

of the multitude. They develop relig-
ious fervor to a degree which is as far
above the capacity and comprehension
of common men as the passion of the
toreador when in the arena is removed
from the calm of the shepherd watching
the same bulls ou the hill-side. A nat-
ural barrier separates them from their
fellow-mortals ; and when they join to-
gether into an order apart, to give free
expression to their devotional feelings,
Mainadism really begins.

This occurs at a very early stage of
culture. Already among the higher sav-
age tribes, where " existence is all a feel-
ing, not yet shaped into a thought,"
there are mystic brotherhoods and sis-
terhoods, whose superiority consists, not
in moral virtues nor spiritual knowledge,
but in keenly sensitive emotional tem-
peraments, and in the superior endur-
ance of pain by piety. Savages, like
children, usually expend the force of
their feelings in muscular activity. As
Tylor says, " They dance their joy and
sorrow, their love and rage, even their
magic and religion." To some this cor-
poreal excitement is as intoxicating in
its effects as alcohol or hashish would
be, and causes a temporary cessation of
volitional power, so that their move-
ments become wholly automatic. Know-
ing as little of the reasons of their
convulsive conduct as a child does of
the man who pulls the wires during a
puppet performance, they attribute it to
supernatural interference. Deeply im-
pressed by the consciousness of occult
forces in nature, they are stirred to the
very depths of their being when they
themselves seem animated by like mys-
terious agents. They feel that subtle
relation between themselves and the ex-
ternal world which later, developing into
well-defined thought, becomes the philos-
ophy which represents man as the mi-
crocosm or mirror of the universe. In
all countries where men are ignorant
of the laws of physiology and psychol-
ogy, the delirium and hallucinations pro-

duced by mental aberration pass for di-
vine revelations, and the contortions and
spasms of nervous affections for super-
natural manifestations. To-day, in the
East, idiots and epileptics are believed
to be inspired saints, and are respected
accordingly. Even in Greece insanity
was considered a divine malady. The
suspension of will, the highest human
function, which the Western man of
modern times would regret as the great-
est of all misfortunes, savages deliber-
ately seek as the supreme point of per-
fection. While those who are perma-
nently disordered must remain uncon-
scious of their supernatural powers, the
partially affected, who live as it were
on the border-land of disease, can in
their lucid intervals devote their ener-
gies to cultivating and increasing them.
The ardor which illuminati at a later
period bring to study and to thought,
primitive children of light spend upon
abnormal sensations and emotions. A
long and painful apprenticeship is re-
quired of aspirants to the mystic orders.
Life in the wilds and woods, far from all
other human beings, silent intercourse
with nature, strange diet, impressive
ceremonial, and strict discipline add still
further to their natural excitability.
Filially, when the time comes for the
celebration of the mystic rites, the ini-
tiated are told to relinquish all self-con-
trol. Yielding to delirious impulses
without inquiring into their why and
whither, they are worked up to a pitch
of frenzy more like an apotheosis of hu-
man passion than an expression of relig-
ious devotion. The orgy in this its crud-
est development is worship of emotion,
in which there is as yet no ideatioual
motive.

Just as the monastic life is the high-
est realization of Catholic ideals, so
Maenadism with savages represents the
culminating point, beyond which relig-
ious enthusiasm cannot go. But for this
very reason it is at first well-nigh in-
separable from witchcraft and soreery.

1883.]

Mcenadism in Religion.

489

Religion in its primitive form is pure
magic, and consequently it values prayer
and ritual in proportion to their magical
efficacy. The gris-gris laden Voduu-vi,
or feticheeresses of Dahomey, by their
unearthly dances excite themselves to
convulsive contortions and wild tearing
of flesh. But even as they dance they
work their mystic spells, as their vou-
dou sisters still do in America. The Sha-
mans in Siberia and the medicine men
of certain North American Indian tribes
sway their bodies to and fro, and writhe
in pious spasms, to produce that orgasm
which sweeps before it all consciousness
and thought, but which, in so doing,
gives them command over the spirits,
and powers akin to those of Joshua in
the valley of Ajalon. The devil-dan-
cers of Ceylon pirouette and chasse to
frighten away the demons, an end which
their hideous movements are well calcu-
lated to accomplish. The Yezedis, by
their frantic leaps and twirls and cruel
flourishing of daggers, so terrible to be-
hold that the usually dauntless Lady
Hester Stanhope fainted at the sight,
implore the miraculous intervention of
Sheitan, or Satan, their lord and master.
Repellent and ridiculous as these cere-
monies appear to us, they are serious
and sacred enough to those taking part
in them. The wild, blood-shot eyes of
Shamans during the final ecstasy ; the
mad transports of the young Dahoman
witches as they follow their arch-Hecate
through the intricate measures of their
dance ; the indifference of the Yezedi
devil-worshipers to gaping wounds and
loss of blood, — all equally attest the
genuine earnestness of these mystics.
Their ends are sordid ; but where relig-
ion does not look beyond the present,
and prayer which does not better man's
temporal condition has no meaning for
him, then those measures by which spir-
its are forced into bestowing their fa-
vors, or removing their curses, constitute
the most perfect forms of religious wor-
hhip.

But the mysticism which is conform-
able with savage standards of conduct is
irreconcilable to higher degrees of civ-
ilization. Feasts and orgies continue
because, notwithstanding more elevated
ideals of morality, men still crave ex-
citement, and enthusiasts still require
extraordinary channels for their piety.
A growing sense of aestheticism may
cause a change in the accessories of rit-
ual. Drums made of skulls and deaf-
ening gongs and whistles are perhaps
replaced by lutes, cymbals, and double
pipes, and rude, spasmodic laughter
and savage screams are softened into
rhythmic invocation and hymn-singing.
Just as the actual intoxication of two
men of equal constitution will not dif-
fer because one drinks from fine Vene-
tian glass and the other from coarse
earthenware, so the delirious orgasm of
orgiastic worship is the same, whether
inspired by discordant drum- beating or
by soft Lydiau airs. But — and here-
in lies the essential difference — mys-
tics who have passed beyond the prim-
itive period of religious development
make their emotional transports a means
to something higher, and not an end in
themselves. The growth of sympathy
in men's relations to their fellow-beings
elevates their conception of the duties
of humanity to divinity. They are con-
vinced that the object of prayer and
sacrifice is not merely to reap benefits
for themselves, but to pay respect to
deity. Therefore, all religious rejoic-
ings, however earthly in tone or how-
ever rapturous, must not only be a cul-
tus of feeling, but must contribute defi-
nitely to the greater glory of a supernat-
ural being. The orgies of the civilized
nations of antiquity were invariably
connected with earth and generative
deities, probably because they were sur-
vivals of dances and debauches which
had flourished long before there was a
systematized belief in Bacchus or My-
litta. While arbitrary feasts must have
perished with the special circumstances

490

Mcenadism in Religion.

[October,

that created them, those which were
associated with natural phenomena could
be adapted to the new culture by con-
verting their vague sympathy with na-
ture into worship of definite deity.

It is chiefly by the orgiastic worship
of the Greeks that we know how Mae-
nadism passed through this stage of de-
velopment. The dancing of the maid-
ens of Shiloh and the frenzied prayers
of the priests of Baal, when, in their
contest with Elijah, they leaped upon the
altar, and " cut themselves after their
manner with knives and lancets, till the
blood gushed out upon them " (1 Kings
xviii. 28), were evidently Maenadic rites,
but the only record of them is a passing
allusion in the Bible. The Teutons,
Celts, and Northmen of pagan Europe
had their spring and autumn, their mid-
summer and midwinter festivities, to the
turbulent nature of which, quaint cus-
toms, such as May-day dances and Saint
John's fires, long attested, but of which
next to nothing is actually known. The
mysteries of Oriental races were guarded
with such jealous care that few but the
initiated ever learnt what took place in
the inner shrine. There was, unfortunate-
ly, no Louis Jacolliot in ancient timers
to watch unseen the sacred midnight
revels, and then give a glowing d escrip-
tion of them to the unilluniiuated', Be-
sides, Maenadism in the East was .merged
at a very early period into a Stiill higher
phase of mysticism. But, though the
fate of Pentheus awaited^ the curious
Greek who dared to pry '^to the secret
rites, there are sufficient data recorded
of the religious orgies IE ^ Greece to show-
that before they came ^un(Jer foreign in-
fluence they were es^eemed as the best
possible testimony ;, of human respect
and love for divinh '^ The enthusiasm
which kindles in tv^ devout an ardent
desire to realize tti,<eir ideai of perfec-
tion by imitating, in wet,,^ human fash-
ion, the supernatural attributes aih.fj ac-
tions of the being worshiped was tilt*
inspiration of Hellenic mystics. Their

excesses, so incoiprehensible in them-
selves, were explined to be either pious
commemoration i incidents in a god's
career, or an e-pression of gratitude
for gifts bestowd upon mortals by the
powers above ; and to prevent human
criticism — ther weak points being well
recognized — :hey were ascribed to a
divine origin. The Corybantic fury of
the priests o' Cybele, when, dancing to
the sound a shrill fife, leathern drum,
and "wild oells' clashing ring," they
scourged ea;h other and mutilated them-
selves, typiied the mad deeds of the fair
young Atys after he had been bereft
of his reason by the " great mother of
the gods," because of his infidelity to
her. By the strange midnight rites of
the Eleus.niian festivals, by the sudden
changes from darkness and mournful
cries to light and joyful hymns, the faith-
ful were acting with true dramatic feel-
ing the wanderings of Demeter in search
of Persj ^hone, and the final reunion of
mother and daughter. The Maenads, in
their dances through mountain and for-
est, and in their fury of lasciviousness
.and animalism, either celebrated the joy
which filled the radiant Dionysos when
the vines bloomed in summer and bore
fruit in autumn, or bemoaned the mad-
ness and desolation which befell him
through the wrath of Hera, when, at
the first chill of winter, his vines with-
ered and died. But there was still an-
other motive to Bacchantic revels.

The Greeks were not a drink-loving
people, like the Northern nations. At
a drinking bout, the gods of Olympus
would have been completely outdone by
the heroes of roaring Valhalla. But
since they believed that Dionysos gave
them the juice of the grape, they also
thought the delirium it produced was
wrought by him. Their arguments were
not unlike those of Omar Khayyam : -

"Why, be this juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare?
A blessing we should use it, should we not? ^
. 4.ud if a curse, — why, then who set it there ? "

1883.]

Mccnadism in Religion.

491

Intoxication was a blessing, because
God-given ; but instead of concluding,
with the Persian poet, that it should be
the chief occupation and end of life, it
was held to be a duty sacred to Bacchus,
the maddening god, " whom swords and
blood and sacred rage delight." It was
a common saying among the ancients
that the Greeks never were intoxicated
save at their holy festivals. It is no
wonder that Dionysos later became the
god of liberty. Those who were conse-
crated to him were exempted from obser-
vance of all human laws and restric-
tions. Once the Bacchantes had donned
the sacred fawn skin and crowned them-
selves witli ivy, had wreathed the ser-
pents in their hair and raised alqft the
mystic thyrsus, they knew no guide but
the impulse of the moment. Maddened
with wine, they did not hesitate at any
pleasure, however dissolute ; nor were
they daunted by any crime, however
cruel. This explanation for the mad-
ness of the Maenads gives us the key-
note to those darker orgies held in honor
of generative and phallic deities. The
rites of the Asiatic Mylitta and Ash-
taroth, the Greek Aphrodite, and the
Samothracian Cabiri were as nameless
as those with which modern Tautrikas
and Sivaite Brahmaus celebrate their
mysteries. At those shrines where a
sin was a prayer and vice became vir-
tue, human sensuality was typical of
certain divine functions, just as intoxi-
cation with Bacchantes was a recogni-
tion of the heavenly origin of the soul-
stirring drink. It is difficult for Chris-
tians, with their doctrines of original sin
and the necessity of penance and mor-
tification of the flesh, to realize that
these practices were religious ceremo-
nies. The orgies were pleasurable in
themselves, and were sometimes abused
by hypocrites ; or, as Pythagoras ex-
pressed it, " Many carry the thyrsus,
but few are inspired with the spirit of
the god." But had self-gratification
been the sole object, and had insincerity

been the rule, and not the exception,
then these shameless indulgences would
have perished because of their own un-
worthiness. Their fundamental cause,
though an unconscious one, was physi-
cal passion but that which made them
possible as sacred ceremonies was an
honest, if mistaken, desire of pious en-
thusiasts to exhaust every conceivable
expression by which finite creatures can
declare their recognition of the infinite.
So well did the enlightened understand
that to the vulgar these rites would
seem like emancipation from moral re-
straints, instead of the freedom of a
devout soul sanctified by divinity, that
none were admitted to the inner sanc-
tuary until they had passed through
many and severe tests, and then they
were sworn to eternal secrecy.

If magical powers were sometimes
obtained during the orgies ; if the
Bacchantes with a stroke of their thyrsi
could make water leap from the rocks,
wine spring from the earth, and their
wands distill great heaps of honey,
these marvels were no more the object
sought than the miracles of Moses were
his main mission when he led the Israel-
ites through the desert. But there were
other wonders worked in man during
his delirium, which finally became of
main importance. Hallucinations pro-
ducing pleasurable sensations are com-
mon symptoms of ecstasy, whether this
be the result of physical disease or of
mental and sensual excitements. The
sincere worshiper, during his orgy, was a
dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions.
He heard sounds to which ordinary ears
were deaf, and saw those things to
which ordinary eyes were blind, and
even while so seeing and hearing was
filled with ineffable rapture. As soon
as more attention was given to the soul
and its future than to the body and the
present, these subjective sensations were
supposed to be due to the free activity of
the soul of the inspired mystic, which,
illuminated with divine wisdom and

492

Mxnadism in Religion.

[October,

inflamed with divine happiness, over-
powered his consciousness of physical
exigence. Had all races considered re-
ligion from the objective stand-point of
the Greeks, esoteric doctrine would per-
haps never have reached such promi-
nence. It was through the influence of
Oriental thought that Eleusiuian cele-
brants were brought to believe that
their rites united them in intimate com-
munion with Demeter herself, and that
Bacchantes imagined that by their de-
bauches they were initiated into the
real meaning of life and death. In the
East, where men despised life because it
was so easy to sustain, and loathed their
bodies, which were a hindrance to a con-
tinual state of Kheyf, prayers and cere-
monies were valued according to their
effect upon the spirit. This indiffer-
ence carried to its extreme taught not
only the delusion but the evil of mat-
ter, and that the one truth and good is
being per se. Since in the orgiastic
ecstasy, as in hashish dreams, all calcu-
lations of time and space are lost sight
of, the ecstatic thought, while in that
state, to fathom the mystery of eternity,
and to feel in the accompanying pleas-
ure the pure joy of release from the
prison-house of flesh. The delirious
orgasm, explained by this higher mys-
ticism, which is still the belief of Ori-
ental philosophers, is the escape of the
vital principle in man from the dark
chrysalis of matter into the divine light
of absolute knowledge. It is the merg-
ing of the finite into the infinite, wheth-
er the conception of the latter be the
Buddhist's Nirvana, the Hindu Yogi's
Samaddi, or the Mohammedan's Allah.
Probably originating in India, this doc-
trine was the inspiration of Egyptian,
Persian, and cabalistic mystics, and it
passed into the West through Neopla-
touism, reappearing in Gnostic beliefs
and Baphometic fire-baptisms of Free-
dom and Prudence, and having Its vo-
taries to-day among those Western oc-
cultists who look upon the manifesta-

tions of spiritualism as only the initial
stage to that perfect wisdom and power
which the soul can reach. The spirit-
ual supremacy must be gained, at any
price. Men who seek to see God face
to face care little as to the nature of
the methods employed, provided these
be efficacious.

" It heeds not whence begins our thinking,
If to the end its night is high."

The end here sanctifies the means, even
if these be wine, women, and sony. as
in Persian Sufism. Hence, this belief
has authorized solemnities, varying from
silent meditation and prayer to the
most outrageous sensualities. Pious
ejaculations and bodily contortions, sa-
cred (hymns and rhythmic movements,
contemplation and hashish fantasies, are
all equally holy, if they can succeed in
intoxicating the soul. The Yogi tor-
tures his body until he exhausts it, or
else, like the monks of Mount Athos,
fixes his eyes upon it until he forgets
it. The Buddhist, by thorough abstrac-
tion, conquers perception, sensation, and
thought. The Neoplatonist freed his
spirit by prayer, music, and dialectics.
But there are still other men, who can-
not excite within themselves the spir-
itual orgasm without recourse to physi-
cal and sensual stimulants. No people
have ever understood the subtle link be-
tween religious emotion and physical
sensation as well as Persians. At once
the most mystical in their philosophy
and the most voluptuous in their pleas-
ures of all men, they have made sensu-
ous raptures the mediums to spiritual
ravishment. There are certain sects of
Sufis, such as the Ahlavis, who in their
sacred orgies realize the erotic and bac-
chanalian excesses which, when sung
by Hafiz, are piously supposed to be
allegorical. The heavenly delirium is
wrought by a very earthly wine-cup,
and the losing of identity in boundless
love is obtained by exhausting every
conceivable caprice of human passion.
The secondary importance which this

1883.]

Mcenadism in Religion.

493

mysticism awards to ritual is signally
illustrated by the different orders of
dervishes. While all are imbued with
Sufism, their ceremonies vary from cor-
poreal excitement, which is probably a
direct inheritance from Corybantes, to
silent, Buddha-like contemplation. The
Ruffi'ees are stimulated by juggler
tricks with sword and fire and acrobatic
feats. Persian dervishes revel in the
fancies of a hashish-created fairy-land.
Mehlevees, or dancing dervishes, best
known to Europeans, spin and turn in
graceful or wild measures, which sym-
bolize the harmonious action of natural
forces, to the sound of their beloved
flute and drum, wherein they hear the
music of the spheres. Kadirees, with
hands resting on each other's shoulders,
sway their bodies to and fro in spas-
modic regularity. But to Nakshiben-
des the recital in chorus of the Iklas,
their sacred prayer, one thousand and
one times is more intoxicating than
drugs and physical movements ; while
Melaneeyoons, sitting in solemn silence
meditating upon the divine spirit, have
no stimulus beyond the magnetic-like
current of sympathy which passes from
one to the other. Yet all, from first to
last, when in the glow of " endless ec-
static fire," imagine themselves in that
state of Noor, or ecstasy, in which the
soul either rests, filled with heavenly
quiescence and delight, or else, loosened
from its body, wanders far and wide,
and even into Paradise, as did the spirit
of the great prophet.

There is another side to Maenadism
entirely distinct from that already con-
sidered. As delirium is in one case
quieted by an opiate, but in another ex-
cited by it, so the spiritual exaltation
which with some men is the result of
the physical excitement is with others
the cause of it. Neophytes with the
dervishes are not allowed to join in the
dancing and spinning, or howling; but
they become so agitated by the words
of the sheik who prepares them for in-

itiation that involuntarily they contort
their bodies in movements closely cor-
responding to those of the regular ritual.
The religious enthusiasm which in its
intensity instinctively seeks relief in
bodily activity, though this may not be
lawfully ordained, has never reached
such an extreme as it did in Europe
during the early and mediaeval period
of Catholicism ; nor is it difficult to un-
derstand why this should have been.
Though Christianity incorporated into
itself the great festivals of paganism, it
substituted the asceticism of the cloister
for its orgies. That the latter did sur-
vive among a minority, who clung to the
old religion, there can be no doubt.
The favorite accusation which the early
Christians hurled at heretics, and which
the latter returned with good interest,
was that they celebrated midnight feasts
as profligate as those of pagans. Gnos-
tics and orthodox alike were declared
to steep themselves in sensuality dur-
ing their sacred mysteries. Rumors of
wild orgies were continually set afloat
throughout the Middle Ages. Walden-
ses were accused of practices which
vied in cruelty and sensuality with the
rites of Moloch, and Moutanists of
transports equaling those of the Mae-
nads. As late as the thirteenth century
an Irish priest was reported to have led
the maidens of his parish in a Baccha-
nalian dance in honor of the " god of
the gardens." Devil-worshipers, when
they met for the Sabbat, on the Brock-
en and other mountain tops or lonely
haunts, were supposed by a complete
rebellion against Christian morality to
express their allegiance to Satan. But,
notwithstanding these survivals, legiti-
mate orgiastic worship had no place in
Catholicism. At the same time, men
too young, hardy, and vigorous for the
indifference to life of Buddha, and too
ignorant for the metaphysics of Plo-
tinus, were bidden to sacrifice earthly
interests to obtain spiritual salvation.
Man's every thought and action was

494

Mcenadism in Religion.

[October,

referred to its influence upon the life
to come. Never was Carlyle's after-
warning, " Beware of fixed ideas ! " so
sadly needed. The effort to impose a
creed whose mainspring was Neoplato-
nism, and whose ideal of worship was
entirely spiritual, upon races hardly ad-
vanced beyond barbarism was as though
an attempt had been made to suddenly
transform Pan and his satyrs into Arte-
mis and her nymphs. Just as the hoofed
heels and horned heads of the brute
deities would have to peep out again
before long, so semi barbarous Europe-
ans were forced occasionally to express
their emotions by physical turbulence
in unison with their natural instincts,
but which, because of their dominant
idea, always bore a religious meaning.
Their restrained feelings found outlets
in crusades and mammoth pilgrimages,
in inquisitions and persecutions of Jews,
and, worse still, in the unparalleled ex-
travagances of nervous epidemics. Eu-
rope became one great bedlam, filled to
overflowing with prophets who received
but too much honor in their own coun-
try, and with devil-possessed victims.
Dervishes did not turn and spin in the
sanctuary, but energumens, of whom the
Russian Yourodevoy are the modern rep-
resentatives, twisted and writhed at the
threshold. There was no priesthood of
Cybele ; but when Italy was suddenly
aroused to a realization of sin, or when
Central Europe was terror-stricken with
the ravages of the Black Death, there
arose, as if by magic, long processions
of penitents, seeking to avert wicked-
ness and disease by Corybantic dances
and mutual flagellations. They marched
from city to city, clothed in sombre
penitential garments, their faces masked,
and carrying triple iron-pointed scourges,
with which they wounded themselves
well-nigh unto death, that they might
by their example preach the necessity
\ of chastening the body and bringing it
into subjection. Troops of men, women,
and children fell into the ranks, and

mothers held up their newly born in-
fants to the lashes of the holy brother-
hood. Town and country, forest and
mountain passes, resounded with their
hymns of praise and thanksgiving, and
streets and highways were reddened
with their blood. And with it all raged

unbounded sensuality. There were no
Bacchantes to revel in honor of a laugh-
ing wine -god, but for two centuries
the inhabitants of one half of Europe
bounded and jumped with the preter-
natural energy of madmen in a tragic,
devil-inspired dance. High and low,
laity and clergy, nobles and peasants,
danced in church and market-place,
through crowded cities and quiet vil-
lages. From far and near they flocked
at the sound of trumpet, drum, and bag-
pipes, garlanded and bedecked as if for
a feast, yet bearing the bandages with
which, when their fury was at its zenith,
they had to swathe themselves, in order
to moderate the physical convulsions.
Epilepsy, hysteria, agonies as if of death,
and only too clear evidence of crime
and brutality, to which their frenzy
sometimes led, could not daunt the
dancers. Neither did they succumb be-
fore the powers of medicine and exor-
cism. Like a great storm, which noth-
ing can stay until all its violence be
spent, the dancing mania lasted until
exhausted by its very vehemence.

Prayer instead of wine was the in-
spiring stimulant of new sisterhoods, but
it fired them with an intoxication as
fierce and intemperate as that of Greek
Maenads. The history of the convents
during the Middle Ages reads like a
canto borrowed from Dante's Inferno,
interpolated with revelations from a mad-
house. Tortures of hellish ingenuity
are mingled with humorous freaks, grim
as the laugh of an enslaved Caliban.
Poor nuns toiling to impossible ideal
heights are hurled pitilessly back into
very actual depths. Now, in the re-
action from spiritual excesses, the sis-
ters of an entire community mew like

1883.]

Mcenadism in Religion.

495

cats, bite like dogs, and crow like cocks ;
again, they burst into uncontrollable
paroxysms of laughter, climb trees with
incredible velocity, and vie with each
other in gymnastic feats. But beneath
this comedy-like surface is the unspeak-
able tragedy of human minds and hearts
unhinged and broken by the terrors of
witchcraft and sorcery, and the ever-
present dread of incubi and succubi, evils
born of too much faith. Terrible as
were the imaginary passions of Maenads
in the legend of Pentheus, they were
surpassed by the reality in the stories
of Louis Garfride and Marie de Sains.

These nervous epidemics did not cease
with mediaevalism, although since that
period they have never been so widely
spread nor of such long duration. While
the Reformation roused religious fervor
to fever heat, the general diffusion of
ideas and interests resulting from the
invention of printing and the revival
of learning diverted much of its inten-
sity into mental channels. It was only
among the most fanatical that the old
evils reappeared. Some of the reform-
'ers believed that the time had arrived
for the fulfillment of the words of the
prophet Joel : " And it shall come to
pass in the last days, saith God, I will
pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh ;
and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy, and your young men shall see
visions, and your old men shall dream
dreams." The inspiration of the Holy
Ghost, which had hitherto been declared
the guide of the church, was now sup-
posed to be not only possible, but neces-
sary, to each individual. In place of one
Pope, all became equally God's vicege-
rents. The workings of the Spirit, being
supernatural, could not be judged by nat-
ural standards, and hence monomaniacs
could declare their insane ravings divine
revelations, and men and women afflicted
with hysteria or epilepsy could proclaim
their convulsive actions manifestations
of the power of the Holy Ghost, with-
out incurring the charge of insanity or

blasphemy. Phenomena which Catho-
lic fanatics had believed to be signs of
diabolical possession were by the new
enthusiasts thought to be evidence of
the outpouring of the Spirit. Western
prophets, unlike Eastern mystics, were
physically agitated by their spiritual il-
lumination. The mental equilibrium of
Anabaptists, the " bastards of the Ref-
ormation," was entirely destroyed by
the new freedom, and, like soldiers sud-
denly let loose in a conquered city, they
plunged into an abyss of crime and
delirium. Men proclaimed themselves
Kings of Siou and Jerusalem, marched
naked through the streets, and even to
the battle-field, and romped in childish
sports that they might be like little chil-
dren ; the ungodly were tortured, mas-
sacred and defrauded; brothers killed
brothers ; strangers were murdered in
broad daylight ; and true believers were
robbed by a crafty tailor, whose revela-
tions were of a peculiarly practical na-
ture. On the one hand, there was an
hysterical extreme, produced by the fast-
ing and prayer of " self-denying spirit-
ual Anabaptists ; " and on the other,
the sensual orgies of " Free Brothers,"
whose Sabbat - like celebrations were,
they said, for Christ's sake. And such
absurdities and infamies were not only
countenanced, but encouraged, because
it was imagined that once a man had
been illuminated by divine grace he was
ever after as infallible as Catholics be-
lieve their church to be, and therefore
he could do no evil.

In France, belief in the outpouring
of the Spirit, aggravated by persecution
and ill-treatment, converted the Hugue-
not inhabitants of Dauphiny, Vivarais,
and Cevennes into seers and oracles. In-
fants of thirteen months from their cra-
dles and gray-headed old men from the
very brink of the grave preached and
prophesied. Poor half-idiotic shepherds
became the Davids of the new revela-
tion, and high-born ladies suddenly awoke
to a consciousness of sibylline powers.

496

Mcenadism in Religion.

[October,

So realistic was the popular delusion
that women refused to eat for fear of
giving offense to the divine Being who
abided within them ; parties of the faith-
ful, meeting, blew into each other's
mouths, that the Holy Ghost might thus
be passed from one to another ; and
troops of prophets and prophetesses
marched to battle unarmed, because by
the power of their breath, as if by a
whirlwind from heaven, they expected
to rout the enemy. The inspired were
counted by thousands, and the invari-
able prelude to their prophetic utter-
ances was agonizing physical suffering.
" When they were seized by the Spir-
it," an eye-witness remarked of the Ce-
venues prophets, " they all of them had
fits, some of one kind and some of an-
other, more or less." The controversy
aroused by the Jansenist revival of the
doctrine of " prevenient grace " coming
to a crisis about the time of the death
of Abbe Paris, the first report of a mir-
acle worked at his tomb at St. Medard
was the signal for the appearance of a
new army of prophets and wonder-work-
ers. Royal intervention and parliamen-
tary proclamations could not stay the
fierce torrent of religious emotions.
Neither was it moderated by the shafts
of ridicule.

" De par le roi defense a Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu ! "

was the jesting account of the wits of
the day of what actually took place.
But when the Convulsionnaires were
shut out from St. Medard they crowded
into Paris, and for over fifty years their
hysterical fanaticism manifested itself,
says Hecker, " in more lamentable phe-
nomena than the enlightened spirits of
the eighteenth century would be will-
ing to allow."

In England, a few poor illiterate Qua-
kers, with morbid imaginations, who had
forsworn whatever little color of pleas-
ure their creed still allowed, but who
could not endure its undemonstrative
form of worship, announced themselves

the direct inheritors of the supernatural
powers of the French prophets. Moth-
er Ann and her followers, instead of be-
ing moved at their meetings to the usual
placid discourses, were made to shake
and tremble like clouds agitated by a
mighty wind. To them their actions
appeared to be the work of that Spirit
which in the latter day was to shake
heaven and earth and the nations there-
in, and which from the time of the
Apostles had manifested itself in the
elect in unwonted liveliness of prayer.
These first involuntary movements were
the origin of the Shaker dances ; found-
ed, according to the faithful, upon spe-
cial revelation and justified by various
scriptural texts, but which are one of
those strange revivals which occur in
the history of all development. To-day,
that religion is more free from supersti-
tion and less emotional than it has ever
been, Spiritualists have renewed the
primitive belief in the active agency of
the spirits of the dead, and Shakers prac-
tice the oldest method of religious wor-
ship. Shakerism was too crude and sub-
versive of social life to affect the mass
of Englishmen, but Methodism appealed
to all classes of men. When religion was
at its lowest ebb in the eighteenth cen-
tury, new doctrines arose to animate it
with fresh vigor. Wesley and Whitefield,
whose oratory was better calculated to
stimulate the emotions than the intel-
lect, preached the necessity of rebirth or
regeneration by faith alone to miners,
farmers, and the hard-working members
of society, to whom religion for many
years had been but a name. Excite-
ment was thus introduced to lives other-
wise dull and eventless, and a sense
of dignity communicated to men as des-
titute of social individuality as bees in
a bee-hive or ants in an ant-hill. More-
over, belief in the sensible operations of
the Spirit aroused in the individual an
unnatural interest in his own emotional
states, an evil which is obviated by those
creeds which make man's salvation as

1883.]

Mcenadism in Religion.

497

dependent upon sacraments and obser-
vance of discipline as upon conscious-
ness of sin and change of heart. This
subjective doctrine reacted with terrible
force upon the nervous systems of peo-
ple to whom an outlet for feeling in
ideal ional energy was simply an impos-
sibility. During Whitefield's first ser-
mon, fifteen of his hearers were driven
mad. " All upon whom God laid his
hand," Wesley naively remarked after a
successful meeting, " turned either very
red or almost black." The record of
the progress of a certain phase of Meth-
odism is one of a long series of convul-
sions, spasms, and agonies of soul, find-
ing vent in screams and groans, or of
poor humanity maddened in its attempt
to become God-like. That the excite-
ment of this movement never developed
into an epidemic as disastrous as that of
the Cevennes or of St. Medard was be-
cause the ever-increasing rationalism of
the age was undermining the old ideas
as to the interaction of physical and spir-
itual forces. From the time of Wesley
to the present, there have been many re-
vivals of the nervous phenomena. When
the first enthusiasm had somewhat abat-
ed, sects of ranters and jumpers sought
to counteract the growing indifference.
In the early part of this century the
inhabitants of Tennessee, Kentucky, and
Virginia, during a period of religious
agitation, were seized by the " jerks," a
contagious nervous disease, not unlike
the chorea which attacked the inmates
of mediaeval convents. The scenes now
at camp -meetings, and in some Meth-
odist churches, rival those of the first
gatherings around Wesley and White-
field. These manifestations must sur-
vive to a limited extent so long as men
with badly balanced minds or nervous
temperaments concentrate their thoughts

l It is impossible in a short article to give the
physiological or pathological causes of ecstasy ;iml
delirium in religion. The curious reader may

VOL. LII. — NO. 312. 32

upon religious belief which does not
concern itself with works ; or so long
as religion is made an excuse for the
disposal of surplus emotional energy, as
is often the case, for example, with
negroes who join Methodist and Baptist
congregations, and with whom a chance
circumstance will divert the tide of re-
ligious fervor into a totally different
channel.

While it is of course impossible to
know what the future may bring forth,
it may be safely predicted that the hys-
terical extravagances of Ma^nadism will
never reappear as epidemics in the civi-
lized Western world. It is a significant
fact that the woric of the Salvation
Army, the great modern revivalists, has
not encouraged the convulsive expres-
sions of religious excitement. Leading
in a few instances to fanaticism and
folly as unfortunate as any excesses in
previous ages, it has at least this merit:
it requires as proof of conversion total
abstinence from drink and tobacco, rath-
er than imaginary sensations and emo-
tions ; thus showing a keener apprecia-
tion, though to be sure a distorted one,
for practical human morality than for
unprofitable supernatural phenomena.
Even if religion should later become
the dominant idea of Europe or Amer-
ica, which seems unlikely from the pres-
ent secularization of interests, it would
not give rise to dancing or prophesying
manias. Never again, unless science
be completely forgotten, can nervous
disorders be attributed to the immediate
action of good or evil spirits. What-
ever faith the future may evolve, if it bo
an embodiment of the ideals of the age,

• O '

its saints and prophets will be those
men who, instead of sacrificing their
will power, will have developed it to
its utmost possibility.1

Elizabeth Robins.

consult the works of Carpenter, Maudsley, Cal-
mi'il, or indeed any of the physiologist.-; of the day
who have written on the action of the brain.

498

JPere Antoine.

[October,

PERE ANTOINE.

"YES, Madame la Comtesse," said
Monsieur le Cure", a mild glow of en-
thusiasm lighting up his irregular fea-
tures, " I have saved five hundred and
fifty francs."

M. le Cure* had come to make a visit
of ceremony at the grand chateau.
Monsieur was scrupulously exact about
his visits of ceremony to Madame de
Mirouet, the sole remaining representa-
tive of the great family in his parish.
His deference to madame was perhaps
all the more marked because of her mis-
fortunes. The family estate's had in great
part passed into the hands of strangers ;
and, in the Franco-Prussian war, her
husband and her two sons had given
themselves for their country. She was
alone in the world now, this stately old
lady ; but the sense of her own dignity
kept her from loneliness. She heard
the discussions of her servants concern-
ing the details of her little farm with the
same well-bred interest which she had
formerly shown in listening to the in-
trigues of statesmen ; and, in her gray
alpaca gown, she received the calls of
M. le Cure with the same serene grace
with which, in her youth, attired in
satins and laces, she had entertained a
royal duke. She was an impressive
old lady, as she sat in a straight-backed
chair in the midst of the dignified and
shabby magnificence of the grand salon.
She seemed to belong to the present no
more than did the ancestral portraits on
the wall ; and one felt that she shared
in their stern, though mute, protest
against the degeneracy of the times.
" The world is indeed in a sad way,"
thought madame, " in these days, when
all the traditions of the noblesse are over-
thrown. It is a comfort to find here and
there a man who has not lost the proper
spirit of deference to his superiors ; "
and she bowed her head with courtly

condescension to the remarks of M. le
Cure, who sat before her, a trifle ill at
ease, the angles in his lank figure rather
displayed than concealed by his shabby
soutane.

Poor M. le Cure ! Did he remember,
as he talked to the faded figure in gray
alpaca, a day, forty years ago, — a day
when the clear sun of Normandy had
shone down on the rose-garden of the
chateau as it was shining this afternoon ;
and the young girl, gathering roses for
her marriage fete, caught sight of a shy
boy peeping over the hedge? Did he
remember how she had smiled frankly
at him, and tossed him a rose with a
gay " Good-by, Antoine ; you will be a
learned man before I see you again ; "
and how the poor fellow had stammered
out his thanks, and run away from the
beautiful vision? Had there, perhaps,
been a little romance in M. le Curd's
life, — a romance none the less pathetic
because unknown to the world and hard-
ly acknowledged even to himself? At
all events, there were no signs of sen-
timent visible now in the middle-aged
man, with somewhat coarse features
and patient face, who sat talking to the
shadowy old lady. M. Antoine was
thinking far more of his five hundred
and fifty francs than of the bright young
girl whom a hard destiny had sent back,
in her old age, to live, desolate and
alone, in her father's house.

" It is a large sum, M. le Cure," said
madame.

"Ah, yes, madame, a sum immense,
which it has required much patience to
save. For two years I have fasted and
pinched. I can hardly believe that my
long waiting is at last rewarded, and
that to-morrow the altar will be mine.
Could you but see it! " M. le Cure went
on, his monotonous voice trembling with
emotion. " The wood is oak, rich and

1883.]

Pcre Antoine.

499

mellowed by age. The altar must date
back to the twelfth ceutury at least; and
the carving — ah, we see no such work
to-day ! At the corners stand as pillars
the four P>angelists ; the space between
is filled with reliefs, but reliefs of a
delicacy and richness ! They represent
the life of the Holy Mother, and are
surrounded by mystical symbols. And
this gem has lain hidden for years in an
obscure Norman town ! It was reserved
for me, — for me, madame, — to discover
it. Fancy my joy as I pictured to myself
that I might become the owner of this
treasure, and my terror lest some rival
should bear it away before I could save
the required sum ! But no one has dis-
covered it, and our little church will
be enriched by a relic unequaled in
France."

As M. le Cure took his leave, and
strode home through the gathering dusk,
his unwonted excitement died away, and
left on his face the placid, dreamy ex-
pression which was often interpreted as
stupidity. He was, in fact, by no means
a clever man. He had disappointed his
friends, who had hoped much from the
shy, studious boy, by an utter lack of
ambition. Yielding to their entreaties,
he had studied for a couple of years at
Paris ; but he felt out of place amid the
bustle and glitter of the great city, and
after taking orders returned, contented
to live and die as priest in his small
native village of Crevecoeur. Perhaps
some early disappointment had taken
from him all desire for worldly honor;
perhaps a certain fastidiousness of feel-
ing, lying beneath his rough exterior,
had caused him to shrink from pushing
himself forward. M. Antoine was quite
satisfied with the life he had chosen.
He was a very happy man this even-
ing, as he strolled home through the
lane, sweet with the fragrance of honey-
suckle. The evening star was just visi-
ble in the west, and the hedgerows were
alive with the soft twittering of birds
and the fluttering of downy night-moths.

The Angelus was ringing, and in the
little village at the foot of the hill a
few twinkling lights appeared, one after
another. A peasant woman, in white
cap and large wooden sabots, dropped a
courtesy to M. le Cure as she passed,
crooning softly to her baby.

M. Antoine felt as peaceful as the
scene. He thought of the little gray
church to which he was going, — the
church which had been to him what
wife and children are to other men ;
and he was filled with joy as he remem-
bered the beautiful altar that he should
soon be able to present to it. His two
years in Paris had made him able to
appreciate the severe but fine architec-
ture of the church, which the peasants
described apologetically, as "old, — very
old ; " and all his innate love of the
beautiful was lavished upon it. The
thought never occurred to M. le Cure
that his church was not alive. Not
alive, when he had lived with it for
years, and knew every stone in its gray
walls ! Not alive ! Had he not felt
the gratitude of the building for the
ivies that he had trained round its porch,
and the beautiful wax candles that he
burnt within ? M. le Cure's happiest
hours were spent in the little church.
Often he would rise in the night, and
slipping through the tiny garden of the
presbytere, would let himself into the
building, and there the morning would
find him, kneeling before the altar. lie
gained a great reputation for sanctity
from these midnight vigils ; but I fear
that if the truth were told M. le Cure's
religious sense was somewhat vaguo.
He would have been horrified had any
one hinted that he was not " bon Catho~
lique ; " he crossed himself at the men-
tion of a heretic ; but in his practical
life all the devotion and enthusiasm of
his nature went out to the church, which
was never cold, never unsympathetic,
never uncongenial, — which was always
ready to receive confidences, and never
needed tiresome explanations. The

500

adornment of the church was the aim
OL M. Antoine's life. Already he had
gained several prizes, such as a singu-
larly beautiful font for holy water, and
some fine brass candlesticks ; but never
had he dreamed of possessing anything
so unique as this twelfth-century altar.
He paused, and clasped his hands, and
his breath came faster as he thought of
the honor which would be done his be-
loved church.

He did not sleep much that night
through excitement, and early the next
morning he started for Lisieux, to com-
plete his bargain.

As he was passing through the vil-
lage, the peasant woman whom he had
seen the night before ran out from her
house, and stopped him.

" Ah, M. le Cure, what good Provi-
dence sends you into the town at this
early hour ? My little Jeanne is ill, and
I was just wishing I could see you. The
doctor says she must have nourishing
food, soups and jellies, and where is the
money to come from ? "

M. le Cure hesitated. He entered
the house, and all the time that he was
uttering the commonplaces of sympathy
he was performing a mental calculation.
Yes, at least forty francs would be neces-
sary to furnish the sick child with the
comforts she needed. Somehow, the
money in M. Antoine's pocket seemed
very heavy just then. And yet — and
yet, forty francs represented at least
two months of saving ; and in those two
months what might not happen ?

At that moment, pale little Jeanne
opened her eyes, smiled at the cure;
and nestled confidingly against the big
brown hand which he had laid on her
cheek.

M. Antoine coughed, fumbled in his
pocket, and drew out a piece of money.
" There, Mere Suzanne," said he awk-
wardly ; " with that you can buy some
trifles for the child," and hastily taking
his leave, to avoid her thanks, he hurried
home.

Pere Antoine. [October,

Mere Suzanne found in her hand a
five -franc piece. She was overcome
with gratitude and delight, for she had
seldom so much money in her possession
at once. " Ah, the saintly man ! " she
murmured. '• With this I can buy tliee
soup and meat for several days, my little
Jeanne."

M. le Cure went home in a discon-
tented frame of mind. He was cross to
old Babette, his housekeeper, when she
expressed surprise at his sudden return,
and spent the morning pacing up and
down the pleached alley in his garden.
He put aside without looking at them
his five hundred and forty-five francs ;
he hated the sight of them, and wished
them either more or less. If he were
to be deprived of the pleasure of buy-
ing his altar for the present, he wished
that he might at least have the privi-
lege of feeling generous. However,
he consoled himself as best he might,
and turned his attention to the quickest
method of making up the missing five
francs.

He succeeded so well that in less
than a week he was on his way to
Lisieux. This time, nothing happened
to interrupt his bargain, and he returned
in triumph, with a joyful sense of secu-
rity. No one could take the altar from
him now ! He spent most of the ensu-
ing day in preparing the church to re-
ceive its new treasure. Poor Babette
had to scrub off every speck of dust
from the stone floor ; and the cure felt
quite impatient with two old women
in muddy sabots who came in to pray
for a few minutes. But at last all was
ready. M. Antoine had even tried to
adorn the chancel with ivy and sprigs
of honeysuckle ; and the result, although
rather clumsy, served its purpose of
affording him pleasure.

Towards evening, the altar arrived.
It jarred a little on M. Antoine that
two sturdy countrymen in blue blouses
should carry it to its place ; he would
have felt it more suitable had an invisi-

1883.]

Pere Antoine.

501

ble band of angels gently lowered the
altar, while chanting the most solemn of
music. However, the work was at last
ended, and the countrymen left the
church. But he was not yet allowed
to enjoy his new possession in peace ; it
was the hour of vespers, and the peas-
ants, who had heard from Babette the
rumor of a new acquisition, came to the
church in larger numbers than usual.
M. le Cure was not sorry to have, as it
were, a little fete in honor of the altar.
He had bought six new wax candles
when at Lisieux ; and now he placed
them upon the altar, and lighted them
proudly. In the dim twilight, the rich
shades of the wood were brought out
by the yellow light, and M. le Cure
thought the effect even finer than he
had anticipated. When service was over
and the people had dispersed, he smiled
scornfully, as he remembered how old
Mere Bichon had muttered that this
altar might be very well, but it was
nothing to the one at Fleumont, which
had a white cloth with gilt fringe, and
was ornamented with two large vases of
paper flowers. As he left the church,
it seemed to him that its gray walls
looked more friendly and protecting than
ever, and he gave it a friendly nod
of understanding, and murmured aloud,
14 Adieu."

M. Antoine did not return -to the al-
tar for several hours ; Tie was an epicure
in his pleasures, and liked to enjoy by
anticipation. At last, however, when
Babette supposed him fast asleep, he
stole through the little garden, and en-
tered the church. He walked straight
to the altar, with a trembling sense that
it might have vanished. But no ; as
lie lighted his wax candles, one after
the other, the four Evangelists at the
corners grew more and more distinct,
and seemed to smile on him. Already
he felt that he knew them as friends.
The altar was certainly a wonderful piece
of work; the candle-light brought out
more clearly the delicate, low relief, and

each instant M. le Cure discovered some
new beauty. The church had never
looked so fair as in this dim light. The
honeysuckle in the chancel mingled its
odor with that of the incense ; behind,
the nave stretched away into the dark-
ness ; and through the little rose-win-
dow at the end there shone a friendly
star. M. Antoine fell on his knees,
with clasped hands, on the chancel steps.
He would have made a fine study for
some mediaeval saint, as he knelt there
in his black robe, the light striking full
on his pale, uplifted face. But M. le
Cure's meditations were far from re-
ligious ; what he was feeling was an ec-
stasy of delight over his new treasure.
It seemed to him that he was taking
part in a grand service, of which the
altar was the central point. Proces-
sions of white-robed boys passed, swing-
ing censers; priests in gorgeous robes
chanted the mass, and lifted the Host
before the adoring crowd ; and M. le
Cure was there in the midst of it all !

Suddenly, breaking in upon his rev-
erie, came a harsh whisper : " Monsieur !
Monsieur Antoine ! " The voice came
from old Babette, who did not dare to
speak aloud.

The cure roused himself, with a sigh.
" What is it ? " said he, going to the
door. " Why do you call me ? I am
engaged."

Beside Babette stood a dark figure,
patting his horse's neck. " Ah, M. le
Cure," said the figure. " Old Jean of
the Mill is dying, and he bade me tell
you to come as quick as you cau to ad-
minister the last sacraments."

Such calls were not uncommon, but
it seemed unjust to M. Antoine that
one should have come on this particular
night ; and I fear that he felt rather in-
different to old Jean's spiritual welfare.
However, he mounted his nag. and start-
ed on his journey, calling to Babette to
extinguish the candles in the church.
But the old woman was either too deaf
or too sleepy to hear him, and went

502

Pere Antoine.

[October,

straight to bed, mattering crossly to her-
self.

M. le Cure returned to Crevecoeur in
the gray dawn of the following morn-
ing, lie had had a hard night, for old
Jean was long about dying, and the
scene had worn upon M. Antoine, who
was not so young as he had once been.
As he rode through the fields in the dewy
morning, he tried to think of the peace-
ful little gray church and the beautiful
altar within ; but he could not bring
them vividly before his mind : the dis-
torted features of the dying man and
little Jeanne's pale face insisted on pre-
senting themselves to him. Passing
through the village, he was surprised to
see several women out, in spite of the
early Jiour ; and noticed, with a certain
dreamy wonder, that they shook their
heads as they looked at him. He did
not stop, although one woman started to
speak to him ; he was in haste to reach
his beloved church. Ah ! here was the
turn in the road where he should first
catch a glimpse of its ivy-covered walls.
But no, he must be wrong ; it was farther
on. . . . The church not yet visible?
What did it mean ? And what was this
sound of voices that came to him across
the quiet meadows ? M. le Cure stopped
his horse for an instant, his heart sink-
ing, and then rode furiously on to the
presbytere gate.

The church was gone ; and in its
place were a few ruined walls and a
heap of smouldering ashes.

M. le Cure dismounted mechanically,
and in spite of the crowd that tried to
prevent him walked into the midst of
the ruins. A little black object caught
his eye, and he stooped and picked it
up. It was the head of the Apostle
John, which, charred by the fire, had
lost its former expression of friendly
benevolence, and looked up at M. le
Cure with a malevolent grin.

Three weeks later, Babette was stand-
ing in the midst of a little group of vil-

lage cronies. They had been talking
fast, and were much excited.

" And you say he has never even
asked about the fire, Mere Babette ? "

" Not a word ; and he does not seem
to hear, though I tell him again and
again how I waked with the smell of
smoke, and how I rushed to the church
and found that precious altar of his all
in a blaze. He does not know that the
church is burned. He will sit still for
hours, smiling to himself ; and then he
will go out and stand among the ruins,
repeating the service. Madame la Com-
tesse came to see him this afternoon,
and she says " — here the old woman
tapped her forehead significantly —
" that we must have the doctor from
Lisieux."

" Ah, poor man ! " murmured the
old women. " I wonder whom we shall
have in his place ; " and, shaking their
heads dismally, they separated.

It was even as Babette had hinted.
When the doctor came, he said that M.
le Cure's mind, already weakened by
his monotonous life, had yielded under
the influence of the shock. The form
which his insanity took was that of living
in the past rather than in the present ;
he might die if he were moved from
his familiar surroundings.

So M. le Cure and Babette lived on
together, and he was very gentle and
submissive to Che discipline that she
sometimes saw fit to administer : but
when her voice grew unusually rasping,
he would slip out, and pass through the
little garden to the ruins. Sometimes he
would poke among the ashes with his
stick, a bewildered expression on his
face, as if he had lost something; but
more often he would stand in his ac-
customed place, and chant the service
solemnly. Sometimes he would fall on
his knees, look rapturously at the empty
spot where the altar had been, and re-
main for hours in that position, quite
content and happy.

So passed M. le Cure's life. And

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

503

there is a new priest in the village of
Crevecoeur, a burly, red-faced man,
who intones the service with a nasal
twang ; and there is a little church all

freshly whitewashed, and within it an
altar covered by a white cloth with gilt
fringe, and upon the cloth three large
vases of paper flowers.

Davida Goit.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ROME DURING THE ITALIAN REVOLU-
TION.

THE foreign tourist now reaches
Rome in the comfortable carriage of an
express train from Florence or from
Naples ; he enters the city under an
arch opened for the purpose in the
walls near the Lateran Gate ; he trav-
erses the gardens and vineyards back of
the ruined temple of Minerva Medica
and the Basilica of Santa Maria Mag-
giore, and, did he but know it, almost
along the line of the far more ancient
Servian wall ; and he alights in a spa-
cious and incongruously modern station
opposite the ruins of the Baths of Dio-
cletfan, on the plateau of the Vimiual
and the Esquiline.

Our tourist then takes his seat in an
open barouche, drives across the broad
piazza, with its beautiful fountain, and
turns into the modern avenue of the
Via Nazionale : it may be to stop at
the large, French-looking Hotel Quiri-
nale, or it may be to drive further on,
down into the very heart of the city,
passing in front of the stately Amer-
ican church, whose noble Lombard tower
rises on the corner of the Via Napoli,
— a monument, as the present King
of Italy once said that it would be, of
American faith in the stability of the
Italian kingdom, and especially in the
continuance of freedom of worship in
the city of Rome.

It is said that when such an innova-
tion as steam traveling was proposed to
Pope Gregory XVI., he peremptorily

refused to allow it in the Papal States ;
adding that were a railroad to come
into Rome it would undermine the Pa-
pacy. The old Pope was quite right,
and wise in his generation, as the event
has proved.

Accordingly, when, six and twenty
years ago, the writer first visited the
Eternal City, he arrived in a little Med-
iterranean steamer at Civita Vecchia ;
waited for hours for permission to dis-
embark ; was rowed on shore in a small
boat ; hired an Italian postilion to drive
him, with a friend, up to Rome; and
spent some five or six hours on the
dreary and desolate road over the Cam-
pagna, passing on the way those who
drove only a single horse, but obliged
to submit to be passed by any one who
boasted more horses, or even to lag be-
hind such an one, however slowly he
might be moving on.

Early in the month of November,
1859, we were able to go up from Civit&
Vecchia to Rome by rail ; but we were
obliged to leave the train outside the
city walls, where our passports were
closely scrutinized by the police. We
were then permitted to enter, in an om-
nibus, by the Porta Cavalleggieri, and
thence to drive along the colonnade of
St. Peter's, over the Ponte Sant' An-
gelo, through the dark and narrow
streets, under the oppressive shadows
of huge stone palaces with their iron-
barred prison windows, to our hotel in
the Via Condotti.

If a railroad had indeed been allowed

504 Recollections of Home during the Italian Revolution. [October,

to come so near the sacred city, in all
other things the Vatican stood firm.
Non possutnus was still enthroned upon,
the seven liills. Pius IX. was in the
vigor of his pontificate ; Antonelli was
in the zenith of his influence and power.
It is true that the battles of Magenta
and Solferiuo had been fought in June
of that same year ; that Milan and Lom-
bardy had been ceded to the Sardin-
ian king. It is true that although the
Treaty of Zurich had declared that the
dispossessed princes of Central Italy
should be reinstated in their former
rights, yet there was no provision for
carrying this declaration into effect, and
Tuscany and the duchies only waited,
under the dictatorship of Ricasoli and
Farini, for permission to unite them-
selves with Piedmont and Lombardy.
It is true that even the Romagna had,
so far, maintained its independence of
the Holy See, pending the decisions of
a European congress which was soon to
meet at Paris, and to which the Italian
question had been referred ; but, mean-
while, a French army of occupation
kept all fear of revolution from the
thresholds of St. Peter's. The French
bugle daily resounded from the arches
of Constantino's Basilica; General Count
de Goyon, on the 15th of November, re-
viewed his troops, some nine thousand
strong, and engaged them in battle with
an imaginary foe on the Campo Farne-
sino, beyond the Tiber ; and the tall
and elegant figure of the Due de Gram-
mont, the French ambassador, was ever
seen on all state occasions in the halls
and corridors of the Vatican.

Nevertheless, of all the exciting prob-
lems in Italian politics, "the Roman
question " was " la question brulante"
About's trenchant little volume was the
politico-literary event of the day. De-
spite post-office censors and papal po-
lice, not a few copies of it had been
smuggled into Rome. Wherever people
dared discuss public affairs at all they
debated whether the French emperor

would be induced by Austria to restore
the legations to the Pope ; or whether
he could be brought by Count Cavour
to leave the Romans also free to settle
their oWn future for themselves, or
even, as About had proposed, if the
temporal power were inevitable, to re-
duce the inevitable to a minimum, and
the temporal papacy to the city and
comarca of Rome.

Such was the state of Italian politics
when the first steps were taken towards
the establishment of American services
and the organization of an American
church.

Protestant worship had for several
years been provided for American trav-
elers, from time to time, under the au-
spices of the American and Foreign
Christian Union ; and the Rt. Rev. Dr.
Alonzo Potter, then Bishop of Pennsyl-
vania, had in the preceding May offici-
ated in the American legation, and ad-
ministered the rite of confirmation. But
now a chaplain of the legation was ap-
pointed, with a view to a more settled
provision for the religious needs of the
Americans in Rome ; and since there
could be but one organization, an Epis-
copal church was established, under the
protection of the Hon. John P. Stock-
ton, then the minister resident, and
with the hearty concurrence of all Prot-
estant Americans in the city, without
regard to denominational differences,
— Presbyterians, Methodists, and Bap-
tists uniting with Episcopalians, alike
in the steps which were then taken and
in the subsequent support of their
church.

Such services could be held at that
time only within the legation itself, the
residence of the minister bringing the
premises constructively under the juris-
diction of the American government, so
,that the papal authorities could take
no cognizance of anything done there.
The legation was that autumn in the
Palazzo Bernini, on the east side of the
Corso, between the Via Frattina and

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

the Via Borgognona, where, opposite a
broad flight of marble steps turning to
the left, was, and no doubt still is, a
large sitting statue of Truth, by Bernini.
Here the tourist of a younger genera-
tion, who feels a patriotic pride in the
noble church on the Via Nazionale, who
may also be interested in its earliest be-
ginnings, and who wishes, therefore, to
recall " the day of small things," will
find a little anteroom, where, on Sun-
day morning, November 20, 1859, were
gathered some forty persons for the
opening services. A formal business
meeting was held on the 26th, in the
private apartment of Mr. Joseph Mo-
zier, Trinita de' Monti, No. 18, at which
the protection extended to the congre-
gation by the American minister was
gratefully acknowledged, and an organ-
ization effected under the name of Grace
Church, of which the Hon. Mr. Stock-
ton was appointed senior, and Dr. Fitz-
William Sargent junior warden. It is
noteworthy that the next morning Car-
dinal Antonelli told Mr. Stockton what
had been done the evening before, as
a good-humored intimation that the au-
thorities were watching us.

Shortly after, the legation was re-
moved — and Grace Church, of course,
with it — to the Palazzo Simonetti, fur-
ther up the Corso. In the court, on the
ground floor of this palace, a brother of
Cardinal Antonelli carried on a profit-
able banking business. Up the winding
staircase, whose open stone balustrade
and marble pillars were very fine, week
after week, all that winter, the more
devout of the Americans in Rome as-
cended to the chancellerie of the lega-
tion, which was transformed every Sun-
day into a church ; while during other
days the chancel and the ecclesiastical
appointments generally were screened
from sight, and the rest of the large
room, whose windows looked into the
Via Latu, given up to diplomacy. The
whole number of Americans in Rome at
any one time this winter never quite

505

reached four hundred : of whom the
maximum attendance at our services —
all the room would hold — was one
hundred and forty.

Under the protection of the legation
and of the rectorship of this little con-
gregation, partly of resident Americans,
more largely of mere travelers, the op-
portunity was enjoyed of studying Ital-
ian politics, ecclesiastical and secular, —
if Italian politics could then, in Rome,
ever be regarded as wholly secular, —
and of undergoing many experiences, not
uninteresting then, but well worthy now,
after so great changes, both political
and ecclesiastical, of being recalled from
the journals and private correspondence
of those years.

One of the first incidents of the chapel
in this palazzo was strikingly illustra-
tive of the place and times. The Rev.
Mr. Heintz, the chaplain of the Prus-
sian embassy, early in December asked
for our assistance in a marriage. The
groom was a lieutenant in the French
army of occupation ; the bride, though
also French by family and nationality
and Roman by birth, was a member of
his own spiritual flock and charge, and
therefore a Lutheran. He could him-
self officiate, on such an occasion, only
in his own chapel ; but this marriage
could not take place in the Prussian em-
bassy because the parties were French.
They could not be married by the
French chaplain, a Roman Catholic
priest, because the lady, at least, was a
Protestant; nor could any one but a
Roman Catholic priest officiate in the
chapel of that embassy; nor, for the
same reason, could she be married by
any one anywhere under papal jurisdic-
tion. Could they be married by the
American chaplain under the protection
of the American flag? Mr. Stockton
replied that the ceremony might be per-
formed in the American chapel, if in
accordance with American laws, and
provided the French ambassador would
express in writing a wish to that effect.

506 * Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. [October,

The necessary correspondence having
taken place, and the parties having been
duly instructed concerning the service,
on the appointed day the chancellerie
was turned into the chapel, the minister
resident, consul, and vice-consul, with a
few others, attending as American wit-
nesses. The French ambassador and
General de Goyon were represented
by their respective aides-de-camp. The
groom was accompanied by a number of
his fellow officers in full uniform, mak-
ing quite a brilliant gathering ; and the
bride, by her parents and several friends,
as well as by her Prussian pastor. The
civil contract had already been signed in
the French embassy ; the religious ser-
vices were partly in French, partly in
English ; and this quasi - international
marriage under difficulties was thus hap-
pily solemnized to the satisfaction of all
concerned.

But the American chaplain at Rome
had, that winter, as ever since, much
more to do with sorrow and sickness
and death than with wedding rejoicings;
and there was one day when, amid the
wildest saturnalia of the Carnival, he
made his way with difficulty through the
noisy buffoonery of the crowded streets,
from one scene of heart-rending anguish
and the bedside of one dying American
traveler to that of another. There were
five deaths among the Americans in
Rome during the season of 1859-60,
and three during the following.

As this second season drew near, a
renewal of the lease of the apartment
in the Palazzo Simonetti was refused to
the legation, if heretic worship were to
be held there. Mr. Stockton thought,
at first, that he might avoid this diffi-
culty by getting some large room else-
where, and constituting it a part of the
legation by placing the American arms
over it. But Cardinal Antonelli told
him categorically that we could not be
permitted to hold our services under
any other roof in Rome save that un-
der which the minister resident himself

slept. Thus forced to the alternative of
closing the chapel, or making another
move, Mr. Stockton — who never spared
himself either trouble or expense where
the interest of his country folk, or what
he held to be his duty to them, was
involved — transferred the legation to
the Palazzo Lozzano, immediately oppo-
site the Church of San Carlo al Corso.
Here, however, it was not the business
offices, but the ball-room of the apart-
ment, and therefore of the legation,
which alone he had to place at our dis-
posal for a chapel.

The appointments and decorations of
this saloon were, as may well be imag-
ined, anything but ecclesiastical. The
walls between the marble pilasters were
either covered with polished artificial
marble, or occupied by large gilt-framed
mirrors. Below, along three sides of
the room, ran an almost continuous di-
van, upholstered in yellow damask. On
the fourth side the windows looked down
into the Corso. The ceiling was divid-
ed by the most graceful gilt arabesques
into paneled compartments, filled with
brilliantly frescoed mythological figures
and subjects, of which the central group
represented some revelry of the gods.
There was around the room a broad
frescoed frieze of dancing nymphs and
graces. At the further end, between
the windows, two carved and gilded ta-
bles, of elaborate design and with crim-
son velvet tops, did duty, the one for
the desk and pulpit, the other for an
altar ; a movable chancel-rail standing
in front. However incongruous, how-
ever strange a contrast, for instance,
to the interior and chancel of the church
on the Via Nazionale, yet all this was
not without some interesting and primi-
tive associations ; for it was probably in
just such places that many congrega-
tions of early Roman Christians wor-
shiped, in that transition period when
they were no longer forced to take ref-
uge in the catacombs, but could not yet
build churches, and when they there-

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

507

fore gathered, for all religious purposes,
in the large halls and festive saloons of
the richer members of their brother-
hood.

Here no Romans, clerical or lay, dare
enter to worship with us, or even to
look on in respectful curiosity. On the
occasion of our services, two papal gens-
d'armes were stationed at the street por-
tone to mark who came. On one oc-
casion, indeed, a young lay attache of
the papal court was seen among us.
He was recognized by several of us, who
knew him at least by sight or name.
His presence there at once excited anx-
ious speculation. Could he be indeed
interested to learn something of our
worship, and of the religious faith of
Protestants, that he should run such
a risk of getting himself into serious
trouble ? How could he have escaped
the watch of the police ? Or could he,
indeed, have come by permission and
with due connivance, as a spy, to as-
certain what we were doing, and what
were our heretical ends and aims ; or to
see if perchance any Roman had been
tempted to venture in ? It was a grave
matter, this young chamberlain's appear-
ance at our service. It transpired, not
long afterwards, that he had secured his
entrance by the simple expedient of
giving a few pauls each to the two Cer-
beri ; and that his mysterious purpose
was to gaze upon a fair American who
had bewitched him at some late social
gathering.

A great war has come and gone for
us Americans since those days : the
wondrous Italian revolution has at last
reached Rome. The successor of Pius
IX. regards himself as morally a pris-
oner in the Vatican ; the successor of
Victor Emmanuel reigns, the king of a
united Italy, from the Quirinal. The

few American residents of Rome who
once attended those early services, and
who yet remain, and the children of
those travelers who visited Rome then,
now turn their steps on the Lord's day
to very different courts ; and many Ital-
ians, with none to arrest their purpose,
meet with them in a noble temple, —
Grace Church is now St. Paul's-within-
the-walls, — conspicuous on a broad ave-
nue, which had no existence twenty
years ago.

When in 1873 the foundations of St.
Paul's Church were about to be laid by
the Rev. Dr. Nevin, the present rector,
it was necessary, in one place, to dig
down through forty feet of accumulated
rubbish before the workmen could lay
the first stones on solid ground. The
strong tower rests on the massive ma-
sonry of Servius Tullius. But out of
those depths rose the substructure on
which the spacious chancel was built up,
and the solemn apse. Upon that Ser-
vian, wall the tower now stands firm,
and from its fair open arches the sweet
bells chime out on the clear air of
Rome their call to prayer. From its
lofty apex the cross is revealed against
the pure blue sky. Within those courts
thousands have worshiped where many
thousands more, God willing, will yet
follow them.

But whether Americans or Romans,
whether from near or from across the
seas, little or nothing will they think or
know of the walls or of the substruc-
tures which lie hidden so far beneath ;
quite as little of the moral depths to
\vhirh they had to go, the difficulties
with which they had to contend, or the
stones which they laid bare, who first
began the work, ere anything perma-
nent could be done towards gathering
such a congregation of Americans in,
Rome.

William Chauncy Langdon.

508

Volcano Studies.

[October,

VOLCANO STUDIES.

ON the line of the projected railroad
from Guayaquil to Quito there is a little
mountain village which is destined to
become the Chamouni of the American
continent. Guanarete, or Santa Rita,
as the Spaniards call it, forms the sum-
mit station of the Cerro de las Playas.
For more than ninety miles the Cerro
runs parallel to the range of the Central
Andes, and opposite Quito, at an eleva-
tion of nine thousand feet above the
level of the Pacific, the heights of the
eastern slope afford a view of the grand-
est mountain panorama of the western
hemisphere. In the east the main chain
of the Andes is broken by two gaps
that reveal the highlands of the Paramos,
the central plateau of the South Amer-
ican Sierras ; and the nineteen snow-
capped peaks in the north, south, and
southwest include the five highest active
volcanoes on earth.

A life-insurance bureau might repu-
diate the policy of an Andes explorer.
He may lose his way, and starve to
death ; he may reach his goal, and
freeze to death : but among the volca-
noes of Ecuador he will not die of ennui.
A first-class man-hunter, like Suwaroff,
may get expert enough to undertake a
battle or a siege as a butcher would take
a beef contract, and repeated attacks
would case-harden even the garrison of
a much-besieged town, but not the de-
fenseless burghers. To passive partici-
pants danger can never become a routine
business, and against the resistless power
of a volcano experience has but rarely
forearmed the forewarned.

Nor can scientists ever exhaust the
problems of volcano study. The pri-
mum mobile of plutonic agencies is still
a mystery, and the fluctuating theories
hardly rival the fitfulness of the phe-
nomena. Besides, every volcano has a
system of its own. The Sangay, forty

leagues due east from Guayaquil, has
never indulged in vehement eruptions,
but has nevertheless afflicted the sur-
rounding country with a greater amount
of cinerous deposits than any active or
extinct volcano of this continent; except-
ing, perhaps, that prehistoric monster
crater that inundated Southern Oregon
with twenty thousand square miles of
lava streams. The Sangay works day
and night, and with the steadiness of a
self-regulating steam-mill. I ascended
the peak in 1881, with a party of Ameri-
can engineers, and whenever we rested
the dark gray ash-cloud which the north
wind drifted toward Cuencja preserved
the uniformity of its outline like the
ridge of a sharply defined mountain
range. As seen from the edge of the
main crater, the eruptions seem to come
by fits and starts, but the aggregate of
the matter ejected in any given minute
remains about the same from morning
till night. Pauses there are none ; a
soughing draft, with a heavier puff at
intervals of fifteen to twenty seconds.
The furnace of the Sangay has three
larger and about fifty smaller vents, that
discharge an aggregate of at least forty
pounds of ashes per second, or fifteen
hundred tons on each day of the year.

With two short intermissions this drain
upon the resources of Vulcan has con-
tinued year after year since the winter
of 1728, before which time the mountain
was supposed to be an extinct volcano.
With two intermissions, I say, for the
ash-rain almost ceased in 1812, on the
day when the volcano of St. Vincent
turned a fertile island into a cinder
heap; and in 1842 ceased entirely for
two weeks, distinguished only by the
bramidos de vera paz, the subterranean
thunders, which frightened rather than
injured the natives of Northern Guate-
mala. But what changes in the inter-

1883.]

Volcano Studies.

509

nal economy of our Mother Earth can
have increased her daily expenditure of
fuel to the amount represented by those
fifteen hundred tons of ashes ? If the
fuel is burned in a perpetual furnace,
how did it dispose of its ashes before it
opened the present vent ? — for no other
mountain ceased smoking when Sangay
began. It is the only incessantly active
volcano of South America, and perhaps
of the whole western hemisphere, since
Steller's arctic Stromboli has never been
rediscovered. On the western slope of
the mountain a few orange-gardeners
eke out a living, for winds from the op-
posite direction are rare ; but on the
north, east, and south, drift-ashes about
the consistency and color of coarse bran
flour have covered an area of four hun-
dred square miles ; and if the restless
mill should continue to grind, the whole
valley of Cuenc.a will ultimately be
ruined. In a high wind the ash-cloud
above the crater flutters like a banner
in a storm, often terminating in curious,
ribbon-like shreds, that extend for miles
along the horizon, like the smoke-traila
in the wake of a Cunard steamer. Vul-
tures sometimes hover at the edge of the
cloud, or float along with it in a sort of
lazy drift before the wind. " Se quieren
calentar" (they want to warm them-
selves), said my Indian guide ; but it is
more probable that they utilize the ashes
for disinfecting purposes, as our barn-
yard chickens often bespatter themselves
with dust.

The Sangay is our Stromboli, and an
indispensable complement to the won-
ders of the New World, though it is a
pity that it should display its pyrotech-
nics in a fertile valley, instead of on a
rocky island.

The peak of Pinchincha in the coast
range is an intermittent volcano. Ten
or twelve times in the course of this
century huge fissures in the flank of the
cone have opened and discharged tor-
rents of lava ; but the main crater emits
only a thin smoke cloud, and now and

then, after weeks of dire birth-throes, a
shower of pumice-stones, mingled with
a few larger rocks and jets of super-
heated steam. The crater is subject to
chronic obstructions, and serves as an
earthquake signal, for almost every seis-
mic tremor is preceded by disturbances
in the coast range, the opening of new
fissures, and subterranean detonations ;
the volcano seems to form the top of a
kettle that has to vent its steam by an
occasional explosion. The vapor erup-
tions occur about once in five weeks,
and when the oven is in full blast its
hot breath can be distinctly felt on the
Alturas of San Rafael, upon the ridge
of the Eastern Andes. The flue must
connect with a very deep-seated furnace.
The snow on the slope of the peak often
melts without any visible increase of the
volcanic emanations, and the theory is
that air currents of a truly infernal
temperature force their way through
clefts where the scoriae cannot follow.
The thermal springs at the foot of the
mountain are too scalding hot for med-
ical purposes, and evaporate almost on
the spot where they exude from the
rocks. But heat and force are convert-
ible terms, and if the scientists of the
future should devise means to tap that
source of caloric, and store the dynamic
elements, the Pinchincha could furnish
motive power enough for all the rail-
roads of South America. On the west
side of the mountain one lava stream
has run for a distance of fourteen Eng-
lish miles, and, judging from its naked
surface, seems to be of rather recent
origin, though since the arrival of the
Spaniards violent eruptions have oc-
curred only (once in eight or nine years)
in the form of stone-showers.

The Cotopaxi (El Gran Cerro, " the
great mountain," as the natives call
it with a sort of devil-worshiping rev-
erence) indulges in even larger pauses,
but has the gift of making up for lost
time. On the second and third day
of June, 1803, the volcano ejected more

510

Volcano Studies.

[October,

than a cubic mile of cinders and burn-
ing stones, and the roar accompanying
the eruption was perhaps the loudest
voice heard on earth since the " dread-
ful shouting of the gods," during the
conflagration of Troy. The rumbling
of an earthquake moves along with the
cause of the disturbance, like the rush
of a storm or the boom of a tidal wave ;
but the thunder of a volcano reverber-
ates from a fixed centre, and has to
transmit its peals by sound-waves, like
the report of a cannon-shot. In that
way the roars of Cotopaxi were carried
to Guayaquil on the sea-coast, and the
echo as far as San Juan de Llanos in
New Grenada, a distance of Jive hun-
dred and sixty English miles, — the dis-
tance from Boston to Petersburg, Va.,
or from Paris to Copenhagen ! A
Spanish officer who survived those two
days at Paso del Toro, six miles east of
the peak, describes the effect of the
detonations as stupefying, mentally as
well as physically. The Indians crouched
in their cabins like cowed beasts, and
the Creoles ran to and fro in a dazed
way, or huddled together in the churches
and shops. About four hundred yards
below the top of the peak there is an
ugly crevice, which in the course of the
last century had been almost filled with
cinders from the upper vent, though
occasional smoke explosions still proved
its connection with the subterranean
furnace. But in 1803 that hell-gate
burst, and the two craters poured forth
a volume of flaming scoriae, which must
have amounted to an average of about
eighty tons per minute ; for on the
plateau of Loreto, thirty miles west of
the mountain, the ground was covered
with a five-inch layer of volcanic ashes,
and at the foot of the volcano that
stratum varied from fourteen to twenty-
eight inches. The lateral crevice has
closed again, but the top crater cannot
be trusted. It has a way of bursting
forth at the most unexpected times, and
on many a cloudless night the peasants

of the Quito valley have been awakened
by the thunders of the Gran Cerro, or
a sudden shower of bituminous stones.

The view from the ridge of Santa
Rita comprises two other active vol-
canoes, the Tunguragua and the Iinba-
bura, the latter (not the Cotopaxi, as
some of our geologists have it) being
the one that vomited the strange me-
lange that deluged the Val de Quito
with mud-water and dead fish.

But besides these conspicuous volca-
noes the Central Andes contain a large
number of hidden craters, which now
and then become vicarious to the ob-
structed vents of the regular chimneys.
All Northern Ecuador seems, in fact,
to rise from the workshops of Tarta-
rus, and scarcely a day passes that the
Titans do not assert their activity in
some way or other. Every now and
then the stillness of the upper Paramos
is broken by the crash of a rock ava-
lanche. The concussions, which, like
fever tremors, vibrate through the bones
of the mountains, shake down all loose
rocks and loosen others, and the high-
land streams have to force their way
through such mountainous heaps of
gravel that the rain-floods scarcely suf-
fice to keep their channels open, and
many of them, like the Rio Esmeraldas,
run for miles below piles of bowlders
that defy the dislodging ability of the
current. These avalanches make the
Paramos rather unsafe. The crash of
their descent often startles the explorer
of the highlands on slopes where neither
trees nor cliffs afford a shelter, and
where life or death may depend upon
a single step. In such moments a herd
of Andes cows would be a study for a
painter. Swiss cattle would be sure to
stampede, but in Ecuador experience
has taught them a trick or two. Instead

of running away, they stand stock still,
and watch the slope with straining eyes.
If the cannonade comes down a little to
the left or right, they move slowly in
the opposite direction ; but if it comes

1883.]

Volcano Studies.

511

right towards them, they know better
than to risk a broadside, and generally
manage to save their lives by facing the
volley, and trying to dodge the individ-
ual bombs. The herder looks out for a
tree, and that failing flings himself flat
upon the ground ; as the larger rocks
come down in wide bounds, the odds are
that they will not touch him. It is the
safest plan ; but temerity is as capricious
as the code of honor : there are men
who would charge a battery rather than
touch a snake, while others surround
themselves with a whole menagerie of
venomous pets, but blanch at the sight
of a pocket pistol. Between Loxa and
Quito I once followed the example of my
traveling companions, two furloughed
United States midshipmen, who had got
off the stage-coach to help the mules
across a steep bluff. We had hardly
alighted when the driver had to ply his
whip to dodge a stone volley that came
crashing through the brambles of the
upper slope. It was curious how, even
in full trot, the mules pricked up their
ears and watched the advent of the vol-
ley ; but still more amusing was the be-
havior of the two cadets. They stood
bolt upright, and cheered each bomb as
if they were standing on the target-
beach of Annapolis, while our equatorial
fellow travelers were crouching down in
the most deferential attitudes. Bodily
prostration somehow suggests the idea
of self-abasement, but it is all custom.

By the special mercy of Providence
the perennial ash-rains of Mount San-
gay are cold ; but the northern volcanoes
often heat the atmosphere with burning
cinders, and if a strong wind blows those
fire-flies against the plateau of the neigh-
boring highlands the effect is apt to
burn itself into the memory of the sur-
prised traveler. It is like passing
through the spray of a flaming coal-oil
tank, or through a cloud of those tse-
tse" gnats that pierce shirt and jacket;
for, like the steel chips of a Bessemer
hammer -work, the sparks from the

smithy of Vulcan preserve their caloric
for minutes together.

It is probable that volcanoes do not
emit flames, in the ordinary sense of the
word, but the larger specimens of their
solid contents often emerge in a state of
incandescence that would serve all the
purposes of an orthodox Hades. Dur-
ing the eruption of Pinchincha in the
winter of 1879, I saw a volcanic bowl-
der go down the eastern slope in wide
bounds, but in spite of its velocity set-
ting the brush afire along the whole
track of its descent ; that is, not only
where it struck the ground, but also
wherever it dashed through, or over, a
tuft of dry grass. A week after the
last great outbreak of Imbabura, several
fragments of volcanic rocks dug out of
a vineyard near Rio Payra were still
too hot to be handled with impunity
By a direct contact of a few seconds, a
bomb of that sort would fire a Monitor
through all its coats of iron.

The two most generally accepted the-
ories about the origin of volcanic agen-
cies are the infiltration and compression
explanations. According to the former,
sea-water or deep rock springs filter
down to the furnace of the central fire,
and thus generate rock-rending steam
clouds ; according to the latter, the grad-
ual contraction of the earth's crust com-
presses the air of subterranean caves,
and forces it up through craters and
crevices. But the steam hypothesis is,
on the whole, the more plausible one,
for the propulsive force of volcanic erup-
tion seems to imply the agency of an
actual explosion, or a sudden rupture of
a solid obstacle. In deep mines, the
collapse of the roof rocks forces out the
air in an irresistible, but 'still gradual,
current, while a gas explosion shoots up
bodies and truck-wheels, as if from the
mouth of a cannon, and motors of that
sort alone can account for the artillery
feats of the active volcanoes. In 1868
the crater of Arequipa, in Peru, hurled
one of its missiles as far as Cafiadas,

512

Volcano Studies.

['October,

twelve miles from the foot of the moun-
tain ; and four miles nearer, the propri-
etor of a grain plantation found in his
fields a volcanic block, eighteen feet in
diameter, whose weight was estimated
at eight hundred and fifty tons.

In the coast range, many springs have
a way of becoming thermal at short
notice, and the simultaneous calefaction
of its affluents sometimes heats a whole
creek to the steaming point. Eels man-
age to survive such decoctions, perhaps
by the same trick that enables them to
defy the droughts of the summer weeks ;
but fishes that cannot burrow in the sand
have to live above hot-water mark, and
are rarely found below the mouth of
the treacherous tributaries. Nearly all
the creeks of the Rio Bamba district
are more or less impregnated with bitu-
minous solutions, besides being heated
by intermittent thermae, but the hot-
spring region par excellence, both in de-
gree and permanence of temperature, is
the upper valley of the Rio Esmeraldas,
a tropical Yellowstone River in a frame
of cyclopean mountain walls, with a
fringe of perennial verdure. The em-
erald mines have been abandoned, but
the Val de Esmeraldas continues to de-
serve its name. It is one of the very
few unspoilaUe parks of nature. The
cloud-capped ridge of Antisana at once
shelters it against the north wind and
the cinder showers of the northern vol-
canoes, and supplies its springs with the
drainage of its perpetual snow-fields.
And though the crater of Antisana has
ceased to excrete volcanic matter, the
activity of its furnace asserts itself along
the base of the mountain in a long series
of geysers and fumaroles, or smoke fis-
sures. With this permanent supply of
heat and moisture the vegetation of the
volcanic hot-house could defy climatic
vicissitudes, and does defy the diurnal
changes of its elevated habitat. At an
altitude of eleven thousand feet, where
the night-frosts limit the flora of other
valleys to grasses and a few hardy va-

rieties of rhododendron, the soil of the
Val de Esmeraldas produces oaks, myr-
tles, mountain cedars, vines, holly, tiger-
lilies, rose bay and buckthorn, as well as
a large number of deciduous flowers.
All along the dolomite cliffs of the
upper valley there are temblorones, or
tremble rocks, that vibrate under each
hammer-stroke of the volcanic Titans ;
steam forces its way through the fissures
of the cliffs, like a mystery struggling
for expression ; the smoke crevices, the
hollow sound of each footfall, every-
thing, suggests the idea of a soil where
a little digging would reveal strange
secrets of the nether world. Between
the mouth of the Rio Palomas and the
upper limit of arboreal vegetation, the
valley is intersected by fourteen or fif-
teen fumaroles, of which the least would
make a New England village the goal
of a perennial pilgrimage. The genesis
of these clefts resembles the formation
of crevices in the ice-bridge of a rising
river. In ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, an earthquake exhibits the
phenomena of a lateral concussion ; but
whenever it is accompanied by a direct
upheaval, the result is a rent through the
mass of the superincumbent rocks, the
permanence of such clefts depending
upon the nature of the surface strata.
In Lisbon, the gulf that swallowed the
Cayo Real, with its six thousand refu-
gees, closed in the next minute by the
collapse of its gravelly edges ; while at
Messina and in the Val de Esmeraldas,
the solid rock testifies to the achieve-
ments of a force which, according to Pro-
fessor McKinney's estimate, has in one
instance done the work of three million
tons of gunpowder. Miners know that
an insufficient charge of blasting-powder
often consolidates the surface rocks by
wedging them closer together, and that
in other cases the explosion expels the
tenuous gases through a hardly visible
fissure. But in the barranca of Peder-
nal, at the foot of Antisana, a chasm
sixty-five feet wide and four thousand

1883.]

Volcano Studies.

513

feet long has been torn through at least
three miles of massive' rocks, to which
depth the walls of the barranca have
been fathomed and have sounded solid.
Clouds of dun smoke rise in whirls from
that hatchway of Tartarus, and the ac-
tual depth of the chasm has been es-
timated at from ten to fifteen miles.
Rocks which five men had to move with
the aid of leverage have been tumbled
over the brink of the abyss, but no hu-
man ear has ever heard the termination
of their descent. For the upper fifty
feet the walls of the gorge are clothed
with a mantle of dingy vegetation, a
matted tangle of vines, brambles, and
pendent mosses. Further down, the
naked rocks project in rough cliffs, and
in the fissures of these cliffs cluster the
only inhabitants of the barranca, drowsy
bats, awaiting the fading of their lu-
minous sk}r-light, and squeaking their
protest against untimely interruptions
of their slumber. If a stone or a pistol
ball dislodges them from their hiding-
place, they plunge out of sight, or flut-
ter to and fro along the twilight edge of
the nether darkness, while their screams
echo up like the cries of the Stymphal-
ides from the shores of Orcus. Their
dismal dormitory is at least well warmed ;
besides the smoke clouds, occasional jets
of steaming water squirt through the
fissures of the barranca, with a hissing
noise, as if the safety-valves of the sub-
terranean furnace had opened, or the old
Midgard Serpent were tightening her
coils. At the head of the gorge, on the
north side of the valley, a little moun-
tain brook trickles down over a terrace
of moderate steepness, which in the hot
season becomes a sort of dry stairway,
though Theseus and Pirithous might
have declined to enter the nether
world by that gate. The river road
bridges the successi ve barrancas at their
upper ends, where their width varies
from five to fifteen feet. Some of the
smaller ones are almost hidden by a
cover of tangle-vines, though they all
VOL. m. — NO. 312. 33

emit smoke, and most of them a pun-
gent smell of hydrochloric acid. It is
a curious fact that people can become
habituated to this smell — that is, not
only inured to its influence, but fond of
it — and use it as a medium of stimula-
tion. In the Rio Bamba district there
are caves where the Indians get gas-
tipsy, like children in the fumes of a
wine-cellar. To non-habitues this smell
is as uninviting as coal-gas. Its physio-
logical action resembles that of nitrous
oxide in its immediate effect upon the
brain and the nerves and the fitful ac-
celeration of the pulse. The after-effect
of the wretched tipple is a two days'
headache, although its devotees claim
that it makes them previsionado, " fore-
sighted," as my landlord in Las Pay-
ras termed it. After a gas spree, one of
his Indians dreamed that he saw a boy
in the serape, or traveling-shawl, of a
neighbor's son, but as thin as a shadow.
The next week the neighbor's boy failed
to return from a hunting-trip, and two
months after they found his body,
wrapped up in an old shawl, on the
Plateau of Dos Pefias, where he had
lost his way and starved to death.

The mining hamlet eight miles above
the mouth of the Palomas was aban-
doned during the war of independence,
but a trip to the head of the valley is
well worth the risk of a night's camp in
the ruined casuchas. Visitors may try
their luck 'at the old placer diggings,
where here and there emeralds are still
found in paying quantities, together with
agates and obsidian pebbles, ground
dingy by friction, but breaking into
glass-like pieces of marvelous dark blue,
sky-blue, and iridescent hues. Gold, too,
was formerly dug from the river-sand ;
but the mines of Western Brazil have
sapped that industry, as the Eldorado
of Northern Georgia was blighted by
the Californian treasure-troves. Two
miles above the ruins the valley nar-
rows into a canon, where one of the in-
termittent geysers hisses and bubbles

514

Volcano Studies.

[October,

in the rocks above, and now and then,
overboiling its cauldron, splashes down
into the river with a peculiar jingling
iioi<f. that rings through the basalt
cliffs like peals of merry laughter.

Naturalists may study the vegetation
of the upper valley and the curious
modifications of a tropical flora in the
rarefied air of this volcanic conservato-
ry; for instance, the bright colors but
diminished size of the bromelia flowers
and ground orchids. The cold winds
that stunt the vegetation of the eastern
slope do not affect the river thickets
of the Esmeraldas, though a protracted
drought now and then blotches the ver-
dure of the foliage. Under the equator
the warm season lasts from March to
July, and, a priori, the weather should
be expected to be as uniform as the
length of the days and nights ; but after
the summer solstice the rain-clouds of
the northern woodlands prevail against
the siroccos of the southern pampas,
and during the following three months
often mingle their thunder-showers with

the ash-rains of the volcanoes.

Sportsmen may devote a day to the
ferre of the higher ridges, where ocelots,
hill-foxes, and wild dogs find a safe re-
treat in the rock-chaos of the Paramo.
Vicunas, too, can be stalked on their
highland pastures, though they take an
amazing deal of killing. Near Salto
Yegua the Quito sportsmen once bagged
an old buck that bore the marks of five
rifle-balls, besides a patchwork of fight-
ing and scraping scars about his neck.
The Creoles hunt them the year round,
but some of their haunts in the summit
of the Andes are so inaccessible that
they will never be wholly exterminated.

Ill a lateral valley of the Esmeraldas
is a famous cavern, the cueva de rugidos,
or murmuring cave, an open grotto with
a crevice, where the approach of an
earthquake can be heard, or rather felt,
like the rumbling of a distant explosion,
and, as the natives assert, for hours in
advance of the catastrophe. But the

frequency of these murmurings makes
their predictive values somewhat doubt-
ful, and for actual eruptions there is a
far surer augurium, — the rule of alter-
nation of the different craters. The
volcanoes hardly ever work together,
but explode by turns ; and if the smoke
clouds in the west presage wrath to the
coast range, the neighbors of Cotopaxi
know that their own monster can be re-
lied upon to keep the peace. The two
mountain ranges seem, in fact, to form,
the double roof of an interconnected sys-
tem of subterranean cauldrons, which
can use only one flue at a time ; and
only during the most violent volcanic
paroxysms is the shock of the eruption
transmitted across the central valley.
At such moments, indeed, the idolaters
of elemental force cannot worship their
deity at a grander shrine than on the
summit ridges in the snow world of the
Eastern Andes, where now and then the
highlanders have seen the explosions of
distant Pinchincha hurling their fire-
storm against the western sky, while at
the same moment an earth wave shook
the solid rocks under their feet.

During the last week of August,
1842, the Rumbling Valley of North-
ern Guatemala depopulated several vil-
lages by its continuous uproars. The
noise was frightful and incessant, but,
strange to say, the phenomenon seems
to have limited itself to an acoustic dem-
onstration. There was no earthquake,
nor even an earth tremor, and when the
villagers found that the cause of their
panic was a vox, et preterea mhil, they
ventured to return to their homes. The
"roars" lasted till September 6th, and
ceased as abruptly as they had begun.

Above the head-waters of the Esme-
raldas lovers of the sublime may as-
cend the Paramos by the old Antisaua
Farmhouse road, and visit the Cerro del
Padre, where a sheer precipice of eighty-
five hundred feet overhangs the valley
of Aguas Negras. Or he may visit the
farmhouse itself, the highest human hab-

1883.]

Knowledge.

515

itation on the globe, eighteen hundred
feet above the source o'f the Esmeral<Uis,
and thirteen thousand feet above the
level of the Pacific. Jamotes (a kind of
sweet potatoes), onions, cabbages, apple-
trees and currants are cultivated in the
stone-walled garden behind the hacien-
da. The pastures, further up, abound
with whortleberries, and in March with
a species of larkspur, with buck beans
and crocus. Wild-growing bushes of
various kinds furnish fuel for culinary
purposes, for white frosts are limited
to the five hours from one to six A. M.
The neighborhood of the equator alone
cannot account for this combination of
creature comforts with an enormous al-
titude : it must be the influence of the
ever-burning fire underneath, the vol-
canic furnace radiating its heat through
every vein of the great mountain system ;
for even up here there are several hot
springs and one fumarole — a hot-air
flue rather than a smoke-vent — in a
ravine where the shepherds often pass
the night in the open air.

The peak of the volcano rises still
six thousand feet higher, and can be as-
cended when the abnormal freshness of
the air is tempered by the rays of the
noontide sun ; but even from the farm-
house the view transcends the grandest
panoramas of the European Alps. That
from the top of Mont Blanc, for in-
stance, is but a flat map of the dwarfed
surrounding mountain systems, while the
bird's-eye view from Antisana is com-

bined with excelsior prospects of the still
higher summits of the Eastern Andes,

— besides the smoke-wreathed dome of
Cotopaxi and the apex of the equatorial
highlands, the unsealed and unscalable
snow-peak of Chimborazo.

From the tavern of Santa Rita the
Val de Esmeraldas can be reached in a
single day ; Sangay and Antisana in two
days ; in four days the Ophir of the
Rio Napo mines, and with a good guide
in about the same time the summit of
Cotopaxi and the Paramos of the Cen-
tral Ancles. Due west, it is only forty
miles to the sea, from where the coast
plain stretches in an unbroken line to
the north end of the continent, and
around to the foot of the isthmus.

That line will be the route of the
predicted intercontinental railroad, and
if General Eads's broad gauges should
prove a success, the tourists of the next
century (and, for all we know, of the
next decade) will leave Boston on the
morning after Christmas, and eat their
New Year's dinner where the tree shade
shelters them from the rays of a ver-
tical sun, or on the piazza of an inter-
national hotel. Even now our winter
tourists visit the Eden of the equator
in numbers that task the resources of
the old Spanish mountain taverns.

The Savoyards, too, may have im-
proved their hotels by that time, but
the landlords of Chamouni must spice
their pastry well if they would compete
with the caterers of Santa Rita.

Horace D. Warner.

KNOWLEDGE.

KNOWLEDGE — who hath it? Nay, not thou,

Pale student, pondering thy futile lore !

A little space it shall be thine, as now

'T is his whose funeral passes at thy door :

Last night a clown that scarcely knew to spell —

Now he knows all. O wondrous miracle !

516

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts.

[October,

THE MUTILATION OF ANCIENT TEXTS.

MANY a lover of the classics, who has
toiled long over a hopelessly corrupt
passage of his favorite author, must
have found himself extremely perplexed
if he attempted to render to his own
mind a satisfactory account of the pro-
cesses by which the depravation of the
ancient texts took place. These pro-
cesses, from the multiplicity of influences
which worked together to produce the
final result, were so numerous that the
task is by no means an easy one.

The first step in departure from ac-
curacy lay in the errors which inevita-
bly attended the transcription of books
by hand. That this was the case even
in antiquity we have the direct testi-
mony of the ancient authors themselves.
Cicero, in two letters to his brother
Quintus, speaks of certain works which,
he says, are so full of errors that he
knows not which way to turn. Aulus
Gellius declares the manuscripts of Vir-
gil to have been in a state of confusion
in the time of Hadrian ; and Strabo,
alluding to Aristotle's writings, says
that the same fate befell all authors in
the hands of scribes who copied them
merely for sale. Booksellers, indeed,
did not always hold themselves responsi-
ble for the accuracy of the works which
they furnished, even when they were
copied in their own shops, and authors
sometimes revised and corrected these
as a favor to friends who had purchased
them.

Another source of corruption lay in
the readiness of pretentious scholars to
emend the text, who quite as often, per-
haps, emended passages which had come
direct from the author's hands. Gel-
lius again speaks of the false and au-
dacious emendators, — falsi et audaces
emendatores, — and there can be little
doubt that the evil was wide-spread.
When we remember the treatment that

Paradise Lost received at the hands of
Bentley, and recall the way in which
Lessing ventured to tinker the text of
Pliny in order to prove that Pythago-
ras Leontinus had left a statue of Phi-
loctetes, we can easily comprehend the
ground of Gellius' complaint. It is
quite probable, too, that many passages
commonly considered spurious or cor-
rupt are merely early draughts, which
the author would have revised and pol-
ished had he been permitted to carry
out his design. This is preeminently
true of certain of the works of Aristotle,
which are regarded as the roughly
sketched plan of treatises that were
never elaborated. These rude outlines
of the great Stagirite were subsequently
filled up by the unscrupulous Apellicon
of Teos, and after his death fell into the
hands of the Romans, to be copied and
sold in the book-stalls of the imperial
city. Ovid, it is well known, committed
the unfinished manuscript of his Meta-
morphoses to the flames, and the work
was preserved only through copies that
chanced to be in the hands of his friends.
Every school-boy is familiar with the
story that Virgil destined his jEiieid to
a similar fate, because he had not time
to correct and polish it, decies ad un-
guem. Had he lived to complete the
task, it is probable that the blemishes
which now mark the work, consisting
of " incongruities, gaps, contradictions,
errors of memory and calculation," and
imperfect lines, — the latter amounting
in all to fifty-eight, — would in great
part have disappeared. One need only
examine fac-similes of manuscripts show-
ing the poems of Milton, Byron, and
other great modern writers at various
stages of completion, to be convinced
how much less perfect their works
would have been had they died before
their task was done. Double readings

1883.]

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts.

517

and 'marginal suggestions would have
crept into the text, instances of inferior
diction would have abounded, and chaos
would ' have prevailed where now we
have some of the most admired passages
of English literature. The desire of
the two great classical writers mentioned
above to burn their unfinished works
affords a striking illustration of the fal-
libility of individuals in judging of the
value of their own productions. In the
case of each of these authors the poem
which by so narrow a chance escaped
destruction has proved to be not only
the most popular, but in spite of all de-
fects the best and greatest, offspring of
his genius that has come down to mod-
ern times. How different would be the
estimate now formed of them if judged
by their other writings alone, there is
no need of argument to prove.

It is not surprising that the evils al-
ready existing among those who used
the classical languages as their mother
tongue should have greatly increased
in the centuries succeeding antiquity.
This was less the case, perhaps, in the
Eastern empire, where the love of liter-
ature never ceased, and where zeal for
the masterpieces of ancient composition
never died out. There scholars con-
stantly devoted themselves to the great
works of the past, and cultivated per-
sons of all ranks, including even the
nobility, frequently employed their time
in copying. In the West, however,
during almost the entire period of the
Middle Ages, the transcription of books
was largely in the hands of monks, who
used only a corrupt and degraded Latin,
and were incapable of appreciating the
beauties and requirements of the clas-
sical style. By such scholars, old and
pure although unfamiliar idioms were
probably often rejected as errors, in a
blind attempt to emend the ancient lan-
guage to the corrupt style of later times.
This result is well seen in those manu-
scripts of Herodotus which have passed
through many transcriptions, copyists

substituting the common forms of the
dialect with which they were familiar
for those of Ionic orthography and ob-
solete words.

In some cases mistakes grew out of
the positive ignorance of scribes who did
not understand the sense of what they
were copying, and therefore had noth-
ing to guide them in making out indis-
tinct chirography. Errors of this kind
abound in the manuscripts of Persius,
but of course are not limited to him. In
other, cases, as in the tragedies of Sen-
eca, they arose in the hands of more
competent transcribers, who found diffi-
culty in deciphering older codices, and
were satisfied if they regained something
like the original sense and metre. The
difficulty was greatly increased by the
numerous abbreviations then in use,
those of earlier times being misunder-
stood and wrongly expanded by subse-
quent Writers.

During the Middle Ages, till nearly
the end of the thirteenth century, every
period had its own spelling and graphic
devices, and even its own Latin gram-
mar, and later copyists frequently found
it no easy task to interpret correctly
the writing of their predecessors. These
abbreviations and ligatures the curious
reader will find collected and discussed
in the third volume of Tassin's Nou-
veau Traite de Diplomatique. So nu-
merous were the mistakes arising from
them that the French government at
length passed a decree forbidding their
employment in all public documents.

Added to these sources of error was
the contempt which large numbers of
the secular clergy and religious orders
felt for the works of classical literature.
The authors were godless heathens, who
were already suffering in hell, and
therefore could hardly be fit teachers or
companions for the saints on earth.
But taste for the classics never quite
died out. Many minds still rose above
the superstition of the age, and listened
to the song, the narrative, the wisdom,

518

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts.

[October,

of the great poets, historians, and philos-
ophers of Greece and Home. The kind
and amount of labor performed hi the
cloister depended entirely on the indi-
vidual tastes and temper of the abbot.
If he loved learning he endeavored to
awaken the same feeling in his monks,
and exacted from them a certain amount
of literary work. Most frequently this
was limited to religious subjects ; yet the
classics were not wholly neglected, aud
the copies which were made and pre-
served during seven centuries after" the
fall of the Western empire came in
great part from the monasteries. That
such labor was often of a merely per-
functory character there can be no
doubt, the lack of interest of course in-
creasing the liability to error.

Another source of corruption in the
hands of monkish transcribers was the
attempt to form expurgated editions of
the classical poets by omitting or alter-
ing objectionable passages, — a process
which is made intelligible when we re-
member that the same fate has befallen
Shakespeare, the prince of poets, in our
own day.

The learned Mabillon, in his work on
Diplomatics, has written at some length
to prove that the ancient authors did
not suffer in transcriptions made by
monks ; but it may be said in reply
that Tiraboschi, himself a monk, admits
such corruption to have taken place, re-
marking, however, that the historian
Sard rather ungallantly charged it to the
copying of manuscripts by the nuns, who,
lie said, did not possess proper qualifi-
cations for the work. Du Gauge, under
the word ScHptores, in his great Glossa-
rium, — a work, it should be remem-
bered, which has been greatly extended
and improved by the monks of St. Maur,
— expressly says that boys and novices
were employed In the important labor
of copying, and that a certain amount
of work was exacted of them daily.
He also quotes Ordericus Vitalis in a
precept exhorting the monks not to per-

mit manuscripts to be corrupted by boys,
thus showing the evil to have become
so common that it required some author-
itative utterance on the subject. He
cites an old capitulary, which provid-
ed that in the transcription of ecclesi-
astical works only persons of mature
age should be employed, — a fact from
which we may infer the laxity that pre-
vailed in the case of secular authors.
We know, indeed, that all precautions
did not preserve even the Scriptures
from numerous errors. Origen, Euse-
bius, Jerome, and, later on, Cassiodorus
aud Lanfranc, were compelled to collect
and compare as many codices as possi-
ble, in order to arrive at anything like
the correct readings. Classical -works
surely can have been in no better condi-
tion. As early as the sixth century
their antiquity and rarity in Italy, the
increase of barbarism, aud the incom-
petence of the copyists led the learned
to the task of collating and emending
texts.

The universality of the evil compels
us to believe that the monkish copyists
were not exempt. Those corruptions,
indeed, which affected the teachings of
secular authors are to be traced direct-
ly to them. Thus the Sentences of
Quintus Sestius Niger, in the hands of
the monk Rufinus, received a distinctly
Christian coloring. Similarly in the ex-
cerpts from Tibullus, which were made
from the ninth to the thirteenth century,
the text is altered to suit the excerptor.
Changes in the diction and amplifica-
tion of the contents of Solinus are con-
jectured to have been due to the Scotch
monks of Lake Constance. Works
which were used as text-books in the
mediaeval schools suffered severely : ow-
ing, in part, to the degradation of style
then prevalent ; in part, it is probable,
to attempts to bring them into harmony
with the ethical aud religious opinions
of the day.

To deny the vast services rendered
to literature by the monks and ecclesi-

1883.J

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts.

519

astics of the Middle Ages would be both
foolish and unjust ; but while according
to them the praise which is their due,
the classical scholar cannot fail to see
that they were often guilty of great neg-
ligence, and of the prejudices natural
to their order. The censure commonly
heaped upon them because they were
not better patrons of secular learning is,
however, hardly well considered. The
monasteries were only religious houses,
and were no more designed to cultivate
or perpetuate polite literature than are
the churches and charitable institutions
of to-day. What the monasteries did
in this direction was wholly gratuitous,
and for it the world has reason to be
thankful. The real ground of complaint
against them is that they were not al-
ways honest in leaving the works of
classical authors as they found them ;
but this grew out of the different liter-
ary ideal of the times, or from a con-
scientious desire to do for them what
we moderns have done in the case of
many of our most familiar hymns, which
have been altered to suit the doctrines
of any sect that chooses to use them.
Still it would be wrong to suppose that
all the corruptions made during the
Middle Ages were due to monastic
scholars alone. Secular grammarians
existed in Italy till at least the seventh
century, and in the East during the en-
tire mediaeval period. These, no doubt,
exercised the assumed prerogative of
their art in working over passages which
failed to harmonize with their personal
views. Copyists who wrought for hire
were also well known, and in their ig-
norance and incompetency often con-
fused both the words and the sense of
the authors that fell into their hands.
One person frequently dictated to several
such writers at a time, — a fact which
would greatly increase the liability to
error. This custom is believed not to
have prevailed to any great extent in
the cloisters, where the rule of silence
seems generally to have been observed.

No century, moreover, was free from
impostors like the unscrupulous Andreas
Darmarius, who corrupted orthography,
gave false titles to works, and struck
out or inserted passages to suit his pleas-
ure. Notwithstanding this, his tran-
scriptions sold at a high price, and are
found in almost all the large libraries of
Europe.

The secularization of learning and the

almost entire cessation of literary activ-
ity in the monasteries during the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries placed
the copying and care of manuscripts
chiefly in the hands of lay scholars. In
this movement the initial impulse came
from the universities. Although the
branches pursued in these institutions
were chiefly canon and civil law, medi-
cine and theology, — the study of the
classics not having taken deep root till
tie latter part of the fourteenth century,
— the need of trustworthy texts for the
thousands of students who congregated
there led to the employment of consid-
erable numbers of copyists. These were
under the direction of the rectors, or
of special censors called peciarii ; they
furnished books at prices fixed by the
latter, and were responsible to them for
the accuracy of their work. But in
spite of all precautions errors were fre-
quent, especially when the copyist left
the routine with which he was familiar.
The fact that the universities found
such a course necessary in order to ob-
tain transcriptions which they would be
willing to recommend to their students
implies that incompetent persons were
already supplying the market with their
own inaccurate texts. Over these nei-
ther the universities nor any other pow-
er exercised the slightest control.

Thus a new industry had sprung into
existence, or rather an old industry had
undergone a wonderful expansion to
meet a new demand. On the revival
of humanistic learning, beginning with
Petrarch, the study of rhetoric, poetry,
philosophy, history, and oratory gradu-

520

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts,

[October,

ally came to occupy the attention of
Italian scholars, until the enthusiasm
for belles lettres engaged all the finer in-
tellects of the times. Competent mas-
ters of the classics found lucrative posi-
tions open to them m the palaces of
wealthy citizens, the courts of princes,
the offices of chancellors of the repub-
lic and secretary of the Roman curia,
and also in tke capacity of orators, am-
bassadors, readers, court-poets, and his-
torians. The immense demand thus
stimulated for the works of polite liter-
ature, as distinguished from law, med-
icine, and theology, furnished a new
field for the activity of transcribers, who
of course multiplied rapidly to supply
the need. Not only were there local
copyists in the various towns, but writers
who prided themselves on their elegance
and skill went around from city to city
and from state to state, copying in the
houses of wealthy individuals, and being
entertained as guests during their stay.
As this movement was to a great extent
outside of the universities, the restraints
applicable to transcriptions made under
their control were no longer available.
Thus the last means of maintaining ac-
curacy was swept away, and this impor-
tant branch of work was left largely in
the hands of incompetent and even ig-
norant persons. Petrarch bitterly la-
mented the low taste of an age which
placed the arts of the kitchen above the
culture of the intellect ; regretting that
no law like that of Constantine now
prevailed, which forbade the copying of
books except by experienced and skill-
ful writers. Cooks, blacksmiths, farm
laborers, weavers, and other artisans, he
argued, would not be employed without
some test of their capability, but copy-
ists were neither examined nor subject-
ed to any restraint. Whoever could
paint on parchment, or form characters
with a pen, straightway was accepted as
a reputable writer, though devoid of
artistic ability, learning, or even intelli-
gence. Correct spelling had long been

lost, but of this he would not complain,
if the copyists would write at all what
was put into their hands. Their own
ignorance might in that case be no less
apparent, but the substance at least of
the original would be preserved. Cicero,
Livy, and especially Pliny, if they could
return to earth, would no longer recog-
nize their own works, and the modern
author who had entrusted a book to
these" catch-penny bunglers would not
himself know it when it was done. In-
deed, after trying more than ten times
to have his De Vita Solitaria transcribed,
he complained in a letter to Boccaccio
that he had not been able to obtain in
many years a copy of a work which he
had written in a few months. Yet for
all such wretched work, adds the histo-
rian, the copyists were sure of a liberal
reward.

From these facts it will readily be
seen why, at the time of the Renaissance,
calligraphy was so highly prized, and
why, as in the case of Niccolo Kiccoli,
a biographer should deem it no slight
praise to say of a scholar that he wrote
a beautiful hand. Mercenary copyists,
who, it is stated, often did not understand
a word of what they wrote, thought only
of rapidity, and cared no more for beauty
or distinctness than for correctness.
The most skillful handwriting, however,
tended quite as little to secure trust-
worthiness of text, the rage for elegance
overshadowing all else. Connoisseurs
prided themselves on their libraries of
ornately written books, and often paid
but slight attention to accuracy, if they
could only secure beauty. This was
the case with the well-known collection
made for King Matthias Corvinus at
Florence in the latter half of the fifteenth
century, the real value of which was by
no means commensurate with the money
expended in securing it.

The readiness to emend the texts of
ancient authors seems never to have
ceased from the times of the Greeks
and Romans onward. St. Jerome la-

1883.]

The Mutilation of Ancient Texts.

521

ments the incompetence of the notaries
and the carelessness of the copyists, who
write not what they find, but what they
understand ; and while they seek to cor-
rect the errors of others succeed only
in making greater of their own. " It
surpasses all understanding," says Ebert,
" how arbitrary a license was exercised
in the Middle Ages in changing, aug-
menting, and at times completely trans-
forming the ancient writers, especially
the historians." Criticism, as now un-
derstood, was unknown, and the most
puerile judgments passed for profound
scholarship. The plain meaning of au-
thors was often not so much as suspected,
and, in order to make their language
conform to the interpretations of bun-
gling commentators, it was changed to
forms which the original writers would
scarcely have comprehended.

Colticcio Salutato speaks of the extent
to which, at the end of the fourteenth
century, codices were corrupted and
spoiled through ignorance and careless-
ness, through the presumption of those
who were eager to better that which
they themselves did not understand,
through the unscrupulousness of others
who purposely altered the text to intro-
duce into it their own opinions, and
through the caprice of certain teachers
who would have the ancient authors
speak in any way that best suited their
whims. In many cases changes started
merely as suggested readings. These
were sometimes written in the margin,
but frequently, in the case of both poe-
try and prose, as interlinear notes. In
subsequent transcriptions by less com-
petent or less principled copyists, such
annotations were often incorporated in
the text, or were accepted as the cor-
rect readings, lines or sentences of the
original being stricken out, and these
being substituted instead. Sometimes
the scribe even carried his ignoble task
so far as to cast these glosses into metre,
in order to make them fit the text of
poems.

The imperfect state of many manu-
scripts when discovered increased this
unfortunate tendency. After the lapse
of centuries the ancient codices were in
many cases worm - eaten or defective,
parts having been torn out or defaced,
and rendered illegible by dust and neg-
lect. These gaps or lacuna in the text
were often filled up by scholars eager to
show their familiarity with the subject
of which the author wrote, or their skill
in catching his spirit and imitating his
style.

In this way Lionardo Bruni under-
took to restore the second Decade of
Livy in a compilation entitled De Primo
Bello Punico. Similarly, Gasparino da
Barzizza attempted to supply the de-
ficiencies of Cicero's De Oratore, which
up to that time had existed only in a
mutilated condition ; but although the
work is said to have been well done, it
was rendered superfluous by the dis-
covery of the entire treatise at Lodi
about 1425. A similar attempt, in the
case of Quintilian's Institutions, came to
naught from the finding of a complete
manuscript of that author at St. Gall.
At the present day such efforts would
be regarded only as the dilettante trifling
of a man of elegant leisure, but then
they were eagerly caught up by copyists
and booksellers, who, unwilling to issue
defective editions, were not scrupulous
about the means employed to fill out the
text. A still more culpable course was
pursued by unprincipled rhetoricians,
who are said to have introduced whole
passages into the works of the ancient
orators, in order to secure stronger de-
clamatory effects.

It is probably true, as Heeren and
Ebert have stated, that the corruption
of ancient literature took place chiefly
in the latter half of the century preced-
ing the discovery of printing. We have
seen, however, that the process began
among the ancients themselves, and did
not cease during the entire period of
the Middle Ages. These facts must be

522

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy.

[October,

borne in mind to prevent their state-
ment from being understood in too
s\vei-j)ing a sense. The establishment
of the printing-press about the middle

of the fifteenth century at length gave
to literature a fixed and permanent form,
and with this great event the work of
corruption ceased.

William S. Liscomb.

AMIABILITY: A PHILOSOPHICAL TRAGEDY.

SCENE : The morning-room at Miss MAYBER-
KY'S. That young lady is seated in an arm-
chair R. manipulating a large fan. Opposite
to her, with his eyes fixed indolently upon the
vista of the garden seen through the open win-
dows, is sitting MR. NORMAN RUTGERS. A
pause in the conversation has somehow occurred.

Miss M. (looking up smilingly).
Well?

MR. R. (starting and returning the
smile). I beg your pardon ! You see
that is the worst of feeling one's self so
confirmedly at ease with an old friend,
Emily. When a man is wooed by a
meditative moment he succumbs to it
without a struggle.

Miss M. No, not the worst of — shall
I call it our predicament? A good
many men, not invariably sensitive,
have thought that the privilege of lis-
tening to wholesome truths about them-
selves from the old friend's lips was
a severe handicap on the relationship.
But don't look about for your hat, Nor-
man. I don't see you often enough
nowadays not to forget your faults
when I do. (I wonder if it is n't a pity
that I ever saw them so distinctly.)
Come, tell me what Roman thought
was wrinkling your forehead so specula-
tively just now. Your brow looked like
a bar of music, — the minor chord of a
weighty cogitation sprawled all over it.

MK. R. Thanks : your simile flatters.
As it happens, however, I was only rec-
ollecting that Jack Flagler promised to
ride with me after luncheon, but sent
me word that his wife was in her room
with such a preciously severe specimen
of those periodical headaches of hers

that he thought that he must stay at
home — for once. And then I went
on to remember, for the five hundredth
time, what an unsymmetrical pair those
two are, Emily, — how contrasted. I
never see Jack but that I fume.

Miss M. (dryly). It's very good of
you to take the trouble. Why, please ?

MR. R. Why? Think of Jack —
handsome, clever, attractive fellow, a
man liked by every woman or other
man directly he is met — mated for
life to a girl like Janet Rainsworth.
(He rises and stands on the rug, leaning
upon the chimney-piece.)

Miss M. (regarding him, not without
admiration, as the attitude is one which
becomes him capitally). You are very
fond of your friends, Norman, are you
not ? In fact, it 's an idiosyncrasy which
ought to be numbered among the best-
But let me tell you that Janet, whom
I have always known better and more
fairly judged than you, may possibly
be denied her share of compassion, on
account of this marriage. In fact, I am
sure she is. Oh, no ; don't look at me in
that bewildered fashion. You are preju-
diced ; but reasonable in most arguments.

MR. R. Heavens, Emily ! Janet Flag-
ler denied her share of compassion ! And
wherefore due her ? She is one of the
luckiest women who ever breathed !
Think of it ! Once a beauty, but faded
by the time she reached four and twen-
ty ; wearied of society because she had
ever lacked the charm to win her suc-
cess in it; increasingly an invalid, so
much so that her great wealth brought

1883.]

Amiability: A Philosophical Tragedy.

523

no enjoyment with it, she loved and
(dare we suggest anything else, since he
has married her ?) was loved by the
most popular and charming fellow of
our set. Himself vigorous and full of
life ; possessed of that perfect tact which
enabled him to adapt himself admirably
to any social surroundings ; above all,
endowed with the sunniest and most
unfailing amiability — why, Emily, the
fact that Jack Flagler is to-day what he
was before he married that serious
schoolmate of yours is enough to make
his character " stick fiery off " forever.
There ! I 'm out of breath ! (Subsides
into his seat, rather ashamed of his own
warmth.)

Miss M. " The sunniest and most un-
failing amiability." Ah, my good Nor-
man, finish that sentence. Finish it
with " and therefore, one of the most
completely and delightfully selfish of
men with whom it is a wife's lot to be
brought into daily contact." Poor Ja-
net ! Small wonder that she has grown
languid, and jaded, and faded !

Mu. R. (indignantly). Upon my
word, Emily, one would fancy that
amiability were tantamount to selfish-
ness ; that, arguing from Jack, the more
a mortal is distinguished for the first
quality, the more inevitably the second
marks him for its own.

Miss M. Precisely. My dear Nor-
man, selfishness is not necessarily ag-
gressive. The worst phase of it, to my
mind, is the passive, the nearly passive.
Just this phase is it that stamps your
" unfailingly amiable " men indelibly.
It is quite as masterful in its way as
that manifestation of it which prompts
one child to snatch a toy from another,
or to refuse to surrender it. Amiability
refuses to surrender itself — to any
unpleasant emotion. Your Jack Flag-
lers never stint their wives' pockets, nor
scant their wardrobes, that my lord may
have more money for cigars or cordials.
Not at all. They content themselves
with slipping beyond the little range of

all which .daily wearies, perplexes, ruf-
fles, the Janet Rainsworths. They smil-
ingly decline to be troubled with these
things. A good deal of the time they
are unconscious of their effort to main-
tain such a course. Their amiability is
become overwrapping, habitual, an ar-
mament cap-a-pie, which, finally, little
can pierce ! (Miss M., who has been
speaking very fast, and as if from some
internal grievance, here stops, toith a
meaning look into Mr. Rulger's slightly
annoyed countenance, bites her lips, and
taps her wrist with her fan.)

Mu. R. Really, Emily, you are still
as casuistic as ever, — as you used to
be on one or two other questions (look-
ing intelligently at her) which I have
had the honor to discuss with you.
You know that I have always said that
you missed your vocation. You should
have been the great American female
lawyer. You should have written A
System of Social Philosophy, by Miss
Emily Arnold Mayberry, instead of —

Miss M. Instead of — (Yes, I have
piqued him. I may draw this other
portrait for the Flagler gallery still
more recognizably before our talk is
over, — a portrait with every lineament
of which my eyes have so long been
familiar. How handsome he always
looks when he is really interested over
anything!)

MR. R. (laughing). — Instead of sim-
ply existing as altogether too wise, too
charming a woman for your old friends'
peace of heart.

Miss M. (with slightly satirical ac-
cent). For the pieces of heart of one
of my old friends, you mean ? Ah ! But
no diverging. We enter upon a whole
avenue of difference, I see. I feel an
unmistakable belligerence. (He always
provokes it in me, nowadays. It all
rises from this tedious, this childish pro-
test of heart against judgment, — the
old battle. Pshaw !) I repeat it, Nor-
man. Your Jack Flaglers are apt to
reach a kind of dead-centre of good-

524

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy.

[October,

nature, from which delightful equipoise
it is hard to throw them off. The man
or woman, standing heside them, who is
pricked hv the thousand pins and nee-
dles of life's every four and twenty
hours, is forced at last to admit with a
sigh that to turn in their direction for
sympathy is a waste. Their nearness
aggravates this fact. If the process of
perfecting the amiability be not com-
plete, if there be merely more or less
admirable capital in hand for it to in-
crease from, why, then there is a gentle
act of repulsion on the amiable person's
part toward the comer. If the process
be complete, there is next to none. Ah,
Norman, a curious life, a sad life, must
the woman lead who is supposed to be
happy in the possession of not a com-
paratively, but a perfectly amiable man
for her liege lord !

MR. R. (uneasily). Ha, ha, Emily !
Really, you amuse me. According to
you, there ought to be no effort to ac-
quire smoothness and sweetness and
suavity of temper in this irritable and
fussy world. It is a moral descent, a
peril to be shunned. Surely, you will
not urge that amiability is always asso-
ciated in individuals with the most dis-
agreeable characteristic of all. I really
don't know what you will be laying
down next, though !

Miss M. Ah, my friend Norman, it
is the exception which proves the rule.
Exceptions there are, indeed, praise be
thanked ! but we seem to find them
white-haired, — our mothers and fathers,
our grandmothers and grandfathers. Is
not that deep-rooted peace, that tranquil
spirit, of old age usually united 'with a
great indifference to exactly those trifles
which so stimulate, so exhaust, our
younger mental energies ? Age is rare-
• •<•(! l)v Prekreuces. It has a sin-
gle great thought ipon which to reflect>
Life has become a u;minuendo.

IR. R. (I shall orobably receive a

large upon my right ving, direct ; but
here goes!) Look here, Emily. I

know a man, let us suppose. Let us
also suppose him young, with zest for
life, with few responsibilities of it to
hamper him and plenty of advantages
for enjoying it. He makes friends with
ease, especially friends of his own sex.
(Here Miss Mayberry's face exhibits a
faint smile, as if perceiving the speaker's
aim.) Furthermore, he likes a some-
what plentiful assortment of the latter
about him as he journeys through this
vale of perplexities. But — mark me !

— while he chooses this man's compan-
ionship for, in a minor degree, this vir-
tue, and that man's for that, one thing
he exacts from each of them, primarily
and positively, as the passport to his re-
gard and his intimacy. The possession
of wit, social rank, wealth, reputation,
generosity, truth, matters not, unless
this one thing be of their very essence.
This one thing is an amiable, compan-
ionable disposition.

Miss M. Excuse me, Norman, but I
really think you 'd better talk about
yourself, without bothering over a dis-
guise. Continue.

MR. R. (reddening perceptibly, but
going on hurriedly). All right ; only
wait till I have finished. Where was
I ? Oh, well, I — this fellow, that is

— we get this sort of set around us.
The dozen or so included within it see
one another daily. Wherever I look I
see the reflection of one general and at-
tractive type of mankind varied only
by minor expressions of individuality.
Now surely you see that being thus
alongside each other so constantly, mak-
ing test of our personalities by the hun-
dred petty accidents of intimacy, it is
simply impossible that we should be
what your view of our distinguishing
characteristic declares us, — the most
completely selfish coterie of human be-
ings imaginable. Our clique could not
hold together a day. To oblige, to help
in any emergency, small or great —

Miss M. Stop ! I anticipate your
argument. You are about to say that

1883.]

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy.

525

you know each other too thoroughly
not to have continually encountered mu-
tual selfishness, did it so pervade your
clique. The answer is easy. You all
instinctively — not by any deliberate or
rapid process of reasoning, but instinct-
ively — avoid, in your daily intercourse,
friction upon just those sensitive points
of your respective characters which
would at once reveal to you each other's
actual personality — selfishness. With-
out realizing it, you intuitively slip
past, you recoil, you glide, — often by
a narrow escape, — from what would
suddenly develop the exercise of your
pleasant friends' latent disagreeable-
nesses. I describe the act as intuitive,
yet in some part it is the result of that
insight and education which your friend-
ship has given you. Nevertheless, you
do not realize that you avoid ; and thus
is perpetuated the amiability of this pre-
cious galaxy of good tempers, in scecula
seculorum. Amen.

MR. R. (laughing). Very nicely
managed, Emily, very, upon my word !
— for a woman.

Miss M. (with a little burst of indig-
nation which hints that her interest in the
topic has now ceased to be purely pro
argumento). For a woman ! Norman !
I 'm ashamed of you ! (The fan begins
to oscillate actively again. Pause.)

Mu. R. (How she always drives me
up iuto a corner, does n't she ! To 't
again.) Well, I won't deny that /
could n't have done half so well myself.
But look here, for another view of the
question from a fresh stand-point. Do
you remember — nonsense, of course
you do ! — those pleasant five years
which preceded the marriage of Chaun-
cey your brother ? Very well. Dur-
ing each of those five years, Emily,
Channcey Mayberry and I were to-
gether, day and night. I sometimes
think that we two were as ideally in-
timate a pair of men as have ever drawn
breath. We walked, we traveled, we
ate, we drank, we lived and slept, to-

gether three fourths of our time. If
Chauncey was called out of town, I shut
my own rooms and went somewhere
myself. You and he always came down
to the Bay in June, and I spent the
other half of the summer with your
people. (Miss M. sighs rather profound-
ly.) It is impossible that any mortal
except one who had entered into exist-
ence in the same hour with Chauncey,
or shared his home with him, could know
him more aufond, see him in more va-
ried lights, than I do — or did. Now,
Emily, I chose and strove to keep
Chauncey for my friend, and liked him
primarily because of the true answer
which his nature rang to this watch-
word of mine, — amiability. I never
saw Chauncey irritated at trifles. I
never found it possible to wrangle with
him. We never had a difference. If
the subject for one cropped up, Chaun*
cey was, I am sure, more prompt than
I to give way, to compromise. Emily,
do you mean to tell me that through-
out all those years of association I never
discovered Chauncey's real nature ?
Measured by his most ample endow-
ment of disposition, that nature must
have been a consummate selfishness to-
ward others, at times when I was not
at his side. Be careful, Emily ; and
(laughing) remember that Chauncey is
married and lives in Brooklyn. De mor-
tuis nil ! (Another short silence ensues.)
Miss M. (icho, while Mr. R. has
been speaking, has been lost in retrospect).
I will be cautious, Norman, and hon-
est as well. I can only reply to you by
again asserting what I have called the
theory of " intuitive avoidance," betwixt
amiable friends ; by reminding you that
there can be between man and man, as
well as between man and woman, a re-
gard so great that, as if by a miraculous
blindness, the most glaring fault is not
perceived ; and last, by calling your at-
tention to your leaving a much larger
loophole than you may think, when you
admit in this proposition that you did

526

Amialrilily : A Philosophical Tragedy.

[October,

not, during any stage of your remark-
able intimacy with my brother, actually
live a single year uninterruptedly with
him to note how he experienced just
those trivial or graver accidents which
are inseparable from family life. These,
more than a decade of dining and sup-
ping and boating and hours at the Club,
make the sister know the brother, the
parent the child. Let me tell you,
Norman, — and I need not say it with
a grain of unkindness — Chauncey was
a man who at home was marvelously
pleased in having his own way ; and
he commonly succeeded in having it.

MR. R. (a trifle slyly). In spite of
the — proportionate amiability of his
— sister ?

Miss M. Certainly. She has a dim
recollection of sundry struggles, none
the less keen because mouth and eyes
smiled quite uncloudedly all through.
I cannot but remember that Chauncey
it was, Norman, who on such occasions
triumphed gloriously, albeit without a
sharp word or an after-boast. There
was a certain gentle insistence, a cer-
tain sportive compulsion — (S/te stops
thoughtfully.}

MR. R. (not without a trace of an-
noyance). Well, I compliment you on
your confidence in familiarizing yourself
with character. To be sure, it is rather
extraordinary that, after chumming as
we did forever and a day, I should be
coolly informed that I have had so im-
perfect a cognizance of my best friend's
heart; but that is neither here nor
there, I suppose. I used to regret that
I was not cast more in Chauncey's
mould. Perhaps I should have been
only more grateful that I was so far be-
hind him in finding life's ways those
of pleasantness, and the paths which
Chauncey and I trod with our light-
hearted company those of peace.

Miss M. To my mind, a friendship
founded upon mutual amiability is the
one great refutation of — (Some wick-
ed spirit seems positively to goad me

on this morning ! He will never for-
give me, and I ought not to care if he
does n't ! ) — of the doctrine that op-
posite natures attract.

MR. R. The presence of the one
characteristic arguing a pro rata degree
of the other ? Ah, I see. Tluvnk you.
(Looks Miss M. in the face with entire
good humor, and as she bows her head
a little maliciously he laughs. Miss M.
does likewise. After which brief re-
freshment they return to the more abstract
discussion of the subject.')

Miss M. One question more. Grant-
ing that you, for example, are the proud
gem, the lieutenant, of exactly so charm-
ing a congeries of unruffled, unwilling-
to-be-ruffled souls as you described a few
moments ago. Some of them you must
count as more nearly attached to you
th^n the rest, I dare say ; but neverthe-
less the predominating degree of fellow-
ship among so considerable a group must
be merely pleasant and intimate ac-
quaintanceship. You would not be like-
ly to grapple so many to your soul with
hooks of steel ! I should hope not.
You follow me ?

MR. R. Yes, go on ; I am interested.

Miss M. Let us then imagine that
you all at once find yourself in a
position where you suddenly glance
about for some one's arm to lean upon.
You need help. I don't necessarily
mean by that help mere money ; in
fact, I will say I don't mean it at all.
Let it be merely that some one should
stand the brunt of strong, unjust social'
disapproval with you, for his sympathy's
sake. On your word as an intelligent
man, Norman, and a remarkably candid
one, would you turn to any of these
adult and gilded cherubs, fully, unhes-
itatingly reckoning upon the support of
one of them through your adversity ?
Remember it is not of your larger, gen-
eral social world of which I speak.
That would make my proposition a very,
very stale one ; for that " all society is
selfish" has been admitted since the

1883.]

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy.

527

days of Greek and Roman philosophy.
These are your chosen few, whom you
at least call friends. Answer me. Would
you, or would you not ?

MR. R. (after a considerable hesita-
tion). Yes — no. The fact is I can
hardly tell how to treat them and your
interrogatory with perfect justice. Yet
I do not believe I can do so unless I
answer no. And furthermore, Emily
(with increasing animation), I should
turn myself, at once, picking him out
from all the rest, absolutely depending
upon him to go with me to any length,
were the cause for which I stood right
or wrong, toward the one man with
whom not one of what you call our
" coterie of cherubs " save myself has
ever been able to keep up an intimacy,
a man whom we all have respected, but
whose hard, steel-like nature has ever
prevented his more than impinging upon
our little clique. Of this one man's sup-
port, generosity and stick - fastness in
any hour, under any contingencies, I am
more certain than I am that the sun
shines this moment over yonder lawn !

Ay, upon W I could hang all my

faith, no matter if mountains were crum-
bling about me. ( With a sudden thrill
of enthusiasm.) See, see, Emily, how I
surrender at the thought of him, — sur-
render to the truth of your whole prop-
osition ! The coincidence overpowers
my defense.

Miss M. Bravo, bravo ! Ah, truly
one example is worth a million pre-
cepts ; especially when it contrives to
thrill these sluggish mortal hearts of
ours, Norman. (And how much of a
heart you have, after all !) Nevertheless
do not fancy that I would build upon
your coincidence a theory that the ma-
jority of disagreeable people in this
world — the man with the nasty temper,
the woman with the peevish spirit — are
sure to be generous and self-sacrificing
in a stated emergency. I wish I could.
But I do maintain that the proportion
of disinterestedness in such as a class

(largely through an overplus in partic-
ular individuals) aggregates more than
in the smiling-eyed, smooth-browed fra-
ternity— and sorosis, if you prefer to
particularize.

MR. R. Yes, I was going to say that
I hoped you used the word " men " in-
clusively. It has been said that women
as a species are more amiable, —

Miss M. And, as a species, men more
selfish : so I believe. You see how ad-
mirably I make the faults homogeneous.
(She pauses : then adds slowly.) I have
heard of women marrying drunkards,
hoping, expecting, to reform them after
marriage. I have heard of women
who, knowing that their lovers might
some day throw down upon the gaming-
table the wedding-rings they had just
bought, yet walked with such men up to
the altar and were married to them,
reliant on the exorcism of wifely love
and domestic calm. Ah, I deem her not
less a fool, a fool of the first water, who,
knowing the man whom she loves to
be thoroughly and irremediably selfish,
gives her hand to him and links her life
to his, expecting happiness !

MR. R. (deliberately). It strikes me
you — exaggerate — you are misled
most oddly by your imagination, Emily.

Miss M. I ? (Smiling bitterly, and
looking directly at Mr. R.) Not so, Nor-
man. And all the worse, the more
heinous her sin, if she knows that she
herself is an amiable and a selfish
woman.

(Mr. R. leans his head between his
palms and looks at the rug. Evidently he
is growing a wiser man than he was an
hour earlier. He scarcely knoios how to
break the silence, yet he would do so.
Miss M. also is studying the carpet in
momentary abstraction).

MR. R. (hesitatingly). It strikes me,
Emily — that you speak — as if a case
of this peculiar character — (He looks
up with a frown.)

Miss M. (meeting his eyes coura-
geously). I have known such. I once

528

Amiability : A Philosophical Tragedy.

[October,

knew a woman who cared for a man,
and whose conviction of the truth of
this very argument of mine was so strong
that it stood between herself and him
forever. As I think of her now, I can
see that she must have been a strange
girl ; but then she could not help that,
and she luckily never appeared so odd
to others as to her secret self. A lit-
tle morbid ? Yes, and doubtless in-
creasingly so as she grew older. He at-
tracted her. He had many good traits ;
but she had grown up with him, and
she knew him to be a (with a forced
laugh) — well, a kind of charming sub-
limation of selfishness. He always fan-
cied her ; and she — she fought him, qui-
etly, determinedly, year by year, from
her. She knew that she would have
hard work to answer him point-blank ;
she feared her own strength to do so.
So she battled unceasingly, and the point
never came bluntly to issue. And all
the time she had her doubts; her spirit
was weary and longing, and cried out
against her unwomanly course. But she
held to her philosophy, and in the des-
perate and cruel struggle of her theory
and her reason against the passion of
her youth she won (here Miss May-
berry's voice, which has been low and yet
unfaltering during the whole of this con-
fession, sinks still lower as she adds) —
won, perhaps at the price of her hap-
piness, for which she believed it must
be maintained.

{Here a complete pause naturally en-
sues. Finally, with an effort at sarcas-
tic raillery, Mr. Rutgers raises his head
and says.) It is unfortunate that any
girl should be cursed with a mind of so
morbid and generally obnoxious a sort.
(Ah, I see this morning what I never
have understood before, — never. She
has held the mirror up to nature with a
vengeance ! Confound it all ! What
an ass I have been !)

Miss M. (recovering her self-control
and speaking flippantly}. Yes, a shock-
ingly unfortunate thing. But come ;

how hideously solemn we have both
grown ! One might really suppose we
had known two such people. I dare
say that you are horrified to hear me
lecture so unequivocally. It 's a talent.
Why, Norman, you 're not angry at
anything I 've said, are you ? (Miss M.
realizes just here that she had best be
cautious, since she herself is in a rather
dangerously hysterical condition.)

MR. R. Angry ? No, of course
I 'm not. (Yes, yes, I understand. She
has managed it wonderfully well, too.
It would have been a blunt thing to

hear, and I should have bored her to
death with fighting such a point ; at
least, I would have, two years ago. But
now — well, now it 's different, I sup-
pose.) You argue as well as ever,
Emily. In fact (looking gravely at her),
— in fact you 've afforded me such con-
siderable food for meditation that I be-
lieve I '11 go off and think about it.
{He shoves his chair back, rises, and goes
for the hat and stick which are reposing
on the sofa.)

Miss M. (Think about it ! — as I have
all these years. But I see he under-
stands. Ah, why could I not have said
less ! This unlucky morning ! No —
no — it's much better so. It had bet-
ter have been this way than the other.)
Well, good-by, then, Norman. I won't
keep you, for Andrew will be chafing
already at my not getting down to the
green-house. (She puts out her hand
with charming frankness, and says, smil-
ing, having by the time quite recovered
herse/f.) Good-by, — Norman, most
amiable of my friends.

MR. R. (bitterly). Thank you. The
same to you. Good-morning.

[Miss Mayberry turns away with a
deep sigh, and dropping his hand passes
out of the door. Mr. R. stops before
making his exit by the open French-
window, looks at her retreating back
with a melancholy air, — and then gives
a short, hard laugh and disappears on
the piazza.]

Edward Irenceus Stevenson.

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 529

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN MASSACHU-
SETTS.

THE ancient manners were giving
way. There grew a certain tenderness
on the people, not before remarked.
Children had been repressed and kept
in the background ; now they were con-
sidered, cosseted and pampered. I re-
call the remark of a witty physician
who remembered the hardships of his
own youth ; he said, " It was a misfor-
tune to have been born when children
were nothing, and to live till men were
nothing."

There are always two parties, the
party of the Past and the party of the
Future; the Establishment and the
Movement. At times, the resistance is
reanimated ; the schism runs under the
world, and appears in Literature, Philos-
ophy, Church, State, and social cus-
toms. It is riot easy to date these eras
of activity with any precision, but in
this region one made "itself remarked,
say, in 1820 and the twenty years fol-
lowing.

It seemed a war between intellect
and affection ; a crack in nature, which
split every church in Christendom into
Papal and Protestant, Calvinism into
Old and New schools, Quakerism into.
Old and New ; brought new divisions
in politics, as the new conscience touch-
ing temperance and slavery. The key
to the period appeared to be that the
mind had become aware of itself. Men
grew reflective and intellectual. There
was a new consciousness. The former
generations acted under the belief that
a shining social prosperity was the be-
atitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly
the citizen to the State. The modern
mind believed that the nation existed
for the individual, for the guardianship
and education of every man. This idea,
roughly written in revolutions and na-
tional movements, in the mind of the

VOL. LII. — NO. 312. 34

philosopher had far more precision ; the
individual is the world.

This perception is a sword such as
was never drawn before. It divides and
detaches bone and marrow, soul and
body ; yea, almost the man from himself.
It is the age of severance, of dissocia-
tion, of freedom, of analysis, of detach-
ment. Every man for himself. The
public speaker disclaims speaking for
any other ; he answers only for himself.
The social sentiments are weak ; the
sentiment of patriotism is weak ; vener-
ation is low ; the natural affections fee-
bler than they were. People grow
philosophical about native land and par-
ents and relations. There is an univer-
sal resistance to ties and ligaments once
supposed essential to civil society. The
new race is stiff, heady and rebellious ;
they are fanatics in freedom ; they hate
tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarch-
ies, governors ; almost the laws. They
have a neck of unspeakable tenderness ;
it winces at a hair. They rebel against
theological as against political dogmas ;
against mediation, or saints, or any no-
bility in the unseen.

The age tends to solitude. The as-
sociation of the time is accidental and
momentary and hypocritical, the detach-
ment intrinsic and progressive. The
association is for power, merely, — for
means ; the end being the enlargement
and independency of the individual.
Anciently, society was in the course of
things. There was a Sacred Band, a
Theban Phalanx. There can be none
now. College classes, military corps,
or trades-unions may fancy themselves
indissoluble for a moment, over their
wine ; but it is a painted hoop, and has
no girth. The age of arithmetic and of
criticism has set in. The structures of
old faith in every department of society

530 Historic Notes of Life and Letters infassachusetts. [October,

a few centuries have sufficed to destroy.
Astrology, magic, palmistry, are long
gone. The very last ghost is laid. De-
monology is on its last legs. Preroga-
tive, government, goes to pieces day by
day. Europe is strewn with wrecks ;
a constitution once a week. In social
manners and morals the revolution is
just as evident. In the law courts,
crimes of fraud have taken the place of
crimes of force. The stockholder has
stepped into the place of the warlike
baron. The nobles shall not any longer,
as feudal lords, have power of life and
death over the churls, but now, in an-
other shape, as capitalists, shall in all
love and peace eat them up as before.
Nay, government itself becomes the re-
sort of those whom government was in-
vented to restrain. "Are there any
brigands on the road ? " inquired the
traveler in France. " Oh, no ; set your
heart at rest on that point," said the
landlord ; " what should these fellows
keep the highway for, when they can
rob just as effectually, and much more
at their ease, in the bureaus of office ? "

In literature the effect has appeared
in the decided tendency of criticism.
The most remarkable literary work of
the age has for its hero and subject
precisely this introversion : I mean the
poem of Faust. In philosophy, Imman-
uel Kant has made the best catalogue
of the human faculties and the best
analysis of the mind. In science the
French savant^ exact, pitiless, with ba-
rometer, crucible, chemic test, and calcy.
lus in hand, travels into all nooks an(j
islands, to weigh, to analyze, and rep-^t.
And chemistry, which is the analysi^ of
matter, has taught us that we eat g^
drink gas, tread on gas, and are gas>
The same decomposition has chai.ge(i
the whole face of physics ; the HVe° -m
all arts, modes. Authority fal|8 }n
Church, College, Courts of law, I'acui_
ties, Medicine. Experiment is credii^g.
antiquity is grown ridiculous.

It marked itself by a certain predon>

inance ofoe intellect in the balance of
powers. The warm swart Earth-spirit
which ade the strength of past ages,
mightitthan it knew, with instincts in-
stead Oscience, like a mother yielding
food fjn her own breast instead of
preparo- it through chemic and culina-
ry ski — warm negro ages of senti-
ment ad vegetation, — all gone; an-
other jur had struck and other forms
arose Instead of the social existence
whic'^H shared, was now separation.
Ever one for himself ; driven to find
all h'resources, hopes, rewards, society
and Hty within himself.

Ti. young men were born with
kniv5 in their brain ; a tendency to in-
trov«sion, self-dissection, anatomizing
of mtives. The popular religion of our
fathts bad received many severe shocks
f romthe new times : from the Armin-
ians^vhich was the current name of the
backiiders from Calvinism, sixty years
ago ;then from the English philosophic
theojgians, Hartley and Priestley and
Beldam, the followers of Locke; and
I should say, much later, from the

v but extraordinary influence of Swe-
dei.x>rg, — a man of prodigious mind,
tho,gb, as I think, tainted with a cer-
taii suspicion of insanity, and therefore
generally disowned, but exerting a sin-
gllar power over an important intellect-
ua class ; then the powerful influence
of the genius and character of Dr. Chan-
ning.

Germany had created criticism m
vain for us until 1820, when Edward
Everett returned from his five years in.
Europe, and brought to Cambridge his
rich results, which no one was so fitted
by natural grace and the splendor of
his rhetoric to introduce and recom-
mend. He made us for the first time
acquainted with Wolff's theory of the
Homeric writings, with the criticism of
Heyne. The novelty of the learning
lost nothing in the skill and genius of
his relation, and the rudest undergrad-
uate found a new morning opened to

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 531

Latin and Greek reading, than exeget-
ical discourses in the style of Voss and
Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic and
ante-Homeric remains, yet this learn-
ing instantly took the highest place
to our imagination in our unoccupied
American Parnassus. All his auditors
felt the extreme beauty and dignity
of the manner, aud even the coarsest
were contented to go punctually to listen
for the manner, when they had found
out that the subject matter was not
for them. In the lecture-room he ab-
stained from all ornament, and pleased
himself with the play of detailing erudi-
tion in a style of perfect simplicity. In
the pulpit (for he was then a clergy-
man) he made amends to himself and
his auditor for the self-denial of the pro-
fessor's chair, and, still with an infan-
tine simplicity of manner, he gave the
reins to his florid, quaint and affluent
fancy.

Then was exhibited all the richness
of a rhetoric which we have never seen
rivaled in this country. Wonderful
how memorable were words made which
were only pleasing pictures, and cov-
ered no new or valid thoughts ! He
abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire,
in splendid allusion, in quotation impos-
sible to forget, in daring imagery, in
parable, and even in a sort of defying
experiment of his own wit and skill in
giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or
Rabbinical words, — feats which no
man could better accomplish, such was
his self-command and the security of
his manner. All his speech was music,
and with such variety and invention
that the ear was never tired. Especially
beautiful were his poetic quotations.
He delighted in quoting Milton, and
with such sweet modulation that he
seemed to give as much beauty as he
borrowed ; and whatever he has quot-
ed will be remembered by any who
heard him with inseparable association
with his voice and genius. He had
nothing in common with vulgarity and

him in the lecture-room of Harvard
Hall.

There was an influence on the young
people from the genius of Everett which
was almost comparable to that of Peri-
cles in Athens. He had an inspiration
which did not go beyond his head, but
which made him the master of elegance.
If any of my readers were at that pe-
riod in Boston or Cambridge, they will
easily remember his radiant beauty of
person of a classic style : his heavy
large eye, marble lids, which gave the
impression of mass which the slight-
ness of his form needed ; sculptured
lips; a voice of such rich tones, such
precise and perfect utterance, that, al-
though slightly nasal, it was the most
mellow and beautiful and correct of all
the instruments of the time. The word
that he spoke, in the manner in which
he spoke it, became current and clas-
sical in New England. He had a great
talent for collecting facts, and for bring-
ing those he had to bear with ingenious
felicity on the topic of the moment.
Let him rise to speak on what occasion
soever, a fact had always just transpired
which composed, with some other fact
well known to the audience, the most
pregnant and happy coincidence. It
was remarked that for a man who threw
out so many facts he was seldom con-
victed of a blunder. He had a good
deal of special learning, and all was
available for purposes of the hour. It
was all new learning, that wonderfully
took and stimulated the young men. It
was so coldly aud weightily communi-
cated from so commanding a platform,
— as if in the consciousness and consid-
eration of all history and all learning, —
adorned with so many simple and aus-
tere beauties of expression, and enriched
with so many excellent digressions and
significant quotations that, though noth-
ing could be conceived beforehand less
attractive or indeed less fit for green
boys from Connecticut, New Hampshire
and Massachusetts, with their unripe

532 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

infirmity, but, speaking, walking, sit-
ting, was as much aloof and uncommon
as a star. The smallest anecdote of his
behavior or conversation was eagerly
caught and repeated, and every young
scholar could recite brilliant sentences
from his sermons, with mimicry, good
or bad, of his voice. This influence
went much farther, for he who was
heard with such throbbing hearts and
sparkling eyes in the lighted and crowd-
ed churches did not let go his hearers
when the church was dismissed, but the
bright image of that eloquent form fol-
lowed the boy home to his bed-cham-
ber ; and not a sentence was written in
academic exercises, not a declamation
attempted in the college chapel, but
showed the omnipresence of his genius
to youthful heads. This made every
youth his defender, and boys filled their
mouths with arguments to prove that
the orator had a heart. This was a
triumph of rhetoric. It was not the
intellectual or the moral principles which
he had to teach. It was not thoughts.
When Massachusetts was full of his
fame it was not contended that he had
thrown any truths into circulation. But
his power lay in the magic of form ; it
was in the graces of manner, in a new
perception of Grecian beauty, to which
he had opened our eyes. There Was
that finish about this person which is
about women, and which distinguishes
every piece of genius from the works
of talent : these last are more or less
matured in every degree of completeness
according to the time bestowed on them,
but works of genius in their first and
slightest form are still wholes. In every
public discourse there was nothing left
for the indulgence of his hearer, no
marks of late hours and anxious, unfin-
ished study ; but the goddess of grace
had breathed on the work a last fra-
grancy and glitter.

By a series of lectures, largely and
fashionably attended for two winters in
Boston, he made a beginning of popular

literary and miscellaneous lectures, which
in that region, at least, had important
results. These are acquiring greater im-
portance every day, and becoming a na-
tional institution. I am quite certain
that this purely literary influence was of
the first importance to the American
mind.

In the pulpit, Dr. Frothingham, an
excellent classical and German scholar,
had already made us acquainted, if pru-
dently, with the genius of Eichhorn's the-
ological criticism. And Professor Nor-
ton, a little later, gave form and method
to the like studies in the then infant
Divinity School. But I think the para-
mount source of the religious revolution
was Modern Science ; beginning with
Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan
fictions of the Church by showing man-
kind that the earth on which we live
was not the centre of the universe,
around which the sun and stars revolved
every day, and thus fitted to be the plat-
form on which the Drama of the Divine
Judgment was played before the as-
sembled angels of Heaven, — " the
scaffold of the divine vengeance," Saurin
called it, — but a little scrap of a planet,
rushing round the sun in our system,
which in turn was too minute to be seen
at the distance of many stars which we
behold. Astronomy taught us our in-
significance in Nature ; showed that our
sacred as our profane history had been
written in gross ignorance of the laws,
which were far grander than we knew ;
and compelled a certain extension and
uplifting of our views of the Deity and
his Providence. This correction of our
superstitions was confirmed by the new
science of geology, and the whole train
of discoveries in every department. But
we presently saw also that the religious
nature in man was not affected by these
errors in his understanding. The re-
ligious sentiment made nothing of bulk
or size, or far or near ; triumphed over
time as well as space ; and every lesson
of humility, or justice, or charity, which

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 533

the old ignorant saints had taught him
was still forever true.

Whether from these influences, or
whether by a reaction of the general
mind against the too formal science, re-
ligion, and social life of the earlier pe-
riod, there was, in the first quarter of
our nineteenth century, a certain sharp-
ness of criticism, an eagerness for re-
form, which showed itself in every quar-
ter. It appeared in the popularity
of Lavater's Physiognomy, now almost
forgotten. Gall and Spurzheim's phre-
nology laid a rough hand on the myste-
ries of animal and spiritual nature, drag-
ging down every sacred secret to a
street show. The attempt was coarse
aud odious to scientific men, but had a
certain truth in it ; it felt connection
where the professors denied it, and was
a leaning to a truth which had not yet
been announced. On the heels of this
intruder came Mesmerism, which broke
into the inmost shrines ; attempted the
explanation of miracle and prophecy as
well as of creation. What could be
more revolting to the contemplative phi-
losopher ! But a certain success attend-
ed it, against all expectation. It was hu-
man, it was genial, it affirmed unity and
connection between remote points, and,
as such, was excellent criticism on the
narrow and dead classification of what
passed for science ; and the joy with
which it was greeted was an instinct of
the people which no true philosopher
would fail to profit by. But while so-
ciety remained in doubt between the
indignation of the old school and the
audacity of the new, a higher note
sounded. Unexpected aid from high
quarters came to iconoclasts. The Ger-
man poet Goethe revolted against the
science of the day, — against French and
English science, — declared war against
the great name of Newton ; proposed his
own new and simpler optics ; in botany,
his simple theory of metamorphosis, —
the eye of a leaf is all ; every part of
the plant from root to fruit is only a

modified leaf; the branch of a tree is
nothing but a leaf whose serratures have
become twigs. He extended this into
anatomy and animal life, and his views
were accepted. The revolt became a
revolution. Schelling and Oken intro-
duced their ideal natural philosophy ;
Hegel, his metaphysics, and extended it
to Civil History.

The result in literature and the gen-
eral mind was a return to law, in sci-
ence, in politics, in social life, as dis-
tinguished from the profligate manners
and politics of earlier times. The age
was moral. Every immorality is a de-
parture from nature, and is punished by
natural loss and deformity. The popu-
larity of Combe's Constitution of Man,
the humanity which was the aim of all
the multitudinous works of Dickens, the
tendency even of Punch's caricature,
was all on the side of the people. There
was a breath of new air, much vague
expectation ; a consciousness of power
not yet finding its determinate aim.

I attribute much importance to two
papers of Dr. Channing, one on Milton
and one on Napoleon, which were the
first specimens in this country of that
large criticism which in England had
given power and fame to the Edinburgh
Review. They were widely read, and
of course immediately fruitful in pro-
voking emulation which lifted the style
of journalism. Dr. Channing, whilst he
lived, was the star of the American,
Church, and we then thought, if we do
not still think, that he left no successor
in the pulpit. He could never be re-
ported, for his eye and voice could not
be printed, and his discourses lose their
best in losing them. He was made for
the public ; his cold temperament made
him the most unprofitable private com-
panion ; but all America would have
been impoverished in wanting him. We
could not then spare a single word he ut-
tered in public, not so much as the read-
ing a lesson in Scripture, or a hymn ;
and it is curious that his printed writ-

534 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

ings are almost a history of the times,
as there was no great public interest,
political, literary, or even economical
(for he wrote on the Tariff), on which
he did not leave some printed record of
his brave and thoughtful opinion. A
poor little invalid all his life, he is yet
one of those men who vindicate the
power of the American race to produce
greatness.

Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840
with George Ripley to the point wheth-
er it were possible to bring cultivated,
thoughtful people together, and make
society that deserved the name. He had
earlier talked with Dr. John Collins
Warren on the like purpose, who ad-
mitted the wisdom of the design, and
undertook to aid him in making the
experiment. Dr. Channing repaired to
Dr. Warren's house on the appointed
evening, with large thoughts which he
wished to open. He found a well-chosen
assembly of gentlemen variously dis-
tinguished ; there was mutual greeting
and introduction, and they were chat-
ting agreeably on indifferent matters,
and drawing gently towards their great
expectation, when a side-door opened,
the whole company streamed in to an
oyster - supper, crowned by excellent
wines : and so ended the first attempt
to establish aesthetic society in Boston.

