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HANDBOUND
AT THE

UNIVERSITY OF

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF

iLiterature, Science, &rt3 ana

VOLUME LXXX

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

, Camfiritige

1897

COPTBIOHT, 1897,

Bi HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.

The Rii>fr.iide\Pre,i*, Cambridge, Mats., U. S. A.
Klectrotyped and Pfiwted by H. O. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS.

Africa, Twenty-Five Years' Progress in
Equatorial, Henry M. Stanley ....

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie
Elia W. Peattie

Allen's, Mr., The Choir Invisible . . .

America, Belated Feudalism in, Henry G.
Chapman

American Fiction, Two Principles in Re-
cent, James Lane Allen .._....

American Forests, The, John Muir . . .

American Historical Novel, The, Paul
Leicester Ford

American Municipal Government, Pecu-
liarities of, E. L. Godkin

American Notion of Equality, The, Henry
Childs Merwin

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor
Poorer ? Carroll D. Wriyht

Astronomical Experience in Japan, An,
Mabel Loomis Todd

Atlantic Monthly, Forty Years of The . .

Bacon-Shakespeare Folly, Forty Years of,
John Fiske

Belated Feudalism in America, Henry G.
Chapman

Burke : A Centenary Perspective, Kate
Holladay Claghorn

Butterfield & Co., Frances Courtenay
Baylor 186,

Butterflies, Illustrations of North Ameri-
can

Caleb West, F. Hopkinson Smith 452, 653,

Carolina Mountain Pond, A, Bradford
Torrey

Chicago, The Upward Movement in, Henry
B. Fuller

Church Colleges, State Universities and,
Francis W. Kelsey

Coming Literary Revival, The, J. S. Tuni-
son 694,

Concerning a Red Waistcoat, Leon H.
Vincent

Confession of a Lover of Romance, The .

Constitution, The Frigate, Ira N . Hollis .

Contributors' Club, The . . . . . . .

Criticism — and After, The Pause in, Wil-
liam Roscoe Thayer

D'Annunzio, Gabriele, the Novelist, Henry
D. Sedgwick, Jr

Decline of Legislatures, The, E. L. God-
kin

Delinquent in Art and in Literature, The,
Enrico Ferri

Democracy and the Laboring Man, F. J.
Stimson

Dwarf Giant, The

Equality, The American Notion of, Henry
Childs Merwin

Fair England, Helen Gray Cone ....

Feudalism in America, Belated, Henry G.
Cnapman

Fiction, Two Principles in Recent Ameri-
can, James Lane Allen

Forest Policy in Suspense, A

Forests, The American, John Muir . . .

PAOB PAQ«

Forty Years of Bacon-Shakespeare Folly,

471 John Fiske 635

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly . . 571
393 French Mastery of Style, The,,F. Brune-

143 tiere 442

Frigate Constitution, The, Ira N. Hollis . 590
745 From a Mattress Grave, I. Zangwill . . 729
Future of Rural New England, The, Alvan

433 F.Sanborn 74

145 Game of Solitaire, A, Madelene Yale

Wynne 685

721 Great Biography, A : Mahan's Nelson . 264
Greatest of These, The, Henry B. Fuller . 762
620 Historical Novel, The American, Paul

Leicester Ford 721

354 Holy Picture, The, Harriet Lewis Bradley . 217
Human, On Being, Woodrow Wilson . . 320
300 Illustrations of North American Butter-
flies . . 278

418 In Quest of a Shadow : An Astronomical
571 Experience in Japan, Mabel Loomis

Todd 418

635 Japan, An Astronomical Experience in,

Mabel Loomis Todd 418

745 Jowett and the University Ideal, W. J.

Ashley 95

84 Juggler, The, Charles Egbert Craddock

106, 241
, 367 Kansas Community, A Typical, William

Allen White 171

278 Laboring Man, Democracy and the, F. J.

806 Stimson 605

Legislatures, The Decline of, E. L. God-

383 kin . . 35

Letters of Dean Swift, Some Unpublished,

534 George Birkbeck Hill . . 157, 343, 674, 784

Life of Tennyson, The, Hamilton Wright

826 Mabie 577

Life Tenant, A, Ellen Mackubin . . . . 130
797 Literary London Twenty_ Years Ago,

Thomas Wentivorth Higginson .... 753
427 Literary Revival, The Coming, J. S. Tuni-

281 son .694,797

590 London Twenty Years Ago, Literary,
715 Thomas Wentworth Higyinson .... 753
Making of the Nation, The, Woodrow Wil-

227 son 1

Man and the Sea, A, Guy H. Scull ... 422
508 Martha's Lady, Sarah Orne Jewett ... 523
Massachusetts Shoe Town, A, Alvan F.

35 Sanborn 177

Matine'e Performance, A 430

233 Mattress Grave, From a, I. Zangwill . . 729

Men and Letters 424

605 Municipal Administration : The New York
715 Police Force, Theodore Roosevelt ..... 289
Municipal Government, Peculiarities of

354 American, E. L. Godkin 620

604 Navy, A New Organization for the New,

Ira N. Hollis 309

745 N^g Cre"ol, Kate Chopin 135

Negro People, Strivings of the, W. E.

433 Burghardt Du Bois 194

268 New England, The Future of Rural, Alvan

145 F. Sanborn 74

Contents.

New Organization for the New Navy, A,

Ira N. Hollis 309

New York Police Force, The, Theodore

Roosevelt 289

North American Butterflies, Illustrations

of . . 278

Notable Recent Novels 846

Novel, The American Historical, Paul

Leicester Ford 721

Novels, Notable Recent 846

Oliphant, Mrs., Harriet Waters Preston . 424

On an Old Plate 718

On Being Human, Woodrow Wilson . . 320
One Fair Daughter, Ellen Olney Kirk . . 54
Origin of the Universe, Recent Discoveries

respecting the, T. J. J. See 484

Our Soldier, Harriet Lewis Bradley . . . 363
Out of Bondage, Rowland E. Robinson . 200
Pause in Criticism — and After, The, Wil-
liam Roscoe Thayer 227

Peculiarities of American Municipal Gov-
ernment, E. L. Godkin 620

Penelope's Progress. Her Experiences in

Scotland, Kate Douglas Wiggin 561, 702, 833
Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin

of the Universe, T. J.J.See. . . . 484
Red Waistcoat, Concerning a, Leon H.

Vincent 427

Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer ?

Are the, Carroll D. Wright 300

Russian Experiment in Self-Government,

A, George Kennan 494

Second Marriage, A, Alice Brown . . . 406
Shoe Town, A Massachusetts, Alvan F.

Sanborn 177

Southerner in the Peloponnesian War, A,
Basil L. Gildersleeve 330

State Universities and Church Colleges,

^ Francis W. Kelsey 826

Sterling, John, and a Correspondence be-
tween Sterling and Emerson, Edward
Waldo Emerson 14

Stony Pathway to the Woods, The, Olive
Thorne Miller 121

Strauss, the Author of the Life of Jesus,
Countess von Krockow 139

Strivings of the Negro People, W. E.
Burghardt Du Bois 194

Swift, Dean, Some Unpublished Letters of,
George Birkbeck Hill . . 157, 343. 674, 784

Teachers, The Training of : The Old View
of Childhood and the New, Frederic
Burk ............. 547

Tennyson, The Life of, Hamilton Wright
Mabie 577

Training of Teachers, The : The Old View
of Childhood and the New, Frederic
Burk

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equato-

547
471

rial Africa, Henry M. /Stanley
Two Principles in Recent American Fic-
tion, James Lane Allen 433

Typical Kansas Community, A, William

Allen White .......... 171

Universe, Recent Discoveries respecting

the Origin of the, T. J.J. See . . . . 484
Universities and Church Colleges, State,

Francis W. Kelsey 826

Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift, Some,

George Birkbeck Hill . . 157, 343, 674, 784
Upward Movement in Chicago, The, Henry

B. Fuller 534

Verse under Prosaic Conditions .... 271
Within the Walls, Guy H. Scull .... 198

POETRY.

Amid the Clamor of the Streets, William

A. Dunn 634

Autumn, P. H. Savage . ..... • • • 728

Benedicite, Martha Gilbert Dickinson . . 366

Day in June, A, Alice Choate Perkins . . 129

Forever and a Day. A Song, Thomas Bai-
ley Aldrich 471

Freeman, The, Ellen Glasgow 796

In Majesty, Stuart Sterne 533

Sargasso Weed, Edmund Clarence Stedman 493

Willow Dale, Lucy S. Conant 405

BOOKS REVIEWED.

Allen, James Lane : The Choir Invisi-
ble 143

Chambers, Robert W. : With the Band . 273
Davis, Richard Harding: Soldiers of For-
tune .... 859

Du Maurier, George : The Martian . . . 851
Edwards, W. H. : The Butterflies of

North America 278

Howells, William Dean: An Open-Eyed

Conspiracy 859

Kipling, Rudyard : Captains Courageous . QKK
Mahaii, Alfred Thayer : The Life of Nel-

855

son, the Embodiment of the Sea Power

of Great Britain 264

Mitchell, S. Weir : Hugh Wynne, Free Qua-
ker 854

Spofford, Harriet Prescott : In Titian's

Garden, and Other'Poems 275

Stevenson, Robert Louis: St. lyes . . . 84(5

Stockard, Henry Jerome : Fugitive Lines 273

Strauss, David Friedrich, Letters of . . 139
Tennyson, Hallam, Lord : Alfred, Lord

Tennyson : A Memoir 577

Thompson, Francis : New Poems . . . 276

Wilkins, Mary E. : Jerome, a Poor Man . 857

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
at jftasa?ine of literature, Science, art, and

VOL. LXXX. — JULY, 1897. — No. CCCCLXXVIL

THE MAKING OF THE NATION.

THE making of our own nation seems
to have taken place under our very eyes,
so recent and so familiar is the story.
The great process was worked out in the
plain and open day of the modern world,
statesmen and historians standing by to
superintend, criticise, make record of
what was done. The stirring narrative
runs quickly into the day in which we
live ; we can say that our grandfathers
builded the government which now holds
so large a place in the world ; the story
seems of yesterday, and yet seems en-
tire, as if the making of the republic
had hastened to complete itself within a
single hundred years. We are elated to
see so great a thing done upon so great
a scale, and to feel ourselves in so inti-
mate a way actors in the moving scene.

Yet we should deceive ourselves were
we to suppose the work done, the nation
made. We have been told by a certain
group of our historians that a nation was
made when the federal Constitution was
adopted ; that the strong sentences of the
law sufficed to transform us from a league
of States into a people single and insepa-
rable. Some tell us, however, that it
was not till the war of 1812 that we grew
fully conscious of a single purpose and
destiny, and began to form policies as if
for a nation. Others see the process
complete only when the civil war struck
slavery away, and gave North and South
a common way of life that should make
common ideals and common endeavors
at last possible. Then, when all have
had their say, there comes a great move-

ment like the one which we call Popu-
lism, to remind us how the country still
lies apart in sections : some at one stage
of development, some at another; some
with one hope and purpose for America,
some with another. And we ask our-
selves, Is the history of our making as a
nation indeed over, or do we still wait
upon the forces that shall at last unite
us ? Are we even now, in fact, a nation ?
Clearly, it is not a question of senti-
ment, but a question of fact. If it be
true that the country, taken as a whole,
is at one and the same time in several
stages of development, — not a great
commercial and manufacturing nation,
with here and there its broad pastures
and the quiet farms from which it draws
its food ; not a vast agricultural com-
munity, with here and there its ports
of shipment and its necessary marts of
exchange ; nor yet a country of mines,
merely, pouring their products forth into
the markets of the world, to take thence
whatever it may need for its comfort and
convenience in living, — we still wait
for its economic and spiritual union. It
is many things at once. Sections big
enough for kingdoms live by agriculture,
and farm the wide stretches of a new
land by the aid of money borrowed from
other sections which seem almost like
another nation, with their teeming cities,
dark with the smoke of factories, quick
with the movements of trade, as sensitive
to the variations of exchange on London
as to the variations in the crops raised
by their distant fellow countrymen on

The Making of tliG Nation.

the plains within the continent. Upon
other great spaces of the vast continent,
communities, millions strong, live the dis-
tinctive life of the miner, have all their
fortune hound up and centred in a single
gi-oup of industries, feel in their utmost
concentration the power of economic
forces elsewhere dispersed, and chafe
under the unequal yoke that unites them
with communities so unlike themselves
as those which lend and trade and manu-
facture, and those which follow the
plough and reap the grain that is to feed
the world.

Such contrasts are nothing new in our
history, and our system of government
is admirably adapted to relieve the strain
and soften the antagonism they might
entail. All our national history through
our country has lain apart in sections,
each marking a stage of settlement, a
stage of wealth, a stage of development,
as population has advanced, as if by suc-
cessive journeyings and encampments,
from east to west ; and always new re-
gions have been suffered to become new
States, form their own life under their
own law, plan their own economy, ad-
just their own domestic relations, and
legalize their own methods of business.
States have, indeed, often been whimsi-
cally enough formed. We have left the
matter of boundaries to surveyors rather
than to statesmen, and have by no means
managed to construct economic units in
the making of States. We have joined
mining communities with agricultural,
the mountain with the plain, the ranch
with the farm, and have left the mak-
ing of uniform rules to the sagacity and
practical habit of neighbors ill at ease
with one another. But on the whole,
the scheme, though a bit haphazard, has
worked itself out with singularly little
friction and no disaster, and the strains
of the great structure we have erected
have been greatly eased and dissipated.

Elastic as the system is, however, it
stiffens at everyWint of national policy.
The federal government can make but

one rule, and that a rule for the whole
country, in each act of its legislation.
Its very constitution withholds it from
discrimination as between State and
State, section and section ; and yet its
chief powers touch just those subjects of
economic interest in which the several
sections of the country feel themselves
most unlike. Currency questions do not
affect them equally or in the same way.
Some need an elastic currency to serve
their uses ; others can fill their coffers
more readily with a currency that is in-
elastic. Some can build up manufac-
tures under a tariff law ; others cannot,
and must submit to pay more without
earning more. Some have one interest
in a principle of interstate commerce ;
others, another. It would be difficult to
find even a question of foreign policy
which would touch all parts of the coun-
try alike. A foreign fleet would mean
much more to the merchants of Boston
and New York than to the merchants of
Illinois and the farmers of the Dakotas.
The conviction is becoming painfully
distinct among us, moreover, that these
contrasts of condition and differences of
interest between the several sections of
the country are now more marked and
emphasized than they ever were before.
The country has been transformed with-
in a generation, not by any creations in
a new kind, but by stupendous changes
in degree. Every interest has increased
its scale and its individual significance.
The " East " is transformed by the vast
accumulations of wealth made since the
civil war, — transformed from a simple
to a complex civilization, more like the
Old World than like the New. The
" West " has so magnified its character-
istics by sheer growth, every economic
interest which its life represents has be-
come so gigantic in its proportions, that
it seems to Eastern men, and to its own
people also, more than ever a region
apart. It is true that the "West" is
not, as a matter of fact, a region at all,
but, in Professor Turner's admirable

The Making of the Nation.

phrase, a stage of development, nowhere
set apart and isolated, but spread abroad
through all the far interior of the con-
tinent. But it is now a stage of devel-
opment with a difference, as Professor
Turner has shown,1 which makes it prac-
tically a new thing in our history. The
" West " was once a series of States and
settlements beyond which lay free lands
not yet occupied, into which the restless
and all who could not thrive by mere
steady industry, all who had come too
late and all who had stayed too long,
could pass on, and, it might be, better
their fortunes. Now it lies without out-
let. The free lands are gone. New
communities must make their life suffi-
cient without this easy escape, — must
study economy, find their fortunes in
what lies at hand, intensify effort, in-
crease capital, build up a future out of
details. It is as if they were caught in
a fixed order of life and forced into a
new competition, and both their self-con-
sciousness and their keenness to observe
every point of self-interest are enlarged
beyond former example.

That there are currents of national
life, both strong and definite, running
in full tide through all the continent
from sea to sea, no observant person can
fail to perceive, — currents which have
long been gathering force, and which
cannot now be withstood. There need
be no fear in any sane man's mind that
we shall ever again see our national gov-
ernment threatened with overthrow by
any power which our own growth has
bred. The temporary danger is that,
not being of a common mind, because
not living under common conditions, the
several sections of the country, which a
various economic development has for
the time being set apart and contrasted,
may struggle for supremacy in the con-
trol of the government, and that we may
learn by some sad experience that there is
not even yet any common standard, either
of opinion or of policy, underlying our

1 American Historical Review, vol. i. p. 71.

national life. The country is of one mind
in its allegiance to the government and
in its attachment to the national idea ;
but it is not yet of one mind in respect
of that fundamental question, What pol-
icies will best serve us in giving strength
and development to our life ? Not the
least noteworthy of the incidents that
preceded and foretokened the civil war
was, if I may so call it, the sectionali-
zation of the national idea. Southern
merchants bestirred themselves to get
conventions together for the discussion,
not of the issues of polities, but of the
economic interests of the country. Their
thought and hope were of the nation.
They spoke no word of antagonism
against any section or interest. Yet it
was plain in every resolution they ut-
tered that for them the nation was one
thing and centred in the South, while
for the rest of the country the nation
was another thing and lay in the North
and Northwest. They were arguing the
needs of the nation from the needs of
their own section. The same thing had
happened in ihe days of the embargo
and the war of 1812. The Hartford
Convention thought of New England
when it spoke of the country. So must
it ever be when section differs from sec-
tion in the very basis and method of its
life. The nation is to-day one thing in
Kansas, and quite another in Massachu-
setts.

There is no longer any danger of a
civil war. There was war between the
South and the rest of the nation because
their differences were removable in no
other way. There was no prospect that
slavery, the root of those differences,
would ever disappear in the mere pro-
cess of growth. It was to be appre-
hended, on the contrary, that the very
processes of growth would inevitably
lead to the extension of slavery and the
perpetuation of radical social and eco-
nomic contrasts and antagonisms be-
tween State and State, between region
and region. An heroic remedy was the

The Making of the Nation.

only remedy. Slavery being removed,
the South is now joined with the " West,"
joined with it in a stage of development,
as a region chiefly agricultural, without
diversified industries, without a multifa-
rious trade, without those subtle extend-
ed nerves which come with all-round
economic development, and which make
men keenly sensible of the interests that
link the world together, as it were into
a single community. But these are lines
of difference which will be effaced by
mere growth, which time will calmly
ignore. They make no boundaries for
armies to cross. Tide -water Virginia
was thus separated once from her own
population within the Alleghany valleys,
— held two jealous sections within her
own limits. Massachusetts once knew
the sharp divergences of interest and
design which separated the coast settle-
ments upon the Bay from the restless
pioneers who had taken up the free lands
of her own western counties. North
Carolina was once a comfortable and in-
different " East " to the uneasy " West "
that was to become Tennessee. Virginia
once seemed old and effete to Kentucky.
The " great West " once lay upon the
Ohio, but has since disappeared there,
overlaid by the changes which have car-
ried the conditions of the " East " to
the Great Lakes and beyond. There
has never yet been a time in our history
when we were without an " East " and
a " West," but the novel day when we
shall be without them is now in sight.
As the country grows it will inevitably
grow homogeneous. Population will not
henceforth spread, but compact ; for there
is no new land between the seas where
the " West " can find another lodgment.
The conditions which prevail in the ever
widening " East " will sooner or later
cover the continent, and we shall at last
be one people. The process will not be
a short one. It will doubtless run
through many generations and involve
many a critical question of statesman-
ship. But it cannot be stayed, and its

working out will bring the nation to its
final character and role in the world.

In the meantime, shall we not con-
stantly recall our reassuring past, re-
minding one another again and again, as
our memories fail us, of the significant
incidents of the long journey we have
already come, in order that we may be
cheered and guided upon the road we
have yet to choose and follow ? It is only
by thus attempting, and attempting again
and again, some sufficient analysis of
our past experiences that we can form
any adequate image of our life as a na-
tion, or acquire any intelligent purpose to
guide us amidst the rushing movement
of affairs. It is no doubt in part by re-
viewing our lives that we shape and de-
termine them. The future will not, in-
deed, be like the past ; of that we may
rest assured. It cannot be like it in de-
tail ; it cannot even resemble it in the
large. It is one thing to fill a fertile
continent with a vigorous people and
take first possession of its treasures ; it
is quite another to complete the work
of occupation and civilization in detail.
Big plans, though^ out only in the rough,
will suffice for the one, but not for the
other. A provident leadership, a patient
tolerance of temporary but unavoidable
evils, a just temper of compromise and
accommodation, a hopeful industry in
the face of small returns, mutual under-
standings, and a cordial spirit of cooper-
ation are needed for the slow intensive
task, which were not demanded amidst
the free advances of an unhampered peo-
ple from settlement to settlement. And
yet the past has made the present, and
will make the future. It has made us
a nation, despite a variety of life that
threatened to keep us at odds amongst
ourselves. It has shown us the processes
by which differences have been obliter-
ated and antagonisms softened. It has
taught us how to become strong, and
will teach us, if we heed its moral, how
to become wise, also, and single-minded.

The colonies which formed the Union

The Making of the Nation.

were brought together, let us first re-
mind ourselves, not merely because they
were neighbors and kinsmen, but because
they were forced to see that they had
common interests which they could serve
in no other way. "There is nothing
which binds one country or one State to
another but interest," said Washington.
" Without this cement the Western in-
habitants can have no predilection for
us." Without that cement the colonies
could have had no predilection for one
another. But it is one thing to have
common interests, and quite another to
perceive them and act upon them. The
colonies were first thrust together by the
pressure of external danger. They need-
ed one another, as well as aid from over-
sea, as any fool could perceive, if they
were going to keep their frontiers against
the Indians, and their outlets upon the
Western waters from the French. The
French and Indian war over, that pres-
sure was relieved, and they might have
fallen apart again, indifferent to any
common aim, unconscious of any com-
mon interest, had not the government
that was their common master set itself
to make them wince under common
wrongs. Then it was that they saw how
like they were in polity and life and in-
terest in the great field of politics, studied
their common liberty, and became aware
of their common ambitions. It was then
that they became aware, too, that their
common ambitious could be realized only
by union ; not single-handed, but united
against a common enemy. Had they
been let alone, it would have taken many
a long generation of slowly increased
acquaintance with one another to apprise
them of their kinship in life and inter-
ests and institutions ; but England drove
them into immediate sympathy and com-
bination, unwittingly founding a nation
by suggestion.

The war for freedom over, the new-
fledged States entered at once upon a
very practical course of education which
thrust its lessons upon them without re-

gard to taste or predilection. The Ar-
ticles of Confederation had been formu-
lated and proposed to the States for their
acceptance in 1777, as a legalization of
the arrangements that had grown up un-
der the informal guidance of the Conti-
nental Congress, in order that law might
confirm and strengthen practice, and be-
cause an actual continental war com-
manded a continental organization. But
the war was virtually over by the time
all the reluctant States had accepted the
Articles ; and the new government had
hardly been put into formal operation be-
fore it became evident that only the war
had made such an arrangement work-
able. Not compacts, but the compul-
sions of a common danger, had drawn
the States into an irregular cooperation,
and it was even harder to obtain obedi-
ence to the definite Articles than it had
been to get the requisitions of the un-
chartered Congress heeded while the war
lasted. Peace had rendered the make-
shift common government uninteresting,
and had given each State leave to with-
draw from common undertakings, and
to think once more, as of old, only of
itself. Their own affairs again isolated
and restored to their former separate
importance, the States could no longer
spare their chief men for what was con-
sidered the minor work of the general
Congress. The best men had been grad-
ually withdrawn from Congress before
the war ended, and now there seemed
less reason than ever why they should be
sent to talk at Philadelphia, when they
were needed for the actual work of ad-
ministration at home. Politics fell back
into their old localization, and every pub-
lic man found his chief tasks at home.
There were still, as a matter of fact,
common needs and dangers scarcely less
imperative and menacing than those
which had drawn the colonies together
against the mother country; but they
were needs and perils of peace, and or-
dinary men did not see them ; only the
most thoughtful and observant were con-

The Making of the Nation.

scions of them: extraordinary events were
required to lift them to the general view.

Happily, there were thoughtful and ob-
servant men who were already the chief
figures of the country, — men whose
leadership the people had long since
come to look for and accept, — and it
was through them that the States were
brought to a new common consciousness,
and at last to a real union. It was not
possible for the several States to live
self-sufficient and apart, as they had
done when they were colonies. They had
then had a common government, little
as they liked to submit to it, and their
foreign affairs had been taken care of.
They were now to learn how ill they
could dispense with a common provi-
dence. Instead of France, they now
had England for neighbor in Canada and
on the Western waters, where they had
themselves but the other day fought so
hard to set her power up. She was their
rival and enemy, too, on the seas ; re-
fused to come to any treaty terms with
them in regard to commerce ; and laughed
to see them unable to concert any poli-
cy against her because they had no com-
mon political authority among them-
selves. She had promised, in the treaty
of peace, to withdraw her garrisons from
the Western posts which lay within the
territory belonging to the Confederation ;
but Congress had promised that British
creditors should be paid what was due
them, only to find that the States would
make no laws to fulfill the promise, and
were determined to leave their federal
representatives without power to make
them ; and England kept her troops
where they were. Spain had taken
France's place upon the further bank of
the Mississippi and at the great river's
mouth. Grave questions of foreign poli-
cy pressed on every side, as of old, and
no State could settle them unaided and
for herself alone.

Here was a group of commonwealths
which would have lived separately and
for themselves, and could not; which

had thought to make shift with merely a
''league of friendship " between them and
a Congress for consultation, and found
that it was impossible. There were com-
mon debts to pay, but there was no com-
mon system of taxation by which to meet
them, nor any authority to devise and
enforce such a system. There were
common enemies and rivals to deal with,
but no one was authorized to carry out
a common policy against them. There
was a common domain to settle and ad-
minister, but no one knew how a Con-
gress without the power to command was
to manage so great a property. The
Ordinance of 1787 was indeed bravely
framed, after a method of real states-
manship ; but there was no warrant for
it to be found in the Articles, and no
one could say how Congress would ex-
ecute a law it had had no authority to
enact. It was not merely the hopeless
confusion and sinister signs of anarchy
which abounded in their own affairs —
a rebellion of debtors in Massachusetts,
tariff wars among the States that lay
upon New York Bay and on the Sound,
North Carolina's doubtful supremacy
among her settlers in the Tennessee
country, Virginia's questionable authori-
ty in Kentucky — that brought the States
at last to attempt a better union and
set up a real government for the whole
countiy. It was the inevitable continen-
tal outlook of affairs as well ; if nothing
more, the sheer necessity to grow and
touch their neighbors at close quarters.
Washington had been among the first to
see the necessity of living, not by a local,
but by a continental policy. Of course
he had a direct pecuniary interest in the
development of the Western lands, —
had himself preempted many a broad
acre lying upon the far Ohio, as well as
upon the nearer western slopes of the
mountains, — and it is open to any one
who likes the sinister suggestion to say
that his ardor for the occupancy of the
Western country was that of the land
speculator, not that of the statesman.

The Making of the Nation.

Everybody knows that it was a confer-
ence between delegates from Maryland
and Virginia about Washington's favor-
ite scheme of joining the upper waters
of the Potomac with the upper waters of
the streams which made their way to the
Mississippi — a conference held at his
suggestion and at his house — that led
to the convening of that larger confer-
ence at Annapolis, which called for the
appointment of the body that met at
Philadelphia and framed the Constitu-
tion under which he was to become the
first President of the United States. It
is open to any one who chooses to recall
how keen old Governor Dinwiddie had
been, when he came to Virginia, to watch
those same Western waters in the inter-
est of the first Ohio Company, in which
he had bought stock ; how promptly he
called the attention of the ministers in
England to the aggressions of the French
in that quarter, sent Washington out as
his agent to warn the intruders off, and
pushed the business from stage to stage,
till the French and Indian war was ablaze,
and nations were in deadly conflict on
both sides of the sea. It ought to be
nothing new and nothing strange to those
who have read the history of the Eng-
lish race the world over to learn that
conquests have a thousand times sprung
out of the initiative of men who have
first followed private interest into new
lands like speculators, and then planned
their occupation and government like
statesmen. Dinwiddie was no statesman,
but Washington was ; and the circum-
stance which it is worth while to note
about him is, not that he went prospecting
upon the Ohio when the French war was
over, but that he saw more than fertile
lands there, — saw the " seat of a rising
empire," and, first among the men of his
day, perceived by what means its settlers
could be bound to the older communities
in the East alike in interest and in poli-
ty. Here were the first " West " and the
first " East," and Washington's thought
mediating between them.

The formation of the Union brought a
real government into existence, and that
government set about its work with an
energy, a dignity, a thoroughness of plan,
which made the whole country aware of it
from the outset, and aware, consequently,
of the national scheme of political life it
had been devised to promote. Hamilton
saw to it that the new government should
have a definite party and body of inter-
ests at its back. It had been fostered
in the making by the commercial classes
at the ports and along the routes of
commerce, and opposed in the rural dis-
tricts which lay away from the centres of
population. Those who knew the forces
that played from State to State, and
made America a partner in the life of
the world, had earnestly wanted a gov-
ernment that should preside and choose
in the making of the nation ; but those
who saw only the daily round of the
countryside had been indifferent or hos-
tile, consulting their pride and their pre-
judices. Hamilton sought a policy which
should serve the men who had set the
government up, and found it in the
funding of the debt, both national and
domestic, the assumption of the Revolu-
tionary obligations of the States, and the
establishment of a national bank. This
was what the friends of the new plan
had wanted, the rehabilitation of credit,
and the government set out with a pro-
gramme meant to commend it to men
with money and vested interests.

It was just such a government that
the men of an opposite interest and tem-
perament had dreaded, and Washington
was not out of office before the issue be-
gan to be clearly drawn between those
who wanted a strong government, with
a great establishment, a system of finance
which should dominate the markets, an
authority in the field of law which should
restrain the States and make the Union,
through its courts, the sole and final
judge of its own powers, and those who
dreaded nothing else so much, wished a
government which should hold the coun-

The Making of the Nation.

try together with as little thought as pos-
sible of its own aggrandizement, went
all the way with Jefferson in his jealousy
of the commercial interest, accepted his
ideal of a dispersed power put into com-
mission among the States, — even among
the local units within the States, — and
looked to see liberty discredited amidst a
display of federal power. When the first
party had had their day in the setting up
of the government and the inauguration
of a policy which should make it authori-
tative, the party of Jefferson came in to
purify it. They began by attacking the
federal courts, which had angered every
man of their faith by a steady main-
tenance and elaboration of the federal
power ; they ended by using that power
just as their opponents had used it. In
the first place, it was necessary to buy
Louisiana, and with it the control of the
Mississippi, notwithstanding Mr. Jeffer-
son's solemn conviction that such an act
was utterly without constitutional war-
rant ; in the second place, they had to en-
force an arbitrary embargo in order to
try their hand at reprisal upon foreign
rivals in trade ; in the end, they had to
recharter the national bank, create a na-
tional debt and a sinking fund, impose
an excise upon whiskey, lay direct taxes,
devise a protective tariff, use coercion
upon those who would not aid them in a
great war, — play the role of masters
and tax-gatherers as the Federalists had
played it, — on a greater scale, even, and
with equal gusto. Everybody knows the
familiar story : it has new significance
from day to day only as it illustrates
the invariable process of nation-making
which has gone on from generation to
generation, from the first until now.

Opposition to the exercise and ex-
pansion of the federal power only made
it the more inevitable try making it the
more deliberate. The passionate pro-
tests, the plain speech, the sinister fore-
casts, of such men as John Randolph
aided the process by making it self-con-
scious. What Randolph meant as an ac-

cusation, those who chose the policy of
the government presently accepted as a
prophecy. It was true, as he said, that
a nation was in the making, and a gov-
ernment under which the privileges of
the States would count for less than
the compulsions of the common interest.
Few had seen it so at first ; the men
who were old when the government was
born refused to see it so to the last ; but
the young men and those who came fresh
upon the stage from decade to decade
presently found the scarecrow look like
a thing they might love. Their ideal took
form with the reiterated suggestion ;
they began to hope for what they had
been bidden to dread. No party could
long use the federal authority without
coming to feel it national, — without
forming some ideal of the common in-
terest, and of the use of power by which
it should be fostered.

When they adopted the tariff of 1816,
the Jeffersonians themselves formulat-
ed a policy which should endow the
federal government with a greater eco-
nomic power than even Hamilton had
planned when he sought to win the sup-
port of the merchants and the lenders
of money ; and when they bought some-
thing like a third of the continent be-
yond the Mississippi, they made it certain
the nation should grow upon a conti-
nental scale which no provincial notions
about state powers and a common gov-
ernment kept within strait bounds could
possibly survive. Here were the two
forces which were to dominate us till the
present day, and make the present issues
of our politics : an open " West " into
which a frontier population was to be
thrust from generation to generation, and
a protective tariff which should build up
special interests the while in the " East,"
and make the contrast ever sharper and
sharper between section and section.
What the " West " is doing now is sim-
ply to note more deliberately than ever
before, and with a keener distaste, this
striking contrast between her own devel-

The Making of the Nation.

opment and that of the " East." That was
a true instinct of statesmanship which led
Henry Clay to couple a policy of inter-
nal improvements with a policy of pro-
tection. Internal improvements meant
in that day great roads leading into the
West, and every means taken to open the
country to use and settlement. While
a protective tariff was building up spe-
cial industries in the East, public works
should make an outlet into new lands
for all who were not getting the benefit
of the system. The plan worked admi-
rably for many a day, and was justly
called "American," so well did it match
the circumstances of a set of communities,
half old, half new: the old waiting to be
developed, the new setting the easy scale
of living. The other side of the policy
was left for us. There is no longer any
outlet for those who are not the beneficia-
ries of the protective system, and nothing
but the contrasts it has created remains
to mark its triumphs. Internal improve-
ments no longer relieve the strain ; they
have become merely a means of largess.
The history of the United States has
been one continuous story of rapid, stu-
pendous growth, and all its great ques-
tions have been questions of growth. It
was proposed in the Constitutional Con-
vention of 1787 that a limit should be set
to the number of new members to be ad-
mitted to the House of Representatives
from States formed beyond the Allegha-
nies ; and the suggestion was conceived
with a true instinct of prophecy. The old
States were not only to be shaken out of
their self-centred life, but were even to
see their very government changed over
their heads by the rise of States in the
Western country. John Randolph voted
against the admission of Ohio into the
Union, because he held that no new part-
ner should be admitted to the federal
arrangement except by unanimous con-
sent. It was the very next year that
Louisiana was purchased, and a million
square miles were added to the territory
out of which new States were to be made.

Had the original States been able to live
to themselves, keeping their own people,
elaborating their own life, without a com-
mon property to manage, unvexed by a
vacant continent, national questions might
have been kept within modest limits.
They might even have made shift to di-
gest Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi,
Alabama, and the great commonwealths
carved out of the Northwest Territory,
for which the Congress of the Confeder-
ation had already made provision. But
the Louisiana purchase opened the con-
tinent to the planting of States, and took
the processes of nationalization out of
the hands of the original " partners."
Questions of politics were henceforth to
be questions of growth.

For a while the question of slavery
dominated all the rest. The Northwest
Territory was closed to slavery by the
Ordinance of 1787. Tennessee, Ken-
tucky, Mississippi, Alabama, took slavery
almost without question from the States
from which they were sprung. But Mis-
souri gave the whole country view of the
matter which must be settled in the mak-
ing of every State founded beyond the
Mississippi. The slavery struggle, which
seems to us who are near it to occupy so
great a space in the field of our affairs,
was, of course, a struggle for and against
the extension of slavery, not for or against
its existence in the States where it had
taken root from of old, — a question of
growth, not of law. It will some day be
seen to have been, for all it was so stu-
pendous, a mere episode of development.
Its result was to remove a ground of eco-
nomic and social difference as between
section and section which threatened to
become permanent, standing forever in
the way of a homogeneous national life.
The passionate struggle to prevent its
extension inevitably led to its total abo-
lition ; and the way was cleared for the
South, as well as the " West," to become
like its neighbor sections in every ele-
ment of its life.

It had also a further, almost incalcu-

The Making of the Nation.

lable effect in its stimulation of a nation-
al sentiment. It created throughout the
North and Northwest a passion of de-
votion td the Union which really gave
the Union a new character. The nation
was fused into a single body in the fer-
vent heat of the time. At the begin-
ning of the war the South had seemed
like a section pitted against a section ;
at its close it seemed a territory con-
quered by a neighbor nation. That na-
tion is now, take it roughly, that " East "
which we contrast with the " West " of
our day. The economic conditions once
centred at New York, Boston, Philadel-
phia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, and the other
commercial and industrial cities of the
coast States are now to be found, hardly
less clearly marked, in Chicago, in Min-
neapolis, in Detroit, through all the great
States that lie upon the Lakes, in all the
old " Northwest." The South has fallen
into a new economic classification. In
respect of its stage of development it be-
longs with the " West," though in senti-
ment, in traditional ways of life, in many
a point of practice and detail, it keeps
its old individuality, and though it has in
its peculiar labor problem a hindrance
to progress at once unique and ominous.
It is to this point we have come in the
making of the nation. The old sort of
growth is at an end, — the growth by
mere expansion. We have now to look
more closely to internal conditions, and
study the means by which a various peo-
ple is to be bound together in a single
interest. Many differences will pass away
of themselves. " East " and "West " will
come together by a slow approach, as cap-
ital accumulates where now it is ^nly bor-
rowed, as industrial development makes
its way westward in a new variety, as
life gets its final elaboration and detail
throughout all the great spaces of the
continent, until all the scattered parts of
the nation are drawn into real commu-
nity of interest. Even the race problem
of the South will no doubt work itself
out in the slowness of time, as blacks

and whites pass from generation to gen-
eration, gaining with each remove from
the memories of the war a surer self-pos-
session, an easier view of the division of
labor and of social function to be arranged
between them. Time is the only legis-
lator in such a matter. But not every-
thing can be left to drift and slow accom-
modation. The nation which has grown
to the proportions almost of the continent
within the century lies under our eyes,
unfinished, unharmonized, waiting still to
have its parts adjusted, lacking its last
lesson in the ways of peace and concert.
It required statesmanship of no mean
sort to bring us to our present growth
and lusty strength. It will require lead-
ership of a much higher order to teach
us the triumphs of cooperation, the self-
possession and calm choices of maturity.
Much may be brought about by a mere
knowledge of the situation. It is not
simply the existence of facts that governs
us, but consciousness and comprehension
of the facts. The whole process of states-
manship consists in bringing facts to light,
and shaping law to suit, or, if need be,
mould them. It is part of our present
danger that men of the " East " listen
only to their own public men, men of
the "West " only to theirs. We speak of
the " West " as out of sympathy with the
" East : " it would be instructive once
and again to reverse the terms, and ad-
mit that the " East " neither understands
nor sympathizes with the " West," — and
thorough nationalization depends upon
mutual understandings and sympathies.
There is an unpleasant significance in the
fact that the " East " has made no serious
attempt to understand the desire for the
free coinage of silver in the " West " and
the South. If it were once really probed
and comprehended, we should know that
it is necessary to reform our currency
at once, and we should know in what
way it is necessary to reform it ; we
should know that a new protective tariff
only marks with a new emphasis the
contrast in economic interest between

The Making of the Nation.

the " East " and the " West," and that
nothing but currency reform can touch-
the cause of the present discontents.

Ignorance and indifference as between
section and section no man need wonder
at who knows the habitual courses of
history ; and no one who comprehends
the essential soundness of our people's
life can mistrust the future of the na-
tion. He may confidently expect a safe
nationalization of interest and policy in
the end, whatever folly of experiment and
fitful change he may fear in the mean-
while. He can only wonder that we
should continue to leave ourselves so ut-
terly without adequate means of formu-
lating a national policy. Certainly Provi-
dence has presided over our affairs with
a strange indulgence, if it is true that
Providence helps only those who first
seek to help themselves. The making of
a nation has never been a thing deliber-
ately planned and consummated by the
counsel and authority of leaders, but the
daily conduct and policy of a nation which
has won its place must be so planned.
So far we have had the hopefulness, the
readiness, and the hardihood of youth in
these matters, and have never become
fully conscious of the position into which
our peculiar frame of government has
brought us. We have waited a whole
century to observe that we have made no
provision for authoritative national lead-
ership in matters of policy. The Pre-
sident does not •always speak with au-
thority, because he is not always a man
picked out and tested by any processes in
which the people have been participants,
and has often nothing but his office to
render him influential. Even when the
country does know and trust him, he can
carry his views no further than to recom-
mend them to the attention of Congress
in a written message which the Houses
would deem themselves subservient to
give too much heed to. Within the
Houses there is no man, except the Vice-
President, to whose choice the whole
country gives heed; and he is chosen,

not to be a Senator, but only to wait
upon the disability of the President, and
preside meanwhile over a body of which
he is not a member. The House of
Representatives has in these latter days
made its Speaker its political leader as
well as its parliamentary moderator ; but
the country is, of course, never consulted
about that beforehand, and his leader-
ship is not the open leadership of discus-
sion, but the undebatable leadership of
the parliamentary autocrat.

This singular leaderless structure of
our government never stood fully re-
vealed until the present generation, and
even now awaits general recognition.
Peculiar circumstances and the practical
political habit and sagacity of our peo-
ple for long concealed it. The framers
of the Constitution no doubt expected
the President and his advisers to exer-
cise a real leadership in affairs, and for
more than a generation after the setting
up of the government their expectation
was fulfilled. Washington was accepted
as leader no less by Congress than by
the people. Hamilton, from the Trea-
sury, really gave the government both
its policy and its administrative struc-
ture. If John Adams had less author-
ity than Washington, it was because the
party he represented was losing its hold
upon the country. Jefferson was the
most consummate party chief, the most
unchecked master of legislative policy,
we have had in America, and his dynas-
ty was continued in Madison and Mon-
roe. But Madison's terms saw Clay and
Calhoun come to the front in the House,
and many another man of the new gen-
eration, ready to guide and coach the
President rather than to be absolutely
controlled by him. Monroe was not of
the calibre of his predecessors, and no
party could rally about so stiff a man, so
cool a partisan, as John Quincy Adams.
And so the old political function of the
presidency came to an end, and it was
left for Jackson to give it a new one,
— instead of a leadership of counsel, a

The Making of the Nation.

leadership and discipline by rewards and
punishments. Then the slavery issue
began to dominate politics, and a long
season of concentrated passion brought
individual men of force into power in
Congress, — natural leaders of men like
Clay, trained and eloquent advocates
like Webster, keen debaters with a logic
whose thrusts were as sharp as those of
cold steel like Calhoun. The war made
the Executive of necessity the nation's
leader again, with the great Lincoln at
its head, who seemed to embody, with a
touch of genius, the very character of the
race itself. Then reconstruction came, —
under whose leadership who could say ?
— and we were left to wonder what,
henceforth, in the days of ordinary peace
and industry, we were to make of a gov-
ernment which could in humdrum times
yield us no leadership at all. The tasks
which confront us now are not like those
which centred in the war, in which pas-
sion made men run together to a common
work. Heaven forbid that we should ad-
mit any element of passion into the de-
licate matters in which national policy
must mediate between the differing eco-
nomic interests of sections which a wise
moderation will assuredly unite in the
ways of harmony and peace ! We shall
need, not the mere compromises of Clay,
but a constructive leadership of which
Clay hardly showed himself capable.

There are few things more disconcert-
ing to the thought, in any effort to fore-
cast the future of our affairs, than the
fact that we must continue to take our
executive policy from presidents given
us by nominating conventions, and our
legislation from conference committees
of the House and Senate. Evidently
it is a purely providential form of govern-
ment We should never have had Lin-
coln for President had not the Republi-
can convention of 1860 sat in Chicago,
and felt the weight of the galleries in its
work, — and one does not like to think
what might have happened had M! r. Sew-
ard been nominated. We might have

had Mr. Bryan for President, because of
the impression which may be made upon
an excited assembly by a good voice and
a few ringing sentences flung forth just
after a cold man who gave unpalatable
counsel has sat down. The country
knew absolutely nothing about Mr. Bry-
an before his nomination, and it would
not have known anything about him
afterward had he not chosen to make
speeches. It was not Mr. McKinley, but
Mr. Reed, who was the real leader of
the Republican party. It has become a
commonplace amongst us that conven-
tions prefer dark horses, — prefer those
who are not tested leaders with well-
known records to those who are. It has
become a commonplace amongst all na-
tions which have tried popular institutions
that the actions .of such bodies as our
nominating conventions are subject to the
play of passion and of chance. They
meet to do a single thing, — for the plat-
form is really left to a committee, — and
upon that one thing all intrigue centres.
Who that has witnessed them will ever
forget the intense night scenes, the fe-
verish recesses, of our nominating con-
ventions, when there is a running to and
fro of agents from delegation to delega-
tion, and every candidate has his busy
headquarters, — can ever forget the shout-
ing and almost frenzied masses on the
floor of the hall when the convention is in
session, swept this way and that by every
wind of sudden feeling-, impatient of de-
bate, incapable of deliberation ? When
a convention's brief work is over, its own
members can scarcely remember the plan
and order of it. They go home un-
marked, and sink into the general body
of those who have nothing to do with the
conduct of government. They cannot be
held responsible if their candidate fails
in his attempt to carry on the Executive.
It has not often happened that can-
didates for the presidency have been
chosen from outside the ranks of those
who have seen service in national politics.
Congress is apt to be peculiarly sensitive

The Making of the Nation.

to the exercise of executive authority by
men who have not at some time been
members of the one House or the other,
and so learned to sympathize with mem-
bers' views as to the relations that ought
to exist between the President and the
federal legislature. No doubt a good
deal of the dislike which the Houses
early conceived for Mr. Cleveland was
due to the feeling that he was an " out-
sider," a man without congressional sym-
pathies and points of view, — a sort of
irregular and amateur at the delicate
game of national politics as played at
Washington ; most of the men whom he
chose as advisers were of the same kind,
without Washington credentials. Mr.
McKinley, though of the congressional
circle himself, has repeated the experi-
ment in respect of his cabinet in the ap-
pointment of such men as Mr. Gage and
Mr. Bliss and Mr. Gary. Members re-
sent such appointments ; they seem to
drive the two branches of the government
further apart than ever, and yet they
grow more common from administration
to administration.

These appointments make cooperation
between Congress and the Executive
more difficult, not because the men thus
appointed lack respect for the Houses or
seek to gain any advantage over them,
but because they do not know how to
deal with them, — through what persons
and by what courtesies of approach. To
the uninitiated Congress is simply a mass
of individuals. It has no responsible lead-
ers known to the system of government,
and the leaders recognized by its rules are
one set of individuals for one sort of
legislation, another for another. The
Secretaries cannot address or approach
either House as a whole ; in dealing with
committees they are dealing only with
groups of individuals ; neither party has
its leader, — there are only influential
men here and there who know how to
manage its caucuses and take advan-
tage of parliamentary openings on the
floor. There is a master in the House,

as every member very well knows, and
even the easy-going public are beginning
to observe. The Speaker appoints the
committees ; the committees practically
frame all legislation; the Speaker, ac-
cordingly, gives or withholds legislative
power and opportunity, and members are
granted influence or deprived of it much
as he pleases. He of course administers
the rules, and the rules are framed to
prevent debate and individual initiative.
He can refuse recognition for the intro-
duction of measures he disapproves of as
party chief ; he may make way for those
he desires to see passed. He is chair-
man of the Committee on Rules, by which
the House submits to be governed (for
fear of helplessness and chaos) in the
arrangement of its business and the ap-
portionment of its time. In brief, he is
not only its moderator, but its master.
New members protest and write to the
newspapers ; but old members submit,
— and indeed the Speaker's power is
inevitable. You must have leaders in a
numerous body, — leaders with author-
ity ; and you cannot give authority in
the House except through the rules.
The man who administers the rules
must be master, and you must put this
mastery into the hands of your best par-
ty leader. The legislature being sepa-
rated from the executive branch of the
government, the only rewards and pun-
ishments by which you can secure party
discipline are those within the gift of the
. rules, — the committee appointments and
preferences : you cannot administer these
by election ; party government would
break down in the midst of personal ex-
changes of electoral favors. Here again
you must trust the Speaker to organize
and choose, and your only party leader
is your moderator. He does not lead by
debate ; he explains, he proposes nothing
to the country ; you learn his will in his
rulings.

It is with such machinery that we are
to face the future, find a wise and mod-
erate policy, bring the nation to a com-

John Sterling.

mon, a cordial understanding, a real
unity of life. The President can lead
only as he can command the ear of both
Congress and the country, — only as any
other individual might who could secure
a like general hearing and acquiescence.
Policy must come always from the de-
liberations of the House committees, the
debates, both secret and open, of the
Senate, the compromises of committee
conference between the Houses ; no one
man, no group of men, leading ; no man,
no group of men, responsible for the out-
come. Unquestionably we believe in a
guardian destiny ! No other race could
have accomplished so much with such a
system ; no other race would have dared
risk such an experiment. We shall work
out a remedy, for work it out we must.
We must find or make, somewhere in
our system, a group of men to lead us,

who represent the nation in the origin
and responsibility of their power ; who
shall draw the Executive, which makes
choice of foreign policy and upon whose
ability and good faith the honorable exe-
cution of the laws depends, into cordial
cooperation with the legislature, which,
under whatever form of government,
must sanction law and policy. Only un-
der a national leadership, by a national
selection of leaders, and by a method of
constructive choice rather than of com-
promise and barter, can a various nation
be peacefully led. Once more is our pro-
blem of nation-making the problem of a
form of government. Shall we show the
sagacity, the open-mindedness, the mod-
eration, in our task of modification, that
were shown under Washington and Madi-
son and Sherman and Franklin and Wil-
son, in the task of construction ?

Woodrow Wilson.

JOHN STERLING, AND A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN STER-
LING AND EMERSON.

How much the world owes, how little
it credits, to the Illuminators. King Ad-
metus had one of these nominally tending
his herds for a time, but who did more
than this for him ; and the story has been
remembered the better because it has
been the fortune of many men to fall in
with one of the herdsman's descendants.
However dark the times and unpromising
the place, these sons of the morning will
appear, and their bright parentage shows
through life, for the years let them alone.
In Rome in her decline Juvenal found
this saving remnant, and rightly told their
lineage in the verses,

" Juvenes queis arte benigna

Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan."

Blest youths, though few, whose hearts the

God of Day
Fashioned with loving hand and from a nobler

clay.

Where they have come, they have gilded
the day for those around, and warmed
their hearts, and made the dim way plain ;
and when they suddenly passed, a bright
twilight has remained, and the voice has
rung for life in the ears that once knew it.
And because the twilight does not last,
and the echo perishes with the ears that
heard it, and the gain of these lives is of
a kind less easily pointed out to the com-
mon eye than if it had taken form in
" goods," or inventions, or institutions,
or even laurels, men often lament and
count such lives as lost.

In presenting the words of good cheer
that passed between John Sterling, the
poet, and a friend, never seen, beyond
the ocean, I wish to urge that here was
one whose nobility and sympathy illumi-
nated in his short day the lives of his
friends ; and though he died before his

John Sterling.

noon, leaving little lasting work, yet was
not the light lost, for the seemingly more
enduring work of his friends was done
in a measure in its rays.

" Poor Sterling," — such is the ever
recurring burden of Carlyle's tribute
to his friend, which he seems to have
been pricked into writing largely because
Sterling's other loyal friend and biogra-
pher, Archdeacon Hare, who had loved
and labored with him in the Church of
England, deplored overmuch his throw-
ing off its rule and vestments. Though
Carlyle has no sympathy for Sterling's
knightly efforts to help the exile and the
slave, and for his apostolic labors among
the poor of England, scouts his verses and
makes light of his essays and romance,
and ever chafes because this fine courser
was not a mighty dray-horse like him-
self, — yes, sad and soured by physical
ailments, he more than half blamed his
brave friend for having the cruel and
long disease through which he worked,
even to his censor's admiration, — yet, in
spite of all, Carlyle's Life of Sterling
shows in every page that this man's short,
brave course lifted and illuminated all
about him, even that weary and sad-eyed
Jeremiah himself as he sat apart and
prophesied and lamented. One recoils
at much of Carlyle's expression in this
work, but, with all its blemish of pity
and Philistinism and pessimism, it stands
remarkable, a monument built by such
hands, — I will not say planned by such a
mind, for the mind protested ; but never-
theless the hands, obedient to the spirit,
built it with the best they could bring
in gratitude to helpful love whose sun-
light had reached an imprisoned soul.

John Sterling died half a century ago.
Little of what he wrote remains. His
fine Strafford, a Tragedy, is now hard to
obtain, and few people even know Dae-
dalus, the best of his poems. His work
is noble in thought and often in expres-
sion, as befitted a man who bravely
turned away from his church, with all it
then meant of opportunity and vantage-

ground, saying simply to his pleading
friends, " No, I cannot lie for God."

I will briefly recall the few outward
events of Sterling's life. He was born in
1806, in the Island of Bute, of gentle
Scotch blood warmed and spiced by the
sojourn of his immediate forerunners in
Ireland, and his first years were passed
in Gaelic and Cymrjan lands ; it is no
wonder that the growth of the young
mind and spirit was determined rather
in the direction of bold and free and fine
imagination than along paths of unremit-
ting and faithful toil. Moreover, he had
that quick sympathy and entire generosi-
ty which, as prompting to turn aside for'
others' interests, do not favor the con-
centration of effort. These and the other
good traits of the Celtic races, their un-
questioning courage, loyalty, gayety, elo-
quence, gave Sterling his brilliancy, which
was saved from the faults that usually
go with the artistic temperament by a
delicate conscience and the controlling
moral sense and principle, the best Saxon
heritage.

He did not undergo the time-honored
and Philistine methods of the great pub-
lic schools, so prized as a foundation of
manhood and grammar for an English
gentleman. He did not need that rude
schooling ; the fire and manhood were
there, and he took to letters by nature.
He studied with various tutors, and be-
came a student at Cambridge. Here
he was a light in the brightest under-
graduate society of his day, among whom
were men destined to impress their gen-
eration. The best of these — Frederick
Maurice, John Trench, John Kemble,
Richard Monckton Milnes, Charles Bul-
ler, and others — were his friends. He
did not value the English university as it
was in his day.

After leaving the university, and after
some false starts like an attempt at read-
ing law and a temporary secretaryship
of a sort of politico-commercial associa-
tion, he soon came to his natural destiny,
a literary life, and of course gravitated

John Sterling.

to London, where his father, a man of
spirit and ability, was already a power
hi the Tunes newspaper.

Sterling joined with Maurice in con-
ducting The Athenaeum. Its high tone
was distinctive while Sterling was con-
nected with it, says Archdeacon Hare ;
and of his literary firstfruits, Essays and
Tales, many of them cast in a Greek
mould, even Carlyle, mainly contemptu-
ous of anything artistic, has to say that
they are " singularly beautiful and at-
tractive." " Everywhere the point of
view adopted is a high and noble one,
and the result worked out a result to be
sympathized with, and accepted as far
as it will go."

The outward life among the highest
literary society in London, in which his
fine - spirited personality soon gave him
prominence, was much to his taste, but
meanwhile his inner life was growing
richer with the days. The simple no-
bility of Arnold, the master of Rugby,
had early interested him ; even in

" Streaming London's central roar "

the voice of Wordsworth from the West-
moreland hills reached him, created a
calm, and brought happiness ; above all,
Coleridge, incomprehensible save to a
few, and now growing dim in age, but
to Sterling's eager soul illuminating the
mists in which he lived, became a pow-
er in his life. Indeed, of some of his
own Athenaeum papers Sterling modestly
wrote that he was " but a patch of sand
to receive and retain the Master's foot-
print." The gospel of the low place of
the understanding, and of faith as the
highest reason, lighted on their way the
disciples of this high priest strangely
arisen in the England of that day.

Sterling's youthful chivalry led him
to befriend and help tne Spanish polit-
ical refugees, of. whom a Numerous band
were in London. AmongV others, he in-
terested in this cause an\ adventurous
young kinsman, lately resigned from the
army, and keen for some daring enter-

prise, and, with the means and zeal which
this ally brought, a descent on the coast
of Spain, to raise the revolutionary stan-
dard there, was planned. Sterling for-
warded this scheme as he could, and
meant personally to share in it, but was
dissuaded because of ill health and his
recent engagement of marriage. The
vessel was seized at the point of rendez-
vous on the Thames, the day before it
was to sail, with Sterling on board help-
ing in the preparations. He escaped
with cool audacity, warned the adven-
turers, saved them from capture, and got
the now sorely crippled and disarmed ex-
pedition otherwise started. But disaster
dogged it, and after some tedious and
ineffectual attempts to promote a rising,
General Torrijos and his helpers, includ-
ing Sterling's young relative, were cap-
tured, and summarily shot on the plaza
of Malaga. Because he had aided the
rash venture, but had not shared its dan-
gers, the blow was almost overwhelm-
ing to a man of Sterling's high honor,
and it was a subject that could never be
spoken of in his presence.

Before the final blow came, he had
gone, because of alarming lung threaten-
ings, to assume the care of an inherited
family property in the Isle of St. Vin-
cent, in the West Indies, carrying his
young wife with him. There he met
slavery, and, sharing the responsibility
for it, began to consider, with both con-
science and common sense, what could *
be done for the poor degraded bonds-
men ; but his residence there was short,
only fifteen months, and his improved
health seemed to warrant an ending of
this exile, so he returned to England in
1832. Though his genius called him to
other works than professed philanthropy,
and these and all of his works had to be
done as they might with the sword of
Azrael hanging over him, — wounding
him grievously many times before its
final fall, — he did not forget the slaves,
and hoped he might yet serve their
cause.

John Sterling.

Once more at home in England, and
rejoicing in this, and yet more in the
blessing of wife and child, Sterling, now
maturing with richer experience, desiring
to serve his kind, and with new hope
and faith, essayed his hand in a thought-
ful novel, Arthur Coningsby, in which
he tried to show that the Church might
still have life and help hidden under its
externals. In this serious frame of mind
he chanced to meet his friend, Julius
Hare, a good man and a servant of the
Lord in the Church of England, who
well knew the nobility that lay in Ster-
ling ; and soon after he became Hare's
curate at Hurstmonceaux, in Sussex.

Into the high and the lowly duties of
his calling Sterling threw himself with
the zeal of the loved disciple, during the
few months that his health allowed him
to labor; though the zealous Paul was
rather his model, he said, and the village
cottages were to be to him his Derbe
and Lystra and Ephesus, a place where
he would bend his whole being, and
spend his heart for the conversion, pu-
rification, elevation, of the humble souls
therein. In that time he found much
happiness, and blessings followed his
steps in the village. But his physicians
told him that he could not do this work
and live, so with much regret he left the
post in which he had given such promise
of being helpful. It was a station on his
journey, a phase in his life ; but he passed
gn, and soon his growing spirit found it-
self cramped by walls built for men of
other centuries and other stature. Yet
for the remaining years of his maimed
and interrupted life he was a noble sol-
dier of the Church militant and univer-
sal, a helper and a light.

Through ten years, with his life in his
hands, under continual marching orders,
cruelly separating him from his loved
and loyal wife and little children, to Ma-
deira, Bordeaux, the southern towns of
England, and finally the Isle of Wight,
he never lost courage or faith, and
worked while yet there was day for him.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 2

And though long disease wore out the
body, it could never touch his soul.

Sterling and Emerson never met face
to face, but there was so strong a like-
ness in some part of their lives — both
the events and the spiritual experience
and growth — that their friendship was,
as it were, ordained above. Both men,
born with a commanding call to letters ;
brought under the awakening influences
that moved England, Old and New, in
their generation ; helped first by Cole-
ridge and charmed by Wordsworth, ear-
nestly hoped to serve their fellow men
by living work in the church in which
they found themselves, though it seemed
well-nigh lifeless then. Both, after a
short service, found their growth resisted
by the walls around them, and at once
passed fearlessly out of the Church par-
tial to be workers in the Church uni-
versal. Disease added its burden to each
at this time, and was bravely borne.
The words of Carlyle came to them,
and moved them so strongly that each
stretched a joyful and grateful hand to
him at a time when it seemed as if none
heeded ; and this their service to his soul
bound him for life to them, though his
sad and stormy spirit chafed at their
singing and chided their hope. Brought
into relation with each other by him,
they met in their honor for him, and in
that other part of their lives to which
he was deaf and blind, — their yearning
to express their respective messages in
lasting verse ; and in this especially, in
the five short years of their friendship,
their hands, held out across the sea to
each other, gave to both happiness and
help.

In Mr. Emerson's journal for the year
1843 is written the following pleasant
account of the coming together, along
lines of sympathy, of Sterling's life and
his own ; —

" In Roxbury, in 1825, 1 read Cotton's
translation of Montaigne. It seemed to

John Sterling.

me as if I had written the book myself
in some former life, so sincerely it spoke
my thought and experience. No book
before or since was ever so much to me
as that. How I delighted afterwards in
reading Cotton's dedication to Halifax,
and the reply of Halifax, which seemed
no words of course, but genuine suffrages.
Afterwards I went to Paris in 1833, and
to the Pere le Chaise and stumbled on

the tomb of ,* who, said the stone,

formed himself to virtue on the Essays
of Montaigne. Afterwards, John Ster-
ling wrote a loving criticism on Mon-
taigne in the Westminster Review, with
a journal of his own pilgrimage to Mon-
taigne's estate and chateau ; and soon
after Carlyle writes me word that this
same lover of Montaigne is a lover of
me. Now I have been introducing to
his genius two of my friends, James and
Tappan, who both warm to him as to
their brother. So true is S. G. W.'s say-
ing that all whom he knew, met."

Here is the passage in the letter of
Carlyle above alluded to, written from
Chelsea on the 8th of December, 1837 :

" There is a man here called John
Sterling (Reverend John of the Church
of England too), whom I love better than
anybody I have met with, since a certain
sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigen-
puttock, and vanished in the Blue again.
This Sterling has written ; but what is far
better, he has lived, he is alive. Across
several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-
of-Englandism and others, my heart loves
the man. He is one, and the best, of a
small class extant here, who, nigh drown-
ing in a black wreck of Infidelity (light-
ed up by some glare of Radicalism only,
now growing dim, too) and about to per-
ish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian
Shovel-hattedness, or ^determination to
preach, to preach peace,Were it only the
spent echo of a peace once preached.
He is still only about tVirty ; young ;
and I think will shed the sm)vel-hat yet,

1 Left blank ; th«| name probOT>ly forgotten.

2 Through the courtesy of Colo\el John Bar-

perhaps. Do you ever read Blackwood ?
This John Sterling is the ' New Contrib-
utor' whom Wilson makes such a rout
about, in the November and prior month:
Crystals from a Cavern, etc., which it
is well worth your while to see. Well,
and what then, cry you? Why, then,
this John Sterling has fallen overhead
in love with a certain Waldo Emerson,
— that is all. He saw the little Book
Nature lying here ; and, across a whole
silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned
what was in it ; took it to his heart, —
and indeed into his pocket ; and has car-
ried it off to Madeira with him, whither,
unhappily (though now with good hope
and expectation), the Doctors have or-
dered him. This is the small piece of
pleasant news : that two sky-messengers
(such they were both of them to me)
have met and recognized each other ;
and by God's blessing there shall one
day be a trio of us ; call you that no-
thing ? "

The news of this new friend and fel-
low worker was joyfully welcomed by
Emerson in his answer. After reading
the prose and verse in Blackwood, he
says, " I saw that my man had a head
and a heart, and spent an hour or two
very happily in spelling his biography
out of his own hand, a species of palmis-
try in which I have a perfect reliance."
The letters to Carlyle written during the
next year and a half tell of his growing
interest in the man and his writings. .