Some time afterwards Dr. Channing
opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs. Rip-
ley, and with some care they invited a
limited party of ladies and gentlemen.
I had the honor to be present. Though
I recall the fact, I do not retain any in-
stant consequence of this attempt, or
any connection between it and the new
zeal of the friends who at that time be-
gan to be drawn together by sympathy
of studies and of aspiration. Margaret
Fuller, George Ripley, Dr. Convers
Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge,
Mr. Brownson, James Freeman Clarke,
William H. Channing, and many others
gradually drew together, and from time
to time spent an afternoon at each oth-

er's houses in a serious conversation.
With them was always one well-known
form, a pure idealist ; not at all a man
of letters, nor of any practical talent,
nor a writer of books ; a man quite too
cold and contemplative for the alliances
of friendship, with, rare simplicity and
grandeur of perception, who read Plato
as an equal, and inspired his companions
only in proportion as they were intel-
lectual, whilst the men of talent com-
plained of the want of point and precis-
ion in this abstract and religious think-
er. These fine conversations, of course,
were incomprehensible to some in the
company, and they had their revenge in
their little joke. One declared that " it
seemed to him like going to Heaven in
a swing ; " another reported that, at a
knotty point in the discourse, a sympa-
thizing Englishman with a squeaking
voice interrupted with the question,
" Mr. Alcott, a lady near me desires to
inquire whether omnipotence abnegates
attribute ? "

I think there prevailed at that time a
general belief in Boston that there was
some concert of doctrinaires to establish
certain opinions, and inaugurate some
movement in literature, philosophy and
religion, of which design the supposed
conspirators were quite innocent ; for
there was no concert, and only here and
there two or three men or women who
read and wrote, each alone, with unus-
ual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed
in having fallen upon Coleridge and
Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Car-
lyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Oth-
erwise, their education and reading were
not marked, but had the American su-
perficialness, and their studies were soli-
tary. I suppose all of them were sur-
prised at this rumor of a school or sect,
and certainly at the name of Transcen-
dentalism, given nobody knows by whom,
or when it was first applied. As these
persons became, in the common chances
of society, acquainted with each other,
there resulted certainly strong friend-

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 535

ships, which of course were exclusive in
proportion to their heat ; and perhaps
those persons who were mutually the
best friends were the most private, and
had no ambition of publishing their let-
ters, diaries, or conversation.

From that time meetings were held
for conversation, with very little form,
from house to house, of people engaged
in studies, fond of books, and watchful
of all the intellectual light, from what-
ever quarter it flowed. Nothing could
be less formal, yet the intelligence and
character and varied ability of the com-
pany gave it some notoriety, and per-
haps wakened curiosity as to its aims and
results.

Nothing more serious came of it than
the modest quarterly journal called The
Dial, which, under the editorship of
Margaret Fuller, and later of some oth-
er, enjoyed its obscurity for four years.
All its papers were unpaid contributions,
and it was rather a work of friendship
among the narrow ^circle of students
than the organ of any party. Perhaps
its writers were its chief readers ; yet
it contained some noble papers by Mar-
garet Fuller, and some numbers had an
instant exhausting sale, because of pa-
pers by Theodore Parker.

Theodore Parker was our Savonarola,
an excellent scholar, in frank and affec-
tionate communication with the best
minds of his day, yet the tribune of the
people, and the stout reformer to urge
and defend every cause of humanity
with and for the humblest of mankind.
He was no artist. Highly refined per-
sons might easily miss in him the ele-
ment of beauty. What he said was
mere fact, almost offended you, so bald
and detached was it ; little cared he. He
stood altogether for practical truth ; and
so to the last. He used every day and
hour of his short life, and his charac-
ter appeared in the last moments with
the same firm control as in the midday
of strength. I habitually apply to him
the words of a French philosopher who

speaks of " the man of nature, who
abominates the steam-engine and the
factory. His vast lungs breathe inde-
pendence with the air of the mountains
and the woods."

The vulgar politician disposed of this
circle cheaply as " the sentimental class."
State Street had an instinct that they
invalidated contracts, and threatened the
stability of stocks ; and it did not fancy
brusque manners. Society always val-
ues, even in its teachers, inoffensive peo-
ple, susceptible of conventional polish.
The clergyman who would live in the
city may have piety, but must have
taste, whilst there was often coming,
among these, some John the Baptist,
wild from the woods, rude, hairy, care-
less of dress, and quite scornful of the
etiquette of cities. There was a pilgrim,
in those days, walking in the country,
who stopped at every door where he
hoped to find hearing for his doctrine,
which was, Never to give or receive
money. He was a poor printer, and
explained with simple warmth the belief
of himself and five or six young men,
with whom he agreed in opinion, of the
vast mischief of our insidious coin. He
thought every one should labor at some
necessary product, and as soon as he
had made more than enough for him-
self, were it corn, or paper, or cloth, or
boot-jacks, he should give of the com-
modity to any applicant, and in turn go
to his neighbor for any article which he
had to spare. Of course we were curi-
ous to know how he sped in his experi-
ments on the neighbor, and his anec-
dotes were interesting, and often highly
creditable. But he had the courage
which so stern a return to Arcadian
manners required, and had learned to
sleep, in cold nights, when the farmer
at whose door he knocked declined to
give him a bed, on a wagon covered
with the buffalo-robe, under the shed, —
or under the stars, when the farmer de-
nied the shed and the buffalo-robe. I
think he persisted for two years in his

536 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

brave practice, but did not enlarge his
church of believers.

These reformers were a new class.
Instead of the fiery souls of the Puri
tans, bent on hanging the Quaker, burn-
ing the witch, and banishing the Roman-
ist, these were gentle souls, with peace
and even with genial dispositions, cast-
ing sheep's-eyes even on Fourier and
his houris. It was a time when the air
was full of reform. Robert Owen, of
Lanark, came hither from England in
1845, and read lectures or held conver-
sations wherever he found listeners, —
the most amiable, sanguine and candid
of men. He had not the least doubt
that he had hit on a right and perfect
socialism, or that all mankind would
adopt it. He was then seventy years
old, and being asked, '; Well, Mr. Owen,
who is your disciple ? How many men
are there possessed of your views who
will remain, after you are gone, to put
them in practice ? " " Not one," was
his reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier
in his old age. He said that Fourier
learned of him all the truth he had ; the
rest of his system was imagination, and
the imagination of a banker. Owen
made the best impression by his rare
benevolence. His love of men made us
forget his Three Errors. His charita-
ble construction of men and their ac-
tions was invariable. He was the bet-
ter Christian in his controversy with
Christians, and he interpreted with great
generosity the acts of the Holy Alliance
and Prince Metternich, with whom the
persevering doctrinaire had obtained in-
terviews. " Ah," he said, " you may
depend on it, there are as tender hearts
and as much good will to serve men in
palaces as in colleges."

And truly, I honor the generous ideas
of the socialiits, the magnificence of
their theories, and the enthusiasm with
which they have been urged. They ap-
peared the inspired men of their time.
Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of la-
bor and reward to the slow ears of his

generation, with the fidelity and devotion
of a saint. Fourier, almost as wonder-
ful an example of the mathematical
mind of France as La Place or Napo-
leon, turned a truly vast arithmetic to
the question of social misery, and has
put men under the obligation, which a
generous mind always confers, of con-
ceiving magnificent hopes, and making
great demands as the right of man. He
took his measure of that which all should
and might enjoy from no soup society
or charity concert, but from the refine-
ments of palaces, the wealth of universi-
ties, and the triumphs of artists. He
thought nobly. A man is entitled to
pure air and to the air of good conver-
sation in his bringing up, and not, as we,
or so many of us, to the poor-smell and
musty chambers, cats and fools. Fou-
rier carried a whole French revolution
in his head, and much more. Here was
arithmetic on a huge scale. His cipher-
ing goes where ciphering never went
before, namely, into stars, atmospheres
and animals and men and women, and
classes of every character. It was the
most entertaining of French romances,
and could not but suggest vast possibili-
ties of reform to the coldest and least
sanguine.

We had an opportunity of learning
something of these socialists and their
theory from the indefatigable apostle of
the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane.
Mr. Brisbane pushed his doctrine with
all the force of memory, talent, honest
faith and importunacy. As we listened
to his exposition, it appeared to us the
sublime of mechanical philosophy ; for
the system was the perfection of ar-
rangement and contrivance. The force
of arrangement could no farther go.
The merit of the plan was that it was a
system ; that it had not the partiality
and hint-and-fragment character of most
popular schemes, but was coherent and
comprehensive of facts to a wonderful
degree. It was not daunted by distance,
or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort,

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 537

but strode about nature with a giant's
step, and skipped no fact, but wove its
large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epi-
cycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with
laudable assiduity. Mechanics were
pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritual-
ism. One could not but be struck with
strange coincidences betwixt Fourier
and Swendenborg. Genius hitherto has
been shamefully misapplied, a mere tri-
fler. It must now set itself to raise the
social condition of man, and to redress
the disorders of the planet he inhabits.
The Desert of Sahara, the Campagna
di Roma, the frozen polar circles, which
by their pestilential or hot or cold airs
poison the temperate regions, accuse
man. Society, concert, cooperation, is
the secret of the coming Paradise. By
reason of the isolation of men at the
present day, all work is drudgery. By
concert and the allowing each laborer
to choose his own work, it becomes
pleasure. " Attractive Industry " would
speedily subdue, by adventurous, scien-
tific and persistent tillage, the pestilen-
tial tracts ; would equalize temperature,
give health to the globe, and cause the
earth to yield " healthy, imponderable
fluids " to the solar system, as now it
yields noxious fluids. The hyena, the
jackal, the gnat, the bug, the flea, were
all beneficent parts of the system ; the
good Fourier knew what those creatures
should have been, had not the mould
slipped, through the bad state of the at-
mosphere ; caused, no doubt, by the same
vicious, imponderable fluids. All these
shall be redressed by human culture,
and the useful goat and dog and inno-
cent poetical moth, or the wood-tick to
consume decomposing wood, shall take
their place. It takes sixteen hundred
and eighty men to make one man, com-
plete in all the faculties ; that is, to be
sure that you have got a good joiner,
a good cook, a barber, a poet, a judge,
an umbrella-maker, a mayor and al-
derman, and so on. Your community
should consist of two thousand per-

sons to prevent accidents of omission ;
and each community should take up six
thousand acres of land. Now fancy the
earth planted with fifties and hundreds
of these phalanxes side by side : what
tillage, what architecture, what refecto-
ries, what dormitories, what reading-
rooms, what concerts, what lectures,
what gardens, what baths ! What is
not in one will be in another, and many
will be within easy distance. Then
know you and all that Constantinople
is the natural capital of the globe.
There, in the Golden Horn, will the
Arch-Phalanx be established ; there will
the Omniarch reside. Aladdin and his
magician, or the beautiful Scheherezade,
can alone, in these prosaic times before
the sight, describe the material splendors
collected there. Poverty shall be abol-
ished ; deformity, stupidity and crime
shall be no more. Genius, grace, art,
shall abound, and it is not to be doubted
but that in the reign of " Attractive In-
dustry " all men will speak in blank
verse.

Certainly we listened with great pleas-
ure to such gay arid magnificent pictures.
The ability and earnestness of the advo-
cate and his friends, the comprehensive-
ness of their theory, its apparent direct-
ness of proceeding to the end they would
' secure, the indignation they felt and ut-
tered in the presence of so much social
misery, commanded our attention and
respect. It contained so much truth,
and promised in the attempts that shall
be made to realize it so much valuable
instruction, that we are engaged to ob-
serve every step of its progress. Yet in
spite of the assurances of its friends
that it was new and widely discrimi-
nated from all other plans for the re-
generation of society, we could not ex-
empt it from the criticism which we ap-
ply to so many projects for reform with
which the brain of the age teems. Our
feeling was that Fourier had skipped
no fact but one, namely, life. He treats
man as a plastic thing, — something that

538 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

may be put up or down, ripened or re-
tarded, moulded, polished, made into
solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the
leader ; or perhaps as a vegetable, from
which, though now a poor crab, a very
good peach can, by manure and expos-
ure, be in time produced, but skips the
faculty of life, which spawns and scorns
system and system-makers, which eludes
all conditions, which makes or supplants
a thousand phalanxes and new harmo-
nies with each pulsation. There is an
order in which in a sound mind the fac-
ulties always appear, and which, accord-
ing to the strength of the individual,
they seek to realize in the surrounding
world. The value of Fourier's system
is that it is a statement of such an order
externized, or carried outward into its
correspondence in facts. The mistake
is that this particular order and series
is to be imposed, by force or preaching
and votes, on all men, and carried into
rigid execution. But what is true and
good must not only be begun by life,
but must be conducted to its issues by
life. Could not the conceiver of this
design have also believed that a simi-
lar model lay in every mind, and that
the method of each associate might be
trusted, as well as that of his particular
Committee and General Office, No. 200
Broadway ? Nay, that it would be bet-
ter to say, Let us be lovers and servants
of that which is just, and straightway
every man becomes a centre of a holy
and beneficent republic, which he sees
to include all men in its law, like that
of Plato and-of Christ? Before such a
man the whole world becomes Fourier-
ized, or Christized, or humanized, and
in obedience to his most private being
he finds himself, according to his pre-
sentiment, though against all sensuous
probability, acting in strict concert with
all others who followed their private
light.

Yet in a day of small, sour and fierce
schemes, one is admonished and cheered
by a project of such friendly aims and

of such bold and generous proportion ;
there is an intellectual courage and
strength in it, which is superior and
commanding ; it certifies the presence
of so much truth in the theory, and in
so far is destined to be fact.

It argued singular courage, the adop-
tion of Fourier's system, to even a lim-
ited extent, with his books lying before
the world only defended by the thin
veil of the French language. The Stoic
said, Forbear; Fourier said, Indulge.
Fourier was of the opinion of St. Evre-
mond ; abstinence from pleasure ap-
peared to him a great sin. Fourier was
very French indeed. He labored under
a misapprehension of the nature of
women. The Fourier marriage was a
calculation how to secure the greatest
amount of kissing that the infirmity of
human constitution admitted. It was
false and prurient ; full of absurd French
superstitions about women ; ignorant
how serious and how moral their na-
ture always is, how chaste is their or-
ganization, how lawful a class.

It is the worst of community that it
must inevitably transform into charlatans
the leaders, by the endeavor continually
to meet the expectation and admiration
of this eager crowd of men and women,
seeking they know not what. Unless
he have a, Cossack roughness of clear-
ing himself of what belongs not, char-
latan he must be.

It was easy to foresee the fate of this
fine system in any serious and com-
prehensive attempt to set it on foot in
this country. As soon as our people
got wind of the doctrine of marriage
held by this master, it would fall at
once into the hands of a lawless crew,
who would flock in troops to so fair a
game, and like the dreams of poetic
people on the first outbreak of the old
French Revolution, so theirs would dis-
appear in a slime of mire and blood.

There is, of course, to every theory
a tendency to run to an extreme, and
forget the limitations. In our free in-

1883. J Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 539

stitutions, where every man is at liberty
to choose his home and his trade, and
all possible modes of working arid gain-
ing are open to him, fortunes are easily
made by thousands, as in no other coun-
try. Then property proves too much
for the man, and the men of science,
art, intellect, are pretty sure to degen-
erate into selfish housekeepers, depend-
ent on wine, coffee, furnace heat, gas-
light and fine furniture. Then instantly
things swing the other way, and we sud-
denly find that civilization crowed too
soon ; that what we bragged as triumphs
were treacheries ; that we have opened
the wrong door, and let the enemy into
the castle ; that civilization was a mis-
take ; that nothing is so vulgar as a
great warehouse of rooms full of furni-
ture and trumpery ; that, in the circum-
stances, the best wisdom were an auc-
tion or a fire. Since the foxes and the
birds have the right of it with a warm
hole to keep out the weather, and no
more, a pent-house to fend the sun and
rain is the house which lays no - tax
on the owner's time and thoughts, and
which he can leave, when the sun is
warm, and defy the robber. This was
Thoreau's doctrine, who said that the
Fourierists had a sense of duty which
led them to devote themselves to their
second-best. And Thoreau gave in flesh
and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief
the purest ethics. He was more real
and practically believing in them than
any of his company, and fortified you
at all times with an affirmative expe-
rience which refused to be set aside.
Thoreau was in his own person a prac-
tical answer, almost a refutation, to the
theories of the socialists. Ho required
no phalanx, no government, no society,
almost no memory. He lived extempore
from hour to hour, like the birds and
the angels ; brought every day a new
proposition, as revolutionary as that of
yesterday, but different : the only man
of leisure in his town ; and his inde-
pendence made all others look like

slaves. He was a good Abbot Samp-
son, and carried a counsel in his breast.
" Again and again 1 congratulate my-
self on my so-called poverty. I could
not overstate this advantage." " What
you call bareness and poverty is to me
simplicity. God could not be unkind to
me if he should try. I love best to have
each thing in its season only, and enjoy
doing without it at all other times. It
is the greatest of all advantages to en-
joy no advantage at all. I have never
got over my surprise that I should have
been born into the most estimable place
in all the world, and in the very nick
of time, too." There 's an optimist for
you!

I regard these philanthropists as
themselves the effects of the age in
which we live, and, in common with so
many other good facts, the efflorescence
of the period, and predicting a good
fruit that ripens. They were not the
creators they believed themselves, but
they were unconscious prophets of a
true state of society ; one which the ten-
dencies of nature lead unto, — one which
always establishes itself for the same
soul, though not in that manner in which
they paint it ; but they were describers
of that which is really being done. The
large cities are phalansteries; and the
theorists drew all their argument from
facts already taking place in our expe-
rience. The cheap way is to make every
man do what he was born for. One mer-
chant, to whom I described the Fourier
project, thought it must not only suc-
ceed, but that agricultural association
must presently fix the price of bread,
and drive single farmers into association
in self-defense, as the great commercial
and manufacturing companies had done.
Society in England and in America is try-
ing the experiment again in small pieces,
in cooperative associations, in cheap eat-
ing-houses, as well as in the economies
of club-houses and in cheap reading-
rooms.

It chanced that here iu one family

540 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

were two brothers ; one a brilliant and
fertile inventor, and close by him his
own brother, a man of business, who
kne\v how to direct the inventor's faculty,
and make it instantly and permanently
lucrative. Why could not the like part-
nership be formed between the inventor
and the man of executive talent every-
where ? Each man of thought is sur-
rounded by wiser men than he, if they
cannot write as well. Cannot he and
they combine ? Talents supplement each
other. Beaumont and Fletcher and
many French novelists have known how
to utilize such partnerships. Why not
have a larger one, and with more vari-
ous members ?

" Of old things all are over old,
Of good things none are good enough ;
We '11 show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff."

Housekeepers say, " There are a thou-
sand things to everything," and if one
must study all the strokes to be laid, all
the faults to be shunned in a building
or work of art, of its keeping, its com-
position, its site, its color, there would
be no end. But the architect, acting un-
der a necessity to build the house for its
purpose, finds himself helped, he knows
not how, into all these merits of detail,
and steering clear, though in the dark,
of those dangers which might have
shipwrecked him.

BROOK FARM.

The West Roxbury association was
formed in 1841, by a society of mem-
bers, men and women, who bought a
farm in West Roxbury, of about two
hundred acres, and took possession of
the place in April. Mr. George Ripley
was the president, and I think Mr.
Charles Dana (afterwards well known
as one of the editors of the New York
Tribune) was the secretary. Many
members took shares by paying money ;
others held shares by their labors. An
old house on the place was enlarged,
and three new houses built. William

Allen was at first and for some time the
head farmer, and the work was distrib-
uted in orderly committees to men and
women. There were many employments,
more or less lucrative, found for, or
brought hither by, these members, —
shoemakers, joiners, sempstresses. They
had good scholars among them, and so
received pupils for their education. The
parents of the children in some instances
wished to live there, and were received
as boarders. Many persons, attracted by
the beauty of the place and the culture
and ambition of the community, joined
them as boarders, and lived there for
years. I think the numbers of this
mixed community soon reached eighty
or ninety souls.

It was a noble and generous move-
ment in the projectors to try an exper-
iment of better living. They had the
feeling that our ways of living were too
conventional and expensive, not allow-
ing each to do what he had a talent for,
and not permitting men to combine cul-
tivation of mind and heart with a rea-
sonable amount of daily labor. At the
same time, it was an attempt to lift oth-
ers with themselves, and to share the
advantages they should attain with oth-
ers now deprived of them.

There was, no doubt, great variety of
character and purpose in the members
of the community. It consisted in the
main of young people; few of middle
age, and none old. Those who inspired
and organized it were persons impatient
of the routine, the uniformity, perhaps
they would say the squalid content-
ment, of society around them, which
was so timid and skeptical of any prog-
ress. One would say then that impulse
was the rule in the society, without cen-
tripetal balance ; perhaps it would not be
severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism,
an impatience of the formal, routinary
character of our educational, religious,
social and economical life in Massachu-
setts. Yet there was immense hope in
these young people. There was noble-

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 541

ness ; there were self-sacrificing victims
who compensated for the levity and
rashness of their companions. The
young people lived a great deal in a
short time, and came forth, some of them,
perhaps, with shattered constitutions.
And a few grave sanitary influences of
character were happily there, which, I
was assured, were always felt.

George W. Curtis, of New York, and
his brother, of English Oxford, were
members of the family from the first.
Theodore Parker, the near neighbor of
the farm and the most intimate friend
of Mr. Ripley, was a frequent visitor.
Mr. Ichabod Morton of Plymouth, a
plain man, formerly engaged through
many years in the fisheries with success,
— eccentric, with a persevering interest
in education, and of a very democratic
religion, — came and built a house on the
farm, and he, or members of his fam-
ily, continued there to the end. Marga-
ret Fuller, with her joyful conversation
and large sympathy, was often a guest,
and always in correspondence with her
friends. Many ladies, whom to name
were to praise, gave character and va-
ried attraction to the place.

In and around Brook Farm, whether
as members, boarders, or visitors, were
many remarkable persons, for character,
intellect, or accomplishments. I recall
one youth of the subtlest mind, — I be-
lieve I must say the subtlest observer
and diviner of character I ever met,
living, reading, writing, talking, there,
perhaps, as long as the colony held to-
gether ; his mind fed and overfed by
whatever is exalted in genius, whether
in poetry or art, in drama or music, or
in social accomplishment and elegancy ;
a man of no employment or practical
aims ; a student and philosopher, who
found his daily enjoyment not with the
elders or his exact contemporaries so
much as with the fine boys who were
skating and playing ball or bird-hunt-
ing ; forming the closest friendships with
such, and finding his delight in the pet-

ulant heroisms of boys : yet was he the
chosen counselor to whom the guard-
ians would repair on any hitch or diffi-
culty that occurred, and drew from him
a wise counsel, — a fine, subtle, inward
genius, puny in body and habit as a girl,
yet with an aplomb like a general, never
disconcerted. He lived and thought in
1842, such worlds of life ; all hinging
on the thought of being or reality as
opposed to consciousness ; hating intel-
lect with the ferocity of a Swedenborg.
He was the abbe or spiritual father,
from his religious bias. His reading
lay in .^Eschylus, Plato, Dante, Calde-
ron, Shakespeare, and in modern novels
and romances of merit. There too was
Hawthorne, with his cold yet gentle
genius, if he failed to do justice to this
temporary home. There was the ac-
complished Doctor of Music, who has
presided over its literature ever since in
our metropolis. Rev. William Henry
Channing, now of London, was from
the first a student of Socialism in France
and England, and in perfect sympathy
with this experiment. An English bar-
onet, Sir John Caldwell, was a frequent
visitor, and more or less directly inter-
ested in the leaders and the success.

Hawthorne drew some sketches, not
happily, as I think ; I should rather say,
quite unworthy of his genius. No friend
who knew Margaret Fuller could recog-
nize her rich and brilliant genius under
the dismal mask which the public fan-
cied was meant for her in that disagree-
able story.

The founders of Brook Farm should
have this praise : that they made what
all people try to make, an agreeable
place to live in. All comers, even the
most fastidious, found it the pleasantest
of residences. It is certain that free-
dom from household routine, variety of
character and talent, variety of work,
variety of means, of thought and in-
struction, art, music, poetry, reading,
masquerade, did not permit sluggish-
ness or despondency ; broke up routine.

542 Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. [October,

There is agreement in the testimony
that it was, to most of the associates,
education ; to many, the most important
period of their life, the birth of valued
friendships, their first acquaintance with
the riches of conversation, their train-
ing in behavior. The art of letter-
writing, it is said, was immensely culti-
vated. Letters were always flying not
only from house to house, but from room
to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a
French Revolution in small, an age of
reason in a patty-pan.

In the American social communities,
the gossip found such vent and sway as
to become despotic. The institutions
were whispering-galleries, in which the
adored Saxon privacy was lost. Mar-
ried women, I believe, uniformly decided
against the community. It was to them
like the brassy and lacquered life in
hotels. The common school was well
enough, but to the common nursery they
had grave objections. Eggs might be
hatched in ovens, but the hen on her
own account much preferred the old
way. A hen without her chickens was
but half a hen.

It was a curious experience of the
patrons and leaders of this noted com-
munity,— in which the agreement with
many parties was that they should give
so many hours of instruction in mathe-
matics, in music, in moral and intellect-
ual philosophy, and so forth, — that in
every instance the new-comers showed
themselves keenly alive to the advan-
tages of the society, and were sure to
avail themselves of every means of in-
struction ; their knowledge was in-
creased, their manners refined, but they
became in that proportion averse to
labor, and were charged by the heads
of the departments with a certain indo-
lence and selfishness.

In practice it is always found that
virtue is occasional, spotty, and not lin-
ear or cubic. Good people are as bad
as rogues, if steady performance is
claimed ; the conscience of the conscien-

tious runs in veins, and the most punc-
tilious in some particulars are latitudi-
narian in others. It was very gently
said that people on whom beforehand
all persons would put the utmost re-
liance were not responsible. They saw
the necessity that the work must be
done, and did it not, and it of course
fell to be done by the few religious
workers. No doubt there was in many
a certain strength drawn from the fury
of dissent. Thus Mr. Ripley told The-
odore Parker, " There is your accom-
plished friend : he would hoe corn all
Sunday, if I 'would let him, but all
Massachusetts could not make him do it
on Monday."

Of course every visitor found that
there was a comic side to this Paradise
of shepherds and shepherdesses. There
was a stove in every chamber, and every
one might burn as much wood as he or
she would saw. The ladies took cold
on washing-day ; so it was ordained
that the gentlemen shepherds should
wring and hang out clothes, which they
punctually did. And it would some-
times occur that when they danced in
the evening, clothes-pins dropped plen-
tifully from their pockets. The country
members naturally were surprised to
observe that one man plowed all day,
and one looked out of the window all
day, and perhaps drew his picture, and
both received at night the same wages.
One would meet also some modest pride
in their advanced condition, signified by
a frequent phrase: "Before we came
out of civilization." The question which
occurs to you had occurred much earlier
to Fourier : " How, in this charming
Elysium, is the dirty work to be done? "
And long ago Fourier had exclaimed,
" Ah, I have it ! " and jumped with joy.
" Don't you see,' ' he cried, " that noth-
ing so delights the young Caucasian
child as dirt? See the mud-pies that
all children will make, if you will let
them. See how much more joy they
find in pouring their pudding on the

1883.] Historic Notes of Life and Letters in Massachusetts. 543

table-cloth than into their beautiful
mouths. The children from six to eight,
organized into companies, with flags and
uniforms, shall do this last function of
civilization."

In Brook Farm was this peculiarity,
that there was no head. In every fam-
ily is the father ; in every factory, a
foreman ; in a shop, a master ; in a
boat, the skipper : but in this Farm, no
authority ; each was master or mistress
of their own actions ; happy, hapless
anarchists. They expressed, after much
perilous experience, the conviction that
plain dealing was the best defense of
manners and morals between the sexes.
People cannot live together in any but
necessary ways. The only candidates
who will present themselves will be
those who have tried the experiment of
independence and ambition, and have
failed ; and none others will barter for
the most comfortable equality the chance
of superiority. Then all communities
have quarreled. Few people can live
together on their merits. There must
be kindred, or mutual economy, or a
common interest in their business, or
other external tie.

The society at Brook Farm existed,
I think, about six or seven years, and
then broke up ; the Farm was sold, and
I believe all the partners came out with
pecuniary loss. Some of them had
spent on it the accumulations of years.
I suppose they all, at the moment, re-
garded it as a failure. I do not think
they can so regard it now, but probably
as an important chapter in their expe-
rience which has been of lifelong value.
What knowledge of themselves and of

each other, what various practical wis-
dom, what personal power, what studies
of character, what accumulated culture,
many of the members owed to it ! What
mutual measure they took of each other !
It was a close union, like that in a ship's
cabin, of clergymen, young collegians,
merchants, mechanics, farmers' sons and
daughters, with men and women of rare
opportunities and delicate culture, yet
assembled there by a sentiment which
all shared, some of them hotly shared,
of the honesty of a life of labor and of
the beauty of a life of humanity. The
yeoman saw refined manners in persons
who were his friends ; and the lady or
the romantic scholar saw the continuous
strength and faculty in people who
would have disgusted them but that
these powers were now spent in the di-
rection of their own theory of life.

I recall these few selected facts, none
of them of much independent interest,
but symptomatic of the times and coun-
try. I please myself with the thought
that our American mind is not now ec-
centric or rude in its strength, but is be-
ginning to show a quiet power, drawn
from wide and abundant sources, proper
to a continent and to an educated peo-
ple. If I have owed much to the spe-
cial influences I have indicated, I am not
less aware of that excellent and increas-
ing circle of masters in arts and in song
and in science, who cheer the intellect
of our cities and this country to-day ;
whose genius is not a lucky accident,
but normal, and with broad foundation
of culture, and so inspires the hope of
steady strength advancing on itself, and
a day without night.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

544

A-Playin1 of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

A-PLAYIN' OF OLD SLEDGE AT THE SETTLEMINT.

" I HEV beam tell ez how them thar
boys rides thar horses over hyar ter the
Settlemiut nigh on ter every night in
the week ter play kyerds, — 'Old Sledge'
they calls it ; an' thar goin's-ou air jes'
scandalous, — jes' a-drinkin' of apple-
jack, an' a-bettin' of thar money."

It was a louely place : a sheer preci-
pice on one side of the road that curved
to its verge ; on the other, an ascent so
abrupt that the tall stems of the pines
seemed laid upon the ground as they
were marshaled in serried columns up
the hillside. No broad landscape was
to be seen from this great projecting
ledge of the mountain ; the valley was
merely a little basin, walled in on every
side by the meeting ranges that rose' so
high as to intercept all distant prospect,
and narrow the world to the contracted
area bounded by the sharp lines of their
wooded summits, cut hard and clear
against the blue sky. But for the road
it would have seemed impossible that
these wild steeps should be the chosen
haunt of aught save deer, or bear, or
fox ; and certainly the instinct of the
eagle built that eyrie called the Settle-
ment, still higher, far above the tower-
ing pine forest. It might be accounted
a tribute to the enterprise of Old Sledge
that mountain barriers proved neither
let nor hindrance, and here in the fast-
nesses was held that vivacious sway,
potent alike to fascinate and to scandal-
ize.

In the middle of the stony road stood
a group of roughly clad mountaineers,
each in an attitude of sluggish disincli-
nation to the allotted task of mending
the highway, leaning lazily upon a grub-
bing-hoe or sorry spade, — except, in-
deed, the overseer, who was upheld by
the single crowbar furnished by the
county, the only sound implement in
use among the party. The provident

dispensation of the law, leaving the care
of the road to the tender mercies of its
able-bodied neighbors over eighteen and
under forty-five years of age, was a god-
send to the Settlement and to the in-
habitants of the tributary region, in that
even if it failed of the immediate design
of securing a tolerable passway through
the woods, it served the far more im-
portant purpose of drawing together the
diversely scattered settlers, and afford-
ing them unwonted conversational facili-
ties. These meetings were well attend-
ed, although their results were often
sadly inadequate. To-day the usual com-
plement of laborers was on hand, except
the three boys whose scandalous suscep-
tibility to the mingled charms of Old
Sledge and apple-jack had occasioned
comment.

" They '11 hev ter be fined, ef they
don't take keer an' come an' work," re-
marked the overseer of the road, one
Tobe Rains, who reveled in a little brief
authority.

" From what I hev hearn tell 'bout
thar goin's-on; none of 'em is a-goin' ter
hev nothin' ter pay fines with, when they
gits done with thar foolin' an' sech,"
said Abner Blake, a man of weight and
importance, and the eldest of the party.

It did not seem to occur to any of the
group that the losses among the three
card-players served to enrich one of the
number, and that the deplorable whole-
sale insolvency shadowed forth was not
likely to ensue in substance. Perhaps
their fatuity in this regard arose from
the circumstance that fining the derelict
was' not an actuality, although some-
times of avail as a threat.

" An' we hev ter leave everythink
whar it fell down, an' come hyar ter do
thar work fur 'em, — a-fixin' up of this
hyar road fur them ter travel," exclaimed
Tobe Rains, in an attempt to chafe

1883.]

A-Playiri1 of Old Sledge at the Settlemint.

,545

himself into a rage. " It 's got ter quit,

— that 's what I say ; this hyar way
of doin' hev got ter quit." By way of
lending verisimilitude to the industrial
figure of rhetoric, he lifted his hammer
and dealt an ineffectual blow at a large
bowlder. Then he picked up his crow-
bar, and, leaning heavily on the imple-
ment, resigned himself to the piquant
interest of gossip. " An' thar 's that
Josiah Tait," he continued, "a settled
married man, a-behavin' no better 'n
them fool boys. He hain't struck a lick
of work fur nigh on ter a month, —
'ceptin' a-goin' huntin' with the t'others,
every wunst in a while. He hev jes'
pulled through at the little eend of the
horn. I never sot much store by him,
nohow, though when he war married
ter Melindy Price, nigh 'bout a year
ago, the folks all 'lowed ez she war
a-doin' mighty well ter git him, ez he war
toler'ble well off through his folks all
bein' dead but him, an' he bed what he
bed his own self."

"I wouldn't let my darter marry no-
man ez plays kyerds," said a very young
fellow, with great decision of manner,
" no matter what he hed, nor how he
bed it."

As the lady referred to was only two
weeks old, and this solicitude concern-
ing her matrimonial disposition was
somewhat premature, there was a good-
natured guffaw at the young fellow's
expense.

" An' now," Tobe Rains resumed,
" ef Josiah keeps on the way ez he hev
started, he hain't a-goin' ter hev no more
'n the t'other boys round the mounting,

— mebbe not ez much, — an' Melindy
Price hed better hev a-tuken somebody
what owned less but hed a harder grip."

A long silence fell upon the party.
Three of the twenty men assembled, in
dearth of anything else to do, took heart
of grace and fell to work ; fifteen leaned
upon their hoes in a variety of postures,
all equally expressive of sloth, and with
slow eyes followed the graceful sweep

VOL. LII. — NO. 312. 35

of a hawk, drifting on the wind, without
a motion of its wings, across the blue
sky to the opposite range. Two, one
of whom was the overseer, searched
their pockets for a plug of tobacco, and
when it was found its possessor gave to
him that lacked. At length Abner
Blake, who furnished all the items of
news, and led the conversation, removed
his eyes from the flight of the hawk, as
the bird was absorbed in the variegated
October foliage of the opposite moun-
tain, and reopened the discussion. At
the first word the three who were work-
ing paused in attentive quietude ; the fif-
teen changed their position to one still
more restful ; the overseer sat down on
a bowlder by the roadside, and placed
his contemplative elbows on his knees
and his chin in his hands. .

" I hev hearn tell," said Abner Blake,
with the pleasing consciousness of ab-
sorbing the attention of the company,
and being able to meet high expecta-
tions, " ez how Josiah hev los' that thar
brindled heifer ter Budd Wray, an' the
main heft of his crap of corn. But
mebbe he '11 take a turn now an' win
'em back agin."

" 'T ain't likely," remarked Tobe
Rains.

" No, 't ain't," coincided the virtuous
fifteen.

The industrious three, who might
have done better in better company,
went to work again for the space of a
few minutes ; but the next inarticulate
gurgle, preliminary always to Blake's
speech, — a sort of rising-bell to ring
up somnolent attention, — brought them
once more to a stand-still.

" An' cornsiderin' ez how Budd Wray,

— he it war ez won 'em ; I seen the
heifer along o' the cow ter his house
yestiddy evenin', ez I war a-comin' from
a-huntin' yander ter the sulphur spring,

— an' cornsiderin' ez he is nothin' but
a single man, an' hain't got no wife, it
do look mighty graspin' ter be a-takin'
from a man ez hev got a wife an' a

546

A-Playiri1 of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

houseful of his wife's ^kinsfolks ter look
arter. Mighty graspin', it 'pears like
ter me."

" I s'pose," said one of the three
workers suggestively, — "I s'pose ez
how Budd won it fair. 'T warn't no
onderhand job, war it? "

There was a portentous silence. The
flight of the hawk, again floating above
the mountains, now in the shadow of
the resting clouds, now in the still sun-
shine, was the only motion in the land-
scape. The sudden bark of a fox in
the woods near at hand smote the air
shrilly.

"That thar ain't fur me ter say,"
Blake replied at last, with significant
emphasis.

The suspicion fell upon the party like
a revelation, with an auxiliary sense
of surprise that it had not been earlier
presented, so patent was the possibility.

Still that instinct of justice latent in
the human heart kept the pause un-
broken for a while. Then Blake, whose
information on most points at issue en-
titled him to special consideration, pro-
ceeded to give his opinion on the sub-
ject : " I 'm a perfessin' member of the
church, an' I duuno one o' them thar
kyerds from the t'other ; an' what is
more, I ain't a-wantin' ter know. I hev
seen 'em a-playiu' wunst, an' I hearn
'em a-talkiu' that thar foolishness 'bout
'n ' high ' an' ' low,' an' sech, — they '11
all be low enough 'fore long. But
what I say is, I dunno how come Josiah
Tait, what 's always been a peart, smart
boy, an' his father afore him always
war a thrivin' man, an' Budd Wray war
never nobody nor nothiu', — he war al-
ways mighty no-'count, him an' all his
folks, — an' what I dunno is, how come
he kin git the upper hand of Josiah Tait
at these hyar kyerds, an' can't git it no
other way. Ef lie keeps on a-playin' of
Old Sledge hyar at the Settlemiut, he '11
be wuth ez much ez anybody on the
mounting what 's done been a-workin'
all thar days, an' hed a toler'ble start

ter begin with. It don't look fair an'
sensible ter me."

" 'Pears like ter me," said the very
young fellow, father of the very young
daughter, " ef a man is old enough ter
git married, he is old enough ter take
keer of hisself. I kin make out no
good reason why Josiah Tait oughter be
pertected agin Budd "Wray. 'Pears ter
nie ef one of 'em kin larn ter play Old
Sledge, the t'other kin. An' Josiah hev
got toler'ble good sense."

" That 's how come all ye young
muskrats dunno nothin'," retorted Blake
in some heat. " Jes' let one of yer git
turned twenty year old, an' yer think ye
air ez wise an' ez settled ez ef ye war
sixty, an' ye can't larn nothin' more."

" All the same, I don't see ez Josiah
Tait needs a dry-miss ter keep off Wray
an' sech critters," was the response.
And here this controversy ended.

u Somehow," said Tobe Rains, reflect-
ively, " it don't look likely ter me ez he
an' Josiah Tait hev any call ter be sech
frien'ly folks. I hev hearn ez how
Budd Wray war a-follerin' round Me-
lindy Price afore she war married, an'
she liked him fustrate till Josiah ttik
ter comiu' 'bout'n the Scrub-Oak Ridge,
whar she lived in them days. That
thar ain't the stuff ter make frien's out'n.
Thar is some sort'n cur'ous doin's a-goin'
on 'bout'n these hyar frien'ly kyerds."

"I knowed that thar 'bout 'n his
a-follerin' round Melindy afore she war
married. I 'lowed one time ez Melin-
dy hed a mind ter marry Wray stiddier
Josiah," said the young father, shaken
in his partisanship. " An' it always
'peared like ter me ez it war mighty
comical ez he an' Josiah tuk ter play-
in' of Old Sledge an' sech tergither."

These questions were not easy of
solution. Many speculations were pre-
ferred concerning the suspicious circum-
stance of Budd Wray's singular profi-
ciency in the black art of playing Old
Sledge ; but beyond disparaging innu-
endo and covert insinuation conjecture

1883.]

A-Playiri1 of Old Sledge at the Settlemint.

547

could not go. Everything was left
doubtful, and so was the road.

It was hardly four o'clock, but the
languid work had ceased and the little
band was dispersing. Some had far to
go through the deep woods to their
homes, and those who lived closer at
hand were not disposed to atone for
their comrades' defection by prolong-
ing their stay. The echoes for a long
time vibrated amid the lonely heights
with the metallic sound of their horses'
hoofs, every moment becoming fainter,
until at last all was hushed. Dusky
shadows, which seemed to be exhaled
from the ground, rose higher and high-
er up the mountain side from the reser-
voir of gloom that lay in the valley.
The sky was a lustrous contrast to the
darkling earth. The sun still lingered,
large and red, above the western hills ;
the clouds about it were gorgeous in
borrowed color ; even those hovering in
the east had caught the reflection of
the sunset splendor, and among their
gold and crimson flakes swung the sil-
ver globe of the hunter's moon. Now
and then, at long intervals, the bark of
the fox quivered on the air ; once the
laurel stirred with a faint rustle, and a
deer stood in the midst of the ill-mended
road, catching upon his spreading antlers
the mingled light of sun and moon. For
a moment he was motionless, his hoof
uplifted ; the next, with an elastic spring,
as of a creature without weight, he was
flying up the steep hillside and disap-
pearing amid the slumberous shades of
the dark pines. A sudden sound comes
from far along the curves of the road,
— a sound foreign to woods and stream
and sky ; again, and yet again, grow-
ing constantly more distinct, the strik-
ing of iron against stone, the quick,
regular beat of a horse's tread, and an
equestrian figure, facing the moon and
with the sun at his back, rides between
the steep ascent and the precipice, on
his way to the Settlement and the en-
ticements of Old Sledge.

He was not the conventional type of
the roistering blade. There was an ex-
pression of settled melancholy on his
face very usual with these mountaineers,
reflected, perhaps, from the indefinable
tinge of sadness that rests upon the Al-
leghany wilds, that hovers about the
purpling mountain - tops, that broods
over the silent woods, that sounds in
the voice of the singing waters. Nor
was he like the prosperous " perfessin'
member " of the card-playing culte. Hia
listless manner was that of stolidity, not
of a studied calm ; his brown jeans suit
was old and worn and patched ; his hat,
which had seen many a drenching win-
ter rain and scorching summer sun, had
acquired sundry drooping curves un-
dreamed of in its maker's philosophy.
He rode a wiry gray mare without a
saddle, and carried a heavy rifle. He
was perhaps twenty-three years of age,
a man of great strength and stature, and
there were lines about his lips and chin
which indicated a corresponding devel-
opment of a firm will and tenacity of
purpose. His slow brown eyes were
fixed upon the horizon as he went around
the ledge, and notwithstanding the lan-
guid monotony of the expression of his
face he seemed absorbed in some defi-
nite train of thought, rather than lost
in the vague, hazy reverie which is the
habitual mental atmosphere of the qui-
escent mountaineer. The mare, left to
herself, traveled along the rocky way in
a debonair fashion implying a familiarity
with worse roads, and soon was around
the curve and beginning the sharp as-
cent which led to the Settlement. There
was a rickety bridge to cross, that
spanned a deep, narrow stream, which
caught among its dark pools now a long,
slender, polished lance of sunlight, and
now a dart from the moon. As the
rider went on upward the woods were
dense as ever ; no glimpse yet of the
signet of civilization set upon the wil-
derness and called the Settlement. By
the time he had reached the summit the

548

A-Playin1 of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

last red rays of the day were fading
from the tops of the trees, but the moon,
full and high in the eastern heavens,
shed so refulgent a light that it might
be questioned whether the sun rose on
a brighter world than that which he
had left. A short distance along level
ground, a turn to the right, and here,
on the highest elevation of the range,
was perched the little town. There
was a clearing of ten acres, a black-
smith's shop, four log huts facing in-
discriminately in any direction, a small
store of one story and one room, and
a new frame court-house, whitewashed
and inclosed by a plank fence. In the
last session of tho legislature, the Set-
tlement had been made the county-seat
of a new county ; the additional honor
of a name had been conferred upon
it, but as yet it was known among the
population of the mountain by its time-
honored and accustomed title.

Wray dismounted in front of the store,
hitched the mare to a laurel bush, and,
entering, discovered his two boon com-
panions drearily waiting, and snaffling
the cards again and again to while away
the time. An inverted split - basket
served as table ; a tallow dip, a great
extravagance in these parts, blinked on
the head of a barrel near by, and gave
a most flickering and ineffectual light,
but the steady radiance of the moon
poured in a wide white flood through
the open door, and kindly supplied all
deficiencies. The two young moun-
taineers were of the usual sad-eyed type,
and the impending festivities might have
seemed to those of a wider range of ex-
perience than the Settlement could fur-
nish to be clouded with a funereal as-
pect. Before the fire, burning low and
sullenly iu the deep chimney, were sit-
ting two elderly men, who looked with
disfavor upon Wray as he came in and
placed his gun with a clatter in the
corner.

" Ye war a long time a-gittin' hyar,
Budd," said one of the card-shufflers in

a gentle voice, with curiously low-spir-
ited cadences. He spoke slowly, too,
and with a slight difficulty, as if he sel-
dom had occasion to express himself in
words and his organs were out of prac-
tice. He was the proprietor of the store,
one Tom Scruggs, and this speech was
by way of doing the honors. The other
looked up with recognizing eyes, but
said nothing.

" I war hendered some," replied Wray,
seating himself in a rush-bottomed chair,
and drawing close to the inverted bas-
ket. " Ez I war a-comin' along, 'bout
haffen mile an' better from my house,
— 't war nigh on ter three o'clock, I
reckon, — I seen the biggest, fattest
buck I hev seen this year a-bouncin'
through the laurel, an' I shot him. An'
I bed ter kerry him 'long home, 'kase
suthin' mought hev got him ef I hed
a-left him thar. An' it hendered me
some."

" An' we hev ter sit hyar a-wastin'
away an' a-waitin' while ye goes a-hunt-
in' of deer," said Josiah Tail, angrily,
and speaking for the first time. " I
could hev gone an' shot twenty deer ef
I would hev tuk the time. Yer said ez
how yer war a-goin' ter be hyar an hour
by sun, an' jes' look a-yander," point-
ing to the lustrous disc of the moon.

" That thar moon war high enough
fore the sun war a-settin'," returned
Wray. " Ef yer air in sech a hurry,
why n't yer cut them thar kyerds fur
deal, an' stop that thar jowin' o' yourn.
I hev hed ez much of that ez I am
a-goin' ter swallow."

" I '11 put it down yer with the ram-
rod o' that thar gun o' mine, ef ye don't
take keer how ye talk," retorted the
choleric Tait ; " an' ef that don't set
easy on yer stomach, I '11 see how yer'll
digest a bullet."

" I 'm a-waitin' fur yer ramrod," said
Wray, calmly. " Jes' try that fust, an'
see how it works."

The melancholy-voiced store-keeper
interrupted these amenities, not for the

1883.]

A-Playirf of Old Sledge at the Settlemint.

549

sake of peace, — white-winged angel, —
but in the interests of Old Sledge. " Ef
I hed a-knowed ex how yer two boys
war a-goiu' ter take ter quarrelin' an'
a-fightin' round hyar, a-stiddier playiu'
of kyerds sensible-like, I would n't hev
shet up shop so quick. I hed a good
many little turns of work ter do what I
hev lef ter play kyerds. An' yer two
mought jow tergither some other day, it
'pears like ter me. Yer air a-wastiu'
more time a-jowin', Josiah, than Budd
tuk up in comin' an' deer-huntin' ter-
gither. Yer hev cut the lowest in the
pack, so deal the kyerds, or give 'em
ter them ez will."

The suggestion to resign the deal
touched Josiah in a tender spot. He
protested that he was only too willing
to play, — that was all he wanted. " But
ter be kep' a-waitin* hyar while Budd
comes a-snakin' through the woods, an'
a-stoppin' ter shoot wild varmints an'
sech, an' then a-goin' home ter kerry
'em, an' then a-snakin' agin through the
woods, an' a-gittin' hyar nigh on ter
night-time, — that's what riles me."

" Waal, go 'long now ! " exclaimed
Wray, fairly roused out of his imper-
turbability. " Deal them kyerds, an'
stop a-talkin'. That thar tongue o'
yourn will git cut out some o' these
hyar days. It jes' goes like a grist-mill,
an' it 's enough ter make a man deef
fur life."

Thus exhorted, Josiah dealt. In re-
ceiving their hands the players looked
searching! y at every card, as if in doubt-
ful recognition of an old acquaintance ;
but before the game was fairly begun
another interruption occurred. One of
the elderly men beside the fire rose and
advanced upon the party.

" Thar is a word ez we hev laid off
ter ax yer, Budd Wray, which will be
axed twict, — wunst right hyar, an'
wunst at the Judgmint Day. War it
yer ez interjuced this hyar coal o' fire
from hell that ye call Old Sledge up
hyar ter the Settlemint ? "

The querist was a gaunt, forlorn-look-
ing man, stoop-shouldered, and slow in
his movements. There was, however,
a distinct intimation of power in his
lean, sinewy figure, and his face bore the
scarlet scar of a wound torn by a furi-
ous fang, which, though healed long
ago, was an ever-present reminder of a
fierce encounter with a wild beast, in
which he had come off victorious. The
tones of his voice and the drift and
rhetoric of his speech bespoke the loan
of the circuit-rider.

The card-players looked up less in sur-
prise than exasperation, and Josiah Tait,
fretfully anticipating Wray, spoke in re-
ply : " No, he never. I fetched this
hyar coal o' fire myself, an' ef yer don't
look out an' stand back out'n the way
it '11 flare up an' singe yer. I larnt how
ter play when I went down yancler ter
the Cross-Roads, an' I brung it ter the
Settlemint myself."

There was a mingled glow of the
pride of the innovator and the disdain-
ful superiority of the iconoclast kin-
dling within Josiah Tait as he claimed
the patent for Old Sledge. The cate-
chistic terrors of the Last Day had less
reality for him than the present honor
and glory appertaining to the traveled
importer of a new game. The Judg-
ment Day seemed imminent over his
dodging head only when beholding the
masterly scene- painting of the circuit-
rider, and the fire and brimstone out of
sight were out of mind.

" But ef yer air a-thinkin' of callin'
me ter 'count fur sech," said Wray,
nodding at the cards, " I '11 hev yer ter
know ez I kin stand up ter anything I
does. I have got no call ter be ashamed
of myself, an' I ain't afeard o' nothin'
an' nobody."

" Ye give me ter onderstand, then, ez
Josiah larned yer ter play ? " asked the
self-constituted grand inquisitor. "How
come, then, Budd Wray, ez yer wins all
the truck from Josiah, ef ye air jes'
a-larnin' ? "

550

A-Playin of Old Sledge at the Settlement. [October,

There was an angry exclamation from
Josiul), and Wray laughed out triumph-
antly. The walls caught the infrequent
mirthful sound, and reverberated with a
hollow repetition. From the dark for-
est just beyond the moon-flooded clear-
ing the echo rang out. There was a
subtle, weird influence in those exultant
tones, rising and falling by fitful starts
in that tangled, wooded desert ; now
loud and close at hand, now the faintest
whisper of a sound. The men all turned
their slow eyes toward the sombre shad-
ows, so black beneath the silver moon,
and then looked at each other. -

" It 's 'bout time fur me ter be
a-startin'," said the bear-hunter. " When-
ever I hear them critters a-lau°;hiu' that

thar way in them woods I puts out fur
home an' bars up the door, fur I hev
hearn tell ez how the sperits air a-prowl-
in' round then, an' some mischief is
a-happeniu'."

"'T ain't nothin' but Budd Wray
a-laughin','' said the store-keeper reas-
suringly. " I hev hearn them thar rocks
an' things a-answeriu' back every minute
in the day, when anybody hollers right
loud."

" They don't laugh, though, like they
war a-laughin' jes' a while ago."

" No, they don't," admitted the store-
keeper reluctantly ; " but mebbe it air
'kase there is nobody round hyar ez hev
got much call ter laugh."

He was unaware of the lurking mel-
ancholy in this speech, and it passed un-
noticed by the others.

" It 's this hyar a-foolin' along of Old
Sledge an' sech ez calls the sperits up,"
said the old man. " An' ef ye knows
what air good fur ye, ye '11 light out
from hyar an' go home. They air
a-laughin' yit" Pie interrupted him-
self, arid glanced out of the door.

The faintest staccato laugh thrilled
from among the leaves. And then all was
silent, — not even the bark of a dog nor
a tremulous whisper of the night-wind.

The other elderly man, who had not

yet spoken, rose from his seat by the fire.
"I 'm a-goin', too," he said. "I kern
hyar ter the Settlemint," he added, turn'
ing upon the gamblers, " 'kase I hev been
called ter warn ye o' the wickedness o'
yer ways, ez Jonah afore me war tole
ter go up ter Nineveh ter warn the folks
thar."

" Things turns out powerful cur'ous
wunst in a while," retorted Wray. '• He
war swallowed by a whale arterward."

" 'Kase he would n't do ez he wur
tole ; but even thar Providence per-
tected him. He come out'n the whale
agin, what nobody kin do ez gits swal-
lowed in the pit. They hev ter stay."

" It hain't me ez keeps up this hyar
game," said Wray sullenly, but stung
to a slight repentance by this allusion
to the pit. " It air Josiah hyar ez is
a-aimin' ter win back the truck he hev
los' ; an' so air Tom, hyar. I hev bed
toler'ble luck along o' this Old Sledge,
but they know, an' they hev got ter
stand up ter it, ez I never axed none of
'em ter play. Ef they scorches they-
selves with this hyar coal o' fire from
hell, ez yer calls it, Josiah brung it, an'
it air Tom an' him a-blowin' on it ez
hev kep' it a-light."

" I ain't a-goin' ter quit," said Josiah
Tait angrily, the loser's desperate eager*
ness pulsing hot and quick through his
veins, — "I ain't a-goin' ter quit till I
gits back that thar brindled heifer an' that
thar gray mare out yander, what Budd
air a-ridin', an' them thar two wagon-
loads o' corn."

" We hev said our say, an' we air
a-goin'," remarked one of the unheeded
counselors.

" An' play on of yer kyerds ! " cried
Josiah to the others, in a louder, shriller
voice than was his wont, as the two old
men stepped out of the door. The
woods caught the sound and gave it back
in a higher key.

" S'pose we stops fur ter-night," sug-
gested the store-keeper ; " them thar
rocks do sound sort 'n cur'ous now."

1883.]

A-Playin of Old Sledge at the Settlemint.

551

" I ain't a-goin' ter stop fur notliin'
an' nobody ! " exclaimed Josiah, in a tre-
mor of keen anxiety to be at the sport.
" Dad-burn the sperits ! Let 'em come
in, an' I '11 deal 'em a hand. Thar ! that
trick is mine. Play ter this hyar queen
o' trumps."

The royal lady was recklessly thrown
upon the basket, with all her foes in am-
bush. Somehow, they did not present
themselves. Tom was destitute, and
Budd followed with the seven. Josiah
again pocketed the trick with unction.
This trifling success went disproportion-
ately far in calming his agitation, and
for a time he played more heedfully.
Tom Scruggs's caution made ample
amends for his lack of experience. So
slow was he, and so much time did he
require for consideration, that more
than once he roused his companions to
wrath. The anxieties with which he
was beset preponderated over the pleas-
ure afforded by the sport, and the win-
ning back of a half-bushel measure,
which he had placed in jeopardy and
lost, so satisfied this prudent soul that
he announced at the end of the game
that he would play no more for this
evening. The others were welcome,
though, to continue if they liked, and
he would sit by and look on. He snuffed
the blinking tallow dip, and reseated
himself, an eager spectator of the play
that followed.

Wray was a cool hand. Despite the
awkward, unaccustomed clutch upon the
cards and the doubtful recognition he
bestowed on each as it fell upon the bas-
ket, he displayed an imperturbability
and nerve tliat usually comes only of
long practice, and a singular pertinacity
in pursuing the line of tactics he had
marked out, — lying in wait and poun-
cing unerringly upon his prey in the nick
of time. The brindled heifer's mother
followed her offspring into his owner-
ship ; a yoke of oxen, a clay-bank filly,
ten hogs, — every moment he was grow-
in«r richer. But his success did not for

an instant shake a stolid calm, quicken
his blood, nor relax his vigilant atten-
tion ; his exultation was held well in hand
under the domination of a strong will
and a settled purpose. Josiah Tait be-
came almost maddened by these heavy
losses ; his hands trembled, his eager
exclamations were incoherent, his dull
eyes blazed at fever heat,- and ever and
anon the echo of his shrill, raised voice
rang back from the untiring rocks.

The single spectator of the game now
and then, in the intervals of shuffling
and dealing the cards, glanced over his
shoulder at the dark trees whence the
hidden mimic of the woods, with some
strong suggestion of sinister intent, re-
peated the agitated tones. There was a
silver line all along the summit of the
foliage, along the roofs of the houses
and the topmost rails of the fences ; a
sense of freshness and dew pervaded
the air, and the grass was all asparkle.
The shadows of the laurel about the
door were beginning to fall on the step,
every leaf distinctly defined in the
moon's magical tracery. He knew with-
out looking up that she had passed the
meridian, and was swinging down the
western sky.

" Boys," he said, in a husky under-
tone, — he dared not speak aloud, for the
mocker in the woods, — " boys, I reckon
it 's 'bout time we war a-quittin' o' this
hyar a-playin' of Old Sledge ; it 's mid-
night an' past, an' Budd hev toler'ble
fur ter go."

The tallow dip, that had long been
flickering near its end, suddenly went
out, and the party suffered a partial
eclipse. Josiah Tait dragged the invert-
ed basket closer to the door and into the
full brilliance of the moon, declaring
that neither Wray nor he should leave
the house till he had retrieved his mis-
fortunes or lost everything in the effort.
The host, feeling that even hospitality
has its limits, did not offer to light an-
other expensive candle, but threw a
quantity of pine-knots on the smoulder-

552

A-Playin* of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

ing coals ; presently a white blaze was
streaming up the chimney, and in the
mingled light of fire and moon the game
went on.

" Ye oughter take keer, Josiah," re-
monstrated the sad-voiced store-keeper,
as a deep groan and a deep curse em-
phasized the result of high, jack, and
game for Wray, and low alone for Tait.
" An' it 's 'bout time ter quit."

" Dad burn the luck ! " exclaimed Jo-
siah, in a hard, strained voice, " I ain't
a-goin' ter leave this hyar spot till I hev
won back them thar critters o' mine
what he hev tuk. An' I kin do it, — I
kin do it in one more game. I '11 bet —
I'll bet" — He paused in bewildered
excitement ; he had already lost to Wray
everything available as a stake. There
was a sudden unaccountable gleam of
malice on the lucky winner's face ; the
quick glance flashed in the moonlight into
the distended hot eyes of his antagonist.
Wray laughed silently, and began to
push his chair away from the basket.

" Stop ! stop ! " cried Josiah, hoarse-
ly. " I hev got a house, — a house an'
fifty acres, nigh about. I '11 bet the
house an' land agin what ye hev won
from me, — them two cows, an' the
brindled heifer, an' the gray mare, an'
the clay-bank filly, an' them ten hogs,
an' the yoke o' steers, an' the wagon,
an' the corn, — them two loads o' corn :
that will 'bout make it even, won't it ? "
He leaned forward eagerly as he asked
the question.

" Look a-hyar, Josiah," exclaimed the
store-keeper, aghast, " this hyar is a-goin'
too fur ! Hain't ye los' enough a'ready
but yer must be a-puttin' up the house
what shelters yer? Look at me, now :
I ain't done los' nothin' but the half-
bushel measure, an' I hev got it back
agin. An' it air a blessin' that I hev
got it agin, for 't would hev been mighty
ill convenient round hyar 'thout it."

" Will yer take it ? " said Josiah, al-
most pleadingly, persistently addressing
himself to Wray, regardless of the re-

monstrant host. " Will yer put up the
critters agin the house an' land ? "

Wray made a feint of hesitating.
Then he signified his willingness by
seating himself and beginning to deal
the cards, saying before he looked at
his hand, " That thar house an' land o'
yourn agin the truck ez I hev won from
yer ? "

" Oh, Lord, boys, this must be sin-
ful ! " remonstrated the proprietor of the
cherished half-bushel measure, appalled
by the magnitude of the interests in-
volved.

" Hold yer jaw ! hold yer jaw ! "
said Josiah Tait. " I kin hardly make
out one kyerd from another while ye 're
a-preachin' away, same ez the rider ! I
done tole yer, Budd," turning again to
Wray, " I '11 put up the house an' land
agin the truck. I '11 git a deed writ fur
ye in the mornin', ef ye win it," he add-
ed, hastily, thinking he detected uncer-
tainty still lurking in the expression of
Wray's face. " The court air a-goin'
ter sit hyar ter-morrer, an' the lawyers
from yander ter Smyrny will be hyar
toler'ble soon, I reckon. An' I '11 git
ye a deed writ fust thing in the morn-
in'."

" Yer hearn him say it ? " said Wray,
turning to Tom Scruggs.

" I hearn him," was the reply.

And the game went on.

" I beg," said Josiah, piteously, after
carefully surveying his hand.

" I ain't a-goin' ter deal ye nare
'nother kyerd," said Wray. " Yer kin
take a pint fust."

The point was scored by the faithful
looker-on in Josiah's favor. High, low,
and game were made by Wray, jack
being in the pack. Thus the score was
three to one. In the next deal, the
trump, a spade, was allowed by Wray
to stand. He led the king. " I 'in low,
anyhow," said Josiah, in momentary ex-
ultation, as he played the deuce to it.
Wray next led the ace whisking for the
jack, and caught it.

1883.]

A-Playiri of Old Sledge at the Settlemint.

553

" Dad-burn the rotten luck ! " qua-
vered Josiah.

With the advantage of high and jack
a foregone conclusion, Wray began to
play warily for game. But despite his
caution he lost the next trick. Josiah
was in doubt how to follow up this ad-
vantage ; after an anxious interval of
cogitation he said, " I b'lieve I '11 throw
away fur a while," and laid that safe
card, the five of diamonds, upon the bas-
ket. " Tom," he added, " put on some
more o' them knots. I kin hardly tell
what I 'in a-doin' of. I hev got the
shakes, an' somehow 'nother my eyes is
cranky, and wobble so ez I can't see."

The white sheets of flame went whiz-
zing merrily up the chimney, and the
clear light fell full upon the basket as
Wray laid upon the five the ten of dia-
monds.

" Lord ! Josiah ! " exclaimed Tom
Scruggs, becoming wild, and even more
ill judged than usual, beginning to feel
as if he were assisting at his friend's
obsequies, and to have a more decided
conviction that this way of coming by
house and laud and cattle and goods
was sinful. " Lord ! Josiah ! that thar
kyerd he 's done saved '11 count him ten
fur game. Ye had better hev played
that thar queen o' di'monds, an' dragged
it out'n him."

" Good Lord in heaven ! " shrieked
Josiah, in a frenzy of rage at this un-
warrantable disclosure.

" Lord in heaven ! " rang loud from
the depths of the dark woods. " Heav-
en ! " softly vibrated the distant heights.
The crags close at hand clanged back
the sound, and the air was filled with
repetitions of the word, growing fainter
and fainter, till they might have seemed
the echo of a whisper.

The men neither heard nor heeded.
Tom Scruggs, although appreciating the
depth of the infamy into which he had
unwittingly plunged, was fully resolved
to stand stoutly upon the defensive, —
he even extended his hand to take down

his gun, which was laid across a couple
of nails on the wall.

" Hold on, Josiah, — hold on ! " cried
Wray, as Tait drew his knife. " Tom
never went fur ter tell, an' I '11 give yer
a ten ter make it fair. Thar 's the ten
o' hearts ; an' a ten is the mos' ez that
thar critter of a queen could hev made
out ter hev tuk, anyhow."

Josiah hesitated.

" That thar is the mos' ez she could
hev done," said the store-keeper, smooth-
ing over the results of his carelessness.
" The jacks don't count but fur one
apiece, so that thar ten is the mos' ez
she could hev made out ter git, even ef
I hed n't a-forgot an' tole Budd she war
in yer hand."

Josiah was mollified by this very eq-
uitable proposal, and resuming his chair
he went on with the play. The ten of
hearts which he had thus secured was,
however, of no great avail in counting
for game. Wray had already high and
jack, and game was added to these.
The score therefore stood six* to two in
his favor.

The perennial faith of the gambler in
the next turn of the wheel was strong
in Josiah Tait. Despite his long run
of bad luck, he was still animated by
the feverish delusion that the gracious
moment was surely close at hand when
success would smile upon him. Wray,
it was true, needed to score only one
point to turn him out of house and land,
homeless and penniless. He was confi-
dent it would never be scored. If he
could make the four chances he would
be even with his antagonist, and then
he could win back in a single point all
that he had lost. His face wore a hag-
gard, eager expectation, and the agita-
tion of the moment thrilled through
every nerve. He watched with fiery
eyes the dealing of the cards, and after
hastily scrutinizing his hand he glanced
with keen interest to see the trump
turned. It was a knave, counting one
for the dealer. There was a moment

554

A-Playin? of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

of intense silence ; he seemed petrified
as his eyes met the triumphant gaze of
his opponent. The next instant he was
at Wray's throat.

The shadows of the two swaying fig-
ures reeled across the floor, marring the
exquisite arabesque of moonshine and
laurel leaves, — quick, hard panting, a
deep oath, spasmodic efforts on the part
of each to draw a sharp knife, prevented
by the strong intertwining arms of the
other.

The store-keeper, at a safe distance,
remonstrated with both, to no purpose,
and as the struggle could end only in
freeing a murderous hand he rushed
into the clearing, shouting the magical
word " Fight ! " with all the strength of
his lungs. There was no immediate re-
sponse, save that the affrighted rocks
rang with the frenzied cry, and the mo-
tionless woods and the white moonlight
seemed pervaded with myriads of strange,
uncanny voices. Then a cautious shut-
ter of a glassless window was opened,
and through the narrow chink there fell
a bar of red light, on which was clearly
defined an inquiring head, like an inquis-
itively expressive silhouette. " They
air a-fightin' yander ter the store, whar
they air a-playin' of Old Sledge," said
the master of the shanty, for the enlight-
enment of the curious within. And
then he closed the shutter, and like the
law-abiding citizen that he was betook
himself to his broken rest. This was
the only expression of interest elicited.

A dreadful anxiety was astir in the
store-keeper's thoughts. One of the
men would certainly be killed ; but he
cared not so much for the shedding of
blood in the abstract as that the deed
should be committed on his premises at
the dead of night ; and there might be
such a concatenation of circumstances,
through the malefactor's willful perver-
sion of the facts, that suspicion would
fall upon him. The first circuit court
ever held in the new county would be
in session to-morrow ; and the terrors

of the law, deadly to an unaccustomed
mind, were close upon him. Finding
no help from without, he rushed back
into the store, determined to make one
more appeal to the belligerents. '• "Budd,"
he cried, " I'll holp yer ter hold Josiah,
ef ye '11 promise yer won't tech him ter
hurt. He air crazed through a-losin' of
his truck. Say ye won't tech him ter
hurt, an' I '11 holp yer ter hold him."

Josiah succumbed to their united ef-
forts, and presently made no further
show of resistance, but sank, still pant-
ing, into one of the chairs beside the
inverted basket, and gazed blankly, with
the eyes of a despairing, hunted crea-
ture, out at the sheen of the moonlight.

" I ain't a-wantin' ter hurt nobody,"
said Wray, in a surly tone. " I never
axed him ter play kyerds, nor ter bet,
nor nothin'. He lamed me hisself, an'
ef I bed los' stiddier of him he would
be a-thinkin' now ez it 's all right."

" I 'm a-goin' ter stand up ter what
I done said, though," Josiah declared
brokenly. " Yer need n't be afeard ez
how I ain't a-goin' ter make my words
true. Ef yer comes hyar at noon ter-
morrer, ye '11 git that thar deed, an' ye
kin take the house an' land ez I an' my
folks hev hed nigh on ter a hundred
year. I ain't a-goin' ter fail o' my word,
though."

He rose suddenly, and stepped out of
the door. His footfalls sounded with a
sullen thud in the utter quietude of the
place; a long shadow thrown by the
sinking moon dogged him noiselessly as
he went, until he plunged into the depths
of the woods, and their gloom absorbed
both him and his silent pursuer.

A dank, sunless morning dawned upon
the house in which Josiah Tait and his
fathers had lived for nearly a hundred
years : it was an humble log cabin nes-
tled in the dense forest, about four miles
from the Settlement. Fifty cleared acres,
in an irregular shape, lay behind it; the
cornstalks, sole remnant of the crop lost
at Old Sledge, were still standing, their

1883.]

A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlement.

555

sickly yellow tint blanched by the con-
trast with the dark brown of the tall
weeds in a neighboring field, that had
grown up after the harvested wheat, and
flourished in the summer sun, and died
under the first fall of the frost. A
heavy moisture lay upon them at noon,
this dreary autumnal day ; a wet cloud
hung in the tree-tops ; here and there,
amid its gray vapors, a scarlet bough
flamed with a sharply accented intensity.
There was no far-reaching perspective
in the long aisles of the woods; the
all-pervading mist had enwrapped the
world, and here, close at hand, were
bronze-green trees, and there spectre-
like outlines of boles and branches, dimly
seen in the haze, and beyond an opaque,
colorless curtain. From the chimney of
the house the smoke rose slowly ; the
doors were closed, and not a creature
was visible save ten hogs prowling about
in front of the dwelling among the fallen
acorns, pausing and looking up with that
odd, porcine expression of mingled im-
pudence and malignity as Budd Wray
appeared suddenly in the mist and made
his way to the cabin.

He knocked ; there was a low-toned
response. After hesitating a moment,
he lifted the latch and went in. He was
evidently unexpected ; the two occupants
of the room looked at him with startled
eyes, in which, however, the momentary
surprise was presently merged in an ex-
pression of bitter dislike. The elder, a
faded, careworn woman of fifty, turned
back without a word to her employment
of washing clothes. The younger, a
pretty girl of eighteen, looked hard at
him with fast-filling blue eyes, and ris-
ing from her low chair beside the fire
said, in a voice broken by grief and re-
sentment, u Kf this hyar house air yourn,
Budd Wray, I wants ter git out'n it."

" 1 hev come hyar tor tell ye a word,"
said Budd Wray, meeting her tearful
glance with a stern stolidity. He flung
himself into a chair, and fixing his moody
eyes on the lire went on : "A word ez

I hev been a-aimin' an' a-contrivin' ter
tell ye ever sence ye war married ter
Josiah Tail, an' afore that, — ever sence
ye tuk back the word ez yer bed gin
me afore ye ever seen him, 'kase o' his
hevin' a house, an' critters, an' sech like.
He hain't got none now, — none of 'em.
I hev been a-layin' off ter bring him ter
this pass fur a long time, 'count of the
scandalous way ye done treated me a
year ago las' June. lie hain't get no
house, nor no critters, nor nothin'. I done
it, an' I come hyar with the deed in my
pocket ter tell ye what I done it fur."

Her tears flowed afresh, and she
looked appealingly at him. He did not
remove his angry, indignant eyes from
the blaze, stealing timidly up the smoky
chimney. " I never bed uothiu' much,"
he continued, " an' I never said I bed
nothin' much, like Josiah ; but I thought
ez how you an' me might make out
toler'ble well, bein' ez we sot consider'-
ble store by each other in them days,
afore he ever tuk ter comin' a-huutin'
yander ter Scrub-Oak Ridge, whar ye
war a-livin' then. I don't keer nothin'
'bout'n it now, 'ceptin' it riles me, an'
I war bound ter spite yer fur it. I don't
keer nothiu' more 'bout yer now than
fur one o' them thar dead leaves. I
want ye ter know I jes' done it ter spite
ye, — ye is the one. I hain't got no
grudge agin Josiah ter talk about He
done like any other man would."

The color flared into the drooping
face, and there was a flash in the weep-
ing blue eyes.

" I s'pose I hed a right ter make a
ch'ice," she said, angrily, stung by these
taunts.

"Jes' so," responded Wray, coolly;
"yer hed a right ter make a ch'ice
atwixt two men, but no gal hev got a
right ter put a man on one eend o' the
beam, an' a lot o' senseless critters an'
house an' land on the t'other. Ye never
keered ncthin' fur me nor Josiah nuther,
ef the truth war knowed ; ye war all
tuk up with the house an' laud an' crit-

556

A-Playiri* of Old Sledge at the Settlemint. [October,

ters. Au' they Lev done lef ye, what
nare one o' the men would hev done."

The girl burst into convulsive sobs,
but the sight of her distress had no soft-
ening influence upon Wray. "I hev
done it ter pay ye back fur what ye hev
done ter me, an1 1 reckon ye '11 'low now
ez we air toler'ble even. Ye tuk all I
keered fur away from me, an' now1 1 hev
tuk all ye keer fur away from yer. An'
I 'm a-goin' now yander ter the Settle-
mint ter hev this hyar deed recorded on
the book ter the court-house, like Law-
yer Green tole me ter do right straight.
I laid off, though, ter come hyar fust,
an' tell ye what I hev been aimin' ter
be able ter tell ye fur a year an' better.
An' now I am a-goiii' ter git this hyar
deed recorded."

He replaced the sheet of scrawled
legal-cap in his pocket, and rose to go ;
then turned, and, leaning heavily on the
back of his chair, looked at her with
lowering eyes.

" Ye 're a pore little cre'tur," he said,
with scathing contempt. "I dunno what
ails Josiah nor me nuther ter hev sot
our hearts on sech a little stalk o' cheat."
He went out into the enveloping
mountain mist with the sound of her
weeping ringing in his ears. His eyes
were hot, and his angry heart was
heavy. He had schemed and waited for
his revenge with persistent patience.
Fortune had favored him, but now that
it had fully come, strangely enough it
fell short of satisfying him. The deed
in his breast-pocket weighed like a stone,
and as he rode on through the cloud that
lay upon the mountain top the sense of
its pressure became almost unendurable.
And yet, with a perplexing contrariety
of emotion, he felt more bitterly toward
her than ever, and experienced a delight
almost savage in holding the possessions
for which she had been so willing to re-
sign him. " Jes' kicked me out'n the
way like I war nothiu' more 'n that thar
branch o' pisen-oak fur a passel o' cattle
an' sech like critters, an' a house an'

land, — 'kase I don't count Josiah in.
'T war the house an' land an' sech she
war a-studyin' 'bout." And every mo-
ment the weight of the deed grew heav-
ier. He took scant notice of external
objects as he went, keeping mechanic-
ally along the path, closed in twenty
yards ahead of him by the opaque cur-
tain of mist. The trees at the greatest
distance visible stood shadow-like and
colorless in their curious, unreal atmos-
phere ; but now and then the faintest
flake of a pale rose tint would appear in
the pearly haze, deepening and deepen-
ing, till at the vanishing point of the
perspective a gorgeous scarlet-oak tree
would rise, red enough to make a re-
spectable appearance on the planet Mars.
There was an audible stir breaking upon
the silence of the solemn woods, the
leaves were rustling together, and drops
of moisture began to patter down upon
the ground. The perspective grew grad-
ually longer and longer, as the rising
wind cleared the forest aisles ; and when
he reached the road that ran between
the precipice and the steep hill above,
the clouds were falling apart, the mist
had broken into thousands of fleecy white
wreaths, clinging to the fantastically
tinted foliage, and the sunlight was strik-
ing deep into the valley. The woods
about the Settlement were all aglow
with color, and sparkling with the trem-
ulous drops that shimmered in the sun.
There was an unwonted air of anima-
tion and activity pervading the place.
To the court-house fence were hitched
several lean, forlorn horses, with shabby
old saddles, or sometimes merely blan-
kets ; two or three wagons were standiag
among the stumps in the clearing. The
door of the store was occupied by a
coterie of mountaineers, talking with un-
usual vivacity of the most startling event
that had agitated the whole country-side
for a score of years, — the winning of
Josiah Tail's house and land at Old
Sledge. The same subject was rife
among the choice spirits congregated in

1883.]

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

557

the court-house yard and about the por-
tal of that temple of justice, and "VVray's
approach was watched with the keenest
interest.

He dismounted, and walked slowly to
the door, paused, and turning as with
a sudden thought threw himself hastily
upon his horse ; he dashed across the
clearing, galloped heedlessly down the
long, steep hill, and the astounded loi-
terers heard the thunder of the hoois as
they beat at a break-neck speed upon
the frail, rotten timbers of the bridge
below.

Josiah Tait had put his troubles in to
soak at the still-house, and this circum-
stance did not tend to improve the
cheerfulness of his little home when he
returned in the afternoon. The few
necessities left to the victims of Old
Sledge had been packed together, and
were in readiness to be transported with
him, his wife, and mother-in-law to Me-
linda's old home on Scrub-Oak Ridge,
when her brother should drive his wagon
over for them the next morning.

They never knew how to account for
it. While the forlorn family were sit-
ting before the smoking fire, as the day
waned, the door was suddenly burst
open, and Budd Wray strode in impet-
uously. A brilliant flame shot up the
chimney, and the deed which Josiah
Tait had that day executed was a cinder
among the logs. He went as he came,
and the mystery was never explained.

There was, however, " a sayin' goin'
'bout the mounting ez how Josiah an'
Melindy jes' 'ticed him, somehow 'nother,
ter thar house, an' held him, an' tuk the
deed away from him tergither. An'
they made him send back the critters
an' the corn what he done won away
from 'em." This version came to his
ears, and was never denied. He was
more ashamed of relenting in his ven-
geance than of the wild legend that he
had been worsted in a tussle with Me-
linda and Josiah.

And since the night of Budd Wray's
barren success the playing of Old Sledge
has become a lost art at the Settlement.
Charles .Egbert Graddock,

THE VOYAGE OF THE JEANNETTE.

WHEN Captain De Long was strug-
gling through the morass of the Lena
Delta, one of his men urged him to aban-
don or to bury the papers which the
party were carrying and thus lighten
their loads, but he refused ; the records
of the voyage should go with him to the
end, and to the end they did go. It
was the instinctive resolution of a brave
man that the story of his endeavor
should not be lost, even though it was
a story of disaster and defeat. It is
no doubt with a similar sentiment that
Mrs. De Long has given to the world

1 The Voyage of the Jeannette. The Ship and
Ice Journals of (JKOKGK W. DK LONG, Lieuten-
ant-Commander U. S. N. and Commander of the
Polar Expedition of 1879-1881. Edited by his

a full narrative of the expedition which
her husband commanded.1 She has
made it so full and complete that one
feels, in reading it, here is the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It is the truth about the Jeannette which
people want, and it is this truth which
will give to the expedition and its com-
mander a fame unmeasured by success
or failure. The most imperishable mon-
ument to a brave man is that knowledge
of his life and character which becomes
the property of the world, and so passes
into human thought and aspiration ;
•wife, EMMA DE LONG. With steel portraits,
maps, and many illustrations on wood and stone.
In two volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and
Company. 1883.

558

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

[October,

whatever may be the fortune of future
expeditions, no results of research can
dim the i'ume of this venture, because
its fame rests not on what it accom-
plished, but upon the witness which it
bore to the temper of men.

The bulk of the work before us is oc-
cupied with a transcript of Captain De
Long's journals, and it was fit, therefore,
that the first chapter should be a sketch
of De Long's life before he took com-
mand of the expedition. The book is
so far a memorial to him that his early
life is not treated as an introduction, but
as a constituent part of the narrative.
It is curious to find that as a boy he
was carefully defended by an over-anx-
ious mother from all perils of the water,
and that the bent of his nature was for
a life the very opposite of that to which
his training was addressed. There is
just enough hint of his family circum-
stances given to suggest to the reader
an irksome repression, but one easily
believes that the direction which De
Long's life took was not in a reaction
from home influence, but in the growth
of a will which was a significant inher-
itance from his mother. The manli-
ness, the openness, and the obedience
of the boy were qualities which do not
accord with mere restlessness of temper,
and the strength of his will is seen in
his final persuasion of his parents, and
not in insubordination.

The training which he received, how-
ever, in the vain effort of his parents to
make a professional man of him, was of
great value, for the journals bear testi-
mony to the skill which he acquired as
a writer. We doubt if it was his edu-
cation at the Naval Academy, so much
as his public school and his private ex-
ercises when a boy, which gave him an
ease in expression ; and we venture the
opinion that if Annapolis and West
Point gave more special attention to lit-
erary training, many an officer in the
navy and in the army would chafe less
under the limitations of his life, and our

literature would show a more admirable
shelf of books written by such officers
than it now does. Be this as it may,
there was, no doubt, in De Long's case
a predisposition to literature. " His
spirit and energy," we are told, " hemmed
in upon the adventurous side, found ex-
ercise in an intellectual ardor, and he
was a fiery little orator and writer."

The manner in which he won over
his parents to consent to his applying
for admission to the Naval Academy,
and then badgered everybody, including
Mr. Benjamin Wood, the Representa-
tive to Congress from his district, and
Secretary Welles, until he carried his
point, is a boyish exhibition of an in-
domitable energy and winning faculty,
which his after experience repeated in
a variety of ways. Just as he had ap-
parently got what he was after, and had
gone to Newport, — for it was in the
early days of the war, when the Acad-
emy was established there, — the officers
at the Academy received a dispatch from
the Secretary of the Navy, instructing
them not to accept Mr. Wood's young
man, for De Long had received the ap-
pointment in consequence of the unex-
pected failure in health of a cadet from
Mr. Wood's district.

" Back to New York rushed De Long,
and demanded of Mr. Wood the reason
for the dispatch. Mr. Wood showed
him a letter from the Secretary, by
which it appeared that the nomination
of De Long had been delayed, and that
the cadet whose place he was to fill had
recovered his health and been reinstated.
' So that ends the matter,' said Mr.
Wood ; but it did not at all end it in
De Long's mind. He burst into a vig-
orous invective against the Department.
It was all wrong. Mr. Wood had been
imposed upon. It was because he was
a Democrat that this injustice had been
done, and the Republican Secretary was
depriving the Congressman of his rights.
He ought not to stand such treatment
an hour. Mr. Wood was amused and

1883.]

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

559

moved by the zeal of the young advo-
cate, and finally said: —

" ' Do you sit down, Mr. De Long,
and write what you want to the Secre-
tary. I will sign the letter, and you can
take it to Washington yourself, if you
like.'

" The letter was written, and De Long
set off at once to Washington. It was in
the fall of 1861, when the trains were
packed with soldiers, and the boy had
to stand all the way from Philadelphia
to Washington, lie reached the city
at six in the morning, and as soon as he
could get something to eat presented
himself at the door of the Secretary's
office, and was ready when the hour
came for business. He entered and
handed Mr. Wood's letter to the Secre-
tary. Mr. De Long often enjoyed tell-
ing of that interview ; how he watched
the various expressions of Mr. Gideon
Welles's face as he read the tempestu-
ous letter which the boy had written.
When the Secretary finished, he pushed
his spectacles up and looked at his vis-
itor.

" l And you are Mr. De Long, are
you ? Well, well, this is a very strange
state of affairs. Mr. Wood seems very
much excited ; but he is laboring under
a delusion. We have no intention of
slighting him in any way. You can re-
turn to the Academy. I will give the
necessary orders for your reception
there, and please say to Mr. Wood that
he shall not be deprived even of his im-
aginary right.' "

De Long completed his term at the
Naval Academy without further interrup-
tion, and entered active service. His
high spirits, his curiosity, and his reso-
lute will are sketched in a number of
entertaining and suggestive incidents;
but the event which most distinctly fore-
told his career was the boat-expedition
which he made with a small party, when
he was lieutenant on the Juniata, a
steamer sent to the coast of Greenland
to search for the missing Polaris. De

Long volunteered to take the steam-
launch and explore Melville Bay, and
the narrative of his daring adventure,
told in his own words, gives one a keen
sense of the courage and prudence which
characterized him. He went to the full
length of his powers, but there was an
absence of mere recklessness, and that
in such affairs counts for as much as
courage.

The boat-journey gave him that taste
of Arctic adventure which is sure to
whet the appetite of a high-spirited man.
To say that De Long caught the Arctic
fever then, and was uneasy until he was
again in high latitudes, would be true,
but might give a false view of the con-
trolling motive of his career. A crav-
ing for mere adventure, the love of ex-
citement, the restless desire for peril, are
after all rather physical than high men-
tal or moral inspirations, and the na-
tures which obey such impulses have
not the stuff out of which real heroism
is made. If there were no other evi-
dence, the power of silent, cheerful en-
durance of disappointment which De
Long and his party showed would inti-
mate that they were sustained by some
higher motive than a desire to achieve
adventure. There is other evidence,
for the whole tenor of De Long's own
words concerning the expedition and
the comprehensiveness of his prepara-
tions indicate how completely he threw
his whole life into the enterprise, and
with what generous purpose he con-
ceived the adventure.

The expedition was linked with the
historical Arctic explorations of Amer-
ica in an interesting fashion.

" When the Juniata was ordered to
the coast of Greenland, Lieutenant De
Long called upon Mr. Henry Grinnell,
of New York, to obtain from him any
information which his long connection
with Arctic explorations could afford.
Mr. Grinnell offered the use of charts
which had been employed on the sev-
eral expeditions he had fitted out, and

560

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

[October,

upon the return of the Juniata Lieuten-
ant De Long restored these charts to
Mr. Griunell, and acquainted him with
his own experience. The two held a
long talk upon Arctic subjects, and
shortly after Lieutenant De Long dined
at Mr. Griunell's in company with Dr.
Bessells and other Arctic voyagers. At
this dinner Mr. De Long asked Mr.
Grinnell : —

" ' Why do you not fit out an expedi-
tion to the North Pole ? I should like
much to take command of one and solve
the problem. You have tried so often
you ought to try again.'

" ' I am too old a man,' replied Mr.
Grinnell, ' and I have done my share.
Younger men must take the matter in
hand. There is Mr. James Gordon Ben-
nett. He is the man to undertake such
an expedition. You should apply to
him.' "

Mr. De Long did apply, and found
Mr. Bennett already thinking of the
scheme. Thus it was that the power
which had essayed to solve the African
problem and had achieved so much suc-
cess was the one to attack the Polar
problem. Nations and commerce have
had their turn in discovery ; it remains
for the fourth estate to organize fur-
ther victories, with this advantage that,
its power of making known its discov-
eries is as great as its power to endow
research, and, moreover, that the very
reason of its being leads to the fullest,
most detailed report.

It was nearly six years before the
plans then conceived were so far consum-
mated that the Jeannette sailed out of
San Francisco harbor on her voyage of
discovery ; and though the time was not
all expended in direct preparation, it
may be said that De Long never lost
sight of his great purpose. A naval
officer in time of peace finds little in the
service to call out his highest qualities,
and De Long was not the man to be sat-
isfied with a life of routine. He did
good work meanwhile in connection with

the school-ship St. Mary, and he made
acquisitions iu science which qualified
him for observation and speculation when
he confronted the perplexing problems
of the Arctic Ocean.

The actual preparation for the expe-
dition was arduous, and De Long threw
himself into the labor with all his im-
petuous and steady might. His over-
sight extended to the minutest partic-
ular, and backed as he was by a man
who had great resources and a generous
confidence in him, he spared no pains
to make the best use of whatever was
available. The combination of advan-
tages was certainly very great. Mr.
Bennett had money, influence, and a lib-
eral zeal. Captain De Long had expe-
rience, enthusiasm, a cool head, and spe-
cial training, while the United States
lent the powerful aid of her naval or-
ganization and discipline. It seems pit-
iful that at the last moment, when every
hour was precious, some inexplicable
economy or churlishness upon the part
of the government should have com-
pelled Captain De Long to lose a fort-
night at least, if not more, from the
necessity of taking along to Alaska a
schooner for consort, instead of a gov-
ernment steamer.

The whole story, indeed, is one of
mournful might have beens. The de-
lay at the start was lengthened by the
errand in search of tidings of Norden-
skjold. That prosperous voyager was
calmly making his way through summer
seas, while De Long was anxiously ex-
ploring the coast about Bearing Strait
for tidings of him. Of course it was all

right, and there was no help for it, and
De Long only did a humane duty ; but
the pity of it ! A month in the sum-
mer of 1879 spent in comparatively low
latitudes contains all manner of possi-
bilities in the way of progress north-
ward. It is impossible to say what par-
allel he might have made if he had
sighted Herald Island on August 4th in-
stead of September 4th. He might sim-

1883.]

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

561

ply have been a month longer in the
ice, but the cruel truth is that he had
scarcely weighed anchor for the great en-
terprise on which he was bound before he
was closed in by the ice, which held him
in a sullen grip for nearly two years.

Instead, therefore, of a voyage of in-
teresting discovery and abundant inci-
dent, the Jeannette and her company
were doomed to an Arctic prison, where
the only change was that brought by
the sun and moon in their rounds and
the restless heaving of the ice. Land
was seen from time to time, as the ship
moved wherever the icy bed in which
she lay was willed to go, drifting in
currents, or impelled by winds. The
aurora displayed its splendid colors, and
the various phenomena of an Arctic sky
passed before them by night and day.
Bears, seals, walruses, foxes, and a few
fowl visited the lonely ship, and once,
near the end of their imprisonment, a
party made a hazardous expedition to
an island past which the ice was drift-
ing, and took possession of it in the
name of the United States.

Of what, then, does the record of these
twenty-one months consist, and what in-
terest has it for the reader ? In the
hands of many brave captains, the story
would have been dry enough, but Cap-
tain De Long4 had resources rarely
granted to Arctic explorers. He had a
power of making the details of the daily
life they led instinct with meaning and
vividness. The bear hunts, the adven-
tures of the different members of the
party, the characteristics of the dogs,
the routine of the ship, furnished him
with material for his diary, which he
wrought simply, naturally, and most ef-
fectively. He did not often indulge in
rhapsodical descriptions of Arctic scen-
ery, but his account of the most notable
feature of their imprisonment, namely,
the action of the ice in which they were
held, is one of exceeding force. This
movement of the ice made so large a
part of their experience and gave rise

VOL. LIT. —NO. 312. 36

to such alternations of hope and dis-
couragement that his record is frequent
and detailed, but also singularly fresh
and varied. Yet he despaired of giving
any adequate conception of this pulsa-
tion of the Arctic Ocean, and seems to
have laid aside his pen more than once
with a sense of the futility of conveying
through words a notion of the sights
and sounds which impressed themselves
so deeply on his own sensory.

" A day of great anxiety," is one
of his entries. " At 6.10 A. M. I was
awakened by the trembling and creak-
ing of the ship, and almost immediately
the man on watch came into my room
to inform me that the ice was again in
motion. Hastily tumbling out and dress-
ing, I went out on the ice. The grind-
ing and crushing flow of ice to the west-
ward had again commenced, and the
jamming of large pieces from time to
time, splintering our floe, caused breaks
and upheavals to within about seventy-
five feet of the ship. The ship groaned
and creaked at every pressure, until I
thought the next would break her adrift.
The pressure was tremendous, and the
noise was not calculated to calm one's
mind. I know of no sound on shore
that can be compared to it. A rumble,
a shriek, a groan, and a crash of a fall-
ing house all combined might serve to
convey an idea of the noise with which
this motion of ice-floes is accompanied.
Great masses, from fifteen to twenty-
five feet in height when up-ended, are
sliding along at various angles of ele-
vation and jam, and between and among
them are large and confused masses of
debris, like a marble yard adrift. Occa-
sionally, a stoppage" occurs ; some piece
has caught against or under our floe ;
then occurs a groaning and cracking ;
our floe bends and humps up in places
like domes. Crash ! the dome splits,
another yard of floe edge breaks off, the
pressure is relieved, and on goes again
the flowing mass of rumbles, shrieks,
groans, etc., for another spell."

562

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

[October,

The occupations of officers and crew
during this enforced isolation were not
especially different from those of other
Arctic voyagers, but it gives one a strong
impression of what Captain De Long
and his associates would have done iu
the way of scientific observation, when
one sees how indefatigably they worked
within the narrow limits of their op-
portunity. Meteorological observations
went on day after day, and, above all,
experiments were made looking to the
health and comfort of the crew which
contain valuable results, positive as well
as negative, which Captain De Long has
recorded in his journal. His investiga-
tions into the presence of salt in potable
water and his persistent attempts to se-
cure conditions of dryness in the quar-
ters plainly constitute valuable contri-
butions to the practical science of Arc-
tic exploration. The thoroughness with
which the interior discipline of the ship
was observed and the unfailing attention
given to details of management bore fruit
in the exceptional well-being of the party.

It is, however, as a record of human
endurance and high courage that the
ship journal has a special value. It is
perhaps too much to expect that most
readers will follow the narrative day by
day through the dreary months of winter
and the even more cheerless summer,
and yet only by such faithful perusal
can the whole force of the narrative be
felt ; for the imagination has to recon-
struct a life which is not sharply to be
conceived, but to be felt as a weight.
That dull iteration of days, that appal-
ling cold and darkness, that gloomy suc-
cession of monotonous incidents, come
finally to lie upon the imagination and
sink into the mind ; and it is only when
this has been done that the reader can
rise to a conception of the undaunted
faith and cheerful hope which pervade
the book. It gives one a new intelli-
gence of what man can do when nature
plants herself with chin on hand to face
him out of hope and belief.

Captain De Long was chary of his
reflections, and yet, under the pressure
of the life which he led, it is not strange
that there escaped from him now and
then a cry of pain and disappointment.
The chapter headed A Frozen Summer,
which records the experience of the sum-
mer of 1880, to which all had looked for-
ward as the time of escape from the win-
try fastness, has a number of passages
which indicate how he was fretted and
galled by his confinement ; but scarcely
has he given vent to his impatience be-
fore he rises to a new confidence in the
coming of a brighter day. Entering the
fact that they had reached the longest
day of the year to some people, but not
to them, he writes, " There can be no
greater wear and tear on a man's mind
and patience than this life in the pack.
The absolute monotony ; the unchanging
rounds of hours ; the awakening to the
same things and the same conditions
that one saw just before losing one's
self in sleep ; the same faces ; the same
dogs ; the same ice ; the same conviction
that to-morrow will be exactly the same
as to-day, if not more disagreeable ; the
absolute impotence to do anything, to
go anywhere, or to change one's situa-
tion an iota; the realization that food is
being consumed and fuel burned with
no valuable result, beyond sustaining
life ; the knowledge that nothing has
been accomplished thus far to save this
expedition from being denominated an
utter failure : all these things crowd in
with irresistible force on my reasoning
powers each night as I sit down to re-
flect upon the events of the day ; and
but for some still, small voice within me
that tells me this can hardly be the end-
ing of all my labor and zeal, I should be
tempted to despair."

There was an end at length to this
monotony. Early in the first winter the
Jeannette had sprung a leak, and there is
an interesting account from time to time
of the efforts made to close the leak and
to pump the ship without recourse to

1883.]

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

563

wasting manual labor. The ingenious
contrivances of the commander and of
the engineer, Mr. Melville, to economize
coal and utilize the steam power had
culminated in the invention of a wind-
mill apparatus; and by the way, we
wish drawings of this appliance had been
given. In June of the second year, how-
ever, the ship suffered a more serious
accident from the pressure of the ice,
and it was plain that she must be aban-
doned. So complete had been all the
preparations for this emergency that
when the event came there was no con-
fusion or disorder, and no hasty loss of
what was afterwards to be regretted.
Captain De Long saw his ship sink, and
had now before him the perilous trans-
portation of men and stores across the
frozen ocean to the nearest land.

At this point begins a narrative of
extraordinary interest. Without flurry
or discomposure the commander quietly
perfected his plan of march, divided his
company, distributed his stores, waited
coolly till all was ready, and then set
out with cautious, intelligent steps to-
ward Siberia. The account of the six
weeks occupied in the march till they
made their first land, the hitherto un-
known Bennett Island, is exceedingly
spirited, and gives a hint of the mani-
fold perils of the journey. Here, for
instance, is one illustration of the diffi-
culties which they encountered : —

"June 29th, Wednesday. At 1.30
turned to. Right at our feet we had
some road-making to do, and then we
came to some very old heavy ice, dirty
and discolored with mud, with here and
there a mussel shell, and with a piece
of rock on it, which, as it was similar
to that on Henrietta Island, I carried
along. Going ahead with the dog sleds
and Mr. Dun bar, we suddenly came to
water, and peering into the fog it seemed
as if we had some extensive lead before
us. Going back hurriedly, I sent the
dingy ahead for an exploration ; but,
alas ! it was fruitless. The favorable

lead which we thought we had turned
out to be another wretched opening sev-
enty-five feet wide, which we had to
bridge. By great good fortune a large
piece was handy, and by hard hauling
Dunbar, Sharvell, and I succeeded in
getting it in place, and a fortunate clos-
ing of the lead a foot or two jammed it
in as a solid bridge. Unfortunately
openings were occurring in our rear,
and we had more bridging to do there.

"Never was there such luck. No
sooner do we get our advance across a
lead than a new one opens behind it,
and makes us hurry back lest our rear
should be caught. By the time we
have got a second sled ahead more open-
ings have occurred, and we are in for a
time. These openings are always east
and west. By no means, seemingly,
can we get one north and south, so that
we might make something by them;
and these east and west lanes meander
away to narrow veins between piled up
masses, over which there can no road
be built, and between which no boat
can be got. It is no uncommon thing
for us to have four leads to bridge in
half a mile, and when one remembers
that Melville and his party have to make
always six and sometimes seven trips,
the amount of coming and going is fear-
ful to contemplate. Add to this the fly-
ing trip of the dog-sleds, and the mov-
ing forward of the sick at a favorable
moment, and it is not strange that we
dread meeting an ice opening."

In the midst of all this terrible expe-
rience Captain De Long found that the
ice was moving more rapidly to the
north than he was making to the south,
and to his dismay they were getting far-
ther and farther away from the conti-
nent. He kept his intelligence to him-
self, changed his course, and corrected
the error. The result was the discov-
ery of an island not before seen by Arc-
tic explorers, and named by him Ben-
nett Island. The landing upon the
island from a surging mass of ice and

564

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

[October,

water is most graphically described, and
one feels a sense of relief as these he-
roic travelers touch solid earth again,
and at once go to work collecting spe-
cimens, making observations, and act-
ing as if their journey had been for the
express purpose of exploring Bennett
Island.

It was after the island was left and
they are able to make more use of the
boats that the gloomiest portion of the
journey was reached ; for, with the hope
of deliverance at hand, they were again
doomed to imprisonment in the ice.
Here was another of the fatal might
have beens. A quarter of an hour's de-
tention of one of the boats resulted in
a ten days' confinement, and one's sym-
pathy goes out to the captain as he re-
cords on what proved to be the last day
of this detention : " I have concluded
that there is very little use in calling all
hands at five A. M. day after day, when
we have no chance to move along, and
God knows the hours of waiting pass
drearily enough without unnecessarily
lengthening the days. Accordingly, all
hands this morning slept on until 6.30,
and when up we found that the ice
seemed more tightly closed than ever."

From this time onward the record is
one of misfortune closing in, and un-
flinching will grappling with untoward
events. In the cold, stormy .September
they made the New Siberian Islands
and took a little breath ; then pushed
out for the Lena Delta, and, halting for
a Sunday at Semanovski Island, made
their last voyage to the coast. In a
gale, September 12th, which struck them
just after they had left shelter, the three
boats in which the company was dis-
tributed were driven asunder. One, the
second cutter, commanded by Lieuten-
ant Chipp, was -never again seen by
mortal eye ; another, the whale-boat,
commanded by Mr. Melville, reached
the east coast of the Delta where natives
gave them needed assistance ; and Cap-
tain De Long himself, with his party in

the first cutter, reached the northern
shore.

A little less than two months later,
Mr. Melville entered a hut where were
two men, Niudemanu and Noros. They
were the sole survivors of the party un-
der Captain De Long. That party,
crippled by cold and hunger, had been
making its way across the great morass,
without guides, with imperfect maps,
finding here and there a deserted hut,
but no natives. The half-frozen streams
could not be navigated by rafts, and the
snow and swamp gave way beneath their
weight, as they struggled on, bearing
the dying Ericksen through that fearful
wilderness. A month after the landing
Captain De Long, facing death, sent
these two men forward to seek relief,
then dragged his little party a few miles
further on, and sat down, unable to
move, to wait for help.

The journal which began with so
much life and fullness in San Francisco
Bay, and was carried forward through
the months of isolation in the Arctic
Ocean, retaining whatever could be
found of incident and observation, which
recorded the terrible experience as the
unbroken company toiled under their
brave commander toward land and sal-
vation, becomes nervously brief as the
end draws near, until at length the
daily record is only the short memoran-
dum which sets down the fatal facts.
Even here De Long's self-possession
and officer-like deliberation do not fail
him.

" October 23d, Sunday. One hun-
dred and thirty-third day. Everybody
pretty weak. Slept or rested all day,
and then managed to get enough wood
in before dark. Read part of divine
service. Suffering in our feet. No
foot gear.

" October 24th, Monday. One hun-
dred and thirty-fourth day. A hard
night.

" October 25th, Tuesday. One hun-
dred and thirty-fifth day.

1883.]

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

565

" October 26th, Wednesday. One
hundred and thirty-sixth day.

" October 27th, Thursday. One hun-
dred and thirty-seventh day. Iversen
broken down.

" October 28th, Friday. One hun-
dred and thirty-eighth day. Iversen
died during early morning.

" October 29th, Saturday. One hun-
dred and thirty-ninth day. Dressier
died during the night.

" October 30th, Sunday. One hun-
dred and fortieth day. Boyd and Gortz
died during night. Mr. Collins dying."

There the pencil falls from his hands,
and the record is closed. The last tally
was kept by no mortal hand. The
snow fell and covered the dead. There
they lay until uncovered by their com-
rades searching for them months after-
ward.

The Voyage of the Jeannette is thus
far the record of Captain De Long, but
the editor has completed the narrative
from authentic sources, and given in de-
tail the marvelous journey of Ninde-
mann and Noros, the adventurers of the
whale-boat party, the efforts to find De
Long, and the experiences of the com-
pany until the return of the last member
to the United States. The public had
already learned much in a fragmentary
and detached way from the reports of
the Court of Inquiry called to examine
the evidence relating to the loss of the
Jeannette, but this narrative furnishes
an ordered and connected story which
one is glad to get. The maps, more-
over, and spirited illustrations put the
reader in clearer possession of the facts
•as they appeal to his imagination.

The book altogether is a most im-
pressive work. If the records of the
Franklin Expedition could have been
found in anything like the completeness
of these journals of Captain De Long,
the world might have had an equally

momentous history. As it is, there has
been no book in the great list of Arctic
explorations which can be compared
with this, as a memorial to human en-
deavor. The very meagreness of the
results attained lifts the humanity of
the work into higher and bolder relief.
The sentence with which the book closes
contains the verdict which the reader
may justly pronounce. That it should
be the deliberate conclusion of the edi-
tor will convey to many a sense of the
self-control and devotion of which stead-
fast human nature is capable.

" It is the record of an expedition
which set out in high hope, and returned
broken and covered with disaster. It is
also the record of lives of men subjected
to severer pressure than their ship met
from the forces of nature. The ship
gave way ; the men surmounted the ob-
stacles and kept their courage and faith
to the end. It is, above all, the record
of a leader of men who entered the ser-
vice in which he fell with an honorable
purpose and a lofty aim ; who endured
the disappointment of a noble nature
with a patience which was the conquest
of bitterness ; who bore the lives of his
comrades as a trust reposed in him ;
and who died at his post with an unfal-
tering faith in God whom he served and
loved.

" The voyage of the Jeannette is end-
ed. The scientific results obtained were
far less than had been aimed at, but
were not insignificant. Something was
added to the stock of the world's knowl-
edge ; a slight gain was made in the so-
lution of the Arctic problem. Is it said
that too high a price in the lives of men
was paid for this knowledge ? Not by
such cold calculation is human endeavor
measured. Sacrifice is nobler than ease,
unselfish life is consummated in lonely
death, and the world is richer by this
gift of suffering."

566

Mr. White on Shakespeare and Sheridan. [October,

MR. WHITE ON SHAKESPEARE AND SHERIDAN.

MR. RICHARD GRANT WHITE has
lately finished two critical studies, wuich
illustrate well two offices of the critic
not often united in one person. He
has reedited Shakespeare,1 with special
reference to securing a sound text, and
he has furnished an introduction to an
edition of Sheridan,2 in which he gath-
ers into a comprehensive statement the
judgments which are to be pronounced
upon that author. Both works imply
the notion of discrimination, which is at
the basis of criticism : but in one case
the discrimination is exercised upon
words and is justified by minute learn-
ing ; in the other it is applied to works
and character, and is excellent accord-
ing to the degree of insight and justice
in the judge.

It should not be inferred that insight
is of no account in an editor of the text
of Shakespeare, or fine scholarship un-
necessary in an estimate of Sheridan,
but in the equipment of a critic it is
rare to find the analytic and the gener-
alizing powers equally well poised. The
combination of the two adds to the
strength of each. A life-time of devo-
tion to a linguistic study of Shakespeare
may qualify one to be a good judge of
the evidence brought before him when
he is to determine a disputed passage,
but it will not necessarily give him that
sudden clearness of vision by which the
true reading flashes upon him with an
invincible self-assertion. So a sympa-
thetic power in the estimate of charac-
ter and rank in literature is often made
less conclusive by the lack of definite
and accurate knowledge.

In undertaking a new Shakespeare
Mr. White has shown the good sense

1 Mr. William Shakespeare'1 1 Comedies, His-
tories, Tragedies, and Poems. The text newly
edited, with jrlossarial, historical, and explanatory
notes, by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883.

which is an excellent substitute for gen-
ius, if indeed it may not be confounded
with it, in divining the needs of the
great body of readers of Shakespeare.
If anybody should claim to know what
these want, Mr. White might speak with
just confidence, for he has been identi-
fied with Shakespearean criticism ever
since he came before the public as a
man of letters, even though the greater
volume of his published work has been
in other subjects. So when he announces
in his preface the plan of his edition,
our sense of its aptness is confirmed by
our confidence in his experience.

" This edition," he says, " of the works
of Shakespeare has been prepared with
a single eye to the wants of his readers.
Its purpose is not to furnish material for
critical study either of the Elizabethan
dramatists or of the English language.
It seeks rather to enable the reader of
general intelligence to understand, and
therefore to enjoy, what Shakespeare
wrote as nearly as possible in the very
way in which he would have understood
it and enjoyed it if he had lived in Lon-
don in the reign of Elizabeth. That
done, as well as the editor was able to
do it under the limiting conditions of
his work, he has regarded his task as
ended."

With this intention, Mr. White has
given scrupulous care to the accuracy
and intelligibility of the text, and after
that has appended at the foot of the
page the briefest possible explanation of-
obscure words and phrases, not hesitat-
ing to repeat the explanation when the
obscurity is repeated ; for he considers,
sensibly enough, that no one is going to
read his Shakespeare through in course,

2 The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan. With an introduction by RICHARD
GRANT WHITE. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.
1883.

1883.]

Mr. White on Shakespeare and Sheridan.

567

and remember, moreover, every note of
explanation against future need. " What
the reader of Shakespeare," he adds,
" the reader of common sense, common
intelligence, common information, and
common capacity of poetical thought
(and to all others Shakespeare or any
other great poet is and must ever re-
main an oracle uttered in an unknown
tongue), — what such a reader needs,
and what, from observation, I am per-
suaded that he wishes, is to feel well
assured that he has before him what
Shakespeare wrote, as nearly as that
may be ascertained, and to have the
language and the construction of this
text explained wherever the one is ob-
solete or the other obscure."

The interesting preface in which he
lays down the several propositions of
his work contains some suggestive illus-
trations of the special criticism which
he has applied to the text, taken at
hap-hazard. They might have been ex-
tended indefinitely, but they are enough
to show the facility with which Mr.
White handles his weapons of criticism.
The truth is that Shakespearean criticism,
at its best, is partly learning and partly
worldly wisdom. It is not closet scholar-
ship which is most effective, especially
not that which has been confined to
Shakespeare and cognate subjects, but
a training in the schools which has been
broadened by a more generous interest
in affairs. Mr. White is all the better
critic of Shakespeare for having writ-
ten a Yankee's Letters to the London
Spectator, and England Without and
Within.

There is a contemptuous tone about
his references to drier schools of criti-
cism which is rather superfluous. The
pedants awaken no enthusiasm, and read-
ers of Shakespeare scarcely need to be
set against them, while the painstaking if
unimaginative commentators have other
uses than to serve as butts for Mr.
White's wit. His impatience carries him
too far. It suits him to say that " com-

mentators at the best are rarely better
than unnecessary nuisances," but an in-
genious defense is requisite to excuse
what follows : " They are so in this pres-
ent case when they presume to do all
the reader's thinking and appreciating
for him, and thus deprive him of the
highest pleasures and richest benefits
that come of reading Shakespeare ; and
chiefly when in doing this they grope
and fumble for a profound moral pur-
pose in those plays, which is really to
insist upon such a purpose in the Italian
novetti and English chronicles which, al-
ways with the least possible trouble to
himself, Shakespeare put into an acta-
ble shape." We are very ready to prefer
Mr. White's edition, with its freedom
from comment and its most reasonable
presentation of the work of the great
dramatist ; but he must not ask us to
believe in a Shakespeare who merely
dramatized, with the least possible
trouble to himself, for stage purposes, the
material which he found at hand. li he
means that Shakespeare did not write his
plays in order to reform his countrymen
and elevate the stage, we have no objec-
tion to agreeing with him ; but if he
means that the difference between the
plays and the chronicles is only a matter
of literary arrangement, he fails to ac-
count for the oblivion of the chronicles
and novelli, and the immortality of the
plays. It is precisely the moral content
of the plays which constitutes the breath
of life inspired by the poet. Otherwise
they too would long ago have been
carcasses.

Something of this reactionary regard
of Shakespeare touches Mr. White's
work elsewhere. He gives an admirably
succinct and clear narative of the facts
of Shakespeare's life as they have come
out from the crucible of historical criti-
cism. He dismisses conjectures, and
gives himself no trouble about internal
evidences. There is no objection to
that view. We are very glad to get so
scientific a resume of Shakespearean

568

Mr. White on Shakespeare and Sheridan. [October,

biography. But Mr. White is less scien-
tific when he proceeds to draw inferences
affecting Shakespeare's character from
this imperfect array of facts. Because,
in the nature of things, more written
evidence is found of his monetary trans-
actions than of his relations with par-
ents, wife, children, and friends, Mr.
White wishes us to regard Shakespeare
as a skinflint. We object to any ver-
dict drawn from such insufficient testi-
mony ; and if we rule out his plays and
poems when we are trying to construct
a Shakespeare, the paucity of the ma-
terial left forbids us to make anything
better than a clay figure, which crum-
bles at the touch, without the aid of any
such thrusts as Mr. White seems dis-
posed to give. In our judgment Mr.
White has been driven into a somewhat
violent temper respecting Shakespeare's
personality by the illogical and pre-
sumptuous attitude of other critics.

Plow reasonable and just he can be
in a general survey of poor human na-
ture appears in the portrait which he
has drawn of Sheridan. The introduc-
tion which he prefixes to Sheridan's
dramatic works is a model of its kind.
Without waste of words, yet with an
agreeable fluency, he tells in forty pages
all that the reader needs to know about
Sheridan and his literary career, and
places the two dramas on which Sheri-
dan's fame rests in their proper rank.
There is a fine satisfaction in reading so
complete a piece of literary workman-
ship. Mr. White's familiarity with his
subject has not made him ambitious to
find out something new, or say some-
thing before unsaid ; but he has written
out of a full mind, with a just sense of
what an introduction should be, as dis-
tinct from a critical review or a bio-
graphical article in an encyclopaedia.

Perhaps it was a reluctance to see
great human nature accused of mean-
ness which made us a little indignant at
Mr. White's treatment of Shakespeare.
la it a cheerful alacrity to admit the

community of wit and wickedness which
commends to us the easy grace with
which Mr. White draws the lines in the
portrait of the scampish Sheridan ? He
sketches the youthful follies of his hero
with a quick sense of their prophetic
value, and draws the last scene of his
life with a power which is not marred
by too much pity.

" From Harrow," he says of the
young Sheridan, " he went to Bristol
for a short time ; and there his soul
lusted for a pair of boots, articles of
dress which in those days were expen-
sive. He had neither money nor credit ;
but he resolved to get the boots. He
therefore ordered from two boot-makers
two pairs of the same pattern, which
were to be delivered at different hours
on the day of his departure. When
the first pair was delivered he declared
that the heel of one of them hurt him,
and requested the boot-maker to stretch
it and return it the next morning. The
man departed, leaving the other boot
with Sheridan. When the second pair
appeared, the same fault was found with
the boot for the opposite foot, and the
same instructions were given and acqui-
esced in as a matter of course ; and the
ingenious young Jeremy Diddler, with
a pair of boots thus obtained, mounted
his horse and rode out of Bristol, leav-
ing a pair of human victims to whistle
for their money the next morning.
This young scamp became the Right
Honorable Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
and in his maturer years he did not fail
to fulfill the promise of his boyhood.
Few men do disappoint reasonable ex-
pectation founded upon their youthful
exhibition of morality." And here is
the closing picture : —

" Sheridan's face had for a long time
become an index of his mode of life
and his character. Nature had given
him a fine, mobile, expressive counte-
nance, of which splendid dark eyes were
a notable feature. These retained their
light and their life ; but the rest of his

1883.]

Mr. White on Shakespeare and Sheridan.

569

face became gross, heavy, and discol-
ored. In the contemporary caricatures
of Gilray, Sheridan's is an oft-recur-
ring figure ; and there we see him with
gaping, pendulous lips, and cheeks- and
nose bloated and pimpled. At last his
stomach grew tired of performing its
functions only in a waistcoat " (he had
replied, when told 'that his excesses
would destroy the coat of his stomach,
" Well, then, my stomach must digest
in its waistcoat "), " in fact, refused to
perform them at all, and he lay stricken
with disease and poverty. Friends
helped him, although in a very moder-
ate way ; but he was past all help, and
erelong he died. The consequences of
his evil habits pursued him, even in his
last extremity. A bailiff, by a trick
worthy of his intended prisoner, ob-
tained entrance into his sick-chamber,
arrested him on .his death-bed, and would
have carried off the feeble, bloated body
of the expiring wit and orator to a
spunging-house, had not his physician
declared that the removal would be im-
mediately mortal, and threatened the
officer with the consequences. To the
boldness of his medical attendant Sheri-
dan owed it that he died out of prison,
and in a semblance of peace. But the
sad melodrama was not to end even
here, and his very funeral was distin-
guished by an incident of, let us hope,
unique atrocity of retribution. As he
lay in his coffin, at the house of a kins-
man whither his remains had been re-
moved, soon to be followed by a crowd
of distinguished mourners, a stranger
dressed'in deep mourning entered the
house, and requested to have a last look
at his departed friend, to obtain which,
he said, he had made a long journey.
His respectable appearance, his mourn-
ing garments, and his apparent grief
caused him to be led into the room
where the closed coffin was lying. The
lid was raised, and the stranger gazed
for some moments upon the still, uncov-
ered face ; then fumbling in his pocket,

he produced a bailiff's wand, with which
he touched the forehead, and announced
that he arrested the corpse in the king's
name for a debt of five hundred pounds.
When this shocking event was an-
nounced to the elegant company assem-
bled in another room, there was a hur-
ried and horror-stricken consultation.
Mr. Canning took Lord Sidmouth aside,
and they, agreeing to discharge the
debt, each gave to the officer a check
for two hundred and fifty pounds, which
he accepted and went off, leaving the
bailiff -hunted corpse to be borne in
pomp to Westminster Abbey ; for in
that grand, solemn mausoleum Sheridan
at last found rest. Such an assembly
of men of rank and mark as attended
his funeral, and honored in death him
whom they neither trusted nor respected
living, is rarely seen."

In his estimate of Sheridan's literary
genius, Mr. White notes the absence of
sentiment and humor, and declares that
the lack of these qualities condemns him
to a secondary place. As a writer, no
doubt he does fail of commanding the
affection of readers ; but we suspect
that the genuine wit of his two plays —
not the wit merely of dialogue, but the
wit of situations — renders them more
effective as stage performances than
many which have a warmer current of
human life and more pervasive humor.
Yet the judgment which Mr. White
pronounces, in an admirably compre-
hensive sentence, is just and final : —

" Sheridan's was a brilliant, shallow
intellect, a shifty, selfish nature ; his
one great quality, his one great element
of success as a dramatist, as an orator
and as a man, was mastery of effect.
His tact was exquisitely nice and fine.
He knew how to say and how to do the
right thing, at the right time, in the
right way. This was the sum of him ;
there was no more. Without wisdom,
without any real insight into the human
heart, without imagination, with a flimsy
semblance of fancy, entirely devoid of

570

Lodge's Webster.

[October,

true poetic feeling, even of the hum-
blest order, incapable of philosophic re-
flection, never rising morally above the
satirizing of the fashionable vices and
follies of his day, to him the doors of
the great theatre of human life were
firmly closed. His mind flitted lightly
over the surface of society, now casting
a reflection of himself upon it, now
making it sparkle and ripple with a
touch of his flashing wing. He was a
surface man, and the name of the two

chief agents in the plot of his principal
comedy is so suitable to him as well as
to their characters, that the choice of it
would seem to have been instinctive and
intuitive. He united the qualities of
his Charles and Joseph Surface : having
the wit, the charming manner, the care-
less good-nature of the one, with at
least a capacity of the selfishness, the
duplicity, and the crafty design, but
without the mischief and the malice, of
the other."

LODGE'S WEBSTER.1

WHEN Mr. Lodge published his mem-
oir of his great - grandfather, George
Cabot, it was thought best by Miss
Dodge (Gail Hamilton) to write a great
many columns in successive numbers of
a New York newspaper, in order to
point out that the book did not deserve
a moment's attention. Many people, as
she justly remarked, had already for-
gotten who George Cabot was. Miss
Dodge undoubtedly knows her own cir-
cle better than we ; and some of her
friends may already have forgotten who
Daniel Webster was. This is, however,
an argument which works both ways.
We once knew a young Irish damsel,
who, on being urged to study arithme-
tic, declined the proposition, on the ap-
parently irrelevant ground that arith-
metic was a subject of which she knew
nothing whatever. It is supposed to be
one object of history to redeem eminent
names from the risk of oblivion, and it
is well worth while to do this in the case
of Daniel Webster, although it cannot
quite be said of the present work, as
was said by Mr. George Bancroft in
respect to the Life of George Cabot,
that it is the most valuable contribution
made to American history for many
years.

The American Statesmen series con-
sidered as a whole might almost merit
Mr. Bancroft's strong phrase of praise,
if we include in historical art the quality
of popularization as well as that of re-
search. Taken together, they present
the history of the United States in its
clearest and simplest form, and are to
Bancroft and Hildreth as Plutarch's
Lives to Thucydides. They are fresh,
lucid, accurate, judicial, condensed. Mr.
Morse's John Quincy Adams still stands
at the head of the series ; it is the only
one of which it can positively be said
that it is difficult to lay it down ; but
the present volume is by no means the
least good, and it is to be remembered
that its theme offers greater difficulties,
in some respects, than any other yet
handled by Mr. Morse's authors. For
one thing, it comes nearer to the pres-
ent time and touches more living prej-
udices ; and it is also a drawback that
it has none of those episodes of foreign
diplomatic life which impart some vari-
ety to the other volumes. Its value has
to be secured by a more careful and
continuous analysis of intellectual work ;
nevertheless the interest is sustained,
and it is undoubtedly from this book
that the rising generation will mainly

1883.]

Lodge's Webster.

571

form its judgment of Webster. Mr.
Curtis's more elaborate memoir, how-
ever painstaking and meritorious, is but
one long course of adulation, without
criticism, discrimination, or perspective.

Sharing the merits of the series to
which it belongs, the present volume
shares also their one chief defect, — the
absence of what Mr. Lodge himself calls
(page 241) " historical scenery." He at-
tributes this want to the period treated,
but we should charge it, in part, to a
defect in the method of these books, or
in their writers. Mr. Lodge truly says,
" The political questions, the debates,
the eloquence, of that day give us no
idea of the city in which the history
was made, or of the life led by the men
who figured in that history " (page 241).
These books, as it strikes us, do very
little to remedy that defect. We are
here introduced to a world where every
man appears to spend his life either in
talking law and politics, or in acting
them out. But these same men exist-
ed in a private and domestic world like-
wise ; they all had mothers ; they gener-
ally had wives and children. The places
where they lived had a social atmos-
phere, however crude : even Washing-
ton had a marked society of its own ;
it had dinner parties and levees ; it had
drinking-bouts, gambling, and duels ; it
was, like all spheres of social life, large-
ly under the influence of women. But
we seldom obtain a glimpse, in these
books, of anything that is not grave,
serious, and masculine. It is rarely that
a woman's name appears in the index
of subjects at the end of the volume;
whereas a corresponding English book
would be pretty sure to contain the
names of twenty, and a French biogra-
phy would probably offer more.

This may be partly due to the greater
political seclusion of American women,
but nobody can say that they are socially
secluded, or that it is possible to depict
society without the aid of their keen
eyes. We know John Adams best

through his correspondence with two
women, his wife and Mercy Warren.
Mrs. Josiah Quincy paints the influences
which surrounded her husband as the
Federalist leader at Washington, and
does it better than he could have done
it for himself. When she describes to us
the winning way in which she and Mr.
Quincy were treated " in the enemy's
camp," as she calls it, — Mrs. Madison's
dinner-parties, where they were the only
Federalists, — she opens to us what was
a very potent influence in bringing on
the era of good feeling. When she rep-
resents Mrs. Madison as saying to a
party of ladies who had been covertly
inspecting the White House, " Ladies,
it is your house as much as it is mine,"
she illustrates, better than it was done
by any speech in Congress, the dem-
ocratic tendencies inaugurated by the
policy of Jefferson ; for neither Mrs.
Washington nor Mrs. Adams would
have been likely to say anything of the
kind. Nor is the social bitterness be-
tween Federalist and Democrat to be as
well discerned in any political debate as
in Miss Sedgwick's description, in her
Reminiscence of Federalism, of the old
horse which used to wander peacefully
up and down a certain village street
in New England, his sides alternately
plastered with handbills of opposite pol-
itics, according as he paced toward the
upper or the lower end of the town. To
write the biographies even of statesmen,
and omit the world of women, is a seri-
ous fault ; it is to leave out the part of
Ophelia.

In Mr. Lodge's Webster,1 there are
more glimpses of historic scenery than
in some of the other volumes of the se-
ries. He at least consents to give us a
graphic picture of Mr. Webster's early
life and love; and even hints, in one
place, at his demeanor toward children.
He perhaps analyzes too minutely the

1 Daniel Webster. By HENRY CABOT LODGE.
American Statesmen series. Boston : lioughtou,
JlMin & Co.

572

Lodge's Webster.

[October,

successive speeches or arguments, yet
he gives us effectively the gradual de-
velopment of his hero's remarkable ca-
reer, and presents a being far more
alive and interesting than that portrayed
by Mr. Curtis. We see first the tall
and awkward country boy, with fiery
eyes and hungry heart ; we see him
brought in contact with refinement and

worldly experience as embodied in
Christopher Gore ; we follow his grad-
ual march to the command of listening
senates ; we recognize his fall from his
early apostleship of freedom ; we trace
his melancholy but still stately old age.
Nothing is extenuated, nothing set down
in malice ; there is not even the com-
monest foible of the biographer, the
crotchet of a new attitude or self-im-
portant discovery ; the sad tale of a
great, faulty, disappointed life is con-
scientiously and simply told.

Mr. Lodge's delineation of Mr. Web-
ster's personal traits is not merely truth-
ful ; it is felicitous, and abounds in graph-
ic and salient passages. It is possible
that he sometimes lacks condensation,
and that he sometimes repeats himself ;
but his own summings-up and obiter dicta
are almost always admirable. When,
for instance, he shows that Mr. Web-
ster's triumph in the Dartmouth Col-
lege case was not due, as has generally
been supposed, to a great discovery in
constitutional law, but to magnificent
rhetoric based upon a brief which oth-
ers had provided, he characterizes the
great orator's method in a few admirable
words, — "his indolent and royal tem-
perament, which almost always relied
on weight and force for victory " (page
98). And no one ever stated the ex-
traordinary effect of Mr. Webster's per-
sonal presence better than when our
author says (page 192), "There is no
man in all history who came into the
world so equipped physically for speech.
In that direction nature could do no
more." Nor has any man pointed out
more clearly than Mr. Lodge the grad-

ual change in public opinion which trans-
formed the Union from the recognized

experiment of 1789 to the solid finality
of 1833. " Whatever the people of the
United States understood the constitu-
tion to mean in 1789, there can be no
question that a majority in 1833 re-
garded it as a fundamental law, and not
as a compact, — an opinion which has
now become universal. But it was
quite another thing to argue that what
the constitution had come to mean was
what it meant when it was adopted "
(page 217 ; compare pages 176-7).

In a few cases, as it seems to us, Mr.
Lodge has not quite made the most of
his opportunities. There are important
aspects of Mr. Webster's life on which
his biographer does not dwell. Mr.
Lodge analyzes admirably, for example,
the bearing in certain directions of the
famous Rockinghain County (N. H.)
Memorial against the war of 1812, as
drawn up by Mr. Webster. But the
point of that memorial which best illus-
trates the peculiar attitude both of the
Federalists and of their spokesman is
that there is not a word of remonstrance
offered respecting the one great griev-
ance of the war, — the insult to the
American flag implied in the practice
of search and impressment. The igno-
minious national disgrace of allowing any
ship in our service to be overhauled and
searched by any British midshipman, —
he being, in the indignant phrase of
Cobbett, at once accuser, witness, judge,
and captor, — this is not even men-
tioned in the Federalist protest against
the war. So long as the young repub-
lic submitted to this ignominy, — one
which, as Lord Collingwood admitted,
England would not have tolerated for
an hour from any nation on earth, —
so long American independence was a
sham. While we endured it, we were
merely, as the London Times insulting-
ly called us at the time when Wash-
ington was captured, " an association."
To have failed to perceive this was the

1883.]

Lodge's Webster.

573

worst mistake of the Federalists ; it was
a far greater error than the Hartford
Convention ; as Mr. Morse well points
out, in another volume of this very se-
ries, the bloodiest war was a smaller evil
than the submission to such a wrong ;
yet Daniel Webster, in the Ilocking-
ham Memorial, never mentioned its exist-
ence. The defender of the Union, the
great advocate of our navy, the vindica-
tor of American nationality against Aus-
tria, he stooped in 1812 to treat that
for which the nation fought as a mere
squabble between Great Britain and her
own deserters, while the shame to the
American flag caused not a thrill of in-
dignation in his heart. And yet, curi-
ously enough, the Federalists were al-
ways convinced that they were utterly
free from party spirit, and whenever
their pulpit orators preached upon the
evils of that sentiment they meant only
the wicked Democrats.

The moral of Mr. Websfer's life, de-
nied us by Mr. Curtis, is candidly drawn
by Mr. Lodge, who has never appeared
to better advantage than when resisting
the still lingering prejudice of his own
circle of friends, and holding aloof from
that sentimental reaction of forgiveness
which is apt to confuse the whole story
of a great man's errors. Mr. Webster's
unexpected support of the Fugitive
Slave Law, for instance, is a part of the
history of the nation, and Mr. Lodge
clearly and ably establishes that his
change of attitude at that time hurt the
national cause, which his general in-
fluence had so greatly helped. So far
as it had weight, it strengthened the
South and weakened the moral senti-
ment of the North ; if emancipation ul-
timately succeeded, it was because Web-
ster's final effort had failed. Had his
7th of March speech carried the nation
with it, not even the exigencies of war
would have brought on emancipation ;

whatever the issue of battle, slavery
would have remained untouched; and
that result would have been lost which
even the defeated party now admits to
have been a blessing in disguise.

In his manly allusion to the private
faults and the financial negligences which
notoriously clouded the career of Mr.
Webster, his present biographer is equal-
ly to be commended. The temptation
was very great to pass them wholly by ;
and on the other hand, if Mr. Lodge

' O

had chosen, he might easily have gath-
ered from the lively reminiscences of
the French M. de Bacourt several pas-
sages much more mortifying than the
very mild one which he has cited. It
is impossible for one of Mr. Lodge's
accurate historic sense to pursue the
tactics of such Websterian defenders as
Rev. W. C. Wilkinson, and others who
simply shut their eyes and ears, and be-
lieve nothing. It is almost absurd to
find clerical choruses now ready to ab-
solve the great man from all personal
misdeeds, merely because he, in the Gi-
rard case, " made his plea," as Judge
Story said, " altogether an address to
the prejudices of the clergy," while a lay
biographer like Mr. Lodge, professing
no especial squeamishness, is yet obliged
to look the truth in the face. Not a
professed moralist, he helps morality by
briefly recognizing the historic fact.
The vices of Paine and Burr have done
nobody in this generation any harm.
Personal, political, and theological hos-
tility have done their utmost to proclaim
them ; they are known to the world at
their worst, and possibly beyond their
worst. What demoralizes young men
is the discovery that the weaknesses
which damn the memory of unpopular
men become venial foibles in heroes,
and gradually so diminish in the report
of successive generations that they are
at last piously forgotten.

574

The Contributors' Club.

[October,

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

THERE has recently sprung up a lit-
tle custom which threatens shortly to be-
come a large nuisance. I refer to those
annual calls made on the householder
by the letter-carrier, the policeman,
and the fireman of the district or pre-
cinct in which the householder chances
to have domicile. Each of these per-
sons appears on your doorstep at the
close of the year with a request that
you contribute to his finances : either
directly, by setting your name against
a certain sum in a subscription book ;
or indirectly, by purchasing tickets for
some ball, fair, or other entertainment
which nobody in the world expects you
to attend.

The letter-cawier you can deny — if
you have the nerve to do it in the face
of the tradition that his pay is light and
his work heavy. If he is dissatisfied
with either or with both, he should lay
the matter before the post-office depart-
ment, and not appeal to private charity.
The letter - carrier, I say, can be dis-
posed of ; but the man whose vigilance
keeps the thieves from your silver-plate,
and the man who stands ready to pour
water on your roof-tree in case of con-
flagration, — what are you to do about
them? They are adequately paid by
the respective departments under which
they serve ; indeed, you pay the men
yourself in taxes that every year grow
more onerous ; yet when these gentle-
men present themselves with their little
subscription papers, you do not quite
dare not to subscribe. What if the fire-
man should be lukewarm about putting
out your fire some night, or the police-
man should discreetly close his off-eye
on buglarious operations in connection
with your rear basement-window ! With
a vague, elusive sense of being softly
blackmailed, you plank down your five-
dollar bill, though you would rather

give it to the Home for Little Wander-
ers, or to the poor widow round the cor-
ner whose son was run over last week.
As the fireman and the policeman walk
away, you wondor why the Prometheus
who lights the city lamps, and the in-
genious Hercules who does n't clean the
streets, and the smart Phaeton who drives
the U. S. Mail cart, — you wonder, I re-
peat, why all these public functionaries
do not drop in on you with their little
December assessment They have pre-
cisely the same lien on your pocket-book
that the letter-carrier, the policeman,
and the fireman have.

When these three first began their
levy on the householder there was a
certain modesty about it ; they made
their requests doubtfully, and received
the gratuity, if any were bestowed, v/ith
courteous thanks. Now the letter-carrier
unblushingly hands in his book as a
matter of course, and the ball tickets
are left at your door by the policeman
or the fireman with the information that
he will call for the money in the even-
ing — when you are at dinner.

All this is delightful, but it would be
more delightful if the heads of the vari-
ous departments were to forbid their
employes collecting funds in this humili-
ating fashion.

Every person in comfortable circum-
stances cheerfully recognizes many
claims on his purse and sympathy. No
one, even if he possess but a moderately
soft heart, can live in a great city with-
out being touched at every turn by the
misery he sees around him. To relieve
this misery so far as he may is a human
instinct. There are few deeper pleas-
ures than result from lending a helping
hand to some deserving fellow-creature.
But one likes to have the privilege of
selecting the fellow-creature.

— After a series of drives in one of

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

575

the smaller Now England cities, I feel
inclined to deplore in public the choice
of shade trees with which the unvary-
ing citizens have adorned their pleasant
streets. Surely, because maples and
horse-chestnuts are fast growers, and
soon make their sheltering presence felt,
it is not worth while to disregard the
claims of many other American trees
which are easily persuaded to flourish
and take kindly to town life. Indeed,
many of the more delicate ones are
thankful for the care and shelter But
by the time the maples are old and wise
enough to pat their heads together, they
become harmful enemies of their would-
be protectors, and keep the sunlight
from the lower rooms of the houses, be-
sides making the ground sodden and
damp. I am not learned in forestry,
but I have been imagining with great
delight the beauty of long double lines
of birches, with their white bark and
glistening leaves ; of silver-leaved pop-
lars and mountain ashes gay with their
brilliant fruit. There are many varie-
ties of maples with most delightful char-
acteristics, and it would possibly not of-
fend the taste of many persons if, where
a street is bordered with a row of Queen
Anne houses, a prim procession of pop-
lars was planted to match. Other trees
than maples and horse-chestnuts may
require more care as to protection and
suitable soil, but we ought to be willing
to take the trouble for the sake of the
pleasure, and the great addition to the
beauty of our fast-lengthening streets.
Surely where a new highway is laid out
the trees ought not to be thought of
last, and provision should be made for
their successful growth and well-being.
Wo associate certain trees with town
life, but that may be more from habit
and custom than from any necessity.
In foreign countries there are wayfarers'
orchards along the great avenues and
narrower by-paths of travel ; but it is
to be feared that if a fruit-tree proved
itself commendable it would find itself

at the mercy of the predatory small boy,
who impatiently risks life and happiness
to eat his apple while it is yet green.
Or we can think of some New England
farmers, who, with an excess of thrift,
would loop in the prize with their near-
est unstable line of fence. It may be
urged that town trees are depended upon
more for shade than for decoration, but
there are few that will overarch the
streets, at any rate, and there is no rea-
son why we should not try some ex-
periments. Then the Willow Streets
and Pine Streets and Chestnut Streets
would deserve their names.

— The labor of reading — which, it
is true, is of the kind that " physics
pain " — might, I am sure, be made
lighter by a little attention, on the part
of writers, to some of the much-neglect-
ed notes and observations of that ancient
worthy, Goold Brown, as found in his
Grammar of the English Language.
One of those notes, standing under the
rule for adjectives, is on this wise :
" When the definitive words, the one,
the other, are used, the former [one]
must refer to the second of the antece-
dent terms, and the latter [other] to the
antecedent term which was used first."
(I quote from memory, — the not very
recent memory of the school-room,—
and I know that my recitation is not, as
the children say, " in the words of the
book.") This is certainly a simple rule
and a reasonable. When, having men-
tioned two things, we refer to them
without repeating their names, we point
with the mental index-finger to that
thing lying nearest us, which is the one
last named, and motion with a broader
sweep of gesture to that which lies far-
ther from us, the thing first mentioned,
the other.

Is the following sentence, taken from
an article on Music and Music Lovers,
in an old number of the Atlantic, cor-
rect when judged by this rule ? " The
connoisseur and the boor enjoy it [wine]
in very different ways. The one de-

576

Books of the Month.

[October.

lights in the wine itself, the other in its
effect." If I can speak with authority
of the tastes of connoisseur and boor, it
is the one who delights in the effect of
the wine, and the other who delights in
the wine itself.

Again, this remark of Sterling's,
quoted in Miss Fox's Memories of Old
Friends, is certainly misleading in its
use of the " definitive words : " " Words-
worth's calmness of spirit contrasted
with Byron's passionate emotion : one,
like moonlight on snow ; the other, like
torchlight in a cavern." I think any
careful reader would have to go over
that sentence a second time in order to
fit the similes in their proper places.

As a crowning example of this faulty
use let me give an extract from an early
letter of Emerson's, lately published in
one of the magazines : " The next books
in order upon my table are Hume and

Gibbon's Miscellanies. ... I cannot
help admiring the genius and novelty of
the one, and the greatness and profound
learning of the other. ... If you read
Hume you have to think ; and Gibbon
wakes you up from slumber, to wish
yourself a scholar, and resolve to be
one." The closing sentence of the quo-
tation, of course, sets right any miscon-
ception as to which author possesses the
" genius and novelty," and which the
"greatness and profound learning," if
the reader should lack the knowledge
of their characteristics necessary to set-
tle the doubt without its help. But
why, in the name of simplicity and com-
fort, could not all this doubtfulness of
meaning have been avoided by adher-
ence to a plain rule ; and why, since that
rule exists, should it not be made — to
borrow a phrase from John Stuart Mill
— " eternally binding " ?

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

Fiction. The latest novels of the Franklin
Square Library (Harpers), are A Foolish Virgin
by Ella Weed, Yolande by William Black, The
Senior Songman by the author of St. Olaves,
and Aut Caesar Aut Nihil by the Countess M.
Von Bothmer. The last two stories are not with-
out interest in their special way ; but, with all re-
spect to the London Saturday Review, Mr. Black's
Yolande is the very poorest thing he has done.
Miss Weed's story makes us hesitate about en-
dowing another college for young women. — A
Newport Aquarelle (Roberts) is manufactured out
of the make-belief high life which 'Newport en-
joys. It is a novel which makes one wonder if
communism may not offer the world a better
chance, after all; but then Newport is not the
world, and this very thin aquarelle is not art. —
A Washington Winter by Madeleine Vinton Dahl-
gren (Osgood), is a series of sketches of society
there strung upon a thread of plot. It has thus
the form of a novel, but the lay figures who move
through it owe whatever vitality they may possess
to the clothes of the real people which they wear.
There is a curious mingling of historic names, so
that one has a vision of real people and wax fig-
ures walking about arm in arm in a show. The
book may be a travesty of Washington, but it is

not good fiction, nor has it good manners. — Times
of Battle and of Rest, by Z. Topelius (Jansen, Mc-
Clurg & Co., Chicago), is one of the series of Sur-
geon's stories of the Swedish historical romancer.
One needs to get rid of a good deal of contempo-
rary literature before this reads familiarly. — Vix,
by George E. Waring (Osgood), is a paper edition
of a popular horse story.

Religion. More Words about the Bible, by James
S. Bush (John W. Lovell Company, New York),
is a little pamphlet containing five sermons which
aim to place the Bible in its relation to theology
and life, and to remove it from an isolated supe-
riority. — Gathered Lambs, by Rev. Edward Pay--
son Hammond (Funk & Wagnalls, New York), is
a volume of talks to children about religion, which
has a tendency, we regret to think, to make hypo-
crites, pharisees, and sentimentalists of them. The
Ten Commandments are more needed.

Travel. The Tourist's Guide- Book to the United
States and Canada (Putnams) appears to be an
English book, of which an edition is published
here. It is disfigured by advertisements between
the leaves, and apparently written and printed by
people to whom America is a foreign country. A
guide-book to France would not contain more
misspelled words and blunders to the square inch.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
#laga$ine of Literature, Science, art, ana

VOL. LII. — NOVEMBER, 1883. — No. CCCXIII.

A ROMAN SINGER.

IX.

AT nine o'clock on the morning of
the baroness's death, as Nino was busy
singing scales, there was a ring at the
door, and presently Mariuccia came run-
ning in as fast as her poor old legs
could carry her, and whiter than a pil-
low-case, to say that there was a man
at the door with two gendarmes, asking
for Nino ; and before I could question
her, the three men walked unbidden
into the room, demanding which was
Giovanni Cardegna, the singer. Nino
started, and then said quietly that he
was the man. I have had dealings with
these people, and I know what is best
to be done. They were inclined to be
rough and very peremptory. I confess
I was frightened ; but I think I am
more cunning when I am a little afraid.

" Mariuccia," I said, as she stood
trembling in the doorway, waiting to
see what would happen, " fetch a flask
of that old wine, and serve these gentle-
men, — and a few chestnuts, if you have
some. Be seated, signori," I said to
them, " and take one of these cigars.
My boy is a singer, and you would not
hurt his voice by taking him out so
early on this raw morning. Sit down,
Nino, and ask these gentlemen what
they desire." They all sat down, some-
what sullenly, and the gendarmes' sa-
bres clanked on the brick floor.

" What do you wish from me ? "
asked Nino, who was not much moved
after the first surprise.

" We regret to say," answered the
man in plain clothes, " that we are here
to arrest you."

" May I inquire on what charge ? "
I asked. " But first let me fill your
glasses. Dry throats make surly an-
swers, as the proverb says." They
drank. It chanced that the wine was
good, being from my own vineyard, —
my little vineyard that I bought outside
of Porta Salara, — and the men were
cold and wet, for it was raining.

" Well," said the man who had
spoken before, — he was clean-shaved
and fat, and he smacked his lips over
the wine, — " it is not our way to an-
swer questions. But since you are so
civil, I will tell you that you are arrest-
ed on suspicion of having poisoned that
Russian baroness, with the long name,
at whose house you have been so inti-
mate."

" Poisoned ? The baroness poisoned ?
Is she very ill, then ? " asked Nino in
great alarm.

" She is dead," said the fat man, wip-
ing his mouth, and twisting the empty
glass in his hand.

" Dead ! " cried Nino and I together.

" Dead — yes ; as dead as St. Peter,"
he answered irreverently. " Your wine
is good, Signer Professore. Yes, I will

578

A Roman Singer.

[November,

take another glass — and my men, too.
Yes, she was found dead this morn-
ing, lying in her bed. You were there
yesterday, Signer Cardegna, and her
servant says he saw you giving her
something in a glass of water." He
drank a long draught from his glass.
" You would have done better to give
her some of this wine, my friend. She
would certainly be alive to-day." But
Nino was dark and thoughtful. He
must have been pained and terribly
shocked at the sudden news, of course,
but he did not admire her as I did.

" Of course this thing will soon be
over," he said at last. " I am very much
grieved to hear of the lady's death, but
it is absurd to suppose that I was con-
cerned in it, however it happened. She
fainted suddenly in the morning when I
was there, and I gave her some water
to drink, but there was nothing in it."
He clasped his hands on his knee, and
looked much distressed.

" It is quite possible that you poisoned
her," remarked the fat man, with annoy-
ing indifference. " The servant says he
overheard high words between you" —
" He overheard ? " cried Nino, spring-
ing to his feet. " Cursed beast, to lis-
ten at the door ! " He began to walk
about excitedly. " How long is this af-
fair to keep me ? " he asked suddenly ;
" I have to sing to-night — and that
poor lady lying there dead — oh, I can-
not!"

" Perhaps you will not be detained
more than a couple of hours," said the
fat man. "And perhaps you will be
detained until the Day of Judgment,"
he added, with a sly wink at the gen-
darmes, who laughed obsequiously. " By
this afternoon, the doctors will know of
what she died ; and if there was no poi-
son, and she died a natural death, you
can go to the theatre and sing, if you
have the stomach. 1 would, I am sure.
You see, she is a great lady, and the
people of her embassy are causing
everything to be done very quickly.

If you had poisoned that old lady who
brought us this famous wine a minute
ago, you might have had to wait till
next year, innocent or guilty." It
struck me that the wine was producing
its effect.

" Very well," said Nino, resolutely ;
"let us go. You will see that I am
perfectly ready, although the news has
shaken me much ; and so you will per-
mit me to walk quietly with you, with-
out attracting any attention ? "

" Oh, we would not think of incom-
moding you," said the fat man. " The
orders were expressly to give you every
convenience, and we have a private
carriage below. Signor Graudi, we
thank you for your civility. Good-
morning — a thousand excuses." He
bowed, and the gendarmes rose to their
feet, refreshed and ruddy with the good
wine. Of course I knew I could not
accompany them, and I was too much
frightened to have been of any use.
Poor Mariuccia was crying in the
kitchen.

" Send word to Jacovacci. the man-
ager, if you do not hear by twelve
o'clock," Nino called back from the
landing, and the door closed behind
them all. I was left alone, sad and
frightened, and I felt very old, — much
older than I am.

It was tragic. Mechanically I sank
into the old green arm-chair, where she
had sat but yesterday evening, — she
whom I had seen but twice, once in
the theatre and once here, but of whom
I had heard so much. And she was
dead, so soon. If Nino could only have
heard her last words and seen her last
look, he would have been more hurt
when he heard of her sudden death.
But he is of stone, that man, save for
his love and his art. He seems to have
no room left for sympathy with human
ills, nor even for fear on his own ac-
count. Fear ! — how I hate the word !
Nino did not seem frightened at all,
when they took him away. But as for

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

579

me — well, it was not for myself this
time, at least. That is some comfort.
I think one may be afraid for other
people.

Mariuccia was so much disturbed that
I was obliged to go myself to get De
Pretis, who gave up all his lessons that
day and came to give me his advice.
He looked grave and spoke very little,
but he is a broad - shouldered, genial
man, and very comforting. He insisted
on going himself at once to see Nino,
to give him all the help he could. He
would not hear of my going, for he said
I ought to be bled and have some tea
of mallows to calm me. And when
I offered him a cigar from the box of
good ones Nino had given me, he took
six or seven, and put them in his pocket
without saying a word. But I did not
grudge them to him ; for though he is
very ridiculous, with his skull-cap and
his snuff-box, he is a leal man, as we
say, who stands by his friends and

J • v

snaps his fingers at the devil.

I cannot describe to you the anxiety
I felt through all that day. I could
not eat, nor drink, nor write. I could
not smoke, and when I tried to go to
sleep, that cat — an apoplexy on her !
— climbed up on -my shoulder and
clawed my hair. Mariuccia sat moan-
ing in the kitchen, and could not cook
at all, so that I was half starved.

At three o'clock De Pretis came
back.

" Courage, conte mio ! " he cried ;
and I knew it was all right. " Courage !
Nino is at liberty again, and says he
will sing to-night to show them he is not
a clay doll, to be broken by a little
knocking about. Ah, what a glorious
boy Nino is ! "

" But where is he ? " I asked, when I
could find voice to speak, for I was all
trembling.

" He is gone for a good walk, to
freshen his nerves, poveriuo. I wonder
he has any strength left. For Heaven's
sake, give me a match that I may light

my cigar, and then I will tell you all
about it. Thank you. And I will sit
down, comfortably — so. Now you
must know that the baroness — requies-
cat ! — was not poisoned by Nino, or by
any one else."

" Of course not ! Go on."

" Piano, — slow and sure. They had
a terrific scene, yesterday. You know ?
Yes. Then she went out and tired her-
self, poor soul, so that when she got
home she had an attack of the nerves.
Now these foreigners, who are a pack
of silly people, do not have themselves
bled and drink malva water as we do
when we get a fit of anger. But they
take opium; that is, a thing they call
chloral. God knows what it is made of,
but it puts them to sleep, like opium.
When the doctors came to look at the
poor lady, they saw at once what was
the matter, and called the maid. The
maid said her mistress certainly had
some green stuff in a little bottle which
she often used to take ; and when they
inquired further they heard that the
baroness had poured out much more
than usual the night before, while the
maid was combing her hair, for she
seemed terribly excited and restless.
So they got the bottle and found it
nearly empty. Then the doctors said,
' At what time was this young man who
is now arrested seen to give her the
glass of water?' The man-servant
said it was about two in the afternoon.
So the doctors knew that if Nino had
given her the chloral she could not
have gone out afterwards, and have been
awake at eleven in the evening when
her maid was with her, and yet have
been hurt by what he gave her. And
so, as Jacovacci was raising a thousand
devils in every corner of Rome because
they had arrested his-principal singer ou
false pretenses, and was threatening to
bring suits against everybody, including
the Russian embassy, the doctors, and
the government, if Nino did not appear
in Faust to-night, according to his agree-

580

A Roman Singer.

[November,

ment, the result was that, half an hour
ago, Nino was conducted out of the po-
lice precincts with ten thousand apolo-
gies, and put into the arms of Jacovacci,
who wept for joy, and carried him off
to a late breakfast at Morteo's. And
then I came here. But I made Nino
promise to take a good walk for his di-
gestion, since the weather has changed.
For a breakfast at three in the after-
noon may be called late, even in Rome.
And that reminds me to ask you for a
drop of wine ; for 1 am still fasting, and
this talking is worse for the throat than
a dozen high masses."

Mariuccia had been listening at the
door, as usual, and she immediately be-
gan crying for joy ; for she is a weak-
minded old thing, and dotes on Nino.
I was very glad myself, I can tell you ;
but I could not understand how Nino
could have the heart to sing, or should
lack heart so much as to be fit for it.
Before the evening he came home,
silent and thoughtful. I asked him
whether he were not glad to be free so
easily. 4

" That is not a very intelligent ques-
tion for a philosopher like you to ask,"
he answered. " Of course I am glad of
my liberty ; any man would be. But
I feel that I am as much the cause of
that poor lady's death as though I had
killed her with my own hands. I shall
never forgive myself."

" Diana ! " I cried, " it is a horrible
tragedy ; but it seems to me that you
could not help it if she chose to love
you."

" Hush ! " said he, so sternly that he
frightened me. " She is dead. God
give her soul rest. Let us not talk of
what she did."

" But," I objected, " if you feel so
strongly about it, how can you sing at
the opera to-night ? "

" There are plenty of reasons why I
should sing. In the first place, I owe
it to my engagement with Jacovacci.
He has taken endless trouble to have

me cleared at once, and I will not dis-
appoint him. Besides, I have not lost
my voice, and might be half ruined by
breaking contract so early. Then, the
afternoon papers are full of the whole
affair, some right and some wrong, and
I am bound to show the Contessina di
Lira that this unfortunate, accident does
not touch my heart, however sorry I
may be. If I did not appear, all Rome
would say it was because I was heart-
broken. If she does not go to the thea-
tre, she will at least hear of it. There-
fore I will sing." It was very reason-
able of him to think so.

" Have any of the papers got hold of
the story of your giving lessons ? "

" No, I think not ; and there is no
mention of the Lira family."

" So much the better."

Hedwig did not go to the opera. Of
course she was quite right. However
she might feel about the baroness, it
would have been in the worst possible
taste to go to the opera, the very day
after her death. That is the way society
puts it. It is bad taste ; they never say
it is heartless, or unkind, or brutal. It is
simply bad taste. Nino sang, on the
whole, better than if she had been there,
for he put his whole soul in his art, and
won fresh laurels. When it was over
he was besieged by the agent of the
London manager to come to some agree-
ment.

" I cannot tell yet," he said. " I will
tell you soon." He was not willing to
leave Rome, — that was the truth of the
matter. He thought of nothing, day
or night, but of how he might see Hed-
wig, and his heart writhed in his breast
when it seemed more and more impos-
sible. He dared not risk compromis-
ing her by another serenade, as he felt
sure that it had been 'some servant of
the count who had betrayed him to the
baroness. At last he hit upon a plan.
The funeral of the baroness was to
take place on the afternoon of the next
day. He felt sure that the Graf von

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

581

Lira would go to it, and he was equal-
ly certain that Hedwig would not. It
chanced to be the hour at which De
Pretis went to the palazzo to give her
the singing lesson.

" I suppose it is a barbarous thing for
me to do," he said to himself, " but I
cannot help it. Love first, and tragedy
afterwards."

In the afternoon, therefore, he sallied
out, and went boldly to the Palazzo
Carmandola. He inquired of the por-
ter whether the Signer Conte had gone
out, and just as he had expected, so he
found it. Old Lira had left the house
ten minutes earlier, to go to the funeral.
Nino ran up the stairs and rang the
bell. The footman opened the door,
and Nino quickly slipped a five-franc
note into his hand, which he had no
difficulty in finding. On asking if the
signorina were at home, the footman
nodded, and added that Professor De
Pretis was with her, but she would doubt-
less see Professor Cardegna as well.
And so it turned out. He was ushered
into the great drawing-room, where the
^>iano was. Hedwig came forward a
few steps from where she had been
standing beside De Pretis, and Nino
bowed low before her. She had on a
long dark dress, and no ornament what-
ever, save her beautiful bright hair, so
that her face was like a jewel set in gold
and velvet. But, when I think of it,
such a combination would seem absurd-
ly vulgar by the side of Hedwig von
Lira. She was so pale and exquisite
and sad that Nino could hardly look at
her. He remembered that there were
violets, rarest of flowers in Rome in
January, in her belt.

To tell the truth, Nino had expected
to find her stern and cold, whereas she
was only very quiet and sorrowful.

" Will you forgive me, signoriua, for
this rashness ? " he asked in a low
voice.

" In that I receive you I forgive you,
sir," she said. He glanced toward De

Pretis, who seemed absorbed in some
music at the piano and was playing over
bits of an accompaniment. She under-
stood, and moved slowly to a window at
the other end of the great room, stand-
ing among the curtains. He placed him-
self in the embrasure. She looked at
him long and earnestly, as if finally rec-
onciling the singer with the man she had
known so long. She found him changed,
as I had, in a short time. His face was
sterner and thinner and whiter than be-
fore, and there were traces of thought
in the deep shadows beneath his eyes.
Quietly observing him, she saw how per-
fectly simple and exquisitely careful was
his dress, and how his hands bespoke
that attention which only a gentleman
gives to the details of his person. She
saw that, if he were not handsome, he
was in the last degree striking to the
eye, in spite of all his simplicity, and
that he would not lose by being con-
trasted with all the dandies and court-
iers in Rome. As she looked, she saw
his lip quiver slightly, the only sign of
emotion he ever gives, unless he loses
his head altogether, and storms, as he
sometimes does.

" Signorina," he began, " I have come
to tell you a story ; will you listen to
it?"

" Tell it me," said she, still looking
in his face.

" There was once a solitary castle in
the mountains, with battlement and moat
both high and broad. Far up in a lone-
ly turret dwelt a rare maiden, of such
surpassing beauty and fairness that the
peasants thought she was not mortal,
but an angel from heaven, resting in
that tower from the doing of good deeds.
She had flowers up there in her cham-
ber, and the seeds of flowers ; and as
the seasons passed by, she took from her
store the dry germs, and planted them
one after another in a little earth on the
window-sill. And the sun shone on
them and they grew, and she breathed
upon them and they were sweet. But

582

A Roman Singer.

[November,

they withered and bore no offspring,
and fell away, so that year by year her
store became diminished. At last there
was but one little paper bag of seed left,
and upon the cover was written in a
strange character, ' This is the Seed of
the Thorn of the World.' But the beau-
tiful maiden was sad when she saw this,
for she said, ' All my flowers have been
sweet, and now I have but this thing
left, which is a thorn ! And she opened
the paper and looked inside, and saw
one poor little seed, all black and shriv-
eled. Through that day she pondered
what to do with it, and was very unhap-
py. At night she said to herself, ' I
will not plant this one ; I will throw it
away, rather than plant it.' And she
went to the window, and tore the paper,
and threw out the little seed into the
darkness."

" Poor little thing ! " said Hedwig.
She was listening intently.

" She threw it out, and, as it fell, all
the air was full of music, sad and sweet,
so that she wondered greatly. The next
day she looked out of the window, and
saw, between the moat and the castle
wall, a new plant growing. It looked
black and uninviting, but it had come

up so fast that it had already laid hold
on the rough gray stones. At the fall-
ing of the night it reached far up to-
wards the turret, a great sharp-pointed
vine, with only here and there a miser-
able leaf on it. ' I am sorry I threw it
out,' said the maiden. ' It is the Thorn
of the World,, and the people who pass
will think it defaces my castle.' But
when it was dark again the air was full
of music. The maiden went to the win-
dow, for she could not sleep, and she
called out, asking who it was that sang.
Then a sweet, low voice came up to her
from the moat. ' I am the Thorn,' it
said, ' I sing in the dark, for I am grow-
ing.' 'Sing on, Thorn,' said she, 'and
grow if you will.' But in the morning,
when she awoke, her window was dark-
ened, for the Thorn had grown to be a

mighty tree, and its topmost shoots were
black against the sky. She wondered
whether this uncouth plant would bear
anything but music. So she spoke to it.
" ' Thorn,' she said, ' why have you
no flowers?'

" ' I am the Thorn of the World,' it
answered, ' and I can bear no flowers
until the hand that planted me has tend-
ed me, and pruned me, and shaped me
to be its own. If you had planted me
like the rest, it would have been easy
for you. But you planted me unwilling-
ly, down below you by the moat, and I
have had far to climb.'

" ' But my hands are so delicate,' said
the maiden. ' You will hurt me, I am
sure.'

" ' YoWs is the only hand in the
world that I will not hurt,' said the
voice, so tenderly and softly and sadly
that the gentle fingers went out to touch
the plant and see if it were real. And
touching it they clung there, for they
had no harm of it. Would you know,
my lady, what happened then ? "

" Yes, yes — tell me ! " cried Hedwig,
whose imagination was fascinated by
the tale.

" As her hands rested on the spiked
branches, a gentle trembling went
through the Thorn, and in a moment
there burst out such a blooming and
blossoming as the maiden had never
seen. Every prick became a rose, and
they were so many that the light of the
day was tinged with them, and their
sweetness was like the breath of para-
dise. But below her window the Thorn
was as black and forbidding as ever, for
only the maiden's presence could make
its flowers bloom. But she smelled the
flowers, and pressed many of them to
her cheek.

" ' I thought you were only a Thorn,'
she said softly.

" ' Nay. fairest maiden,' answered the
glorious voice of the bursting blossom,
1 1 am the Rose of the World forever,
since you have touched me.'

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

583

" That is my story, signorina. Have
I wearied you ? "

Hedwig had unconsciously moved
nearer to him as he was speaking, for
he never raised his voice, and she hung
on his words. There was color in her
face, and her breath came quickly
through her parted lips. She had never
looked so beautiful.

" Wearied me, signore ? Ah no ; it is
a gentle tale of yours."

" It is a true tale — in part," said he.

" In part ? I do not understand " —
But the color was warmer in her cheek,
and she turned her face half away, as
though looking out.

" I will tell you," he replied, com-
ing closer, on the side from which she
turned. " Here is the window. You
are the maiden. The thorn — it is my
love for you ; " he dropped his voice to
a whisper. " You planted it carelessly,
far below you in the dark. In the dark
it has grown and sung to you, and
grown again, until now it stands in your
own castle window. Will you not touch
it and make its flowers bloom for you ? "
He spoke fervently. She had turned
her face quite from him now, and was
resting her forehead against one hand
that leaned upon the heavy frame of the
casement. The other baud hung down
by her side toward him, fair as a lily
against her dark gown. Nino touched
it, then took it. He could see the
blush spread to her white throat, and
fade again. Between the half-falling
curtain and the great window he bent
his knee and pressed her fingers to his
lips. She made as though she would
withdraw her hand, and then left it in
his. Her glance stole to him as he
kneeled there, and he felt it on him, so
that he looked up. She seemed to raise
him with her fingers, and her eyes held
his and drew them ; he stood up, and,
still holding her hand, his face was near
to hers. Closer and closer yet, as by a
spell, each gazing searchingly into the
other's glance, till their eyes could see

no more for closeness, and their lips
met in life's first virgin kiss, — in the
glory and strength of a twofold purity,
each to each.

Far off at the other end of the room
De Pretis struck a chord on the piano.
They started at the sound.

" When ? " whispered Nino, hur-
riedly.

" At midnight, under my window,"
she answered quickly, not thinking of
anything better in her haste. " I will
tell you then. You must go ; my fa-
ther will soon be here. No, not again,"
she protested. But he drew her to
him, and said good-by in his own man-
ner. She lingered an instant, and tore
herself away. De Pretis was. playing
loudly. Nino had to pass near him to
go out, and the maestro nodded care-
lessly as he went by.

" Excuse me, maestro," said Hedwig,
as Nino bowed himself out ; " it was a
question of arranging certain lessons."

" Do not mention it," said he indiffer-
ently ; " my time is yours, signorina.
Shall we go through with this solfeggio
once more?"

The good maestro did not seem great-
ly disturbed by the interruption. Hed-
wig wondered, dreamily, whether he had
understood. It all seemed like a dream.
The notes were upside down in her sight,
and her voice sought strange minor keys
unconsciously, as she vainly tried to con-
centrate her attention upon what she
was doing.

" Signorina," said Ercole at last,
" what you sing is very pretty, but it is
not exactly what is written here. I fear
you are tired."

" Perhaps so," said she. " Let us not
sing any more to-day." Ercole shut up
the music and rose. She gave him her
hand, a thing she had never done be-
fore ; and it was unconscious now, as
everything she did seemed to be. There
is a point when dreaming gets the mas-
tery, and appears infinitely more real
than the things we touch.

584

A Roman Singer.

[November,

Nino, meanwhile, had descended the
steps, expecting every moment to meet
the count. As he went down the street,
a closed carriage drove by with the Lira
liveries. The old count was in it, but
Nino stepped into the shadow of a door-
way to let the equipage pass, and was
not seen. The wooden face of the old
nobleman almost betrayed something
akin to emotion. He was returning
from the funeral, and it had pained him ;
for he had liked the wild baroness, in a
fatherly, reproving way. But the sight
of him sent a home thrust to Nino's
heart.

" Her death is on my soul forever,"
he muttered between his set teeth. Poor
innocent boy, it was not his fault if she
had loved him so much. Women have
done things for great singers that they
have not done for martyrs or heroes. It
seems so certain that the voice that sings
so tenderly is speaking to them indi-
vidually. Music is such a fleeting, pas-
sionate thing that a woman takes it all
to herself ; how could he sing like that
for any one else ? And yet there is al-
ways some one for whom he does really
pour out his heart, and all the rest are
the dolls of life, to be looked at, and
admired for their dress and complexion,
and to laugh at when the fancy takes
him to laugh ; but not to love.

At midnight Nino was at his post, but
he waited long and patiently for a sign.
It was past two, and he was thinking it
hopeless to wait longer, when his quick
ear caught the sound of a window mov-
ing on its hinges, and a moment later
something fell at his feet with a sharp,
metallic click. The night was dark and
cloudy, so that the waning moon gave
little light. He picked up the thing, and
found a small pocket handkerchief
wrapped about a minute pair of scis-
sors, apparently to give it weight. He
expected a letter, and groped on the
damp pavement with his hands. Then
he struck a match, shaded it from the
breeze with his hand, and saw that the

handkerchief was stained with ink and
that the stains were letters, roughly
printed to make them distinct. He hur-
ried away to the light of a street lamp
to read the strange missive.

He went to the light and spread out
the handkerchief. It was a small thing,
of almost transparent stuff, with a plain
" H. L." and a crown in the corner.
The steel pen had torn the delicate
fibres here and there.

" They know you have been here. . I
am watched. Keep away from the house
till you hear."

That was all the message, but it told
worlds. He knew from it that the count
was informed of his visit, and he tor-
tured himself by trying to imagine what
the angry old man would do. His heart
sank like a stone in his breast when he
thought of Hedwig so imprisoned, guard-
ed, made a martyr of, for his folly. He
groaned aloud when he understood that
it was in the power of her father to take
her away suddenly and leave no trace
of their destination, and he cursed his
haste and impetuosity in having shown
himself inside the house. But with all
this weight of trouble upon him, he felt
the strength and indomitable determi-
nation within him which come only to a
man who loves, when he knows he is
loved again. He kissed the little hand-
kerchief, and even the scissors she had
used to weight it with, and he put them
in his breast. But he stood irresolute,
leaning against the lamp-post, as a man
will who is trying to force his thoughts
to overtake events, trying to shape the
future out of the present. Suddenly,
he was aware of a tall figure in a fur
coat standing near him on the sidewalk.
He would have turned to go, but some-
thing about the stranger's appearance
struck him so oddly that he stayed
where he was and watched, him.

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

585

The tall man searched for something
in his pockets, and finally produced a
cigarette, which he leisurely lighted with
a wax match. As he did so his eyes
fell upon Nino. The stranger was tall
and very thin. He wore a pointed
beard and a heavy mustache, which
seemed almost dazzlingly white, as were
the few locks that appeared, neatly
brushed over his temples, beneath his
opera hat. His sanguine complexion,
however, had all the freshness of youth,
and his eyes sparkled merrily, as though
amused at the spectacle of his nose,
which was immense, curved, and pol-
ished, like an eagle's beak. He wore
perfectly fitting kid gloves, and the col-
lar of his fur wrapper, falling a little
open, showed that he was in evening
dress.

It" was so late — past two o'clock —
that Nino had not expected anything
more than a policeman or some home-
less wanderer, when he raised his eyes
to look on the stranger. He was fasci-
nated by the strange presence of the aged
dandy, for such he seemed to be, and
returned his gaze boldly. He was still
more astonished, however, when the old
gentleman came close to him, and raised
his hat, displaying, as he did so, a very
high and narrow forehead, crowned with
a mass of smooth white hair. There
was both grace and authority in the
courteous gesture, and Nino thought the
old gentleman moved with an ease that
matched his youthful complexion rather
than his hoary locks.

" Signor Cardegna, the distinguished
artist, if I mistake not ? " said the stran-
ger, with a peculiar foreign accent, the
like of which Nino had never heard.
He, also, raised his hat, extremely sur-
prised that a chance passer-by should
know him. He had not yet learned
what it is to be famous. But he was
far from pleased at being addressed in
his present mood.

" The same, signore," he replied cold-
ly. " How cau I serve you ? "

" You can serve the world you so well
adorn better than by exposing your no-
ble voice to the midnight damps and
chills of this infernal — I would say,
eternal — city," answered the other.
" Forgive me. I am, not unnaturally,
concerned at the prospect of losing even
a small portion of the pleasure you know
how to give to me and to many others."

" I thank you for your flattery," said
Nino, drawing his cloak about him,
" but it appears to me that my throat is
my own, and whatever voice there may
be in it. Are you a physician, signore ?
And pray why do you tell me that Rome
is an infernal city ? "

" I have had some experience of
Rome, Signor Cardegna," returned th.e
foreigner, with a peculiar smile, " and I
hate no place so bitterly in all this world
— save one. And as for my being a
physician, I am an old man, a very
singularly old man in fact, and 1 know
something of the art of healing."

" When I need healing, as you call
it," said Nino rather scornfully, " I will
inquire for you. Do you desire to con-
tinue this interview amid the ' damps
and chills ' of our ' infernal city ' ? If
not, I will wish you good-evening."

" By no means," said the other, not
in the least repulsed by Nino's coldness.
" I will accompany you a little way, if
you will allow me." Nino stared hard
at the stranger, wondering what could
induce him to take so much interest in
a singer. Then he nodded gravely, and
turned toward his home, inwardly hop-
ing that his aggressive acquaintance
lived in the opposite direction. But he
was mistaken. The tall man blew a
quantity of smoke through his nose and
walked by his side. He strode over the
pavement with a long, elastic step.

"I live not far from here," he said,
when they had gone a few steps, " and
if the Signor Cardegna will accept of
a glass of old wine and a good cigar I
shall feel highly honored." Somehow
an invitation of this kind was the last

586

A Roman Singer.

[November,

thing Nino had expected or desired,
least of all from a talkative stranger
who seemed determined to make his ac-
quaintance.

" I thank you, signore," he answered,
"but I have supped, and I do not
smoke."

" Ah — I forgot. You are a singer,
and must of course be careful. That
is perhaps the reason why you wander
about the streets when the nights are
dark and damp. But I can offer you
something more attractive than liquor
and tobacco. A great violinist lives
with me, — a queer, nocturnal bird, —
and if you will come he will be enchant-
ed to play for you. I assure you he is
a very good musician, the like of which
you will hardly hear nowadays. He
does not play in public any longer, from
some odd fancy of his."

Nino hesitated. Of all instruments
he loved the violin best, and in Rome he
had had but little opportunity of hear-
ing it well played. Concerts were the
rarest of luxuries to him, and violinists
in Rome are rarer still.

" What is his name, signore ? " he
asked, unbending a little.

" You must guess that when you hear
him," said the old gentleman, with a
short laugh. " But I give you my
word of honor he is a great musician.
Will you come, or must I offer you still
further attractions ? "

" What might they be ? " asked Nino.

" Nay ; will you come for what I
offer you ? If the music is not good,
you may go away again." Still Nino
hesitated. Sorrowful and fearful of the
future as he was, his love gnawing cru-
elly at his heart, he would have given
the whole world for a strain of rare mu-
sic if only he were not forced to make it
himself. Then it struck him that this
might be some pitfall. I would not have
gone.

" Sir," he said at last, " if you medi-
tate any foul play, I would advise you
to retract your invitation. I will come,

and I am well armed." He had my
long knife about him somewhere. It is
one of my precautions. But the stran-
ger laughed long and loud at the sug-
gestion, so that his voice woke queer
echoes in the silent street. Nino did
not understand why he should laugh so
much, but he found his knife under his
cloak, and made sure it was loose in its
leathern sheath. Presently the stranger
stopped before the large door of an old
palazzo, — every house is a palazzo that
has an entrance for carriages, — and let
himself in with a key. There was a
lantern on the stone pavement inside,
and seeing a light, Nino followed him
boldly. The old gentleman took the
lantern and led the way up the stairs,
apologizing for the distance and the
darkness. At last they stopped, .and,
entering another door, found themselves
in the stranger's apartment.

" A cardinal lives down-stairs," said
he, as he turned up the light of a couple
of large lamps that burned dimly in the
room they had reached. " The secre-
tary of a very holy order has his office
on the other side of my landing, and al-
together this is a very religious atmos-
phere. Pray take off your cloak ; the
room is warm."

Nino looked about him. He had ex-
pected to be ushered into some princely
dwelling, for he had judged his inter-
locutor to be some rich and eccentric
noble, unless he were an erratic scamp.
He was somewhat taken aback by the
spectacle that met his eyes. The furni-
ture was scant, and all in the style of
the last century. The dust lay half an
inch thick on the old gilded ornaments
and chandeliers. A great pier-glass was
cracked from corner to corner, and the
metallic backing seemed to be scaling
off behind. There were two or three
open valises on the marble floor, which
latter, however, seemed to have been
lately swept. A square table was in the
centre, also free from dust, and a few
high-backed leathern chairs, studded with

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

587

brass nails, were ranged about it. On
the table stood one of the lamps, and
the other was placed on a marble col-
umn in a corner, that once must have
supported a bust, or something of the
kind. Old curtains, moth-eaten and
ragged with age, but of a rich material,
covered the windows. Nino glanced at
the open trunks on the floor, and . saw
that they contained a quantity of wear-
ing apparel and the like. He guessed
that his acquaintance had lately arrived.

" I do not often inhabit this den,"
said the old gentleman, who had divest-
ed himself of his furs, and now showed
his thin figure arrayed in the extreme
of full dress. A couple of decorations
hung at his button-hole. " I seldom
come here, and on my return, the other
day, I found that the man I had left in
charge was dead, with all his family,
and the place has gone to ruin. That
is always my luck," he added, with a lit-
tle laugh.

" I should think he must have been
dead some time," said Nino, looking
about him. " There is a great deal of
dust here."

" Yes, as you say, it is some years,"
returned his acquaintance, still laughing.
He seemed a merry old soul, fifty years
younger than his looks. He produced
from a case a bottle of wine and two
silver cups, and placed them on the
table.

" But where is your friend, the vio-
linist ? " inquired Nino, who was begin-
ning to be impatient ; for except that the
place was dusty and old, there was noth-
ing about it sufficiently interesting to
take his thoughts from the subject near-
est his heart.

" I will introduce him to you," said
the other, going to one of the valises
and taking out a violin case, which he
laid on the table and proceeded to open.
The instrument was apparently of great
age, small and well shaped. The stran-
ger took it up and began to tune it.

" Do you mean to say that you are

yourself the violinist ? " he asked, in as-
tonishment. But the stranger vouch-
safed no answer, as he steadied the fid-
dle with his bearded chin and turned the
pegs with his left hand, adjusting the
strings.

Then, suddenly and without any pre-
luding, he began to make music, and
from the first note Nino sat enthralled
and fascinated, losing himself in the wild
sport of the tones. The old man's face
became ashy white as he played, and
his white hair appeared to stand away
from his head. The long, thin fingers
of his left hand chased each other in
pairs and singly along the delicate
strings, while the bow glanced in the
lamplight as it dashed like lightning
across the instrument, or remained al-
most stationary, quivering in his magic
hold as quickly as the wings of the
humming-bird strike the summer air.
Sometimes he seemed to be tearing the
heart from the old violin ; sometimes it
seemed to murmur soft things in his old
ear, as though the imprisoned spirit of
the music were pleading to be free on
the wings of sound : sweet as love that
is strong as death ; feverish and mur-
derous as jealousy that is as cruel as the
grave ; sobbing great sobs of a terrible
death-song, and screaming in the outra-
geous frenzy of a furious foe ; wailing
thin cries of misery, too exhausted for
strong grief; dancing again in horrid
madness, as the devils dance over some
fresh sinner they have gotten themselves
for torture ; and then at last, as the
strings bent to the commanding bow,
finding the triumph of a glorious rest
in great, broad chords, splendid in depth
and royal harmony, grand, enormous,
and massive as the united choirs of
heaven.

Nino was beside himself, leaning far
over the table, straining eyes and ears
to understand the wonderful music that
made him drunk with its strength. As
the tones ceased he sank back in his
chair, exhausted by the tremendous ef-

588

A Roman Singer.

[November,

fort of his senses. Instantly the old
man recovered his former appearance.
With his hand he smoothed the thick
white hair ; the fresh color came back
to his cheeks ; and as he tenderly laid
his violin on the table, he was again the
exquisitely dressed and courtly gentle-
man who had spoken to Nino in the
street. The musician disappeared, and
the man of the world returned. He
poured wine into the plain silver cups,
and invited Nino to drink ; but the boy
pushed the goblet away, and his strange
host drank alone.

"You asked me for the musician's
name," he said, with a merry twinkle in
his eye, from which every trace of ar-
tistic inspiration had faded ; " can you
guess it now ? " Nino seemed tongue-
tied still, but he made an effort.

" I have heard of Paganini," he said,
" but he died years ago."

"Yes, he is dead, poor fellow ! I am
not Paganini."

"I am at a loss, then," said Nino,
dreamily. " I do not know the names
of many violinists, but you must be so
famous that I ought to know yours."

" No T how should you ? I will tell
you. I am Benoni, the Jew." The tall
man's eyes twinkled more brightly than
ever. Nino stared at him, and saw that
he was certainly of a pronounced Jew-
ish type. His brown eyes were long
and oriental in shape, and his nose was
unmistakably Semitic.

" I am sorry to seem so ignorant,"
said Nino, blushing, " but I do not know
the name. I perceive, however, that
you are indeed a very great musician, —
the greatest I ever heard." The com-
pliment was perfectly sincere, and Be-
noni's face beamed with pleasure. He
evidently liked praise.

" It is not extraordinary," he said,
smiling. " In the course of a very long
life it lias been my only solace, and if I
have some skill it is the result of con-
stant study. I began life very hum-
bly."

" So did I," said Nino thoughtfully,
"and I am not far from the humble-
ness yet."

" Tell me," said Benoni, with a show
of interest, " where you come from, and
why you are a singer."

" I was a peasant's child, an orphan,
and the good God gave me a voice.
That is all I know about it. A kind-
hearted gentleman, who once owned the
estate where I was born, brought me up,
and wanted to make a philosopher of
me. But I wanted to sing, and so I
did."

" Do you always do the things you
want to do ? " asked the other. " You
look as though you might. You look
like Napoleon, — that man always in-
terested me. That is why I asked you
to come and see me. I have heard you
sing, and you are a great artist, — an
additional reason. All artists should be
brothers. Do you not think so ? "

" Indeed, I know very few good
ones," said Nino simply ; " and even
among them I would like to choose be-
fore claiming relationship — personally.
But Art is a great mother, and we are
all her children."

" More especially we who began life
so poorly, and love Art because she
loves us." Benoni seated himself on
the arm of one of the old chairs, and
looked down across the worm-eaten ta-
ble at the young singer. " We," he
continued, " who have been wretchedly
poor know better than others that art
is real, true, and enduring ; medicine in
sickness and food in famine ; wings to
the feet of youth and a staff for the
steps of old age. Do you think I ex-
aggerate, or do you feel as I do ? " He
paused for an answer, and poured more
wine into his goblet.

" Oh, you know I feel as you do ! "
cried Nino, with rising enthusiasm.

" Very good ; you are a genuine ar-
tist. What you have not felt yet, you
will feel hereafter. You have not suf-
fered yet."

1883.]

A Roman /Singer.

589

"You do not know about me," said
Nino in a low voice. " I am suffering
now."

Benoni smiled. " Do you call that
suffering ? Well, it is perhaps very real
to you, though I do not know what it is.
But art will help you through it all, as
it has helped me."

"What were you?" asked Nino.
" You say you were poor."

" Yes. I was a shoemaker, and a
poor one at that. I have worn out more
shoes than I ever made. But I was
brought up to it for many years."

" You did not study music from a
child, then ? "

" No. But I always loved it ; and I
used to play in the evenings, when I
had been cobbling all day long."

" And one day you found out you
were a great artist and became famous.
I see ! What a strange beginning ! "
cried Nino.

"Not exactly that. It took a long
time. I was obliged to leave my home,
for other reasons, and then I played
from door to door, and from town to
town, for whatever coppers were thrown
to me. I had never heard any good
music, and so I played the things that
came into my head. By and by people
would make me stay with them awhile,
for my music's sake. But I never
stayed long."

" Why not ? "

" I cannot tell you now," said Beno-
ni, looking grave and almost sad : " it is
a very long story. I have traveled a
great deal, preferring a life of adven-
ture. But of late money has grown to
be so important a thing that I have
given a series of great concerts, and have
become rich enough to play for my own
pleasure. Besides, though I travel so
much, I like society, and I know many
people everywhere. To-night, for in-
stance, though I have been in Rome
only a week, I have been to a dinner
party, to the theatre, to a reception, and
to a ball. Everybody invites me as soon

as I arrive. I am very popular, — and
yet I am a Jew," he added, laughing in
an odd way.

" But you are a merry Jew," said
Nino, laughing, too, " besides being a
great genius. I do not wonder people
invite you."

" It is better to be merry than sad,"
replied Benoni. " In the course of a long
life I have found out that."

" You do not look so very old," said
Nino. " How old are you ? "

" That is a rude question," said his
host, laughing. " But I will improvise
a piece of music for you." He took his
violin, and stood up before the broken
pier-glass. Then he laid the bow over
the strings and struck a chord. " What
is that ? " he asked, sustaining the sound.

" The common chord of A minor,"
answered Nino immediately.

" You have a good ear," said Benoni,
still playing the same notes, so that the
constant monotony of them buzzed like
a vexatious insect in Nino's hearing.
Still the old man sawed the bow over
the same strings without change. On
and on, the same everlasting chord, till
Nino thought he must go mad.

" It is intolerable ; for the love of
Heaven, stop ! " he cried, pusiJ.ng back
his chair and beginning to pace the
room. Benoni only smiled, and went
on as unchangingly as ever. Nino could
bear it no longer, being very sensitive
about sounds, and he made for the
door.

" You cannot get out, — I have the
key in my pocket," said Benoni, with-
out stopping.

Then Nino became nearly frantic, and
made at the Jew to wrest the instru-
ment from his hands. But Benoni was
agile, and eluded him, still playing vig-
orously the one chord, till Nino cried
aloud, and sank in a chair, entirely
overcome by the torture, that seemed
boring its way into his brain like a cork-
screw.

" This," said Benoni, the bow still

590

A Roman Singer.

[November,

sawing the strings, " is life without laugh-
ter. Now let us laugh a little, and see
the effect."

It was indeed wonderful. With his
instrument he imitated the sound of a
laughing voice, high up above the mo-
notonous chord : softly at first, as though
far in the distance ; then louder and
nearer, the sustaining notes of the mi-
nor falling away one after the other and
losing themselves, as the merriment
gained ground on the sadness ; till final-
ly, with a burst of life and vitality of
which it would be impossible to convey
any idea, the whole body of mirth broke
into a wild tarantella movement, so viv-
id and elastic and noisy that it seemed
to Nino that he saw the very feet of the
dancers, and heard the jolly din of the
tambourine and the clattering, clapper-
ing click of the castanets.

" That," said Benoni, suddenly stop-
ping, " is life with laughter, be it ever
so sad and monotonous before. Which
do you prefer ? "

" You are the greatest artist in the
world ! " cried Nino enthusiastically ;
" but I should have been a raving mad-
man if you had played that chord any
longer."

" Of course," said Benoni, " and I
should have gone mad if I had not
laughed. Poor Schumann, you know,
died insane because he fancied he al-
ways heard one note droning in his
ears."

" I can understand that," said Nino.
" But it is late, and I must be going
home. Forgive nay rudeness and reluc-
tance to come with you. I was moody
and uuhappy. You have given me more
pleasure than I can tell you."

" It will seem little enough to-mor-
row, I dare say," replied Benoni. " That
is the way with pleasures. But you
should get thenj all the same, when you
can, and grasp them as tightly as a
drowning man grasps a straw. Pleas-
ures and money, money and pleasures."

Nino did not understand the tone in

which his host made this last remark,
lie had learned different doctrines from
me.

" Why do you speak so selfishly, af-
ter showing that you can give pleasure
so freely, and telling me that we are all
brothers ? " he asked.

"If you are not in a hurry, I will
explain to you that money is the only
thing in this world worth having," said
Benoni, drinking another cup of the
wine, which appeared to have no effect
whatever on his brain.

" Well ? " said Nino, curious to hear
what he had to say.

" In the first place, you will allow that
from the noblest moral standpoint a
man's highest aim should be to do good
to his fellow creatures ? Yes, you al-
low that. And to do the greatest pos-
sible good to the greatest possible num-
ber ? Yes, you allow that, also. Then,
I say, other things being alike, a good
man will do the greatest possible amount
of good in the world when he has the
greatest possible amount of money. The
more money, the more good ; the less
money, the less good. Of course money
is only the means to the end, but noth-
ing tangible in the world can ever be any-
thing else. All art is only a means to
the exciting of still more perfect im-
ages in the brain ; all crime is a means
to the satisfaction of passion, or avarice
which is itself a king-passion ; all good
itself is a means to the attainment of
heaven. Everything is bad or good in
the world, except art, which is a thing
separate, though having good and bad
results. But the attainment of heaven
is the best object to keep in view. To
that end, do the most good ; and to do
it, get the most money. Therefore, as
a means, money is the only thing in the
world worth having, since you can most
benefit humanity by it, and consequent-
ly be the most sure of going to heaven
when you die. Is that clear ? "

" Perfectly," said Nino, " provided a
man is himself good."

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

591

" It is very reprehensible to be bad,"
said Benoni, with a smile.

" What a ridiculous truism ! " said
Nino, laughing outright.

" Very likely," said the other. " But
I never heard any preacher, in auy
country, tell his congregation anything
else. And people always listen with
attention. In countries where rain is
entirely unknown, it is not a truism to
say that ' when it rains it is damp.' On
the contrary, ia such countries that state-
ment would be regarded as requiring
demonstration, and once demonstrated,
it would be treasured and taught as an
interesting scientific fact. Now it is
precisely the same with congregations of
men. They were never bad, and never
can be ; in fact, they doubt, in their dear
innocent hearts, whether they know
what a real sin is. Consequently they
listen with interest to the statement that
sin is bad, and promise themselves that
if ever that piece of information should
be unexpectedly needed by any of their
friends, they will remember it."

" You are a satirist, Signor Benoni,"
said Nino.

"Anything you like," returned the
other. " I have been called worse
names than that, in my time. So much
for heaven, and the prospect of it. But
a gentleman has arisen in a foreign
country who says that there is no heav-
en, anywhere, and that no one does good
except in the pursuit of pleasure here
or hereafter. But as his hereafter is
nowhere, disregard it in the argument,
and say that man should only do, or ac-
tually does, everything solely for the
sake of pleasure here; say that pleas-
ure is good, so long as it. does not in-
terfere with the pleasures of others, and
good is pleasure. Money may help a
man to more of it, but pleasure is the
thing. Well, then, my young brother
artist, what did I say?— 'money and

pleasure, pleasure and money.' The
means are there ; and as, of course, you
are good, like everybody else, and de-
sire pleasure, you will get to heaven
hereafter, if there is such a place ; and
if not, you will get the next thing to it,
which is a paradise on earth." Having
reached the climax, Signor Benoni lit a
cigarette, and laughed his own peculiar
laugh.

Nino shuddered involuntarily at the
hideous sophistry. For Nino is a good
boy, and believes very much in heaven,
as well as in a couple of other places.
Benoni's quick brown eyes saw the
movement, and understood it, for he
laughed longer yet, and louder.

" Why do you laugh like that ? I
see nothing to laugh at. It is very bit-
ter and bad to hear, all this that you
say. I would rather hear your music.
You are badly off, whether you believe
in heaven or not. For if you do, you
are not likely to get there ; and if you
do not believe in it, you are a heretic,
and will be burned forever and ever."

" Not so badly answered, for an ar-
tist ; and in a few words, too," said Be-
noni approvingly. " But, my dear boy,
the trouble is that I shall not get to
heaven either way, for it is my great
misfortune to be already condemned to
everlasting flames."

" No one is that," said Nino gravely.

" There are some exceptions, you
know," said Benoni.

" Well," answered the young man
thoughtfully, " of course there is the
Wandering Jew, and such tales, but no-
body believes in him."

" Good-night," said Benoni. " I am
tired, and must go to bed."

Nino found his way out alone, but
carefully noted the position of the pa-
lazzo before he went home through the
deserted streets. It was four in the

morning.

F. Marion Crawford.

592

Ezra Ripley, D. D.

[November,

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.1

EZRA RIPLEY was born May 1, 1751
(0. S.), at Woodstock, Connecticut. He
was the fifth of the nineteen children of
Noah and Lydia (Kent) Ripley. Seven-
teen of these nineteen children married,
and it is stated that the mother died
leaving nineteen children, one hundred
and two grandchildren and ninety-six
great-grandchildren. The father was
born at Hingham, on the farm purchased
by his ancestor, William Ripley, of
England, at the first settlement of the
town, which farm has been occupied by
seven or eight generations. Ezra Rip-
ley followed the business of farming till
sixteen years of age, when his father
wished him to be qualified to teach a
grammar school, not thinking himself
able to send one son to college without
injury to his other children. With this
view, the father agreed with the late
Rev. Dr. Forbes, of Gloucester, then
minister of North Brookfield, to fit Ezra
for college by the time he should be
twenty-one years of age, and to have
him labor during the time sufficiently
to pay for his instruction, clothing and
books.

But when fitted for college, the son
could not be contented with teaching,
which he had tried the preceding winter.
He had early manifested a desire for
learning, and could not be satisfied with-
out a public education. Always inclined
to notice ministers, and frequently at-
tempting, when only five or six years
old, to imitate them by preaching, now
that he had become a professor of re-
ligion he had an ardent desire to be a
preacher of the gospel. He had to en-
counter great difficulties, but, through a

1 This sketch was written for the Social Circle,
a club in Concord now more than a century old,
and said to be the lineal descendant of the Com-
mittee of Safety in the Revolution. Mr. Emerson
was a member for many years, and greatly valued
its weekly evening meetings, held, during the

kind providence and the patronage of
Dr. Forbes, he entered Harvard Univer-
sity, July, 1772. The commencement
of the Revolutionary War greatly inter-
rupted his education at college. In
1775, in his senior year, the college
was removed from Cambridge to Con-
cord. The studies were much broken
up. Many of the students entered the
army, and the class never returned to
Cambridge. There were an unusually
large number of distinguished men in
this class of 1776 : Christopher Gore,
Governor of Massachusetts and Senator
in Congress ; Samuel Sewall, Chief Jus-
tice of Massachusetts ; George Thacher,
Judge of the Supreme Court; Royal
Tyler, Chief Justice of Vermont ; and
the late learned Dr. Prince, of Salem.

Mr. Ripley was ordained minister of
Concord, November 7, 1778. He mar-
ried, November 16, 1780, Mrs. Phoebe
(Bliss) Emerson, then a widow of thirty-
nine, with five children. They had three
children: Samuel, born May 11, 1783 ;
Daniel Bliss, born August 1, 1784 ;
Sarah, born April 8, 1789. He died
September 21, 1841.

To these facts, gathered chiefly from
his own diary, and stated nearly in his
own words, I can only add a few traits
from memory.

He was identified with the ideas and
forms of the New England Church,
which expired about the same time with
him, so that he and his coevals seemed
the rear-guard of the great camp and
army of the Puritans, which, however
in its last days declining into formalism,
in the heyday of its strength had planted
and liberated America. It was a pity

winter, at the houses of the members. After the
death of Dr. Ripley, an early member, and con-
nected with him by marriage, Mr. Emerson was '
asked to prepare the customary memoir for the
Club-Book.

1883.]

Ezra Ripley, D.D.

593

that his old meeting-house should have
been modernized in his time. I am sure
all who remember both will associate his
form with whatever was grave and droll
in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted,
square - pewed meeting-house, with its
four iron-gray deacons in their little box
under the pulpit, — with Watts's hymns,
with long prayers, rich with the diction
of ages, and not less with the report
like musketry from the movable seats.
He and his contemporaries, the old New
England clergy, were believers in what
is called a particular providence, — cer-
tainly, as they held it, a very particu-
lar providence, — following the narrow-
ness of King David and the Jews, who
thought the universe existed only or
mainly for their church and congrega-
tion. Perhaps I cannot better illustrate
this tendency than by citing a record
from the diary of the father of his pre-
decessor,1 the minister of Maiden, writ-
ten in the blank leaves of the almanac
for the year 1735. The minister writes
against January 31st, " Bought a shay
for 27 pounds, 10 shillings. The Lord
grant it may be a comfort add blessing
to my family." Jn March following
he notes, " Had a safe and comfort-
able journey to York." But, April
24th, we find, " Shay overturned, with
my wife and I in it, yet neither of us
much hurt. Blessed be our gracious
Preserver. Part of the shay, as it lay
upon one side, went over my wife, and
yet she was scarcely anything hurt.
How wonderful the preservation." Then
again, May 5th : " Went to the beach
with three of the children. The beast,
being frightened when we were all out
of the shay, overturned and broke it.
I desire (I hope I desire it) that the
Lord would teach me suitably to repent
this providence, to make suitable re-
marks on it, and to be suitably affected
with it. Have I done well to get me a
shay ? Have I not been proud or too
fond of this convenience ? Do I exer-

l Rev. Joseph Emerson.
YOL. LII. — NO. 313. 38

cise the faith in the Divine care and
protection which I ought to do ? Should
I not be more in my study and less fond
of diversion ? Do I not withhold more
than is meet from pious and charitable
uses?" Well, on loth May we have
this : " Shay brought home ; mending
cost thirty shillings. Favored in this
respect beyond expectation." 1 6th May :
"My wife and I rode together to Rum-
ney Marsh. The beast frighted several
times." And at last we have this rec-
ord, June 4th : " Disposed of my shay
to Rev. Mr. White."

The same faith made what was strong
and what was weak in Dr. Ripley and
his associates. He was a perfectly sin-
cere man, punctual, severe, but just and
charitable ; and if he made his forms
a strait-jacket to others, he wore the
same himself all his years. Trained in
this church, and very well qualified by
his natural talent to work in it, it was
never out of his mind. He looked at
every person and thing from the paro-
chial point of view. I remember, when
a boy, driving about Concord with him,
and in passing each house he told the
story of the family that lived in it, and
especially he gave me anecdotes of the
nine church members who had made a
division in the church in the time of his
predecessor, and showed me how every
one of the nine had come to bad fortune
or to a bad end. His prayers for rain
and against the lightning, " that it may
not lick up our spirits ; " and for good
weather; and against sickness and in-
sanity, " that we have not been tossed
to and fro until the dawning of the day,
that we have not been a terror to our-
selves and others," are well remembered ;
and his own entire faith that these pe-
titions were not to be overlooked, and
were entitled to a favorable answer.
Some of those around me will remem-
ber one occasion of severe drought in
this vicinity, when the late Rev. Mr.
Goodwin offered to relieve the doctor
of the duty of leading in prayer ; but

594

Ezra Ripley, D. D.

[November,

the doctor suddenly remembering the
season, rejected his offer with some
humor, as with an air that said to all
the congregation, " This is no time for
you young Cambridge men ; the affair,
sir, is getting serious. I will pray my-
self." One August afternoon, when I
was in his hayfield helping him with his
man to rake up his hay, I well remem-
ber his pleading, almost reproachful
looks at the sky, when the thunder gust
was coming up to spoil his hay. He
raked very fast, then looked at the cloud,
and said, " We are in the Lord's hand ;
mind your rake, George ! We are in the
Lord's hand ; " and seemed to say, " You
know me ; this field is mine, — Dr.
Ripley's, thine own servant ! "

He used to tell the story of one of
his old friends, the minister of Sudbury,
who, being at the Thursday lecture in
Boston, heard the officiating clergyman
praying for rain. As soon as the ser-
vice was over, he went to the petitioner,
and said, " You Boston ministers, as
soon as a tulip wilts uader your win-
dows, go to church and pray for rain,
until all Concord and Sudbury are un-
der water." I once rode with him to a
house at Nine Acre Corner, to attend
the funeral of the father of a family.
He mentioned to me on the way his
fears that the oldest son, who was now to
succeed to the farm, was becoming in-
temperate. We presently arrived, and
the doctor addressed each of the mourn-
• ers separately: "Sir, I condole with
you." " Madam, I condole with you."
" Sir, I knew your great-grandfather.
When I came to this town, your great-
grandfather was a substantial farmer in
this very place, a member of the church,
and an excellent citizen. Your stands

father followed him, and was" a virtuous
man. Now your father is to be carried
to his grave, full of labors and virtues.
There is none of that large family left
but you, and it rests with you to bear
up, the good name and usefulness of
your ancestors. If you fail, Ichabod,

the glory is departed. Let us pray."
Right manly he was, and the manly
tiling he could always say. I can re-
member a little speech he made to me,
wjien the last tie of blood which held
me and my brothers to his house was
broken by the death of his daughter.
He said on parting, "I wish you and
your brothers to come to this house as
you have always done. You will not
like to be excluded ; I shall not like to
be neglected."

When " Put " Merriam, after his re-
lease from the state prison, had the ef-
frontery to call on the doctor as an old
acquaintance, in the midst of general
conversation Mr. Frost came in, and the
doctor presently said, " Mr. Merriam,
my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost,
has come to take tea with me. I re-
gret very much the causes (which you
know very well) which make it impos-
sible for me to ask you to stay and
break bread with us." With the doc-
tor's views, it was a matter of religion
to say thus much. He had a reverence
and love of society, and the patient, con-
tinuing courtesy, carrying out every re-
spectful attention to the end, which
marks what is called the manners of
the old school. His hospitality obeyed
Charles Lamb's rule, and " ran line to
the last." His partiality for ladies was
always strong, and was by no means
abated by time. He claimed privilege
of years, was much addicted to kissing,
spared neither maid, wife, nor widow,
and, as a lady thus favored remarked to
me, " seemed as if he was going to make
a meal of you."

He was very credulous, and as he was
no reader of books or journals he knew
nothing beyond the columns of his week-
ly religious newspaper, the tracts of his
sect, and perhaps the Middlesex Yeo-
man. He was the easy dupe of any
tonguey agent, whether colonization ist,
or anti- papist, or charlatan of iron
combs, or tractors, or phrenology, or
magnetism, who went by. At the time

1883.]

Ezra Ripley, D. D.

595

when Jack Downing's letters were in
every paper, he repeated to me at table
some of the particulars of that gentle-
man's intimacy with General Jackson,
in a manner that betrayed to me at once
that he took the whole for fact. To un-
deceive him, I hastened to recall some
particulars to show the absurdity of the
thing, as the major and the President
going out skating on the Potomac, etc.
" Why," said the doctor, with perfect
faith, " it was a bright moonlight night; "
and I am not sure that he did not die in
the belief in the reality of Major Down-
ing. Like other credulous men, he was
opinionative, and, as I well remember,
a great browbeater of the poor old fa-
thers who still survived from the 19th
of April, to the end that they should tes-
tify to his history as he had written it.

He was a man so kind and sympa-
thetic, his character was so transparent
and his merits so intelligible to all ob-
servers, that he was very justly appre-
ciated in this community. He was a
natural gentleman : no dandy, but court-
ly, hospitable, manly and public-spirit-
ed ; his nature social, his house open to
all men. We remember the remark
made by the old farmer, who used to
travel hither from Maine, that no horse
from the Eastern country would go by
the doctor's gate. Travelers from the
West and North and South bear the
like testimony. His brow was serene
and open to his visitor, for he loved
men, and he had no studies, no occupa-
tions, which company could interrupt.
His friends were his study, and to see
them loosened his talents and his
tongue. In his house dwelt order and
prudence and plenty. There was no
waste and no stint. He was open-
handed and just and generous. Ingrati-
tude and meanness in his beneficiaries
did not wear out his compassion ; he
bore the insult, and the next day his
basket for the beggar, his horse and
chaise for the cripple, were at their
door. Though he knew the value of a

dollar as well as another man, yet he
loved to buy dearer and sell cheaper
than others. He subscribed to all char-
ities, and it is no reflection on others to-
day that he was the most public-spirited
man in the town. 0 The late Dr. Gardi-
ner, in a funeral sermon on some parish-
ioner whose virtues did not readily come
to mind, honestly said, " He was good
at fires." Dr. Ripley had many virtues,
and yet all will remember that even in
his old age, if the tire-bell was rung, he
was instantly on horseback, with his
buckets and bag.

He showed even in his fireside dis-
course traits of that pertinency and judg-
ment, softening ever and anon into ele-
gancy, which make the distinction of
the scholar, and which under better dis-
cipline might have ripened into a Bent-
ley or a Person. He had a foresight,
when he opened his mouth, of all that
he would say, and he marched straight
to the conclusion. In debate in the ves-
try or the Lyceum, the structure of his
sentences was admirable; so neat, so
natural, so* terse, his words fell like
stones ; and often, though quite uncon-
scious of it, his speech was a satire on
the loose, voluminous, draggle-tail pe-
riods of other speakers. He sat down
when he had done. A man of anec-
dote, his talk in the parlor was chiefly
narrative. We remember the remark
of a gentleman who listened with much
delight to his conversation at the time
when the doctor was preparing to go to
Baltimore and Washington, that " a man
who could tell a story so well was
company for kings and John Quincy
Adams."

Sage and savage strove harder in him
than in any of my acquaintances, each,
getting the mastery by turns, and pretty
sudden turns : " Save us from the ex-
tremity of cold and these violent sud-
den changes : " " The society will meet
after the Lyceum, as it is difficult to
bring people together in the evening, —
and no moon." "Mr. N. F. is dead,

596

Ezra Ripley, D. D.

[November,

and I expect to hear of the death of Mr.
B. It is cruel to separate old people
from their wives in this cold weather."

With a very limited acquaintance with
books, his knowledge was an external
experience, an Indian wisdom, the ob-
servation of such facts as country life
for nearly a century could supply. He
watched with interest the garden, the
field, the orchard, the house and the
barn, horse, cow, sheep and dog, and all
the common objects that engage the
thought of the farmer. He kept his eye
on the horizon, and knew the weather
like a sea-captain. The usual expe-
riences of men, birth, marriage, sick-
ness, death, burial ; the common temp-
tations ; the common ambitious ; — he
studied them all, and sympathized so
well in these that he was excellent com-
pany and counsel to all, even the most
humble and ignorant. With extraordi-
nary states of mind, with states of en-
thusiasm on enlarged speculation, he
had no sympathy, and pretended to none.
He was sincere, and kept to his point,
and his mark was never reniote. His
conversation was strictly personal, and
apt to the party and the occasion. An
eminent skill he had in saying difficult
and unspeakable things ; in delivering
to a man or a woman that which all
their other friends had abstained from
saying, in uncovering the bandage from
a sore place, and applying the surgeon's
knife with a truly surgical spirit. Was
a man a sot, or a spendthrift, or too long
time a bachelor, or suspected of some
hidden crime, or had he quarreled with
his wife, or collared his father, or was
there any cloud or suspicious circum-
stances in his behavior, the good pastor
knew his way straight to that point, be-
lieving himself entitled to a full expla-
nation, and whatever relief to the con-
science of both parties plain speech
could effect was sure to be procured.
In all such passages he justified himself
to the conscience, and commonly to the

love, of the persons concerned. lie was
the more competent to these searching
discourses from his knowledge of family
history. He knew everybody's grand-
father, and seemed to address each per-
son rather as the representative of his
house and name than as an individual.
In him have perished more local and
personal anecdotes of this village and
vicinity than are possessed by any sur-
vivor. This intimate knowledge of fam-
ilies, and this skill of speech, and, still
more, his sympathy, made him incom-
parable in his parochial visits, and in
his exhortations and prayers. He gave
himself up to his feelings, and said on
the instant the best things in the world.
Many and many a felicity he had in his
prayer, now forever lost, which defied
all the rules of all the rhetoricians. He
did not know when he was good in
prayer or sermon, for he had no litera-
ture and no art ; but he believed, and
therefore spoke. He was eminently
loyal in his nature, and not fond of ad-
venture or innovation. By education,
and still more by temperament, he was
engaged to the old forms of the New
England church. Not speculative, but
affectionate; devout, but with an ex-
treme love of order, he adopted heartily,
though in its mildest forms, the creed
and catechism of the fathers, and ap-
peared a modern Israelite in his attach-
ment to the Hebrew history and faith.
He was a man very easy to read, for his
whole life and conversation were con-
sistent. All his opinions and actions
might be securely predicted by a good
observer on short acquaintance. My
classmate at Cambridge, Frederick King,
told me from Governor Gore, who was
the doctor's classmate, that in college he
was called Holy Ripley.

And now, in his old age, when all the
antique Hebraism and its customs are
passing away, it is fit that he too should
depart, — most fit that in the fall of laws
a loyal man should die.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

597

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE HEBREW TRADITIONS.

THERE has been of late years a great
increase of interest in the history and
literature of ancient Israel. If the
Old Testament is less studied than in
former times as an authority in religious
doctrine, as a book among books it is
studied more than ever. In Holland,
especially, this revival of interest has
been most marked. A whole new school
of Dutch scholars, with Dr. A. Kuenen
at their head, have been subjecting the
Hebrew books to almost microscopic ex-
amination and criticism. Their endeav-
or has been to discover the real date,
character, and authority of those books,
and so to make out the actual course of
the history of Israel. To this task they
have brought rich resources of learning,
and minds at once acute and singular-
ly free from theological prepossessions.
The result has been that they have ar-
rived with striking unanimity at a series
of conclusions as to the age of the ear-
lier portions of the Bible, which they
believe must almost revolutionize the
hitherto accepted ideas of the ancient
Hebrew monotheism. It is the object
of this article not to gainsay their critical
conclusions, but to show that they do not
involve any such revolution. There is
another element in the problem, which
seems to have been hardly noticed, —
tradition. Let this have its due weight,
and then whatever dates be assigned to
the written records, yet the great names,
events, and religious significance of that
wonderful history will remain substan-
tially unaffected.

In order to make the question at issue
clear; note, first, wherein has been sup-
posed to lie the value of the earlier Bi-
ble histories ; and secondly, exactly how
this is supposed to be affected by the
new criticism.

The value of those earlier narratives,
then, — I speak of it, of course, simply

in relation to historical studies, — lay
in their giving the story of a very an-
cient and remarkable outgrowth of com-
paratively pure religion. According to
them, the Jewish people had their very
origin as a separate nationality in a lit-
erally " new departure " of monotheism
under Abraham. It is not without cling-
ing elements of the heathenism round,
yet for that early age it stands out in
marvelous elevation. That monotheism
continues, though gradually weakening,
through successive generations of his de-
scendants : they almost lose it in Egypt,
where they sink into a pariah class of
forced laborers ; it is revived, almost re-
instituted, with a nobler purity and pow-
er than ever by Moses, their great lead-
er, lawgiver, and prophet, who, if the
later Jewish ideas of him were true,
was the loftiest religious teacher of the
ancient world. After him come dark and
broken centuries, during which the He-
brews are constantly falling away from
the religion of Abraham and Moses into
all kinds of home and foreign idola-
tries : but still, from time to time, they
are recalled to it ; the old monotheism
is lifted up again, and restored ; and at
last, in the course of ages, the disunited
tribes become a nation, the worship of
the one God a settled, fervent, national
religion, and out of that religion come
the noble utterances of the prophets,
the long-accumulating treasures of the
Psalms, and ultimately the perfect flow-
er of Christ and Christianity. All this
idea of the earlier Hebrews has rested
not on any extreme theory of the Pen-
tateuch and historical books being in-
spired, but simply on the belief in their
being genuine old-world chronicles : in
parts dating, as written records, from
the very time of Moses ; and through
traditions, virtually indorsed ^by him,
reaching back much earlier still. Thus

598

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions. [November,

it was believed that we had, in fairly
trustworthy history, at least the main
personal and religious facts of that re-
markable line of monotheistic develop-
ment from Abraham downwards.

Now the new criticism of Kuenen
and his collaborateurs shows that the
Hebrew books containing the story of
those earlier ages are not, in their pres-
ent form, nearly so old as used to be
supposed. Deuteronomy is referred to
about 620 B. c. ; the rest of the Penta-
teuch to the time of Ezra, B. c. 458. In
place of the heretofore accepted idea of
Scripture precedence : (1) the Penta-
teuch with the histories, (2) the Psalms,
(3) the prophecies, it is maintained that
the true order is : earliest, the proph-
ecies ; secondly, the Pentateuch ; third,
and latest, the Psalms. The earliest real
records that we have are the earlier
prophets — Amos, Hosea, Micah, and
the first part of Isaiah — dating from
the eighth century B. c. This prophetic
era, therefore, they maintain, gives us our
first contemporaneous evidence of He-
brew monotheism. It is, in itself, quite
a respectable antiquity, but still it does
not bring us within five centuries of
Moses ; while as for Abraham, if there
can now be supposed ever to have been
a man of that name, he lies away back
in the nebulous distances of a thousand
years. Here comes in the practical ef-
fect of the common idea that oral tradi-
tion must necessarily be hazy and un-
reliable. Having relegated everything
prior to the prophetic era to the rank of
tradition, Kuenen regards all that tra-
ditional period as being therefore vir-
tually without history. A few of the
greater names and events he admits as
having probably survived in the nation-
al memory, for example, that the Israel-
ites did come out of Egypt, and that
Moses was the leader of that exodus ;
but as for any earlier personages, the
patriarchs and Abraham, he regards
them as wholly mythical. What is more
important, however, is that the whole

religious character of those traditions
prior to the prophetic era is to be ig-
nored, or set aside as merely a later
gloss. The eighth century B. c. was the
stand-point from which the earlier his-
tory was written, and the ideas per-
vading that history can be only the
ideas of the century which composed
it. All that tone of monotheism, that
pervading monotheistic meaning, giving
the impetus to Abraham's migration and
to Moses' leadership, is merely the retro-
spective coloring infused by the reform-
ing prophets of King Josiah's time, or
the priestly lawgivers around Ezra.
That struggling monotheism of the past
thus cleared away, Kuenen constructs
his theory of the development of Is-
raelitish religion so as to lead up, as he
conceives, more naturally to the state of
things disclosed by the prophetic writ-
ings. Those writings show a gross and
general polytheism on the part of the
people, with only the prophets earnestly
contending against it ; and his theory is
that, in fact, Israel had never previously
known anything but polytheism, and
was only then for the first time emerg-
ing from it. So, the history of what we
are accustomed to regard as the pecul-
iar faith of Israel begins only with the
prophets ; and if we would look still
further back, it must be by picturing to
ourselves not a far earlier dayspring of
comparatively pure religion, but simply
rude sun-god and sky-god worships, and
dark idolatries shading back into un-
broken night.

With regard to the definite conclu-
sions of this new criticism, so far as
they relate to the age and order of the
various Hebrew books I have nothing to
object. I am doubtful, indeed, whether its
expounders give quite sufficient weight
to what is really part of their own
argument, namely, that some of tliose
historical books, though of late compila-
tion as they stand, are actually made up
of various and possibly much more an-
cient literary fragments ; but, with this

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

599

possible exception, I can only bow be-
fore their marvelously minute scholar-
ship and perfect honesty, and do not feel
able — indeed, do not wish — to gain-
say their critical decisions. Let it be
that we have no written record prova-
bly earlier than the prophetic era, the
eighth century B. c. But even if this
be so, and if all the earlier story is only
tradition, still the question remains,
What is the value of those traditions,
and what reliance can be placed upon
them ? It is here that I venture to think
Professor Kuenen's method is open to
some reconsideration.

In a recent number of the Atlantic
Monthly I have drawn attention to the
general subject of the part which tradi-
tion played in the ancient world.1 It
seems to have been curiously overlooked
that oral tradition, prior to the inven-
tion, or common use, of writing, filled
an entirely different place, and therefore
was an entirely different thing from
what it is now. In our modern days
it is an accident, a mere uncertain re-
mainder of things which have not been
forgotten ; but prior to writing, tradi-
tion was an instrument, a purposed and
often carefully disciplined and guard-
ed method of keeping in mind those
things which a people wanted remem-
bered, and wanted truly remembered.
I do not maintain that any absolute
canon can be established of the trust-
worthiness of all ancient tradition ; but
I showed that memory is perfectly ca-
pable of retaining and handing down
narratives of almost any length and any
minuteness of names and details ; and
so I think it must be recognized that,
among peoples who seem to have regard-
ed their traditions as sacred or precious,
and to have taken some deliberate care
in their transmission, especially where
they have been transmitted in fixed and
stereotyped forms, they approach the
quality of actual records, and may be

i The Trustworthiness of Early Tradition, in
The Atlantic for July, page 158.

trusted a long way back for the main-
lines of history.

Now all this involves a kind of in-
quiry with regard to the Hebrew tradi-
tions into which Professor Kuenen does
not appear to have at all entered. He
has concentrated his study upon the
question when the Hebrew historical
records begin ; and finding, as he be-
lieves, nothing earlier than the eighth-
century prophets, he says, There, then,
we must take our stand ; that is the ear-
liest point of knowledge. All prior to
that is mere story, legend, hearsay. As
to these he does not discriminate, or
even attempt to do so. Tradition with
him is tradition. He does not recog-
nize any difference between that of the
nineteenth century after Christ and that
of the nineteenth century before Christ.
He says distinctly that " a century was
a hundred years then " — that is, in ref-
erence to the survival of national recol-
lections — " as it is now ; " and as if to
prevent any possible mistake about his
meaning, he adds an instance of its ap-
plication, which I must again quote :
" The oldest accounts of the Mosaic
time were as far removed from Israel's
lawgiver as we Dutchmen are from the
beginning of the Hoek and Kabeljauw
quarrels. Suppose that we knew of the
latter only by tradition, which had never
been committed to writing up to this
time: should we have the boldness to
trust ourselves to the historian who now
wrote them for the first time, as a safe
guide ? " 2 So that, in fact, this whole
field of inquiry into the special quality
of the Hebrew traditions remains to be
examined. It has not only to be asked
at what point we pass beyond the bounds
of history, — let us suppose that settled,
but when we enter on the traditional re-
gion, — Of what kind are the traditions ?
Are there any marks of special value
having been set upon particular elements
in them ? Are there any indications of

2 The Religion of Israel, vol. i. p. 17.

600

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions. [November,

a tendency to national self-glorification
or the reverse? Especially, are there
any signs of their having been hand*. 3
down, and at last committed to writing,
in set and stereotyped forms ? If there
are such marks, then the Hebrew tradi-
tions must not be brushed aside to make
room for abstract evolutionary theories ;
they must be treated as worthy of a large
and general credit; and while, of course,
not to be followed in minor details, and
needing careful sifting, they may be fair-
ly trusted as having preserved the great
national names, events, and changes, and
especially the larger significance of these
in the national development.

It is earnestly to be hoped that Dr.
Kuenen and his collaborateurs will rec-
ognize the necessity for this further in-
quiry, and themselves take it up. No
other critics are so competent to do so.
For myself, I cannot pretend to any
technical knowledge or ability in that
direction. Simply from my deep inter-
est in all old-world records I have been
led to this idea of a possible value, here-
tofore curiously overlooked, even in
traditions, and to some general examina-
tion of how this idea may apply in one
of those directions along which critics
and historians are so carefully explor-
ing. But even in this general study of
the Hebrew traditions, I cannot help be-
ing struck with the presence of various
characteristics which should win for
them a very high degree of respect, as
faithfully preserving the main lines of
national history from very early times.

The first of these indications appears
in the part which genealogies played in
Hebrew life and thought; not in the
exact accuracy of those genealogies as
they now exist, — that is a secondary
consideration, — but in the evident store
which the Hebrews, set upon pedigree
and the handing down of their lines of
descent. We find this all through their
1 The Talmud says that the Jews did not leave
Babylon till they had sifted the genealogies " to
the finest ground flour." — Note by my friend,
Dr. Gustav GottLeil, the learued Rabbi of New

historical times ; in fact, every one knows
that it has always been one of the most
marked characteristics of the Jews.
Now such characteristics do not grow up
to order, or suddenly. Certainly, they
do not begin with the invention or use
of writing. The genealogies which we
find Jewish writers so carefully treas-
uring and comparing l as soon as they
begin to write history tell, as clearly as
the fossil remains of some early geologic
period, of one of the main interests of
their prehistoric time.

Nor is this general inference in any
degree weakened by finding that the
genealogies by no means always agree.
Genealogies in historic times are con-
stantly found to have most curious dis-
crepancies and difficulties. There are
probably not half a dozen pedigrees,
even of the greatest English families,
reaching back to the Norman Conquest,
that do not present quite as irreconcil-
able perplexities as any of the Jewish
lines preserved in the Bible. But there
is no real uncertainty about the main
names in those great English pedigrees ;
only as to where exactly they belong.
So it is surely fair to believe that the
Jews had from immemorial times hand-
ed down the main links in their great
chains of descent, with something of the
same singular and reverent care with
which we find those chains regarded as
soon as we come upon them in actual
history.

But here we are met by a consider-
ation on which great stress is laid by
Kuenen and others as at once fatal to
any idea of those earlier genealogies be-
ing genuine. The persons composing
them are all " progenitors of tribes ; " 2
therefore it is taken for granted, almost
•as of course, that they cannot have been
real historical personages. But why
does this follow ? "We are told that the
Hebrews in the beginning were one of

York, who has kindly gone over the general argu-
ment with me, and given me various confirmatory
details to strengthen its force.

2 The Religion of Israel, vol. i. p. 109.

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

601

those nomadic tribes of which we have
the analogue, perhaps the actual repre-
sentation, in some of the Arab races of
the present day. I turn, then, to Pal-
grave's Arabia, — about the best author-
ity on the subject, — and find him writ-
ing thus : " Arab nationality, thus far like
that of the historical Jew or the High-
lander, is, and always has been from the
very earliest times, based on the divis-
ions of families and clans." These clans
are generally divided into two branches :
one settled down as " townsmen or
peasants ; " the other still remaining
pastoral and nomadic. And here is the
significant thing: it is the nomadic por-
tions of the tribes which, on the matter
of " family demarkation," " continue to
be the faithful depositories of primeval
Arab tradition, and constitute a sort of
standard rule for the whole nation.
Hence, when genealogical doubts and
questions of descent arise, as they often
do, among the fixed inhabitants or
' dwellers in brick,' recourse is often
had to the neighboring Bedouins for a
decision unattainable in the complicated
records of town life ; whereas the living
Gwillym of the desert can readily ex-
plain every quartering and surcharging
of Arab nobility." 1 The names of the
Arab tribes to this day retain the mark
of this family origin. They are all like
" the children of Israel." " Beni Tagh-
leb," " Beni 'Abs," " Benoo Kahtan,"
" Benoo Hajar," " Beni Tai," are a few
of the names one comes across in a few
pages. Why should it be any way in-
credible that these preserve the fossil
record of real tribal progenitors from
some far-back period when this or that
son of the original family split off, and
went apart with his own little clan of
wives, children, and slaves ? I do not
for a moment argue that the generations
of the patriarchal times, from Moses
back to Abraham, are preserved with
minute accuracy ; but certainly all Arab

1 Abridged from Central and Eastern Arabia.
By William Gifiord Palgrave. Vol. i. p. 35.

analogy confirms the general truthlike-
ness of such generations, such tribal
origins, and such carefully preserved
name-marks of ancestral separation ; and
therefore, if the Hebrew traditions are
otherwise, in the main, natural, there is
nothing in the fact of their chief men
being " progenitors of tribes " to hinder
their being accepted as fairly outlining
a real national descent, and embalming
its most memorable personalities.

While thus the extreme stress laid
upon genealogical matters by the He-
brews, as among the Arabs of to-day,
gives a fair presumption that they have
correctly preserved at least the personal
framework of their history, we have to
look in another direction to gather the
spirit in which that framework has been
fitted up. It might well have been that
the great names of their past should be
preserved, and yet that the stories at-
taching to those names had been so ex-
aggerated as to be historically worthless.
But is this the case ? The Hebrew tra-
ditions themselves supply the answer.
One has only to compare them with,
for example, the Greek traditions of
the heroic age to become conscious of a

certain modest, realistic, almost prosaic
quality pervading them. One curious
element of exaggeration comes in, as if
it were impossible for even the most so-
ber-minded people of antiquity to keep
entirely free from it, — I mean the great
ages of the primeval time. Yet even
those five, or six, or eight hundred years
are modest compared with the millen-
niums and reons by which Persian and
Hindoo mythology lengthened out the
retrospect towards the origin of all
things. This is almost the sole element
of glorifying exaggeration in the He-
brew traditions. Even in their furthest
past, away beyond what can be called
tradition, in the evidently mythical
period, we do not find them conceiving
of any twilight age of demigods. The
one tiny fragment of that kind of my-
thology — that about the " sons of God "

602

The Trustivorthiness of the Hebrew Traditions. [November,

taking wives " of the daughters of men "
— conies in like a bowlder from an alto-
gether different stratum, and by its very
contrast only brings into clearer relief
the simple liumanness of the Hebrew
thought of the beginnings of our race.
But it is when we come to the traditions
proper, from the time of Abraham down,
that this quality appears most striking-
ly. That great figure of their ancestor,
with his little clan (three hundred and
eighteen men all told), living in his tent,
moving away from his own laud with
his flocks and herds, — there is a marked
absence of anything like heroic glorifi-
cation in the earlier traditions about
him. More recent Jewish legends mag-
nify him, as do those of the Arabs ; he
becomes, in the later view, a great con-
quering chief with an army ; but the
primitive Hebrew tradition is entirely
free from anything of the kind. So,
again, coming downwards towards the
historical period, there is a curious spirit
of candor, as compared with the general
tendency of ancient national tradition.
Their annals, handed down orally for
centuries, though with evident exaggera-
tions of numbers and colored by their
belief in providential aid, are yet on the
whole wonderfully moderate and candid.
Take the migration from Egypt, for in-
stance : did ever a people, inventing or
evolving legends about their past, place
themselves in such a miserable light, or
construct such a poor part for them-
selves ? That whole story of the Exodus
seems to have grown into a kind of na-
tional epic, through the sense of its be-
ing the crisis of their history, and through
their reverence for their great leader.
Yet how they tell of their own coward-
ice, their want of faith, their lapses into
sin and idolatry, with a stolid simplicity
curiously different from the usual tone
of retrospective imagination, and unac-
countable, except upon the supposition
that the events of that terrible deliver-
ance, in their general perspective at least,
impressed themselves upon the national

memory, and were handed down with
careful fidelity as sacred traditions which
they dared not alter. Nor is this char-
acteristic confined to those earlier times.
It appears in their later histories, also,
when they begin to touch upon those of
the great nations round. Rawlinson,
the historian of the Five Great Mon-
archies, shows how different was the
tone in their records : "It has always
been the practice in the East to com-
memorate only the glories of the mon-
arch, and to ignore his defeats and re-
verses." Again : " In the entire range
of the Assyrian annals there is no case
where a monarch admits a disaster, or
even a check, to have happened to him-
self or his generals ; and the only way in
which we become distinctly aware, from
the annals themselves, that Assyrian his-
tory was not an unbroken series of vic-
tories and conquests is from an occa-
sional reference to a defeat or loss as
sustained by a former monarch." " The
Jewish records," he says, " furnish a soli-
tary exception to this practice." Sure-
ly no one can read them without feeling
the truth of this. Defeats are narrated
almost as carefully as successes. Their
ideal king, David, is portrayed in his
guilt and his blood-shedding as vividly
as in his glory. The later work of the
Chronicler appears indeed to be his-
tory written for a purpose ; but the tra-
ditional materials, in the books of Kings,
from which it was evidently worked up,
show how different, how honest, the
earlier spirit was. In fact, it is in the
ages of written records that we perceive
the most palpable traces of exaggera-
tion ; and the more we touch here and
there the primitive tradition, the more
evidence do we find of truth-like and
almost stolid simplicity.

Thus far my suggestions touch the
trustworthiness of the historical element
alone in the Hebrew traditions. We
come to a different and more compli-
cated question in considering the great
body of legislation which is interspersed

1883.]

The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

603

throughout the Pentateuch. Dr. Kue-
nen regards this as, in the main, dating
only from the fifth century B. C. A
few chapters, which he thinks may have
constituted an original " book of the
Covenant " (Exod. xxi.-xxiii. 19), he
ascribes to the early prophetic era, the
eighth century B. c., and Deuterouomy
to the time of Josiah, B. c. 622 ; but the
great body of what came afterwards to
be called " the Law of Moses " he at-
tributes to Ezra and the priestly party,
the establishers of that hierarchical com-
munity which, after the return from ex-
ile, took the place of the nation. The
various arguments upon which he bases
this conclusion centre briefly in this :
that we do not find any traces in the
earlier times of such laws being ob-
served, nor even of their being known
to exist.

There is undoubtedly a great deal of
truth and force in this. The earlier
prophets do indeed allude to a " law,"
and " commandments," and " transgres-
sions," which imply some ancient and
traditional legislation, generally known,
though little regarded. But no one, in
reading those prophets or the historical
books, would, from what is told of the
people's life and doings, infer the exist-
ence of such a detailed system of enact-
ments as we find in the Pentateuch. It
is quite possible, in any case, that many
of these may have originated with Ezra,
or been modified by him ; but still there
are several considerations which render
it more likely that his work was not the
imposing of a substantially new law, but
the collecting, transcribing, and revising
the ancient legal traditions of his peo-
ple, which had really been what they
were called, " the Law of Moses."

It would require a treatise to discuss
the whole subject at all adequately, but
I may outline some of these consider-
ations. The first is negative : that the
mere fact that few traces of the most
characteristic laws of the Pentateuch are
found in the earlier history is no neces-

sary disproof of their having been really
given by Moses. It was one thing to
promulgate laws in the desert, and quite
another to carry them out in the restless,
unsettled life of the centuries which fol-
lowed. But apart from any such ex-
planation, this absence of any attempt to
carry out the Mosaic law is almost ex-
actly paralleled in the Vedic legislation.
The very ancient system called " the
laws of Manu " — in part, at least, made
lip from earlier codes — is of far greater
extent than the Jewish ceremonial law,
and deals with an even wider variety of
subjects ; yet Sir Henry Maine states,
as the conclusion of the best scholars,
that " it does not as a whole represent
a set of rules ever actually administered
in Hindustan, but is an ideal picture of
what, in the view of the Brahmans,
ought to be the law." l

But while thus there is no reason why
the Jewish law may not have been sub-
stantially a tradition really dating from
Moses, there are some points in it which
are strongly in favor of such an origin.
Many of the provisions and regulations
are of a kind that would have no appro-
priateness, except in a nomadic, desert
life. The minute directions for the con-
struction of a tabernacle capable of be-
ing taken to pieces and moved from
place to place ; all the sanitary ordi-
nances, for the disposal of the offal from
the sacrifices " outside the camp," and
the unclean being excluded for specified
seasons from " the camp ; " such curious
provisions as that every man must have
a " paddle " (or little shovel) upon his
weapon (Deut. xxiii. 13), — these and
many other laws surely not only come
from the desert wanderings, but .show
how minutely the traditions of (hat time
were preserved. Because it will hard-
ly be suggested that these were manu-
factured antiques, introduced by Jonah's
or Ezra's scribes, to give color to the use
of the name of Moses. Such ideas of
historical appropriateness and realism
1 Ancient Law, page 16.

604 The Trustworthiness of the Hebrew Traditions. [November,

are of a quite later, almost modern ori-
gin.

On the other hand, there are a num-
ber of the laws, and among them the
most singular and characteristic, which,
though applicable only after the occu-
pation of Canaan, could hardly have
originated after the circumstances of oc-

cupation and possession were actually
realized. Take the law of the year of
jubilee, for instance, with its elaborate
provision for the reversion of all land
to the original owners each fiftieth year.
It is urged that no mention is found
of this being carried out in the earlier
times. But then Dr. Kuenen himself
admits that it was never carried out at
all. So of the law allotting forty-eight
cities to the Levites, " which we know,"
he says, " they never possessed but on
paper." Surely it is much more truth-
like that such laws should have been
conceived by Moses, in his ideal parcel-
ing out of a land not yet occupied, than
that they should have been drawn up by
Ezra, when he was going back to a
country where the holding and transfer
of land was already, for centuries, fixed
and settled past all power of altering.
In fact, a great deal of the Mosaic leg-
islation is precisely of this character :
breathing a noble purpose ; fine, as an
ideal ; just what such a lofty, prophetic
mind as that of Moses might well con-
ceive when trying to provide for the fu-
ture well-being of his people, but not
really practicable, and not such as Ezra,
in the circumstances of his far later
day, would have been at all likely to at-
tempt.

It must be considered, too, how inte-
gral a part of a people's life is its law,
and how hard old laws and usages are
to alter. The changes which Ezra and
his party introduced in the actual life
of their time were enough to strain their
authority to the uttermost, even with
all the prestige of acknowledged though
long-neglected tradition to support them.
If they were simply innovations of his

own devising, their success is almost in-
comprehensible. Here I cannot help
paying my tribute of admiration to the
fresh and most living interest with which
Kuenen invests this whole crisis of Isra-
elitish history. He brings out with mar-
velous clearness the conflict of parties :
the fervent monotheists, with Ezra and
Nehemiah at their head, zealous for the
Jahveh worship, eager to realize their
ideal of a great religious community of
Israel, to replace that nation which had
been hopelessly shattered by exile ; the
people, stirred by their zeal, yet hardly
ready for so sweeping changes, liking
some of the old customs, even if they
were associated with idolatry, and not
seeing why it was such a sin to marry
wives from the peoples round. In fact,
he depicts the conservative forces against
which Ezra had to work so vividly that
it is impossible to help asking: Could it
be, then, that all this was a really new
law he was imposing, and that its ascrip-
tion to Moses was a mere pious ruse ? I
confess I cannot so weigh the forces of
national life and feeling. By Dr. Kue-
nen's own reasoning I am led to a con-
clusion the reverse of his. It seems
much more likely, much more adequate
to such a crisis, that Ezra was really, as
the history says (we are in the times of
history now), reviving the ancient law
of his people. What is there unlikely
in the supposition that it had come down
for centuries as the Law of Moses, re-
garded with a traditional reverence al-
most superstitious, though much of it
had never been carried out at all (any
more than the laws of Manu) ; and that
Ezra now brought out for fulfillment
provisions in it which had been over-
looked as completely as the prohibition
of Suttee in the Vedas had been over-
looked by the Hindu priests, who for
over two thousand years had been re-
peating those Vedas ?

But if the acceptance of Ezra's law
by his own people is a strong argument
in the direction of its being substantially

1883.]

The Trustivorthiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

605

an ancient tradition revived, a stronger
argument still is its acceptance by the
Samaritans. Indeed, Dr. Kuenen's own
account of the alienation of the Samari-
tans carries within itself a complete ref-
utation of his theory that " the law "
was a virtually new thing in the time of
Ezra. Mark the facts ! In 53 G B. c. the
first party of exiles returned from Baby-
lon to Jerusalem, and the rebuilding of
the temple was begun. The now mixed
population who had remained in Pales-
tine asked to be allowed, as Jews, to
join in the work. They were refused
and disowned. The refusal drove them
into separation and hostility, and gradu-
ally they became the bitterest enemies
of the Jews. Now, it was not till this
alienation had been going on for nearly
eighty years that Ezra came to Jerusa-
lem, " with the law of his God in his
hand." It was a new law, according to
Kuenen, " made known and imposed
upon the Jewish nation now for the first
time" (vol. ii. p. 231. The italics are
his). Elsewhere he calls it the "found-
ing of Judaism ; " and again he says,
" It is nothing less than a revolution "
(ii. 218). Was it likely that the Sa-
maritans would welcome such a new
law ? Even among the Jews, it aroused
fierce opposition. Some of them, led
by the son of the high priest, withdrew
in disgust and resentment, and joined
the Samaritans, their leader becoming
the Samaritan high priest, and the tem-
ple on Mt. Gerizim being built for him.
Yet, by and by, these Samaritans are
found possessing and cherishing that
very law, in the Pentateuch, and insist-
ing that they alone rightly inherit and
fulfill it ! How comes this ? How is
it, in fact, that the only Hebrew scrip-
tures they carry down in their separate
and rival priesthood, are these (alleged)
latest books, the greater part of which,
we are told, were only composed among
the Jews eighty years after the Samari-
tans had become a separate and hostile
people ? Kueuen's explanation of this

surely serious difficulty is simply this :
that " the Jews being far in advance
of them in religious and intellectual de-
velopment, the Samaritans involuntarily
became their disciples ; " and " when
the five books of Moses had undergone
their final redaction . . . they were also
adopted by the Samaritans. These
books merely required an alteration
here and there to serve them as holy
records and a canon " (ii. 250).

Surely this explanation is wholly,
almost ludicrously, inadequate. Peo-
ple do not adopt " holy records and a
canon " in any such easy-going fashion ;
at any rate, not from neighbors to whom
they have become bitterly hostile. The
very facts so ably brought out all point
to an original traditional law, already
held in reverence for ages, and which
the Samaritans carried with them into
their separate existence ; and if their
Pentateuch is really identical with the
Thorah promulgated by Ezra, then it
only shows how faithfully he must have
kept to the ancient tradition for his
transcription of it to be accepted and
used even by his greatest enemies.

I cannot claim that any of these are
entirely new points, although I think
they have been very much overlooked
in the more modern criticism ; but the
other argument that I have to adduce
is one which, as far as I am aware, has
not been in any way noticed heretofore.

Apart from all general questions as to
the characteristics of the Hebrew tradi-
tions, there is a special interest in con-
sidering whether they were transmitted
orally in their present form. Supposing
that they were only written down and
compiled, as we have them, during or
after the prophetic age, how were they
then found existing by the compilers ?
Were they merely outlines of story,
floating loosely in the mind of older
people, told by each one in his own
words, and only fashioned into their
present shape by those who wrote them
down ; or were they already existing in

606

The Trustivorthiness of the Hebrew Traditions. [November,

set, stereotyped forms, in wordings hand-
ed down from earlier times ? It is plain
that if we should find reason to suppose
that the latter was the case, that what
the prophetic or priestly editors com-
piled were fixed oral traditions however
fragmentary or imperfect, they would
have much more value for us. But
have we any traces that would lead to
this conclusion ? I believe we have.

It is well known that, in the endeav-
or to distinguish the different docu-
ments embodied in the Pentateuch, one
of the indications upon which great
stress has been laid is the name by
which, in this part or that, the Almighty
is spoken of. Thus the Elohistic and
the Jehovistic elements of the Penta-
teuch, including the book of Joshua,
have come to be recognized landmarks
of historical exploration. But the argu-
ment can be carried further. There is,
really, a third indication of the same
kind, the bearing of which has hardly
been perceived, namely, the use of the
expression, applied to God, " of hosts,"
as " Lord of hosts " (original, Jahveh or
Jehovah of hosts) and less frequently
" God of hosts." I do not mean that
this epithet has not been noticed by the
Dutch school ; it has been, but with a
curious inversion of its real bearing. In
fact, it has been taken by them to help
a theory with which it can hardly have
anything to do, while its actual signifi-
cance has been overlooked. This may
seem a strong statement to make about
critics so careful ; but let us look at
the facts. Kuenen, as is well known,
regards Jehovah or Jahveh as having
originally, and in the Mosaic period,
been merely a tribal nature-god, only in
the later, prophetic era developing into
the higher spiritual conception, when the
name came to be regarded as a deriva-
tive of the verb to be. Now he treats
the epithet " of hosts " as a survival il-
lustrative of that older idea of a God
dwelling in the sky and ruling the stars.
These views are in his own Religion

of Israel elaborated at too great length
to quote, but one of the ablest expound-
ers of the new criticism, Professor Toy,
of Harvard University, has lately given
this meaning of the epithet " of hosts "
(as a side illustration of the old heathen
idea of Jahveh as the sky-god) in lan-
guage at once unmistakable and brief.
He says, " From various expressions
in the Old Testament we may infer that
Yahwe was originally a god of the sky,
especially of the thunderstorm. This
suits the fine description in Psalm
XVIII. [of God riding upon the storm]
and many other passages, and the com-
mon Old Testament name ' the Lord of
hosts ; ' that is, Yahwe, the ruler of the
hosts of stars." Now mark how he
proceeds : " In process of time this or-
igin of the deity [that is, as the sky-god]
was forgotten ; moral qualities were as-
sociated with him, his worship was puri-
fied, and he became the just and holy
God, such as we see him in Amos and
the other prophets ; and finally he be-
came the only God."1 But both Pro-
fessor Kuenen and Professor Toy en-
tirely ignore the consideration of when
this " common Old Testament name "
first appears. In fact, it is never found at
all until the times of the prophets, when
the coarser ideas of Jehovah as a sky-
god had passed away ! Throughout the
whole Peutateuch and the continuing
traditions of Joshua and Judges the ex-
pression "God of hosts" or "Lord of
hosts " never once occurs. It is only
when we come to the writings of the
higher period that it first appears. Of
course this is no proof that when it did
thus come into use it had a high spirit-
ual meaning. It seems, in reality, doubt-
ful what its meaning was. But since it
does not appear at all until the higher
spiritual idea of Jehovah had arisen, it
seems rather gratuitous to take it then
in its most materialistic meaning, and to

i The History of the Religion of Israel, an Old
Testament Primer. By Crawford H. Toy. Bos-
ton.

1883.]

The TrustivortTiiness of the Hebrew Traditions.

607

throw that back upon the earlier ages
as an illustration of how gross were
their conceptions of God.

But there is more in this than the sim-
ple allocation of an epithet of doubtful
meaning to its right and later period.
This fact has to be noted : when the
expression " of hosts " did spring up,
it became the favorite national name
for God. In almost every one of the
prophets, and in the later historical
books of the prophetic era, — Samuel,
Kings, etc., — we find it frequently.
From the eighth or ninth century on-
wards one may fairly call it, as Pro-
fessor Toy does, " the common Old Tes-
tament name " for God. Now, is there
nothing significant in the fact that, while
it thus constantly appears in the original
writings of those prophetic centuries,
it is entirely absent from those books
which are supposed to have been simul-
taneously edited from older traditions ?
Remember that Kuenen's central idea is
that those other traditions were then
" made over," if not absolutely recon-
structed ; that the later and higher relig-
ious ideas were read into them, written
into them ; that the whole monotheistic
coloring of Abraham's and Moses' time
was thus a mere retrospective infusion
from the prophetic age. Yet, if so, how
comes it that the favorite God-name of
that prophetic age never appears in
these reconstructed traditions ? Surely
it is significant of those traditions hav-
ing really come down from a quite old-
er time ; not only so, but also of their
having come down in a settled and ac-
cepted and known form ; and, further,
of that settled and known form not hav-
ing been recast into the language and
ideas of the prophetic compilers, but
having been taken simply and unaltered
as it had been handed down, — yes,
taken with such .reverent care that in
all the processes of compiling and re-
compiling, even at long intervals and
probably by many hands, the favorite
and habitual name for God during the

ages of compilation has not crept in, in
one solitary instance.

It would be interesting to inquire
whether, in the general language of the
Pentateuch, there are to be found such
archaisms as it seems natural to expect,
if the wording of its traditions had real-
ly come down from much earlier times
than the prophetic age when the pres-
ent books are supposed to have been
written. I have not, however, sufficient
knowledge of Hebrew to enable me to
pursue such an inquiry, and, as far as I
can gather, the opinions of those who
have are curiously divided. The great
Hebraist Jahn maintained that there are
such archaisms, well marked and nu-
merous ; Gesenius holds the contrary. I
leave this question, to those who are
competent to discuss it, content to con-
tribute to the argument this instance,
palpable even to the mere English read-
er, not of a mere word-form present or
absent, but of a well-marked expression,
standing for a distinct stage of thought.

Only a few closing words are needed
to gather these various suggestions to a
point. I do not for a moment claim to
have made any complete study of the He-
brew historical books, but I do think I
have shown that even as traditions they
are deserving of a kind of study which
they have not been receiving. If fur-
ther investigation shall confirm these
indications which I have pointed out of
their ancient and careful character, and of
their having been transmitted and tran-
scribed in the very phraseology of older
times, this will not, indeed, justify the
place once given to them, and for^which
some still contend, of infallible histories.
But I think it will justify us — I think
enough is already visible to do so — in
regarding them as, in their main out-
lines, preserving the real story of the
Hebrew development. It justifies us
especially in regarding their peculiar
religious coloring, their pictures of a
patriarchal monotheism rising and fall-
ing and rising again, as being a part of

608

Charon's Fee.

[November,

the ancient tradition, and not a gloss of
the far-subsequent prophetic times. The
ages back of the prophets are no longer
a lost, unknown time, whose apparent
names and shapes of " seekers after
God " are mere myths, constructed back-
wards from the stand-point of the eighth
century. We have not to clear them
away, and construct in their place some
evolutionary theory of a race slowly ris-
ing out of gross polytheism. Instead of
this, great names, great religious move-
ments, great historic events, stand out,
far off and often dim, yet unmistakably
real, against the morning sky of Plebrew
antiquity. We may trust the large im-
pression that David left upon the na-
tional heart ; the portrayal of the ten-
derer and nobler side of his life as well
as the strangely candid traditions of
fierce and evil passions in him ; and his
historical place as the fosterer of an
established worship, and at least the
founder of its psalmody. We can be-
lieve the general account of Samuel and
of Saul. We may trace the great out-
lines of the story of the Exodus, with
the grand work of its prophet leader ;
and even if whole codes of later ages
were added on to his, there is quite
enough visible alike of his religion and
of his laws and of his mighty leadership
to leave him, as he has bven regarded
in the past, one of the loftiest teachers

of mankind. Even the stories of the
patriarchs are not incredible, having
been preserved as connecting links in
those genealogical successions which
they counted so important, and are in-
valuable to us for their marvelous pho-
tographs of the world's ancient life.
And, back of all, we can see — and,
for so early an age, in a curious life-
likeness — that father of monotheism, of
whom Max Miiller says, " We want to
know more of Abraham ; but even with
the little that we do know, he stands
before us as a figure second only to one
in the whole history of the world."
These great personalities and their main
religious characteristics abide secure.
We have indeed to feel our way to the
central facts of their history through
traditions often fragmentary and imper-
fect, and through much that is local,
exaggerated, sometimes mythical, and
which it is often a relief to be able to
put aside. But there is still enough
clearly discernible, alike of divine lead-
ings and human doings, to keep that
oldest Hebrew literature in its ancient
place, — not as any cast-iron authority
either of history or of faith, but as the
treasured stories of our faith's begin-
nings, and as the noblest testimonies
from the world's ancient 4ife to the eter-
nal verities of religion and to the deep
workings of God's spirit in man.

Brooke Herford.

CHARON'S FEE.

THIS gray sarcophagus is bare

Of chiseled grace,
And blank the walls of its recess ;
Beside it amphora and vase
Kept tears and spices. Haste ! displace
The lid and night of ages! Day
Looks coldly in on nothingness !

Yet stay !
Green-mouldered coins are ' lying there

For Charon's fee.

1883.]

Newport.

The fee unpaid,
Where wanders the unferried shade?

By dread

Perseis led in crossing ways ?
On oak-grown heights where Zeus' high praise
Erst sounded ? Where the fields proclaim
The presence of Persephone,

To flit and sigh

Anigh
And plead her queenly influence

Returning hence ?

Haste hither, Shade of vanished name !
These crusted coins await thy claim

For Charon's fee.

609

NEWPORT.

YOUNG THORBTJRN AND OLD THOR-
BURN.

PERRY discovered that there were
compensations for his accident on the
polo-field which would almost have per-
suaded him to undergo another like it.
He made a languid state progress from
his father's enormous villa on the Cliffs
to the Casino, the Club, the houses of
his friends, carrying his arm in a sling,
and accepting the solicitude, the admi-
ration, and the fervent good wishes of
many beautiful young ladies and sweet-
ly judicious mammas. Not a bad fel-
low was this Perry, by nature ; but he
had of course been spoiled as a boy, and
it was quite delightful to him to find
that he could now indulge himself with
a complete relapse into unreasonable-
ness, on the excuse of an injured arm.
He enjoyed the affectionate abasement
of his mother and the uncouth tender-
ness of his father, both of whom suffered
from a belief (and yet were pleased by
it) that they did not come up to his
standard. He also enjoyed being taken

VOL. LU. — NO. 313. 39

out on the avenue by some of the best
" whips " among the ladies, and resign-
ing himself, like a wounded veieran, to
their graceful management of the reins.
Frequently he sailed over to James-
town, to call on Josephine ; and as the
Thorburns had brought no yacht to
Newport, Raish Porter quickly saw the
advantage of placing his own boat at
Perry's disposal. All this time, how-
ever, Perry tortured his household with
the most capricious moods, and took es-
pecial pains to make Quisbrough the
victim of his pseudo-invalidism.

Quisbrough still exercised a feeble
tutorial function, although Perry had
reached the age of twenty-four. The
young man had never been to college.
As Quisbrough once confidentially re-
marked, " At first, owing to Perry's
want of appreciation for the require-
ments, Harvard would n't admit him ;
and afterwards, in retaliation, he refused
to admit Harvard." He was understood
to be pursuing advanced studies in pri-
vate, and even entertained notions of as-
tonishing the world, some day ; but his
instructor really had little to do, beyond
certain duties as secretary to Thorburn

610

Newport.

[November,

senior and the submitting himself to
Perry's persecutions. He was obliged
to go in the yacht to Jamestown, re-
maining fixed oa board while the auto-
crat spent an hour or two with Jose-
phine ; and afterwards be had to listen
to his charge's laudations of that young
woman, his sentimental anxieties, and
his peevish dissatisfaction because both
his father and Mr. Hobart opposed a
union with her : the former for the rea-
son that he wanted his vast fortune to
be joined, through his son's marriage,
with some other immense accumulation ;
while Mr. Hobart strenuously demurred
at the idea of losing his daughter's care
and companionship, in his increasing
age and ill-health.

Returning from one of these trips,
Perry insisted upon stretching himself,
propped by a pillow, on a sofa in his
father's library, a long and wide, low-
studded apartment, fitted up with much
grandeur of dark-hued wood ; rows of
elegant, unread books in solid cases —
which, viewing their dead and useless
contents, one might have considered the
catacombs of literature — and as many
other appliances for display as the archi-
tect and furnisher had allowed. The
windows were of plain glass, but were
heavily leaded in a pattern somewhat
resembling a spider-web. The proprie-
tor of this lordly place was seated at an
immense desk — the high altar of his
religion — bestowed in a capacious al-
cove ; one that could be shut off at will
from the main apartment, and had a
vaulted ceiling on which the web design
reappeared. He was extracting benefit
from his seaside leisure by reading some
cipher dispatches which had just come
from New York through his private
wire. The click of the instrument, in
charge of a private operator, could be
heard through an open door leading
from the library ; and there was so
much privacy altogether about the ar-
rangement that to any one but Perry
it would have been sacred. The only

tribute, however, that he paid to the es-
tablished cult was the incense of a cisar

which he proceeded to light.

" Why do you come in here, boy ? "
asked his father, turning his head for
an instant towards Perry. Thorburn
was so heavy a man, his head was so
cumbrous, that he seemed hardly capable
of looking at any one ; but the aspect
of shrewd and searching intelligence
marked upon the bulky, almost brutish
features was distinct, and became, by
contrast with their dull weight, rather
unpleasant — in fact, terrifying at times,
like the sudden projection of a tree or
a rock at night, which transiently takes
on the appearance of a monster's head.
" Have n't you got rooms enough of
your own ? " he continued. " I 'm busy."

" That 's the reason I came," said his
son. " I like to see you doing busi-
ness."

Old Thorburn settled himself into his
former position, as a sign of his displeas-
ure, and was soon absorbed again. Per-
ry, having waited for this, resumed:
" Besides, I Ve got something to speak
about."

" Can't hear it," said his father, with-
out moving.

" Well, it 's just as you like," Perry
answered, imperturbably. " I thought
it would be fair to tell you, but I '11 go
ahead any way, without consulting you."

" What is it ? " Mr. Thorburn asked,
in a voice as heavy as his features, — as
heavy as a sponge full of water. " Busi-
ness ? "

" No. More important than that. I 'm
going to marry Josephine Hobart."

" What ! " exclaimed Mr. Thorburn,
dropping his papers and facing round.
" After my stating expressly that I dis-
approve of it ? " He rose, walked
across the room, and closed the door
of the private telegraph-office. " Have
you spoken to her ? "

" No," said Perry, in a very comfort-
able manner, speaking with his cigar in
his mouth. " But I 'm going to, soon."

1883.]

Newport.

611

At this point, Mr. Thorburn noticed
that Quisbrough had remained in the
room. " You may leave us," he said to
the tutor-secretary. " This is private,"
and with a short, arbitrary gesture, he
indicated the surroundings, himself, and
Perry.

But Perry, seeing an opportunity to
embarrass Quisbrough, said : " No, Quiz,
I 'd rather have you stay. He knows
all about it," he added, to his father.

Quisbrough, without looking at either
of them, continued the perusal of a
small book which he had taken from his
pocket, and did not move.

" Very well, sir," continued Thor-
burn, addressing Perry, " let us have an
explanation. You must be crazy ! Why,
you have n't finished your education
yet."

" No, I have n't," the young man re-
turned ; " but, for all that, I know a
good deal more than you do about some
things."

. Quisbrough, leaning against the base
of a book-case, glanced up with a little
quirk in his thick beard, that apparently
resulted from a smile. " Perry flatters
me," he observed, " beyond my deserts."

" You know a lot more about infer-
nal impudence," Thorburn proceeded,
to his only child, " than I could afford
at your age ; and that 's about all you
have learned. It 's pretty near time for
me to give you a lesson or two myself,
and I 'm damned if I don't do it."

The heir of the estate smiled blandly,
and leaned back on his pillow. " There,"
said he, " is where you 're considerably
off your chump, if you think you can
teach me. I don't see the use of getting
excited : I only thought it would make
things pleasanter and smoother if I gave
you fair notice that I 'm going to marry
Josephine ; and that 's all there is to it."

Old Thorburn glowered at him for a
moment. The millionaire had a big
face, with long and copious side-whiskers
that inclosed a huge shaven area about
the coarsely moulded lips and chin ; and

the big eyes above his well-fed and
well-wined cheeks disclosed, even hi his
genial moments, a semi-indignant ex-
pression, as if they were outraged by
the unfortunate spectacle of the lower
face over which they were compelled to
take their observations. At present they
were more indignant than usual. " Look
here, Perry," he inquired finally, " do
you suppose I 'm going to submit to
this ? Do you really mean to tell me
that without resources of your own —
no business, no opportunities — nothing
but the hundred thousand or so that
I 've given you, you 're going to under-
take a marriage against my will ? You
can't be such a fool ! "

Perry exhaled a meditative wreath
of smoke. " Well," he replied, gently,
" I should relax my features ; I should
murmur ever so sweetly."

"What does the cub mean," Thor-
burn asked, turning helplessly to Quis-
brough, " by those idiotic phrases ?
Does he mean yes or no ? "

" On the whole," said Quisbrough
gravely, " I should say he meant yes."

" Right you are," declared Perry,
nodding his head.

" Then, all I Ve got to say," his fa-
ther exclaimed, growing redder in the
face and squaring his big body at the re-
clining athlete, " is this : I forbid it ! I
won't have it, I tell you ! And I '11 find
ways to stop it, if I want ; you may be
sure of that. Why, old Hobart is op-
posed to it, too — he told me so ; and I '11
make it for his interest to be still more
opposed. Or if that won't do, I '11 buy
the girl off, herself."

Perry leaped from the couch at one
bound. " Stop that, sir ! " he cried.
" There 's one thing you can't do, any
way ; and that is, insult the lady I mean
to marry. By thunder, if it comes to
that, I walk straight out of this house
and stay out. Take your choice." In
his excitement, he tore the lame arm
free from its bandage.

The magnate was cowed, for an in-

612

Newport.

[November,

stant. The owner of railroads and parts
of railroads and masses of the national
debt ; the great operator in stocks ; the
man who had bought up a line of New-
port steamers merely as a diversion, and
was running them in sumptuous style,
with bands of music to give a concert
on every trip ; the owner of sundry re-
vered trotting-horses ; the dealer in leg-
islatures below par ; — this individual,
I say, was frightened by a few manly
words from his useless and indolent son.
Nevertheless, he growled, after a pause,
though not without a strain of concilia-
tion in the gruff, guttural speech : " It 'a
strange that I can't have my own way
in a matter like this — a matter right
in my own family. I 've bought things
a deuced sight more important than the
obedience of a boy or the refusal of a
girl." Here a humorous contraction of
the muscles rolled his lips back in a
grim smile. " But filial affection, I sup-
pose, is a luxury that I ought to appre-
ciate, even if I get it for nothing." He
was pleased with his sarcasm, but, grow-
ing angry again, he continued : " All
the same, I won't have this thing.
Mind now, I 'm opposed to it, first and
last ; and if you persist, I '11 disinherit
you — at least for your mother's life —
and cut you down to the lowest figure,
any way you can fix it."

" Oh, I know you 're a hard custom-
er, when you 've made your mouth up,"
said Perry, returning to slang. This
indirect allusion to the unfortunate fea-
ture in his father's physiognomy was by
no means soothing. " Still, I 've got
some capacity, too, for going ahead,
when I want to. I 'm not afraid."

" Will you allow me one word ? "
Quisbrough now interposed, seemingly
fatigued to the point of somnolence.
" It strikes me, Mr. Thorburn, that you
're forgetting just for the moment our
American principles of free action, and
so forth. What you propose to do
would be all very well in the old coun-
try, but it does n't suit the genius of

our institutions. You see, you have n't
got any background for it."

" Background ! " roared Thorburn.
" What do you call this ? " He waved
his arm, and as it were swept the whole
vista of the opulent room at his critic :
the paneled wood ceiling, the luxurious
chairs, the sham old armor, and the
spider-web tracery of the leaded win-
dows. " What do you call my business
interests ? If all that is n't background
enough, I don't know where you '11 find
it."

" It 's as good as possible, in its way,"
said the secretary, whose sedate manner
of treating the question in a philosophic
mood filled Perry with satirical joy;
" but what I refer to is the social sys-
tem of the country. We need two or
three centuries of a well-defined money
aristocracy, with entail and a fixed prin-
ciple of parental authority, before a man
can expect to control his son's matri-
monial choice."

Thorburn did not fail to see that his
adroit employee, although assuming the
position of a futile theorizer, had really
opened for him the best way out of the
dispute. Besides, he was rapidly sketch-
ing, in the close-barred retirement of
his own mind, where there was neither
secretary nor private wire, a delectable
scheme for impressing his unruly off-
spring, and getting him into a "tight
place ; " and, sharp though his irritation
remained, the first move in that scheme
must, he was aware, be to conciliate
Perry.

He affected to ponder Quisbrough's
words. " Perhaps you are right," he
said, throwing into his reply a careful
reluctance. " If I wanted any tradi-
tions badly enough, I guess I could
make 'em for myself ; still, you may be
right, Quisbrough. It may be better to
float with the current in this particu-
lar case. Well, Perry, my boy," — his
demeanor softened into something like
that of a trained bear, — "I don 't like
it, but I shall try to make the best of it,

1883.]

Newport.

613

if it 's bound to happen. ' First catch
your hare,' though : you 've got to get
the young lady's consent."

"I'll attend to that," replied the
other, serenely.

" Then suppose we drop the subject.
I shall have something to say to you
by and by ; some hints that may be use-
ful. But not now : I 'm busy." Say-
ing which, Thorburn reseated himself
at his desk.

" All right. Come along, Quiz," said
Perry. " I want you to fix up this
sling for me." He began chuckling,
after they left the room. " By Jove,
the old man was bowled over pretty
easily, eh ? Had n't any idea he 'd give
in. Now we 've got to settle Hobart,
and I don't see how to do it. Do you ? "

His companion professed a total in-
ability to assist, but at once began to
cogitate upon methods of doing so. It
was not long before circumstances placed
in his hands a complete outline of the
measures to be adopted. Raish Porter,
having lent his yacht to Perry for the
excursions to Jamestown, found oppor-
tunities to carry him off now and then,
on brief cruises up the bay or along the
outer shore ; and in the course of these
miniature voyages he allowed particu-
lars to be drawn from him respecting
the important enterprises of the Orbicu-
lar Manufacturing Company. With the
diffidence of a man who is sure in the
ownership of a property that must nat-
urally excite the envy of others, he let
fall significant items about the new pat-
ents for cotton-roving machines which
he controlled ; he also alluded to valu-
able railroad appliances to be produced
by the Orbicular Company, the monop-
oly of which alone would bring in a
princely revenue. By and by he al-
lowed him to learn that Mr. Hobart was
a heavy investor in the concern ; a fact
which stimulated Perry's attention to a
wonderful degree.

" I presume," said Raish heartily, —
" since it 's no secret, — that you know

of the attacks which have been made
on the company and myself, during the
last few weeks. They were started by
one of those blackmailing commercial
papers — no account — and have been
taken up by a few others. But look
at the great dailies. The Luminary,
of course, is down on us — down on
everything, if it thinks there 's half a
chance. The Trumpeter writes one way
first, and then the other, so 's to be ' in-
dependent.' But all the rest steer clear,
and there has n't been a particle of evi-
dence produced yet. The best answer
to these slanders is the big factory we 're
putting up out in Jersey : it '11 cost us
a quarter of a million. You can't im-
agine, though, how annoying this irre-
sponsible onslaught is. Some of the
best men are stockholders, but we have
really been slightly impeded by this
thing; capital, you know, is so sensi-
tive. Still, you remember, it has been
said that ' half the failures in life arise
from pulling in one's horse as he is leap-
ing ; ' and I don't propose to pull mine
in just now. Not by a long sight ! "
Raish laughed with great good cheer, in
conclusion.

Quisbrough waited for Perry to broach
the topic, when they were alone, and
then he gradually admitted, with an
apologetic air, that since Porter was
evidently prepared to accept a new sub-
scriber for Orbicular stock, and also had
great influence with Hobart, his ener-
gies might be enlisted to break down
the old gentleman's objection to the
match with Josephine, if Perry should
put money into the new company.
Such a manoeuvre strongly commended
itself to the millionaire's son, who fan-
cied that he saw in it the means of out-
witting his father, and at the same time
conducting a profitable business opera-
tion for himself. Within a day or two,
accordingly, he arrived at an under-
standing with Porter, and agreed to
take a large number of shares in the
Orbicular.

614

Newport.

[November,

Meanwhile, he crossed the bay again,
to see Josephine. She was staying with
her father at a barren old farm-house,
which stood out in the green fields, sur-
rounded by a few stunted trees ; and as
Perry approached, he found the small
covered piazza in sole possession of the
old gentleman, assisted by a brood of
dauntless chickens who were wandering
all over it. " What a frightful place
for her to be in ! " thought the gallant
suitor, as he had often thought before.

Small Mr. Hobart, white-bearded, red-
nosed, fussy, laid down his paper, and
presented to the visitor a countenance
barred by a pair of gold spectacles, which
appeared to restrain and imprison the
choleric wearer, compelling him to ob-
serve an artificial civility. He greeted
Perry much more cordially than usual.
" Glad to see you," he said. " It shows
you have some sense, to get away occa-
sionally from that ridiculous merry-go-
round on the other side of the water,
and come over here. I 've heard some
news about you, too : - it seems you 're
beginning to make a business man of
yourself."

Perry blushed, as well as he could
with his sunburned complexion ; in part
from modesty, but still more from pride
at the first sign of success attending his
machination.

"Well, yes," he said, "I've been
talking with Mr. Porter a little about
your new company. It 's a good thing,
is n't it ? "

" Splendid, sir ! " exclaimed Mr. Ho-
bart, in a cracked voice, taking a pull
at the short brier pipe he was smoking.
" You can't do better, as a beginning.
Lucky chance for you : there ain't many
men Porter would think of letting in ;
but I 'm glad he 's inclined to give you
a block, I swear. You did n't come here
to talk business, though," the retired
merchant continued, giving a wretched
imitation of hilarity in the form of a
shattered laugh. " Josie is n't in the
house ; she 's just walked up the road,

there. I guess you '11 overtake her,
though, if you follow."

And Perry did overtake her. Exactly
what occurred need not be recited here
in detail ; but half an hour later, Quis-
brough beheld his overgrown pupil strid-
ing down to the water's edge at an im-
patient pace. He came out in a boat
to the yacht, and boarded her without
uttering a syllable ; he maintained a
rigorous silence, in fact, all the way
home. But it was not the silence of
satisfaction ; and at length scattered ejac-
ulations, like the first drops of a storm,
began to fall upon Quisbrough, making
known to him the result of the inter-
view. Josephine had not refused Perry ;
but she had put him off, had asked him
to wait. Over and over there recurred
to his mind with galling persistence the
excuses, the delays, the remonstrances,
she had made.

" I am almost sure of gaining your
father over," he had said; "and, even
without that, I should still ask you to
marry me. 1 want to take you away
from this broken-up, unhappy sort of
life you lead with him, and to place you
where you belong. Fortunately, I shall
have all the means for giving you sur-
roundings that would be worthy of you,
Josephine. It will be pleasure enough
for my whole life, only to do that. But
if I were miserably poor, I should love
you just the same, and have just the
same ambition for. you. Is that nothing
to you ? "

" Ah no, no ; you do really love me,
I am certain," she replied, regarding him
calmly, dreamily, with her dark, restful
eyes ; " and to know it, I will tell you
fairly, is a great deal to me, whether I
will or not. But " —

" Oh, you mean you can't return my
sentiments," he interrupted, hotly. " Is
that it ? "

" Don't force me to say so, Mr. Thor-
burn," she admonished him. Her bear-
ing was as serene, as unaffected and yet
queenly, standing there with one elbow

1883.]

Newport.

615

leaned on the roadside stone-wall, and
with open, wind-swept fields stretching
out on every side, as it would have been
if they had met in the most formal
drawing-room of Newport.

" I only want to know the hard fact,"
he declared, obstinately. " Whatever
it may be, I warn you I shall try to
overcome it : I can't help trying. But
only let me know. Oh ! " he suddenly
exclaimed, clapping one hand to his tem-
ple with unmerciful sharpness. " Per-
haps that 's it, but I never thought of
it. I might have known, though : you
— you are thinking of some one else ! "

Josephine desisted from her unfalter-
ing gaze, and the long eyelashes swept
downward as she answered, almost re-
peating her former appeal, " Don't ask
me. I can't say that, either."

" Then, if it is n't so," he implored,
" what is the reason ? What can be
the difficulty ? "

She bent her glance, as it happened,
towards the bay ; she turned towards
the spot where distant Newport lay in a
confused mass of huddled gray roofs on
the dim opposite shore. There was a
strange expectancy in her mien, as if
she awaited an impossible relief from
that quarter. " Mr. Thorburn," she
said, in honest distress, " I beg you
won't go on. I can't explain ; truly, I
can't. I respect your devotion and your
kindness, and I don't want to inflict any
hurt upon you; but oh, indeed, you
must n't ask me any more ! "

Nothing had availed to wring from
her any utterance more satisfactory than
this ; and so poor Perry, who had count-
ed with such assurance upon his facti-
tious advantages and his unqualified af-
fection, was left to reconcile himself to
the baffling situation as well or ill as he
could. He promptly adopted the expe-
dient of becoming reckless. As may
well be guessed, nothing was revealed
to his father concerning the setrback he
had encountered ; but the wily old ma-
nipulator noted in him signs of a despera-

tion which, however, was still temper-
ate, if one may say so. Perry avoided
the society of ladies, now, and hung
about the clubs, drinking and smoking
a good deal ; he also dropped in at the
secret and luxurious gambling - place,
politely supposed not to exist, where
Stillman Ware often sought diversion.
One day old Thorburn summoned him,
being ready to ignite the train he had
laid.

" I see you are restless," he said,
" and I think I can guess why. Of
course it 's natural you should feel the
responsibilities of the line you are tak-
ing. You need more money than you 've
got, and you don't know how to make
it."

" No, I suppose I don't know much
about that," said Perry, amused to think
what a surprise he would give the old
gentleman with his manufacturing-stock,
by and by.

" Well, this is what I referred to, the
other day — hints I wanted to give.
You have n't considered my feelings nor
obeyed my wish about Miss Hobart ;
but I shall do you a good turn, notwith-
standing. Do you know how Trans-
continental Telegraph stands now ? "

As this was one of the most uncer-
tain among the great speculative stocks,
Perry could not say precisely ; and his
father gave him the quotation. " My
ticker," he said, " showed it at seventy-
one and three quarters, about ten min-
utes ago. I advise you to buy in for a
rise." Thorburn was exceedingly ami-
able, at this moment, but contrived als»
to make his advice as impressive as a
command.

" Is there going to be a ' deal ' ? " his
son inquired, eying him intelligently.

" If there were," said his father, " it
would n't do for me to tell you any-
thing about it. Now, I don't want you
to ask questions : I only advise you to
buy. After you have jumped in, you
must rely on your own swimming. /
sha'n't explain to you what you 're to

616

Newport.

[November,

do ; but I feel confident we shall see
Transcontinental at ninety-five, or par,
before many weeks are over. And by
the way, my boy, don't mention this to
any one, unless it be two or three of
your intimate friends."

Perry was quite captivated by his
father's conversion and kindness. He
at once sent an order to Roger Deering,
in New York, to make a considerable
purchase of Transcontinental for his ac-
count. That proceeding was followed
by a creditable impulse to show Raish
some gratitude for his service with re-
gard to Mr. Hobart ; for although mat-
ters did not yet advance any farther in
Perry's wooing of Josephine, Raish's ar-
guments had been effectual at all events
in gaining her father's assent. He had
represented to Mr. Hobart that the
cash assets, of which just then their
company stood most indigently in need,
would be furnished by young Thorburn,
provided Josephine were not trammeled
by parental opposition. Nothing could
have been more natural than that, by
way of returning this favor, Perry should
have bethought him of imparting to
Raish the priceless suggestion which his
father had thrown out. To disregard a
hint from this source would have seemed
to Porter a folly for which he would
never be able to pardon himself : more-
over, the prospect of a swift and colossal
profit was one that, in the temporary em-
barrassment of his manufacturing proj-
ect, was peculiarly acceptable. He, too,
began buying ; and somehow many oth-
er people, in Newport, in New York,
in other cities, or in simple, uncovetous
country regions, were seized with a like
inspiration at the same time. They
winged their way to the brokers for
Transcontinental, even as bees fare to
the garden for honey. As a conse-
quence, the stock went up several points
in a few days. Meanwhile, old Thor-
burn, to whose industry this cheering
circumstance was due, continued to offi-
ciate at his altar-like desk in the little

chancel or alcove off the library ; and
the tangled mouldings above his head
continued to figure the meshes of a web.
The special wire ran out from the house
like a thread prolonged from those
meshes ; it tingled and grew alive with
the quick, secret current of thought pul-
sating through it from the owner's brain ;
and the owner himself remained phys-
ically inert within, as deceptively quiet
as if he had actually been an enlarged
and improved species of spider watch-
fully presiding over those complicated
filaments.

OLIPHANT, OCTAVIA, AND JOSEPHINE.

At this time Oliphant felt all the ro-
mance of his youth returning to him.
He was thoroughly and beyond recall
in love with Octavia ; nothing that he
could remember, nothing that he could
fear or forecast, had any power to re-
strain him from his one great hope of
making her his wife. When he recalled
his first passion for Alice Davenant —
which had thus far been the single mas-
tering emotion of his life-time — it was
only to wonder at the dim in substantial-
ity, into which it now faded : he was
completely puzzled, and remained un-
able to reconcile the two sentiments.
Invariably he came back to the simple
truth that it was Octavia to whom he
looked for a realization of perfect hap-
piness ; she it was for whom he wished
to exist. Certainly, he was troubled by
a lingering tradition of loyalty to Alice ;
and the belief that Octavia also was
haunted by a theory of dedicating her-
self forever to her lost husband con-
stantly intervened to make him hesitate
about bringing his hopes to another and
a final test. But then, too, the consid-
eration would come up that Alice, so
far as the evidence went, had not found
in him the adequate companion that, for
some reason, we human beings believe

1883.]

Newport.

617

ourselves entitled to. Had she, by a
sardonic coincidence, made a fatal error
in refusing Gifford ; while he, too late,
had met this appointed counterpart in
Octavia? The conflict between these
doubts and the one certainty did not,
as we should at first imagine, depress
him. No ; it stimulated him ; the tide of
vitality flowed stronger and more buoy-
ant in him on account of them. At
moments he suffered intensely, but he
rejoiced in his suffering. At other
times his spirits rose to a point of vola-
tile gayety which they had not attained
in years. He had rapidly gained stand-
ing in the most attractive and well-
founded society of the town, as a fa-
vorite against whom no objection was
heard ; and to escape the anxieties he
felt respecting his fate with Octavia, he
insensibly gave himself up more and
more to the intoxicating festivities
which offered on every side. He had
been in the deep places of sorrow long
enough ; surely it was permissible for
him to float on the surface, now, as
much as he liked. The object of New-
port was pleasure, and pleasure suited
him perfectly. And so he came into a
better sympathy with the so-called friv-
olous world than he had ever experi
enced until then.

" Yes," he replied to one of Raish's
burly strictures, " fashionable life here
is hollow ; but since all of us are more
or less hollow, why object to that ?
Fashion is not the fruit, it 's merely the
passing flower, of human desires ; and
the special beauty of a flower is that it
isn't solid."

Mary Deering asked him if he was
not convinced that she had done wisely
in counseling him to come thither, and
he said vigorously, " Indeed you did !
Do you know how it strikes me ? I feel
as if I were one of those figures on a
drop-curtain. No matter what tragedies
have happened, or are to come, on the
stage, the drop-curtain population is al-
ways serene and soothing, and lives in a

softly colored landscape. It 's so here,
too."

It was while Perry was still laboring
under depression that Oliphant strolled
one day into the billiard-room of the old
Club, and found him there. Perry was
playing with De Peyster ; and, although
it was early in the afternoon, he had
just ordered a second bottle of cham-
pagne when our friend entered. " Here,
I '11 pay up now," he said to the waiter.
" How much is it ? " And he pulled out
from his trousers-pocket a handkerchief,
which dragged with it gold and silver
pieces that fell on the floor. Without
noticing this mishap, he dived into his
pocket again, and produced a handful of
the precious metals, while the waiter
was collecting the crumbs of wealth al-
ready fallen. In fact, everything he
did betrayed a disdainful heat of tem-
per. He stalked around the table as if
it were something he had a contempt
for ; he spoke little with De Peyster ; '
and he did n't recognize the existence
of Quisbrough, who sat in one of the
cushioned chairs fixed in a row at the
side of the room ; except that now and
then he sent him a glass of wine. The
tutor always drank it in silence, and
went on smoking cigarettes imperturba-
bly, his face subdued to a self-contained,
dryly sagacious expression. Oliphant
took a place beside him. They had be-
fore now established a pleasant and
easy-going acquaintance, and Quisbrough
had shown a willingness to accept Oli-
phant on terms almost of intimacy, for
he evidently trusted him.

" You are continuing your course of
instruction, I see," Oliphant observed.

"Yes," said Quiz. "It's decidedly
arduous. I have to cover so many
branches. Just think of a man under-
taking to be an Alma Mater, and all by
himself ! That 's what I have to do. I 'm
a walking college, which has to go wher-
ever Perry does ; and, what 's worse, I
have to be professor at the same time.
Just at present I 'm occupying the chair

618

Newport.

[November,

of billiards, you notice. Very arduous,
very ! "

After a while, Perry continuing his
proud moroseness, the two onlookers
strayed out together on the roofless
platform at the side of the club-house.
" Your undergraduate seems to be in a
troubled state of mind," said Oliphant.

"Yes; he's luxuriating in a senti-
ment, I believe," Quiz returned.

" My friend Porter has told me some-
thing about it," Oliphant at once ex-
plained. " He 's an extraordinary fel-
low for finding out things. I infer that
Perry has confided a good deal to him,
and I knew already of the attachment
to Miss Hobart. What a curious thing
all this love-making is, and the misery
people create for themselves out of
it!"

" Very odd," Quiz agreed, with sedate
humor. " It 's not a part of the pre-
scribed course for Perry — only sfn elec-
, tive ; but as he has chosen it, I 've been
obliged to read the subject up, and I
don't mind saying that I fail to master
it. If it 's a science, it 's the science of
unreason ; but if it 's an art, it 's the art
of helpless nature. Then, there are the
different conceptions of love in vari-
ous ages and countries : no one can say
exactly what the essence is, common to
all the ideas of it. Nowadays we 're
governed mainly by what Hegel calls
the Romantic view. Would you like
to hear how he states it ? " Straight-
way, Quiz hauled forth a note-book and
began reading : " ' The highest phase
of love is the devotion of the subject or
person to an individual of the opposite
sex,' — profound, is n't it ? — ' the sur-
render of his independent consciousness,
and of his individual, isolated beiug-for-
himself, which feels itself to have be-
come thoroughly penetrated with its
own knowledge of itself, for the first
time, in the consciousness of another.'
Now, does that make it any clearer ? "
He went on mumbling out words like
" abstract . . . concrete . . . individu-

alized . . . my entire subjectivity," un-
til Oliphant laughingly stopped him.

" That '11 do for the philosophy of it,"
he said.

" Oh, well, I 'm crammed with the
poetry of the thing, too," responded
Quiz, ruffling the leaves of his little
book. " The sum and substance of the
poetical doctrine is that the less you
can tell why you love, and the more you
can glory in your ignorance, the better.
Turn to index of authors, under L.
John Lilly : ' Affection is a fire, which
kindleth as well in the bramble as in
the oak ; and catcheth hold where it
first lighteth, — not where it may best
burn.' Under M., Milton, thusly : —

" ' It is not virtue, wisdom, valor, wit,

Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
That woman's love can win or long inherit.'

And, not to bore you, so it goes on ;
but they all agree that there's some-
thing very fine about love. It 's a sort
of superstition — like religion."

Oliphant became grave. " I 've been
a man of the world, Quisbrough," said
he, " but I hold on to my religion, and
it is n't superstitious ; so I can't quite
accept your remark. Love, like relig-
ion, appears to me to be a result of
faith. Our belief in the good and no-
ble traits of humanity is apt to be disap-
pointed in most cases, and by the flaws
and meannesses we discover in ourselves,
too. But when a man falls in love, he
concentrates his general belief in the
fine qualities of mankind on one person ;
he has faith that she is mainly com-
posed of those qualities ; and that faith
— as we see often enough — will carry
him serenely through life, in face of the
most glaring contradictions. Even when
he detects the woman's faults, he is fond
of them, he comes near being proud of
them, because — well, simply because
he loves her."

" Ah, you see," Quisbrough retorted,
" you come back, as I do, to the ' be-
cause,' which does n't explain anything.
And as to your faith — there 's so much

1883.]

Newport.

619

selfishness, after all, in love ! It 'a a
mutual agreement to be kind and gen-
erous, and to believe, on the distinct
ground that a full equivalent shall be
given in return. You know how easily
love turns to hate ; well, that proves it
to be selfish. But this is just the quality
that makes it so delightful to people:
the passion is merely selfishness in an
etherealized form, which intoxicates the
partaker, inverts his ideas, and makes
him think — or her think — that this
emotion which is dilating the bosom,
and so on, is a magnanimous self-sur-
render."

" But are n't there instances of per-
sons who love long after they have
ceased to receive any return ? "

" Yes ; you 're right ; but they 're
rare, I imagine. Any way, that belongs
to the higher branches : Perry will need
a post-graduate course to get so far."

At this moment Mr. Farley Blazer
appeared on the balcony. He liked to
worry himself by coming down to New-
port sometimes and living in a separate
apartment, whence he could watch his
wife following her path of glory by
means of his wealth. On this occasion
he was very much under the influence
of liquor, and was humming a song, —

" The last poor rat,
Without a cravat;
He had no coat,
And a hole in that," —

which perhaps symbolized to him his
own mental condition. He invited the
two talkers to drink, but they declined ;
and, after a few companionable remarks
of a luridly humorous nature, he with-
drew his wild beard and dull eyes from
their sight.

" There 's an example, now," Quiz re-
sumed. " That man still loves his wife,
though she does n't care a rap for him ;
and he 's paying her the costly tribute
of drinking himself to death, because
there is n't any other way to show his
regard."

Oliphant had a sudden thought of

Koger Deering ; for ugly rumors about
Mary and Atlee had been flying rather
thick of late. And then, passing from
these two instances of badly damaged
conjugal affection, his mind reverted
to the milk-and-water of Hawkstane's
kindness, which was now rapidly turn-
ing its current towards Tilly Blazer.
How could that feeble sentiment be
classed with Craig's devouring passion
for Vivian ? And then, again, could
the name of love be applied to the in-
stinctive calculations of the various
smiling, talkative little rosebuds and
the statelier belles of society, who were
able to gauge their heart-throbs by a
bank account and prospects of " posi-
tion ; " or to the moth-flights of Dana
Sweetser ?

" There are about as many degrees in
these matters," he said, " as there are
individuals. According to your notion,
though, I suppose the giving of devo-
tion with absolutely nothing in exchange
would be the perfect phase of love."

" I should call it the highest," was
Quisbrough's reply. " What is heroism
but a generalized, intense love of others,
who, perhaps, don't know that we ex-
ist ? Men lay down their lives for total
strangers whom they see in peril."

" But that 's a case of honor, or duty^
or enthusiasm. There 's no passion in
it ; is there ? "

" It strikes me there 's passion of the
finest kind in such deeds," Quisbrough
declared. " If they 're not prompted
by a sublimated, unselfish power of
love, I can see no motive in them at
all."

" I never looked at it in that way,"
Oliphant now said, yieldingly. " But I
should n't wonder if you had hit the
truth. Of course love must be an idea,
as well as a passion ; and probably most
of us don't come within a thousand miles
of comprehending the whole idea."

No doubt he meant what he said ;
but, as he walked away from the club,
he told himself that a man like Quis-

620

Newport.

[November,

brough could not really know anything
about it. His own love for Octavia, he
was firmly convinced, rose to the high-
est mark : he knew that he would do
anything for her ; he would sacrifice him-
self for her, if need were ; and, should
she be unwilling to share her life with
him, he was still capable of making his
own minister to hers wherever an oppor-
tunity offered. That .night he walked
out towards her house. In the high
slope of the roof one window was still
glowing, which he tried to suppose was
hers, at the same time that he argued
against its being so. He wandered up
and down the neighboring roads in the
rich, soft silence, feeling the moist sea-
breeze on his face, and gazing now and
then at a bank of white, inchoate cloud-
shapes that throbbed with a dim uncer-
tainty of silver light above the tardy
moon. Remote, intangible, and fair as
those were the hopes that shone down
into his midnight reverie ; but he re-
solved soon to attempt to realize them.
He was to see Octavia the next day ;
for they had made an appointment with
Craig, who wanted them to hear him
practice on the organ in the old church.
Oliphant called for her at the hour
agreed upon, and they drove to Trinity
together. She was rather pale that
morning ; the reason of which was that
she had in fact been sitting up when
Oliphant made his nocturnal reconnais-
sance, and had been thinking a good
deal about him. He was sensible of a
new reserve in her manner, which, in-
stead of warning him away, drew him
— he could not tell how — nearer, and
thrilled him with a vague exultation.
On the way she talked of nothing but
Craig and Vivian, who were still at odds ;
and it seemed that Vivian had been do-
ing all sorts of vexatious things to in-
crease Justin's discouragement : she was
flirting desperately, and defying the con-
ventionalities more than ever. She had
even committed the indiscretion of shar-
ing in a game of polo played entirely

by ladies, which had been conducted
with great secrecy, but had nevertheless
come to everybody's knowledge and
been commented on severely.

" I have decided," said Oliphant, " to
send Justin to Germany, and he will go
before the season 's out. We must get
up a reconciliation by that time."

" Oh, yes ; and sooner," Octavia re-
joined. " I Jiave n't yet told you how
anxious Dana Sweetser is to have Jus-
tin give a concert for the Drainage As-
sociation. We '11 persuade Viviam to
get his consent. Won't that be nice ?
And do you know what else I 've done ?
I'm afraid it shows dreadful duplicity
in me, but I could n't help it : I — I
told her we were all going to be at the
church to-day ! "

Octavia looked at him (they were in
the carriage) with mingled mischief and
contrition, and the effect of her glance
was greatly heightened by the bonnet
she wore, which was made entirely of
pansies, and crowned her with a simple
grace worthy of some mythical wood-
nymph. Were I to tell what Oliphant
thought of this piece of head-gear, and
how he worshiped it, I should make
him appear ridiculous to every one ex-
cepting such ladies as may have had
a bonnet just like it; but the alluring
light in her eyes, the trustful reliance
that he would respond to her mood, and
her sunshiny liveliness — faintly shad-
owed always by that reserve I have
mentioned — were of far more impor-
tance to him. What could all these
mean, unless that she resented nothing
of what he had said at the Pirate's Cave,
and that she might be induced to listen

to him again ? And so, blithely and
sympathetically, they entered the empty
church, took places in one- of the pews
where they could see Justin as well as
hear his playing, and had great enjoy-
ment of the music together. It was de-
lightful to know that one identical strain
of harmony was sweeping through them
both at the same time ; and they ex-

1883.]

Newport.

621

changed many swift looks of approval
and pleasure at particular passages.
And then, as they were preparing to go
away, Octaviu, fancying that she heard
a light step in the vestibule below, hur-
ried to a window in the gallery. Justin
was putting in the organ-stop's ; she
beckoned Oliphaut to come to her side ;
and, standing there, he saw Vivian in
the path leading out of the old grave-
yard. She had of course been listening,
unseen, to the music. She happened to
turn at the moment, glanced up, and
saw them ; and they hastily drew back,
though not before Octavia had shaken
her finger jestingly at her friend.

" You see, I knew what would be the
effect of telling her," she whispered to
Oliphant. " Shall we let Justin know ? "

"Not yet. I will, afterward," he
said.

" Very well : that shall be your part."
Octavia was as full of repressed glee
over the little secret as a child. She
laid her shut fan against her lips and
then touched it to his shoulder, in her
haste to caution him that they should
say no more, because Justin was about
coming towards them. This, to be sure,
was a trifle ; but it would be singular if
she did not perceive what influence such
trifles must have upon Oliphant. At
any rate, the effect was clear to others
when Octavia invited Oliphant, Vivian,
and Craig to dinner one evening. The
younger couple made some approach to
composing their quarrel, and did not stay
very late ; but Oliphant irresolutely
hung back from going, and finally re-
mained longer. He did not dare as yet
to come to the climax of a full avowal,
but they dropped into reflections more
or less personal, which led very close
to it.

When she was once more alone, Oc-
tavia began to wonder what was going
to be the result of such trifles, upon
her. She still felt an unreasoning re-
sentment against Oliphant, yet her mo-
ments of relenting were becoming more

frequent. Just now, as she sat by her
window, trying to read, a microscopic
insect — a winged life no bigger than a
pin-head — fluttered in, and began ex-
ecuting the craziest spirals around her
lamp, always dropping upon the page, on
what served it as a back ; whereat it
went instantly into a frantic spasm, clos-
ing with a general wriggle of legs and
wings that brought it upright again.
There was something so irrational about
this tiny creature that it acquired a like-
ness to humanity, which amused Octavia.
She stopped reading, to watch it ; but her
thoughts returned to Oliphant. " Why
should I care what he feels ? " she mused.
" He asked if I forgave him, and I said,
1 You could n't have done differently.'
Well, I suppose he could n't: another
man might have. If he is punished, will
it be my fault ? " At length, noticing
the insect again, she brushed it away
carelessly, and ended its existence.

Whether it were the insect or Oli-
phant that oppressed her conscience,
she slept ill that night, and woke with
an unappeased questioning at her heart,
still. There is, in one sense, no un-
truth : what seems so is merely the shad-
ow from some cloud of personal tem-
perament, floating between our deeper
selves and the sun of truth. The shadows
could not be without the light ; but light
does not depend for its existence on
shadow. This nullity of untruth is
what makes it difficult for us, when grop-
ing through the gradations of shadow in
our own minds, to know just the degree
of error that obscures our sight. And
so Octavia was unable to make out
whether she was quite veracious or not.

The general talk, however, of those
who kept the run of such matters was
that the affair had arrived at a point
where an engagement must soon follow.
Mrs. Farley Blazer let it be known that
she was delighted with the romantic
conjunction. Mrs. Richards said to
Mary Deering that the wedding ought
to come off during the Newport season ;

622

Newport.

[November,

and that, as Octavia was a widow, she
would probably have to be " married
in a bonuet " (and, incidentally, in a
church). Mrs. Deering, in reply, ob-
served that there was the best sort of
promise for happiness in the match :
" Because, you know, Mrs. Gifford had
such a devoted husband ; and when wid-
ows have had one good husband they
are generally kinder the second time —
to make up for past faults and get even
with their consciences. Eugene will
appreciate this in Octavia, because he
did n't have much happiness from his
marriage."

Views of this sort having been circu-
lated, Josephine came to Octavia and
asked her, " Do you know what every-
body is saying ? "

" ' I decline to be interviewed,' " said
Octavia, parting her lips in a perverse
little laugh.

" Seriously, my dear," insisted her
friend, " you ought to think about it —
you ought to think what you are do-
ing."

" Well ; and perhaps I have thought,"
Octavia retorted.

" Oh, you are in earnest, then ? "

" Did I say I was ? "

" No," answered Josephine. " But
surely " — She finished by a fixed
gaze of melancholy intentness, which
made Octavia nervous. I may add that
this quietude verging on sadness, char-
acteristic of Josephine, had been grow-
ing upon her of late. Even Oliphant
had made observation of it in the fleet-
ing glimpses he had had of her when
she came over to a ball, or a strolling
play at the Casino Theatre ; and it had
resulted that she rose upon his reveries,
now and then, mildly radiant and seri-
ous like the evening star. " I '11 tell
you how it seems to me," she slowly re-
commenced, to Octavia. " Of course I
did n't need other people to show me
that you have been drawing him on :
I 've seen that for some time. But I
don't think you mean to marry him."

" "What right have you to say that ? "
exclaimed Octavia, growing fiery.

" Why, it would be inconsistent with
all your principles — everything you 've
ever said to me about marrying again."
This was Josephine's response', and she
too gave signs of a rising temperature.

" Ah, Josephine," Octavia was swift
in retorting, " how can you let yourself
criticise me so ? Suppose I had recon-
sidered my principle ? "

Josephine did not glide into easy ac-
quiescence. " This is too bad," she said
forlornly. " I can't believe you 've
changed your mind. And yet, and yet
— oh, is it true, Octavia ? You 're de-
ceiving that man ! "

" I deceiving ? " echoed the other
woman. " What do we all do, at times ?
If I was sure I was very fond of him,
and kept back the truth, that would n't
be deceit, I suppose. And if I dislike
him for any reason, and yet treat him
well, that is n't any more deceitful. But
did you ever hear what De Musset
makes a character say in one of his
plays ? — ' Are you sure that every-
thing in a woman lies, when her tongue
does ? ' Why should I tell you this :
can't you guess how hard it is to know
one's own mind ? "

" Yes, I understand it well ! " cried
Josephine, starting up. The evening
star had lost her pensive repose : her
face was tumultuous, now, with feeling,
which she tried hard to suppress. " But
you have gone too far to be uncertain.
It is not right : I cannot stand by and
see this, much as I have loved you, Oc-
tavia. Mr. Oliphant does n't deserve
to be jilted. I came to you, hoping to
persuade you ; but, if that won't do, I
shall look for some other way to save
him. He must be told what you 're pre-
paring for him ! "

Octavia's face lighted with a singular
sort of triumph. " Then, you love
him ! " she said, significantly. " Poor
child, you have been so hasty that you
have betrayed yourself ! " Josephine

1883.]

A Nolle Lady.

623

turned away, blushing in mortification.
" Have you told Perry Thorburn so ? If
you are going to warn Mr. Oliphaut of
anything, how will it do for me to warn
Perry ? Tell me, Josephine."

There was an instant of struggle, of
effort on the part of Josephine to as-
sume a silent pride ; but the attempt
failed, and she clutched at Octavia's

hand with her own, which missed its
grasp and fastened only upon a fold of
the widow's dress. " Oh, you don't
know," she said, in a detached, uncer-
tain way. " You must n't think that
about me. And I — won't think any-
thing about you, except that I hope
you '11 be good to him. And don't —
don't speak to Perry ! "

George Parsons Lathrop.

A NOBLE LADY.

IN the year 1660 Cardinal Mazarin,
everywhere victorious, had just added
the treaty of the Pyrenees to the treaty
of Westphalia. A Spanish gentleman,
Don Luis de Haro, felicitating the car-
dinal on the repose which he was about
to enjoy, now that the season of storms
was over, received the reply that in
France one could never promise one's
self repose. " You Spaniards," said
Mazarin " may talk of it, for your
women busy themselves with love only ;
but in France it is not so. There are
three here now capable of governing or
of overturning three great kingdoms, —
the Duchess of Longueville, the Prin-
cess Palatine, and the Duchess of Che-
vreuse."

The cardinal's words were but a large
statement of the truth that in France,
in the seventeenth century, whoever en-
gaged in the great game of politics found
it necessary to take women into the ac-
count either as friends or foes. Among
these women, famous in love, in politics,
and even in war, are some whose names
are better known than that of Marie de
Hautefort. The careers of Madame de
Longueville and of Madame de Che-
vreuse read like highly colored romances,
full of stirring incident and perilous
adventure. The story of Madame de
Hautefort, if it contains less of the ex-
citing element, on the other hand pos-

sesses a Charm the others lack. She in-
terests as much by the dissimilarity as
by the resemblance of her character to
the characters of her celebrated contem-
poraries. In tracing her history we are
brought into the same period and into
the midst of the same events wherein
Madame de Chevreuse figures so brill-
iantly, but Marie de Hautefort does
not belong in an equal degree to the
political history of the time. She was
Richelieu's enemy, but never his rival ;
she did not dispute with the two great
cardinals their power or the government
of France ; she simply refused to yield
to them her liberty of mind, or to be-
tray to them her friends, and the cause
which to her was that of religion and
virtue. It is this elevation of soul which
distinguishes her from other more daz-
zling figures of the courts of Louis XIII.
and Louis XIV. Beloved as she was
by all for her amiability, her gentle and
compassionate kindness to her inferiors,
to the poor and miserable, yet her most
marked trait was her dignity and noble
pride of character.

She was born in 1616, in an old
feudal castle of Perigord, the youngest
child of the Marquis Charles de Haute-
fort, marshal of the king's army, and
gentleman-in-ordinary of his chamber.
Her father and her mother both dying
soon after Marie's birth, she was left,

62-t

A Noble Lady.

[November,

with very little for her maintenance, to
the care of her grandmother, Madame
de La Flotte Hauterive. Her earliest
years were passed in the obscurity and
monotony of provincial life, of which
the beautiful and intelligent girl did not
fail to become wearied. Certain affairs
calling Madame de La Flotte Hauterive
to Paris, she took with her the child,
whose budding graces made everywhere
the happiest impression, and her grand-
mother found no difficulty in procuring
a place for Marie among the maids of
honor of the queen-mother, Marie de
Medicis. She was fourteen years of age
when in 1630 she accompanied her mis-
tress to Lyons, at which place the king
had been taken seriously ill, while Riche-
lieu was at the head of the army in Italy.
It was here that for the first time Louis
saw Marie, or Aurora, as she was com-
monly called in recognition of the brill-
iancy of her youthful beauty.

Louis XIII., of all men in the worldr
least resembled his father, Henri IV.,
and the facile beauties of the court of
his mother and his wife hardly attracted
his notice. The modesty as well as
beauty of Marie de Hautefort touched
the heart of the melancholy Louis. He
became unable to dispense with the
pleasure of seeing and conversing with
her, and on his return from Lyons,
when his fidelity to Richelieu drove him
to banish his mother from the court, he
took from her her maid of honor, whom
he placed with Queen Anne, begging
that for his sake Mademoiselle de Haute-
fort might be treated with affection.
Anne of Austria received with sufficient-
ly bad grace the present thus made her.
Belonging to the party of the queen-
mother and of Spain, she looked on her
new attendant not only as a rival in the
king's regard, but also as an enemy and
a spy. But she, was not long in recog-
nizing her mistake. The foundation of
Marie's character was a generous pride,
half chivalric, half Christian, which al-
ways urged her to take the side of the

feeble and the oppressed ; and the sight
of her mistress, persecuted and unhappy,
was enough to engage her honor to the
faithful service of the queen. Her loy-
alty and candor, as well as the graces of
her mind, gradually won upon Anne,
until the king's favorite was equally the
favorite of his queen. La Grande Ma-
demoiselle in her Memoirs alludes to this
platonic love of Louis : " The court was
very agreeable at this time. The king's
affection for Mademoiselle de Hautefort,
whom he sought to entertain in every
way, contributed much to this. The
chase was one of his greatest pleasures,
and we often accompanied him. We
all dressed in velvet, and rode beautiful
horses, richly caparisoned. To protect
us from the sun each wore a hat adorned
with a multitude of plumes. The chase
was always directed to the neighborhood
of some fine country house, where a
grand collation was prepared, and on
the return the king took a seat in the
carriage with Mademoiselle de Haute-
fort and me. When he was in a pleas-
ant humor, he conversed agreeably on a
variety of subjects." Even had Made-
moiselle de Hautefort been less discreet,
the king's regard would have brought
with it no alarms. In the evenings he
talked with her in the queen's salon,
but his topics were chiefly his dogs, his
birds, and the chase. Nevertheless, their
intercourse was agitated by frequent
jealousies, for Louis would have liked
to possess himself of the exclusive atten-
tion of Marie. This assiduity of devo-
tion wearied the young girl, and with
her characteristic independence she al-
lowed the king to perceive it, — whence
misunderstandings and reconciliations
that did not endure long. Madame de
Motteville declares that while Made-
moiselle de Hautefort was sensible of the
honor of the king's friendship, she had
no personal liking for him, and treated
him as badly as it is possible to treat a
king. The whole court was aware of it
when one of their fallings-out occurred ;

1883.]

A Nolle Lady.

625

the diversions ceased, and if the king
came in the evening to the queen's salon
he sat in a corner, without speaking a
word. The subject of their quarrels
was most commonly the queen. Louis'
grounds of complaint against Anne
were two : one political, in that she had
allied herself with the party opposed to
Richelieu and himself ; and the other
personal, in that he suspected her of an
understanding with the Duke of Orleans,
and a wish to share the throne with him
after his own decease. But the more
the king endeavored to detach the maid
of honor from her mistress the less did
he succeed. To the cardinal the king's
sombre and fantastic humor was a con-
stant source of disquietude, and he
looked favorably upon the friendship of
Louis for this young girl, who belonged
to no particular party, hoping that her
influence might prove a wholesome and
soothing one. He was prodigal, there-
fore, of compliments and attentions to
her, even putting himself to the pains of
trying to accommodate their disputes,
fancying, in return, to gaiu Marie to his
cause. However, with the young and
ardent girl it was not a question of state
interests, but of personal loyalty ; and
regarding him as the persecutor of her
mistress, Marie rejected the cardinal's
advances and disdained his friendship, at
a time when there was hardly a woman
at the court who would not have offered
up thanks for a glance from him. Not
being able to win her over, Richelieu
set himself to displace Mademoiselle de
Hautefort from the king's regard. He
now mixed in their disputes to aggra-
vate them, and when Louis was at odds
with Marie he threatened her with the
cardinal. She mocked at the menace,
with the levity of youth and the inde-
pendence of her character. Richelieu
found means to detach Louis by bring-
ing him exaggerated reports of jesting
remarks upon the king made by Ma-
demoiselle de Hautefort in the queen's
apartments, and also by magnifying the
TOL. LII. — NO. 313. 40

doubts of the king's scrupulous con-
science as to the possibly immoderate
measure of his affection for Marie. The
rupture having been brought about,
Richelieu managed to maintain it for
two entire years. In place of Marie he
substituted Mademoiselle de La Fayette,
who was a Mademoiselle de la Val-
liere without the frailty. As the new
favorite, however, failed likewise to fall
in with the cardinal's designs, he had re-
course to his former tactics, and ended
by driving her into a convent.

Meanwhile the king had not contin-
ued insensible to the persuasions of these
two n&ble young girls, and his feelings
toward Anne had become softened. The
year 1637 was the most perilous and
distressing that Anne had yet passed
through. With but a small number of
friends and domestics she kept her se-
cluded court, into which, however, the
cardinal's vigilant eye did not fail to
penetrate. Anne was meditating some
desperate enterprise. She intrigued with
Madame de Chevreuse, then in Touraine,
and kept up a correspondence, which
was at least of an equivocal kind, with
her brothers Philip IV. and the Cardi-
nal Infanta while France was at war
with Spain. A certain La Porte, one
of the domestics employed in this corre-
spondence, and who was possessed of all
her secrets, was arrested, thrown into
the Bastille, and subjected to the sever-
est question. The queen, after deny-
ing with assurance all that was charged
against her, was driven to a partial con-
fession ; but it was necessary thatrher
declarations should tally with those of
La Porte, and, in despair of communi-
cating with him, she felt that her safety
hung on a thread. In this grave con-
junction Marie de Hautefort undertook
to aid her mistress. The proud girl, who
had never allowed herself so much as
to receive the slightest billet from a gen-
tleman of the court, set out to do what
might cost her her reputation. She per-
suaded a relative, M. de Montalais, to

626

A Nolle Lady.

[November,

go to Tours and warn Madame de Che-
vrou-e of the situation of affairs. Then
disguising herself us ;i yrisette, she issued
from the Louvre before any one \v;is
a \vuke, entered a jiacre, and was driven
to the Bastille. She requested permis-
sion to see the Chevalier de Jars, a de-
voted servant of the queen, who had al-
ready risked his neck in her cause, and
having just escaped the scaffold was en-
joying a respite from danger and the
liberty of occasional intercourse with a
few friends. Marie gave herself out as
a sister of the chevalier's valet, come to
inform his master of the mortal illness
of the former. The chevalier, •know-
ing his servant to be in good health,
hesitated to disturb himself for this vis-
itor, so that Marie was compelled to
wait for a time in the guard-room, ex-
posed to the jokes and the free regards
of the men present. Being at last ad-
mitted, she made known her errand,
which was to induce the chevalier to at-
tempt communication with La Porte, in
order to convey to him the proper state-
ments to be made to the interrogatories
of his judges. Naturally enough there
was a disposition on the chevalier's part
to decline this entanglement in new
perils, but he yielded to the represen-
tations of Marie de Hautefort and the
force of her brave example. She was
so fortunate as to make her reentrance
into the Louvre unrecognized. The
chevalier accomplished his mission, con-
triving to pierce the floor of his cham-
ber and to let down a letter attached to
a cord, with an entreaty to the prisoner
in the room below to drop the inclosed
billet in like manner to the third floor,
and thence to the fourth, wherein La
Porte was confined.

In 16M, after the advent of an heir
to the throne was announced, greater
peace and harmony in the court suc-
ceeded to the discord of the previous
years. Marie de Hautefort had now at-
tained her twenty-second year. Brought
once more into closer contact with her

in her increased beauty and charm, the
king's flame was rekindled, and their
former intimate but irreproachable re-
lations were in a measure renewed.
At this time Marie was appointed mis-
tress of the robes, with the title of
Madame in place of Mademoiselle. In
spite of appearances, Richelieu, how-
ever, was aware that the queen had not
ceased to encourage the malcontents.
He gained to his interests one of her
maids, the young Mademoiselle de Che-
merault, who became the clever spy of
her mistress' secrets. Not having an-
other Mademoiselle de La Fayette un-
der his hand at this time to balance
Mademoiselle de Hautefort, but aware of
the necessity to Louis of some sort of
sentimental distraction, Richelieu looked
about him and selected Cinq-Mar, son
of his own devoted friend, the Marshal
d'Effiat. The youth pleased the weak-
minded monarch, who found it the easier
to love him since to do so did not in-
volve the cardinal's displeasure. Hav-
ing provided a substitute, the cardinal
now openly accused Madame de Haute-
fort of treasonable intrigues, demanded
her exile from the court, and gave Louis
to choose between her and his minister.
Louis yielded so far as to consent to
a temporary banishment. On receiving
the king's command, Madame de Haute-
fort went to the royal apartment, and
begged to know the cause of her dis-
grace. Louis protested that the exile
was to be but brief and for reasons of
state alone. She replied that the fort-
night assigned as the term of her banish-
ment she knew well would last forever,
and that she would therefore take her
final farewell of his majesty. She re-
tired to an estate at Mans belonging to
her grandmother, taking with her her
young sister and brother, and also the
spy, Mademoiselle de Chemerault, whom
Richelieu thus disgraced to cover his
manoeuvres and to keep watch upon the
exiled favorite. So far was Marie from
suspecting her companion that she wrote

1883.]

A Nolle Lady.

627

from Mans to the queen in behalf of
Mademoiselle do Chemerault, toward
whom the queen's bounty, she thought,
had been but scanty. The queen's res-
ignation to Richelieu's triumph and to
the outrage upon her mistress of the
robes had not failed to wound Marie's
affection, but more than for these she
grieved to see the queen fallen below the
idea of generosity and nobility she had
formed for her royal mistress. Her let-
ter to Anne is an admirable revelation
of her character. For three years she
lived thus in seclusion, seeing only a few
friends, among others La Porte, who in
vain endeavored to warn her against
Mademoiselle de Chemerault, of whose
feigned friendship he was no dupe. The
pure-hearted Marie refused to listen to
h|£i. During this time she heard of
Scarron, of his infirmities and the cour-
age with which he endured them, and
she became, in untold ways, his good
angel : and hence the numerous verses
addressed by Scarron to Madame de
Hautefort and her sister. From her
retreat she looked forth upon the spec-
tacle of the disturbed world outside.
Once she received the present of the
portrait of the dauphin, sent by Anne
as a presage of better days to come. She
saw the fall of the rash- brained youth
who had replaced her in the affection
of the king. She saw the terrible car-
dinal, conqueror of all his enemies,
while still meditating his bold designs,
succumb under the weight of his in-
firmities and thousand cares, and Louis
XIII. ready to follow his minister to the
tomb. Ou the king's death in 1643,
Anne the regent recalled her friend and
former attendant, sending her private
carriage to Mans for her, in which Ma-
dame de Hautefort and La Porte reen-
tered Paris in triumph.