Emerson had sent to Sterling at vari-
ous times, through the hands of their
friend Carlyle, his orations, The Ameri-
can Scholar and Literary Ethics, deliv-
ered respectively before the Phi Beta
Kappa Society at Harvard University,
August 31, 1837, and the literary so-
cieties at Dartmouth College, July 24,
1838 ; and probably also his Address to
the Senior Class at the Divinity School
at Cambridge. These cumulative gifts
drew from Sterling the first letter.2

ton Sterling, of London, I am permitted to
publish the following letters of his father.

John Sterling.

I. STERLING TO EMERSON.

CLIFTON, September 30, 1839.

MY DEAR SIR, — It is a horrible ef-
fort to do at last what one ought to have
done long ago, were it not still more
horrible to postpone it longer. But hav-
ing a conscience, or something nameless
that does the work of one, I feel it some
consolation that I have wronged myself
most by my silence, and especially if I
have let you suppose me insensible to
the beauty and worth of the discourses
you sent me, and to the still more valu-
able kindness which led you to favour me
with them. Unhappily, I am a man of
ill health and many petty concerns, of
much locomotion and infinite laziness
and procrastination ; and though my
failures towards you are infinite, they
are, if possible, more than infinite to
my other friends, — not better, but of
longer standing, and whose claims have
therefore increased at compound interest
to be still more serious than yours. One
of the worst results of my neglect is
that I can no longer offer you, in return
for your books, the first vivid impres-
sions which they made on me. I shall
only now say that I have read very, very
little modern English writing that has
struck and pleased me so much ; among
recent productions, almost only those of
our friend Carlyle, whose shaggy-browed
and deep-eyed thoughts have often a
likeness to yours which is very attractive
and impressive, neither evidently being
the double of the other. You must be
glad to find him so rapidly and strongly
rising into fame and authority among us.
It is evident to me that his suggestions
work more deeply into the minds of men
in this country than those of any living
man : work, not mining to draw forth
riches, but tunnelling to carry inwards

1 In writing to Carlyle himself Emerson said,
" I delighted in the spirit of that paper, — lov-
ing you so well, and accusing you so conscien-
tiously."

In Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Part II. Cap. ii.,
it is hard to tell which to admire more, Ster-
ling's just criticism of Carlyle's (Teufels-

the light and air of the region from
which he starts. • I rejoice to learn from
him that you are about to publish some-
thing more considerable, at least in bulk,
than what I have hitherto seen of yours.
I trust you will long continue to diffuse,
by your example as well as doctrine, the
knowledge that the Sun and Earth and
Plato and Shakespeare are what they are
by working each in his vocation ; and that
we can be anything better than mounte-
banks living, and scarecrows dead, only
by doing so likewise. For my better as-
surance of this truth, as well as for much
and cordial kindness, I shall always re-
main your debtor, and also,

Most sincerely yours,

JOHN STERLING.

II. EMEKSON TO STEBLING.

CONCORD, MASS., 29th May, 1840.

Mr DEAR SIR, — I have trusted your
magnanimity to a good extent in neg-
lecting to acknowledge your letter, re-
ceived in the winter, which gave me
great joy, and more lately your volume
of poems, which I have had for some
weeks. But I am a worshipper of Friend-
ship, and cannot find any other good
equal to it. As soon as any man pro-
nounces the words which approve him
fit for that great office, I make no haste :
he is holy ; let me be holy also ; our re-
lations are eternal ; why should we count
days and weeks ? I had this feeling in
reading your paper on Carlyle, in which I
admired the rare behaviour, with far less
heed the things said ; these were opin-
ions, but the tone was the man.1 But I
owe to you also the ordinary debts we
incur to art. I have read these poems,
and those, still more recent, in Black-
wood, with great pleasure. The ballad of
Alfred 2 delighted me when I first read
drockhs) attitude to the universe, so bravely
yet kindly expressed, or the simple and friend-
ly way in which Carlyle presents it, uncombat-
ed, to his readers.

2 Alfred the Harper, included later in Em-
erson's Parnassus.

John Sterling.

it, but I read it so often to my friends
that I discovered that the last verses
were not equal to the rest. Shall I gos-
sip on and tell you that the two lines,

" Still lives the song though Regnar dies !
Fill high your cups again,"

rung for a long time in my ear, and had
a kind of witchcraft for my fancy ? I
confess I am a little subject to these ab-
errations. The Sexton's Daughter is a
gift to us all, and I hear allusions to it
and quotations from it passing into com-
mon speech, which must needs gratify
you. My wife insists that I shall tell
you that she rejoices greatly that the man
is in the world who wrote this poem.
The Aphrodite is very agreeable to me,
and I was sorry to miss the Sappho
from the Onyx Ring. I believe I do
not set an equal value on all the pieces,
yet I must count him happy who has
this delirious music in his brain, who
can strike the chords of Rhyme with a
brave and true stroke ; for thus only do
words mount to their right greatness,
and airy syllables initiate us into the
harmonies and secrets of universal na-
ture. I am naturally keenly susceptible
of the pleasures of rhythm} and cannot
believe but that one day — I ask not
where or when — I shall attain to the
speech of this splendid dialect, so ardent
is my wish ; and these wishes, I suppose,
are ever only the buds of power ; but up
to this hour I have never had a true suc-
cess in such attempts. My joy in any
other man's success is unmixed. I wish
you may proceed to bolder, to the best
and grandest melodies whereof your
heart has dreamed. I hear with some
anxiety of your ill health and repeated
voyages. Yet Carlyle tells me that you
are not in danger. We shall learn one
day how to prevent these perils of dis-
ease, or to look at them with the seren-
ity of insight. It seems to me that so
great a task is imposed on the young
men of this generation that life and
health have a new value. \The problems
of reform are losing their local and sec-

tarian character, and becoming gener-
ous, profound, and poetic. If, as would
seem, you are theoretically as well as ac-
tually somewhat a traveller, I wish Amer-
ica might attract you. The way is shorter
every year, and the object more worthy.
There are three or four persons in this
country whom I could heartily wish to
show to three or four persons in yours,
and when I shall arrange any such in-
terviews under my«own roof I shall be
proud and happy.

Your affectionate servant,

R. WALDO EMERSON.

JII. STERLING TO EMERSON.

CLIFTON NEAR BRISTOL, July 18, 1840.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — Your cordial
letter is the pleasantest of transatlantic
greetings, and reminds me of the de-
light with which Columbus breathed the
air and saw the flowers of his New
World, which, though I have not dis-
covered either it or anything, salutes me
through you as kindly as if I too had
launched caravels and lighted on new
Indies. And so, in a sense, I have.
Treasures and spice islands of good will
and sympathy blow their airs to me from
your dim poetic distance. In fancy I
ride the winged horse you send me, to
visit you in return, and though prosaic
and hodiernal here, dream that I live
an endless life of song and true friend-
ly communion on the other side of the
great water. In truth, literature has
procured not one other such gratifica-
tion as your letter gives me. Every
other friend I have — and I am not
unfurnished with good and wise ones
— I owe to outward circumstances and
personal intercourse, and I believe you
are the only man in the world that has
ever found any printed words of mine
at all decidedly pleasant or profitable.
I heartily thank you for telling me the
fact, and also for the fact itself. There
are probably at least fifty persons in
England who can write better poetry
than mine, but I confess it pleases me

John Sterling.

very much that, independently of com-
parisons, you should see in it the thought
and feeling which I meant to express,
in words that few except yourself have
perceived to be anything but jingle.

I have lately read with much satis-
faction an American poem called What-
Cheer,1 which you probably know. Why
did not the writer take a little more
pains ? It is more like my notion of a
real American epic on a small scale than
anything I had before imagined. With
us poetry does not flourish. Hartley
Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, and Henry
Taylor are the only younger men I now
think of who have shown anything like
genius, and the last — perhaps the most
remarkable — has more of volition and
understanding than imagination. Milnes
and Trench are friends of mine, — as
Taylor is, — but their powers are rather
fine than truly creative. Carlyle, with
all the vehement prejudice that becomes
a prophet, is the great man arisen in later
years among us, and is daily more and
more widely felt, rather than understood,
to be so. I have just come from London,
where I saw a good deal of him during
the five or six days I was there. He is
writing down his last course of lectures,
and will no doubt publish them. You will
be amused by the clever and instructed
obtuseness of the criticism on him in the
Edinburgh Review, by I know not whom.
I was very near going to America by the
Great Western, a few days ago, to take
care of a sister-in-law bound for Canada,
where her husband, my brother, is. I
should have paid you a visit inevitably. . . .

My wife greets you and yours, as my
children would, were they sufficiently en-
lightened. The doctors have made me
dawdle myself away remedially, and per-
chance irremedially, into a most unpro-
fitable eidolon. Revive me soon with a
book of yours, and believe me faithfully
and gratefully yours,

JOHN STERLING.

1 What-Cheer, or Roger Williams in Banish-
ment, by Job Durf ec", LL. D., Chief Justice of

IV. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, 31st March, 1841.

MY DEAR SIR, — You gave me great
content by a letter last summer, which
I did not answer, thinking that shortly
I should have a book to send you ; but I
am very slow, and my Essays, printed
at last, are not yet a fortnight old. I
have written your name in a copy, and
send it to Carlyle by the same steamer
which should carry this letter. I wish,
but scarce dare hope, you may find in it
anything of the pristine sacredness of
thought. All thoughts are holy when
they come floating up to us in magical
newness from the hidden Life, and 't is
no wonder we are enamoured and love-
sick with these Muses and Graces, until,
in our devotion to particular beauties and
in our efforts at artificial disposition, we
lose somewhat of our universal sense
and the sovereign eye of Proportion.
All sins, literary and aesthetic and scien-
tific, as well as moral, grow out of un-
belief at last. We must needs meddle
ambitiously, and cannot quite trust that
there is life, self-evolving and indestruc-
tible, but which cannot be hastened, at
the heart of every physical and metaphy-
sical fact. Yet how we thank and greet,
almost adore, the person who has once
or twice in a lifetime treated anything
sublimely, and certified us that he be-
held the Law ! The silence and obscuri-
ty in which he acted are of no account,
for everything is equally related to the
soul.

I certainly did not mean, when I took
up this paper, to write an essay on Faith,
and yet I am always willing to declare
how indigent I think our poetry and all
literature is become for want of that. My
thought had only this scope, no more :
that though I had long ago grown ex-
tremely discontented with my little book,
yet were the thoughts in it honest in
their first rising, and honestly reported,
but that I am very sensible how much

Rhode Island, published in 1832, and later in
his Works in 1849.

John /Sterling.

in this, as in very much greater matters,
interference, or what we miscall art, will
spoil true things. . . .

I know not what sin of mine averted
from you so good a purpose as to come
to Canada and New England. Will not
the brother leave the sister to be brought
again ? We have some beautiful and
excellent persons here, to whom I long
to introduce you and Carlyle, and our
houses now stand so near that we must
meet soon.

Your affectionate servant,

K. W. EMERSON.

I have left for my Postscript what
should else be the subject of a new let-
ter. A very worthy friend of mine, bred
a scholar at Cambridge, but now an iron-
manufacturer in this State, named ,

writes me to request that I will ask you
for a correct list of your printed pieces,
prose and verse. He loves them very
much, and wishes to print them at Bos-
ton : he does not know how far our taste
will go, but he even hopes to realize
some pecuniary profit from the Phoeni-
cians, which he will eagerly appropriate
to your benefit. Send me, I entreat, a
swift reply.

V. STERLING TO EMERSON.

PENZANCE, April 30, 1841.
MY DEAR SIR, — It is nearly a fort-
night since the receipt of your welcome
letter of March 31, in which you were good
enough to express a wish for a speedy re-
ply. The state of my health has, how-
ever, been such as to excuse some delay ;
and, moreover, during this very time I
have been employed in seeking for a
house somewhere in these western regions
of ours, as near as possible to America,
finding it impossible to live longer in the
dry, sharp, dogmatic air of Clifton. At
last I have made a bargain for a dwell-
ing at Falmouth. My family will pro-
bably be removing in\June, and until
then it may be feared that I shall have
but little quiet for any of the better ends
of life, which indeed the \frailty of my

health in a great degree withdraws me
from. One of the disadvantages of our
future abode is the remoteness from Lon-
don, whichproduces many inconveniences,
and among others delay and difficulty in
procuring books. Even now I feel the
mischief in the want of the copy of your
Essays which your kindness designed for
me. I console myself by reflecting that
I have a hid treasure which will come to
light some day. There are at this hour,
in the world, so far as I know, just three
persons writing English who attempt to
support human nature on anything bet-
ter than arbitrary dogmas or hesitating
negations. These are Wordsworth, Car-
lyle, and you. The practical effect, how-
ever, of Wordsworth's genius, though not
of course its intrinsic value, is much di-
minished by the extreme to which he
carries the expedient of compromise and
reserve ; and the same was even more
true of my dear and honoured friend Cole-
ridge. Neither Carlyle nor you can be
charged with such timidity, and I look for
the noblest and most lasting fruits from
the writings of both, to say nothing of
the profit and delight which they yield
to me personally, who am already at one
with those friends on many points that
most divide them from their contempora-
ries. Nothing seems more difficult than
to ascertain what extent of influence such
work as yours and his are gaining among
us, but in my boyhood, twenty years ago,
I well remember that, with quite insignifi-
cant exceptions, all the active and daring
minds which would not take for granted
the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Quarter-
ly Review took refuge with teachers like
Mackintosh and Jeffrey, or at highest Ma-
dame de Stae'l. Wordsworth and Cole-
ridge were mystagogues lurking in cav-
erns, and German literature was thought
of with a good deal less favour than we
are now disposed to show towards that of
China. Remembering these things, and
seeing the revolution accomplished among
a part of the most instructed class and
affecting them all, and also the blind,

John Sterling.

drunken movements of awakening intel-
ligence among the labourers, which have
succeeded to their former stupid sleep,
one can hardly help believing that as
much energetic and beneficial change has
taken place among us during the last
quarter of a century as at any former pe-
riod during the same length of time.

As to me, I certainly often have fan-
cied that, with longer intervals of health,
I might be a fellow worker with you and
the one or two others whose enterprise
has alone among all the projects round
us at once high worth and solid perma-
nence. But the gods have this matter
in their hands, and I have long discov-
ered that it is too large for mine. Lat-
terly I have been working at a tragedy,
but with many intimations that my own
catastrophe might come before that of
my hero. It may perhaps be possible to
complete the tangled net before the next
winter weaves its frostwork among the
figures and numbs the workman's hand.

Mr. , whom you wrote of, deserves

and has all my thanks. It is a true sun-
ny pleasure, worth more than all medi-
cine, to know of any one man in the world
who sees what one means, and cares for
it, and does not regard one's heart's blood
as so much puddle water. It would be
a great satisfaction to me to have my
things reprinted as a whole in Amer-
ica.

Forgive this random gossip, and the
emptiness of a letter which ought to have
expressed much better how truly and af-
fectionately I am yours,

JOHN STERLING.

VI. STERLING TO EMERSON.

FALMOUTH, December 2Sth, 1841.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — Your Oration of

the llth August 1 has only just reached

me. Pray accept my thanks for it.

Without this new mark of your kind re-

1 The Method of Nature, delivered before the
Society of the Adelphi in Waterville College,
Maine.

collection I should have written to you
at this time, for, after much work and
much illness, I have been looking for-
ward to the end of the year as a time
when the last twelvemonth might be
pleasantly rounded off with letters to
several friends for a long while past too
much neglected. These are mostly per-
sons with whom I- have once been in
more familiar intercourse than at pre-
sent; years and saddening experiences
and local remoteness having a good deal
divided me of late from most of my for-
mer Cambridge and London intimates.
You are the only man in the world with
whom, though unseen, I feel any sort of
nearness ; all my other cordialities hav-
ing grown up in the usual way of per-
sonal intercourse. This sort of anoma-
lous friendship is owing, I think, even
more to your letters than to your books,
which, however, are always near my
hand. The Essays I have just read over
again, with new and great pleasure. It
also often occurs to me to look back with
joy at the kindness you have expressed
in writing to me, and to say, after all,
our clay has been mixed with something
happier than tears and blood ; for there
is a man beyond the Atlantic whom I
never saw, and who yet is to me a true
and understanding friend. By the way,
your Essays on Love and Friendship are
to me perhaps more delightful than any-
thing you have written. In this last
Oration there is much that I feel strong-
ly ; much, also, that makes me speculate
on the kind of Church or Public that
you address, — which must be very un-
like anything among us ; much, again,
which does not find me, — specially
that abnegation of individualism which
has become less possible for me as I have
gone on in life, and which, by the way,
is perhaps the most striking doctrinal
difference between you and Carlyle. As
to your audience or church, I doubt
whether there are anywhere in Britain,
except in London, a hundred persons to
be found capable of at all appreciating

John Sterling.

what seems to find, as spoken by you,
such ready acceptance from various
bodies of learners in America. Here
we have not only the same aggressive
material element as in the United States,
but a second fact unknown there, name-
ly, the social authority of Church Ortho-
doxy, derived from the close connection
between the Aristocracy (that is, the
Rich) and the Clergy. And odd it is to
see that, so far as appears on the surface,
the last twenty-five years have produced
more of this instead of less.

Incomparably our most hopeful phe-
nomenon is the acceptance of Carlyle's
writings. But how remarkable it is that
the critical and historical difficulties of
the Bible were pointed out by clear-
sighted English writers more than a cen-
tury ago, and thence passed through
Voltaire into the whole mind of Conti-
nental Europe, and yet that in this coun-
try both the facts and the books about
them remain utterly unknown except to
a few recluses ! The overthrow of our
dead Biblical Dogmatism must, however,
be preparing, and may be nearer than ap-
pears. The great curse is the wretched
and seemingly hopeless mechanical ped-
antry of our Monastic Colleges at Oxford
and Cambridge. I know not whether
there is much connection between these
things and the singular fact,' I believe
quite unexampled in England for three
hundred years, that there is no man liv-
ing among us, — literally, I believe, not
one, — under the age of fifty, whose
verses will pay the expense of publica-
tion. -Nevertheless I have been work-
ing in that way, remembering what Cor-
nelius, the German, the greatest of mod-
ern painters, said lately in London, —
that he and Overbeck were obliged to
starve for twenty years, and then became
famous.

I am far from having forgotten my
promise to you to examine and revise all
my past writings. But I find little that
I am at present at all prepared to reprint.
The verses I have carefully corrected,

and these would form a volume about
the size of the last. But as only about
a hundred copies of that have been sold,
I dare not propose printing any more,
even under favour of my kind and muni-
ficent friend the Iron Master, to whom
and to you I hope to be able to send
soon Strafford, a Tragedy, in print. It
has cost me many months of hard work,
and I have some hope of finding a book-
seller rash enough to print it. It \spos-
sible that I may see you early in summer,
as there seems a chance of my having
to go on business to St. Vincent, and I
would try to take you and Niagara on
my way home.

Believe me your affectionate

JOHN STEELING.

VTI. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, 1st April, 1842.

MY DEAR SIB, — I will not reckon
how many weeks and months I have let
pass since I received from you a letter
which greatly refreshed me, both by its
tone and its matter. Since that time I
have been sorely wounded, utterly im-
poverished, by the loss of my only son, a
noble child a little more than five years
old, and in these days must beguile my
poverty and nakedness as I can, by books
and studies which are only a diversion ;
for it is only oblivion, not consolation,
that such a calamity can admit, whilst
it is new.

You do not in your letter distinctly say
that you will presently send me with the
Tragedy of Straff ord,. which I look for,
the promised list of prose and verse for

Mr. . Yet you must ; for I read a

few weeks ago, in a Southern newspaper,
the proposals of a Philadelphia bookseller
to print all your poems. I wrote imme-
diately to the person named as editor in
the advertisement, to inform him of our
project and correspondence with you,
and of the Tragedy that should come ;
and as I have heard nothing further, I
presume that he has desisted. So far,
then, his movement is only a good symp-

John Sterling.

torn, and should engage you to send the
list, with such errata or revisions as you
have, with the Straff ord, to which may
the Muse grant the highest success, the
noblest conclusion.

I read with great pleasure that per-
haps you will come to New England this
ensuing summer. Come, and bring your
scroll in your hand. Come to Boston
and Concord, and I will go to Niagara
with you. I have never been there ; I
think I will go. I am quite sure that, to
a pair of friendly poetic English eyes,
I could so interpret our political, social,
and spiritual picture here in Massachu-
setts that it should be well worth study
as a table of comparison. And yet per-
haps, much more than the large pictures,
I fancy that I could engage your interest
in the vignettes and pendants. However,
about this time, or perhaps a few weeks
later, we shall send you a large piece of
spiritual New England, in the shape of A.
Bronson Alcott, who is to sail for London
about the 20th April, and whom you must
not fail to see, if you can compass it. A
man who cannot write, but whose con-
versation is unrivalled in its way ; such
insight, such discernment of spirits, such
pure intellectual play, such revolutionary
impulses of thought ; whilst he speaks
he has no peer, and yet, all men say,
" such partiality of view." I, who hear
the same charge always laid at my own
gate, do not so readily feel that fault
in my friend. But I entreat you to see
this man. Since Plato and Plotinus we
have not had his like. I have written
to Carlyle that he is coming, but have
told him nothing about him. For I
should like well to set Alcott before that
sharp-eyed painter for his portrait, with-
out prejudice of any kind. If A. comes
into your neighborhood, he will seek
you.

Your picture of England I was very
glad to have. It confirms, however, my
own impressions. Perhaps you have
formed too favorable an opinion of our
freedom and receptivity here. And yet

I think the most intellectual class of my
countrymen look to Germany rather than
to England for their recent culture ; and
Coleridge, I suppose, has always had
more readers here than in Britain. . . .
Your friend,

R. W. EMERSON,

VIII. STERLING TO EMERSON.

FALMOUTH, June 6th, 1842.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I have just re-
turned after a two months' absence,
forced by ill health to the South. Three
weeks in Naples, which I had never seen
before, and one in Rome, have renewed
a thousand old impressions, given sub-
stance to many fancies, and confirmed
a faith in ancient Art which has few
sharers in this country, but is perhaps
as good notwithstanding as some other
faiths we know of.

Your letter spiced my welcome home,
and must be at once acknowledged.
Thanks, and again thanks. Of A. Bron-
son Alcott I have heard indirectly from
London ; and as I must go there soon,
I hope to see him there in Carlyle's
shadow. It seems too clear that actual
England will only a little more than
pain and confuse him, — as it does every
one not swimming with that awful mud-
dy stream of existence which dwindles
your Mississippi to a gutter. Very plea-
sant, however, it will be to hear of this
from himself, and still more to find
him a real and luminous soul, and not a
mere denier and absorbent of the light
around.

As to my proceedings you must hear
a long story. Since my little volume of
poems I have written and published one
called the Election, of which a kind of
secret was made, partly as a condition
of Murray's agreeing to publish it, —
otherwise you should have had a copy.
It seemed a work to give much offense,
but gave none, nobody reading it at all.
Besides this, I corrected the printed vol-
ume, and rewrote all that appeared in
Blackwood of my verses. Also a new

John Sterling.

poem, a Bernesque satire called Coeur de
Lion. Finally, the Tragedy of Strafford,
which Carlyle says is trash, but I know
not to be that, in spite of certain inevi-
table faults.

Now all these things are in the hands
of Lockhart, of the Quarterly Review,
he having proposed to deal with them
as if privately printed, and expressing an
opinion of them that would have made
his article an astonishment to his readers
and a comfort to my wife. Thus mat-
ters stood when I left, two months ago.
I have just written to him to know whe-
ther he still designs giving me publicity
through his huge trumpet. If, as seems
probable, he repents of his dangerous
good nature, I shall have no so satisfac-
tory course as to send to you the papers
now in his hands, to be used or suppressed
at your discretion. Immediately on re-
ceiving his answer I will write to inform
you of its purport. Whatever he may
do, I foresee no chance of being able to
print in this country, and shall be most
glad to find efficient patronage beyond
the Atlantic. Illness and business have
as yet stopped any sufficient revision of
my prose matters, which, however, I now
intend looking into and doctoring.

The pleasantest chance acquaintances
of my recent journey were Americans, —

a Mr. and Mrs. M (he, a lawyer),

of Albany. His enjoyment of works of
art is. for a man who had never seen
any before, really wonderful. My future
movements most uncertain, — not point-
ing, I fear, towards you ; perhaps Ma-
deira next winter. . . .

Yours, JOHN STERLING.

I have said nothing of the painful
part of your letter. You will know that
I grieve £or you and Mrs. Emerson.

IX. STERLING TO EMERSON.

;. June 13th, 1842.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — Lockhart's ill-
ness has prevented him doing anything
about my matters. But he still expresses
the same decided good will and purpose

for the future. Meanwhile I have asked
him for the MSS., and shall send you
very soon (probably within a fortnight)
a volume of prose tales, of which the
Onyx Ring is the principal (none of
them new), and about as much verse,
including the Sexton's Daughter, Miscel-
laneous Poems, and the Election. Of
course I will write with them. But it
may be said now that they must not be
printed among you unless with a fair
prospect of the expenses being paid. No
doubt they are better than a thousand
things that sell largely, but something in
them that would interest you and other
thinkers unfits them for the multitude
who have other business than thinking.
At all events, believe me always yours,
JOHN STERLING.

X. STERLING TO EMERSON.

LONDON, June 28th, 1842.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — At last I have
been able to make some progress among
my papers, and am. about to despatch
a parcel to you, consisting of two main
divisions : the first containing eight Tales,
of which the largest and most important
is the Onyx Ring ; and the other of
five sections of Poems : first, The Sex-
ton's Daughter ; 2, Miscellaneous Poems
(those already published in my vol-
ume) ; 3, Hymns of a Hermit (greatly
altered); 4, Thoughts in Rhyme (cor-
rected) ; 5, The Election. These things,
if it be thought worth doing anything
with them, might appear either in two
small volumes, first verse, second prose,
or in one. If I am able to put together
a lot of strays and prose thoughts, you
shall have them by and by. But as to
the whole, I must earnestly beg that you
and my other kind friends in America
will feel yourselves at perfect liberty to
take no further step in the matter.

With my MSS. I shall put up a Tra-
gedy by a friend of mine, which strikes
me as singularly fine.

The last fortnight I have been in Lon-
don in the midst of bustle, but with the

John Sterling.

great delight of seeing Carlyle, who is
more peaceful than I have ever known
him. He is immersing himself in Pu-
ritanism and Cromwell, — matters with
which you Americans have almost a
closer connection than we. If he writes
our Civil War, the book will have a pro-
digious advantage over his French Revo-
lution, that there will be one great Egyp-
tian Colossus towering over the temples,
tribes, and tents around.

Yesterday, on his table, I found the
newspaper report of certain lectures,
which, however, I could only glance at.
A deep and full phrase that, " The Poet
is the man without impediment."

Mr. Alcott has been kind enough to
call on me, but I was out (out indeed
then), and he would not leave his ad-
dress. Otherwise no engagement would
have prevented my finding him.

Thought is leaking into this country,
— even Strauss sells. I hear his copy-
right is worth more in Germany than
that of any living writer. His books
selling like Bulwer's novels among us.
Some one else has arisen there who at-
tacks Strauss for being too orthodox ;
but the Prussian government has taken
Strauss under its wing, and forbidden his
opponent's books. Forgive this random
undiplomatic stuff from

Your affectionate

JOHN STERLING.

XI. STERLING TO EMERSON.

FALMOUTH, March 29th, 1843.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — I have for many
months been leading a dream-life, fruit-
ful in no result. For a long part of the
time I was lying in bed very ill, and
indeed, as it seemed, near to death. The
prospect was indistinct enough, but far
from frightful, and at the worst of the
disease it never occurred to me as possi-
ble that one's thoughts would terminate
with one's pulse. On the whole, though
a great deal of time has been quite lost,
the experience is worth something. In
the last summer, also, I had a long and

severe illness. And the upshot seems to
me that I must live, if at all, on the
terms of the various mythical personages
doomed for alternate halves of their year
to be lost in Hades. Even the half is
more than I can count on in this upper-
living air. What uncertainty this gives
to all one's projects and arrangements
you can well imagine.

In the midst of this confusion, it is
some, though rather a melancholy amuse-
ment to continue one's lookout over the
world, and to see the daily mass of mis-
ery, nonsense, and non-consciousness shap-
ing itself into an historic period that will
some time or other have its chronicler
and heroic singer, and look not quite so
beggarly. Of the properly spiritual, Eng-
land, however, still shows almost as lit-
tle as the camps of the Barbarians who
deluged Rome. Carlyle is our one Man,
and he seems to feel it his function, not
to build up and enjoy along with his Age,
as even a Homer, a Herodotus, could, but
to mourn, denounce, and tear in pieces.
I find nothing so hard as to discover
what effect he really produces. Proba-
bly the greater part of his readers find
in him only the same sort of mock-turtle
nutriment as in Macaulay. Our mechan-
ical civilization, with us as with you, of
course, goes on fast enough. The Time
spins daily more and bigger teetotums
with increasing speed and louder hum,
and keeps on asking if they be not real-
ly celestial orbs, and that the music of
the spheres. Of anything much higher,
the men of your and my generation, from
whom ten years ago I hoped much, seem
hardly capable. A good many of them,
however, I do think wish for something
better than they are able to conceive
distinctly, much less to realize.

Of the last age, one respectable relic,
you will see, is just removed forever :
Southey is dead, with the applause of all
good men, but with hardly much deeper
feeling from any. Strange proof enough
of the want of poems in our language,
that he should ever have been held a

John Sterling.

writer of such. Partly, perhaps, because
his works had what one finds in so few
English, the greatness of plan and stead-
iness of execution required for a master-
work, — though these were almost their
only merits. I never saw him, and do
not much regret it. One living man in
Europe whom I should most wish to see
is Tieck, — by far, I think, the greatest
poet living. His Vittoria Accoramboua
is well worth your reading. It repro-
duces in the sixteenth century and in
Italy something like the crimson robe,
the prophetic slain Cassandra, and the
tragic greatness of the Agamemnonian
Muse, but this combined at once with
the near meanness and the refined culti-
vation of our modern life.

My own literary matters lie in mag-
netic sleep. Stratford is there finished.
But I have not been able to open it for
many months, and there are a couple of
minor scenes which I fancy I could mend;
and I can do nothing in the matter till
I look at these, which has not yet been
possible.

In the meanwhile, during my illness,
I have entangled myself in the fancy of
a long Orlandish or Odyssean poem, of
which I have written some eight cantos,
and can promise you at least some amuse-
ment from it a hundred and fifty years
hence, by the time England discovers
that it is farther from having a religion
and America a constitution than either
country now supposes.

Believe me with true affection yours,
JOHN STERLING.

XII. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, 30th June, 1843.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — I was very sorry
to let the last steamer go to England
without an acknowledgment of your last
letter, whose nobleness under such ad-
verse events had moved my admiration ;

but I waited to hear again from ,

until it was too late. ^1 have twice
charged that amiable but '•' slow Morti-
mer " to write you himself a report of his

doubts and projects, and I hope he does
so by the packet of to-morrow. Lest he
should not, I will say that I have twice
heard from him since I sent him your
box of printed sheets and MSS. last sum-
mer (with my selected list of imprimen-
da), but both letters expressed a great
indecision as to what he should do. In
truth, our whole foreign -book market
has suffered a revolution within eighteen
months, by the new practice of printing
whatever good books or vendible books
you send us, in the cheapest newspaper
form, and hawking them in the streets
at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-five cents

the whole work ; and I suppose that

fears, if his book should prove popular,
that it would be pirated at once. I
printed Carlyle's Past and Present two
months ago, with a preface beseeching
all honest men to spare our book ; but
already a wretched reprint has appeared,
published, to be sure, by a man unknown
to the Trade, whose wretchedness of
type and paper, I have hope, will still
give my edition the market for all per-
sons who have eyes and wish to keep
them. But, beside the risk of piracy,
this cheap system hurts the sale of dear
books, or such whose price contains any
profit to an author. Add one more
unfavorable incident which damped the
design, — that a Philadelphia edition of
Sterling's Poems was published a year
ago, though so ill got up that it did not

succeed well, our booksellers think.

must be forgiven if he hesitated, but he
shall not be forgiven if he do not tell
you his own mind. I am heartily sorry
that this friendly and pleasing design
should have arrived at no better issue.
We shall have better news for you one
day.

I am touched and stimulated by your
heroic mood and labours, so ill as you
have been. Please God, you are better
now, and, I hope, well. But truly I think
it a false standard to estimate health,
as the world does, by some fat man, in-
stead of by our power to do our work.

John Sterling.

If I should lie by whenever people tell
me I grow thin and puny, I should lose
all my best days. Task these bad bodies
and they will serve us and will be just
as well a year hence, if they grumble to-
day. But in this country this is safer,
for we are a nation of invalids. You
English are ruddy and robust, and sick-
ness with you is a more serious matter.
Yet everything in life looks so different-
ly before and behind, and we reverse our
scale of success so often, in our retrospec-
tions at our own days and doings, that
our estimate of our own health, even,
must waver when we see what we have
done and gained in the dark hours. I
fancy sometimes that I am more practi-
cally an idealist than most of my com-
panions ; that I value qualities more and
magnitudes less. I must flee to that re-
fuge, too, if I should try to tell you what
I have done and do. I have very little
to show. Yet my days seem often rich,
and I am as easily pleased as my chil-
dren are. I write a good deal, but it is
for the most part without connection,
on a thousand topics. Yet I hope, with-
in a year, to get a few chapters ripened
into some symmetry and wholeness on
the topics that interest all men perma-
nently.

Carlyle's new book, which on some ac-
counts I think his best, has given even
additional interest to your English prac-
tical problem ; and if your conservatism
was not so stark, an inertia passing that
of Orientalism, the world would look to
England with almost hourly expectation
of outbreak and revolution. But the
world is fast getting English now ; and
if the old hive should get too warm and
crowded, you may circumnavigate the
globe without leaving your language or
your kindred.

In the hope that my salutations may
find you stronger, and strong, and full
of good thoughts and good events, I am
yours affectionately,

R. W. EMERSON.

XIII. .STERLING TO EMEKSON.

VENTNOK, I. OF WIGHT,
October 1th, 1843.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — At last on this
Saturday evening there is some cessation
of the din of workmen, and I can sit
down to write to you. The last three
months have been all one muddle of car-
penters and other materialists, who have
hardly left me an hour, and certainly not
a day, quite undisturbed by their practi-
cal nonsense. Now I can draw breath
(till Monday morning) in a house which
promises to be as good as a wise man
needs, and far better than most wise
men have ever enjoyed on earth. It
is adjoining a small new stone - built
town, on the south coast, and close to
the sea, and I have some acres (half a
dozen) of field and shrubbery about me.
One inducement for me is the shelter
and mild climate. But a thousand times
I have lamented my folly in engaging
myself with a pest of improvements,
etc., which has swallowed up all my
summer.

Would that I could hope to be re-
warded by such a pleasure as having you
sometime under my thatched roof ! In
the midst of these mechanical arrange-
ments, all higher thoughts have been like
birds in an aviary looking up through
squares of wire that cut across the sky,
whose winged children they imprison.
The birds are there, and the heavens
also, and how little it is, but how insu-
perable, that divides them ! If any good
has grown upon me strongly, it is the
faith in a Somewhat above all this, — a
boat within reach of us at our worst.
Every soul on earth, says Mahomet, is
born capable of Islam. But you, per-
haps, — though having your own difficul-
ties, — hardly know the utter loneliness
of a Rational Soul in this England. Ex-
cept Carlyle, I do not know one man
who sees and lives in the idea of a God
not exclusively Christian : two or three
lads, perhaps ; but every grown man of
nobler spirit is either theoretical and

John Sterling.

lukewarm, or swathed up in obsolete sec-
tarianism.

On Sunday last I had indeed a visit
from an old Friend who delighted me by
his cordial candour, — John Mill, son of
the historian of India, and in many ways
notable among us now. His big book on
Logic is, I suppose, the highest piece of
Aristotelianism that England has brought
forth, at all events in our time. How
the sweet, ingenuous nature of the man
has lived and thriven out of his father's
cold and stringent atheism is wonderful
to think, — and most so to me, who dur-
ing fifteen years have seen his gradual
growth and ripening. There are very
few men in the world on whose generous
affection I should more rely than on his,
whose system seems at first (but only
seems) a Code of Denial.

I was more struck, not long ago, by the
mists of one of the most zealous of the
new Oxford School, — like Newman, a
fellow of Oriel, and holding Newman the
first of teachers. Yet this man, who fan-
cies he can blot a thousand years out of
God's Doings, has a zeal, a modesty, a
greatness of soul, that I have hardly found
in more than half a dozen others on
earth. He is, I hear, sometimes half mad
with ill health and low spirits ; a schol-
ar, a gentleman, a priest, if there is any
true one living, and would let himself be
racked or gibbeted to help any suffering
or erring brother with less self-compla-
cence than most of us feel in giving away
a shilling. Strange, is it not, to find Ege-
ria still alive, and in this shape, too, in
fcece Romuli ?

I rejoice that you have something
more in store for us ; I shall look out
eagerly for your lights ahead. Life with
me has grown empty and dim enough,
and needs what comfort other men's
faith is capable of supplying. . . .
Yours, JOHN STERLING.

I do not know if the bookseller has
sent you a copy of a Ventnor Tragedy
which I ventured to decorate with your
name.

The Strafford was thus dedicated :

TO RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

Teacher of starry wisdom high serene,
Receive the gift our common ground supplies ;
Red flowers, dark leaves, that ne'er on earth

had been
Without the influence of sidereal skies.

VENTNOR, ISLB OF WIOHT,
Midsummer Day, 1843.

J.S.

XTV. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, October llth, 1843.

My DEAR FRIEND, — You have done
me an honour to which I have not the
least title, and yet it is very dear and
animating to me, in putting my name in
purple lines before this rich and wise
poem of Strafford. I blushed to read,
and then thought I should nevermore
be unworthy, and these loving words
should be an amulet against evil ever-
more. I might easily mistrust my judg-
ment of the Play in my love of the
Poet, and, if you think so, may be whol-
ly wrong, for I read it with lively inter-
est, like a friend's manuscript, from end
to end, and grew prouder and richer in
my friend with every scene. The sub-
ject is excellent, so great and eventful a
crisis, and each of the figures in that
history filled and drunk with a national
idea, and with such antagonism as makes
them colossal, and adds solemnity and
omens to their words and actions. I was
glad to find the Countess of Carlisle
in poetry, whom I had first learned to
know by that very lively sketch from Sir
Toby Matthew, which I read in one of
Forster's Lives. I do not yet know whe-
ther the action of the piece is sufficiently
stout and irresistible, alarming and vic-
timizing the reader after the use of the
old " purifiers ; " it seems to me, as I has-
tily read, managed with judgment and
lighted with live coals ; but I am quite
sure of the dense and strong sentences
whose energy and flowing gentleness at
the same time give the authentic expres-
sion of health and perfect manhood.

I rejoice when I remember in what

John /Sterling.

sickness and interruption, by your own
account, this drama had its elaboration
and completion. As soon as I had read
it once, Margaret Fuller, our genius and
Muse here, and a faithful friend of
yours, seized the book peremptorily and
carried it away, so that I am by no
means master of its contents. Mean-
time, may the just honour of all the best
in Old and in New England cherish the
poem and the Poet. Send me, I pray
you, better news of your health than
your last letter contained. I observe
that you date from the Isle of Wight.

Two letters (one from and one

from me) went to your address in Fal-
mouth, in the course of the last summer,
which I hope, for the exculpation of your
friends here, you received.

I am, I think, to sit fast at home this
winter coming, and arrange a heap of
materials that much and wide scribbling
has collected. I shall probably send this
letter by Mr. James, a man who adds to
many merits the quality of being a good
friend of both you and me, and who, pro-
posing with his family to spend a win-
ter in England, for health and travel,
thinks he has a right to see you. He is
at once so manly, so intelligent, and so
ardent that I have found him excellent
company. The highest and holiest Muse
dwell with you always.

Yours affectionately,

R. W. EMERSON.

My friend and near neighbor, W. El-
lery Channing (a nephew of the late
Dr. C.), desires me to send you his little
volume of poems. I love Ellery so
much as to have persuaded myself long
since that he is a true poet, if these lines
should not show it. Read them with as
much love in advance as you can. Mr. J.
will bring them.

XV. EMERSON TO STEELING.

CONCORD, October 15th, 1843.
MY DEAR STERLING, — Henry James,
of New York, a man of ingenious and
liberal spirit, and a chief consolation to

me when I visit his city, proposes to
spend a winter in England with his fam-
ily, for his health and other benefit, and
desires to see you, for whom he has much
affection. I am quite sure that I shall
serve you both by sending him to you.
Yours, R. W. EMERSON.

XVI. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, 31st January, 1844.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — The mercury
has been at zero at my door, with little
variation, for more than a week. Boston
harbour is frozen up for six miles down
to the forts, yet the newspapers tell me
this morning that the merchants have
resolved to saw through these miles a
passage for your royal steamer and other
sea-going ships to-morrow, and I must
not wait another hour if I would speed
my good wishes to the Isle of Wight.

By an unhappy chance, the January
Dials did not sail as they ought in last
month's steamer, and you should receive
by this, via London and Carlyle, a copy
of No. XV., which contains a critique,
written by Margaret Fuller, on Straf-
ford, and other children of genius, both
yours and other men's. I heartily hope
you will find something right and wise
in my friend's judgments, if with some-
thing inadequate, and if her pen ramble
a little. It was her own proposition to
write the piece, led by her love both of
you and of me. After she began it, she
decided to spread her censure so wide,
and comprise all dramas as well as
Strafford. She was full of spirits in her
undertaking, but, unhappily, the week
devoted to its performance was exani-
mated, may I say, by cruel aches and
illness, and she wrote me word that she
was very sorry, but the piece was ruined.
However, as you are by temper and
habit such a cosmopolitan, I hope one
day you shall see with eyes my wise
woman, hear her with ears, and see if
you can escape the virtue of her en-
chantments. She has a sultry Southern
nature, and Corinna never can write.

John Sterling.

I learned by your last letter that you
had builded a house, and I glean from
Russell all I can of your health and
aspect ; and as James is gone to your
island, I think to come still nearer to
you through his friendly and intelligent
eyes. Send me a good gossiping letter,
and prevent all my proxies. What can
I tell you to invite such retaliation ? I
dwell with my mother, my wife, and two
little girls, the eldest five years old, in
the midst of flowery fields. I wasted
much time from graver work in the last
two months in reading lectures to Ly-
ceums far and near ; for there is now a
" lyceum," so called, in almost every
town in New England, and, if I would
accept every invitation, I might read a
lecture every night. My neighbors in
this village of Concord are Ellery Chan-
ning, who sent his poems to you, a youth
of genius; Thoreau, whose name you
may have seen in the Dial ; and Haw-
thorne, a writer of tales and historiettes,
whose name you may not have seen,
though he too prints books. All these
three persons are superior to their writ-
ings, and therefore not obnoxious to
Kant's observation, " Detestable is the
company of literary men."

Good as these friends are, my habit
is so solitary that we do not often meet.
My literary or other tasks accomplished
are too little to tell. I do not know how
it happens, but there are but seven hours,
often but five, in an American schol-
ar's day; the twelve, thirteen, fifteen,
that we have heard of, in German libra-
ries, are fabulous to us. Probably in
England you find a mean between Mas-
sachusetts and Germany. The perform-
ances of Goethe, the performances of
Scott, appear superhuman to us in their
quantity, let alone their quality. Some-
times I dream of writing the only his-
torical thing I know, — the influence of
old Calvinism, now almost obsolete, upon

1 During the year Sterling's mother and wife
had died within three days. Sorrowful and
sick, he had moved with his six children, two

the education of the existing generation
in New England. I am quite sure, if
it could be truly done, it would be new
to your people, and a valuable memoran-
dum to ours.

I have lately read George Sand's Con-
suelo, of which the first volume pleased
me mightily, the others much less, and
yet the whole book shows an extraordi-
nary spirit. The writer apprehends the
force of simplicity of behaviour, and en-
joys, how greatly, the meeting of two
strong natures. But I have gossiped to
the end of my line, and so do commend
myself affectionately to you.

R. W. EMERSON.

XVII. STERLING TO EMERSON.

VENTNOR, February 20th, 1844.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — I had proposed
a letter to you as this morning's work,
and now down the throat of my purpose
jumps your own of January 31. Long
since I ought to have thanked you for
the previous one, but have been too sick
and sad.1 Your reception of Straff ord
was a great pleasure, — so far as any-
thing is so now. The work has become
altogether distant and distasteful to me,
but I can enjoy your kindness. I got
from an English bookseller the October
Dial, which is pleasant reading. If one
could have the whole of the former num-
bers it would be good for me, but I own
that, except your own doings, there is lit-
tle in it that comes home. Channing, I
suppose, I must thank for his friendly
gift ; but the volume — perhaps from
my own deadness — gave me little true
comfort. It seemed to show abundant
receptivity, but of productivity little.
Everything can too easily be referred to
some other parent. If he would read
diligently the correspondence of Schiller
and Goethe, he would learn much, and
would either cease to be a poet or be-
come a good one. At least one hopes

of them infants, to his last earthly home, the
house in Ventnor.

John Sterling.

so. That book has to me greater value
than any or all those on the theory of
art, — besides the beautiful, mild, and
solid humanity which it displays in every
word. There are hardly perhaps three
Englishmen living with the slightest
thought of what art is, — the unity and
completeness of the Ideal. The crowd,
when weary of themselves and their own
noisy choking Reality, take refuge in
Fiction, but care not how lazy, coarse,
and empty. The few among us who
look higher, generally the young, seem
satisfied, not with the Ideal, but their
own feelings and notions about it, which
they substitute for the thing itself ; ser-
mons on the Incarnation instead of the
Incarnate God. Hence all the dreamy
Shelleyan rhapsodies and rhetorical
Wordsworthian moralizings. But who
seriously strives to create images ? Who
does not waste himself in hunting shad-
ows, forgetting that you cannot have them
without first getting the substance, and
that with it you can never be in want of
them ?

So it stands with us in England : is
it otherwise in America? I fear not.
Tennyson does better, but does little, and
they say will hardly wake out of tobacco
smoke into any sufficient activity. Car-
lyle, our far greater Tacitus, in truth
hates all poetry except for that element
in it which is not poetic at all, and aims
at giving a poetic completeness to historic
fact. He is the greatest of moralists and
politicians, a gigantic anti-poet. As far
as I know, there is not a man besides,
on either side of the Atlantic, writing in
English, either in prose or verse, who
need be spoken of.

Your friend James pleased me well.
Would that he could have stayed here
longer and let me know more of him !
But after all regrets, Life is good, — to
Bee the face of Truth, and enjoy the
beauty of tears and smiles, and know
one's self a man, and love what belongs
to manhood, — all this is a blessing that

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 3

may console us for all wants, and that
sickness and sorrow, and, one may trust,
Death, cannot take away. Yet I wish I
could have talk with you some day.
I am yours,

JOHN STERLING.

This is a miserable scrap to send in
the track of Columb.us and Raleigh. But
I have been too ill in body, and am still
too sad in mind.

XVIII. STERLING TO EMERSON.

VENTNOR, I. OF WIGHT, June 14-th, 1844.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — Perhaps you
may have heard that for the last three
months I have been a dying man. It is
certain that I never can recover. But
there seems a melancholy possibility that
I may have to drag on a year or two of
helplessness, cut off from all society and
incapable of any exertion. It is a case
for submission, but hardly for thankful-
ness. The beginning of the illness was
a violent and extensive bleeding from
the lungs, of which, however, I have had
prelibations for many years. It was
strange to see the thick crimson blood
pouring from one's own mouth while
feeling hardly any pain ; expecting to
be dead in five minutes, and noticing
the pattern of the room-paper and of the
Doctor's waistcoat as composedly as if
the whole had been a dream.

At present I am quite incapable, as
indeed I was when I wrote last, of send-
ing you anything worth your reading.

On both sides of Eternity (the out
and in),

Your affectionate

JOHN STERLING.

XIX. EMERSON TO STERLING.

CONCORD, oth July, 1844.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — What news you
send me, — how dark and bitter, and
how unlooked for, and so firmly and sol-
dierly told ! I got your letter yesterday,
and in it the first hint I have had of this
disaster. I dream of you and of Car-

John Sterling.

lyle, whenever steamers go or come, but
easily omit to write ; and this is the pun-
ishment of my luxury, that you should
be threatened, and I should know no-
thing of your danger and mine. I cling
now to the hope you show me that these
symptoms may not be so grave or of
so instant sequel as their first menace.
Yesterday I thought I would go to Eng-
land, and see you alive ; it seemed prac-
ticable and right. But the same hour
showed inextricable engagements here
at home, and I could not see your man-
ly strength, which is so dear to me, and
I might easily make injurious demands
on a sick man. You are so brave you
must be brave for both of us, and suffer
me to express the pain I feel at these
first tidings. I shall come soon enough
to general considerations which will
weigh with you, and with me, I suppose,
to reduce this calamity within the sphere.
I, who value nothing so much as charac-
ter in literary works, have believed that
you would live to enjoy the slow, sure
homage of your contemporaries to the
valor and permanent merits of your
Muse ; and I have pleased myself how
deeply with a certain noble emulation
in which widely separated friends would
bear each other in constant regard, and
with months and years augment the
benefit each had to confer. This must
now be renounced, and the grand words I
hear and sometimes use must be verified,
and I must think of that which you re-
present, and not of the representative
beloved. Happy is it whilst the Blessed
Power keeps unbroken the harmony of
the inward and the outward, and yields
us the perfect expression of good in a
friend ! But if it will disunite the pow-
er and the form, the power is yet to be
infinitely trusted, and we must try, un-
willing, the harsh grandeurs^ of the spirit-
ual nature. Each of us mo^ readily
faces the issue alone than on the account
of his friend. We find something dis-
honest in learning to live without friends :
whilst death wears a sublime aspect to

each of us. God send you, my dear bro-
ther, the perfect mind of truth and heart
of love, however the event is to fall !
Thousands of hearts have owed to you
the finest mystic influences : I must and
will believe in happy reactions which
will render to you the most soothing
music at unawares.

If you have strength, write me, if only
your name. But I shall continue to
hope to see your face. And so I love
you and I thank you, dear Friend !

Yours, R. WALDO EMERSON.

XX. STERLING TO EMERSON.

HILLSIDE, VENTNOR, August 1st, 1844.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — I am very ill
to-day, but, as I am likely to be worse
rather than better, I make the effort of
writing a few words to thank you for
your letter, and also for your care about
my papers.

You and I will never meet in this
world. Among my friends you are an
Unseen One, but not the less valued.
Heaven help you to realize all your in-
spirations. They will be a blessing to
many as well as yourself. My struggle,
I trust, is nigh over. At present it is a
painful one. But I fear nothing, and
hope much.

Your affectionate and grateful

JOHN STERLING.

In the last days of September Carlyle
wrote to tell Emerson of the death of
their friend ; how calm he had been,
and brave, and how to the very last he
worked alone, setting his house in or-
der and sending farewells to his friends,
whom he preferred not to see.

Carlyle's verdict on his friend's life, in
his Memoir, is that it was " a tragedy ;
high hopes, noble efforts ; under thick-
ening difficulties and impediments, ever
new nobleness of valiant effort ; and the
result death with conquests by no means
corresponding." But even while he is

The Decline of Legislatures.

writing this dismal summary, the beauty
and help that this short life had for
those who saw and felt it, and for those
who should later consider it, sweeps over
him, and, the human heart breaking
through the crust, he admits its claim, and
more, the call of Nature, and thus ends :

" The history of this long-continued
prayer and endeavour, lasting in various
figures for near forty years, may now and
for some time coming have something to
say to men !

" Nay, what of men, or of the world ?
Here, visible to myself for some while,

was a brilliant human presence, distin-
guishable, honourable, and lovable amid
the dim, common populations ; among
the million little beautiful, once more a
beautiful human soul, whom I, among
others, recognized and lovingly walked
with, while the years and hours were.
Sitting now by his tomb in thoughtful
mood, the new times bring a new duty
for me. ' Why write a Life of Ster-
ling ? ' I imagine I had a commission
higher than the world's, — the dictate of
Nature herself to do what is now done.
Sic prosit"

Edward Waldo Emerson.

THE DECLINE OF LEGISLATURES.

THE Roman Senate was the proto-
type of all modern legislatures. It had
two great functions, auctoritas and con-
silium. The former was practically what
we call the " veto ; " that is, the Senate
could forbid any legislation not originat-
ing with itself, whether proposed by the
people in the comitia or by the magis-
trates. Nothing became- a law without
its sanction. The latter, consilium, was
nearly what we call " advice and con-
sent ; " that is, the Senate had to pass on
all proposals submitted to it by the exec-
utive officers, and approve or amend, as
the case might be. In considering the
proposals of the people, it decided whe-
ther they were wise and Roman ; but it
consulted with the magistrates concern-
ing every important action or enterprise
about to be undertaken. In all this it act-
ed under two powerful restraints, partly
like the theocracy in the early days of
New England, partly like our constitu-
tions to-day, — namely, the mos majorum
and the auguries. It saw that every-
thing was done in the Roman or ancient
way, and that the unseen forces were

likely to favor it.1 Now, how did this
system succeed ? On this point I cannot
do better than quote the testimony of
Mommsen : —

" Nevertheless, if any revolution or
any usurpation appears justified before
the bar of history by exclusive ability to
govern, even its rigorous judgment must
acknowledge that this corporation duly
comprehended and worthily fulfilled its
great task. Called to power, not by the
empty accident of birth, but substantially
by the free choice of the nation ; con-
firmed every fifth year by the stern
moral judgment of the worthiest men ;
holding office for life, and so not depen-
dent on the expiration of its commission
or on the varying opinion of the people ;
having its ranks close and united even
after the equalization of its orders ; em-
bracing in it all the political intelligence
and practical statesmanship that the peo-
ple possessed ; absolute in dealing with
all financial questions and in the con-
trol of foreign policy ; having complete
power over the executive by virtue of
its brief duration and of the tribunitian

1 Willems' S4nat et R^publique Romaine,
pp. 34, 35.

The Decline of Legislatures.

intercession which was at the service of
the Senate after the termination of the
quarrels between the orders, — the Ro-
man Senate was the noblest organ of the
nation, and in consistency and political
sagacity, in unanimity and patriotism, in
grasp of power and unwavering courage,
the foremost political corporation of all
times ; still even now an ' Assembly of
Kings,' which knew well how to combine
despotic energy with republican self-de-
votion. Never was a state represented
in its external relations more firmly and
worthily than Rome in its best days by
its Senate." 1

As I have said, the Senate was the pro-
totype of all modern legislatures ; but
only two, since the fall of the Roman
Empire, have at all resembled it, the
Venetian Grand Council and the British
Parliament. No others in the modern
world have attempted to discharge so
great a variety of duties, such as holding
large extents of conquered territory and
ruling great bodies of subject population,
or carrying on foreign wars. Its chief
distinction was that, as a rule, subjects
for consideration, on which it had to take
positive action, did not originate with it,
but were brought before it by the exec-
utive officers engaged in the active con-
duct of the government. So that it may
be called a consultative rather than a
legislative body. How this came about
and how it continued, it is not necessary
to discuss here. The general result was
that, through the whole course of Roman
history, the administrative officers re-
mained actually in charge of the govern-
ment, subject to the advice and control
of the legislature. The same system has
prevailed in the British Parliament ever
since it became a i sal power in the state.
Its proceedings are controlled and regu-
lated by the executive officers. They
submit measures to it, and ask its advice
and consent ; but if they cannot carry
them, the matter drops and they resign,
and others undertake the task. Practi-

1 History of Rome, vol. i. pp. 4JO-412.

cally, a private member cannot originate
a bill, or get it discussed, or procure its
passage, except with their consent. In-
deed, as a legislator he is always in a
certain sense an intruder. The function
of the two Houses is essentially, not the
drafting or proposing of laws, but seeing
that no law is passed which is not ex-
pedient and " constitutional ; " " consti-
tutional " being in the British sense what
the Romans meant by being in accord-
ance with the mos majorum and having
the approval of the auguries. The Brit-
ish ministry, in fact, legislates as well as
administers. Every bill is fathered by
the man who is engaged in the active
work of the department which it touches.
If it relate to the finances, it is framed
and introduced by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer ; if it relate to shipping, by
. the President of the Board of Trade ;
if to the army, by the Secretary of War,
and so on. Any private member who
should attempt to regulate these things
would be frowned down and silenced.
His business is to hear what the ministry
proposes, and to pass judgment on it.

Until the French Revolution there ex-
isted no real legislature in Europe except
that of England. After the sixteenth
century the Grand Council of Venice
had sunk into Insignificance. There was
in France, when the Revolution broke
out, hardly even a memory left of legisla-
tive or consulting bodies. Dumont tells
of his going to Paris in 1789, when the
country was busy trying to elect dele-
gates to the States General, and stopping
for breakfast at Montreuil - sur - Mer,
where he found that three days had been
wasted in confusion by the electors, be-
cause " they had never heard of such
things as a president, a secretary, or vot-
ing tickets." He and his friend, almost
by way of joke, drew up rules of pro-
cedure, for which the people were very
grateful and under which they acted. On
arriving in Paris, he found that the body
of the nation there saw nothing more in
the assembling of the States General

The Decline of Legislatures.

" than a means of diminishing taxes,"
and " the creditors of the state, so often
deprived of their dividends by a viola-
tion of public faith, considered the States
General as nothing more than a rampart
against a government bankruptcy." He
attended some meetings of the reform-
ers, which might be called caucuses, held
in private houses. In one at Brissot's
the subject under discussion was a con-
stitution or charter for the city of Paris.
A M. Palessit moved for a special ar-
ticle on " the right of representation,"
as " one of the most precious attributes
of liberty." Dumont and the Genevans
present thought of course he meant repre-
sentation in the legislature ; what he did
mean was the right of producing plays
at the theatre without the interference
of the censor.1 In short, the idea of a
legislating assembly, one might say, had
perished from the European continent*
It was less familiar to the peoples of
modern Europe than it had been to the
ancients.

The reason why the English have
been able to preserve what is called the
" cabinet system " in their proceedings —
that is, the dominance of the executive
officers in the deliberation of Parliament
— is, I need hardly say, historical. Par-
liaments maybe said to have originated as
a check on the royal authority. In the
House of Commons government was re-
presented by the king. The ministry
was emphatically his ministry ; the op-
position was held together partly by fear
and partly by dislike of him. It never
reached the point of seeking to take the
administration of the government out of
his hands or out of those of his officers,
except in the rebellion of 1640. Its high-
est ambition was to be consulted about
what was going to be done, and to be al-
lowed to ask questions about it and to
vote the money for it. It never thought
of taking on itself the function of ad-
ministration. It confined itself to the
exercise of a veto. The ministry never

1 Recollections of Mirabeau, pp. 61-65.

parted with its power of initiation, and
it strengthened its position by what may
be called the solidarity of the cabinet ;
that is, the practice of treating each act
of any particular minister as the act of
the whole body, and standing or falling
by it as such. The occasions have been
rare, in English history, in which any
one member has been surrendered to the
dissatisfaction or reprobation of the op-
position. When Puritan and Cavalier
were succeeded by Whig and Tory, or
Whig and Tory by Conservative and Lib-
eral, the new order merely substituted
one executive for another in the House
of Commons, and did not create a new
kind of executive. No matter what the
relative strength of parties in the coun-
try might be, the dominant party ap-
peared in the House of Commons sim-
ply as administrative officers, seeking
and taking advice and approval from
the representative body.

Now, the value of the preservation of
the consultative rather than the legisla-
tive function by the House of Commons,
the auctoritas and consilium rather than
the initiative, has been brought out more
clearly than ever by the history of legis-
lative bodies on the Continent since the
revival of popular government in 1848,
and by the history of legislatures in this
country since the war. The English House
of Commons, one may say, has grown up
under the consultative system. No other
system has ever been seen or thought of.
Private members have learnt to sit and
listen, to have their opinions asked for
on certain proposals, and, if their advice
is not taken, to seek their remedy in
choosing other agents. They act on all
proposals submitted by the ministry, in
parties, not singly. The experience of
three centuries has taught each member
to be of the same mind, in every case,
as those with whom he ordinarily agrees.
When the House of Commons was taken
as a model on the Continent, especially
after 1848, what was set up was not
really the English Parliament, but a set

The Decline of Legislatures.

of councils for discussion, in which every
man had the right of initiative, or, at all
events, the right to say his say without
sharing with any one the responsibility
for what he said. It was the Witenage-
mote, or the Landesgemeinde, or the town
meeting, over again. The new govern-
ments all had ministries, after the Eng-
lish fashion, but no one in the legisla-
ture felt bound to approve, or felt bound
to join others in disapproving, of their
policy. In other words, the cabinet sys-
tem did not take root in the political
manners. In his Journals, during a visit
to Turin in 1850, Senior records a con-
versation with Cesare Balbo, a member
of the Chamber in the first Piedmontese
Parliament, in which Balbo said, after
an exciting financial debate : " We have
not yet acquired parliamentary discipline.
Most of the members are more anxious
about their own crotchets or their own
consistency than about the country. The
ministry has a large nominal majority,
but every member of it is ready to put
them in a minority for any whim of his
own." 1 This was probably true of every
legislative body on the Continent, and it
continues true to this day in Italy, Greece,
France, Austria, Germany, and the new
Australian democracies.

Parliamentary discipline has not gained
in strength. On the contrary, the ten-
dency to give new men a taste of par-
liamentary life, which is very strong par-
ticularly in France and Italy, has stimu-
lated the disposition to form " groups,"
or to act independently. A man who
is likely to serve for only one term is
unwilling to sink himself either in the
ministerial majority or in the opposition.
He wishes to make a reputation for him-
self, and this he cannot do by voting
silently under a chief. A reputation has
to be made by openly expressed criticism,
or by open hostility, or by the individ-
ual exercise of the initiative. To make
an impression on his constituents, he
has to have a programme of his own
1 Senior's Journals, vol. i. p. 323.

and to push it, to identify himself with
some cause which the men in power
either ignore or treat too coolly. As a
rule, the Continental legislatures, while
modeled on the British or cabinet sys-
tem, have really not copied its most im-
portant feature, the dominance of the
executive in the legislative body. In
Austria and Germany, where the king
or emperor is still a power, this is not
so apparent, but in France and Italy
and in Australia, where the Parliament
is well-nigh omnipotent, the result is in-
cessant changes of ministry, and a great
deal of legislation, intended not so much
to benefit the country as to gather up
and hold a majority.

In America, we have never tried the
cabinet system, partly because our legis-
latures were started before this system
became fairly established in England,
and partly because, in colonial times, the
executive was never in thoroughly friend-
ly relations with the legislative depart-
ment of any colony. Americans entered
on their national existence with the only
sort of legislature that was then known,
a council of equals, where one man had
as much right to originate legislation as
another, subject, of course, to the general
policy of the party to which he belonged.
The device with which we have striven
to meet the confusion thus created is the
formation of committees to examine and
report upon every project of law sub-
mitted by individual members. Every
legislature, including Congress, is now
divided into these committees. With
the executive it has no open or official
relations, for purposes of discussion. No
executive officer is entitled of right to
address, or advise, or consult it. He is
exposed to constant criticism, but he
cannot explain or answer. His presence,
even, in the legislative chambers is an
intrusion. He can communicate in writ-
ing any information which the legisla-
ture demands, but this is the limit of his
relations with it. The President and
every governor of a State have the right

The Decline of Legislatures.

to send what we call " messages " to the
legislature, directing its attention to cer-
tain matters and recommending certain
action, but it is very rare for these recom-
mendations to have much effect. The
messages are rhetorical performances,
intended to give the public an idea of
the capacity and opinions of the writers
rather than to furnish a foundation for
law-making.