In Marie de Hautefort, now twenty-
seven years of age, the young woman
had replaced the young girl. In this
prime of her beauty and intelligence
she became one of the ornaments of the

Hotel Rambouillet, the most perfect of
precieuses. She went among them by
the name of Hermione. It was to be
expected that this charming woman
should not fail of many and noble ador-
ers. Of La Rochefoucauld it is told that
he did not dare to breathe openly the
respectful passion she inspired, but of
which he made confession to her broth-
er on the field of battle ; praying the
marquis to convey the avowal of his love
in a letter to his sister should La Roche-
foucauld perish in the ensuing combat.
Another lover, the Due de Lorraine, de-
clared himself in the romantic fashion
of the Middle Ages by sending from
the battle-field of Nordlingeu a captive
of his hand, that he might kiss the robe
of Madame de Hautefort on the part of
her worshiper, who received this act as
ransom for the prisoner. A formidable
rival of these gentlemen was the young,
handsome, and gallant Marquis de
Gevres, whose appearance as a suitor
for the honor of Madame de Hautefort's
hand during Louis's life-time threw the
king into a passion of jealousy so great
that he sent a message to the father of
the marquis such as compelled the with-
drawal of the son's suit. In the list of
adorers also appears the old Due d'An-
gouleme, governor of Provence, who
put his name and fortune at her feet.
Another admirer was the Due de Lian-
court, who at a time when his wife's
death was hourly expected allowed him-
self to express a hope of future conso-
lation. Madame de Hautefort received
the words in silence, and with a manner
of silence which recalled the duke to
himself, and her exquisite tact afterward
enabled her to convert his passion into
a firm and tender friendship.

We would fain form to ourselves
some idea of the beauty which acted as
one of the many fascinations of this no-
ble dame. No trustworthy and satis-
factory portrait of her exists. The best,
which remains in the possession of one
of the collateral branches of her family

628

A Noble Lady.

[November,

at the present day, has small merit as a
work of art, but its traits correspond
sufficiently well with con temporary pen
portraits. It represents her as a superb
blonde, with large and brilliant blue eyes,
a nose slightly aquiline, richly colored
lips and cheeks, and a little chin dimple.
She wears pearl ornaments in her ears,
a collar of pearls, and an agrafe of the
same upon her breast. The total im-
pression of the .portrait is more one of
nobility and force than of lightness and
grace. Her beauty, like her character,
was altogether in the grand style.

Every detail of the story of Madame
de Hautefort is full of interest, but to
relate it in full would require a volume.
Only a few months had passed since her
recall to the court when Marie de Haute-
fort realized that the charm of her an-
cient friendship with the queen was for-
ever broken, and indeed but a single
year elapsed before she received a sec-
ond dismissal. The reason for this lay
in the fact that Anne of Austria, now
become regent, had changed her poli-
tics, while Madame de Hautefort con-
tinued constant to her former opinions
and to her friends of old. It is said that
the supple Mazarin, in bringing about
Anne's political conversion, made his ap-
peal to the woman's heart as well as the
woman's reason. Without attempting
to enter into historical questions of this
sort, it is enough to say that the rela-
tions of the queen and her minister were
such as the reinstated mistress of the
robes strongly disapproved. To Anne's
change of political view she might have
resigned herself, but not to the aban-
donment of the friendships they had
hitherto cherished in common. How-
ever Madame de Hautefort may be
thought to have failed in political in-
sight, we can but think the better of her
heart when we find her opposing herself
anew to a powerful minister of state, and
risking the favor of the sovereign, from
motives which seemed to her those of
duty and honor. The beautiful and

brilliant woman loved the life of the
magnificent court, yet not for a moment
did she hesitate to range herself on the
side of those ancient friends, some of
whom Anne allowed to retreat into ob-
scurity, while others were proscribed
and forced to follow the path leading to
prison and to exile. An ordinary mis-
tress of the robes would have accommo-
dated herself to the new order of things
at the court, but both honor and piety
forbade Marie de Hautefort from so do-
ing. She was unable to rest fl^ey in
sight of the conduct of her mistress and
friend : she blushed at the idea of a
breath of suspicion attaching to it, and
with her characteristic frankness and
courage she braved the danger of warn-
ing the queen, and set herself to dispute
the influence of the handsome and fj^-
tunate cardinal. The latter at fii^t en-
deavored to gain her over, as Richelieu
had done, but like him in vain ; then,
since he could bring no accusation
against her on the ground of political
ambition or self-interest, he attacked her
only vulnerable part, and complained
of her haughtiness, the license of her
language toward the queen, and brought
exaggerated reports of casual remarks
and comments. Her former adorer and
present friend, the Due de Liancourt,
now high in court favor, defended Ma-
dame de Hautefort with zeal, endeav-
oring at the same time to modify her
opposition to the cardinal. She was not
without other partisans and defenders,
for there was not a person at the court
by whom she was not beloved, no mat-
ter of what political party. At this
time the Due de Schomberg, marshal of
France, was a declared suitor for Ma-
dame de Hautefort's hand. At forty-
two years of age he was still handsome,
and remarkable for his noble and dis-
tinguished mien. By birth, fortune, po-
sition, and character he had claims upon
the consideration of the fastidious mis-
tress of the robes. He belonged to
no party and mingled in no intrigues ;

1883.]

A Noble Lady.

629

he had served the queen and Mazarin
as he had served Richelieu arid Louis
XIII., maintaining always an attitude
of respectful independence. The only
obstacle between, these two, apparently
so suited to each other, was the Due de
Schomberg's loyalty to Mazarin and his
small liking for the Importants, as they
were called, that is, the remaining mem-
bers of the party of the opposition.
Madame de Hautefort, while not insen-
sible to his homage, hesitated, and al-
lowed Jfeer noble suitor to sigh for a
while longer. Mazarin's triumph over
his opponent was but a question of
time. Her pleadings in behalf of the
imprisoned Due de Beaufort were treat-
ed as a capital offense, and in April,
1664, she received her order of dismis-
saljjrom the court. It was impossible
not to^-ecall the words of Louis, who
had warned her : " You are making a
mistake : you serve an ingrate." She
retired to the convent of Les Filles de
Sainte Marie, in the Rue St. Antoine,
with an idea of taking the veil. Maz-
arin, to do him justice, satisfied with his
success, had no thought of persecuting
his enemy. More than one of Madame
de Hautefgri's adorers generously sought
to draw her from her retirement, among
them the Due de Ventadour and the
Marcchal de Gassion, but in vain. At
length the Due de Schomberg appeared
at her convent grating to renew his
pleadings, and this time he was not re-
pulsed. Madame de Hautefort issued
from the convent into the world again,
though without appearing at court. A
strange episode occurred, however, be-
fore the marriage took place. Previous
to leaving the convent she received a
visit from the sister of the Due de
Schomberg and wife of the Due de Li-
ancourt. This lady, having suspected
something of her husband's former pas-
sion for Madame de Hautefort, was
alarmed lest, in the closer intimacy
which the intended marriage would
bring about, her husband's flame might

rekindle. She therefore made represen-
tations to Madame de Hautefort of the
injury it would be to her brother, whose
fortune, she said, was considerably
diminished from various causes, should
he marry one who was not able to re-
establish his affairs upon a better foot-
ing. It was asking of Madame de
Hautefort the sacrifice of her last hope
to require the breaking off of this in-
tended marriage. There was a battle
in her heart, but finally generosity car-
ried the day ; she promised the sister
that she would not be the ruin of the
brother. But happily Madame de Lian-
court was unable to support the false-
hood she had succeeded in imposing.
She made speedy confession of her fault,
begging her injured friend to become
her sister. Madame de Hautefort became
Duchesse de Schomberg at thirty years
of age, and with this event terminated
the more romantic portion of her career.
Thenceforth her life was as peaceful as
its earlier years had been agitated. She
loved her husband with all the fervor of
her disposition, and when in 1656, ten
years after their marriage, the marshal
died, his widow consecrated herself to
his faithful memory. It is said that she
preserved for many years her wonder-
ful beauty. In the portraits of Mademoi-
selle she appears under the name of
Olympe. Without becoming a Jansen-
ist, she had leanings towards Port Royal.
At Metz, during M. de Schomberg's
governorship of that city, she encoun-
tered Bossuet, and became one of his
earliest friends and patrons. Anne of
Austria she seldom saw, but when, in
1666, she learned that her royal friend
was about to die, Madame da Schomberg
sought permission to attend once more
at the queen's bedside; and it is said
that the dying Anne recommended the
faithful friend to the protection of her
son. Louis XIV. in vain endeavored
to draw Madame de Schomberg to his
court : with respectful firmness she de-
clined his favors, and remained in her

630

En Province.

[November,

quiet seclusion. "Works of charity be-
came the occupation, we may say the
passion, of her life. Without children
of her own, she earned the beautiful
name of Mother of the Poor. Her
house in the Faubourg St. Antoine be-
came an asylum for the unfortunate and
oppressed. From this gentle and pious
existence she passed away in her sev-
enty-fifth year, August, 1691, and was
buried beside her beloved husband in
the chapel of the Chateau de Nanteuil.

Bossuet, who always cherished her
memory tenderly, never was at Meaux
without passing by Nanteuil, that he
might pray beside her tomb.

I seem to have been describing here
a paragon. Assuredly Marie de Haute-
fort must have had her defects, but
the record of them has not come down
to us, and whatever they may have
been we are permitted to believe that
her virtues cast her faults into the
shade.

Maria Louise Henry.

EN PROVINCE.

IV.

FROM NARBONNE TO NIMES.

• AT Narbonne I took up my abode at
the house of a serrurier mecanicien, and
was very thankful for the accommoda-
tion. It was my misfortune to arrive at
this ancient city late at night, on the eve
of market-day ; and market-day at Nar-
bonne is a very serious affair. The
inns, on this occasion, are stuffed with
wine-dealers, for the country roundabout,
dedicated almost exclusively to Bacchus,
has hitherto escaped the phylloxera.
This deadly enemy of the grape is en-
camped over the Midi in a hundred
places ; blighted vineyards and ruined
proprietors being quite the order of the
day. The signs of distress are more
frequent as you advance into Provence,
many of the vines being laid under wa-
ter, in the hope of washing the plague
away. There are healthy regions still,
however, and the vintners find plenty to
do at Narbonne. The traffic in wine
appeared to be the sole thought of the
Narbonnais ; every one I spoke to had
something to say about the harvest of
gold that bloomed under its influence.

" C'est inoui, monsieur, 1'argent qtH'il
y a dans ce pays. Des gens a qui la
vente de leur vin rapporte jusqu'a 500,-

000 francs par an." That little speech,
addressed to me by a gentleman at the
inn, gives the note of these revelations.
It must be said that there was little in
the appearance either of the town or of
its population to suggest the possession
of such treasures. Narbonne is a sale
petite vitte in all the force of the term, and
my first impression on arriving there
was an extreme regret that I had not
remained for the night at the lovely Car-
cassonne. My journey from that de-
lectable spot lasted a couple of hours,
and was performed in darkness — a
darkness not so dense, however, but that

1 was able to make out, as we passed it,
the great figure of Beziers, whose an-
cient roofs and towers, clustered on a
goodly hill-top, looked as fantastic as
you please. I know not what appear-
ance Beziers may present by day ; but
by night it has quite the grand air. On
issuing from the station at Narbonne, I
found that the only vehicle in waiting
was a kind of bastard tramcar, a thing
shaped as if it had been meant to go
upon rails ; that is, equipped with small
wheels, placed beneath it, and with a

1883.]

En Province.

631

platform at either end, but destined to
rattle over the stones like the most vul-
gar of omnibuses. To complete the odd-
ity of this conveyance, it was under the
supervision not of a conductor, but of a
conductress. A fair young woman, with
a pouch suspended from her girdle, had
command of the platform, and as soon
as the car was full she jolted us into
the town through clouds of the thickest
dust I ever have swallowed. I have had
occasion to speak of the activity of wom-
en in France — of the way they are al-
ways in the ascendent ; and here was a
signal example of their general utility.
The young lady I have mentioned con-
veyed her whole company to the wretch-
ed little Hotel de France, where it is to
be hoped that some of them found a
lodging. For myself, I was informed
that the place was crowded from cellar
to attic, and that its inmates were sleep-
ing three or four in a room. At Car-
cassonne I should have had a bad bed,
but at Narbonne, apparently, I was to
have no bed at all. I passed an hour or
two of flat suspense, while fate settled
the question of whether I should go on
to Perpignan, return to Be*ziers, or still
discover a modest couch at Narbonne.
I shall not have suffered in vain, how-
ever, if my example serves to deter
other travelers from alighting unan-
nounced at that city on a Wednesday
evening. The retreat to Be*ziers, not at-
tempted in time, proved impossible, and
I was assured that at Perpignan, which
I should not reach till midnight, the af-
fluence of wine-dealers was not less than
at Narbonue. I interviewed every host-
ess in the town, and got no satisfaction
but distracted shrugs. Finally, at an ad-
vanced hour, one of the servants of the
Hotel de France, where I had attempt-
ed to dine, came to me in triumph to
proclaim that he had secured for me a
charming apartment in a maison bour-
geoise. I took possession of it gratefully,
in spite of its having an entrance like a
stable, and being pervaded by an odor

compared with which that of a stable
would have been delicious. As I have
mentioned, my landlord was a locksmith,
and he had strange machines which
rumbled and whirred in the rooms be-
low my own. Nevertheless, I slept, and
I dreamed of Carcassonne. It was bet-
ter to do that than to dream of the Ho-
tel de France. I was obliged to culti-
vate relations with the cuisine of this
establishment. Nothing could have been
more meridional ; indeed, both the dirty
little inn and Narbonne at large seemed
to me to have the infirmities of the
south without its usual graces. Narrow,
noisy, shabby, belittered and encum-
bered, filled with clatter and chatter, the
Hotel de France would have been de-
scribed in perfection by Alphonse Dau-
det. For what struck me above all in
it was the note of the Midi, as he has
represented it — the sound of universal
talk. The landlord sat at supper with
sundry friends, in a kind of glass cage,
with a genial indifference to arriving
guests ; the waiters tumbled over the
loose luggage in the hall ; the travelers
who bad been turned away leaned
gloomily against doorposts ; and the land-
lady, surrounded by confusion, uncon-
scious of responsibility, and animated
only by the spirit of conversation, ban-
died high-voiced compliments with the
voyageurs de commerce. At tea o'clock
in the morning there was a table d'hote
for breakfast — a wonderful repast,
which overflowed into every room and
pervaded the whole establishment. I sat
down with a hundred hungry marketers,
fat, brown, greasy men, with a good
deal of the rich soil of Languedoc ad-
hering to their hands and their boots. I
mention the latter articles because they
almost put them on the table. It was
very hot, and there were swarms of flies ;
the viands had the strongest odor ; there
was in particular a horrible mixture
known as gras-double, a light gray, glu-
tinous, nauseating mess, which my com-
panions devoured in large quantities.

632

En Province.

[November,

A man opposite to me had the dirtiest
fingers I ever saw ; a collection of fingers
which in England would have excluded
him from a farmers' ordinary. The con-
versation was mainly bucolic ; though a
part of it, I remember, at the table at
which I sat, consisted of a discussion as
to whether or no the maid-servant were
sage — a discussion which went on un-
der the nose of this young lady, as she
carried about the dreadful gras-double,
and to which she contributed the most
convincing blushes. It was thoroughly
meridional.

In going to Narbonne I had of course
counted upon Roman remains ; but
when I went forth in search of them I
perceived that I had hoped too fondly.
There is really nothing in the place to
speak of ; that is, on the day of my visit
there was nothing but the market, which
was in complete possession. " This in-
tricate, curious, but lifeless town," Mur-
ray calls it ; yet to me it appeared over-
flowing with life. Its streets are mere
crooked, dirty lanes, bordered with per-
fectly insignificant houses ; but they
were filled with the same clatter and
chatter that I had found at the hotel.
The market was held partly in the little
square of the hotel de ville, a structure
which a flattering wood-cut in the Guide-
Joanne had given me a desire to be-
hold. The reality was not impressive,
the old color of the front having been
completely restored away. Such inter-
est as it superficially possesses it derives
from a fine mediaeval tower which rises
beside it, with turrets at the angles —
always a picturesque thing. The rest
of the market was held in another place,
still shabbier than the first, which lies
beyond the canal. The Canal du Midi
runs through the town, and, spanned at
this point by a small suspension-bridge,
presented a certain sketchability. On
the further side were the venders and
chafferers — old women under awnings
and big umbrellas, rickety tables piled

high with fruit, white caps and brown
faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys. Beneath
this picture was another — a long row
of washerwomen, on their knees on the
edge of the canal, pounding and wring-
ing the dirty linen of Narbonne — no
great quantity, to judge by the costume
of the people. Innumerable rusty men,
scattered all over the place, were buying
and selling wine, straddling about in
pairs, in groups, with their hands in their
pockets, and packed together at the
doors of the cafes. They were mostly
fat and brown and unshaven ; they
ground their teeth as they talked ; they
were very meridional.

The only two lions at Narbonne are
the cathedral and the museum, the lat-
ter of which is quartered in the hotel de
ville. The cathedral, closely shut in by
houses, and with the west front under-
going repairs, is singular in two respects.
It consists exclusively of a choir, which
is of the end of the thirteenth century
and the beginning of the next, and of
great magnificence. There is absolute-
ly nothing else. This choir, of extraor-
dinary elevation, forms the whole church.
I sat there a good while ; there was no
other visitor. I had taken a great dislike
to poor little Narbonne, which struck me
as sordid and overheated, and this place
seemed to extend to me, as in the Mid-
dle Ages, the privilege of sanctuary. It
is a very solemn corner. The other pe-
culiarity of the cathedral is that, exter-
nally, it bristles with battlements, having
anciently formed part of the defenses
of the archeveche, which is beside it
and which connects it with the hotel
de ville. This combination of the church
and the fortress is very curious, and dur-
ing the Middle Ages was not without its
value. The palace of the former arch-
bishops of Narbonne (the hotel de ville
of to-day forms part of it) was both
an asylum and an arsenal during the
hideous wars by which the Languedoc
was ravaged in the thirteenth century.
The whole mass of buildings is jammed

1883.]

En Province.

633

together in a manner that from certain
points of view makes it far from appar-
ent which feature is which. The mu-
seum occupies several chambers at the
top of the hotel de ville, and is not
an imposing collection. It was closed,
but I induced the portress to let me in —
a silent, cadaverous person, in a black
coif, like a beguine, who sat knitting in
one of the windows while I went the
rounds. The number of Roman frag-
ments is small, and their quality is not
the finest ; I must add that this impres-
sion was hastily gathered. There is in-
deed a work of art in one of the rooms
which creates a presumption in favor of
the place — the portrait (rather a good
one) of a citizen of Narbonne, whose
name I forget, who is described as hav-
ing devoted all his time and his intelli-
gence to collecting the objects by which
the visitor is surrounded. This excel-
lent man was a connoisseur, and the vis-
itor is doubtless often an ignoramus.

in.

" Cette, with its glistening houses white,
Curves with the curving beach away
To where the lighthouse beacons bright,
Far in the bay."

That stanza of Matthew Arnold's,
which I happened to remember, gave
a certain importance to the half hour I
spent in the buffet of the station at Cette
while I waited for the train to Montpel-
lier. I had left Narbonne in the after-
noon, and by the time I reached Cette
the darkness had descended. I therefore
missed the sight of the glistening houses,
and had to console myself with that of
the beacon in the bay, as well as with a
bouillon of which I partook at the buffet
aforesaid ; for, since the morning, I had
not ventured to return to the table
d'hote at Narbonne. The Hotel Nevet,
at Moiitpellier, which I reached an hour
later, has an ancient renown all over
the south of France — advertises itself,
I believe, as le plus vaste du midi. It
seemed to me the model of a good pro-

vincial inn : a big, rambling, . creaking
establishment, with brown, labyrinthine
corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule,
into which the diligence, in the bon temps,
used to penetrate, and a hospitality more
expressive than that of the new caravan-
saries. It dates from the days when
Montpellier was still accounted a fine
winter residence for people with weak
lungs ; and this rather melancholy tra-
dition, together with the former celebrity
of the school of medicine still existing
there, but from which the glory has de-
parted, helps to account for its combi-
nation of high antiquity and vast pro-
portions. The old hotels were usually
more concentrated; but the school of
medicine passed for one of the attrac-
tions of Montpellier. Long before Men-
tone was discovered or Colorado in-
vented, British invalids traveled down
through France in the post-chaise or the
public coach, to spend their winters in
the wonderful place which boasted both
a climate and a faculty. The air is mild,
no doubt, but there are refinements of
mildness which were not then suspect-
ed, and which in a more analytic age
have carried the annual wave far be-
yond Montpellier. The place is charm-
ing, all the same, and it served the pur-
pose of John Locke, who made a long
stay there, between 1675 and 1679, and
became acquainted with a noble fellow-
visitor, Lord Pembroke, to whom he
dedicated the famous Essay. There
are places that please, without your be-
ing able to say wherefore, and Mont-
pellier is one of the number. It has
some charming views, from the great
promenade of the Peyrou ; but its posi-
tion is not strikingly fair. Beyond this,
it contains a good museum and the long
facades of its school, but these are its
only definite treasures. Its cathedral
struck me as quite the weakest I had
seen, and I remember no other monu-
ment that made up for it. The place
has neither the gayety of a modern nor
the solemnity of an ancient town, and it

634

En Province.

[November,

is agreeable as certain women are agree-
able \vlio are neither beautiful nor clev-
er. An Italian would remark that it
is sympathetic ; a German would admit
that it i.s (jcinuthlich. I spent two days
there, mostly in the rain, and even un-
der these circumstances I carried away
a kindly impression. I think the Hotel
Nevet had something to do with it and
the sentiment of relief with which, in a
quiet, even a luxurious room that looked
out on a garden, I reflected that I had
washed my hands of Narbonne. The
phylloxera has destroyed the vines in
the country that surrounds Montpellier,
and at that moment I was capable of
rejoicing in the thought that I should
not breakfast with vintners.

The gem of the place is the Musee Fa-
bre, one of the best collections of paint-
ings in a provincial city. Francois Fa-
bre, a native of Montpellier, died there
in 1837, after having spent a consider-
able part of his life in Italy, where he
had collected a good many valuable pic-
tures and some very poor ones, the lat-
ter class including several from his own
hand. He was the hero of a remark-
able episode, having succeeded no less a
person than Vittorio Alfieri in the affec-
tions of no less a person than Louise de
Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of
no less a person than Charles Edward
Stewart, the second pretender to the
British crown. Surely no woman ever
was associated sentimentally with three
figures more diverse : a disqualified sov-
ereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad
French painter. The productions of M.
Fabre, who followed in the steps of Da-
vid, bear the stamp of a cold mediocrity ;
there is not much to be said even for
the portrait of the genial countess (her
life has been written by M. Saint-Rene'-
Taillandier, who depicts her as delight-
ful), which hangs in Florence, in the gal-
lery of the Uffizzi, and makes a pendant
to a likeness of Alfieri by the same au-
thor. Stendhal, in his Memoires d'un
Touriste, says that this work of art rep-

resents her as a cook who has pretty
hands. I am delighted to have an op-
portunity of quoting Stendhal, whose
two volumes of the Memoires d'un
Touriste every traveler in France should
carry in his portmanteau. I have had
this opportunity more than once, for I
have met him at Tours, at Nantes, at
Bourges, and everywhere he is sugges-
tive. But he has the defect that he is
never pictorial, that he never by any
chance makes an image, and that his
style is perversely colorless, for a man
so fond of contemplation. His taste is
often singularly false ; it is the taste of
the early years of the present century,
the period that produced clocks sur-
mounted with sentimental "subjects."
Stendhal does not admire these clocks,
but he almost does. He admires Do-
menichino and Guercino, and prizes the
Bolognese school of painters because
they " spoke to the soul." He is a vo-
tary of the new classic, is fond of tall,
square, regular buildings, and thinks
Nantes, for instance, full of the " air
noble." It was a pleasure to me to re-
flect that five and forty years ago he had
alighted in that city, at the very inn in
which I spent a night, and which looks
down on the Place Graslin and the thea-
tre. The hotel that was the best in 1837
appears to be the best to-day. On the
subject of Touraine, Stendhal is ex-
tremely refreshing; he finds the scenery
meagre and much overrated, and pro-
claims his opinion with perfect frankness.
He does, however, scant justice to the
banks of the Loire ; his want of appre-
ciation of the picturesque — want of the
sketcher's sense — causes him to miss
half the charm of a landscape which is
nothing if not " quiet," as a painter
would say, and of which the felicities
reveal themselves only to waiting eyes.
He even despises the Indre, the river
of Madame Sand. The Memoires d'un
Touriste are written in the character of
a commercial traveler, and the author
has nothing to say about Chenouceaux or

1883.]

En Province.

635

Chambord, or indeed about any of the
chateaux of that part of France; his
system being to talk only of the large
towns, where he may be supposed to
find a market for his goods. It was his
ambition to pass for an ironmonger.
But in the large towns he is usually ex-
cellent company, though as discursive as
Sterne, and strangely indifferent, for a
man of imagination, to those superfi-
cial aspects of things which the poor
pages now before the reader are mainly
an attempt to render. It is his convic-
tion that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the
Countess of Albany terribly, and he
adds that the famous Gallophobe died
of jealousy of the little painter from
Montpellier. The Countess of Albany
left her property to Fabre ; and I sup-
pose some of the pieces in the museum
of his native town used to hang in the
sunny saloons of that fine old palace on
the Arno which is still pointed out to
the stranger in Florence as the residence
of Alfieri.

The institution has had other bene-
factors, notably a certain M. Bruyas,
who has enriched it with an extraordi-
nary number of portraits of himself. As
these, however, are by different hands,
some of them distinguished, we may
suppose that it was less the model than
the artists that M. Bruyas wished to ex-
hibit. Easily first are two large spe-
cimens of David Teuiers, which are in-
comparable for brilliancy and a glow-
ing perfection of execution. I have a
weakness for this singular genius, who
combined the delicate with the grovel-
ing, and I have rarely seen richer ex-
amples. Scarcely less valuable is a
Gerard Dow which hangs near them,
though it must rank lower as having
kept less of its freshness. This Gerard
Dow did me good, for a master is a mas-
ter, whatever he may paint. It repre-
sents a woman paring carrots, while a
boy before her exhibits a mouse-trap in
which !H' lias caught a frightened victim.
The goodvvife has spread a cloth on the

top of a big barrel which serves her as
a table, and on this brown, greasy nap-
kin, of which the texture is wonderfully
rendered, lie the raw vegetables she is
preparing for domestic consumption.
Beside the barrel is a large cauldron lined
with copper, with a rim of brass. The
way these things are painted brings
tears to the eyes ; but they give the
measure of the Musee Fabre, where two
specimens of Teniers and a Gerard Dow
are the jewels. The Italian pictures
are of small value, but there is a work
by Sir Joshua Reynolds, said to be the
only one in France — an infant Samuel
in prayer, apparently a repetition of
the picture in England which inspired
the little plaster image, disseminated in
Protestant lands, that we used to ad-
mire in our childhood. Sir Joshua,
somehow, was an eminently Protestant
painter ; no one can forget that who, in
the National Gallery in London, has
looked at the picture in which he repre-
sents several young ladies as nymphs,
voluminously draped, hanging garlands
over a statue, a picture suffused indefin-
ably with the Anglican spirit and exas-
perating to a member of one of the L'ltin
races. It is an odd chance, therefore,
that has led him into that part of France
where Protestants have been least bien
vus. This is the country of the dragon-
nades of Louis XIV. and of the pastors
of the desert. From the garden of the
Peyrou, at Montpellier, you may see the
hills of the Cevennes, to which they of
the religion fled for safety, and out of
which they were hunted and harried.

I have only to add, in regard to the
Musee Fabre, that it contains the por-
trait of its founder, a little, pursy, fat-
faced, elderly man, whose countenance
contains few indications of the power
that makes distinguished victims, lie
is, however, just such a personage as
the mind's eye sees walking on the ter-
race of the Peyrou of an October after-
noon in the early years of the century :
a plump figure in a chocolate-colored

636

En Province.

[November,

coat and a culotte that exhibits a good
leg — a culotte provided with a watch-
fob from which a heavy seal is suspend-
ed. This Peyrou (to come to it at last)
is a wonderful place, especially to be
found in a little provincial city. France
is certainly the country of towns that
aim at completeness ; more than in other
lands, they contain stately features as
a matter of course. We should never
have ceased to hear about the Peyrou,
if fortune had placed it in a Shrewsbury
or a Hartford. It is true that the place
enjoys a certain celebrity at home, which
it amply deserves, moreover, for noth-
ing could be more impressive and mon-
umental. It consists of an " elevated
platform," as Murray says, an immense
terrace, laid out, in the highest part of
the town, as a garden, and commanding
in all directions a view which in clear
weather must be of the finest. I strolled
there in the intervals of showers, and saw
only the nearer beauties : a great pomp-
ous arch of triumph, in honor of Louis
XIV. (which is not, properly speaking,
in the garden, but faces it, straddling
across the place by which you approach
it from the town), an equestrian statue
of that monarch set aloft in the mid-
dle of the terrace, and a very exalted
and complicated fountain, which forms a
background to the picture. This foun-
tain gushes from a kind of hydraulic
temple, to which you ascend by broad
flights of steps, and which is fed by a
splendid aqueduct, stretched in the most
ornamental and unexpected manner
across the neighboring valley. All this
work dates from the middle of the last
century. The combination of features
— the triumphal arch, or gate ; the
wide, fair terrace, with its beautiful
view ; the statue of the grand monarch ;
the big architectural fountain, which
would not surprise one at Rome, but
does surprise one at Montpellier ; and to
complete the effect, the extraordinary
aqueduct, charmingly foreshortened —
all this is worthy of a capital, of a little

court city. The whole place, with its
repeated steps, its balustrades, its mas-
sive and plentiful stone-work, is full of
the air of the last century — sent bien
son dix-huitieme siecle ; none the less so,
I am afraid, that, as I read in my faith-
ful Murray, after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, the block, the stake,
the wheel, had been erected here for the
benefit of the hunted and tracked Cami-
sards.

IV.

It was a pleasure to feel one's self in
Provence again — the land where the
silver -gray earth is impregnated with
the light of the sky. To celebrate the
event, as soon as I arrived at Nimes I
engaged a caleche to convey me to the
Pont du Gard. The day was yet young,
and it was perfectly fair ; it appeared
well, for a longish drive, to take advan-
tage, without delay, of such security.
After I had left the town I became more
intimate with that Provencal charm
which I had already enjoyed from the
window of the train, and which glowed
in the sweet sunshine and the white
rocks, and lurked in the smoke-puffs of
the little olives. The olive-trees in
Provence are half the landscape. They
are neither so tall, so stout, nor so rich-
ly contorted as I have seen them beyond
the Alps ; but this mild, colorless bloom
seems the very texture of the country.
The road from Nimes, for a distance of
fifteen miles, is superb ; broad enough
for an army, and as white and firm
as a dinner-table. It stretches away
over undulations which suggest a kind of
harmony, and in the curves it makes
through the wide, free country, where
there is never a hedge or a wall, and
the detail is always exquisite, there is
something majestic, almost processional.
Some twenty minutes before I reached
the little inn that marks the termination
of the drive, my vehicle met with an ac-
cident which just missed being serious,
and which engaged the attention of a
gentleman who, followed by his groom

1883.] En Province.

and mounted on a strikingly handsome
horse, happened to ride up at the mo-
ment. This young man, who, with his
good looks and charming manner, might
have stepped out of a novel of Octave
Feuillet, gave me some very intelligent
advice in reference to one of my horses,
who had been injured, and was so good
as to accompany me to the inn, with the
resources of which he was acquainted,
to see that his recommendations were
carried out. The result of our inter-
view was that he invited me to come
and look at a small but ancient chateau
in the neighborhood, which he had the
happiness — not the greatest in the
world, he intimated — to inhabit, and at
which I engaged to present myself after
I should have spent an hour at the
Pont du Gard. For the moment, when
we separated, I gave all my attention to
that great structure. You are very near
it before you see it ; the ravine it spans
suddenly opens and exhibits the picture.
The scene at this point grows extremely
beautiful. The ravine is the valley of
the Gardon, which the road from Nimes
has followed some time without taking
account of it, but which, exactly at the
right distance from the aqueduct, deep-
ens and expands, and puts on those
characteristics which are best suited to
give it effect. The gorge becomes ro-
mantic, still and solitary, and with its
white rocks and wild shrubbery hangs
over the clear-colored river, in whose
slow course there is here and there a
deeper pool. Over the valley, from side
to side, and ever so high in the air,
stretch the three tiers of the tremendous
bridge. They are unspeakably impos-
ing, and nothing could well be more
Roman. The hugeness, the solidity, the
unexpectedness, the monumental recti-
tude, of the whole thing leave you noth-
ing to say — at the time — and make
you stand gazing. You simply feel that
it is noble and perfect, that it has the
quality of greatness. A road, branch-
ing from the highway, descends to the

637

level of the river and passes under one
of the arches. This road has a wide
margin of grass and loose stones, which
slopes upward into the bank of the ra-
vine. You may sit here -as long as you
please, staring up at the light, strong
piers ; the spot is extremely natural,
though two or three stone benches have
been erected on it. I remained there
an hour, and got a complete impres-
sion ; the place was perfectly soundless,
and for the time, at least, lonely ; the
splendid afternoon had begun to fade,
and there was a fascination in the ob-
ject I had come to see It came to pass
that at the same time I discovered in it
a certain stupidity, a vague brutality.
That element is rarely absent from
great Roman work, which is wanting in
the nice adaptation of the means to the
end. The means are always exagger-
ated, the end is so much more than at-
tained. The Roman rigidity was apt
to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a
race which could do nothing small is as
defective as a race which can do nothing
great. Of this Roman rigidity the Pont
du Gard is an admirable example. It
would be a great injustice, however, not
to insist upon its beauty — a kind of man-
ly beauty, that of an object constructed
not to please but to serve, and impres-
sive simply from the scale on which it
carries cut this intention. The number
of arches in each tier is different ; they
are smaller and more numerous as they
ascend. The preservation of the thing is
extraordinary ; nothing has crumbled or
collapsed ; every feature remains ; and
the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-
yellow (as if they had been baked by
the Provencal sun for eighteen centu-
ries), pile themselves, without mortar or
cement, as evenly as the day they were
laid together. All this to carry the wa-
ter of a couple of springs to a little pro-
vincial city! The conduit on the top
has retained its shape and traces of the
cement with which it was lined. When
the vague twilight began to gather, the

638

En Province.

[November,

lonely valley seemed to fill itself with
the shadow of the Roman name, as if
the mighty empire were still as erect as
the supports of the aqueduct ; and it
was open to a solitary tourist, sitting
there sentimental, to believe that no
people has ever been, or will ever be,
as great as that, measured as we meas-
ure the greatness of an individual, by
the push they gave to what they under-
took. The Pont du Gard is one of the
three or four deepest impressions they
have left ; it speaks of them in a man-
ner with which they might have been
satisfied.

I feel as if it were scarcely discreet
to indicate the whereabouts of the cha-
teau of the obliging young man I had
met on the way from Nimes ; I must
content myself with saying that it nes-
tled in an enchanting valley — dans le
fond, as they say in France — and that
I took my course thither on foot, after
leaving the Pont du Gard. I find it
noted in my journal as "an adorable
little corner." The principal feature of
the place is a couple of very ancient
towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and
mantled in scarlet Virginia - creeper.
One of these towers is isolated, and is
only the more effective ; the other is in-
corporated in the house, which is de-
lightfully fragmentary and irregular.
It. had got to be late by this time, and
the lonely castel looked crepuscular and
mysterious. An old housekeeper was
sent for, who showed me the rambling
interior ; and then the young man took
me into a dim old drawing-room, which
had no less than four chimney-pieces,
all unlimited, and gave me a refection of
fruit and sweet wine. When I praised
the wine, and asked him what it was, he
said simply, " C'est du vin de ma mere ! "
Throughout my little journey I had
never yet felt myself so far from Paris ;
and this was a sensation I enjoyed more
than my host, who was an involuntary
exile, consoling himself with laying out
a manege, which he showed me as I

walked away. His civility was great,
and I was greatly touched by it. On
my way back to the little inn where I
had left my vehicle, I passed the Pont
du Gard, and took another look at it.
Its great arches made windows for the
evening sky, and the rocky ravine, with
its dusky cedars and shining river, was
lonelier than before. At the inn I
swallowed, or tried to swallow, a glass
of horrible wine with my coachman ;
after which, with my reconstructed team,
I drove back to Nimes in the moon-
light. It only added a more solitary
whiteness to the constant sheen of the
Provencal landscape.

The weather the next day was equally
fair, so that it seemed an imprudence
not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes.
Nimes itself could wait ; at a pinch, I
could attend to Nimes in the rain. It was
my belief that Aigues-Mortes was a little
gem, and it is natural to desire that
gems should have an opportunity to
sparkle. This is an excursion of but a
few hours, and there is a little friendly,
familiar, dawdling train that will convey
you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to
the small dead town where the blessed
Saint Louis twice embarked for the
crusades. You may get back to Nimes
for dinner ; the run — or rather the
walk, for the train does n't run — is of
about an, hour. I found the little jour-
ney charming, and looked out of the
carriage window, on my right, at the
distant Cevennes, covered with tones
of amber and blue, and, all around, at
vineyards red with the touch of Octo-
ber. The grapes were gone, but the
plants had a color of their own. AVith-
in a certain distance of Aigues-Mortes
they give place to wide salt-marshes,
traversed by two canals ; and over this
expanse the train rumbles slowly upon
a narrow causeway, failing for some
time, though you know you are n-ear
the object of your curiosity, to bring

1883.]

En Province.

639

you to sight of anything but the horizon.
Suddenly it appears, the towered and
embattled mass, lying so low that the
crest of its defenses seems to rise straight
out of the ground ; and it is not till the
train stops, close before them, that you
are able to take the full measure of its
walls.

Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of
a wide etang, or shallow inlet of the sea,
the further side of which is divided
by a narrow band of coast from the
Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carcas-
sonne, to which it forms an admirable
pendant, it is the most perfect thing
of the kind in France. It has a rival
in the person of Avignon, but the ram-
parts of Avignon are much less effective.
Like Carcassonne, it is completely sur-
rounded with its old fortifications, and
if they are far simpler in character
(there is but one circle) they are quite
as well preserved. The moat has been
filled up, and the site of the town might
be figured by a billiard-table without
pockets. On this absolute level, covered
with coarse grass, Aigues-Mortes pre-
sents quite the appearance of the walled
town that a school-boy draws upon his
slate, or that we see in the background
of early Flemish pictures — a simple
parallelogram, of a contour almost ab-
surdly bare, broken at intervals by an-
gular towers and square holes. Such,
literally speaking, is this delightful lit-
tle city, which needs to be seen to tell
its full story. It is extraordinarily pic-
torial, and if it is a very small sister of
Carcassonne it has at least the essen-
tial features of the family. Indeed, it is
even more like an image and less like
a reality than Carcassonne ; for by po-
sition and prospect it seems even more
detached from the life of the present
day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does
a little business ; it sees certain bags of
salt piled into barges which stand in a
canal beside it, and which carry their
cargo into regions comparatively mod-
ern. But nothing could well be more

drowsy and desultory than this indus-
try as I saw it practiced, with the aid
of two or three brown peasants and un-
der the eye of a solitary douanier, who
strolled on the little quay beneath the
western wall. " C'est bien plaisant,
c'est bien paisible," said this worthy
man, with whom I had some conversa-
tion ; and pleasant and peaceful is the
place indeed, though the former of these
epithets may suggest an element . of
gayety in which Aigues-Mortes is defi-
cient. The sand, the salt, the dull sea-
view, surround it with a bright, quiet
melancholy. There are fifteen towers
and nine gates, five of which are on
the southern side, overlooking the wa-
ter. I walked all round the place three
times (it does n't take long), but lin-
gered most under the southern wall,
where the afternoon light slept in the
dreamiest, sweetest way. I- sat down
on an old stone, and looked away to the
desolate salt-marshes and the still, shin-
ing surface of the etang ; and, as I did
so, reflected that this was a queer little
out-of-the-world corner to have been
chosen, in the great dominions of either
monarch, for that pompous interview
which took place, in 1538, between
Francis I. and Charles V. It was also
not easy to perceive how Louis IX.,
when in 1248 and 1270 he started for
the Holy Land, set his army afloat% in
such very undeveloped channels. An
hour later I purchased in the town a
little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin,
who undertakes to explain this latter
anomaly, and to show that there is water
enough in the port, as we may call it
by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of *
crusaders. I was unable to trace the
channel that he points out, but was glad
to believe that, as he contends, the sea
has not retreated from the town since
the thirteenth century. It was comfort-
able to think that things are not so
changed as that. M. Topin indicates
that the other French ports of the Medi-
terranean were not then disponibles, and

640

En Province.

[November,

that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligi-
ble spot for an embarkation.

Behind the straight walls and the quiet
gates the little town has not crumbled,
like the Cite of Carcassonne. It can
hardly be said to be alive, but if it is
dead it has been very neatly embalmed.
The hand of the restorer rests on it con-
stantly ; but this artist has not, as at Car-
cassonne, had miracles to accomplish.
The interior is very still and empty,
with small, stony, whitewashed streets,
tenanted by a stray dog, a stray cat, a
stray old woman. In the middle is a
little place, with two or three cafes dec-
orated by wide awnings, — a little place
of which the principal feature is a very
bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by Pra-
dier. It is almost as bad as the break-
fast I had at the inn that bears the name
of that pious monarch. You may walk
round the enceinte of Aigues-Mortes both
outside and in, but you may not, as at
Carcassonne, make a portion of this
circuit on the chemin de ronde, the little
projecting footway attached to the inner
face of the battlements. This footway,
wide enough only for a single pedestri-
an, is in the best order, and near each
of the gates a flight of steps leads up
to it ; but a locked gate, at the top of
the steps, makes access impossible, or
at least unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, how-
ever, has its citadel, an immense tower,
larger than any of the others, a little
detached, and standing at the northwest
angle of the town. I called upon the
casernier — the custodian of the walls
— and in his absence I was conducted
through this big Tour de Constance by
• his wife, a very mild, meek woman, yel-
low with the traces of fever and ague,
a scourge which, as might be expected
in a town whose name denotes " dead
waters," enters freely at the nine gates.
The Tour de Constance is of extraor-
dinary girth and solidity, divided into
three superposed circular chambers, with
very fine vaults, that are lighted by em-
brasures of prodigious depth, converging

to windows little larger than loopholes,
The place served for years as a prison
to many of the Protestants of the south
whom the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes had exposed to atrocious pen-
alties, and the annals of these dread-
ful chambers during the first half of the
last century were written in tears and
blood. Some of the recorded cases of
long confinement there make one mar-
vel afresh at what man has inflicted and
endured. In a country in which a pol-
icy of extermination was to be put into
practice this horrible tower was an ob-
vious resource. From the battlements
at the top, which is surmounted by an
old disused light-house, you see the little
compact rectangular town, which looks
hardly bigger than a garden - patch,
mapped out beneath you, and follow the
plain configuration of its defenses. You
take possession of it, and you feel that
you will remember it always.

. vi.

After this I was free to look about me
at Nimes, and I did so with such atten-
tion as the place appeared to require.
At the risk of seeming too easily and
too frequently disappointed, I will say
that it required rather less than I had
been prepared to give. It is a town of
three or four fine features, rather than a
town with, as I may say, a general fig-
ure. In general Nimes is poor ; its only
treasures are its Roman remains, which
are of the first order. The new French
fashions prevail in many of its streets ;
the old houses are paltry and the good
houses are new ; while beside my hotel
rose a big spick-and-span church, which
had the oddest air of having been in-
tended for Brooklyn or Buffalo. It is
true that this church looked out on a
square completely French — a square of
a fine modern disposition, flanked on one
side by a classical palais de justice, em-
bellished with trees and parapets, and
occupied in the centre with a group of
allegorical statues, such as one encoun-

1883.]

En Province.

641

ters only in the cities of France, the
chief of these being a colossal figure by
Praclier, representing Nimes. An Eng-
lish, an American town which should
have such a monument, such a square
as this, would be a place of great pre-
tensions ; but like so many little villes
de province in the country of which I
write, Nimes is easily ornamental. What
nobler ornament can there be than the
old Roman baths at the foot of Mont
Cavalier, and the delightful old garden
that surrounds them ? All that quarter
of Nimes has every reason to be proud
of itself ; it has been revealed to the
world at large by copious photography.
A clear, abundant stream gushes from
the foot of a high hill (covered with
trees and laid out in paths), and is dis-
tributed into basins which sufficiently
refer themselves to the period that gave
them birth — the period that has left its
stamp on that pompous Peyrou which
we admired at Montpellier. Here are
the same terraces and steps and balus-
trades, and a system of water-works less
impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious
and charming. The whole place is a
mixture of old Rome and of the French
eighteenth century ; for the remains of
the antique baths are in a measure in-
corporated in the modern fountains. In
a corner of this umbrageous precinct
stands a small Roman ruin which is
known as a temple of Diana, but was
more apparently a •nymphaum, and ap-
pears to have had a graceful connec-
tion wiA the adjacent baths. I learn
from Jfurray that this little temple, of
the period of Augustus, " was reduced
toils present state of ruin in 1577;"
the moment at which the townspeople,
threatened with a siege by the troops of
the crown, partly demolished it, lest it
should serve as a cover to the enemy.
The remains are very fragmentary, but
they serve to show that the place was
lovely. I spent half au hour in it on a
lovely Sunday morning (it is inclosed
by a high grille, carefully tended, and
VOL. LII. — NO. 313. 41

has a warden of its own), and with the
help of my imagination tried to recon-
struct a little the aspect of things in the
Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong, per-
haps, to say that I tried ; from a flight
so deliberate I should have shrunk. But
there was a certain contagion of antiq-
uity in the air, and among the ruins of
baths and temples, in the very spot
where the aqueduct that crosses the Gar-
don in the wondrous manner I had seen
discharged itself, the picture of a splen-
did paganism seemed vaguely to glow.
Roman baths — Roman baths ; those
words alone were a scene. Everything
was changed : I was strolling in ajardin
franyais ; the bosky slope of the Mont
Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hang-
ing over the place, is crowned with a
shapeless tower, which is as likely to be
of mediaeval as of antique origin ; and
yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of
the fountains, where a flight of curved
steps (a hemicycle, as the French say)
descended into a basin full of dark,
cool recesses, where the slabs of the Ro-
man foundations gleam through the clear
green water — as in this attitude I sur-
rendered myself to contemplation and
reverie, it seemed to me that I touched
for a moment the ancient world. Such
moments are illuminating, and the light
of this one mingles, in my memory,
with the dusky greenness of the Jardin
de la Fontaine.

The fountain proper — the source of
all these distributed waters — is the
prettiest thing in the world, a reduced
copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at the
foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point
where that eminence rises with a certain
cliff-like effect, and like other springs
in the same circumstances appears to
issue from the rock with a sort of quiv-
ering stillness. I trudged up the Mont
Cavalier — it is a matter of five min-
utes — arid having committed this cock-
neyism enhanced it presently by an-
other. I ascended the stupid Tour
Magne, the mysterious structure I men-

642

En Province.

[November,

tioned a moment ago. The only feature
of this massive, empty cylinder, except
the inevitable collection of photographs
to which you are introduced by the door-
keeper, is the view you enjoy from its
summit. This view is of course remark-
ably fine, but I am ashamed to say I
have not the smallest recollection of it ;
for while I looked into the brilliant
spaces of the air I seemed still to see
only what I saw in the depths of the
Roman baths — the image, disastrously
confused and vague, of a vanished world.
This world, however, has left at Nimes
a far more considerable memento than
a few old stones covered with water-
moss. The Roman arena is the rival of
those of Verona and of Aries ; at a re-
spectful distance it emulates the Col-
osseum. It is a small Colosseum, if I
may be allowed the expression, and is
in a much better preservation than the
great circus at Rome. This is especial-
ly true of the external walls, with their
arches, pillars, cornices. I must add that
one should not speak of preservation,
in regard to the arena at Nimes, with-
out speaking also of repair. After the
great ruin ceased to be despoiled, it be-
gan to be protected, and most of its
wounds have been dressed with new ma-
terial. These matters concern the ar-
chaeologist, and I felt here, as I felt after-
wards at Aries, that one of the profane,
in the presence of such a monument, can
only admire and hold his tongue. The
great impression, on the whole, is an
impression of wonder that so much
should have survived. What remains
at Nimes, after all dilapidation is esti-
mated, is astounding. I spent an hour
in the Arenes on that same sweet Sun-
day morning, as I came back from the
Roman baths, and saw that the corri-
dors, the vaults, the staircases, the ex-
ternal casing, are still virtually there.
Many of these parts are wanting in the
Colosseum, whose sublimity of size,
however, can afford to dispense with de-
tail. The seats at Nimes, like those at

Verona, have been largely renewed ;
not that this mattered much, as I lounged
on the cool surface of one of them, and
admired the mighty concavity of the
place and the elliptical sky-line, broken
by uneven blocks and forming the rim
of the monstrous cup — a cup that had
been filled with horrors. And yet I
made my reflections ; I said to myself
that though a Roman arena is one of
the most impressive of the works of"
man, it has a touch of that same stu-
pidity which I ventured to discover in
the Pont du Gard. It is brutal, i£ is
monotonous, it is not at all exquisite.
The Arenes at Nimes were arranged
for a bull- fight — a form of recreation
that, as I was informed, is much dans les
habitudes Nimoises and very common
throughout Provence, where (still ac-
cording to my information) it is the
usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon.
At Aries and Nimes it has a character-
istic setting, but in the villages the pa-
trons of the game make a circle of carts
and barrels, on which the spectators
perch themselves. I was surprised at
the prevalence, in mild Provence, of
this Iberian vice, and hardly know
whether it makes the custom more re-
spectable that at Nimes and Aries the
thing is shabbily and imperfectly done.
The bulls are rarely killed, and indeed
often are bulls only in the Irish sense
of the term — being domestic and moth-
erly cows. Such an entertainment of
course does not supply to the arena
that element of the exquisite which I
spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at
Nimes is mainly represented by the fa-
mous Maison Carree. The first impres-
sion you receive from this delicate little
building, as you stand before it, is that
you have already seen it many times.
Photographs, engravings, models, med-
als, have placed it definitely in your
eye, so that from the sentiment with
which you regard it curiosity and sur-
prise are almost completely, and per-
haps deplorably, absent. Admiration re-

1883.] Omens.

mains, however — admiration of a famil-
iar and even slightly patronizing kind.
The Maison Carree does not overwhelm
you ; you can conceive it. It is not one
of the great sensations of antique art,
but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite
of having been put to all sorts of incon-
gruous uses, marvelously preserved. Its
slender columns, its delicate proportions,
its charming compactness, seem to bring
one nearer to the century that built it
than the great superpositions of arenas
and bridges, and give it the interest that
vibrates from one age to another when
the note of taste is struck. If anything
were needed to make this little toy-tem-
ple a happy production, the service
would be rendered by the second-rate
boulevard that conducts to it, adorned
with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops.
Here, in a respectable recess, surround-

643

ed by vulgar habitations, and with the
theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite,
stands the small " square house," so
called because it is much longer than it
is broad. I saw it first in the evening,
in the vague moonlight, which made it
look as if it were cast in bronze. Stend-
hal says, justly, that it has the shape
of a playing-card, and he expresses his
admiration for it by the singular wish
that an " exact copy " of it should be
erected in Paris. He even goes so far
as to say that in the year 1880 this trib-
ute will have been rendered to its
charms ; nothing would be more simple,
to his mind than to " have " in that city
" le Panthdon de Rome, quelques temples
de Grece." Stendhal found it amusing
to write in the character of a commis-
voyageur, and sometimes it occurs to his
reader that he really was one.

Henry James.

OMENS.

As, ere the storm, a silence fills the world,
No blade is stirred, no banner is unfurled,

In conscious field or wood ;

So, all the morning, hushed and tranced with fear,
I seemed to see a messenger draw near,

Whose errand was not good.
I turned, and lo ! within the open door,
The one I deemed beset with perils sore

Close by me, smiling, stood.

II.

I know not why (I said that summer night)
The heart in me should be so wondrous light,

So sweet each moment's breath :
Assurance kind greets me from every star ;
The all-gathering breeze, that hastens from afar, —

How glad a thing it saith !
That was the night my friend beyond the seas,
Within a tent beneath the olive-trees,

Turned his blue eyes on death.

Edith M. Thomas.

644

The Bird of the Morning.

[November,

THE BIRD OF THE MORNING.

IF every bird has his vocation, as a
poetical French writer suggests, that of
the American robin must be to inspire
cheerfulness and contentment in men.
His joyous " Cheer up ! cheer up !
Cheery ! Be cheery ! Be cheery ! "
poured out in the early morning from
the top branch of the highest tree in
the neighborhood, is one of the most
stimulating sounds of spring. He must
"»be unfeeling indeed who can help de-
.serting his bed and peering through
tblinds till he discovers the charming
^philosopher, with head erect and breast
: glowing in the dawning light, forgetting
.the cares of life in the ecstasy of song.

Besides admonishing others to cheer-
fulness, the robin sets the example. Not

• only is his cheering voice the first in
the morning and the last at night, — of
the day birds, — but no rain is wet

• enough to dampen his spirits. In a
drizzly, uncomfortable day, when all

• other birds go about their necessary
tasks of food-hunting in dismal silence,
the robin is not a whit less happy than
when the sun shines ; and his cheery
voice rings out to comfort not only the
inmates of the damp little home in the
maple, but the owners of waterproofs
and umbrellas who mope in the house.

The most delightful study of one sum-
mer, not long ago, was the daily life, the
joys and sorrows, of a family of robins,
whose pretty castle in the air rested on
,a stout fork of a maple-tree branch
i near my window. Day by day I watched
itheir ways till I learned to know them
well.

The seat chosen for observations was
under a tree on the lawn, which hap-
pened to be the robin's hunting-ground ;
and here I sat for hours at a time,
quietly looking on at his work, and lis-
tening to the robin talk around me :
the low, confidential .chat .in the tree

where the little wife was busy, the live-
ly gossip across the street with neigh-
bors in another tree, the warning " Tut !
tut ! " when a stranger appeared, the
war cry when an intruding bird was to
be driven away, and the joyous " Pe-e-p !
tut, tut, tut," when he alighted on the
fence and surveyed the lawn before him,
flapping his wings and jerking his tail
with every note.

In truth, the sounds one hears in a
robin neighborhood are almost as vari-
ous as those that salute his ear among
people : the laugh, the cry, the scold,
the gentle word, the warning, the alarm,
and many others.

When I first took my seat I felt
like an intruder, which the robin plainly
considered me to be. He eyed me with
the greatest suspicion, alighting on the
ground in a terrible flutter, resolved to
brave the ogre, yet on the alert, and
ready for instant flight should anything
threaten. The moment he touched the
ground, he would lower his head and
run with breathless haste five or six
feet ; then stop, raise his head as pert as
a daisy, and look at the monster to see
if it had moved. After convincing him-
self that all was safe, he would turn his
eyes downward, and in an instant thrust
his bill into the soil where the sod was
thin, throwing up a little shower of
earth, and doing this again and again, so
vehemently that sometimes he was taken
off his feet by the jerk. Then he would
drag out a worm, run a few feet far-
ther in a panic-stricken way, as though
" taking his life in his hands," again
look on the ground, and again pull
out a worm ; all the time in an inconse-
quent manner, as though he had noth-
ing particular on his mind, and merely
collected worms by way of passing the
time.

So he would go on, never eating a

1883.]

The Bird of the Morning.

645

morsel, but gathering worms till he had
three or four of the wriggling creatures
hanging from his firm little beak. Then
he would fly to a low branch, run up a
little way, take another short flight, and
thus having, as he plainly intended by
this zigzag course, completely deceived
the observer as to his destination, he
would slip quietly to the nest and quick-
ly dispose of his load. In half a minute
he was back again, running and watch-
ing, and digging as before. And this
work he kept up nearly all day. In si-
lence, too, for noisy and talkative as the
bird is, he keeps his mouth shut when
on the ground. In all my watching of
robins for years in several places, I
scarcely ever heard one make a sound
when on the ground, near a human
dwelling.

Once I was looking through blinds,
and the bird did not see me. He had,
after much labor, secured an unusually
large worm, and it lay a few inches
away ?/here it fell as he- gave it the final
" yank." This was an extraordinary
case ; the robin was too full to hold in,
and there bubbled out of his closed bill
a soft " Cheery ! cheery ! be cheery ! "
hardly above a whisper and half fright-
ened withal. Then snatching the trophy
he flew away, doubtless to show his luck,
and tell his tale at home.

The robin has been accused of being
quarrelsome ; and to be sure he does de-
fend his home with vigor, driving away
any bird which ventures to alight on his
special maple-tree, sometimes with a
loud cry of defiance, and again without
a sound, but fairly flinging himself after
the intruder so furiously that not even
the king-bird — noted as a tyrant over
much larger birds — can withstand him.
But jealous as he is of his own, he is
equally ready to assist a neighbor in
trouble. One day while I was studying
him a great uproar arose in the orchard.
Robin voices were heard in loud cries,
and instantly those near the house took
wing for the scene of distress. With

my glass I could see many robins flying
about one spot, and diving one after an-
other into the grass, where there was a
great commotion and cries of some oth-
er creature, — I thought a hen. The
robins were furious, and the fight grew
very warm, while every now and then a
small object was tossed into the air

Hurrying down to the scene of the
warfare, I found that the creature in the
grass was a hen-turkey with one chick.
She was wild with rage, shaking and
tossing up what looked like another
young turkey, and the robins, evidently
taking the side of the victim, were de-
livering sharp pecks <and scolding vigor-
ously. Securing with some difficulty the
object of her fury, I found it to be a
young robin, which had fallen from a
nest, and which no doubt the usually
meek turkey thought threatened danger
to her own infant.

The poor little fellow was too badly
hurt to live, and although the turkey
was removed, some time passed before
calmness was restored to the neighbor-
hood. It seemed to me that the chat-
ter in the trees that evening was kept
up longer than usual, and I fancied that
every little youngster still living in the
nest heard the direful tale, and received
a solemn Earning.

1 was surprised to discover, in my
close attention to them, that although
early to rise robins are by no means
early to bed. Long after every feather
was supposed to be at rest for the night,
I would sit out and listen to the gossip,
the last words, the scraps of song, — dif-
ferent in every individual robin, yet all
variations on the theme " Be cheery,"
— and often the sharp " He he he he
he ! " so like a girl's laugh, out of the
shadowy depths of the maple.

Once I saw a performance that looked
as if the robin wanted to play a joke
" with intent to deceive." Hearing a
strange bird note, as usual I hastened
to my post. From the depths of a thick
chestnut -tree came every moment a

646

The Bird of the Morning.

[November,

long-drawn-out, mournful " S-e-e-e-p ! '
as though some bird was calling its
mate. It was not very loud, but it was
urgeut, and I looked the tree over very
carefully with my opera-glass before I
caught sight of the culprit, and was
amazed to see the robin. The tone was
so entirely unlike any I ever heard from
him that I should not have suspected
him even then, but I saw him in the
very act. No sooner did he notice that
he was observed than he gave a loud
mocking " He he he ! " and flew across
the lawn to his own tree.

One morning he was not to be seen
at his usual work, imt a furious calling
came from the other side of the lawn.
It was anxious and urgent, and it was
incessant. I resolved to see what was
the trouble. Stealing quietly along, I
came in sight of the bird, loudly calling,
fluttering his wings, and in evident
trouble, though I could not imagine the
cause, until looking closely I saw
perched on a branch of a cedar-tree a
fat, stupid-looking bird, fully as big as
the robin, and covered with feathers, but
with a speckled breast, and no tail worth
mentioning.

There he sat, like a lump of dough,
head down in his shoulders and bill stick-
ing almost straight up, and ifcither the
tenderest coaxing nor the loudest scold-
ing moved him in the least. In fact, I
thought he was dead, till the opera-glass
showed that he winked. But stupid and
ugly as he looked, he was the darling
of the heart in that little red breast, and
the parent fluttered wildly about while
I found a stick, and jarred the branch
slightly as a gentle hint that he should
obey his papa. That started the young-
ster, and away he flew, as well as any-
body, to the other side of the walk.

Wondering why the mother did not
take part in this training, I peeped into
the nest, where I found her sitting, and
I concluded she must be raising a sec-
ond family. It was indeed time for that
grown-up baby to learn to care for himself,

before there was another family to feed.
While I was looking at the nest and its
frightened yet brave little owner, the
young robin came back and alighted on
the ground, and so proud and happy
yet so anxious a parent is rarely seen.
It was soon evident that this was Mas-
ter Robin's first lesson in the worm
business ; he was now to be taught the
base of supplies, and I kept very quiet
while the scene went on. The father
would hop ahead a few feet and call per-
suasively, " Come on ! " The awkward
youngling answered loudly, " Wait !
wait ! " Then he would hop a few steps,
and papa would dig up a worm to show
him how, and tenderly offer it as a
slight lunch after his exertion. So they
went on, that clumsy and greedy young-
ster induced by his desire for worms,
while the patient teacher encouraged,
and worked for him. As for making an
effort for himself, the notion never en-
tered his head.

Not long after I saw one of the same
brood seated on a twig and asking to be
fed. I was quite near, and the robin
papa hesitated to come. Master Robin
called more and more sharply, drawing
up his wings without opening them, ex-
actly like a shrug of the shoulders, and
jerking his body in such a way that it
looked like stamping his foot. It was
a funny exhibition of youthful imperi-
ousness, and resembled what in a child
we call " spunkiness."

One of the most interesting entertain-
ments of the later days was to hear
the young bird's music lesson. In the
early morning the father would place
himself in the thickest part of the tree,
not as usual on the top, in plain sight,
and with his pupil near him would be-
gin, " Cheery ! cheery ! be cheery ! " in
a loud, clear voice ; and then would fol-
low a feeble, wavering, uncertain at-
tempt to copy the song. Again papa
would chant the first strain, and baby
would pipe out his funny notes. This
was kept up, till in a surprisingly short

1883. J-..

Random Spanish Notes.

647

time, after much daily practice both
vvitli the copy and without, I could hard-
ly tell father from son.

When the maple leaves turned, in the
fall, and the little home in the tree was
left empty and desolate, I had it brought
down to examine. It was a curious and
remarkably well-made nest, being a per-
fect cup of clay, a little thicker around

the top, well moulded, and covered in-
side and out with dry grass. This snug
cottage of clay has been the scene of
some of the sweetest experiences of all
lives, great as well as small. For the
happiness it has held I will preserve it :
and thus moralizing I placed it on a
bracket in memory of a delightful study
of the Bird of the Morning.

Olive Thome Miller.

RANDOM SPANISH NOTES.

SPAIN is for all the world the land of
romance. For the artist it is the land of
Murillo, Velasquez, Fortuny, and Goya,
of sunlight and color. For the student
of history it holds the precious archives
of the New World adventure and dar-
ing, of that subtle and sanguinary pol-
icy in religion and war which is typified
in the names of Loyola and Philip II.
For the lover of architecture it contains
some marvels of Gothic boldness and
fancy, and Saracenic beauty and grace.
For the investigator of race and language
it holds the problems of the Basque and
the gypsy. The great races who have
had their day there, the Roman, the
Goth, the Norman, the Moor, have left
visible traces and an historical atmos-
phere of romance.

And yet the real Spain is the least at-
tractive country in Europe to the tour-
ist. The traveler goes there to see cer-
tain unique objects. He sees them, en-
joys them, is entranced by them, leaves
them with regret and a tender memory,
and is glad to get out of Spain. There
are six things to see : the Alhambra,
the Seville cathedral and Alcazar, the
Mosque of Cordova, Toledo and its ca-
thedral, the Gallery at Madrid, and
Monserrat. The rest is mainly monot-
ony and weariness. With the exception
of the Alhambra, which has a spell that
an idle man liuds hard to break, and

where perhaps he could be content in-
definitely, there is no place in Spain
that one can imagine he would like to
live in, for the pleasure of living. Tak-
ing out certain historical features and
monuments, the towns repeat each other
in their attractions and their disagree-
ables. Every town and city in Italy
has its individual character and special
charm. To go from one to another is
always to change the scene and the de-
light. This is true of the old German
towns also. Each has a character. The
traveler sees many a place in each coun-
try where he thinks he could stay on
from month to month, with a growing
home-like feeling. I think there is noth-
ing of this attraction in Spain. The
want of it may be due to the country
itself, or to the people. I fancy that
with its vast arid plains, treeless and
tiresome, its gullied hills and its bare
escarped mountains, Spain resembles
New Mexico. It is an unsoftened, un-
relieved landscape, for the most part,
sometimes grand in its vastness and
sweep, but rugged and unadorned. The
want of grass and gentle verdure is a
serious drawback to the pleasure of the
eye, not compensated by the magic tricks
of the sunlight, and the variegated reds,
browns, and yellows of the exposed soil
and rocks, and the spring-time green of
the nascent crops. I speak, of course,

648

Random Spanish Notes.

[November,

of the general aspect, for the mountain
regions are rich in wild-flowers, and the
cultivation in the towns is everywhere a
redeeming feature.

The traveler, of course, gets his im-
pressions of a people from the outside.
These are correct so far as they go,
and it is in a sense safe to generalize on
them, though not to particularize. He
catches very soon the moral atmosphere
of a strange land, and knows whether
it is agreeable or otherwise, whether
the people seem pleasant or the reverse.
He learns to discriminate, for example,
between the calculated gemiithlichkeit of
Switzerland and the more spontaneous
friendliness of Bavaria. He can pro-
nounce at once upon the cordial good
humor of the Viennese, the obligingness
of the people of Edinburgh, the agreea-
bleness of the Swedes, simply on street-
knowledge, without ever entering a pri-
vate house or receiving anyipersonal hos-
pitality. He knows the wily, poetical
ways by which he is beguiled in Italy,
but grows fond of the sunny race.

In Spain he is pretty certain to be
rubbed the wrong way, most of the
time. He is conscious of an atmosphere
of suspicion, of distrust, of contempt
often. He cannot understand, for in-
stance, why attendants in churches and
cathedrals are so curt and disobliging,
keeping him away, on one pretense and
another, from the sights he has come
far to see, and for which he is will-
ing to pay. Incidents occurred both
at Granada and Toledo that could be
accounted for only on the supposition
that the custodians liked to discommode
strangers. If we had been Frenchmen,
whom the Spaniards hate as the despoil-
ers of churches and galleries, we could
have understood it. By reputation the
Spaniard is at home hospitable, and on
acquaintance gracious, and generally
willing to oblige. But the national at-
mosphere is certainly not what the Ger-
mans call gemiithlich. In no other Eu-
ropean country is the traveler likely to

encounter so much incivility and rude-
ness, so little attempt at pleasing him
and making him like the country. At
least, the attitude is that of indifference
whether the country pleases him or not.
Perhaps this springs from a noble pride
and superiority. Perhaps it is from a
provincial consciousness of being about
two hundred years behind the age. But,
elsewhere, the pleasantest people to
travel among are those whose clocks
stopped two centuries ago. Individual-
ly, I have no doubt, the Spaniards are
charming. Collectively, they do not
appear to welcome the stranger, or put
themselves out to make his sojourn
agreeable.

I should say all this with diffidence,
or perhaps should not say it at all, if I
had been longer in Spain. But surface
impressions have a certain value as well
as deep experiences. Some philosophers
maintain that the first impression of a
face is the true one as to the character
of the person.

Spain, then, impresses one with a sense
of barrenness, — a barren land with half
a dozen rich " pockets." The present
race, if we take out a few artists and
writers, has produced nothing that the
world much cares for. It destroyed and,
sheerly from want of appreciation, let
go to ruin the most exquisite creations
of a people of refinement and genius.
The world ought never to forgive the
barbarity that constructed the hideous
palace of Charles V., in the Alhambra,
— tearing down priceless architectural
beauty to make room for it, — or that
smashed into the forest of twelve hun-
dred columns in the mosque of Cor-
dova, to erect a chapel in the centre.
Since the era of the magnificent Gothic
cathedrals, Spanish taste and character
seem typified in that palace of Charles
in the Alhambra, and in the ugly and
forbidding pile — as utilitarian as a
stone cotton-mill — the Escorial. Mod-
ern Spanish architecture is generally
uninteresting, and would be wholly so

1883.]

Random Spanish Notes.

649

for the inheritance of the Moorish
courts or patios, which give a charm to
the interiors.

But for these and the few remains of
a better age, nothing could be more com-
monplace than the appearance of the city
of Seville, or uglier than its dusty and
monotonous plazas. This character is
that of the cities of Andalusia. Yet what
undying romance there is in the very
names of Andalucia and Sevilla ! What
visions of chivalry and beauty and lux-
ury they evoke ! What a stream of the
imagination is the turbid Guadalquivir,
running through a flat and sandy coun-
try ! Seville itself is flat, and subject
to the overflow of the river. Conse-
quently it is damp and unwholesome a
part of the year ; in summer it is hot,
in winter it has a fitful, chilly climate.
In spite of the mantillas and fans and
dark eyes, the pretty patios with flow-
ers and perhaps a fountain, the irides-
cent splendors of the Alcazar and the
decaying interiors of some old Moorish
houses, like the Casa de Pilatos (said
to be built in imitation of the House of
Pilate in Jerusalem), the magnificent
cathedral, which is as capable as any-
thing in this world, built of stone, to
lift the soul up into an ecstasy of devo-
tional feeling, the aspect of the town
is essentially provincial and common.
It is modernized without taste, and yet
when the traveler comes away he hates
to admit it, remembering the unique at-
tractions of the cathedral and the Al-
cazar, and a narrow, winding street, still
left here and there, with the overhang-
ing balconies high in the air, the quaint
portals, the glimpses of flowery courts,
the towers white with whitewash, the
sharp blue shadows, the rifts of cerulean
sky overhead. He tries to forget the
staring Plaza Nueva, with its stunted
palms, and the Bull Ring, and the gigan-
tic cigar factory, where are assembled,
under one roof, three thousand coarse
women, many of whom have learned
to roll cigars and rock the cradles at

their side at the same time, — three
thousand coarse women, with now and
then a wild beauty ; for it is difficult to
keep beauty out of the female sex alto-
gether, anywhere.

The traveler will fare very well in
the larger towns of Spain, where the
French art of cooking is practiced, with
the addition of an abundance in the way
of fruit. We were very well off at the
Hotel Madrid in Seville, which has spa-
cious rooms and a charming large inte-
rior court, overlooked by verandas, with
a fountain and flowers and oleanders
and other low-growing trees, and with
garlands of vines stretched across it.
The company was chiefly Spanish, and
the long table d'hote was not seldom
amusing, in spite of all the piety of for-
mality which in Europe belongs to the
ceremony of dining. Of course none
but the best people were there, and
after the soup, and at any time during
the courses, the gentlemen lit cigarettes,
so that we could see the ladies' eyes
flashing through a canopy of smoke. It
was a noisy table ; it was in fact a Ba-
bel. The Spaniard, in public, does not
appear to converse ; he orates, and ges-
ticulates, and argues with the vehemence
of a man on the rostrum. He is carried
away by his own eloquence ; he rises,
pounds the table, shakes his fist at his
adversary. But it is not a quarrel. His
adversary is not excited ; he sits perfect-
ly calm, as the listeners do ; and then
in turn he works himself up into a par-
oxysm of communication. Occasionally
they all talk together, and it looks like
a row, and sounds like one. At the first
occurrence of this phenomenon I expect-
ed trouble, and was surprised to see* that
nothing came of it, for the talkers sub-
sided, and left the table together in a
friendly manner. This exuberance gives
a zest to dining.

Cordova is not quite the deadest city
in Spain, but it rubs Toledo very hard.
If there were to be a fair and a compe-
tition for civic deadness, it is difficult to

650

Random Spanish Notes.

[November,

predict which city would win the prize.
They would both deserve it, or at least
honorable mention. Cordova, however,
is not buried, and it is not, like Toledo,
a mass of decay. It has simply stopped
in a decent commouplaceuess ; it does
not apparently do anything ; it has a
vacation. It is whitewashed, and clean
enough. But the streets are vacant,

and there is a suspicion of grass grow-
ing up between the stones. The fifty
thousand people here ought to be lively
enough to keep it down, but there seems
to be nothing to be lively about. And
yet if the tourist only had time to take
in the fact, this is one of the most inter-
esting cities in Spain. No other, not
Seville, preserves so much in its houses
the Moorish appearance, which is the
charm of Spain wherever it exists. It
is a great pleasure to stroll about the
echoing streets and note the old-time
beauty of the dwellings. Cordova —
JKarta-tuba, an " important city " — had
a million of inhabitants from the ninth
to the twelfth century, nine hundred
baths, six hundred inns, and three hun-
dred mosques. Seneca was born here,
and Lucan, and Thomas Sanches, the
Jesuit author of De Matrimonio ; and
here Gonzalo de Cordova, the great cap-
tain, was baptized. It was once the cap-
ital of Moorish Spain, an independent
Khalifate ; in art and letters an Ath-
ens; in wealth, refinement, and luxury
the Paris of the time, with an added
oriental splendor ; a place of pilgrimage
for the occidental world only less sacred
than Mecca.

Cordova has now to show the unique
mosque, one of the most interesting
buildjngs in the world, the monument
of Moorish genius and magnificence,
and a monumental statue, El Triunfo,
— an incongruous pile surmounted by
Rafael, the patron saint of the city,
easily the worst statue in Europe, and
a witness of Spanish taste. This monu-
ment stands down by the great stone
bridge over the Guadalquivir, from which

the lounger has an admirable view of the
picturesque old town.

The Great Mosque was begun in 786
by Abdu-r-rahma I., who determined to
build the finest mosque in the world ;
but even his splendid edifice was greatly
enlarged in the tenth century. There
was an era of good feeling between the
church and Islam in those days. Be-
fore this mosque was built, Christians
and Moslems amicably occupied differ-
ent parts of the same basilica, and when
the Caliph wanted to enlarge he bought
out the Christians. Leo, Emperor of
Constantinople, sent one hundred and
forty precious antique columns for the
new building, and Greek artists to dec-
orate it ; and when Cordova was con-
quered by the Christians, I believe that
for some time the two religions held
worship in this edifice. It occupies the
whole of a vast square. The exterior
walls, six feet in thickness, and from
thirty to sixty feet high, with buttressed
towers and richly carved portals to the
different entrances, is the finest specimen
of this sort of work existing. Nearly a
third of the great square is occupied by
the open Court of Oranges, the abode,
it will be remembered, of Irving's wise
parrot, who knew more than the ordi-
nary doctor of law ; still a delightful
grove of oranges, with great fountains,
where the pious and the idle like to con-
gregate. From this there were nine-
teen doors, — all now walled up except
three, — opening directly into the sacred
mosque. With all these openings, added
to the entrances on the other three sides,
to admit freely light and air, and to per-
mit the light to play on its polished col-
umns, what a cheerful and beautiful in-
terior it must have been ! And what a
bewildering sight it is yet ! The roof is
low, not above thirty-five feet high, and
originally it was all flat. The area is
about 394 feet east and west, by 556
feet north and south, and it is literally
a forest of columns. Of the original
1200, 1096 still stand; the others were

1883.]

Random Spanish Notes.

651

removed to make room for the elaborate
choir erected in the centre, which de-
stroys the great sweep of pillars and
much of the forest effect. It is fit to
make a body weep to see how the Chris-
tians have abused this noble interior.
It would have been more excusable if it
had been done by early Christians, to
whom we pardon everything ; but it was
not : it was done by late and a poor kind
of Christians. These columns, all mono-
liths, and all made to appear of uniform
height by sinking the longer ones in
the floor, were the spoils of heathen tem-
ples in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Many
came from Nimes and Narbonne, some
from Seville and Tarragona, numbers
from Constantinople, and a great quan-
tity from Carthage and other ancient
cities of Africa. They are all of choice
and some of them of rare marbles, jas-
per, porphyry, verd-autique, and all were
originally highly polished, and many
still retain their lustre. They might,
with a little labor, be made again to
shine like gems. From the carved capi-
tals of these columns spring round Moor-
ish arches, painted in red and white,
which, seen in any diagonal view, inter-
lace like ribbons, and produce a sur-
passing and charming effect.

This mosque was called Zeca, the
house of purification ; it was equal in
rank to Al Aksa in Jerusalem, and its
shrine of pilgrimage was second only to
the Kaaba at Mecca. If .the traveler
chooses to walk seven times around the
lovely little chapel in the centre, once
the holy of holies, he will tread in a
well-worn path in the stone made by
tens of thousands of Moslem pilgrim
feet. This chapel and the Mihrab are
brilliant with mosaics, and fine carving
in stone, and stucco ornamentation. I
have heard some critics contrast the
lowness of this edifice with the spring-
ing aspiration of the Gothic cathedrals,
and say that it oppressed them ; but it
is one of the wonders of the world.

Toledo, so often figured and described,

I am sure needs no description from me.
Everybody knows that it stands, with
its crumbling walls and towers and de-
caying palaces, on a high hill of rock
perpendicular on three sides, and that
the muddy Tagus flows around it in a
deep ravine, making it almost an island.
I walked and scrambled entirely around
it one day, — not on the city side, for
that is impossible, but on the high over-
looking hills circling it on the opposite
side of the river, — and marked well
its ramparts and towers. I could n't
throw an orange into it from the encir-
cling hills, but from this vantage ground
artillery could quickly reduce it to a
stone heap. But I do not know as that
would much change the exterior appear-
ance of the city. Nothing in the world
looks so old, scarred, and battered.

Within it is the city of silence. Not
in Karnak is this silence, if one may
say so, more audible to the listening
ear. There are no carriages, except the
omnibus that took us up from the sta-
tion, over the bridge Alcantara — the
high arch beneath which flows the rapid
Tagus — and through the Moorish Gate
of the Sun, and this can make its way
only in a few of the streets ; the others
are too steep, too narrow, too rough.
There is no traffic, and the footfalls
have little echo in the deserted streets.
But what a museum of the picturesque
it is, this stately widow, as somebody,
calls it, of two dynasties, with the re-
mains of noble fa9ades and the loveli-
est carved portals and recesses and win-
dows ! Everywhere Moorish suggestion
and Moorish fancy, a perpetual charm.
The tourist goes hunting everywhere
for the remains of Saracen genius, and
prizes every broken tile, stuccoed room,
ornamented wall and ceiling, and quaint-
ly carved door-way.

Ah, well, this is not a guide-book.
We stayed, while we were in Toledo,
with the sisters Figueroa, descendants, I
believe, of a noble house, who dwell in
a rambling, high, and gaunt tenement

652

Random Spanish Notes.

[November,

that has seen better days, but not clean-
er ; for its entrance steps are scrubbed,
its bare floors are scrubbed, and I think
its hard beds are scrubbed. It is, after
all, a comfortable sort of place, though
I did not find out exactly in what the
comfort consisted. There is only one
other place of entertainment in the whole
city, the inn, and we were zealously
warned against that by all the travelers
we saw who had preceded us. On com-
ing away, we warned people against the
Figueroa. It was the least we could
do. And yet we did it with humorous
regret ; for the ancient maiden sisters
were neat. Ah, if they had only given
us anything we could eat; if they had
not served our morning coffee and bread
on an old salver rusty with age, and not
too clean, and the rusty old coffee-pot
had had a handle, and the bread had been
sweet, how different it would have been !
We took a liking to these venerable
virgins, although they were churlish and
unaccommodating, and treated our hum-
ble requests for certain conveniences
with lofty scorn. But pride and hotel-
keeping must go together in Spain.
They must have had good hearts, these
women, although they were not liberal,
for they kept the house full of pets, —
quail that were always whistling, and
doves that were always loudly cooing,
especially when we wished to sleep in
the morning. We took our frugal re-
pasts in their neat and stuffy little sit-
ting-room. There was riot a book or a
newspaper in the house (in sight), but
the walls were covered with trumpery
pictures of saints and madonnas. In
the little sitting-room, where the sisters
sat by the deep-cushioned window and
sewed, there were five saints and eleven
madonnas. But most pathetic of all
was an etagere, on which these dear old
ladies (it was probably our traveled
rudeness, and their keen perception of
our ignorance of what was good enough
food for anybody, that made them so
angular to us) kept the playthings of

their far-away youth, — their dolls, their
baby-houses, the little trifles dear to
girlhood. No, indeed, I would n't have
had these excellent women different in
any respect, — not in Toledo. For what
has Toledo itself except the toys of its
youth ? It is rather surprising that To-
ledo is as clean as it is, as it has no
water, except what is brought up the
steep hill from the river in jars on the
patient donkeys. It is in no danger
of modern improvements and drainage.
I suppose the rains of heaven wash it ;
and the snow, perhaps, helps, for it is
a frightfully cold place in winter. But
it makes up for that by a hot summer,
when the sun, reflected from the bare
rocks about it, blazes away at it without
hindrance. Its sole specialty is the
beautiful niello work, the inlaying of
gold and silver in steel, which is carried
on at a couple of shops, and at the an-
cient factory across the river, ever fa-
mous for its high-tempered, inlaid To-
ledo blades. We made a journey thith-
er, but it was not remunerative, except
for its historical associations. A few
inferior arms are manufactured there ;
but as fine blades are probably now made
in America and England as Toledo ever
tempered ; and the inlaying of brooches
and fancy scarf pins and other ornamen-
tal things is not equal to the ancient
work. Still Toledo keeps something of
its craft in this exquisite art.

One hesitates to speak of the glory of
the place, the cathedral, because no jus-
tice can be done it in a paragraph ; nor
can any justice be done the surly custo-
dians who refused to let us see some of
its locked-up treasures, after appointing
time after time for us to come. It was a
mine of hoarded wealth and art before it
was plundered by the French in 1808.
The corner-stone was laid by St. Ferdi-
nand in 1226, and it was completed in
the year America was discovered ; but
its enrichment went on, and the names
of one hundred and forty-nine artists are
given who for centuries worked at its

1883.]

Random Spanish Notes.

653

adornment. I do not know anywhere
else a finer example of the pure, vigor-
ous Gothic, scarcely another so nobly
and simply impressive, nor any other
richer in artistic designs. It satisfies
the mind by its noble solidity, purity,
and picturesqueness. When you are in
it, you are quite inclined to accept its
supernatural inception. The Virgin is
said to have come down from heaven
during its erection, and the marble slab
is shown on which she stood when she
appeared to St. Ildefonso. But I do not
see how that could have been, for the
cathedral was not projected till 1226,
and St. Ildefonso died in 617. His body,
carried off during the Moorish invasion,
was recovered about the year 1270, and
is supposed to be buried here. But I be-
lieve the legend is that the Virgin made
several appearances here, and was pres-
ent a good deal of the time during the
building of the cathedral. At any rate,
the stone is here, encased in red marble
in the rear of the shrine of the saint,
and quite worn with the kisses of the
believers, who come still to put their
lips on the exact spot touched by the
Virgin's feet. The cathedral has also
a famous image of the Virgin in black
wood, about which are told the same
legends that enhance the other black
images in Spain. I confess that I
looked with more interest at the banner
which hung from the galley of Don
John of Austria at the battle of Lepan-
to. In this cathedral also is the Muz-
arabic chapel, where the ancient Muz-
arabic ritual is daily performed. I sup-
pose the litany has some affinity with
that of the Eastern church before the
great division. The Muzarabes were
Christian worshipers under the Moorish
rulers, and were tolerated by them. I
saw in the street women wearing yellow
flannel petticoats,'which are said to be
the distinguishing female dress of this
sect. I believe there are several Muz-
arabic pnri>hes in Toledo, but their rit-
ual : ,er:ormed only in this hospitable

cathedral. It is a service of more sim-
plicity than that at the other altars, and
probably would be regarded as " low "
in ecclesiastical terminology. It is said
that the peculiar ritual of this chapel
was established here in 1512 by Car-
dinal Ximenez, as a note of Spanish in-
dependence of the Pope.

Madrid, notwithstanding its size and
large population — about half a million
— and its many stately buildings, a few
brilliant streets and beautiful public
gardens, is still provincial in aspect.
When I saw the ox-carts in the principal
streets I was reminded of Washington
before the war. It has put on a veneer
of French civilization, which contrasts
sharply with the lingering Spanish rus-
ticity and provincialism. It has the air
of a capital in many ways. Its bull-
fights are first-rate; as Paris attracts
the best singers, Madrid draws to it the
most skillful matadores. The Ring is,
I believe, the largest in the kingdom,
and capable of seating fourteen thou-
sand spectators. The fight is the great
Sunday fete, at which the king and the
royal family are always present. As
the performances are in the afternoon,
they do not interfere with the morning
church-going. And if they did, an ex-
cuse for it might be urged that Madrid
has not a single fine church, and, not
being a city, it has no cathedral. The
town has several fine libraries, besides
the Biblioteca Nacional, a splendid col-
lection of armor, and archaeological and
other museums that properly claim at-
tention. Of course the distinction of
the capital is its Royal Picture Gallery,
which compels and repays a pilgrimage
from any distance. One must go there
to see Murillo, Velasquez and Ribera,
and he is almost equally compelled to
go there for the study of the great Ital-
ian and Flemish masters. The collec-
tion is so vast and varied that after days
of wandering through its galleries the
tourist feels that his acquaintance with
it has only just begun.

654

Random Spanish Notes.

[November,

Almost no one speaks well of the cli-
mate and situation of Madrid. Its forced
location w;is the whim of Charles V.
The situation offers no advantages for a
great city. It is built on a lofty plateau
formed by several hills at an elevation
of 2450 feet above the sea ; but it is not
picturesque, for its environs are sterile
plains, swept by the winds. It is the
only large capital that does not lie on
a respectable river ; the Manzanares is
commonly a waterless, stony bed. And
yet, having heard all this about the de-
testable climate and the unhealthy loca-
tion, the traveler, if he happens there
at a favorable time of the year, will
probably be surprised at the cheerful
aspect of the town under the deep blue
sky. Within a few years very much
has been done to beautify it by planting
trees, laying out fine parks, and build-
ing handsome villas. It is amazing what
money can do in the way of transforming
a sterile and intractable place into beau-
ty. Madrid is on the way to be a city
of brilliant appearance in the modern
fashion, though it is not yet very inter-
esting as a whole. But, for details, in
Spain, the traveler is inclined to resent
Paris shop windows and Paris costumes.
Perhaps the climate is maligned. From
what I could hear I should judge it far
better than that of Paris, except, per-
haps, for a part of the summer. Our
minister, Mr. Hamlin, told me that the
winter he spent there — which may have
been an exception — he found agreea-
ble, with very little frost, almost con-
stant sun, and that it compared favorably
with a winter in Washington.

The Spanish people, though reckoned
taciturn and reserved with strangers,

O '

have a Southern demonstrativeness with
each other which does not shrink from
public avowal. We had a pleasing illus-
tration of this when we took the after-
noon train from Madrid for Zaragoza.
A bridal party were on the platform in
the act of leave-taking with the happy
couple, who entered our car. The ten-

der partings at the house seemed to
have been reserved for this public occa-
sion. The couple, as it turned out, were
not going very far, but if they had been
embarking for China the demonstra-
tions of affection, anxiety, grief, and
other excitement could not have been
more moving and varied. There were
those who wept, and those who put on
an air of forced gayety ; and there was
the usual facetious young man, whose
mild buffooneries have their use on such
occasions. The babble of talk was so
voluminous that we did not hear the sig-
nal to start, and as long as we kept the
group in sight their raised outstretched
hands were clutching the air with that
peculiar movement of the fingers which
means both greeting and farewell in this
land. The pretty bride, it soon ap-
peared, was willing to take all the world
into confidence in her happiness and af-
fection. The car was well filled, and,
as it happened, it would have been more
convenient for her to sit opposite her
husband of an hour. But this was not
to be endured. She squeezed herself
into the narrow place beside him, and
began to pet and fondle him in a dozen
decent ways, in the most barefaced and
unconscious manner. The rest of us
were as if we did not exist, and it was
in vain that we looked out of the win-
dow in token of our wish to efface our-
selves in the presence of so much private
happiness. She could not keep either
hands or eyes off him. And why should
she ? He was hers, and for life, and
we were mere accidents of the hour.
The assertion of her possession embar-
rassed us, but the square -faced and
somewhat phlegmatic young gentleman
took it as of right and in a serene con-

sciousness of merit. Opposite this de-
lightful couple, who were entering Par-
adise by such a public door, sat the
beau-ideal of a Spanish gentleman and
grandee — tall, slender, grave, kindly,
high-bred almost to the point of intel-
lectual abdication — and his handsome

1883.]

Random Spanish Notes.

655

young son, a most graceful and aristo-
cratically marked lad, with the signs of
possibly one step farther in the way
of unvigorous refinement ; resembling
very much in air and feature the young
Prince Imperial who was killed in Af-
rica : charming people, with a delicate
courtesy and true, unselfish politeness,
as we discovered afterwards. I watched
to see what effect this demonstration of
national manners hard upon them ; and
I am glad to say that their faces were
as impassive as if they had been marble
images. We all, I trust, looked uncon-
scious, and perhaps we should ultimate-
ly have become so if the doting pair —
God bless their union, so auspiciously
begun ! — had not descended from the
car in a couple of hours at a little way
station. I hope she did not eat him up.
Somehow this little episode put us all
in good humor, and made us think bet-
ter of the world as we journeyed on in
the night through a country for the most
part dreary, and came at midnight to
Zaragoza, and even brought us into the
right sentimental mood to enjoy the
moonlight on the twelve tiled domes of
the Cathedral El Filar, as we rattled in
an omnibus over the noble stone bridge
across the swift, broad, and muddy Ebro,
— the most considerable and business-
like river we had seen in Spain. Zara-
goza pleased us in a moment by its
quaint picturesqueness and somnolent
gravity. My room, in the rear of the
hotel, looked upon a narrow street in-
closed by high buildings, and was exact-
ly opposite a still narrower street, into
which the high moon threw heavy shad-
ows from the tall houses. The situa-
tion was full of romantic suggestions,
and I was familiar with just such scenes
in the opera. As I looked from my
window, before going to bed, a brigand
in a long cloak and sombrero, carrying
a staff in one hand and a lantern in the
other, came slowly through this street,
set his lantern down at the junction of
the two streets, looked carefully up and

down, and then in a musical tenor sang
the song of the watchman, — " Half
past one o'clock, and fine weather."
Then he took up his lantern and glided
away to awake other parts of the town
with his good news.

We found Zaragoza exceedingly at-
tractive in its picturesque decay. No-
where else did we see finer mediaeval
palaces, now turned into rookeries of
many tenements and shops. We were
always coming upon some unexpected
architectural beauty, as we wandered
about the narrow streets of high houses.
Of the two cathedrals, the old one, La
Seo, is the most interesting. It has
a curious, lofty octagonal tower, with
Corinthian columns, drawn out like a
jointed telescope, and on one side some
remarkable brick-work of the fourteenth
century, inlaid with Moorish tiles, varie-
gated in color. But El Filar, modern
and ugly within, attracts most worship-
ers, for there is the alabaster pillar upon
which the Virgin stood. A costly chapel
is erected over it, and upon it stands the
black-wood image of the Virgin, blazing
with jewels. The pillar cannot be seen
from the front, but a little of it is visi-
ble in the rear, and this spot is kissed
by a constant stream of worshipers all
day long. This pillar and figure is the
great fact in Zaragoza; it is its most
sacred and consoling possession. Many
shops are devoted to the manufacture
and sale of representations of it, so that
this seemed to be the chief industry of
the city.

The Maid of Zaragoza is not much
attended to, and it was difficult to get
any traces of her, or to make her very
real. We could not even determine the
exact place of her heroic fight during
the siege by the French in 1809. It
was somewhere near the southwest gate
of the city. Here, says the guide-book,
which calls this heroine " an Amazon,
and a mere itinerant seller of cooling
drinks," — " here, Agustina, the Maid
of Zaragoza, fought by the side of her

656

Random Spanish Notes.

[November,

lover, — an artilleryman, — and when
he fell, mortally wounded, snatched the
match from his hand and worked the
gun herself." For all that, this plebeian
maid, who has an immortal niche in
poetry, may outlast Zaragoza itself, or
suflice to preserve its memory.

Traveling towards Tarragona, we
found dull scenery and a waste country.
The land is worn in ragged gullies, and
at intervals are mounds of earth, as if
left by the action of water, that looked
artificial,, square-topped, with a button-
like knob, — a singular formation. Now
and then we had a glimpse of an old
castle perched on a hill. At Lareda a
genuine surprise awaited us, — the best
breakfast we had in Spain. It seems
voracious to say it, but it is in human
nature to be pleased with something
really appetizing after two months of
privation. The character of the cos-
tume changed here. The peasants wore
sandals, often without stockings. The
men sported the dull red, or purple,
Phrygian cap, hanging well in front.
The women wore no distinguishing cos-
tume, unless plainness of face is a dis-
tinction among the sex, and were more
hard-featured than their soft southern
sisters. Here is a different and a more
virile race, for we are in Catalonia. As
we approach Tarragona the country
is very much broken into narrow val-
leys and hills, but all highly cultivated.
Everything is dry and dusty. There is
no grazing ground or grass, but vine-
yards, mulberry-trees, and pomegranates.

Tarragona is set on a hill, and from
the noble terraces, opening out from the
Rambla, one of the chief streets, six
hundred feet above the shore, there is a
magnificent view of the coast and the
sea. The city has a small harbor, pro-
tected by a long mole. The command-
ing position, the dry air, the lovely win-
ter climate, and the historic interest of
the place cause Tarragona to be recom-
mended for a winter residence. But I
should think it would be dull. There

is too much of a decayed and melan-
choly, deserted air about it. We had
another surprise here, not so much in
the excellence of the hotel in which we
stayed as in the civility of the landlord.
But our hopes were dashed of making
the amende to Spain in this respect,
when we found that he was an Italian.

If not for a whole winter, Tarragona
might detain the traveler interested for
many days, for it is exceedingly pictur-
esque, inside and out. I made the cir-
cuit of its high but somewhat dilapi-
dated walls, and marked the enormous
stones laid in it. Within, the houses
are built close to the wall, and occa-
sionally windows are cut through it, —
a very good use for these mediajval de-
fenses. There are ruins of old fortifi-
cations on the hill back of the town,
and I believe that the town is, in show
at least, very well fortified ; but we did
not inquire into it, having no inten-
tion of taking it. The cathedral, high
up, and approached by a majestic flight
of steps, sustains its reputation, on ac-
quaintance, as one of the noblest Gothic
edifices in Spain. We were especially
detained by the wonderful archaic carv-
ing all over the interior. Attached is a
pretty garden with fine cloisters, Moor-
ish windows and arches, and the quaint-
est, most conceit-full, and amusing carv-
ing in the world. We wanted to bring
away with us the gigantic iron knocker
on the cathedral door, — a hammer
striking the back of a nondescript ani-
mal. On an unfortunate afternoon, we
were roughly jolted in a rattling omni-
bus — the only vehicle we could pro-
cure — three miles along the shore
over a wretched road, enveloped in
clouds of dust, to a grove of small pines,
to see what is called Scipio's Tower. I
wished we had never had anything more
to do with it than Scipio had. And yet
the view from there of the rock-built
city, with its walls sloping to the ever-
fascinating sea, and the line of purple
coast will long endure in the memory.

1883.]

Random Spanish Notes.

657

To come to Barcelona is to return to
Europe. Signs of industry multiply as
we approach the town. The land is
more highly andv carefully cultivated
than elsewhere in Spain, but the ab-
sence of grass and the exposure of the
red earth give the country a scarred,
ragged, and raw appearance, which the
vines and the few olive-trees do not hide.
There is nothing to- compensate the
Northern-bred eye for the lack of grass
and the scarcity of foliage.

Barcelona is the only town in Spain
where the inhabitants do not appear
self-conscious, the only one that has at
all the cosmopolitan air. The stranger
is neither stared at nor regarded with
suspicion. The people are too busy to
mind anything but their own affairs, yet
not too busy to be courteous and civil,
after the manner of people who know
something of the world, and there is a
bright vivacity in the place which is
very taking. We saw here, however,
the first time on this abstemious penin-
sula, a man drunk on the street. Only
once before had we seen any persons in-
toxicated, and they were a party of
young gentlemen accompanying ladies
through the Escorial, who had taken so
much wine at dinner that even the
gloom of that creation of a gloomy
mind had no sobering effect on them.
The traveler who has been told that
Barcelona is too modern and commer-
cial to interest him will be agreeably
disappointed. If he likes movement and
animation he will find it in the chief
street of the place, the Rambla, a broad
thoroughfare which runs from the port
entirely through the city, planted with
trees, and having in the centre a wide
trottoir, which is thronged day and night
with promenaders. On Sunday and
Wednesday mornings it offers a floral
show which is unequaled. On one side
are displayed broad banks of flowers,
solid masses of color, extending for
something like a quarter of a mile, —
roses, carnations, violets, and so on, each

VOL. LII. — NO. 313. 42

massed by its kind in brilliant patches ;
and the buyers walk along from bank to
bank and make up their bouquets with
the widest range for selection. If the
traveler cares for shopping he will find
dazzling shops on the San Fernando,
and he may amuse himself a long time
in front of the fan and lace windows.
As a rule, the windows of Spanish shops
do not make a very attractive display,
and the hunter after bricabrac and cu-
rios seems to be gleaning in a field that
has been pretty well ransacked. But
everywhere in Seville, Madrid, and Bar-
celona the most handsome windows are
those filled with painted fans. Their
prominence is a sign of the universal
passion for these implements of coquet-
ry. Barcelona is the centre of the lace
manufactory, especially the machine-
made. The traveler is also told that he
can buy there better than elsewhere the
exquisite blonde, which is made by hand.
But it is like going to the seaside for
fish. The finest blonde, of which very
little is produced in comparison with
the black, is sent to foreign markets,
and in the three largest depots of hand-
made blonde lace we found only one
sample in each, of the best.

The old part of the town will, how-
ever, most attract the Northern wander-
er, and if he has heard as little as we
had of the cathedral he has a surprise
in store for him. Its wide and lofty
nave is exceedingly impressive, and the-
slender columns supporting the roof
give it a pleasing air of lightness and
grace. There is also much rich orna-
mentation, and the stained glass is su-
perb. The lover of old iron-work will
find it difficult to tear himself away
from the cloisters, where he will find an
infinite variety of designs and exquisite
execution. The cloisters and garden,
with flowers and fountain and orange-
trees, are altogether delightful. On one
side is the court of the tailors, where the
knights of the shears lie buried under
the pavement, with the crossed shears

658 Recollections of Home during the Italian Revolution. [November,

cut in the stones, as honorable a symbol
of industry as crossed swords elsewhere.
The shoemakers also come to honor
in this democratic resting-place, — God
rest their souls ! — and the emblem of
the boot speaks of a time when honest
work was not ashamed to vaunt itself.

It was the eve of Corpus Christi, and
the quaint old court was beautifully
decorated and garlanded with flowers.
An egg was dancing on the fountain jet,
and all the children of the town seemed
to be there, watching the marvel with
sparkling eyes, while a dozen artists
were sketching the lively scene. The
procession next day, which moved after
a solemn service in the cathedral, showed
remnants of the mingling of mediaeval
facetiousness with the religious pageant-
ry. The principal figures were the
King and Queen of Aragon, gigantic in
size, and gaudy in mock-heroic apparel.
The movers of these figures were men
who were concealed under the royal
skirts and carried the vast frame-work
on their shoulders. The teteriug mo-
tion of the queen, so incongruous with
her size and royal state, called forth
shouts of laughter. A very pretty sight
was the troop of handsome boys on

horseback, who followed their majesties,
beating drums. Two of them wore white
wigs and gowns of scarlet velvet trimmed
with gilt, and rode white horses with
similar caparison. Four other boys
were more elaborately appareled. They
were clad in red caps with blue tops and
white feathers, a blue satin blouse, a belt
of yellow, yellow breeches, scarlet hose,
shoes laced with blue, and on the breast
a shield of gold with the cross. The
admiration of the crowd seemed to nurse
the spiritual pride of these boys, who
bore themselves with a haughty air.
We fancied that the Catalonians, who
are politically turbulent and indepen-
dent, rather delighted in the exhibition
of mock royalty made by the King and
Queen of Aragon.

We left the cheerful town in the en-
joyment of this curious pageant. Al-
most immediately the railway train took
us into a new region. The character of
the landscape wholly changed. Grass
appeared, the blessed green turf, and
trees. The earth was clothed again.
And with whatever sentimental regrets
we left the land of romance, the verdure
so delighted the eye that it was like en-
tering Paradise to get out of Spain.
Charles Dudley Warner.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ROME DURING THE ITALIAN REVOLU-
TION.

II.

A THOUGHTFUL Italian writer has
traced the developments of ecclesiastical
policy which culminated in the Council
of the Vatican to the state of Italian
politics in the winter of 1859-60. He
might have been even more precise.
He might have named the 22d of De-
cember, 1859, and have claimed that
the Council was the ultimate consequent
of the influences which were set in mo-

tion and of the combinations brought
about by the French pamphlet, Le Pape
et le Congres, published on that day.

There was a calm in Italian politics
during that fall and early winter. The
Lombard war was over and Garibaldi
had not yet sailed for Sicily. The in-
terests of the revolution, of Italy and
of the Papacy, were therefore, for the
time being, wholly in the hands of the
diplomates. The Treaty of Zurich had
been signed in October ; and the Euro-

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

659

pean congress therein provided for, and
to which was referred the future of the
Romagna and of the Roman question,
was to meet early in January of the
coming year.

Of this calm interval the political
event was the sudden appearance of the
above remarkable pamphlet. It was un-
signed, but it was none the less every-
where attributed to M. de la Guerro-
niere, and regarded as the virtual ut-
terance of the French emperor ; and,
with whatever reserve in phraseology,
was always discussed as such. It is cu-
rious reading now, in the light cast upon
it by the events of these intervening
years, — a light very different from that
in which it was written to be read ; and
it would furnish the text for a mono-
graph which would be interesting to the
student of philosophic history. A glance
at its argument is quite worth a page or
two of these reminiscences.

To ^ certain point this pamphlet was
an echo of About's La Question Ro-
maine, already cited in the former arti-
cle. M. About had called the attention
of Europe to the practical character of
the Papal government, and had com-
pelled a public recognition of the social,
financial, moral, and political results
which were inevitably involved in it.
So doing, he proposed that these evils
should be at least minimized, by re-
leasing the trans-Apennine states from
subjection to ecclesiastical rule, and in-
deed by restricting the temporal power
to the smallest territory possible. And
he added, by the way, a broad hint that
it would also be better for France if her
ecclesiastical affairs were ordered from
Paris rather than from a foreign see.

Upon a basis somewhat like this the
writer of Le Pape et le Congres now
sought to discuss the Papal question, or
rather that of the legations, as it must
come before the approaching congress ;
and to foreshadow such a solution, or,
perhaps, to test the preparedness of pub-
lic opinion to accept it.

The pamphlet tacitly assumed as con-
ceded, or rather as not in question, the
permanence of the spiritual Papacy.

It was then argued that the temporal
power was, not only from a religious but
from a political point of view as well,
absolutely essential to that spiritual
supremacy. " It is necessary that the
chief of two hundred millions of Catho-
lics should be subject to no one ; that he
should be subordinate to no other au-
thority ; and that the august hand that
governs souls, being relieved of all de-
pendence, should be able to rise above
all human passions. If the Pope were
not an independent sovereign, he would
be French, Austrian, Spanish, or Ital-
ian, and the title of his nationality
would take from him the character of
his universal pontificate ; " for it would
thus, in the interest of that one na-
tionality, make the ecclesiastical and re-
ligious power reposing hi his hands a
source of possible disquiet, or even dan-
ger, to the peace of all other govern-
ments.

The conclusion was that the mainte-
nance of the temporal power was, there-
fore, for Europe, a political necessity.
" It concerns England, Russia, and Prus-
sia, as well as France and Austria, that
the august representative of the unity
of Catholicism should be neither con-
strained, humiliated, nor subordinated."

But, on the other hand, the writer
urged that the social, civil, and political
complications in which such a temporal
sovereignty had ever and would ever
involve the Pope must keep up a per-
manent conflict between the secular in-
terests of his people and the true and
consistent exercise of that spiritual sov-
ereignty. " The Pontiff is bound," he
argues, " by the principles of divine or-
der, which be has no right to abandon ;
the Prince is solicited by the demands of
social order, which he cannot put away.
How, then, shall the Pontiff find in the
independence of the Prince a guarantee
of his authority, without at the same

660 Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. [November,

time finding there an embarrassment
for bis conscience ? "

In fine, it is inevitable tbat, in such a
state, the rights of the people and the
correlative duties of the Prince must
yield to those of the Pope. Such a
state would indeed wish — especially if
it were an important factor in a possible
nationality — " to live politically, to
perfect its institutions, to participate in
the general movement of ideas, to ben-
efit by the changes in the times, by the
advance of science, by the progress of
the human spirit." But of course this is
out of the question. The laws of such
a state " will be enchained to dogmas.
Its activity will be paralyzed by tradi-
tion. Its patriotism will be condemned
by its faith. It will be compelled to re-
sign itself to immobility, or to go on to
revolution. The world will move, and
will leave it behind." There will re-
sult one of two things : either all real
life will die out among that people ; or
" the noble aspirations of nationality
will break out," and it will be necessary
to repress it by foreign intervention,
and the temporal power will again be
dependent, as it has been heretofore,
upon French or Austrian military occu-
pation.

" So, then," continues the brochure,
" the temporal power of the Pope is
necessary and legitimate ; but it is in-
compatible with a state of any consid-
erable extent." In other words, while
the temporal sovereignty must be main-
tained, it is also essential to reduce the
territory over which it is exercised to
the smallest possible proportions.

Now, whatever may have been the
syllogistic force of such an argument
(concerning which there certainly was
room for question), its practical con-
clusions were that the true course for
the approaching congress was to rec-
ognize the separation of the Romagna
from the Papal government, if not also
to relieve the Pope of Umbria and the
Marches of Ancona, — of all, indeed,

save the city and immediate neighbor-
hood of Rome ; and that the true policy
of the Pope was frankly to consent to
this dismemberment of his inheritance,
and to ask of Europe in return a guar-
antee of the territory which would then
still remain to him.

On the other hand, the people of
Rome were to be asked, in the interests
of Catholicity, to acquiesce in a future
which was sketched for them in these
attractive colors : " There will be in
Europe a people who will have at their
head less a king than a father, and
whose rights will be guaranteed rather
by the heart of their sovereign than by
the authority of laws and institutions.
This people will have no national repre-
sentation, no army, no press, no magis-
tracy. All their public life will be con-
centrated in their municipal organiza-
tion. Beyond that restricted horizon
there will be no other occupation for
them than contemplation, the arts, the
worship of great memories, and prayers.
They will be forever debarred that no-
ble participation in public life which is
in all countries the stimulant of patriot-
ism, and the legitimate exercise of the
higher faculties and of the nobler traits
of character. Under the government
of the sovereign Pontiff none can aspire
to the fame either of the soldier, or of
the orator, or of the statesman. This
will be a realm of repose and medita-
tion ; a kind of oasis where the passions
and the interests of politics will not in-
trude, — one which will have only the
- sweet and calm perspectives of the spir-
itual world."

To most logical and wholly unbiased
readers, it would seem that this pam-
phlet must have had the effect of a re-
ductio ad absurdam, suggesting more
than a doubt of the assumed major pre-
mise from which such embarrassing
conclusions had been drawn. It is diffi-
cult, indeed, not to take it for a piece
of exquisite satire. It requires an ef-
fort to regard it as a sober political doc-

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. 661

ument, put forth in all simplicity and
good faith, in a period of patient but
resolute expectancy following one of
great excitement in the midst of a na-
tional revolution. If such an argument
meant anything at all, it surely placed
the spiritual supremacy itself in a posi-
tion of irreconcilable antagonism to all
that was truest, noblest, and most ar-
dently sought and longed for in social
and political life and progress. It cer-
tainly was accepted by both the Papal
and the patriot party as the expression
of a purpose far more radical than that
which it professed.

This pamphlet, of which Cardinal
Antonelli was no doubt even more
promptly informed, was clandestinely
brought into Rome during Christmas
week. The effect of its appearance can,
at the present day, scarcely be appreci-
ated. Its importance was certainly due
far less to the intrinsic value of its
analysis or to the force of its reasoning
— less even to its conclusions them-
selves— than to the circumstances under
which those conclusions were put forth,
the source to which the pamphlet was
attributed, and above all to the ulterior
purposes which were on either side, to
say the least, suspected.

The English press regarded the prop-
ositions of this brochure, so far as they
referred to the maintenance of the tem-
poral power, in anything but a serious
spirit. The Times especially character-
ized the prospect therein held out to the
Romans in a vein of humorous irony
that was much more appropriate than
any sober counter-argument.

It was at once answered, however, by
Mgr. Dupanloup of Orleans, under date
of December 25th ; the doughty bishop
sharply denouncing alike its professed
principles, its proposed means, and the
ends in view, declaring these latter
" worthy of the absurdity " of the first
and " the iniquity " of the second.

The Giornale di Roma, of December
30th, protested in the most formal man-

ner against the pamphlet, and its very
presence in Rome was interdicted. On
Sunday, January 1st, when General
Count de Goyon waited upon the Pope
to pay his New Year respects, the Pope
made it the text of his reply. He de-
nounced it as " a monster monument of
hypocrisy and a despicable jumble of
contradictions ; " and affecting to be-
lieve that its principles and purposes
would of course be repudiated and con-
demned by Napoleon, in that conviction
he bestowed his hypothetical blessing
upon the emperor and upon France.

Matters were not made much better,
therefore, by the arrival, immediately
thereafter, cf a letter from Napoleon to
the Pope, dated December 31st, which,
in language not materially variant from
that of the pamphlet itself, reached vir-
tually the same conclusions: that the
solution of the difficulties and dangers
with which the problem was beset, " most
conformable to the true interests of the
Holy See," would be " to surrender the
revolted provinces."

Whatever language the Pope might
think it best to hold on state occasions,
neither he nor Cardinal Antonelli had,
from the first, misunderstood this suffi-
ciently significant brochure ; and there
seem to have been grounds for an en-
try in the writer's journal, on the even-
ing of that very New Year's day, to the
effect that " the Pope had determined
to withdraw from the congress," and
that, " in consequence, Austria, Spain,
and Naples had also withdrawn, and
the meeting, of course, been given up."
At all events, the fact that the French
emperor did not disavow the principles
of the pamphlet ; the great favor with
which it was received in England^ and
even more throughout Italy ; the coinci-
dent announcement that Sardinia would,
with the consent of the powers, be rep-
resented at the congress by Count Ca-
vour, together with the intimation from
the Papal nuncio at Paris that the policy
thus foreshadowed was one that might

662 Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. [November,

compel the Pontiff to resort to the last
defense of Rome and to appeal to spir-
itual arms, — all made a harmonious
issue of such a congress hopeless. The
diplomates therefore abandoned the Ital-
ian question, and turned it over again to
the " men of action " and to the self-
solution of coming events.

From this time forward, for the next
two or three months, Rome was in a
state of continual excitement and ex-
pectation. The vigilance of the Papal
police was so excessive that it some-
times involved Cardinal Antonelli in
awkward predicaments. Even a sealed
packet of "dispatches" for the Amer-
ican minister — a harmless congres-
sional report, in fact — was seized at
Civita Vecchia, taken from the posses-
sion of an American gentleman coming
to Rome with a courier's passport, un-
der the suspicion that it might contain
copies of the obnoxious pamphlet. The
packet was demanded in the middle of
the night, and at once produced with
" explanations." The custom-house au-
thorities, according to Cardinal Anto-
nelli, had not observed the two large,
red official seals with which the charac-
ter of the packet was certified, and to
which Mr. Stockton pointedly called the
cardinal's attention !

But even such vigilance was in vain.
The pamphlet, or at all events a knowl-
edge of its contents, was soon all over
the city. Both French and Italian
copies made their appearance. Strips
from newspapers containing it were re-
ceived in letters ; and, finally, it was
actually reprinted in Rome itself, secret-
ly and by private hands, and circulated
everywhere. An Italian reply, said to

have been written bv the I-"*" ". ^"

/, jre certainly was

Father Curci, — of Jr., .. ,

_i), its practical con-
the stand i ^ the true ^^ for

vrm /..Broaching congress was to rec-
ognize the separation of the Romagna
from the Papal government, if not also
to relieve the Pope of Umbria and the
Marches of Ancona, — of all, indeed,

deep undercurrent of feeling was setting
in and steadily gaining strength. It
would from time to time break out in
some seemingly futile, even trifling, but
yet very characteristic " demonstration."
Illustrations of this state of popular feel-
ing and of the on dits of the day are
found in such incidents as these, gath-
ered from a diary of the time.

It was said " in well-informed circles,"
on January 14th, that Marshal Canro-
bert had been appointed to replace
Count de Goyon in command of the
French troops at Rome ; that these lat-
ter would remain only till the 22d of
February ; that the Pope would leave
Rome before that day, in which case the
marshal would take possession of the
city and put it under French martial
law. These rumors were, however, on
the 19th somewhat discountenanced by
the appearance of Cardinals Antonelli
and D' Andrea, in at least conventional-
ly friendly intercourse with the Due de
Grammont and Count de Goyon, at a
reception given by the American min-
ister.

The next subject of comment was an
address of the Roman nobility to the
Pope, no doubt initiated by Antonelli,
and intended to impress public opinion
with the devotion of the Romans to the
pontifical government and to the per-
son of the Pope. This had, however,
an ambiguous effect, for it was as nota-
ble for the names which were absent as
for those which were appended.

As an offset to this, on the evening
of January 22d, " about a thousand Ital-
ians of the middle classes gathered under
the Palazzo Ruspoli, where General de
Goyon lives ; and when a body of Chas-
phlet n? Vincennes came by, shouted,
ductio «2rancia»' ' Viva 1>Italia'' ' Viva
than a doubt 5ZO'' ' Viva Vittorio Etn-
mise from whi\ on> after which they
conclusions had b-ithout waiting for the
cult, indeed, not Police-" The follow;
of exquisite satire^ of these> who had
fort to regard it ase arrested, and sent

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

663

to the Castle of St. Angelo. None the
less the Due de Grammout received in-
telligence on the 26th that a body of
some two thousand more were coming
to make a similar demonstration in the
cortile of the Palazzo Colouna, at that
time the French embassy. General de
Goyon sent for the leaders of these pa-
triot irrepressibles, and told them firmly
that the demonstration must not take
place, and that if it were attempted he
should himself put it down. This, there-
fore, was given up.

But the spirit which was thus re-
pressed in the piazzas broke out in the
theatres, if nowhere else. Cost what
it might, the actors in the popular pan-
tomimes and the favorite ballet dancers
must needs indulge in treasonable witti-
cisms, or in little demonstrations of their
own. For instance, at the Argentina, on
the evening of that very 26th, Punchi-
nello, in a stage dilemma which of two
pigs to kill, one white and the other
black, blindfolded himself, and seizing
at hazard upon the black pig, plunged
his knife into him, and snatching away
his handkerchief roused the enthusiasm
of the audience to frenzy by crying out,
" Providence wills the death of the
blacks ! " — the neri, that is, the priests
and Papal party. A well-known dancer,
about the same time, having been re-
buked for appearing in tricolor costume,
and warned not to wear more than a
single color, appeared in red ; but re-
ceiving from among the spectators a
large green wreath, in twining it around
herself, skillfully caught up her skirt and
displayed her white under-dress, so com-
bining the three national colors of Italy.
Of course both of these reckless expo-
nents of popular feeling were arrested :
the one was imprisoned, and the other
sent out of Rome.

Still another and a far more unman-
ageable " demonstration " was inaugu-
rated on the 4th of March. " The pop-
ular party resolved to abstain from
cigars and from the purchase of lottery

tickets," on the very principle of the
Boston tea-drinkers of old. Tobacco
being in every form a government mo-
nopoly, and the lottery being the source
of no inconsiderable portion of the lo-
cal revenue, such abstentions had great
meaning ; while they also implied no
ordinary understanding among them-
selves, and no small amount of feeling
and resolution on the part of a populace
so deeply addicted to both smoking and
this form of gambling. For a given pe-
riod this continued almost universally ;
since even a Papal police could not force
a man to smoke when he said politely
that it did not agree with him ; nor even
a Roman priest constrain one to buy a
lottery ticket when he ingenuously re-
plied that he really could not afford it
at just that time.

So passed the weeks and early months
of 1860 to the Romans and foreign
sojourners in the Papal capital. From
time to time there was ever a new re-
port that the French troops were about
to be withdrawn ; that Rome was to
be given up to her own citizens or to
a guardia civile ; and that Pius IX.,
launching an interdict alike against the
French, the Italians, and his own re-
bellious provinces, and against Rome
itself, would withdraw to Beneveuto.
One day it would be a sensational tele-
gram from Paris ; another, a paragraph
in the usually well-informed Belgian pa-
per, Le Nord ; now it would be a whis-
pered report of a conference at the
Vatican ; and again, the opinion of an
officer of the French army of occupation.

There was naturally some anxiety
about the local consequences of such a
revolution in Rome as ever seemed im-
pending. American priests asked of
Mr. Stockton the promise of protection
in case of popular tumult, and that he
would hoist the American flag over the
so-called American College, as Mr. Cass
had done in ] 849 ; and, indeed, very
many priests of all nationalities made
their arrangements for safety in case of

664

An Only Son.

[November,

an emergency. American residents and
travelers generally had an understand-
ing with their minister as to what they
should do if ;i revolution should sudden-
ly burst upon them.

Meanwhile, during all this commotion
and expectation in Rome, the question
of the future of Central Italy was, on
the 10th and llth of March, submitted
to the decision of those immediately
concerned, the people of Tuscany, the
duchies, and the legations. In conse-
quence of an overwhelming popular vote
to that effect, the union of these prov-
inces to the throne of Piedmont was
formally proclaimed, constituting the
Kingdom of Italy, and Victor Emman-
uel II. its king.

Most of the Americans then in Rome
speculated with eager interest upon the
probability that they would now have
the opportunity of witnessing a great
mediaeval ceremony of the major excom-

munication " in awful form," with bell,
book, and candle ; and it was with a
certain sense of personal disappointment
that they saw the terrible blow fall in
the form of an ordinary modern printed
poster, dated March 26th, and affixed
on the 28th to the gates of the Vatican
basilica, and realized that their disap-
pointment of the expected dramatic pa-
geantry was probably the chief practical
effect produced by it.

Italian politics passed now once more
into the hands of soldiers. Umbria and
the Marches had but a few months more
to wait ; the Romans, indeed, more than
ten years yet ; while the ecclesiastical
politicians of the Holy See devoted
themselves to the preparation and evolu-
tion of a policy which, if it did not ar-
rest the progress of Italian nationality,
would restore to the Papacy, in another
form, the power which thus seemed slip-
ping from its grasp.

William Chauncy Langdon.

AN ONLY SON.

IT was growing more and more un-
comfortable in the room where iDeacon
Price had spent the greater part of a
hot July morning. The sun did not
shine in, for it was now directly over-
head, but the glare of its reflection from
the dusty village street and the white
house opposite was blinding to the eyes.
At least one of the three selectmen of
Dalton. who were assembled in solemn
conclave, looked up several times at the
tops of the windows, and thought they
had better see about getting some cur-
tains.

There was more business than usual,
but most of it belonged to the familiar de-
tail of the office ; there were bills to pay
for the support of the town's-poor and
the district schools, and afterward some
discussion arose about a new piece of

road which had been projected by a few
citizens, who were as violently opposed
by others. The selectmen were agreed
upon this question, but they proposed
to speak in private with the county
commissioners, who were expected to
view the region of the new highway
the next week. This, however, had been
well canvassed at their last meeting,
and they had reached no new conclu-
sions since ; so presently the conversa-
tion flagged a little, and Deacon Price
drummed upon the ink-spattered table
with his long, brown fingers, and John
Kendall the miller rose impatiently and
went to the small window,, where he
stood with blinking eyes looking down
into the street. His well-rounded figure
made a pleasant shadow in that part of
the room, but it seemed to grow hotter

1883.]

An Only Son.

665

every moment. Captain Abel Stone
left his chair impatiently, and taking
his hat went down the short flight of

stairs that led to the street, knocking
his thick shuffling boots clumsily by the
way. He reached the sidewalk, and
looked up and down the street, but no-
body was coming ; so he turned to Asa
Ball the shoemaker, who was standing
in his shop-door.

" Business is n't brisk, I take it ? "
inquired the captain ; and Mr. Ball re-
plied that he did n't do much more than
tend shop, nowadays. Folks would
keep on buying cheap shoes, and think-
ing they saved more money on two pair
a year for five dollars than . when he
used to make 'em one pair for four.
" But I make better pay than I used to
working at my trade, and so I ain't go-
ing to fret," said Asa shrewdly, with a
significant glance at a modest pile of
empty cloth-boot boxes ; and the captain
laughed a little, .and took a nibble at a
piece of tobacco which he had found
with much difficulty in one of his deep
coat pockets. He had followed the sea
in his early life, but had returned to the
small, stony farm which had been the
home of his childhood, perhaps fifteen
years before this story begins. He had
taken as kindly to inland life as if he
had never been even spattered with sea
water, and had been instantly given the
position in town affairs which his wealth
and character merited. He still re-
tained a good deal of his nautical way
of looking at things. One would say
that to judge by his appearance he had
been well rubbed with tar and salt, and
it was supposed by his neighbors that
his old sea-chests were guardians of
much money ; he was overrated by some
of them as being worth fifteen thousand
dollars with the farm thrown in. He
was considered very peculiar, because
he liked to live in the somewhat dilapi-
dated little farmhouse, and some of his
attempts at cultivating the sterile soil
were the occasion of much amusement.

He had made a large scrap-book, dur-
ing his long sea-voyages, of all sorts
of hints and suggestions for the tillage
of the ground, gleaned from books and
newspapers and almanacs, and nobody
knows where else. He had pasted
these in, or copied them in his stiff,
careful handwriting, and had pleased
himself by watching his collection grow
while he was looking forward through
the long, storm-tossed years to his quiet
anchorage among the Dalton hills. He
was a single man, and though a braver
never had trod the quarter-deck, from
motives of wisest policy he seldom op-
posed his will to that of Widow Martha
Hawkes, who had consented to do him
the great favor of keeping his house.

" Havin' a long session to-day, seems
to me," observed the shoemaker, with
little appearance of the curiosity which
he really felt.

" There was a good many p'ints
to be looked over," answered Captain
Stone, becoming aware that he had se-
crets to guard, and looking impenetrable
and unconcerned. " It 's working into
a long drought, just as I said — I never
took note of a drier sky ; don't seem
now as if we ever should get a sprinkle
out of it, but I suppose we shall ; " and
he turned with a sigh to the door, and
disappeared again up the narrow stair-
way. The three horses which were
tied to adjacent posts in the full blaze
of the sun all hung their ancient heads
wearily, and solaced their disappoint-
ment as best they might. They had
felt certain, when the captain appeared,
that the selectmen's meeting was over.
If they had been better acquainted with
politics they might have wished that
there could be a rising of the opposi-
tion, so that their masters would go out
of office for as many years as they had
come in.

The captain's companions looked up
at him eagerly, as if they were sure
that he was the herald of the expected
tax collector, who was to pay a large

666

An Only Son.

[November,

sum of money to them, of which the
town treasury was in need. It was
close upon twelve o'clock, and only a
very great emergency would detain
them beyond that time. They were
growing very hungry, and when the
captain, after a grave shake of his head,
had settled into his chair again, they
all felt more or less revengeful, though
Deacon Price showed it by looking sad.
One would have thought that he was
waiting with reluctance to see some
punishment descend upon the head of
the delaying official.

" Well, Mis' Hawkes will be waiting
for me, and she never likes that," said
Captain Stone at last ; and just at that
minute was heard the sound of wheels.

" Perhaps it 's my mare stepping
about, — she 's dreadful restive in fly-
time," suggested Mr. Kendall, and at
once put his head out of the window;
but when he took it in again, it was to
tell his fellow-officers that Jackson was
coming, and then they all sat solemnly
in their chairs, with as much dignity as
the situation of things allowed. Their
judicial and governmental authority was
plainly depicted in their expression.
On ordinary occasions they were not re-
markable, except as excellent old-fash-
ioned country men ; but when they rep-
resented to the world the personality
and character of the town of Dalton,
they would not have looked out of place
seated in that stately company which
Carpaccio has painted in the Reception
of the English Ambassadors. It was
Dalton that was to give audience that
summer day, in the dusty, bare room, as
Venice listens soberly in the picture.

They heard a man speak to his horse
and leap to the ground heavily, and then
listened eagerly to the clicks and fum-
bling which represented the tying of the
halter, and then there were sounds of
steps upon the stairway. The voice of
Mr. Ball was heard, but it did not seem
to have attracted much attention, and
presently the long-waited-for messenger

was in the room. He was dusty and sun-
burnt, and looked good-naturedly at his
hosts. They greeted him amiably enough,
and after he had put his worn red hand-
kerchief away he took a leather wallet
from his pocket, and looking at a little
roll of bills almost reluctantly, turned
them over with lingering fingers and
passed them to Mr. Kendall, who sat
nearest him, saying that he believed it
was just right.

There was little else said, and after the
money had again been counted the meet-
ing was over. There had indeed been a
hurried arrangement as to who should
guard the treasury, but when Deacon
Price had acknowledged that he meant
to go to South Dalton next morning,
he was at once deputed to carry the re-
mittance to the bank there, where the
town's spare cash and many of its pa-
pers already reposed. The deacon said
slowly that he did n't know as he cared
about keeping so much money in the
house, but he was not relieved by either
of his colleagues, and so these honest
men separated and returned to private
life again. Their homes were at some
distance from each other ; but for a half
mile or so Deacon Price followed Cap-
tain Stone, and a cloud of dust fol-
lowed them both. Then the captain
turned to the left, up toward the hills ;
but Deacon Price kept on for some dis-
tance through the level lands, and at last
went down a long lane, unshaded except
here and there where some ambitious
fence stakes had succeeded in changing
themselves into slender willow-trees. In
the spring the sides of the lane had
been wet, and were full of green things,
growing as fast as they could ; but now
these had been for some time dried up.
The lane was bordered with dusty may-
weed, and three deep furrows were worn
through the turf, where the wagon
wheels and the horse's patient feet had
traveled back and forward so many
years. The house stood at the end,
looking toward the main road as if it

1883.]

An Only Son.

667

wished it were there ; it was a low-
storied white house, with faded green
blinds.

The deacon had tried to hurry his
slow horse still more after he caught
sight of another horse and wagon stand-
ing in the wide dooryard. He had en-
tirely forgotten until that moment that
his niece and housekeeper, Eliza Stor-
row, had made a final announcement in
the morning th'at she was going to start
early that afternoon for the next town to
help celebrate a golden wedding. Poor
Eliza had been somewhat irate because
even this uncommon season of high fes-
tival failed to excite her uncle's love for
society. She had made him run the
gauntlet, as usual on such occasions, by
telling him successively that he took no
interest in nobody and nothing, and that
she was sure she should n't know what
to say when people asked where he was ;
that it looked real unfeeling and cold-
hearted, and he could n't expect folks
to show any interest in him. These ar-
guments, with many others, had been
brought forward on previous occasions
until the deacon knew them all by heart,
and he had listened to them impassively
that morning, only observing cautiously
to his son that Eliza must go through
with just so much. But he had prom-
ised to come back early from the village,
since Eliza and the cousin who was to
call for her meant to start soon after
twelve. It was a long drive, and they
wished to be in good season for the gath-
ering of the clans.

He left the horse standing in the yard
and went into the house, feeling carefully
at his inner coat pocket as he did so.
Eliza had been watching for him, but the
minute he came in sight she had left the
window and begun to scurry about in the
pantry. The deacon did not stop to speak
to her, but went directly to his bedroom,
and after a moment's thought placed the
precious wallet deep under the pillows.
This act AV:IS followed by another mo-
ment's reflection, and as the old man

turned, his son stood before him in the
doorway. Neither spoke ; there was a
feeling of embarrassment which was not
uncommon between them ; but presently
the young man said, " Eliza 's been wait-
ing for you to have your dinner ; she 's
in a great hurry to get off. I '11 be in
just as quick as I take care of the
horse."

" You let her be ; I '11 put her up my-
self," said the deacon, a little ungracious-
ly. " I guess Eliza '11 be there eoon
enough. I should n't think she 'd want
to start to ride way over there right in
the middle of the day." At another
time he would have been pleased with
Warren's offer of aid, for that young
man's bent was not in what we are
pleased to call a practical direction. As
he left the kitchen he noticed for the
first time Mrs. Starbird, who sat by the
farther window dressed in her best, and
evidently brimming over with reproach-
ful impatience. Deacon Price was a
hospitable man, and stopped to shake
hands with her kindly, and to explain
that he had been delayed by some busi-
ness that had come before the select-
men. He was politely assured that the
delay was not of the least consequence,
for Mrs. Starbird was going to drive the
colt, and could make up the lost time on
the road. As they stood talking, Eliza's
footsteps were heard behind them, and
without turning or deigning to enter
into any conversation with his niece
the deacon went out into the bright sun-
light again.

Warren had preceded him after all,
and was unfastening one of the traces,
and his father unbuckled the other with-
out a word. " You go in and have your
dinner, — why won't you, father?" the
young man said, looking up appealing-
ly. " You need n't be afraid but I '11 do
this all right."

" I declare, I was grieved when I saw,
as I came up the lane, that you had n't
mended up the fence there where I told
you this forenoon. I had to be off, and

668

An Only Son.

[November,

there 's the two calves right into the
garden piece, and I don't know what
works they 've been and done. It does
seem too hud, Wurren."

The son hud worn a pleased and al-
most triumphant look, as if he had good
news to tell, hut now his face fell, and
he turned crimson with shame and an-
ger. " I would n't have forgot that for
anything ! " he stammered. " I 've been
hurrying as fast as I could with some-
thing I 've been doing — I 'm going off "
— but his father had already stepped
inside the barn door with the hungry
horse, and it was no use to say any
more. Presently the deacon went into
the house and ate his dinner, and after
the few dishes hud been washed, and
Eliza had told him about the bread and
a piece of cold boiled beef and a row of
blueberry pies and the sheet of ginger-
bread which she had provided for the
family's sustenance in her absence, she
added that she might not be back until
early Wednesday morning, and then she
drove away in triumph with cousin Star-
bird. It was the first outing the good
woman had had for more than a year,
except for half a day or so, and the
deacon wished her good day with real
affection and sympathy, having already
asked if she had everything she wanted
to carry over, and finally he desired his
respects to be given to the folks. He
stood at the corner of the house and
watched her all the way down the lane
until she turned into the main road, and
Eliza herself was much pleased as she
caught sight of him. She waved her
hand gulluntly, to which he responded
by an almost imperceptible inclination
of the head and at once turned away.
" There ain't a better man alive," said
cousin Sturbird, whipping the elderly
colt; "he's as set as anybody I ever
see, in his own ways, but he's real good
hearted. I don't know anybody I 'd
look to quicker than him if I got into
misfortune. lie 's aged a good deal this
last year, don't you think he has, 'Liza ?

Sometimes I feel sure that Warren's
odd notions wears on him more than we
think."

" Course they do," said Eliza, throw-
ing back the shawl which she had felt
obliged to put on at first, out of respect
to the occasion. " His father 's mindful
of Warren every hour in the day. He
is getting more and more helpless and
forgitful, and uncle 's growing feeble,
and he ain't able either to hire help or
to do the farm work himself. Some-
times Warren takes holt real good, but it
ain't often ; and there he sets, up in that
room he 's fixed over the wood-house,
and tinkers all day long. Last winter
he used to be there till late at night ;
he took out one o' the window panes
and set a funnel out through, and used
to keep a fire going and a bright light
up there till one or two o'clock in the
morning. His father never slept a wink,
I don't believe. He looks like a man
of hard on to eighty, and he wa'n't but
sixty-seven his last birthday. I guess
Warren's teased him out of about all
the bank money he had long ago. There !
I used to get interested myself in War-
ren's notions about his machines, but
now I can't bear to hear him begin, and
I go right into the pantry and rattle
round as if I was drove to pieces."

" I suppose his father has indulged
him more, seeing that he was so much
younger than all the rest of his children,
and they being dead anyway. I declare,
I never see such a beautiful creatur' as
Warren's mother was. I always thought
she was kind of homesick here ; 't was
a lonesome place to me, always, and
I never counted on its being healthy.
The deacon 's begun to look kind o' mossy,
and I don't think it 's all worry o' mind.
It's kind of low land, and it's always
been called fevery." Cousin Starbird
was apt to look on the durk side of
things. " You can't always see the
marks o' trouble," she went on. " There
was old John Stacy, that lost three chil-
dren in one day with scarlet fever, the

1883.]

An Only Son.

669

fall after his wife died ; then his house
got afire, and the bank failed where
his property was. Job himself could n't
be no worse off ; and he took on dread-
ful, as one thing after another come
upon him, but there wa'n't a younger
appearing man of his age anywhere at
the time he died. He seemed to spring
right up again, like a bent withe. I al-
ways thought it was a kind of a pity that
the deacon did n't push Warren right off
while he was young. He kept him to
home trying to make a farmer of him
till he was a grown man."

" Warren used to beseech him dread-
fully to let him go off, when I first come
over to live," said Eliza Storrow. " He
had a great notion of working in some
kind of a machine shop, and they said
that there wa'n't so smart a workman
there as he was ; but he got a notion
that he could improve on one of the
machines, and he lost his interest in
welkin' his trade, and the end of it was
that he spent a sight o' money to get a
patent, and found somebody had stepped
in with another just the week before.
'T was an awful mean thing, too, for
some thought it was his notion that had
been stole from him. There was a fel-
low that boarded where he did, to Low-
ell, that left all of a sudden, and they
thought he took the plan, — Warren be-
ing always free and pleasant with him,
— and then let somebody else have part
of it to get the patent through ; anyway
it was n't called for in any name they
knew ; Warren was dreadful discouraged
about it, and was set against folks know-
ing, so don't you never say nothing that
I said about it. I th'ink he 's kind of
crazed about machinery, and I don't be-
lieve he knows what he 's about more
than half the time. He never give me
a misbeholden word, I '11 say that for
him, but it 's getting to be a melancholy
habitation if ever I see one," said Eliza,
mournfully ; and after this the conver-
sation turned to more hopeful themes
relating to the golden wedding.

The deacon had sighed as he turned
away. He had wondered if they would
make the twelve-mile journey in safety,
and smiled in spite of himself as he re-
membered an old story. He wished he
had reminded them of those two old
women who were traveling from Dalton
to Somerset, and forgot where they
came from, and what their names were,
and where they were going. After this
hidden spring of humor had bubbled to
the surface a little too late for anybody's
enjoyment but his own, he relapsed into
his usual plaintive gravity, and, bring-
ing a hammer and nails and some stakes
from the wood-house, he went out to
mend the broken fence. It had been
patched and propped before, and now
seemed hardly to be repaired. The
boards and posts had rotted away, and
the gamesome calves had forced a wide
breach in so weak a wall. It was a half
afternoon's work, and the day was hot,
but the tired old man set about it un-
fliachingly, and took no rest until he
had given the topmost rail a shake and
assured himself that it would last through
his day. He had brought more tools
and pieces of board, and he put these
together to be replaced. Just as he had
begun his work he had caught sight of
his son walking quickly away, far be-
yond the house, across the pastures.
The deacon had given a heavy sigh, and
as he had hammered and sawed and
built his fence again, there had been
more than one sigh to follow it, for had
not this only son grown more helpless
and useless than ever ? There seemed
little to look forward to in life.

The garden was being sadly treated
and hindered by the drought ; the beets
and onions were only half grown, and
the reliable old herb bed seemed to have
given up the fight altogether. In one
place there had once been a flower-bed
which belonged to Warren's mother,
but it was almost wholly covered with
grass. Eliza had no fondness for flow-

670

An Only Son.

[November,

ers, and the two men usually were un-
conscious that there were such things in
the world. But this afternoon the dea-
con was glad to see a solitary sprig of
London pride, which stood out in bold
relief against the gray post by the little
garden gate. It sent a ray of encour-
agement into the shadow of his thoughts,
and he went on his way cheerfully. He
told himself that now he would attend
to the wagon wheels, because he should
need to start early in the morning, in
order to get home before the heat of the
day ; it was a hot piece of road from
here to the south village. He wondered
idly where Warren had gone ; he was
glad he had not asked for money that
day, but he had done questioning his
son about his plans, or even the reason
of his occasional absences.

The side door, which led into the
kitchen, was shaded now, and a slight
breeze seemed to be coming across the
level fields, so the deacon sat down on
the doorstep to rest. The old cat came
out as if she wished for company, and
rubbed against his arm and mewed with-
out making any noticeable sound. She
put her fore-feet on the old man's knee
and looked eagerly in his face and
mewed again in audibly, and her master
laughed and wondered what she wanted.
" I suppose the cellar door is locked and
bolted, and you want to go down," said
the deacon, " that's it, ain't it? I should
ha' thought 'Liza would have rec'lected
about them kittens, should n't you ? "
and pleasing himself with the creature's
companionship, he rose and entered the
house. The cat trotted alongside and
disappeared quickly down the stairway,
and moved by some strange impulse,
Deacon Price went into his bedroom to
make sure that the wallet was safe un-
der the pillow. He did not reach it at
first, and he groped again, thinking that
he had forgotten he pushed it so far un-
der. But although he eagerly threw off
the clothes and the pillows, and shook
them twice over, and got down on his

hands and knees and crept under the
bed, and felt an odd singing noise grow
louder and louder in his head, and at
last became dizzy and dropped into the
nearest chair, there was no wallet to be
found.

At last he crept out into the empty
kitchen, where the only sound was made
by a fly that buzzed dismally in a spi-
der's web. The air was close and hot
in the house, and as the old man stood
in the doorway it seemed as if there
had some change come over his whole
familiar world. He felt puzzled and
weak, and at first started to go out to
the wagon with the vain hope of finding
the lost purse ; it might be that he —
but there was no use in imagining that
he had done anything but put it care-
fully under the pillow, that his son had
stood in the doorway as he lifted his
head, and that the money was gone. It
was no use to deceive himself, or to
hunt through the house ; he had always
before his eyes the picture of the pas-
ture slope with the well-known figure of
his son following across it the path that
led to the nearest railroad station, a mile
or two away.

The daylight waned slowly, and the
heat of the sun lingered late into the
night. Poor John Price went through
with his usual duties mechanically, but
with perfect care, and he made the do-
ing of his work last as long as he could.
The pig and the chickens and the horse
were fed ; then there were the cows to
bring in from pasture and to be milked ;
and at last the poor man even remem-
bered the cat, and gave her a saucer of
milk for her supper ; but still it would
not grow dark, and still the shame and
sorrow weighed him down. In hia
restlessness he went through the lower
rooms of the house, and opened the
front door and shut it again, and looked
into the stiff little best room, and felt as
if he were following the country custom
so familiar to him of watching with the
dead.

1883.]

An Only Son.

671

He did not get much sleep either, in
the uncomfortable bed which he had
tried to put into some sort of order be-
fore he lay down. Once he prayed
aloud that the Lord would vouchsafe
him a miracle, and that he might find
his trust again, and what was still more
precious, his confidence in his only son.
For some reason he- could not bear the
sound of his own voice ; and the thought
of his time-honored office in the church
pained him, for was it not disgraced and
made a reproach ?

Little by little the first sharpness of
the shock wore away, and he tried to
think what was to be done. The thought
seized him that his son might have left
some explanation of his going away,
and he rose and took a candle and went
to the little workshop. There was less
than the usual litter of cogwheels and
springs and screws, but somehow in the
hot little room a feeling of reassurance
anu almost of hope took possession of
him. It might be that Warren's hopes
would not be disappointed, that he might
be able to repay the stolen sum, that he
had only secreted it, and would return
later and give it back ; for the poor dea-
con assured himself over and over that
he would talk about the boy's affairs
with him, and try again to aid him and
to put him into a likely way at last,
even if he had to mortgage the farm.

But in the morning, if there was still
no sign of the lad, what could be done ?
The money which Jerry Jackson had
owed the town as tax-collector, and paid
at last that very day, — that seven hun-
dred dollars ; the five hundred dollar bill
and the two that stood for a hundred
each, and some smaller bills which were
to pay the interest, — how should they
be replaced ? He had no ready money
of any amount, nor would have until
the pay came for some hay, or unless
he could persuade a neighbor, whose
payments were honest but slow, to take
up a note given for a piece of outlying
woodland sold the winter before.

All through that long summer night
he worried and waited for the morning,
and sometimes told himself that his
only son had robbed him, and sometimes
said that Warren would never serve
him like that, and when he came home
it would be all made right. The whip-
poorwills were singing about the house,
and one even came to perch on the
kitchen doorstep and make its accusing
cry. The waning moon rose late, and
made a solemn red light in the east, and
shone straight in at the little bedroom
window as if it were a distant bale-fire
on the hills. A little dog kept up a
fierce barking by the next farmhouse,
far away across the fields, and at last
the tired man was ready to think his
miserable wakefulness was the fault of
the cur. . . . Yes, he had given War-
ren all the money he could, he had
meant well by the boy, and surely now,
unless the poor fellow had gone mad,
there would be some way out of all this
trouble ; at any rate he would not let
other people have a chance to call his
son a thief until there was no help for it.

The next morning, after a short, un-
easy sleep, from which the deacon had
a sad awaking, he hungrily ate some
breakfast at the pantry shelves, and
harnessed the old horse, and set out on
a day's journey of which he hardly
knew the end. He shut the door of the
house, and locked it, and gave a look
of lingering affection at the old place,
even stopping the horse for a minute in
the lane that he might turn to survey it
again most carefully. He felt as if he
were going to do it wrong, and as if it
were a conscious thing, the old weather-
beaten dwelling that had sheltered him
all his life, and those who had been
dearest to him. It had no great attrac-
tions to a stranger. It was -a represen-
tative house for that somewhat primi-
tive farming region, though it had fallen
out of repair, and wore a damaged and
resourceless aspect. The appearance

672

An Only Son.

[November,

of a man's home is exactly characteris-
tic of himself. Human nature is more
powerful than its surroundings, and
shapes them inevitably to itself.

It was still very early in the morn-
ing, and few persons were stirring. In
fact, Deacon Price met nobody on the
road except a sleepy boy following his
cows to pasture, and he did not feel like
looking even him in the face, but gave
a pull at the reins to hurry the horse
and pass by the quicker. He took a
cross road that was cool and shady at
that hour, and while he journeyed slow-
ly up the rough by-way he let the horse
choose its own course without guidance.
Some birds were crying and calling in
the woods close by, as if it were alto-
gether a day of ill omen and disaster.
John Price felt more and more as if
his world was coming to an end, and
everything was going to pieces. He
never had understood his son very well ;
there are some people who are like the
moon, always with one side hidden
and turned away, and Warren was only
half familiar to his father. The old
man had been at first inclined to treat
his bright boy with a sort of respect
and reverence, but in later years this
had changed little by little to impatience
and suspicion. It had been a great
mortification that he had been obliged
to maintain him, and once when some-
body, perhaps Eliza Storrow, had been
commenting upon a certain crop of wild
oats which a neighboring lad had ar-
ranged for his harvesting, the deacon
was heard to mutter, " Better them than
no crop at all ! " Yet he had never
suffered his acquaintances to comment
upon his son's behavior ; his own treat-
ment of him in public had insisted upon
the rendering of respect from other peo-
ple, but he had not acknowledged to
himself, until this last sad night, that
there was no practical result to be hoped
for from Warren's gifts and graces.
This might have been borne, and they
might have struggled on together, some-

how or other, but for the terrible blow
of the theft of the town's money, which
had left a debt and sorrow on the old
man's shoulders almost too heavy to be
borne.

In a short time the woods were passed
and the road led out to a pleasant coun-
try of quite a different character from
the lowland neighborhood left behind.
There were gently sloping hills and
long lines of elms, and the farms looked
more prosperous. One farm only on this
road was unproductive, and it was part-
ly the fault of art, and partly of nature,
for this was the homestead of Captain
Stone, a better sailor than farmer. Its
pastures' were gathering-places for the
ledges, and its fields had been made
swampy by many springs. It seemed
to be the wasto corner of that region
for all unused and undeveloped mate-
rials of farming land ; but while there
was every requisite, there was a cha-
otic and primitive arrangement or no-
arrangement. Yet the captain had set-
tled down here in blissful content as a
tiller of the soil; and while he might
have bought the best farm in the county,
he congratulated himself upon his rare
privileges here, and would have found
more level and kindly acres as uninter-
esting as being becalmed in tropic seas.
He worked his farm as he had sailed
his ships, by using tact and discretion
and with true seaman's philosophy he
never fretted. He waited for the wind
to change, or the tide of spring to flow,
or of winter to ebb, for he had long
ago learned there was no hurrying na-
ture ; and to hear him talk of one of his
small plots of thin hay or slow-growing
potatoes, you would have thought it an
intelligent creature which existed main-
ly on his benevolent encouragement and
tolerance. By some persons the cap-
tain was laughed at, and by others he
was condemned. The trouble was that
he had a shrewd insight into human
nature, and was so impossible to de-
ceive or to persuade against his will that

1883.]

An Only Son.

673

he had made many enemies, who had
hoped to grow rich by emptying the
good old man's pockets.

It was to this life-long friend that
Deacon Price had turned in his extrem-
ity; but as he drew nearer that morning
to the red house on the hilltop, his heart
began to fail him, for what if he should
be refused ! There seemed no other re-
source, in such a case, but to make the
sad occurrence known, or to go away in
search of Warren himself. He could
put the deeds of his farm, those worn
deeds that had come down from father
to son generation after generation, into
the hands of the other selectmen, who
would be sure to stand his friends and
keep the secret for a time. Warren had
looked discouraged, and pale, and des-
perate in the last month, and his father
suddenly remembered this, and groaned
aloud as he wished that the boy had
come to him, and that he had made it
possible, instead of coldly ignoring and
disapproving him day after day ; such
a mixture of wrath and shame and com-
passion has seldom been in a father's
heart.

The captain was abroad early, and
the deacon saw him first, sauntering
about at the foot of the slope on which
his house and buildings stood. He
seemed to be examining the soil, and
greeted his guest with a hearty satis-
faction. The deacon slowly alighted,
and leaving his trusty steed to gnaw
the fence or browse among the bushes
as she chose, went into the field. He
walked feebly, and when he met the
captain he could hardly find words to
tell his errand. Men of his kind are
apt to be made silent by any great oc-
currence ; they have rarely anything but
a limited power of expression, and their
language only serves them for common
use. Those who have lived close to
nature understand each other without
speech, as dogs or horses do, and the
elder generations of New Euglanders

VOL. LII. — NO. 313. 43

knew less of society and human com-
panionship and association than we can
comprehend.

The captain had watched his visitor
as he came toward him, and when they
met he gave one quick, final look, and
then proceeded to make use of his usual
forms of greeting, as if he had no idea
that anything was the matter.

" I 've taken a notion to set out some
cramb'ries hereabouts, another year," he
announced. " I never made a voyage
to sea without cramb'ries aboard, if I
could help myself. They last well, and
taste sprightly when other things is be-
gun to lose savor. I don't cut any hay
to speak of, in this piece. I 've been
meaning to tackle it somehow, — see
here," — pushing it with his great foot,
— " it 's all coming up brakes and
sedge. I do' know 's you want to be
standing about — it is master spongy
for good grass land, and 't would be a
great expense to drain it off. I s'pose
I 'm gettin' too old to try any of these
new notions, but they sort of divert me.
We 're having a bad spell o' drought,
ain't we ? 'T is all tops of rocks about
here, and we 're singed pretty brown."
The captain chattered more briskly
than was his wont ; it would have been
impossible to mistake that he was a
sailor, for indeed that business stamps
its followers with an unmistakable
brand.

They had ventured upon a wetter
spot than usual, and when the deacon
pulled up his foot from the mire under-
neath with a resounding plop, his host
proposed that they should seek the high-
er ground.

" Pretty smart at home ? " asked the
captain presently, to end a season of
strange silence, and the deacon replied,
at first somewhat sorrowfully, that they
were middling, but explained directly
that Eliza was away for a couple o*
nights, and Warren too ; it cost a great
effort to speak the young man's name.

" Oh yes, I rec'leet," growled the

674

An Only Son.

[November,

captain amiably. "You spoke about
the golden weddin' yisterday ; I should
thought you 'd ha' gone too, along with
'Liza; such junkets ain't to be had
every day. I must say I wish something
or other would happen to take Mis'
Ilawkes's attention off of me," drop-
ping his voice cautiously, as they came
nearer to the house. " She 's had a
dreadful grumpy time of it, this week
past, and looked homely enough to stop
a clock. I used to be concerned along
in the first of it, when I come off the
sea, but I found it did n't do no hurt,
and so I let her work, and first thing you
know the wind is veered round again
handsome, and off we go."

The deacon tried to laugh at this ;
they had seated themselves on the off-
side of the woodpile, under the shade
of a great choke-pear tree. They had
mounted the chopping-block, which was
a stout elm log, standing on six legs, so
that it looked like some stupid blunder-
headed creature of not altogether harm-
less disposition. The two old men were
quite at its mercy if it should canter
away suddenly ; but they talked for
some minutes on ordinary subjects, and
even left their position to go to inspect
the pigs, and returned again, before the
deacon arrived at an explanation of his
errand.

It was a hard thing to do, and the
captain turned and looked at him nar-
rowly.

" I 've got to use the money right
away as soon as I can have it. I want to
see to some business this forenoon ; you
know I 've been calc'latin' to go to the
South village to-day anyway. I did n't
know for certain I should have to see
about this, or I would n't have given
you such short notice " — and here the
deacon stopped again ; it had come very
near an untruth, this last sentence, and
he would not cheat the man of whom
he was asking so great a favor.

" I did n't fetch the papers along be-
cause I did n't know how 't would be

with you," he explained ; " they '11 make
you safe. Austin's folks was talking
round, this spring, to see if I wanted to
part with our north field ; his youngest
son 's a smart fellow, and wants to set up
for himself and have a truck farm. But
I 'm only asking the loan for a time, ye
know, neighbor," and the deacon looked
anxiously at the old captain, and then
leaned over, poking the chips about with
the butt of his whip, which he had
brought with him from the wagon.