There is nothing more striking in our
system than the perfunctoriness which
has overtaken both these documents and
the party platforms, and there can be no
better illustration of the effect of the ab-
sence of the executive from the legisla-
tive chambers. If there were a ministry,
or if there were members of a cabinet
sitting in the chambers and charged with
the initiation of legislation, they would
naturally be charged also with the duty of
carrying out the President's or the Gov«
ernor's recommendations, and embody-
ing the party platform in laws. But
under the committee system nobody is
burdened with this duty, and after the
messages and platforms have been print-
ed they do not often receive any further
attention. Few can remember what a
party platform contains, a month after
its adoption, and it is very seldom that
any legislative notice is taken of it, ex-
cept by the opposition press, which oc-
casionally uses it to twit the party in
power with its inconsistency or negli-
gence. In fact, legislation, both in Con-
gress and in the state legislatures, may
be said to have become government by
committee. The individual member has
hardly more to do with it than is the
case in England. Yet this does not pre-
vent his making attempts to legislate.
He does not ask permission to introduce
bills, but he introduces them by thou-
sands every session. His right to legis-
late is recognized as good and valid, but
the rules which regulate the course of his
bill through the House make the right
of little more value than that of the
private member of the House of Com-

mons. His bill, as soon as it is preseni-
ed, passes into the custody of one of the
committees. He is not allowed to say a
word in its behalf, and he has no know-
ledge of what its fate will be. He is
literally cut off from debate no less by
the rules than by the Speaker's favor.
This functionary, by simply refusing to
see him, can condemn him to perpetual
silence, and has no hesitation in exercis-
ing his power to advance or retard such
business of the House as he approves or
dislikes.

It seems, at first sight, as if the pri-
vate member were in much the same
condition in America and in England.
In neither country is legislation within
his control. But there is this difference :
In England, the persons who take his
bill out of his hands, or refuse him per-
mission to introduce it, are themselves
engaged in the work of legislation. They
are responsible for the conduct of the
government. They profess to be supply-
ing all the legislation that is necessary.
They simply deny the private member any
participation in their work. In America,
the committee which takes his bill from
him and seals its fate is composed of his
own equals. They have no more to do
with the executive than he has. They
are no more charged with legislation on
any particular subject than he is. Their
main function is to examine and " re-
port," but whether they will ever report
is a matter entirely within their discre-
tion. They are not bound to substi-
tute anything for what they reject or
ignore. They have so much to pass
upon that their duty of initiation is re-
duced to a minimum. Moreover, when
they report favorably on any bill in their
custody, or originate one of their own,
they are not bound to allow full discus-
sion of it in the open House. All need-
ful discussion of it is supposed to have
taken place in their chamber. If any
one is allowed to say much about it in
the House, it is rather as a matter of
grace ; and unless he is an orator of re-

The Decline, of Legislatures.

putation, but few listen to him. Conse-
quently, there is in practice a wide dif-
ference between the control of legislation
in the British Parliament and the control
in our Congress. With us it is exercised
by an entirely different class of persons.
They are not accountable for the fate of
any bill. If they choose not to report
it, they are not bound to give their rea-
sons. The function of the British minis-
try is to provide the necessary legislation,
and as a rule the ministry is composed
of men well known to the public and of
more than usual experience. The func-
tion of the American committee, on the
other hand, is simply to sift or impede
the efforts of a large assembly, composed
of persons of equal authority, to pass
laws, with the execution of which, if
they were passed, they would have no-
thing to do. As everybody has a right
to introduce bills, without being in any
way responsible for their working, there
must be some power to examine, revise,
choose, or reject, and this need is sup-
plied by the committee system.1

The great change in the position and
powers of the Speaker in Congress and
in all American legislatures has been due
to the same causes as the institution of
the committees. He has been changed
from his prototype, the judicial officer
who presides over debates in the House
of Commons, into something like the
European prime minister, so that he has
charge of the legislation of his party.
He appoints the various committees, and
can in this way make himself feared or
courted by ^members. By his power of
" recognitiok " he can consign any mem-
ber to obscurity. He can encourage or
hinder a committee in any species of legis-
lation. He can* check or promote extra-
vagance. He makes no pretension to im-
partiality : he professes simply to be as
impartial as a man can be who has to look
after the interests of his own party and

1 The working of this system and the actual
functions of the Speaker are well described in
Wilson's Congressional Government, and in Misa

see that its " policy " is carried out. In
fact, he differs but little from the "lead-
er" of the House of Commons, except that
he has nothing to do with the execution
of the laws after he has helped to make
them. He may have to hand them over
to a hostile Senate or to a hostile exec-
utive, after he has secured their passage
in his own assembly, and the country
does not hold him responsible for them.
No matter how badly they may work, the
blame is laid, not on him, but on " the
House " or on the party. He has no-
thing personal to fear from their failure,
however active he may have been in se-
curing their enactment. But the steady
acquiescence in his increased assumption
of power in every session of Congress
or of the legislatures is clearly an ad-
mission that modern democratic legisla-
tures are unfit for the work of legislation.
We attach importance to stronger and
more imperative leadership than has been
provided by any constitution.

There are two committees which may
be said to be charged with the work of
legislation, and these are the Committee
of Ways and Means and the Commit-
tee on Appropriations. But neither of
them supplies what may be called a" bud-
get ; " that is, a statement of necessary
expenditure and of probable revenue.
These calculations are made, it is true, in
the various administrative offices, but
the committees are not bound to take
notice of them. The Committee of Ways
and Means fixes the revenue, as a rule,
mainly with regard to the state of pub-
lic opinion touching the principal source
of revenue, the taxes on imports. If the
public is deemed to be at that moment
favorable to protection, these taxes are
put high ; if favorable to free trade, they
are put low. The relation to the public
outlay is not made the chief considera-
tion. In other words, " taxation for re-
venue only " is not an art practiced by

Follett's Speaker of the House of Representa-
tives.

The Decline of Legislatures.

either party. Taxation is avowedly prac-
ticed as the art of encouraging domestic
industry in some degree. The Commit-
tee on Appropriations has no relations
with the Ways and Means Committee.
It does not concern itself about income.
It adds to the necessary expenditure
of the government such further expen-
diture as is likely to be popular, as for
river and harbor improvements and for
pensions. In this way, neither commit-
tee is responsible for a deficit, for neither
is bound to make ends meet.

This absence of connection between
the levying and the spending authorities
would work speedy ruin in any Europe-
an government. The danger or incon-
venience of it here has been concealed
by the very rapid growth of the country
in wealth and population, and the result-
ing rapid increase of the revenue under
all circumstances. It is not too much to
say that the first serious deficiency of
revenue was experienced on the out-
break of the civil war. After the war,
there was no difficulty in meeting all
reasonable expenses until the yearly re-
curring and increasing surplus bred the
frame of mind about expenditure which
led to enormous appropriations for pen-
sions and domestic improvements. These
have at last brought about, and for the
first time in American history, a real
difficulty in devising sources of revenue.
At this writing the question under debate
is what taxes will be most popular in the
country, when it ought to be what taxes
will bring in most income. This has been
largely due to the appropriations for pur-
poses not absolutely necessary, but the
Committee of Ways and Means is com-
pelled to treat them as if they were le-
gitimate expenses. This separation be-
tween the power which lays taxes and
the power which spends them is proba-
bly the boldest of our experiments, and
one which has never before been tried.
Its inconveniences are likely to be felt
increasingly, as the habits bred by easy
circumstances become more fixed.

The tendency to lavish expenditure
has been stimulated, too, by the tempta-
tion of the protective system to make a
large revenue collected from duties on
imports seem necessary. All govern-
ments are prone to make taxation serve
some other purpose than to raise reve-
nue ; that is, to foster or maintain some
sort of polity. It was used for ages to
promote inequality ; now it is frequently
used to promote certain special interests.
In England, the import duties on corn
were meant to benefit the landed inter-
est and foster large estates. In Ameri-
ca, the duties on imports are meant to
benefit native manufactures indirectly ;
but by showing that they are also essen-
tial to the government, a great deal of
the opposition to them as a benefit to
the manufacturers is disarmed. In no
way can the needs of the government be
made so conspicuous as hy keeping the
treasury empty. Since protection for
industry was, after the war, incorporated
in the fiscal system of the government,
therefore, it has begotten extravagance
almost as an inevitable accompaniment.
The less money there is on hand, the
higher does it seem that duties ought to
be ; and the way to keep little on hand
is to spend freely.

The difficulty of getting rid of the
protective system, in any modern coun-
try, is to be found in part in the growth of
democracy. To the natural man, protec-
tion for his products against competition is
one of the primary duties of government.
Every citizen or mechanic would fain
keep the neighboring market to himself,
if he could. The shoemaker wishes to
make all the shoes of his village, the
carpenter to do all the carpentering.
In fact, protection is the economical
creed which the " uninstructed political
economist" always lays hold of first.
Its benefits seem clearest, and its opera-
tion in his own interest is most visible
and direct. This undoubtedly goes far to
account for, the failure of the free-trade
theory to make more way in the world

The Decline of Legislatures.

since the days of its early apostles. The
arguments by which it is supported are
a little too abstract and complex for the
popular mind. The consequence is that
a distinct revival of protectionism has
accompanied the spread of popular gov-
ernment both in Europe and Australia,
and in this country. The use of the gov-
ernment to keep the market for his pro-
ducts, and the theory that the market is
a privilege for the seller which he ought
not to be expected to share with an alien,
will long meet with ready acceptance
from the workingman ; so that the pro-
tective system will probably pass away
only under the influence, whether acci-
dental or intentional, of a signal prosper-
ity, — which is clearly not due to the
system. Whatever be its industrial or
economical merits or demerits, its effect
politically, in stimulating expenditure in
the United States, has been plain ; and
as long as taxpayers respond so readily
to pecuniary demands on them as they
have always hitherto done, close calcula-
tion of outgoings and incomings will not
be easy to bring about. At present, the
" elasticity " of our revenue, owing to
the rapid increase of our population and
the magnitude of our undeveloped re-
sources, is one of the great wonders of
European financiers, and renders the edu-
cation of financial experts difficult. Any
source of taxation which even the most
inexperienced of our economists reaches
is apt to pour forth results so abundant-
ly as to make the caution, the anxiety,
and the nice adjustments on which the
financial system of the Old World is
based appear unnecessary or even ridicu-
lous.

But the most serious defect in the com-
mittee system, and the one that is hardest
to remedy, is the stopper it puts on de-
bate. The objection is often made, and
with a show of reason, to the cabinet
system, and its practice of deciding things
only after open discussion, that it un-
duly stimulates mere talk, and postpones
actual business for the purpose of allow-

ing a large number of persons to state
arguments which are found not to be
worth listening to and which have no
real influence on the results. This is
true, in particular, of all countries in
which, as on the Continent, an attempt
has been made to govern assemblies with-
out parliamentary discipline and without
practice in acting by parties rather than
singly or in groups. Various forms of
" closure " have been invented in order
to check this habit. It may be found in
an extreme degree in our own Senate,
which has no closure, and in which ir-
relevant speeches are inflicted by the
hour, and even by the day, on unwilling
listeners. But our demand on legisla-
tive bodies for " business " has carried
us to the other extreme, which may be
seen in the House of Representatives.
There is nothing, after all, more impor-
tant to the modern world than that the
intelligence and character of the nation
should find their way into the legisla-
tures ; and for this purpose the legisla-
tures should be made something more
than scenes of obscurity, hard work, and
small pay. The English House of Com-
mons owed its attractiveness for two cen-
turies, in spite of the non-payment of
members, to the fact that it was " the
pleasantest club in Europe." It was
also a place in which any member, how-
ever humble his beginnings, had a chance
to make fame as an orator. In recent
days, legislatures in all the democratic
countries have been made repulsive to
men of mark by the pains taken " to get
business done " and to keep down the
flood of speech. Everybody who enters
a legislature now for the first time, espe-
cially if he is a man of talent and char-
acter, is bitterly disappointed by find-
ing that the rules take from him nearly
every opportunity of distinction, and, in
addition, condemn him to a great deal
of obscure drudgery. It is only by the
rarest chance that he finds an opening
to speak, and his work on the commit-
tees never shows itself to the public. It

The Decline of Legislatures.

consists largely in passing on the mer-
its of the thousands of schemes concoct-
ed by inexperienced or ignorant men,
and has really some resemblance to a
college professor's reading of " themes."
In fact, the committee room may be
called the grave of honorable ambition.
We find, accordingly, that only few men
of real capacity, who have once gone to
the legislature or to Congress, are will-
ing to return for a second term, simply
because they find the work disagreeable
and the reward inadequate ; for it is one
of the commonplaces of politics that, in
every country, the number of able men
who will serve the public without either
pay or distinction is very small. Even
the most patriotic must have one or the
other ; and to set up legislatures, as all
the democratic countries have done, in
which no one can look for either, is an
experiment fraught with danger. If I
am not greatly mistaken, the natural re-
sult is beginning to show itself. There
is not a country in the world, living
under parliamentary government, which
has not begun to complain of the decline
in the quality of its legislators. More and
more, it is said, the work of governments
is falling into the hands of men to whom
even small pay is important, and who
are suspected of adding to their income
by corruption. The withdrawal of the
more intelligent class from legislative du-
ties is more and more lamented, and the
complaint is somewhat justified by the
mass of crude, hasty, incoherent, and un-
necessary laws which are poured on the
world at every session. It is increasingly
difficult to-day to get a man of serious
knowledge on any subject to go to Con-
gress, if he have other pursuits and other
sources of income. To get him to go to
the state legislature, in any of the pop-
ulous and busy States, is well-nigh impos-
sible. If he has tried the experiment
once, and is unwilling to repeat it, and
you ask him why, he will answer that the
secret committee work was repulsive ;
that the silence and the inability to ac-

complish anything, imposed on him by
the rules, were disheartening ; and that
the difficulty of communicating with his
constituents, or with the nation at large,
through the spoken and reported word,
deprived him of all prospects of being
rewarded by celebrity.

It is into the vacancies thus left that
the boss steps with full hands. He sum-
mons from every quarter needy young
men, and helps them to get into places
where they will be able to add to their
pay by some sort of corruption, however
disguised, — perhaps rarely direct bri-
bery, but too often blackmail or a share in
jobs ; to whom it is not necessary that the
legislature should be an agreeable place,
so long as it promises a livelihood. This
system is already working actively in
some States ; it is spreading to others,
and is most perceptible in the great cen-
tres of affairs. It is an abuse, too, which
in a measure creates what it feeds upon.
The more legislatures are filled with bad
characters, the less inducement there is
for men of a superior order to enter
them ; for it is true of every sort of pub-
lic service, from the army up to the cabi-
net, that men are influenced as to enter-
ing it by the kind of company they will
have to keep. The statesman will not
associate with the boy, if he can help it,
especially in a work in which conference
and persuasion play a large part.

If it be true that the character and
competency of legislators are declining,
the evil is rendered all the more serious
by the fact that the general wealth has
increased enormously within the present
century. Down to the French Revolu-
tion, and we might almost say down to
1848, the western world, speaking broad-
ly, was ruled by the landholding or rich
class. Its wealth consisted mainly of
land, and the owners of the land carried
on the government. In commercial com-
munities, like Genoa or Venice, or the
Hanse Towns, the governing class was
made up of merchants, but it was still
the rich class. Within fifty years a great

The Decline of Legislatures.

change has occurred. The improvement
in communication has brought all the
land of the world into the great mar-
kets, and as a result the landowners have
ceased to be the wealthy, and the demo-
cratic movement has taken the govern-
ment away from them. From the hands
of the wealthy, the power, as a rule, has
passed or is passing into the hands of
men to whom the salary of a legislator
is an object of some consequence, and
who are more careful to keep in touch
with their constituents than to afford ex-
amples of scientific government, even if
they were capable of it. Probably no
greater revolution has taken place any-
where, during the past century, than this
change in the governing class. It can-
not be said, in the light of history, that
the new men are giving communities
worse government than they used to have,
but government in their hands is not
progressing in the same ratio as the other
arts of civilization, while the complexity
of the interests to be dealt with is stead-
ily increasing. Science and literature are
making, and have made, much more con-
spicuous advances than the management
of common affairs. Less attention is
given to experience than formerly, while
the expectation of some new idea, in
which the peculiarities of human nature
will have much slighter play, is becom-
ing deeper and more widespread.

No effect of this passage of legislative
work into less instructed hands is more
curious than the great stimulus it has
given to legislation itself. Legislators
now, apparently, would fain have the field
of legislation as wide as it was in the
Middle Ages. The schemes for the regu-
lation of life by law, which are daily
submitted to the committees by aspiring
reformers, are innumerable. One legis-
lator in Kansas was seeking all last win-
ter to procure the enactment of the Ten
Commandments. In Nebraska, another
has sought to legislate against the wear-
ing of corsets by women. Constant ef-
forts are made to limit the prices of

things, to impose fresh duties on com-
mon carriers, to restrain the growth of
wealth, to promote patriotic feeling by
greater use of symbols, or in some man-
ner to improve public morals by artifi-
cial restraints. There is no legislature
in America which does not contain mem-
bers anxious to right some kind of wrong,
or afford some sort of aid to human char-
acter, by a bill. Sometimes the bill is in-
troduced to oblige a constituent, in full
confidence that it will never leave the
committee room ; at others, to rectify
some abuse or misconduct which hap-
pens to have come under the legislator's
eye. Sometimes, again, the greater ac-
tivity of one member drives into legisla-
tion another who had previously looked
forward to a silent session. " The
laurels of Miltiades will not let him
sleep." Then it has to be borne in mind
that, under the committee system, which
has been faithfully copied from Congress
in all the legislatures, the only way in
which a member can make his constit-
uents aware that he is trying to earn
his salary is by introducing bills. It
does not much matter that they are not
finished pieces of legislation, or that
there is but little chance of their passage.
Their main object is to convince the dis-
trict that its representative is awake and
active, and has an eye to its interests.
The practice of " log-rolling," too, has
become a fixed feature in the procedure
of nearly all the legislatures ; that is, of
making one member's support of another
member's bill conditional on his receiv-
ing the other member's support for his
own. In the attempted revolt against the
boss, during the recent senatorial elec-
tion in New York, a good many mem-
bers who avowed their sense of Platt's
unfitness for the Senate acknowledged
that they could not vote against him
openly, because this would cause the de-
feat of local measures in which they
were interested. This recalls the fact
that many even of the best men go to the
legislature for one or two terms, not so

The Decline of Legislatures.

much to serve the public as to secure the
passage of bills in which they, or the vo-
ters of their district, have a special con-
cern. Their anxiety about these makes
their subserviency to the majority com-
pletg, on larger questions, however it is
controlled. You vote for an obviously
unfit man for Senator, for instance, be-
cause you cannot risk the success of a
bill for putting up a building, or erect-
ing a bridge, or opening a new street,
in your own town. You must give and
take. These men are reinforced by a
large number by whom the service is ren-
dered for simple livelihood. The spoils
doctrine — that public office is a prize, or
a " plum," rather than a public trust —
has effected a considerable lodgment in
legislation. Not all receive their places
as the Massachusetts farmer received his
membership in the legislature, a few
years ago, because he had lost some cows
by lightning, but a formidable number —
young lawyers, farmers carrying heavy
mortgages, men without regular occupa-
tion and temporarily out of a job — find
service in the legislature, even for one
term, an attractive mode of tiding over
the winter.

The mass of legislation or attempts at
legislation due to this state of affairs is
something startling. I have been unable
to obtain records of the acts and resolu-
tions of all the States for the same year.
I am obliged to take those of Arkansas
for the year 1893, four other States for
1894, ten for 1896, and the rest for 1895.
But I have taken only one year for each
State. The total of such acts and re-
solutions is 15,730, and this is for a
population of 70,000,000. In addition,
Congress in 1895-96 passed 457 acts
and resolutions. But the amount of work
turned out is really not very surprising,
when we consider the number of the legis-
lators. There are no less than 447 nation-
al legislators and 6578 state legislators,
— in all 7025, exclusive of county, city,
and all other local authorities capable
of passing rules or ordinances. At this

ratio of legislators to population, 4000 at
least would be engaged on the laws of
Great Britain, without any provision for
India and the colonies, 3800 on those
of France, about 5000 on those of Ger-
many, and 3000 on those of Italy. It
will be easily seen what a draft this is on
the small amount of legislative capacity
which every community contains. No-
thing like it has ever been seen in the
history of the world. There is no coun-
try which has yet shown itself capable of
producing more than one small first-class
legislative assembly. We undertake to
keep going forty-five for the States alone,
besides those for Territories. All these
assemblies, too, have to do with interests
of the highest order. As a general rule,
in all governments the chief legislative
body is entrusted with the highest func-
tions. Its jurisdiction covers the weight-
iest interests of the people who live un-
der it. The protection of life and pro-
perty, the administration of civil and
criminal justice, and the imposition of
the taxes most severely felt are among
its duties. All minor bodies exist as its
subordinates or agents, and exercise only
such powers as it is pleased to delegate
to them. This brings to the superior as-
sembly, as a matter of course, the lead-
ing men of the country, and by far the
larger share of popular attention. In
the formation of our federal Constitu-
tion, this division, based on relative im-
portance to the community, was not pos-
sible. The States surrendered as little
as they could. The federal government
took what it could get, and only what
seemed absolutely necessary to the cre-
ation of a nation. The consequence is
that, though Congress appears to be the
superior body, it is not really so. It is
more conspicuous, and, if I may use the
word, more picturesque, but it does not
deal with a larger number of serious pub-
lic interests. The States have reserved
to themselves the things which most con-
cern a man's comfort and security as a
citizen. The protection of his property,

The Decline of Legislatures.

the administration of civil and criminal
justice, the interpretation of contracts
and walls, and the creation and regulation
of municipalities are all within their ju-
risdiction. Most of the inhabitants pass
their lives without once coining into con-
tact with federal authority. As a result,
an election to Congress is only seeming
political promotion. It gives the candi-
date more dignity and importance, but
he really has less to do with the every-
day happiness of his fellow citizens than
the state legislator. If he were deprived
of the power of raising and lowering the
duties on foreign imports and of bick-
ering with foreign powers, his influence
on the daily life of Americans would be
comparatively small. When he goes to
Washington, he finds himself in a larger
and more splendid sphere, but charged
with less of important governmental
work. The grave political functions of
the country are discharged in the state
legislatures, but as a rule by inferior men.
In so far as Congress makes a draft on
the legislative capacity of the nation, it
makes it at the expense of the local gov-
ernments.

For this anomaly it would be difficult
to suggest a remedy. The division of
powers between the Confederation and
the States, though not a logical one, was
probably the only possible one • at the
time it was made. The main work of
government was left to the States, but by
its conspicuousness the field at Washing-
ton was made more attractive to men of
talent and energy in politics ; so that it
may be said that we give an inordinate
share of OUT parliamentary ability to af-
fairs which concern us in only a minor
degree. This, however, can hardly be
considered as the result of a democrat-
ic tendency. The federal arrangement
has really nothing to do with democra-
cy. It was made as the only practicable
mode of bringing several communities
into peaceful relations, and enabling them
to face the world as a nation, though it
might as readily have beerix the work of

aristocracies as of democracies ; but in
so far as it has in any degree lowered
the character of legislative bodies, demo-
cracy has been made and will be made
to bear the blame.

This opinion has been strengthened
by the discredit which has overtaken two
very prominent features of the federal
arrangement, — the election of the Pre-
sident by the electoral college, and the
election of Senators by the state legisla-
tures. The fact is that the complete disuse
of their electoral functions within forty
years after the adoption of the Constitu-
tion was one of the most striking illus-
trations that history affords of the fu-
tility of political prophecy. Here is the
judgment on this feature of their work
by the framers of the Constitution, as
set forth in The Federalist : —

" As the select assemblies for choosing
the President, as well^as the state legis-
latures who appoint the Senators, will in
general be composed of the most en-
lightened and respectable citizens, there
is reason to presume that their attention
and their votes will be directed to those
men only who have become the most dis-
tinguished by their abilities and virtue,
and in whom the people perceive just
grounds for confidence. The Constitu-
tion manifests very particular attention
to this object. By excluding men under
thirty-five from the first office, and those
under thirty from the second, it confines
the electors to men of whom the people
have had time to form a judgment, and
with respect to whom they will not be
liable to be deceived by those brilliant
appearances of genius and patriotism
which, like transient meteors, sometimes
mislead as well as dazzle. If the obser-
vation be well founded, that wise kings
will always be served by able ministers,
it is fair to argue that as an assembly
of select electors possess, in a greater de-
gree than kings, the means of extensive
and accurate information relative to men
and characters, so will their appoint-
ments bear at least equal marks of dis-

The, Decline of Legislatures.

cretion and discernment. The inference
is that President and Senators so chosen
will always be of the number of those
who best understand our national inter-
ests, whether considered in relation to
the several States or to foreign nations,
who are best able to promote those in-
terests, and whose reputation for integri-
ty inspires and merits confidence. With
such men the power of making treaties
may be safely lodged." 1

And here is the opinion of the earli-
est and most philosophic of our foreign
observers, M. de Tocqueville : —

" When you enter the House of Re-
presentatives at Washington, you are
struck with the vulgar aspect of this
great assembly. The eye looks often in
vain for a celebrated man. Nearly all
its members are obscure personages,
whose names suggest nothing to the mind.
They are for the most part village law-
yers, dealers, or even men belonging
to the lowest classes. In a country in
which education is almost universal, it
is said there are representatives of the
people who cannot always write cor-
rectly. Two steps away opens the hall
of the Senate, whose narrow area in-
closes a large part of the celebrities of
America. One hardly sees there a sin-
gle man who does not recall the idea of
recent fame. They are eloquent advo-
cates, or distinguished generals, or able
magistrates, or well-known statesmen.
Every word uttered in this great assem-
bly would do honor to the greatest par-
liamentary debates in Europe.

" Whence comes this strange con-
trast ? Why does the elite of the na-
tion find itself in one of these halls
more than in the other ? Why does the
first assembly unite so many vulgar ele-
ments, while the second seems to have
a monopoly of talents and intelligence ?
Both emanate from the people and both
are the product of universal suffrage,
and no voice, until now, has been raised
in the United States to say that the
1 The Federalist, No. LXIII.

Senate was the enemy of popular inter-
ests. Whence comes, then, this enor-
mous difference ? I see only one fact
which explains it: the election which
produces the House of Representatives
is direct ; that which produces the Sen-
ate is submitted to two degrees. The
whole of the citizens elect the legisla-
ture of each State, "and the federal Con-
stitution, transforming these legislatures
in their turn into electoral bodies, draws
from them the members of the Senate.
The Senators, then, express, although in-
directly, the result of the popular vote ;
for the legislature, which names the Sen-
ators, is not an aristocratic or privileged
body, which derives its electoral rights
from itself ; it depends eventually on the
whole of the citizens. It is, in general,
elected by them every year, and they
can always govern its decisions by elect-
ing new members. But the popular will
has only to pass through this chosen as-
sembly to shape itself in some sort, and
issue from it in a nobler and finer form.
The men thus elected represent, then,
always exactly the majority of the na-
tion which governs ; but they represent
only the more elevated ideas which cir-
culate among them, the generous in-
stincts which animate them, and not the
small passions which often agitate them
and the vices which disgrace them. It
is easy to foresee a time when the Amer-
ican Republic will be forced to multiply
the two degrees in their electoral sys-
tem, on pain of wrecking themselves
miserably on the shores of democracy.
I do not hesitate to avow it. I see in
the double electoral degree the only
means of bringing political liberty with-
in the reach of all classes of the people.
Those who wish to make of it the ex-
clusive weapon of a party, and those
who fear it, seem to me to fall into the
same error." 2

It is more than half a century since
the electoral college, thus vaunted by its
inventors, exerted any influence in the

a De la Democratic en Ame'rique, t. ii. p. 53.

The Decline of Legislatures.

choice of the President. An attempt on
the part of one of its members to use
his own judgment in the matter would
be treated as an act of the basest trea-
chery. It has become a mere voting ma-
chine in the hands of the party. The
office of " elector " has become an emp-
ty honor, accorded to such respectable
members of the party as are unfit for,
or do not desire, any more serious place.
The candidates for the presidency are
now chosen by a far larger body, which
was never dreamed of by the makers
of the Constitution, rarely bestows any
thought on fitness as compared with
popularity, and sits in the presence of
an immense crowd which, though it does
not actually take part in its proceedings,
seeks to influence its decisions by every
species of noise and interruption. In
fact, all show of deliberation has been
abandoned by it. Its action is settled
beforehand by a small body of men sit-
ting in a private room. The choice of
the delegates is prescribed, and may be
finally made under the influence of a se-
cretly conducted intrigue, of a " deal,"
or of a wild outburst of enthusiasm
known as a " stampede." A more thor-
ough departure from the original idea
of the electoral college could hardly be
imagined than the modern nominating
convention. It exemplifies again the un-
fitness of a large body of equals, with-
out discipline or leadership, for any de-
liberative duty. As little as possible of
the work of the convention is left to the
convention itself. When the proceedings
begin in the general assembly, each de-
legate, as a rule, knows what he is to do.
When the members break away from this
inner control, under a sudden impulse,
as at Chicago in 1896, they are quite
likely to nominate a completely unknown
man like Bryan through admiration for
something like his " cross of gold " me-
taphor, which throws no light whatever
on his fitness for the office. The last
two conventions illustrated strikingly
the two dangers of these enormous as-

semblies. The one at Chicago nominat-
ed a man of whom the mass of the nation
had never heard, and the other simply
registered a decision which had been
carefully prepared by politicians a year
or two beforehand. In neither case was
there anything which could be called de-
liberation.

Much the same phenomena are to be
witnessed in the case of the election of
Senators by state legislatures. The ma-
chinery on which Tocqueville relied so
confidently, the use of which he expect-
ed to see spread, has completely broken
down. The legislators have not continued
to be the kind of men he describes, and
their choice is not governed by the mo-
tives he looked for. There is no longer
such a thing as deliberation by the legis-
latures over the selection of the Senators.
The candidate is selected by others, who
do not sit in the legislature at all, and
they supply the considerations which are
to procure him his election. He is given
the place either on account of his past
electioneering services to the party, or on
account of the largeness of his contribu-
tions to its funds. The part he will play
in the Senate rarely receives any atten-
tion. The anticipations of the framers of
the Constitution, as set forth in the pas-
sage from The Federalist which I have
quoted, have been in no way fulfilled.
The members of the legislature, as a gen-
eral rule, when acting as an electoral col-
lege, are very different from those whom
the fathers of the republic looked for.
In fact, the break-down of their system
is widespread, and appears to have ex-
erted such a deteriorating influence on
the character of the Senate that we are
witnessing the beginnings of an agita-
tion for the election of Senators by the
popular vote. Yet it is plain to be seen
that no change whatever in the quality
of the candidates can be expected from
this as long as our nominating system
remains what it is. The same persons
who now prescribe to the legislature
whom to elect would then prescribe to

The Decline of Legislatures.

the party whom to elect, and their orders
would be only occasionally disobeyed by
means of a popular " rising," when the
candidate's unfitness became more than
usually conspicuous.

II.

Why thd founders and Tocqueville
were mistaken about the double election
as a check is easily explained. The
founders knew little or nothing about
democracy except what they got from
Greek and Roman history ; Tocqueville
saw it at work only before the Eng-
lish traditions had lost their force. De-
mocracy really means a profound belief
in the wisdom as well as the power of
the majority, not on certain occasions,
but at whatever time it is consulted.
All through American history this idea
has had to struggle for assertion with
the inherited political habits of the An-
glo-Saxon race, which made certain
things " English " or " American " just
as to the Romans certain things were
" Roman," for no reason that could be
easily stated except that they were prac-
tices or beliefs of long standing. In
England these habits have always com-
posed what is called "the British Consti-
tution," and in America they have made
certain rights seem immemorial or in-
alienable, such as the right to a speedy
trial by jury, the right to compensation
for property taken for public use, the
right to the decision of all matters in
controversy by a court. This vague and
ill-defined creed existed before any con-
stitution, and had to be embodied in
every constitution. The nearest approach
to a name for it, in both countries, is the
" common law," or customs of the race,
of which, however, since it formed or-
ganized civilized societies, the courts of
justice have always been the fountains
or exponents. "We have had to ask the
judges in any given case what the " com-
mon law " is, there being no written
statement of it. It was consequently a
comparatively easy matter, in America,

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 4

to get all questions in any way affecting
the life, liberty, or property of individuals
put into a fundamental law, to be inter-
preted by the courts. Against this no-
tion of the fitness of things, democracy,
or the wisdom of the majority, has beaten
its head in vain. That it should be
hindered or delayed in carrying out its
will by a written instrument, expounded
and applied by judges, has, therefore, al-
ways seemed natural.

In all the countries of Continental Eu-
rope, at the beginning of this century, it
would have appeared a scandal or an ano-
maly that everybody should be liable to
be called into court, no matter what of-
fice he held, on the plaint of a private
man. With us the thing has always
been a simple and inherent part of our
system. But in the matter of appoint-
ment to office, which could have no effect
upon or relation to private rights, pure
democracy has never shown any dispo-
sition to be checked or gainsaid. It has
never shown any inclination to treat pub-
lic officers, from kings down, as other
than its servants or the agents of its
will. It revolted very early against
Burke's definition of its representatives,
as statesmen set to exercise their best
judgment in watching over the people's
interests. The democratic theory of the
representative has always been that he
is a delegate sent to vote, not for what
he thinks best, but for what his constit-
uents think best, even if it controverts
his own opinion. The opposition to this
view has been both feeble and incon-
stant ever since the early years of the cen-
tury. The " delegate " theory has been
gaining ground in England, and in
America has almost completely succeed-
ed in asserting its sway, so that we have
seen many cases recently in which mem-
bers of Congress have openly declared
their dissent from the measures for which
they voted in obedience to their constit-
uents.

It was this determination not to be
checked in the selection of officers, but to

The Decline of Legislatures.

make the people's will act directly on all
nominations, which led to the early re-
pudiation of the electoral college. That
college was the device of those who
doubted the wisdom and knowledge of
the majority. But the majority was de-
termined that in no matter within its
jurisdiction should its wisdom and know-
ledge be questioned. It refused to ad-
mit that if it was competent to choose
electors and members of Congress, it was
not competent to choose the President.
It accordingly set the electoral college
ruthlessly aside at a very early period
in the history of the republic. Tocque-
ville's idea that, in recognition of its own
weakness and incompetence, it would
spread the system of committing the ap-
pointing power to small select bodies of
its own people, shows how far he was
from comprehending the new force which
had come into the world, and which he
was endeavoring to analyze through ob-
servation of its working in American in-
stitutions.

It may seem at first sight as if this
explanation does not apply to the fail-
ures of the legislatures to act upon their
own judgment in the election of Sena-
tors. But the election of Senators has
run exactly the same course as the nom-
ination of Presidents ; the choice has been
taken out of the hands of the legislatures
by the political party, and in each polit-
ical party the people are represented by
its managers, or " the machine," as it is
called. They insist on nominating, or,
if in a majority, on electing the Sena-
tors, just as they insist on nominating,
or, if in a majority, on electing the Presi-
dent. Nearly every legislator is elected
now with a view to the subsequent elec-
tion of the Senators whenever there is a
vacancy. His choice is settled for him
beforehand. The casting of his vote is a
mere formality, like the vote of the presi-
dential electors. The man he selects for
the place is the man already selected by
the party. With this man's goodness
or badness, fitness or unfitness, he does

not consider that he has anything to do.
'Nothing can less resemble the legisla-
ture which filled the imagination of the
framers of the Constitution than a legis-
lature of our time assembled in joint
convention to elect a Senator. It has
hardly one of the characteristics which
the writers of The Federalist ascribed
to their ideal ; it is little affected by any
of the considerations which these gentle-
men supposed would be predominant with
it. This has already led to the begin-
nings of an agitation for the direct elec-
tion of Senators by the people ; but such
election, as I have tried to show, would
really, as long as our present system of
nomination continues, have very little or
no effect on the situation. The result of
their election by the people would be in
no respect different from the result of
their present election by the legislature,
except in the omission of the legislative
formality. They would still be designat-
ed by the party managers, and the choice
of the party managers would be set aside
by the public only on rare occasions.

Any change, to be effective, must be a
change in the mode of nomination. All
attempts to limit or control the direct
choice of the people, such as the use of
the lot or of election by several degrees,
as in Venice, must fail, and all machin-
ery created for the purpose will probably
pass away by evasion, if not by legisla-
tion. The difficulties of constitutional
amendment are so great that it will be
long before any legal change is made in
the mode of electing Senators. It is not
unsafe to assume that if any change be
made in the mode of nomination, one of
its first uses will be the practical impo-
sition on all legislatures of the duty of
electing to the Senate persons already
designated by the voters at the polls. It
must not be forgotten that democracy
has everywhere only recently begun to
rule, and that it is reveling in the enjoy-
ment of the power which has now first
come into its hands, and which it most
envied kings and emperors through long

The Decline of Legislatures.

ages, — the power, that is, of appointing
to high offices. It is this novelty more
than aught else which fills all democratic
lands with a rage for place, and makes
the masses resent any attempt to inter-
fere with their freedom of choice. The
pleasure of seeing every place accessible
to any sort of man is one which will
decline but slowly, and will not be ex-
hausted completely without some long
experience of its disastrous effects ; so
that we can hardly expect any very sud-
den change.

As regards the state legislators them-
selves, it is well to remember that all
political prophets require nearly as much
time as the Lyell school of geologists.
It is difficult enough to foresee what
change will come about, but it is still
more difficult to foretell how soon it will
come about. No writer on politics should
forget that it took five hundred years
for Rome to fall, and fully a thousand
years to educe modern Europe from the
mediaeval chaos. That the present le-
gislative system of democracy will not
last long there are abundant signs, but
in what way it will be got rid of, or
what will take its place, or how soon
democratic communities will utterly tire
of it, he would be a very rash speculator
who would venture to say confidently.
The most any one can do is to point out
the tendencies which are likely to have
most force, and to which the public seems
to turn most hopefully.

At present, as far as one can see, the
democratic world is filled with distrust
and dislike of its parliaments, and sub-
mits to them only under the pressure of
stern necessity. The alternative appears
to be a dictatorship, but probably the
world will not see another dictator chosen
for centuries, if ever. Democracies do
not admit that this is an alternative, nor
do they admit that legislatures, such as
we see them, are the last thing they have
to try. They seem to be getting tired
of the representative system. In no
country is it receiving the praises it re-

ceived forty years ago. There are signs
of a strong disposition, which the Swiss
have done much to stimulate, to try the
" referendum " more frequently, on a
larger scale, as a mode of enacting laws.
One of the faults most commonly found
in the legislatures, as I have already
said, is the fault of doing too much. I
do not think I exaggerate in saying that
all the busier States in America, in which
most capital is concentrated and most
industry carried on, witness every meet-
ing of the state legislature with anxiety
and alarm. I have never heard such a
meeting wished for or called for by a se-
rious man outside the political class. It
creates undisguised fear of some sort of
interference with industry, some sort of
legislation for the benefit of one class, or
the trial of some hazardous experiment
in judicial or administrative procedure,
or in public education or taxation. There
is no legislature to-day which is controlled
by scientific methods, or by the opinion
of experts in jurisprudence or political
economy. Measures devised by such
men are apt to be passed with exceed-
ing difficulty, while the law is rendered
more and more uncertain by the enor-
mous number of acts passed on all sorts
of subjects.

Nearly every State has taken a step to-
wards meeting this danger by confining
the meeting of its legislature to every
second year. It has said, in other words,
that it must have less legislation. In
no case that I have heard of has the op-
position to this change come from any
class except the one that is engaged in
the working of political machinery ; that
is, in the nomination or election of can-
didates and the filling of places. The
rest of the community, as a rule, hails it
with delight. People are beginning to
ask themselves why legislatures should
meet even every second year ; why once
in five years would not be enough. An
examination of any state statute-book
discloses the fact that necessary legisla-
tion is a rare thing ; that the communi-

The Decline of Legislatures.

ties in our day seldom need a new law ;
and that most laws are passed without
due consideration, and before the need
of them has been made known either by
popular agitation or by the demand of
experts. It would not be an exaggera-
tion to say that nine tenths of our mod-
ern state legislation will do no good, and
that at least one tenth of it will do posi-
tive harm. If half the stories told about
state legislatures be true, a very large
proportion of the members meet, not with
plans for the public good, but with plans
either for the promotion of their person-
al interests or for procuring money for
party uses or places for party agents.

The collection of such a body of men,
not engaged in serious business, in the
state capital is not to be judged simply
by the bills they introduce or get passed.
We have also to consider the immense
opportunities for planning and scheming
which the meetings offer to political job-
bers and adventurers ; and the effect, on
such among them as still retain their po-
litical virtue, of daily contact with men
who are there simply for illicit purposes,
and with the swarm who live by lobby-
ing and get together every winter to
trade in legislative votes. If I said, for
instance, that the legislature at Albany
is a school of vice, a fountain of polit-
ical debauchery, and that few of the
younger men come back from it without
having learned to mock at political puri-
ty and public spirit, I should seem to be
using unduly strong language, and yet I
could fill nearly a volume with illustra-
tions in support of it. The temptation
to use their great power for the extor-
tion of money from rich men and rich
corporations, to which the legislatures
in the richer and more prosperous North-
ern States are exposed, is immense ; and
the legislatures are mainly composed of
very poor men, with no reputation to
maintain or political future to look after.
The result is that the country is filled
with stories of scandals after every ad-
journment, and the press teems with

abuse, which legislators have learned to
treat with silent contempt or ridicule, so
that there is no longer any restraint
upon them. Their reelection is not in
the hands of the public, but in those of
the party managers, who, as is shown in
the Payn case in New York, find that
they can completely disregard popular
judgments on the character or history of
candidates.

Side by side with the annual or bien-
nial legislature we have another kind of
legislature, the " Constitutional Conven-
tion," which retains everybody's respect,
and whose work, generally marked by
care and forethought, compares credit-
ably with the legislation of any similar
body in the world. Through the hun-
dred years of national existence it has
received little but favorable criticism
from any quarter. It is still an honor
to have a seat in it. The best men in
the community are still eager or willing
to serve in it, no matter at what cost to
health or private affairs. I cannot re-
call one convention which has incurred
either odium or contempt. Time and
social changes have often frustrated its
expectations, or have shown its provi-
sions for the public welfare to be inad-
equate or mistaken, but it is very rare
indeed to hear its wisdom and integrity
questioned. In looking over the list of
those who have figured in the conven-
tions of the State of New York since the
Revolution, one finds the name of near-
ly every man of weight and prominence ;
and few lay it down without thinking how
happy we should be if we could secure
such service for our ordinary legislative
bodies.

Now what makes the difference ?
Three things, mainly. First, the Con-
stitutional Convention, as a rule, meets
only 'once in about twenty years. Men,
therefore, who would not think of serv-
ing in an annual legislature, are ready
on these rare occasions to sacrifice their
personal convenience to the public in-
terest. Secondly, every one knows that

The Decline of Legislatures.

the labors of the body, if adopted, will
continue in operation without change for
the best part of one's lifetime. Thirdly,
its conclusions will be subjected to the
strictest scrutiny by the public, and will
not be put in force without adoption
by a popular vote. All this makes an
American state constitution, as a rule, a
work of the highest statesmanship, which
reflects credit on the country, tends pow-
erfully to promote the general happiness
and prosperity, and is quoted or copied
in foreign countries in the construction of
organic laws. The Constitutional Con-
vention is as conspicuous an example of
successful government as the state legis-
latures are of failure. If we can learn
anything from the history of these bodies,
therefore, it is that if the meetings of
the legislature were much rarer, say once
in five or ten years, we should secure
a higher order of talent and character
for its membership and more careful de-
liberation for its measures, and should
greatly reduce the number of the latter.
But we can go further, and say that in-
asmuch as all important matter devised
by the convention is submitted to the
people with eminent success, there is no
reason why all grave measures of ordi-
nary legislation should not be submitted
also. In other words, the referendum
is not confined to Switzerland.1 We
have it among us already. All, or near-
ly all our state constitutions are the pro-
1 Oberholtzer's Referendum in America, p. 15.

duct of a referendum. The number of
important measures with which the le-
gislature feels chary about dealing, which
are brought before the people by its di-
rection, increases every year. Upon the
question of the location of the state cap-
ital and of some state institutions, of the
expenditure of public money, of the es-
tablishment of banks, of the maintenance
or sale of canals, of leasing public lands,
of taxation beyond a certain amount, of
the prohibition of the liquor traffic, of the
extension of the suffrage, and upon sev-
eral other subjects, a popular vote is of-
ten taken in various States.

In short, there is no discussion of the
question of legislatures in which either
great restriction in the number or length
of their sessions, or the remission of a
greatly increased number of subjects to
treatment by the popular vote, does not
appear as a favorite remedy for their
abuses and shortcomings. If we may
judge by these signs, the representative
system, after a century of existence, un-
der a very extended suffrage, has failed
to satisfy the expectations of its earlier
promoters, and is likely to make way in
its turn for the more direct action of
the people on the most important ques-
tions of government, and a much-dimin-
ished demand for all legislation what-
ever. This, at all events, is the only
remedy now in sight, which is much
talked about or is considered worthy of
serious attention.

E. L. Godkin.

One Fair Daughter.

ONE FAIR DAUGHTER.

MR. REGINALD DORSEY not only re-
cognized the unique distinction of being
the father of such a girl as Edith, but
he felt as well the responsibilities of the
position. Mr. Dorsey had never taken
any responsibility lightly. He carried
a habit of high discretion into the least
detail of his mental operations. It must
be dazzling high noon before he would
fully admit that the day was likely to be
fine. He made no investment or pur-
chase until he had permitted the sun to
go down many times upon his indecision.
His ultimate opinion was watched, waited
for, and acted upon. Nine different cor-
porations boasted that he was one of their
directors, and that single circumstance
made each enterprise known as both pay-
ing and safe, like that tower instanced
by Dante which, firmly fixed, shakes not
its head for any blast that blows.

Edith had been motherless since she
was a child of three, and Mr. Dorsey
had been left unaided to grapple with
the crucial questions which rose at each
stage of the girl's development. He had
not only to arrive at some solution of
purely ethical and intellectual problems,
but to meet the climbing wave of femi-
nine evolution and to experiment with
modern ideas. Should Edith go in for
the higher education ? Should Edith
attend dancing-classes ? Should Edith be
permitted to learn to ride the bicycle ?
Each of these questions had in turn to
be met, looked at in all lights, and final-
ly decided by a conscientious and con-
sistent theory. Mr. Dorsey wished to
preserve in his daughter what he recog-
nized as her distinctive attributes: an
old-time modesty, seriousness, and sim-
plicity which raised her so far above van-
ity and caprice as to efface both. Still,
although it was his duty, his function,

the reason of his existence, to foster in
her the tendencies he loved and believed
in, what he tried to keep in mind was
her ultimate good. She was not only his
child, but the child of her age. Since she
had been born in the last quarter of the
century, he must meet its requirements
for her. Thus Edith took the prepara-
tory college course ; she rode the bicycle,
but round dances she did not learn. She
was brought up in almost conventual se-
clusion, and up to the age of nineteen, ex-
cept her father and her professors, she
had not one single acquaintance among
the opposite sex. Nevertheless, Mr.
Dorsey, who thought of every possible
emergency for Edith, had thought of her
marriage, — a marriage which was to
crown a brilliant social career after her
education was complete, — always with
compressed lips and a knitting of the
brows, which meant that no man would
ever become Edith's husband until he
had been weighed in the balance and not
found wanting, had gone through the
needle's eye, — in short, submitted to a
series of rigid tests.

Thus when, soon after Edith's nine-
teenth birthday, Mr. Dorsey received a
proposal of marriage for his daughter,
the effect upon his mind was abrupt and
extraordinary. He had just returned
from a journey, and, washed, shaven, and
freshly dressed in his habitual suit of
gray tweed, had sat down in his library
to look over the letters which had ar-
rived in his absence, when a card was
brought to him, on which he read " Mr.
Gordon Rose." Who Mr. Gordon Rose
might be Mr. Dorsey was comfortably
far from having any idea. A strange
young man was ushered in, who met the
glance of the tall, slim, clear-eyed gen-
tleman almost like a culprit as he stam-
mered out a few faltering words to the
effect that Edith had accepted him, and

One Fair Daughter.

that he had come to ask her father's con-
sent to their marriage.

" Your marriage to my daughter ! "
ejaculated Mr. Dorsey. He went on to
observe that never in his life had he
heard of such presumption. He glanced
at the card which he had crumpled in
his hands. Mr. Gordon Rose, he de-
clared witheringly, was a perfect stran-
ger both to him and to Miss Dorsey.

" We have been together almost two
weeks," gasped Gordon.

Been together almost two weeks ! Fa-
tal two weeks, spent by Mr. Dorsey most
reluctantly in a trip to the Southwest
with a party of railway magnates to look
after the interests of a railroad which
had fallen into their hands. For the
period of his absence he had confided
Edith to the care of his aunt, Mrs. Car-
michael, an old lady, who, with an inva-
lid daughter, lived at Lenox. For almost
the first time in his life taken unaware,
Mr. Dorsey proceeded to put question
after question to his visitor. The situa-
tion became clear, painfully clear. Gor-
don Rose had been visiting at a place
adjoining Mrs. Carmichael's. He and
Edith had met ; he had taught her golf ;
they had played it together. Just twen-
ty-four hours before he had asked her
to marry him, and she had told him her
father was then upon the point of reach-
ing New York, and that she could do
nothing without his consent.

Without her father's consent ? Of
course Miss Dorsey could never become
engaged without her father's consent.
She could never become engaged at all
except by the gradual development of
an acquaintance of long years, the result
of thorough experience, a .perfect con-
geniality.

" There is the most perfect congenial-
ity ! " exclaimed Gordon in a tone almost
of indignation. " We fell in love on the
instant — it was " —

" Nonsense ! absurd ! " said Mr. Dor-
sey testily, and proceeded to define his
ideas of love and marriage, — no acci-

dent, no haphazard outcome of spending
a few days in the same neighborhood, but
the irresistible evolution of a logical sit-
uation, each step developed on a precon-
ceived plan, — in short, inevitable.

" This was inevitable," declared Gor-
don, trying to assert himself against that
freezing demeanor, that impenetrable
face, that icy glance, that cold, critical
tone which seemed not only unsympa-
thetic, but final. " We saw each other
from morning until night ; we " —

" A mere chance acquaintance," Mr.
Dorsey insisted, " founded on no reason,
leading to no sequence."

" I wish to marry Miss Dorsey," fal-
tered Gordon. " I can support her hand-
somely."

" I can support my daughter without
the aid of any man alive," said Mr. Dor-
sey.

Gordon murmured deprecatingly that
he had no doubt of that. " But," he
added, " Edith likes me, and " —

"She knows nothing, nothing what-
ever, on the subject. She has been care-
fully brought up. All her thoughts have
been given to her books. Her educa-
tion has hardly begun. She is to enter
college next year. She has never gone
into society. I consider twenty -three
years of age the time for a girl to enter
society. Edith is a mere child. If for
a few days while I took a business jour-
ney, leaving her, as I supposed, carefully
guarded and chaperoned " —

" She was chaperoned, — that is, Mrs.
Carmichael had us always in view as we
played golf ; she said she liked to watch
us through her opera-glass," Gordon ex-
plained.

"I blush to think of an honorable
man's taking advantage of such inno-
cence, such inexperience."

Gordon blushed for himself. Up to
this moment he had been inclined to ac-
cept a generous estimate of his circum-
stances and position, not to say his per-
sonal qualities, but he now felt himself
dwindling to the vanishing point.

One Fair Daughter.

" Knowing as I only can Miss Dor-
sey's preeminence in family position, in
social prestige, not to say in beauty, in
intellect, in character," pursued Mr. Dor-
sey, easily discerning the fact that the
young man was each moment becoming
more and more discomfited, " naturally
I have my own views regarding the alli-
ance I shall deem fitting for her when
she reaches the proper age."

Gordon's gaze fastened eagerly upon
the gray, grim, well-shaven face.

" I should like," Mr. Dorsey contin-
ued, " to see her the wife of an English
statesman, — of a man like Mr. Glad-
stone."

Gordon's whole face expressed intense
passionate indignation. " Mr. Gladstone
is more than eighty years old ! " he burst
out.

" I mean a man of that sagacity, that
distinction, that trained ability, that test-
ed character. The matter of age I should
regard very little, unless possibly it was
too absolutely disproportionate. To my
mind, few men under fifty years of age
are safe guardians of a woman's happi-
ness."

Gordon uttered an expressive gasp.

" Failing such a statesman as Mr.
Gladstone," Mr. Dorsey proceeded more
and more blandly, " failing some English-
man not only of high birth, title, ances-
tral estates, but of the most unblemished
moral character, I should like her to be-
come the wife of one of our ambassadors."

" An American ambassador ? "

"An American ambassador such as
Mr. Motley or Mr. Lowell," Mr. Dorsey
explained.

Gordon looked bewildered ; he looked
also in despair. " Buty.they are dead,"
he murmured.

Mr. Dorsey did not gainsay the state-
ment, nor the possible inference that
what he demanded for Edith was some-
thing wholly out of reach. What he
needed to do was to nip this presumptu-
ous young fellow's aspirations in the bud,
and from Gordon's look and manner this

seemed successfully achieved. Sitting
in his familiar library chair, an elbow on
each arm, his hands raised, fingers ex-
tended as if ready to check off any dam-
aging admission, Mr. Dorsey now began
a series of categorical questions, and
they were answered in this wise.

Gordon Rose was the son of a Scotch-
man, poor, but of good family, who had
come to this country at the age of twen-
ty, taken a position in a New England
manufacturing concern, and five years
later married the daughter of the chief
partner. Both he and his wife had died
early, leaving Gordon, their only child,
to be brought up by his maternal grand-
father, Elihu Curtis. - Elihu Curtis had
retired from business ten years before,
and had settled down quietly in an in-
land city. He had now been dead almost
a year, and had left all he possessed to
his grandson. Had he, Gordon, been
well educated ? Gordon, recalling how
only by dint of being crammed by three
different experts he had finally passed
his examinations at Harvard, said diffi-
dently that he was afraid Mr. Dorsey
would not think so. Had he failed to
take a degree ? Oh, he was a B. A., but
no doubt the husband of Edith would be
expected to have Ph. D. or LL. D. after
his name. What was his age ? Twenty-
four ; and the shake of the head showed
that this was by far too young. What
friends had he to vouch for him ? Gor-
don named half a dozen without receiv-
ing more than a cold stare ; but when
he mentioned Bartram Van Kleeck, Mr.
Dorsey was so good as to remark dryly
that he believed Van Kleeck was engaged
to marry a distant cousin of his own and
a friend of Edith's.

" Bartram has known me all my life,"
Gordon was now ready to announce,
when Mr. Dorsey went on to add that
Van Kleeck being, he feared, destitute of
those qualities which command success,
he was hardly in a position to permit his
commendation to carry weight.

At this point it occurred to Gordon to

One Fair Daughter.

interpose a plea for himself. He knew,
he said, that he was altogether unworthy
of Miss Dorsey ; still —

Mr. Dorsey snapped at the admission
as a hungry dog snaps at a bit of meat.
He observed frigidly that he could not
consent to his daughter's accepting the
attentions of a man who confessed him-
self unworthy of her, and he seemed so
ready to conclude the interview that Gor-
don, bewildered, disappointed, chilled to
the heart, with this denial reverberating
in his heart and brain, got himself out of
the house. Of course he was unworthy
of Edith. It was not that he fell short
of being Mr. Gladstone, an English peer,
or an American ambassador, but because
he was simply a man, while Edith was
an angel. Hitherto Gordon had taken
life only too happily ; he had not known
the meaning of despair. Now his de-
spair was great, and he poured it forth
in three letters to Edith.

Mr. Dorsey had lost no time in going
to Lenox and taking his daughter home
to their country place on the North Riv-
er, and these letters fell into his hands.
They were written with convincing force
and naturalness. He had seen Gordon,
and knew the handsome, eager young face
behind them, and they did not wholly dis-
please him. In fact, in spite of the in-
tense shock of feeling Gordon had given
him, something in the way the young
man had looked, listened, and spoken
had touched the paternal chord. Mr.
Dorsey had never had a son, but had al-
ways felt a vague yearning for one. Of
course this foolish young fellow was not
a suitable husband for Edith ; but then
Mr. Dorsey did not desire any sort of a
husband for Edith, not even an English
statesman or an American ambassador,
for at least ten years to come. He wished
to keep his daughter to himself.

But alas, he found that Edith was
pining, pining for the lover, the friend,
her father had denied her. Mr. Dorsey
set himself to the task of finding out all
he could about Gordon Rose. Gordon

had done as many foolish things as most
other young fellows, but perhaps he had
been led into them, and left to find his
own way out of the scrapes. They were
faults which a nervous, bilious, over-con-
scientious father might make out as big
as a steeple, but they were still the sort
of foibles which a man who longed to
see his daughter cease pining could put
in his sleeve. Mr. Dorsey sent for Bar-
tram Van Kleeck and had a talk with
him. Van Kleeck was conscientious to
the core, and no mere feeling of camara-
derie, of so to speak helping a lame dog
over a stile, could make him say that
he considered Gordon a model. To his
thinking, Gordon was spoiled, had had
too much of everything. No man amount-
ed to much who had never borne the yoke
in his youth, and no yoke had galled Gor-
don's shoulders ; indeed, old Elihu Cur-
tis had said that he wanted to see how a
young fellow would turn out who had al-
ways had a good time.

" Too high spirits ; he overdoes the
thing," said Van Kleeck. Still, when
pressed for facts, he admitted that Gor-
don's high spirits had not led him into
anything worse than absurdity. " If I
had his money and his leisure for diver-
sions, I should require them — huge,"
said Van Kleeck. " He is only a boy ;
he may safely be forgiven a good deal."

Mr. Dorsey decided to go to Gordon's
rooms and have a talk with him. It was
such a pity, with his fortune, with his
advantages generally, to throw away his
chances without looking at them serious-
ly. Life is full of opportunities for re-
nunciation. Let him renounce. Let him
apply to himself a series of rigid tests.
Burning to impress these truths upon
Gordon, Mr. Dorsey tapped at his door.
He had chosen an unfortunate moment.

II.

"It is all over," Gordon said next
day in a sepulchral voice, looking up as

One Fair Daughter.

Bartram Van Kleeck entered his room.
Van Kleeck had dropped in to tell some
important news of his own, but, finding
Gordon plunged in the depths of de-
spair, was obliged to listen to an account
of Mr. Dorsey's visit.

" It 's all over," Gordon said again.
" He would n't hear a word I told him.
He simply ejaculated, ' This is incredi-
ble, this is incredible ! Unless I had
seen it with my own eyes, I could never
have believed it ! "

" I confess I can't blame him," said
Van Kleeck. " How a man deeply in
love, and in love too with a girl like
Edith Dorsey, as you profess to be " —

" Profess to be ? "

— " should lower his dignity by dan-
cing a skirt-dance " —

" I was n't dancing a skirt-dance."

"You just told me that when Mr.
Dorsey entered the room he found you
executing a, pas seul."

" I explained to you how it happened,
I explained to Mr. Dorsey, but neither
of you will listen to me. It was Alexis
Brown, who was coming to my rooms to
take a lesson of Madame Bonf anti. She
and her daughter had arrived. I heard
the elevator, then a step in the hall. I
supposed it was Alexis. I slipped on the
skirt, raised one foot in air — the door
opened " —

" And instead of Alexis Brown it was
Mr. Dorsey," said Van Kleeck, when
Gordon paused and uttered a groan.
" He must have been surprised. He saw
Madame Bonfanti ? "

" Saw her ? He looked at her as if
she had been a cobra. You should have
heard her after he had gone out. She
went away in dudgeon, poor woman ! "

" She should n't have come."

" No doubt she should n't have come ;
but Alexis wanted to dance the ski\ -
dance at an entertainment lie and sonic!
other fellows are getting up, and as he
assured me there was n't room to swing
a cat in his quarters, I told him he might
come to mine and welcome."

"Certainly," said Van Kleeck, with
a shake of his grave, capable head, " it
was most unlucky."

" Unlucky ! If I could lay it to luck !
If I did not have to lay it to my being
a fool ! I had little or no hope before
of winning Edith ; now I Ve lost her
irretrievably, and the rest of life is no-
thingness and void, darkness and gnash-
ing of teeth. I did it all myself, but yet
I 'm not such an idiot as I seem. Bart,
I give you my word of honor I 'm not."

" It 's your confounded high spirits,"
said Van Kleeck.

The two young men had been friends
from their boyhood, but they were in all
respects opposites. Van Kleeck had al-
ways been poor, while Gordon was rich.
Gordon was fair, with golden-brown hair,
a bright chivalrous face, his whole look
and manner showing love of life and
capacity for enjoyment. Van Kleeck
was dark, sallow, saturnine, with deeply
set gray eyes under pent-house brows,
and a heavy jaw giving extra firmness
to his proud, well-curved lip. Every-
thing in his appearance suggested solid-
ity ; that he was a decided fellow, never
taken unaware ; with unerring judgment,
determined aims, and developed capaci-
ties. He had made his way through
college chiefly by gaining prizes and
fellowships ; but in spite of high degrees
in mathematics, physics, and chemistry,
at twenty - eight years of age he had
found nothing more profitable than an
instructorship. His phrase for two years
had been, " I must have money," and
his object in coming to-day was to tell
Gordon of a golden opportunity at last
presented. Self-denial and self-restraint
had always been the law of Van Kleeck's
existence, and accordingly he offered his
sympathy, and waited for his own chance
to come.

" It 's your confounded high spirits,"
he reiterated, sitting down opposite Gor-
don, and speaking with his usual air of
understanding the whole subject.

" High spirits ! " repeated Gordon in-

One Fair Daughter.

credulously. " If I had n't been so utter-
ly wretched, so utterly broken in spirit,
I could n't have permitted the thing to
happen. It was a mere stop-gap."

" I confess I have sometimes envied
you your high spirits," Van Kleeck con-
ceded, with an air as if his companion
had made no disclaimer.

" I shall never have any more high
spirits. I 'm out of conceit with exist-
ence. I understand to-day why men
commit suicide. It 's the irony of life,
of circumstances, that makes men cyn-
ical."

" You have n't the faintest notion of
what cynicism means," retorted Van
Kleeck, who began to feel that he had
done his duty. " How do you suppose
you would have borne what I have had
to bear, what I shall have to bear for a
long time yet ? "

" I consider you just the happiest fel-
low in the world, engaged to the girl you
love, nobody and nothing to hinder ! "

" Nothing to hinder, when we have
been engaged for two years, and are still
too poor to marry ! "

" Oh, the mere question of money " —

" The mere question of money ! It 's
the only question. Here it is driving me
to a climate which may very possibly kill
me."

" Have you really got that offer you
were telling me about ? "

" Got it, and accepted it. I sail for
Southampton a week from to-day ; go to
London for instructions, then to South
Africa. I must have money, and this
is the only chance I know of getting it."

" Are you going to be married, and
take your wife with you ? "

" No," answered Van Kleeck, knitting
his brows. " Cerise flung herself into
the idea at first with her usual ardor ;
but her uncle objects, and, upon reflec-
tion, it seems the best thing for me to
go out alone, make and save all I can,
and wait another two years. Married
life is so expensive."