" You shall have it," said the captain
at last. " 'T ain't everybody I 'd do
such a thing to oblege, and I am only
going to have my say about one thing,
John : I never had no family of my
own, and I suppose the feeliu's of a fa-
ther are somethin' I don't know nothing
about, for or against ; but I must say I
hate to see ye an old man before your
time, runuin' all out and looking dis-
couraged on account o' favorin' Warren.
You '11 come in astern o' the lighter,
and he too ; and if he 's been beseechiu'
ye to get this money together to further
bis notions, I 'm doing ye both a wrong
to let ye have it. But I can't deny ye,
and I 've got more than what ye say ye
want, right here in the house as it hap-
pens. I was going to buy into that new
three-masted schooner the Otises have
got on the stocks now ; I don't know
but I am getting along in years to take
hold of anything new in navigation."

" I ain't intending to let Warren have
none o' this," said the deacon humbly,
and he longed to say more, and felt as
if he never could hold up his head again
among his fellows ; and the time seemed
very long and dreary before the captain
came back from his house with the note
ready to sign, and the eight hundred dol-
lars ready to place in the deacon's gray
and shaking hand. His benefactor pon-
dered long over this strange visit, long-
ing to know what had happened, but he
assured himself over and over that he
could n't help letting him have it, and if
never a cent of it came back there was

1883.]

An Only Son.

675

nobody he was gladder to oblige. And
John Price took his weary way to the
South village of Dalton and paid a sum
of seven hundred and thirty-five dollars
to the credit of the town. It was not
until early in the afternoon that old
Abel Stone suddenly bethought himself
that something might have happened
about that payment of Jerry Jackson's.
If he was not growing old and a fool at
last ! Why had n't he asked the dea-
con if he had lost the money he had
tttken home from the selectmen's office !
And when Mis' Hawkes afterward ven-
tured to ask him a harmless question he
had grown red in the face and poured
forth a torrent of nautical language
which had nearly taken her breath away,
without apparent reason or excuse. The
captain, it must be confessed, was an
uncommon swearer ; he was one of the
people who seem to serve as volcanoes
or outlets for the concealed anger of
poor human nature. It is difficult to
explain why profanity seems so much
more unlawful and shocking 5u some
persons than in others, but there was
something fairly amusing in the flurry
and sputter of irreverent words which
betokened excitement of any kind in
the mind of Captain Stone. He even
forgot himself so far as to swear a little
occasionally in the course of earnest ex-
hortations in the evening prayer-meet-
ings. There was not a better man or
a sincerer Christian in the town of Dal-
ton, though he had become a church
member late in life ; and knowing this,
there was never anything but a compas-
sionate smile when he grew red in the
face with zeal, and recommended those
poor wretched damned dogs of heathen
to mercy.

Nothing seemed to have changed out-
wardly at the South village. John Price
did his errands and finished his busi-
ness as quickly as possible, and avoided
meeting his acquaintances, for he could
not help fearing that he should be ques-

tioned about this miserable trouble. As
he left the bank he could not help giv-
ing a sigh of relief, for that emergency
was bridged over ; and for a few min-
utes he kept himself by main force from
looking at the future or asking himself
"What next?"

But as he turned into his dust-pow-
dered lane again at noon, the curious
little faces of the mayweed blossoms
seemed to stare up at him, and there
was nobody to speak to him, and the
house was like a tomb where all the
years of his past were lying dead, and
all the pleasantness of life existed only
in remembrance.

He began to wish for Warren in a
way he never had before, and as he
looked about the house he saw every-
where some evidence of his mechanical
skill. Had not Eliza Storrpw left home
without a fear because, as she always
said, Warren was as handy as a woman ?
The remembrance of his patient dili-
gence at his own chosen work, his qui-
etness under reproach, his evident dis-
comfort at having to be dependent upon
his father linked to a perfect faith in
the ultimate success of his plans, —
the thought of all these things flashed
through the old man's mind. " I wish I
had waited 'till he told me what he had
to say, yisterday," said Deacon Price
to himself. " 'T was strange about
that fence too. He 's al'ays been willing
to take holt and help whenever I spoke
to him." He even came to believe that
the boy had grown desperate, and in
some emergency had gone in search of
new materials for his machine. " He 's
so forgitful," said the father, " he may
have forgot to speak about the money,
and 't was but a small-looking roll of
bills. He '11 be back to-night, like 's
not, as concerned as can be when he finds
out what 't was he took." It was the
way we only remember the good qual-
ities of our friends who have died, and
let the bad ones fade out of sight, and
so know the angels that were growing

676

An Only Son.

[November,

iu them all the while, and out of our
sight at last have thrown off the disguise
and hindrance of the human shape.

Towards evening Jacob Austin, a
neighbor, came into the yard on an er-
rand, and was astonished to see how tired
and old the deacon looked. He had left
the oxen and their great load of coarse
meadow hay standing at the end of the
lane in the road, and he meant at first
to shoulder the borrowed pitchfork and
quickly rejoin them, but it was impossi-
ble. He asked if anything were the
matter, and was answered that there was
something trying about such a long spell
of drought, which did not in the least
satisfy his curiosity.

" No," said the deacon, " I 'm getting
to be an old man, but I keep my health
fairly. Eliza and Warren, they 're both
off 'tending to their own concerns, but
I make sure one or both of 'em '11 be
back toward sundown." And Jacob, af-
ter casting about in his mind for any-
thing further to say, mentioned again
that 't was inconvenient to break a pitch-
fork right in the middle of loading a
rack, and went away.

" Looked to me as if he had had a
stroke," he told his family that night at
supper time ; and the conduct of War-
ren and Eliza Storrow, in going off and
leaving the old deacon to shift for
himself, was more severely commented
upon.

But all this time, the latter half of
that Tuesday afternoon, Eliza and her
cousin Starbird were jogging toward
home over the Dalton and Somerset
hills. The colt was in good trim, and
glad to be nearing his own familiar stall
again, and struck out at an uncommon-
ly good pace, though none of the swift-
c-t at that. It was hardly six o'clock
when the two tired-out and severely
sunburnt women came into the yard.
The deacon heard the high-pitched voice
which he knew so well before he heard
the sound of the wheels on the soft, dry

turf, and went out to greet the new
comers, half glad and halt' afraid. Eliza
took it for granted that Warren was
either in the workshop as usual, or, as
she scornfully expressed it, roaming the
hills, and did not ask for him. Cousin
Starbird had accepted an invitation to
tea, as her home was three miles farther
on. They were both heavy women, and
stiff from sitting still so long in the old
wagon, and they grumbled a little as
they walked toward the house.

" Yes, 't was a splendid occasion,"
Eliza answered the deacon, as he stood
near, hitching the colt to a much gnawed
post. " It all went off beautifully.
Everybody wanted to know where you
was, an' Warren. There, we talked till
we was all about dead, and eat ourselves
sick ; you never saw a handsomer table
in your life. The old folks stood it
well, but I see they 'd begun to kind o'
give out at dinner-time to-day, — last
night was the celebration, you know,
because lots could come in the evenin'
that was occupied by day. They want-
ed us to stop longer, but I see 't was
best to break it up, and I 'd rather go
over again by and by, and spend the day
in peace an' quietness, and have a good
visit. We 've been saying, as we rode
along, that we should n't be surprised
if the old folks kind o' faded out after
this, they 've been lookin' forward to it
so long. Well, it 's all over, like a hoss-
race ; " and Eliza heaved a great sigh
and went into the front room to open
the blinds and make it less stuffy ; then
she removed her best bonnet in her own
room, and presently came out to get tea,
dressed in her familiar every-day calico
gown.

The deacon was sitting by the open
window, drumming on the sill ; he had
a trick of beating a slow tattoo with
the ends of his queerly shaped fingers.
They were long and dry, and somehow
did not look as if they were useful,
though John Price had been a hard-
working man. Cousin Starbird had

1833.J

An Only Son.

677

come clown-stairs first, and had gone out
to get a piece of the golden wedding
cake that had been left in the wagon.
Eliza was busy in the pantry, scolding a
good deal at the state she found it in.

" Whatever is this great thing in my
pocket ! " she exclaimed, as something
had struck the table-leg as she came by
it to bring the last brace of blueberry
pies; and quickly fumbling in the pock-
et's depths she brought up in triumph
the deacon's great brown wallet, and
presented it to its owner.

" Good King Agrippy ! " said the
amazed man, snatching it, and then hold-
ing it and looking at it as if he were
afraid it would bite.

" I ain't give it a thought, from that
minute to this," said Eliza, who was not
a little frightened. " I s'pose you 've
been thinking you lost it. I thought
you looked dreadful wamblecropped
when I first saw you. Why, you see,
I did n't undertake to wash yesterday
moruin', because I did n't want the
clothes a-layin' and mildewin', and I
kind of thought perhaps I 'd put it off
till next week, anyway, though it ain't
my principle to do fortnight's washes.
An' I had so much to do, gettin' ready
to start, that I 'd gone in early and made
up your bed and not put a clean sheet
on ; but you was busy takin' out the boss
after you come home at noon, and had
your dinner to eat, and I had the time
to spare, so I just slipped in and stripped
off the bedclothes then, and this come
out from under the pillow. I meant to
hand it to you when you come in from
the barn, but I forgot it the next min-
ute ; you know we was belated about
starting, and I was scatter-witted. I
hope it ain't caused you no great incon-
venience ; you ain't wanted it for any-
thing very special, have you ? I s'pose
't was foolish to go fussin' about the
bed, but I thought if you should be sick
or anything " —

" Well, I 've got it now," said the
deacon, drawing a long breath. " I own

I felt some uneasy about it," and he
went out to the yard, and beyond it to
the garden, and beyond the garden to
the family burying-lot in the field. He
would have gone to his parish church to
pray if he had been a devout Catholic ;
as it was, this was the nearest approach
he could make to a solemn thanksgiv-
ing.

Some of the oldest stones lay flat on
the ground, and a network of blackberry
vines covered them in part. The leaves
were burnt by the sun, and the crickets
scrambled among them as the deacon's
footfall startled them. His first wife
and his second wife both were buried
there, their resting-places marked by a
slate headstone and a marble one, and
it was to this last that the old man went.
His first wife had been a plain, hard-
worked woman of sterling worth, and
his fortunes had declined from the day
she left him to guard them alone ; but
her successor had been a pale and deli-
cate schoolteacher, who had roused some
unsuspected longing for beauty and ro-
mance in John Price's otherwise prosaic
nature. She had seemed like a wind-
flower growing beside a ledge ; and her
husband had been forced to confess that
she was not fit for a farmer's wife. If
he could have had a combination of his
two partners, he had once ventured to
think, he would have been exactly suit-
ed. But it seemed to him, as he stood
before the grave with his head bowed,
the only way of making some sign of
his sorrow, he had wrongfully accused
an innocent man, his son and hers ; and
there he stayed, doing penance as best
he could, until Eliza's voice called him
to the house, and to some sort of com-
fortable existence and lack of self-re-
proof.

Before they had finished supper War-
ren came in, looking flushed and tired ;
but he took his seat at the table after a
pleasant greeting, and the deacon passed
him every plate within reach, treating
him with uncommon politeness. The

678

An Only Son.

[November,

father could not help noticing that his
son kept stealing glances at him, and
that he looked pleased and satisfied. It
seemed to him as if Warren must have
known of his suspicions and of their
happy ending, but it was discovered
presently that the loug-toiled-over ma-
chine had been proved a success. War-
ren had taken it to his former employer
at Lowell, who had promised, so great
was his delight with it, to pay the ex-
penses of getting the patent in exchange
for a portion of the right. " He said
there would be no end to the sale of it,"
said the young' man, looking eagerly at
his father's face. " I would n't have run
off so yesterday, but I was so full of it I
could n't bear to think of losing the cars,
and I did n't want to say one word about
this thing till I was sure.

" I expect I have been slack," he
continued with evident effort, while they
leaned over the garden fence, and he
looked at his father appealingly. " But
the fact is, I could n't seem to think
of other things ; it took all there was of
me to keep right after that. But now
I 'm going to take right hold and be
some help about the place. I don't
seem to want to touch a tool again for
a year." He looked pale and restless ;
the reaction from his long excitement
had set in.

The deacon gave a shaky laugh, and
struck his son's shoulder by way of a
clumsy caress. " Don't you go to fret-
tin' yourself now," he said. " I ain't
felt so pleased as I do to-day since the
day you come into the world. I sort of,
felt certain then that you was goin' to
be somebody, I do' know why 't was,"
— and he turned away suddenly toward
the house. " If you are as rich as you
say you be, I should n't wonder if be-
tween us we had n't better get them

blinds painted, and smart up a little, an-
other year. I declare, the old place has
begun to look considerable gone to seed."

That night a great thunder shower
broke the spell of the long drought, and
afterward, until morning, the rain fell
fast upon the thirsty ground. It was a
good night to sleep, Eliza had said, as
she wearily climbed the crooked back-
stairs at nine o'clock, for there was al-
ready a coolness in the air. She never
was told the whole of the story about
the wallet, for when she heard part of
it she only said it was just like a man,
— thay were generally the most helpless
creaturs alive. He might have known
she had put it away somewhere. Why
did n't he come and ask her ? He never
seemed to mistrust that it was a direct
p'inting out of his duty to ride over
to Somerset to the gathering, and just
speak to the folks.

In the early morning, while it was
cool and wet, the deacon drove up to
the captain's farm, and the two select-
men perched on the chopping log again,
and the confession was made and lis-
tened to with great gravity. The cap-
tain swore roundly in his satisfaction,
and said he was going to have a square
talk with Warren, and advise with him
a little, for fear that those lands-harks
down in Lowell should undertake to
cheat him. He stowed away the repay-
ment of the loan in one of his big pock-
ets, as if it were of little consequence to
him, but he announced with considerable
satisfaction at the next selectmen's meet-
ing, that he owned a few planks of that
three-masted schooner which the Otises
were about ready to launch. And he
winked at Deacon Price in a way that
their brother Kendall was not ablo to
understand.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

1883.] Venice. 679

VENICE.

WHILE the skies of this northern November
Scowl down with a darkening menace,

I wonder if you still remember

That marvelous summer in Venice, —

When the mornings by clouds unencumbered

Smiled on in unchanging persistence
On the broad, bright Lagura that slumbered

Afar in the magical distance ;

And the mirror of waters reflected

The sails in their gay plumage, grouping

Like tropical birds that erected

Their wings, or sat drowsily drooping ;

How by moonlight our gondola, gliding

Through gleams and through shadows of wonder,

With its sharp, flashing beak flew dividing
The waves slipping silently under.

Then almost too full seemed the chalice
Of new-brimming life and of beauty,

As we floated by Riva and palace,
Dogana and stately Salute,

Through deep-mouthed canals, overshaded
By balconies gray, quaint, and olden,

Where ruins of centuries faded

Stood stripped of their azure and golden.

Do you call back the days when before us

The masters of art shone, revealing
Their marvels of color, and o'er us

Glowed grand on the rich, massy ceiling

In the halls of the doges, where trembled

The state in its turbulent fever,
And purple-robed senates assembled

In days that are shadows forever ?

You remember the yellow light tipping
The domes when the sunset was dying ;

The crowds on the quays, and the shipping,
The pennons and flags that were flying ;

Saint Mark's, with its mellow-toned glory,
The Splendor and gloom of its riches ;

680 The New Departure in Negro Life. [November,

The columns Byzantine and hoary,
The arches, the gold-crusted niches ;

And the days when the sunshine invited

The painters abroad, until, mooring
Their bark in the shadow, delighted

They wrought at their labors alluring ;

The pictures receding in stretches

Of amber and opal around us,
The joy of our mornings of sketches,

The spell of achievement that bound us.

Ah, never I busy my brushes

With scenes of that radiant weather,
But through me the memory rushes

When we were in Venice together.

Fair Venice, the pearl-shell of cities !

Though poor the oblations we bring her, —
The pictures, the songs, and the ditties, —

Ah, still we must paint her and sing her !

A vision of beauty long vanished,

A dream that is joy to remember,
A solace that cannot be banished

By all the chill blasts of November !

Christopher P. Cranch.

THE NEW DEPARTURE IN NEGRO LIFE.

IT is, I believe, universally admitted selves. Even the most casual observer
that the spirited pictures of negro life cannot fail to be struck with the per-
now current represent the past rather functory, half-hearted manner in which
than the present. The picturesque old- they are gone through with. The im-
time customs that have hitherto formed memorial corn shuckings, preeminent-
the main element in the conception of ly the most characteristic of all such
negro life have passed or are passing " getherings," once the rendezvous of
away. Doubtless the sense of their de- whole neighborhoods and the nocturnal
cadence adds to their interest. For, scenes of mirth explosions perhaps un-
generally speaking, the perspective of equaled since the days of the Bacchanal,
time is no less essentially an adjunct of are now very tame affairs indeed. Time
the picturesque than the perspective of was when November evenings were fit-
space, fully resonant with corn-shucking songs ;

Where these characteristic festivities when night after night stunning volumes

still linger their decadence is manifest ; of weirdest melody shrilled through the

they are but phantoms of their former humid, helpful air, till met and buffeted

1883.]

The New Departure in Negro Life,

681

by kindred strains ; and when for many
successive nights one would seek in vain
to pass beyond their sway. Now vainly
is the " oration put out ; " no crowd as-
sembles, and as a rule the planters are
driven to husk corn in the daytime and
with hired labor. Even when, in ac-
cordance with ancient usage, the negroes
meet for that purpose, it is without zest
or spirit, less carnival than conventicle.

Not that the freedman is one whit less
sociable than formerly, for he is a gre-
garious creature. His faculties are as
yet of too low an order to generate
spontaneously sufficient mental pabulum.
Reflection is out of his line. He seeks
as eagerly as ever that stimulus indis-
pensable to illiterate minds, which is
found only in the crowd. Nor are the
assemblies of the new cult anywise less
noisy, demonstrative, and inflammable
than those of the old. His ardor has
simply taken a different turn. It is the
same impetuous current of emotion, now
swollen to a torrent, that has burst its
former bounds, and worked itself a whol-
ly different channel, — a channel doubt-
less more conformable to the instincts
and genius of the race.

In short, an unmistakable change in
negro character, the natural outcome of
his altered conditions in life, is now at
hand, and in an advanced stage of prog-
ress. He is putting away childish things,
and striving in his own crude, grotesque
way to grasp matters of higher import.
The bulk of the black race have learned
to read after a fashion. His primer, his
vade mecunij is the Bible. And Bible
reading, Bible poring, has produced its
inevitable results on a race at once ig-
norant, imaginative, and supersuscepti-
ble. That wondrous volume is suddenly
unsealed to hearts too impressible to
ignore ; to minds too un philosophical to
nullify. Sudden light discovers and
magnifies to an unthinking, godless peo-
ple the awful peril of their position. A
material heaven looms above; a still
more material hell yawns beneath. They

recoil in horror and dismay from their
previous course. Everything appertain-
ing to it is rigidly, indiscriminately ta-
booed. Presto ! his lightness turns to
gravity, his mirth to austerity, and his
freedom to asceticism. Agreeableness
is the touchstone to which he brings
every thought, action, and word. Pleas-
ure and happiness become synonyms for
vice and ungodliness.

Never before, perhaps, in the history
of the world have two decades brought
about such a manifest change in a race.
It is as impossible for the jocund cus-
toms of the past to subsist in this at-
mosphere as for the carnivals and merry-
meetings of the sixteenth century to
survive the austere spirit of the Refor-
mation and inceptive Puritanism. The
corn shuckings and " shindigs " have
fallen as irrecoverably as fell the saturna-
lia of the " Boy Bishop," the " Abbot
of Unreason," or the " Pope of Fools."
To the morbidly intense and brooding
imagination of the impassioned religion-
ist, impending damnation is too vivid,
too real, to admit of levity or even of
cheerfulness. Every trivial daily action,
lopped, stretched, and distorted, is sub-
jected to the Procrustean test of Bib-
lical models, or pseudo-models. Re-
ligion, religionism, has permeated and
steeped every fibre of his being. It
forms the staple of his speech by day,
and the stuff that 'his dreams are made
of by night. This is intensified as he
grows in Biblical knowledge. The met-
aphors and illustrations with which he
never tires of garnishing his talk have
but one source. Nothing warms his
blood so quickly or so thoroughly as
religious controversy, into which he en-
ters with the volubility of a Kettle-
drummle and the pertinacity of a Mause
Headrigg. He dogmatizes with equal
glibness on the abstruse and the simple.
He expounds the unfathomable myste-
ries of the Apocalypse with the same
offhand ease and patronizing self-suffi-
ciency that he proves immersion to be

682

The New Departure in Negro Life.

[November,

the primitive and only authentic and
ctlu'Ufious mode of baptism. His active
imagination literalizes the entire Scrip-
tures, and he has an inbred contempt
for commentaries. Ban-ing the uuspell-
able names, the Bible is to him a vol-
ume of glass, clear, plain, unmistakable,
seen through at a glance, from Genesis
to Revelation. Nor are his interpreta-
tions always inept or ever unoriginal.
lie has the insight, one-sided and defec-
tive though it may be, which the fanatic
seldom lacks.

The preference he shows for partic-
ular parts of tho sacred volume is also
highly characteristic. He prefers the
technically religious to the practically
righteous, the old Bible to the new. It
has to do more with the concrete, and is
therefore more congenial and more tan-
gible to men of low mental and spiritual
cast. Its thoroughly human tone is more
in accord with the coarseness and crude-
ness of his moral fibre. It depicts an
intensely religious life in which religion
and ethics were widely sundered. And
when I predicate these features of the
negro cult, I assert no more than could
be broadly maintained of every religion
save Christianity alone, and what was
in great measure true of that prior to
the comparatively modern divorce be-
tween the secular and the spiritual.

However, the New Testament is by
no means unread. Perhaps it is read as
much as the Old, though its contents
are not so readily assimilated. But even
there the reader's preferences are no less
characteristic. The parables and the vis-
ion of St. John seem to be his favorites.
Especially if the plot of the parable —
if I may use the term — bears an anal-
ogy to some incident with which he is .
familiar, or is founded on some phase of
nature which has come under his own
observation, it strikes him at once. He
revolves it in his mind again and again,
and is as much delighted at his clever-
ness as was the primitive Indian when
he first found himself able to manipulate

a fire-lock or a jack-knife. I have never
heard a negro quote any part of the Ser-
mon on the Mount, saving perhaps the
parable of the candle and the bushel.
Perhaps it is too direct and practical.
He seeks canons of faith rather than
rules of action. It is simply maintain-
ing a truism to assert that poetry is
more insinuating than philosophy or
ethical codes ; that the imaginative fac-
ulty preludes the reasoning.

Almost the last spark of the negro's
hilarity and joyousness is quenched by
this chilling religionism. Saving the
indispensable vocations of life, there is
little or no discrimination between the
secular and the sinful. To be happy is
to be wicked. Dancing and the singing
of secular songs are relegated to the cat-
egory of unpardonable sins. It is safer
to impeach his honesty than his ortho-
doxy. Better call him a bad man than
a lax Christian. For from his point of
view the terms are by no means synony-
mous. With him, as with all similarly
conditioned people, religious fervor and
practical uprightness go not always hand
in hand.

A case highly illustrative of this
point came recently under my own ob-
servation. In the neighborhood lived a
cheery, light-hearted negro fiddler called
" Sol." Sol, though the rendering of
divers of his pieces might have grated
somewhat on an over refined ear, saw fit
to dub himself " er born musicianer ; "
and as his music sufficed to dance by,
no one challenged his right to bear the
title. His position was both popular
and lucrative. In fact, the earnings of
his fiddle were about double the gross
product of his little farm, on which he
and his family — particularly the lat-
ter — delved year in and year out. For
many years did this rustic Ole Bull with-
stand the aggressive religious ferment
that encompassed him. His wife suc-
cumbed and " got religion," as did his
children down to an age far below what
is commonly deemed the limit of moral

1883.]

The New Departure in Negro Life.

683

responsibility. Finally there opened a
revival, exceptionally long, fervid, and
uproarious. Sol " come through," and
his first act of atonement was to immo-
late with all due solemnity his fiddle, as
both fellow and instrument in his old
ways of unutterable turpitude ; leav-
ing its shreds as an accursed thing by
the stump over which it was shivered.
Thenceforward his face wore an altered
look. Not only the expression changed,
but the very cast of the features was
different. He at once became as much
noted for silence and ruefulness as he
had been for loquacity and merry-mak-
ing. But sad to tell, scarce three months
had worn away when a neighboring mill
was feloniously entered, and several
sacks of flour taken therefrom. By a
fortuitous chain of circumstances the
flour was traced direct to Sol's house
and found under his bed, in bags bearing
the mill-owner's name. He confessed
the theft, which was indeed undeniable,
and got a twelvemonth in the peniten-
tiary. But being popular, and hitherto
irreproachable in character, a numerous-
ly signed petition effected his release
somewhat short of that term.

He has lately returned home, and
though laboring under the stigma of con-
fessed theft, no measure of reward or
punishment could drive him to touch a
fiddle or engage in any form of worldly
diversion. Nor is he, viewed from his
standpoint, a hypocrite or mere simula-
tor of piety. He does not profess to be
sans tache, but what candid man does ?
His grotesque, illogical mind totally re-
verses the scale of culpable actions. To
him ungodliness is a crime, theft a pec-
cadillo. It is blameworthy to steal, but
atrocious to enjoy one's self. In fine, he
seems to think that the rigidness with
which he observes the first half of the
decalogue atones for his frequent in-
fringement of the remainder. In his
zeal to perform his duty towards God,
he overlooks his duty towards his neigh-
bor.

The vast majority of the blacks are
Baptist. Next in point of numbers
come the Methodists. Lastly, though
vastly in the minority, stand the Pres-
byterians and Episcopalians. In fact,
the latter admit and deplore their in-
ability to carry out an adequate system
of missionary work among the negroes.
In only a few of the large towns do we
find African Episcopal churches. True,
all the white Episcopal churches have
galleries set apart for the negroes, but
they are unused, or at most sparsely oc-
cupied. It is not uncommon to see a
white Episcopal church with one or more
colored members ; but the chances are
that one will turn out to be the well-
paid sexton, and the rest a couple of su-
perannuated carriage drivers, who, hav-
ing in former days " 'sociated wid the
quality," scorn to " take up wid poor
folks and niggers."

As a rule the doctrine and ritual of
this church seem utterly incomprehen-
sible, and therefore repellant, to the
negro. He harbors an undisguised dis-
trust of it. He does not consider it re-
ligion at all. He has not the faintest
idea that it can save anybody. There
is too little heat and too much form ;
and the negro is the truceless enemy of
form in religion or out of religion. He
is a creature of emotion, impulse, noise.
Restraint is odious, insupportable. An
apt text, a familiar allusion, or simply
the shout of a fellow listener, plunges
him into ecstasies, and thenceforward he
is alive only to the sound of his own
voice.

As an illustration of what the mass
of the negroes think of Episcopacy, I
will give a colloquy I once overheard
between an old Baptist negro and his
former master's son. It had been near-
ly a score of years since they parted,
and the affectionate old man had made
a long and weary journey on foot to see
as a man the one he had doted on as a
child. Before separating he gave the
talk a religious turn, expressing much

684

The New Departure in Negro Life. [November,

anxiety lest the young man should be
lost.

•• Why, Uncle Ned," responded the
youth, " 1 attend church regularly, and
endeavor in all things to do what is
right. AYhat more can I do ? "

u All, Mars Tom, Mars Tom," said the
old man fervently, " when did yer get
'liwiou ? Wliar was it yer went down un-
der de water ? 'Member, child, de good
book says 'pent and he baptized, else
yer ca' enter de kingdom of heaben."

" True, Uncle Ned," was the rejoinder ;
"but you must remember that we Episco-
palians, while as devout and earnest as
you are, have different notions of what
repentance and baptism mean. We are
less demonstrative though more deliber-
ate than you are."

" Child," said the old man solemn-
ly, " yer talk is too highfalutin fer me.
But de Bible is plain as A, B, C, whar
it says yer is got ter 'pent and be bap-
tized, er yer '11 be damned. Ise erfeard,
fact I knows, yer's not done nuther.
It 's dat Pisterpalium church what 's der
matter long yer. Fer what wid yer git-
tin's up and yer sittin' down, and yer
'sponsin', . and yer prayin' prayers dat
er man up Norf made and put 'em in
er book, and yer mellydoriums er play-
in' all ther time, yer 's so tuck up ther
Sperit ca' come nigh yer. Why, hon-
ey, dese same old eyes " (touching them
thoughtfully) " is seed yer preacher
lookin' on at folks dancin' and break-
in' der commandments. And dat ai' all.
My Polly says she seed him fingerin'
un er fiddle hisself, and moughter nigh
'bout ter play. 'Member, honey, ther
Scripture says keep yer lamp trum an'
er buruin', an' yer ile-can full ter pour
in it."

" Now, Uncle Ned," was the evasive
reply, " I hope you don't think my lamp
is without oil, do you ? "

" Child, tai' even got no wick in it.
Fac' is, Ise erfeard yer ai' even got no
lamp," muttered the decrepit old negro,
as he mournfully shambled off.

As before stated, the bulk of the
negroes are Baptists, staunch and im-
movable. Nor is the reason for their
preference hard to mid. The glowing,
tumultuous, uncontrolled fervor of the
revival, where hundreds writhing in in-
ward agony literally cast themselves in
the dust ; the weird, preternatural solem-
nity of the night on which each new
convert rises in turn in the hushed, dim-
ly lit church, and with hands stretched
towards heaven pours out with charac-
teristic volubility his minute, realistic
account of his desperate struggle with
the devil, his hairbreadth escape from
hell, his brief sojourn in heaven ; the
haunting scene of the baptizing, where
thousands assemble around the leaf-en-
sconced, unrippled pond, gazing, sway-
ing, singing, shouting, awakening echoes
that have slumbered since the departure
of the red man, — these, these only, are
the sermons that speak irresistibly to
him. Without them religion is dull, in-
sipid, unalluring.

The negro preachers may be sharply
divided into two classes, the educated
and the uneducated ; or as they phrase
it, the " larnt " and the " unlarnt." The
former are young men who have grown
up amid the new order of things, and
who by dint of their own industry and
frugality have managed to defray part of
the cost of their limited education, some
assistance having been afforded by their
respective churches. They read with
tolerable fluency, are slight smatterers
in theology, and write after a fashion
which, although almost wholly unintel-
ligible to educated people, is, I believe,
decipherable by their own race. These
young divines, though they have higher
ideals for their race, and are gradually
acquiring a wholesome influence over
them, do not as yet possess the sway
of the older uneducated preachers. It
would seem that they have learned just
enough to make them obscure ; enough
to lift them out of sympathy with their
simple-minded hearers, but not enough

1883.]

The New Departure in Negro Life.

685

to give them true breadth and insight ;
and while sticklers for polysyllables,
they fret in grammatical traces, inso-
much that the soul-glow, the ebullient
spontaneity of the race, is entangled and
smothered. Book lore is as yet clogs,
not pinions.

It is among the older set, if anywhere,
that we must look for the traditional
black orator. His originality would
more than satisfy the wildest apostle of
the unconventional. Neither in point
of rite or doctrine is he fettered, scarce
even guided, by rule or precedent. He
manufactures theology with the noncha-
lance of a Jesuit, and coins words with
the facility of a Carlyle. He may just
be able to flounder through a chapter of
Scripture, uncouth in gesture, barbarous
in diction, yet earnestness lends dignity
to his manner, and passion fuses his jar-
gon into eloquence. He may habitual-
ly outrage logic and occasionally contra-
vene Scripture, but the salient points of
his discourse are sound, and his words
go straight home to the hearts of his
hearers.

His power out of the pulpit is also
great, almost boundless. Within his
own parish he is practically priest and
pope. Excommunication itself is his
most trenchant weapon. Never was pa-
pal anathema a more potent bugbear
than his threat to " cut off." His cen-
sorship of the morals and deportment
of his flock, though to our minds insup-
portably annoying and humiliating, is
undoubtedly wholesome and necessary.
Though his discipline can by no means
escape the charge of inconsistency, his
influence is always exerted to make
them honest and faithful men and wom-
en, and to restrain the besetting sins of
the race. In many instances he resorts
to their employers for information touch-
ing their honesty aud industry. Then

monthly, on a stated Saturday, they are
rigidly required to assemble and give an
account of themselves. As the negroes
possess almost a morbid local attach-
ment, they are exceeding loath to trans-
fer their membership, when in quest of
employment they move to a distance,
and in many instances this monthly at-
tendance involves a tramp of forty miles
or more. But no excuse is taken, and
upon failure to attend for three consecu-
tive months they are unhesitatingly cut
off. It is at these meetings that all ru-
mors touching the morals and deport-
ment of each member are rigidly inves-
tigated, and the culprits summarily,
though from our standpoint indiscrim-
inately, punished ; the same penalty —
six months' suspension — being inflicted
for dancing and for theft, for worldli-
ness and for unchastity.

It is manifest to all acquainted with
the facts that the social and moral eleva-
tion of the negro is not coextensive with
his religious inflation. His perverted
conception of religious truth, the wide
chasm between his belief and his prac-
tice, might mislead many to suppose
that he is actually retrograding ; that he
is really worse than when he professed
nothing. But a stream should be judged
by its current, not by its eddies ; and on
a wide and prolonged survey of the race
it is plain that it moves. The motion is
slow, almost imperceptible, but it is in
the right direction. It is true that re-
ligion has as yet wrought little change
in the negro's conduct. His undiscrim-
inating mind sees small inconsistency in
sanctity and dishonesty, piety and un-
truthfulness, devoutness and unchastity.
He cannot always understand that prob-
ity should be the handmaid of religion,
that works should accompany faith, and
that one must needs be moral before he
can truly be religious.

0. W. Hackndl

686 What Instruction should be given in our Colleges? [November,

WHAT INSTRUCTION SHOULD BE GIVEN IN OUR COLLEGES?

AT the time of founding the earlier
American colleges, mental discipline
was the chief end of the four years'
course of study. But if college pro-
fessors were asked to-day what is the
chief end of the course, we fear that
many of them could not give satisfactory
answers. Certainly their answers would
not be the same. If they should say
mental discipline, the answer could not
easily be reconciled with the long, incon-
gruous list of studies, the primary aim
for pursuing which is to store the mind
with facts. If they should say, to ac-
quire knowledge, the answer could not
easily be reconciled with the presence
of Latin, Greek, and mathematics in
the course. If they should say, mental
discipline and general culture, the an-
swer would betray a very imperfect
conception of what constitutes general
culture, considering our enormously ex-
panded circle of knowledge and our
mental activity. If they should say,
there is no longer a chief end, but that
several ends are kept in sight, then it is
very desirable to know what these ends
are, and whether they are worth the
cost of attaining them.

To acquire mental discipline, Latin,
Greek, and mathematics were formerly
regarded the best instruments. For
many years this idea of college instruc-
tion was unchallenged, and even now is
maintained by some persons with uu-
lessened confidence. From most minds,
however, the idea has been partly or
wholly dislodged. Latin and Greek are
pri/ed as highly as they ever were for
their Ix-aiuy, .strength, and finish, but
have lost their magic charm as instru-
ments for fashioning the mind. They

1 In this connection Dugald Stewart's famous
remark on the universities of his day is worth
r< -|> 'Miing: "The academical establishments of
SOHH: parts of Europe are not without their use to
the historian of the human iniud. Immovably

have been cast down from their peculiar
niche in the educational structure, and
perhaps will never be replaced.

So long as the chief aim of college
instruction was mental discipline, and so
long as Latin, Greek, and mathematics
were regarded the best instruments for
acquiring it, the course was consistent.
But when the craving for more knowl-
edge was developed, to satisfy which
new studies were added, the consistency
disappeared. Every additional study
was a new disfigurement. When the
sciences were added, one by one, — phys-
ics, geology, mineralogy, chemistry, bota-
ny, and so on, — the disfigurement was
complete. A confused jumble of studies
is now seen, creating the painful impres-
sion that the old curriculum has been
shaken by an earthquake.

That the present course is a concre-
tion, and not a systematic and fair
growth, hardly any one will deny. It
resembles an ancient building which
originally was well proportioned and
pleasing, and which served a highly
useful purpose. It was indeed the good-
liest structure of the time. All honor
to the builders ! But by making addi-
tions the proportion of parts hus been
destroyed, and the beauty of the original
design wholly lost. We may call the
structure a building, but it certainly
does not serve the end for which it was
designed as perfectly as it did in the be-
ginning.1

This is clearly enough seen by most
of our college teachers. We may find
fault with them for not rebuilding, but
we should do them a far greater wrong
by asserting that they have not seen
more or less clearly the chaotic condi-

moored to the same station by the strength of
their cables and the weight of their anchors, they
enable him to measure the rapidity of the current
by which the rest of the world is borne along."

1883.] What Instruction should be given in our Colleges?

687

tion into which the structure has fallen.
The proof that they see is the permis-
sion given to students to decide to some
extent what studies they shall pursue.
College professors know how general
is the dislike among students of many of
the studies now pursued, especially Lat-
in, Greek, and mathematics. To make
college instruction more satisfactory to
them, " the elective system," as it is
called, has been introduced. This phrase
finely illustrates the trick which can be
played with language, for the elective
system is no system ; it is the aban-
donment of a system. The adoption of
the elective system is simply a confes-
sion that the existing curriculum is in-
adequate, and that the student knows
better than his teacher what to learn.
We earnestly maintain that those who
have spent their lives in educating boys
and young men, and who are familiar
with the experience of former educators,
know best what the course should be.
" Young America " is " smart," but we
do not believe that he has advanced far
enough to prescribe for himself.

If, then, the existing course be im-
perfect, how can it be improved ? We
maintain that college instruction should
be prescribed with reference to the fol-
lowing aims : (1) to discipline the mind ;
(2) to teach the expression of thought
in speech and writing in the best man-
ner ; (3) to develop the powers of the
body and mind as well as an understand-
ing of moral and social relations ; (4) to
impart knowledge ; (5) to build up a
solid foundation for those special studies
and pursuits which are to be undertaken
after the completion of the course.

(1.) There is no need to define what
we mean by mental discipline. Noth-
ing connected with higher education is
better understood. Persons, when told
in their youth that one aim of education
is to discipline the mind, do not under-
stand what is meant, but with fuller
mental maturity they do. Now we would
contend as strenuously as any devotee to

the study of ancient language that this
end should never be obscured. To ex-
plore the vast domain of knowledge, to
carry our conquests further, the mind
must be perfected to the highest possi-
ble degree, and that this end may be bet-
ter attained is a strong reason why the
present college course should be revised.
For the multiplicity of studies now pur-
sued does not conduce to the highest
mental discipline. The mind is dis-
tracted by them. Some change of study
is desirable for healthy mental growth,
but not too much. There must be fewer
studies if we would have stronger minds.
Mental power in every direction should
be developed : the critical faculty should
be sharpened ; the reflective faculty be
broadened and deepened ; the construc-
tive, exercised ; the memory, strength-
ened. But to effect this mental en-
largement and strengthening, a course
of study very different from the present
must be prescribed.

How can mental discipline be best ac-
quired ? Here we come to the parting
of the ways. One class of educators
maintain that this can be done best by
the study of Latin and Greek ; another
class, by the study of science. A third
class contend that mental discipline is
the result of a method of studying rath-
er than of the particular study pursued.

Does the most careful analysis of the
ancient languages disclose any peculiar
elements by the mastery of which the
mind is better trained than by the mas-
tery of other studies? If, for example,
the training of the memory be desired,
cannot this be effected as perfectly by
learning a modern language as by learn-
ing the long-honored Latin and Greek ?
If the desired training be that of the
judgment or power to discriminate, can-
not this be had as well by comparing
the definitions of words in modern lan-
guages, their shades of meaning, and by
different translations of phrases and sen-
tences in them, as by pursuing the same
exercises in the ancieut languages ? The

688 What Instruction should be given in our Colleges? [November,

more critically the point is studied the
more clearly does the fact appear that
any power of mind, or the mind as a
unity, can be as highly developed by the
study of modern languages as by that of
the ancient ones. No peculiar quality
lias been discovered in them for exercis-
ing the mind. They are not specifics.
The persons who maintain that they are
have never shown wherein their superi-
ority consists. They have never gone
farther than to make general assertions.
If our conclusions be correct, we are
confronted with the question, Should
Latin and Greek be retained in the cur-
riculum as means of general culture ?
We should employ every means to ex-
tend our culture ; not the smallest trifle
of intellectual or moral beauty, from
whatever source, should be cast aside.
But we would no longer confine our
conception of general culture to the mas-
tery of the Latin and Greek languages
and literatures. Such a conception is
too narrow. The man who can give
you a fine description of Cybele, or any
other god of Aryan mythology, but can-
not give you a good account of the part
that Jefferson and Adams played in
American history, or of the functions of
the lungs, should no longer be regarded
a cultivated man. Once there was no
science, and hardly any history, outside
that of Greece and Rome. Since then
many planets of knowledge have been
added to the few which existed before.
These additions have had the effect of
changing the meaning of culture. Un-
happily, many of our college professors
do not seem to have found this out.
They are still dreaming in the moon-
light of the Middle Ages. They still
believe that young men should get the
same education as was prescribed for
them when the world knew less. It
is time to dispel this pernicious idea.
Modern culture is infinitely broader and
deeper than mediaeval culture, and to
get it the appropriation of all the men-
tal and moral wealth of Greece and

Rome will not suffice. In drawing from
these sources, however, 'an easier and
more fruitful method than the present
one can be employed, and we should
not hesitate to employ it. What more
convincing proof is wanted of the neces-
sity for doing this than the introduction
and success of the elective system ?

One reason why these languages con-
tinue to enchant men is because, for
many centuries, they were the best
sources of culture. Refinement is asso-
ciated with them as closely as a polished
man with a home in which beauty is
everywhere visible. Through long as-
sociation of this nature, therefore, these
languages possess an enchanting power.
But though they were formerly the
principal sources of mental culture, they
are not now. The knowledge of the
ancients was confined within narrow
bounds, like the physical world they
knew. Those who regard the Latin and
Greek literatures as the principal means
of general culture have no adequate
conception of the vast acquisitions since
those ancient springs ceased to flow.
Placing before our view the entire field
of knowledge and the entire history of
man, can we believe that those two an-
cient languages, and the people who used
them, possess such a potency of general
culture to the present generation as some
persons maintain ? This can be attained
only by drawing copiously from other
and living fountains. The social life of
the Greeks never reached the plane of
more modern people ; their moral ideas
were less finely cut than our own ; their
aspirations were lower, and most of their
writings are as cheerless as George
Eliot's, containing not a gleam of hope
for man. Since those far-off times men
have come to love the truth more for
the truth's sake ; life has become an in-
finitely grander thing, is filled with no-
bler yearnings and possibilities, and is
cheered with better revelations. In
many ways there has been an immense
development, to know of which will

1883.] What Instruction should be given in our Colleges?

689

bring a broader, higher, and better cul-
ture than can be acquired by the most
assiduous study of the ways and works
of the Greeks and the Romans, or by
the largest infusion of their spirit.

(2.) The next aim of the four years'
courses should be to teach the student
how to express his thoughts in speech
and writing in the best manner. Until
recently the attention bestowed on this
subject was very slight. It was assumed
that a student understood his mother
tongue when he entered college. Yet
too often students knew not how to
construct a strong English sentence
when they entered or when they left.
Perhaps they knew at the end of their
college career how to write an elegant
Greek one ; but the persons met in
the outside world did not know Greek,
and Greek composition availed nothing
amon£ them. If the English language
has been improved and enriched by
studying Greek and Latin, on the other
hand, English grammar and English
composition have beon debased by the
admixture of too much foreign alloy.
The borrowings and copyings have been
too servile and frequent. This is espe-
cially noteworthy of those who strenu-
ously maintain that Latin and Greek
should retain their place in the curric-
ulum. They have studied Latin and
Greek most zealously, but forgotten or
never acquired their own tongue. How-
ever well adapted the study of these lan-
guages may be for disciplinary purposes,
it is not helpful to an effective mastery
of English, judged by most of the ut-
terances and writings of the defenders
and teachers of the ancient classics.

Knowledge is power ; so is language.
The study of the method of expressing
thought, however, is of supreme impor-
tance. Our colleges are awakening very
slowly to the need of better instruction
on the subject.

The first line of study, therefore,
should be language, extending through
the four years' course. We would

VOL. LU. — NO. 313. 44

have three languages taught, English,
French, and German. Nevertheless, if
a student, when entering college, desired
to study Latin and Greek instead of
French and German, his desire should
be respected. We would not ignore the
great merits of Latin and Greek instruc-
tion, but for many reasons we maintain
that French and German are entitled to
a higher place. The stress of our argu-
ment, however, is that five languages,
beside the other studies now prescribed,
cannot be thoroughly acquired in four
years. The time is too short for more
than three languages ; hence the stu-
dent, in the beginning of his college
career, should decide to study either
Latin and Greek or French and Ger-
man. Frequent compositions in English
should be required, and there should
be enough instructors to give to each
student special training in the art. At
present, how little attention can be given
to this subject ! Now and then a stu-
dent gets fifteen minutes of instruction
from a professor, but this is only a small
fraction of the time* that should be de-
voted to each student. Our instructors
doubtless do the best they can, but they
are too few to furnish the instruction
required. Were adequate instruction
given, perhaps a wonderful revolution
would be wrought in our speech, and
literature. Amazing as are the con-
quests of science, the acquisitions in
philology and in almost every depart-
ment of knowledge, we believe that new
and splendid glories will be reflected by
voice and pen, when our college courses
shall be so revised that a profound study
of the capacity of the English language
for speech and written composition
shall be undertaken. Is there any rea-
son for supposing that our vehicle of
thought can be brought no nearer to
perfection? It may appear some day
that our language is now in a crude,
half-developed stage, its greatest power
and beauty unknown. How great is the
pleasure of the Greek scholar in unlock-

690 What Instruction should be given in our Colleges? [November,

in" the wonderful secrets inclosed in the

Greek particles! But if he had dis-
played half the industry in trying to
add force to these little words in Eng-
lish, perhaps they would excite more
admiration to-day from the philosophical
linguist than the particles of any other
language. The old Greeks sought to
make their language a powerful instru-
ment for the expression of thought, and
their success is one of the perpetual
wonders of the world. We too should
strive to make our language beautiful
and perfect, but this can never be done
simply by studying Greek, any more
than a homely woman can become beau-
tiful by studying the beauty of another.
To make our language a more perfect
instrument of thought, we must radical-
ly change our method of studying it.
The Greeks did not improve their lan-
guage by studying the languages of con-
temporaries. They knew Greek, and it
alone. Why will not the modern wor-
shiper of the Greek language adopt the
method by which that marvelous instru-
ment of speech was made so perfect ? If
this method should be adopted, the Eng-
lish language of the future may be as
superior to ours as the Greek of the
age of Pericles was to that of Hesiod or
Anaximenes.

The time has fully come for our col-
leges to do this work. It is peculiarly
their own, — to teach and develop the
latent capacities of the English tongue.
No longer should the might of philolog-
ical teaching be devoted to Greek and
Latin. Employ this power in the mas-
tery of English, and good results will
speedily appear. Erelong these results
would doubtless silence all who still
cling to the wreck of the ancient order
of things, and lead them to confess their
error in adhering too long to a course of
study which consisted in admiring the
past, rather than in resolutely determin-
ing to improve their own language and
to make it a perfect instrument in which
to set the precious gems of thought.

The colleges have played an ignoble
part in maintaining that Greek and Lat-
in were the best mental gymnastics, and
worthy of all the study bestowed on
them, because they are so finished.
One feels that the men who say these
things are hardly a part of the world,
or have much at heart the permanent
improvement of mankind. We have
read some parts of President Porter's
book on American Colleges several
times, and every re-reading caused ad-
ditional pain, because he showed so
much admiration for the past, and so
little inclination toward improvement.
If our language be not so beautiful as
the Greek, if our morality be inferior
to theirs, if our sense of beauty be less
keen, if our intellect be not so acute, if
our manhood be below the Attic stan-
dard, let us resolve to advance. But let
us not march by the roundabout way of
Greece and Rome, as if we did not care
much about improving ourselves. Let
us adopt a course of instruction which
shall plainly reveal to the student the
ends to be attained by pursuing it. We
confess our surprise that a clergyman
like President Porter, whose Christian
living and thinking have been consis-
tent and of fine example, should dwell
so fondly on the ancient classics as a
means of moral and aesthetic culture.
Instead of giving up so much of those
precious four years to an admiration of
the past in literature and art, the stu-
dent should be more thoroughly stimu-
lated and prepared for the work of life.

How often have men declared that
when they went forth into the world at
the end of their college career, instead
of having been fitted for their work,
they were unfitted ! After a time, they
acquired needful knowledge and un-
learned much. The college of to-day is
too unreal. Doubtless something can
be said in favor of making it so, of
breaking up former modes of thought
and action. But the re-creation of the
student is often carried too far. The

1883.] What Instruction should be given in our Colleges?

691

consequence is, he becomes unfitted to
master the situation, while the theory
of college education is that he will mas-
ter it more easily. The study of Latin,
Greek, and mathematics is the chief
agency in putting him into this idealis-
tic, unreal condition, — of losing him, as
it were, in the world. These studies
touch life so remotely, they abstract the
student so far from the world, that when
he gets into it he is like a babe, and
much must be explained to him. After
sundry mishaps and no little ridicule his
eyes are opened, and he ceases to see
men as trees walking. Root out the an-
cient languages and mathematics, sub-
stitute French, German, and English,
and men will be sent into the world bet-
ter equipped than they are now. They
will remain near enough to the actual
world in college to know how to act
when they go outside. It is true that
we are " as soldiers fighting in a foreign
land, understanding not the plan of the
campaign;" but we shall fight with more
heart and energy, and with stronger hope
of winning, if our preparation, though
inadequate, seems fitted for the work
before us, than we shall if distrustful of
our preparation. Life always becomes
solemn as soon as we discover what it
really is : but in the former case solemni-
ty is brightened with hope ; in the other,
it is darkened with despair so great that
many flee from the field as soon as dan-
gers appear.

(3.) The next line of study pertains to
the cultivation of the body and mind,
and to the moral and social relations.

The first three studies in this line
should be anatomy, physiology, and hy-
giene. Through the first study we
should learn how the body is construct-
ed, through the second what are its dy-
namics, and through the third how to
conserve the body and use it most effec-
tively. These studies, therefore, should
come first in the second line, and run
parallel with the first line. They form
the physical groundwork for all future

study. They properly stand at the portal
through which we must enter the tem-
ple of knowledge.

Next in the same line of study should
follow logic and mental philosophy.
These studies are needful to teach us
what are the powers of mind and how
to employ them. Of course, some per-
sons maintain that mental philosophy is
dreary and useless, because no certain
knowledge can be attained. They say
that the whole ground is a battlefield
on which men have been contending
since the earliest ages, and that nothing
has yet been settled. Should such a
study as this, they say, be pursued in
our colleges ? This, however, is a shal-
low way of regarding the matter. Many
of the questions lying in the domain of
mental philosophy are asked by every
thoughtful person, and whether answers
shall ever be found satisfactory to all
minds, many desire to know what an-
swers have been given. But there is
a considerable body of valid knowledge
concerning the mind which surely should
be acquired. Besides, this study has an
excellent disciplinary effect. The stu-
dent learns to discriminate, to analyze,
and to construct. In no other study is
the synthetic faculty more powerfully
exercised.

The study of anatomy and physiology
is a good introduction to logic and men-
tal philosophy. There is a physical
side to this study which, until recent
years, has been too much ignored. Most
of the teachers of mental philosophy
have known nothing about anatomy and
physiology, and consequently have taught
a one-sided mental philosophy and psy-
chology. While many of the anatomists
and physiologists have gone to the other
extreme, it must be apparent that by
pursuing these four studies in the order
named, more useful and satisfying re-
sults are likely to be attained than by
continuing the present course of study.

After unfolding the physical and
mental powers we reach the moral ones.

692 Wliat Instruction should be given in our Colleges? [November,

This is by a regular arid natural grada-
tion. Then follows the study of man
in his social relations, and thus a knowl-
edge of the state and of our duty as
citizens is a proper outgrowth and com-
pletion of this Hue of study.

(4.) The aim of the third line of
study is to acquire facts. These are to
be drawn from history. History is the
record of the world's experience. A
high value should be put on this knowl-
edge. It is true that prejudice may be
fed in studying history, while no danger
of the kind is possible in studying the
binomial theorem. But the risk may
be wisely taken for the sake of the
knowledge. In every field containing
wheat, tares abound ; yet it is better to
work in a wheat-field than to dig wells
in a desert.

But, says the defender of Latin and
Greek, if we would learn all the lessons
which Greece and Rome have for us,
we must master their languages. We
will not deny that an accomplished
Latin and Greek scholar ought to draw
more wisdom from Greek and Roman
history than he who has an imperfect
acquaintance with the Latin and Greek
languages, or none whatever. But we
must remember that only at rare in-
tervals does a Latin or Greek scholar
of high order blossom in our colleges.
They educate far more sunflowers than
century plants. Most of their graduates
do not advance so far as to driuk in
the lessons of Greek and Roman wis-
dom more fully than others do by a dif-
ferent and an easier method. On the
other hand, if the time spent in acquir-
ing these languages were devoted to our
own, and French and German, and in
storing up the best experience of man-
kind, the college student would get a
better culture than he is getting now.

Beginning with the cave and lake
dwellers, and following with the geog-
raphy, history, and archaeology of suc-
ceeding peoples, this third line of study
should be extended to the present time,

broadening out and deepening as we ad-
vanced. All sides of life should be con-
sidered,— the political, moral, religious,
industrial, social, and economic.

Such knowledge shows the action of
man, his influence, his victories over na-
ture. It is one-sided, however, regarded
from one point of view, because it does
not show the power of nature over man.
To supplement, correct, and complete
this knowledge a study of man's envi-
ronment is essential. But instead of
studying nature in a fragmentary way,
as colleges do now, by merely peeping
into geology, mineralogy, astronomy,
botany, physics, chemistry, and the like,
it is proposed that instruction should be
given in the physical history of the uni-
verse. This would comprise the differ-
ent theories concerning the origin of the
earth, its form and motions, the compo-
sition of the sun and planets and the
probable history of the solar system, the
forces of nature and their operation, an
inquiry into the materials composing the
earth, and the order of the vegetable
and animal creation from the beginning
to the present. This study would be an
unveiling of the wonders of the universe,
a blending of all the sciences into one,
whereby their mastery would be easy
and useful. The study of science would
no longer be fragmentary. It may be
objected that this knowledge should pre-
cede the history of man. Though it re-
lates to the world chiefly before man ap-
peared, yet it would be easier to study
his history first, and the order of knowl-
edge might be reversed in the mind as
soon as the student had traversed the
whole field. This third line of study, it
is also proposed, should run through the
entire course.

(5.) These three lines of study would
form a broad and solid foundation for
any kind of superstructure of knowl-
edge. Considered with reference to
future studies, the proposed course is
preparatory only, — the vestibule to the
glories which may be seen by all who

1883.]

What Instruction should be given in our Colleges ? 693

enter the inner courts of knowledge, and
devote themselves to further study.

Perhaps something should be said
concerning the total exclusion of math-
ematics from the proposed course. A
thorough knowledge of the elementary
mathematics should be required of the
student when entering college ; the high-
er mathematics should be regarded as
technical studies, and relegated to the
courses of which they form a necessary
part. The superiority of such a course
of study over the present, we maintain,
is very great.

(1.) Far better discipline of mind and
body would be acquired, assuming, of
course, that the studies proposed were
taught with as much thoroughness as
the studies now prescribed. Under the
proposed system, the student would be
pursuing three lines of study at a time :
one in language, another relating to the
cultivation of his physical and mental
powers and his moral and social duties,
and a third relating primarily to the ac-
quisition of facts. In the first two lines
of study, and also in the relation which
one study bears to another, mental disci-
pline is kept in view. There is change
enough to rest the mind and impart to it
the elasticity needful for its best develop-
ment, as well as concentration enough to
prevent the mind from scattering and
becoming dissipated and weakened, as
often happens in pursuing the present
chaotic course.

(2.) The studies would be more per-
fectly mastered than the larger number
in the existing course. If four years
were needed to master the old curricu-
lum, surely four years are not enough
for the modern. Doubtless they are
right who contend that colleges grad-
uated better disciplined men formerly
than they do to-day. And the reason is
very simple, namely, when fewer studies
were taught they were more thoroughly
acquired ; and thoroughness of study is
the essence of mental discipline.

(3.) The student would be better pre-

pared to contend with the world than he
is after finishing the present course.
He would have a true idea of life. He
would have a richer fund of experience.
He would have a far better knowledge
of himself. He would have less to un-
learn. He could make better use of all
that he had been taught.

If Latin, Greek, and mathematics
were eliminated from the four years'
course, would they lose their standing
in the court of knowledge ? Certainly
not. They would be fitted into other
courses of which they would form a
more important part. If one intended
to study theology, beside studying He-
brew he should study Greek, because to
the theological student it has a special
value. If one intended to study law,
he should also study Latin, in order to
master the Roman jurisprudence, which
is the admiration of all who are accom-
plished in the law. Medicine has well-
defined courses of study concerning
which nothing need be said. There are
numerous scientific courses, which prop-
erly cover the entire fields of science
and mathematics. No study, therefore,
is put in the background ; the complete
curriculum of knowledge is simply re-
arranged so as to serve a more useful
purpose.

There are courses, also, in philology
for persons desirous of making a further
study of language, in philosophy for the
still unsatisfied, and in economic and
political science. Other courses may be
added, as they become needful, to cover
in a systematic way the entire mental
sphere.

It must be apparent to the reader that
all knowledge is reduced to more per-
fect symmetry by the general course
and by the special courses here indi-
cated than it has been by the courses
hitherto prescribed. We have not thrown
away the smallest fragment. We have
simply rearranged our knowledge so
that it can be more easily gained, the
relation of one division of it to another

G94 What Instruction should be given in our Colleges? [November,

be more easily seen and understood, and
our power and happiness be materially
increased.

The criticism may be made that such
a course would be too rigid, and would
not give sufficient play to the different
types of mind. So far as possible, col-
lege teachers should understand these
types, and adapt studies to them in or-
der to produce the highest mental devel-
opment. Surely, if a student be inca-
pable of comprehending the calculus or
metaphysics, he should not be forced to
pursue those studies. Such treatment
is both disheartening and demoralizing.
Other studies should be substituted, but
the teacher should have the controlling
voice in choosing. The studies which a
student intended to pursue when enter-
ing college should not be dropped when
half completed, unless for reasons which
are thought sufficient by his teachers.
The claim is made that since the intro-
duction of " the elective system " stu-
dents choose studies that are congenial
to their tastes, and which are adapted
to their mental capacities ; but the great-
er truth is, they generally choose the
studies that are easiest, and for the rea-
son that they desire to escape from work.
Like electricity, they move along the
lines of least resistance. If the proposed
course be adapted to students generally,
the substitution of one study for another
in a particular case should turn on the
question of the student's capacity, and
not on his inclination. In no case should
a student be permitted to depart from
the course without the approval of his
teachers, whose decision should be based,
not simply on the desire of the student,
but on the belief that a better result
would be obtained by pursuing another
study than the one prescribed in the
course.

A few words may be added concern-
ing the adoption of the course : (1.) It
may be adopted as a substitute for the
present course. This may be regarded
as too daring an experiment. (2.) It

may be adopted as an independent
course, and tried alongside the other.
This would be a very interesting experi-
ment, because the inferiority or superi-
ority of the proposed course would more
clearly appear. The experiment, how-
ever, would require another corps of in-
structors, and the cost of maintaining
them doubtless would be too great for
most institutions. (3.) A third way is
to adopt parts of the proposed course at
different times. Latin and Greek might
be reduced by degrees, and more of
English, French, and German put in
their place. Mathematics might be sup-
planted by anatomy, physiology, and hy-
giene. The physical history of the uni-
verse might be substituted for the studies
in physical science. Thus one study
after another in the proposed course
might be substituted, until the recon-
struction of the course was complete.
Changes so slowly made would probably
excite less opposition, would involve no
additional expense, and could hardly be
regarded as experiments.

Is there not truth enough in the ideas
herein set forth to repay their consid-
eration by those who are studying the
question of higher education ? Some-
thing must be done without delay. The
theory is fallacious that students who
know but little about themselves, and
still less about the ends of education
and how they are to be attained, know
best what and how to study. Let those
who have meditated on the question
longest and most deeply undertake the
long-needed work of reconstructing the
course on sound principles. The task
may seem arduous, but the loss occa-
sioned by every year's delay is very
great. In the vivid knowledge of innu-
merable shipwrecks, caused too often,
by an imperfect outfit, a mighty effort
should be made, if need be, to start our
youth on the voyage of life better pre-
pared to encounter the many difficulties
which even the most favored voyager
cannot escape.

Albert S. Bolles.

696

A Good-By to Rip Van Winkle. 697

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tion is not riveted, i

has most happily succ GOOD-BY TO RIP VAN WINKL no fear now," re-
cult task of keeping h • looks first at the
on the stage almost cor? the last days of acter was represephe retreating form of
without seemin to uinkle. We shall

seeming to pu
make him garrulous, or reopourse, so long
ence that they are seeing a giStage ; but it
the star. This, as well as the'? resistance
certainly the art that conceals a?igns fail,
deed, I doubt very much if oneT like a
in ten thousand has ever thought jersaries
rather singular fact that Jeffersot worn
the something over two hours it r Jes, Mr.
to act the play, is scarcely off the1 except
fifteen minutes. i then

In this and in many other respite in
Mr. Boucicault deserves much en-
but if the draft of the play, as prepement
by him, were found (and by the wty Mr.
it is in existence, it is because it> part
boon stenographed and stolen, for- No
Jefferson has no copy), it would be play>
covered that the finest touches, hui1 Pre*
ous and pathetic, the naturalness of actor,
language as well as of the acting the
many of the most effective points, e^ to
Jefferson's, and not the playwrigr1011^
Sometimes this appears in a whole S(nse>
tence ; again, in a word, or the reverP^d
of the order of words in the origin ^
text. From first to last the part of BPer-
Van Winkle is a profound study in Peen
guage and movement, and the part, Dative
ing reached practical perfection, h?-c10118'
acted by Mr. Jefferson for yej> the ver-
scarceiy a change in a gesture/6** by Mr.
gan playing this version ina Boucicault.
the auditor who saw him c^as the credit
stage fifteen years ap/v°I7> an°l his deft
on the table at a certain DfQ& in its easy
a certain position, sees turacter °f ^P
to-day, and. observing hieted by Jeffer-
time, fails to discover evereati°n> iQ a l^
parture from the original*amatic sense,
of the piece. ated that Mr.

I would not care to guess ^e -^P much
her of times I have witnessed 8tory, bu'

but it was only within the last ? '". ''.'.'

v m his

memory of the f pretended to befriend
little treachero' to us, but we know that
The original d> a"d is carefully consid-
was the wodasons for this unexpected
relative tQ the part of Derrick. Then
quite s'3 words, " I don't know about
Mr. J>*e uneasy tossing of the purse
characand the exclamation, "It don't
ful at ike good money, any way."
deed, t?eaking of the finer and more
son in ; features of this delineation, one
won fche risk of producing only the
ago.3' anfl failing to invest them with
of nl*ng like the meaning given them
was e actor. In such a case the effort
read£rove flat and unprofitable indeed,
that ;o many are familiar with the part
was he bare repetition of the words of
caul£xt may recall the actor's manner
he Expression ; and this being so, the
fonr;sion may prove interesting.
worpen Rip passes up the stage and
Irv]- in the direction where Gretchen

jpposed to be busy with her duties,
copmentary feeling of admiration, and
th<iaPs self-condemnation, comes over
be;-

wt' There she is at the wash-tub," says
abl "What a hard-working woman
an js ! " Then, with a sigh, " Well,
wornMJy has got to do it, I suppose."
dramatich°le character of Rip is re-

Now t}hat one sentence,
mon mista.00^ Meenie comes to him
would amouier arms around his neck,
character, burning vagabond has an-
of the best conscience: —
test of dramaF°u for 8uch a long time,
terest a play e> her face between his
a competent ^ • I don't deserve to
this, Rip Va Qg like dot."
mean prete' a g°°d PaP<V observes

"No, I'm not! No good f adder
would go rob his child. Dot's wot I

A Good-By to Rip Van Winkle.
What

[November,

"apidly ; there are not
be more easily seeder when the atten-
our power and ha^ind Mr. Boucicault
increased. eeded in the diffi-

The criticism ma) is main character
a course would be tostantly, and yet
not give sufficient pla>t him forward,
types of mind. So far .-ind the audi-
lege teachers should uuue-eat deal of
types, and adapt studies to ^acting, is
der to produce the highest meLrt. In-
opment. Surely, if a student person
pable of comprehending the caof the
metaphysics, he should not be fon, in
pursue those studies. Such tequires
is both disheartening and demo' stage
Other studies should be substitutt
the teacher should have the contacts,
voice in choosing. The studies W3dit ;
student intended to pursue when ared
ing college should not be droppeo.y, if
half completed, unless for reasons has
are thought sufficient by his te Mr.
The claim is made that since the dis-
duction of "the elective system nor-
dents choose studies that are COL the
to their tastes, and which are ag at
to their mental capacities ; but the are
er truth is, they generally choosit's.
studies that are easiest, and for thejn-
son that they desire to escape from v^al
Like electricity, they move alongial
lines of least resistance. If the propip
course be adapted to students genean*
the substitution of one study for ahav-
in a particular case should tucs been
question of the student's caars with
not on his inclination. In nr. He be-
a student be permitted t 1865, and
the course without the Dme upon the
teachers, whose decision id take a seat
not bimply on the desinoment and in
but on the belief thahe same thing
would be obtained by m time after
study than the one p: a minute de-
course. " business "
A few words may be

I ever saw a break of any kind, and that
was through the blunder of a property
man, and necessitated a movement and
a few words on the part of Mr. Jeffer-
son which were not down in the play.

When Gretcheu put her hand into the
game bag, where she usually finds a bot-
tle, which she pulls out and shakes in
the guilty face of her spouse, the bottle
was not there. The lady who was sup-
porting Mr. Jefferson whispered the fact
to him, when he immediately said, —

" You go mit the children, Gretchen,
— go 'long mit you, now."

And thus speaking, he pushed her to-
wards the side entrance, where the bot-
tle was secured, placed in the game bag,
and the play went on.

I have spoken of the fine touches, the
supreme naturalness of language and
acting that characterizes this presenta-
tion. At the risk of seeming to dwell
on trifling points and unimportant de-
tails, I venture to particularize.

The coarser way of telling that Rip
is very tired of his wife's ways, and
quite disappointed in the quantity of
happiness he has extracted from the
matrimonial state, would be for him to
say at once what he says later, and pur-
sue the subject in that strain : that if
ever Gretchen tumbles in the water she
has got to help herself, — to " schwim,"
as he expresses it ; but Jefferson grad-
ually approaches that point.

" Stop ! " he says, taking his cup from
his mouth, after being told that the
liquor bought by Derrick of Nick Ved-
der is ten years old, " Stop ! That
liker is more dan ten years old. You
put it in the cellar the day I got mar-
ried, you say. Well, I know it by dat.
Dot is more dan ten years ago. You
tink I will ever forget the day I got
married ? No, indeed ! I remember
that the longest day 1 live." This in

a natural way introduces the subject of
ing the adoption of the coarse : (1.) 1 Jlip's marital troubles. After admitting
may be adopted as a substitute for the pafiretcheu ..was a lovely girl then,
present course. This may be regarded which evero how, on the day of the
as too daring an experiment. (2.) It cannot esc% a Cl

1883.]

A Good-By to Rip Van Winkle.

697

wedding, " she like to got drounded,"
that the ferry-boat she was coming over
in upset, but " she was n't in it," a very
nice bit of work is brought forward.

" But surely, Rip," says Derrick,
" you would not see your wife drown ?
You would rescue her."

Rip rocks back and forth on the table,
his hands clasped over one of his knees,
and a smile half reflective and half
amused on his face.

" You mean I would yump in and pull
Gretchen out ? Would I ? Humph ! "
(Still rocking. After a moment's pause
and with a sudden thought :) " Oh, den ?"
(Stops rocking.) " Yes, I believe I would
den. And it would be more my duty
now."

Derrick. Why, how is that, Rip ?

Rip. Well, when 'a man gets married
mit his wife a long time he grows very
fond of her. But now, if Gretchen was
drcwnin,' and she say, " Rip, come and
save your vife ! " I say, Mrs. Van Win-
kle, I shust go home and I tink about
dot. Oh, no, if Gretchen ever tumble
in the water, she has got to schwim.

Mr. Jefferson never talks to the audi-
ence. His best points are made in an
ordinary tone, and the spectators seem
to be overhearing by chance, and not
listening to what is intended to catch
their ears and tickle their fancy.

" Ah, where will we be then ? " (twen-
ty years from now), sighs Derrick, as
he prepares the paper for Rip to sign.

" I don't know about myself," re-
sponds Rip, as if speaking to himself, —
never to the audience ; " but I can guess
pretty well where you '11 be about dot
time." This, if spoken with the appear-
ance of trying to create a laugh, would
lose half its force.

Observe the look that tells better
than words that Rip's suspicions are
aroused by the gift of the purse of
money.

" All right now, ain't it, Rip ? " que-
ries Derrick. Rip bows in a puzzled
way, tossing the purse uneasily in his

hands. " No fear of Gretchen now,
eh?"

" No-o, — oh, no, no fear now," re-
sponds Rip, as he looks first at the
purse and then at the retreating form of
the man who has pretended to befriend
him. His back is to us, but we know that
he is perplexed, and is carefully consid-
ering the reasons for this unexpected
kindness on the part of Derrick. Then
come the words, " I don't know about
dot," the uneasy tossing of the purse
again, and the exclamation, "It don't
chink like good money, any way."

In speaking of the finer and more
delicate features of this delineation, one
runs the risk of producing only the
words, and failing to invest them with
anything like the meaning given them
by the actor. In such a case the effort
must prove flat and unprofitable indeed.
But so many are familiar with the part
that the bare repetition of the words of
the text may recall the actor's manner
and expression ; and this being so, the
discussion may prove interesting.

When Rip passes up the stage and
looks in the direction where Gretchen
is supposed to be busy with her duties,
a momentary feeling of admiration, and
perhaps self-condemnation, comes over
him.

" There she is at the wash-tub," says
Rip. " What a hard-working woman
that is ! " Then, with a sigh, " Well,
somebody has got to do it, I suppose."

The whole character of Rip is re-
vealed in that one sentence.

When his child Meenie comes to him
and throws her arms around his neck,
the good-for-nothing vagabond has an-
other qualm of conscience : —

" I don't see you for such a long time,
do I?" (taking her face between his
hands). My ! My ! I don't deserve to
have such a t'ing like dot."

" You are a good papa," observes
Meenie.

" No, I 'm not ! No good f adder
would go rob his child. Dot's wot I

698

A Good-By to Rip Van Winkle.

[November,

done, my darling. I gone an' rob you.
All dese houses and lauds, dey all be-
long to me once, and dey would been
yours when you grow up. What has
come of them now ? I gone and drunk
'em all up, my darling, — dot 's what I
done. Hendrick " (to the boy), " you
take warning : never you drink anything
so long wot you live. It brings a man
to ruin and misery and rags and — Ish
dere any more dere in dot cup ? "

But Kip has pride, with all his worth-
lessness. He must find out the real
purport of the paper Derrick has given
him to sign ; yet he does not like to ap-
pear ignorant before the lad who has so
often seen him drunk, — not an unusual
thing in such cases. He calls the boy
to him, and begins in a roundabout way.

" Why don't you go to school to-day,
Hendrick ? You go to school sometimes,
don't you ? "

" When my father can spare me,"
returns the boy.

'• What you learn there now ? Pretty
much sometings — I mean eberytings ? "

" I learn reading, writing, and arith-
metic," answers Hendrick.

" Readin' ? "

" Yes."

"Und what?"

" Writing."

" Writin' ? "

" Yes, and arithmetic."

" Und what maticks is dot ? "

" Arithmetic."

" Can you read ? "

" Oh, yes."

"I don't believe it." (Taking out
paper.) " If you can't read, I won't let
you marry my daughter. I won't have
anybody in my family who can't read."
(Handing paper to Hendrick.) " Can
you read dot ? "

" Oh, yes ; this is writing."

" I thought it was readin'."

" So it is ; reading and writing both."

" Both togedder ! " (taking paper and
looking at it.), " Oh yes, — so-o it is. I
did n't see dot."

Derrick has read this document aloud
to Rip up to a certain point, but beyond
that the provisions are vastly different
from those represented. When the boy
reads the first line, — " Know all men
by these presents," — Rip notes that the
words are the same that he has heard
Derrick recite, and he merely remarks
encouragingly, —

"You read almost as well as Der-
rick." The boy continues : —

" That I, Rip Van Winkle, in consid-
eration of the sum of fifteen pounds " —

" You read just as well as Derrick,"
interrupts Rip. " Go on."

Here comes in a little bit of " busi-
ness," that Mr. Jefferson never omits,
and which is always acted in precisely
the same way. It shows how every
movement is studied, and how careful
he is about the smallest details of his
work.

He has placed his hands over his head,
leaning back in the attitude of listening,
and as he tells Hendrick to go on lifts
his limp hat from his head, and holds it
in his fingers. Hendrick proceeds : —

" Do bargain, sell, and convey all my
houses, lands, and property whereof I hold
possession " —

Then the hat drops, — a perfect ex-
pression of sudden surprise, — and Rip
hurriedly inquires what Hendrick is read-
ing some " rithmeticks " for, which are
not down in the paper. Assured that the
words are all there, he folds the docu-
ment up, and for the first time assumes
an earnest tone as he says, —

" Yes, my boy. You read it better
than Derrick."

Startled at this attempt to rob him,
Rip resolves to be watchful ; and right
here Mr. Jefferson's delineation of the
well-meaning but weak and vacillating
Dutchman appears in all its perfection.

" Now, Rip," he says to himself,
" keep a sharp lookout. I drink no
more liker, that 's certain. I swore off
now for good."

But alas, he has promised to stand

1883.]

A Good-By to Hip Van Winkle.

699

treat to the whole village, and here the
village comes, eager for a carouse.

" Here I have just gone and invited
the boys to a 'rouse," says Rip, as he
remembers the embarrassing situation,
" and I swore off." But he pays for
the liquor, and tells them to go on.

" I do not yoin you ; I swore off."

Swore off, and on such an occasion as
this ! Why, it is ridiculous, and they
tell him so. It is easy to see, moreover,
that Rip is a little out of patience him-
self at his hasty promise ; but he main-
tains a determined front, and rebukes
those who urge him to take part with
ludicrous severity.

"Jacob Stine! Don't I told you I
swore off ? Veil, den, dot 's enough. Wen
I say a ting I mean it." But as he
turns from Jacob Stine, there stands
Nick Vedder, with the tempting cup, on
tk^ other side, and the look of comical
displeasure melts away ; the good reso-
lutions are forgotten, and with a prom-
ise -not to " count dis one " Rip gives
himself up again to conviviality. " Here
is your good healths and your families ;
may they live long and prosper."

In a picture so perfect as a whole, it
is difficult to select points for special
commendation, but the consummate act-
ing in the scene where Rip returns to
his home in the storm, still under the
effect of the liquor he has taken, occurs
to me as particularly worthy of men-
tion. Gretchen is secreted behind a
clothes-horse near the open window, as
Rip staggers up. A glimpse of his
ragged coat as he approaches the win-
dow, and then dodges back, fearing his
wife, is the first intimation we have of
his coming. The children see him, and
when he reappears motion him to be-
ware ; but he does not understand them,
and in his drunken awkwardness drops
his hat inside the window. His involun-
tary " reach " for the hat and sudden
recollection of danger and abandonment
of the attempt are very ludicrous. Find-
ing that ho is not pursued, however, Rip

ventures up again, and seeing no signs
of Gretchen inquires for her, bending
over to recover his hat at the same
time.

" Has de wild cat come home ? " says
Rip ; but he is seized by the hair at this
juncture, and immediately realizes that
he is in the toils of the enemy.

" My darlin' — don't do that," says
Rip.

" Don't, mother, don't ! " cries Mee-
nie.

" Don't, mother, don't ! " repeats Rip.
" Don't you hear the children dere talk-
in' to you ? "

Gretchen. Now, sir, who did you
call a wild cat ?

Rip (reflecting and chewing the end
of his necktie). Dot 's the time when
I come in the window there ?

Gretchen. Yes, when you — come —
in — the — window.

Rip. That 's the time wot I said it.

Gretchen. And that 's the time that
I heard it. Now who did you mean ?

Rip (as if trying to remember).
Who did I mean ? May be I mean my
dog Snyder.

Gretchen. That 's a likely story.

Rip. Ov course it is likely. He 's
my dog. I '11 call him a wild cat as
much as I like.

One more allusion to this scene.

When Gretchen gets the bottle of
liquor, Rip tries very hard to induce her
to give it back; and failing to do so,
breaks a plate or two, and finally sets
himself down on the table, with his back
to Gretchen, in high dudgeon. Gretch-
en, warlike and determined, takes a seat
in a chair at the other end, and says, —

" Now perhaps you will be kind
enough to tell me where you have been
for the last two days." (No answer.)

" Where have you been ? " (Still no
answer.) " Do you hear me ? "

Rip (partly turning round). It 's
not my bottle, any way. I borrowed de
bottle,
easy Gretchen (thoroughly mad, and strik-

700

A Crood-By to Rip Van Winkle.

[November,

ing the table to emphasize each word).
"\\~hy — did — you — stop — out — all

— night ?

7i'//> (equally emphatic, and striking
the table in the same manner). Because

— I — wanted — to — get — up — ear-
ly — jn — de — moh(hic)ning.

" I don't want the bottle," says Rip.
" I have had enough."

" I am glad you know that you have
had enough," responds Gretchen.

" Dot 's the same way with me," an-
swers Rip. " I am glad that I know
when I have had enough. And I am
glad when I have had enough, too."

Mollified at last, he proceeds to tell
Gretchen of his adventures.

" You know that old forty -acre field
of ours," says Rip.

" Ours!" exclaims Gretchen bitterly.

" Well, it used to be ours. You know
well enough what I mean." (The in-
terruption has offended Rip, and he
stops his story.) " It don't belong to
us now, does it ? " he says rather mock-

" No, indeed," responds Gretchen.

" Well, den, I would n't bodder about
it. Let the man wot owns it worry
over it."

When Gretchen begins to cry, Rip's
spirits rise.

" Doant you cry, Gretchen, my dar-
lin'," says Rip, in a comforting tone.

" / wiU cry ! " exclaims Gretchen,
spitefully.

" Oh, very well ; cry as much as you
like ! " exclaims Rip, relapsing into an
ugly mood again.

But this passes off. Gretchen's head
is on the table. The bottle is iii her
pocket. Rip sees his opportunity. He
approaches, ostensibly to comfort her,
really to get the bottle. Finally, after
much manoeuvring, he obtains it, and
then, putting his arms around her shoul-
ders, rocks back and forth as he sits on
the table, gently patting her on the
shoulder and keeping time to his mo-
tion.

" Oh, if you would only treat me
kindly ! " sobs Gretchen.

" Well, I 'm going to treat you kind-
ly," returns Rip, still patting Gretchen
at regular intervals as he rocks.

" It would add ten years to my life,"
says Gretchen. Rip's hand is up, about
to descend in its regular stroke on her
back, but it stops short. It is the an-
nouncement of Gretchen that kindness
will add ten years to her life that stops
it. The hand talks, and it says this ; no
need of a word from Rip to indicate
that he considers the inducement ques-
tionable. You know that well enough
before he speaks.

I know of no other play where three
whole scenes are given with but one
speaking, character ; yet, from the en-
trance on the first of these scenes by
Rip, where he announces that he must
spend another night in the mountains,
and where he talks to the trees as if
they knew and understood him, to his
departure down the mountain after his
supposed sleep of twenty years, there is
not a moment when the interest flags.
His interview with the ghostly crew is
unique, and though there are not twenty
lines in the scene it occupies nearly
twenty minutes in the playing.

Judging, from the motions of the first
one of the crew he meets, that his
strange visitor wants help up the moun-
tain with the keg, Rip points to the keg,
then to his own shoulders, then up the
mountain, whereupon the hunchback
bows in assent.

" Veil, vy don't you say so, den ? "
asks Rip. "You want me to help you
up the mountain with the keg, eh ? "
(Bows.) " What have you got in the keg ?
Schnapps ? " (More bows.) " I don't be-
lieve it." But he does believe it, and
the spectator sees that he goes with
much more alacrity in consequence.

Frightened at the array of unearthly-
looking men on top of the mountain, Rip
excuses himself by saying to the chief
that he did not want to come, any way.

1883.]

A Q-ood-By to Rip Van Winkle.

701

" Your old grandchild never told me
anybody was here, did you ? " (appealing
to the figure he has met at the foot of
the mountain, which figure signifies by
a shake of the head that such was the
fact). " No ! Veil, you ought to told
me about dot," says Rip.

I have said that much of this play is
the work of Mr. Jefferson, and this scene
is an illustration of the fact. No play-
wright, indeed, could make it as Jeffer-
son presents it.

The ghostly captain signifies that
there is liquor to be drunk, and Rip's
timidity largely disappears. Here he is
at home.

Rip. You want to drink mit me?
(Captain bows.) Say, wot 's the matter
mit you? Was you deaf? (A shake
of the head.) Oh, no, of course you was
not deaf, or you could not hear wot I
wa,«i saying. Was you dumb ? (Bows.)
So? Oh! (pityingly). You vas dumb !
(Expression of commiseration.) Has all
of your family got the same complaint ?
(Bows from the captain.) Yes ? All
dumb? (turning slowly round, and sur-
veying the circle of figures, all of whom
bow, in affirmative answer to his ques-
tions. As the last one bows, Rip nods
towards the others). Yes, dey told me.
(Raising his cup as if to drink, he sud-
denly stops.) Oh, have you got any
girls ? (Shake of the captain's head.)
No ? Such a big family, and all boys !
Dot 's a pity. If you had some girls,
what wives they would make !

The appearance of Rip in the pros-
perous and bustling little village, after
his twenty years' sleep, could very easily
be made ridiculous, but the character
never becomes so in the hands of Mr.
Jefferson. What a weak, bewildered old
man he is ! The town is familiar, yet
strange. The river and the hills and the
mountains seem natural, but the faces
have changed since yesterday, and no
one looks upon him with a nod of rec-
ognition. Plere where his humble house
stood rises a, pretentious dwelling.

" Tell me, do you live here ? " he in-
quires of the smart young successor of
Nick Vedder, who kept the village tav-
ern twenty years before.

" Well, rather. I was born here."

Yes, he knew Nick Vedder and Jacob
Stine, but both are long since dead.

" Did you know " (hesitatingly) —
a did you know Rip Van Winkle ? "

" What, the laziest drunken vagabond
in the whole village ? "

" Yes, dot was the man," says Rip
sadly.

" Oh, he has been dead these twenty
years."

" Rip Van Winkle is dead ? "

" Why, certainly."

All this is very bewildering, but after
a glass of wine Rip tries again.

" Dot gives me strength to ask these
people one more question. My friend,
there was a little girl — Meenie she was
called. She — she is not dead ? "

The holding of the breath, the con-
vulsive fumbling of the chin and lip, —
how much they tell ! How eloquently
they express the painful suspense of the
inquirer ! But she is alive, "and an ap-
pearance of relief strikes Rip's whole
figure at this intelligence.

" Meenie is alive ! It 's all right
now."

" She is not only alive, but the pret-
tiest girl in the whole village," says the
young man.

" Oh, I know that," says Rip, with
the father's pride in his voice, — "I
know that ! "

Up to this time Rip supposes that
Gretchen is dead, and the announcement
that she is not gives an opportunity for
humor to follow close on the heels of
pathos.

" Gretchen ! " he exclaims. " Why,
is not Gretchen dead, then ? "

" No, but married again."

" Why, how could she do a thing like
that?"

It is explained to him that it was all
easy enough. When Rip died, Gretchen

702

A Good-By to Rip Van Winkle.

[November,

became a widow, and of course she was
free to marry.

" Oh, yes," remarks the husband. " I
forgot about Rip being dead."

Then the crowning surprise comes in
the statement that she has married Der-
rick.

" What ! Derrick Von Beekman !
Has Gretchen married Derrick ? Well !
I never thought he would come to any
good. Poor Derrick."

Finally the simple old fellow is urged
to tell who and what he is.

" I don't know how it is," he says,
"but my name used to be Rip Van
Winkle."

" Impossible ! " exclaims young Hen-
drick Vedder.

" Well, I would not swear to it my-
self," says Rip.

Seeing that none recognize him, and
wondering what can be the matter and
how it can all be, Rip comes to that
soliloquy so full of pathos and which
strikes such a chord in the hearts of his
audience : —

" Why, I was born here. Even the
dogs used to know me. Now dey bark
at me. And the little children, dey all
used to know me ; now (swallowing a
sob) — now dey run from me. My,
my ! are we so soon forgot when we are
gone ? "

But the summit of the pathetic is
reached when Rip endeavors to make
his child remember him. For a time
he cannot believe that the full-grown
woman before him is really his daugh-
ter ; but in talking with her of her fa-
ther, he soon discovers the features of
his Meenie.

"See the smile! Oh! — and the
eye ! That is just the same."

Meenie having wished that her father
were only here now, Rip tremblingly
looks at her as he says, —

« H,,t _ but he is n't. eh ? No."

Finally seeing the necessity of mak-
ing himself known, but fearful of the
consequences, Rip speaks : —

" Meenie ! You don't forget your
fadder's face — you could n't do that.
Look at me now, and tell me, did you
never see me before ? Try ! try ! "

The girl looks, half dou'btingly, and
asks him to explain. He goes on.

" Yesterday — it seems to me yester-
day — I had here my wife, my home,
my child Meenie, and my dog Snyder ;
but last night — well — there was a
storm — try to remember — I went away
— you were a little girl — I met some
queer fellows in the mountains, and I
got to drinking mit 'em, and I guess I
got pretty drunk — When I wake this
morning — well " (putting his hands to
his head and face in that effort to crush
back the sobs), " my wife is gone, my
home is gone, and my child looks in my
face and don't know who I am."

If there is a fault in the acting of
this play, it is in the hurried recognition
of her father by Meenie at this point ;
but the audience are always eager for
this denotement, and do not stop to
weigh the effect of a little longer pause
at this crisis of the piece.

Taking this representation altogeth-
er, I think the impartial verdict must
be that it exhibits the most perfect bit
of acting on the stage. But it is like
a rare painting, rich and deep, and need-
ing long and earnest inspection to dis-
cover its full beauty.

Mr. Jefferson acts with his whole
body, and from head to foot is charged
with the part. When he overhears
Gretchen saying, threateningly, "Oh,
Rip, Rip, just wait till I get you home ! "
and he turns and walks swiftly away,
the action is literally twice as expres-
sive as words. A terrified exit or a
trembling of the limbs would make the
thoughtless laugh just as loud, but would
destroy that striking realism which is
conspicuously present in all he does. A
coarser-fibred actor would play it that
way, and in the shout would mark a tri-
umph for himself, and be puzzled to ac-
count for his failure to aoVv.eve a Jeffer-

1883.] The Songs that are not Sung. 703

sonian success. But the fault would be of Caleb Plummer, in the Cricket on the
simply that he failed to observe the in- Hearth, induces the belief that his tri-
junction of Hamlet, and hold the mir- umph in this character will be second
ror up to nature. That Mr. Jefferson only to that of Rip Van Winkle. Re-
does, vised and rearranged, this piece will be
As indicated at the beginning, the presented as the principal one of his
public will see little more of Rip Van repertory next season, being supple-
Winkle. Mr. Jefferson will not only mented by that clever farce, Lend Me
play less in the future, but he will de- Five Shillings, which affords a fine con-
vote the greater share of the time he trast to the former play, and enables
spends on the boards to other pieces. Mr. Jefferson to show his versatility to
His recent success in reviving the part great advantage.

Gilbert A. Pierce.

THE SONGS THAT ARE NOT SUNG.

Do not praise: a word is payment more than meet for what is done.
Who shall paint the mote's glad raiment floating in the molten sun ?
Nay, nor smile : for blind is eyesight, ears may hear not, lips are dumb ;
From the silence, from the twilight, wordless, but complete, they come.

Songs were born before the singer: like white souls that wait for birth,
They abide the chosen bringer of their melody to earth.

Deep the pain of our demerit : strings so rude or rudely strung,
Dull to every pleading spirit seeking speech, but sent unsung.
Round our hearts with gentle breathing still the plaintive silence .plays,
But we brush away its wreathing, filled with cares of common days.

Ever thinking of the morrow, burdened down with needs and creeds,
Once or twice, mayhap, in sorrow, we may hear the song that pleads.
Once or twice, a dreaming poet sees the beauty as it flies ;
But his vision, — who shall know it ? Who shall read it from his eyes ?
Voiceless he : his necromancy fails to cage the wondrous bird ;
Lure and snare are vain when fancy flies like echo from a word.
Only sometime he may sing it, using speech as 't were a bell, —
Not to read the song, but ring it, like the sea-tone from a shell.
Sometimes, too, it comes and lingers round the strings all still and mute,
Till some lover's wandering fingers draw it living from the lute.

Still, our best is but a vision which a lightning-flash illumes,
Just a gleam of life elysian flung across the voiceless glooms.

Why should gleams perplex and move us ? Ah, the soul must upward grow
To the beauty far above us, and the songs no sense may know.

John Boyle O'Reilly.

704

The East and the West in Recent Fiction. [November,

THE EAST AND THE WEST IN RECENT FICTION.

SINCE we have learned to be content
with something less than the continental
in American fiction, we may think it a
piece of good luck that the season brings
us t\vo such characteristic works from
the separate shores of the continent as
Mr. Howells's story of A Woman's Rea-
son and Mr. Harte's novel In the Car-
quiuez Woods. Both writers pay due
respect to the oceans which they face.
Mr. Howells imports an English lord
for duty in the neighborhood of Boston,
and Mr. Harte touches in a Chinaman
as a slight piece of local color. In the
realism of A Woman's Reason there is
all the suggestion of a high-strung At-
lantic civilization ; in*Mr. Harte's scene-
painting one may see a sketch of that
melodramatic California which he has
annexed to the republic of letters. The
geographical influences in the two books
might easily be made, after the fashion
of some physicists, to account for the
variations in the heroes and heroines,
but the reader who does not wish to be
too learned will probably accept the
characters as the work of the literary
creators.

We have called A Woman's Reason1
a story, hi spite of the announcement
of the title-page. It is the first time
that Mr. Howells has allowed the story
element to get the upper hand of him.
Dr. Breen's Practice was not an argu-
ment against the invasion of the medical
profession by women. A Modern In-
stance was not a tract upon the divorce
laws, though some seem so to have re-
garded it. But A Woman's Reason is an
interesting contribution to the discussion
of self-help by women, in the form of a
narrative of Miss Helen Harkness's ex-
perience from the time when she lost

1 A Woman's Reason. A Novel. By WILLIAM
D. HOWELLS. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co.
1883.

her father, her lover, and her money
until she recovered her lover and was
relieved from the predicament in which
she found herself. Not until she has
sounded the gamut from decorating pot-
tery to serving behind the counter in a
photograph saloon is her lover allowed
to come to her rescue. He is kept away
by an ingenious series of disasters, but
the reader awaits his final return with
a calm confidence in the uprightness of
the story-teller.

The play of plot upon character and
of character upon plot which constitutes
a novel is not wanting, but it is subor-
dinate, and with this change of design
Mr. Howells may easily gain more read-
ers without increasing the worthiness of
his art. It is entertaining to follow Miss
Harkness through her perplexities, and
one discovers common sense in a variety
of new and piquant forms ; but it miy
be questioned if enough light has been
cast upon a social problem to compensate
for the loss of a piece of higher art.
Miss Harkness is rather a variation of
a type than a distinct addition to the
portrait gallery which Mr. Howells has
been collecting. Her waywardness is
relieved a little by the pretty touch
which makes her a day-dreamer, and
her character is redeemed by the instant
response to an appeal for integrity and
the one moment of constancy ; but that
is the way with most of Mr. Howells's
young women. Caprice and a charm-
ing negation of logic are the e very-day
dress of their characters ; they keep the
purple and fine linen of high thoughts
and noble enterprise for great occasions
only. We own we like them, these
pretty creatures who italicize their sen-
tences and turn sharp corners in their
minds, and we know that in emergen-
cies they may be depended upon. Per-
haps we ought to ask for nothing more.

1883.]

The East and the West in Recent Fiction.

705

But, with the memory of Florida and
Marcia, we look wistfully for faces a lit-
tle more enduring, a little more expres-
sive of every-day capacity for greatness.

Yet how thoroughly enjoyable this
story is to any one who knows the orig-
inals ! We are not certain that a fa-
miliar acquaintance with Boston and
Cambridgeport and the Beverly shore
can be dispensed with in a satisfactory
appreciation of the characters and situ-
ations. Only he who has seen and
known all this in the flesh can really
enjoy the felicities of the spiritual re-
production ; and this is what makes us
half afraid that Mr. Howells's success
as an artist depends upon his realism,
whereas the reverse should be true, that
one reading his books might recognize
the originals when he saw them. But
why fret ourselves over this ? We have
the entertaining dialogue, which is nat-
ural and not hopelessly brilliant and
epigrammatic ; the gentle satire ; the
playful contrast of English and Ameri-
can habits of thought ; the humorous
studies of life in Kimball and Giffen
and Mr. Evertou ; the careful, graphic,
and repressed narrative of Fenton's ad-
ventures. There is more variety of situa-
tion than commonly occurs in Mr. How-
ells's fiction, and it would almost seem
as if he had gone back temporarily to
possess himself of some of the ordinary
trappings of fiction, to which he had
been indifferent in his previous succes-
sion of novels ; so that we are justified in
the confidence which we always like to
feel regarding the work of contemporary
writers that movement is progress.

It is like passing from playing on the
violin to hoisting a mainsail when we
lay down A Woman's Reason and take
up In the Carquinez Woods.1 Mr.
Harte's characters, whatever their other
deficiencies, never lack brawn. They
are apt to change their costume with
the agility of Harlequin and Columbine,

i In the Cnrquinez Woods. By BRET HARTE.
Boston: Hcughton, Mifflin & Co. 1883.

VOL. LII. — NO. 313. 45

but they are equally vigorous and con-
fident in every new disguise. We must
say for this little novel at the outset
that it is more consistent and less care-
less than any of Mr. Harte's fuller nar-
ratives, and has a more involved move-
ment than any of his short stories. It
carries forward into the region of the
novel those excellencies which made his
short stories famous, and while the melo-
dramatic element remains, there is a
more studied attempt to make use of
the common virtues of humanity.

It is the women of a novel which de-
termine its truthfulness. The very sub-
tlety of the sex makes any delineation
a test of the writer's truthfulness in
art ; for while a writer who is a law to
himself will make this subtlety an excuse
for drawing characters which transgress
all known laws, an artist will employ
the same subtlety to. bring into distiucter
light the obedience to law which under-
lies subtlety. To compare for a mo-
ment the character of Helen Harkuess,
which we have just been considering,
with that of Teresa, the central figure
in this novel of Mr. Harte's : the vari-
ableness of the girl who dismisses her
lover in a freak, and who turns impul-
sively from one form of self-support to
another, has a superficial quality; the
reader is not left in doubt as to the real
gravitation of her heart, or the inflexi-
ble honesty of her nature. On the oth-
er hand, Teresa appears before the read-
er as a vulgar heroine of a shooting
affray, a woman of dance halls and
many lovers : " The daring Teresa ! the
reckless Teresa ! audacious as a woman,
invincible as a boy; dancing, flirting,
fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking,
smoking, fighting Teresa ! " The hero
is a man of half-Indian blood, with all
the best qualities of the Indian, and
with a delicacy and refinement of nature
which Mr. Harte insists upon at every
turn. He is in love with a village co-
quette, a daughter of the Baptist min-
ister, who is an offensive hypocrite. The

706

The East and the West in Recent Fiction. [November,

young lady throws over the half Indian,
after playing with him, and he turns to
Teresa, who has already become pas-
sionately in love with him, but whom he
has disregarded in his preoccupation
with the coquette.

There is certainly nothing impossible
in a man transferring his affections un-
der these circumstances, and Mr. Ilarte
has paved the way for the half Indian
by allowing Teresa to develop some-
what similar qualities, and to show how
much more akin she is to the man than
the heartless minister's daughter. The
inconsistency lies deeper. The trans-
formation of Teresa from a coarse rowdy
into a gentle, delicate, suffering woman
may be a miracle wrought by love, and
so we suppose Mr. Harte intends it to
be, but no account seems to be taken of
nature ; the change is wrought in obe-
dience to the demands of the story. It
is a shallow and not a profound reading
of human nature which discovers the
woman beneath the courtesan, and treats
the courtesanship as a mask which can
be dropped easily at will and leave no
signs of itself behind. If one can read
Mr. Harte's stories long enough he may
be beguiled into belief in a world where
the virtues and vices play at cross-tag,
and one is puzzled to know which is
'• it," and then such a story as this will
have the charm of an ingenious play
among people who put on and off their
characters with a dexterous facility. The
hypocrites have the hardest time. No
chance is given them, and they remain
sternly consistent to the end. One of
the cleverest bits in this novel is the
scene where the Baptist minister, — who
'by the bye is made to have service and
'to receive the Bishop, — in talking with
some of the roughs with whom he wishes
to be hail fellow well met, boasts of an
oath in which he had indulged. "There
was something so unutterably vile in
the reverend gentleman's utterance and
emphasis of this oath that the two men,
albeit both easy and facile blasphemers,

felt shocked ; as the purest of actresses
is apt to overdo the rakishness of a gay
Lothario, Father Wynn's immaculate
conception of an imprecation was some-
thing terrible."

The natural setting of the story is
very striking. The Carquinez Woods
are dealt with in a strong, imaginative
way, and one enters them at different
points in the narrative with a positive
sense of leaving towns and houses be-
hind. The wolves and the fire also
have a vivid and lurid presentation
which show Mr. Harte at his best ; for
there is no mistaking the strength of his
hand when he is dealing with nature,
physical or human, in its coarser fibre.
Gentleness and serenity have a meagre
representation in his pictures of life,
and it is noticeable that the quality of
tenderness is assigned by him to men
rather than to women. His world is a
world of men, where some are gentler
than others. The women who play their
parts are usually the disturbing element,
not the healing ; they are apt to be mas-
queraders, rather than constituent parts
of society. Can it be that the Pacific
slope is after all accurately portrayed
in Mr. Harte's fiction ? The constancy
which he shows to a few types is evi-
dence of his own faith. Still we may
be permitted to believe that his Califor-
nia is largely his own discovery, and
thus we may give him credit for a
breadth of imagination which disdains
the aid of a minute realism. His novel
of In the Carquinez Woods is so remote
from the customary fiction of the day
that it attracts one by its very rebound.
It keeps a connection with certain liber-
al romance of earlier days ; we are not
sure that it may not contain some proph-
ecy of the fiction that is to come. At
any rate, we hope the coming novelist,
if he is heir to the grace and distinct
naturalness of Mr. Howells, will have
something of the large, vigorous, im-
aginative vividness which are the unde-
niable properties of Mr. Harte's fiction.

1883.]

James Buchanan.

707

JAMES BUCHANAN.

MR. CURTIS has undertaken in these
two goodly volumes 1 to rehabilitate
James Buchanan. Such a task was
probably more congenial to Mr. Curtis
than it would be to , most American
writers ; but even a large measure of
sympathy could not have made the labor
easy. James Buchanan has rested, and
still rests, under a heavy weight of oblo-
quy. At the crisis of his own and the
nation's fate, men on both sides lost all
faith in him, and the clouds of popular
contempt and distrust hung darkly over
his declining years. He failed to disperse
these clouds himself, and the effort has
now been renewed by Mr. Curtis, under
more favorable auspices and with better
opportunities. The only point worth
considering in the limited space at our
command is how far Mr. Curtis has suc-
ceedfed in his attempt.

At the outset it may be said that the
biography is entirely worthy of its au-
thor's well-known abilities. It is neither
brilliant nor picturesque, but it is cool
and clear, admirably reasoned in the ar-
gumentative portions, thorough, careful,
and exact. We have noted only one
error, so trifling in importance as hardly
to deserve reference, but singular in the
work of a writer so thoroughly well in-
formed and so painstaking as Mr. Cur-
tis. On page 38 (vol. i.) Mr. Curtis
says, speaking of the presidential candi-
dates, that in the year 1824, " Mr. Craw-
ford, who had formerly been a senator
from Georgia, was not in any public
position." Mr. Crawford was at that
time Secretary of the Treasury, an office
which he had held since 1816, and which
he continued to hold, despite his partial
paralysis, until the inauguration of Mr.
Adams in March, 1825. Indeed, it was
the possession of the Treasury Depart-

1 Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth Presi-
dent of the United States. By GEOKOE Ti< KMM:

ment which was Mr. Crawford's chief
source of strength as a candidate for the
presidency.

It may be admitted at the outset that
Mr. Curtis has shown that Mr. Buchan-
an was a man of much more intellectual
force than has been popularly supposed
of late years. This in one sense gives
Mr. Buchanan a better standing histor-
ically. At the same time the proof of
superior ability enhances the responsi-
bility of its possessor, and justly sub-
jects him to a severer judgment.

James Buchanan sprang from the
vigorous Scotch-Irish race which flour-
ished so extensively in Pennsylvania,
and he was a strange scion to come
from such a stock. It is well known
that among certain virgin tribes of
Africa perfectly white children have
been born. These freaks of nature are
commonly known as albinos, and we
cannot describe Buchanan better than
by saying that he was the Albino child
of his tribe. The Scotch-Irish have in
their veins the blood of Scotland and
of Puritan England. Transplanted to
Ireland, they found themselves in the
midst of a people alien in blood and re-
ligion, and intensely hostile. They
lived in their new home surrounded by
danger, and engaged in constantly re-
curring wars. By nature hard and
strong, such conditions intensified all
their most salient qualities. They be-
came a hot-headed, vindictive, unreason-
able, and at the same time a singularly
brave, reckless, and determined people.
They were essentially fighters in every
nerve and fibre of their being. From
such a strongly marked race, whose
normal outcome and highest types in
our own country were Andrew Jackson
and John C. Calhoun, came James Bu-

(VUTIS. In two volumes. New York: Harper
& Brothers. 1883.

708

James Buchanan.

[November,

chiuian. His people were quick in quar-
rel and heavy of hand. He never quar-
reled with anybody, and was above all
things a man of peace. They were
reckless, daring, impatient. He was
cool, cautious, timid, enduring. He had
no characteristics of his race except a
quiet tenacity of purpose, a religious
temperament, and a certain austerity
of life and thought, the traces of a
vigorous blood lingering amid a mass
of wholly alien and different qualities.
Above all, James Buchanan was smooth,
sleek, and plausible, — traits as foreign
to his ancestry as pink eyes to that of
the dwellers by the Congo.

At the same time, this Scotch-Irish
Albino was admirably adapted for suc-
cess in politics when everything was
calm, or when there were no more than
the ordinary fluctuations of party strife.
An agreeable story-teller and talker, with
pleasant, affable manners, Mr. Buchanan
was invariably liked in society, and al-
ways obtained an easy popularity. His
most attractive side was toward his
family and immediate friends. He had
a deep vein of real sentiment, as shown
by his luckless love affair, which shad-
owed and darkened his whole life. This
and a very kindly nature, and an amia-
ble and even temper, made him beloved
by all who were closest to him. With
an unusual warmth Mr. Curtis extols
Mr. Buchanan's letters to Miss Lane.
He seems to us to have greatly exag-
gerated the merit of these productions.
They are clear and sensible, but per-
fectly commonplace, exhibiting little hu-
mor and no great depth or acuteness of
observation. Nevertheless they are thor-
oughly kind and affectionate, and to-
gether with his generous conduct toward
his favorite niece, and indeed toward all
his relatives, show a gentle and lovable
nature in private life.

These same qualities which made Mr.
Buchanan beloved at home made him
popular abroad. He offended no one,
and every one was glad to help him

forward. Moreover, Mr. Buchanan had
many admirable qualifications for a pub-
lic servant and practical statesman,
lie was very industrious and thorough.
He always was master of the subject in
hand. He was a clear, smooth, plausi-
ble speaker, and a close and lucid rea-
soner. He was a sound lawyer, and re-
markably learned^ and able as an ex-
pounder of the constitution. He would
have made an excellent judge, and it
was a cruel fate which kept him from
the supreme bench in 1845, to raise him
to the presidency in 1857.

Starting as a Federalist and rising
rapidly in politics during the era of
good feeling, Mr. Buchanan, with that
unerring instinct for the winning side
which is characteristic of such natures as
his, attached himself to the fortunes of
General Jackson. Any other man would
have failed in this alliance if he had had
the experience which befell Buchanan.
General Jackson«was engaged in reiter-
ating the proved falsehood of bargain And
corruption against Mr. Clay, and finally
cited Mr. Buchanan as his witness to Mr.
Clay's efforts to make a trade in 1824,
first with one candidate, and then with
another. Buchanan, never having at-
tempted to negotiate in Mr. Clay's be-
half, utterly failed to sustain Jackson's
statement. So far as pressing and re-
peating the charge was concerned, this
offered no let or hindrance to the hero
of New Orleans ; but at the same time
Buchanan's failure to support him was
a serious offense in the eyes of Jackson.
It would have been the ruin of any oth-
er man. Buchanan, however, soon ef-
faced it from the general's memory, and
such a feat shows a power for concilia-
tion which is rarely to be met with.
The way in which he had been mollified
ouo-ht to have convinced Jackson that

the man capable of such dexterous man-
agement had a genius for diplomacy.
Whether he thought so or not, he sent
Mr. Buchanan as Minister to Russia, and
both there and at a later period in Lon-

1883.]

James Buchanan.

709

don Mr. Buchanan showed the greatest
aptitude for the highest diplomacy. In-
oiV< nsive and yet persistent, adroit, pa-
tient, determined, he almost always suc-
ceeded in carrying his point, and he was
thoroughly informed as to all questions
of our foreign relations. Above all, he
was an uncompromising American in all
his thoughts and feelings, and he never
appears to greater advantage than in the
many complicated affairs with which he
dealt as Secretary of State and as Minis-
ter to Russia and England.

Gradually Mr. Buchanan rose in the
political world. His industry, capacity,
and even temper all helped his eleva-
tion. He was also a thorough party
man. He swallowed every doctrine of
bis party, and was an unflinching adher-
ent of every notion originated by Jack-
son, including the spoils system and the
theory of rotation in office. He never
hesitated at anything, and in some of the
speeches quoted by Mr. Curtis there is
a cheap partisanship of tone and state-
ment unworthy of a man who had as
much statesman-like ability as Mr. Bu-
chanan. But this very partisanship was
a recommendation in the right quarter.
It required no great perspicacity to per-
ceive that the South ruled the demo-
cratic party, and that whoever would rise
in that party was obliged to serve the
South. From this Mr. Buchanan did
not shrink. He was the faithful servant
of the South for years. He supported all
the Southern measures. He was in favor
of the annexation of Texas, and he
helped on the infamy of the Mexican
war, covering the progress of the sla-
very movement with all sorts of smooth
and specious pretexts and excuses, while
he kept strictly for home consumption
a very mild disapproval of the system
of slavery as an abstract theory.

As he prosperously advanced in his
public career, the great prize of the
presidency came nearer and nearer.
But Mr. Buchanan was above all things
patient. He knew how to wait. He

put by the crown more than once, and
judiciously withdrew from struggles
which appeared premature. At last, in
1852, it seemed as if his time had come,
and then the master whom he had served
set him aside and selected Franklin
Pierce, a man in every way inferior, and
therefore likely to be even more subser-
vient than Buchanan. The rejected can-
didate resigned himself to his disappoint-
ment, and was consoled by the mission
to England. Thence he returned to
receive the nomination for which he had
waited, and to be triumphantly elected
to the highest office in the gift of the
people.

Three years glided by. There was
another election, and the Republican
party was victorious. In 1856 Mr. Bu-
chanan had preached with great zeal
the duty of the North to abide by the
decision of the ballot-box. In 1860 the
North succeeded, but the President's be-
loved South, while firmly convinced that
the North ought always to accept the will
of the majority, now hastened to perpe-
trate one of the greatest crimes in his-
tory by dissolving the Union and plung-
ing the country into the horrors of civil
war, solely because they had lost an elec-
tion and with it the control of the gov-
ernment.

There is something very pitiable —
something almost tragic — in the figure
of James Buchanan during those last
months of his administration. The
smooth, plausible, wary politician, hav-
ing touched the summit of his ambition,
was caught at the last moment between
two great factions, bitterly excited and
just ready to spring at each other's
throat. The Southerners turned against
Buchanan when they found that there
was a point at which even he stopped,
and that he would not openly aid seces-
sion. They had no reason to be indig-
nant with the President, for they had no
right to suppose for a moment that a
Northern man capable of bending to
them as Buchanan had always done

710

James Buchanan.

[November,

should also possess the daring and reck-
less courage needed to commit a great
crime. At bottom Buchauan was weak
and timeserving, but he was not a vil-
lain, and he recoiled with horror from
the pit which the Southern leaders
opened in his path. Mr. Curtis shows
very clearly that Buchanan was opposed
to secession. It is a significant com-
mentary that argument and proof on
such a point in regard to a President of
the United States should be considered
necessary, and at the same time it does
not touch the heart of the matter at all.
That Mr. Buchanan was opposed in
opinion to secession is wholly secondary.
The real question is, How did he meet
secession when it confronted him ? Mr.
Curtis devotes nearly a volume to the
consideration of the last few months of
Mr. Buchanan's presidential term, and
it is of course impossible in a brief no-
tice to take up in detail such an elab-
orate defense. But the general result
can be easily stated. On Mr. Curtis's
own showing, presumably the best that
can be made, Buchanan failed miserably
at the great crisis in the nation's life.
He took the ground that he would not
precipitate war by applying force to pre-
vent a State from seceding, but that he
would defend the flag and property of
the United States. With this seeming-
ly vigorous and magnanimous policy
upon his lips he suffered one public
building after another to be seized, and
never struck a blow. All that he re-
tained were the two forts, Sumter and
Pickens. Treason was rife in his cab-
inet, and he allowed the traitors to de-
part without a word. He drafted an
answer to the Southern commissioners
which was so weak and vacillating that
his cabinet felt obliged to protest and
stop it. General Dix sent his famous
order, and says he did not show it to
the President because he knew the lat-
ter would not have allowed it to go
forth. In other words, the President of
the United States would have refused

to order an officer of the government to
defend the national flag. It seems hard-
ly worth while to write a volume in de-
fense of a man who was in such a state
of cowardly panic as that. Mr. Curtis
says that Buchanan had no troops, and
that Congress would not do anything to
help him. He had enough troops to
have fought on the instant, and at the
first moment the flag was touched or a
public building seized. The moment a
move was made by the South he should
have struck hard, and whether defeated
or victorious the " next breeze that
swept from the North would have
brought to his ears the clash of resound-
ing arms." Congress did nothing for
him for the obvious reason that they did
not trust him. They knew that he was
timid and timeserving, and they then
thought him a traitor. Many people in
the North could not believe that the
South would really secede, and the lead-
ers who saw what was coming were sim-
ply playing for time and waiting until
they could get a President in whom they
could confide.

The fact was that Buchanan was a
very weak man, who had been a tool of
stronger forces all his life. He sudden-
ly found himself in the midst of a ter-
rible crisis, calculated to try the nerve
and courage of a man of iron mould.
The South, which had owned and sup-
ported him, flung him aside and trampled
on him when he had served his turn.
The ruling party at the North despised
and distrusted him and turned coldly
away from him. The firm rock on which
he had always rested had crumbled be-
neath him, and he found himself drift-
ing helpless and alone on the seething
waters of secession and civil war. He
quivered and shook and made some con-
stitutional arguments, and failed utterly,
hopelessly, miserably. He had served
slavery all his life, and when the crash
came he had no courage and no convic-
tions to fall back upon. He sank out
of sight", and the great national move-

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

711

ment swept over him and all his kind.
He fills a place in history, because for
many years he was a faithful public ser-
vant and finally President; but no art
or argument can rehabilitate him, or
make him other than he was. He was
not even a great failure, for he showed
.in his downfall that with all his ability,
adroitness, and industry, the essential
qualities of greatness were wholly lack-
ing-
One word more and we have done.
It has been the fashion in certain quar-
ters for many years to openly avow or
covertly suggest that if a sectional party
had not been built up in the North, se-
cession and civil war would not have
come to pass. Mr. Curtis indulges in
this talk a little, and it is high time
that nonsense of this sort should cease
or be left exclusively to such conserva-
tive gentlemen as Bob Toombs and Jeff
Davis. There was a sectional party
from the foundation of the government,
the party of slavery. However the
South might divide on other questions,
on slavery it was solid. After many
years the sectional party of the South

bred an opposition in the North, and
then the Southerners and all their
friends began to moan over Northern
sectionalism, and have kept it up ever
since. All sectional parties are bad
things, and the blame for them rests with
the South, who paid the penalty, and is
nevertheless solid and sectional at this
very moment. In view of these simple
facts, it seems hardly worth while for
anybody to continue to lay the blame
for secession openly or by implication
upon the North and the Republican
party. That heavy burden, the burden
of a gigantic and unsuccessful crime,
lies upon the South and her Northern
sympathizers and servants, of whom
James Buchanan was a type. It be-
longs to them in about equal proportions,
the only difference being that the South
expiated her fault in defeat and ruin
after a gallant fight, while her Northern
allies got off scot free. There has been
enough said, therefore, by the latter class
about Northern sectionalism being the
cause of the war, and it is time that
such false and miserable cant ceased to
find a place in any historical work.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

THE fact that the frenzied Andro-
maque of Georges Rochegrosse carried
away the first prize of the Salon of
1883 is not calculated to diminish an
unpleasant impression of contemporary
French art which every observant visi-
tor must have received from this Salon.
To the praise of English art, it can be
said that no such offensive impression
ever results from closest acquaintance
with the Royal Academy exhibitions.
Although the brio and bravura of Conti-
nental technique mocks at the more lim-
ited skill, the dulcet sentimentality and
conventional morality, of the British
school, the cultivated public at large has

a right to insist that the art which shocks
and disgusts the spiritual sensibilities of
humanity is inferior to that which does
not, however the former may excel in
pleasing a trained but artificial sense
for composition and form. A truth of
which artists themselves are so often
profoundly ignorant is that art is an ex-
pression of the ideal part of universal
humanity, not an exclusive right of those
who paint and carve ; and he to whom
is given the mere brain and hand power,
which is but a simple medium of expres-
sion, has no more right to limit what
that expression may or may not be than
he who learns a language has to assert

712

The Contributors' Club.

[November,

what imaginative or spiritual impulse
may or may not flow through it. As
well might the poet declare that the sole
purpose of his art ought to be the
musical quantity and rhythm that tickle
the ear, or the architect that architec-
ture, and not human need, is the fun-
damental purpose of building.

To those who look upon contempora-
neous French art from the stand-point
of spiritual and imaginative humanity,
and not from that of the sense-absorbed
solorist and draughtsman, indications are
not wanting that the art of which the
Salon is the annual exponent is narrow-
ing itself away from any other ideal
than that of mere painting, and there-
fore approaching to the floridity and
exuberance of expression for mere ex-
pression's sake which degraded the Ital-
ian art of the seventeenth century, and
made that art as full-bodied but as soul-
less as the art of Pope's Song by a
Person of Quality. Curiously enough,
this element of decadence was intro-
duced into both Italian and French art
by the most vital and vigorous of ro-
mantic humanists ; and what Michael
Angelo's titanic unrestraint did for his
less imaginative followers, Delacroix's
passion for abrupt light and shade and
twisted " romantic " attitudes may yet
do for the Salon.

The success of Rochegrosse's Andro-
maque is a mere craftsman's triumph,
not an artist's ; for nothing can be con-
summately artistic while horrible and
repulsive, as is this gory, ghastly scene.
One need only to imagine it placed in
a gallery of work of the full -bloom-
ing Florentine Renaissance, that rich,
thoughtful, serene, and immortal period,
to realize what fatal element of decay
exists in a school which gives its highest
commendation to such scientific brutal-
ity as this.

The incident of the picture is An-
dromaque's agonized struggle when her
infant son is torn from her arms, by the
order of Ulysses, to be thrown from the

ramparts. Convulsive is the first im-
pression one receives from the violent
foreshorten ings and abrupt shadows,
masterly as they are as mere craftsman-
ship. The action of the central figure,
this raging, distorted, disheveled Audro-
maque, whose very hair, even, seems
to rage and writhe in mortal throes, is
as strained and painful as could be con-
ceived. Death is all about, — putrid
death, green and loathsome, as well as
violent death, in its first hideous expres-
sion of gaping, staring surprise. Though
the legend is classical, not the least faint
shadow rests upon it of such antique
dignity and calm as stamp even the La-
ocoon and group of the Farnese Bull.

All who remember this same artist's
picture of last year, representing Vi-
tellius hooted at by the mob, a can-
vas crowded with repulsive figures and
disheveled by a raggedness of light and
shade suggestive of some rending and
violent explosion, will recognize that in
this purely technical success the most im-
aginative and least mechanical element,
even of mere technique, is wanting, —
the element of color. Rochegrosse is
no colorist, and the monochromatic dull-
ness of his canvas of this year, beside
the cheap, calico-like surface of the one
of last, impresses the observer more
than ever that scientific knowledge and
dashing skill, rather than ideal or even
sensuous beauty, are the qualities valued
by those who award the prizes of the
French Salon, and thus represent French
art.

Bin's Mort a la Peine, or Death and
the "Woodcutter, as it has been also
called, is another of the season's suc-
cesses which illustrate certain tenden-
cies. It is not a furious canvas, like
the Andromaque, but one with quite as
little elevation or beauty of sentiment
animating its skill ; even the pathos
which the subject might otherwise pos-
sess being buried beneath a piling-up of
more effective horrors. The woodman,
just killed by a false stroke of his own

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

713

axe, lies amid a huge circumference of
blood. The face is unutterably repul-
sive in its dingy pallor, sunken -eyed,
open-mouthed, and with its last living
expression of agonized terror frozen
upon it. Vultures hover low over the
corpse, adding such a sickening, imagi-
native influence to the scene as not all
their scientific effectiveness in " contin-
uing a line " or enhancing a light ought
ever to atone for. The draughtsman-
ship is powerful, firm, and sweeping ; the
wooded landscape artistically subordi-
nate and receding, dull and unassertive,
behind the masterly modeling of figures ;
but the whole spiritual effect of the pic-
ture is to send one away with both sick
and pained realization of the miserable
tragedies to which hapless humanity is
liable, — tragedies without dignity, all
brutal horror, agony, and disgust.

The Crucifixions of this year, not less
numerous than usual, mark also with
pregnant emphasis this characteristic of
to-day's French art. Not one of them,
vital point of the religious life of mill-
ions though that scene is, would awake
a single heaven ward -aspiring thought,
or even tender earthly emotion. A
small canvas — representing a lurid,
cloud-tossed midnight, and the solitary
figure of a dancing-girl just from some
scene of revelry, in modern stage tights,
with bare breasts and arms, stretching
on tiptoe, up from a donkey's back, to
passionately kiss the impenitent thief,
— is the only one which does not sooner
sfcir the coarser passions of hate and re-
venge against the crucifiers than of
love, pity, or reverence for the Crucified.
In all these pictures, the showy, color-
ful, and color-focusing blood is always
scientifically arranged, and largely en
evidence, while the anatomical and mus-
cular expression of the mortal leaves
no place for suggestion of the divine
agony.

A huge canvas by Brunet, pupil of
Gerome and Boulanger, is singular
among these in representing Les Gibets

du Golgotha, with the central figure left
out ! The two thieves, apparently studied
from long-dead and decomposed models,
are tied with ropes to their crosses.
Those crosses are huge, towering, mas-
sive, and richly bitumened ones, which
Hercules himself could not have borne,
and which in the hard realism of mod-
ern French art have no symbolical sig-
nificance as representing the sins of the
world. The feet and hands of the
thieves are pierced with huge nails, but
only Christ seems to have bled. His
vacant cross stands there, horrible above
all the horrors.

The subject is too repulsive to pursue
longer, and the writer will only allude en
passant to such scenes as Une Bouche-
rie pendant le Siege, which degraded
color and drawing worthy of better use.
Briefly, too, must be mentioned the cli-
max of hideous brutality of the whole
exhibition, L'Alcool of Anatole Beau-
lieu, one of Eugene Delacroix's pupils.
The art which has given the world the
Sistine Madonna has fallen as low in
this canvas as the art which created
Dorothea Brooke fell in the creation of
Nana.

— There is a charge commonly
brought against dwellers in capital cit-
ies from which, in the interest of fair
judgment, I should like to defend them,
— I mean the accusation of a frivolity
of life far exceeding that of the inhab-
itants of rural towns1 and villages. In
a loose use of language, frivolity is taken
to mean the same thing as dissipation, or
at least a preoccupation with the pleas-
ures of the gay world. But frivolity is,
properly speaking, but another name for
trifling, and a frivolous life is one spent
in trivial pursuits. There are frivolous
persons to be found everywhere, and,
according to my view, the life of large
cities is no more favorable to the pro-
duction of a trivial temper of mind and
habit of existence than that of smaller
districts. Even worldliness is less a mat-
ter of external activities than of interior

714

The Contributors' Club.

[November,

disposition. There are country girls
with till the will to be as worldly as the
gayest city belle, and who display the
worldly spirit just as far as they have
opportunity to do so ; and city girls who
are not worldly, though with every temp-
tation to estimate social enjoyment and
social success above things nobler. I
have heard good people declaim against
the social life of cities as if there were
really something criminal in a fondness
for dinner parties, receptions, and balls,
and a high degree of virtue in abstaining
from such pleasures by those who could
not have them if they would. I have
had considerable experience of life in
rural towns, and so far as it informs me
I am willing to maintain that life in
them is no more earnest, dignified with
worthy interests and aims, than life in
cities, but merely a less busy and a dull-
er thing. The frivolous city girl's day
is filled with engagements from morning
to night, — with shopping, paying and
receiving visits, driving in the park, and
theatre or ball going in the evening.
Her mind is taken up with these things
to the exclusion of anything like intel-
lectual occupation, — for novel-reading
does not come under that head. She is
absorbed in pleasure-seeking in all its
various kinds. The frivolous country
girl has more time on her hands, but
does she do anything better with it?
She, too, seeks her pleasures, as many
as are to be had, and sighs that there are
no more of them. She shops and pays
calls, and plays tennis in the afternoon
instead of driving on the avenue; wishes
there were a dance for the evening, but
since there is not stays at home and does
some fancy-work, finishes her novel, or
chats with some intimate who " drops
in " on her. What real difference in
her character is made by the fact that
she has had but o.ne party to attend dur-
ing the week, where the other girl has
had six ? Is worldliness worse because
it is on a larger scale ? Is scandal about
the last elopement in fashionable society

more demoralizing than gossip about
one's next-door neighbor's son and the
attention he is paying to Miss So-and-
So ? The virtue of minding one's own
business is not more commonly practiced
in rural places than in larger ones. I
know of city girls who mingle with their
pleasures an active care for the poor
and sick, spending as much thought and
time in charitable work as those who,
living in country places, have less de-
mand upon their leisure. It is sad to
see a man or woman spending life in
thoughtless gayety ; to me, it is equally
sad to see one wasting it in simple,
negatively virtuous inanity. I know
certain worthy persons the mere sight
of whom is depressing beyond words.
The vacancy of their minds oppresses
me as a suspension in a strain of music
distresses the ear ; the dullness of their
undeveloped sensibilities, the contrac-
tion of the mental and spiritual space
they are shut up in, affects me as a posi-
tive pain. If it were an external neces-
sity that compelled to this way of exist-
ence, the case would be hard enough ;
but being, as I know it is, the result of
choice and habit, and that, again, the
outcome of sluggish temperament and
minds deprived of proper stimulus, the
pity of it is so much the greater. Some-
times such people do suffer from this
species of self -starvation, yet without
knowing it, or at least without compre-
hension of the true cause of their dull
unrest. Perhaps it is just such a one,
of all persons, whom you will hear
speaking in disparagement of " fashion-
able " society. In the name of reason,
one exclaims internally, is it not better
at least to enjoy one's self than to make
an absolute nothing of one's life ? To
be pleased with trifles is at least no
crime, but you would make it a virtue
to be pleased with nothing. Life, for
such of us, is what we can make out of
ourselves and circumstances ; and some
know how to make so much out of so
little, others so little out of so much.

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

715

No, frivolity is no more a natural con-
sequence of living in capitals than in
country places. There is more tempta-
tion to worldliness of spirit, doubtless,
but whether the actual amount of it be
larger in the former than in the latter
there is no very precise means of deter-
mining. As to vice (not crime), there
is as much in proportion in our rural
places as in any city. Ask the clergy-
man and the physician of the village or
the township, aud he will tell you if it
be not so.

— In speaking of a fly-trapper rather
than of a fly-trap, I do so advisedly ;
since the object I wish to describe acts
from its own volition, possesses ration-
al intelligence, has articulate speech, is
capable of handling tools, laughs, — in
short, displays all the faculties and
traits characteristic of the highest order
of animal life. I sometimes think that
my friend the fly-trapper, in view of
the singular use he serves in the econ-
omy of nature, should be set off in a
genus by himself ; at least, he should be
accounted as sui generis, in the fullest
acceptation of that convenient term.
Your first impression regarding him
would doubtless be : Here is one labor-
ing under mania ; he sees what I cannot
see ; he grasps in the air at impalpable
nothings. You would be much relieved
upon discovering that he was catching
flies, — an action with him as sane and
normal as any harmless idiosyncrasy in
your own behavior. With the excep-
tion of this peculiar habit, the fly-trap-
per is very much like other rural folk
with whom we are acquainted : hard-
working, rheumatism-plagued, weather-
forecasting, one-newspaper-reading, pol-
itics-and-theology-debating. The last-
named trait is, in his case, rather more
strongly developed than is usual, and I
have known him, when he had a good
listener, to stretch most unthriftily the
harvest noon hour, in order that he
might fully define " the ground I take,"
on any given question of a political or

religious nature. At such times he is
more than ever expert at the practice
for which he is so justly distinguished
in his own neighborhood. It is indeed
wonderful, — the double presence of
mind by which he is enabled to carry
on argumentative discourse and at the
same time attend to the flies. If one
of those insects alight on the wall, or
the table, anywhere within arm range,
it is to the grief of that insect, for the
hand of its fate is relentless aud unerr-
ing. The trapper is also a good marks-
man, and can take a fly upon the wing
as well as in any other situation ; ap-
parently, he knows just how long the
insect will be in moving from a given
point over a given space. Often have
I watched the slow, pendulum - like
swing of his arm, bringing up, at length,
with fingers shut upon the palm aud the
unlucky fly. I feel sure that this time-
ly and triumphant gesture serves the
speaker as well as would exact logic
and verbal force. It is a little strange,
however, that the coup de grace always
falls at the right instant to clench the
argument. I own to a feeling of fasci-
nation, while listening to his exposition
of Foreknowledge and Foreordination,
— the doctrines are so capitally illus-
trated ; the flies figuring as wretched
humanity, and the fly-trapper as the
dread Predestinator. From the twinkle
in his eye, when a successful sweep has
been made, and the hapless victim
crumpled between thumb and finger, I
infer perfectly well the satisfaction a
supreme being must take in dooming its
abject creatures. I have been assured
by those who have excellent opportu-
nities for observation that a little circle
of the slain is always to be found upon
the floor around the chair occupied by
the trapper. There can be no reason-
able doubt that, like the great little
tailor in the German fairy tale, our
hero has killed his " seven at one
stroke," though it has never occurred to
his modest spirit to vaunt itself on that

716

The Contributors' Club.

[November,

account. To compare him with Domi-
tiau, who also was an adept in this Hue,
would be to do an injustice to a very
humane diameter ; for, when you have
excepted the fly -catching propensity,
you, as the representative of the Soci-
ety for the Prevention of Cruelty, can
find no stain upon our friend's record.

I cannot say how long the subject of
this notice has been in practice (he is
now in his sixtieth year), yet probably
for more than half a century, from the
time when he sat an urchin on the high
seat in the district school, he has served
in the humble but useful way described.
I know how strong is the force of habit,
and forbear to laugh when occasionally
I see him at his fly-catching after the
fly season is past. Is it that his deft
hand cannot forget its cunning, or was
its dexterity always a vain show, — no
real fly in the case ?

— Whence is it that so many Eng-
lish writers derive grammatical author-
ity for the phrase " different to " ? To
us, who use the word from in this com-
bination, the common English substitu-
tion of to sounds very strange. " My
feeling is different to yours," " This is
a very different matter to that," — one
finds such sentences in almost any Eng-
lish book. I am not sure that I have
ever seen the preposition " to " used with
the present tense of the verb, as " This
differs to that," though to be consistent
Englishmen should so express them-
selves. Consistency, however, is hardly
an English characteristic. There are
writers of good English who still write
" diflVivnt from," — Mr. James Bryce,
F. D. Maurice, Miss Youge, to instance
some at haphazard ; but the majority
of British writers do not. If we Amer-
icans and the few English who agree to

o o

prefer from are in error, it is because
our conservative instinct has led us to
follow the pattern of speech set in this
matter by Hooker and by Fielding, who
who were thought to write well in their
day-

It has been pointed out before now
that certain queer Americanisms, so
called, are but survivals of old English
which happen to have fallen out of use
in the mother country.

— I have a moral perplexity which I
am anxious to share. Some time ago
my friend and I enjoyed the honor of
an interview with an eminent philan-
thropist. She (the philanthropist is a
woman) has given her youth, her health,
and her fortune to the work in which
she is engaged. She has done this not
only ungrudgingly and cheerfully, but
almost, it would seem, unconsciously,
possessed by the purest enthusiasm for
the unhappy creatures whom she has
befriended. She is still on the borders
of youth, very clever, and would be
good-looking but for her expression of
invincible determination.

She explained her work and its re-
sults — which are truly marvelous — at
length.

Now here comes my perplexity. It
shaped itself while I listened. The phi-
lanthropist is a noble, an admirable
woman ; more and more was I impressed
with the conviction of her worth and
our worthlessuess. Surely (thus my per-
plexity grew into words) such a woman
ought to be most attractive, but — she
is nothing of the kind ! My friend, who
does not believe in charity, and frank-
ly objects to "going on a high moral
plane," is an eminently charming wom-
an. She charms every one. I could see
that she charmed the philanthropist with
her sweet politeness. But the philan-
thropist is not charming. Yet I some-
how felt that Nature had meant her to
be winning and gracious. She has most
beautiful eyes, her rare smile is delight-
ful, her features are delicate, her figure
is good ; but somehow there was such
an uncompromising and resistless energy
about every look and movement that the
timid, unphilanthropic mind quailed be-
fore her. She scorned the arts of the
toilet ; a severe neatness was her aim, —

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

717

nothing more. She walked with a stern
determination to get over the ground
with as few steps as possible. Her ges-
tures were entirely unconventional, and
chiefly noticeable for vigor. When she
talked, her pleasant voice had a ring of
military firmness which made it stern.
Her conversation was quite in keeping
with her appearance. She talked fluent-
ly, rapidly, forcibly ; she was picturesque,
interesting, enthusiastic. In a word, her
conversation was that of a woman of
wide and extraordinary experience, who
had the courage of her opinions. But
it was, so to speak, conversation on a
straight line, disturbed by no curves of
fancy, no flourishes of humor, no side
branchings into appreciation of others'
views of the question. It would be too
much to say that my philanthropist was
arrogant, but she certainly lacked sym-
pathy for all opinions save her own.

Oi course, we, being unprincipled
worldlings, dissembled our own private
beliefs, and agreed with her by oiir si-
lence, if not by our words.

When it was all over, my friend said,
" So that is a woman in earnest. Do
you suppose it is her earnestness that
makes her so unprepossessing ? "

This is my perplexity reduced to its
last equation : Was it her earnestness ?

My friend held that it was. " If you
have observed," said she, " women with
aims are always like that. They are too
superior to condescend to make them-
selves agreeable. Besides, they have n't
time. Then they never can see but one
side of a question, — the side they are
on. They are always dragging their
own opinions to the front, and always
running full tilt against everyone else's.
That is where they differ most from
women who have n't purposes and who
have seen a good deal of the world. It
is the business of a woman of the world

to be agreeable. She spares no pains to
make herself just as good-looking as
possible, and just as charming. And she
is always tolerant. She may think you
a fool for your beliefs, but she does n't
tell you so brutally, or try to crush you
with an avalanche of argument. She
tries to look at the matter from your
point of view ; in short, she feigns a
sympathy, if she have it not. Your
women with a purpose think it wrong to
feign anything. They won't pretend to
be sympathetic any more than they will
powder their faces, or let their dress-
maker improve their figures. That 's why
they are so boring ; they are too narrow
to be sympathetic and too conscientious
to be polite. It is earnestness does it ;
earnestness is naturally narrowing. It
is earnestness, too, sets their nerves in
a quiver and makes them so restless.
They can never sit still ; they are always
twitching, don't you know ? That 's
earnestness. It has a kind of electrical
effect. Women in earnest have no re-
pose of manner. But a woman of the
world feigns that, just as she feigns sym-
pathy, because it makes her pleasant to
other people. Oh, there 's no doubt of
it : women with a purpose are vastly bet-
ter than other women, but they are not
nearly so nice ! "

My own experience corroborates my
friend's opinions. Women with a pur-
pose, women in earnest, have a notice-
able lack of charm. And I regret to
say that the nobility of the purpose does
not in the least affect the quantity of
charm. Very likely their busy lives
and the hard fight they have had to
wage with social prejudices and moral
anachronisms may have something to
do with it.

But after making all deductions, I
wonder if my friend's theory does not
hit somewhere near the mark !

718

Books of the Month.

[November,

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

Theolngy, Religion, and Philosophy. Dr. Sam-
uel Harris, a powerful thinker who has made his
mark in teaching rather than in literature, has
written a treatise on The Philosophical Basis of
Theism (Scrilincrs), which is a distinct addition to
American philosophical literature. The work is
an examination of the personality of man, to as-
certain his capacity to know and serve God, and
the validitv of the principles underlying the de-
fense of theism. It is critical and historical in its
treatment of the subject, and will attract many
minds which are repelled by the apparent dogma-
tism of Dr. Mulford's Republic of God, with which
Dr. Harris is partially in sympathy, though he
lacks the poetic temperament which seems to be
requisite in an Hegelian. — The Scriptural Idea of
Man, by Dr. Mark Hopkins (Scribners), is a vol-
ume of six lectures given before the theological
students of Princeton. The vigor, the lucidity,
and the comprehensiveness of this masterly teach-
er are shown in a compass so brief that we may
hope for a more positive recognition of Dr. Hop-
kins's ability than his previous books have called
out. — Christian Charity in the Ancient Church,
bv Dr. Gerhard Ulhorn, has been translated from
the German (Scribners), and is an interesting in-
quiry upon historical lines into the practical oper-
ations of the great law of love in Christianity,
carrying the subject from the foundations of char-
ity in the Apostolic age to the time of the Refor-
mation.—The Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge (New York agents, E. & J. B. Young
& Co.) are issuing in paper form The Church-
man's Family Bible, a devout commentary adapt-
ed to ordinary intelligence. — In Topics of the
Times series, the fifth number is devoted to Ques-
tions of Belief, but the writers are pretty much all
of one school, those who question belief. — Con-
flict in Nature and Life is further described on the
title-page as a study of antagonism in the consti-
tution of things : for the elucidation of the prob-
lem of good and evil, and the reconciliation of
optimism and pessimism (Appleton). "Life," this
anonymous author says, " is but the picking of
one's way through the tangled mazes of contra-
diction." He appears to enlarge upon the dictum,
Whatever is is right, by showing that whatever is
wrong is. The book is a thoughtful one, but the
notion of an unending conflict as an element in
iinewhat depressing. — The Founda-
tions of Religious Belief; the Methods of Natural
Theology vindicated against Modern Objections is
the I',Miop Paddock Lectures for 1883. The au-
thor is I!ev. W. D. Wilson, and he directs his
thoughts to readers of Mill, Spencer, and Tyndall
(Appleton). — In the Early Christian Literature
primers (Appleton) the latest volume is one on
the Post-Nicene Greek Fathers, by Rev. George
A. Jackson. It is a series of notices rather than
a comprehensive study.

History and Biography. History of the North-

ern Pacific Railroad, by Eugene V. Smalley (Pnt-
nams) is a substantial and comely volume, with en-
gravings and map, which gives not only the his-
tory of this enterprise but of the general move-
ment into Oregon. It is a straightforward narra-
tive of a most interesting series of transactions,
and since the Northern Pacific, like any great rail-
road, changes the country through which it passes,
one has in this work a glimpse of history in mak-
ing. — A Bird's Eye View of the Civil War, by
Theodore Ayrault Dodge (Osgood), will be wel-
comed as a quick, well analyzed sketch of the
military operations, with some characterization of
leading men and a slight account of the political
element involved. It is furnished with maps and
plans, and the dates, set in as marginal notes, help
one in keeping the chronology. — In Topics of the
Times series (Putnams) the fourth number treats
of Village Life in Norfolk Six Hundred Years Ago,
Sieria, A Few Words about the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, France and England in 1793, and General
Chanzy. The selection is well made. — Irving's
Life of Washington is issued in two double-col-
umn parts (Putnams). The printing is clear, the
few cuts are indifferent, and the price is low. —
Autobiography of Charles Biddle, vice-president
of the supreme executive council of Pennsylvania,
is a work privately printed, but to be had of E.
Claxton & Co., Philadelphia. The period cov-
ered by the autobiography is from 1745 to 1821.
Mr. Biddle was the father of Nicholas Biddle, and
his intimate connection with Philadelphia people
and affairs renders the book an interesting illus-
tration of social and political life. — The Genealo-
gy and Biography of the Waldos of America from
1650 to 1883, compiled by Joseph D. Hall, Jr.
(Schofield & Hamilton, Danielsonville, Conn.),
is arranged under the heads of the descendants
of the Children of Cornelius Waldo, Ipswich,
Mass., 1654. — Eugene Fromentin, Painter and
Writer, is a translation by Mary Caroline Robbins
of a life by Louis Gonse. originally published in
the Gazette des Beaux Arts, of which M. Gonse
is editor (Osgood). Fromentin was both a painter
who wrote and a writer who painted. The work is
sketchy, not to say journalistic in its character, but
its very contemporaneousness gives it a freshness
of interest. — Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has done a wom-
anly and graceful deed in giving Mary Lamb a
book to herself. (Roberts.) The character is one
which has always drawn readers out of all pro-
portion to the fullness of their knowledge, and
many will be grateful to Mrs. Gilchrist for bring-
ing together into a simple, unstrained narrative
all that is to be learned of Lamb's sister. Her
diligence has been rewarded also by the discovery
of some few facts and dates not before in the
possession of the public. — The Early History of
Land-Holding among the Germans, by Denman W.
Ross (Soule & Bugbee, Boston), is a monograph
which represents a careful investigation of original

1883.]

Books of the Month.

719

materials ;' it is incidentally, but not polemically, a
criticism of Sir Henry Maine, and it is put forth
with a sincerity of purpose and a modesty of
claims worthy of all praise. It is a book for his-
torical students rather than for readers, who may
miss generalizations which they can easily appro-
priate. Mr. Ingleby, the author of Shakespeare,
The Man and the Book, has published through
Triibner & Co., a striking argument in favor of
examining Shakespeare's tomb. Mr. Ingleby
holds that the poet's curse was not pronounced
against such recreant admirers as would transport
the sacred dust to Westminster Abbey, but against
the parish sexton who periodically cleared out the
graves in the church. The authenticity of the sev-
eral portraits of Shakespeare might be settled,
Mr. Ingleby thinks, if measurements of the poet's
skull could be taken — providing the skull has
not been already been removed. The author's
little book is interesting in view of the fact that
the question of opening the grave has recently
been revived at Stratford. The authorities have
decided against permitting the exhumation of any
possible remains.

Art. The latest volume of L'Art (J. W. Bou-
ton & Co.) holds to the high precedents which it
has established for itself in its literary and ar-
tistic departments. The letter-press presents the
usual variety of carefully prepared matter. If
this q;^>rterly issue differs from the best of its im-
mediate predecessors, it is in the number and ex-
cellence of the etchings here given. The reader
will tind the critical papers on the Salon of 1883
particularly interesting: these articles are admi-
rably illustrated. — The fourteenth part of Raci-
net's Le Costume Historique (J. W. Bouton &
Co.) contains numerous colored illustrations of
eighteenth century costumes in England, Scot-
land, France, Poland, Switzerland, etc. The an-
cient costumes represented are those of India and

Egypt.

Literature and Criticism. The new edition of
Emerson's complete works has been begun by the
issue of Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, and Es-
says, first series. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) The
page is a pretty one, the binding is neat, and the
whole effect is to make this author look exceed-
ingly classic. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by
Mrs. Oliphaut, is the latest volume in the English
Men of Letters series (Harpers). Mrs. Oliphant
throws a veil of womanly charity over Sheridan,
and misses some of the piquancy which the char-
acter suggests. The work is evenly done, but such
a suhji-et calls fora crisper treatment. — A Diction-
ary of Quotations from English and American
Poets (Crowell) is based upon Bonn's Dictionary.
Mr. R. H. Stoddurd furnishes a complimentary in-
troduction. The book is alphabetically arranged
by subjects, not by authors, for it is a collection
of apt, not of familiar quotations. The authors
referred to are in general the popular poets, but
some persons have gotten into the company ap-
parently by virtue of having said something pat.
— Verbal Pitfalls, by C. W. Bardeen (C. W. Bar-
deen, Syracuse, N. Y.), is a manual of 1500 words
commonly misused, arranged alphabetically. Mr.

Bardeen has reached his results by culling indus-
triously from the authors like Dean Alford and
others who have acted as special police in lan-
guage. — In Appleton's Home Books, there is a
sensible volume on The Home Library by Arthur
Penn, which treats both of the books and the
structure and furnishing of a library. — Mr.
James's comedy of Daisy Miller has been pub-
lished as a book (Osgood) and one may now see
more distinctly the missing link between a story
and a play.

Poetry. Mano, by Richard Watson Dixon
(Routledge), is, as the title-page declares, a poet-
ical history: of the time of the close of the tenth
century: concerning the adventures of a Norman
knight: which fell part in Normandy, part in
Italy. The stop-watch punctuation of the title-
page is curiously reflective of the "triple rime"
which the poet has employed in his work. The
measure suits the theme, — that may be said ; and
yet the quaintness of the style raises some suspi-
cion whether the poem is not in the main a res-
toration rather than a good piece of original ar-
chitecture. — The Blind Canary, by Hugh Farrar
McDermott (Putnams), is the second and revised
edition of a volume of poems, the first of which
gives the title. There is a poem inspired by phre-
nology, which is the first gift, so far as we remem-
ber, from the muse of any degree to that latest of
sciences. — The Old Swimmin-Hole and 'Leven
more Poems, by James W. Riley (George C. Hitt
& Co.), is a collection of dialect verse so full of
amiability and good sense that one condones its
lack of poetry. Several of these little Hoosier
lyrics have a naturalness and a pathos quite their
own. — Sibyl is a poem by George H. Calvert.
(Lee & Shepard.) — Wild Flowers is the title given
by Joseph Daly to a volume of poems (Stanley &
Usher, Boston), written by him while in his teens,
and thus forestalling criticism, except that by
wise friends. — Phantoms of Life, by Luther Dana
Waterman. (Putnams.) It is hard to read far-
ther in a book of which the first line is, —

" I would unclasp a fibre of life's pain."

Until the fibre has been unclasped, one is disposed
to wait tranquilly. — My Ain Countree, and Other
Verses, by Mary Lee Demarest (Randolph), is a
collection of poems, mainly inspired by religion.
— The Love Poems of Louis Barnaval, edited with
an introduction by Charles DeKay (Appleton),
seems to lessen Mr. DeKay's monopoly of verse
of the character which has hitherto appeared in
his volumes. Had Mr. Barnaval lived and pub-
lished his own poetry, Mr. DeKay might have
been embarrassed, and been undone by a double.

Education and Text-Books. Mr. W. J. Rolfe,
who is so well known by his edition of Shake-
speare, has prepared an edition of Scott's Lady of
the Lake upon the same general plan and uniform
in external style. (Osgood.) I Ii- shows that we
have suffered from an imperfect text of the poem,
and supplies the work with a profuse array of
notes. A little too much annotated, it seems to
us. By the way, his note on favor, line 680, could
receive an addition from a good many boys and

720

Books of the Month.

[November.

girls who have danced the German. It is a pity
that th«> cuts which \\vre usod in the pretty illus-
trated edition should here lose the beauty which
good paper and press work gave them before. Is
it p<>s-i1.1e that it was not the engraver, but the
printer and paper maker, who deserved credit for
ii which the gift-book made ?

— A hr.-t Latin. Book, designed as a manual of
progressive exercises and systematic drill in the
elements of Latin, and introductory to Caesar's
Commentaries on the Gallic War (Allyn, Boston),
is a school-book prepared by a master in one of
our secondary schools, D. Y. Comstock, of Phillips
Academy. Andover. It is a compact, carefully
planned book, and in the hands of a competent
teacher may be made an admirable drill manual.

— A College Fetich is the Phi Beta Kappa address
given at Harvard in the summer by Charles Francis
Adam>, Jr. (Lee & Shepard.) — Modern Spanish.
Readings, embracing text, notes, and an etymo-
logical vocabulary, by William I. Knapp (Ginn,
Heath & Co.), is a reader drawn, as the title indi-
cates, not from classic authors but from contempo-
raneous literature, which would seem to make the
work of use especially to those who have commer-
cial needs of Spanish. — The eighteenth edition of
A. L. Perry's Political Economy (Scribners), has
given the author an opportunity to perfect his
work in the direction of simplification. Professor
Perry acknowledges gracefully the service which
he has received from his own class-room experi-
ence. — Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), has been cleverly ar-
ranged in seven scenes for school exhibitions and
private theatricals. Nothing has been added, and
the poem is made ingeniously to furnish stage di-
rections. — The Meisterschaft System has been ap-
plied to the Spanish language, and the method
presented in fifteen parts. (Estes & Lauriat.) —
In the series of History Primers (Appleton), Medi-
aeval Civilization is the subject treated by Pro-
fessor George Burton Adams, of Drury College,
Missouri. Why are all professors of history named
Adams '/ — Handbook of the Earth (Lee & Shep-
ard), is a little manual by Louisa Parsons Hop-
kins, in which (lie natural method in teaching
geography is insisted on, and the teacher furnished
with hints. It is a suggestive book.

Political and Social Economy. Congested Prices
is the title of a little book by M. L. Scudder, Jr.
(Jansen, McClurg & Co., Chicago), in which the
author aims to describe the cause and cure of the
prices which are made in certain unhealthy condi-
tions of trade. He believes that we are in a period
of declining prices, and he asks the commercial
world to accept the fact calmly. Those who are
getting ready to buy will be quite calm. The
Look is worth reading. —French and German So-
cialism in Modern Times is the title of a little vol-
ume by Richard T. Ely (Harpers), in which he
aims "to give a perfectly fair, impartial presenta-
tion of modern communism and socialism in their
two strongholds, France and Germany." The
book is based on lectures given at Johns Hopkins

and Cornell. — What Social Classes Owe to Each
Other is a series of papers published by W. G.
Sumner in Harper's Weekly, and now issued in a
small volume. (Harpers). — Dr. W. G. Thompson
has prepared a little volume mainly descriptive on
Training Schools for Nurses, with notes on twen-
ty-two schools. (Putnams.) — Mrs. Fields's little,
book How to Help the Poor (Houghton, Mifflin &
Co.), is full of admirable suggestions, especially
for those who with leisure and good will give
much thought and time to the most effective ser-
yice.

Science. Esoteric Buddhism, by A. P. Sinnett
(Houghton, Mifflin £ Co.), makes such claims to
the solution of oriental problems of the universe
that one can only declare that it is important, if
true; and the source from which the work comes,
since Mr. Sinnett is president of the Simla Eclectic
Theosophical Society, requires one to treat the
work with respect. — Evolution, a summary of
evidence, is a lecture delivered in Montreal by
Robert C. Adams (Putnams), and is intended as a
convenient statement of a subject of which the last
volume has not been written. It is impossible for
any but a master to teach anything of evolution
within such confines, and one easily distrusts a
popular lecture. — The Society for Psychical Re-
search issues its proceedings through Triibner &
Co., London, and the number for April, 1883, has
reached us, with interesting papers, in which
ghosts are cross-examined in a manner which
must convince them how useless it is to try to van-
ish.— Government has issued the Annual Report
of the Operations of the United States Life-Saving
Service. It contains accounts of apparatus which
has been invented, and it furnishes excellent ma-
terial for novelists who wish to introduce ship-
wrecks. It is just the volume that Lieutenant
Fenton ought to have had in his cocoa-nut grove.
Mr. Giffen would have found a companion in it.

Fiction. A Righteous Apostate, by Clara Lan-
za (Putnams), is a novel which depends for its in-
terest upon an involved plot. — The Diothas, or a
Far Look Ahead, by Ismar Thiusen (Putnams), is
an elaborate, and somewhat unreadable piece of
prophetic fiction. The unreality of this class of
literature has a blighting effect upon the story.
— Among the Lakes, by William O. Stoddard
(Scribners), is a lively picture of Western life as
led by young people mainly. — Thicker than
Water, by James 'Payn, has been published in
neat sixteenmo form by Harpers. The Harpers
issue their Franklin Square Library in duodecimo
form also; Altiora Peto, by Lawrence Oliphant,
and By the Gate of the Sea, by D. C. Murray,
lead off the series with fairly readable type on
thin paper, paper covers. In the older form ap-
pear Robert Reid, Cotton Spinner, by Alice
O'llanlon, and Disarmed, by Miss Betham-Ed-
wards. — Up from the Cape (Estes & Lauriat) is
a plea for republican simplicity, in the form of
criticism upon city life by a countrywoman, but
the criticism is neither very useful nor very well
put.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
91 #iaga$me of Literature, Science, art, ann

VOL. LIL — DECEMBER, 1883. — No. GGGXIV.

A ROMAN SINGER.

XI.

EARLY in the morning after Nino's
visit to Signor Benoni, De Pretis came
to my house, wringing his hands and
making a great trouble and noise. I
had not yet seen Nino, who was sound
asleep, though I could not imagine why
he did not wake. But De Pretis was
in such a temper that he shook the
room and everything in it, as he stamped
about the brick floor. It was not long
before he had told me the cause of his
trouble. He had just received a formal
note from the Graf von Lira, inclosing
the amount due to him for lessons, and
dispensing with his services for the fu-
ture.

Of course this was the result of the
visit Nino had so rashly made ; it all
came out afterwards, and I will not now
go through the details that De Pretis
poured out, when we only half knew
the truth. The count's servant who
admitted Nino had pocketed the five
francs as quietly as you please ; and the
moment the count returned he told him
how Nino had come and had stayed
three quarters of an hour, just as if it
were an every-day affair. The count,
being a proud old man, did not encour-
age him to make further confidences,
but sent him about his business. lie
determined to make a prisoner of his
daughter until he could remove her from

Rome. He accordingly confined her in
the little suite of apartments that were
her own, and set an old soldier, whom
he had brought from Germany as a body-
servant, to keep watch at the outer door.
He did not condescend to explain even
to Hedwig the cause of his conduct, and
she, poor girl, was as proud as he, and
would not ask why she was shut up, lest
the answer should be a storm of abuse
against Nino. She cared not at all how
her father had found out her secret, so
long as he knew it, and she guessed
that submission would be the best pol-
icy.

Meanwhile, active preparations were
made for an immediate departure. The
count informed his friends that he was
going to pass Lent in Paris, on account
of his daughter's health, which was very
poor, and in two days everything was
ready. They would leave on the follow-
ing morning. In the evening the count
entered his daughter's apartments, af-
ter causing himself to be formally an-
nounced by a servant, and briefly in-
formed her that they would start for
Paris on the following morning. Her
maid had been engaged in the mean time
in packing her effects, not knowing
whither her mistress was going. Hed-
wig received the announcement in si-
lence, but her father saw that she was
deadly white and her eyes heavy from
weeping. I have anticipated this much

722

A Roman Singer.

[December,

to make things clearer.

It was on the
first morning of Hedwig's confinement
tlnit l)e Pretis came to our house.

Nino was soon waked by the maes-
tro's noise, and came to the door of his
chamber, which opens into the little sit-
ting-room, to inquire what the matter
might be. Nino asked if the maestro
were peddling cabbages, that he should
scream so loudly.

" Cabbages, indeed ! cabbage yourself,
silly boy ! " cried Ercole, shaking his
fist at Nino's head, just visible through
the crack of the door. " A pretty mess
you have made, with your ridiculous
love affair ! Here am I " —

" I see' you are," retorted Nino ; " and
do not call any affair of mine ridiculous,
or I will throw you out of the window.
Wait a moment ! " With that he slammed
his door iu the maestro's face, and went
on with his dressing. For a few min-
utes De Pretis raved at his ease, vent-
ing his wrath on me. Then Nino came
out.

" Now, then," said he, preparing for
a tussle, " what is the matter, my dear
maestro ? " But Ercole had expended
most of his fury already.

" The matter ! " he grumbled. " The
matter is that I have lost an excellent
pupil through you. Count Lira says he
does not require my services any longer,
and the man who brought the note says
they are going away."

" Diavolo ! " said Nino, running his
fingers through his curly black hair, " it
is indeed serious. Where are they go-
ing?"

" How should I know ? " asked De
Pretis angrily. " I care much more
about losing the lesson than about
where they are going. I shall not fol-
low them, I promise you. I cannot take
the basilica of St. Peter about with me
in my pocket, can I ? "

And so he was angry at first, and at
length he was pacified, and finally he
advised Nino to discover immediately
where the count and his daughter were

going ; and, if it were to any great cap-
ital, to endeavor to make a contract to
sing there. Lent came early that year,
and Nino was free at the end of Carni-
val, — not many days longer to wait.
This was the plan that had instantly
formed itself in Nino's brain. De Pre-
tis is really a most obliging man, but
one cannot wonder that he should be
annoyed at the result of Nino's four
months' courtship under such great diffi-
culties, when it seemed that all their ef-
forts had led only to the sudden depar-
ture of his lady-love. As for me, I ad-
vised Nino to let the whole matter drop
then and there. I told him he would
soon get over his foolish passion, and
that a statue like Hedwig could never
suffer anything, since she could never
feel. But he glared at me, and did as
he liked, just as he always has done.

The message on the handkerchief that
Nino had received the night before
warned him to keep away from the Pa-
lazzo Carmandola. Nino reflected that
this warning was probably due to Hed-
wig's anxiety for his personal safety,
and he resolved to risk anything rather
than remain in ignorance of her desti-
nation. It must be a case of giving
some signal. But this evening he had
to sing at the theatre, and therefore,
without more ado, he left us and went
to bed again, where he stayed until
twelve o'clock. Then he went to re-
hearsal, arriving an hour behind time,
at least, a matter which he treated with
the coolest indifference. After that he
got a pound of small shot, and amused
himself with throwing a few at a time
at the kitchen window from the little
court at the back of our house, where
the well is. It seemed a strangely
childish amusement for a great singer.

Having sung successfully through his
opera that night, he had supper with us,
as usual, and then went out. Of course
he told me afterwards what he did. He
.went to his old post under the windows
of the Palazzo Carmandola, and as soon

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

723

as all was dark he began to throw small
shot up at lledwig's window. He now
profited by his practice in the after-
noon, for he made the panes rattle with
the little bits of lead, several times. At
last he was rewarded. Very slowly
the window opened, and lledwig's voice
spoke in a low tone : —

" Is it you ? "

" Ah, dear one ! Can you ask ? " be-
gan Nino.

" Hush ! I am still locked up. We
are going away, — I cannot tell where."

" When, dearest love ? "

" I cannot tell. What shall we do ? "
very tearfully.

" I will follow you immediately ; only
let me know when and where."

" If you do not hear by some other
means, come here to-morrow night. I
hear steps. Go at once."

" Good-night, dearest," he murmured ;
but the window was already closed, and
the fresh breeze that springs up after
one o'clock blew from the air the re-
membrance of the loving speech that
had passed upon it.

On the following night he was at his
post, and again threw the shot against
the pane for a signal. After a long
time Hedwig opened the window very
cautiously.

*' Quick ! " she whispered down to
him, " go ! They are all awake," and
she dropped something heavy and white.
Perhaps she added some word, but Nino
would not tell me, and never would read
me the letter. But it contained the
news that Hedwig and her father were
to leave Rome for Paris on the follow-
ing morning; and ever since that ni^ht
Kino has worn upon his little finger a
plain gold ring, — I cannot tell why, and
he says he found it.

The next day he ascertained from the
porter of the Palazzo Carmandola that
the count and contessina, with their ser-
vants, had actually left Rome that morn-
ing for Paris. From that moment he
was sad as death, and went about his

business heavily, being possessed of but
one idea, namely, to sign an engagement
to sing in Paris as soon as possible. In
that wicked city the opera continues
through Lent, and after some haggling,
in which De Pretis insisted on obtain-
ing for Nino the most advantageous
terms, the contract was made out and
signed.

I see very well that unless I hurry my-
self I shall never reach the most impor-
tant part of this story, which is after all
the only part worth telling. I am sure
I do not know how I can ever tell it so
quickly, but I will do my best, and you
must have a little patience ; for though
I am not old, I am not young, and
Nino's departure for Paris was a great
shock to me, so that I do not like to re-
member it, and the very thought of it
sickens me. If you have ever had any
education, you must have seen an exper-
iment in which a mouse is put in a glass
jar, and all the air is drawn away with
a pump, so that the poor little beast lan-
guishes and rolls pitifully on its side,
gasping and wheezing with its tiny lungs
for the least whiff of air. That is just
how I felt when Nino went away. It
seemed as though I could not breathe in
the house or in the streets, and the lit-
tle rooms at home were so quiet that
one might hear a pin fall, and the cat
purring through the closed doors. Nino
left at the beginning of the last ten days
of Carnival, when the opera closed, so
that it was soon Lent ; and everything
is quieter then.

But before he left us there was noise
enough and bustle of preparation, and
I did not think I should miss him ; for
he always was making music, or walk-
ing about, or doing something to disturb
me, just at the very moment when I
was most busy with my books. Mari-
uccia, indeed, would ask me from time
to time what I shcfUld do when Nino
was gone, as if she could foretell what
I was to feel. I suppose she knew I
was used to him, after fourteen years of

724

A Roman Singer.

[December,

it, and would be inclined to black hu-
mors for want of his voice. But she
could not know just what Nino is to me,
nor how I look on him as my own boy.
These peasants are quick-witted and
foolish ; they guess a great many things
better than I could, and then reason on
them like idiots.

Nino himself was glad to go. I could
see his face grow brighter as the time
approached ; and though he appeared to
be more successful than ever in his sing-
ing, I am sure that he cared nothing for
the applause he got, and thought only
of singing as well as he could for the
love of it. But when it came to the
parting we were left alone.

" Messer Cornelio," he said, looking
at me affectionately, " I have something
to say to you to-night, before I go
away."

" Speak, then, my dear boy," I an-
swered, " for no one hears us."

" You have been very good to me. A
father could not have loved me better,
and such a father as I had could not
have done a thousandth part what you
have done for me. I am going out into
the world for a time, but my home is
here, — or rather, where my home is
will always be yours. You have been
my father, and I will be your son ; and
it is time you should give up your pro-
fessorship. No, not that you are at all
old ; I do not mean that."

" No, indeed," said I, " I should think
not."

"It would be much more proper if
you retired into an elegant leisure, so
that you might write as many books as
you desire, without wearing yourself out
in teaching those students every day.
Would you not like to go back to Ser-
veti ? "

" Serveti ! — ah, beautiful, lost Served,
with its castle and good vinelands ! "

" You shall have it again before long,
my father," he said. He had never called
me father before, the dear boy ! I sup-
pose it was because he was going away.

But Serveti again ! The thing was im-
possible, and I said so.

" It is not impossible," he answered
placidly. " Successful singers make
enough money in a year to buy Ser-
veti. A year is soon passed. But now
let us go to the station, or I shall not
be in time for the train."

" God bless you, Nino mio," I said as
I saw him off. It seemed to me that I
saw two or three Niuos. But the train
rolled away and took them all from me,
— the ragged little child who first came
to me, the strong-limbed, dark-eyed boy
with his scales and trills and enthusi-
asm, and the full-grown man with the
face like the great emperor, mightily
triumphing in his art arid daring in his
love. They were all gone in a mo-
ment, and I was left alone on the plat-
form of the station, a very sorrowful
and weak old man. Well, I will not
think about that day.

The first I heard of Nino was by a
letter he wrote me from Paris, a fort-
night after he had left me. It was char-

acteristic of him, being full of eager
questions about home and De Pretis
and Mariuccia and Rome. Two things
struck me in his writing. In the first
place, he made no mention of the count
or Hedwig, which led me to suppose
that he was recovering from his passion,
as boys do when they travel. And sec-
ondly, he had so much to say about me
that he forgot all about his engagement,
and never even mentioned the theatre.
On looking carefully through the letter
again, I found he had written across the
top the words " Rehearsals satisfactory."
That was all.

It was not long after the letter came,
however, that I was very much fright-
ened by receiving a telegram, which
must have cost several francs to send all
that distance. By this he told me that
he had no clue to the whereabouts of
the Liras, and he implored me to make
inquiries and discover where they had
gone. He added that he had appeared

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

725

in Faust successfully. Of course he
would succeed. If a singer can please
the Romans, he can please anybody.
But it seemed to me that if he had re-
ceived a very especially flattering recep-
tion he would have said so. I went to
see De Pretis, whom I found at home
over his dinner. We put our heads to-
gether and debated how we might dis-
cover the Paris address of the Graf von
Lira. In a great city like that it was
no wonder Nino could not find them ;
but De Pretis hoped that some of his
pupils might be in correspondence with
the coutessina, and would be willing to
give the requisite directions for reach-
ing her. But days passed, and a let-
ter came from Nino written immediately
after sending the telegram, and still we
had accomplished nothing. The letter
merely amplified the telegraphic mes-
sage.

" It is no use," 1 said to De Pretis.
" And besides, it is much better that he
should forget all about it."

" You do not know that boy," said
the maestro, taking snuff. And he was
quite right, as it turned out.

Suddenly Nino wrote from London.
He had made an arrangement, he said,
by which he was allowed to sing there
for three nights only. The two man-
agers had settled it between them, be-
ing friends. He wrote very despond-
ently, saying that although he had been
far more fortunate in his appearances
than he had expected, he was in despair
at not having found the contessina, and
had accepted the arrangement which
took him to London because he had
hopes of finding her there. On the day
which brought me this letter I had a
visitor. Nino had been gone nearly a
month. It was in the afternoon, to-
wards sunset, and I was sitting in the
old green armchair watching the gold-
finch in his cage, and thinking sadly of
the poor dear baroness, and of my boy,
and of many things. The bell rang,
and Mariuccia brought me a card in

her thick fingers which were black from
peeling potatoes, so that the mark of
her thumb came off on the white paste-
board. The name on the card was
" Baron Ahasuerus Benoni," and there
was no address. I told her to show the
signore into the sitting-room, and he
was not long in coming. I immediate-
ly recognized the man Nino had de-
scribed, with his unearthly freshness of
complexion, his eagle nose, and his
snow-white hair. I rose to greet him.

" Siguor Grandi," he said, " I trust
you will pardon my intrusion. I am
much interested in your boy, the great
tenor."

" Sir," I replied, " the visit of a gen-
tleman is never an intrusion. Permit
me to offer you a chair." He sat down,
and crossed one thin leg over the other.
He was dressed in the height of the
fashion ; he wore patent-leather shoes,
and carried a light ebony cane with a
silver head. His hat was perfectly new,
and so smoothly brushed that it reflected
a circular image of the objects in the
room. But he had a certain dignity
that saved his foppery from seeming
ridiculous.

"You are very kind," he answered.
" Perhaps you would like to hear some
news of Signor Cardegna, — your boy,
for he is nothing else."

" Indeed," I said, " I should be very
glad. Has he written to you, baron ? "

" Oh, no ! We are not intimate
enough for that. But I ran on to Paris
the other day, and heard him three or
four times, and had him to supper at
Bignon's. He is a great genius, your
boy, and has won all hearts."

" That is a compliment of weight
from so distinguished a musician as
yourself," I answered ; for, as you know,
Nino had told me all about his playing.
Indeed, the description was his, which is
the reason why it is so enthusiastic.

" Yes," said Benoni, " I am a great
traveler, and often go to Paris for a day
or two. I know every one there. Car-

726

A Roman Singer.

[December,

degna had a perfect ovation. All the
women scut him flowers, and all the
men uskud him to dinner."

•• Pardou my curiosity," I interrupted,
" but as you know every one iu Paris,
could you inform me whether Count
von Lira and his daughter are there
at present? He is a retired Prussian
officer." Benoni stretched out one of
his long arms and ran his fingers along
the keys of the piano without striking
them. He could just reach so far from
where he sat. He gave no sign of in-
telligence, and I felt sure that Nino had
not questioned him.

" I know them very well," he said
presently, " but I thought they were
here."

" No, they left suddenly for Paris, a
month ago."

" I can very easily find out for you,"
said Benoni, his bright eyes turning on
me with a searching look. " I can find
out from Lira's banker, who is proba-
bly also mine. "What is the matter with
that young man ? He is as sad as Don
Quixote."

" Nino ? He is probably in love," I
said, rather indiscreetly.

" In love ? Then of course he is in
love with Mademoiselle de Lira, and
has gone to Paris to find her, and can-
not. That is why you ask me." I was
so much astonished at the quickness
of his guesswork that I stared, open-
mouthed.

" He must have told you ! " I ex-
claimed at last.

" Nothing of the kind. In the course
of a long life I have learned to put two
and two together, that is all. He is in
love, he is your boy, and you are look-
ing for a certain young lady. It is as
clear as day." But in reality he had
guessed the secret long before.

" Very well," said I humbly, but
doubting him, all the same, " I can only
admire your perspicacity. But I would
be greatly obliged if you would find out
where they are, those good people. You

seem to be a friend of my boy's, baron.
Help him, and he will be grateful to
you. It is not such a very terrible
thing that a great artist should love a
noble's daughter, after all, though I used
to think so." Benoni laughed, that
strange laugh which Nino had described,
— a laugh that seemed to belong to
another age.

" You amuse me with your prejudices
about nobility," he said, and his brown
eyes flashed and twinkled again. " The
idea of talking about nobility in this
age ! You might as well talk of the
domestic economy of the Garden of
Eden."

" But you are yourself a noble — a
baron," I objected.

" Oh, I am anything you please,"
said Benoni. " Some idiot made a bar-
on of me, the other day, because I lent
him money and he could not pay it.
But I have some right to it, after all,
for I am a Jew. The only real nobles
are Welshmen and Jews. You cannot
call anything so ridiculously recent as
the European upper classes a nobil-
ity. Now I go straight back to the
creation of the world, like all my coun-
trymen. The Hibernians get a facti-
tious reputation for antiquity by saying
that Eve married an Irishman after
Adam died, and that is about as much
claim as your European nobles have to
respectability. Bah ! I know their be-
ginnings, — very small indeed."

" You, also, seem to have strong prej-
udices on the subject," said I, not wish-
ing to contradict a guest in my house.

" So strong that it amounts to having
no prejudices at all. Your boy wants to
marry a noble damosel. In Heaven's
name, let him do it. Let us manage it
amongst us. Love is a grand thing.
I have loved several women all their
lives. Do not look surprised. I am a
very old man ; they have all died, and
at present I am not in love with any-
body. I suppose it cannot last long,
however. I loved a woman once on a

1883,]

A Roman Singer.

727

time " — Benoni paused. He seemed
to be on the verge of a soliloquy, and
his strange, bright face, which seemed
illuminated always with a deathless vi-
tality, became dreamy and looked older.
But he recollected himself, and rose to
go. His eye caught sight of the guitar
that hung on the wall.

" Ah," he cried suddenly, " music is
better than love, for it lasts ; let us
make music." He dropped his hat and
stick and seized the- instrument. In an
instant it was tuned, and he began to
perform the most extraordinary feats of
agility with his fingers that I ever be-
held. Some of it was very beautiful,
and some of it very sad and wild, but I
understood Nino's enthusiasm. I could
have listened to the old guitar in his
hands for hours together, — I, who care
little for music ; and I watched his face.
He stalked about the room with the
thin'^ in his hands, in a sort of wild
frenzy of execution. His features grew
ashy pale, and his smooth white hair
stood out wildly from his head. He
looked, then, more than a hundred years
old, and there was a sadness and a hor-
ror about him that would have made the
stones cry aloud for pity. I could not
believe he was the same man. At last
he was tired, and stopped.

" You are a great artist, baron," I
said. " Your music seems to affect you
much."

"Ah, yes, it makes me feel like
other men, for the time," said he, in a
low voice. " Did you know that Pag-
aniiu always practiced on the guitar ?
It is true. Well, I will find out about
the Liras for you in a day or two, before
I leave Rome again."

I thanked him, and he took his leave.

XII.

Benoni had made an impression on
me that nothing could efface. His tall,
thin figure and bright eyes' got into my

dreams and haunted me, so that I thought
my nerves were affected. For several
days I could think of nothing else, and
at last had myself bled, and took some
cooling barley water, and gave up eat-
ing salad at night, but without any per-
ceptible effect.

Nino wrote often, and seemed very
much excited about the disappearance
of the contessina, but what could I do ?
I asked every one I knew, and nobody
had heard of them, so that at last I quite
gave it over, and wrote to tell him so.
A week passed, then a fortnight, and I
had heard nothing from Benoni. Nino
wrote again, inclosing a letter addressed
to the Contessina di Lira, which he im-
plored me to convey to her, if I loved
him. He said he was certain that she
had never left Italy. Some instinct
seemed to tell him so, and she was evi-
dently in neither London nor Paris, for
he had made every inquiry, and had
even been to the police about it. Two
days after this, Benoni came. He looked
exactly as he did the first time I saw
him.

" I have news," he said briefly, and
sat down in the armchair, striking the
dust from his boot with his little cane.

" News of the Graf ? " I inquired.

" Yes. I have found out something.
They never left Italy at all, it seems.
I am rather mystified, and I hate mysti-
fication. The old man is a fool ; all old
men are fools, excepting myself. Will
you smoke ? No ? Allow me, then. It
is a modern invention, but a very good
one." He lit a cigarette. " I wish
your Liras were in Tophet," he contin-
ued, presently. " How can people have
the bad taste to hide ? It only makes
ingenious persons the more determined
to find them." He seemed talkative,
and as I was so sad and lonely I encour-
aged him by a little stimulus of doubt.
I wish I had doubted him sooner, and
differently.

" What is the use ? " I asked. " We
shall never find them."

728

A Roman Singer.

[December,

" ' Never ' is a great word," said Beno-
ni. " You do not know what it means.
I do. But as for finding them, you
shall see. In the first place, I have
talked with their banker. He says the
count gave the strictest orders to have
his address kept a secret. But, being
one of my people, he allowed himself to
make an accidental allusion which gave
me a clue to what I wanted. They are
hidden somewhere in the mountains."

'' Diavolo ! among the brigands, they
will not be very well treated," said I.

" The old man will be careful. He
will keep clear of danger. The only
thing is to find them."

" And what then ? " I asked.

" That depends on the most illustri-
ous Signor Cardegna," said Benoni,
smiling. " He only asked you to find
them. He probably did not anticipate
that I would help you."

It did not appear to me that Benoni
had helped me much, after all. You
might as well look for a needle in a
haystack as try to find any one who goes
to the Italian mountains. The baron
offered no further advice, and sat calm-
ly smoking and looking at me. I felt
uneasy, opposite him. He was a mys-
terious person, and I thought him dis-
guised. It was really not possible that
with his youthful manner his hair should
be naturally so white, or that he should
be so old as he seemed. I asked him
the question we always find it interest-
ing to ask foreigners, hoping to lead him
into conversation.

" How do you like our Rome, Baron
Benoni ': "

" Rome ? I loathe and detest it," he
said, with a smile. " There is only one
place in the whole world that I hate
more."

" What place is that ? " I asked, re-
membering that he had made the same
remark to Nino before.

"Jerusalem," he answered, and the
smile faded on his face. I thought I
guessed the reason of his dislike in his

religious views. But I am very liberal
about those things.

" I think I understand you," I said ;
" you are a Hebrew, and the prevailing
form of religion is disagreeable to you."

" No, it is not exactly that, — and
yet, perhaps it is." He seemed to be
pondering on the reason of his dislike.

" But why do you visit these places,
if they do not please you ? "

" I come here because I have so many
agreeable acquaintances. I never go to
Jerusalem. I also come here from time
to time to take a bath. The water of
the Trevi has a peculiarly rejuvenating
effect upon me, and something impels
me to bathe in it."

" Do you mean in the fountain ? Ah,
foreigners say that if you drink the
water by moonlight you will return to
Rome."

" Foreigners are all weak-minded
fools. I like that word. The human
race ought to be called fools generically,
as distinguished from the more intelli-
gent animals. If you went to England,
you would be as great a fool as any
Englishman that comes here and drinks
Trevi water by moonlight. But I as-
sure you I do nothing so vulgar as to
patronize the fountain, any more than
I would patronize Mazzarino's church,
hard by. I go to the source, the spring,
the well where it rises."

" Ah, I know the place well," I said.
" It is near to Serveti."

" Serveti ? Is not that in the vicinity
of Horace's villa ? "

" You know the country well, I see,"
said I, sadly.

" I know most things," answered the
Jew, with complacency. " You would
find it hard to hit upon anything I do
not know. Yes, I am a vaiu man, it
is true, but I am very frank and open
about it. Look at my complexion. Did
you ever see anything like it ? It is
Trevi water that does it." I thought
such excessive vanity very unbecoming
in a man of his years, but I could not

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

729

help looking amused. It was so odd
to hear the old fellow descanting on his
attractions. He actually took a small
mirror from his pocket, and looked at
himself in most evident admiration.

" I really believe," he said at length,
pocketing the little looking-glass, " that
a woman might love me still. What do
you say ? "

" Doubtless," I answered politely, al-
though I was beginning to be annoyed,
" a woman might love you at first sight.
But it would be more dignified for you
not to love her."

" Dignity ! " He laughed long and
loud, a cutting laugh, like the breaking
of glass. " There is another of your
phrases. Excuse my amusement, Signer
Grandi, but the idea of dignity always
makes me smile." He called that thing
a smile ! " It is in everybody's mouth,
— the dignity of the state, the dignity
of the king, the dignity of woman, the
dignity of father, mother, schoolmaster,
soldier. Psh ! an apoplexy, as you say,
on all the dignities you can enumerate.
There is more dignity in a poor, patient
ass toiling along a rough road under a
brutal burden than in the entire human
race put together, from Adam to myself.
The conception of dignity is notional,
most entirely. I never see a poor
wretch of a general, or king, or any
such animal, adorned in his toggery of
dignity without laughing at him, and
his dignity again leads him to suppose
that my smile is the result of the pleas-
urable sensations his appearance excites
in me. Nature has dignity at times ;
some animals have it; but man, never.
What man mistakes for it in himself is
his vanity, — a vanity much more per-
nicious than mine, because it deceives
its possessor, who is also wholly pos-
sessed by it, and is its slave. I have
had a great many illusions in my life,
Signor Grandi."

" One would say, baron, that you had
parted with them."

" Yes, and that is my chief vanity, —

the vanity of vanities which I prefer to
all the others. It is only a man of no
imagination who has no vanity. He
cannot imagine himself any better than
he is. A creative genius makes for his
own person a ' self ' which he thinks he
is, or desires other people to believe
him to be. It makes little difference
whether he succeeds or not, so long as
he flatters himself he does. He com-
placently takes all his images from the
other animals, or from natural objects
and phenomena, depicting himself bold
as an eagle, brave as a lion, strong as an
ox, patient as an ass, vain as a popinjay,
talkative as a parrot, wily as a serpent,
gentle as a dove, cunning as a fox, surly
as a bear ; his glance is lightning, his
voice thunder, his heart stone, his hands
are iron, his conscience a hell, his sinews
of steel, and his love like fire. In short,
he is like anything alive or dead, except
a man, saving when he is mad. Then
he is a fool. Only man can be a fool.
It distinguishes him from the higher
animals."

I can not describe the unutterable scorn
that blazed in his eyes as Benoni poured
out the vials of his wrath on the un-
lucky human race. With my views,
we were not likely to agree in this
matter.

" Who are you ? " I asked. " What
right can you possibly have to abuse us
all in such particularly strong terms ?
Do you ever make proselytes to your
philosophy ? "

" No," said he, answering my last
question, and recovering his serenity
with that strange quickness of transi-
tion I had remarked when he had made
music during his previous visit. " No,
they all die before I have taught them
anything."

" That does not surprise me, baron,"
said I. He laughed a little.

" Well, perhaps it would surprise you
even less if you knew me better," he
replied. " But really, I came here to
talk about Cardegna, and not to chatter

730

A Roman Singer.

[December,

about that contemptible creature, man,
who is not worth a moment's notice, I
assure you. I believe I can find these
people, and I confess it would amuse
me to see the old man's face when we
walk in upon him. I must be absent
for a few days on business in Austria,
and shall return immediately, for I have
not taken my bath yet, that I spoke of.
Now, if it is agreeable to you, I would
propose that we go to the hills, on my
return, and prosecute our search togeth-
er; writing to Nino in the mean time
to come here as soon as he has finished
his engagement in Paris. If he comes
quickly, he may go with us ; if not, he
can join us. At all events, we can have
a very enjoyable tour among the natives,
who are charming people, quite like ani-
mals, as you ought to know."

I think I must . be a very suspicious
person. Circumstances have made me
so, and perhaps my suspicions are very
generally wrong. It may be. At all
events, I did suspect the rich and dan-
dified old baron of desiring to have a
laugh by putting Nino into some absurd
situation. He had such strange views,
or, at least, he talked so oddly, that I
did not believe half he said. It is not
possible that anybody should seriously
hold the opinions he professed.

When he was gone I sat alone, pon-
dering on the situation, which was like
a very difficult problem in a nightmare,
that could not or would not look sensi-
ble, do what I would. It chanced that
I got a letter from Nino that evening,
and I confess I was reluctant to open it,
fearing that he would reproach me with
not having taken more pains to help
him. I felt as though, before opening
the envelope, I should like to go back a
fortnight and put forth all my strength
to find the contessina, and gain a com-
forting sense of duty performed. If I
had only done my best, how easy it
would have been to face a whole sheet
of complaints ! Meanwhile the letter
was come, and 1 had done 'nothing worth

mentioning. I looked at the back of
it, and my conscience smote me ; but it
had to be accomplished, and at last I
tore the cover off and read.

Poor Nino ! He said he was ill with
anxiety, and feared it would injure his
voice. He said that to break his en-
gagement and come back to Rome would
be ruin to him. He must face it out,
or take the legal consequences of a
breach of contract, which are overwhelm-
ing to a young artist. He detailed all
the efforts he had made to find Hedwig,
pursuing every little sign and clue that
seemed to present itself ; all to no pur-
pose. The longer he thought of it, the
more certain he was that Hedwig was
not in Paris or London. She might be
anywhere else in the whole world, but
she was certainly not in either of those
cities. Of that he was convinced. He
felt like a man who had pursued a beau-
tiful image to the foot of a precipitous
cliff ; the rock had opened and swal-
lowed up his dream, leaving him stand-
ing alone in hopeless despair ; and a
great deal more poetic nonsense of that
kind.

I do not believe I had ever, realized
what he so truly felt for Hedwig, until
I sat at my table with his letter be-
fore me, overcome with the sense of my
own weakness in not having effectually
checked this mad passion at its rise ;
or, since it had grown so masterfully,
of my wretched procrastination in not
having taken my staff in my hand and
gone out into the world to find the wom-
an my boy loved and bring her to him.
By this time, I thought, I should have
found her. I could not bear to think
of his being ill, suffering, heart-broken,
— ruined, if he lost his voice by an ill-
ness, — merely because I had not had
the strength to do the best thing for
him. Poor Nino, I thought, you shall
never say again that Coruelio Grand!
has not done what was in his power to
make you happy.

" That baron ! an apoplexy on him !

1883.]

A Roman Singer.

731

has illuded me with his promises of
help," I said to myself. " He has no
more intention of helping me or Nino
than he lias of carrying off the basilica
of St. Peter. Courage, Cornelio ! thou
must gird up tby loius, and take a little
money in thy scrip, and find Hedwig von
Lira."

All that night I lay awake, trying
to think how I might accomplish this
end ; wondering to which point of the
compass I should turn, and above all
reflecting that I must make great sacri-
fices. But my boy must have what he
wanted, since he was consuming him-
self, as we say, in longing for it. It
seemed to me no time for counting the
cost, when every day might bring upon
him a serious illness. If he could only
know that I was acting, he would allow
his spirits to revive and take courage.

In the watches of the night I thought
over my resources, which, indeed, were
meagre enough ; for I am a very poor
man. It was necessary to take a great
deal of money, for once away from Rome
no one could tell when I might return.
My salary as professor is paid to me
quarterly, and it was yet some weeks to
the time when it was due. I had only
a few francs remaining, — not more than
enough to pay my rent and to feed Ma-
riuccia and me. I had paid at Christ-
mas the last installment due on my vine-
yard out of Porta Salara, and though I
owed no man anything 1 had no money,
and no prospect of any for some time.
And yet I could not leave home on a
long journey without at least two hun-
dred scudi in my pocket. A scudo is a
dollar, and a dollar has five francs, so
that I wanted a thousand francs. You
see, in spite of the baron's hint about
the mountains, I thought I might have
to travel all over Italy before 1 satisfied
Nino.

A thousand francs is a great deal
of money, — it is a Peru, as we say.
I had not the first sou toward it. I
thought a long time. I wondered if the

old piano were worth anything ; whether
anybody would give me money for my
manuscripts, the results of patient years
of labor arid study ; my old gold scarf-
pin, my seal ring, and even my silver
watch, which keeps really very good
time, — what were they worth ? But it
would not be much, not the tenth part
of what I wanted. I was in despair,
and I tried to sleep. Then a thought
came to me.

" I arn a donkey," I said. " There is
the vineyard itself, — my little vineyard
beyond Porta Salara. It is mine, and
is worth half as much again as I need."
And I slept quietly till morning.

It is true, and I am sure it is natural,
that in the daylight my resolution looked
a little differently to me than it did in
the quiet night. I had toiled and scraped
a great deal more than you know to buy
that small piece of land, and it seemed
much more my own than all Serveti had
ever been in my better days. Then I
shut myself up in my room and read
Nino's letter over again, though it pained
me very much ; for I needed courage.
And when I had read it, I took some
papers in my pocket, and put on my
hat and my old cloak, which Nino will
never want any more now for his mid-
night serenades, and I went out to sell
my little vineyard.

" It is for my boy," I said, to give
myself some comfort.

But it is one thing to want to buy,
and it is quite another thing to want to
sell. All day I went from one man to
another with my papers, — all the agents
who deal in those things ; but they only
said they thought it might be sold in
time ; it would take many days, and
perhaps weeks.

" But I want to sell it to-day," I ex-
plained.

" We are very sorry," said they, with
a shrug of the shoulders ; and they
showed me the door.

I was extremely down-hearted, and
though I could not sell my piece of land

732

A Roman Singer.

[December,

I spent three sous in buying two cigars
to smoke, and I walked about the Piazza
Colonna in the sun ; I would not go
home to dinner until I had decided what
to do. There was only one man I had
not tried, and he was the man who had
sold it to me. Of course I knew peo-
ple who do this business, for I had had
enough trouble to learn their ways when
I had to sell Serveti, years ago. But
this one man I had not tried yet, be-
cause I knew that he would drive a
cruel bargain with me when he saw I
wanted the money. But at last I went
to him, and told him just what my
wishes were.

" Well," he said, " it is a very bad
time for selling land. But to oblige
you, because you are a customer, I will
give you eight hundred francs for your
little place. That is really much more
than I can afford."

" Eight hundred francs ! " I exclaimed
in despair. " But I have paid you near-
ly twice as much for it in the last three
years ! What do you take me for ? To
sell such a gem of a vineyard for eight
hundred francs ! If you offer me thir-
teen hundred I will discuss the matter
with you."

" I have known you a long time,
Signor Grandi, and you are an honest
man. I am sure }'ou do not wish to de-
ceive me. I will give you eight hun-
dred and fifty."

Deceive him, indeed ! The very man
who had received fifteen hundred from
me said I deceived him when I asked
thirteen hundred for the same piece of
land ! But I needed it very much, and
so, bargaining and wrangling, I got one
thousand and seventy -five francs in
bank-notes; and I took care they should
all be good ones, too. It was a poor
price, I know, but I could do no better,
and I went home happy. But I dared
not tell Mariuccia. She is only my ser-
vant, to be sure, but she would have
torn me in pieces.

Then I wrote to the authorities at the

university to say that I was obliged to
leave Rome suddenly, and would of
course not claim my salary during my
absence. But I added that I hoped
they would not permanently supplant
me. If they did, I knew I should be
ruined. Then I told Mariuccia that I
was going away for some days to the
country, and I left her the money to
pay the rent, and her wages, and a little
more, so that she might be provided for
if I were detained very long. I went
out again and telegraphed to Nino, to
say I was going at once in search of the
Liras, and begging him to come home
as soon as he should have finished his
engagement.

To tell the truth, Mariuccia was very
curious to know where I was going, and
asked me many questions, which I had
some trouble in answering. But at last
it was night again, and the old woman
went to bed and left me. Then I went
on tiptoe to the kitchen, and found a
skein of thread and two needles, and set
to work.

I knew the country whither I was go-
ing very well, and it was necessary to
hide the money I had in so.me ingenious
way. So I took two waistcoats, — one
of them was quite good still, — and I
sewed them together, and basted the
bank-notes between them. It was a
clumsy piece of tailoring, though it took
me so many hours to do it. But I had
put the larger waistcoat outside very
cunningly, so that when I had put on
the two, you could not see that there
was anything beneath the outer one. I
think I was very clever to do this with-
out a woman to help me. Then I looked
to my boots, and chose my oldest clothes,
— and you may guess, from what you
know of me, how old they were, — and
I made a little bundle that I could carry
in my hand, with a change of linen, and
the like. These things I made ready
before I went to bed, and I slept with
the two waistcoats and the thousand
francs under my pillow, though I sup-

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

733

pose nobody would have chosen that
particular night for robbing me.

All these preparations had occupied
me so much that I had not found any
time to grieve over my poor little vine-
yard that I had sold ; and besides, I was
thinking all the while of Nino, and how
glad he would be to know that I was
really searching for Hedwig. But when
I thought of the vines, it hurt me ; and
I think it is only long after the deed
that it seems more blessed to give than
to receive.

But at last I slept, as tired folk will,
leaving care to the morrow ; and when
I awoke it was daybreak, and Mariuccia
was clattering angrily with the tin coffee-
pot outside. It was a bright morning,
and the goldfinch sang, and I could hear
him scattering the millet seed about his
cage while I dressed. And then the
parting grew very near, and I drank my
coffee silently, wondering how soon it
would be over, and wishing that the old
woman would go out and let me have
my house alone. But she would not,
and to my surprise she made very little
worry or trouble, making a great show
of being busy. When I was quite ready,

she insisted on putting a handful of roast-
ed chestnuts into my pocket, and she
said she would pray for me. The fact
is, she thought, foolish old creature as
she is, that I was old and in poor health,
and she had often teased me to go into
the country for a few days, so that she
was not ill pleased that I should seem
to take her advice. She stood looking
after me as I trudged along the street,
with my bundle and my good stick in
my right hand, and a lighted cigar in
my left.

I had made up my mind that I ought
first to try the direction hinted at by the
baron, since I had absolutely no other
clue to the whereabouts of the Count
von Lira and his daughter. I therefore
got into the old stage that still runs to
Palestrina and the neighboring towns,
for it is almost as quick as going by
rail, and much cheaper ; and half an
hour later we rumbled out of the Porta
San Lorenzo, and I had entered upon
the strange journey to find Hedwig von
Lira, concerning which frivolous people
have laughed so unkindly. And you
may call me a foolish old man if you
like. I did it for my boy.

F. Marion Crawford.

MARY MOODY EMERSON.1

I WISH to meet the invitation with
which the ladies have honored me, by of-
fering them a portrait of real life. It
is a representative life, such as could
hardly have appeared out of New Eng-
land ; of an age now past, and of which, I
think, 110 types survive. Perhaps I de-
ceive myself and overestimate its inter-
est. It has to me a value like that which
many readers find in Madame Guyon,
in liahel, in Eugenie de Guerin, but it

1 Aunt of Mr. Emerson, and a potent influence
on the lives of him and his brothers. This paper
was read before the Woman's Club, in Boston,
several years ago, under the title Amita, which

is purely original and hardly admits of a
duplicate. Then it is a fruit of Calvin-
ism and New England, and marks the
precise time when the power of the old
Creed yielded to the influence of Mod-
ern Science and humanity. I have found
that I could only bring you this portrait
by selections from the diary of my hero-
ine, premising a sketch of her time and
place. I report some of the thoughts
and soliloquies of a country girl, poor,
was also the original superscription of the Nun's
Aspiration, in his Poems; a rendering into verse
of a passage in Miss Emerson's diary.

734

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

solitary, — " a goody," as she called her-
self, — growing from youth to age amid
slender opportunities aud usually very
humhle company.

Mary Moody Emerson was born just
before the outbreak of the Revolution.
When introduced to Lafayette at Port-
land, she told him that she was " in
arms " at the Concord fight. Her fa-
ther, the minister of Concord, a warm
patriot in 1775, who went as a chaplain
to the American army at Ticonderoga,
carried his infant daughter, before he
went, to his mother in Maiden, and told
her to keep the child until he returned.
He died, at Rutland, Vermont, of army
fever, the next year, and Mary remained
at Maiden with her grandmother, and,
after the death of this relative, with her
father's sister, in whose house she grew
up, rarely seeing her brothers and sis-
ters in Concord. This aunt and her hus-
band lived on a farm, were getting old,
and the husband a shiftless, easy man.
There was plenty of work for the little
niece to do day by day, and not always
bread enough in the house. One of her
tasks, it appears, was to watch for the ap-
proach of the deputy-sheriff, who might
come to confiscate the spoons or arrest
the uncle for debt. Later another aunt
who had become insane, was brought
hither to end her days. More and sad-
der work for this young girl. She had
no companions, lived in entire solitude
with these old people, very rarely cheered
by short visits from her brothers and sis-
ters. Her mother had married again, —
married the minister' who succeeded her
husband in the parish at Concord (Dr.
E/ra Ripley), and had now a young
family growing up around her.

Her aunt became strongly attached to
Mary, and persuaded the family to give
her up to them as a daughter, on some
terms embracing a care of her future in-
terests. She would leave the farm to
her, by will. This promise was kept ;
Mary came into possession of the farm
many years after, and her dea^gs with

it gave her no small trouble, though
they give much piquancy to her letters
in after years. Finally it was sold, and
its price invested in a share of a farm
in Maine, and she lived there as a board-
er, with her sister, for many years. The
farm was in a picturesque country, with-
in sight of the White Mountains, with
a little lake in front, at the foot of a
high hill, called Bear Mountain. Not
far from the house was a brook running
over a granite floor like the Franconia
Flume, and noble forests around. Every
word she writes about this farm (" Elm
Vale," Waterford), her dealings and
vexations about it, her joys and rap-
tures of religion and Nature, interest
like a romance, and to those who may
hereafter read her letters, will make its
obscure acres amiable.

In Maiden she lived through all her
youth and early womanhood, with the
habit of visiting the families of her
brothers and sisters on any necessity of
theirs. Her good-will to serve, in time
of sickness or of pressure was known
to them, and promptly claimed, and her
attachment to the youths and maidens
growing up in those families was secure
for any trait of talent or of character.
Her sympathy for young people who
pleased her was almost passionate, and
was sure to make her arrival in each
house a holiday.

Her early reading was Milton, Young,
Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan
Edwards, and always the Bible. Later,
Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus,
Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Herder,
Locke, Madame De Stael, Channing,
Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read
in her manuscript, or recall the conver-
sation of old-school people, without see-
ing that Milton and Young had a relig-
ious authority in their minds, and nowise
the slight, merely entertaining quality
of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle,
Plotinus, — how venerable and organic
as Nature they are in her mind !

What a subject is her mind and life

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

735

for the finest novel ! When I read
Dante, the other day, and his para-
phrases to signify with more adequate-
ness Christ or Jehovah, whom do you
think I was reminded of ? Whom but
Mary Emerson and her eloquent theol-
ogy ?

She had a deep sympathy with gen-
ius. When it was unhallowed, as in
Byron, she had none the less, whilst she
deplored and affected to denounce him.
But she adored it when ennobled by
character. She liked to notice that the
greatest geniuses have died ignorant of
their power and influence. She wished
you to scorn to shine.

" My opinion," she writes, [is] " that a
mind like Byron's would never be satis-
fied with modern Unitarianism, — that
the fiery depths of Calvinism, its high
and mysterious elections to eternal bliss,
beyond angels and all its attendant won-
ders, would have alone been fitted to fix
his imagination."

Her wit was so fertile, and only used
to strike, that she never used it for dis-
play, any more than a wasp would pa-
rade his sting. It was ever the will and
not the phrase that concerned her. Yet
certain expressions, when they marked
a memorable state of mind in her expe-
rience, recurred to her afterwards, and
she would vindicate herself as having
said to Dr. R., or Uncle L., so and so,
at such a period of her life. But they
were intensely true, when first spoken.
All her language was happy, but inim-
itable, unattainable by talent, as if
caught from some dream. She calls her-
self " the puny pilgrim, whose sole tal-
ent is sympathy." " I like that kind of
apathy that is a triumph to overset."

She writes to her nephew Charles
Emerson, in 1833, "I could never have
adorned the garden. If I had been in
aught but dreary deserts, I should have
idolized my friends, despised the world
and been haughty. I never expected
connections and matrimony. My taste
was formed in romance, and I knew I

was not destined to please. I love God
and his creation as I never else could.
I scarcely feel the sympathies of this
life enough to agitate the pool. This in
general, one case or so excepted, and
even this is a relation to God through
you. 'T was so in my happiest early
days, when you were at my side."

Destitution is the Muse of her gen-
ius, — Destitution and Death. I used
to propose that her epitaph should be :
" Here lies the angel of Death." And
wonderfully as she varies and poetically
repeats that image in every page and
day, yet not less fondly and sublimely
she returns to the other, — the grandeur
of humility and privation ; as thus : " The
chief witness which I have had of a
godlike principle of action and feeling
is in the disinterested joy felt in others'
superiority. For the love of superior
virtue is mine own gift from God."
" Where were thine own intellect if oth-
ers had not lived ? "

She had many acquaintances among
the notables of the time, and now and
then, in her migrations from town to
town in Maine and Massachusetts, in
search of a new boarding-place, discov-
ered some preacher with sense or piety,
or both. For on her arrival at any new
home she was likely to steer first to the
minister's house and pray his wife to
take a boarder ; and as the minister
found quickly that she knew all his
books and many more, and made shrewd
guesses at his character and possibilities,
she would easily rouse his curiosity, as
a person who could read his secret and
tell him his fortune.

She delighted in success, in youth, in
beauty, in genius, in manners. When
she met a young person who interested
her, she made herself acquainted and
intimate with him or her at once, by
sympathy, by flattery, by raillery, by an-
ecdotes, by wit, by rebuke, and stormed
the castle. None but was attracted or
piqued by her interest and wit and wide
acquaintance with books and with emi-

736

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

nent names. She said she gave herself
full swing in these sudden intimacies,
for she knew she should disgust them
soon, and resolved to have their best
hours. " Society is shrewd to detect
those who do not belong to her train,
and seldom wastes her attentions." She
surprised, attracted, chided and de-
nounced her companion by turns, and
prc-tty rapid turns. But no intelligent
youth or maiden could have once met
her without remembering her with in-
terest, and learning something of value.
Scorn trifles, lift your aims : do what
you are afraid to do : sublimity of char-
acter must come from sublimity of mo-
tive. These were the lessons which
were urged with vivacity, in ever new
language. But if her companion was
dull, her impatience knew no bounds.
She tired presently of dull conversa-
tions, and asked to be read to, and so
disposed of the visitor. If the voice or
the reading tired her, she would ask the
friend if he or she would do an errand
for her, and so dismiss them. If her
companions were a little ambitious, and
asked her opinions on books or matters
on which she did not wish rude hands
laid, she did not hesitate to stop the
intruder with " How 's your cat, Mrs.
Tenner ? "

" I was disappointed," she writes,
" in finding my little Calvinist no com-
panion, a cold little thing who lives in
society alone, and is looked up to as a
specimen of genius. I performed a mis-
sion in secretly undermining his vanity,
or trying to. Alas ! never done but by
mortifying affliction."

From the country she writes to her
sister in town, " You cannot help saying
(hut my epistle is a striking specimen of
egotism. To which I can only answer
that, in the country, we converse so
much more with ourselves, that we are
almost led to forget everybody else.
The very sound of your bells and the
rattling of the carriages have a tendency
to divert selfishness." " This seems a

world rather of trying each others' dis-
positions than of enjoying each others'
virtues."

She had the misfortune of spinning
with a greater velocity than any of the
other tops. She would tear into the
chaise or out of it, into the house or
out of it, into the conversation, into
the thought, into the character of the
stranger, — disdaining all the gradua-
tion by which her fellows time their
steps ; and though she might do very
happily in a planet where others moved
with the like velocity, she was offended
here by the phlegm of all her fellow-
creatures, and disgusted them by her im-
patience. She could keep step with no
human being. Her nephew [R. W. E.]
wrote of her : " I am glad the friend-
ship with Aunt Mary is ripening. As
by seeing a high tragedy, reading a
true poem, or a novel like Corinne,
so by society with her one's mind is
electrified and purged. She is no stat-
ute-book of practical commandments,
nor orderly digest of any system of phi-
losophy, divine or human, but a Bible,
miscellaneous in its parts, but one in its
spirit, wherein are sentences of condem-
nation, promises, and covenants of love
that make foolish the wisdom of the
world with the power of God."

Our Delphian was fantastic enough,
Heaven knows, yet could always be
tamed by large and sincere conversation.
Was there thought and eloquence, she
would listen like a child. Her aspira-
tion and prayer would begin, and the
whim and petulance in which, by dis-
eased habit, she had grown to indulge
without suspecting it, was burned up in
the glow of her pure and poetic spirit,
which dearly loved the Infinite.

She writes: "August, 1847. Vale.
My oddities were never designed —
effect of an uncalculating constitution,
at first, then through isolation ; and as
to dress, from duty. To be singular of
choice, without singular talents and vir-
tues, is as ridiculous as ungrateful." " It

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

737

is so universal with all classes to avoid
contact with me that I blame none.
The fact lias generally increased piety
and self-love." " As a traveler enters
some fine palace, and finds all the doors
closed, and he only allowed the use of
some t»renues and passages, so have I
wandered from the cradle over the apart-
ments of social affections, or the cabi-
nets of natural or moral philosophy, the
recesses of ancient and modern lore.
All say, Forbear to enter the pales of
the initiated by birth, wealth, talents,
and patronage. I submit with delight,
for it is the echo of a decree from above ;
and from the highway hedges where I
get lodging, and from the rays which
burst forth when the crowd are entering
these noble saloons, whilst I stand in
the doors, I get a pleasing vision, which
is an earnest of the interminable skies
where the mansions are prepared for
the pour."

"To live to give pain rather than
pleasure (the latter so delicious) seems
the spider-like necessity of my being on
earth, and I have gone on my queer
way with joy, saying, ' Shall the clay
interrogate ? ' But in every actual case
't is hard, and we lose sight of the first
necessity, — here too amid works red
with default, in all great and grand
and infinite aims, yet with intentions
di>interested, though uncontrolled by
proper reverence for others."

When Mrs. Thoreau called on her,
one day, wearing pink ribbons, she shut
her eyes, and so conversed with her for
a time. By and by she said, "Mrs.
Thoreau, I don't know whether you
have observed that my eyes are shut."
"Yes, madam, I have observed it."
" Perhaps you would like to know the
reasons ? " " Yes, I should." " I don't
like to see a person of your age guilty
of such levity in her dress."

When her cherished favorite, E. H.,
was at the Vale, and had gone out to
walk in the forest with Hannah, her
niece, Aunt Mary feared they were lost,

VOL. LII. — wo. 314. 47

and found a man in the next house, and
begged him to go and look for them.
The man went, and returned, saying
that he could not find them. " Go, and
cry ' Elizabeth ! ' ' The man rather de-
clined this service, as he did not know
Miss H. She was highly offended, and
exclaimed, " God has given you a voice
that you might use it in the service of
your fellow-creatures. Go instantly,
and call ' Elizabeth,' till you find them."
The man went immediately, and did as
he was bid, and having found them
apologized for calling thus, by telling
what Miss Emerson had said to him.

When some ladies of my acquaint-
ance, by an unusual chance, found them-
selves in her neighborhood and visited
her, I told them that she was no whis-
tle that every mouth could play on, but
a quite clannish instrument, a pibroch,
for example, from which none but a na-
tive Highlander could draw music.

In her solitude of twenty years, with
fewest books, and those only sermons,
and a copy of Paradise Lost, without
covers or title-page, so that later, when
she heard much of Milton, and sought
his work, she found it was her very
book which she knew so well, she
was driven to find Nature her compan-
ion and solace. She speaks of " her
attempts in Maiden to wake up the soul
amid the dreary scenes of monotonous
Sabbaths, when Nature looked like a
pulpit."

"Maiden, 1805, November loth.
What a rich day, so fully occupied in
pursuing truth that I scorned to touch
a novel, which for so many years I have
wanted. How insipid is fiction to a
mind touched with immortal views !

"November IGth. I am so small in
my expectations, that a week of indus-
try delights. Rose before light every
morn ; visited from necessity once, and
again for books ; read Butler's Analogy ;
commented on the Scriptures ; read in a
little book, Cicero's Letters, — a few ;
touched Shakspeare ; washed, carded,

738

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

cleaned house, and baked. To-day can-
not recall an error, nor scarcely a sacri-
fice, but more fullness of content in the
labors of a day never was felt. There
is a sweet pleasure in bending to cir-
cumstances while superior to them."

"Maiden, 1807, September. The
rapture of feeling I would part from, for
days more devoted to higher discipline.
But when Nature beams with such ex-
cess of beauty, when the heart thrills
with hope in its Author, — feels that it
is related to him more than by any ties
of creation, — it exults, too fondly per-
haps for a state of trial. But in dead
of night, nearer morning, when the
eastern stars glow, or appear to glow,
with more indescribable lustre, a lustre
which penetrates the spirit with wonder
and curiosity, — then, however awed,
who can fear ? Since Sabbath, Aunt

B [the insane aunt] was brought

here. Ah ! mortifying sight ! instinct
perhaps triumphs over reason and every
dignified respect to herself, in her anx-
iety about recovery, and the smallest
means connected. Not one wish of oth-
ers detains her, not one care. But it
alarms me not, I shall delight to re-
turn to God. His name my fullest con-
fidence. His sole presence ineffable
pleasure."

"I walked yesterday five or more
miles, lost to mental or heart existence,
through fatigue, just fit for the society
I went into : all mildness and the most
commonplace virtue. The lady is cele-
brated for her cleverness, and she was
never so good to me. Met a lady in the
morning walk, a foreigner, — conversed
on the accomplishments of Miss T. My
mind expanded with novel and inno-
cent pleasure. Ah ! were virtue and
that of dear heavenly meekness attached
by any necessity to a lower rank of gen-
teel people, who would sympathize with
the exalted with satisfaction ? But that
is not the case, I believe. A mediocrity
does seem to me more distant from emi-
nent virtue than the extremes of station :

though after all it must depend on the
nature of the heart. A mediocre mind
will be deranged in either extreme of
wealth or poverty, praise or censure,
society or solitude. The feverish lust
of notice perhaps in all these cases
would injure the heart of common re-
finement and virtue."

Later she writes of her early days in
Maiden, " When I get a glimpse of the
revolutions of nations, — that retribution
which seems forever going on in this
part of creation, — I remember with
great satisfaction that from all the ills
suffered, in childhood and since, from
others, I felt that it was rather the or-
der of things than their individual fault.
It was from being early impressed by
my poor, unpractical Aunt that Provi-
dence and prayer were all in all. Poor
woman ! Could her own temper in
childhood and age have been subdued,
how happy for herself, who had a warm
heart ; but for me would have prevented
those early lessons of fortitude which
her caprices taught me to practice. Had
I prospered in life, what a proud, ex-
cited being, even to feverishness, I
might have been. Loving to shine,
flattered and flattering, anxious, and
wrapped in others, frail and feverish as
myself."

She alludes to the early days of her
solitude, sixty years afterwards, on her
own farm in Maine, speaking sadly the
thoughts suggested by the rich autumn
landscape around her : " Ah ! as I
walked out this afternoon, so sad was
wearied Nature that I felt her whisper
to me, ' Even these leaves you use to
think my better emblems have lost their
charm on me too, and I weary of my
pilgrimage, — tired that I must again
be clothed in the grandeurs of winter,
and anon be bedizened in flowers and
cascades. Oh, if there be a power supe-
rior to me, — and that there is my own
dread fetters proclaim, — when will He
let my lights go out, my tides cease to
an eternal ebb ? Oh for transformation !

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

739

I am not infinite, nor have I power or
will, but bound and imprisoned, the tool
of mind, even of the beings I feed and
adorn. Vital, I feel not ; not active,
but passive, and cannot aid the creatures
which seem my progeny, — myself. But
you are ingrate to tire of me, now you
want to look beyond. 'T was I who
soothed your thorny childhood, though
you knew me not, and you were placed
in rny most leafless waste. Yet I com-
forted thee when going on the daily
errand, fed thee with my mallows on
the first young day of bread failing.
More, I led thee when thou knewest
not a syllable of my active Cause, (any
more than if it had been dead eternal
matter,) to that Cause ; and from the
solitary heart taught thee to say, at first
womanhood, Alive with God is enough,
— 't is rapture.' "

[1826.] " This morning rich in ex-
istence ; the remembrance of past desti-
tution in the deep poverty of my Aunt,
and her most unhappy temper ; of bit-
terer days of youth and age, when my
senses and understanding seemed but
means of labor, or to learn my own
unpopular destiny, and that — but no
more ; — joy, hope and resignation unite
me to Him whose mysterious" Will ad-
justs everything, and the darkest and
lightest are alike welcome. Oh could
this state of mind continue, death would
not be longed for." " I felt, till above
twenty years old, as though Christianity
were as necessary to the world as exist-
ence : — was ignorant that it was lately
promulged, or partially received." Later:
" Could I have those hours in which in
fresh youth I said, To obey God is joy,
though there were no hereafter, I should
rejoice, though returning to du<."

" Folly follows me as the shadow
does the form. Yet my whole life de-
voted to find some new truth which will
link me closer to God. And the simple
principle which made me say in youth
and laborious poverty, that should He
make me a blot on the fair face of his

creation, I should rejoice in His will, has
never been equaled, though it returns
in the long life of destitution like an
angel. I end days of fine health and
cheerfulness without getting upward
now. How did I use to think them
lost ! If more liberal views of the Di-
vine Government make me think noth-
ing lost which carries me to His now
hidden presence, there may be danger
of losing and causing others the loss of
that awe and sobriety so indispensable."

She was addressed and offered mar-
riage by a man of talents, education, and
good social position, whom she respected.
The proposal gave her pause and much
to think, but after consideration she re-
fused it, I know not on what grounds :
a few allusions to it in her diary sug-
gest that it was a religious act, and it
is easy to see that she could . hardly
promise herself sympathy in her relig-
ious abandonment with any but a rarely-
found partner.

" 1807, January 19, Maiden [allud-
ing to the sale of her farm]. Last night
I spoke two sentences about that fool-
ish place, which I most bitterly lament,
— not because they were improper, but
they arose from anger. It is difficult,
when we have no kind of barrier, to
command our feelings. But this shall
teach me. It humbles me beyond any-
thing I have met, to find myself for
a moment affected with hope, fear, or
especially anger, about interest. But I
did overcome and return kindness for
the repeated provocations. What is it ?
My uncle has been the means of lessen-
ing my property. Ridiculous to wound
him for that. He was honestly seeking
his own. But at last, this very night,
the bargain is closed, and I am delight-
ed with myself : my dear self has done
well. Never did I so exult in a trifle.
Happy beginning of my bargain, though
the sale of the place appears to me of
tin; worst things for me at this time."

•-.I an nary '2\. Weary at times of
objects so tedious to hear aud see. Oh

740

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

the power of vision, then the delicate
power of the nerve which receives im-
pn-»ions from sounds! If ever I am
with a social life, let the accent
be grateful. Could I at times be re-
galed with music, it would remind me
that there are sounds. Shut up in this
weather with careful, infirm, af-
flicted age, it is wonderful, my spirits;
hopes I can have none. Not a prospect
but is dark on earth, as to knowledge
and joy from externals ; but the pros-
pect of a dying bed reflects lustre on all
the rest. The evening is fine, but I dare
not enjoy it. The moon and stars re-
proach me, because I had to do with
mean fools. Should I take so much care
to save a few dollars ? Never was I so
much ashamed. Did I say with what
rapture I might dispose of them to the
poor ? < Pho ! self-preservation, dignity,
confidence in the future, contempt of
trifles ! Alas, I am disgraced. Took a
momentary revenge on for worry-
ing me."

"January 30. I walked to Captain
Dexter's. Sick. Promised never to
put that ring on. Ended miserably the
month which began so worldly.

" It was the choice of the Eternal that
gave the glowing seraph his joys, and
to me my vile imprisonment. I adore
Him. It was His will that gives my
superiors to shine in wisdom, friendship
and ardent pursuits, while I pass my
youth, its last traces, in the veriest
shades of ignorance and complete desti-
tution of society. I praise Him, though
when my strength of body falters it is
a trial not easily described." " True,
I must finger the very farthing candle-
end-;, — the duty assigned to my pride ;
and indeed so poor are some of those
allotted to join me on the weary, needy
path, that 't is benevolence enjoins self-
denial. Could I but dare it in the
bread-and-water diet ! Could I but live
free from calculation, as in the first half
of life, when my poor aunt lived. I
had ten dollars a year for clothes and

charity, and I never remember to have
been needy, though I never had but two
or three aids in those six years of earn-
ing my home. That ten dollars my
dear father earned and one hundred
dollars remain, and I can't bear to take
it, and don't know what to do. Yet I

would not breathe to or my

want. 'T is only now that I would not

let pay my hotel-bill. They have

enough to do. Besides, it would send me
packing to depend for anything. Better
anything than dishonest dependence,
which robs the poorer, and despoils
friendship of equal connection."

In 1830, in one of her distant homes,
she reproaches herself with some sud-
den passion she has for visiting her old
home and friends in the city, where she
had lived for a while with her brother
[Mr. Emerson's father] and afterwards
with his widow. " Do I yearn to be in
Boston ? 'T would fatigue, disappoint ;
I, who have so long despised means,
who have always found it a sort of re-
bellion to seek them ? Yet the old de-
sire for the worm is not so greedy as
[mine] to find myself in my old haunts."

" 1833. The difficulty of getting
places of low board for a lady is obvi-
ous, and, at moments, I am tired out.
Yet how independent, how better than
to hang on friends ! And sometimes I
fancy that I am emptied and peeled to
carry some seed to the ignorant, which
no idler wind can so well dispense."
" Hard to contend for a health which is
daily used in petition for a final close."
" Am I, poor victim, swept on through
the sternest ordinations of nature's laws
which slay ? Yet I '11 trust." " There
was great truth in what a pious enthu-
siast said, that, if God should cast him
into hell, he would yet clasp his hands
around Him."

" Newburyport, September, 1822.
High, solemn, entrancing noon, prophetic
of the approach of the Presiding Spirit
of Autumn. God preserve my reason !
Alone, feeling strongly, fully, that I

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

741

have deserved nothing ; according to
Adam Smith's idea of society, 'done
nothing ; ' doing nothing, never expect
to ; yet joying in existence, perhaps
striving to beautify one individual of
God's creation.

" Our civilization is not always mend-
ing our poetry. It is sauced and spiced
with our complexity of arts and inven-
tions, but lacks somewhat of the grand-
eur that belongs to a Doric and unphil-
osophical age. In a religious contempla-
tive public it would have less outward
variety, but simpler and grander means ;
a few pulsations of created beings, a
few successions of acts, a few lamps
held out in the firmament, enable us to
talk of Time, make epochs, write histo-
ries, — to do more, — to date the revela-
tions of God to man. But these lamps
are held to measure out some of the
moments of eternity, to divide the his-
tory'of God's operations in the birth
and death of nations, of worlds. It is
a goodly name for our notions of breath-
ing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We
personify it. We call it by every name
of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery.
Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity.
Dissolve the body and the night is gone ;
the stars are extinguished, and we meas-
ure duration by the number of our
thoughts, by the activity of reason, the
discovery of truths, the acquirement of
virtue, the approach to God. And the
gray -headed god throws his shadows all
around, and his slaves catch, now at
this, now at that one ; at the halo he
throws around poetry or pebbles, bugs
or bubbles. Sometimes they climb,
sometimes creep into the meanest holes ;
but they are all alike in vanishing, like
the shadow of a cloud."

To her nephew Charles : " War ;
what do 1 think of it ? Why, in your
ear I think it so much better than op-
pression, that if it were ravaging the
whole geography of despotism it would
be an omen of high and glorious im-
port. Channing paints its miseries, but

does he know tnose of a worse war, —
private animosities, pinching, bitter war-
fare of the human heart, the cruel op-
pression of the poor by the rich, which
corrupts old worlds ? How much better,
more honest, are storming and confla-
gration of towns ! They are but letting
blood which corrupts into worms and
dragons. A war-trump would be har-
mony to the jars of theologians and
statesmen such as the papers bring. It
was the glory of the Chosen People ;
nay, it is said there was war in Heaven.
War is among the means of discipline,
the rough meliorators, and no worse than
the strife with poverty, malice, and igno-
rance. War devastates the conscience of
men. Yet corrupt peace does not less.
And if you tell me of the miseries of
the battle-field, with the sensitive Chan-
ning (of whose love of life 1 am
ashamed), what of a few days of agony,
what of a vulture being the bier, tomb,
and parson of a hero, compared to the
long years of sticking on a bed and
wished away ? For the widows and or-
phans — Oh, I could give facts of the
long-drawn years of imprisoned minds
and hearts, which uneducated orphans
endure!

" 0 Time ! thou loiterer, thou whose
might has laid low the vastest and
crushed the worm, restest on thy hoary
throne, with like potency over thy agi-
tations and thy graves, oh when will
thy routines give way to higher and
lasting institutions ? When thy trophies
an<J thy name and all its wizard forms
be lost in the Genius of Eternity ? In
Eternity, no deceitful promises, no fan-
tastic illusions, no riddles concealed by
thy shrouds, none of thy Arachnean
webs, which decoy and destroy. Hasten
to finish thy motley work, on which
frightful Gorgons are at play, spite of
holy ghosts. 'Tis already moth-euten,
and its shuttles quaver, as the beams of
the loom are shaken.

" 25, Saturday. Hail, requiem of de-
parted Time ! Never was incumbent's

742

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

funeral followed by expectant heir with
more satisfaction. Yet not his hope is
mine. For in the weary womb are pro-
lific numbers of the same sad hour, col-
ored by the memory of defeats in vir-
tue, by the prophecy of others, more
dreary, blind and sickly. Yet He who
formed thy web, who stretched thy warp
from long ages, has graciously given
man to throw his shuttle, or feel he
does, and irradiate the filling woof with
many a flowery rainbow, — labors, rath-
er, evanescent efforts, which will wear
like flowerets in brighter soils ; — has
attuned his mind in such unison with
the harp of the universe that he is nev-
er without some chord of hope's music.
'T is not in the nature of existence,
while there is a God, to be without the
pale of excitement. When the dreamy
pages of life seem all turned and folded
down to very weariness, even this idea of
those who fill the hour with crowded vir-
tues lifts the spectator to other worlds,
and he adores the eternal purposes of
Him who lifteth up and casteth down,
bringeth to dust and raiseth to the skies.
'T is a strange deficiency in Brougham's
title of a System of Natural Theology,
when the moral constitution of the being
for whom these contrivances were made
is not recognized. The wonderful inhab-
itant of the building to which unknown
ages were the mechanics is left out as to
that part where the Creator had put his
own lighted candle, placed a vicegerent.
Not to complain of the poor old earth's
chaotic state, brought so near in its Jong
and gloomy transmutings by the geol-
ogist. Yet its youthful charms as decked
by the hand of Moses' Cosmogony will
linger about the heart, while Poetry
succumbs to Science. Yet there is a
sombre music in the whirl of times so
long gone by. And the bare bones of
this poor embi*yo earth may give the
idea of the Infinite far, far better than
when dignified with arts and industry :
its oceans, when beating the symbols of
ceaseless ages, than when covered with

cargoes of war and oppression. How
grand its preparation for souls, — .souls
who were to feel the Divinity, before
Science had dissected the emotions and
applied its steely analysis to that state
of being which recognizes neither psy-
chology nor element.

" September, 1836. Vale. The mys-
tic dream which is shed over the season.
Oh to dream more deeply ; to lose exter-
nal objects a little more! Yet the hold
on them is so slight that duty is lost
sight of, perhaps, at times. Sadness is
better than walking, talking, acting som-
nambulism. Yes, this entire solitude
with the Being who makes the powers
of life ! Even Fame, which lives in oth-
er states of Virtue, palls. Usefulness,
if it requires action, seems less like ex-
istence than the desire of being ab-
sorbed in God, retaining consciousness.
Number the waste places of the jour-
ney, — the secret martyrdom of youth,
heavier than the stake, I thought ; the
narrow limits which know no outlet,
the bitter dregs of the cup, — and all
are sweetened by the purpose of Him I
love. The idea of being no mate for
those intellectualists I 've loved to ad-
mire is no pain. Hereafter the same
solitary joy will go with me, were I not
to live, as I expect, in the vision of the
Infinite. Never do the feelings of the
Infinite, and the consciousness of finite
frailty and ignorance, harmonize so well
as at this mystic season in the deserts of
life. Contradictions, the modern Ger-
man says, of the Infinite and Finite."

I sometimes fancy I detect in Miss
Emerson's writings a certain — shall I
say polite and courtly homage to the
name and dignity of Jesus, not at all
spontaneous, but growing out of her re-
spect to the Revelation, and really veil-
ing and betraying her organic dislike
to any interference, any mediation be-
tween her and the Author of her being,
assurance of whose direct dealing with
her she incessantly invokes : for exam-
ple, the parenthesis, " Saving thy pres-

1883.]

Mary Moody Emerson.

743

ence, Priest and Medium of all this ap-
proach for a sinful creature ! " " Were
it possible that the Creator was not vir-
tually present with the spirits and bodies
which He has made, — if it were in the
nature of things possible He could with-
draw himself, — I would hold on to the
faith that, at some moment of His ex-
istence, I was present : that, though cast
from Him, my sorrows, my ignorance
and meanness were a part of His plan ;
my death, too, — however long and te-
diously delayed to prayer, — was de-
creed, was fixed. Oh how weary in
youth — more so scarcely now, not when-
ever I can breathe, as it seems, the at-
mosphere of the Omnipresence : then I
ask not faith nor knowledge ; honors,
pleasures, labors, I always refuse, com-
pared to this divine partaking of exist-
ence ; but how rare, how dependent on
the organs through which the soul oper-
ates !

" The sickness of the last week was
fine medicine ; pain disintegrated the
spirit, or became spiritual. I rose, — I
felt that I had given to God more per-
haps than an angel could, had promised
Him in youth that to be a blot on this
fair world at His command would be
acceptable. Constantly offer myself to
continue the obscurest and loneliest thing
ever heard of with one proviso, — His
agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou
dost, while Thou sheddest frost and dark-
ness on every path of mine."

For years she had her bed made in
the form of a coffin ; and delighted her-
self with the discovery of the figure of
a coffin made every evening on their
sidewalk by the shadow of a church
tower which adjoined the house.

Saladin caused his shroud to be made,
and carried it to battle as his standard.
She made up her shroud, and death still
refusing to come, and she thinking it a
pity to let it lie idle, wore it as a night-
gown, or a day-gown, nay, went out to
ride in it, on horseback, in her moun-
tain roads, until it was worn out. Then

she had another made up, and as she
never traveled without being provided
for this dear and indispensable contin-
gency, I believe, she wore out a great
many.

" 1833. I have given up, the last year
or two, the hope of dying. In the low-
est ebb of health nothing is ominous ;
diet and exercise restore. So it seems
best to get that very humbling business
of insurance. I enter my dear sixty the
last of this month."

"1835, June 16. Tedious indisposi-
tion ; — hoped, as it took a new form, it
would open the cool, sweet grave. Now
existence itself in any form is sweet.
Away with knowledge ; — God alone.
He communicates this our condition and
humble waiting, or I should never per-
ceive Him. Science, Nature, — oh I 've
yearned to open some page ; — not now,
too late. Ill health and nerves. Oh
dear worms, — how they will at some
sure time take down this tedious taber-
nacle, most valuable companions, in-
structors in the science of mind, by
gnawing away the meshes which have
chained it. A very Beatrice in show-
ing the Paradise. Yes, I irk under con-
tact with forms of depravity, while I
am resigned to being nothing, never ex-
pect a palm, a laurel, hereafter."

" 1826, July. If one could choose, and
without crime be gibbeted, were it not
altogether better than the long droop-
ing away by age without mentality or
devotion ? The vulture and crow would
caw, caw, and, unconscious of any de-
formity in the mutilated body, would
relish their meal, make no grimace of
affected sympathy, nor suffer any real
compassion. I pray to die, though hap-
pier myriads and mine own companions
press nearer to the throne. His coldest
beam will purify and render me forever
holy. Had I the highest place of acqui-
sition and diffusing virtue here, the prin-
ciple of human sympathy would be too
strong for that rapt emotion, that severe
delight which I crave ; nay, for that

744

Mary Moody Emerson.

[December,

kind of obscure virtue which is so rich
to lay at the feet of the Author of mo-
rality. Those economists (Adam Smith)
who say nothing is added to the wealth
of a nation but what is dug out of the
earth, and that, whatever disposition of
virtue may exist, unless something is
done for society, deserves no fame, —
why, I am content with such paradox-
ical kind of facts ; but one secret senti-
ment of virtue, disinterested (or per-
haps not), is worthy, and will tell, in
the world of spirits, of God's immediate
presence, more than the blood of many
a martyr who has it not." " I have heard
that the greatest geniuses have died ig-
norant of their power and influence on
the arts and sciences. I believe thus
much, that their large perception con-
sumed their egotism, or made it impossi-
ble for them to make small calculations."

" That greatest of all gifts, however
small my power of receiving, the ca-
pacity, the element to love the All-per-
fect, without regard to personal happi-
ness ; happiness, — 't is itself."

She checks herself amid her passion-
ate prayers for immediate communion
with God : " I who never made a sacri-
fice to record, — I cowering in the nest
of quiet for so many years ; I indulge
the delight of sympathizing with great
virtues, blessing their Original : have I
this right ? "

" While I am sympathizing in the
government of God over the world, per-
haps I lose nearer views. Well I learned
his existence a priori. No object of
science or observation ever was pointed
out to me by my poor aunt, but His
Being and commands ; and oh how
much I trusted Him with every event
till I learned the order of human events
from the pressure of wants."

" What a timid, ungrateful creature !
Fear the deepest pitfalls of age, when
pressing on, in imagination at least, to
Him with whom a day is a thousand
years, — with whom all miseries and ir-
regularities are conforming to universal

good ! Shame on me who have learned
within three years to sit whole days in
peace and enjoyment without the least
apparent benefit to any, or knowledge
to myself, — resigned, too, to the mem-
ory of long years of slavery passed in
labor and ignorance, to the loss of that
character which I once thought and felt
so sure of, without ever being conscious
of acting from calculation."

Her friends used to say to her, " I
wish you joy of the worm ; " and when at
last her release arrived, the event of her
death had really such a comic tinge in
the eyes of every one who knew her
that her friends feared they might, at
her funeral, not dare to look at each
other, lest they should forget the serious
proprieties of the hour.

She gave high counsels. It was the
privilege of certain boys to have this
immeasurably high standard indicated
to their childhood ; a blessing which
nothing else in education could supply.
It is frivolous to ask, " And was she
ever a Christian in practice ? " Cas-
sandra uttered, to a frivolous, skeptical
time, the arcana of the Gods, but it is
easy to believe that Cassandra domesti-
cated in a lady's house would have
proved a troublesome boarder. Is it the
less desirable to have the lofty abstrac-
tions because the abstractionist is ner-
vous and irritable ? Shall we not keep
Flamsteed and Herschel in the obser-
vatory, though it should even be proved
that they neglected to rectify their own
kitchen clock ? It is essential to the
safety of every mackerel fisher that lati-
tudes and longitudes should be astronom-
ically ascertained ; and so every bank-
er, shopkeeper and wood-sawyer has a
stake in the elevation of the moral code
by saint and prophet. Very rightly, then,
the Christian ages proceeding on a grand
instinct have said : Faith alone, faith
alone.

I confess that when I read these pa-
pers I do not feel that religion has

1883.] TJie Initiate. 745

made any progress in our community, bert, and Thoreau, and this woman,
Neither do I feel that society and con- have no contemporaries : —
versation have. But elevation must al- i. Nor ponr thcse visioils of my Lord
ways be solitary. Plotinus, and Her- Through this glad mind as erst they poured."

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

THE INITIATE.

SLOWLY, with day's dying fall,
And with many a solemn sound,
Slowly from the Athenian wall,
The long procession wound.

Five days of the mystic nine
Clad in solemn thought were passed,
Ere the few could drink the wine
Or seek the height at last.

Then the chosen, young and old,
To Eleusis went their ways ;
But no lip the tale has told
Of those mysterious days.

In the seer's seeing eye,
The maiden with a faithful soul,
In youth that did not fear to die,
Was felt that strange control.

Yet no voice the dreadful word
Through these centuries of man
Made the sacred secret heard,
Or showed the hidden plan.

All the horrors born of death
Rose within that nine days' gloom,
Chasing those forms of mortal breath
From awful room to room.

Deep through bowels of the earth
They drove the seekers of the dark,
Hearts that longed to know the worth
Hid in the living spark.

In that moment of despairs
Was revealed — but who may tell
How the Omnipotent declares
His truth that all is well ?

746 Recollections of Rome daring the Italian Revolution. [December,

Saw they forms of their own lost ?
Heard they voices that have fled?
We know not, — or know at most
Their joy was no more dead.

Light of resurrection gleamed,
But in what shape we cannot hear ;
Glory shone of the redeemed
Beyond this world of fear.

Old books say Demeter came
And smiled upon them, and her smile
Burned all their sorrow in its flame,
Yet left them here awhile.

O shadowed sphere whereon we pause
To live our dream and suffer, thou
Shroudst the initiate days ; the cause
Gleams on thy morning brow !

A. F.

RECOLLECTIONS OF ROME DURING THE ITALIAN REVOLU-
TION.

III.

IN the immediate neighborhood of the
Fountain of Trevi, within sound indeed
of its falling jets and cascades, was an
ordinary building at the corner of the
Via del Nazereno and the Angelo Cus-
tode. An alto-relievo figure of such an
angel, on the walls of a house near by,
gave the latter street its name. An oil-
lamp burning before a shrine supplied
the neighborhood, on moonless evenings,
with pretty much all its light, whether
for those who, coming down from the di-
rection of the Pincian, turned to the left
towards the Stamperia and the Fountain,
or for those who took the right fork,
the Nazereno, towards S. Andrea delle
Fratte.

In the latter narrow street is the
stone - arched doorway to this corner
house, closed by two strong wooden
doors, on one of which hangs a large

iron knocker. Two distinct blows with
this are followed by a sharp click with-
in ; a large iron latch is invisibly lifted
by a cord from above ; and, pushing the
heavy door slowly open, the visitor finds
himself in a small, dark, lava-paved ves-
tibule. Entering, the deep gurgling of
unseen waters, ever flowing somewhere
just beneath, is his welcome. A dark
stone stairway opens on the right ; and
unless the stranger has learned to pro-
vide himself with a small match-box and
a waxen taper, which the resident in
Rome generally carries for such an exi-
gency, he must grope his way up-stairs,
with no light but his imagination or his
memory. On the second landing a small
red and white cord and tassel hang out
from a little hole in a well barred and
bolted door, with which, if needful, a
second summons can be given.

At least, all this was so twenty-four
years ago. And then a voice would

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. 747

promptly meet the ascending visitor
with its quick " Chi e?" (Who is it ?)
And if the reply were satisfactory, or if
a searching glance from within, through
a little grated wicket, rendered the in-
quiry superfluous, the door was quickly
opened, and a bright little woman, un-
naturally short in stature, appeared upon
the threshold with an antique brass Ro-
man lamp, to give a cheery greeting,
and to show the comer into a small
apartment of three rooms, which did
duty for the first rectory of the Amer-
ican church in Rome. What the ante-
room of the Palazzo Bernini and the
Chancellerie of the American Legation
were to St. Paul's-within-the- Walls, that
this little apartment was to the rectory
which is now slowly going up on the
Via Napoli, near that church.

No one of these, three rooms boasted
either fireplace or chimney, — indeed,
few Roman houses had anything of the
kind save in the kitchen ; but a sheet
of tin replaced a pane of glass in one
parlor window, and a hole in this gave
egress to the outer air for a pipe from a
little stove standing near ; and in this
stove, on a cold or rainy day, our dwarf
maid, Checca, would light up a fagot
or two of brush for us. Another and a
less obstructed window looked out across
the Angelo Custode upon the quarters
of certain officials of the French Army
of Occupation. Here the French colors
were brought back after every great
parade, escorted by a special guard of
honor, and were formally saluted, before
being taken into the house, by military
music from a fine brass band of fifty-
seven pieces. This frequent perform-
ance was a great attraction to the neigh-
borhood.

Checca, good soul, was a devotee, and
never mi>srd her daily mass, or her de-
vout prayer in the Fratte on every festa.
Her padrone and our landlord, on the
contrary, was a liberal and a republican.
He had his stories of the early days of
Pius IX., of the lay ministry of Count

Mamiani, of the assassination of Count
Rossi, of the flight of the Pope to Gaeta,
and of the siege of Rome. He had
been a member of the civic guard under
Garibaldi, in the defense of the city
against the French, ten years before.
Checca faithfully brought us all the
church news. She knew when the Pope
might be seen driving in the Villa Bor-
ghese or on the Pincio, when a triduo
would be sung at the Gesu, who would
preach the Quarantina at the Fratte, or
what were likely to be blessed numbers
at the pontifical lottery. From the pa-
drone, on the other hand, we were pretty
sure to hear of all the revolutionary
ebullitions or half-open secrets, to get
a copy of any political pamphlet which
might be in clandestine circulation, or
to learn the latest rumors from the world
without, bearing on the prospects of the
national movement. That Checca be-
lieved in the holy church and asked no
questions was clear. That the padrone
was concerned in every demonstration
against the Pope-king, of which he so
forewarned us, or afterwards gave us
details, was very probable.

When the Pope and Antonelli had
given up all hope from the congress and
the diplomates, they turned appropriate-
ly to more ecclesiastical defenders and
methods of defense. St. Joseph was
the husband and protector of the Virgin :
consequently, he was the natural pro-
tector of the church. To San Giuseppe,
therefore, on the 19th of March, I860,
all the faithful were now exhorted to
address themselves, invoking his inter-
ference to arrest the revolution. Checca
of course went over to the church be-
times ; but so did the padrone ! At St.
Peter's and everywhere the churches
were thronged far beyond ecclesiastical
expectation ; but by no means only with
devotees. For the Romans, wishing to
do honor to any one, instead of observ-
ing his birthday, as with us, celebrate
his name-day ; that is, the festa of the
saint whose name he bears. The lib-

748 Recollections of Home during the Italian Revolution. [December,

erals now opportunely recollected that
Giuseppe was the Christian name of
Garibaldi, and the festa was accordingly
observed in a spirit most uncalled for ;
and San Giuseppe (Garibaldi) was in-
voked in the very churches, as well as in
the piazza, to come to the relief of Rome.

This, as may be imagined, was most
aggravating to the authorities. A charge
of cavalry could readily be launched
against any liberal demonstration in the
streets, — as was done, indeed, on this
very St. Joseph's day, — and bad pol-
itics there corrected with sabre blows
and horses' hoofs. But when the Ro-
mans conformed only too generally to
the Invito Sagro of the cardinal vicar,
and filled the very churches themselves,
what could be done about it ?

We were not supposed to get any po-
litical information which the authorities
did not think best for the faithful to re-
ceive ; but, early in April, in spite — or
in consequence ? — of this observance of
St. Joseph's Day, disquieting rumors be-
gan to come again, this time from the
south. What the Naples papers and
the Giornale di Roma called " some un-
important disturbances " had taken place
in Palermo and Messina, possibly in
other parts of Sicily. These were, it
seems, " readily suppressed ; " but the
steamers of the Marseilles line were
pressed into government service, and
twenty thousand troops dispatched from
Naples, — a fact which raised a doubt
about the " unimportance " of the up-
rising. Private letters, moreover, and
even the Paris press soon represented
the whole island as in arms, the most
inland villages being in insurrection, un-
til it was difficult to say whether the
Neapolitan troops in the cities held the
inhabitants of the island in a state of
siege, as the Giornale di Roma assured
us to be the case ; or the insurgents had
shut up the troops in the cities, which
was more probable.

Under these circumstances, although
the Roman journal reiterated the assur-

ance that these Sicilian troubles were
" wholly without significance," yet the.
Pope decided to organize a small army
of " Pontifical Volunteers," upon which
he could rely were French protection
suddenly to fail him. The cardinal
vicar, also, ordered a litany procession
on the 15th of April, for the defense
of the Pope and " the recovery of the
Romagna."

The procession came off, as ordered,
but was spoken of as consisting only of
" three fraternities, the last of whom
were Cappuccini, bearing crucifixes and
sauntering along negligently, carrying
candles and chanting in a monotonous,
soulless way." But the Papal army
was soon made up of volunteers of al-
most every nationality, — notably, how-
ever, Belgian and Irish; the French
General LamoricierQ being authorized
by the emperor to enter into the Papal
service and take the command. Yet
even these seemed soon to be infected
with the spirit of the place. Some Irish
squads were quite too ready to extem-
porize a fight on any occasion, even
though they chanced to get on the wrong
side ; and " it was said " that a whole
regiment, the second Cacciatori, appar-
ently Italians, having been severely up-
braided by their French commander,
marched off from Viterbo, over the fron-
tier, and tendered their services to the
King of Italy.

The popular feeling about these pon-
tifical zouaves found little opportunity
of expression in Rome itself. But the
Florence Lampion e of May 17th had a
cartoon representing Lamoriciere march-
ing forth to the defense of Rome, armed
with a sword in one hand and a pastoral
staff in the other, the cross-keys on his
breast, and on his head a cardinal's hat,
from which waved a military plume. A
long winding train of priests and priest-
lings followed him, in full churchly rig,
fiercely prancing onward, four abreast,
chanting in full chorus, and armed with
bell, book, and holy-water sprinklers.

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

719

Meanwhile that Rome was thus at
once assuaging alarm and preparing for
the worst, news was brought by travel-
ers and by newspapers in their pockets
that, whatever San Giuseppe might be
doing, Giuseppe Garibaldi had escaped
the vigilance of the Sardinian authori-
ties at Genoa, suddenly embarked for
Sicily with a thousand or more enthu-
siasts from North Italy (three thou-
sand, as the story then came to Rome),
well supplied with arms and ammunition,
and landed at Marsala, under the vir-
tual protection of some English vessels,
which were so constantly in the way
that the Neapolitan cruisers could not
attack the Garibaldians.

During this month of May, the news
from Sicily came bit by bit, and in such
shape that no one could tell what to
make of it. The Papal authorities evi-
dently dreaded political infection. Al-
most daily did the Giornale di Roma,
on the faith of official information from
Naples, announce one after another a
succession of actions or skirmishes, in
which the royal cause was invariably
victorious, — losses, defeats, routs, pur-
suits, for the patriots, until it was a
marvel what there could be left from
one of these disasters to form material
for the next. Daily did the cause of
the heroic adventurer, desperate at first,
seem to grow worse and worse ; until
the climax was finally reached in the
announcement that, in despair of escape,
Garibaldi had committed suicide. But
in the teeth of such veracious chron-
icling, private rumor would persist in
telling a very different story. A three
days' prayer to the Virgin for the King
of Naples was unnecessarily, as would
seem, ordered to be observed at S. An-
drea delle Fratte, under the auspices of
some of the cardinals. The very scenes
of all these defeats and routs, as <jiven
in the Giornale itself, succeeded each
other in an extraordinary direction, —
the victors ever falling back, the defeated
ever advancing, until we learned at last,

as a Munich paper put it, that Garibaldi
" was so much exhausted by his repeat-
ed discomfitures that he was obliged to
retreat to Palermo, and rest himself in
the royal palace." Even after the Sicil-
ian capital had actually been surren-
dered, the Giornale di Roma would not
admit the fact, until the Count de Goyon
threatened, if it were not at once ac-
knowledged, to placard the intelligence
in the streets over his own signature.

Remarkable as this expedition will
ever be held as an episode in history, it
seemed even more extraordinary at the
time. Few then knew how far Garibaldi
really received cooperation where the ef-
fort was apparently made to thwart and
arrest him. Count Cavour was obliged
to reprove the negligence of the officials
who allowed arms to be left where Gar-
ibaldi could get possession of them, and
to charge the naval commander at Genoa
to prevent his departure from that port.
But both the Italian and the English
naval officers understood perfectly, in the
one case, that they were not expected
to be over-vigilant ; and, in the other,
that they would not be severely cen-
sured should Garibaldi turn to account
their presence in Sicilian waters. But
neither Garibaldi nor the public under-
stood this at the time. A popular carica-
ture of a little later day, July 8th, repre-
sented Cavour as a balancer on the tight
rope of Italian unity, at one end of
which Garibaldi is tugging, with great
danger to the equilibrium of the other.
Cavour, carrying the long pole of diplo-
macy, weighted with England and France
at either end, calls to Garibaldi not
to pull so hard upon the rope. The lat-
ter rejoins that he must do his duty ;
that it is Cavour who does not know
how to perform his part properly. The
world now knows with what great skill
Cavour was, at that very time, guarding'
his gallant but most undiplomatic co-
laborer from foreign interference, and
securing for him the possibilities of suc-
cess.

750 Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. [December,

Few of those, moreover, who had not
come, within the sphere of Garibaldi's
personal influence then fully realized
the moral power of the man, — of his
givat un-rllishness, of his sublime sin-
gltvlieartedness. He was indeed a brave
and daring soldier ; but he was no gen-
eral. It was this moral power, not ex-
ceptional military capacity, that was the
secret of his Sicilian campaign. It was
this power that, at Calatafiini, gave to a
thousand of his volunteers victory over
six times as many regular Neapolitan
troops, who cared little for either their
cause or their king. This confidence
in the paladin of the Italian revolution
was so unquestioning that the news of
the taking of Palermo actually antici-
pated the fact. For a week previous
to the event, the record appears, in the
diary on which this article largely de-
pends, of whispered congratulations on
the piazze, and the assurance of our pa-
drone that " after a skirmish, in which
the royal troops were repulsed, Garibal-
di intrenched himself on the heights of
Monreale, above Palermo ; and it is now
stated definitely that on the [day fol-
lowing] he marched into the city itself."
Palermo was actually occupied on the
6th of June, one month from the date
of Garibaldi's departure from Genoa.

Here Garibaldi, without the slightest
authority for so doing, save his own hon-
est heart and loyal purpose, proclaimed
himself dictator in the name of Victor
Emmanuel. During the month of June,
while tho cession of Savoy and of his
native Nice to France was quietly ef-
fected, and while he was himself en-
gaged in organizing a provisional gov-
ernment for Sicily, — a work for which
he was but poorly fitted, and in which
contending factions of either extreme
sought to make their own account, —
Rome was comparativly free from ru-
mors and disturbances.

Towards the close of June, Francis of
Naples made a late and desperate at-
tempt to save his throne. The Florence

caricaturist represented him as a gallant
in the street, guitar in hand, serenading
Signorina Cavour at a window above.
The serenade consisted of the offer of
a general amnesty, a constitution, the
tri-colored flag, an almost independent
viceroyalty for Sicily, and an alliance
with Piedmont. But the Sicilians and
Neapolitans received the tardy offer in
much the same amused and sarcastic
temper as the fair lady at the window,
and both Francis and Rome awaited the
progress of the revolution, helpless either
to persuade or to resist it.

Just at this time, moreover, a comet
appeared over Rome, which was of
course interpreted as the precursor of
war and further troubles, causing no
small excitement amongst the people,
and thus added to the perturbation which
the news from Sicily and Naples gave
to Antonelli and the Pope. " Almost
daily," to quote a private letter of this
date, " the troops are practiced in the
fields near the city. The Pope himself
went to witness the drill a few days
since, praised and encouraged them,
and presented each soldier with a little
medal of the Virgin, for whose aid there
are daily and constant prayers and spe-
cial ceremonies in the churches in behalf
of the Pope, and for his victory over his
enemies."

But to turn from this little flurry in
the secular armory to these more ap-
propriate "special ceremonies," on St.
Peter's day, June 29th, the function at
the Vatican basilica was, or was intend-
ed to be, exceptionally solemn. It was,'
however, far too seriously wanting in
reverence and even in common decency,
on the part of the subordinate perform-
ers, to impress the northern spectator
with its religious character.

The Pope was always reverent in
manner, and even devout, on such occa-
sions. Antonelli never forgot himself.
But near the high altar was a sort of
buffet ; and during the services a con-
tinual preparing, cleansing, and arraug-

1883.] Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution.

751

ing of the sacred vessels, — not only for
the altar service, but also for washing
the Pope's hands, — napkins, serving-
aprons, etc., gave the whole, at times,
quite as much the appearance of a do-
mestic gathering as of a religious cere-
mony. There was nothing serious in
the demeanor even of the officiating
priests. The officials at the side table
talked and lounged as servants would in
an anteroom.

The most impressive part of the ser-
vices was when, during the Pope's cel-
ebration of the mass, he elevated the
host. The whole multitude in the vast
church knelt, save here and there a
Protestant spectator. The sabres of the
noble guard rung for a moment on the
pavement ; then, after a solemn still-
ness, a breathless silence, the sound of
the silver trumpets came from the dome
above, the clear notes seeming to float
downwards from heaven itself.

To this provision of spiritual bread
succeeded, in the evening, the circenses,
which were, the day after, thus de-
scribed in a private letter from a lady :

"The celebrations of the day were
finished off by the girandola, or display

of fireworks from Monte Pincio. W

obtained a comfortable place for me, and
at half past eight we set off in a little
carriage. After being stopped at the
corners of several streets by mounted
guards, we finally reached the Ripetta,
and driving for a little distance on the
bank of the river (which was lighted
up with bonfires, producing beautiful
effects on the wal'r) we had from this
point a view of St. Peter's, which was
again illuminated, looking like some
temple of fairy-land. We were only
permitted to go within a very short dis-
tance of the Piazza [del Popolo], so we
alighted, and, mingling with the crowd,
soon got to the place where our chairs
were waiting for us.

" The commencement was announced
by the firing of cannon. Then followed
the ascent of some beautiful rockets,

which burst and descended in showers
of fire ; then a magnificent volcanic ir-
ruption preceded the transformation of
the great architectural piece — which
[on this occasion] was St. Peter's, fol-
lowed by the Fountain of Trevi — into
a temple of light. The various changes
of form and color were magical, and at
each, a signal was given by the cannon.
There was not enough wind to carry off
the smoke, but as it was lighted up it
gave a beauty of its own, though it
marred the brilliancy of the whole.

" After a while, a flame of light shot
from the Pincian to the base of the
obelisk, played around it, and then dart-
ed to posts standing about in the piazza,
where it lighted the lamps and revealed
the crowd in all directions, thus serv-
ing the double purpose of a fine finish-
ing off and of lighting up their home-
ward departure. All was quiet and or-
derly. The immense mass, estimated at
twenty thousand, had enjoyed the fire-
works, and, being satisfied, passed away
in groups by the three streets which ter-
minate in the Piazza del Popolo. We
gained our carriage without trouble or
being in any way inconvenienced by the
motley crowd about us."

Of one of the special ceremonies of
the church at this period, the same cor-
respondent writes :

" While I was at the window [in the
Via Sistina, July 8th] I was attracted
by a large crowd about the church of
Santa Maria Maggiore. I have since
learned that it was a procession to take
the picture of the Virgin — a miracu-
lous picture, highly esteemed, having
stopped the cholera at one time when
it was raging in Rome, — from that
church to the Gesu, in order there to
have prayers to the Virgin for peace.
It was attended by the cardinal vicar
of Rome and thousands of priests and
frati, bearing lighted candles. The pic-
ture was brilliantly illuminated, and the
people from time to time cried out?
' Ave Maria ! Ora pro nobifl ! ' '

752 Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution. [December,

On the second Sunday following, July
'22d, there was another of these sol-
emn processions, to which the Pope re-
sorted for protection in his danger ; in
honor, however, of an entirely different
madonna.

I quote now from a diary of the time :
" First, after a line of guards, came two
drummers, rattling away at a singular
rate. Then came a long double row of
candle-bearing frati ; then a brass band,
followed by an immense picture of the
Madonna and child, swung from a large
gilt rod and two upright staffs, borne by
priests. The reverse of this picture
represented a saint adoring and implor-
ing the Virgin. After this were a few
more priests, and then a huge cross,
seemingly of logs. It was about six-
teen feet high ; the foot, pointed as if
to go into the ground, rested in a belt
socket of the bearer. It was of paste-
board, but the imitation was perfect,
both of the bark and of the section,
which was about twelve inches in diam-
eter, and also of a few little ivy vines
and leaves twining around it. This was
followed by another double row of frati,
Dominicans.

" Then came another brass band, some
more priests, a mitred bishop bearing
a small silver crucifix, and then, the
great object of the procession, the shrine
of the Madonna. It was much like a
throne raised upon an altar, borne by
sixteen men, and rising in heavily gilt
arabesque forms, supported by cherubs,
to a large crown which formed its can-
opy. In this shrine sat an image of the
Virgin, arrayed in a dress of white satin,
embroidered heavily with gold, low in
the neck and with flowing sleeves. She
wore also a jeweled crown. The infant
Saviour in her arms was somewhat sim-
ilarly dressed.

" The people had showed some rever-
ence at the other parts of the proces-
sion ; but when this shrine came by,
%tlie crowds that filled the streets knelt
on all sides, more than I think I had

seen before, offering the profoundest
worship to the image."

" There is to be still another proces-
sion, next Sunday " (July 29th), — quot-
ing again the private correspondence al-
ready cited, — " to carry back the pic-
ture of the Madonna from the church
of II Gesu to that of Santa Maria
Maggiore, the Pope having in the mean
while presented the miraculous picture
with a silver chalice."

On the 30th, the same writer resumes :

" In the evening, about six, W went

to the church to see the procession. The
picture was loaded with votive offerings
of gold and silver and precious stones.
I don't know what effect has been pro-
duced upon Italian affairs, but at the
appearance of the picture the crowd
prostrated themselves in humble adora-
tion. I could see from my window the
illumination of the church, which pre-
sented the appearance of a pyramid of
lights and was very beautiful."

This procession, it seems, was "some
forty minutes in passing." The streets
along the route through which it passed
were gayly decked with red and yellow
tapestries ; and at least one private house
opposite the church, as well as the cam-
panile of the church itself, was thus illu-
minated.

During the period of these great July
processions, to which far more than to
his secular defenders the Pope had con-
fident recourse for protection against the
approaching revolution, Garibaldi was
pressing his attack upon Messina, the
last hold of Francis upon the island of
Sicily. On the 30th, the day following
this formal and solemn restoration of
the miraculous picture to Santa Maria
Maggiore, the news reached Rome that
Messina was taken, this extraordinary
three months' campaign at an end, and
Trinacria redeemed for constitutional
liberty and Italy. Our good Checca
shook her head, and devoutly said that
" we must accept the decrees of Provi-
dence ; " the padrone seutentiously as-

1883.]

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch.

753

sured us that Garibaldi " would take
Naples also in the coining fall, and that
he would be in Rome itself ere winter
should set in."

There were few left in Rome then to
give an unbiased judgment upon such
a prophecy. The American minister

was gone. The American church was
closed for the summer. The August
heats now forced away to the moun-
tains, or to cooler latitudes, the last
Americans who yet lingered in Rome.
Even the Italian revolution paused
again in its advance.

William Ghauncy Langdon.

0-BE-JOYFUL CREEK AND POVERTY GULCH.

" WHAT 's in a name ? " is no idle
question in a mining country. Every-
thing is in the names ; records of hope,
disappointment, success, failure, exiles'
homesickness, lovers' passion, despera-
does' profanity, — all are left, written
often in strange syllables on the rocks,
hills, and streams of the half-conquered
wildei ness.

When the wilderness has proved a
mockery, refusing to give up its treas-
ures, and the miners have pushed on,
leaving behind them no trace except
deserted cabins and mounds of tin cans,
the names they gave still linger, becom-
ing part of the country's history, and
outranking in importance ordinary geo-
graphical designations. No doubt, in
centuries to come, antiquaries will puz-
zle and delve over the nomenclatures
in all those portions of America now
known as " mining regions." It would
not be strange, either, if the tin-can
mounds ultimately became centres of
archaeological research. Nothing can
be more certain than that, if the human
race continues to advance, an age will
come which will abhor and repudiate
the tin can, with all its sickening con-
tents. After a century or two of disuse
and oblivion, the hideous utensil and its
still more hideous foods will be rele-
gated to their proper place as relics of a
phase of barbarism ; and then the ex-
huming of some of the huge mounds of
them, now being piled up in mining

VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 48

camps, will be interesting to all persons
curious in such matters. The miner's
frying-pan also may come in for a share
of analytic attention ; will perhaps take
a place in museums, in the long proces-
sion headed by the Indian's stone mor-
tar and pestle. It may even come about
that there will be an age catalogued in
the archaeologist's lists as the tin age.
Contrasted with it, what noble dignity
will " the stone age " assume !

Such forerunning fancies as these,
sometimes fantastic, sometimes, again,
melancholy to the last degree, haunt
one in journeying among mining camps,
old and new. It is hard to keep sepa-
rate the fantastic and the sad, in one's
impressions ; hard to decide which has
more pathos, the camp deserted or the
camp newly begun, the picture of dis-
appointment over and past or that of
enthusiastic hopes, nine out of ten of
which are doomed to die. I have some-
times thought that the newest, livest,
most sanguine camps were saddest sights
of all.

The expression of a fresh mining
camp, at the height of its " boom," is
something which must be seen to be
comprehended.

The camp is in the heart of a fir for-
est, perhaps, or on the stony sides of
a gulch. Trees fall here, there, every-
where, day and night. Nobody draws
breath till he has got a cabin, or a bough
hut, or a tent over his head. As if b j

754

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch. [December,

magic, there grows up a sort of street, a
dozen or two board shanties, with that
cheapest and silliest of all shams, the bat-
tlement front, flaunting its ugly squares
all along the line. Glaring signs painted
on strips of cotton sheeting, bleached
and unbleached, are nailed over doors.
In next to no time, there will be a
"mint," an "exchange," a "bank," a
" Vienna bakery," a " Chinese laundry,"
a " hotel," and a " livery stable." Be-
tween each night and morning will blos-
som out crops of "real estate offices,"
and places where " mining properties
are bought and sold," " claims located,
proved, bought and sold," " surveys of
mining claims made," etc. ; crops also,
alas, of whiskey saloons, with wicked
names and lurid red curtains, danger and
death signals.

The stumps are not taken out of the
pretense of a road, neither are the
bowlders ; nobody minds driving over
them, or over anything, in fact, so he
gets quick to his " claim," or to the
tract in which he is feverishly " pros-
pecting." If a brook trickles through
the camp, so much the better ; it can do
double duty as drain and well. Luck-
iest they who drink highest up, but they
who drink lowest down do not mind.
The women, if women there are, are
fierce and restless, like the men. They
make shifty semblances of homes out
of their one-roomed cabins. It is not
worth while to have things comfortable,
or keep them in order, for there is no
knowing whether the camp will turn
out to be a good one or not ; and to-
morrow they may pack up their chattels
and move on. At the faintest rumor of
a bigger " find," in another camp, the
men to whom they belong will be off,
and they must follow. They stand in
their doorways, idling, wondering, wait-
ing, gossiping, and quarreling. The only
placid creatures are the babies, whose
simple needs of sun, dirt, and being
let alone are amply supplied. They are
happy, and they only, in all the camp.

It is a strange life, unnatural, un-
wholesome, leading to no good, comfort-
less to a degree which many of those
who lead it would not endure a day,
except for the hope of great gain, which
fires their very veins. The worst of it
is that the life is as fascinating as it is
unwholesome. " Once a miner always
a miner " is a proverb which is little
less than an exact truth. The life is
simply a gamester's life, with the wide
earth for a hazard table, and the in-
stances are rare in which a person who
has once come under its spell ever
breaks away. It is no uncommon thing,
in Colorado, to meet an old gray-haired
man who has been prospecting and
mining all his life, and has not yet made
a dollar, but is buoyantly sure that he
will " strike it " soon.

During the autumn of 1880 there
were frequently to be seen in the Col-
orado newspapers, and also in the lead-
ing ones of the Eastern States, accounts
of new and wonderful discoveries of
precious metals and minerals in Gunni-
son County, Colorado. The excitement
was not so intense and sudden as that
which followed upon the Leadville finds,
but it was sufficient to send thousands
of men swarming into the " Gunnison
country," as it was called, and to bring
into existence, in less than a year, scores
of brisk, bustling, " bonanza " mining
towns.

" On to Gunnison ! " was the cry
throughout the mining population of
the State. It is instructive as well as
interesting to read now, and on the
ground, the descriptions then written
and the prophecies then made of some
of these towns. There was, perhaps,
no exaggeration in the descriptions or
the prophecies, applying them to the re-
gion at large, for it is undoubtedly one
of the richest and most varied in treas-
ures in all Colorado. But the casual
observer would hardly believe this, jour-
neying to-day through some of the dis-
tricts of which, at the beginning of the

1883.]

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Crulch.

755

" boom," such unbounded successes were
predicted. The likelihood of the first
being last and the last first was never
better proven and shown. There seems,
on a closer view of the situations, to
have been a half-fantastic analogy be-
tween the irregular and unforeseeable
human conditions and successions in the
country and the puzzling conditions and
successions geologically recorded there :
veins crossing and outcropping in in-
explicable places ; crevices and fissures
doubling on themselves, twisting and
tying knots, tendril-like; deposits and
measures due, according to all known
antecedents, in one spot appearing in
quite another, — overlying where they
should underlie, going to left where
they should go to right, and setting at
defiance all the horizontal and vertical
conventionalities in well-regulated geo-
logical society. Evidently there were
periods when something, whether mis-
ery or joy, made strange bedfellows un-
derground in Gunnison County. Evi-
dently, also, the law had not then been
heard of that as one makes his bed so
he must lie ; for every mother's son of
them, — primitive granite, coal-measure
sediments, silica, calc-spar, porphyry, —
all have shifted around as they liked,
century in and out, till a state of things
has resulted which puzzles the best ex-
perts in rocks and formations.

The town of Crested Butte and its
vicinity afford good opportunities for
observing these interesting phenomena
of both the upper and the under world.

Crested Butte lies among the peaks
of the Elk Mountain range, twenty-
eight miles north of Gunnison City, in
a beautiful basin, to the making of which
go -three mountains, two streams, and
many gulches. The town gets its odd
and rather high-sounding name at sec-
ond hand, from the highest mountain in
its neighborhood. Why Hayden, in his
survey, should have named this sharp,
pyramidal peak Crested Butte does not
at all appear until one goes some dis-

tance north of the mountain. Seen
from that side, part of its sky line is a
curious jagged cock's-comb sort of crest,
which vindicates the first half of the
epithet, but leaves the last hardly less
inappropriate than before : a peak twelve
thousand feet high, its upper half of
bare majestic stone, is surely entitled to
a rank higher than " Butte."

Crested Butte, more than any other
town, is centrally located in relation to
the mines of Gunnison County. Every
road leading out of the town to east,
west, or north brings out before long in
a mining camp. It is thus a natural
centre of supplies, and has in that one
fact alone an excellent reason for being,
aside from its own resources, which are
already so great that it would be a rash
man who undertook to-day to set limit
to them. Both south and north of the
town are vast coal measures, the extent
of which can as yet only be guessed at.
Thousands of acres in the immediate
outskirts of the village are evidently
underlaid by the veins already in work
ing; and similar measures are to be
traced on the terraced fronts of the hills
and mountains for many miles to the
north and west. Mountains full of sil-
ver and gold, and creek beds and gulches
close at hand full of fuel to smelt and
refine them, — what more could the heart
of money-lover ask, and what plainer
indication could nature give of the chief
duty of man in lands thus formed and
filled ? This would be the miner's creed
of predestination in the Crested Butte
region.

One need not, however, be either
money-seeker, miner, or predestinnrian
to enjoy Crested Butte and its vicinity.
Even to eyes that could not tell trachyte
from sandstone, or a coal measure from
a granite ledge, the country lias treas-
ures to offer. There are many sorts
of " claims," " prospectors," and " pros-
pecting."

There is a field of purple asters two
miles west of Crested Butte that some

756

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch. [December,

people would rather possess for the rest
of the summers of their lives than the
coal bank opposite it, — a million times
rather ; and if a man would secure them
a perpetual " claim " to the roadway
and a narrow strip of shore of O-Be-
Joyful Creek, he might have all the
gold and silver in the upper levels of its
canyon, and welcome. There is no ac-
counting for differences in values ; no
adjusting them, either, unluckily. The
men who are digging, coking, selling
the coal opposite the aster field, do not
see the asters ; the prospectors hammer-
ing away high up above the foaming,
plashing, sparkling torrent of the 0-Be-
Joyful water do not know where it is
amber and where it is white,. or care for
it unless they need drink. And I, be-
fore whose eyes the aster field, only
once seen, will go on and on waving
its purples and yellows all winter, with
the laugh of the O-Be-Joyful stream still
echoing and the mystery of its amber
pools still lingering in my heart, — I
shall never see either the radiant field
or the laughing water again.

There is one comfort : the " market "
in which stock in aster fields and brooks
is bought is always strong. Margins are
safe, and dividends sure. Ten years
from now, that coal bank may not pay,
but I shall have my aster field. Who-
ever goes in July to Crested Butte
may have it also, if he will drive out of
town westward, up Coal Creek Gulch,
on the road leading to the White Cloud,
Ruby, Irwin, and Hopewell camps. It
is a toll road, built at the time when
from Ruby Camp there were daily being
taken out masses of ruby native and
wire silver, and fortunes were supposed
to be waiting to be picked up on all
hands. The road lies high on the south-
facing slope of the gulch's north wall ;
far below it, to the left, dashes the black
little stream, close to the base of the
gulch's south side, which is a steep and
almost unbroken wall of fir and spruce
forests. On the right-hand slope run

the aster fields, — not asters alone, but
every other flower of the region : where
the slope is steepest, the .uppermost
ranks and ranges of blossoms are pricked
out against the sky ; where the hills fall
back, and the fields spread out at easier
angles, their surface is a mosaic. The
blue harebells, scarlet gilia, lupine of
all shades of blue and purple, mariposa,
golden-rod, white yarrow, purple vetch,
red roses, are there in abundance wher-
ever the purple aster leaves space ; but
the asters have plainly been first in the
field for generations. They grow like
clover, in clumps and thickets, making
in many places a firm tint of shaded
mauve and purple, as solid as ever mead-
ow clover can make at its best. Next
to the asters in supremacy is wild pars-
ley, which grows here with a magnifi-
cent prodigality, spreading feathery um-
brels two hand's-breadths broad. The
delicate white " bedstraw " also is stip-
pled in, in masses ; and crowning, light-
ing up all, like the last touches of gold
in the illuminated page, is spread a bla-
zonry of yellow, — sunflowers of un-
usual varieties : one, deep orange, with
long, pointed, drooping petals, like a
greyhound's ears, — perhaps it is not a
sunflower ; another, pale straw color,
with an old-gold button in the centre, —
dusky old gold, like the color of a bum-
ble-bee in the sun ; another, small, thick-
set, like a glorified dandelion ; golden
coreopsis, of many kinds, and a satin-
surfaced, yellow-disked blossom, like the
immortelle : these are a few I knew,
or partly knew, and can recollect. But
there were scores of others, of which I
knew neither face nor name. Never,
except in a certain meadow in the Arn-
pezzo Pass, in Titian's country, have I
seen such splendid and unstinted mass-
ing of flowers. Snow lies from five to
twelve feet deep, in the Crested Butte
region, all winter, and the winter is
from five to seven months long. This
is the secret — this, and the plentiful
spring rains — of the short summer's

1883.]

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gulch.

757

brilliant blossoming ; only another of
the myriad instances of the great and
tender law of compensation.

There are eight miles of these flower
fields and fir forests between Crested
Butte and White Cloud, the first of the
mining camps on the Ruby road. At
the end of this eight miles the gulch
suddenly widens into a basin, surround-
ed by high mountains, on the summits of
which clouds are always resting. Hence
the beautiful name of White Cloud.
Of White Cloud's past I learned noth-
ing, except by the picture of its pres-
ent: a half dozen houses, all deserted;
windows boarded up, and wild weeds
running riot over door-sills ; even the
mounds of tin cans and broken bot-
tles, sunk and softened into rounded con-
tours, being fast draped in green and
reclaimed into decency by gracious na-
ture.

The most significant sight in White
Cloud was a large building, evidently in-
tended for smelting-works : every win-
dow and door boarded, and the whole
place as it were barricaded by piles of
rusty, battered iron machinery which
would never again do duty, — piles of
old iron wheels, cylinders, pipes, trays
of pots, tanks, all the innumerable con-
trivances and devices for metal working ;
there they lay, in confused heaps, like
the debris of a fire, or a wreck. And so
they are, — debris of fire and wreck in
which the hope and strength of many a
heart have been lost forever.

At White Cloud the Ruby road turns
sharply to the north and follows up
another gulch, heading toward two high
red mountains, named Ruby One and
Ruby Two. In some lights, these peaks
glow like carnelians, and it is easy to
see why their baptismal name, Ruby, was
numerically pieced out, and made to do
double duty for them both. No other
name would have answered so well for
either.

Just beyond White Cloud we passed
a heavy ore wagon, whose driver, at

some inconvenience, drew out to one
side of the narrow stony road, to let us
pass ; an attention for which I expressed
warm gratitude to him, and proceeded
to make similar comments on it to my
driver. He listened amusedly to all I
had to say, and then replied, in a de-
liberate tone, —

" Well, p'r'aps he ain't so kind 's you
think. A feller that 's teamin' on these
roads 's got to be accommodatin' V git
out th' way, 's often 's he can. Ef he
don't, there won't nobody git out th'
way for him, don't you see ? A feller 'd
better be accommodatin', I tell you, or
he '11 get paid up 'mighty quick. Any
feller 's on the road '11 tell all the rest."
After a short interval of reflection, he
continued, " A pusson thet ain't in any
hurry can make a heap o' trouble for
one thet is," which bit of well-phrased
philosophy gave me pleasure, and is
worth recalling in many a crisis in life.

Ruby is — was (one hesitates as to
tenses, in speaking of these camps)
much larger than White Cloud, and had
a more vigorous and developed life in
its day. It is not yet quite dead. Smoke
was curling from a chimney or two ;
one multifarious shop had its door open ;
also, one whisky saloon, where on the
door-sill, with their elbows on their
knees, sat three men, whose faces of
ludicrous wonderment, as we drove by,
were speaking tokens of the evenness
of the tenor of the usual way in Ruby.
Big -lettered signs, grotesquely out of
proportion to the diminutive buildings,
even in their heyday of brisk business,
looked still more grotesque, now, on the
fronts of shanties with doors bearded
and windows either boarded or ghastly
with cobwebs and broken panes. " Ruby
City Bank," " Exchange," " News Com-
pany," all closed ; the place that knew
them knew them no more. Above
some of the doorways hung fluttering
shreds of cotton cloth, the remains of
signs which more economical migrants
(b there any other word that would

758

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Grulch. [December,

so properly designate the class?) had
stripped off their deserted houses, aud
carried on to the next camp.

Where Ruby leaves off and Irwin
begins does not appear. In fact, the
camps need not have had two names,
most of the Irwinites being Ruby men,
who pushed on a half mile farther up
the gulch, to be nearer to the Forest
Queen and other seductive mining prop-
erties of high-grade ores. Irwin still
lives. At least half of the houses are
occupied, and businesses of various sorts
seem to be — it would perhaps be ex-
aggeration to say, going on ; seem to
be still extant would come nearer to
giving a correct picture of the curious
atmosphere of half-suspended activity
which the place presents. Dumps of
ore here and there on the hillsides and
sounds of steam-pumping indicated that
miners were at work ; the faces of the
people also showed it. They were go-
ing about their business, in one way or
another, but the very fact of this par-
tial activity seemed only to heighten
and emphasize the desolate look of the
many houses deserted. I wondered
what would be the effect on a sensitive
and impressionable nature of living for
a year in a place where one half the
houses were not only empty, but aban-
doned forever by the men who had
builded them. Simply the continued
seeing of such houses might well breed
a contagion of restlessness and migra-
tory impulse. Whither did all those
men go ? Was it not to a better place ?
Are they not glad they went ? There
are not such fierce suns as this, perhaps,
or so cold rains, where they are. " Let
us follow ! " says the idle, dreaming
thought, looking day after day on the
deserted homes.

In the northward suburbs of Irwin
were several deserted log cabins, among
trees, in rude inclosures, overgrown and
choked with scrambling, blossoming
things. It was noticeable that there was
about these no expression of dreariness

or desolation. The log cabin is, of all
man-built homes, the nearest to nature.
Left unoccupied, it is quickly relegated
to its original affinities, slips back into
much of its old tree dignity, and can
never by any chance become unsightly.
Coming upon such a cabin, open-doored,
wiudowless, the grass perhaps its only
floor, the traveler is never repelled, only
attracted. " Not a bad place to sleep,
if one need," he says, and half wishes
he need. But the board shanty, and
above all the battlement-fronted board
shanty, has only to be left disused for a
brief period to acquire abjectness, igno-
miuy, a look of having come from base
uses and being fit only for such. There
is room here for analysis aud reflection,
if one chose ; especially is there room
for analytic reflection on the battlement
front, its significance and insignificance.
It is in pioneer ways and means and
standards at once a feature and a fac-
tor; its appearance and its disappear^
ance are alike gauges of the communi-
ty's condition, a record much more ex-
act than would be supposed. There can
be few better signs in a new town than
the arrival of the day when a man is
ashamed to put up a battlement-front-
ed house, and knows that it would be
against his business interests to do so.

Just beyond Irwin's last uninhabited
log cabin, on the shores of a beautiful
emerald-green lake, we found a United
States survey party camped.

" You call these camps deserted ? "
said one of the engineers. " Why, these
camps are lively. You have n't been to
Silver Cliff, I guess. Down there, there
are thousands of acres with the pros-
pect holes not over a foot apart. The
ground is nothing more than a colan-
der, and there is n't a living person in
Silver Cliff, and has n't been for a year.
These Ruby camps are lively. You 'd
better go to Silver Cliff. It 's a sight
worth seeing, just to look at those acres
of prospect holes."

At the head of the gulch, close at the

1883.]

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Gf-ulch.

759

base of Ruby One and Ruby Two, lies
the town of Hopewell, the last of the
four once " booming " mining camps in
Ruby Gulch. Of the half dozen houses,
two were inhabited. One was the
"Pink Boarding -House," a building
quoted as a landmark in giving us our
directions for finding the Ruby chief
mine. The house was not so flagrant
as its name ; aesthetic art would have
found some other designation for its
mongrel tint, which was nearer to the
crushed strawberry than to any other
defined color. It stood out in amazing
relief. Its two high stories, abundant in
windows, its double doors and expan-
sive sides of startling hue, — all these
contrasted with the desolate loneliness of
the spot, and the low cabins of logs or
rough boards on either hand seemed to
lift the ugly structure into a sort of
magnificence ; and it was not to be won-
dered at that it had attained an emi-
nence of notoriety in the region.

The keeper of the Pink Boarding-
House was an elderly woman, with
bright, resolute hazel eyes, who had a
story to tell; one of the instances, so
frequently met with in Colorado jour-
neying, of lives which would read like
romances if written out in detail. She
moved from Seneca Falls in New York
to Denver, in 1859 ; " the second white
woman who," as she emphatically said,
" ever set foot in Denver." She lived
there through the horrors of the Ara-
pahoe and Cheyenne wars. She saw,
drawn in open wagons through Denver
streets, the dead bodies of men and
women, killed by Indians. She also
saw white men, Chivington's men, mur-
derers of friendly and unarmed Indians,
ride through the same streets, carrying
at their saddle-bows unmentionable tro-
phies of the horrible massacre they had
perpetrated. After seven years of this
life, she migrated back again, eastward,
to Wisconsin, where they had good luck,
made a comfortable home, and lived
until the mining fever of 1880 seized

her husband. On the pleasant Wiscon-
sin home, " with every comfort heart
could wish," they had turned their backs,
and plunged into this wilderness for gain
of silver and gold. Here she had lived
three years. Two winters she had spent
in this home, with the snow twelve feet
deep all around ; no going about except
on snow-shoes ; no going out at all, for
her, for twelve long weeks. The win-
dows on the south side of the house were
blocked by drifted snow to the eaves ;
on the north side one row of panes in
the upper-story windows was left uncov-
ered ; long tunnel ways led to the doors,
through banks of snow so high that the
tunnel ways were dark. This it is to
mine for precious metals in Hopewell in
winter. Strange as it seems, however,
the winter is the better part of the year
for work. In summer, the innumerable
mountain springs are so full that pumps
have to be kept going continually to
clear the mines of water. In winter the
only danger is from snow-slides. Hear-
ing this woman's graphic account of a
slide in the winter of 1882, which " went
off like a cannon," she said, " waking
them right up " at midnight, and in a
minute had piled its mountain of snow
far down the valley, having carried with
it all the buildings of the Ruby chief
mine, and buried two miners, asleep
in their cabins (one killed instantly ;
one worse off than his dead comrade,
crushed, but left alive, to linger in
agony for days) : all this over and past
in the twinkling of an eye, at dead of
night, — hearing this story, it no longer
seemed strange that Hopewell and Ruby
and Irwin and White Cloud were so
nearly deserted of men ; the wonder was
that any should remain. But the non-
chalant indifference of miners to chances
of death is proverbial. They play at
the game so constantly that their sense is
dulled. Later on this very day, I spoke
with a Hopewell miner, who said, " I
was in that slide she was a-tellin' ye
about."

760

0-Be-Joyfid Creek and Poverty Gulch. [December,

" In it ! " I cried. " Were you hurt ? "
" No. I was in the tunnel, when it
went off. I 'd changed round with an-
other feller : I 'd gone on the night
shift in place of him. He wa'n't feelin'
well, so I took his place on the night
shift. My cabin was buried up : reckon
I might ha' been killed if I 'd happened
to ha' been in it." No more trace of
feelhiff in his tone as he said this than

if he had spoken of the most every-day
matters.

Sixteen miles north of Crested Butte
is a new and live mining town called
Schofield. It is in a basin ; the centre
of a knot, almost a tangle, of peaks, all
supposed to be full of mineral. The
drive to it from Crested Butte is a suc-
cession of beautiful and weird pictures :
first, low hills, flower meadows, and
slopes similar to those on the westward
road ; then, steep mountain spurs, dark
green lakes, and dense fir forests. High
up on one of these spurs, midway be-
tween Crested Butte and Schofield, is the
town of Gothic, at the base of a grand
trachyte pyramid fourteen thousand feet
high, bearing the same name. Two
years ago Gothic was larger aud more
flourishing than Crested Butte. To-day
Gothic is dead, and Crested Butte thrives
and grows. A Gothic philosopher, sit-
ting at midday on his saw-horse smoking
his pipe, nodded complacently to us as
we passed.

" Where are all the people of this
town ? " I asked.

" Gone to the mountains," was the
reply.

" Ah. the place is not really deserted,
then ? " I said.

"Well, not exactly," answered the
philosopher, with a twinkle.

" What do you think about the
place?" I continued.

" Well, it 's this way : there 's plenty
of good properties here, but the people
are too poor to work them, anything
more'n just to do their assessment work
and hold 'em."

" Do you mean to stay ? "
" Yes, I think I '11 see it through."
" When were all these houses built ? "
" Two years ago, when everybody
thought that mountain " — pointing to
Gothic peak — " was made of solid sil-
ver; and so 'tis, pretty near, if there
was only any getting at it."

A few steps farther on we met an-
other Gothic man : rosy, hearty, ac-
coutred in fringed buckskin, with a can-
opy-brimmed yellow sombrero, he gal-
loped along as if he owned the earth
and the air. To him, also, we put the
same questions. He had been there two
years ; had no idea of going away. The
region was " full of splendid properties,"
and Gothic would be " a first-rate camp
to live in when they got things fixed up
a little." It was not " just the place for
the winter," but by. and by it would be.
Gothic was " all right."

Chance bits of talk like these, along
roadsides, always bring interesting facts
to surface. They are like the deep-
sea soundings of naturalists ; not one of
the masses of sand and rubbish which
dredgers bring up, is without its shell,
or bone, or scale, or plant, significant in
record.

" Waiting for a boom ; that 's what 's
the matter with this town," said a dis-
contented woman, in Schofield. " I 've
got no patience with this boom business.
It 's the i-uination of this country. It
just spoils everything. There is n't a
decent house in the town, and there
won't never be."

"The camp's been pretty dull, this
spring," said the landlord of the board
shanty which does duty as Schofield's
inn, — " the camp 's been pretty dull,
and so we have n't got our horses in yet.
You see there was a foot of snow lyin'
in the street here the 22d of June, and
that 's put things back. It looked for
a spell as if there would n't be much
doin' here this season ; but they 're corn-
in' now, fast."

This was the 10th of August ; in six

1883.]

0-Be-Joyful Creek and Poverty Grulch.

761

or eight weeks more, Schofield would be
snowed in again. Before the first of
November everything needed for seven
months' living must be provided, and
must be packed up to the mines over
steep trails.

After the first deep snow, all mines
high up on the mountain sides are cut
off from communication with the region
below. It must be a good deal like be-
ing dead, seven months of such isolation,
and severance of all connection with
human life outside the walls of the
mine and the cabin. At the bare thought
of it the imagination instantly teems
with fancies of terrible possibilities : ill-
ness, death, in that icy solitude ; hardly
less awful, the coming down in the
spring, ignorant of what the winter may
have wrought of harm or loss. One
pictures the mute question of the eye,
which the lips would refuse to frame,
on tlie first meeting of such an exile
with his neighbor below. Though a man
should gain the whole world, would he
be well paid for such a life as this ?

It is claimed by enthusiastic Crested
Butteians that there are within an easy
day's drive of their town seventy miles
of good roads, all leading through wild
and picturesque scenery. This seems in
no wise incredible on the spot, when
going only to the west and northwest
one has driven out twenty miles a day,
for three successive days, never repeat-
ing a mile previously seen, and finding
each day's journey more and more beau-
tiful. Oar third and last day was most
brilliant of all ; a twelve-hour day, but
if the sun could have been bribed we
would have had it longer.

In the morning we climbed up through
flowery meadows and cotton wood groves,
among ridges and basins and gulches,
over a thousand feet in a vertical line,
above the Crested Butte level, to a large
coal mine recently opened, and promis-
ing to be of enormous value.

To look through green vistas of wav-
ing boughs, grasses five feet high, myr-

iads of huge - leaved plants of almost
tropical luxuriance, up to the glistening
black coal measures and grim stone ter-
races, hundreds of feet above, was a
strange sight. Once up at the mine's
mouth the picture is stranger still. The
mountain side is so steep that the Crest-
ed Butte basin sinks, and seems a low
valley. Down this valley the Slate
River winds in so serpentine a course
that at most of the angles it is lost from
sight, and the effect on the eye, look-
ing down from above, is of an infinity
of small, oval-shaped, shining tarns in
the green meadows. The three majes-
tic trachyte mountains, Crested Butte,
Wheat Stone, and Gothic, rising from
these meadows, are now seen to be the
upper crests, monarchs as it were, of a
vast system of divides, gulches, basins,
mountains, and ridges, which at once
suggest, even to the most superficial
thought, the idea of a period of terrific
throes in the whole visible frame of the
earth. Down the sides of these mighty
stone-walled basins spin threads of sil-
ver water, like the fosses in Norwegian
fjords ; the bottoms of the basins are
emerald green, as if of solid moss ; they
seem a reproduction, on a colossal scale,
of the exquisite little cup-like, moss-car-
peted basins, fed by trickling springs,
which are to be found along the rims
of mountain brooks in rocky beds. This
beauty of coloring gives to the titanic
shapes a look of warm vitality, almost
personality, weird in effect. There is a
radiant exultance about them, a myste-
rious audacity of delight, which fills the
very air itself with a solid warp and
woof of uncanny spell.

A Scotchman called Jim Brennan,
" a sort of genius," — " more what they
call a genius at the East, though, than
out here," our guide and legend-teller
said, — had prospected in 1879, up and
down, over and through, this whole king-
dom, and given queer names to many of
the localities, branding them by the
stamp of his own good or ill luck. He

762

The World Well Lost.

[December,

it was who, having searched along the
sides of one of the dark fir-crowded
gulches, and found nothing, nailed up,
on one of the trees at the mouth, as he
came out, a shingle on which he had
scrawled the name " Poverty Gulch ; "
the most opprobrious epithet a miner
could invent. Bad names stick to local-
ities as to persons. The gulch is still
called Poverty Gulch, spite of the fact
that some of the best paying and best
promising mines to-day are on its sides.
Brennan was not so wise as those who
came after him. He searched too low
down ; was perhaps a trifle lazy about
climbing precipices.

"I don't never want to hear nothin'
about no claims down among the slip
rock," said an old miner we met draw-
ing a load of good silver ore from his
mine in this very gulch. " The higher
up a claim is, the better I like it; 't
least, in these mountains. Them fellers
that prospected here first did n't know
nothin' about the way things is tilted
up endways here. That's the reason
they was in such a hurry to call it Pov-
erty Gulch. Ain't much poverty about
it now."

From Poverty Gulch the Scotchman
and his party pushed south, and came
soon into a splendid basin, where they
found rich indications of ore and a de-
lightsome stream of water leaping from
summits above, and cutting a fantastic
way for itself down between porphyry
walls and layers of slate to the valley
below. " 0-Be-Joyful " basin they forth-
with named it ; and the darling stream,

the "O-Be-Joyful Creek." The name
will commend itself forever, so long as

* O

water runs and sun shines. The basin
is hard to get at ; it is to be reached only
by a narrow trail, difficult even to sure-
footed mules. But the creek is at all
men's pleasure to follow. Along its
right-hand bank was the natural way
for a road to go, to a nest of mining
camps in some small gulches and basins
a few miles out to the westward ; so the
road goes up, and the brook comes down,
and the pair of them are as fine a sight
as ever was seen out-of-doors on a sum-
mer day. The road has rims and walls
of blossoms, chiefly purple asters ; the
brook has shelves and beds of purple
slate, columns of porphyry and great
tables of granite, ferns and moss in
every crevice, and still green pools after
every tumble. When it reaches the
valley level it spreads out in many a
rivulet, with winding, shaded beaches ;
and you ford and ford and ford it be-
fore you leave it fairly behind, and
come to the straight river road in the
meadow.

When Jim Brennan named these
basins and gulches, nothing was farther
from his mind, probably, than the idea
of speaking in parables. But if he had
so meant he could not have done bet-
ter. Poverty Gulch and O-Be-Joyful
Creek, — the two will be found always
side by side, as they are in Gunnison
County. Only a narrow divide sepa-
rates them, and the man who spends his
life seeking gold and silver is as likely
to climb the wrong side as the right.

H.H.

THE WORLD WELL LOST.

THAT year ? Yes, doubtless I remember still, —
Though why take count of every wind that blows!

'T was plain, men said, that Fortune used me ill
That year, — the self-same year I met with Rose.

1883.] Newport. 763

Crops failed ; wealth took a flight ; house, treasure, land,
Slipped from my hold — thus Plenty comes and goes.

One friend I had, but he too loosed his hand
(Or was it I?) the year I met with Rose.

There was a war, methinks; some rumor, too,

Of famine, pestilence, fire, deluge, snows;
Things went awry. My rivals, straight in view,

Throve, spite of all ; but I, — I met with Rose !

That year my white-faced Alma pined and died :
Some trouble vexed her quiet heart, — who knows ?

Not I, who scarcely missed her from my side,
Or aught else gone, the year I met with Rose.

Was there no more ? Yes, that year life began :
All life before a dream, false joys, light woes, —

All after-life compressed within the span

Of that one year, — the year I met with Rose !

Edmund C. Stedmcm. i

NEWPORT.

XII.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FATE.

THE discovery of Josephine's hidden
predilection for Oliphant brought upon
Octavia a rush of new excitement which
she could not fathom or control. That
fine sheathing of comparative indiffer-
ence, which had enabled her to go on thus
far without sacrificing her peace of mind,
suddenly vanished, and she ceased to
be merely a spectator of her relations
with Oliphant. Like an actress carried
away by her part, she became subject
to the situation ; no longer felt that she
was moulding it, but rather that she was
at the mercy of events.

She was willing to confess, now, that
during the busy weeks of their acquaint-
ance a strong admiration for Oliphant
had grown up in her mind. She had
not suspected that a character so little
salient, a presence so quiet, could acquire

such sway over her ; yet it had come to
pass that if she missed seeing him for
a single day she was conscious of a void
and blankness in the day's experience.
There was a silent persuasive power
about him, a something calmly strong,
which had caused a belief to gain upon
her that his worth was sound and com-
plete beyond that of men who might
be more brilliant, or of more flexible
mind. And now her belief and her
admiration were confirmed by the deep
impression he had made upon Josephine.
Who would ever have dreamed that
that self-possessed, ambitious girl could
fall in love with him ? For a moment,
indeed, Octavia allowed herself to doubt
that it could be so. " At any rate," she
thought, " if she does love him, what
does it amount to ? Nothing but an
icicle giving back a ray of the sun.
She 's too cold. She can't love him as
— as / could." But those unspoken
words brought blushes to her cheeks,

764

Newport,

[December,

and frightened her. Was it already
possible for her to come to such a cli-
max, even in fancy ?

Moreover, had she not decided that
love was an illusion, a tradition, a thing
no one could be sure of ? If this was
her conviction, surely she could not
pretend to anything more than a friend-
ly sentiment towards Oliphant; yet it
irked her to suppose that she could be
inferior to Josephine in the capacity for
an honest and trusting affection. Be-
sides, it was beyond all dispute that Oli-
phant cared for her, and not for Jose-
phine. The knowledge gratified her ;
but at the next instant she was thrilled
by a notion of renouncing him for her-
self, and making him marry Josephine.
It was delightful to think how noble
such a proceeding would be. Before
she had time, however, to sketch it out
in all its bearings, she had abandoned
the scheme, and dropped helplessly back
into the vortex of uncertainty from
which circumstances would not permit
her to escape.

Retreat might be another alterna-
tive ; but what would become of her pur-
pose, then ? Had she not made an in-
ward vow ? Was there not a duty for
her to perform, a revenge to take ?
Anger and pity and a gathering tender-
ness swept by turns through her heart,
confusing her more and more ; but one
thing, she saw, was decided : there could
be no retreat. In the restlessness en-
gendered by this conflict, she had gone
out upon the grounds of High Lawn,
after Josephine's visit, and was walking
aimlessly among the trees, when she
saw a man's figure passing up the drive-
way to the house. She could not tell
who it was, but her heart throbbed
quickly ; she at once thought of Eugene.
Returning by a door near the silk-pan-
eled room, she was disappointed to find
that it was Raish Porter who awaited
her. But he brought, an invitation that
promptly enlivened the coloring of her
mood ; for he had devised a yachting

party, to come off the next day, in which
the Wares, Count Fitz-Stuart, Josephine,
Oliphant, and several others would be
included. Mrs. Farley Blazer was not
invited, and Octavia consented with
eager readiness to go.

"It's unusual to get people out on
that sort of trip, here," said Raish, " and
I 'm as elated at my success as the sailor
I 've heard of, who fiddled so well that
the whales all came round him to be
harpooned."

Raish's jovial deportment had noth-
ing to do with the placidity that returned
to Octavia. It was the prospect of the
excursion that brought back her good
spirits. Her perplexities were not solved,
but they had disappeared : the knowl-
edge that she was to have Oliphant by
her side, on the yacht, furnished a thread
which she was content to take for her
clue through the maze, at present.

It was a cool morning when Raish's
small schooner - yacht, the Amaranth,
glided out of the harbor, leaving behind
the fossil part of Newport, with its tape-
measure sidewalks and huddled gambrel-
roofs, and quaint, cramped old Thames
Street. The sky was half-clouded, like
a face softened by pensive memories ;
but the gayety of the sailing-party was
not abated, and their light talk and
laughter around the deck played sympa-
thetically into the murmur of the rip-
pling tide. Smoothly the trim craft ran
past Fort Adams and the bare hills ar-
rayed in dull green, or, where the sun
shone, in a warm, smiling brown that
held a hint of rose ; past the Point of
Trees and Ramshead, too, with Conan-
icut on the right, all blended of mild
grays and varying greens, except for its
border of rough rock harsh with shadow.
Then, as they made out into the open
ocean, they saw a white strip of mar-
guerites, like a broad chalk-streak, amid
the green on the riglit, and far away a
line of blue and purple heights. Under
the changing heaven Beaver Tail Light,
with its bltuiched tower on the long, low

1883.]

Newport.

765

point, was brought out in white-spotted
clearness by wandering sunbeams, and
swiftly reduced to moist dimness again,
as if it had been a lantern - picture
abruptly dissolving.

" Look there ! " said Raish, pointing
to the cliff, as the Amaranth buffeted
her way gayly across the stronger waves
that met them after they had passed
Gooseberry Island and Spouting Rock.
" Look at that row of summer palaces !
Where can you show me anything to
equal it ? Think of all that growing
out of the quiet little town behind it,
dressed in Quaker gray and white."

" The wicked worldling," said Oota-
via, with a smile, " coming after the
stern and pious parent."

" It 's a great contrast," Oliphant as-
sented. " I should like to know what
is to be the result of the new develop-
ment."

" I '11 tell you," said Raish, address-
ing several of the group. " We have
three epochs represented here : first,
the early settlers, by the old stone mill ;
then the defunct American democracy,
who built the older part of the town ;
and these villas here, standing for the
present American oligarchy. After that
will come — revolution."

He shrugged his shoulders, and looked
quite French ; that is, like a cynic sud-
denly disordered by a gust of proph-
ecy.

" Mais non. How can you think pos-
sible ? " Fitz-Stuart exclaimed, a dimin-
utive consternation agitating his fea-
tures.

" But, Mr. Porter," objected Vivian,
" revolution belongs to the effete mon-
archies, you know. Surely, you don't
think we can descend to borrowing any-
thing of the kind from them."

" Why not ? " Raish answered. " We
imitate them in everything else, as far
as possible ; and we '11 have to end by
imitating them in that, too."

Josephine laughed. " / shall be safe,
at any rate," said she. " When the time

comes, and you are all blown up over
here at Newport, I shall be quietly
eating bread and milk in Jamestown.
That 's the advantage of being pastoral
and innocent."

As the rest broke into a general buzz
of conversation, Oliphant said to her,
" I should n't think Jamestown would
be likely to satisfy you."

" To tell you the truth," she replied
frankly, in a lower voice, " it does n't.
I 'd rather be in Newport and be de-
stroyed with the rest, if it came to that."

" Oh, Raish is talking nonsense," he
said.

" I 'm not so sure," Josephine an-
swered, slowly. " We 're often told
that society is in an unhealthy state,
and I almost believe it is."

" Then why are you so fond of it ? "

" Well, it 's like taking arsenic, you
know. If you once begin, even in small
doses, you get to depending on it. But
what 's your taste, Mr. Oliphant ? Don't
you like arsenic ? "

" I 'm afraid I do," he said, uncon-
sciously stealing a glance at Octavia.
" I 've begun to, lately. But there was
a time when I used to dream of an idyl-
lic sort of life in some sleepy little
place not too far out of the world."

" Like Jamestown ? "

" Possibly."

A gentle dreaminess suffused her face.
" It might be a very happy life," she
said, " under certain conditions." And
as her eyes met his, he thought he saw
burning deep within them a peculiarly
tremulous flame.

" Why is n't Perry Thorburn here
to-day ? " he suddenly asked, glancing
around as if the young man might have \
been hidden in the cabin and were about '
to emerge.

" I 'm sure I don't know," said Jo-
sephine. " Does his absence trouble
you ? "

He saw that she was annoyed by his
question, which was in fact a too sig-
nificant one. Accordingly he began to

766

Newport.

[December,

praise the absent Perry, telling her that
lie had grown to like him very much.
" Still," he added, smiling fn a gallant
manner, " I can get along perfectly with-
out him, at present."

This speech was not a success, either.
It was a refinement of pain to poor Jo-
sephine, who knew how superficial the
complimentary tone must be, since his
heart was really with Octavia. But she
concealed its effect upon her, and kept
him engaged in talk, drawing him al-
ways a little deeper, and always with
that strange trembling light in her eyes.
Oliphant felt the fascination, and even
felt that he might begin to succumb to
it before long. Meanwhile Octavia was
left mainly to the attentions of Stillman
Ware, who remarked with great satis-
faction that Fitz-Stuart was progressing
admirably with Vivian : they had gone
away by themselves towards the forward
part of the yacht, under the shadow of
the foresail, and were apparently en-
grossed with each other. Oliphant sev-
eral times resolved to move away from
Josephine, but he still remained by her.
She knew the power of the spell she
could exercise, and had recklessly re-
solved to use it. Was it not her right,
by nature ? Moreover, if Octavia was
bent upon trifling with this man, any
means were justifiable for saving him,
even to winning him away from her.
xAnd Oliphant, though he did not know
her motive, became conscious that she
exhibited a singular interest in him.
Shall we admit that the discovery ex-
cited his vanity a little ? Or shall we
say that he enjoyed it because it was ex-
traneous evidence, giving him a sense
of his value which made it seem less
audacious for him to hope that he could
gain Octavia's love ?

Octavia watched them, at first with
scorn for what she.considered Josephine's
unfairness, and then with a rankling
envy of her friend's easy power : finally,
the desire to bring Oliphant to her feet
— whether for mere triumph, or for the

securing of a genuine happiness, she
scarcely knew — began to rise to the
point of fever.

The situation was broken by an an-
nouncement of lunch in the cabin, made
by Raish's negro steward, Fortune.

" Is n't he a perfect specimen ? " Por-
ter asked his guests, as they assembled
to go in. " You noticed the wonderful
curl of his hair, I suppose. Why, it 's
so woolly that positively he has to put
camphor in it, early in the summer, to
keep the moths out ! "

Porter, as usual when at table, was
in the best of spirits, and soon allayed
for the time being the conflict and agi-
tation that were threatened in the minds
of Octavia, Oliphant, and Josephine.
Several dainty and elaborate courses
were served, but the choicest dish of all
consisted of broiled green plover served
on plates which had been washed in
champagne. " It 's the only way to get
the finest flavor," Raish declared ; " and
the only thing I know of that comes
anywhere near plover served like this
is the ' larks stewed in morning's roseate
breath, or roasted by a sunbeam's splen-
dor,' which Tom Moore once offered to
the Marquis of Lansdowne."

He was. so gay that one would have
thought he had n't a care in the world ;
but as a matter of fact he had not at all
enjoyed Josephine's proceedings toward
Oliphant, since it was for his own in-
terest that Perry's attachment for her
should come to a prosperous issue. He
was disappointed, too, at Perry's fail-
ure to join the party, and still more
disturbed by the knowledge that that
young speculator had not yet actually
taken or paid for the Orbicular stock
which he proposed to buy. But, as I
say, he kept his company in capital hu-
mor. They suspected nothing ; and if
he had never been going to give another
entertainment — if he and they had all
been destined to fade away into the
mists and be seen no more, with the
Amaranth turning to a phantom yacht

1883.]

Newport.

767

under their feet — he could not have
made a happier ending.

But they had no intention of fading.
When they came out, with smiling lips
and with the delicate tingle of wine in
their veins, the mists had disappeared,
and they turned to make the run home-
'ward in a soft glow of sunshine. As
they approached within a certain dis-
tance of the shore, a strange phenome-
non saluted them. All at once the salt-
ness of the air seemed to cease ; the
wind came from off the land, and poured
around them in a breath of honey the
mingled scent of flowers by thousands
in the rich villa - gardens of Newport,
and in the fields far away. It was an
intoxicating aroma ; it was like the ex-
halation from some enchanted territory
of delights. In a minute or so, with a
veering of the wind, it had passed ; but
Oliphant, hanging over Octavia, mur-
mured, " This is a good omen for our
return to land, is n't it ? "

" Yes ; a much more hopeful one than
the chilly mist we sailed out with."

And there was a new significance in
her gaze, as she spoke with lifted face, —
a significance that referred to his linger-
ing near Josephine so long before lunch,
and to the slight shadow of jealousy
which she allowed to rest upon her own
mind, and was willing that he should
perceive.

He sat down beside her, his face radi-
ant with something more than the sun-
shine, and remained there until they
came into port. He had made another
advance ; they had entered a new phase
in their friendship ; and to him the un-
derstanding established between them
was the next thing to a mutual confes-
sion. Still, when he landed, he felt
that he had left behind him, on that lit-
tle voyage, the last vestige of the inde-
pendence which had been his at the be-
ginning of the season ; and this inde-
pendence, albeit one of loneliness and
sorrow, was something the loss of which
might have to be regretted. He was

drifting, now ; he was at her mercy he
know ; yet the fact was sweet to him,
and he rejoiced in it. One must " give
all for love ; " but the price was not too
great.

He longed to put his fate to the test ;
but somehow there was difficulty in find-
ing room for any action so momentous
in the crowded round of social occupa-
tions. The very next day was to cul-
minate in that brilliant musical drainage
entertainment, the well-vouched-for ben-
efit concert in aid of Dana Sweetser's
movement, at which Justin was to make
his public debut ; and during most of
the interval Oliphant was busy in as-
sisting about the final arrangements.

With the social support which had
been pledged to it, the concert could not
have missed being the success it was.
Mrs. Farley Blazer would have dorie all
the injury she could to the enterprise,
because of Justin's participation, except
for the restraint put upon her by friend-
ly regard for Dana. This prevented
her active hostility, and she compro-
mised by sending Tilly and Lord Hawk-
stane, in charge of some friends, while
she herself stayed at home. Mrs. Chaun-
cey Ware, however, threw her patron-
age unreservedly into the scales on
Dana's side ; and the sibylline scrolls of
gray hair that identified as hers a cer-
tain black bonnet, from under which
they projected, were seen in one row
of chairs with Stillman .and Vivian and
Count Fitz-Stuart. The mother and
brother were thus gracious in respect
of Justin because they believed the cool-
ness that obviously had interposed be-
tween him and Vivian was to be perma-
nent ; and in the fullness of their grati-
tude to Providence for the sacred gift
of this lovers' quarrel, they were able to
spare a little gentle generosity for the
young musician.

I am not going to describe the con-
cert, but from the interest which Viv-
ian Ware took in the music it must have
been passably good. Several times she

768

Newport.

[December,

bent her head and wrote comments on
the programme, with the small gold pen-
cil which the count lent her for the pur-
pose, and then folded up the paper, as
if the brief record of her pleasure were
too precious to be exposed to the outer
air. The count betrayed a lover-like
curiosity to see what she had written,
but with corresponding coquetry she
kept putting him off, and he did not get
a sight of it, the whole evening.

After the performance, Justin ap-
peared for two or three minutes in the
eddying drift of copious silks, light
shoulder-wraps, and black coats, moving
towards the exit. Octavia in her pansy
bonnet and Oliphant in evening dress
were there to welcome him with hearty
praise ; many bystanders regarded him
with manifest admiration ; and as he
drew near Vivian, she was so eager to
thank him for his playing, that she
dropped her programme m turning to
meet him. He caught it before it had
reached the floor, and offered to return
it to her.

" Never mind," she said. " It has
some notes of my impressions. Keep
it, and tell rne by and by if I am right."

Justin bowed, and almost instantly
glided away. The count at first looked
mortified that the programme should
have escaped him ; but the expression
was followed by one of serenity, as of a
man who could afford so trifling a loss,
in view of what he retained ; and so he
went out with Vivian to join Stillman,
who was busy finding the carriage.

XIII.

HAWKS AND DOVES.

The episode of the programme, how-
ever, had not escaped the notice of one
or two ladies who were standing near.

They belonged to a small coterie
which was in the habit of meeting every
day or two at the houses of the several

acquaintances who composed it. The
members of this circle gathered together
for self-improvement ; that is, they de-
voted an hour to trimming and polishing
their finger-nails, by means of the latest
and most approved apparatus. This
species of culture induced in them a lib-
erality which extended to the improve-
ment of other people, so far as that
could be done by defining and thorough-
ly discussing their demerits, in order
that if those persons should improve
every one would know exactly how
much they had done so.

Pious Mrs. Ballard Mole was one of
this group. It had been proposed by
somebody to hold concerts at the Casino
on Sunday evenings, and this was enough
to deter Mrs. Ballard Mole from going
to any musical affair in that place, how-
ever worthy the object. None the less,
though, was she willing to listen to re-
ports of what had occurred at the Sweet-
ser entertainment ; and when Miss De
Peyster (Roland's ugly sister) began to
say something about the strangeness of
Vivian's remark to Craig, Mrs. Mole
experienced a chilly joy in thinking that
if any germ of scandal had effected a
lodgment in that distinguished audi-
ence, it was only a righteous judgment
on the projectors of chimerical Sunday-
concerts that had not come to pass.

" There seems to be something be-
tween those two, — some understanding
that is n't quite right, under the circum-
stances," said Miss De Peyster, opening
her case of nail instruments, and inspect-
ing them as if she had been a surgeon
about to begin vivisection.

She was seated on the broad veranda,
shaded by vines and canvas curtains, of
Mrs. Mole's scriptural villa, called Petra,
on the Cliff, where the conclave had
been called for that morning.

" Then, do you consider Vivian en-
gaged to the count?" asked Mary Deer-
ing, who was one of the worldly repre-
sentatives in this little circle.

"Well, if she isn't, it's about tune

1883.]

Newport.

769

she should be," Miss De Peyster an-
swered, clicking her scissors sharply.

" Oh, do you know what I heard yes-
terday ? " This question proceeded from
a lady who wore a jaunty ruby-tinted
turban, and enjoyed great intimacy with
Mrs. Farley Blazer.

" No ; what ? " " Anything about the
count ? " Uttering responses of this sort,
everybody became attentive, and there
was a momentary pause in the wielding
of their small steel weapons.