" It is hard," said Gordon in a tone

of commiseration. " Still, if I knew I
was sure to have Edith at the end even
of two years, I should be willing to work
like a galley-slave."

" I see you working like a galley-
slave ! "

" You don't know what is in me,"
Gordon declared. " Nobody except
Edith knows what 4s in me. Edith could
do anything with me. As Edith's hus-
band, I do believe even Mr. Dorsey
would never have occasion to find fault
with me. She could keep me straight.
Without her I shall go to the devil."

" A man walking upright, and not a
swine running headlong into the sea, has
no business to talk in that way," said
Van Kleeck, with impatient disgust.
" Whether you marry Edith or don't
marry Edith, you are yourself answer-
able to your Maker and to society for
your actions. If you could be a man
with her, you can be a man without her.
Besides, you do yourself injustice. I
have told you that I said to Mr. Dorsey
that if I were Gordon Rose with his
money and his leisure, instead of being
tied by the leg by poverty and overwork,
I should have done twenty foolish things,
not to say worse, where he has done one.
The push is in me, only I have no money."

" Mr. Dorsey believes the worst of
me, — you may be sure of that."

" Nonsense ! I will go and see him.
If you really care about Edith, and she
cares about you, this absurdity will not
stand in the way. But show a little
sense, a little discrimination ; prove to
Mr. Dorsey that as his son-in-law " —

" He will never give me the chance.
You should have seen his eyes, you should
have heard his tone, as he said, ' I have
come to return these letters, with the re-
quest that there shall be no more.' It
froze the very heart within me."

" You had written to Edith ? "

" Naturally I had written to her. You
don't suppose I " —

" Did he intercept the letters ? "

" I dare say she handed them over to

One Fair Daughter.

him. That V Edith, — all honor, all de-
votion, all duty ! She said to me that
her father had only her, and that she
had had only her father. Ah ! the look
she gave me as she said this, — the look
which told me he was no longer every-
thing to her ! It goes through me like
a knife, — it is an actual physical pain.
And now her father will tell her " —

" Tell her you were dancing a skirt-
dance with a hideous old Frenchwoman."

" It was only a pretense. I was not
dancing it."

" But you had on the skirt."

Gordon groaned.

" I fancy, from certain things Cerise
has dropped, that Edith is a little au-
stere."

" No more austere than a woman
ought to be. I want a woman austere.
That 's why I love Edith, that 's why I
long to marry Edith, — that she may be
my conscience-keeper."

" I confess I prefer to take care of
my own conscience, and my wife's too,"
said Van Kleeck. " It 's the law of con-
traries that draws us," he pursued philo-
sophically. " Now, you, who are perhaps
too mercurial, need a woman to brace
you up. I 'm a little dry and serious,
and I require relaxation and amusement ;
Cerise is such a fascinating mixture of
high spirits and submissive childlike sim-
plicity, she just suits me."

"There is an infinite variety about
Miss Gale, I should judge, from what lit-
tle I have seen of her," returned Gordon,
willing to humor his friend. " She may
not be beautiful like Edith, but she is " —

" I consider her the most beautiful girl
I know," explained Van Kleeck, with
warmth. " Such a shimmer of radiance,
such endless variety."

" Certainly most attractive," Gordon
conceded. " I confess my ideal is of a
woman who is always the same."

Van Kleeck's ideal was exactly the
opposite. The subject was most suggest-
ive. Each saw his beloved in the hues
of his desire for her. Each tried to de-

fine to the other just where lay the over-
mastering charm. In the mere fact that
the two girls were cousins (thrice re-
moved) was some piquancy. Miss Dor-
sey offered a sense of tranquillity, of re-
pose ; Miss Gale, on the other hand,
stimulated. In Miss Dorsey's dress and
manner were no lures, no traps to the
imagination : her gowns were plain ; she
wore no curl, no flower, hardly a ribbon.
What especially bewitched Van Kleeck
was that Miss Gale and her frizzes, her
gowns, her ribbons, her laces, shoes, and
gloves all played into each other, as it
were. It was no easy matter to define
what was chiffon and what the woman.

" But, poor child, she will be terribly
lonely in that dreary suburb," said Van
Kleeck. " I do wish you would go and
see her once a week or so, Gordon."

" It would be something to do," said
Gordon ; " that is, if " —

" She can tell you about Edith."

Where Van Kleeck was everything
fell into order. He had rallied Gordon
out of despair. Gordon had come to
New York to study law. He was to
have a desk in Judge Graham's office
and attend the law school, and now it
was settled that he should apply himself
with all his might and main, and show
Mr. Dorsey there was stuff in him.

"Just use a little judgment, a little
tact," insisted Van Kleeck. " These
rich men don't yearn to hand over their
money and their daughters to foolish
young fellows who will take no care of
either. Always be on your guard. Some-
body is always watching you, weighing
you. Now there was Macalpine, the capi-
talist, coming home from Mount Desert,
and somewhere the party he belonged to
missed a connection. Their tickets were
limited, and either they had to pay two
dollars extra, or sit down and wait for
a couple of hours for their own train.
* I don't know any easier way of making
two dollars than sitting down here and
waiting for two hours,' said old Macal-
pine. But there was Linsley Crooke,

One Fair Daughter.

who had been attentive to Mary Macal-
pine all that month at Mount Desert :
he said he could n't afford to wait two
hours for two dollars, so jumped into the
unlimited and went on. 'That young
man is too high-priced an article,' said
Macalpine. And so it appeared, for,
three days after, Mary Macalpine refused
Linsley point-blank. There 's a Provi-
dence that watches over these things."

" Good heavens," murmured Gordon
in a tone of awe, " what pitfalls there
are for fellows! With Edith along, I
would sit down cheerfully and wait for
a week; but otherwise — Yet really,
now, Bartram, a business man might lose
a small fortune by sitting down and wait-
ing two hours."

" I know ; I thought of that when I
heard the story," Van Kleeck admitted,
wrinkling his forehead slightly. " These
distinctions are subtle. I simply wished
to warn you to be on guard, study hard,
gain the good opinion of solid men, and
your chance will come. Edith will be
faithful, like a rock, and finally Mr.
Dorsey is likely to give in. Still," Van
Kleeck added, with a sudden far-reach-
ing vista of thought, " it 's a little singu-
lar how apt a man who has one only
daughter is to sacrifice her. Look at
Agamemnon."

" And Jephthah ! " Gordon exclaimed,
aghast.

" Then there was the Merchant of
Venice," Van Kleeck pursued; "and
just recall how Portia's father limited her
free choice by means of those caskets."

" And how that horrible old Polonius
played with Ophelia ! "

" It 's the instinct of a man, if he has
one daughter and loves her devotedly, to
sacrifice her, — no doubt of that," said
Van Kleeck. " Perhaps it is just as well
he should do so, for if he does not sacri-
fice her, she is likely to sacrifice him.
Look at Desdemona, for example."

Gordon tried to adjust these wide gen-
eralizations to personal particular mean-
ings. Van Kleeck could reduce his own

experience to a formula, but Gordon's ex-
perience always seemed chaotic, defying
fixed rules. In the present case, it turned
out that at this very hour, three o'clock
in the afternoon, while the two friends
were discussing the best means of propi-
tiating Mr. Dorsey, that gentleman and
his daughter had already embarked for
Europe. Before Gordon was aware of
the fact, there were some hundreds of
miles of " unplumb'd, salt, estranging
sea " between him and Edith. What
was she thinking of him ? What was she
doing ? Talking to others, devoting her-
self to others, while he himself was re-
jected, condemned unheard, pushed out
of sight, left to suffer. What was life
worth under these circumstances ?

Van Kleeck, sailing just one week later
than the Dorseys, bade Gordon study
law and go to see Miss Cerise Gale.

III.

Miss Gale was an orphan, and lived
with her uncle and aunt, who had a plea-
sant place at Capua, fifteen miles from
New York. To pay visits in the suburbs
requires no little premeditation. It
necessitates the study of time-tables ; it
is a sacrifice of time, also of money ; but
above all, it leads to intimacy by the
shortest route. In town, a man rings his
friend's door-bell, enters, and stays ten
minutes or an hour, as the spirit moves
him. In a remote suburb, his first in-
voluntary movement towards picking up
his hat is met by the precise statement
that one train has just gone, but that
there will be another in thirty-seven min-
utes. Those thirty-seven minutes have
altered the destiny of many a man.

The 4.03 train from town reached
Capua at 4.31. To return by the 4.58
gave Gordon exactly sixteen minutes to
spend with Miss Gale. Could this frac-
tion of an hour have been devoted solely
to inquiries about whether she had news
from Edith and her answers, he might,

One Fair Daughter.

after greedily snatching at this refresh-
ment, have flown to the station and
caught the last car of the 4.58. It was,
however, essential that he should endea-
vor to console Miss Gale for the absence
of Van Kleeck: thus he was obliged to
prolong his stay for a whole hour.

" I know what a sacrifice it is," Miss
Gale said, with appreciation. " I tell
Bartram, every time I write, what cour-
age you show. You are the most de-
voted friend to him ! Actually, if any
one has the supreme good fortune to live
in town, I don't consider life long enough
to live in a suburb."

" Life seems pretty long to me just at
present," Gordon answered, with a sigh.
" It 's a distinct relief to come out here
and " —

" Talk about Edith," Miss Gale made
haste to suggest, with her half-arch, half-
pleading glance and smile. " It 's just
too awfully good of you. I know what
an effort it is, for my whole life has
been spoiled by the necessity of catching
trains. I never expect to sit through a
whole play or a whole concert ; and if I
go to a party, I miss the supper and the
dances with the partners I really care
about, for aunt whisks me away."

Embarked on this subject, Miss Gale
went on to describe the difficulties Bar-
tram had found in the way of taking her
to places of amusement, and how glad he
had been to give it all up, declaring that
a quiet talk before the fire and a good
book were so much more satisfactory.

" We have learhed to do things inex-
pensively," she added, sighing. " Bar-
tram is always praising economy." She
confided to Gordon the pathetic fact that
she cried herself to sleep every night.
He naturally improved this chance of as-
suring her that it was sure to be a brief
parting. Van Kleeck wou?d make a for-
tune ; his salary was large, his chances
for investment were good. If it were
but a question of money which divided
him from Edith !

Cerise had no alternative but to cheer

up the despondent lover. Although
cousin Reginald was jealous of every
man who came near Edith, still he had
actually but one wish, which was to make
the dear girl happy. " I have not the
least doubt but that you and Edith will
be married long before Bartram and I
are ! " she burst out, with strong feeling.
" We have been engaged already for two
years."

Gordon said that to be engaged, really
engaged, must of itself be such a hap-
piness ; and he went on to quote Van
Kleeck's observation, that a long engage-
ment was an admirable discipline.

" It is," returned Cerise. " It makes
one so sure of one's own heart. Bar-
tram said when he was going away, ' If
our love for each other were a thing of
days, of weeks, even of months, I might
tremble, but you have belonged to me for
two years.' "

With delightful candor, she described
the incidents of their love affair : her
impressions of Bartram, his impressions
of her ; the gradual leading up of their
acquaintance to their engagement. Goi'-
don waited impatiently for her to finish,
then gave the story of his thirteen days
with Edith, — every day about sixteen
hours long. Each lent an outward atten-
tion to the other, eager for a chance to
pour out his or her personal revelations.

It is love's instinct to halo the absent,
and when Gordon wished to have Miss
Gale sing the praises of Edith he would
begin thus : " Van Kleeck has none of
the petty vices, the love of idleness and
luxury, which undermine the character
of most men."

" No, indeed. He says that most of
us manufacture our own indigestion and
laziness by eating bonbons. He does n't
approve of bonbons."

" What I admire in him is that he
carries the same consistent economy, the
same conscientious thrift and indepen-
dence, into the least detail of his conduct.
Now when I occasionally ask him to
dine with me, he insists on ordering his

One Fair Daughter.

own meal and paying for it. I should
rather enjoy doing the thing handsome-
ly, but it ends in our having each a chop
or beefsteak, a boiled potato, and a glass
of beer."

" He is not only abstemious himself,
but he makes other people abstemious ! "
Miss Gale would exclaim, with admira-
tion. " I have given up everything I
really like. I try to be a Spartan."

" He will not want you to be a Spar-
tan," Gordon would insist. " Quite the
contrary. He stints himself to be lavish
in other directions. He is always plan-
ning for a happy future. I said to him
once, ' Van Kleeck, what do you do with
your old clothes ? ' and he replied, ' I
wear them.' Now I call that heroic."

" Is n't it grand ? It 's what makes
me adore him. I only wonder how he
can stoop to care about poor little me."

A compliment was of course dropped
in here, just as a wise landowner pops
an acorn out of his pocket into a vacant
place on his estate, wishing it to grow
and flourish for five hundred years. Gor-
don, however, improved the occasion sim-
ply to fill up the gap which yawned for
it. He was not insincere, and there was
a certain zest, even in his present state
of desolation, in offering some mild form
of flattery to Miss Gale. She took it
with such artless joy. She seemed so
surprised. Her whole face lighted up
with such na'ive childish pleasure. At
first Gordon had coldly, critically said
to himself, " Of course she could never
be pretty with that nose" But after
taking a liking to a woman, one can ac-
cept her nose, even when it spoils the
outline of her face, as a circumstance
over which she has no control. Edith
Dorsey was faultlessly beautiful ; to
compare Cerise to her would be doing
the latter injustice. Yet there was, es-
pecially when she was happy and ani-
mated, a radiance, a shimmer about Ce-
rise, an impression of color, which made
one forget that she was plain. Her little
head was set in a golden glory, as it were,

for her hair was fluffy and of the most
peculiarly beautiful shade, her cheeks
were like the sunny side of a peach, her
blue eyes were bright, and her slight fig-
ure was always charmingly arrayed.

Gordon having done handsomely by
Van Kleeck, it was clearly Miss Gale's
duty to praise Edith. Edith, she said,
was an angel ; so lofty, so high-minded,
so indifferent to what others of her age
and sex were pining for. Once when
cousin Reginald had taken both girls to
Tiffany's and bidden them choose each
some pretty ornament, Edith had given
Cerise the first choice ; then, making her
own selection, had bestowed the jewel
on Cerise. " Take them both, dear,"
she said. " I have too many things al-
ready." Edith had no vanity, no world-
liness ; she was a saint.

" She is two years younger than I
am," Cerise continued, bubbling with en-
thusiasm, " but she seems to me ten years
older. Don't you look up to her with
reverence and awe ? "

" Like Dante to Beatrice," Gordon af-
firmed, with emotion. At Lenox, one
rainy day, he had found her reading
Dante. Of late she had forgotten her
duty, she told him, but she always in-
tended to read eighteen lines a day.

" I held the dictionary for her," said
Gordon, deeply moved.

It was one of the coincidences which
were all the time cropping up in the
two very different love affairs that Van
Kleeck and Cerise had also been read-
ing the Divine Comedy together.

" But not in Italian," Cerise explained.
" It 's quite sufficiently hard in English.
Bartram never told me I was like Bea-
trice," in a tone of poignant regret.

Gordon said he was sure Van Kleeck
wished her to resemble no one, — to be
simply herself.

On the contrary, Van Kleeck was
certain to find some trait in every hero-
ine which he wished her to take example
by, — all the girls in the Waverley novels,
all Shakespeare's women. Then there

One Fair Daughter.

was Ethel Newcome, and Dorothea in
Middlemarch. Finally he halted be-
tween Marcella and Trilby. Cerise had
thrown herself with zeal into the for-
mer's part, — had delighted in visiting
slums ; but after she had brought home
three different diseases to the children,
her aunt objected. Then she tried to
talk politics and humanitarianism, and
her uncle objected ; and when one of the
class of workingmen to whom she read
Shakespeare took to bringing her flow-
ers, Bartram objected. As to Trilby,
Cerise had decided that the charm of
Trilby lay chiefly in the environment ;
at least it seemed incompatible with the
limitations of her aunt's house. And
Bartram, when he saw that she was try-
ing to find an outlet and escape from
every-day prosaic duties, was rather se-
vere, — said it was the essential woman-
ly charm of Trilby which a man longed
fot, and wished to enshrine in the wo-
man he loved.

" Essential womanly charm," said Ce-
rise, extending one taper finger, "Mar-
cella's lofty ideals and social earnest-
ness," a second finger joined the first,
" Dorothea's belief in people, Ethel New-
come's brilliance and fascination, then
all Shakespeare's heroines and Scott's."
She paused. " I can be one woman," she
pursued, " I can be two women, I can, at
a pinch, be three women, but I can't be
all the women in all the books, can I ? "

" That 's only Bartram's love of high
ideas. He likes the best, — ' the best
that is known and thought in the world.'
I fancy it 's a phrase he picked up some-
where."

"I've heard it," said Cerise mourn-
fully. " Sometimes I feel such a failure.
He always made a schedule of my time.
I was to read so much, practice so much,
sew so much. He insists that I shall get
myself into orderly habits by keeping a
list of my expenses. They never add
up right, and I hate to see my mistakes
glaring me in the face. Don't you ? He
wanted me to go to a cooking-school."

" Oh, what a wife he has in training ! "

" But he said the dishes I learned to
make gave him dyspepsia, and that, after
all, we ought to be able to afford a good
plain cook. Bartram has a way of sit-
ting silent and wrinkling up his forehead,
— chewing the cud of conversation, he
calls it, — and then bursting out with a
question: 'Cerise, have you any idea
how much it costs to keep a table, a
fairly generous table, you know, for a
week, — say, coffee, chops or beefsteak,
for breakfast, a dainty little luncheon for
you, then a dinner with a good soup, a
joint of meat, two vegetables, a salad,
and a light dessert ? ' I answered that
I thought a hundred dollars ought to do
it ; but these figures gave him such a
shock I made haste to say I fancied my
estimate was too high, and that it might
be done for five."

" Did that please him ? "

" Not at all. He was more unhappy
than ever. We had a sort of quarrel.
I told him I hated these sordid, practi-
cal considerations ; that I wanted a little
room for imagination in the world."

" But you finally made up ? "

" Oh yes. When we quarrel, I always
give way. That 's why I adore Bartram.
He 's so strong. I worship force."

"Yes, Van Kleeck is strong. I ad-
mire his force."

" So presently I tell him that I know I
am all wrong, that he is right. ' I have
the habit of being right before I begin,'
he answers, and so it is all made up."

She brought the scene to Gordon ; it
was alive.

IV.

By the end of March it had become
the chief social occupation of Gordon
Rose to go to Capua twice a week. He
had not been contented with a bare
perfunctory performance of his duty to-
wards his absent friend, but had tried
to infuse into it something which should
give relief from the flatness and ennui

One Fair Daughter.

which a charming girl necessarily suffers
when parted from the man she loves.
Van Kleeck could very well discard
trivial attentions ; could label bonbons as
poisonous, cut flowers as unprofitable,
and tickets for the theatre and opera
as unsatisfactory. When Gordon carried
these slight offerings to Miss Gale, he
would say, " Van Kleeck can afford to
despise these things, but then I am not
Van Kleeck." He felt, in fact, that he
owed Cerise a debt of gratitude. With-
out this resource he would have been
absolutely shut out of Edith's world ;
but the two cousins wrote to each other
occasionally, and thus he had news of
the girl he loved. She was in London
pursuing her studies ; was to pass the
coming examinations, and then decide
what college to enter. Gordon pon-
dered much on the question of whether
he ought or ought not to break the
silence between them. He had stuck in-
defatigably to his routine of work, both
at the law school and in Mr. Graham's
office. He had begun to like it, not as
a mere grind, but finding order, reason,
logic, evolve out of what had seemed to
him at first nothing but a wordy chaos.
He had a sense that he was mastering
difficulties. He had heard that Mr.
Dorsey was obliged to be in New York
in April, and Gordon began to feel that
he could point to his winter's record and
ask if it might not balance that absurd
mistake of the preceding autumn ; if it
could not, indeed, atone for it and make
promise for the future. Mondays, Tues-
days, Thursdays, and Fridays the young
man patiently glued his eyes to the
pages before him, opened his ears to the
wisdom imparted, and wrote as he was
required, giving resounding phrase to
commonplace and locking subtleties into
impenetrable mystery. But on Wednes-
days, Saturdays, and Sundays there was a
sensible lightening in his whole demean-
or. It has been observed by philosophers
and naturalists, who like to stretch a
simple fact until it covers a theory, that
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 5

mules whose task it once was to draw
street cars in certain towns became used
to making five journeys from one end to
the other of the route before they were
released, and went four times content-
edly, but setting out on the final track
they brayed with joy. Thus Gordon, on
these three days, was kindled with a
sense of joyful expectation. Wednesday
and Sunday he went to Capua. On
Saturday it might be said that Capua
came to him, for on the morning of that
day Miss Gale almost invariably took the
11.58 train to town, and Gordon was
almost certain to meet her, and, with
the sort of paternal tenderness a mature
young fellow of twenty-four can feel in
giving pleasure to a sweet little girl of
one-and-twenty, take her to some matine'e
performance of opera or play. There
was a real satisfaction in thus answering
the passion, the enthusiasm, the ardent
curiosity which belonged to Cerise, which
had been hitherto starved on meagre fare.
However, one Sunday night late in
March, when Gordon was on his way
back to town after spending six hours
in Miss Gale's society (for, as was not
infrequent in these days, he had been in-
vited to remain and partake of the even-
ing meal of the family), his heart and
conscience were both brought up sudden-
ly by a sharp pull. It was a singular
circumstance that neither he nor Miss
Gale, in all those hours of intimate
conversation, had once alluded either to
Bartram Van Kleeck or to Edith Dorsey.
Never had Cerise been so entertaining.
On the Saturday before the two had had
a very successful day together ; she was
in the highest spirits, and the piquancy
and audacity of her criticisms, the feli-
city of her droll little hits, had made
him put off any mention of the absent
dear ones until it was too late, for he
had been obliged to run for the train.
This omission of Edith's name and of
Van Kleeck's had happened once before,
but Gordon now said to himself it must
not happen again. It meant neither for-

One Fair Daughter.

getf ulness nor disloyalty, of course ; per-
haps it was the inevitable reaction after
their early outpourings of confidence.

" The shallows murmur, but the deeps are
dumb."

He recalled one significant circum-
stance which showed that it was actually
Cerise's generous disposition to make the
best of things which kept her from harp-
ing on her desolate position. When, the
week before, he had alluded to South
Africa, she had exclaimed, with a sort
of shuddering sigh, "Don't talk about
South Africa ! "

" A fellow must have some subject,"
he had replied. "What shall I talk
about?"

"Talk about me," she retorted, with
her pretty childish air of petulance.

" That 's a charming subject, I admit,"
Gordon had observed inevitably.

He had noticed at times a sort of ex-
citement in Cerise, and he had said to
himself that she put on her blitheness
for Van Kleeck's sake. She wished to
please his friend, to make the hours
pass. The artless and spontaneous way
in which she discussed her own char-
acteristics, her impressions, her crying
wishes, and her imperious needs was all
a part of her devotion to Van Kleeck,
came from the instinct to seem gay and
happy and content. On Gordon's side,
it was his office to applaud the delightful
little creature ; for Van Kleeck's sake, to
keep her up to high-water mark, not per-
mit her to dwindle into dullness and low
spirits. Yet on this particular Sunday, hi
spite of such a plain deciphering of duty,
it seemed to Gordon flat disloyalty to his
absent friend to have been sitting easy
and comfortable, listening to Cerise talk-
ing of everything that came into her
head, silent about her betrothed husband,
who was toiling and sweating in a climate
which exposed him to every sort of peril.

No, Gordon was not content, and
when, on the following Wednesday, he
presented himself at Capua, he carried
in his hand a bunch of violets, together

with some jonquils. He gave the latter
flowers to Cerise, but retained the violets.

" They remind me of Edith," he said.
" There was a shady spot at Lenox where
they bloomed all summer."

" Oh," said Cerise, " you are always
thinking of Edith."

"Of course I am," Gordon retorted;
" just as you are always thinking about
Van Kleeck."

" Indeed I am not always thinking
about Bartram. I think about a great
many other things," Cerise declared, with
a vivid spot of color burning on each
cheek. " Why should I not ? He is
thinking of all sorts of things and doing
all sorts of things I know nothing about."

" But they all refer to you. I would
wager a considerable sum that he thinks
of you when he eats, when he works,
when he sleeps. 'Will Cerise like this? '
' Would Cerise be able to stand that ? '
' When shall I see Cerise ? ' " Gordon's
voice lingered on these questions. He
asked them with a lover's insistence.

She gave him a soft little glance.
There was an odd droop at the corners
of her lips.

" A man is bound to attend to his busi-
ness," he resumed.

" And is a woman not bound to attend
to hers ? " cried Cerise, smiting his ar-
gument with relentless logic. " He is in
South Africa, and I — I am in Capua."

Her glance perplexed Gordon. It
seemed almost to include him in this iso-
lation, this separation from Van Kleeck.
It seemed to say, " You and I are here."

" His letters ought to account for a
good deal of his time," Gordon sug-
gested. " You say he writes you twelve
pages twice a week."

" They are all statistics. I don't care
in the least about statistics. Bartram is
so fond of giving information, and at least
eleven pages of each letter are devoted
to an account of the climate, productions,
and inhabitants of the gold region."

" But the other page no doubt makes
up for the rest."

One Fair Daughter.

" On the other page," said Cerise
blandly, " he praises economy, tells how
little he can live on in that climate, one
requires so few clothes, and he hopes I
like a vegetable diet, for it enables one
to save so much."

Gordon felt a rebellious rush of sym-
pathy for Cerise. He had indeed expe-
rienced it more than once before. Van
Kleeck was the noblest fellow in the
world, but he overdid the thing. A man
who loves a girl must not disregard the
life, the passion, the aspiration, which are
the essence of the creature. Certainly,
if he, Gordon, had a chance to write to
Edith, little enough of statistics and eco-
nomies would he try to give her. Nev-
ertheless, what he now observed to Miss
Gale was : " The truth is, money to Van
Kleeck means his happiness. Two thou-
sand a year is having you on the nar-
rowest possible margin ; three thousand,
with a little more comfort ; five thousand
and upward, with ease, elegance, luxury."

" I hate those material ideas. I don't
want to measure all the world by sordid
considerations," Cerise burst forth im-
petuously.

" Bartram is never sordid. His prac-
tical forethought is all for you. His only
wish is to have you for his wife."

" I don't want to be his wife. I don't
want to go to South Africa."

" Do you mean " — Gordon began ;
then broke off aghast at the very sugges-
tion of such perfidy.

" Yes, that is what I mean," she said,
quite understanding.

" He thinks you love him devotedly ! "

" I did n't like to hurt his feelings."

Never in his life had Gordon experi-
enced such wretched discomfort. The two
were looking at each other intently, both
flushed, both tremulous, both wearing an
air of being a good deal frightened. But
besides this half-terror Gordon was con-
scious of something else in the look and
tone of Cerise, — of elation, of having
found an outlet, an escape, from what had
cramped and thwarted her. Her bright,

fluffy little head was poised like a bird's.
He gazed at her with dire consternation,
feeling in his heart some vibrating re-
sponsive chord answering hef, and angry
with himself for feeling it.

" You should n't say such things ! " he
exclaimed, as if with intense indignation.
" You should stop and think."

" I don't want to-stop and think. You
ought to have told me long ago to stop
and think," Cerise retorted, also with an
air of being exasperated to the last de-
gree. " You have let me go on and on
— you have brought me flowers — you
have — I don't want to stop and think.
It would make me miserable. I have n't
thought for a long time. I have just put
every idea away — except — except " —

" Except what ? " demanded Gordon.

" Except that you would be here, if
not to-day, then to-morrow ; if not to-
morrow, next day."

Gordon sat as if stunned. He was
conscious of a strong current of emotion
through his veins, but could not define
the different sensations which seemed to
rush together and gather in a blow that
stupefied him. He saw that tears filled
her eyes and brimmed over. He pitied
her with all the strength of his nature.

" We — have — been — so — happy"
she faltered, bending forward and with
her wet face near his, speaking.in a tone
which addressed his heart rather than his
ear.

He jumped up, with a feeling of
wrenching himself away from a position
of extreme peril. " You don't think of
Van Kleeck. You don't think of Edith,"
he said. Feeling had roughened his
voice so that it was unrecognizable.

"You did n't think of Edith ! "

" I always think of Edith."

" Were you thinking of her last Sat-
urday, when we were going about to-
gether ? " Cerise asked this eagerly ;
then without waiting for him to answer
she went on: "You were not thinking
of her at all. You have not thought of
her of late. Why should you think of

One Fair Daughter.

her ? There is nothing for you to think
of. It is not as if you had actually been
engaged to her. If I can give up Bar-
tram — after — after being everything
to him for two years, and he everything
to me, why, it ought to be nothing, no-
thing in the world, to give up Edith, who
does not really care for you, who never
in her life cared for anybody but her fa-
ther, who is wrapped up in binomial the-
orems, who " —

" Don't, don't, Cerise ! " cried Gordon,
raising his hand as if to ward off a blow.

" She is cold — she is — But no, no,
I will not be so unfair. She is greater
than I am, sweeter than I am, but oh,
Gordon, she does n't care about you as
I do."

The charm, the tyrannous actuality of
the real presence of a lovely girl close
beside one, — her tearful eyes raised, her
moist red lips quivering, her whole face,
tone, gesture, eloquent alike ! At such
a moment a man's heart must respond in
some measure to what is so palpable, so
absolute ; the absent must become more
or less vague, shadowy, problematical.

"And you don't really care about
Edith," the voice went on in that terrible
whisper. " I saw that long ago. If I
had not seen it, if I had not known it
was a fiction, a pretense, I could n't have
begun to feel that " —

Her tone thrilled him ; her look drew
him. Her quick sobbing breath — the
tears on her cheek —

He hardly knew what had happened,
but somehow his own face was wet. He
felt as if blinded and scorched by pure
flame. Yet in another moment he was
out of doors, on his way to the station.
Who knows whether destiny bade Mrs.
Gale stand sentinel that day ? Was it
simply because for domestic or economi-
cal reasons a guest would have been un-
welcome ? Or did she feel as if her niece's
tete-a-tete with the friend of her fiance
were somewhat unduly prolonged ? At
any rate, this happy accident was the re-
sult of her glance at the clock. Harold,

a lively boy of five, suddenly threw open
the parlor door, and called at the top of
his lungs, " Mr. Rose, mamma says, if
you want to take the 5.58 train, you will
have to make haste ! "

" I feel absolutely stuck fast in the
mire ! " Gordon said to himself at least
a hundred times in the course of the next
forty-eight hours. Did this exclamation
come from a feeling of being entangled,
from a longing for deliverance ? And if
so, a longing for deliverance from what ?
From Edith ? From Cerise's snares and
nets ?

That last interview remained a fixed
impression, a speechless and sombre load
upon his heart and sense. He could not
shake it off. He could not understand
what had happened, — why he felt
wrenched away, separated from what he
loved most. He put out his hands to
meet Edith, but they fell empty. Hither-
to, even with the ocean rolling between
them, she had been near, her heart beat-
ing with his, her faith answering his.
Now she was cold, remote ; imagina-
tion flapped a leaden wing and could not
soar : absolutely, it seemed to him he
had forgotten Edith's very look and fea-
tures.

But close beside him, too importunate
to be banished, too sweet, too seductive,
to be denied, was Cerise, flattering his
longing to be beloved, to love somebody.
The pathos of the situation was so deep.
Her cry for happiness, for freedom, for
the emancipation which lies in having a
hatful of money to spend, was one which
he could answer so ungrudgingly. It was
so pitiful that the charming little creature
could not have free play, she had been so
limited, so hindered ! They had already
enjoyed so much together.

Yes, Cerise no doubt had come close,
— irresistibly close. She had made
everything so clear. Her sequences had

One Fair Daughter.

been appalling in their logic. The idea
that an imperative duty called him to
her thrilled his heart and imagination,
worked upon him like a spell, fevered
him with a restless happiness. He felt
himself to be a man pushed by destiny.

But there was not only Cerise in the
world. He might argue that no tie bound
him to Edith, that Edith could not accuse
him of duplicity. There was Van Kleeck,
and thinking of Van Kleeck, Gordon
loathed his own hollow and hypocritical
pretense of friendship.

" I don't think," Gordon nevertheless
argued to himself, with an effort at high
moral indignation, "that a man ought to
hand over his betrothed wife to another
man's keeping and go to the other end of
the world. I don't think it 's safe."

Here the inward monitor took up the
argument.

"It is true it might be safe with a
loyal, honorable fellow, and Van Kleeck
supposed I was loyal and honorable."

" He thought I loved Edith, — that
nothing would make me unfaithful to
Edith."

" He believed Cerise, poor child, loved
him."

" He had spoken of the discipline of
a long engagement. He said it was the
supreme test that ought always to be im-
posed. But then Van Kleeck is not a
pendulum, vibrating first to the right,
then to the left."

These reflections did not pursue each
other coherently ; rather, like the occa-
sional bubble from the depths of a trou-
bled pool, each welled up as by irresisti-
ble pressure. More than once, in the two
nights which followed the Wednesday, he
started out of his sleep, with some new,
perverse, self-scrutinizing, nervous tre-
mor over the dilemma he was in. When
he was awake, his conscience was not so
much his monitor as his accomplice ; it
pointed to duty, but that duty was to
Cerise. The sensations she stirred in
him of inconsequent enjoyment, of plea-
sure in the lucky accident of their being

together, of his marching to her orders
and rather liking it, belonged to the re-
veries of his waking hours. In his sleep
his soul made its claim ; it was then that
his love for Edith asserted its power.

" I told Van Kleeck that without Edith
I should go to the devil," Gordon would
say to himself in despair. " / have ar-
rived"

In spite of all his thinking, he grew
hour by hour to know less and less what
he really thought. He had postponed any
absolute decision as to his future course
of conduct until Saturday, for on that day
he was to see Cerise again. In this inter-
val of irresolution it was a relief to fasten
with a fresh grip to his work. He liked
the hard, cold, remorseless logic of the
argument he was studying. What had
heretofore been dry, colorless, pedantic,
suddenly became infused with the decree
of the fixed, the immutable ; it gave him
intense satisfaction. A thing himself of
shreds and patches, of ideas starting from
no fundamental principle and leading to
no conclusion, it was a comfort to find
that human conduct is not to be based on
sentiment, on taste, even on passion. He
began dimly to feel that there must be a
tribunal before which he might state his
predicament and find some sort of deliv-

On that Friday afternoon Gordon was
sitting at his desk in Judge Graham's
office, working with a sort of fury at an
abstract which he had been asked to pre-
pare, oblivious of everything that was
going on about him, when all at once
there appeared on the sheet of foolscap
over which he was bending a very small
limber square of pasteboard, on which
was engraved, "Mr. Reginald Dorsey,
Gramercy Park."

Gordon stared at the card, as if some
inner spasm of feeling, of conscience,
of memory, had suddenly taken visible
shape and risen to accuse him. While
he was trying his wits at the riddle, the
clerk whispered in his ear, " Mr. Dorsey

One Fair Daughter.

is in Judge Graham's private office. He
wants to see you."

Gordon sprang to his feet. With a
beating heart he strode down the long
room, went out into the lobby, and, with
a feeling of being confronted with some
new trial whose difficulties he could not
measure, turned the handle of the sec-
ond door. Judge Graham was sitting
talking to Mr. Dorsey as the young man
entered.

"I must go," the judge said, rising.
" I have been telling Mr. Dorsey good
things about you, Rose. When you first
took a desk here, I thought to myself it
was a lucky thing for you you had n't to
make your living by the law. Now I 've
changed my opinion; I have decided
that with the requisite push of poverty
you would go far."

But Gordon heard nothing. Mr. Dor-
sey, shaking his hand and looking into
his face, was puzzled. The young fellow
was pale, but his eyes were burning ; his
lips were compressed ; altogether he had
an air as if bracing himself for a grapple
with an enemy.

All he said in response to Mr. Dorsey's
greeting was, " I supposed that you were
in Europe."

" Graham cabled for me. There was
important business. I came at an hour's
notice. I only got in last night."

Gordon's eyes had an eager question
in them, his lips seemed ready to utter
it ; but then he dropped his glance to the
floor, shut his mouth firmly, and said not
a word. He had wanted to ask if Edith
had come, but of course Edith had not
come.

" Are n't you well, Rose ? " Mr. Dor-
sey inquired.

" Oh yes, I'm well ; that is, physically."

Mr. Dorsey's instinct, sounding the
young man through, discovered some-
thing amiss, something wanting. But
after all, might it not be that Gordon
had something to forgive ? Had not his
claims been treated with ignominy ?
Had not his suit been dismissed, Edith

carried off, and he himself left to eat out
his heart with empty longing ?

" Sit down," said Mr. Dorsey. " I want
to talk with you. I decided last fall
that if you were really in love with my
daughter you ought to be able to endure
a six months' test. Afterwards when I
went to see you — but we '11 pass that
over " —

" I never wondered that you despised
me," Gordon broke in. " I feel that if
you told Edith how " —

" I did not tell her. I saw Van
Kleeck in London, and he made it clear
to me how it happened. Rose, my dear
boy, I did not mean to be too rigid. But
a father's position is one of terrific re-
sponsibility. All Edith's future happi-
ness depends on the character of the man
she marries."

Gordon heaved a deep sigh, but for a
long moment answered not a word.

Mr. Dorsey looked surprised, almost
displeased. Something, everything he
expected was lacking in the young fel-
low. After such a concession from the
father of the girl he was prepared to
love eternally, he ought not to stand
dull, inert, staring as if at a blank
wall ; then, when aghast at the silence,
answering in the most perfunctory way,
« Yes."

" It is not yet six months," observed
Mr. Dorsey succinctly, " since you pre-
sented yourself as Edith's suitor."

" It was on the twenty-second day of
last October."

" Precisely, — hardly more than five
months. You told me then that you
loved my daughter devotedly."

" I loved her with all my heart," said
Gordon, with an energy in his accent
which suggested some bitterness of feel-
ing.

" Has there been any change in your
regard for her ? "

" Any — change — in — my — regard
— for — her ?"

•• I mean, do you love her still ? "

*' I adore her."

One Fair Daughter.

" You love her as you loved her then,
with all your heart and soul ? "

" With all my heart and soul." As
he spoke a gleam crossed Gordon's fea-
tures. It was the first sign of the passion-
ate gladness of the lover he had evinced
to Mr. Dorsey's disappointed eyes. But
just as this belated instinct of manly feel-
ing began to move him he pulled him-
self up, as it were. " That is," he added
hastily, " I should love her still with all
my heart and soul unless " —

" Unless what ? "

" Don't ask me, sir. To enter into ex-
planations would lead to madness."

" Let me try to understand," said Mr.
Dorsey, endeavoring to command his
baffled and wrathful temper. " Do you
wish me to believe that you still love my
daughter? "

" I never loved anybody else, — I
never could really love anybody else,"
said Gordon mechanically, all the fervor
of a lover absent from his look and tone.

" There is some one else," said Mr.
Dorsey sternly.

Gordon gave him a glance, — a word-
less confession, but enough.

" There is some one else," Mr. Dorsey
reiterated.

Gordon drew his hand across his fore-
head. " I 'm utterly stupefied at the po-
sition in which I find myself," he mur-
mured blankly.

" Are you engaged to some one else ? "

" Oh no, sir, not engaged."

" Have you been making love to some
one else ? "

Gordon shuddered. His conscience
was on edge. " Not intentionally," he
muttered ; " still " —

" You told me just now that you loved
Edith."

" I do love her."

" Do you love — the other ? "

Gordon drew a deep breath. "If I
did not, I should be the most ungrateful
cur alive."

" It is impossible," Mr. Dorsey now
exclaimed in a tone of intense exaspera-

tion, " for a man to be in love with two
women at once."

" I used to think so," said Gordon in
a hollow voice.

" It is, at any rate, impossible for a man
to be married to two women at once."

" I know it," Gordon conceded, with a
sigh, " and I have become convinced that
most of the trage'dies in life are due to
that circumstance."

Mr. Dorsey, confounded, gazed at the
young man. The situation was incon-
ceivable. Here had he come back from
England feeling at last that the just and
right thing to do was to let Edith have
the lover she had not forgotten, whom
she could not forget ; who, in fact, Mr.
Dorsey had gradually grown to believe,
was the one man on earth whom he de-
sired for her husband and his own son.
He himself had hankered after the young
fellow almost if not quite as much as had
Edith. When he had heard how well
Gordon was behaving, how he fastened
to his desk like a bur, the older man's
heart had yearned over him. He had
come to love Gordon ; he repented his
hardness on Gordon's little naughtinesses
and naturalnesses. Still, he had been
right in the main. It was better that he
should not have given his consent at once.
Engaged to Edith, . Gordon would not
have shown the stuff that was in him.

So firm had been Mr. Dorsey's faith,
he had thought of no possibility except
that, at the first mention of Edith, Gor-
don would be on fire with longing to see
her.

" If you have been false to Edith, if
she is replaced in your affections," the
father now said, " I will go away on
the instant. If she is still anything to
you, I have, I think, a right to under-
stand " —

" I wish with all my heart you did un-
derstand ! " Gordon burst out. " If some
one only knew just what has happened
— how I am placed " —

" Tell me about it."

" I don't know how. But I have just

One Fair Daughter.

begun to say to myself, ' If there were
but some one to whom I could go for
counsel ! ' '

" Why not to me ? "

" If I were the only one concerned " —

" But there is the other — the woman ?"

" Two others ! "

" Two women ? "

" No, only one woman ; the other is a
man, my friend."

It was an easy matter now to see that
there was some form of fierce self-con-
demnation in the young man's breast.
Mr. Dorsey had not, in general, the
faculty of reading the hearts and minds
of other men, and it was this incapacity
of swift insight which made him slow in
making up his mind. But at this mo-
ment, shaping itself little by little out of
various vague suggestions, came a tan-
gible idea. He remembered his cousin
Cerise. Three years before, he himself
had been for about forty-eight hours un-
der her spell. He had been a little be-
witched, he had almost thought of her as
a mother for Edith. Then espying in
himself such possibilities, he had rubbed
his eyes and awakened. He could re-
call now the fact that Edith had about
six weeks before been a little downcast
after receiving a letter from her cousin ;
that since that time she had not men-
tioned the name of Cerise, — that is, not
voluntarily ; but when he alluded to Ce-
rise, she had spoken of her as so charm-
ing, so permeated with life and f reshness,
with audacity, with piquancy, with siu!h
an intense relish for life, she ought ^
have a chance to be happy, — since some*
people were born to be happy, just as
for others were appointed renunciations.
With instant divination, Mr. Dorsey now
observed quietly, " You have been seeing
a good deal of my cousin, Miss Gale ? "

Gordon, sharply startled, assented.

" Has she broken her engagement to
Van Kleeck ? " Mr. Dorsey inquired fur-
ther, with clear significance.

"Not yet," Gordon responded, the
color rushing violently to his face, then

ebbing, leaving him suddenly more pale
than before.

" I fancy I see your dilemma," Mr.
Dorsey said, as if musing. " The fact is,
my cousin Cerise is a very charming
girl ; she is a girl, too, of unusual strength
of mind, with plenty of will of her own.
She has only one weakness, and that is a
dislike to have any man near her who is
not in love with her, — at least a little in
love with her." He said no more, his in-
tuition telling him that discussion might
kindle fires not easily extinguished. " I
want," he added, rising, " to have you
tell me the whole story. This is not the
place. It will be better for you to dine
with me to-night."

VI.

Gordon was in no state of mind to
prepare his conversation skillfully. Still,
in the interval between parting with Mr.
Dorsey on Wall Street and presenting
himself at the door of the house in Gra-
mercy Park at twenty-five minutes past
seven, he did try to decide what he him-
self sincerely wished, and what he need-
ed to say to Mr. Dorsey. He had to re-
flect that Edith was well placed, happy,
with a devoted father, every material
thing she needed in the world within
reach, loving her studies, ambitious to
pursue them and excel. There was Ce-
rise, who needed him, who was betrothed
to a man not wholly congenial who had
left her alone. If she actually wished
to be released from her engagement to
Van Kleeck, was it not Gordon's duty to
shield and serve her in this crisis ? He
would entreat Mr. Dorsey to look at the
matter dispassionately ; to weigh the right
and wrong of it ; to tell him whether it
would be an unmanly breach of faith for
him to marry the woman who had been
for two years and more engaged to his
friend. At least one grandiloquent, not
to say pathetic phrase was to be pressed
into service.

One Fair Daughter.

" I can give up the woman I love, but
ought I to give up the woman who loves
me ? "

This was the case in a nutshell.

The visitor was admitted, and, pass-
ing through the still dismantled hall,
was ushered into the library, comfortably
warmed and lighted. There was no one
in the room, but easy-chairs were drawn
up temptingly before the fire. He did not
sit down. Comfort, ease, peace of mind,
were not for him. He had an ominous
vision of what Mr. Dorsey would say.
Here in this room, which he had once
entered with such very different feelings,
conscience pinched him like an ill-condi-
tioned garment. He would presently be
sent away miserable, pining, again shut
out as unworthy. The only consolation
possible was that he, no matter how de-
feated in sacredest hopes and wishes,
could at least insure the happiness of Ce-
rise. Poor little Cerise, who loved him !

He heard a sound at the door. It
was his host. It was also his censor, his
judge, indeed his executioner. His heart
was heavy with dread, but he turned.

The room was only half lighted ; that
is, all the lights were veiled. He saw a
figure entering, but not that of the gen-
tleman of the house. Instead it seemed
an apparition, — a cloud of white that
glimmered, that wavered, that hesitated
to advance, that lingered in the far-off
gloom. Was it a girl, — a beautiful girl
in a white gown ? It was Gordon who
advanced. It was Gordon who darted
across the room, who approached, who
stood as if overcome by the exquisite and
unexpected bliss of the moment, then
gasped out, " Edith ? You here ? "

The two stood looking each into the
other's face. There she was, tall, slen-
der, full of grace and dignity ; with that
pure, proud, unspeakably beautiful face ;
the candid brow, the wide-open eyes, the
tender lips that smiled in the corners.

" Have you actually remembered me
all this time ? " she asked, the little dim-
ples playing in her cheeks.

There came over Gordon, as he took a
hand of hers in each of his, such a poi-
gnant sense of happiness, of salvation, of
deliverance, that he had but one resource,
— to clasp Edith in his arms ; and that
was what he did.

Mr. Dorsey presently followed his
daughter. If he had used his wits to
prepare a brilliant counterstroke, he had
been successful. He had never before
seen Gordon with Edith. Now that he
saw them together, he felt that he wished
never again to see them apart.

" If," he said with feeling, as Gordon
rushed towards him, and wrung his hand
over and over — "if — you — love —
her " —

" Love her ? I worship her ! " cried
Gordon, and this time nothing of pas-
sionate gladness was missing in his look
and tone.

" She is all I have. I 'm like the man
in the play : —

' One fair daughter, and no more,
The which he loved passing well.' "

" You will have me," said Gordon.

Later in the evening, Mr. Dorsey found
a chance to ask, " Did you tell Edith ? "

" There was nothing to tell her," an-
swered Gordon with decision, — " no-
thing."

" I have a dislike for beginnings, but
once begun, I want things never to end."

" This shall never end."

" And by the way," said Mr. Dorsey,
" do you happen to know that Van Kleeck
has sent for Miss Gale ? He wants her
to go to Paris with some friends who sail
on the 6th of April. She will prepare
her trousseau in Paris, and he will meet
her there, and they will be married at the
American minister's."

Ellen Olney Kirk.

The Future of Rural New England.

THE FUTUKE OF RURAL NEW ENGLAND.

THE township of Dickerman, in the in-
terior of one of the New England States,
has a large area, with a scattered pop-
ulation of about fifteen hundred souls.
Farming is the only industry of the peo-
ple. The roads, bad at all seasons, and
in the spring almost impassable, are so
encroached upon by untrimmed brush
that wagons have much ado to pass one
another. Such guide-boards as are not
prone and crumbling are battered and
illegible. The mail-boxes at the cross-
roads are as untrustworthy as worn-out
pockets. The orchards are exception-
ally picturesque, but they owe their pic-
turesqueness to the unpruned, scraggly,
hollow-trunked condition of the trees.
The fields wear a disappointed, discour-
aged air, and the stone walls and rail
fences which outline them — they can-
not by any stretch of the imagination be
said to inclose them — sag at all possi-
ble angles, uncertain in their courses as
drunken men without guides. Piles of
magnificent logs, valuable even where
lumber is cheap, are rotting by the road-
sides, and stacks of cord-wood, long ready
to be transported, stand in the forests.

Many of the farmhouses have been
tenantless for years. Many of the oc-
cupied houses are so gray, moss-grown,
and dilapidated that they are only a tri-
fle less ghastly than the tenantless ones.
They are so weather-beaten as to retain
only the faintest traces of the paint that
once brightened them. Their windows
have the traditional stuffed panes, and
the blinds — when there are any — have
broken slats. The chimneys, ragged of
outline and almost mortarless, threaten
to topple over in the first high wind.
The outbuildings are flanked by fence-
rail buttresses, lest they fall over or
break apart. The) door-yards are over-
grown with rank weeds and overrun with
pigs and poultry ; the few flowers, which

fidelity to country tradition has planted
there, being forced to seek refuge behind
screens of rusty wire netting or palisades
of unsightly sticks. The barn-yards are
littered, miry, and foul-smelling, and the
stock within them — with the exception
of the pigs, which thrive — are lean and
hungry.

Even the few houses that have not
been allowed to fall into disrepair have
a sullen, forbidding appearance. The
blinds are closed or the curtains are
drawn at all but the kitchen windows.
Seen for the first time, they suggest a re-
cent death and an approaching funeral.
Every day, however, year in and year
out, it is the same with them ; they are
perpetually funereal. Spick-and-span-
ness they have, but without brightness,
and thrift, but without hospitality.

Dickerman is traversed by a railway,
with a station at the"" Corners," as that
section of the township is called which
contains the post-office, the town-house,
two stores, two churches, and a squalid
hotel, and which therefore comes a lit-
tle nearer than any other part to being
the village proper. Here are also a de-
serted store, abandoned saw and grist
mills, a long-disused academy, a neglect-
ed cemetery, and rather more than a
due proportion of empty and dilapidated
dwellings. The deserted store has never
been deprived of its fittings ; the dust-
coated shelves, counters, and glass show-
cases, the rust-incrusted scales, the cen-
tre stove and the circle of armchairs
about it, all remaining in their places,
as any one may see who takes the pains
to clean a spot for peering through one
of the bedaubed windows.

It is more than twenty years since the
wheel of the village mill stopped because
of the death of its owner, who left no
children. The mill is a sad ruin now,
almost roofless, two of its side-walls prone

The Future of Rural New England.

on the ground, its machinery oxidizing
and falling to pieces, and the piles of
sawed and unsawed lumber decomposing
around it. It is longer still — more than
thirty years — since the academy closed
its doors to pupils. The academy build-
ing was used for a variety of purposes
afterwards — even as a dwelling — be-
fore the ultimate and complete desertion
that is now its lot. Its sign has remained
in place through all its vicissitudes, and,
though badly weather-beaten, would still
be legible to an expert decipherer of in
scriptions.

There are Catholic communities, both
in America and in the Old World, where
an extreme wretchedness in the dwell-
ings is at once partially explained by the
richness and beauty of the churches.
But not so in Dickerman. On the con-
trary, both the Dickerman churches are
of a piece with their surroundings. The
Congregational Church, more than a cen-
tury old (" Orthodox " is the name it still
goes by), was a worthy structure in its
day, and would be so yet had it been
kept in good repair. Alas, it is only
the ghost of its former pretentious self !
Its sills are badly rotted. Its spire and
belfry have been shattered by lightning,
and imperfectly restored. Its roof is
leaky, the clapboards of its walls are
warped and blistered, and its heavy bell,
once sweet of tone, is cracked and dis-
sonant. The Baptist Church, built only
a few years ago, mainly at the expense
of a church building society, is one of
the shoddily constructed, many-gabled
atrocities due to the malign influence of
the so-called Queen Anne restoration. Its
original coat of paint of many colors has
mostly soaked into the surrounding soil.
Its panes of stained glass, as they have
been broken from time to time, have
been replaced by ordinary window-glass,
with piebald, uncanny results. The pre-
sent town-house (the original town-house
was burned several years ago), the only
public building in the place, comports
well with the churches, being a square,

squat, unpainted thing, with so striking
a resemblance to a barn that it would
surely be taken for one, were it not for
its lack of barn doors, its isolated and
honorable position in the centre of the
village common, and its adornment by a
bulletin-board thickly plastered with lists
of voters, town-meeting warrants, and
legal notices in large variety.

In a word, a stranger entering Dick-
erman for the first time could not fail to
be astounded by the marks of desolation
and decay on every hand. To him, the
most conspicuous evidence that it was or
had been a populated town would be
the closeness of the gravestones in the
graveyard ; the best evidence of business
enterprise, a freshly painted undertaker's
sign, bearing the brisk announcement
that coffins, caskets, and burial-robes are
always ready ; the one touch of beauty,
a magnificent double row of aged elms
leading up to the forsaken academy ; and
the one patch of warm color visible, the
flaming circus posters with which both
the outside and the inside of the Ortho-
dox Church sheds perennially bloom.

When first I saw the crumbling croft-
ers' huts of the Scottish Highlands, I felt
that I could never see anything sadder.
I had not then seen the deserted farms
of my own New England hills. When
I visited them, I recognized instantly a
sadder sight than the crofters' huts ; de-
cay in a new country being as much more
appalling than decay in an old country
as the loss of faculties in youth is more
appalling than the loss of them in age.

What Dickerman is in appearance, a
desolate, destitute community, that it is
in reality. To begin with homely and
material conditions, even at the risk of
seeming pettiness, a word must be said
regarding the food of its inhabitants.
The Dickerman diet is the most un-
wholesome possible. Pork in one form
or another is its staple, — " meat " and
pork, " hearty food " and pork, are used
as synonyms ; and pork is supplemented
mainly with hot cream-of-tartar and sal-

The Future of Rural New England.

eratus biscuit, doughnuts, and pies. The
sanitary, not to mention the epicurean
possibilities of the meats, vegetables,
mushrooms, and fruits within easy reach,
either are not known or are ignored.
The results are just what might be ex-
pected. The men are listless, sullen,
stolid. Chronic dyspepsia and other in-
ternal disorders are common. That their
constitutions are not completely under-
mined is due largely to the power of re-
sistance that life in the open air gives
them. The women, who have not the
advantage of outdoor living, who indeed
are by necessity or choice quite as much
confined within doors as their sisters of
the cities, suffer frightfully. They take
refuge (as men would turn to drink) in
floods of unwholesome patent medicine,
and in the nostrums of quacks who ap-
pear at regular intervals in the village,
only to make a bad state of health a
worse one. Small wonder that as a class
they are pale, haggard, prematurely old,
shrill, ill-tempered, untidy, and inefficient
in their housekeeping. To the physical
and sensuous delights of the country —
a little fishing and hunting on the part
of the men excepted — one sex is as in-
different as the other.

The social life is pinched and bare.
The only organizations are the churches
and a moribund lodge of Good Templars.
Of neighborliness there is little, and that
little consumes itself so entirely in the
retailing of petty scandal that there is
nothing left for beneficence. To the
sights and sounds of nature — the spring
flowers, the summer insects, the autumn
foliage, the winter chiaroscuro, the chants
of birds, brooks, and woodlands — the
people are deaf and blind. The fresh-
ness of the morning and the glowing
colors of the sunset stir no more emo-
tion in them than inVtheir kine.

The schools are held\in poorly equipped
buildings, taught by girls without train-
ing or enthusiasm, and attended by chil-
dren devoid of ambition. One might al-
most say they are as bad as they could

be. The Sunday-schools are even worse.
Except the two Sunday-school libraries,
which are little better than nothing, there
is no circulating library in the whole
township. Memoirs of martyr mission-
aries and antiquated books of devotion
are among the heirlooms of many fam-
ilies ; they are held in profound respect,
but are never read. Such other books
as appear on the tables are those the
owners have been wheedled into purchas-
ing by clever book agents, — subscription
books all : campaign Lives of candidates
for the presidency, county histories, cook-
books, sermons of evangelists and emo-
tional preachers, Home Treasuries of
prose and poetry ; above all, books of eti-
quette. The denominational religious
weeklies, the cheaper fashion and house-
keeping periodicals, the fifty-cent story
papers (whose real business is a traffic in
notions by post), and the stanch old par-
ty organs (daily, semi-weekly, and week-
ly) enter some of the households. But
the real, the typical reading of Dicker-
man, the reading of men and women,
young and old, is the sensational news-
paper of the worst kind, especially the
Sunday edition, which is sold at every
cross-roads in New England, even where
the railway has not yet penetrated.

One is not surprised to find a dearth
of public spirit. The civic sense of Dick-
erman manifests itself once a year only,
at town-meeting, chiefly in reducing the
regular and necessary appropriations to
the lowest possible limit, in protesting
against innovations on the ground of
burdensome taxes, and in quarreling over
trifles. In fact, were it not for the
fears of each of the several sections of
the township that it would get less than
its share of the public moneys, and for
the widespread desire to hold office, which
finds profit in encouraging these petty
sectional jealousies, there would hardly
be any public appropriations whatever
in Dickerman. Civic honesty, naturally
enough, is at the same low ebb as civic
spirit. The buying and selling of votes

The Future of Rural New England.

has been in vogue for years, and has
not been as much lessened by the intro-
duction of the secret ballot as in larger
communities, where secrecy of any sort
is more practicable. Only lately, the
chairman of the board of selectmen was
kept from foreclosing a mortgage solely
by the threat of his mortgagee to make
public the amounts that he and others
had received from the official for their
votes in the preceding election. Liquor-
selling under a state prohibitory law is
condoned by the selectmen for pecuniary
considerations, these being tacitly under-
stood to be legitimate perquisites of the
office of selectman.

The two churches of Dickevman are
not the dispensing centres of sweetness
and light that we would fain believe
all religious organizations to be. The
Orthodox Church, as immutable in its
methods as in its doctrines, is cold, un-
aggressive, self-righteous, and contempt-
uous of everything religious or anti-re-
ligious that is not part and parcel of its
tradition. The Baptist Church, equally
conservative in matters of doctrine, is
nevertheless committed to sensationalism
of method, and it is a poor year indeed
when it does not manage to produce at
least one genuine excitement. It indulges
in fierce and frequent tirades against
free-thinking, worldly amusements, and
Sabbath-breaking, and, for purposes of
edification, imports evangelists, Bible
readers, leaders of praying bands, total
abstinence apostles, refugee Armenians,
anti-Catholic agitators, educated freed-
men, and converted Jews. The church-
goers, while they are sadly lacking in the
positive virtues of honesty, generosity,
and brotherly love, are as a class fairly
faithful to the code of a conventional
negative morality that makes it incum-
bent upon them to be temperate and or-
derly, at least in public. The churches
are thus a valuable restraining force.
Furthermore, they discharge an impor-
tant social function in bringing together,
regularly, people who would otherwise

not be brought together at all in an or-
ganized way. Barren, then, as the life of
Dickerman is with its churches, it would
be still more barren without them. The
social immorality of rural New England
is a subject that does not fall directly in
our way, but it ought to be said that the
good people who take it for granted that
country life develops social purity pro-
bably do not know the true condition of
country life anywhere ; certainly they do
not know it in New England. If the
whole truth were told about the people
of Dickerman in this respect, it would
be sad truth. An eminent American has
recently been urging the protection of the
morals of the city against the country.
Novel as the argument seems, it is none
the less a sound one.

The foregoing description of life in
Dickerman is not exaggerated. Its out-
ward dilapidation and the emptiness of
its inner life could not be exaggerat-
ed. But there are, of course, individuals
who are intelligent, honest, large-hearted.
And things have not always been at
such a pass there. The very dilapida-
tion, destitution, and decay are eloquent,
as tombstones are eloquent, of a life that
has been, of a bygone golden age. Six-
ty years ago Dickerman was one of the
most flourishing farming communities in
its State. It was an important coaching
station on a main road, with a roomy and
hospitable road-house, whose tap-room
flip, jollity, and repartee enjoyed an in-
terstate reputation. Then, as now, except
that the sawmill and gristmill were al-
ways buzzing, farming was its only indus-
try. The farms were well tilled without
the assistance of machinery, and the farm-
buildings were kept in good repair. The
farmers were hard-working, thrifty, and
alert ; the farmers' wives were efficient
out of doors and within doors, and as well
able as the men to withstand a pork diet,
if that was then the fashion. Sons and
daughters alike were expected to do their
share towards the family's maintenance
during the busy season, in recompense

The Future of Rural New England.

for which they were allowed to devote
themselves heartily to the winter school.
This winter school was invariably taught
by a man, usually a college student ; the
work of the colleges then being arranged
to make teaching in winter possible. The
relation of the teacher to his pupils was
a highly personal one ; hence the ready
transmission of enthusiasm and the de-
velopment of individuality. Dickerman
Academy was the pride not only of the
township, but of a large rural district
from which it drewboarding-pupils. Even
to this day a few of the older citizens
who still hold to the Dickerman tradition
will name to you the eminent judges,
members of Congress, Senators, and cler-
gymen to whom Dickerman Academy
was an alma mater. A weekly lyceum
was held in the academy building during
the winters months, and a singing-school
in the schoolhouse. Neighborhood social
events were frequent, hearty, and whole-
some. The church (there was only one
then) was so conducted as to afford, in-
directly, large opportunities for the inter-
change of courtesies, news, and ideas. It
was generously supported, and so close
was the union of its interests with those
of the town that fidelity to the one
meant practically fidelity to the other.
Altogether it was a healthy, homogene-
ous life, a little slow, perhaps, but far
from lethargic, and productive of much
that was worth while, especially of the
thing the best worth while of all things,
— character.

What has brought about the change
in Dickerman ? First, there was the dis-
covery of gold in California, with its
promises of large fortunes to all who
were enterprising enough to go across
the plains. Some went from Dicker-
man, — the most ardent and adventurous
of those whose careers were not mapped
out for them, a few even of those to
whom a fair success in life was already
assured. Those who were left behind
had to be philosophers to remain serene
under the fabulous stories that came to

them, through the mails, from those who
had gone among the first ; and not all
stood this test.

Later, the railway came to Dicker-
man, establishing quick connection with
the manufacturing towns and cities, just
then entering on a period of extraordi-
nary activity, and with the New England
metropolis. The reports of the high and
steady wages to be earned in the shoe-
shops and in the cotton and woolen mills
made the young people even more rest-
less than the reports from the gold-fields
had made them, — the shops and the
mills were so much nearer, — and many
young women, as well as young men,
went forth to try their fortunes.

The civil war called a number away.
Of these, some of course were killed
in battle ; others, after their discharge,
yielded to the enticements of the cities,
and never went back to the farms. Of
those who returned to Dickerman to live,
a part were physically disabled, or were
demoralized by dissipated habits con-
tracted during their camp life.

Finally, the emigration which set in
from New England to the Western prai-
ries, and which brought the relatively
small and barren home farms into an ill-
deserved contempt, took a large part of
those who were left and were worth tak-
ing. By these successive losses of popu-
lation the town was at last so far im-
poverished that no great attraction from
without was necessary to keep up the
drain, for the very deadness and dull-
ness within exerted a strong expulsive
force ; depletion itself being a sufficient
reason for further depletion. There was
once a saying current to the effect that
as soon as a boy was able to walk, he
walked away from Maine. So it came
to be at Dickerman, and has been ever
since : as soon as a boy has become able
to walk, he has walked away from Dick-
erman. And, pray, why not? What
inducement could he have to remain?
Instead of leaving a good place to live in
for one that might or might not be bet-

The Future of Rural New England.

ter, as the first emigrants did, he was
merely leaving a bad place to live in for
a place that could not possibly be worse.
The same influences that caused the
depletion and the decay of Dickerman
— the rush to the gold-fields, the civil
war, the emigration to the prairies, the
large cities, and the manufacturing towns,
and the feeling of isolation and lack of
opportunity resulting from this emigra-
tion— have been operative throughout
all rural New England with more or less
disastrous results. Another influence,
just as generally operative, has been an
exaggerated notion of the luxury and
gentility of city life. To hail from Bos-
ton or from New York is to be both
wealthy and aristocratic, according to
the typical rural mind, which groups city
people together in a single social stratum,
without question as to where they live
or how they live, and assigns farmers,
whatever their individual qualities, to a
social stratum lower by many degrees.
This absurd notion has not only driven
country people away from the country,
but has also demoralized those whom it
has not driven away. Hence has come
the pathetic desire of such as find them-
selves doomed to live elsewhere than in
cities to imitate, as nearly as their imper-
fect knowledge permits, the manner of
life of city folk. They endeavor to dress
as city people dress, to furnish their rooms
as city people do, even to readjust their
houses to the city mode. They remodel
a fine, sensible old homestead into some-
thing that is neither a farmhouse nor a
town-house, but an ugly nondescript, with
the disadvantages of both and the ad-
vantages of neither ; or they demolish a
house honestly built to stand for gener-
ations to make way for a gingerbread
sham of a villa, as much out of place in
the midst of farm surroundings as bric-a-
brac would be in a stable. They discard
their heirlooms — handsome, heavy, an-
tique furniture, and rare china — for up-
to-date gewgaws, with neither durabili-
ty, usefulness, nor beauty to recommend

them. The women waste no end of time
and money, and fret and fuss their lives
out into the bargain, in a vain and ludi-
crous attempt to keep pace, from season
to season, with the changing fashions in
dresses and hats. Furthermore, this gro-
tesque exaltation of city conduct has bred
a contempt not only for the healthy out-
door work that women formerly did, but
also for menial labor of every sort even
within doors.

If these attempts to put away old
country fashions were genuine Teachings
out towards a higher life, there would
be no good reason for deploring them ;
but they are so plainly mere affecta-
tions that they are thoroughly pernicious.
The standards they are based upon are
ready-made importations, not the natural
and healthy outgrowth of rustic condi-
tions. The result is glaring incongruity ;
and incongruity is invariably either ludi-
crous or pathetic, never constructive. A
farmer might as well try to plough in a
dress suit as a farming community try to
ape the manners of a metropolis. The
undermining of character necessarily in-
volved in such a proceeding is its worst
consequence. Wasteful expenditure -is
an immediate result, for peddlers and
sharp - dealing tradespeople know this
rural weakness and take advantage of
it. The country people, being hopeless-
ly under the spell of the notion that
they must have things exactly as city
people have them, are easily beguiled
by cleverly exaggerated advertisements
and voluble chatter into believing that
many unnecessary things are necessary,
and that it costs nothing to buy on the ac-
cursed installment plan. They purchase
pianos and organs on which they never
learn to play ; reclining - chairs whose
mechanism is so defective that they re-
fuse to recline except at highly inoppor-
tune moments ; hanging - lamps, rarely
lighted, which, when lighted, are unfit to
read, to write, or to sew by ; smart sets of
parlor furniture, whose stuffing of Span-
ish moss takes impressions and keeps

The Future of Mural New England.

them, as putty does ; plush albums that
will not hold color even in the dim light
of the best room ; spectacles and eye-
glasses that do the eyes positive harm ;
ear-drums that give no aid to the deaf ;
and folding-beds and bed-lounges whose
only possible excuse for existence is the
lack of space in a city flat, — space, so
dull is perversity, being the one thing
above all others in which country people
are privileged not to economize. It is
surprising how much these foolish pur-
chases cost. Only one who is familiar
with living on a small margin can know
how far the exchequer of the average
country family is demoralized by them.
A sixty-five-dollar cooking-stove that was
not needed, whatever its merits, the or-
gan that is never played, or the unlove-
ly plush album may be the very thing
that precludes the possibility of closing
the year out of debt.

When a young man, with only his
hands or his untrained brain to depend
upon for a living, deliberately refuses to
accept an average farm from his father
as a gift, subject to the condition that he
shall live on it and work it, — a thing
that is constantly occurring in New Eng-
land, — the natural conclusion is that
the young man sees no profit in farm-
ing ; and though in exceptional cases
his refusal may have other than finan-
cial reasons, the conclusion is generally
a sound one. The fact that farming as
ordinarily carried on does not pay is a
highly important factor in the present
situation. Most New England farmers
are up to their eyes in debt ; overbur-
dened with real estate and chattel mort-
gages which they can never hope to pay ;
constantly harassed by the insistence of
a dozen other obligations which they can
never hope to meet ; more than satisfied
if they are able to keep up the interest
on their mortgages, keep the town wait-
ing for their taxes, and get extension of
time on their notes. But it would be in-
structive to know whether the actual pro-
fits on capital and labor invested in New

England farming are any smaller to-day
than they were formerly, or whether it
is the foolhardy attempt to lead a city
life in a country environment that makes
them appear to be reduced. The farmers
themselves believe the profits to be much
smaller, but their belief is hardly conclu-
sive, inasmuch as in the first place they
are prejudiced observers, and in the sec-
ond place, for what reason I know not,
they are the most incorrigible grumblers
in the world. The proverbial discontent
of the laboring man is as nothing to theirs.
Besides the government, which we all de-
cry on occasion as a matter of habit, and
which may therefore be left out of the
account, the farmer has three favorite ob-
jects of abuse, — the railroads, the specu-
lating capitalists, and the middlemen.

That the speculating capitalists play
with farm products as they would with
cards is notorious. That railroads some-
times impose exorbitant freights and
bribe legislatures, to their own advantage
and the farmers' confusion, is well known.
That the middlemen get more than their
proper share of the profit, though not
entirely clear in view of the risks they
run, is not unlikely. If we grant that
the farmer is right in believing himself
the victim of these men, we see only
the more clearly his own inferiority. In
truth, the failure of the average New
England farmer to make a good living
is probably due quite as much to his
incapacity as to the extravagance of his
imitations of city life, on the one hand,
and the impositions of his economic mas-
ters, on the other hand. This incapacity
is made up of unintelligence, shiftless-
ness, and dishonesty in about equal parts.

It is a trite saying, and only partially
true, but true enough to bear repeat-
ing, that if the average farmer did his
work with the same intelligence that the
average business man uses, he would suc-
ceed as well as the latter. The farmer,
instead of studying markets systemati-
cally, makes wild hits at them. Because
peas brought a good price a previous

The Future of Rural New England.

season, owing to their scarcity, he plants
ten times as many peas as usual ; forget-
ting that everybody else has planted peas
for the same reason. If he lives near
enough to a city to make dairying and
market-gardening profitable, he is like-
ly to become possessed with the desire
to raise only one or two vegetables ; or
he ignores the proper rotation of crops ;
or he is constantly sacrificing permanent
profit for ready cash, taking everything
out of the land, and putting nothing into
it. After leaving his wagons, tools, and
machines exposed to all the elements, he
is amazed and angry that he so often has
to buy new ones, curses them for being
poorly made, and inveighs boisterously
against the dishonesty of the time.

Such a farmer seems never to learn
that clubs and families in cities are will-
ing to pay a high price for thoroughly
honest products ; for when he finds per-
sons who might easily be made perma-
nent buyers from him, he estranges them
by inflicting upon them dishonest things.
Doing little to make his produce attrac-
tive, he nevertheless devotes a great deal
of ingenunity to arranging it dishonestly,
— "deaconing it," to use the significant
country phrase. He " deacons " his fruit,
his vegetables, everything in fact, even
his eggs, — selling as fresh eggs that have
been packed all winter, and taking it as
a sort of personal affront that the men
who stamp and guarantee their eggs can
command a fancy price all the year. Al-
though the farmer is perhaps not more
dishonest than other men, it is proba-
ble that he suffers more from his dishon-
esty than most others : partly because he
deals so largely with perishable materials,
in which fraud is easily and quickly de-
tected ; and partly because he is less sub-
tle in his deceits, and less apt in defend-
ing himself against the consequences of
detection. One year when the best ap-
ples were hard to dispose of, a certain
district Grange offered its members a
chance to send apples to Liverpool. Some
took advantage of the situation to get rid

VOL. rxxx. — NO. 477. 6

of their poor fruit. The Liverpool agents
very naturally felt aggrieved, and the
Liverpool market was closed to the farm-
ers of that district for the rest of the
season, during which many barrels of
good fruit rotted.

The prime cause of the impoverish-
ment of the social life of rural New Eng-
land has been, of course, the impairment
of vital force by the loss of great num-
bers of worthy people, but this cause
alone does not entirely explain the de-
cline. The large size of the townships
and the long distances between dwellings
have had much to do with making social
coherence difficult. A single township
may embrace four or five communities
two or three miles apart, with no com-
mon rallying-point but the annual town-
meeting. Not only do these detached
sections get nothing socially from the
township as a whole, but they are not, as
a rule, populous or compact enough to
have any appreciable social activity of
their own. In this respect our farming
communities are at a distinct disadvan-
tage as compared with those of France
and most of the other countries of the Old
World. There the tillers of the soil live
closely together, in almost crowded vil-
lages, from which they go forth to their
work in the outlying fields. There is no-
thing in their situation to prevent their
life from being as highly organized as if
they were not tillers of the soil at all.

In Dickerman and Indian Ridge (as
I described the latter in The Atlantic
Monthly for May) two true if extreme
types of contemporary New England ru-
ral life have been presented ; one show-
ing progress at its best, the other show-
ing decay at its worst. There are few
Dickermans, there are still fewer Indian
Ridges. Most New England farming
towns range themselves between these
two types in poinfof character ; they are
not so dead as Dickerman, and not so en-
ergetic as Indian Ridge. That the coun-
try in general, however, has slipped back,
no one who knows it can doubt. But

The Future of Rural New England.

several influences which in a measure
counteract the general tendency to decay
must be mentioned. Village Improve-
ment Societies, though varying greatly in
their efficiency, have brought much bene-
fit to many localities. The Grange, while
doing little enough of the sort of service
that was expected of it in the reform
of economic conditions, is working social
and intellectual miracles. The Home
Culture Clubs and the Chautauqua Cir-
cles and Assemblies must be admitted
to have given an intellectual stimulus to
country life. An educational unity, pro-
ductive of better schools in towns of
scattered population, has been effected
by the simple device of free transpor-
tation to and from a centrally located
school. Public libraries have increased
in number, and the Sunday-school libra-
ries of some of the towns not yet provided
with public libraries have been so far lib-
eralized as to prove not unworthy substi-
tutes. The beauty of the memorial libra-
ry buildings and churches erected here
and there by wealthy individuals, and
the improvement that has taken place in
the architecture of the railway stations,
are doing something for the development
of taste.

I venture a few words, then, at the
risk of blundering badly, as to the future.
Farming communities which like Indian
Ridge have held out successfully against
the powerful disintegrating forces of the
last half - century have thereby proved
themselves possessed of so much inher-
ent virility that their life may be de-
pended upon to continue vigorous, what-
ever transformations it may undergo.
Then the trolley roads are rapidly cov-
ering Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut with a network that is slow-
ly and surely redistributing the popula-
tion ; it seems almost inevitable that a

1 The least important, perhaps, and yet to
some of us the saddest^thing about the decay
of New England country life has been the dis-
appearance of the hospitable wayside tavern.
Something similar, it is hoped, may be brought

great part of the present rural area of
these three States will ultimately be in-
cluded in the suburbs of their numerous
and widely scattered industrial centres
and of their dozen or more larger cities.
When this condition arrives, if it does
arrive, rural life will have become sub-
urban, and farming, aside from mar-
ket-gardening, will have practically dis-
appeared. The bicycle and good roads
are exerting a minor but considerable
influence in the same direction.1

Equally important is the fact that
large areas in all sections of New Eng-
land are in process of transformation
from farms to sites of country-seats.
Residents of the cities are coming more
and more to make their real homes in
the country. They are building their
country houses with more comfort and
more solidity, and are living in them a
much larger part of the year than for-
merly. The country season extends al-
ready from the first of May to the first
of November, and is still lengthening.
Improved railway and steamboat trans-
portation, the multiplication of large for-
tunes, greater leisure, above all a grow-
ing appreciation of the sports and re-
sources of country life, have contributed
to this result. It looks very much as if
our urban society were attaching itself
primarily to the land, — living on the
land, and leaving it for the city only in the
festive season. Whether this tendency
will produce again a landed aristocracy
instead of an aristocracy of other forms
of wealth, who can say ? One thing only
is sure, — it would produce thereby a
new New England. During the hunt-
ing and fishing seasons of the last few
years, northern Maine, the wildest and
most remote section of New England, has
been visited by such numbers of sports-
men that the income to the residents has

in by the bicycle. It is much to be feared, how-
ever, that the new bicycle road-house will be
nothing more hospitable than a mammoth stand-
up lunch-counter.

The Future of Rural New England.

been prodigious. If this region is not
permanently reserved to sport (as it
ought to be), its magnificent lake, moun-
tain, and river districts will be crowded
with summer hotels, as soon as they be-
come a little more accessible by rail.
From the summer hotel to the summer
cottage is but a step, and from the sum-
mer cottage to the solid country house is
but another step. Considerable sections
of Vermont, New Hampshire, and west-
ern Massachusetts, and of the New Eng-
land coast from Eastport to the New
York line, have already been transfigured
by this remarkable return to the soil.
Curious indeed it would be if rural New
England, which has been largely depop-
ulated and impoverished by a movement
of country people to the city, should be
repopulated and enriched, should have
its economic and social equilibrium re-
stored, by a counter-movement of city
people to the country.

Finally, there is some hope for the
New England farms as farms, — for
farms, although apparently destined to
play a less important part than they
formerly played, will hardly disappear
from such sections as are neither adja-
cent to the cities and industrial centres
nor specially attractive for residence, —
and this hope seems to rest with our im-
migrants. They alone are willing and
able to lead simple farm lives, such as
the pioneers of the West or the original
New England settlers lived. The na-
tive Americans are now too impatient,
too extravagant, too proud, under the
changed conditions, to be successful
farmers. In many sections, this occupa-
tion and rehabilitation of the soil by for-
eigners has actually begun. Many of the
abandoned farms which come into the
market are bought by them at very low
prices. Most of these newcomers pro-
sper, just as the American settlers of a
former period prospered when they held
to the plain life of pioneers. If these

immigrant farmers were crowding native
Americans off the land, as immigrant
laborers have from time to time crowded
them out of the labor market, their ad-
vent would be ominous ; but since they
step in to fill a vacuum, to do what oth-
ers have failed to do, there is no good
reason why they should not have a hearty
welcome.

The old New England, the New Eng-
land of the farms, seems destined to dis-
appear, if indeed it has not disappeared
already. The people who gave it its
character have long been away from
the farms, building up and enriching the
West, the Northwest, the Southwest, the
interior, and the large cities and manu-
facturing towns of the Atlantic coast
States. The primitive, rugged, whole-
some life of the fathers is gone forever.
Nothing can bring it back. I have ven-
tured to predict a new New England,
composed of large cities and manufac-
turing towns of greatly expanded sub-
urbs, districts of country - seats, and a
remnant of farms worked by immigrant
farmers. The prophecy seems fair
enough in the light of the most conspic-
uous present conditions ; but so seemed
the prophecy, before the day of railways,
that New Orleans would be one of the
great cities of the world. As the rail-
ways prevented the development of New
Orleans and created Chicago, so such a
simple and probable event as the deri-
vation from the New England water-
courses of electrical power, and its trans-
mission for long distances, may of itself
be sufficient to change the life and as-
pect of all New England within a very
brief period.

The typical New England community
of to-day, however, is neither the de-
cayed farming town Yior the prosperous
farming town, but the manufacturing
town. Such a community will be the
subject of the next and final chapter of
these studies.

Alvan F. Sanborn.

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

BURKE: A CENTENARY PERSPECTIVE.

JUST a hundred years ago there was
laid to rest in the quiet country church
at Beaconsfield one to whom we Ameri-
cans owe a debt of gratitude that has
never been fully paid. Edmund Burke,
whom the world now recognizes as one
of the few great men of all time, made
his first appearance in public life in con-
nection with American affairs. That
early speech which won him instant fame
as an orator was made in advocacy of
the rights and privileges of Americans.
In the course thus entered upon he per-
sisted with untiring interest through long
and discouraging years of ministerial
wrong-headedness and incapacity. He
brought to his service a deep and thor-
ough knowledge of American conditions,
a sound political philosophy, and a glow-
ing genius ; and yet Burke was little of
a hero in American eyes during the
struggle of the Revolution, and little of
a guide in the formative period that suc-
ceeded.

There are certain outer and obvious
reasons for this neglect, perceptible at
once as we glance, for instance, from
Bnrke to the one whom Americans did
cherish in their hearts as their chief pro-
tector and defender on English ground,
— Lord Chatham. Burke was a begin-
ner in political life ; Chatham had been
for years a dominant figure in European
politics. Chatham had rank and high
social connection ; Burke was an obscure
young Irishman of no connection at all.
Chatham was a strong and masterful
party leader ; Burke stood, as he always
deliberately chose to stand when circum-
stances permitted it, in the subordinate
position of party follower.

For the failure of our ancestors to re-
cognize the value of Burke's services and
to adopt his ideas, there were, however,
other and deeper reasons, to be found in
certain general currents of thought and

feeling, opposing, crossing, and inter-
mingling in the political and social life
of the time.

The anti-American party in English
politics began its work of aggression un-
der the cover of legal right, — a right
justifying any procedure that might be
warranted by the letter of law or the
wording of statute. Grenville, the man
who, in concocting the Stamp Act, struck
the match that set off the whole maga-
zine of revolution, was the arch-type of
the legal mind. The various celebrated
pen portraits that we have of him show
him to have been upright, painstaking,
and honest, but oppressively literal, mak-
ing no allowance for the disturbing force
of human emotion in schemes constructed
by the human intellect. Having, as he
thought, a legal competency to tax the
colonies, he saw no possible reason why
he should not exercise his right, and he
at once proceeded to do so. In oppo-
sition to his policy, the party of Chat-
ham and Camden, following the lines
laid down by their teacher, Locke, urged
the claims of a natural or moral right,
which, they maintained, graven deeply
and unmistakably in the individual con-
sciousness, offered to every man an in-
fallible test for determining when the
commands of positive law embodied jus-
tice, and when they did not.

The doctrine of moral right is to be
found in the colonies, also, in a state
of vigorous and flourishing growth.
Wrought out as it had been through
ages of social conflict, by one minority
party after another, as a weapon of de-
fense against the established law of a
hostile party in power, this doctrine was
peculiarly at home in a community which,
like colonial America, was largely peo-
pled by such a minority party and their
descendants. Nor was a doctrine of
legal right unfamiliar there ; but while

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

in England law and nature, as political
principles, were pitted against one an-
other by party politicians, in the colonies
they were used to support one another
in a common cause of resistance to Eng-
lish oppression.

Two notable figures appear in colonial
history, the minister of religion and the
lawyer, — the former the dominant per-
sonage in the seventeenth century, the
latter in the eighteenth ; and while the
former, as a true son of the Reformation,
had developed, expounded, and typified
the doctrine of moral right, until it had
become ingrained in the thought of the
people, the latter, when he came into
prominence, was eager to show his fa-
miliarity with the arts of his particular
vocation, — all devices of offense and
defense that may claim as their warrant
the letter of law. We are not, however,
to regard the ministerial class in the
concrete, at the Revolutionary period,
as engaged in teaching a moral right ex-
clusively, while the lawyers, on the oth-
er hand, devoted themselves entirely to
legality. It was rather the case that the
moral or natural right theory, developed
and fostered in the period of theological
influence, descended to the legal period
to form part of a common stock of doc-
trine which was drawn upon freely by
any one at will, as occasion seemed to
require.

Burke, in the meantime, was conduct-
ing his American campaign along quite
other lines. Obedience makes govern-
ment, he thought, and obedience can be
secured only when the governor knows
and will work in harmony with the forces
of human motive actually in operation
in the people to be governed. If men
were beings of a simple nature, moved
by reason entirely, or by some one funda-
mental emotion such as fear, the moral
right resting on logic, and the legal right
resting on force, might do very well as sole
principles of government. But Burke
saw not only that men are curiously in-
tricate complexes of feeling, reason, de-

sire, belief, passion, and prejudice, but
that they are not even uniform in their
complexity. The elements of human na-
ture vary from race to race, from com-
munity to community, even from person
to person. The first task of the legisla-
tor, then, if he wants to form a plan of
government that will work successfully
in practice, must be to study the peculiar
temper and character of the particular
people with whom he is to deal.

Such a special study Burke made of
the American people, — of its original
race traits, of its acquired characters,
and of all the influences of climate, soil,
geographical position, and social tradi-
tion that might be counted on to modify
those traits and to accentuate those char-
acters still further. From this research
into local conditions emerged certain psy-.
chological principles of general applica-
tion, prominent among them the law of
habit. Habit is the force, Burke thinks,
that has consolidated the elements of
feeling, instinct, and reason in the hu-
man mind into a smoothly working whole.
Habit gives to human action a strength,
surety, and swiftness that seem unattain-
able by any other means ; and the long-
er habit is at work, the greater will be
the effect produced by it. Escape from
the influence of habit is difficult, if not
impossible. Even when a person or a
community voluntarily determines wholly
to ignore it, and to reconstruct in every
detail the already established plan of
life, the attempt will result either in a
stoppage of action, or in a failure to
break away from custom after all. Much
less can habit be uprooted by external
agency. The legislator who tries to run
counter to the fixed customs of a people
will meet with a strength of resistance
that will be found insuperable.

Rejecting, then, a legal right which he
thought impracticable, and a moral right
which he thought misleading, Burke
founded his political philosophy upon
that use and wont, that custom from
time immemorial, which is the basis of

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

the English common law, and in great
part of the English Constitution.

So far, Burke might be merely the
skillful politician, the Machiavelli of his
time, studying without approval or dis-
approval the complicated instrument he
is trying to know only that he may play
a tune of his own upon its stops. But a
thorough belief in his chosen principle
gives to Burke's philosophy an accent of
greatness. Use and wont are means not
only to easier but to better action. It
is true that habit must be reckoned with
by the legislator ; a people cannot be
permanently governed contrary to its in-
clinations, and its inclinations become
more firmly fixed and more definitely es-
tablished by long-continued custom. The
path is, however, to be kept not only be-
cause walking is difficult outside of it,
but because the track thus worn by the
converging tread of countless feet, at the
call of countless interests, desires, and
calculations, leads more directly to the
great ends of human society than any
new road, laid out arbitrarily by the sin-
gle speculator. And so innovation was,
for Burke, the great political heresy, and
his chief article of complaint against the
Tory party of his day in England.

Use and wont as a ground of doctrine
had their place in colonial thought by
right of inheritance from a long line of
English ancestry. Custom, as well as
moral and legal right, was freely alleged
in justification of American claims. In
the various addresses, petitions, and de-
clarations issued by the colonists from
time to time we may find expression of
all these doctrines, either separately or
in amicable even if somewhat incongru-
ous combination. But as the contest
went on, use and wont seemed to be
found less and less available as a basis of
argument. Hutchinson writes in 1774 :
" The leaders here seem to acknowledge
that their cause is not to be defended on
constitutional principles, and Adun's now
gives out that there is no need of it ;
they are upon better ground ; all men

have a natural right to change a bad
constitution for a better, whenever they
have it in their power." If the princi-
ple adopted by Burke was in reality a
sound and fruitful one, why should it
have been dropped from favor in this
way ?

With the passage of time the substan-
tial correctness of Burke's analysis of
the American situation is seen more and
more clearly. The revolt was brought
about, as Burke said it was, by British
violation of use and wont, by British con-
tempt for American opinion and f eeling.
The condition of affairs in America was
the result of natural growth and pre-
vailing circumstance substantially as he
depicted it iff his various speeches and
letters dealing with the American ques-
tion. Burke's doctrine of use and wont,
however, is a doctrine of the group ; and
the colonists were going all the time
further and further along the way of
individualism. The moral right so dear
to the colonists was based upon individ-
ual reason ; and the legal right invoked
so often both for and against them was
based upon individual will, either of the
one or of the many arbitrarily united.

The use and wont that Burke appealed
to, on the other hand, are the work, not
of some chance aggregation of unrelated
individuals, but of a social group, unit-
ed by ties of common descent, common
names, and mutual affection, — a group
joining present, past, and future genera-
tions in intimate and living union. Into
this group, which Burke assumes as the
fundamental unit of human society, mem-
bers enter, as a rule, not by deliberate
choice, but by the involuntary avenue of
birth. It is made up, like the family
group, of the weak and the strong, of
the ignorant and the experienced ; and
as in the family group, the strong and
the wise are the natural leaders, the
weak and the ignorant are the willing
and obedient followers, while all mem-
bers work together, not for individual
profit, but for the good of the whole.

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

Their plan of action is to be found in
the wisdom of ancestors, — the know-
ledge gathered through ages of experi-
ence, and the principles worked out and
tested by the actual operation of events.
It is all very well, however, to have
recourse in this way to the wisdom of
ancestors and to institutions that have
stood the test of time and experience,
so long as one is in unbi'oken connection
with ancestors, and the conditions pro-
vided for in their institutions remain the
same ; but when ancestors cast one off
and circumstances change completely,
what is to be done ? The habit that
connected the colonists with England and
English institutions was necessarily some-
what weakened, as Burke himself had
shown, by the circumstances of coloniza-
tion. He had in mind particularly, as
causes of disconnection, the wide dis-
tances that separated the colonists from
their old home, and the necessity for
hardihood and individual self-reliance
arising in the settlement of a new and dif-
ficult country. We may see, in addition,
that the social group of early colonial
times was not, to begin with, the natural
group assumed by Burke as the unit of
society and as the author of use and wont,
but, consisting as it did mainly of adult
men and women who had deliberately
broken away from former local and so-
cial ties, and had deliberately united in
a new association by agreement, it was
in great degree a concrete example of
the artificial group assumed by Locke in
his compact theory, — a group formed
by the free volition of independent and
equal individuals. The tradition of in-
dividual independence thus established
was never quite lost sight of, even after
long settlement had transformed the
originally artificial groups into natural
groups, which held largely to old Eng-
lish lines of thought and belief, and ar-
ranged themselves in the main under the
old English social and governmental
framework.

In the struggle with the mother

country, the necessity for independence
of thought and action became once more
pressing. More and more the colonists
found themselves cut off from precedent
and tradition; more and more they found
it necessary to assert the rights of the
individual against the power of the group
as represented by an oppressive govern-
ment ; more and more they were forced
into the position of revolt against all
establishment and control, although, as
Burke maintained, the establishment they
contended against was itself an innova-
tion, and the control was not the true
expression of group opinion, but the
violation of it. So, while Burke would
undertake the work of politics with a
" total renunciation of every speculation
of [his] own," and would put his " foot
in the tracks of our forefathers," where
he could *' neither wander nor stumble,"
the colonists, with Otis, were beginning
to see in the inherited laws of nations
"nothing more than the history of an-
cient abuses." While Burke thought that
" intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you
sophisticate and poison the very source
of government " by prying too closely
into its nature, the colonists were becom-
ing ready (again in Otis's words) " to
examine as freely into the origin, spring,
and foundation of every power and mea-
sure in the commonwealth as into a piece
of curious machinery." This fundamen-
tal difference of attitude regarding gov-
ernment and society was too great to be
overlooked, and accounts clearly enough
for an absence of strong sympathy on the
part of the colonists for Burke's leading
ideas, and indeed of any complete com-
prehension of them.

It would be natural to suppose that
when the war of the Revolution was over,
the constructive forces once at work in
colonial life would resume their activity.
The circumstances of the time seemed
to call for principles arid methods just
the opposite to those found necessary in
the struggle for independence. During
that struggle, the first necessity was to

Burke : A Centenary Perspective.

provide for the individual a way of es-
cape from the group ; now the individ-
ual must be brought into group relations
again, if the American people were to
work together as a political society.

At this time there did indeed arise
a party that looked first to social order,
opposed to a party that looked first
to individual liberty ; and in that party
of order — the party of Madison and
Hamilton — we might naturally expect
to find some reflection caught from the
great thinker who had expounded so wise-
ly, and so favorably to the cause of the
Americans, the fundamental principles of
social order. But during the period of
the formation and establishment of the
federal Constitution there is little trace
of the influence of Burke. Turning to
The Federalist, that authoritative text-
book of constitutional principle, we do,
it is true, find some suggestions of Burke's
thought and method. In it the com-
plexity of social workings is recognized ;
it is felt that slender results are to be at-
tained by the efforts of human sagacity ;
long adjustment of a system of govern-
ment to its surroundings is regarded as
necessary before it can work properly ;
function in government is more than
form, and parchment barriers cannot pre-
vent the encroachment of power ; gov-
ernment rests upon opinion, and requires
for real stability that veneration which
time bestows on everything.

But whatever its authors may have held
as personal opinion, the general direction
of argumentation taken in The Federal-
ist had to be along quite other lines than
those laid down in Burke's philosophy.
In urging the adoption of the Constitution,
its advocates cwild not expect to reach
a people in the f rtll tide of individualism,
after a successful revolt from the group,
by any appeals to a group theory of
use and wont ; and besides, by a curious
turn of affairs, so far as a doctrine of
use and wont could be applied, it would
work directly against their purposes.

Our Constitution has been amply shown

by numerous modern commentators to
be, in its substance, as much the embodi-
ment of actual experience as is the Eng-
lish Constitution itself. We suffer, in-
deed, from an embarrassment of riches
in sources of practice, American, English,
or Dutch, for its various formal provi-
sions. And yet, while the substance and
matter of the federal Constitution may
be old, there is enough in it that was new
in form at the time of its construction
to distract attention from more familiar
features. For example, popular thought
could not take in without difficulty the
idea of a political society made up of
States that were independent, and at the
same time under central control ; nor
could it understand a central control ex-
cept under the old form of king and
standing army. Furthermore, the circum-
stances attending the forming and adop-
tion of the Constitution were such as to
make it appear a new construction. The
meeting of a body of men representing a
nation, with the deliberate intention of
framing a fundamental law covering the
entire field of government, was a new
event in political experience. Although
much might be said in the convention
about English practice and the English
Constitution, the fact of choice, of free-
dom to adopt or reject, made even the
following of custom in some sort an act
of voluntary creation. This aspect of the
convention's work, at any rate, was the
aspect that impressed the imagination of
the time most forcibly, and has continued
to impress the imagination of succeed-
ing generations until within very recent
years.

To this apparently new device of in-
dividual creation were opposed those nat-
ural groups which had been slowly form-
ing out of the artificial groups of early
colonial society, through a hundred years,
more or less, of settlement, — the differ-
ent States of the new union. They ex-
hibited the true characteristics of natural
groups : peculiar local traits, particular
local customs, differing local institutions,

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

and a general sympathy for all that was
within the group, together with a gen-
eral indifference or hostility to all that
was without it. The framers of the Con-
stitution, in trying to establish a uniform
and stable system of government, found
themselves obliged to get behind the col-
lective personality of these groups to the
group members as separate and inde-
pendent individuals. " The great and
radical vice in the construction of the ex-
isting confederation," says Hamilton in
The Federalist, " is in the principle of
legislation for states or governments in
their corporate or collective capacities,
and as contradistinguished from the in-
dividuals of which they consist" Lu-
ther Martin, of the other party, com-
plained bitterly that such disregard was
paid in the Constitutional Convention to
the claims of state groups : " We had not
been sent to form a government over the
inhabitants of America considered as in-
dividuals, . . . but in our proceedings we
adopted principles which would be right
and proper only on the supposition that
there were no state governments at all,
but that all the inhabitants of this exten-
sive continent were in their individual
capacity, without government, and in a
state of nature" The advocates of the
Constitution, then, were obliged to meet
the charge of violation of use and wont,
— that " innovation" which Burke saw
as the great vice of political action, —
and they accepted the issue fairly and
squarely on that ground. Madison asks
in The Federalist : " Is it not the glory of
the people of America that, whilst they
have paid a decent regard to the opinions
of former times and other nations, they
have not suffered a blind veneration for
antiquity, for custom, or for names to
overrule the suggestions of their own
good sense, the knowledge of their own
situation, and the lessons of their own
experience ? . . . Happily for America,
happily, we trust, for the whole human
race, they pursued a new and more noble
course. They accomplished a revolution

which has no parallel in the annals of
human society. They reared the fabrics
of governments which have no model on
the face of the globe"

During all this time Burke himself was
becoming more and more openly and de-
finitely a supporter of tradition and the
group. While we were making and es-
tablishing our Constitution, he was be-
coming, by preoccupation with questions
of English local policy, less conspicuous
as a friend of American liberty ; and a
few years later he was seen occupying a
position that apparently indicated him as
the enemy of liberty in general. In the
overturning in France Burke thought he
saw the same spirit of innovation at work
that he had deplored in the conduct of
the English government in the American
matter, and he urged in resistance to it
the same considerations of use and wont,
of long - continued custom, that he had
urged on the former occasion ; but the ap-
plication of his doctrine made his course
appear diametrically opposite in the two
cases. What the unreflective mind saw
in both instances was a people trying to
win freedom, with Burke as their advo-
cate in the one case, against them in the
other. As a political philosopher, above
and beyond the party politician and bril-
liant orator, Burke first came into pro-
minence by means of his Reflections on
the Revolution in France, which was
widely and eagerly read from the time
of its publication. This work stamped
him in popular thought as the stanch up-
holder of royalty, of aristocracy, and of
governmental control, — a position that
could hardly commend him in a country r
that had just shaken off royalty, and
that had scarcely founded a government.
There was besides, in America, a natural
feeling of sympathy for a country trying
to work out its destiny on principles os-
tensibly the same as those adopted in
American practice. Jefferson expresses
the feeling of the " French party " in his
disdainful comment on the picture of roy-
alty " gaudily painted in the rhapsodies

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

of the Rhetor Burke, with some smart-
ness of fancy, but no sound sense." Even
the " English party " could not regard
with open approval a defense of institu-
tions that they themselves honestly felt
were superseded and antiquated, while
at the same time they had to suffer every
day the imputation of trying to restore
them.

The development of the individual, the
trust in his powers, the belief in his ca-
pabilities, continued unchecked through
the early years of our country's exist-
ence as a separate political society. Just
as the last portion of land taken into
cultivation fixes the rate of rent for all
other land in use, so the ever advancing
frontier fixed a general type of temper,
character, and manner for the whole
people. When the intricate network of
social relation and institution that each
individual has to fit himself to, in an old
and compact society, began to form in the
longer - settled communities, the young
and enterprising, who felt themselves
hampered by these growing restrictions,
found an ample outlet for their energies
in the boundless opportunities and wide
spaces of the West. It is not possible
to regard very seriously limitations from
which escape is so easy ; and so the free-
dom of the West was an ever present
influence in thought, even where condi-
tions were arising to prevent complete
individual liberty in practice. The
method of the pioneer — the self-reliant,
resourceful man who can at call turn
his hand to anything — was the method
of the whole country, not only because a
, constant process of new settlement de-
manded the continued use of that method
somewhere, but because it had been hand-
ed down by tradition from the days when
the frontier was the Atlantic seaboard,
as the way in which we were at one
time accustomed to conduct our affairs
everywhere. There was little or no re-
spect for the expert in any line ; a cer-
tain native shrewdness, unaided by spe-
cial training, long practice, or social sup-

port, was thought to be the entire outfit
needed by the free-born American to ac-
complish anything. To outsiders, too,
the typical " American " was the fron-
tiersman, because he was the superlative
degree of American tendencies, and be-
cause he afforded the most complete con-
trast to the European type of charac-
ter, — and contrast always attracts ; so
this figure, reflected back through the
opinions of others, was fixed even more
firmly in the self - consciousness of the
American as his own true image.

This individualism of a society domi-
nated by the frontier ideal flourished,
until in the war of secession it attained
its culminating moment. The abstract
theory avowedly held by a whole people,
that all men are equal, and, by virtue
of bare humanity, endowed with certain
natural rights to certain desirabilities of
existence, had not been completely car-
ried out in practice, whatever legal cas-
uists might say to the contrary, while
human slavery existed as a social institu-
tion. Although it is true that political
and economic causes deeper than any
abstract doctrine of " rights " had their
powerful effect in bringing on the civil
war, it is no less true that one of its causes
was the constant discussion of rights and
the constant appeal to ostensibly accept-
ed principles, and that one of its great
results was a more complete realization
of those principles in the freeing of the
slaves. Another victory, too, for indi-
vidualism was won by the war. The nat-
ural groups represented in the States,
each with its own distinct social person-
ality, — the same natural groups that had
resisted the adoption of a Constitution
which threatened to dissolve them into
their individual elements, — were, in the
civil war, again arrayed against a power
that menaced group customs and habits.
The result of that war was still further
to reduce the power of those groups, to
violate local custom and local feeling,
and to establish a more general relation
of individuals with individuals, regard-

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

less of state lines and of state author-
ity.

At this very moment of individualistic
triumph, however, group influence began
to assert itself again, and with ever in-
creasing power. In the South, the ruin
of the war was aggravated by the pre-
sence of a population recently freed
from a position of legal dependence, but
as yet unfitted for a position of econom-
ic and social independence. It had to
be admitted by the warmest lovers of
liberty that even for the enfranchised
class itself freedom from outer control
was not the unmixed blessing it had been
supposed to be ; and so the abstract the-
ory of moral or natural right got a blow.
The beautifully balanced Constitution
we took such pride in had been juggled
with by advocates and opponents of sla-
very, by Whigs and Democrats, until we
came to think that even the letter of . a
law might not be a certain safeguard ;
and so an abstract theory of legality was
weakened. Large numbers of foreign-
ers were already coming among us, and
inequalities of intelligence, varieties of
social condition and local characteristic,
were made so prominent that it was in-
creasingly difficult to think of men as
" man," but we were obliged to regard
them as particular kinds of men living in
particular ways. Pressure of a popu-
lation growing rapidly by immigration
and by natural growth brought a greater
degree of social control, — men cannot
act with perfect freedom when they are
closely elbowing one another ; and from
this growing social control escape was less
and less easy to a frontier that was offer-
ing ever narrowing possibilities. Pres-
sure of population brought the large in-
dustry, which requires a wide and stable
market for its product ; and the large
industry brought a still further expansion
of social control. The large industry
makes men unequal and dependent, by
fitting them into a great system of un-
like and interlocking parts. They can
no longer stand in the individual single-

ness of the frontiersman, but are united
in mutual subordination in a group.

Since the war American society has
been arranging itself more and more
group-wise ; and, in consequence, Ameri-
can thought is becoming more conscious
of an inadequacy in the individualistic
theories of society. that flourished so nat-
urally and so vigorously in an individu-
alistic stage of social life.

About the time that individualism in
this country was at its highest point,
there emerged into notice, on the other
side of the water, a philosophy of the
group which had been long prepared for
in various movements of thought, and
which was soon to be the dominant in-
tellectual influence of the time. That
philosophy, eagerly taken up in this
country, was the general doctrine of evo-
lution. According to older theories of
the universe, each thing worked out its
own unimpeded course as a result of
qualities inherent from the beginning,
which made up its " nature," — a nature
completely expressible in the logical de-
finition of the thing. The evolution phi-
losophy represents things in systems of
interaction, as a result of which charac-
ters are developed and qualities acquired;
and " nature " is not an abstract concep-
tion, but a concrete process. The ele-
ments in this process are indefinitely nu-
merous ; their reactions are perplexingly
intricate. The result of group action in
the process of evolution is unlikeness ;
it is not conceivable that all particles in
a system can be acted upon in the same
way at the same time, and the result of
unlike action is unlike quality, which in
its turn becomes the ground for a further
differentiation of elements. This theory
makes the group the controlling force,
the individual the result, — and a result
varying in character as the conditions of
group action vary.

The application of this general idea
to political theory is obvious, and has
been widely made. We are now begin-
ning to regard human society as the re-

Burke : A Centenary Perspective.

suit of numberless actions and reactions
of elements, not always perceptible in
all the detail of their working, but obey-
ing fixed and constant laws. We are
beginning to recognize as a normal and
necessary process the control exerted by
a social group over its parts, its action
in assigning each to an appropriate place
and function, and its influence in estab-
lishing in them appropriately varying
characters. We are learning that rea-
son, logic, and abstract truth are not the
only elements to be considered in the
political process, but that the social emo-
tions, instincts, feelings, and impulses
caused by a long course of group actions
and reactions, differing in their charac-
ter with the peculiar circumstances and
conditions of each social group, are just
as important, if not more so.

With a growing prominence of the
group as an actual concrete fact in our
country, and with the growing preva-
lence of the group doctrine of evolution
as a theory, it seems as if the time were
now ripe for the great political philoso-
pher of the group, so long neglected, to
take his rightful place among us as a
source of theory and a guide to prac-
tice. The doctrine of natural selection,
the corner-stone of the evolution philo-
sophy, has two aspects, or two stages of
logical development, — the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest.
For the former partial principle, Darwin
himself, the teacher of natural selection
to our generation, acknowledges his debt
to Malthus. But almost a century be-
fore Darwin, and a half-century before
Malthus, a distinct exposition of the lat-
ter principle was made. Burke's entire
political philosophy, from beginning to
end, is a copious, powerful -bid infinitely
varied treatment of the docti^ne of the
survival of the fittest. This is the funda-
mental principle of his conservatism, —
the conservatism that he taught during
the American war as well as at the time
of the French Revolution, that he fol-
lowed in the matter of economical re-

form as well as in the matter of parlia-
mentary representation. It is hard to
catch any set formulation of this prin-
ciple in Burke's utterances, by reason of
a peculiarity that is itself the best ex-
pression of a principle, — a dislike for
stating principle except in its concrete
application. But we may come pretty
near to such a formulation in this de-
scription of the British Constitution :
" And this is a choice not of one day or of
one set of people, not a tumultuary and
giddy choice ; it is a deliberate election
of ages and of generations ; it is a con-
stitution made by what is ten thousand
times better than choice ; it is made by
the peculiar circumstances, occasions,
tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil,
and social habitudes of the people, which
disclose themselves only in a long space
of time. It is a vestment which ac-
cqmmodates itself to the body. Nor is
prescription of government formed upon
blind, unmeaning prejudices ; for man
is a most unwise and a most wise being.
The individual is foolish. The multitude
for the moment is foolish, when they act
without deliberation ; but the species is
wise, and when time is given to it, as a
species it almost always acts right."

On nearly every page of Burke's work
is to be found some touch of detail, some
contributory figure to fill up and. adorn
this outline. His insistence upon the ne-
cessity of dealing with men according to
their special tempers and characters is an
insistence upon the great principle of
adaptation, so important in the evolution-
ary doctrine ; his constant reminder that
temper and character differ in different
groups of men is a reminder of the vary-
ing influences at work in the adaptive pro-
cess. His appeal to the feelings and even
the prejudices of men, as a surer guide
and stronger force than reasoned calcu-
lation, is an appeal to a wisdom gathered
and proved in long experience, until,
through habit, the conscious process of
thought has been consolidated into the un-
conscious process of instinct. For Burke,

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

as for the modern evolutionist, " sur-
vival " is group survival. The end of
the process of selection in the physical
organism is the preservation or destruc-
tion of the whole group of related traits
and characters, forces and elements,
that we know as the living creature.
With Burke, the survival of the social
whole, not of any one element in it, nor
of all its elements taken out of relation
to it, was the great end to be sought in
the social process. This was, in practi-
cal affairs, the final ground of reform or
of conservatism, of action or of refusal
to act. The urgent " necessity " that
Burke allows as a valid plea for the
breaking of all bonds of legal and po-
litical institution is the necessity for so-
cial continuance ; the menacing danger
against which all barriers of law and or-
der, of instinct, reason, and feeling, must
be set up, is the danger of social, not
individual dissolution. In short, Burke
is found possessed in a remarkable de-
gree of the fundamental conceptions of
organic life long before any general re-
cognition of them. He approaches his
object of study — the social group — in
the very spirit of the biological student
yet to come, looking at it with a fine in-
stinct for the flowing, merging, and blend-
ing of subtle elements that make up the
life-process ; feeling in it, as it were with
sensitive finger-tips, the warmth and pul-
sation, the inexpressibly delicate and ir-
regular ramification of fibre and inter-
lacement of tissue, of the living thing.

Steeped as we are to-day in evolution-
ary conceptions, Burke's thought speaks
to us in the language we understand best ;
it speaks besides with a power that makes
it more than a simple parallel to already
existing influences. Modern evolution-
ary philosophy has produced no master
of political science worthy to be com-
pared for a moment to Burke, in depth
of thought, wealth of observation, experi-
ence, and research ; and above all, in that
primal energy of mind which, baffling all
explanation or formulation, in its mighty

outflow bears along with it the minds and
feelings of men in enforced but willing
subdual.

Although Burke has much to tell us
of bygone political complications that
have little or no living interest for us, he
has also much to tell us that we may
put to immediate practical use. He can
help us particularly in our endeavor to
deal with the problems presented as a
result of the growing power of the so-
cial group, by showing us the true na-
ture of social groups and their normal
laws of action. We may thank him for
offering in these laws and principles a
test by which we may see that the so-
cialism we are half tempted into, in our
feelingf that the individualism of an ear-

Her day is outworn, is in reality no
group theory at all, but simply another
individualism in disguise. The schemes
for group action, laboriously contrived
by the social theorist and enforced by
the legislator to serve the interests of the
social whole, are, Burke shows us, but
clumsy hindrances to true group action,
to the fine and delicate processes of so-
cial adjustment that go on by means of
the spontaneous growths and natural in-
tertwinings of all the interests, feelings,
sentiments, habits, and necessities of
men, — a whole too complex ever to be
seen by one man in all its parts, much
less to be controlled and adjusted by
one man's calculation and forethought.
The same objection applies to that form
of socialism known as regulation of
trade. Here Burke may give us direct
assistance, because he dealt with that spe-
cial problem in his own practical polit-
ical work. In the heyday of the mer-
cantile system, before Adam Smith had
spoken, Burke was a free-trader, in com-
plete consistency with his own theory
of the group. It is just because the
group as a whole is so sure to work out
its own processes, because the wants and
desires of men will arrange themselves
so inevitably in an industrial system of
mutual demand and supply, that we need

Burke: A Centenary Perspective.

not form any artificial plan for their
guidance. Indeed, if we do adopt such
a plan, we shall lose the very good we
are aiming at. Under the influence of
Burke's teaching, we shall not so much
fear the natural and unimpeded develop-
ment of an industrial system, the grow-
ing complexity of which has caused a
certain alarm, as we shall fear to meddle
with it on every occasion by an ignorant
tinkering that will invariably do real
and serious harm, even when it brings a
little apparent good.

Much difficulty is felt, in our political
system, because of a lack of organization
along the lines of natural groups united
by common character, common interests,
and common sympathies. Recent polit-
ical studies have pointed out the oppor-
tunities for political corruption, or, to
say the least, for political ineffectiveness,
offered in the attempt to work as a po-
litical whole an artificial group that em-
braces inharmonious natural groups, or
cuts groups away from their natural al-
liances. One such instance may be a
large and compact city group, of distinct
type and character, united artificially
with a large and scattered country group,
of opposed type and character ; another
may be an upland, infertile district, with
certain needs and supporting certain in-
dustries, united with a lowland, alluvial
district, of quite other needs and sup-
porting quite other industries. From
Burke we may learn the advantages of
leaving natural groups as far as possible
to work out their own problems within
their own limits.

Most healthful for us would be that
respect for th-? expert that Burke teaches
not only in his theory, but by his practice.
All his attempts to deal with the work of
government were preceded by long and
careful study of each matter he took up,
even to the point of exhaustion. The
time-honored American theory that any
man can take up any task, with any or
no degree of preparation, is showing it-
self more and more inadequate in a more

and more complicated state of society
and government. The parliamentary
system under which our political affairs
are managed was the development, not
of democracy, but of that eighteenth-
century English oligarchy in which Burke
saw — with too glowing idealization, per-
haps — the type of a true aristocracy.
Is it not possible that the faults and fail-
ures we find occasion to deplore every
day in the working of that system with
us are to be provided for, its dangers and
perils met, only by recourse to the prin-
ciple on which it was originally based,
the principle taught by Burke, that lead-
ership by right belongs only to those
of sufficient ability and training to deal
skillfully with complicated affairs, and
with sufficient sense of responsibility to
the community to use their skill for the
common good ? It is, in fact, one of the
most necessary lessons we have to learn,
that the welfare of the state and the suc-
cessful conduct of affairs depend upon
personal integrity and ability, under the
guidance of which any form of govern-
ment will work, and without which no
form of government can work.

After all, the best good we may get
from Burke is contact with his lofty spi-
rit. The bare and naked truths of philo-
sophical doctrine he clothes in the gleam-
ing garments of the imagination, and sets
walking before us in all the glow and
flush of life, — radiant forms that cap-
ture our dearest affections and claim our
deepest devotion. The state, for Burke,
is not a certain tract of bare ground from
which to wrest the material supplies of
physical existence ; it is figured under
" the image of a relation in blood," con-
straining love, reverence, and duty. It
is not for bare life alone, but for the best
life ; it is " a partnership in all science,
a partnership in all art, a partnership in
every virtue and in all perfection ; " it
comprehends " all the charities of all."

This generous ardor is contagious.
Civic enthusiasm, slightly out of fashion
with us for some time, is coming in again,

Jowett and the University Ideal.

though largely under the form of belli-
cose ebullitions of temper against foreign
nations. But the civic enthusiasm that
Burke inspires is for right living at
home, just dealing in internal as well as
external concerns, and regard for social
duties as well as for social rights. To
his mind, the due and faithful adminis-
tration of civil office, the honest and eco-
nomical disbursement of public money,
the painstaking adjustment of borough,
township, and city affairs, are as vital to
the state, as much matters of interest and
concern, as brilliant leadership in the
daring raids, the spectacular campaigns,
and the noisy victories of party politics
or foreign war.

From Burke we may catch not only
the spirit of duty, but the spirit of cour-
age and hope. Humanity as he sees it,
" with all its imperfections on its head,"
has within it certain strong life-forces,

that work often through crooked and
dubious ways, but that, if we give our dis-
interested service to their guidance, will
finally bring the race to higher levels.
With this fundamental conviction im-
planted in us, we need not despair of
the state : when theories break down, we
may simply think that growth is taking a
new direction ; when conditions become
perplexingly involved, we may trust that
after we have reached the limit of our
powers of reason and calculation to un-
ravel them they will work out their own
best answer ; when forms of government
and society seem hopelessly rotten and
bad, we may feel that there is always a
remedy to be found in the " plain, good
intention," the good faith and honor,
which cannot be entirely absent from a
people, and which need only encourage-
ment and a showing of the way to enter
helpfully into public affairs.

Kate HoUaday Claghorn.

JOWETT AND THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL.

THE expansion of American univer-
sities which has been so conspicuous a
feature of the last quarter of a centu-
ry is evidently slackening just now, un-
der the strain of business depression.
Academic revenues are shrinking ; new
endowments are rare ; the number of
students, instead of advancing by leaps
and bounds, is well-nigh stationary ; and
it is pretty generally recognized that any
enlargement of teaching or improvement
of surroundings that calls for further ex-
penditure must be postponed to a more
propitious season.

During this quarter of a century of ex-
pansion there has not only been material
growth ; new ideals of study, new meth-
ods of instruction, have been introduced,
which have already exerted no small in-

1 The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett,
Master of Balliol College, Oxford. By EVELYN

fluence on several generations of under-
graduates. Yet one cannot mingle much
with the younger generation of Ameri-
can professors without perceiving a cer-
tain uneasiness among them as to some
features of the new system, a certain ten-
dency to revert to older and apparent-
ly abandoned conceptions of academic
duty. The lull in things external seems
likely to be utilized for reflection on
things internal. In this time of halt, of
return upon ourselves, we cannot fail to
greet with peculiar interest the record
of the life-work of a great Academic in
another land.1 It is from this point of
view, and this only, that I shall here con-
sider Jowett.

First a word or two as to the chro-
nology of his life. Born in 1817, he

ABBOTT and LEWIS CAMPBELL. In two vol-
umes. New York : E. P. Button & Co. 1897.

Jowett and the University Ideal.

received his early education at St. Paul's
School, and, after winning a Balliol schol-
arship in 1835, went up to Oxford in
1836. In 1838, while still an undergrad-
uate, he was elected to the Balliol Fel-
lowship, which he held until he became
Master. After taking his degree in 1839,
he became Assistant Tutor of his college
in 1841 ; was ordained in 1842, and was
appointed to the Tutorship which thence-
forward engaged most of his attention
until he exchanged it for the Master-
ship, — itself, in his eyes, a sort of glo-
rified Tutorship. In 1855 appeared his
edition of three Epistles of St. Paul, and
in the same year he was appointed by
the Crown to the Regius Professorship
of Greek. The theological antagonism
awakened by his book on the Epistles
led to the salary — attached in equity,
if not legally, to the Greek chair — be-
ing withheld for a decade. Clerical hos-
tility was inflamed still further by the
appearance of Essays and Reviews in
1860, which contained a paper from Jow-
ett's pen on the Interpretation of Scrip-
ture. In 1870 he was chosen Master of
Balliol ; and the translation of Plato's
Dialogues, which was his most consider-
able literary work, appeared on the very
day of his election. In 1881 was issued
his translation of Thucydides ; in 1885
his translation of the Politics of Aristotle ;
and from 1882 to 1886 he served the
usual term of four years as Vice-Chan-
cellor of the university. He died on
October 1, 1893.

The reader who has glanced over this
short list of landmarks in Jowett's life
may be surprised to learn that in the Ox-
ford and England of our own time his
reputation rests almost entirely on his ac-
tivity as Master of his college. His the-
ological writings first attracted to him the
notice of the world at large ; his transla-
tions have opened the treasures of Greek
thought to thousands who could profit by
them, and to whom they would other-
wise have remained sealed. But more
than thirty years before his death Jowett

abandoned all attempts to guide the reli-
gious thought of the country. He long
dreamt of writing a Life of Christ ; but
when, in his later years, he was asked why
he did not carry out the plan, " he replied,
falling back in his chair, with tears in his
eyes, ' Because I cannot ; God has not
given me the power to do it.' " And his
biographers assure us that " after the
harsh reception of his theological work,
he was haunted by the fear that, by writ-
ing, he might do harm as well as good."
His translations, again, appeal more to
the general public than to the scholar ;
Jowett was not a great classical scholar,
in either the German or the English sense
of the word. In the field of university
politics, moreover, he does not seem to
have initiated any one movement of the
first importance. But as Master he was
a great and brilliant success, and in the
college and through the college he exer-
cised enormous influence. Early in his
reign he wrote to a friend, " I want to
hold out as long as I can, and hope to
make Balliol into a really great college
if I live for ten years." He lived for
twenty years, and died knowing that he
had accomplished his purpose. Never
was there a Head so bound up with his
college ; so keenly attached to its inter-
ests, its members, and its associations.
Without wife or child, and for the last
few years of his life without a single near
relative, the college was his only home,
and took the place of family ties. Never,
in return, was there a Head of whom
his college was so proud as Balliol was of
" old Jowler," or who was regarded with
the same mingled feeling of awe and ad-
miration and protecting affection.

How, then, did Jowett esteem his own
work ? What did he consider the pe-
culiar functions of the university or the
colleges ? It will be observed by every
attentive reader of the Life, first, that
Jowett hardly assigned any specific func-
tion to the university as such, as distinct
from the colleges ; and secondly, that
both for the college and for the univer-

Jowett and the University Ideal.

sity he laid almost exclusive stress on
the two tasks of promoting education
and of bringing about social intercourse.
In his first sermon in Balliol Chapel af-
ter his election to the Mastership, he
spoke of the college, " first, as a place
of education ; secondly, as a place of
society ; thirdly, as a place of religion."
He was accustomed to use very similar
language about the university : " There
are two things which distinguish a uni-
versity from a mere scientific institu-
tion: first of all, it is a seat of liberal
education ; and secondly, it is a place
of society." Both education and society
he conceived of nobly. He sought to
impress upon each generation of under-
graduates " the unspeakable importance
of the four critical years of life between
about eighteen and twenty-two," when
the task before each young man is " to
improve his mind, to eradicate bad men-
tal habits, to acquire the power of order
and arrangement, to learn the art of fix-
ing his attention." " The object of read-
ing for the schools " — the final honor
examinations — " is not chiefly to attain a
first class, but to elevate and strengthen
the character for life." As against those
who declare examinations injurious, he
maintained that " they give a fixed aim,
towards which to direct our efforts ; they
stimulate us by the love of honorable dis-
tinction ; they afford an opportunity of
becoming known to those who might not
otherwise emerge ; they supply the lead-
ing-strings which we also need. Neither
freedom nor power can be attained with-
out order and regularity and method.
The restless habit of mind which passes
at will from one view of a subject or
from one kind of knowledge to another
is not intellectual power." On the value
of social intercourse he laid almost equal
stress. " His ideal of the work and of-
fice of the university " was that it should
form " a bridge which might unite the
different classes of society, and at the
same time bring about a friendly feeling
in the different sects of religion, and that
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 7

might also connect the different branches
of knowledge which were apt to become
estranged one from another." He was
anxious " to bring men of different
classes into contact," for the benefit es-
pecially of those who had had no social
advantages. " Jowett observed that men
of very great ability often failed in life,
because they were unable to play their
part with effect. They were shy, awk-
ward, self-conscious, deficient in man-
ners, — faults which were as ruinous as
vices." And the supreme end which
Jowett kept in mind for all this training
of every kind was " usefulness in after-
life."

Towards promoting social intercourse
much was done by college life itself, —
by the mere juxtaposition of undergradu-
ates in hall and chapel and quadrangle,
by spontaneous association in sports and
debating clubs ; towards education much
was done by the stimulus and guidance
of a properly devised scheme of exam-
ination. But both together were insuffi-
cient, left to themselves ; another force
was necessary, and that force Jowett
found in the tutorial system.

I doubt whether it is possible to give
anything like an accurate impression of
the Oxford tutorial system to those who
have not seen it at work. There is the
initial difficulty of framing any brief
generalization which shall be reasonably
true for all the studies of the place and
all the colleges. The practice varies
from college to college ; and in several
colleges it has not seemed possible to ex-
tend tutorial supervision to the recently
introduced studies in physical and biolo-
gical science. It may be said with suffi-
cient accuracy that all save a small minor-
ity of undergraduates, during the greater
part of their university career, work un-
der the immediate oversight and direc-
tion of a college tutor, whether he actu-
ally bears that name or the more humble
designation of " lecturer." The system
is more highly developed with honor men
than with pass men, and it can be best

Jowett and the University Ideal.

studied in the two " honor schools " of
Liter* Humaniores and Modern Histo-
ry, which attract perhaps four out of five
honor students. Colleges prefer to ap-
point their tutors from among their own
Fellows ; and in spite of all the recent
changes, the majority of the tutors still
reside within the college walls.

The tutors of the last fifty years have
been among the most industrious of men,
taking their duties very seriously, and
watching with sedulous care the progress
of their pupils from week to week, and
from term to term. As a rule, each un-
dergraduate has a regular appointment
with his tutor every week ; he is seen
alone for half -an hour or three quarters,
and exhibits a piece of work, usually
in the form of an essay, which is then
and there read and criticised ; and these
weekly pieces of work are so arranged
that the undergraduate may acquaint
himself, during the allotted time, with
the whole field on which he proposes to
be examined.

This conception of tutorial duty has
been a growth of the present century,
and indeed would seem first to have
made itself visible about 1830 and in
Oriel College. Very different was the
condition of things when Gibbon went
up to Magdalen in 1752. His first tu-
tor, he tells us, was " one of the best
of the tribe," but even "he was satis-
fied, like his, fellows, with the slight and
superficial discharge of an important
trust." When the young Gibbon began
to make excuses they were received with
smiles. " The slightest motive of laziness
or indisposition, the most trifling avoca-
tion at home or abroad, was allowed as
a worthy impediment ; nor did my tutor
appear conscious of my absence or neg-
lect. No plan of study was recommend-
ed for my use ; no exercises were pre-
scribed for his inspection." His next

tutor was even worse. " Dr. well

remembered that he had a salary to re-
ceive, and only forgot that he had a
duty to perform. Excepting one volun-

tary visit to his rooms, during the eight
months of his titular office the tutor and
pupil lived in the same college as stran-
gers to each other."

Even after the reformed scheme of
examination for degrees was introduced
in 1802, — largely owing to the efforts
of Eveleigh, the Provost of Oriel, —
some time elapsed before college teach-
ing came to be directed towards fitting
men to obtain honors. " That was the
day," says Mark Pattison in his Me-
moirs, speaking of 1830, " of private tu-
tors ; it was the ' coach,' and not the col-
lege tutor, who worked a man up for his
' first.' " The originality of the first set
of energetic college tutors at Oriel —
Newman, Hurrell Froude, and Robert
Wilberforce — consisted precisely in this,
as a contemporary put it : that " they
bestowed on their pupils as much time
and trouble as was usually only expected
from very good private tutors."

When Jowett went up to Balliol, the
new tutorial enthusiasm had already
made its way thither, and his predecessor
as tutor, A. C. Tait (afterwards Arch-
bishop of Canterbury), had made a great
impression on the college by his assidu-
ity and his charm of manner. Jowett,
in spite of the shyness which hampered
him throughout life, applied himself
with extraordinary energy to the tutori-
al task ; and it was thus that, after a few
years, he began to gain influence, and to
win for himself the enthusiastic esteem
of scores of undergraduates. Varying
accounts are given of his early tutorial
years ; but it is certain that " his devo-
tion to his pupils was, at this time, some-
thing unique in Oxford." One distin-
guished pupil of his between 1852 and
1854 tells us that he " often took compo-
sition to Jowett at half past twelve at
night." Jowett early established the
custom of taking half a dozen men of
ability away with him in the vacations,
to work under his eye for a few weeks,
— a practice he maintained till almost
the end of his life. Such zeal soon pro-

Jowett and the University Ideal.

duced a crop of first classes for Balliol,
and raised the intellectual reputation of
the college ; the infection was caught by
such of his own pupils as became tutors
at Balliol or at other colleges ; and tu-
torial ardor, once introduced, was fanned
by intercollegiate rivalry. As soon as
he became Master, Jowett added the
coping-stone to the fabric by " establish-
ing weekly tutorial meetings, at which
he never failed to attend, going through
the whole list of undergraduates, and sat-
isfying himself by inquiry about the work
of every man," — two hundred or more ;
and other colleges, again, imitated, with
various modifications, the new machin-
ery. Among the qualities desirable in the
Head of a college, set down in some cu-
rious memoranda of Jowett's, occurs this
requirement : " He should know how to
' put pressure ' upon everybody." His
own Mastership left nothing to be de-
sired in this respect.

Jowett was thus, in large measure, the
creator of the modern tutorial ideal.
What that involves may be readily ga-
thered from a phrase used in passing by
one of the writers of the Life, himself an
eminent Balliol tutor. College tutors,
he tells us, are held " responsible for the
position of a pupil in the class list."