" Yes ; the count. Dana Sweetser
says he was walking, the other morning,
over where the Cliff begins, you know*,
— that bare spot where it 's so quiet, —
and he noticed three Frenchmen sitting
on the grass, with a basket of breakfast
and some claret ; and they were talking
quite loud and laughing, don't you know,
so they did n't notice him. And he
made put that they were creditors of the
count's. They 're lying in wait for him,
in a sort of way ; at any rate, watching
him. Mr. Sweetser says he believes
they even have a detective keeping his
eye on Hartman's, where the count
stays, you know. Is n't it odd. — a man
who might have been King of England,
may be, having creditors after him ?"

The rest agreed that it was very odd,
and that the count's speedy engagement
to Vivian, with a claim on the Ware
property, ought to be wished for by
every one who understood the pathos of
the situation.

" Besides," Mrs. Mole declared, " he 's
a much more desirable person than that
penniless pianist."

" But Mr. Craig plays the organ in
church," Mary Deering suggested, with
a spice of malice, and spoiled the effect
of her shot by sending off another :
" The count is penniless, too, it ap-
pears."

"Temporarily, my dear," Mrs. Bal-
lard Mole retorted, assuming a mien of
devout loyalty. " Temporarily penni-
less ; that is all. It can't last."

" The creditors evidently think it

VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 49

can't, or sha'n't," whispered Mary to
Mrs. Richards, who was present.

Then they all began talking about
other things and people. There were
rumors of an approaching divorce, to be
assorted ; and the ladies next devoted
themselves sadly to comment on various
unfortunate fraits in their associates,
which ought to be corrected, as well as
to the ins and outs of sundry quarrels
that had begun to shatter the harmony
of Newport society. Gradually an ap-
proach was made to the subject of Mrs.
Blazer's confidential relations with Por-
ter ; though, in deference to Mrs. Blazer's
friend, who was there, the approach was
characterized by Christian tenderness.

" It 's really a pity, you know," said
Miss De Peyster to the friend, " when
her husband is about, and they 're not
living together, /don't believe there 's
anything in it, you know ; but so many
will take that view."

Mrs. Richards burst into uncontrolla-
ble laughter. " Oh, the funniest thing
yet ! " she ejaculated, while the jewels
on her generous bosom shook with sym-
pathetic humor. " Sarah Loyall made
a mistake yesterday, and called Mr. Por-
ter ' Mr. Blazer,' in Mrs. Blazer's pres-
ence. But she was equal to the occa-
sion : she said, ' Oh, Mrs. Loyall, don't
make him out to be anything so disa-
greeable as a husband ! ' Was n't that
rich ? "

There was great amusement on the
veranda, at this ; even the ruby-tur-
baned friend of Mrs. Blazer joining in
the merriment.

Snip, snip, went the scissors, as the
ladies chattered on, and deftly labored
to modify the lingering vestiges of a sav-
age state at the termination of their soft,
white fingers. The scissors were stumpy,
curved and sharply pointed like the
beaks of hawks ; and as they continued
their work they seemed at the same
time to be tearing numerous reputations
into fragments.

Mrs. Deering finished her task first,

770

Neivport.

[December,

and, being obliged to go, bade the rest
good-morning. As soon as she hud dis-
appeared, tbe lady in the ruby turban
saw an opportunity to equalize matters
for Mrs. Farley Blazer by introducing
a slight diversion at Mary's expense.

•• I 'in afraid," she observed, " our
last remarks were n't entirely agreeable
to Mrs. Deering."

" Oh," began Mrs. Ballard Mole,
" on account of " —

•• Mr. Atlee, of course," supplemented
Mrs. Richards.

" It really is becoming disgraceful,"
said the ruby turban, " the way those
two are going on. It grows worse and
worse."

" Can't something be done to stop
it ? " queried Mrs. Mole, in a regener-
ating frame of mind. " I really wish
there could."

" Stop it ? " Miss De Peyster shrilled.
"Stop an avalanche! Why, -he goes
with her everywhere, — driving, hunt-
ing, polo ; and not satisfied with that,
they take quiet walks together in the
twilight. Then they are on the Cliff,
Sundays. He never goes to church with
her, I notice, but he spends a great deal
of time at the house, and is constantly
there at dinner while Mr. Deering is in
New York. I should think she would
have some consideration for her chil-
dren's sakes, at least. What she can
find in the man, either ! Really and
truly, I think sometimes people ought
just to be exiled ! "

An instant's silence intervened after
this outburst ; and then Mrs. Richards
said sweetly, " My dear, you should n't
use the steel. It 's injurious, very."
She referred merely to the fact that
Miss De Peyster, in her preoccupied
excitement, was rather fiercely prodding
one of her finger-nails with the smooth
end of a flat steel file.

They had now reached the powdering
and polishing stage of their work, and
the remarks interchanged gradually took
on a more suave and dignified character.

The reflections which had been made
upon Mary Deering were not, however,
confined to the self-improving coterie
whose confidences we have allowed our-
selves to summarize. Oliphant had
here and there come upon the traces of
similar ones, which, aided by his own
observation, had disturbed him exces-
sively. He noticed the increasing im-
prudence of his cousin's conduct ; also
that Roger now came on to Newport
less frequently than before, and that
when he did come there was a queer
kind of restraint on his part towards his
wife. The ruddy-faced, short-haired
broker's former air of confidence was
perceptibly subdued. To Oliphant the
change was pathetic, and he had re-
solved to speak to his cousin seriously.
He fancied that he understood the case.
Mary Deeriug had simply had her head
turned by the frivolities of the place,
and had been led into making an idol of
this Anglicized nonentity, who to her
mind represented the most important
local tendency. Nevertheless, the idol
or fetich was a man, and she ought not
to carry her admiration too far.

Obeying his advisory impulse, he be-
took himself to her house, on the second
day after the concert ; but Mary was
not at home. He decided to wait ; and
in a moment or two, seeing the door
into the dining-room half open and some
one apparently seated at the table there,
he moved to the threshold, half believ-
ing that it was Atlee. With a rush of
sudden anger, he determined to upbraid
the dandy, and so stepped forward vig-
orously. But, to his astonishment, he
beheld only little Clarence in a chair by
the table.

The boy had a glass of claret and
water before him, and was smoking a
cigarette.

" What does this mean ? " Cried Oli-
phant. " Are you crazy, Clarence ? "

" I 'm trying to soothe my nerves,"
the child answered, looking up wea-
rily at him. Oliphant was horrified at

1883.]

Newport.

771

the premature age in his unformed lit-
tle countenance. He stood speechless.
" It 's just what papa does now," Clar-
ence continued, calmly, " whenever he
comes here. I don't know what the
matter is, but " — At this point he slid
from his chair, and rapidly made his way
towards Oliphaut. " Oh, cousin Oli-
phant, papa does n't seem a hit happy !
Last time he came here, he took me out
on the piazza, and mamma and Mr.
Atlee were talking all the time, inside
here, and papa said to me, he asked me,
— was n't it queer ? — if I did n't want
to go away with him back to New York,

O v

or way out West somewhere ; and I
said I didn't, unless mamma and all of
us were going. And then he said,
' Um,' like that," — Clarence pursed his
lips up severely, — " and he said he
did n't think there was any room for us
here, he did. Now what did he mean,
cousin Oliphant ? "

His cousin took him by the hand and
led him away into the other room, sick-
ened and aghast by the dreary, uncon-
scious revelation ; but just as he was
making a suitably superficial reply,
Mary Deering appeared from the hall.

She dismissed Clarence with harsh
pcremptoriness, to his nurse, and re-
turned to Oliphant, looking, as he con-
ceived, rather distraught and ill at ease.
It was late; the dusk was beginning to
throw its soft folds of crape around the
trees and the house, casting deeper
shadows into the small interior. Oli-
phant thought Mrs. Deering must have
a prescient sense of his object in calling
upon her. Ah, how sadly unlike that
bright, playfully mischievous face with
which she met him when he first dropped
down in Newport was the mobile, anx-
ious one that he saw opposite to him
now !

A crisis impended. He opened his
attack weakly with some general in-
quiries about Roger.

Suddenly they heard steps ascending
to the piazza. There was an impetuous

knock at the door. Again Oliphant
thought of Atlee, and became so excited
that he braced himself for a personal en-
counter. Mary Deering, overwrought
and expectant of some painful scene,
uttered a low cry. But, as they rose
to meet the new-comer, their suspense
relaxed ; for it was Stillman Ware whom
they descried in the increasing gloom.

" Is my sister here ? " he inquired at
once.

They both answered, " No."

" I meant," said Stillman, in a shaky
and unnerved sort of way, " is Mr. Oli-
phant here ? Ah, yes, that is Mr. Oli-
phant. I have just been to Mrs. Gif-
ford's to look for my sister ; and she
is n't there. We can't find her. Do
you know anything about young Craig's
movements ? "

" Nothing," returned Oliphant, " ex-
cept that he told me he should be out
of town this afternoon."

" Then," cried Stillman, clapping one
hand to his distracted little bald fore-
head, " they have gone together ! My
God, Oliphant, she has run away with
him ! "

XIV.

THE FLIGHT OF A METEOR.

No one could tell how the elopement
had come about, but every one was volu-
ble in relating that the event had really
taken place, and there were many wild
rumors and surmises added to the fact.
It was said that several persons had sus-
pected that something of the kind was
about to happen ; there was also a story
of a clandestine meeting effected by the
two young people near the Forty Steps,
the night after the concert. A servant
had seen a woman's white figure in the
grassy street there, which was presently
joined by a dark, shadowy man. and both
had disappeared over the edge of the
Cliff, so that the servant had thought
them to be ghosts, and kept silence,

772

Newport.

[December,

through fear. The fashionable world
was excitedly scandalized ; poor little
Stillman continued in great agitation ;
Mrs. Ware took it upon herself to be
" prostrated," and her course in so do-
ing was generally approved by her
friends. A search was begun for the
fugitives, and Stillman even engaged
detective assistance.

But, whatever else might be in doubt,
it was soon made clear that Octavia and
Oliphant received a large share of blame
for the occurrence. The circumstance
of the two runaways having dined at
High Lawn with the widow and wid-
ower, a few days before, came to light,
and was construed as a proof of conni-
vance. It was also remembered that,
on the previous Sunday, Octavia and
Oliphant had strolled on the Cliff Walk
with Justin, and that, by turning often,
they kept meeting Vivian, who was
likewise sauntering in the throng there
with Count Fitz-Stuart.

In reality our friends knew nothing
about the scheme ; but the false con-
struction placed upon them was strength-
ened by Oliphant's receiving very
promptly a message from Craig, dated
at Tiverton, and saying that Vivian and
he, having been quietly married, had
takeia lodging for a short time in that
modest and drowsy watering-place,
which gazes so meekly from the mainland
towards the prouder shores of Aquid-
neck Island. The reason for their pre-
cipitancy was that the count, becoming
urgent, and being sustained by Mrs.
Chauncey Ware and Stillman, had in-
sisted upon an ultimate decision as to
his suit, and Vivian had been driven to
an unexpected mode of settling the ques-
tion.

Oliphant hastened by the first train
to Tiverton ; and finding that Justin had
no capital beyond .two or three hundred
dollars, a large part of which he had
received for his services in the Sweetser
concert, he made the heartiest offers of
assistance. " You know," he said, " I

was go'ing to send you to Germany. I
meant to hand you, as a first installment,
a thousand dollars. Why not take it
now ? "

" Because I 'm not going to Germany
just yet," said Justin, with buoyant
good fellowship and enviable serenity.
" I shall go on with my work at Trin-
ity and find people to take piano les-
sons."

" But if you need me you will let me
know ? " queried Oliphant almost plain-
tively, pleading with the portentous self-
reliance of the new husband. "Miss
Vivian, — Mrs. Craig, I mean, — I rely
upon you to see to this ; " and he ap-
pealed to her.

Vivian was dressed in white, as usual.
Her costume was an expensive work
of artifice, imported from Paris, and by
a rare purity of outline, with a drap-
ing of folds from one shoulder across
the waist, produced a semi-statuesque
Greek effect, which gained an amusing
piquancy from its utter inappropriate-
ness to Vivian's quick, whimsical, and
wholly modern attitudes and gestures.
The three were standing on a plot of
grass in front of the absurdly stunted
and riotously ugly French-roofed cot-
tage where the lovers had ensconced
themselves. Vivian gave a little half
jump, which disarranged her classic folds,
and said, " You are a dear good fellow,
Mr. Oliphant ; and we appreciate you.
But I 'm sure my husband can make his
own way. Can't you, Justin ? "

She placed one hand for an instant
on Justin's arm, in token of dependence
and of possession, but quickly took it
away again. Then she fronted towards
Oliphant, with a shining happiness in
her eyes, the like of which he had never
seen.

He had come to play the part of a
venerable benefactor, bestowing some-
thing of practical value on these chil-
dren. He went away as the recipient
of an inspiration from that spectacle of
ideal love which made him poor by con-

1883.]

Newport.

773

trast, and reproached him with his pov-
erty.

Intending to go and describe his visit
to Octavia (to whom he had already
sent a note saying that he had heard
from the truants), he was prevented
from doing so, on his return, by an oc-
currence so extraordinary as to merit
recital.

Transcontinental Telegraph stock, un-
der the impulse imparted to it through
the private wire from Thorburn's villa,
had been executing some interesting but
not unnatural manosuvres. First it fell
off a very little in price ; then it began
to rise ; and as it ascended there were
many purchases made on the strength
of a rumor that Thorburn had gone to
work in earnest to " peg " the stock
quite up to par. The buyers were very
confidtnt ; they wore a joyous look, as
of men at last released from all harass-
ing doubts, and kindly presented with a
free pass to fortune. No one could ex-
plain precisely why the thing was so
certain, but few thought of questioning.
It was one of those grand spontaneous
movements of the human mind which,
in Wall Street, teach us that faith in
the unseen and the unknowable still
survives, notwithstanding the churches
may bemoan its decline. Suddenly,
however, Transcontinental began to go
down again. It dropped below the point
from which it had started, and kept on
sinking, by eighths and quarters, from
one figure to another, with ominous reg-
ularity. Did this shake the sublime
confidence of the multitude? Not at
all. A few timid souls here and there
shrank affrighted, and parted with their
holdings ; but there were plenty of peo-
ple who had bought at the highest
prices, and now not only kept increasing
their margins, but also invested in more
shares.

Their courage was apparently justified
when the stock began to rally and went
up several points in a few days. Many

now sold out and cleared handsome
amounts. Those, however, who were
anxious to " get in " and go on with
the flood-tide were more numerous; and
Thorburn accommodated them with a
good deal of stock which he had ac-
quired at a lower price. At last, after
one or two more of these ups and downs,
and when Thorburn had sold a sufficient
quantity " short," Transcontinental took
its final plunge. It had been like a kite
sailing aloft and gleefully watched by
school-boys, as it rose or fell with the
wind ; but the pulling of the string had
brought it to such a point that, with-
out warning, the kite came tilting over
on its head, and made straight for the
ground.

Perry ran to his father for advice.
That heroic old gentleman told him that
without pluck and endurance he never
would make an " operator." He point-
ed out some of the reasons why Trans-
continental never could remain for a
great length of time at the bottom of
the heap.

" Still," he said, " / can't advise you.
You must decide everything for your-
self, and make up your mind wheth-
er you are carrying too much load or
not."

Reassured, Perry held on, and many
of his friends and their acquaintance,
knowing this, did likewise. Some actu-
ally continued to buy in afresh. Pres-
ently, however, he and they awoke to
the fact that they were in a financial
Bay of Fuudy, where the ebb of the
tide was abnormal and altogether be-
yond their calculations. The sinking
went on irnmitigably. Old Thorburn
professed to be unable to account for it,
and seemed perplexed. Then Perry,
who had assumed altogether too large a
risk, and was already severely depleted
by his margins, decided to take care of
himself. He got rid of nearly all his
Transcontinental at an enormous sacri-
fice, paid in full for a couple of hundred
shares which he retained, and found

774

Newport.

[December,

that his losses amounted to nearly fifty
thousand dollars.

" Now, sir," he said to his father,
with pardonable indignation in his tone,
" 1 "vo acted without consulting you,"
and he explained his situation, omitting
to speak of the shares he had kept ; " but
I should like to know what you meant
by getting me into this trap. I consider
that I 've been treated outrageously ! "

Old Thorburn displayed no anger.
On the contrary, he leaned back in his
chair, beneath the spider-web design
of his alcove, and laughed slyly, then
broadly ; finishing up with a second sly
chuckle. " Why, my dear boy," said
he, in his heavy, spongy voice, " what
are you talking about ? Can't you see
the point ? "

" The point, eh ? Is it a joke ? "

" Of course it is, — for you and me.
Some of the outsiders, I suppose, think
it 's pretty serious. I just wanted to
show you how to do things."

" Well, you 've shown me how to lose
fifty thousand dollars."

Old Thorburn broke into a roar of
laughter. " Exactly ! " he cried. " And
now that you know how, don't you do it
again. That 's my advice, Perry. By
George, this is the neatest piece of tac-
tics I ever carried through ! "

"You call it neat, then, to swindle
your own son ? " Perry inquired, with
intense disgust.

" ' Swindle ' is your word, not mine,"
returned his father. " Call it what you
like, /call it keeping my own counsel.
I 've taught you not to trust anybody in
business, — not even me." Thorburn's
manner conveyed a sort of virtuous sur-
prise at himself that he could not be
trusted. <; And at the same time, I 've
used you to good purpose in making the
mob do just what I wanted. Damn it,
Perry," — the old gentleman was begin-
ning to exhibit heat, — "I should think
you would have some kind of appreci-
ation, instead of growling like a hurt
child."

Perry's expression was far from con-
veying respect. " Perhaps I have some
kind of appreciation," he said, curtly.
*' And now I suppose you 're going to
work to drive the stock up, after buy-
ing all you wanted from me and from
the rest at a ruinous rate."

" We shall see," answered the elder
man, crafty glee reappearing in his eyes.
" I don't like to tell you anything about
it, because you see — ha, ha ! — you
might not believe me."

At this climax, his merriment entirely
overcame him, and Perry scornfully left
him to enjoy it by himself. The only
satisfaction he had was in the thought
of the shares he owned, which would
receive the benefit of his father's next
move, and probably bring him back in
the long run a third of what he had lost.
Yet even this prospect gave him a cer-
tain horror of himself, because it re-
minded him that he was acting on the
same instinct of deceit which struck him
as so hideous in his father.

Thorburn senior proceeded to encour-
age the market, for the purpose of real-
izing the immense profits which formed
the object of all his strategy ; but his
victims were, for the most part, too
much crippled to take the field again
and share in the benefit of the gradual
rise which presently began. Many of
them, indeed, were wrecked for life by
the terrible throw their invisible antag-
onist had given them.

Raish Porter was a heavy sufferer ;
and, besides being greatly out of pocket,
he had to endure the disappointment of
learning that Perry, owing to the absorp-
tion of half his private property in the
recent " deal," would be unable to take
at present the block of Orbicular stock
which had been promised him. It was
a painful crisis for Raish ; but he did
not lose his nerve. His quiet, searching
eye remained imperturbable as ever ;
his bluff, self-confident demeanor under-
went no change ; and perhaps he would
have found a way out of his dilemma,

1883.]

Newport.

lib

had it not been for sundry other unlucky
accidents.

Mr. Hobart had become dissatisfied
with the slow progress of the Orbicular
Company, from which as yet he could
get no return on his investment; and,
what was more serious, he began to
evince suspiciousness regarding the value
of the company's patents. Raish sug-
gested that he should ask Judge Malachi
Hixon to confer with his (Raish's) law-
yer, Strange, and investigate the subject
anew. Raish was fond of extolling the
judge's incorruptibility, but this was
chiefly with a feeling that it might some
time be peculiarly useful to have Hixon
considered unimpeachable ; privately, he
believed that he could insinuate his own
prepared statements into that gentle-
man's mind, and induce him to ratify
them.

Accordingly it was settled that Strange
should call upon the judge, at the Ocean
House. He did so, and was courteously
received by the learned Malachi, who
was grappling at the moment with an
especially huge and black cigar, the
pressure of his lips upon which greatly
increased the usual complexity of wrin-
kles in his face.

" So you think this is a good thing,
Mr. Strange ? " he asked.

" Oh, excelsior," said Strange, casual-
ly as it were, and softly. He was a
small, dexterous, accommodating man,
with a conical head, which looked as
if it would make a great effort to
pass through almost any required knot-
hole.

" Have you got any papers with you
— schedules, lists of the patents, and so
forth ? "

" Why, certainly ; any amount," Mr.
Strange replied, apparently eager to
empty the contents of his satchel. But,
after bustling at it, he paused, and
launched into a general disquisition.
He told of the marvelous growth of the
corporation, and named some of the sub-
stantial men who held its stock ; and he

was very ingenuous and pleasing and en-
thusiastic, altogether.

Judge Hixon, nevertheless, continued
to mention the papers. Strange showed
him one or two, and then, after feeling
around a little, came to his point. " I 've
told you enough in a general way," he
said, " to satisfy you of the excellence
of the concern and its prospects. We
should like very much to have you for
a stockholder, judge, — very much, in-
deed. Now, anything you can do in
the way of satisfying Mr. Hobart, or
any one else who should fall into sim-
ilar confusion about the details of the
affair, will be of as much service to my
client, of course, as to Mr. Hobart. Mr.
Porter can let you have five thousand
dollars' worth of the stock, just as well
as not, and — and you need n't pay for
it until convenient."

Mr. Strange was bland, but slightly
nervous : his conical head looked as if
it were preparing to dodge. Judge Mal-
achi Hixon straightened up in his chair,
and removed his right leg from its rest-
ing-place on the knee of the left. He
gazed steadily at Mr. Strange, who has-
tily noted the judge's resemblance to a
harassed and dejected specimen of the
American eagle, and was in suspense as
to which of the attributes of that typ-
ical bird the judge was about to offer, —
the arrows or the olive-branch.

" It is a very liberal proposition,"
said Judge Hixon slowly. " I have n't
got any too much money laid up, and
this may prove profitable. Did you
bring the stock with you ? "

" Oh, yes," said Strange, diving into
his bag with the greatest alacrity.

" IS'ever mind it now," resumed the
judge, genially, taking the cigar out of
of his mouth and letting the wrinkles
ameliorate themselves. Then he placed
it between his teeth once more, and the
wrinkles all came back. " You can wait
till I send forit," he explained. "Mean-
while, leave nie any papers you like,
and I will louk them over."

776

Newport.

[December,

" With the greatest pleasure," said
Strange, aud left a few.

He reported his success to Raish.
The game had always worked well be-
fore, and they had no reason to suppose
that it would not do so now. But
Malachi Hixon immediately set to work
investigating in earnest. He started
the district attorney in New York upon
the case, and rapidly pumped into his
own mental reservoir whatever knowl-
edge Hobart had of the company's trans-
actions. By means of brief research
and some detective work, it was found
that the enterprise had been built up
from small beginnings by advertising
in metropolitan journals, then copying
these advertisements with laudatory no-
tices in rural papers throughout sev-
eral States, and by sustaining a showy
office upon the receipts which rapidly
flowed in. Apparently, all the money ob-
tained was spent in clerk-hire and more
advertising. Then Porter had flown
for higher game ; and, through his busi-
ness and social connections, had induced
a number of capitalists to put in con-
siderable sums. The district attorney
was surprised at some of the names
Strange had given him, but his inquiry
corroborated the list. Little by little,
he ascertained that these men were con-
vinced that the Orbicular Manufacturing
Company was fraudulent, but did not
dare to appear against its promoter, for
fear of injuring their own credit with
the banks ; since a prosecution must
reveal their want of judgment in mak-
ing snch an investment. Fortunately
Hobart, being a man of irritable leisure,
and vindictive as well, was not re-
strained by any such scruples.

It was important, however, to obtain
further evidence of imposture by prov-
ing the unauthorized character of some
of the manufactures contemplated by
Raish. Unexpectedly, this came to hand,
through the labors of the detective. A
workman employed in another machine-
works was brought to confess that he

had traced the patterns of appliances
made by his employers, and had fur-
nished them to Raish, who in turn had
had drawings made from them, with
which he shrewdly dazzled the minds of
successive investors.

On the evening of Oliphant's return
from Tiverton, after he had dined com-
fortably at the Queen Anne cottage with
Raish, the latter noticed that his guest
was thoughtful and looked despondent.
The truth is, Eugene was overburdened
with anxiety for the results of Justin's
rash proceeding, with worry about Mary
Deering, and with his own problem in
connection with Octavia.

" Do you ever feel gloomy ? " Raish
asked him, blowing out a cloud of smoke
which thinly veiled the cheery twinkle
of his eyes.

" Yes, I do," answered Oliphant sol-
emnly.

" Well, /don't ! " Raish affirmed, with
hearty satisfaction. '• It does n't pay.
I 've seen a good many vicissitudes, and
I 've been through more than one Sat-
urday night when I did n't have a red
cent in my pocket, and did n't know
where my Sunday's dinner was coming
from. But I 've always smoked the best
cigars and drank the very best wines,
and I never have felt gloomy."

There was such a superabundance of
ease and buoyancy in Raish's tone that
Oliphant began to feel decidedly better.

Ten minutes later, some one rang at
the door. James returned to the parlor
and announced a strange gentleman, on
business. " Well, let 's see him," said
Raish, good-humoredly. " I have n't
any appointment at this hour, but show
him right in, James."

The visitor proved to be a sergeant
of police, in plain clothes, with requi-
sition papers from the Governor of
Rhode Island aud a warrant for Raich's
arrest on a charge of obtaining money
under false pretenses.

"Never heard anything so ridiculous

1883.]

Newport.

Ill

in my life ! " exclaimed Raish, cordially.
" How do you explain it, sergeant ?
Who 's the complainant ? By the way,
have a cigar ? "

" Thank you, sir," said the sergeant,
accepting the favor. " The complaint
was entered by Mr. Hobart. You know
him, I suppose."

" I have an idea that I do," Raish
responded. " But I never was aware
that the Hobart I know could be so
silly and suicidal as to do this. Sit
down, and let 's see if we can't straighten
the thing out, somehow."

After a brief colloquy, Raish per-
ceived that there was no escape : he
was given a letter from Hobart, inform-
ing him of the workman's confession.
Nevertheless, he maintained his jaunti-
ness, and proposed to the sergeant that
he be allowed to remain in the house
over. night, and proceed to New York in
the morning.

This the sergeant at first refused : he
had two other officers waiting outside,
and said it was impossible to keep them
up all night. But Raish insisted on
their being asked in. " We '11 give 'em
some supper, at any rate," he declared,
with as much welcome as if they had
been the most desired of companions.
" Better stay over, sergeant," he con-
tinued, invitingly. " I '11 give you all a
fine sail on my yacht to Wickford, first
thing in the morning, and we can take
any train you like from Providence.
It's nothing but a dyspeptic whim of
old Ilolnirt's," he added to Oliphaut :
" I don't see why I should be so incon-
venienced by it."

The officer was really charmed by
Raish's ease and hospitality, and at
length fell in with tin; plan. His pris-
oner then applied himself to packing a*
valise, and setting his affairs in order as
well as he could, though he was not al-
lowed to handle a single object without
close surveillance, nor to be for a mo-
ment out of sight. About one o'clock,
Raish asked permission to walk up and

down the open piazza at one side of the
house, with Oliphant. This was granted,
but the sergeant took a chair out, too,
and remained on guard.

Raish tramped leisurely to and fro
with his friend, talking in his custom-
ary entertaining way. All at once, Oli-
phant was startled out of the mood of a
quiet listener by seeing Raish put his
fingers into his vest-pocket and then
suddenly raise his arm, carrying a small
object to his lips.

Without having time to reflect, Oli-
phant instinctively struck down the arm
and clutched Raish's hand. There was
a small phial in it, which Raish at-
tempted to throw away ; but his friend
was too quick for him, and seized it.
The sergeant came promptly to their
side, and pinioned the brilliant financier.

" Yes, it 's poison," Raish confessed in
a species of gasp, answering Oliphant's
look of amazement and reproach. " Cy-
anide of potassium. In two minutes I
should have been a dead man. Oh, yes,
it's all up, Oliphant, my boy. Too
bad, too bad ! " He lifted his forehead,
and gazed at the sky for an instant.
" You remember what I said this even-
ing about the best cigars ? " he went
on, smiling sarcastically. " Well, there
they are : all those stars ! Those are
the smouldering stumps, it strikes me."
He groaned slightly. " Ah," he cried,
" I was too respectable ! I ought to
have been like the gamblers over there,
who are plying their game at this mo-
ment, and are left in peace ; or else like
old Thorburn, who cleaned me out, and
prevented me from warding off this ac-
cident. I '11 tell you what I 'in remind-
ed of: that fellow who was porter (see
the pun ?) on a drawing-room car, and
had a wife at each end of the liner By
his painstaking diligence in bigamy he
attained to the ripe honors of a term in
the penitentiary ; but the only thing he
regretted was that he could n't divide
his term, as he had all his other posses-
sions, between the two wives ! I would

778

Bermudian Days.

[ December,

be willing to make that sacrifice myself,
for Thorburii and the other gamblers."

Something of his wonted hilarity re-
turned to him as he finished. " I 'm
more sorry than I can tell you, for all
this," said OHphant. "Is there any-
thing I can do for you, Porter ? "

" Nothing whatever, my boy." The
sergi-ant here explained that he felt
obliged to put handcuffs upon his pris-
oner, and Kaish, having submitted to
that operation, talked on without em-
barrassment. "I only want you," he'
said, " to recognize the correctness of
what I have said to you about the bol-
lowness and humbug of society here,
/'ma humbug, and therefore 1 was able
to perceive it all. I don't speak from

envy: what good would that do me
now ? No, I merely notice that I am a
straw on the current, or a falling cigar-
stump in the sky, that shows what may
happen as soon as a general combustion
begins."

When the first chill and distant gray
light of morning came, Oliphant accom-
panied his quondam host and the police
officers to the wharves, whence they
were rowed out to the Amaranth. He
watched her getting under sail, and
waited until the pretty schooner was
well out in the harbor. Far above her,
one star glimmered wearily in the pale,
whitish-blue of the sky ; but that, too,
faded while the yacht was growing
smaller, and disappeared.

George Parsons Lathrop.

BERMUDIAN DAYS.

THREE feet of snow, the thermome-
ter at zero, bitter March winds, and re-
membrances, of the slow coming of the
New England spring. To sit in the sun
and be idle seemed best of all things, so
we went to Bermuda.

The road to Paradise is rough and
thorny. Beautiful Bermuda sits upon
her coral reefs, guarded by waters that
are not to be lightly ventured. Cross-
ing the Gulf Stream diagonally is not
conducive to ease of mind or body.
Given the passage of the English Chan-
nel intensified and stretched out over
four days instead of four hours, and you
have the voyage from New York to Ber-
muda. The less said about it the better.

But beyond Purgatory lies Paradise.
We left New York on a Thursday in
March. On Sunday morning (Easter
Sunday of 1883)", those of us who were
on deck saw a wonderful transformation
scene, as the Orinoco passed from the
dark and turbulent billows of the At-
lantic into the clear blue waters of the

land-locked harbor of Bermuda. There
was no gradual blending of color. On
one side of a sharply defined line was
the dull black of molten lead ; on the
other the bright azure of the June heav-
ens. One by one the white and hag-
gard passengers crept on deck. How
they mocked at the delusion of pleasure
travel at sea ! How they protested
that the dry land would be good enough
for them, after this ! Yet in three days'
time these same passengers were char-
tering whale-boats, sail-boats, yachts,
steam-tugs, anything that would take
them far out among the reefs, where
the ocean swell was heavies. So bles-
sedly evanescent is the memory of sea-
sickness !

The Bermudas are a cluster of isl-
ands, lying in the form of a fishhook, or
a shepherd's crook. It is claimed that
there are three hundred and sixty-five
of them, one for each day in the year.
But in this count, it' count it is, are in-
cluded many so minute that a single

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

779

tree would shade their whole circumfer-
ence. The five largest are St. David's,
St. George's, the Main Island, or the
Continent, as it is occasionally called,
Somerset, and Ireland's Island. St.
George's lies at the upper end of the
crook ; Ireland's at the extreme point.
Nature seems to have taken great care
of this precious bit of her handiwork.
So perfectly is it guarded by its outly-
ing coral reefs that there is but a sin-
gle channel by which large vessels can
enter the harbor. Fifteen miles from
shore, at the extreme northern limit
of the reefs, rises a picturesque group
called the North Rocks, — the high-
est pinnacles of a submerged Bermuda.
But though according to the chronicles
they may be seen, they seldom are, and
the first land sighted by the New York
steamer is the northeast coast of St.
George's Island. By night, the fixed
white light on St. David's Head alone
gives evidence that laud is near. The
tortuous though well-buoyed channel can
be entered only by daylight.

Out comes the negro pilot, and
scrambles up on deck. We round St.
George's, and follow the northern coast
line at a respectful distance till we
reach Point Ireland and her majesty's
dockyard, and come to anchor in Grassy
Bay. It is barely noon, but we find
to our chagrin that the tide is out, and
we must lie here till night and wait
for it. Presently appears the little
steam-tug, the Moondyue (or Mo-on-
dy-ne, — meaning the messenger, — if
you choose to appear wiser than other
folks), which sooner or later becomes
so pleasantly known to all Bermudian
visitors, and demands the mail. It is
but a five-mile run into Hamilton har-
bor, and most of the passengers avail
themselves of this opportunity to leave
the steamer ; but the Moondyne, crowd-
ed from stem to stern, looks half under
water, and the descent by the swaying
stairs is not enticing to heads and feet
that are still unsteady.

It is dark when we reach, the dock
at Hamilton, — a dark, rainy, moonless
night. How long it takes to lay the
planks, and make ready for our disem-
barkation ! II hurries on shore to

look for quarters. No rooms at the
hotels for love or money, but pleasant
lodgings " out," with board at the Ham-
ilton. A carriage waits, and a not long
drive through the soft, damp, odorous
darkness brings us to our temporary
home.

By a flight of winding stairs we reach
a covered balcony, over which a tropi-
cal vine wanders at will. Double glass
doors lead into a large, square cham-
ber, with walls of snow and floor of
cedar, out of which open two good-sized
bedrooms. The furniture is quaint and
old-fashioned, and there are brass bed-
steads with lace draperies wonderful to
behold.

We crept into blessed beds that would
not roll, with a queer but delightful
sense of isolation akin to that one feels
at night on the highest peak of some
lonely mountain. What was Bermuda
but a speck, a dot upon the map ! Sure-
ly the wind that was stirring the cedars
would blow us off this atom in the illim-
itable waste of waters. But we slept,
nevertheless.

Two or three low, sweet bugle notes,
that I afterwards discovered to be the
morning call of the baker's boy, and
a burst of jubilant bird-song awakened
me. It took but a moment to throw
open the window. What a contrast to
icy mountains and valleys of drifted
snow ! Before me were large pride-of-
India trees, laden with their long, pen-
dulous racemes of pale lavender, each
separate blossom having a drop of ma-
roon at its heart. Clumps of oleanders,
just blushing- into bloom, rose to the
right and the left. Beneath me were
glowing beds of geraniums, callus, roses,
K:i>tcr lilies, and the many-lined coleus.
Scarlet blossoms burned against the
dark green of the pomegranate leaves.

780

Bermudian Days.

[December,

There rose the tall shaft of a stately
palm ; there the spreading fans of the
palmetto, or the slender spires of the
swaying bamboo. As far as the eye
could reach was one stretch of unbroken
bloom and verdure. But stop a minute !
Surely there are patches of snow set in
all this greenery ; snow-covered roofs
glittering in the morning sun, and daz-
zling the eye with their brilliancy. It
took more than a glance to discover that
the snow was but the white coral rock,
of which more anon.

It seemed a cruel waste of time to
go to breakfast, but there was no help
for it. As we passed from beneath our
pride-of-Indias to the winding Serpen-
tine, a very pretty girl, neatly, even
daintily, dressed, and carrying a little
basket lined with scarlet, tripped up to
us, and with a graceful apology for de-
taining us, in words as well chosen as
those of any lady, begged the privilege
of doing our washing ! The pretty face
was dark, — as dark as that of a bronze
Venus. We said Yes, quite shame-
facedly, no doubt, and went our way,
wondering what manner of land this

might be, where melodious bugle notes
announce the advent of the baker, and
your washerwoman has the speech and
carriage of a duchess.

Kind and thoughtful courtesy is the
rule in Bermuda. A handful of lo-
quottes were laid beside my plate that
morning with the remark that they were
nearly out of season, and this might
be my only opportunity to taste them.
The loquotte is somewhat like a yellow
plum; bitter and astringent if plucked
too soon, but juicy and most delicious
when fully ripe.

That Easter Monday was a great day
for the boys of Pembroke grammar
school. There were to be athletic sports
at Tucker's Field, and the victors were
to receive their prizes from the fair
hands of no less a personage than the
Princess Louise. Such an opportunity
to see Bermuda in gala-dress was not to

be despised. So to the Field we went,
starting early, and taking a long drive
to the Flatts on Harrington Sound on
the way, in order to call at the quaint and
beautiful home of the American consul.
There we saw our first cocoa-nut palm,
its feathery branches making a soft, rus-
tling music as the wind swept through
them. And here, too, in the basin of a
fountain fed directly from the sea, were
dozens of beautiful angel fish, so exqui-
site in their blue and gold, and with
something so human in their mild, inno-
cent faces, that they seemed half un-
canny. Here, also, were the little striped
" sergeant majors," or pilot-fish. These
curious wee creatures seem to be the
forerunners, or " pilots," of the mighty
sharks, and, it is said, always precede
them. Without vouching for the truth
of this, I may say that whenever we saw
sharks in these waters, as we often did,
the pilot-fish invariably preceded them.

Tucker's Field was»a gay sight. All
Bermuda was there, — a throng of well-
dressed, handsome grown folks and pret-
ty children. Full one half were colored
people, and it is not too much to say
that some of the finest looking and finest
mannered of the crowd were among
them. One of the most noticeably ele-
gant men on the grounds was a tall and
stately black, with a beautiful child in
his arms and his pretty wife by his side.
There were soldiers in gay coats, stream-
ers and banners flying in the soft yet
not heated air, a close greensward un-
der our' feet, a wall of cedars encircling
us, the blue sky over our heads, and
glimpses of the blue sea in the distance.
Against a background of cedar arose a
white pavilion, over which floated the
Bermudian flag ; and in front of it was
a raised platform, covered with scarlet
cloth, sacred to the princess and her
suite. Her royal highness had not ar-
rived, but the boys were already ac their
work, running hurdle races, vaulting,
and leaping.

Presently there was a little cornmo-

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

781

tion, a stir of expectancy. Down sank
the flag of Bermuda, and the princess's
own standard, gorgeous in scarlet and
gold, rose in its stead, as an open car-
riage, with outriders, drove on to the
grounds. The princess, in a pretty and
simple costume of purple silk, with a
bonnet to match, — a little puffed affair,
guiltless of flowers or feathers, — bowed
to the right and to the left, her strong,
sweet, womanly face lighting up as she
received the greetings of the people.
In Bermuda the' Princess Louise won
all hearts by her gracious sweetness, her
affability, and the cordial kindliness and
simplicity with which she met all ad-
vances.

But to go back to the boys. They
raced ; they jumped ; they ran " three-
legged races ; " they rode obstinate
though gayly caparisoned donkeys, amid
cheers and laughter ; they vaulted, the
pole being raised higher and higher, until
the princess put a stop to it, lest the
brave lads should break their necks :
and then, one by one, the blushing and
victorious knights received their shining
silver cups from the hands of her royal
highness. The pretty pageant was over,
and our first day in Bermuda as well.

I have said that courtesy is the rule
in Bermuda. Here is a proof of it.
At one time during these performances,
the crowd surged in front of me, so that
I could see only a wall of backs and
shoulders. A kindly-faced and sweet-
voiced negro woman, perceiving this,
touched my shoulder, saying, " Take
my place, lady. You cannot see." "But,"
I answered, " if I do, you will see noth-
ing." " Oh, that does not matter," she
said, with a bright smile. " The lady
is a stranger, but I have seen the prin-
cess a good many times."

Manners in the islands, if not hearts,
are exceedingly friendly. Everybody,
as a rule, salutes. No man, be he white
or black, passes a lady without lifting
his hat. Every child makes its grave
little salutation. Negro women, with

baskets on their heads, give you a word
or a smile, as they go by. Little boys
and girls steal shyly up with gifts of
flowers or fruit. Nobody is in a hurry,
nobody seems to have anything to do ;
yet every one is well clad, and looks
happy and contented.

Perhaps there is poverty in Bermuda,
but squalor and absolute want, if they
exist, keep themselves strangely out of
sight. The first thing, perhaps, that
strikes the visitor, after the beauty of
the water and the perfection of the flow-
ers, is the appearance of ease and well-
to-do comfort that pervades the islands.
There is no rubbish, no dirt, no dust,
no mud. Instead of the tumble-down
shanties that deform and defile the rest
of the world, here the humblest citizen
not only dreams of marble halls, but
actually dwells in them — or seems to.
All the houses are built of the native
snow - white stone ; a coral formation
that underlies every foot of soil. When
first quarried, this stone is so soft that
it can be cut with a knife. But it hard-
ens on exposure to the air, and so dur-
able is it that a house once builded is
good for at least a hundred years. That
it readily lends itself to architectural
purposes is shown by the interior of
Trinity Church, and by the handsome
and massive gateways, with their arches
and columns, that one meets at every
turn. These, with the well-kept grounds,
give an impression of affluence and ele-
gance that is, perhaps, sometimes mis-
leading. For we are told there are not
many large incomes in Bermuda, and
that the style of living in these beauti-
ful and picturesque homes is very sim-
ple and unostentatious.

It is the very afternoon for a walk,
the air being cool and bracing, though
the sun is hot. It is the 3d of April,
and the mercury at eight A. M. stood at
62° in the shade. " Too cold to work
out-of-doors," explained a laborer whom
our landlord had engaged to work in
his garden ; and forthwith he gathered

782

Bermudian Days.

[December,

up his tools and departed. Think of
that, ye Yankee farmers, who chop wood
and •• cut fodder " with the thermometer
at zero !

Shall we go to the North Shore, tak-
ing Pembroke church by the way ? You
can see its square tower of massive
stone rising above the trees yonder.
The long white roof with the two tow-
ers, nearly opposite, just beyond that
stately royal palm, belongs to Wood-
lands, one of the finest places here. Here
the hard, smooth road leads us on be-
tween long avenues of cedar-trees, and
there between walls of coral rock thirty
feet high. We pause to rest on a «low
stone wall, where the oleander hedges,
just bursting into bloom, pink and white
and vivid crimson, reach far above our
heads and fill the air with fragrance.
Deadly sweet ? Poisonous ? May be so,
like many other charming things. But
we '11 risk it, with this strong sea-breeze
blowing.

We meet funny, sturdy little donkeys
drawing loads preposterously large ;
carts laden with crates of onions for the
outgoing steamer ; negro women bear-
ing baskets and bundles on their tur-
baned heads, — tall, erect, stately, often-
times with strong, clearly cut features
almost statuesque in their repose ; chil-
dren, white and black, just out of school,
with their books and satchels.

For a wonder, the square-towered
Pembroke church is closed. But the
gate is open, and we turn into the quiet
churchyard, where so many generations
lie buried. To unaccustomed eyes the
scene is a strange one, and the effect
is most singular. The surface of the
ground is almost hidden by gray, coffin-
shaped tombs, like huge sarcophagi,
solid and heavy as the eternal rocks of
the island. As I understand it, the
bodies are deposited, tier upon tier in
many cases, in excavations, or tombs,
cut in the underlying rock, and these
strange structures are raised over them.
But the impression one gets is that of

a multitude of great stone coffins, rest-
ing on the ground. Very few of them
bear any inscription. For the most part,
they are simply numbered, and the rec-
ord of names and dates is kept in a
parish book.

Of course there are exceptions, as in
the case of Bishop Field, who lies un-
der a polished slab of Peterhead gran-
ite, suitably inscribed. But love cares
for her dead, all the same. Palms rustle
softly. Pride-of-India trees, oleanders,
and pomegranates wave their boughs
and scatter their blossoms. Lilies and
callas and roses in rich profusion make
the place lovely beyond description,
while wreaths and crosses lie upon tombs
that are gray with age. At the head of
one grave — that of Governor Laffan,
who died last year — is a great tub of
English violets. At its foot a sago-palm
stretches its broad arms as if in bene-
diction.

We go past the government house,
Mount Langton, catching a glimpse
of the avenue, where the bourgam-i-
lier, a tropical vine, covers a wall thir-
ty-five feet high with a solid mass of
crimson flowers. But special permission
to enter must be had ; so we can only
take a surreptitious glance to-day, and
are soon at the North Shore, looking
straight out to sea.

The nearest point of land is Cape
Hatteras, six hundred and fifty miles
away. The strong ocean winds, free
from all taint of earthly soil or sin,
sweep over us with strength and heal-
ing in every breath. And the coloring !
Look ! Far off on the horizon, the sky,
azure overhead, softens to a pale rose-
color. The line that meets it is a deep
indigo blue, — a blue so intense that we
can hardly believe it is the sea. Thence,
through infinite gradations, the color
faints and fades, from indigo to dark
sapphire, from sapphire to lapis-lazuli,
from lapis-lazuli to the palest shade of
the forget-me-not. It changes, even as
we gaze, to deepest emerald, which

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

783

in turn fades to a tender apple-green,
touched here and there with rose. It
dies away in saffron and pale amber
where it kisses the shore, with long
reaches of purple where the coral reefs
lie hidden.

But as we scramble down upon the
rocky shore, how the huge breakers
foam and fret ! They toss their proud
heads, and dash themselves against the
frowning cliffs with the noise of boom-
ing thunder. We can scarcely hear our
own voices, and will run from the spray
and the tumult to a quieter spot farther
on. Here we find some oddly shaped
shells, and that strange creature called
the Portuguese man-of-war. It looks
like a pale bluish pearl, shining in the
sea. But it is merely an elliptical
bladder, and floats about, balanced by
long, blue, hanging tentacles. Capture
it with cane or parasol, if you can. But
beware of touching it, for it exudes a
subtle liquid that will sting you like a
nettle.

To-morrow, an' you please, we will
cross the island to the Sand Hills, on the
South Shore ; shortening the distance,
if we choose, by taking the ferry across
the harbor to Paget. The ferry is a
row-boat, and Charon will take us over
for a penny ha'penny apiece, with all
the beauty and the soft sweet airs thrown
in. Cheap enough, in all conscience !
For here are softly undulating shores,
green-clad hills, white cottages, each a
pearl iu a setting of emerald, the busy
dock with its quaintly foreign aspect,
the white-winged yachts flying hither
and thither, the blue sky overhead, the
bluer sea below. Is it not worth the
money ? Yonder lies a Norwegian ship,
with her sailors climbing the shrouds
like so many monkeys. Round the near-
est point comes a boat from H. M. ship
Tcnedos. The Tenedos is lying at
Grassy Bay, making herself fine to re-
ceive the princess, and her jolly taix are
in high spirits. When her royal highness
sails, next week, what with the flying

banners and the gayly dressed crowd,
the blue and white canopy with its flow-
er-wreathed pillars, the broad scarlet-
covered steps leading down to the water,
the admiral's cutter with its blue-jack-
eted tars, the gold-laced admiral himself
with his sword and his plumed hat and
all the rest of the fuss and feathers, it
will be for all the world like a scene
from Pinafore.

But this morning Jack is bent on
getting rid of his money. He will man-
age to leave half a year's wages behind
him in those queer, dark, uninviting lit-
tle shops on Front Street. For there
are more enticements hidden away in
most incongrudus nooks and corners than
one would imagine. You step into a
grocery, for instance, and find a fine
display of amber jewelry. If you are
in want of some choice cologne, do not
fail to ask for it at the nearest shoe-shop.
It is as likely to be there as in more le-
gitimate quarters. The rule is, If you
want a thing, hunt till you find it. It
is pretty sure to be somewhere.

A pleasant walk from the ferry brings
us to the Sand Hills, over which we
tramp, only pausing to admire the ex-
quisite oleander blooms, the largest we
have yet seen. We clamber down the
rocks, and reach the long, smooth, white
beach, as hard and level as a floor.
There is a fresh breeze, and the surf
comes rolling in, driving the baby crabs
far up the beach, and leaving them
stranded. We laugh at their queer an-
tics for a minute, and then leave them
to chase the sea-bottles that are rolling
over the sand. Can they really be alive.
these little globes of iridescent glass
filled with sea-water ?

But we turn, erelong, from all the
strange creatures of the sea to the sea
itself, lured by its own resistless spell.
There is not a being in sight, save one
lone darkey gathering mussels in the
distance. There is not a sign of human
habitation. Only the long stretch of
sandy beach, the rocky background, and

"84

Bermudian Days.

[December,

the wide ocean, vast, lonely, illimitable.
We write dmr names on the sand, and
with half asiniK' and a whole sigh watch
the tide as it blots them out. What do
we care that myriads before us have
played at the same childish game?
Higher and still higher up we write
them, but the result is always the same.
The cruel, crawling, hungry sea stretches
its hand over them, and they are gone.

Having done much tramping within a
day or two, what if we were to take a
drive to-day, a long one to St. George's ?
We can go by the North Road, the
South Road, or the Middle Road. They
are all good. But we will take the
North, returning by the South. The
comfortable carriage has seats for four ;
but we look dubiously at the one horse,
until we are told that on these hard,
smooth roads, hewn out of the solid
rock, one horse will do the work of two.
It is whispered, also, under the rose,
that there are not more than four pairs
of horses, or " double teams," in all
Bermuda. -

So off we go, in the cool, clear morn-
ing, bright with sunshine and odorous
with flower scents. As we bowl swiftly
along, the sea sparkles at our left, as if
there were a diamond in the heart of
every sapphire wave. Between us and
it the slight and graceful tamarisk rises
like a pale green mist. The Bermudians
call it the " salt cedar." Taste it, and
you get the very flavor of the brine.
To the right are undulating hills and
sleepy valleys, with pretty cottages nes-
tling in their green recesses, and here
and there a stately mansion perched far
up on some height that commands two
ocean views. We pass clumps of cedar
and thickets of the fan-leaved palmetto.
The curious, club-like paw-paw rises,
straight as an arrow, with a tuft of
leaves at the top, and fruit, looking not
unlike a great green lemon, growing
directly from the trunk. The aloe is in
bloom, and the Spanish bayonet bristles
by the wayside. The drooping purple

flower of the banana and its heavy clus-
ters of fruit are in every garden. The
banana is as omnipresent as the onion.

Often the road passes for long dis-
tances between lofty walls of solid rock,
from the crevices of which all lovely
growths are springing. The dainty
sweet elyssum clings to the rock in great
patches, and the little rice plant lays its
pink cheek against it lovingly. Here
and everywhere spring the life-plant
and the blue stars of the Bermudiana.
The orange is not now in fruit, but on
many of the lemon - trees the yellow
globes are hanging like golden lamps.

A long causeway — a gigantic piece
of work, massive and strong enough to
defy wind and water for ages — con-
nects St. George's with the mainland.
As we approach it, a fresh and exqui-
site picture meets us at every turn,
while the' views from the causeway itself
are surpassingly fine. It is nearly two
miles in length, and a revolving bridge
gives two wide water passages for boats.

The quaint, picturesque old town,
which was founded in 1612, seems to
bristle with forts. Indeed, this is true
of the whole island range, — the Ber-
mudas being, with the exception, of
Gibraltar, England's most strongly forti-
fied hold. One not to the manner born
cannot help wondering why this infini-
tesimal bit of land in the midst of mighty
seas should require a fort on every ex-
posed point ; why there should be bat-
teries and martello towers at every turn,
and why red-coats and marines should
meet you at every corner. But it must
be remembered that this is the rendez-
vous for the British fleet in all these
waters, and here vast quantities of arms
and ammunition are stored. England
doubtless knows her own business ; and
it cannot be questioned that her strong
position here would give her an im-
mense advantage, in case — which may
God forbid ! — of her ever going to
war with America.

Strangers are not allowed inside the

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

785

forts. But we can climb the heights, if
we choose, and see the outside of the
shore. Or, while we are waiting for
dinner to be made ready in the old-fash-
ioned inn facing the square, where the
landlord himself will serve you at table,
carving the joints with his own hand,
we can wander about the narrow streets
with their odd balconied and jalousied
houses, and imagine ourselves in the
Orient. Or we can go to the Public
Garden, and sit under the shade of date-
palms one hundred and fifty years old.
Here, in the ivy-covered wall at the left
of the lower gate, — a dark slab in a
niche, — is the monument of Sir George
Somers, for whom the town was named,
and in honor of whom the Bermudas
were once known as the Somers Islands.
Only his heart is buried here. His body
lies in White Church, Dorsetshire, Eng-
land. In the wall above the old monu-
ment'la a white marble tablet, erected
by Lieutenant-General Lefroy, bearing
this inscription : —

Near this spot
Was interred, in the year 1610, the Heart of the

Heroic Admiral,

SIR GEORGE SOMERS, KT.,
Who nobly sacrificed his Life

To carry succor
To the infant and suffering Plantation,

Now

THE STATE OF VIRGINIA.

To preserve his Name to Future Ages

Near the scene of his memorable shipwreck of

1609,

The Governor and Commander-in-Chief
Of this Colony for the time being caused this
tablet to be erected.
1876.

Building's Bay, on the North Shore, is
believed to be the spot where, after the
shipwreck, the " heroic admiral " built
his two cedar ships, the Deliverance and
the Patience.

In the Public Library at Hamilton
one is shown with much pride a thin
booklet of perhaps a dozen pages, print-
ed in black letter. It has lately been re-
bound in red morocco, thus renewing its
youth. It bears the imprint " London,
1613," and purports to be Sir George's

VOL. LH. — NO. 314. 50

own account of his shipwreck and de-
liverance.

It is but a step from the Public Gar-
den to St. Peter's, the oldest church on
the islands. In the walls are many
interesting tablets, and the sexton will
show you the communion service, of
massive silver, presented by King Wil-
liam III., in 1684.

To American eyes, its narrow streets
and oddly shaped houses give St. George's
a charm that is quite distinctive. York
Street is but ten feet wide, and, with its
gardens crowded with semi-tropical vege-
tation, it is like an oriental picture.

On the way home there are marvel-
ous caves it would be a sin not to visit.
We leave the carriage, and pick our way
for some distance through thickets of
cedar and oleander, with coffee-trees,
bamboos, and lemons interspersed, till
we reach the desired haven. It proves
by no means a haven of rest, however,
for the descent into the caves is rough
and precipitous. Yet, if you are fond
of cavernous depths, it pays. Our guide,
an intelligent colored man, who owns
the place, lights a bonfire of cedar brush,
and the transformation scene begins.

The dark, damp, gloomy cavern stretches
away through magnificent distances, and
through openings in the walls we catch
glimpses of other chambers, of whose
splendors we are content to dream.
Far above us soars the vaulted roof,
hung with stalactites, and glittering as
with the light of countless jewels. Be-
low us lies a lake, clear and cold, where-
on fairies might launch their airy shal-
lops. There are many of these caves in
different parts of the islands, but one
description answers for all. We may,
however, stop for a moment at the
"Devil's Hole." No rendezvous for
gods or fairies this, but a natural fish-
pond, through whose rocky basin, set in
a huge cavernous chamber, the ocean
sends its tides continually. The fish,
strange creatures called groupers, with
great sluggish bodies and horribly hu-

786

Bermudian Days.

[December,

man faces, come crowding up to be fed,
and stare at us hungrily with their aw-
ful eyes.

It is Sunday morning, and all eyes
are turned anxiously to the signal sta-
tion at Mount Langton. As we look, a
red, white, and blue pennant flies from
the yard-arm, announcing that the steam-
er from New York is in sight. Now we
can go to church in peace, sure of get-
ting our mail some time to-morrow. It
is impossible to get it to-day, and after
a little natural Yankee grumbling at
Bermudian slowness we accept the situ-
ation. What does it matter ? What
does anything matter in this lazy, lotus-
eating land, where it seems always after-
noon ?

The Bermudians are a church-going
people. The question asked is not,
" Are you going to church to-day ? " but,
" Where are you .going ? " The going
is taken for granted, as it used to be in
New England. Yet there is no Puri-
tanic sombreness. All is gay and bright.
Flags fly in honor of the day from
Mount Langton, from Admiralty House,
and from the shipping in the harbor.
At half past nine A. M. precisely, a pen-
nant flies from the staff in Victoria Park,
to announce that church time is near.

We Hamiltonians can go to Pem-
broke, beautifully set in its garden of
green ; or to Trinity, a "handsome church,
with fine memorial windows, and col-
umns and arches of the native stone.
Or we can get Charon to row us across
the ferry, and stroll for a mile along a
quiet, shaded country road to the beau-
tiful Paget Church. If we do this last,
we shall surely be tempted to rest a
while on a low stone wall that runs
parallel with the road behind the parish
school, and try to fix the 'lovely picture
in our minds forever.

We can easily find a Presbyterian
kirk and a Wesleyan chapel. But
here, as in England, Dissenters are in
the minority, the union of church and
state being very close. Wherever we

go, however, we shall find the same
pleasant and cordial mingling of whites
and blacks in the audience. Bermuda
does not raise a partition wall between
her children, setting the light on one
side, the dark on the other. Their
pews are side by side, in the flower-
decked churches, and as a rule the col-
ored people are as neatly dressed, as well
mannered, and as devout, as their lighter
brethren. One cannot look upon their
tranquil, thoughtful faces, or hear their
low - toned, musical voices in the re-
sponses, without thanking God for what
fifty years of freedom, under favorable
auspices, can do for the black race.

Bermuda belongs to the see of New-
foundland and Labrador, the bishop
making a yearly visitation. What a
rounding of the circle, — to live half
the year in frozen Labrador, and half
in soft Bermuda !

There are eight parishes, with the
names of which the visitor soon grows
as familiar as with the streets of his na-
tive town ; if he stays long he talks of
Southampton, Devonshire, and Warwick
as glibly as the islanders themselves.
Parliament is composed of a legislative
and executive council appointed by the
crown, and an assembly. The latter,
formed of four members from each par-
ish, is elected for a term of seven years.
The schools are in charge of the parish
authorities, who are empowered to en-
force attendance. A fine is exacted from
the parent if the child fails to appear.
There are also several private schools,
which are said to be good. At all events,
the Bermudians are refined and intel-
ligent, and by far the greater number,
of course, have been educated at home.
Now and then the son or daughter of
a well-to-do family is sent to England
to be "finished," but one meets many
bright and clever men and women who

have never left the islands.

A certain insular narrowness may
sometimes be felt, as when a lady said
to her friend, " I wonder what the world

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

787

would do without Bermuda ! Just think
how many potatoes and onions we ex-
port ! " It is a blessed fact that one's
own home is the hub of the universe.
Bermuda does not seem small to its in-
habitants. To them it is the world, and
holds the fullness thereof. " The maps
do not do us justice," said one of them
to the writer. " For you see we really
are not so very small."

But the truth is that in its exceeding
smallness lies one of its chief charms.
And to realize how small it is one must
visit the lighthouse, a drive of six miles,
or so, from Hamilton. Down the hill
to Front Street, past Parliament House
and the Public Library, past Pembroke
Hall and its group of Royal Palms, —
five magnificent trees, lifting their state-
ly, granite-colored shafts like columns
in some ancient temple, — round the
harbor, and then on through Paget and
"Warwick to Gibbs's Hill in Southamp-
ton. This is one of the most delightful
drives possible, the road running past
fine country mansions and cozy cottages,
with here and there a glimpse of the
shining sea. Just where we leave the
highway to go to Gibbs's Hill we pass a
ruined house, weird and sombre in its
desolation. It is a place to haunt one's
dreams. The high stone steps are worn
in great suggestive hollows. The wa-
ter tank is empty, and rats have taken
possession. From the broken windows
ghostly faces seem peering out. But
we pick a geranium that flaunts gayly in
the sun by the shattered door-sill, and
go on our upward and winding way to
the lighthouse.

The ascent of the lofty tower is not
difficult, in spite of its height. The
light is, we are told, a " revolving diop-
tric lens with mirrors," — whatever that
may be, — and is among the largest and
most powerful in the world. The build-
ing is exquisitely kept, its polished
floors and glittering brasses being dainty
enough for my lady's boudoir. Civil
service means something in Bermuda.

One of the three keepers told me he
had not left his lonely eyrie for a 'night
in seventeen years, and it was evident
he considered himself settled for life.
Very proud were the three of their
stately and beautiful charge, touching
the costly and delicate machinery as
tenderly as if it were a sentient being
and felt their caressing hands.

But it is the view from the gallery
we came to see, and out we go, with a
word of caution from the guide as to
the wind. We are on the very outer-
most point of the southwestern coast,
and from where we stand we can take
in the whole island group, from St.
George's to Ireland. What a little spot
it is, to be sure ! — a mere point in the
illimitable waste of waters that stretch
away to the horizon on every side. But
the view is magnificent beyond descrip-
tion. It is worth the half of one's king-
dom to stand for just half an hour, of a
clear afternoon, on the lighthouse tower
at Gibbs's Hill.

Yet the chief attraction of Bermuda
is in her iridescent waters and what lies
beneath them. At nine of the clock, one
morning, Williams, a bronze Hercules,
low voiced, gentle mannered, a trusty
boatman, and an enthusiast in his call-
ing, meets us at the dock, with his water
glasses, nippers, and all else needed for
a successful trip to the reefs. But our
first objective point is Ireland Island,
and to gain time we embark on the
Moondyne, — a pleasant party of five,
with lunch baskets and the ever-present
waterproofs and umbrellas. Towing our
row-boat, away we glide down the beau-
tiful sunlit bay, winding our way in and
out among the fairy islands of the Great
Sound, after a fashion strikingly like the
passage through the Thousand Islands
of the St. Lawrence. Passing the love-
ly shores of Somerset and Boaz, which
last was formerly the convict station, we
get good views of the naval and mili-
tary hospitals, with their broad balconies
and shaded grounds. At Ireland Island

788

Bermudian Days.

[December,

is her majesty's dockyard, with forts
and batteries, all alive with soldiers,
marines, and busy workmen. Several
men-of-war, with a multitude of smaller
craft, are at anchor in Grassy Bay, and
the admiral's ship, the Northampton, is
lying in the great floating dock, Ber-
muda, for repairs. This enormous struc-
ture, said to be the largest of its kind in
the world, was towed over from England
in 1868. To naval, military, and busi-
ness men this is a most attractive spot,
but so much red tape must be untied
before one can enter the dockyard that
we content ourselves with an outside
view, and walk across the island to the
cemetery. Here, within sound of the
moaning sea and the fierce guns of the
forts, all is as peaceful and serene as
in any country graveyard in New Eng-
land. Trees wave, flowers bloom, bright-
winged birds flit from palm to cedar,
and great masses of the scarlet heath
burn in the soft, cool light.

But we are most impressed by the
records of sudden and violent deaths ;
for here we find inscriptions instead of
the conventional number. " Killed by
a fall from the masthead of H. M. ship
Daylight." " Drowned off Spanish
Rock." " Died suddenly, a victim to
yellow fever." " Erected by his mess-
mates to the memory of , who died

at sea." So the inscriptions ran. Many
of the epitaphs were curious ; but all
were to me indescribably pathetic.

Some civilians are buried here, and
many little children ; and I came upon a
pathetic memorial to a fair young Eng-
lish vr'fe, who followed her soldier hus-
band hi'her only to give birth to a little
child and die on these far-off shores.
But for the most part the sleepers in
this beautiful God's acre are strong and
stalwart men, cut off in the flower of
their days.

We lunch in delicious shade, with the
sea at our feet and a bright-eyed, swift-
footed little mulatto boy for our Gany-
mede. Theu we row along the coast and

through the narrows to the dockyard
harbor, bound for the reefs.

As we round the point there is a sud-
den gathering of the clans and the swell
of martial music. Hundreds of soldiers
and sailors swarm upon the piers and
cling to every masthead. Evidently
something exciting is going on. The
band strikes up Home, Sweet Home,
and the good ship Humber steams out,
with all sails set, bound for England,
and crowded from stem to stern. She
takes home a regiment whose term of
service has expired. A storm of cheers
bursts from the comrades they are leav-
ing behind, answered by shouts and hur-
rahs from the happy fellows on board.
They scramble up the tall masts, and far
out on the yard-arms ; they cling to the
shrouds, waving their caps and shouting
themselves hoarse, as the band plays
The Girl I left Behind Me. One agile
fellow stands on the very top of the tall-
est mast, his figure in bold relief against
the blue of the sky. As the ship passes
the near buoys Auld Lang Syne floats
plaintively over the deep, and the men
on the dock turn soberly, perhaps sadly,
to the monotonous routine of duties.

Williams picks up his oars, and we
are soon far out among the reefs. It is
so still and clear that a water glass is
scarcely needed. Without its aid we can
look far down, down, into the azure and
amber depths, so translucent, so pure,
that the minutest object is distinctly
visible. What marvelous growths, what
wonderful creations ! Is this a sub-
merged flower-garden ? Great sea-fans
wave their purple branches, swaying to
the swell as pine-boughs sway to the
breeze. Magnificent sprays of star-coral,
some as fine and delicate as lace-work,
and so frail that it would be impossible
to remove them from their bed, and
some like the strong antlers of some
forest monarch, grow upon the sides of
the deep sea mountains. Here the shelf-
coral hangs from the rocks like an in-
verted mushroom, delicately wrought,

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

789

and the rose-coral unfolds like a fairy
flower. There lie great brainstones, an-
other variety of coral, with their singu-
lar convolutions, side by side with finger-
sponges, tall, brown, branching sea-rods,
sea-cucumbers, and many another won-
der. There are star-fish, sea-urchins,
and sea-anemones, — gorgeous creatures
in ashes of rose and orange, or in pink
and brown with dashes of yellow, and
a flutter of white ruffles, that unfold as
you gaze, like the opening of a flower-
bud. And in and around and about them
all glide the blue angel fish, with their
fins just tipped with gold, yellow canary
fish, the zebra-striped sergeant majors,
and a ruby-colored fish that gleams in
the water like a ray of light.

We gather fans and corals ; we ex-
haust our vocabularies in expressions of
delight ; and then in the soft glow of
sunset, while the shores are bathed in
rosy mist, and each little island is an
emerald or an amethyst set in silver,
and the far lighthouse towers above
them all like a watchful sentinel, we
half row, half float, homeward with the
tide, silent, tired, but happy.

It would be impossible to tell of all
the pleasant excursions that gave light
and color to our Bermudian days. One
morning we drove to Tucker's Town —
about seven miles — and there hired a
whaleboat and three stout oarsmen for
the day, that we might explore Castle
Harbor and its surroundings.

We were soon flying over the waves,
with our square sail set, bound for Castle
Island ; but we stopped at the extreme
point of the mainland, that the gen-
tlemen might visit a cave called the
Queen's White Hall. The ladies, mean-
while, climbed the high cliffs to watch
the breakers as they dashed over the
rocks below us. Suddenly there was a
rush, a loud whirr of wings, a burst of
laughter, and a call to us ; and down we
went. The lighting of a bit of mag-
nesium wire had disclosed a boatswain
bird on its nest. Blinded by the sudden

glare, it had given one fearful cry ere it
was caught and brought out for our in-
spection. The boatswain is a beautiful
white creature, of th'e gull family, with
two long feathers in its tail, by means
of which it is popularly supposed to
steer its flight ; hence the name. When
we let it go, it flew far out to sea. But
we were scarcely in the boat again when
we saw it circling and wheeling far above
our heads, only waiting till we strange
intruders should be gone before return-
ing to its nest.

Having set sail again, we made for
Castle Island. Steep stairs cut in the
rocks led us to a broad plateau bordered
by ruined fortifications, massive struc-
tures which were built early in the sev-
enteenth century, when the Spanish buc-
caneers made constant raids upon Ber-
muda. In fact, the pirates once held
Castle Island, and we walked over the
paths their feet had worn nearly three
hundred years ago. Afterwards the cas-
tle was for a time the seat of govern-
ment. The massive walls of fort and
castle, full ten feet thick, seem as if they
might stand forever.

Climbing up into one of the deep em-
brasures, with the lonely sea before me
and the silent court behind, I tried to
imagine the scene as it was when gay
with red-coats and gold-laced officers,
with their powdered wigs, their queues,
their queer cocked hats, and all the pomp
and pageantry of glorious war. Far
down on the beach below me lay a rusty
cannon, half buried in the sand. Doubt-
less from the very spot where I stood it
had belched forth its thunders at the ap-
proaching pirate fleets.

We lunched in the gray old court, sit-
ting on a low stone seat whereon, it was
easy to believe, many a brave soldier
and many a fair lady had whispered
sweet secrets, long ago. Names were
carved in the rocks and on the walls,
the numbers of many regiments — some
famous in English annals — appearing
over and over again. The remains of

790

Bermudian Days.

[December,

the old ovens were still there, and chim-
neys blackened by the smoke of fires so
long gone out.

In the old government house there
is a hall, floorless and windowless now,
where many a Bermuda girl danced and
was made love to by the gay gallants of
other days. For Bermuda has always
been gay, — gayer, they say, in the past
than it is now. So long ago as when
our Puritan fathers were struggling with
cold, with savages, and with all the hard-
ships and privations of early New Eng-
land life, Bermuda was sitting in the
sun and smiling as serenely as to-day.
The traditions there are not of spinning
and weaving, of hard-won comforts, of
serious endeavor, of Indian fights and
cruel massacres, but of gay fetes and
brilliant masquerades, of happy compe-
tence and careless ease. The old ladies
of to-day show you the fine dresses, the
laces and ornaments, that their great-
grandmothers wore when they, the
great-grandmothers, were young.

Setting sail again, we swept through
the great harbor, passing Nonsuch and
Cooper islands and rounding St. Da-
vid's Head, a magnificent promontory,
against which the sea beat itself to foam.
The wind was high ; we were in the
open sea, and the boat was tossed like
a feather by the great waves that came
rolling in from beyond the reefs. The
headlands of St. David's are precipitous
cliffs, with deep bays and curious indent-
ed caves. One of them is called Cu-
pid's Oven, — a most maladroit name,
— for the little god would be frightened
out of his wits by the mere sight of the
dark, uncanny hole. Elsewhere a door
is cut in the high ocean wall. Does it
lead down to Hades ?

We entered the narrows just beyond
the island, and the oarsmen, the sail be-
ing lowered, pulled along the coast to
St. George's. Here our carriages were
in waiting and we drove home by the
way of Moore's Calabash Tree, in a
dark, secluded glen. The poet, it is

said, was wont to sit here and sing of
the charms of Bermudian girls.

In this long and, for our men, hard
trip, we did not hear from them one
loud word, much less an oath. The cap-
tain, a handsome young negro, gave his
orders by a look, a word, a sign, and
was obeyed as quietly.

One can't get lost in Bermuda. Walk
where you will, or drive, if you dare, —
for Bermudians turn to the left, and
Americans are apt to come to grief, —
you will be sure to come out in sight
of some well-known landmark. Never
to be forgotten is one bright afternoon,
when two of us drove all by ourselves
to Knapton Hill and Spanish Rock. Sa-
cred, too, is the memory of another,
when, in the same independent fashion,
we went to Spanish Point, and after
picking up shells for an hour, and count-
ing the white sails flitting like sea-gulls
over the sparkling bay, we turned and
drove to the North Shore. The water
was so marvelously clear that from cliffs
forty feet above the sea we could count
the shells and pebbles lying twenty feet
beneath it. By and by we turned off
into a road that was new to us, leading
up a hill, and lined with oleanders, pink,
white, and crimson, as large as good-sized
apple-trees. We did not know where it
led, nor did we care. But we came out
at last near the old church in Devon-
shire, an ivy-covered ruin. Having been
warned that the roof might fall, we did
not go inside, but through the broken
windows we saw the crumbling walls,
from which the precious tablets had been
removed, the dilapidated pews, and the
high pulpit with antique hangings, faded
and hoary. In one of the aisles was
stowed away a ghastly hearse and a tot-
tering bier, on which, no doubt, many
generations of the dead who were sleep-
ing so soundly, hard by, had been borne
to their last rest. I turned away with
a shudder.

But without, how sweet and still it
was! It was late afternoon. Not a

1883.]

Bermudian Days.

791

sound reached us, not even the lapsing
of the waves. Only now and then a
lone bird twittered softly, or the winds
Sighed in the palm-trees. Great gray
Jombs lay all around, like huge sarcoph-
agi, and stretched far up the hill, weird
and sombre in the light of dying day.
Perhaps it was against the rules, — I
don't know, — but with a great lump in
my throat, and a tender thought of the
little unknown sleeper, I picked a rose
from a bush that was heaping a child's
grave with its fragrant petals. If it
was a sin, I here make full confession,
and crave absolution from the baby's
mother ! Rose geraniums grew wild in
great profusion, making the air sweet
with their strong perfume. It is called
in Bermuda the " graveyard geranium,"
and I was told that pillows for coffined
heads are filled with the fragrant leaves.
An immense but dying cedar — the old-
est on the islands — stands near the
church, and is used as a bell-cote. The
trunk is hollow, and inside it two vigor-
ous young trees are growing.

There are no springs in Bermuda,
and the great water-tanks are conspicu-
ous objects everywhere. Built of heavy
stone, cool, dark, and entered solely by a
door in the side which admits the bucket,
the water they contain is limpid and de-
licious. Every householder is compelled
by law to have a tank, and to keep it in
good repair.

Another thing that attracts attention
is the animals tethered here, there, and
everywhere. You see donkeys, goats,
cows, even cats, hens, and turkeys, —
these last- drooping sulkily, or swelling
with outraged dignity, — confined by the
inevitable tether. Noticing the strange
manoeuvres of a hen in an inclosure near
the road, I stopped to investigate, and
discovered that she was tied by a cord
two yards long to another hen. Their
gyrations aud flutterings were attempts
to walk in opposite directions, — a pair
of unaccommodating Siamese twins.

But time would fail us to tell of all

that filled our Bermudian days with a
satisfying, restful delight : of trips on
the Mooudyne ; of moonlit walks to Hun-
gry Bay, when the spray was hoar frost,
and the waves were rippled silver; of
Saturday mornings at Prospect, to see
the fine drill of the Royal Irish Rifles;
of amateur theatricals given by the offi-
cers and their wives in the rickety old
theatre ; of receptions and lawn tennis
at the government house ; of pleasant
glimpses of Bermudian homes ; of kindly
greetings and warm hand clasps. Shall
I ever forget a certain " afternoon tea,"
where we were served in the shaded bal-
cony by the five fair daughters of the
house, while the happy, handsome moth-
er smiled serenely, and took her ease
with the rest of us ? Shall I ever cease
to remember the mangroves, looking for
all the world like tipsy bacchanalians,
that in some way always reminded me
of Saxe Holm's story of the One-Legged
Dancers ?

A few last words as to the climate.
It is somewhat capricious, but is never
really cold. Bermuda has no frosts.
Yet during seven weeks, beginning in
March and ending in May, we were in
no need of thin summer clothing. The
mercury in winter seldom falls below
60°. In the height of summer it is sel-
dom above 85°, and there is always the
breeze from the sea. When it blows
from the southwest, Bermudian s stay
within doors, and remain quiet till it
changes. Tropical plants thrive, not
because it is hotter than with us in sum-
mer, but because they are never winter
killed.

Bermuda is not the place for con-
sumptives. But for the overworked and
weary, for those who need rest and rec-
reation and quiet amusement, for those
who love the beauty of sea and sky bet-
ter than noisy crowds and fashionable
display, and can dispense with some
accustomed conveniences for the sake
of what they may gain in other ways, it
is truly a paradise.

JuKa C. R. Dorr.

792

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

SOME ALLEGED AMERICANISMS.

REVERTING to a subject which I have
treated heretofore, in The Atlantic and
elsewhere,1 I have to begin by a caution
which indeed may be regarded as a mo-
nition : this, — that the stigmatizing of
a word, or a phrase, or even a pronun-
ciation, as an Americanism, by any cen-
sor, however accomplished or however
thoroughly English, or by any " author-
ity " (so called), British or American,
however high, is not to be regarded as of
very great moment in the settlement of
the question, still less as at all decisive.
It is very rarely that a word or a phrase
can be set down as an Americanism
except upon probability and opinion ;
whereas the contrary is shown, if shown
at all, upon fact-proof that cannot be
gainsaid. The citation of a word from
English literature at or before the time
of Dryden shows that it cannot possibly
be " American " in origin ; evidence of
its continued use by British writers dur-
ing the last century and the present
proves the impossibility of its being an
Americanism in any sense of that term.
Indeed, evidence and proof should hard-
ly be mentioned in relation to this show-
ing. Of words and phrases which have
such origin and history as has just been
specified, it is simply to be said that they
are English. To stamp a word or a
phrase as an Americanism, it is neces-
sary to show that (1) it is of so-called
" American " origin, — that is, that it
first came into use in the United States
of North America ; or that (2) it has
been adopted in those States from some
language other than English, or has
been kept in use there while it has
wholly passed out of use in England.

Now these points are very difficult of
sufficient proof ; and the defeats of those

1 Galaxy, September and November, 1877, Jan-
uary, 1878. Atlantic, April, May, July, Septem-
ber, and November, 1878, January, March, May,
November, 1879, May, 1880, May, 1881. This note

who have assumed them in various in-
stances are almost numberless. The
production of unknown and unsuspect-
ed evidence has often toppled bold as-
sertions over, and swept into oblivion
judgments long reverently accepted ;
and it may at any time do so again.
When those who assume to speak au-
thoritatively upon the subject declare
that a word or a phrase is an American-
ism, they must be prepared with a full
and satisfactory answer to the question,
What do you know about it ? They
may perhaps know what is English, but
how will they prove the negative, that
this or that word or phrase is not Eng-
lish ? Indeed, generally the declaration
that a word is an Americanism (or not
English) can only be (what it almost
always is) the mere expression of the
declarer's opinion that he or she does
not remember having heard the word,
and rather dislikes it, and therefore as-
sumes that it is not English, but " Amer-
ican." At its strongest, such a judg-
ment is the mere opinion of a critical
scholar whose reading in English lit-
erature, ancient and modern, has been
both wide and observant. An opinion
from such a quarter has some value ;
but it becomes absolutely worthless in
the presence of adverse facts.

Now it is very significant of the dif-
ficulty which besets this question that
British journals of the highest standing
keep up the manufacture of an ever-
lengthening chain of blunders in regard
to it ; each one, now and then, as if im-
pelled by some blind instinct, adding its
little link of welded ignorance and prej-
udice ; and hardly less remarkable is it
that studious men, not taught by study
the wisdom of reserve, make assertions
will, I hope, be accepted as a reply to letters ad-
dressed and otherwise to be addressed to me. I
do not know where copies of the Galaxy may be
obtained.

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

793

•which rival those of the journalists in
rashness and in error.

An astonishing blunder, or rather se-
ries of blunders, was committed in the
past summer (July 21st) by a London
journal of the highest standing, the Spec-
tator. There is not in England, hard-
ly in Europe, a journal whose opinions
upon politics, literature, society, and art
are more worthy of consideration. This
eminent British journal published a
long and carefully written critical arti-
cle on Walt Whitman's prose ; and in
summing up a well-merited condemna-
tion remarked that " unless the reader
possesses considerable familiarity with
American slang he will frequently be
stopped by such expressions as ' fetching
up,' ' scooted,' ' derring do,' ' out of kil-
ter,' " etc. American slang ! Revered
shades of Edmund Spenser and of Wal-
ter Scott, refrain your ghostly vengeance
while one of your devoted worshipers
cites you as evidence that "derring do"
is " American " and slang !

"So from immortal race he does proceede

That mortal hands may not withstand his

might,

Drad for his derring doe and bloudy deed ;
For all in bloud and spoile is his delight."

(Faerie Queen, II. c. i. st. 42.)
" All mightie men and dreadful derring doers
(The harder it to make them well agree)."

(Idem, IV. c. ii. st. 38.)

" ' I will put my faith in the • good
knight whose axe hath rent heart of oak
and bars of iron. Singular,' he again
muttered to himself, ' if there be two
who can do such a deed of derring do.' "
(Ivanhoe, chap, xxix.)

In truth, this piece of alleged " Amer-
ican " slang would not be understood by
one person in five hundred thousand
in " America ; " and my attention was
called to it by inquiries as to its mean-
ing and its origin by two intelligent
friends.

The other phrases cited as American-
isms by the Spectator are folk phrases
of such character that they would not
be easily discovered in literature; but

they are so purely English that it would
seem quite impossible for a competent
English scholar to regard them as hav-
ing any other origin. It is only neces-
sary to turn to Halliwell's dictionary to
find " Scooter : a syringe or squirt. To
go like a scooter ; that is, very quick."
"Kilters : tools, instruments; the compo-
nent parts of a thing." To scoot, there-
fore, means to move very quickly; and
out of kilter, to have the component
parts deranged. Both words are East
Anglican provincialisms. They are not
" classical " in England ; neither are
they so in the United States. They have
just the same form, the same meaning,
and the same status in both countries.
The like is true of " derring do," as to
which the facts are these : Spenser used,
according to wont, an archaic phrase ;
Scott remembered it, and introduced it
in Ivanhoe, a tale of the twelfth cen-
tury ; and Walt Whitman, remembering
Scott, used it, as to sense, just as he did.

The Spectator, however, does not
stop here. It goes on to say that Walt
Whitman " is compelled to employ a
large original vocabulary," and as a
part of this vocabulary it quotes "jet-
ted," " ostent," and " promulge." Now
as to the originality of a large part of
that self-styled " Cosmos " there will be
no dispute among persons competent to
form an opinion ; but again this censor
of things " American " is very unfor-
tunate in his specification of what is
" American." The words which he re-
gards as original in Walt Whitman have
been in use by the best English writers
for centuries. For instance : —

" O, peace ! Contemplation makes a
rare turkey-cock of him : how he jets
under his advanc'd plumes ! " (Twelfth
Night, Act II. Sc. 5, 1. 26.)

" Whose men and dames so jetted and adorn'd,
Like one another's glass to trim them by."

(Pericles, Act I. Sc. 4, 1. 26.)

" Use all the observance of civility,
Like one well studied in a sad ostent
To please his grandam."

(The Merchant of Venice, Act II. Sc. 4, 1. 175.;

794

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

"He forbids it,
Being free from vainness and self - grievous

pride;

Giving lull trophy, signal and ostent
Quite from liiniM'lf t<. God."

(Henry V., Act V. Chorus, 1. 19.) l

As to " promulge," it is only neces-
sary to say that it is found in all mod-
ern English dictionaries (even the Glos-
sographia Anglicana Nova, 1707, and
Miege, 1679), in which examples of
its use are cited from such writers as
Prynne, South, Pearson, and Atterbury.
It must be very much older ; for it is
of Old French origin.

What shall be said when we find a
writer, to whom a journal of the grade
of the London Spectator assigns the
task of writing a critical article upon
style, setting forth boldly and without
qualification such words as these as Amer-
icanisms, either slang or the original
inventions of an " American " writer ?
It shall be said merely that this is a fair
example of the knowledge of what is
English that is displayed by most Brit-
ish critics when they unfold themselves
upon this subject. For to know what
is English is the first and essential qual-
ification for pronouncing judgment upon
what is not English ; and on this point
almost all persons who have written
upon this subject — not only British crit-
ics, lay and professional, but compilers
of dictionaries of Americanisms — have
shown themselves distinctively ignorant.
Like that of the samphire gatherers,
theirs is a " dreadful trade." They are
likely to be cast headlong at any minute
by a misstep, even when they feel most
sure of their footing ; and they who
in such case feel much pity must have
more sympathy with their business than
I have. Searching for Americanisms
is the pettiest subdivision of the pet-
tiest department of literature, — verbal
criticism.

A terrible example of the destructive
uncertainty which attends this envious

1 These line references are to the numeration in
the text of the Riverside Shakespeare.

business is the phrase "enjoys poor
health." If there is one phrase which
more surely than any other has been
regarded as an Americanism, and as
such has been scoffed at by British
critics, it is this. I have heretofore
shown that it is well known in England,
colloquially and as a provincialism, in
Leicestershire and in "Warwickshire;
but lately, turning to the fly-leaves of a
book which I had not seen for some
years, I found a memorandum of its use
by a writer than whom there could not
be better evidence as to what is English.
The Reverend Henry Venn, author of
the famous book The Complete Duty of
Man, one of the most celebrated evan-
gelical divines and preachers of the last
century, was born in Surrey in 1724.
His ancestors were clergymen of the
Church of England, in an uninterrupted
line, from the period of the Reformation.
He was a scholar of St. John's College,
Cambridge, and Fellow of Queen's, of
the same university. He was vicar of
Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and rector of
Yelling, Huntingdonshire. His style is
remarkable, even in his letters, for a
union of correctness and ease, and his
English for its purity. This Surrey-
born man and Cambridge scholar, in
whom centred generations of university-
bred divines, writing to his daughter,
October 19, 1784, says : —

" We expect Joseph Scott here, to
take home his wife, who is something
better for our air ; though, at best, she
enjoys poor health." (Life and Letters
of Rev. Henry Venn, page 407. Third
edition, London, 1835.)

His editor, who is his grandson, the
Reverend Henry Venn, also Fellow of
Queen's College, passes the phrase with-
out remark ; and I think that now we
may as well have heard the last of it
as an Americanism. It is more rarely
heard, I believe, in the United States
than in England. It is a strange phrase,
and pot admirable ; and in regard to
its origin, I venture the conjecture that

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

795

it is a product of the feeling in the class
of religionists, of whom the author of
The Complete Duty of Man was a
shining example, that everything ought
to be enjoyed, even poor health, which
is bestowed by Providence ; as the pious
old rustic, in The Dairyman's Daughter,
said that the weather to-morrow would
surely be good, because it would be such
as pleased God. (I quote from mem-
ory.) So Venn afterwards, referring to
his having been struck down with pal-
sy, writes, " I am come to the days of
darkness, but not of dejection ; for why
should not Christians be afraid of dejec-
tion, as they are of murmuring and com-
plaint ? " To enjoy poor health seems,
then, evangelical English rather than
" American." Yet see in a speech in
Pericles (Act IV. Sc. 3), out of ques-
tion written by Shakespeare, this ex-
amplo of a corresponding confusion of
thought : —

" 0, go to. "Well, well !
Of all the faults beneath the heavens, the gods
Do like this worst." .

But I admit that when I see phrases
branded in this way as Americanisms I
have pleasure in feeling that often there
is somewhere a shot in my locker that
will knock the notion into splinters.

And here I am tempted to remark,
as it were parenthetically, upon a very
ancient prototype of what seems to be
a very modern Americanism, which is
noted in Bartlett's Dictionary as " to
let slide, to let go," with the examples,
"Let him slide," " Let her slide," " Let
California slide." Now, in the first
lines of Henry the Minstrel's Wallace,
composed about 1470, we find this very
phrase, used exactly as it is used in the
slang of the present day : —

" Our antecesscnvris, that we suld of reide,
And liald in mind thar nobille worthi deid,
We lot ourslii/e, throw werray sleuthfulnes;
And ws till vthir besynes." i

(Book I. 1. 1-4.)

1 Here " suld of reide "= should read of; " wer-
ray " = very ; " ws " = us; " vthir " = other. The
rest is plain enough, antique as its form is.

It will be seen that in " lat ourslide " =
" let slide over," there is not a shade of
difference, either in sense or in sound,
from our slang phrase. Needless to say
that this is not evidence that the former
has been preserved for four centuries,
to be heard in slangish talk in the
United States (although the history of
language records freaks not less strange
than that would be) ; but it is worthy
of remark that these lines show that the
essential thought in question and the
form which it takes belong to the race
and the language, and not to any par-
ticular time or country.

To return to the purpose with which
I set out, which is, it should be borne
in mind, less the proving that certain
words and phrases are not American-
isms than the showing the incompetence
of nearly all the critics, British and
" American," to pass a trustworthy opin-
ion upon this subject ; — incompetence
resulting from the union of a lack of ac-
quaintance with the vocabulary of Eng-
lish writers and speakers, past and pres-
ent, to a misapprehension of the very
little that they do know of English as
it is spoken in the United States, and
of true Americanisms, and I will add
of " American " manners and customs,
as well as " American " speech. Even
when such critics are soberly and judi-
cially disposed, there seems to be some
mental or moral twist in their natures
which prevents them from rightly ap-
prehending and comprehending what
they do see and hear. Mr. George
Augustus Sala shall furnish us with an
example in point, very trifling and sim-
ple, and therefore the more significant.
In Paris Herself Again, he mentions
having " gone so far " as to ask on ship-
board for " the American delicacy of
[«e] pork and beans," 2 and then this
paragraph follows : —

" ' It 's done, sir,' replied the steward,

2 As to this, by the way, see England Without
and Within, chap. vii.

796

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

who was of Milesian descent. ' Yes,' I
told him gently, ' I should like the pork
and beans to be well done.' ' Shure
[Why the /* in this word ? How does
Mr. Sala pronounce sure? If he had
used two r's, the reason would be plain],

— shure, it 's through,' urged the stew-
ard. I was not proficient in transatlantic
parlance, and bade him bring the dish
through the saloon. ' I mane that it 's

played out,' persisted the steward, in
a civil rage with my stupidity, — ' that
it 's finished, — that it 's clane gone.'
He should have said at first that the
pork and beans were gone, and then my
Anglo-Saxon mind [How came a man
named Sala with an Anglo-Saxon mind ?
It is quite easy to understand how he
might have an English education] would
have mastered his meaning." (Chap,
xxxii.)

And Mr. Sala, who is generally cred-
ited with somewhat more than the aver-
age capacity of observation, could write
that passage after having been twice in
the United States, for some months at
least at each visit! Any "transatlan-
tic " boy would laugh at his blunder.
The steward's speech, if correctly re-
ported, would have been quite as incom-
prehensible to any " American " as Mr.
Sala informs us it was to him. No
such use of " through " is known in the
United States ; but the passage shows
an entire misapprehension of a use of
that word at table, which is common.
No " American " says that a dish is
through, meaning that it is all gone ;
but many " Americans " do say, unfor-
tunately, when they have breakfasted or
dined, that they are " through ; " that is,
that they have got through their break-
fast or their dinner. In William Black's
clever little novel A Beautiful Wretch,

— the heroine of which, by the way,
is one of his charming women, — two

O '

young men are at breakfast, and one
says, " But that 's only her fun, don't
you know ; she 's precious glad to get
out of it, — that 's my belief ; and no-

body knows better than herself he
would n't do at all. Finished ? Come
and have a game of billiards, then."
(Chap, ii.) Now here one of the trans-
atlantic speakers whom Mr. Sala had
in mind would have said, not " Fin-
ished ? " but " Through ? Come and have
a game," etc. This trivial instance is
characteristic of a common failure of
apprehension in the British critic of
" American " speech and manners.

Mr. Edmund Yates has also visited
the States on a lecturing tour, I be-
lieve. Exactly how long he remained
here I do not know, but long enough,
it would appear, to become a British
authority upon things " American," and
gain an experience which leads him to
continue in England the lecturing of the
" Americans," which seems not to have
been completed in their country. Not
long ago, in this vein, he stated that all
that the "Americans" knew of Christ-
mas they had learned from, or since the
publication of, Dickeus's Christmas sto-
ries. (I quote from memory only ; and
I ask his pardon if I am not literally
correct.) An amazing announcement !
The Maryland descendants and repre-
sentatives of the old Roman Catholic
colony of Lord Baltimore, and the New
Orleans natives of the same faith, will
learn with some surprise that they owed
to the Protestant heretic Charles Dick-
ens the birth of the feeling which made
Christmas to them a great and solemn
festival. But it is not necessary to go
to Southern and Roman Catholic com-
monwealths to find a refutation of this
wildly ignorant assertion. There are
thousands and tens of thousands of men
yet living, in New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and New England, who
can remember that long before Dick-
ens's first Christmas story was published
Christmas was the turning-point of their
childhood's year. Tt was par excellence
the one great family and social festival.
They can hear yet the joyful Christ-
mas anthem chanted in churches which

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

797

were great bowers of evergreens ; they
remember the family gatherings, the
somewhat oppressive nature of which
was relieved by a dinner sweeter in the
mouth than in the stomach on the next
day. To all this, if I may be pardoned
a personal recollection, I can testify.
To this my father could testify; and
he did tell me that the church, in Con-
necticut, in which he kept Christmas,
of which my grandfather was rector,
was not only decked with evergreens on
Christmas Eve, but illuminated, and in
so ample a style that the reliquary can-
dles, extinguished at midnight, were an
important perquisite of the sexton. This
takes us back three generations in a
country which, Mr. Yates informs his
readers, learned Christmas-keeping from
Charles Dickens ! The truth is simply
this : There has been in the United
States, of late years, a much more near-
ly universal observance of this Christian
festival than there was before. Of this
there are two causes, Charles Dickens
not being one of them : first, what has
been called the " broad church move-
ment," in consequence of which peo-
ple of other denominations have gladly
adopted, to a certain extent, the Christ-
mas customs of the churches of England
and of Rome ; next, the conviction that
we needed more of general holiday-keep-
ing than we had in earlier days. These
causes have come into their full opera-
tion necessarily since the publication of
Dickens's Christmas stories, but not be-
cause of them : they were post hoc, but
not propter hoc. The inference that
they were so is exemplary of the near-
ness of approach by most British crit-
ics to truth as to things "American."
Frenchmen are so ludicrously far away
from it that what they say is worthy
of no consideration, except in case of a
patient investigator and thinker like De
Tocqueville, and even he made some
striking blunders.

Generally, however, it is true that
the European traveler — and the more

surely if he is British and a person of
any note — leaves the States quite as
ignorant of them and their people on
all essential points as he was before he
crossed the ocean, and with his igno-
rance at once confused and confirmed
and elevated into conceit by misappre-
hension of the very little of any real
significance that he has been able to
see. For the distinguished traveler sees,
indeed, through no fault of his own,
very little that reveals to him the real
condition of " American " society, of
which he touches only the surface at a
few salient points. All the vast level
range below, not to say the yet un-
derlying strata, is hidden from his
eyes. If he is a man of any fame in
politics, literature, art, or society, his ar-
rival is announced by the press ; he is
interviewed ; he is seized upon by vari-
ous people, who, with social, business,
or other motives, wish to use him for
their own purposes. He is entertained,
feted, taken to this, that, and the other
" institution," where he is expected, and
indeed almost required, to " make a few
remarks." He passes over a great many
miles of country shut up in a railway
car, and surrounded by his "party."
He sees a big waterfall and some moun-
tains, a president and some governors,
— waterfalls and mountains in their own
way ; and this is all. What does this
teach him of the society of the people
among whom he has been ? Entertain-
ments, parties, receptions, among people
of wealth (the only people with whom
he is likely to mix), are much the same
upon the surface in the superior circles
of all Western nations. And who learns
anything about anybody in formal " so-
ciety " ? What do we ever learn of each
other at such gatherings ? We merely
go through the parade in due form.
Moreover, these more or less distin-
guished strangers are on such occasions
here the principal guests. People are
invited to " meet " them. They are on
exhibition to the other guests, and the

798

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

other guests are on exhibition to them.
"What is the "meeting"? An intro-
duction, a languid hand-shake of some
scores or some hundreds, a few words,
" delighted to meet," " charmed," " hope,"
" always remember," and so forth ; and
this repeated a dozen times in the prin-
cipal places, and two or three times in
the minor places. Of what significance
or instructiveness is this ? It is not at
such entertainments, or at formal din-
ners, or even at less formal breakfasts,
that a people is to be studied in its habits
of life, its tone of thought, its morals,
or even its language. To do that it is
necessary to live among them, and to
live among them unremarked as a nota-
bility and a watchful stranger ; to see
them when they are off their guard, and
not when you are on parade to them,
and they are, or wish to be, on parade
to you. Probably the most ignorant
man about anything essentially and
characteristically "American," who is
at present in the country, is Lord Cole-
ridge ; and so he will doubtless remain,
except as to what may be seen almost
as well in photograph as in reality. The
Englishman who, according to my ob-
servation, is most capable, of all of his
living countrymen, to write with under-
standing about the country told me that
after having lived here a year and a half
he was obliged to throw overboard all
his theories and the opinions he had
formed, and begin again from the foun-
dation.1

But I have been led away from my
immediate subject, to which I must re-
turn, merely remarking, by the way,
upon the absurdity of Mr. Henry Irv-
ing's proposition to publish his impres-
sions of America. "What will they be

1 The author of that extraordinary book, Asmo-
de"e en New York (Paris, 18G8), which is filled from
cover to cover with the products of long and pa-
tient observation, keen penetration, and reflection,
but deformed and debased by some monstrous mis-
representations, says, " Pour connaitre au fond le
caractere du peuple ame"ricain, il ne faut pas des
semaines, il ne faut pas des mois ; il faut des an-
ne"es." (Page 498.)

worth ? Absolutely nothing ; because
Mr. Irving's visit, unless it takes some
other form than that of a professional
tour, will teach him nothing.

Among our British visitors and critics
Mr. Laurence Oliphant is conspicuous
for common sense, for perception, and
for candor. He had the advantage of
seeing the country and the people as
they are, and without the deceptive ef-
fect of distorting influences. He was
neither a lord nor a lecturer ; and he
lived here, how long I do not know, but
long enough to learn something, and to
understand what he learned. He treat-
ed us to some very pungent satire, —
well deserved. It is not generally
known, I believe, that the writer of
those two papers in the North American
Review of May and July, 1877, which
professed to record the political impres-
sions of a Japanese traveler, and which
attracted much attention, was Mr. Lau-
rence Oliphant. They showed that he
could see to the bottom of what he
looked at. And yet Mr. Oliphant, when
he comes to treat " American " charac-
ter and manners concretely, and to put
language into the mouths of " Amer-
icans," blunders sadly in simple mat-
ters. His Irene Macgillicuddy was cor-
rect only as to the merest surface traits,
and as a human creature quite an im-
possibility,— in this country, at least,
and so, too, at least in all their distinc-
tive traits, were the otherwise charming
" American " girls in his recent very
clever novel, Altiora Peto.2 To show
this is not here pertinent ; but to re-
mark upon the failure of this unusually
well-equipped observer to represent the
speech of " Americans " is proper to my
present subject. Of the personage meant

2 Those who need no explanation of this ingen-
ious title will pardon one for those who do. Alti-
ora peto is Latin for "I seek higher things." It is
the motto of the Oliphant family. But Peto is an
old English name, which is found in Shakespeare's
Henry IV. ; and some of us remember Sir Martin
Peto, who was here some years ago. Altiora is
enough like a woman's name to be used for Mr.
Oliphant's high-flying heroine.

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

799

to be most characteristic in this respect,
Hannah Coffin, it is only necessary to
remark, in the words of a discriminating
critic in the New York Evening Post,
that the young ladies " have with them
a terrible old companion, or chaperon,
named Hannah, who talks something
between a Maine Yankee and Buffalo
Bill." Hannah is an impossible person-
age, — in " America," at least ; a gro-
tesque ; not even a caricature of any ac-
tual living thing ; and her talk is a mon-
strous gabblement, made up of perverted
phrases of people who live thousands of
miles apart. A woman who acted and
who talked as she does would be a char-
acter, a show, a laughing-stock, in the
remotest rural village in New England.
And it is all the worse, so far as truth-
fulness of representation is concerned,
that, owing to the writer's clear imagina-
tion and his humor, her character is full
of ve^ve and life. But to consider in
detail a few of Mr. Oliphant's errors in
language, which must have attracted the
attention of many of his readers, here
is a passage which illustrates Hannah's
impossible, hybrid talk : —

" ' Laws ! ' said Hannah, who had been
watching these British feminine greet-
ings with great interest, ' that ain't the
reason. It 's because they laces so tight.
You just try and buckle yourself across
the waist and chest like them gells, and
then see how it eases your breathing to
stick out your elbows.' . . .

" ' Still, you know, that won't account
for the men doing it,' said Mattie, anx-
ious to get back to the safer topic of the
elbows.

" ' Laws ! yes, it does : they jest foller
the gells. It's the gells that sets the
fashion.'

" ' Not in England, I assure you,' said
Lord Sark, much amused. ' In Amer-
ica, I understand, the women take the
lead in most things ; but in England we
flatter ourselves that the male sex holds
its own.'

" ' Bless you, they flatter themselves

just the same with us ! The question
is, Do they ? No\v, there ain't no one
here as knows as much about the men
of both countries as Mrs. Clymer. I '11
jest ask her what she says. Which men
have you found most difficult to get
along with, my dear ? ' ' (Chap, viii.)
In this passage an error which per-
vades all Hannah Coffin's speech occurs
thrice, — " gells " for girls. This is a
British provincialism. Yankees never
say " gells ; " but some of them, like
some of their cousins in England, do
say " gals." " Laws " would be more
naturally " Law suz." " You just try "
should be " You jess try ; " the omission
of the t being as characteristic as the e
for u; and the utterance of the two
contiguous t's by a New England woman
of Miss Coffin's quality almost impossi-
ble. " They laces " is a violation of
grammar that would make the hair of
a decent New England woman of far
humbler condition than hers stand on
end ; and the like objection applies to
her reply, in a later passage, to a young
clergyman, who told her he was in holy
orders : " Holy orders is mighty difficult
to obey ; don't you find 'em ? " although
she would say, not " Yes, it does," but
" Yes, it dooz," and instead of " the same
with us," " the same 'ith us." The last
sentence of this passage contains a blun-
der which spots all this worthy, but un-
happily monstrous, female's speeches :
" there ain't no one here as knows," etc.
This preservation of the old English
use of " as " in constructions where mod-
ern English requires " that " is unheard
and unknown in New England, where
fairly " good grammar " is spoken even
by those who have received only a few
winters' district-schooling, and who will
use queer, uncouth phrases, pronounce
grotesquely, and speak in a sharp, na-
sal tone that sets one's teeth on edge.
Therefore it is the more disturbing that
Mr. Oliphant's really captivating, but
also somewhat impossible, " American "
heroine exclaims, " And how his clothes

800

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

do sit ! " for which we cannot account,
unless by supposing — dreadful thought !
— that our author himself tells Poole or
Stnalpage that his own trousers don't
sit well ; in which case it is not improb-
able that the reply would be, in very
good English, that they were not sitting
trousers, and that he must not sit in
them if he expected them to set well.

When Mr. Oliphant makes Hannah
arrest Mr. Murkle's attention by crying
out " Hyar ! " he jumps at least five
hundred miles. That form of " here "
is Southern and Southwestern. Indeed,
it is negro talk, caught by the whites
in childhood from their old sable atten-
dants : he might as well make her say
" gwine " for " going," instead of " go-
in'," which she would have said, like
many an Englishman of the best birth
and breeding. So her " disremember "
is Southern, although it is sometimes
heard from our Irish " Biddies." Yet
he makes Miss Coffia say, carefully,
" curious," when she would be very sure
to say " curus," and " judge " for the in-
variable " jedge " of people of her sort.
Strangest of all, almost, he makes her
speak of a man " who 's gone back to
the States ; " she would have been quite
as likely to say " the colonies."

When, in recounting a discussion of
Highland costume between Stella and
Ronald MacAlpine (whose identity with
a well-known aesthetic lecturer is mani-
fest), Mr. Oliphant writes, — " ' What !
leaving so much more of the limb bare ? '
Stella had still retained too much of the
prejudices of her countrywomen to say
' leg.' « Oh, that wquld be what I think
you gentlemen would call quite too ex-
quisitely precious ! '" — he is correct,
except in the universality of his implied
assertion ; but when he afterwards makes
Miss Coffin, as she is trying on a fash-
ionable gown, exclaim, " My, now ! if
I aiu't real uncomfortable about the
legs ! " he is not only incorrect and incon-
sistent, but shows that he has failed to
apprehend the truth about this squeam-

ish feeling. Mr. Edward Everett, re-
proving a pupil who startled the propri-
ety of the lecture room by a blast upon
the nasal trumpet, confessed that he him-
self did blow his nose " in the privacy
of his own apartment ; " but even there
Hannah Coffin would not have admit-
ted to her young friends that she had
legs. She could not have got further
than " limbs." But Mr. Oliphant thus
brings up a little point as to Ameri-
canism which has been discussed so much
and for so long that it may as well now
be settled.

That many Americans — even men
as well as women, but not all — do say
" limb," when good sense, good English,
good taste, and good manners require
that they should say " leg," is true. But
the squeamishness is by no means dis-
tinctively " American." It may be found
on the pages of many British writers.
In a paragraph before me from the Sat-
urday Review (date unfortunately lost),
criticising a staute of Phryne, the writ-
er shrinks from " legs," even in regard
to marble, and calls them " the lower
limbs." A conspicuous and amusing
example of this skittishness is found in
the Shakespeare Glossary of that dis-
tinguished scholar and critic, Alexander
Dyce. There has long been a question
as to the meaning of Orlando's phrase
" Atalanta's better part," in As You
Like It. Various explanations have been
offered. I produced many passages to
show that the intended " better part " of
the beautifully formed and swiftly run-
ning Atalanta was what the Saturday
Review called the lower limbs, but I did
not use that euphemism. Whereupon,
after recounting some of the explana-
tions, although he is writing a critical
note for the critical, Mr. Dyce, blushing
and shrinking behind his paper, cannot
bring himself even to suggest the idea
by a periphrasis, but says, " Mr. Grant
White's explanation of the lady's better
part I had rather refer to than quote " !
After that, I think that the pretense

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

801

of any peculiar Americanism upon this
point may well be given up.

In connection with this allegation,
and in support of it, one assertion has
been made, and made so frequently,
through so many years, that it may as
well be disposed of now and here for-
ever. It is that " the Americans " (the
general term universally applied, as usu-
al) are so exceedingly shamefaced that
they put the very legs of their piano-
fortes in trousers or pantalets. This
ridiculous story was told long ago, in the
Mrs. Trollope day ; but I believe that
it first appeared in Captain Basil Hall's
book. Since that time it has pervaded
British books and British newspapers.
It has been one of the stock illustrations
of " American " manners. I have seen it
three or four times within the last few
months. Now it is true that in Mrs.
Trollope's and Captain Hall's day most
" American " housewives who then had
piano-fortes did cover the legs of them.
And yet the story, as it was told and is
told, is absurdly untruthful. About that
time the legs of the piano-forte, which
had previously been small, straight,
square mahogany sticks, began to be
highly ornamental, with fluting and carv-
ing. The instrument became the most
elaborately made and highly prized piece
of furniture in the drawing-room, or
rather parlor ; and in the careful house-
wifery of that day (which kept parlors
dark, that the sun might not fade the
carpet) it was protected, except on grand
occasions, — "a party," or the like, —
with a holland cover ; and the legs,
that they might not be defaced, were
also covered with cylinders of holland.
That is all. Tables and chairs and side-
boards had legs also ; but they were not
covered, simply because they were not
ornamental and easily injured. More-
over, at festive gatherings, when the
room was filled with a mixed company,
in which young women predominated,
the trousers, the pantalets, — oh, horror !
— were deliberately taken off the " low-

VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 51

er limbs " of the instrument, which were
then shamelessly exposed to the naked
eye. And this is the truth of that mat-
ter, which has been left to be told at
this late day. It is a characteristic and
worthy exemplification of the ability of
the British traveler to apprehend and to
set forth the truth as to what he sees in
" America."

My article will be, I fear, like a house
in which the porch is larger than the
main building ; but time and space will
not have been wasted if I have enabled
the readers of The Atlantic, on both sides
of the ocean from which it takes its
name, to see with what thorough dis-
trust and continuous doubt they should
receive the assertions of European critics
that this, that, or the other word, phrase,
or custom is distinctively " American." -

Let us now turn to our own seekers
after Americanisms in language, and,
looking chiefly to the well-known Dic-
tionary of Americanisms, so called, of
Bartlett, see, as we have seen before,
with what industrious lack of essential
knowledge — the knowledge of what is
English — the search is prosecuted.

Under the letter N there is less occa-
sion for criticism than we have found
under its predecessors ; the chief reason
of which, however, is the fewness of the
words which begin with that letter. For
it is worthy of remark that, while the
nasal sound m is copious in the intro-
duction of words, its congener n is in all
languages, at least all the Indo-Euro-
pean languages, much restricted in this
respect.

Characteristically, the list of Ameri-
canisms under this letter is introduced
by " Nabber : in the city of New York,
a thief." The city of New York ! The
word has been thus used in English
time out of mind, although of course it is
rare in literature. The colloquial verb
nab =• seize quickly and violently, is to
be found in all English dictionaries, in-
cluding Johnson's. If the words were
not before us, we could hardly believe

802

Some Alleged Americanisms.

that a professed dictionary of American-
isms could include nary =. ne'er a, nig-
ger, negro-fellow, negro less, negro-min-
strels, negrophite, negro-worshiper, no ac-
count, no-lion', nothing to nobody, to be
nowhere, nobby, — all of which are, and
since their beginning ever have been,
as common among British as among
American writers or speakers of corre-
sponding classes. This does not need
illustration. But the introduction of
nation, a corruption of " damnation," is
an offense against common sense which
is of a sort so common in this book that
it goes to make up the greater part of
its bulk. For not only do we find na-
tion both in Pegge's dictionary and in
Halliwell's, with the gloss " very, exces-
sive," but our compiler himself remarks
upon it, " used in both ways in Old and
in New England." Pegge's book pre-
ceded in London Bartlett's in Boston by
more than thirty years. That settled
the question about this slang word, if
it needed settling. But this it did not
need ; for see the following example of
its use by one of the recognized masters
of English : " And what a nation of
herbs he had procured to mollify her
humours." (Sterne, Tristram Shandy,
chap, ccxxii.)

Of like non-pertinence is the next
item which I shall remark upon, which,
however, adds error to superfluity : —

"No — not. What the Portuguese
say of the Brazilians the English say
of the Americans, — that they are as
fond of double negatives as Homer."
If any English writer or speaker ever
said this, he showed by the mere saying
that he was worthy of no attention. So
far is the use of double negatives, like
" I have n't got none," " I don't know
nothing," from being an Americanism
that it is far commoner in England than
in the United States, where people of
inferior condition are much more anx-
iously " grammatical " than they are in
England, and are consequently, in gen-
eral, less racy and idiomatic in their

speech. Double negatives were com-
mon of old, and are so now, in English
literature. The reader of Shakespeare
encounters them on almost every page.
Their use extends back into the time
when English was Anglo-Saxon. Dr.
Pegge, who indeed apologizes for them,
if he does not defend them, mentions as
an example the inquiry of a London
citizen who had mislaid his hat, " if
nobody had seen nothing of never a
hat nowheres." Nor can any one who
has been in England have failed to hear
just such speeches there nowadays from
speakers of superior grade to those by
whom they are very rarely uttered here.

Next we remark a short series of
words, of normal form and of ordinary
English use, which appear in every Eng-
lish dictionary, from Johnson's down,
which are used in exactly the same sense
in both countries, and which, when they
are not of remote English origin, came
to us through British channels : such are
nankeen, national, naturalized, nice =
fair, good, nicely = very well, non-man-
ufacturing, non-slaveholding, north and
south. It has been before remarked in
these papers that a book which is known
as a Dictionary of Americanisms, which
is largely made up of such words as
these, must produce a very erroneous
and injurious impression in regard to
the language of the country. The com-
piler has merely fallen into the weak-
ness of specialists and of collectors. Let
a man begin to collect, and he at once
becomes slightly insane, and rakes into
his hoard everything that for any fan-
ciful reason he can make a part of it.

When we deduct from the list under
this letter words of the sort already re-
marked upon, and phrases which really
merit no attention, like national dem-
ocrats and native Americans, non-com-
mittal, little is left; but that little in-
cludes a few genuine Americanisms, of
which the following are worthy of spe-
cial attention : —

Notify. The use of this verb in the

1883.]

Some Alleged Americanisms.

803

sense to give information or notice to a
person is of " American " origin. For a
long time it was used by the best English
writers, both British and " American,"
only with the sense of to make known,
to declare, as, for example, by Hooker :
" There are other kinds of laws which
notify the will of God." But about the
end of the last century respectable writers
began in this country to use the word in
the sense, to give notice to ; and the pro-
priety of this has been somewhat reluc-
tantly but finally admitted by British
writers of repute, by whom the word is
now so used ; and in the latest English
dictionary, Stormonth's, it appears with
the definition " to give notice."

Nimshi : a foolish fellow. This is an
example of a genuine Americanism of
another sort. Its use is confined to New
England, or to speakers of New Eng-
land origin, among whom it is recognized
religious cant. Mr. Bartlett says noth-
ing by way of explanation, except (right-
ly, I believe) that the word came from
Connecticut. It is from the Bible, in
the Hebrew chronicles of which we find
the name Nimshi ; but we are told ab-
solutely nothing of him, except that he
was the grandfather of the fast-driving
Jehu, who revolted against Jehoram and
became king of Israel. Why the name
of the grandfather of this successful
rebel became a synonym for a fool is
surely one of the things that cannot be
found out.

Noodlejes is an example of a limited
Americanism, and of another sort ; a
word never English, which is, or once
was, domesticated by English-speaking
people in one of the United States. It
is Dutch, and means dough rolled thin
and cut into slices for soup. But it has
already almost passed away ; and even
in New York and Long Island, where
only it was heard, it is now nearly, if not
quite, unknown.

Notions, in the sense of small wares
or trifles, I have already shown to be of
English origin and classical use.

The most astonishing of the so-called
Americanisms under N is this : " Nose.
'To bite one's nose off' is to foolishly
inflict self-injury while striving to injure
another ; " and they who would be most
astonished at its being written down as
" American " would be the people liv-
ing between John O'Groats and Land's
End. It is an English saying of inde-
terminable antiquity, and at this time
of every-day use. Indeed, it may be
doubtful whether, even, it is English, and
whether it does not belong to the human
race, with whom it has been in use ever
since man had a nose to bite and spite
with which to bite it. Will Mr. Bart-
lett go on and annex the north pole
and the equator ? This item enriches
only his last edition of the dictionary,
or, little attention as I can give to my
present subject, I should be able to put
my hand upon ample evidence of an-
cient and modern use of this phrase in
England, which, however, no person
born and bred there will require.

Of the alleged Americanisms in O,
we start at once by setting summarily
aside the following, which are too cer-
tainly, and it should seem too notorious-
ly, English-born to need a word of ex-
planation or illustration : to feel one's
oats, obstropulous, odd stick for an eccen-
tric person, — crooked being sometimes
used instead of odd, — of in " feel of,"
" doin' of," offen for " off from," offish
for "distant," old fogy, old man for
" father," Old Scratch, onst for '' once,"
ought in " had n't oughter " for " had n't
ought to," ourn, outen for " out of," ottts
and ins for persons out of and in office,
over the left, owdacious, overly = exces-
sively. The last, which is strangely tick-
eted Western (I have never been in the
West, and have often heard the word in
the rural districts of New England and
New York), may admit the following il-
lustration from an old English writer of
high repute, Bishop Hall : —

" Your attire (for whither do not cen-
sures reach?) not youthfully wanton,

804

Some Alleged Americanisms.

[December,

not, in these yeores, affectedly ancient,
but grave and comely, like the minde,
like the behavior of the wearer ; your
gesture like your habit, neither favoring
of giddy lightness nor ouerly insolence
nor waiitonnesse, nor dull neglect of
yourself." (Epistles, Decad.V., Epist. v.,
p. 163, ed. 1008.)

To these are to be added, as having
no peculiar character, either "American "
or British, the following: Ocelot, once
and again for " repeatedly," office-holder,
office-holding, office-hunter, office-hunting
(observe how the list is lengthened by
giving four compound words, when, in
any case, two only were needed), okra,
Old Probabilities, Old North State, oleo-
margarine, ordinary for " plain, not
handsome," Oregon grape, Osage orange,
Osioego tea, over and above for " much,"
" very." Some of these, it will be seen,
are mere names of American things.
None of them are isms of any sort.

A few of the words under this head
may admit particular remark : —

Obligement. This obsolete old Eng-
lish word, which needs no definition,
Pickering says was used " by old peo-
ple " in New England, and these only
we may be sure, when he wrote* three
quarters of a century ago. But it passed
away with those old people. It does not
appear in literature, is now not heard,
and has no proper place among Ameri-
canisms. Obtusity, instead of " obtuse-
ness," is a word of the same sort.

Of. One use of this word, not set
forth by Mr. Bartlett, is, I believe, dis-
tinctively an Americanism, — "a quar-
ter of twelve," instead of " a quarter to
twelve ; " the latter being the phrase
used in England, and by the best speak-
ers in the United States. Yet indeed
there is no peculiarity in the use of the
preposition. The phrases present dif-
ferent thoughts.- One means, it lacks
a quarter of an hour of twelve ; the oth-
er, it is a quarter of an hour to twelve.

On, in " I met him on the street,"
" He lives on Broadway," is very prop-

erly presented as an Americanism ; and
it is one of a very bad sort. It appears
only in Mr. Bartlett's last edition, 1877 ;
but I had remarked upon it at some
length, in Words and Their Uses (1871).
But it is not, I suspect, of " American "
origin. Carlyle uses it in his translation
of Wilhelm Meister. In the phrase " on
yesterday " the superfluous preposition
is, I believe, an unmitigated American-
ism, and had its origin at the South,
whence, from the Southwest particular-
ly, come the larger number of indispu-
table Americanisms.

Onto. Of this compound preposition
Mr. Bartlett says, " Although used here
much more frequently than in England,
it is not peculiar to America." I should
think not. On the contrary, it is more
frequent in England. It trips one up
all through the novels of Anthony Trol-
lope, who is the best guide to the cur-
rent and accepted speech of the highest
and most cultivated social class in Eng-
land, and who works this phrase without
mercy. Writers of like grade in this
country use it rarely, if at all. Trollops
constantly uses it, even in the follow-
ing extreme and needless way, when it
would seem that " upon " would nat-
urally suggest itself : —

" It was well he was not going fast, or
he would have come on to your head."
(Last Chron. of Barset, chap. Ixiii.)

" Both the ladies sprung on to their legs.
Even Miss Prettyman herself jumped
on to her legs." (Ibid., chap. Ixxi.)

Outsider. Many other persons be-
sides Mr. Bartlett regard this word as
an 'Americanism ; wholly without rea-
son. It is a sort of word which, from its
construction and its application, could
not have failed to come into use among
all English-speaking people. It occurs
in its political sense thus twice on one
page of the London Examiner : —

" The successive efforts of France —
efforts of much more cheap generosity
than the Outsider seems to consider
them — and the curious way in which

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

805

Russia, almost against her will, became
a benefactor of the new nation are well
described. . . . On the other hand, the
Outsider, holding the ' legitimate aspira-
tion ' theory, naturally does not com-
prehend this, or attributes it to ' Turk-
ophilism,' to the dislike of aristocracies
for revolutionists, and to other more
or less irrelevant causes." (August 9,
1879.)

Trollope uses it frequently, and even
in a social sense, thus : —

"But Lord George felt it to be a

matter of offence that any outsider should
venture to talk about his family." (Is
He Popenjoy ? Chap, xxix.)

Here I stay for the present our hunt
for the evasive Americanism. It is not
in my estimation a very sportive literary
recreation ; but it is not wholly profit-
less. For certain of the hunters may
discover by it not only that there is very
little in " American " speech that may
safely be made game of, but also get —
what they seem to need — some knowl-
edge of the English language.

Richard Grant White.

LUTHER AND HIS WORK.1

THE power which presides over hu-
man destiny and shapes the processes of
history is wont to conceal its ulterior
purpose from the agents it employs, who,
while pursuing their special aims and
fulfilling their appointed tasks, are, un-
known to themselves, initiating a new
era, founding a new world.

Such significance attaches to the name
of Luther, one of that select band of
providential men who stand conspicuous
among their contemporaries as makers
of history. For the Protestant Refor-
mation which he inaugurated is very im-
perfectly apprehended if construed sole-
ly as a schism in the church, a new de-
parture in religion. In a larger view, it
was our modern world, with its social
developments, its liberties, its science,
its new conditions of being, evolving
itself from the old.

It would be claiming too much to as-
sume that all of good which distinguishes
these latter centuries from mediaeval
time is wholly due to that one event ;
that humanity would have made no
progress in science and the arts of life
but for Luther and his work. Other,

1 This paper was read before the Massachusetts
Historical Society on the 10th of November, 1883.

contemporary agencies, independent of
the rupture with Rome, — the printing-
press, the revival of letters, the discov-
ery of a new continent, and other geo-
graphical and astronomical findings, —
have had their share in the regeneration
of secular life.

But this we may safely assert: that
the dearest goods of our estate — civil
independence, spiritual emancipation,
individual scope, the large room, the
unbound thought, the free pen, what-
ever is most characteristic of this New
England of our inheritance — we owe
to the Saxon reformer in whose name
we are here to-day.

A compatriot of Luther, the critic-
poet Lessing, has made us familiar with
the idea of an Education of the Human
Race. Vico had previously affirmed a
law of historic development, and in-
ferred from that law a progressive im-
provement of man's estate. Lessing
supplemented the New Science of Vico
with a more distinct recognition of di-
vine agency and an educating purpose
in the method of history. But Lessing
confined his view of divine education to
the truths of religion. For these the
school is the church. But religion ia

806

Luther and his Work.

[December,

only one side of human nature. Man
as a denizen of this earthly world ha8
secular interests and a secular calling,
which may, in some future synthesis, be
found to be the necessary complement
of the spiritual, — the other pole of the
same social whole, — but meanwhile re-
quire for their right development and
full satisfaction another school, coordi-
nate with but independent of the church.
That school is the nation.

Now the nation, in the ages following
the decline of Rome, had had no proper
status in Christian history. There were
peoples — Italian, French, English, Ger-
man— distributed in territorial groups,
but no nation, no polity conterminous
with the territorial limits of each coun-
try, compacted and confined by those
limits, having its own independent sov-
ereign head. France, Germany, Eng-
land, were mere geographical expres-
sions. The peoples inhabiting these
countries had a common head in the
bishop of Rome, whose power might be
checked by the rival German empire
when the emperor was a man of force,
a veritable ruler of men, and the papal
incumbent an imbecile, but who, on the
whole, was acknowledged supreme. Eu-
rope was ecclesiastically one, and the
ecclesiastical overruled, absorbed, the
civil.

But already, before the birth of Lu-
ther, from the dawn of the fourteenth
century, the civil power had begun to
disengage itself from the spiritual. The
peoples here and there had consolidated
into nations. Philip of France had de-
fied the Pope of his day, and hurled him
from his throne. The Golden Bull had
made the German empire independent of
papal dictation in the choice of its in-
cumbents. Meanwhile, the Babylonish
Captivity and subsequent dyarchy in
the pontificate had sapped the prestige
of the Roman see. As we enter the
fifteenth century, we find the principle
of nationality formally recognized by
the church. At the Council of Con-

stance, the assembly decided to vote by
nations instead of dioceses, each nation
having a distinct voice. Then it ap-
peared that the nation hud become a
reality and a power in Christendom.

Another century was needed to break
the chain which bound in ecclesiastical
dependence on Rome the nations espe-
cially charged with the conduct of man-
kind. And a man was needed who had
known from personal experience the
stress of that chain, and whose moral
convictions were too exigent to allow of
compliance and complicity with manifest
falsehood and deadly wrong. To eccle-
siastical severance succeeded political.
To Martin Luther, above all men, we
Anglo-Americans are indebted for na-
tional independence and mental freedom.

It is from this point of view, and not
as a teacher of religious truth, that he
claims our interest. As a theologian,
as a thinker, he has 'taught us little.
Men of inferior note have contributed
vastly more to theological enlightenment
and the science of religion. Intellectu-
ally narrow, theologically bound and
seeking to bind, his work was larger
than his vision, and better than his aim.
The value of his thought is inconsidera-
ble; the value of his deed as a provi-
dential liberator of thought is beyond
computation.

The world has no prevision of its he-
roes. Nature gives no warning when a
great man is born. Had any soothsay-
er undertaken to point out, among the
children cast upon the world in electoral
Saxony on the 10th of November, 1483,
the one who would shake Christendom
to its centre, this peasant babe, just ar-
rived in the cottage of Hans Luther at
Eisleben, might have been the last on
whom his prophecy would have fallen.
The great man is unpredictable; but
reflection finds in the birth of Luther a
peculiar fitness of place and time. Fit-
ness of place, inasmuch as Frederick
the Wise, Elector of Saxony, his native
prince and patron, was probably the

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

807

only one among the potentates of that
day who, from sympathy and force of
character, possessed the will and the
ability to shield the reformer from pre-
latical wiles and the wrath of Rome.
Fitness of time. A generation had
scarcely gone by since the newly in-
vented printing-press had issued its first
Bible ; and during the very year of this
nativity, in 1483, Christopher Columbus
was making his first appeals for royal
aid in realizing his dream of a west-
ern hemisphere hidden from European
ken behind the waves of the Atlantic,
where the Protestant principle, born
of Luther, was destined to find its most
congenial soil and to yield its consum-
mate fruit.

More important than fitness of time
and place is the adaptation of the man
to his appointed work. There is an
easy, leveling theory, held by some, that
men are the product of their time, great
actors the necessary product of extraor-
dinary circumstances ; that Caesar and
Mohammed and Napoleon, had they not
lived precisely when they did, would
have plodded through life, and slipped
into their graves without a record ; and
that, on the other hand, quite ordinary
men, if thrown upon the times in which
those heroes lived, would have done as
they did and accomplished the same re-
sults, — would have overthrown the Ro-
man aristocracy, abolished idolatry, and
brought order out of chaotic revolution.

But man and history are not, I think,
to be construed so. There is a law
which adapts the man to his time. The
work to be done is not laid upon a
chance individual ; the availing of the
crisis is not left to one who happens
to be on the spot ; but from the founda-
tion of the world the man was selected
to stund just there, and to do just that.
The opportunity does not make the
man, but finds him. He is the provi-
dential man ; all the past is in him, all
the future is to fiow from him.

What native qualification! did Luther

bring to his work? First of all, his
sturdy Saxon nature. The Saxons are
Germans of the Germans, and Luther
was a Saxon of the Saxons : reverent,
patient, laborious, with quite an excep-
tional power of work and capacity of en-
durance ; simple, humble ; no visionary,
no dreamer of dreams, but cautious, con-
servative, iucorruptibly honest, true to
the heart's core ; above all, courageous,
firm, easily led when conscience sec-
onded the leading, impossible to drive
when conscience opposed, ecstatically de-
vout, tender, loving, — a strange com-
pound of feminine softness and adaman-
tine inflexibility. Contemporary ob-
servers noticed in the eyes of the man,
dark, flashing, an expression which they
termed demonic. It is the expression
of one susceptible of supernatural im-
pulsion, — of being seized and borne on
by a power which exceeds his conscious
volition.

In this connection I have to speak of
one property in Luther which especially
distinguishes spiritual heroes, — the gift
of faith. The ages which preceded his
coming have been called " the ages of
faith." The term is a misnomer if un-
derstood in any other sense than that' of
blind acquiescence in external authority,
unquestioning submission to the dictum
of the church. This is not faith, but
the want of it, mental inaction, absence
of independent vision. Faith is essen-
tially active, a positive, aggressive force ;
not a granter of current propositions,
but a maker of propositions, of dispen-
sations, of new ages.

Faith is not a constitutional endow-
ment ; there is no lot or tumulus as-
signed to it among the hillocks of the
brain ; it is not a talent connate witli
him who has it, and growing with his
growth, but a gift of the spirit, commu-
nicated to such as are charged with a
providential mission to their fellow-men.
It is the seal of their indenture, the test
of their calling. In other words, faith
is inspiration; it is the subjective side

808

Luther and his Work.

[December,

of that incalculable force of which inspi-
ration is the objective. So much faith,
so much inspiration, so much of deity.

Inspiration is in no man a constant
quantity. In Luther it appears unequal,
intermittent; ebb and flood, but always,
in the supreme crises of his history, an-
swering to his need ; a master force, an
ecstasy of vision and of daring ; lifting
him clean out of himself, or rather elicit-
ing, bringing to the surface, and forcing
into action the deeper latent self of the
man, against all the monitions not only
of prudence, but of conscience as well.
The voice of worldly prudence is soon
silenced by earnest souls intent on no-
ble enterprises of uncertain issue. What
reformer of traditional wrongs has not
been met by the warning, " That way
danger lies " ? But in Luther we have
the rarer phenomenon of conscience it-
eelf overcome by faith. We have the
amazing spectacle of a righteous man
defying his own conscience in obedience
to a higher duty than conscience knew.
For conscience is the pupil of custom,
the slave of tradition, bound by pre-
scription ; the safeguard of the weak,
but, it may be, an offense to the strong ;
wanting initiative ; unable of itself to
lift itself to new perceptions and new
requirements, whereby " enterprises of
great pith and moment their currents
turn awry, and lose the name of action."
Conscience has to be new-born when a
new dispensation is given to the world.
It was only thus that Christianity
through Paul could disengage itself from
Judaism, which had the old conscience
on its side.

In Luther faith was stronger than
conscience. Had it not been so we
should not be here to-day to celebrate
his name. Of all his trials in those
years of conflict, which issued in final
separation from Rome, the struggle with
conscience was the sorest. However
strong his personal conviction that in-
dulgences bought with money could not
save from the penalties of sin, that the

sale of them was a grievous wrong, to
declare that conviction, to act upon it,
was to pit himself against the head of
the church, to whom he owed uncondi-
tional allegiance. It was revolt against
legitimate authority, a violation of his
priestly vows. So conscience pleaded.
But Luther's better moments set aside
these scruples, regarding them, as he did
all that contradicted his strong intent,
as suggestions of the devil. " How,"
whispered Satan, " if your doctrine be
erroneous ; if all this confusion has been
stirred up without just cause ? How
dare you preach what no one has ven-
tured for so many centuries ? "

Over all these intrusive voices admon-
ishing, " You must not," a voice more
imperative called to him, " You must ; "
and a valor above all martial daring
responded, " I will." Here is where a
higher pow'er comes in to reinforce the
human. When valor in a righteous
cause rises to that pitch, it draws heaven
to its side ; it engages omnipotence to
back it.

Our knowledge of Luther's history is
derived in great part from his own rem-
iniscences and confessions.

His boyhood was deeply shadowed
by the sternness of domestic discipline.
Severely and even cruelly chastised by
conscientious but misjudging parents,
more careful to inspire fear than to cher-
ish filial love, he contracted a shyness
and timidity which kept back for years
the free development of a noble nature.
At school it was still worse : the business
of education was then conceived as a
species of rhabdomancy, a divining by
means of the rod the hidden treasures
of the boyish mind. He cannot forget,
in after years, that fifteen times in one
day the rod, in his case, was so applied.
" The teachers in those days," ,he says,
" were tyrants and executioners ; the
school a prison and a hell."

At a more advanced school in Eise-
nach, where the sons of the poor sup-
ported themselves by singing before the

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

809

doors of wealthy citizens, who respond-
ed with the fragments of their abun-
dance, a noble lady, Dame Ursula Cotta,
impressed by the fervor and vocal skill
of the lad, gave him a daily seat at her
table, and with it his first introduction
to polite society, — a privilege which
went far to compensate the adverse in-
fluences of his earlier years.

At the age of eighteen he entered the
University of Erfurt, then the foremost
seminary in Germany, the resort of stu-
dents from all parts of the land. The
improved finances of his father sufficed
to defray the cost of board and books.
He elected for himself the department
of philosophy, then embracing, together
with logic, metaphysic, and rhetoric, the
study of the classics, which the recent
revival of letters had brought into
vogue. The Latin classics became his
familiar friends, and are not unfrequent-
ly quoted in his writings. He made
good use of the golden years, and re-
ceived in due order, with high distinc-
tion, the degrees of bachelor and of mas-
ter of arts.

With all this rich culture and the new
ideas with which it flooded his mind, it
does not appear that any doubt had been
awakened in him of the truth of the
old religion. He was still a devout Cath-
olic ; he still prayed to the saints as the
proper helpers in time of need. When
accidentally wounded by the sword which
according to student fashion he wore at
his side, lying, as he thought, at the point
of death, he invoked not God, but the
Virgin, for aid. " Mary, help ! " was his
cry.

He was destined by his father for the
legal profession. It was the readiest
road to wealth and power. According-
ly, he applied himself with all diligence
to the study of law, and had fitted him-
self for the exercise of that calling, when
suddenly, in a company of friends as-
sembled for social entertainment, he an-
nounced his intention to quit the world
and embrace the monastic life. They

expressed their astonishment at this de-
cision, and endeavored to dissuade him
from such a course. In vain they urged
him to reconsider his purpose. " Fare-
well ! " he said. " We part to meet no
more."

What was it that caused this change
in Luther's plan of life ? To account
for a turn apparently so abrupt, it must
be remembered that his religion hith-
erto, the fruit of his early training, had
been a religion of fear. He had been
taught to believe in an angry God and
the innate, deep corruption of human
nature. He was conscious of no crime;
no youthful indiscretions, even, could
he charge himself with ; but morbid self-
scrutiny presented him utterly sinful and
corrupt. Only a life of good works
could atone for that corruption. Such a
life the monastic, with its renunciations,
its prayers and fastings and self-torture,
was then believed to be, — a life well
pleasing in the sight of God, the surest
way of escape from final perdition. Ex-
ceptional virtue tended in that direction.
To be a monk was to flee from wrath
and attain to holiness and heaven.

All this had lain dimly, half con-
sciously, in Luther's mind, not ripened
into purpose. The purpose was precip-
itated by a searching experience. Walk-
ing one day in the neighborhood of Er-
furt, he was overtaken by a terrific thun-
derstorm. The lightning struck the
ground at his feet. Falling on his knees,
he invoked, in his terror, the intercession
of St. Anna, and vowed, if life were
spared, to become a monk. Restored to
his senses, he regretted the rash vow.
His riper reason in after years convinced
him that a vow ejaculated in a moment
of terror imposed no moral obligation ;
but his uniustructed conscience could
not then but regard it as binding.
In spite of the just and angry remon-
strances of his father, who saw with dis-
may his cherished plan defeated, the
luird-earned money spent on his boy's
education expended in vain, he sought

810

Luther and his Work.

[December,

and gained admission to the brotherhood
and cloisters of St. Augustine at Er-
furt.

His novitiate was burdened with cruel
trials. The hardest and most repulsive
offices were laid upon the new-comer,
whose superiors delighted to mortify the
master of arts with disgusting tasks.
To the stern routine of cloister disci-
pline he added self-imposed severities,
more frequent fastings and watchings,
undermining his health, endangering
life. Harder to bear than all these were
his inward conflicts, — fears and fight-
ings, agonizing self-accusations, doubts
of salvation, apprehensions of irrevoca-
ble doom. He sought to conquer heaven
by mortification of the flesh, and de-
spaired of the result. Finally, encour-
aged by Staupitz, the vicar-general of
the order, and guided by his own study
of the new-found Scriptures, he came to
perceive that heaven is not to be won
in that way. Following the lead of St.
Paul and Augustine, he reached the
conclusion which formed thenceforth
the staple of his theology and the point
of departure in his controversy with
Rome, — the sufficiency of divine grace,
and justification by faith.

In the second year of his monastic
life he was ordained priest, and in the
year following promoted to the chair of
theology in the new University of Wit-
tenberg, where he soon became famous
as a preacher.

In 1511 he was sent on a mission to
Rome, in company with a brother monk.
When he came within sight of the city
he fell upon his knees and saluted it :
" Hail, holy Rome, thrice consecrated by
the blood of the martyrs ! " Arrived
within the walls, the honest German was
inexpressibly shocked by what he found
in the capital of Christendom : open in-
fidelity, audacious falsehood, mockery
of sacred things, rampant licentiousness,
abominations incredible. The Rome of
Julius II. was the Roma rediviva of
Caligula and Nero : pagan in spirit, pa-

gan in morals, a sink of iniquity. It
was well that' Luther had personal ex-
perience of all this ; the remembrance
of it served to lighten the struggle with
conscience, when called to contend
against papal authority. But then such
contest never entered his mind ; he was
still a loyal son of the church. He
might mourn her corruption, but would
not question her infallibility. Like oth-
er pilgrims zealous of good works, he
climbed on his knees the twenty-eight
steps of the Santa Scala. While engaged
in that penance there flashed on his
mind, like a revelation from heaven, de-
claring the futility of such observances,
the saying of the prophet, "The just
shall live by faith."

Returned to Wittenberg, he was urged
by Staupitz to study for the last and
highest academic honor, that of doctor
of philosophy. The already overtasked
preacher shrank from this new labor.
" Herr Staupitz," he said, " it will be
the death of me." " All right," an-
swered Staupitz. " Our Lord carries
on extensive operations ; he has need of
clever men above. If you die you will
be one of his councilors in heaven."

I now come to the turning point in
Luther's life, — the controversy with
Rome on the subject of indulgences,
which ended in the schism known as the
Protestant Reformation.

Leo X., in the year 15] 6, ostensibly
in the interest of a new church of St.
Peter in Rome, sent forth a bull accord-
ing absolution from the penalties of
sin to all who should purchase the in-
dulgences offered for sale by his com-
missioners. Indulgence, according to
the theory of the church, was dispensa-
tion from the penance otherwise re-
quired for priestly absolution. It was
not pretended that priestly absolution
secured divine forgiveness and eternal
salvation. It was absolution from tem-
poral penalties due to the church ; but
popular superstition identified the one
with the other. Moreover, it was held

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

811

that the supererogatory merits of Christ
and the saints were available for the use
of sinners. They constituted a treasury
confided to the church, whose saving vir-
tue the head of the church could dis-
pense at discretion. In this case the ap-
plication of that fund was measured by
pecuniary equivalents. Christ had said,
"How hardly shall they that have
riches enter the kingdom of heaven."

Leo said in effect, " How easily may
they that have riches enter the kingdom
of heaven," since they have the quid
pro quo. For the poor it was not so easy,
and this was one aspect of the case which
stimulated the opposition of Luther.
Penitence was nominally required of
the sinner, but proofs of penitence were
not exacted. Practically, the indul-
gence meant impunity for sin. A more
complete travesty of the gospel —
laughable, if not so impious — could
hardly be conceived. The faithful them-
selves were shocked by the shameless
realism which characterized the proc-
lamations of the German commissioner,
Tetzel.

Luther wrote a respectful letter to the
Archbishop of Mainz, praying him to
put a stop to the scandal ; little dream-
ing that the prelate had a pecuniary inter-
est in the business, having bargained for
half the profits of the sale as the price
of his sanction of the same. Other dig-
nitaries to whom he appealed refused to
interfere. As a last resource, by way of
appeal to the Christian conscience. On
the 31st October, 1517, he nailed his
famous ninety-five theses to the door of
the church of All Saints. These were
not dogmatic assertions, but propositions
to be debated by any so inclined. Never-
theless, the practical interpretation put
upon them was the author's repudiation
of indulgences, and, by implication, his
arraignment of the source from which
they emanated.

It is doubtful if Luther apprehended
the full significance of the step he had
taken. He did not then dream of se-

cession from the church. He was more
astonished than gratified when he learned
that his theses and other utterances of
like import had, within the space of
fourteen days, pervaded Germany, and
that he had become the eye-mark of
Christendom. More than once before
the final irrevocable act he seems to have
regretted his initiative, and though he
would not retract he would fain have
sunk out of sight.

But fortunately for the cause, Tetzel,
baffled in his designs on Luther's con-
gregation, attacked him with such abu-
sive virulence and extravagant assertions
of papal authority that Luther was pro-
voked to rejoin with more decisive dec-
larations. The controversy reached the
ear of the Pope, who inclined at first to
regard it as a local quarrel, which would
soon subside, but was finally persuaded
to dispatch a summons requiring Luther
to appear in Rome within sixty days, to
be tried for heresy. Rome might sum-
mon, but Luther knew too well the prob-
able result of such a trial to think of
obeying the summons. The spiritual
power might issue its mandates, but the
temporal power was needed to execute
its behests. Would the temporal, in this
case, cooperate with the spiritual ? There
had been a time when no German po-
tentate would have hesitated to surren-
der a heretic. But Germany was get-
ting tired of Roman dictation and ultra-
montane insolence. The German princes
were getting impatient of the constant
drain on their exchequer by a foreign
power. Irrespective of the right or
wrong of his position, theologically con-
sidered, the question of Luther's extra-
dition was one of submission to author-
ity long felt to be oppressive. Only
personal enemies, like Eck and Eraser
and Tetzel, would have him sent to
Rome. Miltitz, who had been deputed to
deal with him, confessed that an army of
twenty-five thousand men would not be
sufficient to take him across the Alps,
so widespread and so powerfully em-

812

Luther and his Work.

[December,

bodied was the feeling in his favor. The
Hitter class, comprising men like Franz
von Sickingen and Uirich von Hutten,
were on his side ; so were the humanists,
apostles of the new culture, which op-
posed itself to the old mediaeval scholas-
ticism. The Emperor Maximilian would
have the case tried on German soil. Con-
spicuous above all, his chief defender,
was Luther's own sovereign, the Elec-
tor of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Hu-
manly speaking, but for him the Refor-
mation would have been crushed at the
start, and its author with it. Frederick
was not at this time a convert to Luther's
doctrine, but insisted that his subject
should riot be condemned until tried by
competent judges and refuted on scrip-
tural grounds. He occupied the fore-
most place among the princes of Ger-
many. On the death of Maximilian,
1519, he was regent of the empire, and
had the chief voice in the election of the
new emperor. Without his consent and
cooperation it was impossible for Lu-
ther's enemies to get possession of his
person. For this purpose, Leo X., then
Pope, wrote a flattering letter, accom-
panied by the coveted gift of the " golden
rose," supreme token of pontifical good-
will. " This rose," wrote Leo, " steeped
in a holy chrism, sprinkled with sweet-
smelling musk, consecrated by apostolic
blessing, symbol of a sublime mystery,
— may its heavenly odor penetrate the
heart of our beloved son, and dispose
him to comply with our request."

The request was not complied with,
but by way of alternative it was pro-
posed that Luther should be tried by a
papal commissioner in Germany. So
Leo dispatched for that purpose the
Cardinal de Vio, of Gaeta, his plenipo-
tentiary, commonly known 'as Cajetan.
A conference was held at Augsburg,
which, owing to the legate's passionate
insistence on unconditional retractation,
served but to widen the breach. The
afforts of Miltitz, another appointed
mediator, met with no better success.

Meanwhile Luther had advanced with
rapid and enormous strides in the line
of divergence from the Catholic church.
The study of the Scriptures had con-
vinced him that the primacy of the
Roman bishop had no legitimate founda-
tion. The work of Laurentius Valla,
exposing the fiction of Constantino's
pretended donation of temporal sov-
ereignty in Rome, had opened his eyes
to other falsehoods. He proclaimed his
conclusions, writing and publishing in
Latin and German with incredible dili-
gence. His Address to the Christian
Nobility of the German Nation, con-
cerning the Melioration of the Christian
State, the most important of his publi-
cations, anticipates nearly all the points
of the Protestant reform, and many
which were not accomplished in Lu-
ther's day. The writing spread and
sped through every province of Ger-
many, as if borne on the wings of the
wind. An edition of four thousand copies
was exhausted in a few days. It was
the Magna Charta of a new ecclesias-
tical state.

But now the thunderbolt was launched
which his adversaries trusted should
smite the heretic to death and scatter
all his following. On the 16th June,
1520, Leo issued a bull condemning Lu-
ther's writings, commanding that they
be publicly burned wherever found, and
that their author, unless within the space
of sixty days he recanted his errors, al-
lowing sixty more for the tidings of his
recantation to reach Rome, should be
seized and delivered up for the punish-
ment due to a refractory heretic. All
magistrates and all citizens were re-

quired, on pain of ecclesiastical penalty,
to aid in arresting him and his followers
and sending them to Rome. The papal
legates, Aleander and Caraccioli, were
appointed bearers of a missive from the
Pope to Duke Frederick, commanding
him to have the writings of Luther
burned, and either to execute judgment
on the heretic himself, or else to deliver

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

813

him up to the papal tribunal. The
Elector replied that he had no part in
Luther's movement, but that his writings
must be refuted before he would order
their burning ; that their author had been
condemned unheard ; that his case must
be tried by impartial judges in some
place where it should be safe for him to
appear in person.

Miltitz persuaded Luther, as a last re-
source, to write to the Pope a concilia-
tory letter, disavowing all personal hos-
tility and expressing due reverence for
his Holiness. He did write. But such
a letter ! An audacious satire, which,
under cover of personal respect and
good-will, compassionates the Pope as
" a sheep among wolves," and charac-
terizes the papal court as " viler than
Sodom or Gomorrah."

When the bull reached Wittenberg it
was treated by Luther and his friends
with all the respect which it seemed to
them to deserve. On the 10th of Decem-
ber, 1520, a large concourse of students
and citizens assembled in the open space
before the Elster gate ; a pile was erect-
ed and fired by a resident graduate of
the university, and on it Luther with
his own hands solemnly burned the bull
and the papal decretals, amid applause
which, like the " embattled farmers' "
shot at Concord in 1775, was "heard
round the world."

So the last tie was severed which
bound Luther to Rome. After that
contumacious act there was no retreat
or possibility of pacification.

But though Luther had done with
Rome, Rome had not yet done with
him. When Leo found that he could
not wrest the heretic from the guardian-
ship of Frederick, he had recourse to im-
perial aid. The newly elected emperor,
Charles V., a youth of twenty-one, in
whose blood were blended three royal
lines of devoted friends of the church,
might be expected to render prompt
obedience to its head. But Charles
was unwilling to breuk with Frederick,

to whom he was chiefly indebted for his
election. He would not, if he could,
compel him to send Luther a prisoner
to Rome. He chose to have him tried
in his own court, and only when proved
by such trial an irreclaimable heretic
to surrender him as such.

An imperial Diet was about to be
held at the city of Worms. Thither
Charles desired the Elector to bring the
refractory monk. Frederick declined
the office, but Luther declared that if
the emperor summoned him he would
obey the summons as the call of God.
To his friend Spalatin, who advised his
refusal, he wrote that he would go to
Worms if there were as many devils
opposed to him as there were tiles on
the roofs of the houses.

The summons came, accompanied by
an imperial safe-conduct covering the
journey to and from the place of trial.
Luther complied ; he had no fear that
Charles would repeat the treachery of
Sigismund, which had blasted that name
with eternal infamy and incarnadined
Bohemia with atoning blood. The jour-
ney was one triumphal progress. In
every city ovations, not unmingled with
cautions and regrets. He arrived in
the morning of the 16th of April, 1521.
The warder on the tower announced
with the blast of a trumpet his ap-
proach. The citizens left their break-
fasts to witness the entry. Preceded
by the imperial herald and followed by
a long cavalcade, the stranger was es-
corted to the quarters assigned him.
Alighting from his carriage, he looked
round upon the multitude and said,
" God will be with me." It was then
that Aleander, the papal legate, re-
marked the demonic glance of his eye.
People of all classes visited him in his
lodgings.

On the following day he was called
to the episcopal palace, and made his
first appearance before the Diet. A
pile of books was placed before him.
" Are these your writings ? " 'The titles

814

Luther and his Work.

[December,

were called for, and Luther acknowl-
edged them to be his. Would he retract
the opinions expressed in them, or did
he still maintain thvm ? He begged time
for consideration ; it was a question of
faith, of the welfare of souls, of the
word of God. A day for deliberation
was allowed him and he was remanded
to his lodgings. On the way the people
shouted applause, and a voice exclaimed,
" Blessed is the womb that bare thee ! "
But the impression made oil the court
was not favorable. He had not shown
the front that was expected of him. He
had seemed timid, irresolute. The em-
peror remarked, " That man would never
make a heretic of me."

His self-communings in the interim,
and his prayer, which has come down to
us, show how deeply he felt the import
of the crisis ; how " the fire burned," as
he mused of its probable issue, know-
ing that the time was at hand when he

might be called to seal his testimony
with his blood.

" Ah, God, thou my God ! stand by
me against the reason and the wisdom
of all the world ! Thou must do it ; it
is not my cause, but thine. For my own
person, I have nothing to do with these
great lords of the earth. Gladly would
I have quiet days and be unperplexed.
But thine is the cause ; it is just and
eternal. Stand by me, thou eternal God !
I confide in no man. Hast thou not
chosen me for this purpose. I ask thee ?
But I know of a surety that thou hast
chosen me."

On the 18th he was summoned for the
second time, and the question of the pre-
vious day was renewed. He explained
at length, first in Latin, then in German,
that his writings were of various im-
port : those which treated of moral top-
ics the papists themselves would not
condemn ; those which disputed papal
authority and those addressed to private
individuals, although the language might
be more violent than was seemly, he
could not in conscience revoke. Unless

he were refuted from the Scriptures, he
must abide by his opinions. He was
told that the court was not there to dis-
cuss his opinions ; they had been already
condemned by the Council of .Constance.
Finally, the question narrowed itself to
this : Did he believe that councils could
err ? More specifically, Did he believe
the Council of Constance had erred?
Luther appreciated the import of the
question. He knew that his answer
would alienate some who had thus far be-
friended him. For, however they might
doubt the infallibility of the Pope,
they all believed councils to be infalli-
ble. But he did not hesitate. " I do so
believe." The fatal word was spoken.
The emperor said, " It is enough, the
hearing is concluded."

The shades of evening had gathered
over the assembly. To the friends of
Luther they might seem to forebode the
impending close of his earthly day.
Then, suddenly, he uttered with a loud
voice, in his native idiom, those words
which Germany will remember while
the city of Worms has one stone left
upon another, or the river that laves her
shall find its way to the German Ocean :
" Hier steh'ich, ich kann nicht anders ;
Gott hilf mir ! Ameu ! "

By the light of blazing torches the
culprit was conducted from the council
chamber, the Spanish courtiers hissing
as he went, while among the Germans
many a heart no doubt beat high in re-
sponse to that brave ultimatum of their
fellow-countryman.

With the consent of the emperor fur-
ther negotiations were attempted in pri-
vate, and Luther found it far more dif-
ficult to resist the kindly solicitations of
friends and peacemakers than to brave
the threats of his enemies. But he did
resist ; the trial was ended. The great
ones of the earth had assailed a poor
monk, now with menace, now with en-
treaty, and found him inflexible.

" The tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world "

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

815

had broken powerless against the stern
resolve of a single breast.