Yet as tutor he was more than an in-
structor. He wished to know his under-
graduates personally, to influence the de-
velopment of their- characters in every
possible way for good, to promote socia-
bility and bring men together. Hospi-
tality was therefore a duty as well as a
pleasure, and " he was the most hospi-
table of men." "When his stipend as
Greek professor was increased, the fact
was brought home to us his pupils by the
increase in the plates and dishes which
his servant piled up on the stairs lead-
ing to his room. He had undergradu-
ates with him at almost every meal ; he
wished to know as much of them as pos-
sible." What Jowett did, his disciples
who were tutors did in their turn ; when
he became Master, he " ui-ged the Balliol

tutors to do the same." In later years,
he rejoiced to fill the Master's Lodge,
from Saturday to Monday, with visitors
of distinction, and many a joke has been
cracked about this little hobby. But
" he never, in anything that he did, for-
got the college or the undergraduates,
and nothing was more remarkable in
him than the pains which he took about
the future careers of his ' young men.'
This was, in his opinion, one of the chief
duties of the head of a college."

So the ideal of the tutor was still fur-
ther enlarged and grew to be what we
know it : that combination of authority
and comradeship, of dignity and bonho-
mie, which is often presented in forms of
infinite attractiveness, and which has ex-
cited the longing admiration of so many
American observers.

There is a significant passage in Pat-
tison's Memoirs where he explains the
reasons which led the Provost of Oriel
to get rid of the three energetic and suc-
cessful tutors before mentioned : " New-
man insisted upon regarding his relation
to his pupils as a pastoral one. Unless
he could exercise the function of tutor on
this basis, he did not think that he, being
a priest, could be a tutor at all. . . .
The Provost's proposal that all under-
graduates should be entered under one
common name, and no longer under re-
spective tutors, interfered with New-
man's doctrine of the pastoral relation.
This was the point which Newman would
not give up, and for which he resigned."
Pattison remarks, in his unsympathetic
fashion, that if Newman had succeeded,
" a college would have become a mere
priestly seminary." But seven or eight
years later we find Tait, at Balliol, — a
most unpriestly tutor, — turning over in
his mind " what can be done to make
more of a pastoral connection between
the tutors and their pupils." In fact,
through all the changes that the last six-
ty years have brought, with most of the
tutors laymen, and many by no means
orthodox, with every effort to wear vel-

100

Jowett and the University Ideal.

vet gloves and to keep serious purposes
well in the background, the ideal of the
relation has continued to be, in a very
real sense, a pastoral one.

So much, then, for the theory ; now
as to the results. None but a fanatical
and unobservant adversary can deny that
the system is in many respects highly
beneficial to the undergraduates. The
abler men are taught to work rapidly
and consecutively ; they acquire a great
deal of information ; they learn the art
of presenting their knowledge in lucid
and forcible shape. The stupid and the
idle are made to do some systematic
work ; and an enthusiastic tutor will suc-
ceed in striking a spark of genuine in-
terest out of perhaps one in ten even of
them. But there are some deductions
to be made from the verdict of success.
The tutorial system often does for the
undergraduate more than is good for
him. In one of his sermons of 1885,
Jowett compares the present Balliol un-
dergraduate with his predecessor forty
or fifty years ago, not altogether to the
advantage of the former : " There is
greater refinement and greater decorum ;
there is also more knowledge and steady
industry. On the other hand, there was
more heartiness and originality and force
among the youth of that day." In that
entertaining and witty book, Aspects of
Modern Oxford, by a Mere Don, there
is the same lament : " There are certain
indications that the undergraduate is less
of a grown-up person than he was in the
brave days of old. It takes him a long
time to forget his schooldays. Only ex-
ceptionally untrammeled spirits regard
independent reading as more important
than the ministrations of their tutor."

If the intellectual results are not whol-
ly satisfactory, what of the social? Under
Jowett, Balliol grew in numbers, till it
outstripped all other colleges except Christ
Church ; and the undergraduate body be-
came more and more composite in social
origin, — from the earl down, or up, to
the clever son of the artisan. Jowett's

dream was that the earl and the artisan's
son should fraternize ; but as a matter of
fact, they did not. It was notorious in
Oxford that Balliol was one of the most
cliquy of colleges. Jowett did his best
to fight against the growing evil. He
induced Mr. John Farmer to come from
Harrow and establish Sunday - evening
concerts of classical music, and Monday-
evening smoking - concerts with college
songs, as a means of binding the college
together. But, with all his shrewdness,
he failed to realize that a large and di-
versified college is incompatible with real
acquaintance with one another on the part
of the undergraduates. No quantity of
college songs or tutorial " tea and toast "
can make headway against the centrifu-
gal forces.

This is the undergraduate's side of
the account ; now for the tutor's. The
Oxford tutor — his admirers, like "a
Mere Don," regretfully acknowledge it
— has become a schoolmaster, with the
qualities and the defects of the qualities.
Other and external causes have contrib-
uted to make him the overworked school-
master he is ; for the number of tutors
has by no means increased, as it should
have done, in proportion to their labors.
Professor Freeman used to point out —
as his recent biographer tells us — that
"the university was becoming less and
less a centre for learning, and sinking
more and more int6 a mere education-
al machine ; " and that " meanwhile the
ablest works in philosophy and history
proceeded from university men, indeed,
but not, as a rule, from those who were
resident, but from the cabinet minister,
the banker, or the country clergyman."
This is not hard to account for. Let any
one read the humorous Diary of a Don,
in Aspects of Modern Oxford, with its
picture of perpetual bustle from morning
to night, and he will understand how
exceedingly difficult it must be to get
much time for steady reading or quiet
thought.

Did Jowett realize any part of this ?

Jowett and the University Ideal.

101

Hardly. And still there are some sig-
nificant phrases in his letters. Writing
to Stanley in 1852, and urging him to
take the headship of a proposed " Bal-
liol Hall," he was careful to point out
that the position was " not that of a
drudging college tutor." In 1870 he
confessed to the same friend that he
was glad to reach the Mastership, " be-
cause I want more rest and leisure to
think, and I have been overworked for
many years past." Among his Memo-
randa has been found a little set of
"Maxims for Statesmen and Others,"
wherein " Never spare " and " Never
drudge " stand cheek by jowl.

The pressure of duty upon the tutor
has been very considerably increased by
the growth of the " combined lecture "
plan. Many of the tutors, besides giving
instruction to their college pupils, lecture
two or three times a week, to all under-
graduates who choose to attend. As a
result, some of them perform what one
may describe as " professorial " functions
in addition to their strictly tutorial ones.
As Freeman put it less kindly, they have
" become mongrel beings, — neither pro-
fessor, nor college tutor, nor private
coach." It needs but little reflection to
see how severe must be the strain upon
the teacher who, besides being responsi-
ble for the examination feats of a couple
of dozen undergraduates, tries to keep
abreast of the latest investigations in the
special subject on which he is lecturing.

Jowett viewed the outcome of these
tendencies with much disquietude, but,
characteristically enough, on account of
the lecturer, not of the hearer. The sub-
stitution of " praelections " for the older
catechetical instruction, he declared in
his later years, was " utterly bad for the
students, though flattering to the teach-
er." Often the mere listening to a lec-
ture is "no intellectual discipline at all."
Yet the " combined lecture " was in two
ways the result of Jowett's action and that
of men like him. It was the inevitable
result of the intercollegiate combination ;

it was also the outlet which the professo-
rial instinct, insuppressible in a great mod-
ern university, found for itself under the
tutorial regime. In his evidence before
the University Commission in 1877, Jow-
ett urged the necessity of enlarging the
professoriate in order to create " a career
to which college tutors can look forward,"
now that they no longer look to prefer-
ment in the Church. But nowadays men
are hardly likely to be appointed to pro-
fessorships unless they have done some
more or less original work in the subject
of the chair ; how men are to do that
original work, and at the same time be
college tutors of the kind Jowett would
have had them, it is not easy to see.

Up to this point, it will be observed,
I have abstained from criticising the tu-
torial ideal as Jowett cherished it, and
the preceding remarks as to its deficien-
cies have been based chiefly on Jowett's
own observations. The readers of this
paper probably do not need to be told
that another university ideal has had its
champions in Oxford, and that the tuto-
rial system has not been without its critics.
Of these the most vigorous and emphatic
was Mark Pattison, the late Rector of
Lincoln. According to Pattison, the col-
leges were never intended by their found-
ers to be " establishments for the educa-
tion of youth," " schools for young men
who had outgrown school," but rather to
be " retreats for study." The original
object of their foundation was " the pro-
motion of learning," " the endowment of
knowledge." "So far from its being
the intention of a fellowship to support
the Master of Arts as a teacher, it was
rather its purpose to relieve him from
the drudgery of teaching for a mainte-
nance, and to set him free to give his
whole time to the studies of his faculty."
It was the Jesuits who first introduced
" the principle of perpetual supervision,
of repeated examinations, of weekly ex-
ercises," that is, the tutorial method, —
at first greeted as a reform, but found in
the end to produce "starved and shriveled

102

Jowett and the University Ideal.

understandings." Pattison demanded a
return to the old ideals, an " endowment
of research" in some shape or other,
even if it could take no better form than
the creation of a body of professors whose
true purpose was " veiled from the sneers
of Philistinism by the thin disguise of
setting them to deliver terminal courses
of lectures to empty benches." That
Oxford should do nothing but educate,
and educate for examinations,was bad, he
declared, for both teacher and taught,
and fatal to the university as a place of
learning. He had himself been a highly
successful tutor, and in his earlier days
had done for Lincoln something like
what Jowett, his contemporary, was do-
ing for Balliol. " I have never ceased,"
he declared in the closing days of his
life, " to prize as highly as I did at that
time the personal influence of mind upon
mind, — the mind of the fully instructed
upon the young mind it seeks to form.
But I gradually came to see that it was
impossible to base a whole academical
system upon this single means of influ-
ence." Jowett, meanwhile, as his bio-
graphers tell us, " had no sympathy with
the organized endowment of research,
and he was strongly opposed to any
measures which were likely to lessen the
influence of the colleges." Nor was he
afraid to exclaim, " How I hate learn-
ing!"

Whatever the purposes of the original
founders may have been, we may be
pretty sure that the English universities
will never become primarily places of
original investigation or homes of learned
leisure. There is the crowd of under-
graduates to be dealt with somehow;
there is the obvious benefit that can be
conferred upon the students, and the in-
fluence for good that can be exercised
through them upon the nation. On the
other hand, it can hardly be maintained
that Oxford does as much as might fairly
be expected of her for the advancement
of knowledge ; and it is scarcely seemly
for her to be so very dependent for fresh

ideas and new conclusions upon German
universities and "private scholars." Of
course it is good for most scholars to be
compelled from time to time to take stock
of their labors and to put their results into
teachable shape. It is equally true that
academic teaching is bound, in the long
run, to deteriorate unless it is inspired
by the consciousness of widening know-
ledge and the hope of personally advan-
cing the cause of science. No Oxford
man who has had any experience in
American universities will be inclined to
underestimate the incalculable service
done to the undergraduate by collegiate
life and discipline. It is rather a case of
" These ye ought to have done, and not
to have left the other undone." Perhaps
even now forces are at work which will
restore the balance. The professorships
established by the last University Com-
mission are beginning to make them-
selves felt ; the number of " schools," or
curricula for honors, is being increased ;
two scholarly journals, comparable with
the best of any country, the English His-
torical Review and the Economic Jour-
nal, are being edited in Oxford ; and the
ideas of " graduate studies " and " re-
search degrees " are in the air. Oxford
has already much to offer the serious
American graduate student ; and per-
haps his resort thither will in some slight
measure help Oxford herself to return to
her older traditions.

When we turnfrom Oxford and Jowett
to the university problem in America,
our first impression, maybe, is of the to-
tal dissimilarity of conditions, and of the
hopelessness of deriving any lessons from
English experience. Yet the American
reader of Jowett's biography will be sin-
gularly irresponsive if it does not prompt
some consideration of the functions of
the university in this country. In what
I have left to say, I shall confine myself
to Harvard, with which alone, among
American universities, I have any inti-
mate acquaintance.

The peculiarity in the position of Har-

Jowett and the University Ideal.

103

vard is that while the professorial ideal
has definitely triumphed among the teach-
ing body, the tutorial ideal is still cher-
ished by the "constituency." Most of
the professors care first of all for the
advancement of science and scholarship ;
they prefer lectures to large audiences to
the catechetical instruction of multiplied
"sections," and they would leave stu-
dents free to attend lectures or neglect
them, at their own peril ; they would pick
out the abler men, and initiate them into
the processes of investigation in small
" research courses " or " seminaries ; "
and, to be perfectly frank, they are not
greatly interested in the ordinary un-
dergraduate. On the other hand, the
university constituency — represented, as
I am told, by the Overseers — insists
that the ordinary undergraduate shall be
" looked after : " that he shall not be al-
lowed to " waste his time ; " that he shall
be " pulled up " by frequent examina-
tions, and forced to do a certain mini-
mum of work, whether he wants to or
not. The result of this pressure has been
the establishment of an elaborate ma-
chinery of periodical examination, the
carrying on of a vaster book-keeping for
the registration of attendance and of
grades than was ever before seen at any
university, and the appointment of a le-
gion of junior instructors and assistants,
to whom is assigned the drudgery of
reading examination-books and conduct-
ing " conferences."

So far as the professors are concerned,
the arrangement is as favorable as can
reasonably be expected. Of course they
are all bound to lecture, and to lecture
several times a week ; they exercise a
general supervision over the labors of
their assistants ; they guide the studies
of advanced students ; they conduct the
examinations for honors and for higher
degrees ; they carry on a ceaseless corre-
spondence ; and each of them sits upon a
couple of committees. But they are not
absolutely compelled to undertake much
drudging work in the way of instruction,

and if they are careful of their time
they can manage to find leisure for their
own researches. As soon as " a course "
gets large, a benevolent Corporation will
provide an assistant. The day is past
when they were obliged, in the phrase of
Lowell, " to double the parts of profes-
sor and tutor."

But the soil of America is not as pro-
pitious as one could wish to the plant of
academic leisure. It is a bustling at-
mosphere ; and a professor needs some
strength of mind to resist the temptation
to be everlastingly " doing " something
obvious. The sacred reserves of time
and energy need to be jealously guard-
ed ; and there is more than one direction
from which they are threatened. Uni-
versity administration occupies what
would seem an unduly large number of
men and an unduly large amount of
time ; it is worth while considering whe-
ther more executive authority should
not be given to the deans. Then there
is the never ending stream of legislation,
or rather, of legislative discussion. I
must confess that when I have listened,
week after week, to faculty debates, the
phrase of Mark Pattison about Oxford
has sometimes rung in my ears : " the
tone as of a lively municipal borough."
It would be unjust to apply it ; for, after
all, the measures under debate have been
of far-reaching importance. Yet if any
means could be devised to hasten the
progress of business, it would be a wel-
come saving of time. Still another dan-
ger is the pecuniary temptation — hardly
resistible by weak human nature — to
repeat college lectures to the women stu-
dents of Radcliff e. That some amount of
repetition will do no harm to teachers of
certain temperaments and in certain sub-
jects may well be allowed, but that it is
sometimes likely to exhaust the nervous
energy which might better be devoted to
other things can hardly be denied. The
present Radcliffe system, to be sure, is
but a makeshift, and an unsatisfactory
one.

104

Jowett and the University Ideal,

The instructors and assistants, on their
part, have little to grumble at, if they, in
their turn, are wise in the use of their
time. It is with them, usually, but a few
years of drudgery, on the way to higher
positions in Harvard or elsewhere ; and
it is well that a man should bear the
yoke in his youth. Let him remember
that his promotion will depend largely
upon his showing the ability to do inde-
pendent work ; let him take care not to
be so absorbed in the duties of his tem-
porary position as to fail to produce some
little bit of scholarly or scientific achieve-
ment for himself. I have occasionally
thought that the university accepts the
labors of men in the lower grades of the
service with a rather stepmotherly dis-
regard for their futures.

Come now to the " students," for
whose sake, certainly, Harvard College
was founded, whatever may have been
the case with English colleges, and whose
presence casts upon those responsible for
academic policy duties which they can-
not escape, if they would. Grant that
education — and education as Jowett un-
derstood it, the training of character as
well as mere instruction — is the main
business of a university, what is to be
said of the situation of affairs ? That we
do as much here for the average man as
the Oxford tutorial system accomplishes,
it would be idle to affirm. The intro-
duction of the tutorial system, however,
is out of the question : it needs the small
college for its basis ; it requires that the
tutor should enjoy a prestige which we
cannot give him ; and it is still further
shut out by " elective " studies. Yet in
its way the Harvard practice suffers from
the same defects as the Oxford ; it does
too much for the men. Take the mat-
ter of examinations, for instance. Sure-
ly it would be better to relax the contin-
uous pressure, — which after all is not
in any worthy sense effective, — and to
reinforce it instead at special points. It
was the conviction, we are told, of Pro-
fessor Freeman that "if examinations

were necessary evils, they should be few,
searching, and complete, not many and
piecemeal." At present, there are so
many "tests," of one sort or another,
that no one examination sufficiently im-
presses the undergraduate mind. The
kind of work done by a student who is so
persistently held up by hour examinations
and conferences that he must be an ab-
normal fool to " fail " at the end, cannot
be regarded as really educational in any
high sense of the word. By a great many
men, the help showered upon them is re-
garded merely as the means of discover-
ing just how little they can do, and still
scrape through. To sweep away all ex-
aminations except the final annual one ;
to leave the student more to himself ; to
set a higher standard for passing, and
ruthlessly reject those who do not reach
it, would undoubtedly, in the long run,
encourage a more manly spirit on the
part of undergraduates, and a deeper re-
spect for the university. This I say with
the fuller confidence because, when I left
Oxford, some nine years ago, I could see
nothing but the evils of the examination
system as it there affects students of
promise. I am now convinced that it
would be possible and salutary in Har-
vard to add greatly to the awfulness of
examination; and that much could be
done in this direction without approach-
ing within measurable distance of any
results that need be feared.

From a natural distrust of examina-
tions and a desire to encourage indepen-
dent thought, it has of late become the
practice to prescribe two or more the-
ses during the progress of a "course."
The result is that many a man has half a
dozen or more theses to write during the
year, for two or three different teachers.
This undoubtedly " gets some work out
of the men." But the too frequent con-
sequence, with students who take their
work seriously, especially with gradu-
ates, is that they have no time for any-
thing but to get up their lectures and
prepare their theses. Any parallel read-

Jowett and the University Ideal.

105

in by the side of their lectures they find
in .practicable. But one of the best things
<t student can do is just to read intelli-
gently. Certainly the graduate students,
if not the undergraduates, would some-
times be the better for being left more to
themselves.

These are, however, relatively minor
matters. A good deal could be said
about that corner-stone of Harvard aca-
demic policy, the " elective " system. I
must confess that I have hitherto failed
to see the advantage of the completely
elective plan (for any but exceptional
students) over the plan of " groups," or
"triposes," or "schools," with some de-
gree of internal elasticity to suit particu-
lar tastes. That it is an improvement
on the old compulsory curriculum is like-
ly enough ; but I do not know that any
great American university has ever yet
fairly tried the group arrangement. This,
however, is too large a subject for the
end of a paper, and I hurry on to my
last point.

Of all the educational agencies at Ox-
ford, Oxford itself is the strongest.

" That sweet city with her dreaming spires
She needs not June foi- beauty's heighten-
ing."

Harvard, indeed, is truly " fair " at Com-
mencement, and in the evening lights
the Yard has always a sober dignity.
But Harvard in the daytime sadly needs
May or October for beauty's heightening.
The disadvantages of youth and climate
"may not be altogether surmountable ;
yet Cambridge surroundings could doubt-
less be made more comely and restful
with comparatively little trouble. There

must be a certain atrophy of the aesthetic
sense when luxuriously furnished dormi-
tories have no difficulty in securing ten-
ants though they face rubbish dumps,
and when rowing-men can practice with
equanimity beneath a coal-dealer's mam-
moth advertisement. What is much to
be desired for every young man — most
of all for those from homes of little cul-
tivation — is that he should live in the
presence of grace and beauty and state-
liness. The lesson of good taste cannot
be learnt from lectures, and is imbibed
unconsciously. Here we must turn to
our masters, the Corporation, and to the
worshipful Benefactors to come. Is all
the thought taken that might be taken,
all the pressure used that might be ex-
erted, to increase the amenity of the
neighborhood ? And further, is it Uto-
pian to imagine that some benefactor
will yet arise who will enable Harvard
to imitate the noble example of Yale,
and erect dormitories that shall delight
the eye ? Is it too much to hope that
the university may soon be enriched
with at least one more building such as
Memorial Hall ? For many a Harvard
student his daily meals in Memorial
Hall, in that ample space, beneath the
glowing colors of the windows and sur-
rounded by the pictures of the Harvard
worthies of the past, constitute the most
educative part of his university career,
though he may not know it. Only half
the students can now be brought within
this silent influence. A second dining-
hall, of like dignity, is the most urgent
educational need of Harvard, and the
need most easily supplied.

W. J. Ashley.

106

The Juggler.

THE JUGGLER.

ROYCE waited over one day after this
agreement with Tynes, and marked with
satisfaction how thoroughly his will was
subject to his own control. He had seen
the Springs once. There was naturally
a certain mundane curiosity on his part
to be satisfied. Doubtless, after another
excursion or so thither, it would all pall
upon him and he would be more content,
since there was no dream of unattain-
able enchantments at hand upon which
he dared not look.

The place was singularly cheerful of
aspect in its matutinal guise. The diago-
nal slant of the morning sunshine struck
through the foliage of the great oaks and
dense shrubs ; but there was intervenient
shadow here, too, dank, grateful to the
senses, for the day already betokened the
mounting mercury. Across the valley
the amethystine mountains shimmered
through the heated air ; ever and anon
darkly purple simulacra of clouds went
fleeing along their vast sunlit slopes be-
neath the dazzling white masses in the
azure sky. In the valley, a tiny space of
blue-green tint amongst the strong full-
fleshed dark verdure of the forests of
July bespoke a cornfield, and through a
field-glass might be descried the little
log cabin with its delicate tendril of
smoke, the home of the mountaineer who
tilled the soil. Of more distinct value in
the landscape was the yellow of the har-
vested wheatfields in the nearer reaches
of the Cove, where the bare spaces re-
vealed the stage road here and there as
it climbed the summits of red clay hills.

There was no sound of music on the
air, the band being off duty for the nonce.
Even that instrument of torture, the ho-
tel piano, was silent. Tire wind played
through the meshes of the deserted ten-
nis-nets, and no clamor of rolling balls

thundered from the tenpin alley, the low
long roof of which glimmered in the
sunshine, down among the laurel on the
slope toward the gorge. The whole life
of the place was focused upon the ve-
randa. Royce's reminiscent eye, gazing
upon it all as a fragment of the past as
well as an evidence of the present, dis-
cerned that some crisis of moment in
the continual conjugation of the verb
s'armiser impended. The usual laborious
idleness of fancy-work would hardly ac-
count for the unanimity with which fem-
inine heads were bent above needles and
threads and various sheer fabrics, nor for
the interest with which the New Helvetia
youths watched the proceedings and self-
sufficiently proffered advice, despite the
ebullitions of laughter, scornful and su-
perior, with which it was inevitably re-
ceived. There was now and again an
exclamation of triumph when a pair of
conventionalized wings were held aloft,
completed, fashioned of gauze and wire
and profusely spangled with silver. He
caught the flash of tinsel, and gratula-
tion and great glee ensued when one of
the old ladies, fluttered with the anxiety
of the inventor, successfully fitted a sil-
ver crown upon the golden locks of a
poetic-faced young girl, a very Titania.
The jocose hobbledehoy whom Royce had
noted on the occasion of his previous ex-
cursion sat upon a step of the long flight
leading from the veranda to the lawn,
surrounded by half a dozen little maidens,
and, armed with a needle and a long
thread, sewed industriously, rewarded by
their shrieking exclamations of delight
in his f unniness every time he grotesque-
ly drew out the needle with a great curve
of his long arm, or facetiously but f utile-
ly undertook to bite the thread.

With zealous gallantry sundry of the
young men plied back and forth be-
tween the groups on the veranda to

The Juggler.

107

facilitate the exchange of silks and scis-
sors, and occasionally trotted on simi-
lar errands, businesslike and brisk, down
the plank walk to the store. Sometimes
they asked here for the wrong thing.
Sometimes they forgot utterly what they
were to ask for, and a return trip was in
order. Sometimes they demanded some
article a stranger to invention, unheard
of on sea or shore. Thus cruelly was
their ignorance of fabric played upon
by the ungrateful and freakish fair, and
the little store rang with laughter at the
discomfiture of the young Mercury so
humbly bearing the messages of the dei-
ties on the veranda; for the store was
crowded, too, chiefly with ladies in the
freshest of morning costumes, and Royce,
as he paused at the door, realized that
this was no time to claim the attention of
the smooth-faced clerk. That function-
ary was as happy as a salesman ever gets
to be. There was not a yard of any
material or an article in his stock that
did not stand a fair chance of immedi-
ate purchase as wearing apparel or stage
properties. Tableaux, and a ball after-
ward in the dress of one of the final pic-
tures, were in immediate contemplation,
as Royce gathered from the talk. This
was evidently an undertaking requiring
some nerve on the part of its projectors,
in so remote a place, where no opportu-
nities of fancy costumes were attainable
save what invention might contrive out of
the resources of a modern summer ward-
robe and the haphazard collections of a
watering-place store. Perhaps this add-
ed element of jeopardy and doubt and
discovery and the triumphs of ingenuity
heightened the zest of an amusement
which with all necessary appliances might
have been vapid indeed.

Royce could not even read the titles
of the books on the little shelf at this dis-
tance, above the heads of the press, and
he turned away to await a more conve-
nient season, realizing that he had at-
tracted naught but most casual notice,
and feeling at ease to perceive, from one

or two specimens to-day about the place,
that mountaineers from the immediate
vicinity were no rarity at New Helvetia ;
their errands to sell fruit to the guests or
vegetables or venison to the hotel being
doubtless often supplemented by a trifle
of loitering to mark the developments of
a life so foreign to their experience.
As he strolled along the plank walk, his
supersensitive consciousness was some-
what assuaged as by a sense of invisibil-
ity. Every one was too much absorbed
to notice him, and he in his true self
supported no responsibility, since poor
Lucien Royce was dead, and John Leon-
ard was merely a stray mountaineer,
looking on wide-eyed at the doings of the
grand folk.

From the locality of the portion of the
building which he had learned contained
the ballroom he heard the clatter of ham-
mer and nails. The stage was proba-
bly in course of erection, and, idly fol-
lowing the sound along a low deserted
piazza toward one of the wings, he stood
at last in the doorway. He gazed in list-
lessly at the group of carpenters work-
ing at the staging, the frame being al-
ready up. A blond young man, in white
flannel trousers and a pink -and -white-
striped blazer, was descanting with know-
ingness and much easy confidence of
manner upon the way in which the cur-
tain should draw, while the proprietor,
grave, saturnine, with a leaning toward
simplicity of contrivance and economy in
execution, listened in silence. The wind
blew soft and free through the opposite
windows. Royce looked critically at the
floor of the ballroom. It was a good
floor, a very good floor. Finally he
turned, with only a gentle melancholy in
his forced renunciation of youthful amuse-
ments, with the kind of sentiment, the
sense of far remove, which might ani-
mate the ghost of one untimely snatched
away, now vaguely awaiting its ultimate
fate. He continued to stroll along, en-
tering presently the quadrangle, and not-
ing here the grass and the trees and the

108

The Juggler.

broad walks ; the romping children about
the band-stand in the centre, dainty and
fresh of costume and shrill of voice ; the
chatting groups of old black " mammies "
who supervised their play. One was
pushing a perambulator, in which a pre-
cocious infant, totally ignoring passing
adults, after the manner of his kind,
fixed an eager, intent, curious gaze upon
another infant in arms, who so returned
this interested scrutiny that his soft neck,
as he twisted it in the support of his re-
tiring nurse, was in danger of disloca-
tion.

" Tu'n roun' yere, chile ! " she admon-
ished him as if he were capable of un-
derstanding, while she shifted him about
in her arms to cut off the vision of the
object of interest. " Twis' off yer hade
lak some ole owel, f us' t'ing ye know ;
owel tu'n his hade ef ye circle roun' him,
an' tu'n an' tu'n till his ole fool hade
drap off. Did n' ye know dat, honey ?
Set disher way. Dat 's nice ! "

She almost ran against the juggler as
she rounded the corner. He caught the
glance of her eye, informed with that
contempt for the poor whites which is so
marked a trait of negro character, as she
walked on, swaying gently from side to
side and crooning low to the baby.

He did not care to linger longer with-
in the premises. He could not even en-
joy the relapse into old sounds and sights
in a guise in which he was thought so
meanly of, and which so ill beseemed his
birth and quality. When he issued at
last from the quadrangle, at the lower
end of the veranda, he found he was
nearer the descent to the spring than to
the store. He thought he would slip
down that dank, bosky, deserted path,
make a circuit through the woods, and
thus regain the road homeward without
risking further observation and the la-
ceration of his quivering pride. False
pride he thought it might be, but ac-
coutred, alas, with sensitive fibres and
alert and elastic muscles for the writh-
ings of torture, with delicate membranes

to shrivel and scorch and sear as if it
were quite genuine and a laudable pos-
session.

The ferns with long wide - spreading
fronds, and great mossy boulders amongst
the dense undergrowth, pressed close on
either hand, and the thick interlacing
boughs of trees overarched the precipi-
tous path as he went down and down
into its green-tinted glooms. Now and
again it curved and sought a more lev-
el course, but outcropping ledges inter-
posed, making the way rugged, and soon
cliffs began to peer through the foliage,
and on one side they overhung the path ;
on the - other side a precipice lurked,
glimpsed through boughs of trees whose
trunks were fifty feet lower on a slope
beneath. An abrupt turn, — the odor of
ferns blended with moisture came deli-
cately, elusively fragrant ; a great frac-
ture yawned amidst the rocks, and there,
from a cleft stained deeply ochreous
with the oxide of iron, a crystal - clear
rill fell so continuously that it seemed to
possess no faculty of motion in its limpid
interfacings and plaitings as of silver
threads ; only below, where the natural
stone basin — hewn out by the constant
beating on the solid rock — overflowed,
could its momentum and power be in-
ferred by the swift escape of the water,
bounding over the precipice and rushing
off in great haste for the valley. The
proprietor had had the good taste to
preserve the woodland character of the
place intact. No sign that civilization
had ever intruded here did Royce mark,
as he looked about, save that suddenly
his eye fell upon a book, open and turned
downward on a rock hard by. Some
one had sought this sylvan solitude for
a quiet hour in the fascinations of its
pages.

He hesitated a moment, then advanced
cautiously and laid his hand upon it.
How long, how long — it seemed as if in
another existence — since he had had a
book like this in his hand ! He caught
its title eagerly, and the name of the

The Juggler.

109

author. They were new to him. He
turned the pages with alert interest. The
book had been published since the date
of his exile. Once more he fluttered the
leaves, and, like some famished, thirsting
wretch drinking in great eager gulps, he
began to absorb the contents, his eyes
glowing like coals, his breath hot, his
hands trembling with nervous haste,
knowing that his time for this draught
of elixir, this refreshment of his soul,
was brief, so brief. It would never do,
for a man so humbly clad as he was, to
be caught reading with evident delight a
scholarly book like this. When at last
he threw himself down amongst the thick
and fragrant mint beside the rock, his
shoulders supported on an outcropping
ledge, his hat fallen on the ground, he
was not conscious how the time sped by.
His eyes were alight, moving swiftly
from side to side of the page. His face
glowed with responsive enthusiasm to the
high thought of the author. His troubles
had done much to chasten its expres-
sion and had chiseled its features. It
had never been so keen, so intelligent,
so frank, so refined, as now. He did not
see how the shadows shifted, till even
in this umbrageous retreat a glittering
lance of sunlight pierced the green gloom.
He was not even aware of another pre-
sence, a sudden entrance. A young lady,
climbing up from the precipitous slope
below, started abruptly at sight of him,
jeopardizing her already uncertain foot-
ing, then stared for an instant in blank
amazement.

So uncertain was her footing where
she stood, however, that there was no
safe choice but to continue her ascent.
He did not heed more the rustle of her
garments, as she struggled to the level
ground, than the rustle of the leaves,
nor the rattle of the little avalanche of
gravel as her foot upon the verge dis-
lodged the pebbles. Only when the shaft
of sunlight struck full upon her white
pique* dress, and the reflected glare was
flung over the page of the book and into

his eyes with that refulgent quality which
a thick white fabric takes from the sun,
he glanced up at the dazzling apparition
with a galvanic start which jarred his
every fibre. He stared at her for one
moment as if he were in a dream ; he
had come from so far, — so very far !
Then he grasped his troublous identity,
and sprang to his feet in great embar-
rassment.

" I must apologize," he said, with his
most courteous intonation, "for taking
the liberty of reading your book."

" Not at all," she murmured civilly,
but still looking at him in much surprise
and with intent eyes.

Those eyes were blue and soft and
lustrous ; the lashes were long and black ;
the eyebrows were so fine, so perfect, so
delicately arched, that they might have
justified the writing of sonnets in their
praise. That delicate small Roman nose
one knew instinctively she derived from
a father who had followed its prototype
from one worldly advancement to anoth-
er, and into positions of special financial
trusts and high commercial considera-
tion. It would give distinction to her
face in the years to come, when her
fresh and delicate lips should fade, and
that fluctuating sea-shell pink hue should
no longer embellish her cheek. Her com-
plexion was very fair. Her hair, dense-
ly black, showed under the brim of the
white sailor hat set straight on her small
head. She was tall and slender, and
wore her simple dress with an effect of
finished elegance. She had an air of
much refinement and unconscious digni-
ty, and although, from her alert volant
poise, he inferred that she was ready to
terminate the interview, she did not move
at once when she had taken the book in
her hand.

" I merely intended to glance at the
title," he went on, still overwhelmed to
be caught in this literary poaching, and
hampered by the consciousness that he
and his assumed identity had become
strangely at variance. " But I grew so

110

The Juygler.

much interested that I — I — quite lost
myself."

She had some thought in her mind as
she looked down at the book in her
gloved hand, then at him. The blood
stung his cheek as he divined it. In
pity for his evident poverty and hanker-
ing for the volume, she would fain have
bid him keep it. If this stranger had
been a woman, she would have bestowed
it on the instant. As it was, with an ex-
acting sense of conventionality, she said
suavely, but with impersonal inexpres-
siveness, " It is no matter. I am glad
it entertained you. Good-morning."

He bowed with distant and unpresum-
ing politeness, and as she walked, with
a fine pose and a quick elastic gait, along
the shadowy green path, vanishing at the
first turn, he felt the blood beating in
his temples with such marked pulsation
that he could have counted the strokes
as he stood.

Did she deem him, then, only a com-
mon mountaineer, a graceless unlettered
lout ? She rated him as less than the
dust beneath her feet. He could not en-
dure that she should think of him thus.
How could she be so obtuse as to fail
to see that he was a gentleman for all
his shabby gear ! It was in him for a
moment to hasten after her and reveal
his name and quality, that she might
not look at him as a creature of no
worth, a being of a different sphere, hard-
ly allied even to the species she repre-
sented.

He was following on her path, when
the reflex sentiment struck him. " Am
I mad? " he said to himself. " Have I
lost all sense of caution and self-preser-
vation ? "

He stood panting and silent, the
wounded look in his eyes so intense that
by some subtle sympathetic influence
they hurt him, as if in the tension of a
strain upon them, and he passed his hand
across them as he took his way back to
the spring.

Did he wish the lady to recognize his

station in life, and speculate touching
his name ? He was fortunate in that she
was so young, for to those of more ex-
perience the incongruities of the inter-
est manifested by an uncouth and igno-
rant mountaineer in a metaphysical book
like that might indeed advertise mystery
and provoke inquiry. Was he hurt be-
cause the lady, noting his flagrant pov-
erty, had evidently wished to bestow upon
him the volume which he had been read-
ing with such delight, — so little to her,
so infinite to him ? And should he not
appreciate her delicate sense of the ap-
propriate, that had forbidden this gen-
erosity, considering her youth, and the
fact that he was a stranger and seeming-
ly a rustic clown ? He rather wondered
at the scholarly bent of her taste in lit-
erature, and her avoidance of the mirth-
ful scenes of the veranda, that she might
spend the morning in thought so fresh,
so deep, so expansive. It hardly seemed
apposite to her age and the tale that the
thermometer told, for this was a book
for study. There was something simple-
hearted in his acceptance of this high
intellectual ideal which all at once she
represented to him. A few months ago
he would have scoffed at it as a pose ;
he would at least have surmised the fact,
— a mistake caused by a similarity of
binding with a popular novel of the day
with which she had hoped to while away
the time in the cool recesses beside the
spring, and thus the volume had been
thrown discarded on the rock, while she
climbed the slopes searching for the
Chilhowee lily.

The fire of humiliation still scorched
his eyes, his deep depression was patent
in his face and figure, when he reached
the Sims house at last, and threw himself
down in a chair in the passage. One
arm was over the back of the chair, and
he rested his chin in his hand as he looked
out gloomily at the mountains that limit-
ed his world, and wished that he had
never seen them and might never see
them again. The house was full of the

The Juggler.

Ill

odor of frying bacon, for there was no
whiff of wind in the Cove. The rooms
were close and hot, and the sun lay half
across the floor, and burnt, and shim-
mered, and dazzled the eye. The suffo-
cating odor of the blistering clapboards,
and of the reserves of breathless heat
stored in the attic, penetrated the spaces
below. Jane Ann Sims sat melting by
degrees in the doorway, where, if a
draught were possible to the atmosphere
from any of the four quarters, she might
be in its direct route. Meantime she
nodded oblivious, and her great head and
broad face dripping with moisture wab-
bled helplessly on her bosom.

Euphemia, coming out suddenly with
a pan of peas to shell for dinner, and seek-
ing a respite from the heat, caught sight
of Royce with a radiant look of delight to
which for his life he could not respond.
She was pallid and limp with the heat and
the work of preparing dinner, and even
in the poetic entanglements of her curl-
ing shining hair she brought that most
persistent aroma of the frying-pan. The
coarse florid calico, the misshapen little
brogans which she adjusted on the rung
of her chair as she tilted it back against
the wall with the pan in her lap, her
drawling voice, the lapses of her igno-
rant speech, her utter lack of all the
graces of training and culture, impressed
him anew with the urgency of a fresh
discovery.

" What air it ez ails you-uns ? " she
demanded, with a certain anxiety in her
eyes. " Ye hev acted sorter cur'ous all
this week. Do you-uns feel seek enny-
whars ? "

" Lord, no ! " exclaimed the juggler
irritably ; " there 's nothing the matter
with me."

She looked at him in amazement for
a moment ; he had had no words for
her of late but honeyed praise. The
change was sudden and bitter. There
was an appealing protest in her fright-
ened eyes, and the color rushed to her
face.

He had no affinities for the role of
tickle-minded lover, and he was hardly
likely to seek to palliate the cruelty of
inconstancy. He took extreme pride in
being a man of his word. The sense of
honor, which was all the religion he had
and was chiefly active commercially, was
evident too in his personal affairs. Was
it her fault, his poor little love, that she
was so hopelessly rustic ? Had he not
sought her when she was averse to him,
and won her heart from a man she loved,
who would never have thought himself
too good for her? He would not apo-
logize, however. He would not let her
think that he had been vexed into hasty
speech by the sight of her, the sound of
her voice.

" You just keep that up," he said,
conserving an expression of animosity
before which she visibly quaked, " and
you '11 have Mrs. Sims brewing her in-
fernal herb teas for me in about three
minutes and a quarter. I want you to
stop talking about my being ill, short
off."

As she gazed at him she burst into a
little trill of treble laughter, that had
nevertheless the tone of tears ready to
be shed, in the extremity of her relief.

" I have walked twenty miles to-day,
and it 's a goodish tramp, — over to New
Helvetia and back ; and I 'm fagged out,
that 's all."

Her equilibrium was restored once
more, and her eyes were radiant with the
joy of loving and being loved. Yet she
paused suddenly, her hand — he winced
that he should notice how rough and
large it was, the nails blunt and short and
broad — resting motionless on the edge
of the pan, as she said, " I wisht ye would
gin up goin' ter that thar hotel. Ye look
strange ter-day," — her eyes searched
his face as if for an interpretation of
something troublous, daunting, — " so
strange ! so strange ! "

" How ? " he demanded angrily, knit-
ting his brows.

"• Ez ef — ef ye hed been 'witched some-

112

The Juggler.

hows," she answered, " like I 'low folks
urns' look ez view a witch in the woods
an' git under some unyearthly spell. The
woods air powerful thick over to'des New
Heveshy, an' folks 'low they air fairly
roamin' with witches an' sech. I ain't
goin' ter gin my cornsent fur ye ter go
through 'em no mo'."

She pressed a pod softly, and the peas
flew out and rattled in the pan, and the
tension was at an end. He felt that she
was far too acute, however. He was
sorry she had ever known of his visits to
New Helvetia. She should suppose them
discontinued. He certainly coveted no
feminine espionage.

He could not escape the thought of the
place now. The face of the beautiful
stranger was before his eyes every wak-
ing hour ; and these were many, for the
nights had lost their balm of sleep. The
tones of her voice sounded in his ear.
The delicate values of her refined bear-
ing, the suggestions of culture and charm
and high breeding which breathed from
her presence like a perfume, had in-
thralled his senses as might the subtile
and aerial potencies of ether. He had
no more volition. He could not resist.
Yet it was not, he argued, this stranger
whom he adored. It was what she em-
bodied, what she represented. He per-
ceived at last that for him the artifi-
cialities of life were the realities. Even
his own cherished gifts were matters of
sedulous cultivation of certain natural
aptitudes, the training of which was more
remarkable than the endowment ; and
indeed, of what worth the talent without
that culture which gives it use, and in
fact recognized being at all ? The status
had an inherent integral value, the hu-
man creature was its mere incident. Na-
ture was naught to him. The triumphs
of the world are the uses man has made
of nature ; the force that has lifted him
from plane to plane, and sublimated the
mere intelligence, which he shares with
the beast, into intellectuality, which is
the extremest development of mind.

As he argued thus abstractly, the long-
ing to see her again grew resistless. Not
himself to be seen, and never, never again
by her ! He would only look at her from
afar, as one — even so humble a wretch
— might gaze at some masterpiece of the
artist's craft, might kneel in abasement
and self - abnegation before some noble
shrine. He craved to see her in her
splendid young loveliness and girlish en-
joyment, in gala attire, at the grand fete
on which the youth of New Helvetia
were expending their ingenuity of in-
vention and expansive energy. Even
prudence could not say him nay. Did
fate grudge him a glimpse that he might
gain at the door, or while between the
dances she walked with her partner on
the moonlit veranda ? Who would note
a flitting ghost, congener of the shadow,
lurking in the deep glooms beneath the
trees and looking wistfully at the world
from which he had been snatched away ?
It was with a lacerating sense of renun-
ciation that he parted with each instant
of the time during the momentous even-
ing when he might have beheld her in
the tableaux ; for he could with certainty
fix upon the place she occupied, having
gathered from the talk at the store the
date and order of the festivities.

But he could not rid himself of the
Sims family. It had been vaguely borne
in upon Mrs. Sims that he was growing
tired of them, and in sudden alarm lest
Euphemia's happiness prove precarious,
and with that disposition to assume the
blame not properly chargeable to one's
self which is common to some of the
best people, who perceive no turpitude in
lying when it is only to themselves, she
made herself believe that the change was
merely because she had been remiss in
her attentions to her guest, and had treat-
ed him too much and too informally as
one of the family. She smiled broadly
upon him, with each of her many dimples
in evidence, which had never won upon
him, even in the days of his blandest
contentment. She detained him in con-

The Juggler.

113

versation. She requested that he would
favor her with the exact rendition of the
air to which he sang the words of Rock
of Ages, one Sunday morning when he
had heard the bells of the St. Louis
church towers ringing from out of the
misty west ; and as he dully complied, his
tones breaking more than once, she ac-
commodatingly wheezed along with him,
quite secure of his commendation. For
Jane Ann Sims had been a " plumb spe-
cial singer " when she was young and
slim, and no matter how intelligent a
woman may be, she never outgrows her
attractions — in her own eyes.

At last the house was still, and the jug-
gler, having endured an agony of sus-
pense in his determination to suppress
all demonstrations of interest in New
Helvetia, lest the intuition of the two
women should divine the cause from
even so slight indicia as might baffle
reason, found himself free from question
and surmise and comment. He was off
in the moonlight and the shadow and
the dew, with a furtive noiseless speed,
like some wild errant thing of the night,
native to the woods. He had a sense
of the shadow and of the sheen of a
fair young moon in the wilderness ; he
knew that the air was dank and cool and
the dew fell ; he took note mechanically
of the savage densities of the wilds when
he heard the shrill blood-curdling quaver-
ing of a catamount's scream, and he laid
his grasp on the handle of a sharp knife
or dagger that he wore in his belt, which
he had bought for a juggling trick that
he had not played at the curtailed per-
formance in the schoolhouse, and wished
that it were instead Tubal Cain's shoot-
ing-iron. But beyond this his mind was
a blank. He did not think ; he did not
feel ; his every capacity was concen-
trated upon his gait and the speed that
he made. He did not know how soon
it was that the long series of points of
yellow light, like a chain of glowing
topaz, shone through the black darkness
and the misty tremulous dimness of the

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 8

moon. His teeth were set; he was fit
to fall ; he paused only a moment, lean-
ing on the rail of the bridge to draw a
deep breath and relax his muscles. Then
he came on, swift, silent, steady, to the
veranda.

Around the doors, outside the ballroom,
were crowded groups of figures, whose
dusky faces and ivory teeth caught the
light from within and attested the enjoy-
ment of the servants of the place as
spectators of the scene. He saw through
an aperture, as one figure moved aside, a
humble back bench against the wall, on
which sat two or three of the mountain-
eers of the vicinity, calmly and stolidly
looking on, without more facial expres-
sion of opinion than Indians might have
manifested. He would not join this
group, lest she might notice him in their
company, which he repudiated, as if his
similarity of aspect were not his reliance
to save all that he and men of his ilk
held dear. The windows were too high
from the ground to afford a glimpse of
the interior ; he stood irresolute for a
moment, with the strains of the waltz
music vibrating in his very heart-strings.
Suddenly he marked how the ground
rose toward the further end of the build-
ing. The last two windows must be par-
tially blockaded by the slope so close
without, and could serve only purposes
of ventilation. Responsive to the thought,
he climbed the steep slant, dark, dewy,
and solitary, and, lying in the soft lush
grass, looked down upon the illuminated
ballroom.

At first he did not see her. With his
heart thumping much after the fashion
of the bass viol, till it seemed to beat in
his ears, he gazed on the details of a scene
such as he had thought never to look
upon again. He recognized with a sort
of community spirit and pleasure how
well the frolicsome youth had utilized
their slender opportunities, so far from
the emporiums of civilization. Great
branching ferns had adequately enough
supplied the place of palms, their fronds

114

The Juggler.

waving lightly from the walls in every
whirling breeze from the flight of the
dance. Infinite lengths of vines — the
Virginia creeper, the ground ivy, and
the wild grape — twined about the pillars,
and festooned the ceiling, the band-stand,
and the chandeliers. For the first time
he was made aware of the decorative
values of the blackberry, when it is red,
and, paradoxically, green. The unripe
scarlet clusters were everywhere massed
amidst the green vines with an effect as
brilliant as holly. All the aisles of the
surrounding woods had been explored for
wild flowers. Here and there were tables
laden with great masses of delicate blos-
soms, and from time to time young cou-
ples paused in their aimless strolling back
and forth, — for the music had ceased for
the nonce, — and examined specimens,
and disputed over varieties, and apparent-
ly disparaged each other's slender scraps
of botany.

The band, high in their cage, — pro-
sperous, pompous darkies, of lofty man-
ners, but entertaining with courteous con-
descension any request which might be
preferred, in regard to the music, by the
young guests of the hotel, — looked down
upon the scene complacently. Now and
then they showed their ivory teeth in
an exchange of remarks which one felt
sure must be worth hearing. Against the
walls were ranged the chaperons in their
most festal black attire, enhanced by fine
old lace and fragile glittering fans and a
somewhat dazzling display of diamonds.
The portly husbands and fathers, fitting
very snugly in their dress suits, hovered
about these borders with that freshened
relish of scenes of youthful festivity which
somehow seems increased in proportion
as the possibility aud privilege of parti-
cipation are withdrawn. Some of the
younger gentlemen also wore merely the
ordinary evening dress, the difficulty of
evolving a fancy costume, or a secret aver-
sion to the characters they had represent-
ed in the tableaux, warranting this de-
parture from the spirit of the .occasion.

Everywhere, however, the younger
feminine element blossomed out in poetic
guise. Here and there fluttered many a
fairy with the silver-flecked gauze wings
that Royce had seen a-making, and Tita-
nia still wore her crown, although Bottom
had thrown his pasteboard head out of the
window, and was now a grave and sedate
young American citizen. Red Riding-
Hood and the Wolf still made the grand
tour in amicable company, and Pocahon-
tas, in a fawn-tinted cycling skirt and leg-
gings and a red blanket bedizened with
all the borrowed beads and feathers that
the Springs could afford, was esteemed
characteristic indeed. Davy Crockett had
a real coonskin cap which he had bought
for lucre from a mountaineer, and which
he intended to take home as a souvenir
of the Great Smokies, although he was
fain to carry it now by the tail because of
the heat ; but he invariably put it on and
drew himself up to his tableau estimate
of importance whenever one of the el-
derly ladies clutched at him, as he passed,
to inquire if he were certainly sure that
the long and ancient flintlock (borrowed)
which he bore over his shoulder was
unloaded. There had evidently been a
tableau representing Flora's court or sim-
ilar blooming theme, since so many per-
sonified flowers were wasting their sweet-
ness on the unobservant and unaccus-
tomed air. The wild rose was in several
shades of fleecy pink, festooned with her
own garlands. A wallflower — a dashing
blonde — was in brown and yellow, and
had half the men in the room around her.

Suddenly — Lucien Royce's heart gave
a great throb and seemed to stand still,
for, on the arm of her last partner, com-
ing slowly down the room until she stood
in the full glow of the nearest chandelier,
all in white, in shining white satin, with a
grace and dignity which embellished her
youth, was she whom he had so longed
to see. Her bare arms and shoulders
were of a soft whiteness that made the
tone of the satin by contrast glazing
and hard. Her delicate head, with its

The Juggler.

115

black hair arranged close and high, had
the pose of a lily on its stalk. Scat-
tered amid the dense dark tresses dia-
monds glittered and quivered like dew-
drops. Her face had that flower-like
look not uncommon among the type of
the very fair women with dark hair from
the extreme south. Over the white satin
was some filmy thin material, like the
delicate tissues of a corolla ; and only
when he had marked these liliaceous
similitudes did he observe that it was the
Chilhowee lily which she had chosen to
represent. Now and again that most
ethereal flower showed amongst the folds
of her skirt. A cluster as fragile as a
dream lay on her bosom, and in her hand
she carried a single blossom, poetic and
perfect, trembling on its long stalk.

There rose upon the air a sudden
welling out of the music. The band was
playing Home, Sweet Home. She had
moved out of the range of his vision.
There was a murmur of voices on the
veranda as the crowd emerged. The
lights were abruptly quenched in dark-
ness. And he laid his head face down-
ward in the deep grass and wished he
might never lift it again.

XII.

Owen Haines spent many a lonely hour,
in these days, at the foot of a great tree
in the woods, riving poplar shingles.
Near by in the green and gold glinting
of the breeze-swept undergrowth another
great tree lay prone on the ground. The
space around him was covered with 'the
chips hewn from its bole, — an illumi-
nated yellow-hued carpet in the soft wa-
vering emerald shadows. The smooth
shingles, piled close at hand, multiplied
rapidly as the sharp blade glided swiftly
through the poplar fibres. From time to
time he glanced up expectantly, vainly
looking for Absalom Tynes ; for it had
once been the wont of the young preacher
to lie here on the clean fresh chips and

talk through much of the sunlit days to
his friend, who welcomed him as a desert
might welcome a summer rain. He would
talk on the subject nearest the hearts of
both, his primitive theology, — a subject
from which Owen Haiues was otherwise
debarred, as no other ministerial magnate
would condescend to hold conversation on
such a theme with the laughing-stock of
the meetings, whose aspirations it was
held to be a duty in the cause of religion
to discourage and destroy if might be.
Only Tynes understood him, hoped for
him, felt with him. But Tynes was at the
schoolhouse in the Cove, listening in fas-
cinated interest to the juggler as he re-
cited from memory, and himself reading
in eager and earnest docility, copying
his master's methods.

Therefore, when the step of a man
sounded along the bosky path which
Haines had worn to his working-place,
and he looked up with eager anticipation,
he encountered only disappointment at
the sight of Peter Knowles approaching
through the leaves.

Knowles paused and glanced about
him with withering disdain. " Tynes
ain't hyar," he observed. " I dunno ez I
looked ter view him, nuther."

He dropped down on the fragrant car-
pet of chips, and for the first time Haines
noticed that he carried, after a gingerly
fashion, on the end of a stick, a bun-
dle apparently of clothes, and plentifully
dusted with something white and pow-
dery. Even in the open air and the rush
of the summer wind the odor exhaled
by quicklime was powerful and pungent,
and the scorching particles came flying
into Haines's face. As he drew back
Knowles noticed the gesture, and adroit-
ly flung the bundle and stick to leeward,
saying, " Don't it 'pear plumb cur'ous
ter you-uns, the idee o' a minister o'
the gorspel a-settin' out ter 1'arn how ter
read the Bible from a onconverted sin-
ner ? I hearn this hyar juggler - man
'low ez he warn't even a mourner,
though he said he hed suthin' ter mourn

116

The Juggler.

over. An' I '11 sw'ar he hev," he add-
ed significantly, " an' he may look ter
hev more."

The poplar slivers flew fast from the
keen blade, and the workman's eyes were
steadfastly fixed on the shingle growing
in his hand.

Peter Knowles chewed hard on his
quid of tobacco for a moment ; then he
broke out] abruptly, " Owen Haines, I
knows ye want ter sarve the Lord, an'
thar 's many a way o' doin' it besides
preachin', else I 'd be a-preachin' my-
self."

Such was the hold that his aspiration
had taken upon Haines's mind that he
lifted his head in sudden expectancy and
with a certain radiant submissiveness on
his face, as if his Master's will could come
even by Peter Knowles !

" I brung ye yer chance," continued
the latter. Then, with a quick change
from the sanctimonious whine to an
eager, suppressed voice full of excite-
ment, " What ye reckon air in that
bundle ? "

Haines, surprised at this turn of the
conversation, glanced around at the bun-
dle in silence.

" An' whar do ye reckon I got it ? "
asked Knowles. Then, as Owen Haines's
eyes expressed a wondering question,
he went on, mysteriously lowering his
voice, " I fund it in my rock-house, flung
in thar an' kivered by quicklime ! "

Haines stared in blank amazement for
a moment. " I 'lowed ye hed plugged
up the hole goin' inter yer rock-house,
ter keep the lime dry, with a big boul-
der."

" E4zac'ly, edzac'ly ! " Knowles as-
sented, his long narrow face and close-
set eyes so intent upon his listener as to
put Haines out of countenance in some
degree.

Haines sought to withdraw his glance
from their baleful significant expression,
but his eyelids faltered and quivered,
and he continued to look wincingly at
his interlocutor. " I 'lowed 't war too

heavy for any one man ter move," he
commented vaguely, at last.

" 'Thout he war holped by the devil,"
Knowles added.

There was a pause. The young work-
man's hand was still. His companion's
society did not accord with his mood.
The loneliness was soft and sweet, and
of peaceful intimations. His frequent
disappointments were of protean guise.
Where was that work for the Master
that Peter Knowles had promised him ?

" Owen Haines," cried Peter Knowles
suddenly, " hev that thar man what calls
hisself a juggler-man done ennythin' but
harm'sence he hev been in the Cove an'
the mountings ? "

Haines, the color flaring to his brow,
laid quick hold on his shingle-knife and
rived the wood apart ; his breath came
fast and his hand shook, although his
work was so steady. He was all un-
noting that Peter Knowles was watch-
ing him with an unguarded eye of open
amusement, and a silent sneer that left
his long tobacco-stained teeth visible be-
low his curling upper lip. But a young
fool's folly is often propitious for the
uses of a wiser man, and Knowles was
not ill pleased to descry the fact that the
relations between the two could not ad-
mit of friendship, or tolerance, or even in-
difference.

" Fust," he continued, " he gin that
onholy show in the church-house, what I
never seen, but it hev set folks power-
ful catawampus an' hendered religion,
fur the devil war surely in it."

Owen Haines took off his hat to toss
his long fair hair back from his brow,
and looked with troubled reflective eyes
down the long aisles of the gold-flecked
verdure of the woods.

" Then he tricked you-uns somehows
out'n yer sweetheart, what ye hed been
keepin' company with so long."

Haines shook his head doubtfully.
" We-uns quar'led," he said. " I dunno
ef he hed nuthin' ter do with it."

" Did she an' you-uns ever quar'l 'fore

The Juggler.

117

he kem ter Sims's ? " demanded the sly
Knowles.

They had never quarreled before
Haines " got religion " and took to
" prayin' fur the power." He had never
thought the juggler chargeable with
their differences, but the fallacy now oc-
curred to him that they might have been
precipitated by Royce's ridicule of him
as a wily device to rid her of her lover.
His face grew hot and angry. There
was fire in his eyes. His lips parted
and his breath came quick.

" He hev toled off Tynes too," resumed
Knowles, with a melancholy intonation.
" He hev got all the lures and witch-
ments of the devil at command. I kem
by the church-house awhile ago, an' I
hearn him an' Tynes in thar, speakin'
an' readin'. An' I sez ter myself, sez I,
'Pore Owen Haines, up yander in the
woods, hev got nuther his frien', now, nor
his sweetheart. Him an' Phemie keeps
company no mo' in this worl'.' "

There was a sudden twitch of Haines's
features, as if these piercing words had
been with some material sharpness thrust
in amongst sensitive tissues. It was all
true, all true.

The iron was hot, and Peter Knowles
struck. " That ain't the wust," he said,
leaning forward and bringing his face
with blazing eyes close to his companion.
" This hyar juggler hev killed a man, an'
flung his bones inter the quicklime in my
rock-house."

Haines, with a galvanic start, turned,
pale and aghast, upon his companion.
He could only gasp, but Knowles went
on convulsively and without question :
"I s'picioned him from the fust. He
stopped thar whar I was burnin' lime
the night o' the show, an' helped ter put
it in outer the weather, bein' ez the rain
would slake it. An' he axed me ef quick-
lime would sure burn up a dead body.
An' when I told him, he turned as he
went away an' looked back, smilin' an'
sorter motionin' with his hand, an' looked
back agin, an' looked back."

He reached out slowly for the stick
with the bundle tied at the end, and
dragged it toward him, the breath of
the scalding lime perceptible as it was
drawn near.

" Las' week, one evenin' late," he said
in a lowered voice and with his eyes
alight and glancing, " hevin' kep' a watch
on this young buzzWd, an' noticin' him
forever travelin' the New Helveshy road
what ain't no business o' his'n, I 'lowed
I 'd foller him. An' he kerries a bundle.
He walks fast an' stops short, an' stud-
ies, an' turns back suddint, an' stops
agin, an' whirls roun' an' goes on. An'
his face looks like death ! An' sometimes
he stops short to sigh, ez ef he could n't
get his breath. But he don't go ter New
Helveshy. He goes ter my rock-house.
An' he hev got breath enough ter fling
away that tormented big boulder, an'
toss in these gyarmints, an' churn the
lime over 'em with a stick till he hed ter
hold his hand over his eyes ter keep his
eyesight, an' fling back the boulder, an'
run off faster 'n a fox along the road ter
Sims's."

There was a long silence as the two
men looked into each other's eyes.

" What air ye tellin' this ter me fur ? "
said Haines at last, struggling with a mad
impulse of hope — of joy, was it ? For if
this were true, — and true it must be, —
the spurious supplantation in Euphemia's
affections might soon be at an end. If her
love could not endure ridicule, would it
condone crime ? All might yet be well ;
justice tardily done, the law upheld ; the
intruder removed from the sphere where
he had occasioned such woe, and the old
sweet days of love's young dream to be
lived anew. %

" Fur the Marster's sarvice," said the
wily hypocrite. " I sez ter myself, ' Owen
Haines won't see the right tromped on.
He won't see the ongodly flourish. He
won't see the wolf a-lopin' through the
fold. He won't hear in the night the
blood o' Abel cryin' from the groun' agin
the guilty Cain, an' not tell the sher'ff

118

The Juggler.

what air no furder off, jes' now, 'n 'Pos-
sum Cross-Roads.' "

" Why don't you-uns let him know
yerse'f ? " demanded Haines shortly.

" Waal, I be a-settin' up nights with
my sick nephews : three o' them chil'n
down with the measles, an' my sister an'
brother-in-law bein' so slack-twisted I be
'feard they 'd gin 'em the wrong med'-
cine ef I warn't thar ter gin d'rections."
His eye brightened as he noted Haines
reaching forward for the end of the stick
and slowly drawing the bundle toward
him.

It is stated on excellent authority that
a leopard cannot change his spots, and,
without fear of successful contradiction,
one may venture to add to the illustra-
tions of immutability that a coward can-
not change his temperament. Now that
Peter Knowles was a coward had been
evinced by his conduct on several occa-
sions within the observation of his com-
patriots. His craft, however, had served
to adduce mitigating circumstances, and
so consigned the matter to oblivion that
it did not once occur to Haines that it
was fear which had evolved the subter-
fuge of enlisting his well-known enthu-
siasm for religion and right, and his nat-
ural antagonism against the juggler, in
the Master's service. On the one hand,
Knowles dreaded being called to account
for whatever else might be found uncon-
sumed by the lime in his rock-house, did
he disclose naught of his discovery. On
the other hand, the character of inform-
er is very unpopular in the mountains,
owing to the revelations of moonshining
often elicited by the rewards offered by
the revenue laws. Persons of this class
sometimes receive a recompense in an-
other metal, which, if not so satisfactory
as current coin, is more conclusive and
lasting. It was the recollection of leaden
tribute of this sort, should the matter
prove explicable, or the man escape, or
the countryside resent 4the appeal to the
law, which induced Peter Knowles to
desire to shift upon Haines the active

responsibility of giving information : his
jealousy in love might be considered a
motive adequate to bring upon him all the
retributions of the recoil of the scheme
if aimed amiss.

He watched the young man narrowly
and with a glittering eye as, with a trem-
bling hand and a look averse, he began
to untie the cord which held the package
together.

" He killed the man, Owen, ez sure
ez ye air livin', an' flunged his bones in
the quicklime, an' now he flunged in his
clothes," Knowles was saying as the bun-
dle gave loose in the handling.

Drawing back with a sense of suffo-
cation ,as a cloud of minute particles
of quicklime rose from the folds of the
material, Owen Haines nevertheless re-
cognized upon the instant the garments
which the juggler himself had worn when
he first came to the Cove, the unaccus-
tomed fashion of which had riveted his
attention for the time at the " show " at
the church-house.

With a certain complex duality of emo-
tion, he experienced a sense of dismay
to note how his heart sank with the ex-
tinguishment of his hope that the man
might prove a criminal and that this
discovery might rid the country of him.
How ill he had wished him ! Not only
that the fierce blast of the law might
consume him, but, reaching back into the
past, that he might have wrought evil
enough to justify it and make the retribu-
tion sure ! With a pang as of sustaining
loss he gasped, " Why, these hyar gyar-
mints air his own wear. I hev viewed
him in 'em many a time whenst he fust
kem ter the Cove ! "

Knowles glared at him in startled
doubt, and slowly turned over one of the
pointed russet shoes.

" He hed 'em on the night he gin the
show in the Cove," said Haines.

" I seen him that night," said Knowles
conclusively. " He hed on no sech
cur'ous clothes ez them, else I 'd hev re-
marked 'em, sure ! "

The Juggler.

119

" Ye lowed 't war night an' by the
flicker o' the fire, an' ye war in a corn-
sider'ble o' a jigget 'bout'n yer lime."

" Naw, sir ! naw, sir ! he hed on no
sech coat ez that," protested Knowles.
Then, with rising anger, " Ye air a pore
shoat fur sense, Owen Haines ! Ef they
air his gyarmints, what 's the reason he
hid 'em so secret an' whar the quicklime
would deestroy 'em ; bein' so partic'lar
ter ax o' me ef 't would burn boots an'
clothes an' bone, — bone, too ? "

" I dunno," said Haines, at a loss, and
turning the black-and-red blazer vaguely
in his hands.

" I do ; them folks over ter New Hel-
veshy wears sech fool gear ez these."

"Thar ain't nobody missin' at New
Helveshy ! " Haines argued, against his
lingering hope.

" How do you-uns know ? " exclaimed
Knowles hurriedly, and with a certain
alert alarm in his face. " Somebody
comin' ez never got thar ! Somebody
goin' ez never got away ! " He had risen
excitedly to his feet. What ghastly se-
cret might be hidden beneath the resi-
due of quicklime in his rock-house, the
responsibility possibly to be laid at his
door !

Owen Haines, looking up at him with
childlike eyes, was slowly studying his
face, — a fierce face, with the savagery
of his cowardice as predatory an element
as the wantonness of his malice.

" These hyar air his clothes," Haines
reiterated; " I 'members 'em well. This
hyar split buttonhole at the throat " —

" That 's whar he clutched the mur-
dered one," declared Knowles tumultu-
ously.

— " an' these water-marks on these
hyar shoes, — they hed been soaked, —
an' this hyar leather belt, whar two p'ints
hed been teched through with a knife-
blade, stiddier them round holes, ter
draw the belt up tighter 'n it war made
ter be wore, — I could swar ter 'em, —
an' this hyar " —

Knowles looked down at him in angry

doubt. " Shucks," he interrupted, " ye
besotted idjit ! I dunno what ailed me ter
kem ter you-uns. I 'lowed ye war so beset
ter do — yer — Marster's — work ! "
with a mocking whine. " But ye ain't.
Ye seek yer own chance ! The Lord tied
yer tongue with a purpose, an' he wasted
no brains on a critter ez he did n't 'low
ter hev gabblin' round the throne. Ye
see ter it ye say nuthin' 'bout'n this, else
jestice '11 take arter you-uns, too, an'
ye won't be much abler ter talk ter the
court o' law 'n the court o' the Lawd."
He wagged his head vehemently at the
young man, while kneeling to make up
anew the bundle of garments, until the
scorching vapor compelled him to turn
aside. When he arose, he stood erect for
one doubtful instant. Then, satisfied by
the reflection that for the sake of his own
antagonism toward the juggler the jeal-
ous and discarded lover would do naught
to frustrate the vengeance that menaced
Royce, he turned suddenly, and, with the
bundle swaying as before on the end of
the stick, started without a word along
the path by which he had come, leaving
Owen Haines gazing after him till he
disappeared amongst the leaves.

How long Owen Haines sat there star-
ing at the vanishing point of that bosky
perspective he could hardly have said.
When he leaped to his feet, it was with a
repentant sense of the waste of time and
the need of haste. His long, lank, slouch-
ing figure seemed incompatible with any
but the most languid rate of progression ;
and indeed it was not his habit to get over
the ground at the pace which he now set
for himself. This was hardly slackened
through the several miles he traversed
until he reached the schoolhouse, which
he found silent and empty. After a wild-
eyed and hurried survey, he set forth
anew, his shoulders bent, his head thrust
forward, his gait unequal, tired, breath-
less ; for he was not of the stalwart phy-
sique common amongst the youth of the
Cove. He reached the Sims cabin, pant-
ing, anxious-eyed, and hardly remember-

120

The Juggler.

ing his grievances against Phemie when
he came upon her in the passage. She
looked at him askance over her shoulder
as she rose in silent disdain to go indoors.

" I ain't kem hyar ter plague you-uns,
Phemie," he called out, divining her in-
terpretation of his motive. " I want ter
speak ter that thar juggler-man," — he
could not bring himself to mention the
name.

She paused a moment, and he per-
ceived in surprise that her proud and
scornful face bore no tokens of happi-
ness. Her lips had learned a pathetic
droop ; her eyelids were heavy, and the
long lashes lifted barely to the level of
her glance. The words in a low voice,
" He ain't hyar," were as if wrung from
her by the necessity of the moment, so
unwilling they seemed, and she entered
the house as Mrs. Sims flustered out of
the opposite door.

" Laws-a-massy, Owen Haines," she
exclaimed, " ye better lef ' be that thar
juggler-man, ez ye calls him ! He could
throw you-uns over his shoulder. Ye '11
git inter trouble, meddlin'. Phemie be
plumb delighted with her ch'ice, an' a gal
hev got a right ter make a ch'ice wunst
in her life, ennyhows."

He sought now and again to stem the
tide of her words, but only when a breath-
less wheeze silenced her he found oppor-
tunity to protest that he meant no harm
to the juggler, and he held no grudge
against Euphemia ; that he was the bear-
er of intelligence important to the jug-
gler, and she would do her guest a favor
to disclose his whereabouts.

There were several added creases —
they could hardly be called wrinkles —
in Mrs. Sims's face of late, and a certain
fine network of lines had been drawn
about her eyes. She was anxious, trou-

bled, irritated, all at once, and entertained
her own views touching the admission of
the fact of the juggler's frequent and
lengthened absence from his beloved.
Euphemia's fascinations for him were
evidently on the wane, and although he
was gentle and considerate and almost
humble when he was at the house, he
seemed listless and melancholy, and had
grown silent and unobservant, and they
had all marked the change.

"We-uns kin hardly git shet o' the
boy," said Mrs. Sims easily, lying in an
able-bodied fashion. " But I do b'lieve
ter-day ez he hev tuk heart o' grace an'
gone a-huntin'."

Owen Haines's countenance fell. Of
what avail to follow at haphazard in the
vastness of the mountain wilderness ?
There was naught for him to do but re-
turn to his work, and wait till nightfall
might bring home the man he sought.
Meantime, the sheriff was as near as
'Possum Cross-Roads, only twelve miles
down the valley. Peter Knowles would
probably give the information which he
had tried to depute to the supplanted
lover. Haines did not doubt now the
juggler's innocence, but the hiding away
of those garments in so mysterious a
manner might be difficult to explain, and
might cost him at least a wearisome im-
prisonment. It was within Haines's ob-
servation that other men had found it
well to be out of the way at a time of
suspicion like this. He appreciated the
cruel ingenuity of perverse circumstances,
and he had felt the venom of malice.
Thus it was that he had sought to warn
the man of the discovery which Peter
Knowles had made, and of the strange
and forced construction he was disposed
to place upon the facts, — seeming in
themselves, however, inexplicable.

Charles Egbert Craddock.

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

121

THE STONY PATHWAY TO THE WOODS.

" The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine."

THE way to the woods was by an old
road that wound around between the
rocks to the top of the ledge, so long
unused that it was given over to grass
and flowers. Tall feathery meadow rue
peeped out from the bushy growth of al-
ders on one side ; white-faced daisies, and
buttercups with " tiny polished urns held
up," waved over the old wheel - track ;
while wild roses perfumed the air, and
a little farther in,

" beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnsea hung its twin-born heads."

The woods into which the stony way
plunged, the moment it left the main road,
were Nature's own. She had sown her
spruces and pines and birches on a bit of
the earth almost impassable to man. A
jumble of rocks piled in dire confusion,
presenting sharp edges at every possi-
ble angle, or covered inches deep with
soft moss yielding to the feet like a
cushion, and all extremely slippery from
the fallen spruce leaves of many years ;
trees growing wherever they could secure
foothold ; dead hanging branches and
prostrate trunks bristling with jagged
points, — the whole impenetrable except
to wings. It was one of Nature's inimi-
table wild gardens, —

" an unkempt zone

Where vines and weeds and spruce-trees inter-
twine,
Safe from the plough."

Thanks to the difficulties with which
it was surrounded and the little tempta-
tion it offered for clearing, it was abso-
lutely untouched by man, excepting here
and there in a more practicable spot,
where he had made a small inroad. It
was a paradise for birds and bird-lovers,
though the latter were obliged to content
themselves with what they could see on
the edge and by looking in.

Up that delectable path was my morn-
ing walk. Along its rugged sides cer-
tain approximately level rocks made rest-
ing-places on which to pause and look
about. The first halt was under a low
cedar-tree, and in a warbler neighbor-
hood. As soon as I became quiet my
ears were assailed by faint notes almost
like insect sounds, " pip " or " tic," some-
times whispered " smacks " or squeals,
and I watched eagerly for a stirring leaf
or a vibrating twig. Many times I was
not able, with my best efforts, to see the
least movement, for spruce boughs re-
spond but slightly to the light touch of
tiny creatures. But usually silence and
absolute quiet had their reward. Here
I saw the magnolia warbler in his gor-
geous dress of black and gold, calling an
anxious " davy-davy ! which is it ? " and
bustling about after a restless youngster
the size of a walnut, with the nestling's
down still clinging to his head. Into a
low tree across the pathway came often
the black-and-white creeper, tiptoeing
his way up the trunk and uttering his sib-
ilant " see-see ! see-see ! " On one side ap-
peared once or twice a redstart, prancing
over the ground in his peculiar " show-
ing off " manner, in which he " folds and
unfolds his twinkling tail in sport," and
in his brilliant orange and black looks
as much out of place in the simplicity of
the woods as a fine lady in full dress.
This was also the haunt of a myrtle war-
bler in sombre black and white, quaint-
ly decorated with four patches of bright
yellow, and very much concerned about
a nest somewhere in that lovely green
world.

In this nook I was visited daily by a
chickadee family, — " droll folk quite in-
nocent of dignity," as Dr. Coues says, —
who fascinated me with their pretty ways
and the many strange utterances of their
queer husky voices. At first, on finding

122

The Stony Pathway Ifo the Woods.

an uninvited guest in their quarters, they
were very circumspect, and carried on
their conversation overhead in the odd-
est little squeaky tones, not to be heard
ten feet away. Once an elderly bird
got the floor and gave an address, per-
haps pointing out the dangers to be
feared from the monster sitting so silent
under the cedar. The burden of his
talk sounded to me like " chit-it-it-day !
day ! " but there were varied inflections,
and it evidently meant something very
serious, for every twitter was hushed,
while the discourse was loud, urgent, and
snapped out in a way I never thought
possible to the

" Merry little fellow with the cheery little
voice."

The sermon, or lecture, was ended by
one of the audience interrupting with the
plaintive little two-note song of the fami-
ly, upon which they all broke out chat-
ting again, and scurried over the trees
with a thousand antics. As they grew
accustomed to my presence they became
more demonstrative and voluble, show-
ing me unsuspected capabilities of chick-
adese. Such squeaks and calls and re-
markable notes, such animated discus-
sions and such irrepressible baby-talk,
were altogether enchanting. One infant
sometimes came alone, talking to him-
self, and at intervals essaying in a feeble,
unsteady manner the " pe-wee " note of
his race. On one occasion, the head of
the family — as I suppose — flew down
toward me, alighted just before my face
not two feet away, and looked at me
sharply. I spoke to him quietly in at-
tempted imitation of his language, but
my little effort at conversation was not
a complete success, for after a short, not
too civil answer he flew away.

The crowning delight of my chickadee
study was the song to which I was treated
one day. A bird was singing when I
arrived, so that I stopped short of my
seat and listened. The song was so low
that it could not be heard unless one were
very near, and in a tone so peculiar that

I could not believe it came from a
chickadee until I saw him. It consisted
of the usual utterances differently ar-
ranged. There seemed to be, first, a
succession of " dee-dee's " followed by a
solitary " chick " a third lower, then the
same repeated and interrupted by the
" pe-wee," but all slurred together and
given in tremolo style utterly unlike any
chickadee performance I had ever heard.
It was most bewitching, and was kept up
a long time.

Having at last settled myself in my
usual place, and while waiting for the
next caller to show himself, I had lei-
sure to notice and admire the peculiar
character of the woods ; for Nature has
infinite resources at command, and no
two spots are arranged on the same
plan. Spruces were most prominent, with
birches and maples to soften their se-
verity, lighten their sombreness, and give
a needed touch of grace. The mixture
was felicitous. The white stems of the
birch, " most shy and ladylike of trees,"
stood out finely against the dark spruces,
just then decked with fresh tips to every
twig, which gave somehow a rich velvety
appearance to the foliage. The pic-
turesque irregularity of the birch trunks
was very noticeable. Hardly one was
straight. Some leaned to one side, as
if it had been hard to get the delicate
branches in between the stiff and angu-
lar boughs of the spruces among which
they grew ; others had turned this way
and that, in wavering uncertainty, as if
they had been unable to decide which
way they would go, till they were full
grown, and the indecisions of youth were
perpetuated in a crooked trunk.

There was n.o appearance of indeci-
sion, past or present, about the spruces.
Each stem stood as straight as a fresh
West Point cadet. There was never an
instant's doubt in what direction one
of those sturdy trees had set its heart.
Straight up was the aim of every one,
and straight up it vent ; stern, unbend-
ing, self-willed, like some of our own

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

123

race, with branches at right angles on
every side, let neighbors less strong of
purpose fare as they could.

The beauties and idiosyncrasies of
these woods might be enjoyed at leisure,
for they possessed one great advantage
over any other I have found east of
the Rocky Mountains. Through all this
month of July which I spent among
them, not a fly showed his impertinent
head, and mosquitoes appeared but rare-
ly. When any of the latter did make
themselves obvious, they presented their
little bills in the most modest manner.
They asked so very, very little, and asked
it so gently, no one could refuse or re-
sent it. It was darkly whispered by those
who in the past had outstayed July that
the whole season was not so blessed ;
that insect hordes were simply biding
their time, and later they would come
out in force. But later one need not be
here.

I noted also with relief that there was
another absentee, the red -eyed vireo,
common almost everywhere, to whose
jerky, hurried, never ending song dis-
tance lends enchantment in exact propor-
tion to the number of rods it is removed.
Not one of those lovely and well-mean-
ing but woefully misguided birds did I
see or hear in the woods of that happy
island.

Warblers, however bewitching, — and
I admit their claims, — and woods, how-
ever suggestive and delightful, could not
content me long ; for voices were calling
from above, voices most potent of all,
— thrushes. After an hour under the
cedar I resumed my stony way up the
hill to the edge of an opening where trees
had been felled, — a " cut-out," as it
is called, — and there, on a convenient-
ly placed rock, I waited for who might
come. One day, as I sat there, a royal
guest appeared, alighted on a small tree,
and threw up his tail in characteristic
fashion ; then his eyes fell upon me,
perhaps thirty feet away. I remained
motionless while the bird — a hermit

thrush — took a long and close look at
the intruder upon his grounds. Quiet
as I might be, it was plain the beautiful
creature was not for a moment deceived.
He recognized me as one of the race
against whom he must be on his guard.
He wished to pass on, but panic or even
vulgar haste is not in his nature. He
stood a few moments, calmly answered a
hermit call from the woods, then with-
out hurry flew to the ground, ran lightly
along to a rock, on the highest peak of
which he paused again, tossed his tail,
and looked at me ; then on again to the
next rock, where he repeated the pro-
gramme. And so he proceeded, greet-
ing me gracefully from the top of every
eminence before he ran on to the next,
until he gained the cover of the woods
across the open, — all in the most digni-
fied way.

This experience seemed to give the
bird courage, for the next time he found
me in my customary seat he mounted a
stump, sang a snatch of his song, ran
to a low bush and added a few more
notes, came to the ground, where he for-
aged among the dead leaves a minute,
then up again on a bent sapling, bub-
bling over in joyous notes ; and thus he
went on singing and eating in the most
captivating way, and in apparent indif-
ference to his unobtrusive but delighted
spectator on the rock. I was surprised ;
this bird being one of our greatest sing-
ers, I had a feeling that a certain amount
of " dress parade " must accompany his
performance. Indeed, those of his kind
I had seen before had always taken a
" position " to sing.

If the hermit thrush could be per-
suaded to end his chant with the second
clause, he would be unapproachable as a
musical performer, as he and his near
relations are already in quality of voice.
But he seems to be possessed of an un-
fortunate desire to sing higher than his
register, and invariably, so far as I have
heard, he persists in this effort, and goes
all to pieces on the high note. At least

124

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

so his song sounds to one listener, who
finds the heavenly first clauses sadly
marred by the closing one.

Somewhere in this attractive place was
hidden an oven-bird's nest which I want-
ed much to see. I never thought, how-
ever, of undertaking the hopeless task
of hunting for it; but one day, when
I happened upon one of the birds with
worms in her mouth, prepared to feed
her brood, I was seized with the hope that
she would be simple enough to point it
out to me, and at once devoted my whole
attention to watching her movements.
Her tactics were admirable. When she
first saw me she stood on a low bush and
stared at me, head feathers erected like
a crest, showing plainly the golden crown
that gives the name, golden-crowned war-
bler, and uttering her curious " smack."
In a few minutes she was joined by her
mate, also with a mouthful of squirming
provisions.

For some time the pair stood still,
doubtless waiting for me to pass on ; but
finding that I did not leave, they grew
impatient and began moving about. The
female would go to the ground with an
air of the greatest caution, run about
among the leaves and fallen sticks as if
she had important business, every mo-
ment glancing at me, till she came to a
slight ridge of earth, or a small rock or
log, behind which she would straightway
vanish. In vain did I watch intently
for her to reappear on the other side.
No doubt as soon as she found herself
out of my sight she ran like a mouse,
keeping the stone or log well between us
as a screen. Meanwhile her mate aided
her efforts nobly by making himself most
conspicuous, fidgeting about on his bush,
mounting a stump and singing " teacher !
teacher ! teacher ! " at the top of his
voice, as if calling for help, and in every
way trying to keep my attention fixed
upon him. After a while the other par-
ty to the little game would fly up from a
point far away from where she had dis-
appeared, with an empty beak and an

innocent air of never having dreamed of
a nest, and begin to " smack " as when
she first discovered me. Then it was
her turn to keep me diverted while her
mate slipped away. Sometimes they em-
barrassed me further by separating wide-
ly, so that I could not keep my eyes on
both. In fact, after some hours given
to the beguilements of this brave pair,
and much searching among the dead
leaves in places they had apparently
pointed out, I was obliged to confess my-
self outwitted by the clever little actors.

But there was a stranger in the woods,
a thrush, I judged from the voice and the
manner of singing, who had tantalized
me from the day I entered that enchant-
ed isle on the coast of Maine. From the
distant forest came a strange, loud call
in the peculiar tremulous tones of the
veery, sounding to me like " wake up !
Judy ! " the first two notes with falling,
the last two with rising inflection. As
evening of that first day drew on, the
call to Judy was accompanied by other
sounds uttered in the same voice, a loud
ringing song or recitative composed of
similar ejaculations, with varied modu-
lations that gave it greater resemblance
to conversation than to music. Indeed,
while I sat and listened through the long
twilight to two or three birds calling
and answering one another from distant
treetops, I could not rid myself of the
fancy that they were exchanging opin-
ions across their green world. The next
morning I was wakened by an unfamiliar
and remarkable bird note, a low liquid
"quit," sometimes followed by an ex-
plosive sound impossible to characterize,
— a sort of subdued squawk, or what one
might suppose to be as near a squawk as
a refined, well-bred bird could accom-
plish. Naturally, all this«, mystified me
and aroused great interest, and now I
was waiting and longing for an opportu-
nity to see the mysterious unknown.

As we have been told, and as some of
us know, " all things come in time to
him who can wait." To me at last came

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

125

my chance. One afternoon there rolled
in upon us, from our restless neighbor the
sea, an all-embracing fog, which grad-
ually enfolded us till we were closely
wrapped as in a heavy blanket. The
fog-bell on a point near by tolled dis-
mally, and a more distant whistling buoy
sent out at intervals a groan, as if wail-
ing for all who had found graves beside
the rocks it was now set to guard. All
night this continued, and in the morn-
ing the fog was lighter, but a steady rain
was falling. Now, I thought, is my time
to see the stranger who has so interested
me ; for in a steady rain birds find it
somewhat less comfortable on the tree-
tops, and incline to get under the leafy
roofs for shelter as well as for food.
Duly encumbered by wraps and protect-
ors that man has devised as shields from
the weather, I hastened to a «bit of the
woods where for a few rods it was level
and penetrable, and where I had heard
the luring voice. Here, with some dif-
ficulty, I found a spot firm enough to
support the legs of my chair, and settled
myself to wait.

More conspicuous than ever were the
contrasted tree trunks, as the dampness
turned the spruces black, and brought
out the beauty of the decorative lichens
in every shade of green, from almost
white to dead black, with here and there
bits of pink and drab, all standing up,
living and beautiful as always in a soak-
ing rain. Even the rocks were glorified
by great patches of these curious plants,
which show freshness and life only when
wet, the tender blue-green leaves, — if
one may call them so, — with their rich
brown lining, all expanded in exquisite
ruffle-like convolutions.

Spruce trunks had also another peculi-
arity. As they had grown they had shed
their youthful branches. One young tree,
not more than ten feet high, had already
dropped off twenty-seven branchlets, re-
taining only a few at the top, and bend-
ing all its energies to the task of reach-
ing and penetrating the thick green roof

to the sunlight above. Each limb, as it
broke off, left a part, a few inches or a
foot long, standing straight out from the
trunk, the whole forming a sort of cir-
cular ladder, by which it seemed one
might mount to the upper regions, and,
better yet, offering convenient perches
for the feathered woodlanders.

While I was absorbed in admiration
of my surroundings a bird note fell upon
my ear, a low " quit " in an unmistakable
thrush tone. Turning my eyes quickly,
I saw the speaker, standing on a round
of the ladder encircling a tall old spruce-
tree at the outer edge of the little clear-
ing, pioneer of that bit of woods. Very
slowly I brought my glass to bear upon
him. A thrush, certainly, but none that I
knew ; neither hermit, wood, nor tawny.
While I tried to see some characteristic
by which to identify him, he spoke again,
this time the rich " quit " with the pe-
culiar added squawk, as I will call it,
which had mystified me in the morning.
Meanwhile another of the family came
noiselessly to a tree over my head, and
whispered the same cry in an indescriba-
bly sweet and liquid tone. Still I looked
in silence, and still the bird remained on
the spruce. But after a while the dan-
ger of the presence of one of the human
family seemed to be borne in upon him,
and he suddenly startled me with a new
sound, a sort of shriek, loud and on a
much higher key. Even then I remained
motionless ; at last he grew somewhat
more calm, and as if to put my last doubt
to rest and to prove that he alone was
author of all the sounds that had per-
plexed me, he began to sing in a low tone
many of the strange clauses that I had
heard shouted from the treetops. Final-
ly, when confidence was assured by my
unvarying stillness, he flew to another
tree trunk, then to a second, and at last
to the ground, where he busied himself
among the dead leaves.

I continued to sit without moving, and
presently another of the family came
about, with manners somewhat different.

126

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

He stood on one of the broken branches,
in plain sight, and treated me to a curi-
ous exhibition. Beginning with the usual
" quit," very loud and on a high key, he
repeated it many times, each repetition
being lower in pitch and softer, till it
became the merest murmur, almost in-
audible at my short distance, with eyes
fixed on me all the time. Strangely
enough, as he proceeded, one after an-
other of the birds around us — warblers,
j uncos, and others — was hushed, till not
a sound was heard excepting the rain on
the leaves overhead. Then, having re-
duced his small world to absolute silence,
he broke into a queer medley, whether
song or scold, or a mixture of both, I
could only guess. First came the com-
mon call uttered in the customary tone,
then this call with added squawk, then
the startling shriek on a high key, and
after that a combination of all with some
scraps of song. It was a confused jum-
ble of all his accomplishments, forming
a potpourri such as I never heard from
thrush before. I was greatly interested
in this exhibition of his character, and
surprised at his versatility. Though he
lacked the serene repose, the perfect dig-
nity, of some of his family, he was a bird
of marked individuality, and one well
worthy of study.

After two hours with the thrush — the
olive-backed, or Swainson's, as I found
out later — I turned from the woods and
made my way back down the stony path-
way, very wet, indeed, but very happy ;
for I had added an acquaintance to my
delightful list, and henceforth, whenever
his peculiar inspiring notes might fall
upon my ear, I should know him. Many
evenings and mornings were passed lis-
tening to his song, and at last I felt fa-
miliar with every loud utterance of the
bird, and was content to wait till some
future summer for the pleasure of seeing
him in his domestic relations and know-
ing him more intimately.

One thing more I must add to this lit-
tle chronicle of the olive-backed thrush.

A friend who had the happiness to see
a family of five olive-backed younglings
take flight in the woods close by brought
me the nest and its surroundings. It was
an exquisite affair ; being the whole up-
per part of a young spruce six or seven
feet high, with the little homestead two
feet from the top, resting on three branch-
lets and surrounded by many more. And
as the leaves fell off, revealing the deli-
cately marked golden-brown twigs form-
ing a complete protection on every side,
it was picturesque and beautiful, worthy
of a highly original member of one of
our most characteristic and interesting
bird families.

This quiet corner of my lovely island
— Mount Desert by name — was not
without the mysteries that all students
of bird life find. Before I had been on
the ground an hour I was puzzled by
a song of four notes deliberately pro-
nounced,— a drowsy, hot -noon kind of
strain, in a minor key. I hurried out
to see the singer, but he was as elusive
as he was singular, slipping away through
a tangle of bushes and young trees,
and avoiding my sight completely. The
white - throated sparrow, with his very
precise song, was a resident of the vicin-
ity, and the voice and manner of the
unknown suggested that bird. But the
white-throat's song as given in the books,
and as I had always heard it, is one, or
at most two regular arrangements of
two or three notes, followed by a trio of
triplets, and variously characterized by
words, the most familiar being those
which give him his popular name in
New England, the Peabody bird, " Old
Tom Peabody, Peabody, Peabody."
The unknown, I thought, might be a
bird of erratic tastes, a misanthrope, pos-
sibly, who had turned the serene and
cheerful carol of his tribe into a dismal
performance, and I made great efforts to
see him in the nook where he always
appeared to sing. All in vain. As I came
near, the song invariably ceased and
the songster vanished. Finally I aban-

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

127

doned the attempt to see him, and con-
fined myself to hearing. Several days
or a week he kept to his score, but one
day, perhaps in a fit of absence of mind,
he added the three triplets of the white-
throat. He might as well have shouted
his name, for his identity was at once
established. And as a matter of fact,
later in the season I saw him, and caught
him in the act of uttering his simple
minor, then reversing it, and further
than that presenting a totally different
arrangement of the notes, so that he
sang at least three distinct songs. But
for weeks he was to me only a voice.

Far more perplexing than this was
the conduct of a bird in another part of
the island. One day, with a fellow bird-
lover, I was walking down a shady road
that led to the sea. Part of the way the
path ran through a bit of woods, wholly
old spruces, gloomy and high-arched,
with softest carpet of fallen needles
and green mosses, where no underbrush
was tolerated, — a grim and sombre, yet
somehow a noble way, with its peaceful-
ness and its unobscured views on every
side. We had emerged from the woods
and were passing along the deserted road,
listening as usual to various bird notes,
— prominent among them, as it invari-
ably is wherever it is heard, that of New
England's bird, the white-throated spar-
row. Suddenly, on one side, a rather
harsh voice broke out into three or four
loud, ringing triplets, — a rough imita-
tion, as it seemed, of part of the white-
throat's song, though differing from the
genuine both in manner and in quality.

" Some boy's poor attempt," I said.
" I could do better myself," and we went
on, a little annoyed at this intrusion upon
our quiet.

In a moment we passed beyond the
close border of greenery beside the road,
and came into view of some very tall
old trees farther back. Again the loud,
incisive notes rang out, sounding even
less birdlike than before ; and casting
my eyes toward the quarter whence they

came, I was astounded to see that they
were produced by a bird, perched on the
top twig of the tallest spruce. In an in-
stant our glasses were up, but so far away,
and against a white cloudy sky, he was
unrecognizable. Whoever he might be,
he was evidently proud of his achieve-
ment, for he stood there in plain sight,
and repeated his mockery, till he had
every white-throat in the neighborhood
wild, singing at the top of his voice,
though not one of them could compete
with him in power.

But who could this wonderful mimic
be ? Hopeless of identifying him that
evening, we went home completely mys-
tified, resolved to return in the morning
to hunt him down. Long after I reached
the house I heard his loud, penetrating
notes, though not another bird voice
reached me from that distance. More-
over, I found the white-throat near home
so excited that he could not sleep, for
three or four times during the night,
which was very dark, I heard his erratic
minor strain.

At the first opportunity we went again
down the shady road, and placed our-
selves beside a clump of trees, near
where the mysterious bird had sung.
Before long we heard him afar, and
he gradually approached, singing as he
came, till at last he obligingly flew to
the top of a small tree, perhaps fifteen
feet high and twenty feet from us, and,
with eccentric flourishes of body, shouted
out his extraordinary solo. But again
we could not see him well, for the sun
was behind him. We carefully studied
his unique performance, however, and
while in arrangement it greatly resem-
bled part of the song of the white-throat,
being three sets of triplets rapidly re-
peated, it differed in every other way.

The song of the white-throat is dig-
nified, calm, and tranquil in tone and
manner, while his clumsy mocker threw
his head far back and flung his notes
into the air with the utmost vehemence
and abandon, and with great apparent

128

The Stony Pathway to the Woods.

effort He was restless, constantly fid-
geting, throwing up his tail, and jerking
himself about in the pauses of his song.
In the genuine melody the triplets sound
like one note " shaken," but the imitator
gave the three as distinct and staccato
as if each one were a word. Again, the
white-throat is a modest singer, but this
stranger allowed us to level our glasses
at him, move about, and talk, and he was
as unconcerned through all as a robin.
Everything indicated that he was a mere
mocker, and not a good one at that.

We noted all these points carefully,
discussing them freely and comparing
our impressions, before the bird flew.
This time he alighted farther off, on a
taller tree, but the light was in our favor
and my glass was good. I saw at once
that his throat was white, and when, in
one of his pauses, he put his head down
to arrange the plumage of his breast, con-
spicuous stripes over the crown came into
view, and I was startled. In a moment
he confirmed my sudden suspicion by
turning his back to us, thereby showing
his sparrow colors.

He was a white-throat himself !

I was more surprised than if I had
found him anything else. If he were
one of the family, whence this astonish-
ing eccentricity ? Why did he not sing
in a white-throat voice, and the proper
white-throat song ? Why should he so
far depart from the ways of his kindred
as to shout from the top of the tallest
tree in that bold way, and what object
could he have in setting the whole tribe
frantic ? Had he secured a white-throat
mate with that intolerable voice, and had
he a family coming up to imitate his un-
natural performance ? Or was he a dis-
appointed bachelor, aiming to stir up his
domestic brethren ?

All these questions pressed to our lips,
but there was no reply ; and as long as
we stayed he continued to render his
triplets, sometimes prefacing them with
the two or three long notes that belong
to them, but all on the same key, utterly

unlike his fellows, and loud enough to be
heard a mile away.

The solo of the white-throated spar-
row differs from nearly all other bird
songs that I know, being a clear, dis-
tinct whistle that may easily be reduced
to our musical scale, and perfectly imi-
tated by the human voice ; in this lat-
ter quality it is almost unique. The
notes are very few, usually two, never,
I think, more than three ; and the lit-
tle ditty consists of, first, a single long,
deliberate note, then two short repeti-
tions of one a third higher, followed by
three triplets at the same pitch. There
seems small chance for changes in such
a limited register, but I found the song
capable of very different arrangements,
and on recording those I had heard I
was surprised to see that I had noted
seventeen distinct ones. How many va-
riations were made by one bird I was
not able to determine, from the diffi-
culty of keeping one under observation,
now that the young were able to go about
and nobody was confined to any special
locality. But one, as I have already
mentioned, certainly sang three songs,
and I know no reason why he may not
have sung a dozen. I am obliged to
confess that although it is delightful to
hear one of these sparrows, or two to-
gether, a chorus of a dozen or more must
be considered a failure, as music. Each
bird has a decided musical pitch of his
own, and unless the several singers hap-
pen to harmonize they produce an un-
pleasant discord.

After this disappointing solution to
the mystery which had so interested me,
and while there still remained ten days
of the second summer month, that lovely
corner of the world was again wrapped
in a smothering fog, which came in the
afternoon and remained all night, with
rain. The next morning was clear and
bright, but a strange hush had fallen
upon us. Not a bird note was to be
heard save
" The gossip of swallows all through the sky."

A Day in June.

129

Warblers and thrushes, white-throats and
even juncos, seemed to have departed in
a body. All day this unnatural silence
continued. I was alarmed. Had migra-
tion already begun ? Had the warblers,
who heretofore had hardly moved with-
out uttering their little calls and cries,
taken leave for the season? Had the
olive-backed thrush, so voluble only the
day before, been suddenly stricken dumb?
I sought the records, and found that
migrating warblers began to be due in
the neighborhood of New York about
ten days later, and as I knew they
sometimes lingered here and there on
their way, it might indeed be true that
they had started. My first impulse was
to follow, in my slower way; but the
country was still beautiful, the weather
perfect, they could not all have disap-
peared in a night, and I resolved to wait.
In a day or two some of the white-
throats recovered their voices. The mis-
guided genius down by the sea shouted
as usual from afar, though not so often,
and my neighbor up by the house sang
a little, but not with the old spirit ; once
or twice a thrush plucked up heart for a

few musical remarks, and a robin, whose
mate was sitting, down the lane, tried,
with indifferent success, to keep up the
music. But the glory of summer songs
had departed, and now
" Day after day there were painstaking lessons
To teach sky science and wings delight,"

in preparation for the final hegira.

I made many excursions to see if the
birds had really gone so early. Now
and then in my rambles I came upon
a black-throated green warbler, whose
song had heretofore made the woods re-
sound, going about shyly and without
a peep ; and a glimpse or two I had of
others, preserving the same unaccount-
able quiet. Even the stony pathway,
rallying-place for nearly all the bird pop-
ulation, was now silent as a desert way,
and melancholy as a tomb to the bird-
lover, and I was forced to conclude that
if not absolutely departed, these tiny fel-
low creatures were engaged in putting
on their traveling-suits for the long jour-
ney, and it was time for me to resume
my own, and to return where

" the noisy world drags by
In the old way, because it must."

Olive Thome Miller.

A DAY IN JUNE.

SOFT breezes through the apple orchards blow.
Deep in the tangle of the matted grass
Lies golden silence. High above me pass
The summer clouds, white, fathomless, and slow.
The dim green aisles beneath the branches low
Are hushed and still ; only one merry bird
Clear calling from a treetop high is heard.
The sunlight glances through the leaves below.
There is a sense as of a world apart,

Where peace and beauty hand in hand will go.

Lost is all bitterness, and hate, and wrong.
Concealed within the dusky wood's deep heart
The quiet hours seem lingering as they go,
And all the perfect day is one glad song.

Alice Choate Perkins.
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 477. 9

130

A Life Tenant.

A LIFE TENANT.

DANE was a tall, robust, handsome
man of thirty when he arrived in Zenith
City, and he gave immediate token that
his coming would prove an epoch in the
history of the precocious infant town.

He possessed a little money, much en-
ergy, and a talent for inducing other
people to accept his point of view. As
for his luck, it was unfailing, and every-
thing he undertook succeeded. He ac-
knowledged, with a candor which was
as cynical as his good humor, that such
luck was a new experience to him. But
he repeated gayly the threadbare quota-
tion that there is a tide in each man's
affairs which will float him to prosper-
ity if promptly used, and he added that
he was not likely to miss his opportuni-
ty. He made no pretense of public spi-
rit in his enterprises, — a sincerity that
naturally increased his neighbors' belief
in his honesty, and their desire to share
the schemes which resulted in fat profit
to him. He started a " general store,"
so thoroughly stocked that custom de-
serted a rival establishment of previous
popularity. Six months after his arrival
he sold out this store with gain, and
opened an office where he received de-
posits, managed investments, and con-
ducted a banking business in a small
way. This was an advance in civilization
greatly appreciated by the soberest of
the citizens, who became regular depos-
itors, while the ranchmen of Coun-
ty soon learned to bring thither the re-
sults of their cattle - sales, which had
hitherto been mostly lavished on riotous
living.

Dane was well bred, well educated,
and, though favorably inclined to poker
and to jovial company, he took no part
in the grosser dissipation which degraded
the town. His preferred associates were
the younger officers at Fort Fletcher,
three miles away across the prairie, yet

that the association was constant rather
than intimate was his fault, not theirs.
Close comradeship bound them together,
and they would willingly have included
Dane ; but his cool reticence nipped con-
fidences as with a frost. Great, then, was
the surprise among them when, more
than a year after they had made his
acquaintance, he manifested an unsus-
pected capacity for strong feeling. Sev-
eral of the lieutenants had spent the day
in Zenith City, and had persuaded Dane
to return with them to the post for an
evening's jollification. As they rode
through the ragged outskirts of the town,
a woman's voice called sharply, " Edna !
Edna ! "

Dane started so visibly in his saddle,
and the color rushed so warmly over his
dark face, that the officer beside him
broke into a laugh. " Who is Edna ? "
he asked.

" There is only one for me," Dane
answered gravely. " She is in Virginia,
but I hope to bring her to live here
soon."

" Boys ! He is in love ! He is going
to be married ! " the lieutenant cried
across his shoulder to those who followed.

They drew nearer, with gay exclama-
tions of incredulity : —

" Impossible ! "

" Nobody can fall in love without los-
ing his heart. Dane has never had a
heart to lose : therefore he cannot be in
love."

Dane, however, had recovered his
usual ironical placidity. " Why have I
no heart ? " he demanded. " Because I
don't display it for you" fellows ? "

" Exactly ! You would not sleep less
soundly if the redskins should wipe out
the whole regiment in the next cam-
paign."

" Teddy stated your case at the club,
a night or two ago."

A Life Tenant.

131

" Teddy is keen ! What was the ver-
dict of his discernment ? "

" He said that you were like a man
who, not owning a house, could not be
blamed for inhospitality though he never
entertained a guest."

" Teddy is wrong. I possess the pro-
perty he denies me, but it is fully occu-
pied by — a life tenant ! "

The joking vanished before the frank-
ness of Dane's smile. The inquiries
which ensued were made with friendly
eagerness, and the diffuseness of his re-
plies was almost as unexpected as his
sentiment. He had been engaged to
his sweetheart for six years, during
which he had not seen her. She was
the only child of a wealthy Virginian,
who, alarmed by rumors of Dane's -wild
youth and the certainty of his empty
pockets, had refused to allow her to
marry him. Dane had come West with
her promise never to give him up, and
his own resolve never to claim her un-
til he could prove his disinterestedness.
Twice in these six years fortune had
slipped from his grasp just when he
had thought his hold assured. But now
the father was dead, and, through one
of those periodical crises which upset
our country's finances, he had left his
daughter penniless. Dane's resolve had
endured this practical test. She had
promised to marry him so soon as he
could go to Virginia for her, and he in-
tended to get away within a couple of
weeks.

There was general curiosity to see the
bride, a month later, when it became
known that Dane had returned from his
wedding journey, and had said that he
should bring her to service at Fletcher
on the following Sunday. It would be
his first appearance, also, in the chapel,
and the garrison ladies argued favorably
for her influence among the younger set
by this evidence of its tendencies. A
thrill of surprise pervaded the congre-
gation when the two entered together,

— a surprise which, however, grew less
with every succeeding glance at Dane's
wife. She was not very young. She was
not very pretty. But there was a bright-
ness in her gray eyes, a sweetness about
her delicate lips, which Teddy declared
brought to his mind somebody's lovely
ideal of " a face which made sunshine
in a shady place."

The ladies waited as unanimously as
the officers to meet her after service,
and " Mrs. Colonel " invited her and her
husband to luncheon. Thus began a so-
cial success which did not visibly elate
its subject, who was probably used to it.
Nor did Dane exult in it.

" She has a way with her," he said,
when her popularity was pointed out to
him. " Who should be better aware of
her power than I, who am the chief of
her victims ? "

It was a power difficult to explain in
other fashion than the perspicacious Ted-
dy's. She was no more brilliant than
she was beautiful, yet the soft radiance
which surrounded her made her presence
a charming abiding-place. And in Ze-
nith City, throughout a winter of ex-
ceptional severity and widespread illness,
she proved a valuable assistant to an
overworked doctor and an inexperienced
young priest.

Except, however, in the constant manr
ifestation of his devotion to her, his mar-
riage had neither added to nor subtracted
from Dane's previous habits. Shrewd,
cynical, good-humored, he managed vari-
ous money - making enterprises besides
his bank, and joined an occasional poker
party at the post according to his wont.

" He loves her with what is good in
him, but she has no influence with what
is bad. She is so different from him
that she has not yet perceived his lim-
itations nor her own. Something inter-
esting will happen when she does."

Thus prophesied Teddy ; but nobody
was more amazed than he at the manner
in which his prophecy was fulfilled.

Early in the succeeding summer Mrs.

132

A Life Tenant.

Dane went to Virginia for a visit, and it
was announced that Dane would short-
ly join her and bring her home again.
Those who saw her before her departure
reported that her radiance had been sadly
overcast in leaving her husband.

" She did not want to go," Dane
himself said, while watching the noisy
process by which the Great Northwest
got into midstream. " She needs a
change after all the hardship she went
through last winter, but she went away
only to please me. She — she " — his
voice shook perceptibly — " she would
turn her back on heaven, if I wished her
to do so."

" I should say that she is more likely
to take you to heaven against your will,"
declared Teddy, to whom this curious
utterance was delivered.

" She is a saint," Dane murmured
half audibly, with a smile, — a smile
whose blended tenderness and tyranny
Teddy long remembered. " But she loves
my will better than her own ! " Then
he resumed his usual briskness, and dis-
cussed the probable arrival of freight
for whose safe transport he had become
responsible to the consignee, a remote
ranchman.

A fortnight later Dane's bank re-
mained closed one morning, and inves-
tigation revealed the fact that he had
disappeared with all available funds.
Zenith City is not easily startled by any
exhibition of the frailty of human na-
ture, but this shook it as with a moral
earthquake, and the losses sifted through
every class. Everybody had believed in
Dane's prosperity, and had trusted the
man who, with so blithe a repudiation
of higher motives, had asserted his belief
that honesty was the best business policy.
Everybody had lost something, from the

wealthiest cattle-owner in County to

the widow of a notorious gambler whose
disreputable associates had recently de-
posited a collection for her benefit.

As a first expression of public feel-
ing the rougher citizens desired to tear

down the frame bank building, which
contained also the rooms to which Dane
had brought home his bride. But this
was decided to be a futile vengeance, and
destructive of the only assets left by the
defaulter.

How he had gone, and whither, next
became questions of literally vital inter-
est ; for the merest new-comer in Zenith
City understood that Dane's life would
not be worth ten minutes' purchase should
that mob find him. When twenty-four
hours brought no answer to these ques-
tions, their interest grew languid. Dane,
who was familiar with the potentialities
of his neighbors, was unlikely to have
wasted that length of time in getting be-
yond their reach.

On the second day after the catastro-
phe half a dozen of the prominent losers
were assembled within the bank. It
was a rather hopeless consultation, for,
though a description of Dane had been
telegraphed to Bismarck and to Bozeman,
the prairie offered present sanctuary and
future escape to a refugee so well en-
dowed with wit and ready money.

The thirty or forty loafers who had
hitherto hung about the doors of the
bank had deserted to the landing, where
the weekly steamer had just arrived. It
was the Great Northwest, which on its
last down trip had carried Mrs. Dane
away. The feelings of that curious as-
semblage were too intricate for a limited
analysis when, amidst the noisy disem-
barkation of freight and passengers, that
lady's graceful figure appeared on the
gangway.

What had brought her back, when
she could not have gone further on her
journey than to Bismarck ? Two facts
seemed clear to those perplexed specta-
tors : though she was the wife of a man
whom they would lynch at sight, she
must be yet more wronged than they,
for only ignorance of his plans could
have induced her return ; though she
was the wife of a man who had robbed
them, she was the woman to whom half

A Life Tenant.

133

their number had owed kindness during
the bitter winter in which Zenith City
had learned to rejoice in her presence.

Thus it was that nothing worse than
gloomy silence received her when she
found herself among those familiar faces.
But this was not the welcome Edna Dane
had expected from those whom she con-
sidered her friends. A haunting anxiety
which had forced her to return acquired
sudden substance.

" Some of you would say that you are
glad to see me, unless harm had hap-
peried to my husband," she said, stand-
ing still and straight, as though her brave
spirit braced her frail body to hear the
reply. " Where is he ? "

" That is what we want to know ! "
insolently cried the voice of one who was
a stranger to her.

There followed a growl, — not loud,
but fierce. The animal was well devel-
oped in that humanity, and it made it-
self heard.

The deck-hands, busy unloading boxes
and barrels, halted glowingly, anticipat-
ing a row. A couple of stalwart fellow
passengers drew nearer Mrs. Dane, as
she paused beside the gangway. But
their protection was not needed.

An elderly man advanced from among
those growling roughs. " We don't know
where Dane has gone," he said harshly.
" But he has robbed us. They will tell
you more at the bank. Go to them."

" Robbed you ? " she repeated haughti-
ly. " That is impossible." Her bright
eyes swept the hard, worn faces, and her
haughtiness softened tremulously. " You
believe what you say. i"ou are very
troubled, I see ! " she exclaimed. " But
I swear to you that my husband will make
all right for you — if he is alive."

With that, surrounded by silence, she
turned away, and walked swiftly up the
long street which led from the riverside
to her home. When she entered the
bank, the leading citizens there assembled
would have been less astounded to see
Dane. But the frontier deference for

womanhood brought those loungers to
their feet instantly. She looked very
white and slight, and she clasped her
hands on the back of a chair, as though
needing support. Yet her eyes did not
flinch, nor did her voice falter.

" I have heard that my husband has
left the town, and that there are accu-
sations against him," she said. " Will
you tell me what you know ? "

Thereupon she heard what has been
already told here, and furthermore that
papers had been found which proved
ruinous loss to Dane's investments for
his clients during nearly a year, and that
his defalcation had been prompted by
certain large funds deposited with him
recently. These facts were related, with-
out comment, by a man who respected
this woman whom he believed more
cruelly robbed than himself. When he
paused, she covered her face and sank
to her knees. For a moment they thought
that she was fainting. Then it dawned
upon the most spiritually dull of them
that she had taken her shame and her
grief away from their tribunal. Nobody
spoke for a space, nor were they sure
whether that space had been long or
short when she rose. Color had come into
her cheeks, and more than their wonted
brightness shone in her gray eyes.

" Will you listen to me now ? " she said
clearly. " You know that I left here a
fortnight since to go to Virginia for sev-
eral months. I have returned because
the fear has haunted me night and day
that my husband needed me."

Still nobody spoke. Each man knew
that her return was indeed a contra-
diction of the plan with which she had
begun her journey. Not one of them
doubted her explanation of the impulse
which had brought her back. They
waited dumbly to hear how she purposed
to use her strangely influenced presence
among them.

" My husband has wronged you," she
continued steadily, " but there is that in
his heart which will save him, and re-

134

A Life Tenant.

store to you all that he has taken from
you. This is why God has led me here."
She broke off once more with a quick,
quivering sigh. " I will remain under
your care until my husband comes for
me and delivers to you the money which
belongs to you," she ended firmly.

There was a chorus of repudiation, a
chorus of relief from the spell her in-
tense conviction had laid upon them : —

" We have no grudge against you."

"A man's wife ain't responsible for
his misdoings."

" Dane is n't likely to come back into
a trap, for anybody."

Dane's wife smiled a very brave, white
smile. " He will come back for me" she
said, " and when he has paid you every-
thing he owes you, I think you' will let
him take me away."

There were some who felt a choking in
their throats which forbade speech, but
he who had told the story of Dane's
dishonor was made of sterner stuff.

" You are a good woman, and we know
that Dane is fond of you," he exclaimed,
" but he will not give up the money for
which he has risked so much ! This is
a state's-prison job, and the kind of man
he is cannot live without his freedom."

" He cannot live without me ! " she
cried, with a passion which transfigured
her. " Keep me here ; shut me up ; pub-
lish it everywhere that I refuse to leave
here until he comes for me, and he will
come ! "

They believed her. Half a dozen of
the shrewdest and most prosperous citi-
zens of County, where the quality

of shrewdness must be keen indeed to
develop prosperity, — they believed her ;
they obeyed her.

Their decision and the terms of it
were discussed in wide-scattered ranches,

on Yellowstone steamers, on wandering
" prairie schooners," as far east as Bis-
marck, even so far as Chicago. It stirred
human nature, according to its quality,
to derision or to tears, to scoffing or to
confidence.

While they yet disputed concerning
his coming, Dane came. He appeared in
the twilight to the deputy sheriff, who,
since recent events, had been domiciled
at the bank. " Send for your betters,"
he said roughly. " I 'm going upstairs
to my wife."

Edna Dane had spent those days and
nights in the rooms she had first seen as
a bride, and for the greater part of the
time Teddy's sister had kept her compa-
ny, but she was alone on this evening.
God knows how far away a woman's
heart hears the step she loves ! She
met Dane in the doorwaj'. She made
him sit in his own armchair. She knelt
beside him and looked into his haggard
eyes.

" I thought you would forgive me
anything and meet me anywhere," he
murmured. "They may break their word
to you, now that I am in their power.
Why have you brought me here ? "

" Because I love you," she answered ;
" not only these dear hands that I kiss,
not only this dear head that I hold upon
my breast, — I love you, yourself, your
soul ! " She laid her face down close on
his. " And he shall save his soul alive,"
she whispered, with holy passion.

Zenith City kept its word to Edna Dane.
A certain magnanimity runs thread by
thread with sternness through the rough
woof of the Northwest.

" She has made him bring back to us
what we want," Zenith City said. " Let
her take away what she wants."

Ellen Mackubin.

Ney Creol.

135

NF.G CRF.OL.

AT the remote period of his birth he
had been named Cdsar Francois Xavier,
but no one ever thought of calling him
anything but Chicot, or Ne*g, or Marin-
gouin. Down at the French market,
where he worked among the fishmongers,
they called him Chicot, when they were
not calling him names that are written
less freely than they are spoken. But
one felt privileged to call him almost
anything, he was so black, lean, lame,
and shriveled. He wore a head-kerchief,
and whatever other rags the fishermen
and their wives chose to bestow upon
him. Throughout one whole winter he
wore a woman's discarded jacket with
puffed sleeves.

Among some startling beliefs enter-
tained by Chicot was one that "Michie'
St. Pierre et Michid St. Paul " had cre-
ated him. Of " Michie" bon Dieu " he
held his own private opinion, and a not
too flattering one at that. This fantas-
tic notion concerning the origin of his
being he owed to the early teaching of
his young master, a lax believer, and a
great farceur in his day. Chicot had
once been thrashed by a robust young
Irish priest for expressing his religious
views, and another time knifed by a Si-
cilian. So he had come to hold his peace
upon that subject.

Upon another theme he talked freely
and harped continuously. For years he
had tried to convince his associates that
his master had left a progeny, rich, cul-
tured, powerful, and numerous beyond
belief. This prosperous race of beings
inhabited the most imposing mansions in
the city of New Orleans. Men of note
and position, whose names were familiar
to the public, he swore were grandchil-
dren, great-grandchildren, or, less fre-
quently, distant relatives of his master,
long deceased. Ladies who came to the
market in carriages, or whose elegance

of attire attracted the attention and ad-
mii-ation of the fishwomen, were all des
'tites cousines to his former master, Jean
Boisdure". He never looked for recogni-
tion from any of these superior beings,
but delighted to discourse by the hour
upon their dignity and pride of birth
and wealth.

Chicot always carried an old gunny-
sack, and into this went his earnings.
He cleaned stalls at the market, scaled
fish, and did many odd offices for the
itinerant merchants, who usually paid in
trade for his service. Occasionally he
saw the color of silver and got his clutch
upon a coin, but he accepted anything,
and seldom made terms. He was glad
to get a handkerchief from the Hebrew,
and grateful if the Choctaws would trade
him a bottle of file1 for it. The butcher
flung him a soup-bone, and the fishmon-
ger a few crabs or a paper bag of shrimps.
It was the big mulatresse, vendeuse de
cafe, who cared for his inner man.

Once Chicot was accused by a shoe-
vender of attempting to steal a pair of
ladies' shoes. He declared he was only
examining them. The clamor raised in
the market was terrific. Young Dagoes
assembled and squealed like rats ; a
couple of Gascon butchers bellowed like
bulls. Matteo's wife shook her fist in the
accuser's face and called him incompre-
hensible names. The Choctaw women,
where they squatted, turned their slow
eyes in the direction of the fray, taking
no further notice ; while a policeman
jerked Chicot around by the puffed sleeve
and brandished a club. It was a nar-
row escape.

Nobody knew where Chicot lived. A
man — even a ne*g cre"ol — who lives
among the reeds and willows of Bayou
St. John, in a deserted chicken-coop con-
structed chiefly of tarred paper, is not go-
ing to boast of his habitation or to invite

136

Neg Crtol.

attention to his domestic appointments.
When, after market hours, he vanished
in the direction of St. Philip Street, limp-
ing, seemingly bent under the weight of
his gunny-bag, it was like the disappear-
ance from the stage of some petty actor
whom the audience does not follow in
imagination beyond the wings, or think
of till his return in another scene.

There was one to whom Chicot's com-
ing or going meant more than this. In
la maison grise they called her La Chou-
ette, for no earthly reason unless that she
perched high under the roof of the old
rookery and scolded in shrill sudden out-
bursts. Forty or fifty years before, when
for a little while she acted minor parts
with a company of French players (an
escapade that had brought her grand-
mother to the grave), she was known as
Mademoiselle de Montallaine. Seventy-
five years before she had been christened
Aglae" Boisdure'.

No matter at what hour the old negro
appeared at her threshold, Mamzelle
Aglae* always kept him waiting till she
finished her prayers. She opened the
door for him and silently motioned him
to a seat, returning to prostrate herself
upon her knees before a crucifix and a
shell filled with holy water that stood on
a small table ; it represented in her ima-
gination an altar. Chicot knew that she
did it to aggravate him ; he was con-
vinced that she timed her devotions to
begin when she heard his footstep on the
stairs, He would sit with sullen eyes con-
templating her long, spare, poorly clad
figure as she knelt and read from her
book or finished her prayers. Bitter was
the religious warfare that had raged for
years between them, and Mamzelle Aglae*
had grown, on her side, as intolerant as
Chicot. She had come to hold St. Peter
and St. Paul in such utter detestation
that she had cut their pictures out of her
prayer-book.

Then Mamzelle Aglae" pretended not
to care what Chicot had in his bag. He
drew forth a small hunk of beef and laid

it in her basket that stood on the bare
floor. She looked from the corner of
her eye, and went on dusting the table.
He brought out a handful of potatoes,
some pieces of sliced fish, a few herbs, a
yard of calico, and a small pat of butter
wrapped in lettuce leaves. He was proud
of the butter, and wanted her to notice it.
He held it out and asked her for some-
thing to put it in. She handed him a
saucer, and looked indifferent and re-
signed, with lifted eyebrows.

" Pas d' sucre, Ne"g ? "

Chicot shook his head and scratched
it, and looked like a black picture of dis-
tress und mortification. No sugar ! But
to-morrow he would get a pinch here and
a pinch there, and would bring as much
as a cupful.

Mamzelle Aglae* then sat down, and
talked to Chicot uninterruptedly and con-
fidentially. She complained bitterly, and
it was all about a pain that lodged in her
leg ; that crept and acted like a live, sting-
ing serpent, twining about her waist and
up her spine, and coiling round the shoul-
der-blade. And then les rhumatismes in
her fingers ! He could see for himself
how they were knotted. She could not
bend them ; she could hold nothing in
her hands, and had let a saucer fall that
morning and broken it in pieces. And
if she were to tell him that she had slept
a wink through the night, she would be
a liar, deserving of perdition. She had
sat at the window la nuit blanche, hear-
ing the hours strike and the market-
wagons rumble. Chicot nodded, and
kept up a running fire of sympathetic
comment and suggestive remedies for
rheumatism and insomnia : herbs, or ti-
sanes, or grigris, or all three. As if he
knew ! There was Purgatory Mary, a
perambulating soul wnose office in life
was to pray for the shades in purgatory,
— she had brought Mamzelle Aglae* a
bottle of eau de Lourdes, but so little of
it ! She might have kept her water of
Lourdes, for all the good it did, — a drop !
Not so much as would cure a fly or a

Neg Creol.

137

mosquito! Mamzelle Aglae" was going
to show Purgatory Mary the door when
she came again, not only because of her
avarice with the Lourdes water, but, be-
side that, she brought in on her feet dirt
that could only be removed with a shovel
after she left.

And Mamzelle Aglae" wanted to inform
Chicot that there would be slaughter and
bloodshed in la maison grise if the people
below stairs did not mend their ways.
She was convinced that they lived for no
other purpose than to torture and molest
her. The woman kept a bucket of dirty
water constantly on the landing with the
hope of Mamzelle Aglae" falling over it
or into it. And she knew that the chil-
dren were instructed to gather in the hall
and on the stairway, and scream and
make a noise and jump up and down like
galloping horses, with the intention of
driving her to suicide. Chicot should no-
tify the policeman on the beat, and have
them arrested, if possible, and thrust into
the parish prison, where they belonged.

Chicot would have been extremely
alarmed if he had ever chanced to find
Mamzelle Aglae" in an uncomplaining
mood. It never occurred to him that she
might be otherwise. He felt that she
had a right to quarrel with fate, if ever
mortal had. Her poverty was a disgrace,
and he hung his head before it and felt
ashamed.

One day he found Mamzelle Aglae
stretched on the bed, with her head tied
up in a handkerchief. Her sole com-
plaint that day was, " Aie — aie — aie !
Aie — aie — aie ! " uttered with every
breath. He had seen her so before, es-
pecially when the weather was damp.

" Vous pas bdzouin tisane, Mamzelle
Aglae" ? Vous pas veux mo cri gagni
docteur ? "

She desired nothing. " Aie — aie —
aie ! "

He emptied his bag very quietly, so as
not to disturb her ; and he wanted to
stay there with her and lie down on the
floor in case she needed him, but the wo-

man from below had come up. She was
an Irishwoman with rolled sleeves.

" It 's a shtout shtick I 'm afther giv-
ing her, Ne"g, and she do but knock on
the flure it 's me or Janie or wan of us
that '11 be hearing her."

" You too good, Brigitte. Aie — aie
— aie ! U ne goutte d'eau sucre", Ne"g !
That Purg'tory Marie,* — you see hair,
ma bonne Brigitte, you tell hair go say
li'le prayer la-bas au Cathedral. Aie —
aie — aie ! "

Ne"g could hear her lamentation as he
descended the stairs. It followed him
as he limped his way through the city
streets, and seemed part of the city's
noise ; he could hear it in the rumble of
wheels and jangle of car-bells, and in the
voices of those passing by.

He stopped at Mimotte the Voudou's
shanty and bought a grigri, — a cheap
one for fifteen cents. Mimotte held her
charms at all prices. This he intended
to introduce next day into Mamzelle
Aglae*'s room, — somewhere about the al-
tar, — to the confusion and discomfit of
"Michie" bon Dieu," who persistently de-
clined to concern himself with the wel-
fare of a Boisdure*.

At night, among the reeds on the bay-
ou, Chicot could still hear the woman's
wail, mingled now with the croaking of
the frogs. If he could have been con-
vinced that giving up his life down there
in the water would in any way have bet-
tered her condition, he would not have
hesitated to sacrifice the remnant of his
existence that was wholly devoted to her.
He lived but to serve her. He did not
know it himself ; but Chicot knew so lit-
tle, and that little in such a distorted way !
He could scarcely have been expected,
even in his most lucid moments, to give
himself over to self-analysis.

Chicot gathered an uncommon amount
of dainties at market the following day.
He had to work hard, and scheme and
whine a little ; but he got hold of an or-
ange and a lump of ice and a chou-fleur.
He did not drink his cup of cafe au lait,

138

Neg Creol.

but asked Mimi Lambeau to put it in
the little new tin pail that the Hebrew-
notion - vender had just given him in
exchange for a mess of shrimps. This
time, however, Chicot had his trouble for
nothing. When he reached the upper
room of la maison grise, it was to find
that Mamzelle Aglae" had died during
the night. He set his bag down in the
middle of the floor, and stood shaking,
and whined low like a dog in pain.

Everything had been done. The Irish-
woman had gone for the doctor, and Pur-
gatory Mary had summoned a priest.
Furthermore, the woman had arranged
Mamzelle Aglae" decently. She had cov-
ered the table with a white cloth, and had
placed it at the head of the bed, with
the crucifix and two lighted candles in
silver candlesticks upon it : the little bit
of ornamentation brightened and embel-
lished the poor room. Purgatory Mary,
dressed in shabby black, fat and breath-
ing hard, sat reading half audibly from
a prayer-book. She was watching the
dead and the silver candlesticks, which
she had borrowed from a benevolent so-
ciety, and for which she held herself re-
sponsible. A young man was just leav-
ing, — a reporter snuffing the air for
items, who had scented one up there in
the top room of la maison grise.

All the morning Janie had been escort-
ing a procession of street Arabs up and
down the stairs to view the remains.
One of them — a little girl, who had had
her face washed and had made a species
of toilet for the occasion — refused to be
dragged away. She stayed seated as if
at an entertainment, fascinated alternate-
ly by the long, still figure of Mamzelle
Aglae", the mumbling lips of Purgatory
Mary, and the silver candlesticks.

" Will ye get down on yer knees, man,
and say a prayer for the dead ! " com-
manded the woman.

But Chicot only shook his head, and
refused to obey. He approached the bed,

and laid a little black paw for a moment
on the stiffened body of Mamzelle Aglae".
There was nothing for him to do here.
He picked up his old ragged hat and his
bag and went away.

" The black h'athen ! " the woman
muttered. " Shut the dure, child."

The little girl slid down from her chair,
and went on tiptoe to shut the door which
Chicot had left open. Having resumed
her seat, she fastened her eyes upon Pur-
gatory Mary's heaving chest.

" You, Chicot ! " cried Matteo's wife
the next morning. " My man, he read iu
paper 'bout woman name' Boisdure', use'
b'long to big-a famny. She die roun'
on St. Philip — po', same-a like church
rat. It 's any them Boisdure's you alia
talk 'bout ? "

Chicot shook his head in slow but em-
phatic denial. No, indeed, the woman
was not of kin to his Boisdure's. He sure-
ly had told Matteo's wife often enough
— how many times did he have to repeat
it ! — of their wealth, their social stand-
ing. It was doubtless some Boisdure* of
les Attakapas ; it was none of his.

The next day there was a small fu-
neral procession passing a little distance
away, — a hearse and a carriage or two.
There was the priest who had attended
Mamzelle Aglae", and a benevolent Cre-
ole gentleman whose father had known
the Boisdure's in his youth. There were
a couple of player-folk, who, having got
wind of the story, had thrust their hands
into their pockets.

" Look, Chicot ! " cried Matteo's wife.
" Yondago the fune'al. Mus-a be that-a
Boisdure* woman we talken 'bout yesa-
day."