The curtain falls ; when next it rises
we are in the Wartburg, the ancestral
castle of the counts of Thiiringen, where
St. Elizabeth, the fairest figure in the
Roman calendar, dispensed the benefac-
tions and bore the heavy burden of her
tragic life. The emperor, true to his
promise, had arranged for the safe re-
turn of Luther to Wittenberg, declaring,
however, that, once returned, he would
'' jal with hitn as a heretic. At the in-
stigation, perhaps, of Frederick, the pro-
tecting escort was assailed on the way,
and put to flight by an armed troop.
Luther was taken captive, and borne in
secret to the Wartburg, where, disguised
as a knight, he might elude the pursuit
of his enemies. While there he occu-
pied himself with writing, and among
other labors prepared his best and price-
less gift to his country, his translation of
the New Testament, afterward supple-
mented by his version of the Old.

A word here respecting the merits of
Luther as a writer. His compatriots
have claimed for him the inestimable
service of founder of the German lan-
guage. He gave by his writings to the
New High German, then competing
with other dialects, a currency which has
made it ever since, with slight changes,
the language of German literature, the
language in -which Kant reasoned and
Goethe sang. His style is not elegant,
but charged with a rugged force, a ro-
bust simplicity, which makes for itself
a straight path to the soul of the reader.
His words were said to be " half bat-
tles ; " call them rather whole victories,
for they conquered Germany. The first
condition of national unity is unity of
speech. In this sense Luther did more
for .the unification of Germany than any
of her sons, from Henry the Fowler to
Bismarck. " We conceded," says Gervi-
nus, " to no metropolis, to no learned so-
ciety, the honor of fixing our language,
but to the man who better than any

other could hit the hearty, healthy tone
of the people. No dictionary of an
academy was to be the canon of our
tongue, but that book by which modern
humanity is schooled and formed, and
which in Germany, through Luther, has
become, as nowhere else, a people's
book."

Returning to Wittenberg, when
change of circumstance permitted him
to do so with safety, he applied himself
with boundless energy to the work of
constructing a new, reformed church to
replace the old ; preaching daily in one
or another city, writing and publishing
incessantly, instituting public schools,
arranging a new service in German as
substitute for the Latin mass, compil-
ing a catechism, a model in its kind, a
hymnal, and other appurtenances of wor-
ship. And, like the Israelites on their
return from Babylon, while building the
new temple with one hand, he fought
with the other, contending against Miin-
zer, Carlstadt, the mystics, the icono-
clasts, the anabaptists ; often, it must be
confessed, with unreasonable, intoler-
ant wrath, spurning all that would not
square with his theology, as when he
rejected the fellowship of the Swiss,
who denied the Real Presence in the
eucharist. When the fury of the peas-
ants' war was desolating Germany, he'
wielded a martial pen against both par-
ties ; arraigning the nobles for their cru-
el oppressions, reproving the peasants
for attempting to overcome evil with
greater evil.

His reform embraced, along with
other departures from the old regime,
the abolition of enforced celibacy of the
priesthood. He believed the family life
to be the true life for cleric as well as
lay. He advised the reformed clergy
to take to themselves wives, and in 1525,
in the forty-third year of his age, he en-
couraged the practice by his example.
He married Catherine von Bora, an es-
caped nun, for whom he had previously
endeavored to find another husband.

816

Luther and his Work.

[December,

She was one of the many who had been
}>l:u'i'<i in convents against their will, and
forced to take the veil. It was no ro-
mantic attaelmu nt which induced Lu-
ther to take this step, but partly the feel-
ing that the preacher's practice should
square with his teaching, and partly
an earnest desire to gratify his father,
whose will he had so cruelly traversed
in becoming a monk. To marry was
to violate his monastic vow, but he had
long since convinced himself that a vow
made in ignorance, under extreme pres-
sure, was not morally binding.

Pleasing pictures of Luther's domestic
life are given us by contemporary wit-
nesses, and the reports of his table talk.
In the bosom of his family he found an
asylum from the wearing labors and
never-ending conflicts of his riper years.
There he shows himself the tender fa-
ther, the trusting and devoted husband,
the open-handed, gay, and entertaining
host. His Kiitchen proved in every re-
spect an all-sufficient helpmeet. And
it needed her skillful economy and cre-
ative thrift to counterbalance his incon-
siderate and boundless generosity. For
never was one more indifferent to the
things of this world, more sublimely
careless of the morrow.

The remaining years of Luther's life
'were deeply involved in the fortunes of
the Reformation, its struggles and its
triumphs, its still advancing steps in
spite of opposition from without and dis-
sensions within. They developed no
new features, while they added intensity
to some of the old, notably to his old
impatience of falsehood and contradic-
tion. They exhibit him still toiling and
teeming, praying, agonizing, stimulating,
instructing, encouraging ; often pros-
trate with bodily disease and intense
suffering ; and still, amid all disappoint-
ments, tribulations, and tortures, breast-
ing and buffeting with high-hearted valor
the adverse tide which often threatened
to overwhelm him.

Thus laboring, loving, suffering, ex-

ulting, he reached his sixty-fourth year,
and died on the 18th of February, 1546.
The last words he uttered expressed un-
shaken confidence in his doctrine, tri-
umphant faith in his cause.

By a fit coincidence death overtook
him in Eisleben, the place of his birth,
where he had been tarrying on a journey
connected with affairs of the church.

The Count Mansfeld, who, with his
noble wife, had ministered to Luther in
his last illness, desired that his mortal
remains should be interred in his do-
main ; but the Elector, now John Fred-
erick, claimed them for the city of Wit-
tenberg, and sent a deputation to take
them in charge. In Halle, on the way,
memorial services were held, in which
the university and the magnates of the
city took part. In all the towns through
which the procession passed the bells
were rung, and the inhabitants thronged
to pay their respects to the great de-
ceased. In Wittenberg a military cor-
te"ge accompanied the procession to the
church of the electoral palace, where
the obsequies were celebrated with im-
posing demonstrations, and a mourning
city sent forth its population to escort
the body to the grave.

In the year following, the Emperor
Charles, having taken the Elector pris-
oner, stood as victor beside that grave.
The Duke of Alva urged that the bones
of the heretic should be exhumed and
publicly burned ; but Charles refused.
" Let him rest ; he has found his judge.
I war not with the dead."

I have presented our hero in his char-
acter of reformer. I could wish, if time
permitted, to exhibit him in other as-
pects of biographical interest. I would
like to speak of him as a poet, author of
hymns, into which he threw the fervor
and swing of his impetuous soul ; as a
musical composer, rendering in that ca-
pacity effective aid to the choral service
of his church. I would like to speak
of him as a humorist and satirist, exhib-
iting the playfulness and pungency of

1883.]

Luther and his Work.

817

Erasmus without his cynicism ; as a lov-
er of nature, anticipating our own age
in his admiring sympathy with the beau-
ties of earth and sky ; as the first natu-
ralist of his day, a close observer of the
habits of vegetable and animal life ; as a
leader in the way of tenderness for the
brute creation. I would like also, in
the spirit of impartial justice, to speak
of his faults and infirmities, in which
Lessing rejoiced, as showing him not too
f / removed from the level of our com-
mon humanity.

But these are points on which I am
not permitted to dwell. That phase of
his life which gives to the name of Lu-
ther its world-historic significance is
comprised in the period extending from
the year 1517 to the year 1529 ; from
the posting of the ninety-five theses to
the Diet of Spires, from whose decisions
German princes, dissenting, received the
name o'l Protestants, and which, followed
by the league of Smalcald, assured the
success of his cause.

And now, in brief, what was that
cause ? The Protestant Reformation, I
have said, is not to be regarded as a
mere theological or ecclesiastical move-
ment, however Luther may have meant
it as such. In a larger view, it was sec-
ular emancipation, deliverance of the
nations that embraced it from an irre-
sponsible theocracy, whose main interest
was the consolidation and perpetuation
of its own dominion.

A true theocracy must always be the
ideal of society ; that is, a social order
in which God as revealed in the moral
law shall be practically recognized, in-
spiring and shaping the polity of nations.
All the Utopias from Plato down are
schemes for the realization of that ideal.
But the attempt to ground theocracy on
sacerdotalism has always proved and
must always prove a failure. The ten-
dency of sacerdotalism is to separate
sanctity from righteousness. It invests
an order of men with a power irre-
spective of character ; a po\ver whose

VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 52

strength lies in the ignorance of those
on whom it is exercised ; a power which
may be, and often, no doubt, is, exer-
cised for good, but which, in the na-
ture of man and of things, is liable to
such abuses as that against which Lu-
ther contended, when priestly absolution
was affirmed to be indispensable to sal-
vation, and absolution was venal, when
impunity for sin was offered for sale,
when the alternative of heaven or hell
was a question of money.

It is not my purpose to impugn the
Church of Rome as at present admin-
istered, subject to the checks of mod-
ern enlightenment and the criticism of
dissenting communions. But I cannot
doubt that if Rome could recover the
hegemony which Luther overthrew,
could once regain the entire control of
the nations, the same iniquities, the
same abominations, which characterized
the ancient rule would reappear. The
theory of the Church of Rome is fatally
adverse to the best interests of human-
ity, light, liberty, progress. That theory
makes a human individual the rightful
lord of the earth, all potentates and
powers beside his rightful subjects.

Infallible the latest council has de-
clared him. Infallible ! The assertion is
an insult to reason. Nay, more, it is
blasphemy, when we think of the attri-
bute of Deity vested in a Boniface VIII.,
an Alexander VI., a John XXIII. In-
fallible ? No ! forever no ! Fallible,
as human nature must always be.

Honor and everlasting thanks to the
man who broke for us the spell of pa-
pal autocracy ; who rescued a portion, at
least, of the Christian world from the
paralyzing grasp of a power more to be
dreaded than any temporal despotism, a
power which rules by seducing the will,
by capturing the conscience of its sub-
jects, — the bondage of the soul ! Lu-
ther alone, of all the men whom history
names, by faith and courage, by all his
endowments, — ay, and by all his limit-
ations,— was fitted to accomplish that

818

Social Washington.

[December,

saving work, — a work whose full import
he could not know, whose far-reaching
consequences he had not divined. They
shape our life. Modern civilization, lib-
erty, science, social progress, attest the
world-wide scope of the Protestant re-
form, whose principles are independent
thought, freedom from ecclesiastical

o t

thrall, defiance of consecrated wrong.
Of him it may be said, in a truer sense
than the poet claims for the architects
of mediaeval minsters, " He builded bet-
ter than he knew." Our age still obeys
the law of that movement whose van he
led, and the latest age will bear its im-
press. Here, amid the phantasms that
crowd the stage of human history, was
a grave reality, a piece of solid nature,

a man whom it is impossible to imagine
not to have been ; to strike whose name
and function from the record of his time
would be to despoil the centuries fol-
lowing of gains that enrich the annals
of mankind.

Honor to the man whose timely re-
volt checked the progress of triumphant
wrong ; who wrested the heritage of God
from sacerdotal hands, defying the tra-
ditions of immemorial time ! He taught
us little in the way of theological lore ;
what we prize in him is not the teacher,
but the doer, the man. His theology is
outgrown, a thing of the past, but the
spirit in which he wrought is immortal ;
that spirit is evermore the renewer and
saviour of the world.

Frederic Henry Hedge.

SOCIAL WASHINGTON.

WHEN Washington was planned, — so
tradition tells us, — it was intended that
the city should crown what is known as
Capitol Hill, stretching away toward the
east, and that the White House should
be in a retired spot a mile out in the
country. Georgetown was not expected
to grow eastward across Rock Creek,
and the capital city, it was assumed,
would have that proper respect for the
dignified retirement of the chief magis-
trate which would deter it from making
unseemly advances upon his residence.
All the world knows that Washington
has disappointed its projectors. Those
worthy persons apparently failed to ap-
preciate the social influences that would
spread out from the home of the Presi-
dent. Perhaps General Washington and
his contemporaries could not grasp the
idea of social pleasures that did not in-
volve a long ride over country roads
and through virgin forests. Their fes-
tivities meant journeys to distant plan-
tations and farms, and embraced not

only the breaking of bread at the host's
board, but lodging for the men and
women, and stabling for the cattle. In
the new country there could be no price
too great to pay for social privileges, but
the demands of public business made it
necessary that those engaged in it should
live near each other, and not far from
the place of meeting of Congress. The
city was intended for the carrying on
of the work of government, and there
seems to have been no thought that oth-
er influences would have juiy agency in
directing its growth. The serious labors
of such a statesman as John Adams
were expected to command more con-
sideration than the frivolities of all the
fashion that might ever find its way to
the town. But it turns out that fashion,
by which is generally meant not only
the frivolous but the best social life, is
stronger than the plans of sages, and its
convenience has required that the peo-
ple who feast and dancev who lionize
and are lionized, who give and receive

1883.]

Social Washington.

819

the inspiration that is the best result
of the meeting of clever men and wom-
en, should dwell near the White House.
Thus it is that the dignified official home
of the President is not out in the coun-
try, but in the thick of the city, looking
out upon its most fashionable quarter.

The President and his family are ex-
pected to lead not only in the official so-
ciety, but in the more intellectual and
cnlfivated life of the capital. Some ad-
ministrations have disappointed this ex-
pectation, but as a rule the influence of
the head of the nation is felt in the
active social life of Washington ; and,
generally, to be unknown to those who
rule at the White House is to be at least
out of the centre of the finest privileges
which the capital has to give. There
are those who, because of personal or
political rivalry, have no relations with
the executive power except of business ;
but if 'they possess that kind of merit
which makes men and women sociable
or companionable in the eyes of the
people who stand within the reflection
of the light that beats upon the throne,
they are safe from utter exclusion.

The fashionable quarter of Washing-
ton has been a natural growth. First,
the cabinet officers were obliged to live
near the man to whom they ministered
advice ; then, naturally, the families of
senators and of justices of the supreme
court followed, while the diplomates,
having nothing to do with the legisla-
tive branch of the government, and
everything to do with the executive,
have always dtfelt under the shadow of
what has come to be called the Exec-
utive Mansion. These official people
and a few Georgetown aristocrats, whose
descendants ceased to recognize Wash-
ington when the war of the rebellion
broke out, made the beginning of the
rich and picturesque life that is now to
be found at the federal city.

Of all places in this country, Wash-
ington is the city of leisure. On bright
winter afternoons, its thoroughfare is

full of pleasure-seeking saunterers ; it
is the one community in the United
States whose working people are not
forever filling its streets with the bustle
and hurry of their private affairs. In
truth, trade disturbs it very little. Com-
merce has no foothold where are en-
acted the laws intended to regulate it.
Business has left all the region for a
more congenial atmosphere. In one or
two places on the Potomac it has grasped
at the river, but its fingers have slipped
off, and the days when Georgetown
and Alexandria were important market
towns have passed away. Decaying
warehouses and ruined wharves and
grass-grown streets remind one of a tra-
dition which is to the effect that once
farmers brought their produce to now
departed commission houses, to be load-
ed in sloops that crept sleepily down the
yellow waters to the Chesapeake. The
broad river seems consecrated to the
heroic memories of two wars, for the
interest in its almost townless shores
centres in the thousands of graves at
Arlington and the one tomb at Mt. Ver-
non. The banks of the stream at Wash-
ington are almost as green with herb-
age and trees as the water-side of an un-
pretentious village. People who are in
government employ still make the ma-
jority of the more interesting classes,
and work for the public is done by many
hands and in a few hours. Moreover,
the men who are engaged in it rarely
permit it to worry them, and almost in-
variably shake off its cares with their
office-coats. After four o'clock in the
afternoon, they do with their time what
seems best to them, and, if their posi-
tion warrants it, they devote themselves
to the performance of social duties, — a
ta>k which, more than in any other city
of the country, is a pleasure. The af-
ternoon teas, the evening receptions, —
most of them very simple entertainments,
— and the round of dinner-parties make
constant demand upon the eligible men
and women who spend their winters in

820

Social Washington.

[December,

Washington; and most of the men, ex-
cept those who are in political or judicial
life, have time to satisfy the demand.

The question that interests the world
outside seems to be, " How much is so-
cial life disturbed and coarsened by con-
tact with the politicians ? " If we were
to answer this inquiry from the novels
that have been written about Washing-
ton, \ve should be obliged to confess
that those who govern us have a great
capacity for demoralizing the people
whom they meet when they lay aside
the labors of state, and unbend. The
truth is, however, that a fair picture of
the social side of Washington has never
been painted. There have been truth-
ful sketches of certain features, but all
attempts to portray the life led by the
clever and refined people have been
unfaithful. The misrepresentation of
which the capital has been the victim
is due largely to the great hotels and
their environment. The best side of
the city cannot be studied in its public
places. It would be unnecessary to say
this of Boston, or New York, or Phil-
adelphia. No one would think of un-
dertaking a study of the inner and best
life of any one of our great business
communities in the vestibule or smoking-
room of his hotel. It is possible that
Washington receives a different treat-
ment because the public has an idea that
the city is composed mainly of congress-
men and treasury clerks. It suffers fr.om
superficial observation. To a stranger
nothing is so distracting as the bustle
of the great caravanseries that are the
centres of a life redolent with surface
politics, noisy, showy, and misleading,
and with all the cheap pretentiousness
of shoddy fashion. Into this coarse
and glaring activity very often fall the
honest, worthy, unsophisticated country
member and his wife, — he, frequent-
ly, a man of strong head and solid ac-
complishments, and she a modest, trust-
ful, sensible housewife, whose ambition
is satisfied with her husband's honors.

This mingling of the vulgar and the in-
nocent helps to maintain the deception,
and does much to induce the casual ob-
server to believe that he is seeing the
true essence, when he is looking at a
very bad imitation. Almost all the writ-
ers of fiction who have fluttered, moth-
like, about the shining subject have been
too much attracted by the glare of the
public places. It takes time and oppor-
tunity to learn that the men who are
most in the newspapers are not neces-
sarily the most prominent in society.
There is many a popular orator or par-
ty leader whom one will never meet out-
side of the Capitol, except at hotel hops
and the crushes sometimes given by
short-sighted people, who think to reach
social eminence accompanied by the
notes of a ball-room orchestra, amid the
fumes of unstinted champagne, and on
the wings of indiscriminate invitations.

There is a vulgar side to Washington
society. Why should not this be ex-
pected ? There is a vulgar side to
the society of every city in the country.
There are coarse and untrained people
even in Boston, and strange tales come
from New York. Social solecisms are
due largely to provincialism. When,
therefore, the various degrees of pro-
vincialism which are to be found in the
United States are brought together into
one heterogeneous mass, and are mixed
up with the low politicians and lobbyists
who infest every capital in the country,
it is not to be wondered at if provincial-
ism, looking upon these creatures as
men of the world, adepts' their bad man-
ners, which give the noisome reputation
that some writers of fiction, both in nov-
els and in the newspaper press, have
liberally spread over the whole city.
So far as I know, only one writer —
the author of Democracy — has shown
any familiarity with the customs of the
best side of Washington ; and even he
(or she) has misrepresented or misun-
derstood the people whom that most de-
ceptive of books assumes to portray. All

1883.]

Social Washington.

821

the other inventors have been blinded
by the glitter of politics, and by their
industry in circulating their own misin-
formation they have given the capital
of the country a bad name, both at home
and abroad. Much of this reputation is
due to published letters written by per-
sons who never enter a private house,
except on business with its master, and
who meet no women habitually except
those found at their boarding houses.

Washington has become a winter re-
sort, and the character of its society is
of interest and importance, because we
ought to expect that, in its development
on its intellectual and aesthetic side, it
will be representative of the culture of
the ' country. Many of the growing
class of rich persons with leisure are
discovering that the capital is tending
toward the intellectual headship of the
nation, and that the crude display that
first catches the eye is no more an indi-
cation of the real life than is the brill-
iant disorder of a modern bar-room the
symptom of discordant drawing-rooms.
The turbulent revelries of adventurers
drown for a time the harmonies of a
life that is essentially undisturbed, and
even untouched, by them.

Politics is the business of Washing-
ton, and men whose work is in the large
affairs that concern the public natu-
rally dominate. The painful effect pro-
duced by men of the lower stratum of
politicians has been indicated, but their
social organization, if it be an organi-
zation, is primarily for the purposes of
business, and they reveal their object so
openly that none but the unwary can
be trapped more than once. Those
who entertain for the advancement of
their schemes are easily read by men
who are only ordinarily shrewd. The
best public men are never found at cer-
tain dinner-parties. The congressman
who attends them likes terrapin and
champagne more than he cares for a
good reputation.

The best society of the capital is

probably the most delightful in the
country. The city has cast off much of
its rural character, and its fashionable
quarter is as beautiful as the correspond-
ing part of any city in the country. Of
course, there are occasions when the
larger cities outdo anything that can be
done in Washington, but the tone of
society there is continuously and uni-
formly good. During the last three
years the town has taken marvelous
strides. There has been almost an epi-
demic of building. The senate is be-
coming a club of moneyed men, and its
members put up handsome houses, and
pay for them by successful speculations
in real estate. Judges of the supreme
court follow their example. A great
house in Washington, however, is not
the affair that a railway king makes for
himself in one of the large cities. A
house costing $25,000 is noteworthy,
and when the charges of the builder
reach $50,000, the city has acquired one
of its palaces. Equipages also are
modest. In this wholesome restriction
of outward show is illustrated one of the
pleasant features of Washington. The
average income of the place is compar-
atively small. When it is recollected
that a cabinet officer receives $8000 a
year, a justice of the supreme court
$10,000, assistant secretaries, bureau
chiefs, chief clerks, and other employ-
ees of the government from $2500 to
$6000, a senator $5000, it will be un-
derstood that social success must depend
largely on cleverness and good taste,
and that lavish display and extravagance
must be vulgar. An impression seems
to obtain elsewhere that the members
of the diplomatic corps indulge in the
rush and whirl of extravagant life, and
that, though they are exclusive, they
keep up at least with the reckless dis-
sipations that are represented as char-
acterizing the national hotbed of gross-
ness and corruption. But the truth is
that foreign ministers ha this country
live very inexpensively. They are to

822

Social Washington.

[December,

be found in modest rented houses, and
sometimes in boarding-houses, almost
never in the large hotels. They are,
as a rule, pleasant, companionable peo-
ple, who take kindly to the methods
of Washington. Certainly, they do not
complain because the demands upon
them are so light that they can live
more cheaply here than at almost any
other diplomatic station in the world.
They do not indulge in revels ; they do
not throw away money in unseemly
pleasures ; most of them are gentlemen
of moderate tastes and of fair abilities.
There is a tradition that foreign minis-
ters regard Washington as a place of
exile. There was once a time when it
was necessary, in order to make a dip-
lomatic call, to flounder through mud
that was hub deep. In that day, a
stream, crossed by a foot-bridge only,
traversed the road over which the Eng-
lish minister had to make his way to
the White House. All that, however,
is past, and the United States has be-
come a rather popular mission among
the stations of its class. The pleasure
of living at the capital has been greatly
added to, without a material increase of
expense. Men of small means can en-
joy all its social advantages. Cleverness
and presentability are now and must
remain the passports to its best houses.
Politics and politicians necessarily
exert much influence in a city which
would probably not exist were it not
the capital of the country. But it is a
pleasant fact that the trade of politics is
rarely talked of by the people who are
met in the society which is made up of
the clever and refined. To talk politics
in Washington is to talk shop. As a
matter of course, one hears discussions
of public questions, and it is undoubted-
ly true that ambitious men talk to svm-
pathizing women of their hopes and
aspirations. The affairs of the govern-
ment make certainly a worthy subject
for conversation, and can hardly be com-
pared with the private business interests

of which one constantly hears in the
more pretentious cities. But the gross-
er side of politics is no more talked
about in the presence of refined women
than are the details of the day's bar-
gaining at the dinner-table of a Boston
merchant. One may possibly hear, at a
Washington dinner-party, of a public
measure, or of a public man. The sub-
ject, however, must be of immediate and
universal interest and importance in or-
der to afford entertainment to the men
and women who, for the moment, are
more interested in one another than in
the larger concerns of the country. The
man who would drag the affairs of the
caucus or primary, or the transactions
and personel of the lobby, into parlors
and dining-rooms would not be tolerated.
He does not exist outside the pages of
Washington novels ; and the writer of
fiction who is familiar with the best side
of life at the capital, and who neverthe-
less introduces such a creature into his
pages, is guilty of that incomprehensible
but too common vice of preaching an
untruthful sermon against a sin that is
never committed.

It must not be understood, by the
statement that to talk politics is to talk
shop, that public questions stand in
Washington as haberdashery stands in
commercial communities. Indeed, the
conversation about matters of public in-
terest that is heard in private houses at
the capital is especially charming, for
it is made up largely of the honest opin-
ions of the leading men of the country,
expressed with the frankness that is
induced by the confidence which the
speakers have in those who hear them,
and without which intimacies and friend-
ships could not exist. In Congress, men
are limited in their speech by the fact
that they are advocates ; outside and
among their friends, there need be no
repression of the whole truth. The real
meaning of political movements, the pre-
cise significance of important measures,
the true character of public men, are

1883.]

Social Washington.

823

best learned from familiar intercourse
with the actors in the events and the
associates of those who are shaping the
history of the country, and who cannot
be constantly and satisfactorily met ex-
cept at the capital.

Public affairs are. however, seldom
talked about. The serious business of
life is not generally the topic of conver-
sation when people of varied accom-
plishments and tastes meet for pleasure.
The men who are found in the finest
drawing-rooms and the most delightful
dining-rooms of the capital are seeking
for rest and for an inspiration that is de-
rived best from a well-ordered and highly
civilized society, of which women of wit
and intelligence are the important factor.
They do not carry their speeches with
them ; they do not shoulder the burdens
of their constituents with the covert
purpose of distributing the load among
their friends. A public man need not go
into society, and if he does not like it,
or if society does not like him, he is very
likely to stay at home with his books or
his game of cards. The difference be-
tween the society men of Washington
and those of other places is that among
the former less is heard of " form," and
more is seen of substance. It is, of
course, an axiom that no society can ex-
ist without the youth of agile heels. He
is the amusing and interesting being at
the capital, that he is in other cities ;
but the percentage of him is not so large,
and the percentage of the man with a
head is greater.

Congressmen are not the prominent
features of Washington parlors. Most
of the members of the legislative branch
of the government are country lawyers,
many of them able and accomplished
men. They go to Washington with the
habits of village life. They are not
only unaccustomed to take their pleas-
ures gracefully, but most of them are
too old to learn. Many of their wives
are like them, in this respect, and the
best and wisest lead precisely the kind

of life they have at home. The church
thus becomes as much a social insti-
tution as it is in the villages of New
England and Ohio. It is one of the
noteworthy features of Washington that
many men who live for years amid the
best influences never overcome their
awkwardness. They acquire a certain
familiarity with the superficial usages of
the people with whom they associate,
but the polish remains imperfect. They
have passed their early years in the so-
ciety of women who, following an un-
wholesome rural tradition, have permit-
ted the duties of housewife to put an end
to all effort for mental growth. These
men enjoy the acquaintance of women
of the world, but they never completely
understand them, and seldom acquire
the intellectual grace which is essential
to put themselves wholly at their ease.
They therefore gradually slip out of
sight, and seek the companionship of
men who, like themselves, unbend best
in the presence of their own sex. A
game of whist at their rooms, with the
stock stories of the country bar during
the deals, has more solid enjoyment for
them than all the elegance and refine-
ments of society.

A politician is not aided by social in-
fluences at the capital. The strength
which a member of Congress has with
an administration depends on his stand-
ing at home. Even his own merit has
not so much weight as a strong, many-
headed constituency. All the allure-
ments of beauty, all the charm of the
most delightful hospitality, cannot alone
advance a politician to the cabinet.
Back of all the attractions that may
surround a public man must stand heavy
masses of voters, who can repay the ad-
ministration for the favors bestowed
upon their " favorite son." It is true,
indeed, that army and navy officers are
sometimes given desirable posts and sta-
tions, and that young men in civil life
secure appointments at home and abroad
because they and their friends are known

824

Social Washington.

[December,

to the appointing power. These, how-
ever, are comparatively unimportant mat-
ters in the groat governmental machine.
The country ought not to care very much
because a young man receives a twelve-
hundred- dollar clerkship through the
friendship of the administration. He
is much more likely to turn out a good
and conscientious public servant than is
some worker for a politician. The civil
service is reforming now, but, as matters
stood before the law was passed, appoint-
ments based on personal considerations
were quite as good as those bestowed
for party services. The little that Wash-
ington society has been guilty of in this
direction has not made a ripple on its
surface. Men of the world do not give
dinner-parties, or balls, or receptions in
order that they and their wivea may
intrigue for political advancement. They
know well enough that, as politics go in
this country, it would do them no good.
To be able to give a model dinner to a
President who loves gastronomy may
help along an officer of the army or the
navy ; but the country might as well
settle down comfortably to the conclu-
sion that it will always hear of injustice
to the individuals in these two services,
— at least until a war shall enable the
President to award honors for merit in
battle. All this has very little to do with
the government, and it is hardly fair to
condemn a whole community because,
for friendship's sake, an occasional officer
is promoted or given a pleasant station.
All that is done in this direction does
not turn a single tea-party, much less a
whole social fabric, into the whirlpool
of intrigue that Washington has been
represented to be. The country can
rest assured that refined women do not
become busy politicians and lobbyists
merely by translation to the federal cap-
ital, the fictitious assurances of some
novel-writers to the contrary notwith-
standing. The average woman of soci-
ety in Washington hates corruption and
immodesty as strongly as does her sister

of the commercial cities. She is good
and pure. She is not made coarse by
fast companionship and excessively high
living. If her husband is a public man,
as he may be, and she has kept pace
with him and has grown with his ad-
vancement, so that her home is worthy
of his place in the world, she is likely
to be much more interesting than many
who read Democracy, or Through one
Administration, or A Washington Win-
ter, and shudder at her ignorance and
her ill-breeding.

Occasionally there will be found a
woman who has not grown up to her
husband's position, but this is a blemish
on that society which rests entirely on
official rank. It makes up a small part
of Washington life, however, and its
duties may be made merely perfunctory.
It has its stated reception days, and
its people go to certain entertainments
given by other persons similarly situ-
ated." It is all formal, and does not
make any part of the best life of the
capital. That depends wholly on con-
geniality. Many official people are
found in it, for there are a good many
agreeable persons among the employees
of the government, — more perhaps than
strangers imagine. People who are in-
teresting and pleasant to one another
drift together everywhere, and in Wash-
ington, as in other cities, there are all
sorts of social conditions. The trouble
has been that the glare of the coarser
kind has obscured that in which are
found the really influential people of
the capital and the country ; and yet it
is the very best and most cultivated that
make the social activity of the place.

" Does political position carry a man
into this best society ? " is an interesting
question. It may take him just within
its edge, but beyond that individual merit
must be depended on. Occasionally there
will appear a strong, coarse-natured, am-
bitious senator or cabinet officer, who
bears down upon the refined life of the
city with the purpose of making an im-

1883.]

Social Washington.

825

pression upon it ; but people draw them-
selves together and defend themselves,
for they realize that any impression
that such an exotic can make must be
necessarily fatal. A vigorous and influ-
ential statesman standing in the middle
of a drawing-room, red with embarrass-
ment, tugging away at his big white
gloves and looking helplessly for a
friendly face, is an uncommon but not a
wholly unknown spectacle at the larger
parties, given by persons who cannot
refuse to send a card to a congressman
who is bold enough to ask it.

The public men of the country do not
pollute the men and women into whose
houses they enter. As a rule, they are
men whose training and accomplish-
ments mako them additions to any so-
ciety. Congress has a bad reputation,
for the newspaper press has naturally
most to say of its bad deeds and its cor-
rupt »aen ; but its character is better
than its reputation. The stock congress-
man of the writers of fiction does not
exist. He cannot even be compiled
from the vices of all the wicked men
who have cajoled their constituents into
voting for them. The senate, instead
of being composed of corruptionists, has
not a dozen members who suffer under
even unsupported accusations. One
writer, who is very popular in England,
says that the senate chamber has a
" code of bad manners and worse mor-
als," and intimates that it matters little, .
in this country, whether a man is in
politics or in prison. This brutal flip-
pancy is not very uncommon, and it is
usually uttered in the name of reform ;
but what kind of morality is it that talks
of fewer than twelve men, amonf them

some of the weakest of the body, making
a code of morals for sixty-four stronger
men ? If our politics are to be reformed
by the banishment of the wicked dozen,
is the amelioration to be brought about
by persons who are careless enough to
state that because twelve senators are
bad, therefore all the seventy-six are

bad ? By an examination of the list of
senators, I find at least twenty whose
" manners " have been formed by asso-
ciation with the most polite people of
the country. Fifty certainly, perhaps
more, are entitled to respect for the
possession of some undeniable element
of strength, or for professional learning.
There have been grossly corrupt men in
the senate, but almost without excep-
tion exposure of their vices has driven
them into private life.

There are pretenders among civil-
service reformers, and office - beggars
among " scholars in politics ; " but such
persons are surely not more dangerous
than those who write books and news-
paper editorials in which wholesale abuse
is substituted for sober truth. There
are facts about public men and public
life that are grave enough, and that call
sufficiently loud for change ; but the re-
form that is demanded cannot be accom-
plished by false and exaggerated state-
ments. One mischief, at least, that does
not exist in Washington is the social
ascendency of men and women to whom
no political advancement could give a
like leadership in the life of the smallest
and most unpretentious city in the land.

More and more every year, as the
city grows in beauty, the society of
Washington is becoming worthier of the
capital of the country. The advent of
people of wealth and leisure does not
mar its simplicity, because those who
must remain its leaders have moderate
incomes ; it is not broken into sets or
cliques, because it is composed largely of
attractive men and women who spend
the winters together, and who have none
of the local traditions and prejudices
that do so much to breed dissension
among those who live in the communi-
ties where they were born and it is safe
to predict that before many years shall
have passed Washington will be the so-
cial capital of the country as indisputa-
bly us it is now tl.e capital of its gov-
ernment.

Henry Loomis Nelson.

826

Mr. Longfellow and the Artists.

[December,

MR. LONGFELLOW AND THE ARTISTS.

WHEN the history of civilization in
America comes to be written, the judi-
cious author will begin a consideration
of the period which we are just now un-
wittingly closing somewhat as follows :
There was as yet no sign of any general
interest in the graphic arts. Here and
there a painter of portraits found a
scanty recognition among families moved
more by pride of station than by love of
art, and a lonely painter of landscapes
had tried to awaken enthusiasm for au-
tumn scenes, which were supposed to be
the contribution of America to subjects
in landscape art ; but such men escaped
to Europe, if fortunate, and found a
more congenial home there. Popular
apprehension of art was wanting ; there
was no public to which the painter could
appeal with any confidence, nor indeed
any public out of which a painter would
naturally emerge. Then it was that a
group of poets began to sing, having lit-
tle personal connection with each other,
forming no school, very diverse in aim,
but all obedient to the laws of art. The
effect upon the people was not confined
to a development of the love of poetry ;
it was impossible that the form which art
first took in America should be exclusive
of other forms : on the contrary, poetry,
the pioneer, led after it in rapid succes-
sion the graphic and constructive arts
and music. Now we may trace this in-
fluence of poetry most distinctly in the
case of Mr. Longfellow's work. Not
only was his poetry itself instinct with
artistic power, but his appropriating gen-
ius drew within the circle of his art a
great variety of illustration and sugges-
tion from the other arts. The subjects
which he chose for. his verse often com-
pelled the interpretation of older exam-
ples of art. He had a catholic taste, and
his rich decoration of simple themes was
the most persuasive agency at work in

familiarizing Americans with the treas-
ures of art and legend in the Old World.
Even when dealing expressly with Amer-
ican subjects, his mind was so stored
with the abundance of a maturer civili-
zation that he was constantly, by refer-
ence and allusion, carrying the reader on
a voyage to Europe. Before museums
were established in the cities, and be-
fore his countrymen had begun to go in
shoals to the Old World, Mr. Longfellow
had, in his verse, made them sharers in
the riches of art. It is not too much to
say that he was the most potent indi-
vidual force for culture in America, and
the rapid spread of taste and enthusiasm
for art which may be noted in the peo-
ple near the end of his long and honor-
able career may be referred more dis-
tinctly to his influence than to that of
any other American.

So far our judicious historian, who
has, as men of his class are apt to have,
a weakness for periods and sounding
phrases. Still, a quotation from his
forthcoming treatise does not seem whol-
ly out of place as an introduction to an
examination of the singularly abundant
illustration of Mr. Longfellow's works
by artists, which this season brings. If,
as we believe, art in America is indebted
largely to Mr. Longfellow, it is pleasant
to be assured that some part of the debt
is discharged in the most graceful of
ways. The very nature of Mr. Long-
fellow's work makes it easy and natural
to call in the explication and adornment
which the other arts afford. Probably
no living poet has been so frequently
accompanied by music, and subjects
from his poems may be found in Amer-
ican and English picture-galleries. It
is, however, through the most popular
form of art that this most popular poet
has met with illustration, and for many
years his poems have been published

1883.]

Mr. Longfellow and the Artists.

827

with designs executed in wood and stone.
Now, when the artist and engraver have
come to a more reasonable relation with
each other than ever before, it is satis-
factory to find that some of the most
praiseworthy results have been in con-
nection with the illustration of Mr.
Longfellow's verse.

Three years ago, Mr. Longfellow's
publishers issued his poetical works in
two illustrated quarto volumes. They
have now issued a corresponding vol-
ume,1 comprising his complete prose
works and such of his poetry as had not
been published at the time. The later
poems thus included in this volume con-
sist of those which were gathered in the
little volume ^In the Harbor, not long
after the poet's death, and of the dra-
matic poem Michael Angelo, which first
saw the light in this magazine. The
collection, therefore, in the three vol-
umes of this quarto edition is complete,
and by the addition of all of Mr. Long-
fellow's prose, treated in a similar man-
ner, a work has been finished which will
long staird as a remarkable monument
to the genius and memory of an Amer-
ican poet.

The same general plan has been fol-
lowed in this third volume which was
adopted for its predecessors, but in one
respect an improvement may be noted.
There is greater variety and richness
in the strictly decorative features. Mr.
Ipsen has won an honorable recognition
by the definite and carefully-studied
character of his work in the previous
volumes ; he is supplemented here by
Mr. S. L. Smith, who has taken a wider
range of thought and imported into the
borders and tablets a richness of fancy
which makes these apparently conven-
tional parts to have a high value. The
reproduction of these decorative designs,
whether by engraving or by mechanical
process, is a marked feature of excel-

* The Complete Prose Works and Later Poems

of Jlmry W. Longfellow. Illustrated. Boston:
Houghton, Mifilin & Co.

lence. Exception must be taken to the
piece closing page 949, where the folds
of the drapery are too hard and sub-
stantial ; one can scarcely get it out of
his head that he is looking at the trunk
of an oak.

Our interest in the volume is chief-
ly in the interpretation of the prose.
While this was capable of frequent il-
lustration, preference has been given to
large and comprehensive designs ; and
very properly, for in the diffusiveness
of prose there is less occasion for those
expansions which pictorial art so readily
gives to the suggestions of poetry. Of
the smaller designs there are several
which keep before the eye a remem-
brance of the large element of travel-
sketch in Mr. Longfellow's prose. The
interior of Rouen cathedral nave, on
page 1029, preserves appropriately the
sentiment of the author : for it is more
than an architectural perspective ; it is,
like the accompanying prose, a glimpse
of the dark ages. The sentiment in
the minor landscape and architectural
subjects agrees well with the romantic
light which touches Mr. Longfellow's
prose. Thus, the allusive design on
page 1039 is a continuation of the mood
in which the reader is left by the text,
and the poetic landscape which closes
Hyperion has an imaginative charm
which is of more value than any mere
transcript of the scene of action. With
so much of beauty and aptness in the
smaller designs, it is a little disappoint-
ing to find the figure-subjects, which
prevail among the larger pictures, of
less distinct excellence. The artists
who worked upon Hyperion have been
conscientiously desirous of reproducing
the dress of the period embraced by the
romance, but they have scarcely been
equally successful in reproducing the
character of Paul Flemming, — type of
romantic, dreaming youth. It is un-
fortunate that the same artist should
not have furnished all the designs in
which Flemmiug was to appear ; con-

828

Mr. Longfellow and the Artists.

[December,

sistency of type, at least, would thus
have been secured. M:-. Smudlcy's Flein-
ming is not ill-cousiilemi, though in the
picture where the young man waits
upon the sketching Mary Ashburtoii,
earnestness is almost travestied ; where
he walks in thoughtful mood with the
baron, a better success has been reached ;
but when he is turned over to the mer-
cy of Mr. Share, he is made to be a
subdued caricature of the traditional
Yankee. Something of this is due to
his contrasted relation toward the no
less conventional John Bull. Mr. Par-
sons's Monk of St. Anthony, also, is bet-
ter than Mr. Share's more realistic fig-
ure, and Mr. Gaugengigl's Sexagenarian
is exceptionally good, if we are not too
much influenced by our association with
very hearty examples of sixty years'
life.

The large landscapes are among the
best work in the book. The Jungfrau,
by Mr. Woodward, has almost the value
of a painting ; it is strong, rich, and
greatly helped by the carefulness of the
foreground. Mr. Ross Turner's Venice
by Moonlight, again, is more than effec-
tive ; it has a genuine poetic worth.
Some of the smaller landscapes, also,
should be noted, as that of Lake Lu-
cerne, on page 1194, and the noble
one of the amphitheatre of Vespasian,
on page 1117. On the whole, if this
volume has not the profuseness of the
two earlier ones, it represents, to our
thinking, a firmer art and more even
excellence of work.

If we are right in thinking that Mr.
Longfellow's poetry led the way in art,
then it is a specially happy sequence
which is intimated by the illustration
which Mr. Ernest Longfellow has given

of certain of his father's poems.1 He
has selected twenty, with no other rule,
apparently, than to. take such as offered
free play for his brush. His choice has
l Twenty Poems from 11 \ nnj Wn/hworth Long-
fellow. Illustrated from painting by his son,
ERNEST W. LONGFELLOW. Boston : Houghton,
MilHin & Co. 1884.

been chiefly of scenes which permit the
quiet, secluded, half-dreamy phases of
nature and life, — the boat becalmed, the
cattle standing knee-deep in the river
or crossing the wet sands, twilight and
moonlight, shadowed aisles, reflections ;
and when we name these, still more
when we look at the engravings, we are
reminded how large a place such scenes
have filled in Mr. Longfellow's verse.
There are added a few records, doubly
interesting from the authenticity which
one feels them to possess : thus the il-
lustrations to The Bells of Lynn, Three
Friends of Mine, and The Tides are
like pictorial and half- biographical notes
to those poems, while the sketches of
foreign scenes are direct commentaries
upon the lines which call up the mem-
ories of them. The fancy in the poem
of Moonlight is given a slight enlarge-
ment, which adds to its value, and every-
where there is an unstrained rendering
into line of the thought which lies so
tranquilly upon the surface of the poe-
try. The aspects of nature most readily
recalled from the poetry are simply and
truthfully reflected in the art, and the
result is one of harmony and grace. A
portrait of the poet by his son prefaces
the book, and agrees admirably with the
interpretation of the poems ; for the face
has precisely that musing, half-remote
expression which suggests a subjective
study of outward nature.

In speaking of the third volume of
the collected works in the illustrated
quarto edition, we omitted any mention
of the treatment of Michael Angelo,
because, while that poem occurs, with
many illustrations, in its proper place,
it is also published in separate form 2
with more complete illustration, and in
a style which calls for special notice.
A quarto, printed on clear white paper,
and bound in a novel but dignified man-
ner, the book attracts the eye at once

2 Michael Angelo : A Dramatic Poem. By
HENRY WADSWOKTII LONUKKLLOW. Illustrated.
Boston : Houghtou, Mifflin & Co. 1884.

1883.]

Mr. Longfellow and the Artists.

829

as a piece of unusual mechanical excel-
lence. Then the printing is admirable.
The generous page of pica type is rich
in color ; the engravings have ample
space, and are printed with decision and
refinement; altogether, the book has the
elegance of a fine simplicity and breadth
of treatment. The work of the artists
who have been engaged upon it is care-
fully studied, and generally of a high
order. The strict historical limitations,
under which both poet and artists la-
bored, have served as a protection
against caprice and mere ingenuity, so
that there is a stateliness about the de-
signs and an orderliness which lift the
book into dignity. Possibly one excep-
tion may be made. Mr. Shirlaw's com-
position of the Casting of Perseus, page
155, is in a measure true to the text
which it accompanies, although it would
be difpcult to find the exact moment to
which it refers ; it is expressive also, in
the principal figure, of the volatile Cel-
lini ; and yet, vigorous as the picture is,
it impresses us as out of key, and pro-
ducing a slight discord. The energy of
the picture leans to the demoniac, and
the entire conception of the poem, this
particular part as well, is directly op-
posed to the demoniac. The serenity
of Mr. Longfellow's art has rarely had
a more commanding expression than in
this poem, and it is a pity that the whole
illustrative appurtenance should not have
conspired to the same end.

The general scheme of the illustra-
tion looks to a careful commentary upon
the historic and biographic facts of the
poem. Mr. Longfellow, as our readers
have perceived when reading Michael
Angelo in this magazine, built his poem
upon a chronological series of incidents
in Michael Angelo's life, introduced
either directly or by reference the per-
sons with whom the great artist held
close connection, and made the action
of the poem to be associated with monu-
ments of art. Consequently the graphic
comment is iu the reproduction of por-

traits, the definition of localities, the il-
lustration of archaeology, and in the dra-
matic action of figures, these last being
in intention of historical accuracy.

The brief and useful notes at the
close of the volume enable the reader
to trace the portraits to their original
sources, and remind him with how much
painstaking these interesting representa-
tions of the characters in the poem have
been brought together. If he be not
solicitous to verify the truthfulness of
the portraits, he can find an artistic
pleasure in studying the great beauty of
the draughtsman's and engraver's work.
The noble portrait of Michael Angelo
which fronts the volume, familiar enough
to readers, takes on a special worth
through Mr. KruelPs massive, sharply-
defined engraving ; quite as good in its
own way is the small engraving after
Buonasoni's, on page 36. So, too, the
small portraits of Titian and Cardinal
Ippolito show with what spirit, engrav-
ers on wood can follow masterpieces of
engraving on steel.

The places whose names are conspic-
uous in the poem are presented in a po-
etic rather than in a matter-of-fact way.
Mr. Turner's Venice by Night, to which
we have already referred, is accompanied
by a smaller view of Venice, and both
are not more spiritualized than his Ve-
suvius. With these two transcripts of
Venice we could perhaps have spared
Mr. Wendell's City of Silence floating
in the Sea, since it is a somewhat feeble
design. Mr. Gibson's Ischia is some-
thing of a surprise, and a pleasant one,
for he has exchanged his dreamland
landscapes for a clear and strong com-
position. Mr. Schell's Florence is more
severe and matter of fact than the other
representations of places. Compared
with Mr. Gibson's Ischia, it seems un-
necessarily hard ; and the comparison is
fairer with that than with Mr. Turner's
views, which are so differently conceived.

The archaeological and decorative fea-
tures deserve especial attention. They

830

Mr. Longfellow and the Artists.

[December,

are to be found principally in the head-
ings and half-titles, and are the work
there of Mr. Smith. Barring a slight
tendency to dwarfing the human figure,
tliis artist seems to us to have more
<i<Miius in catching the spirit of great
work and reproducing it in decorative
form than any other American. We
say this without forgetting Mr. Vedder.
Mr. Smith has not Mr. Vedder's origi-
nality, but he has, what is of infinite
value in decorative work, an assimilating
faculty, a capacity for renewing great
art under other conditions, and a free-
dom of execution in which boldness
never becomes rudeness. In so slight a
matter as lettering this is observable, as
any one may see who lights upon the
dedication page. All the half-titles bear
evidence of Mr. Smith's power, but the
bravest illustration is the Finis, directly
facing the last page of the poem. With
what exquisite feeling has all the orna-
ment here been conceived and executed !
And when we have said this, we wish to
join with the draughtsman the engrav-
er, who is plainly wing and wing with
him in the work. A better design of its
class, and a more masterly piece of en-
graving and printing, one would search
far to find. And would he find it, after
all?

The dramatic action of the poem is
interpreted in a series of figure pieces,
which are of varying degrees of merit,
and none of careless or inferior work.
Mr. Hovenden's Michael Angelo in his
study is the least satisfactory, for the
figure is rather lumpish ; but the subject
was certainly a difficult one. Mr. De
Thnlslrup is unequal : his little figure
of Cellini at the siege of Rome is an
eager, spirited sketch, and his Michael
Angelo and Bindo Altoviti is bright,
with a narrow escape from too much
consciousness ; his. Michael Angelo and

Urbino has awkwardness instead of an-
imation in the figure of Urbino, and
Michael Angelo's face is not so carefully
studied as in other designs. Mr. Millet
has given a character of his own to his
work, and we think we should like it
better by itself. Here it seems to us a
little insistent, as if the artist were al-
most willful in calling attention to his
solidity of style. Mr. Shirlaw's pictures
are all good : they are thoughtful ; they
have a grace which, without being aca-
demic, shows the influence of academies.
The death scene of Yittoria Colonna
marks his highest reach in this volume.
So we have gone through the book,
lingering over its pages, as we trust
many of our readers will do. Taken
all in all, it is the most satisfactory work
of illustrative art which has appeared in
America. Other books may have shown
single designs of higher imaginative
power, but none have presented a com-
bination of merits of so high an order.
It is a pleasure to consider that the oc-
casion of the book was Mr. Longfellow's
latest poem of magnitude. The reader
of Michael Angelo can scarcely have
missed the voice of. the poet in the ut-
terances of the hero of the poem. Mi-
chael Angelo rehearsing his art is dra-
matically conceived, and there is no lapse
into the poet's own speech ; for all that,
and because of that, the reader is always
aware of the presence of Longfellow,
wise, calm, reflective, brooding over the
large thoughts of life and art. The
whole poem is a spiritual autobiography,
cast in a form remote from the facts of
the poet's life, but not the less indicative
of his experience. Therefore, we repeat,
it is a pleasure that he who was so large
a prophet of art should at the end of his
life have given the opportunity for so
excellent a testimony to the truth of his
prediction.

1883.]

Foreign Lands.

831

FOREIGN LANDS.

IT is frequently remarked that a
strong parallelism exists between the
reduction of the ancient world to Ro-
man rule and the colonization of distant
hinds, still incomplete, by the English
race ; and if the prime distinction be
kept in mind — that in the former case
the aim was to establish one govern-
ment over peoples of diverse civiliza-
tions by means of arms, and in the latter
it is to establish one civilization among
peoples of different modes of government
by means of mechanical appliances and
commercial regulations — the parallel
is useful in bringing out the character
of the principal movement of our time,
and iii heightening its apparent to some-
thing like its real importance. In all
the outlying lands this movement has
taken the form of an actual colonization,
as in our country, or of that ^Masa-coloni-
zation which consists in influencing the
ideas and habits of less developed na-
tions, as in India. Now, in the practical
exhaustion of the waste lands, this latter
method is becoming more and more prev-
alent, and must soon absorb our interest,
as its consequence is better appreciated
through its reactions on the English
race itself. Nor is there any arrogance
in claiming this extension of civilization
over alien countries as really an achieve-
ment of the English race. Notwithstand-
ing the explorations of other national-
ities and their alliance with us at many
points, the settlement of America and
the opening of Asia were our work ; the
future of Africa, Mexico, and the old
Spanish provinces seems likely to rest in
the hands of England and this country ;
and certainly the retroactive effects from
the lower civilizations in India and China
will first be borne by our kin. Whether

1 The Middle Kingdom. A Survey of the Ge-
ography, (iovi'ninuMit, Literature, Social Life,
Arts, and History of the Chinese Empire and its
Inhabitants. By S. WELLS WILLIAMS, LL. D.

the Indian and Chinese civilizations, in-
bred until they have obtained a certain
rigidity even in the mental structure of
the natives, can be permanently modi-
fied toward better ways of living and
more profitable modes of manual and
mental employment ; whether Western
ideals can win at all upon Oriental pas-
sivities ; whether, without such a change,
there can be equal competition between
these nations and ourselves ; or whether
their " cheap food " will prove an offset
to " the thews that throw the world," —
such questions must now take the place
held fifty years ago by the survey and
settlement of the great West ; for on the
answer to them the rate and character of
further progress largely depend.

The impact of the Chinese, in particu-
lar, on our western coast, and the meas-
ures already taken against them, are
significant in this connection : partly be-
cause the Chinese are now shown to be
a colonizing race themselves, in spite of
serious superstitious and social obstacles,
and partly because our conduct in shut-
ting our gates evinces a certain timidity.
We have now, in fact, twenty years to
reflect on the profit and loss of Chinese
immigration, and it is to be hoped that
some portion of this time may be taken
to inform ourselves respecting the pe-
culiar people of Asia, although there
may be a doubt as to whether Dr. Wil-
liams' work 1 is the best for our future
legislators to begin with. These two
bulky volumes, in which, says the author,
there is not a doubtful or superfluous
sentence, comprise a complete survey of
the geography, history and antiquities,
arts, manufactures, games, religious, lit-
erature, education, government, customs,
science, and ten thousand other things

i edit ion, with Illustrations and a new Map
of the Empire. Two volumes. New York : Charles
Scribner's Sons. 1883.

832

Foreign Lands.

[December,

which enter into the civilization, or are
among the belongings, of the Celestials.
The predominant fault which makes the
work unreadable (but perhaps it was not
meant to be mid, any more than a dic-
tionary) is one common enough in things
Chine>e, — a lack of perspective. It is
really an encyclopaedia of China, made
up of the immediate information of the
author and of abstracts from the best
authorities, and in it can be found any-
thing, from a list of spiders or snails to
one of dynasties that almost out-Noah
Noah ; for the date here regarded as the
starting-point of all things mundane is
the flood, 3155 B. c., with its attendant
dispersion of Shem, Ham, and Japhet to
the three continents. Indeed, if we
were to mark a second defect in this
work, it would be the coloring given to
it by the peculiar propagandist prede-
terminations of a missionary. The ac-
ceptance of the belief that the world was
created six thousand years ago might be
pa->ed over; but the explanation of ali
deficiencies in the Chinese by the word
idolaters, and of all excellences by the
formula God's purposes, shows a men-
tal twist which must be called perverse.
In the region of facts, however, the mi-
nuteness and variety of knowledge indi-
cate that we have here the accumula-
tions of a long and laborious life by a
man whose judgment is excellent when
his prejudices have no play.

To make a selection which shall have
some general interest, and which, indeed,
will not be without its lesson to any
who may chance to have read the re-
markable brochure in which Mr. Zincke
has so plausibly estimated the Englishry
of a century hence at a thousand mill-
ions, Dr. Williams' examination of the
census which gives so large a popula-
tion to the empire seems especially com-
prehensive and just. He concludes that
the numbers are in the main to be re-
lied on ; and although he notes how
large a portion of the imperial domain
is waste land, he supports his conclu-

sion by reminding us of the double crop,
the economy of land available for agri-
culture, the utilization of all kinds of
food, the fertility of the soil, the salubri-
ty of the climate, the peace of nearly
one hundred and fifty years (1 700-1850),
the custom of early marriage, and what
is practically the religious duty of propa-
gation. In addition to these considera-
tions he brings forward two others, which
emphasize the fact that the limit of pop-
ulation is not the land supply, but the
food supply, and that these terms are
not identical. In the first place, one
may say that in China nothing is grown
on purpose for animals, and when one re-
flects how much more land is necessary
to support a horse or cow than a man
the fact is very significant; secondly,
the consumption of fish is greater than
anywhere else, unless it be in Japan.
The fishing fleets, the nets of the great
rivers, the stocking of the irrigation
tanks, the conversion of the rice fields
temporarily into fish pools, and the like
illustrate the extent to which the water
is made to serve equally with the land
for human support, and show us how
far we may be from the limit of the food
supply even when the cultivable surface
of the globe shall be exhausted. Wheth-
er our descendants will ever be willing
to solve t-he food problem as the Chinese
have done, by yielding up the cattle
which are our inheritance from our pas-
toral forefathers, and by betaking them-
selves to the ocean to provide for the
deficiencies of land tillage, is certainly
very doubtful ; but if Mr. Zincke's thou-
sand millions of English-speaking people
arise in the next century, they are likely
to consider the suggestion respectfully.

With this race, nevertheless, which
now outnumber the English three to
one, we are coming into conflict or com-
petition. They seem to us rather con-
temptible enemies ; how should it be
otherwise, when instead of playing base-
ball they fly kites, and are ruled by lit-
erary men versed in the classics of thou-

1883.]

Foreign Lands.

833

sands of years ago instead of French
and German, physics, botany, and chem-
istry ? They present many curious in-
consistencies, as it seems to a Western
mind, as if their intelligence were made
up, so to speak, of opaque and transpar-
ent elements in layers. They are ration-
alistic, but superstitious, and the belief
in Fetichism and Shahmanism survives
among them ; they are ruled by an ab-
solute monarch, but are educated in
democratic principles in many regards ;
they are one people, but composed of
three distinct and unreconciled races,
and many tamed or restive tributaries ;
they have advanced in theoretic ethics ;
they are frank enough to confess that
no' one has caught their principal meta-
physical idea since Confucius, but they
know nothing of science ; they possess
a few arts, but they have carried none
of these very far toward perfection, and
have thereby shown that their inventive
faculty, if not slight, is astonishingly
slow : and so one might go on ad in-
Jinitum, like Dr. Williams, to end with
the conviction that their race qualities
have been much overrated. They are
most marked among nations by their
longevity, — a result which our author
ascribes to a sort of left-handed opera-
tion of the fifth commandment, on ac-
count of their worship of ancestors, but
which is due, perhaps, rather to their
isolation by natural barriers and the
readiness with which they have acqui-
esced in the usurpations which occurred
to break the dynastic successions ; for,
stable as they seem, they have still the
same social levity that has always char-
acterized Asiatic hordes, the same sus-
ceptibility to ecstasy, particularly of a
superstitious kind, as was seen in the
Tai-ptng rebellion, so similar in all ex-
cept spiritual substance to the rise of
Islamism. If they are not, like savage
races, physically incapacitated for our

* Old Mexico and her Lost Provinces. A
Journey in Mexico, Southern California, and Ari-
zona, by Way of Cuba. By WILLIAM HENBT
VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 53

material civilization, as seems to be
proved by the ease with which they ap-
propriate it, they may be unable to as-
similate its higher portion ; and in that
case the struggle with them will offer
many novel and curious problems to our
ethical sense. The prospect is that a
long, perhaps an unending, tutelage will
be necessary, and will even be insisted
on, as the doctrines of education, now
in vogue and rising, overcome the doc-
trines of '89 in the popular mind.

In Mexico the question presents so
different a phase as hardly to seem anal-
ogous ; but the point of view taken by
Mr. Bishop 1 constantly exhibits Mex-
ico as a land being rapidly subjected to
an English civilization by the introduc-
tion of railroads, the development of
industries, and in general by the awak-
ening of an " American " spirit. Mex-
ico, indeed, if one leaves out its tropical
and Old World picturesqueness, does not
differ from one of our Western States
in the character of the progress going
on, but only in degree. The bands of
prospectors, speculators in real estate,
agents for the introduction of novel
manufactures, venders of new methods
of ore reduction, searchers for mines,
civil engineers surveying or track-lay-
ing, newspaper correspondents, scientific
explorers, archasologists, tourists, — this
is the personnel of Colorado as char-
acteristically as of Mexico. There is a
novelty, however, a something that ap-
proaches romance, in this incursion of
the van of new or broken men into the
kingdom that the high-bred Castilians
conquered in so different a way, though
the aim of these invaders, too, be to save
Mexico and make their fortunes ; and this
contrast of the old and the new, this re-
lief of the Western border against a half-
Spanish, half-Aztec background, this fo-
ray of enterprise and industry into the
heart of the indolent, fete-loving, censer-

BISHOP. With Illustrations,
per & Bros. 1883.

New York : Har-

834

Foreign Lands.

[December,

vative republic, has been caught by the
author of these sketches, and used most
effectively. He draws well the features
of the landscape', the physiognomy and at-
titude of the natives, the quaint, serious,
comfortable architecture of the Span-
ish, the sombre, sphinx-like ruins of the
Aztec time, — draws both with pen and
pencil the luxuriance of the lowlands,
the savageness of the mountain peaks,
and the look, human and natural, of most
that lies between, — and has thus made,
as readers of Harper's Magazine know,
a real picture of what he saw. In con-
nection with the larger relations of so-
ciety, of which he is by no means un-
conscious, the most noticeable observa-
tions he reports are the jealousy of the
Mexicans toward Americans, and the
indifference of the pure-blooded natives
toward everything except their subsis-
tence. The fate of this race is certainly
one of the most melancholy in history ;
they seem likely to be gradually exter-
minated, except such of them as may be
saved by the Spanish strain. As every
one knows, the crusade is being pushed
very rapidly now, and there is every rea-
son to believe that in all but name and
government old Mexico must eventually
be counted among the Northern lands,
and so share the destiny of her " lost
provinces," as Mr. Bishop styles the
Southwest and California. Of these his
account is among the few truthful ones
we have seen ; but it should be remarked
that he has allowed his description of
life in Arizona to be colored too crudely
with the border war-paint.

From China and Mexico to Italy, the
goal of all journeys, is far indeed, and
to the Italy of Mr. Symonds it is an al-
most impassable distance. In this book 1

1 Italian Byways. By JOHN ADDINGTON SY-
MONDS. New York : Henry Holt & Co. 1883.

he has gathered up several scattered es-
says, some very old, some recently pub-
lished, and dealing, as a body, with
many subjects. Only a small portion are
really travel-sketches, — a fact which we
regret, for these few describe the dis-
tricts treated of in much detail, and at
the same time let us into the secret of
the charm of Italy for one of the Eng-
lishmen on whom her attraction has been
most powerful.

So much of the impression that Italy
makes on the eye is derived from the
imagination, so much is due to histori-
cal and literary association reaching far
back into the ancient world, that a trav-
eler who attempts to describe that land
ought to be scholar and poet as well .as
artist. Perhaps Mr. Symonds' qualifi-
cations come as near to such require-
ments as can be hoped for in an age
of specialists; our only complaint is that
he has not given more of his travels in-
stead of his studies, and thus justified
the natural sense of his title. His Ital-
ian Byways lead him, for example, into
a long criticism of the dramatist Web-
ster, which is easily forgiven on ac-
count of its excellence ; but why should
they lead him into the mazy discussion
of the relative rank of the arts, the
nature of music, and such dissertations,
which might be as appropriately in-
cluded in a book of Byways in No-
Man's Land? To most of the historical
essays, again, the objection holds that
much of their story has been told in his
more important works. We say this only
to warn the unwary that, delightful as
the volume is, it is not a book of travels,
but a collection of travel, history, poetry,
criticism, philosophy, and what not ; al-
ways entertaining, often suggestive, as
would be expected of the opera minora
of a refined scholar.

1883.]

Recollections of a Naval Officer.

835

RECOLLECTIONS OF A NAVAL OFFICER.

OF all men, naval officers ought to be
most entertaining. In the first place,
they go to sea, and it stands to reason
that a great deal more of what is worth
telling must happen on such an uncer-
tain floor as the top of an ocean wave
than on the fixed and stable earth. Peo-
ple who live in earthquake countries are
the only ones who have an equal advan-
tage. Then they have not much to do
except to tell stories. The sailors do
the drudgery ; the officers have to pass
away the time. When they get ashore,
moreover, they always form a pictur-
esque contrast to landsmen, and are sure
to introduce novel situations, as in the
story of an old salt who rode by Gen-
eral Scott's quarters, in Mexico, upon a
donkey. Some officers standing by ob-
served that he was, as they thought,
seated too far back, and called to him
to shift his seat more amidships. " Gen-
tlemen," said Jack, drawing rein, " this
is the first craft I ever commanded,

and it's d d hard if I cannot ride

on the quarter-deck."

The story is one that comes back to
us from Captain Parker's Recollections,1
a book which keeps up the traditions
of the sea ; for Captain Parker, besides
his natural and professional aptitude for
story-telling, shows himself to have been
a generous lover of the best literature,
so that the reader has the pleasure not
only of hearing good stories, but of hear-
ing them well told. When we say sto-
ries, we mean the word in its widest
sense ; for while there is a good store of
anecdote and jest, the real occasion of the
book is in the large, retentive memory
of a man who has led a varied life, and is
willing to tell frankly what he has seen
and heard, a large part of which he was.

i Recollections of a Naval Officer, 1841-1865.
By Captain WILLIAM HAKWAK PARKER. New
York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1883.

Captain Parker began his naval ca-
reer by being the son of a naval officer
and reading Marryatt's novels. His first
public appearance, however, as an officer
was in 1841, when he entered the United
States navy as midshipman, at the age
of fourteen. " I well recollect," he
says, "my extreme surprise at being
addressed as Mr. by the commodore,
and being recalled to my senses by the
sharp William of my father, who accom-
panied me to the Navy Yard." This
Tom Tucker of a midshipmite was very
much perplexed by seeing the . ham-
mocks swung, but not unlashed ; and
after speculation upon the difficulty of
a straddling rest, which seemed the only
possible one, entertained doubts if he
had not better resign and go home, when
he was relieved to find that upon being
opened and spread the hammock fur-
nished a much more reasonable bed.
He innocently opened his trunk, when
he was ready to turn in, and drew out a
close-fitting night-cap, of which he had
a stock, made of many colors, from the
remnants of his sisters' dresses. It was
a precaution against earache, to which
the little fellow had been accustomed at
home ; though one wonders that a naval
officer's wife should have imagined her
boy wearing such a head-piece in secu-
rity. " If I had put on a suit of mail,"
he says, " it could not have caused
greater astonishment among these light-
hearted reefers. They rushed to my
trunk, seized the caps, put them on, and
joined in a wild dance on the orlop
deck, in which were mingled red caps,
blue caps, white caps, — all colors of
caps, — in pleasing variety. I had to
take mine off before turning in, as it
really did seem to be too much for their
feelings ; but I managed to smuggle it
under my pillow, and when all was quiet
I put it on again ; but when the mid-

836

Recollections of a Naval Officer.

[December,

shipman came down at midnight to call
the relief, he spied it, and we had an-
other scene. This was the last I ever
saw of my caps. I have never had one
on since, and consequently have never
had the earache ! "

Of the young midshipman's early
cruises the incidents are not many, but
the reminiscences of associates are en-
tertaining. It is not so much as a trav-
eler that the naval officer tells his story,
although there are many quick charac-
terizations of places and scenes rather,
he is one of a party of youngsters, kept
in discipline by their elders, but full of
life, and gaining rapidly in confidence
and self-reliance as they use the little
authority with which they are entrusted.
An officer of the navy carries the en-
tire United States on the quarter-deck ;
and since he is brought into frequent
intercourse with representatives of other
governments, he acquires a dignity and
sense of responsibility which are often
beyond his years. At the same time,
he has all the freedom of a man of the
world, and, associating with his equals
in close companionship, he keeps a bon-
homie which makes him the envy of
those who are entangled in the life of
cities and the snares of competition.

When the war with Mexico came, the
young midshipman, then under twenty,
secured an appointment on the Potomac,
which had been ordered to the Gulf, and
his narrative of adventures during the
war, when the navy was supporting the
army, is exceedingly racy. There is an
absence of any comment upon the rights
or wrongs of the war ; one only sees the
lively young officer in for the fun of the
thing, and the sailors doing their part
with an indescribable drollery. The
light-heartednessof the navy, its innocent
bravery, its careless, happy-go-lucky
style of entering upon grave situations,
are all reflected in the story of the squad-
ron. Captain Parker gives an account
of the capture of Alvarado, a small town
thirty-three miles southeast of Vera

Cruz, by Lieutenant Hunter, of the
Scourge, in the most impudently private
fashion. Commodore Perry had made
up his mind to take the place, and ac-
cordingly moved gravely toward it with
his squadron.

" We sailed in the Potomac, and as
the signal was made to the ships to make
the best of their way we, being out of
trim and consequently a dull sailer, did
not arrive off Alvarado until toward the
last. As we approached the bar we saw
that something was wrong, as the vessels
were all underweigh instead of being at
anchor. Very soon the Albany hailed
us, and said that Alvarado was taken.
' By whom ? ' asked our captain. ' By
Lieutenant Hunter, in the Scourge,' was
the reply. And so it was. Hunter,
the day before, had stood in pretty close,
and observing indications oi flinching on
the part of the enemy he dashed boldly
in and captured the place almost with-
out firing a gun. Not satisfied with this,
he threw a garrison, consisting of a mid-
shipman and two men, on shore, and pro-
ceeded in his steamer up the river to a
place called Tlacatalpan, which he also
captured.

" When General Quitman arrived with
his brigade, and the place was delivered
over to him by Passed Midshipman Wil-
liam G. Temple (the present Commo-
dore Temple), he was greatly amused,
and laughed heartily over the affair. But
it was far otherwise with Commodore
Perry ; he was furious, and as soon as
he could get hold of Hunter (which
was not so easy to do, as he continued
his way up the river, and we could
hear him firing right and left) he placed
him under arrest, and preferred charges
against him. This was a mistake ; he
should have complimented him in a gen-
eral order, and let the thing pass. Lieu-
tenant Hunter was shortly after tried
by a court-martial, and sentenced to be
reprimanded by the commodore ; the
reprimand to be read on the quarter-
deck of every vessel in the squadron.

1883.]

Recollections of a Naval Officer.

837

This was done, and the reprimand was
very bitter in tone and unnecessarily
severe. The reprimand said in effect,
' Who told you to capture Alvarado ?
You were sent to watch Alvarado, and
not to take it. You have taken Alva-
rado with but a single gun, and not a
marine to back you ! ' And it wound up
by saying that the squadron would soon
make an attack on Tobasco, in which he
should not join, but that he should be
dismissed the squadron. This action on
the part of the commodore was not
favorably regarded by the officers of
the squadron ; and as to the people at
home, they made a hero of Hunter. Din-
ners were given him, swords presented,
etc., and he was known as ' Alvarado '
Hunter to his dying day."

One does not need to go so far as
Commodore Perry in his reprimand,
which undoubtedly had much to do in
causing' u reactionary feeling, but it is
a little curious to find an officer like Cap-
tain Parker so entirely indifferent to a
clear breach of discipline. If Lieuten-
ant Hunter had not succeeded, what
would have been the judgment?

It is hard not to let Captain Parker
tell over again here some of the amus-
ing stories which make his pages a run-
ning fire of laughter, as of the captain
who treated his crew by the Thompsoni-
an method, in which all the numbers
were marked from one to ten, and find-
ing himself out of an appropriate num-
ber six dosed his victim with two threes ;
of the dueling at Annapolis; of the
sailor who captured a Mexican and
hauled him along to the captain's tent,
inviting his friends to come along and
see him shoot him after he had report-
ed the capture, and the sailor's discomfi-
ture when his captive was put in the
guard-house instead, and he himself nar-
rowly escaped the cat ; and of Captain
Parker's predicament when he found
himself on a Fall River steamboat with
empty pockets. The drollery with which
his stories are told is delightful, and the

good-natured criticism of himself and
comrades is always in good taste.

The really important part of the book,
however, is that which follows the date
of 1861, when Captain Parker, then an
instructor in the Naval Academy, re-
signed his commission when Virginia
seceded, and took his stand with the
Confederacy. He indulges in a little
reserved comment upon the political as-
pects of the rebellion, but his chief con-
tribution to history is in his account of
the engagements in which he took part.
His narrative is so straightforward and
so free from bluster that it carries with
it conviction of its truthfulness, and
must take its place as a valuable report
of an eye-witness. ' One is struck by
the change in tone. The old gayety is
nearly gone, and, though cheerfulness
and resolution are never wanting, there
is from the outset an air of resignation,
as if the narrator quietly abandoned any
hope of success, but never for a moment
his sense of duty to the Confederacy
The animus of the book is so fair and
honorable that the most ardent Unionist
can read it with respect for the captain,
and it will go hard with him if he can-
not applaud him for his manliness and
devotion.

The most spirited narrative is un-
doubtedly his account of the engagement
of the Merrimac with the Cumberland.
He has an air of slighting the operation
of the Monitor, but his picture of the
uncouth monster which ran its snout
into the wooden navy, and at once made
a revolution in marine warfare, is very
effective. So, too, is his account of the
manner jn which the Palmetto State, of
which he was lieutenant, temporarily
broke up the blockade of Charleston;
and we close this running comment of a
most readable book with a portion of
this narrative, which gives a good ex-
ample of Captain Parker's more careful
manner : —

" About ten p. M., January 30th, Com-
modore Ingraham came on board the

838

Recollections of a Naval Officer.

[December,

Palmetto State, and at 11.30 the two
vessels quietly cast off their fasts and
got underweigh. There was no demon-
stration on shore, and I believe few of
the citizens knew of the projected at-
tack. Charleston was full of spies at
this time, and everything was carried to
the enemy. It was nearly calm, and a
bright moonlight night, — the moon be-
ing eleven days old. We went down
very slowly, wishing to reach the bar
of the main ship channel, eleven miles
from Charleston, about four in the morn-
ing, when it would be high water there.
Commander Hartstene (an Arctic man,
who rescued Kane and his companions)
was to have followed us with several
unarmed steamers *aud fifty soldiers to
take possession of the prizes ; but for
some reason they did not cross the bar.
We steamed slowly down the harbor,
and, knowing we had a long night be-
fore us, I ordered the hammocks piped
down. The men declined to take them,
and I found they had gotten up an im-
promptu Ethiopian entertainment. As
there was no necessity for preserving
quiet at this time, the captain let them
•enjoy themselves in their own way. No
men ever exhibited a better spirit be-
fore going into action ; and the short,
manly speech of our captain convinced
us that we were to be well commanded,
under any circumstances. We passed
between Forts Sumter and Moultrie, —
the former with its yellow sides looming
up and reflecting the moon's rays, — and
turned down the channel along Morris
Island. I presume all hands were up
in the forts and batteries watching us,
but no word was spoken. After mid-
night the men began to drop off by twos
and threes, and in a short time the si-
lence of death prevailed. I was much
impressed with the appearance of the
ship at this time. Visiting the lower
deck, forward, I found it covered with
men sleeping in their pea-jackets, peace-
fully and calmly, on the gun-deck ; a
few of the more thoughtful seamen were

pacing quietly to and fro, with folded
arms ; in the pilot-house stood the com-
modore and captain, with the two pilots ;
the midshipmen were quiet in their
quarters (for a wonder) ; and aft I found
the lieutenants smoking their pipes, but
not conversing. In the ward-room the
surgeon was preparing his instruments
on the large mess-table; and the pay-
master was, as he told me, ' lending him
a hand.'

" As we approached the bar, about
four A. M., we saw the steamer Merce-
dita lying at anchor a short distance
outside it. I had no fear of her see-
ing our hull ; but we were burning soft
coal, and the night being very clear,
with nearly a full moon, it did seem to
me that our smoke, which trailed after
us like a huge black serpent, must be
visible several miles off. We went si-
lently to quarters, and our main-deck
then presented a scene that will always
live in my memory. We went to quar-
ters an hour before crossing the bar,
and the men stood silently at their guns.
The port-shutters were closed, not a
light could be seen from the outside, and
the few battle-lanterns lit cast a pale,
weird light on the gun-deck. My friend
Phil. Porcher, who commanded the bow-
gun, was equipped with a pair of white
kid gloves, and had in his mouth an
unlighted cigar. As we stood at our
stations, not even whispering, the si-
lence became more and more intense.
Just at my side I noticed the little pow-
der-boy of the broadside guns sitting on
a match -tub, with his powder -pouch
slung over his shoulder, fast asleep, and
he was in this condition when we rammed
the Mercedita. We crossed the bar and
steered directly for the Mercedita. They
did not see us until we were very near.
Her captain then hailed us, and ordered
us to keep off, or he would fire. We
did not reply, and he called out, 'You
will be into me.' Just then we struck
him on the starboard quarter, and, drop-
ping the forward port-shutter, fired the

1883.]

Recent Poetry.

839

bow-gun. The shell from it, according
to Captain Stellvvagen, who commanded
her, went through her diagonally, pene-
trating the starboard side, through the
condenser, through the steam-drum of
the port boiler, and exploded against the
port side of the ship, blowing a hole in
its exit four or five feet square. She
did not fire a gun, and in a minute her
commander hailed to say he surrendered.
Captain Rutledge then directed him to
send a boat alongside. When I saTw the
boat coming I went out on the after-
deck to receive it. The men in it were
half dressed, and as they had neglected
to put the plug in when it was lowered,
it was half full of water. We gave
them a boat-hook to supply the place of
the plug, and helped to bail her out.

" Lieutenant T. Abbott, the execu-
tive officer of the Mercedita, came in
the boat. I conducted him through the
port to the presence of Commodore In-
graham. He must have been impressed
with the novel appearance of our gun
deck ; but his bearing was officer-like
and cool. He reported the name of the
ship and her captain ; said she had one
hundred and twenty-eight souls on board,
and that she was in a sinking condition.
After some delay Commodore Ingraham
required him to ' give his word of honor,
for his commander, officers, and crew,
that they would not serve against the
Confederate States until regularly ex-
changed.' This he did, — it was a ver-
bal parole. He then returned to his
ship."

RECENT POETRY.

Is there a mood in which one should
read poetry ? Possibly, if the poetry be
the expression of a mood. The wiser
answer looks to a mood created by the
poetry which one reads, and requires that
poetry itself should issue from a state
of thought and feeling which is beyond
the power of caprice. A fine example
of a mood passing into a state, and be-
ing thus rid of mere caprice, is in Words-
worth's Resolution and Independence.
Certainly, the test of poetry which is to
stand all weathers is in its power to re-
call one to that which is permanent in
human experience ; in its answer not to
temporary, fitful gusts of feeling, but to
those elemental movements of our na-
ture which lie open to inspiration. The
sifting of the older verse is after this
silent fashion. Men drop the accidental
and hold to the incidental, to that which
belongs to poetry rather than to the
poet and his times. They do not by this
discard the personal, but they require

that the personal shall have the essen-
tial attributes of personality, and not the
mere dress of the period.

It is here that the difficulty comes
in reading the newest poetry. We who
read are not quite sure that we bring to
the reading minds unembarrassed by the
mere fashion and show of things. Yet we
have this advantage, — and it is one with
the poets themselves, — that there ex-
ists a permanent body of poetry which is
beyond the chances and changes of mor-
tal life. This body of poetry may be
added to : we look eagerly in each gen-
eration for such additions. It may be
departed from in form ; but it remains
substantially intact, imperishable, new to
each generation of men, because its age
is the sign of its eternal youth. It fur-
nishes a, standard not only for the com-
parison of new poetry, but for the meas-
ure of theology and philosophy. The
consensus of poets is really the final
tribunal of human thought.

840

Recent Poetry.

[December,

There is a perceptible restlessness
nowadays at the absence of new and
notable poetry ; a half-expressed doubt
if poetry has not folded its wings and
flown to other spheres, perhaps remain-
ing behind to touch secretly the heart
of the novelist, but lingering in an at-
mosphere inapt for poetic breath. We
have no fears. Poetry is not an acci-
dental visitor in this world of ours. If
we fancy that agnosticism, for example,
must have a new form of expression,
or that science has an expulsory power,
we shall be wise to wait a bit. Poetry
is -to decide whether these forms of in-
tellectual life are to abide ; they are not
the judges. Agnosticism is trying its
hand at verse. The most cheerful gnos-
tic could ask no better test of the per-
manence of the mood.

It is thus of little consequence that
when one gathers the fall harvest of po-
etry in this country he surveys bis gains
with a compassionate smile. It is true
that the gleaner may yet find some gold-
en grain, unobserved by the critical reap-
er ; but taking the field as most see it,
the poetic yield is noticeably slight. To
change the figure, here is but a half-
penny worth of sack to an intolerable
deal of bread. Yet as a thimbleful of
lachryma christi outweighs a gallon of
New England cider, one need not be
wholly in despair because the quantity
is so meagre.

To help us in our measure of recent
poetry, we are fortunate in having a
new draught of the old. For a long
time to come new poetry in America
will be read by those who have been
bred on Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier,
Bryant, Holmes, and Lowell: it will
not necessarily be written in the suppo-
sition of these poets, but whoever comes
before the public will find that a stand-
ard of poetry exists which they have
formed. The prolongation of notes from

* The Buy of Seven Islands, and other Poems.
By JOHN GKKKNLEAF WHITTIER. Boston:
Houghton, Miffliu & Co. 1883.

the elder poets is one of the most de-
lightful pleasures which the ear already
attuned can receive ; and since no imita-
tion, however close, can have the same
charm, we care less at this moment for
any poet who may be a disciple of Mr.
Whittier than we do for Mr. Whittier
himself.

The little volume1 which bears the
name of its first poem is to the lovers of
this poet a reminiscence of all that they
enjoy in his verse. Here is the story
in which the sea seems almost one of
the actors ; the harrowing tale of Puri-
tan ferocity with the antithesis of a gen-
tler, purer Christianity ; the landscape
of mountain and storm ; the version of
an Israelite legend ; the playful, tender
thought of friends ; the parable ; the
large, patriotic, prophetic psalm of the
country ; the wistful, trusting look into
the future ; the mellow memory ; and
the quiet revelation of the poet's own
personal aspect of life. The verse shows
no new essays, but the poet has struck
the notes familiar to him, and the read-
er has a grateful sense of the ease and
firmness of the touch.

One renews his admiration for the
power with which Mr. Whittier repro-
duces color and movement in his poems.
Our readers will recall the Storm on
Lake Asquam,2 which is included in this
volume, and if they read it again will
mark the vigorous imagination which
records a great moment in nature, and
at once lifts it into personality : the rise
of the storm, its fury and its decline to a
peaceful end, are given with a definite-
ness of art which a painter could scarce-
ly make more bright to the eye.

It is, however, in the history of hu-
man faith and love that this poet finds
his best inspiration. He rarely surprises
one, for it is not the novel but the com-
mon experience which most quickly finds
him ; his simple power of repeating iu

2 Atlantic Monthly, October, 1882.

1883.]

Recent Poetry.

841

melodious form a sentiment which needs
no singular interpretation is a rare po-
etic gift, accepted naturally by listeners,
and only wondered at when compared
with the commonplace which is its easy
imitation. Thus he has turned the as-
sociation of Mr. Longfellow's last birth-
day with the observance of it by public
school children into a lovely poem. The
thought was in everybody's mind ; it
was a poetic thought, which arose easily,
and had become a commonplace, so to
speak, before Mr. Whittier touched it.
What has he done, then, in casting it in
poetic form ? He has enshrined it. He
has also, unconsciously we think, impart-
ed something of the charm of Mr. Long-
fellow's own manner, so that in reading
it we are affected as if the dead poet
were himself reciting the lines.

THE POET AND THE CHILDREN.

With a glory of winter sunshine

Over his locks of gray,
In the old historic mansion

He sat on his last birthday ;

With his books and his pleasant pictures,
And his household and his kin,

While a sound as of myriads singing
From far and near stole in.

It came from his own fair city,
From the prairie's boundless plain,

From the Golden Gate of sunset,
And the cedarn woods of Maine.

And his heart grew warm within him,
And his moistening eyes grew dim,

For he knew that his country's children
Were singing the songs of him :

The lays of his life's glad morning,
The psalms of his evening time,

Whose echoes shall float forever
On the winds of every clime.

All their beautiful consolations,
Sent forth like birds of cheer,

Came flocking back to his windows,
And sang in the Poet's ear.

Grateful, but solemn and tender,

The music rose and fell
With A joy akin to sadness

And a greeting like farewell.

With a sense of awe he listened
To the voices sweet and young ;

The last of earth and the first of heaven
Seemed in the songs they sung.

And waiting a little longer
For the wonderful change to come,

He heard the Summoning Angel,
Who calls God's children home !

And to him in a holier welcome
Was the mystical meaning given

Of the words of the blessed Master:
" Of such is the kingdom of heaven! "

It is pleasant to pass from an elder to
a younger poet, and find that we are not
called upon to throw away what we have
cared for in poetry at the demand of a
singer of later fashion. Mr. Thompson
is in the succession of poets ; he appears
to have made no frantic effort to go off
into a corner and flock all by himself,
but has joined the birds whose notes
are already familiar. None the less, he
adds a distinct note of his own. For
both these facts let us be profoundly
thankful. Mr. Thompson has long been
known as an ardent advocate of archery,
and many of the poems in his little book1
find their occasion in his hunting^. What
pleases us is that he has not felt himself
bound to turn any back somersaults,
in his poetry, because he shoots with
a bow instead of a double-barreled gun.
The genuineness of his verse ought to
convince people, if they had any doubt,
of the genuineness of Mr. Thompson's
archery, and that he is not masquerading
as the Robin Hood of Indiana. For sin-
cerity is the finest note of this volume.
One gets a little tired of the praise of out-
door verse, and inclined to charge affec-
tation on the poets who make an impera-
tive demand upon us to leave our books
and seek a more intimate acquaintance
with nature. Mr. Thompson has none of
this nonsense. He has a healthy passion
for the woods, and he sings at his sport
How pretty is his little poem on The
Archer ! Its hint of Robin Hood is sim-

1 Songs of Fair Weather. By MAURICE
THOMPSON. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co.
1883.

842

Recent Poetry.

[December,

pie enough. Robin Hood is the titular
saint of archers, as I/aak Walton is of
fishermen. Most of the people who are
enthusiastic over one or the other never
read a line of the ballads, or troubled
themselves as to Walton's Angler. It
is the proper thing to refer to them, but
Mr. Thompson impresses us as one who
has read his ballads, and has made them
a part of nature. There is a faint re-
minder in his verse of William Barnes,
the Dorsetshire poet. It is not neces-
sary that Mr. Thompson should ever '
have read a line of Barnes's Rural
Poems ; it is enough that the two poets
have the same unaffected love of nature
in its details, and especially in its ani-
mated life, and the same simple domes-
tic feeling, although this has a larger
share in Barnes's themes. We are sure,
for instance, that Mr. Barnes would en-
joy

A FLIGHT SHOT.

We were twin brothers, tall and hale,
Glad wanderers over hill and dale.

We stood within the twilight shade
Of pines that rimmed a Southern glade.

He said, "Let 's settle, if we can,
Which of us is the stronger man.

" We '11 try a flight shot, high and good,
Across the green glade toward the wood."

And so we bent in sheer delight
Our old yew bows with all our might.

Our long, keen shafts, drawn to the head,
Were poised a moment ere they sped.

As we leaned back a breath of air
Mingled the brown locks of our hair.

We loosed. As one our bow-cords rang,
As one away our arrows sprang.

Away they sprang, 's the wind of June
Thrilled to their softly whistled tune.

We watched their flight, and saw them strike
Deep in the ground, slantwise, alike ;

So far away that they might pass

For two thin straws of broom-sedge grass !

Then arm in arm we doubting went
To find whose shaft was farthest sent ;

Each fearing in his loving heart
That brother's shaft had fallen short.

But who could ti'll by such a plan
Which of us was the stronger man V

There at the margin of the wood,
Side by side, our arrows stood :

Their red cock-feathers wing and wing,
Their amber nocks still quivering;

Their points deep-planted where they fell,
An inch apart and parallel !

We clasped each other's hands ; said he,
" Twin champions of the world are we ! "

Mr. Thompson employs this favorite
measure very felicitously in a number
of poems, like that collection named In
Haunts of Bass and Bream, and gives
one a real sense of free air and wooded
depths. It is clear that he owes his in-
spiration largely to the joyous sharing
of nature by day and by night. Possibly
he is now and then a little over-conscious
of this, but he is so frank in his moods
that we rather look upon his more pos-
itive praises of nature as a bit of po-
etic proselyting, done in the fervor of
an apostle of the woods and streams.
Wherever he is reporting what he has
seen he is strong, simple, and often fine-
ly imaginative, as in his little poem enti-
tled Solace. We hesitate to follow him
only when he Hellenizes. There is no
reason why a dweller on the Wabash
should not reproduce a Greek statue as
fairly as Keats a Greek vase, and the
chances are in favor of the poet who
gets at his perception of Greek life
through a free intercourse with nature ;
but we suspect that Mr. Thompson has
not gone straight to Helicon from the

Wabash, but has taken London in the
way, for there is a color about some of
his Grecian themes which seems to owe
a little of its warmth to the Rossetti
school. About some of them, we say, —
not about all ; for Diana is a poem fresh
from an archer's heart, and Ceres may
be found on a Western prairie.

We half grudge Englishmen the

1883.]

Recent Poetry.

verses In Exile, in which, in a half-shy,
half-confidential mood, the young poet
seems to mingle a longing for our Old
Home with a desire for the recognition
of his verse there ; but we content our-
selves by thinking that it is the England
of our dreams from which he is in ex-
ile, and the England of song to which
he would be united. It will go ill, but
American readers shall welcome one of
their own kind ; and yet we smile fur-
tively as we think how perplexed some
foreign well-wishers will be when they
try to square Mr. Thompson's light, me-
lodious, and graceful verse with what
they fancy the West ought to give them.
For ourselves, we rejoice over the ap-
pearance of a genuine poet in a State
which is popularly supposed to produce
chiefly candidates for the presidency.
We leave him after copying one more of
his poems, for its quickness of life and
its flashes of color : —

A MORNING SAIL.

Out of the bight at Augustine

We slowly sailed away;
We saw the lily sunrise lift

Its bloom above the bay.

Scared birds whisked past, with wings aslant
And necks outstretched before ;

Some wracks hung low; I thought I heard
A growling down the shore.

The Anastasia light went out,

San Marco's tower sank low;
The long Coquiria island flung

Its reef across our bow.

Far southward, where Matanzas shines,
The sea-birds wheel and scream;

A roseate spoon-bill passes like
A fancy in a dream.

We laugh and sing; the gale is on,

The white-caps madly run;
The sloop is caught, we shorten sail,

We scud across the sun !

We sport with danger all the morn;

For danger what care we ?
We hear the warring of the reef,

The storm song of the sea!

Mr. Thompson, with his bow and ar-
rows, making fresh acquaintance with
nature is a peculiarly American figure,

and one that we watch with the pleasure
of anticipation. It is youth gone a-hunt-
ing, we say to ourselves, and the songs
of fair weather which he sings have the
gladness and lightness of youth. Yet
Nature has other moods, and though we
come back to a more conventional ac-
quaintance with her, through the inter-
pretation of Mr. Story,1 the contrast
serves to heighten the effect of each
poet. Mr. Story takes us into a glen,
and we have our out-door poetry as he
pleases ; but it is poetry out of a port-
folio, read and enjoyed and commented
on by the poet and a friend, two people
of mature taste and highly civilized in-
stincts. The scheme of the book is a
clever and attractive one. The poet,
who requires no other title than He,
" was in the habit," Mr. Story tells us,
" of wandering alone, during the sum-
mer mornings, through the forest and
along the mountain side, and one of his
favorite haunts was a picturesque glen,
where he often sat for hours alone with
nature, lost in vague contemplation :
now watching the busy insect life in the
grass or in the air ; "now listening to the
chinning of birds in the woods, the mur-
muring of bees hovering about the flow-
ers, or the welling of the clear mountain
torrent, that told forever its endless tale
as it wandered by mossy bowlders and
rounded stones down to the valley be-
low; now gazing idly into the sky,
against which the overhanging beeches
printed their leaves in tessellated light
and dark, or vaguely watching the lazy
clouds that trailed across the tender
blue ; now noting in his portfolio some
passing thought, or fancy, or feeling,
that threw its gleam of light or shadow
across his dreaming mind.''

This is the familiar picture, which the
mind recognizes, of the poet who sketches
out-of-doors, and Mr. Story's ingenuity
is in turning the figure into one of the

1 lie and She; or, A Pofft Portfolio. By
W. W. STOKY. Boston: Houghtou, Mifflin &
Co. 1884.

844

Recent Poetry.

[December,

speakers of a graceful little dialogue ;
for while he is thus fulfilling the poetic
function, She, who also needs and has no
other title, comes upon him, and conver-
sation takes place. The conversation is
between a gentleman and gentlewom-
an. She taxes him with having a book
full of verses, and demands to hear them ;
he pleads guilty and waves the matter
aside, but after a little pressure consents
to read a poem. The poem read, they
fall to discussing it in an airy, half-ban-
tering fashion ; and thereupon another
follows, with more comment, and anoth-
er, and so on, to the end of the book,
when the little scene closes with a de-
scription of the glen itself in which the
two have been sitting.

The scheme is a pretty one, and is car-
ried out daintily. The comment is close
enough to criticism to echo more than
once the thought which leaps to the
reader's lips, and the tone is that of
high breeding, delicate, not too pro-
found, frank, courteous, and sometimes
penetrating. The reader is beguiled
from point to point, and the rests be-
tween the poems which the talk affords
are better to him than silences. We
must congratulate Mr. Story on his
ingenious conceit, and on the deftness
with which he elaborates it : a little
more handling, and he might have tired
us ; a little less, and he might have failed
to keep us.

There are a score and a half of poems
in the little volume, and to read them
in succession, as they should be read, in
their setting, is to pass an agreeable
evening with two charming people, one
of them a poet. The moods of the
verse are various, but the subjects are
chiefly of persons rather than of nature.
With nature, indeed, we begin, in a poem
which calls for the staying of a happy
day ; but we pass lightly to personal
thoughts, to glimpses of the outer pas-
sions, then into deeper moods, until the
poetry and the talk become quieter,
more serious, and more searching. This

movement of the book is artistic, and
yet strikes us as half accidental, and that
with a little more pains the author
might have given his work a stronger
effect by regarding the transition more
carefully.

In the range which Mr. Story's verse
takes in this volume, one may easily
plea'se himself. • If he likes the vers de
societe, he will find it to his mind in the
very musical waltzing song, or in this
Mistake, which we copy, with the be-
ginning of the slight conversation which
follows : —

" How your sweet face revives again
The dear old time, 1113- pearl, —
If I may use the pretty name
I called you wheu a girl.

" You are so young ; while Time of me

Has made a cruel prey,
It has forgotten you, nor swept
One grace of youth away.

" The same sweet face, the same sweet smile,

The same lithe figure, too ! —
What did you say? ' It was perchance
Your mother that I knew ? '

" Ah, yes, of course, it must have been,

And yet the same you seem,

And for a moment all these years

Fled from me like a dream.

" Then what your mother would not give,

Permit me, dear, to take,
The old man's privilege — a kiss —
Just for your mother's sake."

" She. Ha, ha ! That was a pretty
mistake; but you got out of it fairly
well.

" He. Yes ; I got the old man's priv-
ilege, but I don't know that that is a
great consolation. A man begins to feel
old, really, when the young girls are
not shy of him, and let him kiss them
without making any fuss about it, but
almost as a matter of course. As long
as they blush and draw back, he natters
himself that he is not really so old, after
all. The last, worst phase is when they
don't wait for him, but come and kiss
him of their own accord. Oh, that is
too much. Gout is nothing to that, nor
white hairs."

1883.]

Recent Poetry.

845

If one wishes for the dramatic mono-
logue after Browning's manner, he will
find it in tlie sleighing incident and in
the poem called A Moment ; if he would
see Mr. Story at his best, let him read
his lo Victis and his fancied translation
from a lost ode of Horace. The de-
scription of the glen, with which the
book closes, takes the poet in reverie
into the Grecian thought of nature. In
his reflective mood he partly echoes the
feeling which drew from Mr. Thomp-
son the impulsive words, after reading
Theocritus, —

" Now I would give (such is my need)

All the world's store of rhythm and rhyme
To see Pan fluting on a reed,
And with his goat hoof keeping time ! "

Mr. Story, in his more philosophical
way, broods over the mystery of nature,
and writes, —

" Here, magnetized by Nature, if the eye
Upglanijng should discern in the soft shade
Some Dryad's form, or, where the waters braid
Their silvery windings, haply should descry
Some naked Naiad leaning on the rocks,
Her feet dropped in its ba.«in. while her locks
She lifts from off her shoulders unafraid,
And gazes round, or looks into the cool
Tranced mirror of the softly-glenming pool,
To see her polished limbs and bosom bare
And sweet, dim eyes and smile reflected there,
*T would scarce seem strange, but only as it were
A natural presence, natural as yon rose
That spreads its beauty careless to the air,
And knows not whence it came nor why it grows,
And just as simply, innocently there ;
The sweet presiding spirit of some tree,
The soul indwelling in the murmuring brook,
Whose voice we hear, whose form we cannot see,
On whom, at last, 't is given us to look ;
As if dear Nature for a moment's space
Lifted her veil and met us face to face.
Such Grecian thought is false to our rude sense,
That naught believes, or feels, or hears, or sees
Of what the world in happier days of Greece
Felt with a feeling gentle and intense."

No one can have missed the accom-
paniment of Greece to the Little Renais-
sance which we are now enjoying. So
we are not surprised at coming upon a
new volume1 of American verse, which
turns quite distinctly to Greece for its in-

1 Poems Antique and Modern. By CHARLES
LEONARD MOORE. Philadelphia: John £. Potter
&Co.

spiration ; for though Mr. Moore names
his book Poems Antique and Modern,
the antique themes predominate, and the
modern appear to be influenced by a
habit of mind formed upon a study of
the antique. The most striking and sig-
nificant of these poems is the first and
longest, Herakles, in seven books. Mr.
Moore reconstructs the myth, using for
his material the incidents of the hero's
career, but making them all tell upon a
certain poetic conception of Herakles,
which is more or less akin to the con-
ception of Prometheus ; that is, Hera-
kles is taken as a figure of man con-
ceived as a mighty physical force, un-
intellectual, slow, massive, capable of
hate and love, but with a very elemental
constitution, just as Prometheus may
be taken as a figure of man, conscious"
of intellectual life, yet exercising his
intellect through the simplest forms.

" Audacious as the day and as august,

Naked, and like another element

New risen to control the older four,

Behind his oxen up Cithaeron's slope

Rose Herakles. Like ocean waves they were,

That heave the low-hung clouds upon their backs

When the grey morn gives giants to the sea:

.Emerging mist-enlarged so they came,

Tramping and tossing wild; but Herakles

Beyond his mould enormous, with the might

Of limb-erecting thought, twice terrible,

Gigantic to all grim opposing bulks,

Strode here and there amid them ; lustful bulls

By their air-tossing horns he seized, and sent

Crashing unto then- knees, and where he saw

The milkless-uddered, morning-eager kine,

Whose snuffing nostrils wandered o'er cold rock,

He drove them on, and the disordered herd

Kept in one track, till from the exercise

He gleamed all ruddy in a dewy bath,

Like some tall personage of autumn woods,

Some cliff enrobed with flaming leaves and vines,

Decked so and dedicated to itself

To need no adoration from the sun ;

So seemed he, but unto his glory soon

The outward inspiration of the morn

Added, as ruddier at his back arose

The horizon beast, reared sudden from its sleep

To shake the sunlight from its shaggy hair."

So the poem opens. The fight with
the lion follows, and is finely used by
the poet to signalize the awaking by
Herakles to consciousness of his strength.
It is but a line which notifies the reader ;

846

Recent Poetry.

[December,

thrown in almost casually, yet with real
significance : —

" Waked to the proper life of his proud soul."
The incidents of the fight are splendid-
ly imagined. Stripped of the investi-
ture of imagery, they are found in an
attack hy Ilerakles, with the aid of a
goring bull, upon the lion, which he
topples over a cliff. Then the man
and beast confront each other warily,
moving in vast circles, until Herakles,
missing his footing, falls into a deep
ravine. He recovers himself in the
night which follows, contrives a gigantic
bow and arrows, and with these kills the
lion.

" No touch of triumph to the hero came.
On its gray, faded eyes, that yet were filled
With ruined visions, like the twilight west,
He gazed, and for a moment would recall
Their savage splendor into throbbing life."

The first book is occupied with this
theme, and although a careful reading
is required of one or two passages, which
are so rich in decoration as to confuse
the mind for a moment, the story is told
with great impressiveness. One feels
the mist of an early antiquity about it,
in the absence of other figures than that
of Herakles and the brutes, while the
forms of nature have scarcely yet lost
their personal realism.

To follow the course of the poem
would be to follow the hero through

adventures which add at each stroke
new characteristics of humanity. He
strives with Helios, the sun god, drives
him off victoriously, and receives a visit
from Keiron, who recites the incident of
the strangling of serpents in his cradle.
" Come with us," cries the centaur
king, " and be our fellow through futu-
rity ! " He accompanies the centaurs,
and yet this first comradeship, in which
he rises from the animal into a half-com-
pleted humanity, carries with it dim fore-
bodings. It is the sense of a conflict
yet to come between him and his com-
panions, for at the feast given by Pirith-
ous, when the centaurs are slain, Her-
akles is the one who is fated to slay

them while aiming at their enemies.
Mr. Moore has, so far as we know, in-
vented this version of the incident, and
he turns it to admirable account. It is
a part of the gradual humanizing of Her-
akles, which inevitably leads him into
destruction of the tie which binds man
to the beast. The strife and the burial
of the centaurs leave Herakles alone,
with the words of Keiron in his ears: —

" Golden youth,

Touched gloriously with some far-off doom,
Thou, thou art lineal to our energies,
And in thy statue earth is humanized !
Be thine to be a vision of sole strength,
A simple virtue of sufficiency,
Mid the mad, mist-abused, and star-nurled
Changes and doubts and dreamings of the world."

This is the prophecy of the life of
Herakles, and perhaps it may be taken
as the key to the conception of the char-
acter, but in the unfolding of the poem
there are still fuller disclosures of the
growth of the soul of man. Mr. Moore
disregards the story of the labors, but
takes his hero's career up again at the
quarrel with Eurytus, and so brings Om-
phale upon the scene, binds Herakles
in her chains, and through the power of
womanhood lifts him to a higher plane.
Then Herakles makes a descent into
hell, and finally, at the end of his life, is
visited by Hermes with a promise of
the life of a god. He refuses, and has
a vision of life, death, immortality, in
which he is left alone by men and gods,
returns as it were to Nature, and ends
his days in her arms.

" Grown one with nature's growths, he knew
Here was his home, here was his horizon,
And for him, baring her mysterious limbs,
Nature's self saw he waiting. Suddenly
His heroic frame, fulfilled of all desire,
Crashed backward in the arms of his sole mate."

In our hurried synopsis of the con-
tents of the poem, we have half put our"
own interpretation on the poem, half
followed the author's lead. It is a
poem so well worth studying that we
haye wished rather to hint at its rich-
ness than to attempt a full exposition.
The thought, if we have discovered it,

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

847

is essentially pagan, but so is the theme,
and we like better the dramatic pagan-
ism of Mr. Moore than the confused
mingling of modern paganism with old
forms w,hich confronts one so constant-
ly in the work of the English school of
Hellenistic poets.

We have lingered so long over Her-
akles that we shall dismiss the rest of
the volume with no other words than
such as may apply to the first poem also :
namely, that Mr. Moore seems at his
best in the antique ; that he has a rich,
powerful imagination ; that he is often
reckless in his speech and careless in
his measure. He does not always suc-
ceed in making his meaning clear, and
he is misled by the fertility of his im-
agination into a prodigality which often
destroys one's pleasure in the verse.
That he should sometimes recall Keats
or Shelley is not strange, nor is it nec-
essarily to his discredit. The poet who
has studied models carefully is not there-

fore unlikely to create models in time.
His book can scarcely command popu-
larity, but it ought to excite the liveli-
est interest of all who are watching for
the development of poetry in America.

Thus, though we were half disposed
at first to join in the self-commiseration
over the paucity of poetic ventures, we
are not sure but the season may be
called a somewhat notable one, which
brings to pass the publication of four
books so individually interesting and
worthy as those which we have had in
review. Mr. Whittier keeps in our
memory the treasures we already had ;
Mr. Thompson lights the horizon with
a bright flush ; Mr. Story helps us to
recognize the facile grace which poetry
may lend to our worldly life ; and Mr.
Moore comes with his large, forcible
verse to show that art and poetry have
not yet taken leave of imagination and
surrendered themselves to the lighter
chains of fancy.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

THERE is a curious form of semi-re-
ligious — perhaps I should say irrelig-
ious — speech whose genesis it would be
interesting to trace. When you resolve
upon any act or course of conduct which
appears to your friends particularly ven-
turesome and unsafe, are you not sure
to be met with the intelligence that you
are " tempting Providence " ? If you
stop to consider the phrase as an expres-
sion of piety, it strikes you that the
piety is most perilously involved, and
that the role which it assigns to Provi-
dence is far from creditable to the pat-
ronized deity. This Providence, you
are persuaded, must have a close rela-
tionship with the old-fashioned Ate, who
used to wander about invisible, and
bring to pass all the unguarded prayers

and imprecations of mortals ; or you
think of the mischievous Scandinavian
god Loki, or of any other impish spirit
ever held in fearful esteem, and repre-
sented as hovering or prowling, on the
lookout for an opportunity to do despite
to the helpless human race. Providence,
the current warning seems to say, will
do you a bad turn as often as possi-
ble, and is never so gratified as when
occasion offers in which to " come up "
with you for your unbecoming display
of pride or bravery. Beware of Prov-
idence. Do not, in the thunderstorm,
stand under a tall tree, lest Providence
perceive you, and mow you down with
a crooked lightning sharpened for that
purpose. Do not walk under the preci-
pice, for Providence is just above, wait-

848

The Contributors' Club.

[December,

ing to drop a stone to crush your fool-
hardy little person. Do not pitch your
tent on that low, malarious ground ; for
Providence, having to make some dispo-
sition of the gifts in his left hand, will
quarter with you fever and ague, and
megrims unnumbered. Providence may
have had affairs which took him to the
remotest parts of the universe; but on
your offering him a pleasing chance to
torment you, he returns in a trice, and
has in working order his engines of tor-
ture and devastation. It would not
require a very sagacious eye to see be-
hind such Providence a " smiling face,"
though not the smile which devout Cow-
per saw, but one of sardonic malice and
triumphant cruelty. Nevertheless, since
this bad Providence is dependent upon
our indiscretion for his opportunity, be-
ing otherwise inoperative and harmless,
whom but ourselves can we reasonably
blame for the ills that befall us? In-
deed, some such plea might be made in
his behalf as medieval apologists offered
for the arch-adversary, when they de-
clared him to be not so culpable as the
meddlesome mortals (witches, magicians,
and the like) who invited him to acts
of malevolence. Perhaps the phrase in
question owes its origin to a strategic
disposition in mankind to " get on the
right side " of the prime mischief-work-
er, by conferring upon him the title of
4i Providence ; " for cleverness, this ruse
would compare favorably with that em-
ployed by the seaman, who addressed his
prayers to the " good Lord, or good
devil." Or the phrase may have origi-
nated with some scrupulous but short-
sighted individual, who, fearing he might
be thought atheistical if he spoke of
" tempting fate," hit upon the plan of
substituting for the objectionable sub-
stantive a word whose orthodoxy could
not be questioned. Certain philosophers
would have us believe that in every in-
stance the idea of God is drawn in the
likeness of the believer. It would be
uncharitable to apply this theory in the

case of the many good people who
speak of " tempting Providence." Hap-
pily, they do not resemble the sly, disin-
genuous deity, of whose dangerous char-
acter they are so prompt to give warn-
ing.

— Is there not some comfort to be
derived from studying the etymological
affinities of the word fault? It appears
that nothing of criminal activity and
stubborn evil-mindedness is implied in
this word, but rather an unlucky failing
to be or to do something prescribed, —
a mere passive falling from the plane
of ideal perfectness. Among the invol-
untary faults of our human nature are,
weakness, the failing of strength ; age,
the failing of youth ; and, grand fault
of all, death, the failing of life. There
is also, I think, a euphemistic way of
treating the more voluntary faults of
our nature, as to say that procrastina-
tion is a failing to be prompt ; babbling,
a failing to be discreet ; mendacity, a
failing to be truthful ; and so on through
the list of mortality's failings and fall-
ings. Perhaps I put up with my own
faults, if not with others', a little more
easily for having indulged in the fore-
going sophistries. So much in the field
of etymology ; if there is any comfort
in analogy, I have that also. I am
pleased to learn from geologists that
the innocent and irresponsible old earth
has her faults, namely, upheavals in
the geologic column and dislocations of
strata. Very like these are our faults,
— unexpected juxtapositions in the col-
umn of character, more or less regret-
table departures from balance and sym-
metry. Our very faults, it sometimes
seems, might be -counted to us for vir-
tues, could they be made to take their
proper place in the stratification. Could
we but change foibles, now and then,
with some other poor wayfaring creature,
the transaction might prove to be of
mutual benefit. Our fault transplanted
to his soil, as his to ours, might flourish
as a kindly, wholesome plant, where now

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

849

it is escaped from the garden, and be-
come wild and poisonous. What a hap-
py discovery in moral science, to find
that a transfusion of qualities was pos-
sible ! Then, one by nature rash and
defiant would give the overplus of his
hardihood to the shrinking and irreso-
lute ; the meek and lowly in spirit would
make over to the harsh and scornful
that which now tempts the oppressor to
cruelty. The flush hand would bestow
something upon the over-frugal hand,
the over-frugal restrain the flush ; a
wise temperateness and a wise generos-
ity resulting.

There are faults and faults. The
whole matter of their discrimination de-
pends upon the degree of gracefulness
with which they are worn, and upon
the taste or distaste of the censor. You
and I, who so well perceive the various
imperfections of our mutual friends,
would yet never agree as to which of
these imperfections is the lightest, which
the most serious. The faults you find
venial, and even with something of
amenity in them, are, likely enough,
the very ones to which I can give no
quarter. Do you know what are the
generous faults, the lovable, the admira-
ble faults ? They are those which come
from abcoad, and which, our tempera-
ment forbidding, will never be illustrated
by us. Let us claim it as a strain of
nobleness in ourselves that home faults
are not the admirable ones, in our eyes.
Such as bear this strong family likeness
would better try some other tribunal, if
they hope to get off with a light judg-
ment : hereabouts, they are too well
known. There is nothing piquant or
engaging in that image of our little vices
unconsciously thrown back by others.
Yet we are invited to special sympathy
with those whose imperfections have
the same brand as our own, to the end
that they may bear with us and we with
them, — unprofitable reciprocity ! This
counsel tastes insipid. Better to form
our closest alliance with those who will

VOL. LII. — NO. 314. 54

not bear with our faults, but who will
use strenuous means to bear us out of
them. Lucky are we if we find one
who will play Brutus to our Cassius ;
who stoutly persists, " I do not love
your faults." Not improbably, we shall
come across others who will assure us
that our faults as well as our virtues can
command their love. In truth, I fear it
cannot be promised that, if we will
pluck ourselves away from our besetting
sin, we shall be rewarded with sweeter
and warmer friendships. If our friend-
ships be taken as the signature of our
worth, not always will the worthiest en-
joy the highest appraisal, since it is not
always the choicest of spirits that gath-
ers to itself the " friends of noble touch."
History has its instances, but we need
not go back of the current record for
illustration of how a huge bulk of self-
ishness, because it happens to be trav-
ersed by a little vein of gayety, fancy,
or tenderness, can manage to adorn it-
self with the most illustrious friend-
ships.

Faults have their uses. If we cannot
or will not part with ours, why such
desperate pains to conceal them ? Let
them hang aloft, exposed to the wind
and weather, — a warning to all the
neighbors : only in this way can we
requite the similar service they have
rendered us. But alas, when it is our
dearest friends' life and story that point
a moral of the cautionary sort, showing
what error of judgment or weakness of
will we are to avoid ! This print hurts
our eyes. If wo must be instructed, let
it be by the faults of those to whom we
are indifferent.

— If other persons share the curiosity
I have always had as to the origin of
many familiar old sayings, they may
like to have here the explanation of
some such, which I found recently in an
English book. The majority of these
proverbial sayings are, I suppose, of old
date, and come down to us from our
English or Dutch forefathers. Here is

850

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[December,

the origin of the expression " tick," for
credit, which I have always taken to be
quite modern slang. It seems, on the
contrary, that it is as old as the seven-
teenth century, and is corrupted from
ticket, as a tradesman's bill was then
commonly called. On tick was on
ticket.

" Humble pie " refers to the days
when the English forests were .stocked
with deer, and venison pasty was com-
monly seen on the tables of the wealthy.
The inferior and refuse portions of the
deer, termed the " umbles," were gen-
erally appropriated to the poor, who
made them into a pie ; hence " urnble-
pie " became suggestive of poverty, and
afterwards was applied to degradations
of other kinds.

" A wild-goose chase " was a sort of
racing, resembling the flying of wild
geese, in which, after one horse had
gotten the lead, the other was obliged
to follow after. As .the second horse
generally exhausted himself in vain
efforts to overtake the first, this mode
of racing was finally discontinued.

The expression " a feather in his
cap" did not signify merely the right
to decorate one's self with some token
of success, but referred to an ancient
custom among the people of Hungary,
of which mention is made in the Lans-
downe Manuscripts in the British Mu-
seum. None but he who had killed a
Turk was permitted to adorn himself
in this fashion, or to " shew the number
of his slaine enemy s, by the number of
fethers in his cappe." It occurs to me
to question whether the similar phrase,
to " plume himself," has not its source
in the same tradition.

" Chouse " is a Persian word, spelt
properly kiaus or chiaus, meaning in-
telligent, astute, and as applied to pub-
lic agents an honorary title. In 1G09,
a certain Sir Robert Shirley sent before
him to England a messenger, or chiaus,
as his agent from the Grand Signior
and the Sophy, he himself following at

his leisure. The agent chiaused the
Persian and Turkish merchants in Ensr-

land of four thousand pounds, and fled
before Sir Robert arrived.

These sayings I have never heard the
origin of before. There are some others
which I remember to have learned, and
afterwards forgotten, and which I may
as well give here for the benefit of those
who may not have been able to trace
them out.

A " baker's dozen " was originally
the devil's dozen, thirteen being the
number of witches supposed to sit down
together at their great meetings or sab-
baths. Hence the superstition about
sitting thirteen at table. The baker
was an unpopular character, and became
substitute for the devil. (Query, Why
was the baker unpopular ?)

The explanation of the proverbial
saying about " Hobson's choice " is
given by Steele in the Spectator, No.
509. Hobson kept a livery stable, his
stalls being ranged one behind another,
counting from the door: each customer
was obliged to take the horse which
happened to be in the stall nearest the
door, this chance fashion of serving be-
ing thought to secure perfect impartial-
ity.

— Who can tell why the working of
tapestry has gone out of fashion ? It
would be so much more satisfactory
than the endless procession of tidies and
pincushions and sofa-pillows, each with
its little design, if some fair needle-
woman would give her spare time and
thought to a larger piece of work. It
might be done in small separate squares,
so that there would be no objection to
the clumsy roll of canvas, which could
not be moved about or looked upon as
fancy-work ; and it would be so pictur-
esque and full of the spirit of romance
to see a lovely lady with her colored
crewels and her quaint designs, and
know that she was stitch by stitch achiev-
ing a great work which would keep her
memory bright for years to come. No-

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851

body cares what becomes of the smaller
pieces of needle-work after their bloom
is, so to speak, worn off, but let us pic-
ture to ourselves the religious care with
which we should guard the handiwork
of our great-grandmothers, if it were of
this sort. We venerate the needle-books
and work-bags and samplers almost ab-
surdly, and this is an index to our ca-
pacity for appreciating a more impor-
tant treasure.

Besides, it is a great loss both to art
and literature that our stitches tend to
such petty ends. An embroidery frame
is a charming addition to a portrait,
and nothing could make a more delight-
ful and suggestive background than the
blurred figures and indistinct design of
a tapestried wall. And in a story, what
aid a writer could give his reader by his
suggestions of the work the heroine's
slender fingers toyed with idly, or called
into existence skillfully in a busier hour!
What light, indeed, the description of the
design would throw upon the character
of the maiden ! We could make up our
minds instantly to many certainties when
we knew whom she had taken for her
hero in a battle piece, or if it were only
a quiet landscape which she deftly wove
when her lover met her first.

We have long lost the fashion of com-
memorating historical events in this
manner, and we are contented to cover
our walls with gilt and shining papers
instead of these splendid hangings,
though I happened to find the last of
the tapestry-makers some time ago, — a
plain little countrywoman, whose worst-
ed works were the admiration of her
village neighbors. The fountain of in-
spiration as to composition and artistic
excellence had nearly run dry, but her
patience was superhuman, and she had
covered her walls with huge pictures
in cross-stitch, — portraits of illustrious
men of her time, and one or two large
groups, like the surrender of Cornwallis
and Washington crossing the Delaware,
where there had been a long and se-

vere and most monotonous season of
embroidering the raging waves of the
river. The likenesses, as a rule, were
not satisfactory, but who could resent
that unimportant defect ? The colors
were brave and chosen for their bright-
ness. There was one great undertaking
nearly finished, — a view of the Capitol
at AVashington in shaded grays and
white, with a splendid blue sky and
green grass. It really was most impos-
ing. But one could not help remember-
ing that it must be an inherited gift
from some Flemish or French ancestress,
who had sat among her maidens in a
high stone tower, and sung the songs of
the troubadours as she bent over her
work. There were brave knights gone
afield while she drew in her threads and
plied her busy needle in their honor, as
she sat at home.

— There is an effect of natural beau-
ty which I am apt to name to myself
musical. Some persons would perhaps
call it poetic, and certainly music and
poetry have enough affinity to make it
seem proper in some connections to
use the words interchangeably. Still,
there is a difference between the poetic
effect of certain beautiful days and that
impression they make which I call mu-
sical. Any fine summer day has a va-
riety of sounds belonging to it which
with but little license of language we
speak of as nature's music, the prelud-
ing strains waking at dawn from a hun-
dred bird throats, with sweet clamor
and rivalry of theme and counter-theme,
short motifs broken off, and again re-
sumed, while interrupting notes fill up
the pauses and complete the choric har-
mony. When the overture ceases the
singers still have their parts to sustain
in the day's long concerto, some clear
voice ever and anon making itself heard,
loud and bold, in a brief, brilliant strain
far up in the airy distance, or trickling
down in light liquid melody from the
elm bough close at hand. At midsum-
mer the crickets, performing on their

852

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[December,

curious little instruments, keep up a
continuous iourdonnement, or humming
accompaniment. The winds bring with
them their own music : warm and ca-
ressing from the soft south, wooing to
sweet do-nothingness, or freshly blowing
from the west, with stir and movement
of rustling leaves and waving grasses.
Bird songs, insect murmurs, breezy whis-
perings and agitations, — it is natural to
speak of them as music ; and is not the
play of lights and shades, that melt and
pass and change position, like an ex-
quisite modulation of sweetly subdued
musical tones? The analogy between
musical and color tones was remarked
before Mr. AVhistler began to paint noc-
turnes and symphonies. Mr. Haweis,
in his oddly-entitled book, Music and
Morals, prophesied a good many years
ago that the science of color-harmony
would ultimately be wrought out into as
complete a system as that of musical in-
tonations. However that may be, the
analogy once pointed out is clear enough
to any one, and I often please myself
with noting these correspondences in
nature. In the light-and-shadow dance
of sunlit gray and silver clouds over
blue hill slopes, green meadows, and
golden grain fields, one finds the rhythm,
the movement, as well as the blent tones
of a delicate Mendelssohnian melody.
Days are set in different keys. Some
neutral-tinted ones start in the melan-
choly minor, and breathe from first to
last but pensive or plaintive strains.
Others strike the first chord in the bold
and cheerful major. What a full and
rounded music comes with certain days
of glowing midsummer ! From crimson
sunrise to purple sunset, what a depth
of color-tone ! The opening movement
is an all too brief and sparkling allegro
of dewdrop glittering and floating silver
cloud-fragments, which ceases as the
sun takes possession of the heaven.
There it hangs, a ball of golden fire, in
a blue so intense as to look solid, the
atmosphere a molten-golden vapor, the

whole affecting one like some over-rich,
bewildering strain, charged as full of
the spirit of sensuous beauty and delight
as a damask rose of perfume. After
such a magnificent andante is like
enough to follow the wild-measured
scherzo of a sudden thunder-storm, with
mutterings and growlings as of deep
bass-viols, a tumult of claps, rattlings
and rollings of the drums and trombones,
and gusty sweepings up the scale of
reed instruments and violins. Then a
momentary silence till the sun flashes
out again like the startling of a sudden
clarion. But the superbest harmonies
are reserved for the triumphant finale
of the sunset. Sometimes this move-
ment is brief and rapid ; the crimson ball
drops down, and the horizon flames up
broadly with one sustained trumpet-
blare, fiery red. At other times, the in-
strumentation is more complex, the har-
monies most subtle and intricate, golden
tones passing into red and purple,
barred and streaked with lines of fire,
with modulations into related chords of
orange and indigo, with interventions
of clear green and primrose yellow ; all
changing, fusing, gradually sinking down
into the quiet of the dusk, till after a
brief recurrence of the day's opening
notes of rose, pearl-gray, and faint gold,
there falls at last the silence of the
dark. There are days, however, com-
posed in another manner than the sump-
tuous, imperious strains to which we
are commonly treated during the glow-
ing heats of July and August. To follow
out our fancy, we may say that some of
our fine calm days of midwinter have
the austere beauty of style that we find
in Gliick, and Bach, and Spohr. The
cool midsummer of the present year was
remarkable for still another musical
mode; a manner partaking largely of
the admirable simplicity of the earlier
masters, yet warmed with a touch of the
complex modern spirit : at midday the
liquid-golden sunlight streamed down
from a pure, sapphire sky ; the sun

1883.]

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853

towards its decline became a sphere
of silver, so intensely burnished that
its rays flashed through the trees with
a diamond - like brilliancy, but, once
dropped below the horizon, the music
took on a softer strain, a slower meas-
ure, and died away in long-drawn, tran-
quil chords of amber and silver and
pale gold. From color-symphonies like
these one may gather an emotion of un-
defined, yet poignant delight, similar in
kind and almost equal in degree to that
received from fine music. One's hab-
itation ought to be placed, if possible,
where freedom of daily audience may
be had to these skyey orchestral per-
formances.

— Usually I fall in with the common
error of human-kind, and look upon the
so-called dumb creation as wholly free,
careless, and jubilant. In some moods I
would fain challenge the impertinently
happy tribes of nature to change places
with me for a while, to see whether
they would be able to keep their good
spirits and optimistic notions regarding
the universe in general, and their own
fortunes in particular. But it happened,
the other day, that my eyes were
opened to a different view of their case,
and I saw, as I had not done before, the
afflictions, dilemmas, and petty mortifi-
cations to which these sometimes envied
creatures are subject. Starting on my
morning walk with an impression that
everything, and I in everything, enjoyed
the good-will of the delicious hour, I had
the bad luck to be contradicted at the
very outset. A white butterfly had been
caught in a spider's web. Its wings
were torn, and its powdery plumage
was half rubbed off. " Careless thing,"
was my comment, " to get yourself into
this predicament, spoiling your own
pleasure, and that of a superior being
as well ! " But I was unable to pro-
ceed with my walk until I had helped
the butterfly out of its trouble, adding
it, I hoped, to the company of the morn-
ing-glad. Before I left the garden, it

happened to a bumble-bee to be de-
voured by a snapdragon, into whose
throat he had ventured too far. Noth-
ing of him remained visible but his hind
legs, which protruded from the mouth
of the humorous flower like a couple of
extra-long stamens. Deep and wrathy
were his threats, and soon the dragon
disgorged its unquiet morsel.

Farther on, I stopped to admire a
tall milkweed, whose blossoms simulated
ornaments of ivory and pink coral. But
here was a moving calamity ! This
plant, which is very attractive to bees,
has a treacherous way of detaining
them for hours together, frequently to
their death. While at work on the
flower, the bee is liable to have its foot
caught in one of the deep crevices con-
taining the polliuia ; even if it succeed in
pulling its foot out of the crevice, its
embarrassment is not over, for it also
pulls out the two pollen masses (resem-
bling a pair of saddle-bags), and is com-
pelled to carry them, until some lucky
chance sets it free. On this particular
occasion, I found two bees and a black
ant, each suspended by one of its feet
from a blossom ; dead, after probable
hours of torturous struggle to escape.
Other bees were still alive, but caught
at some point, or dragging about one or
more pairs of gluey saddle-bags, — much
in the situation of convicts wearing the
ball and chain. It appeared to me that
the career of a honey-gatherer was not
one of unalloyed sweetness.

Next, coming to the creek, which in
the dry season takes the " footpath way,"
and lets the grass grow far into its bed,
I observed that it had cruelly shirked
its responsibilities, in leaving near its
margin a helpless and panic-stricken
school of minnows. These were living
in a pool scarcely wider than a hoof
span. Clearly, it was a question of but a
few hours with them in their drop of an
oasis surrounded by a burning Sahara.
Here was a true distress-siege, which
neither the wisdom nor the valor of the

854

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[December,

besieged could avail to solve. From
a minnow point of view, it seemed that
life must look " more doubtful than cer-
tain."

I was still thinking of the minnows,
when I met a venerable mud-turtle, the
initials of an unknown cut in its shell.
The turtle, unfortunately, was not trav-
eling alone, but in the company of a boy,
who held it suspended by a cord. I
asked the boy what he would do with
his capture, and received this answer :
" Take him home, put him in the swill-
bar'l, an' fat him up ; then, eat him.
There 's seven kinds of meat in a tur-
tle," — this last with an air of experi-
ence and relish. Filled with pity at
thought of the degradation iu store for
the turtle (I doubtless overestimated its
sense of refinement), I tried to bring the
boy to accept a ransom and leave his
prize with me. But either he disap-
proved my interference as a display of
morbid humanity, or his sybaritic anti-
cipation of the " seven kinds of meat "
was stronger than his pecuniary crav-
ing, for he rejected all my offers.

Going home, I passed a flock of hens,
which were in great consternation,
caused by the movements of a hawk.
So free and beautiful was its aerial
geometrizing, that I found it difficult to
charge the hawk with any mean or
bloodthirsty motive. Yet, in a future
age, when military expeditions are em-
barked in balloons, some Napoleonic in-
vader in his hovering warship may ter-
rify the inhabitants of a country much
as the hawk terrified those poor fowls of
the earth.

As though I had not already seen
enough of the straits and misfortunes
which happen to those whom Nature is
supposed to have under direct protec-
tion, I must listen to the plaints of a
mother that had lately been deprived of
her offspring, — a young, graceful, fawn-
like creature I had often admired. The
mother did not tell me in so many words
of the ache in her heart, of the pretty

and apt ways her darling had, or of her
fears for its safety ; but her large,
mournful eyes (so beautiful that Juno
need not have resented the comparison)
expressed more of sorrow than did even
the deep melancholy of her tones. She
was already somewhat comforted by my
sympathy and caresses, and I reflected
that time and the good pasture would
steal away her sense of the affliction.
This, however, I did not say aloud, since
to me their light forgetting of grief
seems the most pathetic thing in the life
of animals.

— In the June Atlantic, attention
was drawn by a member of the Club to
the perfidious conduct of a certain mid-
dle-aged young person, who had intrud-
ed upon the literary privacy of the Con-
tributor, and who had subsequently
served up for the columns of The West-
ern Reserve Bugle all her host "did
n't say upon that occasion." The Con-
tributor very naturally appealed to the
Club for a phrase that would " adequate-
ly characterize " the conduct of his rep-
rehensible visitor. Not being gifted
with the power of invective, we cannot
furnish the phrase desired, but we can
say with all sincerity that we are more
than moderately interested in the case,
more than mildly grieved at the over-
zeal and unprincipledness of the elderly
young woman. It is possible that our
being a native of that particular pin-
point in Western space known as the
Reserve, has something to do with the
exceeding interest and chagrin felt by us.
We have made diligent inquiry as to a
newspaper with the inspiriting name of
The Western Reserve Bugle. We find
no such paper ; not even an obscure
country bantling, thus christened and
dying immediately afterward, has been
reported. Also, we have made a study
of the newspaper " correspondence "
done by middle-aged young ladies in
this slurred quarter of the country, and
we do not find it more discommendable
than work of a similar character done

1883.]

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855

elsewhere. In vain we try to recall hav-
ing met with a person who answered to
the description given by the Contributor.
The Reserve is really a small area, and
she ought to be found if residing therein.
It now occurs to us that she may have
gone abroad for the improvement of her
mind, though to accomplish so consider-
able a journey she must be more happily
circumstanced financially than the liter-
ary sisterhood in general.

To conclude : we are not so much
pained by the fact that the offender is a
resident of the Western Reserve (which
is a kind of newer New England), but
that, being so, she should by her un-
seemly conduct cast reflection upon the
excellent race of which she is an un-
worthy descendant. Since she is only
" middle-aged young," it would not be
surprising to learn that she first saw
the light among the Berkshire hills, or
even -farther eastward, at some subse-
quent period emigrating with her par-
ents to the West. Perhaps the unto-
ward influences of frontier life in the
Reserve should be held to account for
the blunting of her sensibilities, as well
as for her lack of ethical culture.

— In speaking recently of inherited
tastes and preferences, I remembered
something which had been forgotten for
years. When I was a child I bestowed
great affection upon a small copy of
Sterne's Sentimental Journey, which I
chanced to find in an upper room of the
house, among an uninteresting collection
of old pamphlets and magazines and
cast-off books which had been brought
up from the shelves of my father's
library. The lower part of the house
was, as is not unusual, constantly being
relieved of these armfuls of miscellane-
ous literature, and I used to please my-
self by hunting and searching, I did not
know exactly for what, though I some-
times read eagerly a story or two in a
magazine, and always was enticed by the
pictures. One day, however, I lighted
upon a slender little volume, bound in

boards, with pale yellow paper sides and
much-frayed back, and I immediately
took a great fancy to it. It was a case
of love at first sight. I had no need to
wait for a taste of its contents, and it
seemed perfectly consistent with its in-
stantly recognized character that I should
discover, on further acquaintance, the
story of the prisoner and the starling,
of the happy peasants, and of poor Ma-
ria. It seemed more like a long-lost
treasure brought to light than a new
and unfamiliar book. It gave a certain
completeness and satisfaction to my life,
and from that time I always knew where
this little book was. I carried it about
with me, for it was not too large for
even my small pocket, and no doll that
ever lived and was loved could have been
so great a delight to me.

One rainy afternoon I was sitting by
a window with the book in my hands,
and my father stood beside me, and was
speaking to me laughingly and care-
lessly ; but suddenly, as he looked down
at my lap, he reached for the book with
great surprise. " Where in the world
did you find this ? " said he, and turned
its pages with affection. " I have not
seen it for years, and was afraid it was
lost. I have had it ever since I can
remember, and when I was a child I
used to insist upon taking it to bed with
me and keeping it under my pillow. I
suppose it was because it was small and
like a plaything, at first; but when I
grew old enough to read it I used to
wake early in the morning and spell out
the stories."

I felt only a gense of pride and of
being like my father, at that moment ;
but since then I have thought many
times of the curious incident, and my
almost superstitious feeling toward the
playfellow volume has interested me
very much, it was so plainly an in-
heritance in which my will took little
part. Though I have always enjoyed
a Sentimental Journey most sincerely,
yet I must confess to often finding my-

856

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[December,

self a little astray in modern editions,
and I turn the small leaves of this be-
loved copy with pleasantest memories
and best content.

— That is an admirable as well as a
venerable law which forbids the laud-
owner to build so close upon the boun-
dary between himself and his neighbor
that his roof shall project beyond tire
line. The law requires that he shall
leave a space for eaves, and that the dis-
charge from the eaves (Anglo-Saxon
yfesdrype) shall be upon his own terri-
tory. Thus, reference is made to a right
in the air as well as in the soil, and a
strip of neutral ground is left between
adjacent builders. If I mistake not,
these strictures hold equally good in the
ethics of social life. Judicious souls
everywhere accept cheerfully the law
of bounds ; only the inexperienced and
the unwise appeal. Well do we re-
member making the discovery (grievous
enough, at first) that the book of our
thoughts and feelings was by no means
as intelligible as we hoped it would be
to those with whom we entrusted it for
sympathetic perusal. By a still later
discovery, we found that, were it possi-
ble, we would not have our book lumi-
nous in all its passages, — would not that
even the best-disposed reader should
think he had penetrated quite to the
heart of our mystery. Formerly, we,
too, had taken pains to address a pref-
ace to the understander ; but in all later
editions the whimsical thing was left
out, as being trivial, if not misleading.
"Were we now to meet one who assumed
the airs of the understander, we should
exhibit a singular unrespousiveness in
place of the revealing spirit of our pref-
ace. It is true, the world's cruelty has
not touched us ; none has dealt with us
treacherously ; we are not less interest-
ed than formerly in our fellow beings :
then, why so self * retiring, why so ex-
acting of our neighbors that they shall
align their walls, and have a care tljat
their eaves shall not encroach? We

may reply. We are thus self-retired,
respecting also the self-retirement of
others, because the things of our spirit-
ual nature become more and more ours,
and yet less ours to divulge freely and
unconditionally. The heart knoweth not
only its own bitterness, deep and in-
communicable, but also a sweetness of
joy, which it neither wishes nor is able
to reveal. As delightful as sympathy
may be, it must come to us only in such
remittances as our conscious need de-
mands ; we know not how to dispose of
any excess. We have with ourselves
alone certain confidences, the revelation
of which, though to the alter eyo, would
be nothing less than an act of bad faith.
The alter ego, we expect, will guard as
jealously the neutral precinct, as prompt-
ly warn off the trespasser, though the
trespasser be our dear self. I was nei-
ther hurt, nor in the least surprised,
at reading the Orphic verse which my
nearest and oldest neighbor had posted
above his door, though I knew at once
to whom alone it was addressed : —

Crowd not too close upon the line ;

Give space for eavesdrip, neighbor mine,

As I upon my side must give ;

Then, we in amity shall live.

I love thee dearly, yet I would

At some remove our dwellings stood;

Not wall to wall should we two build,

But so the statute be fulfilled :

The rain that courseth from the roof

The bounding-line shall put to proof.

If thou the common weal would serve,

The law of dripping eaves observe ;

Crowd not too close, O neighbor mine;

The air-drawn limit is divine.

— I believe it was Mr. Higginson
who said that it has taken a hundred
years to eliminate the lark from Amer-
ican literature; but there are several
other lingering delusions which we have

O O ,

unlawfully inherited from our English
ancestry. I have lately found myself
much dissatisfied with Italy and the
Mediterranean Sea, because the skies of
one and the waters of the other failed
to keep up their time-honored reputa-
tion for unequaled blueness. I do not
need to explain that English writers

1883.]

The Contributors' Club.

857

have commented from century to cen-
tury upon the contrast between the Ital-
ian atmosphere and their own, and have
celebrated the glories of the former.
The color of the waves that beat against
the shores of Great Britain is apt to be
a dull brown ; in many places it seems
as if the London fogs were the fountains
from which the sea is replenished. But
we Americans go on placidly making
our copy-books say over and over again
that the sky is blue in Italy, as if there
were not a bluer and a more brill-
iant one over our own heads. Soft and
tender the heavens may be in Venice
and above Lake Como, but there is a
tenderness and a softness of clear light
and of shadowed light in New England
of which we should do well to sing the
beauty and the glory.

Just in the same fashion we mourn
over the gloominess of autumn, as if
ours T^ere the autumn of Thomson, or
of Cowper, or of any poet who wrote of
fogs, and darkness, and shortness of days,
and general death, and soddenness, and
chill despair. Here there is little dull
weather until winter is -fairly come, but
through the long, bright months of Sep-
tember and October, and sometimes the
whole of the condemned and dreaded
November, the days — not nearly such
short days as in England — are bright
and invigorating. But we are brought
up on English books, and our delusions
of this sort are, after all, rare disadvan-
tages, that never can counterbalance the
greater mercies and delights of our in-
herited literature.

But I laugh when I think of some
mistakes I made in my youth, as I tried
to order my life in conformity to the
precepts of my little books. These
stories were crammed with the English

traditional ideas of our duty to our poor
neighbor, and I remember that I dili-
gently sought through the thrifty New
England village where I was brought
up for some suffering person with whom
I might share the bounty which I did
my best to enjoy. There seemed to be
no leaky-roofed cottages, and I myself
came usually as near to the description
of a ragged child as any roving young
person I could meet, since my clothing
was always more or less tattered and
damaged by the last fence or brier-bush.
But one day I happened to hear some
elder member of my family speak of a
neighbor compassionately, and I lay in
wait for her, so to speak. That after-
noon, when I chanced to be overtaken
by hunger, and had brought my piece
of bread and butter out-of-doors, the
neighbor came by, and to her great as-
tonishment, and not without a great
struggle on my own part, I offered her
the square slice, from one side of which
I had taken a little round bite. She
treated me very kindly, but appeared
somewhat surprised ; and I felt that
there was something not quite right
about the whole occasion, as she walked
away up the street. She had a child in
her arms, to whom she gave my bread
and butter. He seemed to enjoy it ;
but it was not the way poor persons be-
haved in my English story-books.

858

Books of the Month.

[December,

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

Trcrcl end Description. The second volume of
The Wheelman (The Wheelman Co., Boston) has
the dash and imisc'.essness of this narrowest-plumed
vehicle. It is extraordinary how the enthusiasm
of the wheel makes even literature a servant. Base-
ball occupies more space in the newspaper, but the
bicycle takes a higher (light, and spins triumphant-
ly through the monthly magazine. It is a pleasure
to find so clean and spirited a literature attached
to this cheerful sport. — Seven Spanish Cities and
the Way to Them, by Edward E. Hale (Roberts),
is a contribution to the accumulating literature
of Spanish travel ; for Mr. Hale carried with him
the wealth of the Indies, and while lie writes in
the lively, almost breathless manner which we
know so well, he is full of interesting suggestion
in historical matters, and the best of traveling
companions always.

Li>< ratiire and Criticism. The new Riverside
edition of Emerson's Works (Houghton, Mifflin &
Co.) includes now the second series of Essays,
Representative Men, Society and Solitude, and
English Traits, four volumes. The clearness of
the page seems to strike into the thought. — Mr.
W. J. Linton and Mr. R. H. Stoddard have pre-
pared a collection of poetry under the general title
of English Verse, two volumes of which, one Chau-
cer to Burns, the other Lyrics of the XIX. Cen-
tury (Scribners), have already appeared. The ex-
ternal finish of the work is extremely attractive in
its elegant simplicity; the head lines alone mar
the effect of the page, by introducing a needless
eccentricity. The editorial work shows good taste,
scholarship, and patient care. Mr. Stoddard has
written a spirited introduction to each volume, and
the editors have furnished useful notes at the end.
The stream of verse is clear, and one will not find
worthless work as he will miss — who will not ? —
many of his favorites ; but the scheme intends
compactness. In the latter volume American and
English authors appear in a general chronolog-
ical order. — The Book-Lover's Enchiridion is the
catch-title of a little book which is further ex-
plained on the title-page as Thoughts on the Sol-
ace and Companionship of Books, selected and
chronologically arranged by Philobiblos. (Lippin-
cott.) This edition is an American reprint, re-
vUed and enlarged. We do not think it was a
courteous proceeding to revise and enlarge with-
out stating specifically what is the share of the
American editor. The selections are good and full
of fine suggestion. — Pen Pictures of Modern Au-
thors, edited by William Shepard (Putnams), is a
larger-paged and illustrated edition of a book pub-
lished a year or two ago. It is a mosaic of per-
sonal descriptions of familiar authors. — Mr. Fred-
erick Saunders's Salad for the Solitary and the
Social, a book which is a medley of the curiosi-
ties of life and literature, has been reissued by T.
Whittaker, New York. — The Wisdom of Goethe,
by the veteran John Stuart Blackie (Scribners), is

an anthology, prefaced by an essay on Goethe.
Professor Blackie is an old friend of Goethe, for
it was he who introduced Eckermauu to the Eng-
lish public.

Biblical Study and Theology. The Doctrine of
Sacred Scripture, a critical, historical, and dog-
matic inquiry into the origin and nature of the
Old and New Testaments, by George T. Ladd.
(Scribners.) This is a work in two octavo vol-
umes, thoughtful, learned, reasonable, and in gen-
eral agreement with the sense of Christendom.
The author's conclusion states the result reached:
"The race is in need of redemption, and man dimly
or more clearly recognizes his need. The Bible is
the book which presents the facts and ideas of re-
demption, as God has brought the process of re-
demption to its culmination in the personal appear-
ance and work of Christ and in the founding of the
Christian church." The book is thoroughly in-
dexed, and is a thesaurus for the student of the
subject. — Biblical Study, its Principles. Methods,
and History, together with a catalogue of books of
reference, is the work of C. A. Briggs, professor
of Hebrew and the cognate languages in Union
Theological Seminary. (Scribners.) He has col-
lected and rewritten in a consecutive form a num-
ber of his special articles upon the subject of his
book, which is in effect a hand-book for students
of the Bible and of Biblical criticism. It is some-
what piecemeal in character. — A Companion to
the Greek Testament and the English Version
(Harpers) is a manual of textual criticism, by Dr.
Philip Schaff, and includes also a historical sketch
of the work of the revision committee. The book
will interest the curious, also, by its many fac-
simile illustrations of MSS. and standard editions
of the New Testament. — In the International Re-
vision Commentary on the New Testament, also
edited by Dr. Schaff, a volume has been published
on the Gospel according to John. (Scribners.) The
editors are W. Milligan and W. F. Moulton, who
were members of the English committee. There
is a whole meadow of commentary to a trickling
rill of text. It is a pity, we think, to publish
commentaries which, like this, smother a reader's
mind. — The Grounds of Theistic and Christian
Belief, by Professor Geo. P. Fisher (Scribners), is
a discussion of the evidences of both natural and
revealed religion, with special reference to modern
theories and difficulties. Professor Fisher always
claims attention by his eminent fairness in argu-
ment.

Fiction. Fortune's Fool is Mr. Julian Haw-
thorne's latest novel. (Osgood.) — A Woman of
Honor, by H. C. Bunner (Osgood), is the author's
novelization of his drama ; it has the brusqueness
of style which seems the contribution of the stage
to modern manners, and is clever, but its clever-
ness is wasted upon a trifle. What would a Scrap
of Paper be, made into a volume of three hundred
pages ? — A Great Treason, by Mary A. M. Hop-

1883.]

Books of the Month.

859

pus, is a story of the war of independence. (Mac-
millan.) The independence is of these United
States, and the story centres upon Arnold and
Andre". It is a somewhat galvanized work, but
apparently Ihe historic facts are studied with care.
The liveliness of the book is not made loss wiry
by the use of the historic present. — Godfrey Mor-
gan, aCalifornian Mystery, by Jules Verne (Scrib-
ners), is the story of — But why should we tell the
story, since there Is then nothing left forthe reader
of the book? By the way, is the general appear-
ance of Verne's books an intimation of the pub-
lishers' estimate of their value? — Ruby is the
second of Col. Geo. E. Waring's spirited horse
stories. (Osgood.) — The Recollections of a Drum-
mer Boy, by Harry M. Kiefer (Osgood), comes
under the head of fiction, from the form in which
it i.- cast, but it purports to be the author's personal
recollections of three years of army life in actual
service in the field. It has the air of honesty. —
A new and complete edition of the works of Donald
G. Mitchell (Scribner's Sons) shows that they have
not lost the charm which won them multitudes of
readers twenty years ago. The Reveries of a Bach-
elor and Seven Stories constitute the first two
volumes of the reissue, the typography and exter-
nals of which are exceedingly neat.

History and Biography. The third volume of
Mr. Bancroft's last revision of his History of the
United, States of America (Appletons) covers what
the author makes the second epoch, when Britain
estranges America, 1763-1774. — Comprehensive
Dictionary of Biography, by Edward A. Thomas
(Porter & Coates), is a double-columned crown oc-
tavo volume of six hundred pages, containing
from five to ten titles on a page. The editor has
made his selection without .any apparent law, his
articles have not the conciseness which a book of
reference requires, his information is not alwa\'s
of the latest, and the book shows little evidence of
thoroughness and care. — Mrs. Julia Ward Howe
has written Margaret Fuller for the Famous Wom-
en series. (Roberts.) — John Keese, Wit and
Litterateur, is a biographical memoir, by William
L. Keese (Appletons), of a New York book auction-
eer who was a well-known figure in New York
when trade- sales formed the only literary con-
gress, and by his tastes was a friend of the authors
as well as of their books. — Albert Gallatin, by
John Austin Stevens, is the latest volume in the
series of American Statesmen. (Houghton, Mifilin
&Co.)

Books for Young People. Our Young Folks'
Plutarch, edited by Rosalie Kaufman (Lippincott),
is a reproduction of some of the Lives in a form
for young people. While we are heartily glad
that young people should read Plutarch in any
form, we question whether the limpid English of
Clough's Dryden or the more picturesque render-
ing of North is not good enough for boys. — Young
Folks' Whys and Wherefores, a story by Uncle
Lawrence (Lippincott), is an adaptation from the
French, in which the pictures and ideas are re-
tained and the story is rendered by American per-
sons. It contains a familiar explanation of an
assortment of phenomena. — The Hoosier Sehool-
Boy, by Edward Eggleston (Scribners), is a pen-

dant to the same author's Hoosier School-Master,
and like that reproduces with a blunt pencil char-
acteristic scenes of Indiana life. Mr. Eggleston
has, however, sharpened his pencil somewhat in
this little book, and uses a liner taste in his choice
of material. — The Story of Roland, by James
Baldwin (Scribners), is another of the valuable
adaptations of mediaeval romance to a youthful au-
dience. The more boys and girls cut their roman-
tic teeth on these books, the better men and wom-
en they will make. — The American Girl's Home
Book of Work and Play, by Helen Campbell (Put-
nams), is an admirable hand-book for the family,
full of good hints for sport and occupation. Mrs.
Campbell refers to Mrs. Child's Girl's Own Book
as if it had been in some sort the basis of this, but
we think the acknowledgment is due to the Ameri-
can Girl's Book, by Miss Leslie, and not to the
Girl's Book of the former writer. — The London
S. P. C. K. through E. & J. B. Young & Co.,
their New York agents, send us two toy books,
Blue-Red and From Do-Nothing Hall to Happy-
Day House. The former relates in verse the his-
tory of the discontented lobster, in which the
changes are run ingeniously on the colors blue
and red ; the pictures are fairly good and printed
in colors. The second is a simple little parable
with modest pictures. — The Bodley Library — it
is almost as if one were to say the Bodleian Li-
brary— has a notable addition this year in a vol-
ume in which the American Bodleys are brought
into personal relations with the English branch of
the family. This capital idea affords Mr. Scudder
the chance to give his readers a great variety of
happy letter-press and fitting illustrations. The
book, which forms the seventh volume of the
series, is entitled the English Bodley Family.
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)

Poetry. Patrice, her Love and Work, by E. F.
Hay ward (Cupples, Upham & Co.), is a story in
verse, in which great injustice is done to the tirst
wife. — Whispering Pines is a volume of poems, by
John Henry Boner. (Brentano Bros., New York.)
It is of Southern origin, and from the excessive at-
tention paid to memory in it we should surmise
it to be the work of a young man. — Sol, an Epic
Poem, by Rev. Henry Iliowizi, Minneapolis, is a
commemoration of a faithful Israelite in Africa,
and incidentally a plea for more justice to the Is-
raelitish faith. — Hymns and a few Metrical
Psalms, by Thomas MacKellar (Porter & Coates),
is intended for devotional use. — The Early Po-
etical Works of Franklin E. Denton (Cleveland,
Ohio, W. W. Williams) is introduced by A. G. R.,
who states that Mr. Denton is but twenty-three.
The title of the book is thus all ready for future
use, but we trust Mr. Denton will get over this fe-
verish attack.

Philosophy and Science. Man a Creative First
Cause, by Rowland G- Hazard (Houghton, Milllin
& Co.), is a little volume of two discourses given
before the Concord School of Philosophy. It is
in effect a vindication of metaphysics from the
char0o of fruitlessness. — Instinct, its ollice in the
animal kingdom and its relations to the higher
powers in man, is a rei-sue of the'Lowell Lectures
of the late President P. A. Chadbourne. (PuU

860

Books of the Month.

[December.

nams.) Dr. Chadbourne was a most intelligible
lecturer, and a good observer in science. — The
Law of Ili-re^iity, a Study of the Cause of Vari-
ation and the Origin of Living Organisms (John
Murphy & Co., Baltimore), is by W. K. Brooks,
associate in biology, Johns Hopkins University,
and is modestly put forward as a contribution to
speculation on the subject. It is dedicated to Mr.
Darwin, from whose works the facts have largely
been drawn, although the author is no mere com-
piler, but is himself an investigator.

Education and Text-Books. The Iliad of Ho-
mer, Books I.-YI., with an introduction and
notes by Robert P. Keep (Allyn), is an admirable
school-book, both from the thoroughness with
which the text is annotated in the interest of
school-boys and from the number of practical
suggestions which Dr. Keep offers to teachers. It
is a book which has grown, and was not made. —
Dr. A. P. Peabody's translation of Cicero de Of-
ficiis (Little, Brown & Co.), though a contribution
to the literature of ethics, is excellently adapted
for educational uses by those who would naturally
study the original if they had the appliances. —

Anti-Tobacco, by A. A. Livermore, R. L. Carpen-
ter, and G. F. Witter (Roberts), is a little book
which is plainly of most use to school-boys, or
rather their teachers. Yet we question whether
a more guarded presentation of the evil would
not in the long run be worth more than this,
which, while in the main good, runs into extrava-
gance. — In Mrs. Gilpin's Frugalities, by Susan
Ann Brown (Scribner's Sons), the wise housewife
will be glad to find directions for using the rem-
nants of food usually wasted or unappetizingly
reproduced. The author shows how these frag-
ments may be served in two hundred different
ways.

Politics and Society. The People and Politics,
or the Structure of States and the Significance
and Relation of Political Forms, by G. W. Hos-
mer (Osgood), is an octavo volume, which intends
a critical and historical view of the subject. It
seems to fail in establishing any definite conclu-
sions.— In Putnam's Handy Book Series of Things
Worth Knowing is a treatise on Work for Women,
by George J. Hanson, in which practical sugges-
tions are made by a hopeful man.

AP The Atlantic monthly

A8
v.52

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