But Chicot paid no heed. What was
to him the funeral of a woman who had
died in St. Philip Street ? He did not
even turn his head in the direction of the
moving procession. He went on scaling
his red-snapper.

Kate Chopin.

Strauss, the Author of The Life of Jesus.

139

STRAUSS, THE AUTHOR OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

THOUGH posthumous, the recently pub-
lished volume of Letters of David Frie-
drich Strauss, the author of The Life of
Jesus, does not smell of dust. On the
contrary, it is thoroughly alive in the
vigor of its uneasy polemic spirit and
fleet touch. It opens with the year 1830,
when Strauss was twenty-two years old,
and had just finished his career at the
University of Tubingen with brilliant
honors. He was serving as temporary
vicar to the pastor of the parish of Klein-
Ingersheim, and that his religious opin-
ions were already novel and independent
is shown by the letters to his friend
Marklin. In reply to the latter's scru-
ples about a freethinker like himself min-
istering to an orthodox flock, Strauss
maintains that the case of a liberal pas-
tor is precisely analogous to that of a
prince who is endowed with more intel-
ligence than his subjects : let both see to
it that first of all they fulfill the duties
of the offices to which they have been
called. He makes a distinction between
a man's individual, private life and his
life as an official, — a view which is like-
ly to be condemned by persons who are
taught to regard the preaching of the
gospel as a calling, but is both natural
and frequent among the clergy of na-
tions which support an established state
church.

Strauss did not remain long in an am-
biguous incumbency. He quitted the pul-
pit within a year for a professor's chair
in Maulbronn, and this chair, in the au-
tumn of 1831, for the University of Ber-
lin, where he sat at the feet of Hegel till
Hegel's death (in November, 1831). In
the following year the theological semi-
nary of Tubingen counted him among
its tutors.

Thus at the very opening of this
indirect autobiography is betrayed the
need that Strauss felt of a frequent

change of abode, a peculiarity that was
shown throughout his life. The occasion
of his removal was sometimes a definite-
ly disagreeable experience, such as the
dismissal from the Tubingen seminary
on account of the publication of The
Life of Jesus ; sometimes it was an in-
definite and even unreasonable feeling
of unrest ; in only a few instances was
it a real consideration ; generally he was
moved by a hope of finding better com-
panionship and means for research. An
explanation which he once gave of his
peevish fits of discontent takes the re-
sponsibility entirely off his own shoul-
ders and puts it upon the broad back of
heredity. His mother, he says, told him
that his father, who had killed her love
and the affection of all his friends and
relations by his selfishness, became pas-
sionately devoted to their first-born child,
so that when the boy died he went near-
ly mad. One day he would sink into de-
spairing dejection ; the next he would
be furious with wrath against the Al-
mighty. " And at this period of pater-
nal disquiet," writes Strauss, " I was
conceived and born."

Strauss thought himself indebted to
his father for the logical clearness of his
style. " But everything else in me that
is good, and of any worth, I owe to my
mother, — yet I do not amount to half
what she was for all that," he laments
to his friend Rapp. " She had the ca-
pacity of not being prevented by small
things from keeping the greater things
in mind ; she understood art, and she
managed always to keep the upper hand
over painful feelings and a mastery of
distressing emotions by the simple method
of holding herself fast to some hard piece
of work. Yet how unworldly was her
spirit in spite of all this show of the prac-
tical ! " he adds. " She despised senti-
mentality and cant in religion with all

140

Strauss, the Author of The Life of Jesus.

her heart. She could feel so sure, for
instance, that labor might be a real kind
of divine service, under certain circum-
stances, that occasionally she would take
up something to do on Sunday, and the
reproachful looks of her church-going
relatives she would charm away by the
tranquil and joking remarks which she
let fall. But it was ever for others she
worked, never for herself ; generally it
was for her children."

In truth, if fortitude can be an inherit-
ance, then it was from his maternal par-
ent that Strauss derived his. He needed
a goodly portion to weather the storm
that burst upon his head on the occasion
of the publication of The Life of Jesus ;
and fortunately for his health and well-
being he possessed it. The book came out
in Tubingen, in the spring of 1835, when
he had just attained his twenty-eighth
year. It represented, it seems, only one
part of a vast general design that in-
cluded the whole sum and substance of
the world's dogmatic history. The Ttt-
bingen university cast him out ; his name
was stricken off its list of tutors, and his
literary work was reduced to the pro-
duction of replies to adversaries. His
mind and strength were diverted from
his great work then and there, for good
and all.

In Ludwigsburg, whither he retired
after the loss of his position in Tubingen,
he revised a second edition of the Life,
and wrote unfruitful polemical pam-
phlets. His courage was unbroken, but
all too soon he became ill at ease again.
The truth is, his native town was hardly
the right place for him at this time. He
had many good friends, to be sure, but
his family was a source of disquiet to
him. His father, who really rejoiced in
secret at the blow that his son had struck
in the simpleton face of Piety, as he ex-
pressed it, professed to disapprove of him
in public. Strauss was forced, on the
other hand, to see his mother wearing an
air of hardest indifference to the world
while she was smarting inwardly. Once

she said to him, " There is one thing in
me, Fritz, that is immortal, I am sure,
and will continue to live in me on the
other side. That is my love." This was
uttered in a gay and tender tone, but
Strauss knew what heavy grief could lie
close in his mother's soul behind the
light messengers of banter that she sent
forth. Who wonders that he grew sick
of life ? He wrote to Rapp that the
subject of religion palled on him. Sci-
ence lost its interest for him, too. He
wished to go away from Ludwigsburg.

Now Rapp was a clergyman in full
and regular orders, and as such he could
not see that there was any scientific need
of The Life of Jesus. Yet he remained
devoted to Strauss at this time, like the
rest of Strauss's intimates, the most of
whom were theologians ; and he an-
swered the disheartened letter by recom-
mending occupation, and the acceptance
of the chair of theology in Zurich which
had been offered him. Strauss had hoped
for a more distinguished call, but he
thought that the best thing to do for the
present was to accept the Swiss offer. A
little later, however, he and his friends
learned that the country round about
Zurich was stirred up against the nom-
ination of the author of The Life of
Jesus to a chair in the new university.
Then came the news that a mob of pea-
sants, headed by priests, had marched
into Zurich and threatened the magis-
trates with harm if they persisted in their
appointment, and had emphasized their
threat by burning Strauss in effigy. Soon
afterward he received a letter from the
embarrassed authorities of the univer-
sity, offering him a pension of a thou-
sand francs a year. But he had already
penned a dignified not* of resignation.
He relinquished not only the chair of
theology in Zurich, but every hope of a
career as professor. It is safe to say,
indeed, that this blow was felt more
keenly by Strauss than the public con-
tumely which succeeded the publication
of the Life. It drove the fact into his

Strauss, the Author of The Life of Jesus.

141

soul that there is a power in religious
feelings that a man cannot stand against
alone. He had not before been able to
believe it, but now he had the proof.

He was then residing in Stuttgart. A
letter from his elder brother, William,
brought him back for a while to Ludwigs-
burg. His mother seemed uncommon-
ly weak. Strauss was frightened, and
watched over her and nursed her most
devotedly, but in vain. "Just at this
time, Fritz," she says deprecatingly to
her son on her deathbed, " it 's too bad.
People will say it is grief over your Zu-
rich trouble that carries me off."

There were excellent galleries of pic-
tures and a good opera troupe in Stutt-
gart, and he devoted himself to art and
music. His interpreter of music was the
beautiful prima donna, Fraulein Christina
Schebest. But an artist does not always
make a good housewife ; and Strauss
wrote to Rapp, asking if he and his wife
would not look about a little for a lady
who would suit his tastes, belonging to
some worthy family of the middle class.
It was quite useless, he said, to try to set-
tle down to any earnest task in his present
uninspired mood : he must be wrought
up to a fine fury of enthusiasm in order
to write, and he felt now that he must
fall into the clutches of some passion, or
perish. Rapp seems to have fancied that
a note from the Stuttgart Royal Opera
House had fallen into his old classmate's
letter, for he answered in such common-
place fashion that Strauss was offended,
and dropped the correspondence for a
long time. When he resumed it, he wrote
one of the most delightful gruffly frank
notes that I remember ever to have read,
— declaring that he will never again
turn to Rapp for sympathy. Yet a lit-
tle further along in the volume we read,
in a letter to the same friend, a confi-
dential description of how Juno-like is
the figure, how noble the carriage, of
Fraulein Schebest, and how, in spite of
all, she loves him ! A few weeks later
Strauss announces that he and Christina

are to be married, and declares that
Rapp, and no other, shall unite them.

Now for a season the letters are very
foolish honeymoon letters. Instead of
resuming the observations on men and
things which make his correspondence so
uncommonly diverting, Strauss scribbles
verses on Christina's doughnuts, and de-
scribes her efforts -to attain to the stan-
dard which he has set for a perfect cook.
In a little while, however, his letters to
all the old friends whom he had neglect-
ed for Christina become very frequent
again. Before long a still further hint of
impending evil is encountered, — a hint
not only of domestic and sentimental
satiety, but of something much worse.
We are slow in coming clearly to the
plain truth, for the editor evidently has
suppressed a great deal of his material ;
but by gleanings from detached sentences,
scattered in a half dozen letters, we ar-
rive at the indubitable fact at last that
the pair separate. Strauss settles for a
while in Heilbronn, while Christina rees-
tablishes herself in Stuttgart, with their
son and daughter. No reason for the
separation is allowed to appear. Strauss
once makes an accusation to the effect
that Christina is too self-complacent, but
this can hardly have been the whole rea-
son for disagreement. Christina wrote
two books subsequently, one of which was
a textbook on acting. She died in Stutt-
gart in 1870, aged fifty-seven, but she is
not mentioned again in Strauss's letters.

It appears as a saving grace in Strauss's
character that the breaking of family ties
caused a good deal of wavering. No
other event of his life so shook his nat-
ural fortitude as this. He was tempted
again and again to go back to his home.
He longed for his children. He saw in
Venice Titian's picture of the child Mary
ascending the steps of the Temple, was
reminded of his own little daughter, and
felt ready to weep. Nor could he go to
the opera for many a year without noting
the inferiority of the singers to Christina
as she used to be.

142

Strauss, the Author of The Life of Jesus.

With his self-willed separation from
Christina, however, the climax of his
emotional life passed. He experienced
no more passions. Of the brief political
career which followed, he writes that he
had no pleasure in being a deputy, and
we discern for ourselves that he pos-
sessed no political sagacity, although
events have proved that he had extraor-
dinary political foresight. His life, from
the time when he quitted his seat in the
Wurtemberg Landtag, in 1849, till its
close in 1874, was one of pure mentality.
He occupied himself with the study of
material for biographies and with culti-
vating his taste for art, to the exclusion
of all practical activities. The single in-
terruption of his domestic loneliness —
the return of his two children to his sare
— was of short duration because they
were soon placed in boarding-schools.
Yet for all this solitude no stagnation
ever took place in his interest in things.
He shifted his residence, he made new
acquaintances, he traveled to Italy, Swit-
zerland, and Vienna, in order to learn ;
and the register of "names referred to "
in the Letters, which comprises more than
seven hundred, might be balanced by a
similar register of " things referred to,"
quite as long and miscellaneous, so nu-
merous are his themes. He led the tra-
ditional existence of a German scholar
without falling into the German scholar's
habitual tenuity of thought. His liveli-
ness of style is encouraged by the variety
of his topics, and by a habit of referring
to the dramatic side of incidents.

The fact is, Strauss was the " artist by
nature's malevolence," which he once in
early life described himself to be. He
was wanting in the higher creative tal-
ent, but his style in writing proves that
he had a graphic" gift of imitation. What
could be neater and clearer and more
full of life than the few lines on George
Eliot, from Munich, in July, 1858 ? " I
had a charming little experience on
Thursday last in meeting the English

translator of my Life of Jesus, who is now
the wife of Mr. Lewes, the author of the
Life of Goethe. When they heard of my
being here they both called on me, but
I was out. When I returned the visit I
found only her. I had seen her once
before in Cologne as Miss Evans, when
she could not speak any German at all.
Now she can talk it pretty well. She is
in her thirties, not beautiful, but with a
transparent countenance full of expres-
sion, more from the heart than the brain.
. . . As I rose to go the amiable woman
said, ' When you came in I was so de-
lighted I could not speak.' "

Finally be it remarked that Strauss's
vividness and virility extended to his
hatreds as well as his loves. He called
a spade a spade. Old and half-dead as
Strauss was in January, 1874, he still
wrote the following against the Bayreuth
and Viennese idols of the day : " You
say in your letter that Hermann Grimm
has described Dttrer as being a great
man, but not a great artist. I hope
these are not Grimm's own words. . . .
Dttrer no artist ! the man who possessed
imagination, the highest gift of artists,
in such over - abundant measure that
whole generations of painters supplied
their wants from it ! Beauty, it is true,
is not to be found in his works. Yet
what artistic reserve do they display,
what knowledge and conscientious mas-
tery of technique, what profound human
feeling ! But then, to be sure, in the
eyes of our contemporaries he had the
fault of being estimable in private life,
and of attaining simplicity and beauty of
character. The men whom folks admire
nowadays and take to be great artists,
Richard Wagner and Hans Makart, are
just the contrary kind of men to Diirer,
are sybaritic beggars or self - idolizing
blasphemers."

Blasphemous Strauss was called ; but
no man, after reading these revelations
of his life, can throw at him the worse
epithets of sybaritic and self-idolizing.
Countess von Krockow.

Mr. Allen's The Choir Invisible.

143

MR. ALLEN'S THE CHOIR INVISIBLE.

IT is not altogether easy to say whether
a poet and a historian have been deflect-
ed in Mr. James Lane Allen, or a novel-
ist is in process of development through
the absorption of lyric and historic pro-
pensities. Certain it is that in his latest
book 1 Mr. Allen does not yet show him-
self a great story-teller, but so far from
disappointing the reader, he arouses the
liveliest anticipations, and causes one to
wonder just how he will emerge under
the various influences which seem to be
impelling him. We think he will be a
novelist, perhaps even a great novelist, —
one of the few who hold large powers of
divers sort in solution to be • precipitated
in some new, unexpected form. For af-
ter all, his prime interest, as this book
discloses, is in character, and character
dramatically presented, and this is the
fundamental aim of the great novelist.

Yet the structural story of The Choir
Invisible is meagre, and Mr. Allen has
not even made the most of the opportuni-
ty for narrative which it presents. John
Gray, a young Kentucky schoolmaster
of Scotch parentage and Pennsylvania
backwoods rearing, five years before the
close of the last century, thought himself
in love with Amy Falconer, the coquet-
tish niece of Major Falconer, of Lex-
ington. He was about to offer himself
to her, in spite of the guarded dissuasion
of Major Falconer's young wife, who
had read the girl's nature more clearly
than John, when the caprice of fortune
and a careless jest separated the two,
and another lover stepped in and carried
off the prize. The true woman whom
nature had designed for him was Mrs.
Falconer, but under the influence, so to
speak, of the choir invisible, this man and
woman missed the perfection of union,

1 The Choir Invisible. By JAMES LANE
ALLEN. New York : The Macmillan Company.

1897.

and, after a time of tremulous nearness,
separated at a parting of the ways.

As we have said, story there is none
in the plain acceptation of the term.
There are two or three moving incidents,
as the fight with the panther and the
tussle with a coarse mischief-maker, but
the drama which is enacted, a spiritual
drama of real significance, finds but
casual materialization in the events of
life as led by the dramatis personce.
Mr. Allen's attention is fixed upon the
struggle which is going on within the
breast of John Gray, first when he is
losing Amy, and then when he is finding
Jessica. It is, by the way, one of the
delicate touches by which Mr. Allen adds
to the sanctuary about his heroine that he
scarcely refers to her by this name. She
is " Mrs. Falconer " throughout, " aunt
Jessica " once or twice, and " Jessica "
once only in a bird's remote call to the
hero's consciousness. All besides this is
treated as episodical. The incidents
which carry the narrative along are the
mere nothings of life. In one aspect
this nonchalance of narrative heightens
the effect of the spiritual story ; yet it is
a dangerous expedient. A great esoteric
action craves great exoteric art, and we
think Mr. Allen depends too much upon
the suggestion of incident, as when, at a
critical moment in his hero's life, he be-
trays the inward movement only by an
almost casual reference to a night ride
back to the heroine's neighborhood.

The story is set in a slight frame-
work of pioneer life, and there are a
few hints at that undercurrent of history
which nearly swept Kentucky into the
deep waters of imperial dreams. Again,
this lightly sketched background appears
to have been used for the purpose of
throwing the lovers into higher relief,
yet one looks wistfully at the possibilities
implied in the historic events. The fine

144

Mr. Allen s The Choir Invisible.

imaginative power with which Mr. Allen
reconstructs the period holds out such
promise of vigorous action and portrait-
ure that the reader is inclined to regret
the trivial use to which the power is put.
Surely the love story would not have suf-
fered if it had been the centre of a po-
litical storm as well. But this is going
beyond our limits. We have to do with
the story Mr. Allen wrote, not with the
one we wished him to write. Only, we
urge, why throw back so modern a theme
into a former century and not derive
still greater benefit from the rejection ?
We value the sureness with which the
ethical problem implied in the story is
stated and solved ; we set a very high
estimate on the power of historic im-
agination which Mr. Allen shows, and
recognize with the greatest pleasure that
he is not exploiting local idiosyncrasies,
but drawing with a free hand the out-
lines of an adolescent state, and if we
had only these elements of a worthy
novel we should think ourselves fortu-
nate. But the charm which The Choir
Invisible holds for an attentive reader
does not lie in either of these elements
half so much as it springs from the in-
forming spirit of the book, — a spirit so
rare in our fiction that we watch it here
with the keenest pleasure. The humor
and grace which attend upon a refined
estimate of life we have had in our fic-
tion ; the purity of tone, also, which is
the fragrance of a delicate perception of
values. Mr. Allen himself, in previous
books, has shown a playfulness which
is winning ; there is less of it in this.
But the imaginative beauty which lies
deep at the roots of things and makes
him who perceives it rather grave than
merry, this is a rarer grace, a more en-
during quality of fine literature. We
have had the opportunity of noting it
once or twice. Mr. Arthur Sherburne
Hardy has disclosed it in Passe Rose,
and there have been touches of it in
minor pieces of fiction. Hawthorne had

it supremely, yet one cannot read Haw-
thorne without being reminded of Cole-
ridge's river Alph flowing through sun-
less caverns. This beauty has lain in
other books by Mr. Allen, but in none,
we think, has it been under such high
command as in this.

It would be ineffective to attempt to
persuade the reader of this by means of
single passages, though many could be
cited which would at once give out their
own music. The beauty is largely due
to the noble use which Mr. Allen makes
of the note which nature sounds. Again
and again one is reminded, not by a
f anoiful interpretation, but by strong im-
aginative penetration, of the elemental
forces of nature as they make themselves
known in various forms of life. It is as
if one had held communion with nature,
not as a hermit nor as a scientific inves-
tigator, but as a poet with strong human
sympathies, and then, essaying to render
plain the passages of a man's heart, had
brought with him this hypaethral light
and let it flow into all the recesses.

Indeed, paradoxical though it be, this
very quality of beauty, almost lyrical
sometimes in its form, has misled Mr.
Allen in his task as a writer of fiction.
It has apparently persuaded him to be
neglectful of the homely virtues without
which fiction cannot maintain a secure
hold on life. In his deep interest in his
hero and heroine he has too often for-
gotten his story, and the three, author,
hero, and heroine, have gone off into the
woods by themselves. The reader fol-
lows them, but at too great a distance,
after all, for his own satisfaction. He
does not miss the rare strain of music
in Jessica Falconer, o» the shrill sweet-
ness of the parson ; he is aware of the
vibrant melody in John Gray himself ;
but the choir invisible is a little too
screened from view, a trifle too remote,
to permit its harmony the full measure
of tone which the reader of this book
divines rather than dkectly perceives.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

of literature, Science, art, ana

VOL. LXXX. — A UGUST, 1897. — No. CCCCLXXVIII.

THE AMERICAN FORESTS.

THE forests of America, however
slighted by man, must have been a great
delight to God ; for they were the best
he ever planted. The whole continent
was a garden, and from the beginning it
seemed to be favored above all the other
wild parks and gardens of the globe.
To prepare the ground, it was rolled and
sifted in seas with infinite loving delib-
eration and forethought, lifted into the
light, submerged and warmed over and
over again, pressed and crumpled into
folds and ridges, mountains and hills,
subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires,
ploughed and ground and sculptured into
scenery and soil with glaciers and rivers,
— every feature growing and changing
from beauty to beauty, higher and higher.
And in the fullness of time it was plant-
ed in groves, and belts, and broad, ex-
uberant, mantling forests, with the lar-
gest, most varied, most fruitful, and most
beautiful trees in the world. Bright seas
made its border with wave embroidery
and icebergs ; gray deserts were out-
spread in the middle of it, mossy tun-
dras on the north, savannas on the south,
and blooming prairies and plains ; while
lakes and rivers shone through all the
vast forests and openings, and happy
birds and beasts gave delightful anima-
tion. Everywhere, everywhere over all
the blessed continent, there were beauty,
and melody, and kindly, wholesome, food-
ful abundance.

These forests were composed of about
five hundred species of trees, all of them
in some way useful to man, ranging in

size from twenty-five feet in height and
less than one foot in diameter at the
ground to four hundred feet in height
and more than twenty feet in diameter,
— lordly monarchs proclaiming the gos-
pel of beauty like apostles. For many a
century after the ice-ploughs were melt-
ed, nature fed them and dressed them
every day ; working like a man, a loving,
devoted, painstaking gardener; fingering
every leaf and flower and mossy furrowed
bole ; bending, trimming, modeling, bal-
ancing, painting them with the loveliest
colors ; bringing over them now clouds
with cooling shadows and showers, now
sunshine ; fanning them with gentle
winds and rustling their leaves ; exercis-
ing them in every fibre with storms, and
pruning them ; loading them with flowers
and fruit, loading them with snow, and
ever making them more beautiful as the
years rolled by. Wide -branching oak
and elm in endless variety, walnut and
maple, chestnut and beech, ilex and lo-
cust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy
translucent canopy along the coast of
the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and
ridges of the Alleghanies, — a green bil-
lowy sea in summer, golden and purple
in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast
frozen mist of interlacing branches and
sprays in leafless," restful winter.

To the southward stretched dark,
level-topped cypresses in knobby, tangled
swamps, grassy savannas in the midst
of them like lakes of light, groves of
gay sparkling spice-trees, magnolias and
palms, glossy-leaved and blooming and

146

The American Forests.

shining continually. To the northward,
over Maine and the Ottawa, rose hosts
of spiry, rosiny evergreens, — white pine
and spruce, hemlock and cedar, shoulder
to shoulder, laden with purple cones,
their myriad needles sparkling and shim-
mering, covering hills and swamps, rocky
headlands and domes, ever bravely aspir-
ing and seeking the sky ; the ground in
their shade now snow-clad and frozen,
now mossy and flowery ; beaver meadows
here and there, full of lilies and grass ;
lakes gleaming like eyes, and a silvery
embroidery of rivers and creeks water-
ing and brightening all the vast glad
wilderness.

Thence westward were oak and elm,
hickory and tupelo, gum and lirioden-
dron, sassafras and ash, linden and lau-
rel, spreading on ever wider in glorious
exuberance over the great fertile basin
of the Mississippi, over damp level bot-
toms, low dimpling hollows, and round
dotting hills, embosoming sunny prai-
ries and cheery park openings, half sun-
shine, half shade ; while a dark wilder-
ness of pines covered the region around
the Great Lakes. Thence still w'estward
swept the forests to right and left around
grassy plains and deserts a thousand
miles wide : irrepressible hosts of spruce
and pine, aspen and willow, nut - pine
and juniper, cactus and yucca, caring no-
thing for drought, extending undaunted
from mountain to mountain, over mesa
and desert, to join the darkening mul-
titudes of pines that covered the high
Rocky ranges and the glorious forests
along the coast of the moist and balmy
Pacific, where new species of pine, giant
cedars and spruces, silver firs and se-
quoias, kings of their race, growing close
together like grass in a meadow, poised
their brave domes and "spires in the sky
three hundred feet above the ferns and
the lilies that enameled the ground ; tow-
ering serene through the long centu-
ries, preaching God's forestry fresh from
heaven.

Here the forests reached their highest

development. Hence they went waver-
ing northward over icy Alaska, brave
spruce and fir, poplar and birch, by the
coasts and the rivers, to within sight of
the Arctic Ocean. American forests !
the glory of the world ! Surveyed thus
from the east to the west, from the
north to the south, they are rich beyond
thought, immortal, immeasurable, enough
and to spare for every feeding, shelter-
ing beast and bird, insect and son of
Adam ; and nobody need have cared had
there been no pines in Norway, no cedars
and deodars on Lebanon and the Hima-
layas, no vine-clad selvas in the basin of
the Amazon. With such variety, har-
mony, and triumphant exuberance, even
nature, it would seem, might have rested
content with the forests of North Amer-
ica, and planted no more.

So they appeared a few centuries ago
when they were rejoicing in wildness.
The Indians with stone axes could do
them no more harm than could gnaw-
ing beavers and browsing moose. Even
the fires of the Indians and the fierce
shattering lightning seemed to work to-
gether only for good in clearing spots
here and there for smooth garden prai-
ries, and openings for sunflowers seeking
the light. But when the steel axe of
the white man rang out in the startled
air their doom was sealed. Every tree
heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of
smoke gave the sign in the sky.

I suppose we need not go mourning
the buffaloes. In the nature of things
they had to give place to better cattle,
though the change might have been made
without barbarous wickedness. Like-
wise many of nature's five hundred kinds
of wild trees had to nuake way for or-
chards and cornfields. In the settlement
and civilization of the country, bread
more than timber or beauty was wanted ;
and in the blindness of hunger, the early
settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide,
regarded God's trees as only a larger
kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard
to get rid of. Accordingly, with no eye

The American Forests.

147

to the future, these pious destroyers
waged interminable forest wars ; chips
flew thick and fast ; trees in their beauty
fell crashing by millions, smashed to con-
fusion, and the smoke of their burning
has been rising to heaven more than two
hundred years. After the Atlantic coast
from Maine to Georgia had been mostly
cleared and scorched into melancholy
ruins, the overflowing multitude of bread
and money seekers poured over the Al-
leghanies into the fertile middle West,
spreading ruthless devastation ever wider
and farther over the rich valley of the
Mississippi and the vast shadowy pine
region about the Great Lakes. Thence
still westward the invading horde of de-
stroyers called settlers made its fiery
way over the broad Rocky Mountains,
felling and burning more fiercely than
ever, until at last it has reached the
wild side of the continent, and entered
the last of the great aboriginal forests
on the shores of the Pacific.

Surely, then, it should not be wondered
at that lovers of their country, bewailing
its baldness, are now crying aloud, " Save
what is left of the forests ! " Clearing
has surely now gone far enough ; soon
timber will be scarce, and not a grove
will be left to rest in or pray in. The
remnant protected will yield plenty of
timber, a perennial harvest for every
right use, without further diminution of
its area, and will continue to cover the
springs of the rivers that rise in the
mountains and give irrigating waters to
the dry valleys at their feet, prevent
wasting floods and be a blessing to every-
body forever.

Every other civilized nation in the
world has been compelled to care for its
forests, and so must we if waste and de-
struction are not to go on to the bitter end,
leaving America as barren as Palestine
or Spain. In its calmer moments in the
midst of bewildering hunger and war
and restless over-industry, Prussia has
learned that the forest plays an impor-
tant part in human progress, and that

the advance in civilization only makes it
more indispensable. It has, therefore,
as shown by Mr. Pinchot, refused to de-
liver its forests to more or less speedy
destruction by permitting them to pass
into private ownership. But the state
woodlands are not allowed to lie idle.
On the contrary, they are made to pro-
duce as much timber as is possible with-
out spoiling them. In the administration
of its forests, the state righteously consid-
ers itself bound to treat them as a trust
for the nation as a whole, and to keep in
view the common good of the people for
all time.

In France no government forests have
been sold since 1870. On the other
hand, about one half of the fifty million
francs spent on forestry has been given
to engineering works, to make the re-
planting of denuded areas possible. The
disappearance of the forests in the first
place, it is claimed, may be traced in
most cases directly to mountain pastur-
age. The provisions of the code concern-
ing private woodlands are substantially
these : No private owner may clear his
woodlands without giving notice to the
government at least four months in ad-
vance, and the forest service may forbid
the clearing on the following grounds:
to maintain the soil on mountains, to de-
fend the soil against erosion and flooding
by rivers or torrents, to insure the ex-
istence of springs and watercourses, to
protect the dunes and seashore, etc. A
proprietor who has cleared his forest
without permission is subject to heavy
fine, and in addition may be made to re-
plant the cleared area.

In Switzerland, after many laws like
our own had been found wanting, the
Swiss forest school was established in
1865, and soon after the Federal Forest
Law was enacted, which is binding over
nearly two thirds of the country. Under
its provisions, the cantons must appoint
and pay the number of suitably educated
foresters required for the fulfillment of
the forest law ; and in the organization

148

The American Forests.

of a normally stocked forest, the object
of first importance must be the cutting
each year of an amount of timber equal
to the total annual increase, and no
more.

The Russian government passed a law
in 1888, declaring that clearing is for-
bidden in protection forests, and is al-
lowed in others " only when its effects
will not be to disturb the suitable rela-
tions which should exist between forest
and agricultural lands."

Even Japan is ahead of us in the man-
agement of her forests. They cover an
area of about 29,000,000 acres. The
feudal lords valued the woodlands, and
enacted vigorous protective laws ; and
when, in the latest civil war, the Mi-
kado government destroyed the feudal
system, it declared the forests that had
belonged to the feudal lords to be the pro-
perty of the state, promulgated a forest
law binding on the whole kingdom, and
founded a school of forestry in Tokio.
The forest service does not rest satisfied
with the present proportion of woodland,
but looks to planting the best forest trees
it can find in any country, if likely to be
useful and to thrive in Japan.

In India systematic forest manage-
ment was begun about forty years ago,
under difficulties — presented by the
character of the country, the prevalence
of running fires, opposition from lum-
bermen, settlers, etc. — not unlike those
which confront us now. Of the total
area of government forests, perhaps
70,000,000 acres, 55,000,000 acres have
been brought under the control of the
forestry department, — a larger area
than that of all our national parks and
reservations. The chief aims of the
administration are effective protection
of the forests from fire, an efficient sys-
tem of regeneration, and cheap trans-
portation of the forest products ; the
results so far have been most beneficial
and encouraging.

It seems, therefore, that almost every
civilized nation can give us a lesson

on the management and care of forests.
So far our government has done nothing
effective with its forests, though the best
in the world, but is like a rich and fool-
ish spendthrift who has inherited a mag-
nificent estate in perfect order, and then
has left his rich fields and meadows, for-
ests and parks, to be sold and plundered
and wasted at will, depending on their
inexhaustible abundance. Now it is plain
that the forests are not inexhaustible,
and that quick measures must be taken
if ruin is to be avoided. Year by year
the remnant is growing smaller before
the, axe and fire, while the laws in exist-
ence provide neither for the protection
of the timber from destruction nor for
its use where it is most needed.

As is shown by Mr. E. A. Bowers,
formerly Inspector of the Public Land
Service, the foundation of our protective
policy, which has never protected, is an
act passed March 1, 1817, which author-
ized the Secretary of the Navy to re-
serve lands producing live-oak and ce-
dar, for the sole purpose of supplying
timber for the navy of the United States.
An extension of this law by the pas-
sage of the act of March 2, 1831, pro-
vided that if any person should cut live-
oak or red cedar trees or other timber
from the lands of the United States for
any other purpose than the construction
of the navy, such person should pay a
fine not less than triple the value of the
timber cut, and be imprisoned for a
period not exceeding twelve months.
Upon this old law, as Mr. Bowers points
out, having the construction of a wooden
navy in view, the United States govern-
ment has to-day chiefly to rely in pro-
tecting its timber throughout the arid
regions of the West, where none of the
naval timber which the law had in mind
is to be found.

By the act of June 3, 1878, timber
can be taken from public lands not sub-
ject to entry under any existing laws ex-
cept for minerals, by bona fide residents
of the Rocky Mountain States and Terri-

The American Forests.

149

tories and the Dakotas. Under the tim-
ber and stone act, of the same date, land
in the Pacific States and Nevada, val-
uable mainly for timber, and unfit for
cultivation if the timber is removed, can
be purchased for two dollars and a half
an acre, under certain restrictions. By
the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant
and right-of-way railroads are author-
ized to take timber from the public lands
adjacent to their lines for construction
purposes ; and they have taken it with a
vengeance, destroying a hundred times
more than they have used, mostly by al-
lowing fires to run into the woods. The
settlement laws, under which a settler
may enter lands valuable for timber as
well as for agriculture, furnish another
means of obtaining title to public tim-
ber.

With the exception of the timber cul-
ture act, under which, in consideration
of planting a few acres of seedlings,
settlers on the treeless plains got 160
acres each, the above is the only legisla-
tion aiming to protect and promote the
planting of forests. In no other way
than under some one of these laws can
a citizen of the United States make any
use of the public forests. To show the
results of the timber-planting acty it need
only be stated that of the 38,000,000
acres entered under it, less than 1,000,-
000 acres have been patented. This
means that less than 50,000 acres have
been planted with stunted, woebegone,
almost hopeless sprouts of trees, while
at the same time the government has
allowed millions of acres of the grandest
forest trees to be stolen, or destroyed,
or sold for nothing. Under the act of
June 3, 1878, settlers in Colorado and
the Territories were allowed to cut tim-
ber for mining and agricultural purposes
from mineral land, which in the practi-
cal West means both cutting and burn-
ing anywhere and everywhere, for any
purpose, on any sort of public land.
Thus, the prospector, the miner, and
mining and railroad companies are al-

lowed by law to take all the timber they
like for their mines and roads, and the
forbidden settler, if there are no mineral
lands near his farm or stock-ranch, or
none that he knows of, can hardly be
expected to forbear taking what he
needs wherever he can find it. Timber
is as necessary as bread, and no scheme
of management failing to recognize and
properly provide for this want can pos-
sibly be maintained. In any case, it
will be hard to teach the pioneers that
it is wrong to steal government timber.
Taking from the government is with
them the same as taking from nature,
and their consciences flinch no more in
cutting timber from the wild forests than
in drawing water from a lake or river.
As for reservation and protection of for-
ests, it seems as silly and needless to
them as protection and reservation of
the ocean would be ; both appearing to
be boundless and inexhaustible.

The special land agents employed
by the General Land Office to protect
the public domain from timber depreda-
tions are supposed to collect testimony to
sustain prosecution, and to superintend
such prosecution on behalf of the gov-
ernment, which is represented by the
district attorneys. But timber - thieves
of the Western class are seldom con-
victed, for the good reason that most of
the jurors who try such cases are them-
selves as guilty as those on trial. The
effect of the present confused, discrim-
inating, and unjust system has been to
place almost the whole population in
opposition to the government; and as
conclusive of its futility, as shown by Mr.
Bowers, we need only state that during
the seven years from 1881 to 1887 in-
clusive the value of the timber reported
stolen from the government lands was
$36,719,935, and the amount recovered
was $478,073, while the cost of the
services of special agents alone was
$455,000, to which must be added the
expense of the trials. Thus for nearly
thirty-seven million dollars' worth of tim-

150

The American Forests.

her the government got less than no-
thing ; and the value of that consumed
by running fires during the same period,
without benefit even to thieves, was pro-
bably over two hundred millions of dol-
lars. Land commissioners and Secreta-
ries of the Interior have repeatedly called
attention to this ruinous state of affairs,
and asked Congress to enact the requi-
site legislation for reasonable reform.
But, busied with tariffs, etc., Congress
has given no heed to these or other ap-
peals, and our forests, the most valuable
and the most destructible of all the nat-
ural resources of the country, are being
robbed and burned more rapidly than
ever. The annual appropriation for so-
called " protection service " is hardly
sufficient to keep twenty - five timber
agents in the field, and as far as any effi-
cient protection of timber is concerned
these agents themselves might as well be
timber.

That a change from robbery and ruin
to a permanent rational policy is urgent-
ly needed nobody with the slightest know-
ledge of American forests will deny. In
the East and along the northern Pacific
coast, where the rainfall is abundant,
comparatively few care keenly what be-
comes of the trees as long as fuel and
lumber are not noticeably dear. But in
the Rocky Mountains and California and
Arizona, where the forests are inflam-
mable, and where the fertility of the
lowlands depends upon irrigation, public
opinion is growing stronger every year
in favor of permanent protection by the
federal government of all the forests
that cover the sources of the streams.
Even lumbermen in these regions, long
accustomed to steal, are now willing and
anxious to buy lumber for their mills
under cover of law : some possibly from
a late second growth of honesty, but
most, especially the small mill - owners,
simply because it no longer pays to steal
where all may not only steal, but also
destroy, and in particular because it costs
about as much to steal timber for one

mill as for ten, and therefore the ordi-
nary lumberman can no longer compete
with the large corporations. Many of
the miners find that timber is already
becoming scarce and dear on the denud-
ed hills around their mills, and they too
are asking for protection of forests, at
least against fire. The slow-going, un-
thrifty farmers, also, are beginning to
realize that when the timber is stripped
from the mountains the irrigating streams
dry up in summer, and are destructive
in winter ; that soil, scenery, and every-
thing slips off with the trees : so of course
they are coming into the ranks of tree-
friends.

Of all the magnificent ceniferous for-
ests around the Great Lakes, once the
property of the United States, scarcely
any belong to it now. They have dis-
appeared in lumber and smoke, mostly
smoke, and the government got not one
cent for them ; only the land they were
growing on was considered valuable, and
two and a half dollars an acre was
charged for it. Here and there in the
Southern States there are still consider-
able areas of timbered government land,
but these are comparatively unimpor-
tant. Only the forests of the West are
significant in size and value, and these,
although still great, are rapidly vanish-
ing. Last summer, of the unrivaled red-
wood forests of the Pacific Coast Range
the United States Forestry Commission
could not find a single quarter - section
that remained in the hands of the gov-
ernment.

Under the timber and- stone act of
1878, which might well have been called
the " dust and ashes act," any citizen of
the United States could take up one hun-
dred and sixty acres of timber land, and
by paying two dollars and a half an acre
for it obtain title. There was some vir-
tuous effort made with a view to limit
the operations of the act by requiring
that the purchaser should make affidavit
that he was entering the land exclusively
for his own use, and by not allowing any

The American Forests.

151

association to enter more than one hun-
dred and sixty acres. Nevertheless, un-
der this act wealthy corporations have
fraudulently obtained title to from ten
thousand to twenty thousand acres or
more. The plan was usually as follows :
A mill company desirous of getting title
to a large body of redwood or sugar-
pine land first blurred the eyes and ears
of the land agents, and then hired men
to enter the land they wanted, and im-
mediately deed it to the company after
a nominal compliance with the law ; false
swearing in the wilderness against the
government being held of no account.
In one case which came under the ob-
servation of Mr. Bowers, it was the prac-
tice of a lumber company to hive the
entire crew of every vessel which might
happen to touch at any port in the red-
wood belt, to enter one hundred and six-
ty acres each and immediately deed the
land to the company, in consideration
of the company's paying all expenses
and giving the jolly sailors fifty dollars
apiece for their trouble.

By such methods have our magnificent
redwoods and much of the sugar-pine
forests of the Sierra Nevada been ab-
sorbed by foreign and resident capital-
ists. Uncle Sam is not often called a
fool in business matters, yet he has sold
millions of acres of timber land at two
dollars and a half an acre on which a
single tree was worth more than a hun-
dred dollars. But this priceless land has
been patented, and nothing can be done
now about the crazy bargain. Accord-
ing to the everlasting laws of righteous-
ness, even the fraudful buyers at less
than one per cent of its value are mak-
ing little or nothing, on account of fierce
competition. The trees are felled, and
about half of each giant is left on the
ground to be converted into smoke and
ashes ; the better half is sawed into choice
lumber and sold to citizens of the United
States or to foreigners : thus robbing the
country of its glory and impoverishing
it without right benefit to anybody, — a

bad, black business from beginning to
end.

The redwood is one of the few coni-
fers that sprout from the stump and
roots, and it declares itself willing to
begin immediately to repair the dam-
age of the lumberman and also that of
the forest-burner. As soon as a red-
wood is cut down or burned it sends up a
crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which,
if allowed to grow, would in a few de-
cades attain a height of a hundred feet,
and the strongest of them would finally
become giants as great as the original
tree. Gigantic second and third growth
trees are found in the redwoods, forming
magnificent temple -like circles around
charred ruins more than a thousand years
old. But not one denuded acre in a
hundred is allowed to raise a new forest
growth. On the contrary, all the brains,
religion, and superstition of the neigh-
borhood are brought into play to prevent
a new growth. The sprouts from the
roots and stumps are cut off again and
again, with zealous concern as to the best
time and method of making death sure.
In the clearings of one of the largest
mills on the coast we found thirty men
at work, last summer, cutting off redwood
shoots " in the dark of the moon," claim-
ing that all the stumps and roots cleared
at this auspicious time would send up no
more shoots. Anyhow, these vigorous, al-
most immortal trees are killed at last, and
black stumps are now their only mon-
uments over most of the chopped and
burned areas.

The redwood is the glory of the Coast
Range. It extends along the western
slope, in a nearly continuous belt about
ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon
boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a
distance of nearly four hundred miles,
and in massive, sustained grandeur and
closeness of growth surpasses all the
other timber woods of the world. Trees
from ten to fifteen feet in diameter and
three hundred feet high are not uncom-
mon, and a few attain a height of three

152

The American Forests.

hundred and fifty feet, or even four
hundred, with a diameter at the base
of fifteen to twenty feet or more, while
the ground beneath them is a garden of
fresh, exuberant ferns, lilies, gaultheria,
and rhododendron. This grand tree, Se-
quoia sempervirens, is surpassed in size
only by its near relative, Sequoia gigan-
tea, or big tree, of the Sierra Nevada,
if indeed it is surpassed. The semper-
virens is certainly the taller of the two.
The gigantea attains a greater girth, and
is heavier, more noble in port, and more
sublimely beautiful. These two sequoias
are all that are known to exist in the
world, though in former geological times
the genus was common and had many
species. The redwood is restricted to
the Coast Range, and the big tree to the
Sierra.

As timber the redwood is too good to
live. The largest sawmills ever built are
busy along its seaward border, " with all
. the modern improvements," but so im-
mense is the yield per acre it will be long
ere the supply is exhausted. The big tree
is also to some extent being made into lum-
ber. Though far less abundant than the
redwood, it is, fortunately, less accessi-
ble, extending along the western flank of
the Sierra in a partially interrupted belt
about two hundred and fifty miles long,
at a height of from four to eight thou-
sand feet above the sea. The enormous
logs, too heavy to handle, are blasted into
manageable dimensions with gunpowder.
A large portion of the best timber is
thus shattered and destroyed, and, with
the huge knotty tops, is left in ruins for
tremendous fires that kill every tree
within their range, great and small. Still,
the species is not in danger of extinction.
It has been planted and is flourishing
over a great part of Europe, and magni-
ficent sections of the aboriginal forests
have been reserved as national and state
parks, — the Mariposa Sequoia Grove,
near Yosemite, managed by the State of
California, and th6 General Grant and
Sequoia national parks on the King's,

Kaweah, and Tule rivers, efficiently
guarded by a small troop of United
States cavalry under the direction of
the Secretary of the Interior. But there
is not a single specimen of the redwood
in any national park. Only by gift or
purchase, so far as I know, can the gov-
ernment get back into its possession a
single acre of this wonderful forest.

The legitimate demands on the forests
that have passed into private ownership,
as well as those in the hands of the gov-
ernment, are increasing every year with
the rapid settlement and upbuilding of
the country, but the methods of lumber-
ing are as yet grossly wasteful. In most
mills only .the best portions of the best
trees are used, while the ruins are left
on the ground to feed great fires which
kill much of what is left of the less de-
sirable timber, together with the seedlings
on which the permanence of the forest
depends. Thus every mill is a centre of
destruction far more severe from waste
and fire than from use. The same thing
is true of the mines, which consume and
destroy indirectly immense quantities of
timber with their innumerable fires, ac-
cidental or set to make open ways, and
often without regard to how far they run.
The prospector deliberately sets fires to
clear off the woods just where they are
densest, to lay the rocks bare and make
the discovery of mines easier. Sheep-
owners and their shepherds also set fires
everywhere through the woods in the
fall to facilitate the march of their count-
less flocks the next summer, and perhaps
in some places to improve tbe pasturage.
The axe is not yet at the root of every
tree, but the sheep is, or was before the na-
tional parks were established and guard-
ed by the military, the only effective and
reliable arm of the government free from
the blight of politics. Not only do the
shepherds, at the driest time of the year,
set fire to everything that will burn, but
the sheep consume every green leaf, not
sparing even the young conifers when
they are in a starving condition from

The, American Forests.

153

crowding, and they rake and dibble the
loose soil of the mountain sides for the
spring floods to wash away, and thus at
last leave the ground barren.

Of all the destroyers that infest the
woods the shake-maker seems the happi-
est. Twenty or thirty years ago, shakes,
a kind of long boardlike shingles split
with a mallet and a frow, were in great
demand for covering barns and sheds,
and many are used still in preference
to common shingles, especially those
made from the sugar-pine, which do not
warp or crack in the hottest sunshine.
Drifting adventurers in California, after
harvest and threshing are over, often-
times meet to discuss their plans for the
winter, and their talk is interesting.
Once, in a company of this kind, I heard
a man say, as he peacefully smoked
his pipe : " Boys, as soon as this job 's
done I 'in goin' into the duck business.
There 's big money in it, and your grub
costs nothing. Tule Joe made five hun-
dred dollars last winter on mallard and
teal. Shot 'em on the Joaquin, tied
'em in dozens by the neck, and shipped
'em to San Francisco. And when he
was tired wading in the sloughs and
touched with rheumatiz, he just knocked
off on ducks, and went to the Contra
Costa hills for dove and quail. It 's a
mighty good business, and you 're your
own boss, and the whole thing 's fun."

Another of the company, a bushy-
bearded fellow, with a trace of brag in
his voice, drawled out : " Bird business is
well enough for some, but bear is my
game, with a deer and a California lion
thrown in now and then for change.
There 's always a market for bear grease,
and sometimes you can sell the hams.
They 're good as hog hams any day.
And you are your own boss in my busi-
ness, too, if the bears ain't too big and
too many for you. Old grizzlies I de-
spise, — they want cannon to kill 'em ;
but the blacks and browns are beauties
for grease, and when once I get 'em just
right, and draw a bead on 'em, I fetch

'em every time." Another said he was
going to catch up a lot of mustangs as
soon as the rains set in, hitch them to a
gang-plough, and go to farming on the
San Joaquin plains for wheat. But most
preferred the shake business, until some-
thing more profitable and as sure could
be found, with equal comfort and inde-
pendence.

With a cheap mustang or mule to
carry a pair of blankets, a sack of flour, a
few pounds of coffee, and an axe, a frow,
and a cross - cut saw, the shake - maker
ascends the mountains to the pine belt
where it is most accessible, usually by
some mine or mill road. Then he strikes
off into the virgin woods, where the
sugar-pine, king of all the hundred spe-
cies of pines in the world in size and
beauty, towers on the open sunny slopes
of the Sierra in the fullness of its glory.
Selecting a favorable spot for a cabin
near a meadow with a stream, he un-
packs his animal and stakes it out on the
meadow. Then he chops into one after
another of the pines, until he finds one
that he feels sure will split freely, cuts
this down, saws off a section four feet
long, splits it, and from this first cut,
perhaps seven feet in diameter, he gets
shakes enough for a cabin and its fur-
niture, — walls, roof, door, bedstead, ta-
ble, and stool. Besides his labor, only a
few pounds of nails are required. Sap-
ling poles form the frame of the airy
building, usually about six feet by eight
in size, on which the shakes are nailed,
with the edges overlapping. A few bolts
from the same section that the shakes were
made from are split into square sticks
and built up to form a chimney, the in-
side and interspaces being plastered and
filled in with mud. Thus, with abun-
dance of fuel, shelter and comfort by his
own fireside are secured. Then he goes
to work sawing and splitting for the
market, tying the shakes in bundles of
fifty or a hundred. They are four feet
long, four inches wide, and about one
fourth of an inch thick. The first few

154

The American Forests.

thousands he sells or trades at the near-
est mill or store, getting provisions in
exchange. Then he advertises, in what-
ever way he can, that he has excellent
sugar-pine shakes for sale, easy of access
and cheap.

Only the lower, perfectly clear, free-
splitting portions of the giant pines are
used, — perhaps ten to twenty feet from
a tree two hundred and fifty in height ;
all the rest is left a mass of ruins, to rot
or to feed the forest fires, while thou-
sands are hacked deeply and rejected in
proving the grain. Over nearly all of the
more accessible slopes of the Sierra and
Cascade mountains in southern Oregon,
at a height of from three to six thousand
feet above the sea, and for a distance
of about six hundred miles, this waste
and confusion extends. Happy robbers !
dwelling in the most beautiful woods,
in the most salubrious climate, breath-
ing delightful doors both day and night,
drinking cool living water, — roses and
lilies at their feet in the spring, shed-
ding fragrance and ringing bells as if
cheering them on in their desolating
work. There is none to say them nay.
They buy no land, pay no taxes, dwell
in a paradise with no forbidding angel
either from Washington or from heaven.
Every one of the frail shake shanties is
a centre of destruction, and the extent
of the ravages wrought in this quiet way
is in the aggregate enormous.

It is not generally known that, not-
withstanding the immense quantities of
timber cut every year for foreign and
home markets and mines, from five to
ten times as much is destroyed as is
used, chiefly by running forest fires that
only the federal government can stop.
Travelers through the West in summer
are not likely to forget the fire-work dis-
played along the various railway tracks.
Thoreau, when contemplating the de-
struction of the forests on the east side
of the continent, said that soon the coun-
try would be so bald that every man
would have to grow whiskers to hide its

nakedness, but he thanked God that at
least the sky was safe. Had he gone
West he would have found out that the
sky was not safe ; for all through the
summer months, over most of the moun-
tain regions, the smoke of mill and forest
fires is so thick and black that no sun-
beam can pierce it. The whole sky, with
clouds, sun, moon, and stars, is simply
blotted out. There is no real sky and
no scenery. Not a mountain is left in
the landscape. At least none is in sight
from the lowlands, and they all might
as well be on the moon, as far as scenery
is concerned. •

The half dozen transcontinental rail-
road companies advertise the beauties
of their lines in gorgeous many-colored
folders, each claiming its as the " scenic
route." " The route of superior desola-
tion " — the smoke, dust, and ashes route
— would be a more truthful description.
Every train rolls on through dismal
smoke and barbarous melancholy ruins ;
and the companies might well cry in
their advertisements : " Come ! travel
our way. Ours is the blackest. It is
the only genuine Erebus route. The
sky is black and the ground is black,
and on either side there is a continuous
border of black stumps and logs and
blasted trees appealing to heaven for
help as if still half alive, and their mute
eloquence is most interestingly touching.
The blackness is perfect. On account of
the superior skill of our workmen, ad-
vantages of climate, and the kind of trees,
the charring is generally deeper along
our line, and the ashes ware deeper, and
the confusion and desolation displayed
can never be rivaled. No other route
on this continent so fully illustrates the
abomination of desolation." Such a
claim would be reasonable, as each se.ems
the worst, whatever route you chance to
take.

Of course a way had to be cleared
through the woods. But the felled tim-
ber is not worked up into firewood for
the engines and into lumber for the

The American Forests.

155

company's use : it is left lying in vulgar
confusion, and is fired from time to time
by sparks from locomotives or by the
workmen camping along the line. The
fires, whether accidental or set, are al-
lowed to run into the woods as far as
they may, thus assuring comprehensive
destruction. The directors of a line
that guarded against fires, and cleared
a clean gap edged with living trees, and
fringed and mantled with the grass and
flowers and beautiful seedlings that are
ever ready and willing to spring up,
might justly boast of the beauty of their
road ; for nature is always ready to heal
every scar. But there is no such road
on the western side of the continent.
Last summer, in the Rocky Mountains,
I saw six fires started by sparks from
a locomotive within a distance of three
miles, and nobody was in sight to pre-
vent them from spreading. They might
run into the adjacent forests and burn
the timber from hundreds of square
miles ; not a man in the State would
care to spend an hour in fighting them,
as long as his own fences and buildings
were not threatened.

Notwithstanding all the waste and use
which have been going on unchecked
like a storm for more than two centu-
ries, it is not yet too late, though it is
high time, for the government to begin
a rational administration of its forests.
About seventy million acres it still owns,
— enough for all the country, if wisely
used. These residual forests are gen-
erally on mountain slopes, just where
they are doing the most good, and
where their removal would be followed
by the greatest number of evils ; the
lands they cover are too rocky and high
for agriculture, and can never be made
as valuable for any other crop as for the
present crop of trees. It has been shown
over and over again that if these moun-
tains were to be stripped of their trees
and underbrush, and kept bare and sod-
less by hordes of sheep and the innu-
merable fires the shepherds set, besides

those of the millmen, prospectors, shake-
makers, and all sorts of adventurers, both
lowlands and mountains would speedily
become little better than deserts, com-
pared with their present beneficent fer-
tility. During heavy rainfalls and while
the winter accumulations of snow were
melting, the larger streams would swell
into destructive torrents ; cutting deep,
rugged-edged gullies, carrying away the
fertile humus and soil as well as sand and
rocks, filling up and overflowing their
lower channels, and covering the lowland
fields with raw detritus. Drought and
barrenness would follow.

In their natural condition, or under
wise management, keeping out destruc-
tive sheep, preventing fires, selecting the
trees that should be cut for lumber, and
preserving the young ones and the shrubs
and sod of herbaceous vegetation, these
forests would be a never failing fountain
of wealth and beauty. The cool shades
of the forest give rise to moist beds and
currents of air, and the sod of grasses
and the various flowering plants and
shrubs thus fostered, together with the
network and sponge of tree roots, absorb
and hold back the rain and the waters
from melting snow, compelling them to
ooze and percolate and flow gently
through the soil in streams that never
dry. All the pine needles and rootlets
and blades of grass, and the fallen de-
caying trunks of trees, are dams, storing
the bounty of the clouds and dispensing
it in perennial life-giving streams, in-
stead of allowing it to gather suddenly
and rush headlong in short-lived devas-
tating floods. Everybody on the dry
side of the continent is beginning to find
this out, and, in view of the waste going
on, is growing more and more anxious
for government protection. The out-
cries we hear against forest reserva-
tions come mostly from thieves who are
wealthy and steal timber by wholesale.
They have so long been allowed to steal
and destroy in peace that any impedi-
ment to forest robbery is denounced as

156

The American Forests.

a cruel and irreligious interference with
" vested rights," likely to endanger the
repose of all ungodly welfare.

Gold, gold, gold ! How strong a voice
that metal has !

" 0 wae for the siller, it is sae preva'lin'."

Even in Congress, a sizable chunk of gold,
carefully concealed, will outtalk and out-
fight all the nation on a subject like for-
estry, well smothered in ignorance, and
in which the money interests of only a
few are conspicuously involved. Under
these circumstances, the bawling, blether-
ing oratorical stuff drowns the voice of
God himself. Yet the dawn of a new day
in forestry is breaking. Honest citizens
see that only the rights of the govern-
ment are being trampled, not those of
the settlers. Merely what belongs to all
alike is reserved, and every acre that is
left should be held together under the
federal government as a basis for a gen-
eral policy of administration for the pub-
lic good. The people will not always be
deceived by selfish opposition, whether
from lumber and mining corporations or
from sheepmen and prospectors, however
cunningly brought forward underneath
fables and gold.

Emerson says that things refuse to be
mismanaged long. An exception would
seem to be found in the case of our for-
ests, which nave been mismanaged ra-
ther long, and now come desperately
near being like smashed eggs and spilt
milk. Still, in the long run the world
does not move backward. The wonder-
ful advance made in the last few years,
in creating four national parks in the
West, and thirty forest reservations, em-
bracing nearly forty million acres ; and
in the planting of the borders of streets
and highways and spacious parks in all
the great cities, to satisfy the natural
taste and hunger for landscape beauty
and righteousness that God has put, in
some measure, into every human being
and animal, shows the trend of awaken-
ing public opinion. The making of the

far-famed New York Central Park was
opposed by even good men, with mis-
guided pluck, perseverance, and ingenu-
ity ; but straight right won its way, and
now that park is appreciated. So we con-
fidently believe it will be with our great
national parks and forest reservations.
There will be a period of indifference on
the part of the rich, sleepy with wealth,
and of the toiling millions, sleepy with
poverty, most of whom never saw a for-
est ; a period of screaming protest and
objection from the plunderers, who are
as unconscionable and enterprising as
Satan. But light is surely coming, and
the friends of destruction will preach
and bewail in vain.

The United States government has
always been proud of the welcome it has
extended to good men of every nation,
seeking freedom and homes and bread.
Let them be welcomed still as nature
welcomes them, to the woods as well as
to the prairies and plains. No place is
too good for good men, and still there is
room. They are invited to heaven, and
may well be allowed in America. Every
place is made better by them. Let them
be as free to pick gold and gems from
the hills, to cut and hew, dig and plant,
for homes and bread, as the birds are to
pick berries from the wild bushes, and
moss and leaves for nests. The ground
will be glad to feed them, and the pines
will come down from the mountains for
their homes as willingly as the cedars
came from Lebanon for Solomon's tem-
ple. Nor will the woods be the worse
for this use, or their befiign influences
be diminished any more than the sun is
diminished by shining. Mere destroyers,
however, tree - killers, spreading death
and confusion in the fairest groves and
gardens ever planted, let the government
hasten to cast them out and make an
end of them. For it must be told again
and again, and be burningly borne in
mind, that just now, while protective
measures are being deliberated languidly,
destruction and use are speeding on faster

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

157

and farther every day. The axe and
saw are insanely busy, chips are flying
thick as snowflakes, and every summer
thousands of acres of priceless forests,
with their underbrush, soil, springs, cli-
mate, scenery, and religion, are vanish-
ing away in clouds of smoke, while, ex-
cept in the national parks, not one forest
guard is employed.

All sorts of local laws and regulations
have been tried and found wanting, and
the costly lessons of our own experience,
as well as that of every civilized nation,
show conclusively that the fate of the
remnant of our forests is in the hands
of the federal government, and that if
the remnant is to be saved at all, it must
be saved quickly.

Any fool can destroy trees. They can-
not run away ; and if they could, they
would still be destroyed, — chased and
hunted down as long as fun or a dollar

could be got out of their bark hides,
branching horns, or magnificent bole
backbones. Few that fell trees plant
them ; nor would planting avail much
towards getting back anything like the
noble primeval forests. During a man's
life only saplings can be grown, in the
place of the old trees — tens of centuries
old — that have beien destroyed. It took
more than three thousand years to make
some of the trees in these Western woods,
— trees that are still standing in perfect
strength and beauty, waving and sing-
ing in the mighty forests of the Sierra.
Through all the wonderful, eventful cen-
turies since Christ's time — and long be-
fore that — God has cared for these
trees, saved them from drought, disease,
avalanches, and a thousand straining,
leveling tempests and floods ; but he can-
not save them from fools, — only Uncle
Sam can do that.

John Muir.

SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF DEAN SWIFT.

JOHN FORSTKR, who lived to complete
but one of the three volumes in which he
had planned to write the Life of Jona-
than Swift, speaks in the preface of his
hero's correspondence " with his friend
Knightley Chetwode, of Woodbrooke,
during the seventeen years (1714-1731)
which followed his appointment to the
deanery of St. Patrick's. Of these let-
ters," Forster goes on to say, " the rich-
est addition to the correspondence of this
most masterly of English letter-writers
since it was first collected, more does
not need to be said here ; but of the
late representative of the Chetwode fam-
ily I crave permission to add a word.
His rare talents and taste suffered from
his delicate health and fastidious tem-
perament, but in my life I have seen few

things more delightful than his pride
in the connection of his race and name
with the companionship of Swift. Such
was the jealous care with which he pre-
served the letters, treasuring them as an
heirloom of honour, that he would never
allow them to be'moved from his family
seat ; and when, with his own hand, he
had made careful transcript of them for
me, I had to visit him at Woodbrooke
to collate his copy with the originals.
There I walked with him through ave-
nues of trees which Swift was said to
have planted."

As Forster did not bring down the Life
later than 1711, — three years and more
before the first of these letters was writ-
ten, — he made scarcely any use of the
correspondence. He refers to it twice,
and twice only. On his death, the copy
of the originals, with the corrections he

158

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

had made, was returned to Woodbrooke.
It has lately come into my possession.
What wonder would have seized on
Swift's mind had it been foretold to him
that these letters of his, after lying hid-
den nearly two hundred years, were first
to see the light of day in an American
magazine ! America, to borrow the words
of Edmund Burke, "served for little
more than to amuse him with stories of
savage men and uncouth manners." For
him " the angel did not draw up the
curtain, and unfold the rising glories of
the country." He rarely mentions the
settlements in his writings ; and when
lie does, it is for the most part with ig-
norance and contempt. He regrets that
England's long and ruinous war with
France had kept " Queen Anne's care
of religion from reaching her American
plantations. These noble countries," he
continues, "stocked by numbers from
hence, whereof too many are in no very
great reputation for faith or morals,
will be a perpetual reproach to us, until
some better care be taken for cultivat-
ing Christianity among them." In his
Modest Proposal for Preventing the
Children of Poor People in Ireland
from being a Burden to their Parents
or Themselves, he says, " I have been
assured by a very knowing American of
my acquaintance in London, that a young
healthy child, well nursed, is at a year
old a most delicious, nourishing, and
wholesome food, whetker stewed, roast-
ed, baked or boiled." His strange igno-
rance of the natural history of America
is shown in one of his papers in The
Spectator, where he makes some Indian
kings who had visited London say that
" whigs and tories engage when they
meet as naturally as the elephant and
the rhinoceros."

Of the intimacy of Knightley Chet-
wode with Swift nothing, apparently, was
known to the dean's earlier biographers.
He is not mentioned in the more recent
Life by Craik. His name is found only
once in the twenty-four volumes of Nich-

ols's edition of Swift's works. He was
sprung from a family which for some
centuries had its seat at Warkworth, near
Banbury, where the tombs of many gen-
erations of Chetwodes can still be seen.
In the reign of James I., the head of
the house ruined himself in vainly assert-
ing his claim to the Barony De Wahull.
Warkworth was sold. His son went into
the Church, became Dean of Gloucester,
and died on the edge of the Promised
Land, a bishop elect. It was the dean's
son who was Swift's correspondent. He
married the daughter and heiress of
Richard Brooking of Totness, and settled
in Ireland, near Portarlington, Queen's
County, about fifty miles southwest of
Dublin. The house which he built still
stands in its main fabric. He called it
Woodbrooke, a name compounded of the
second syllable of Chetwode and the first
of Brooking.

Swift's first letter to Chetwode was
written less than two months after the
queen's death had broken the whole
scheme of his life, and sent him back
to Ireland a soured and querulous man.
He who had been hand in glove with
great ministers of state was now to be
bullied by Dublin's archbishop and pelt-
ed by its mob. " I '11 lay you a groat,
Mr. Dean, I don't know you," said an
Irishman to him after his fall, with whom,
in the days of his prosperity, he had
lived in the greatest intimacy. " I '11 lay
you a groat, my Lord, I don't know you,"
Swift retorted to him, some years later,
when " the whirligig of time had brought
about its revenges," and he was the fa-
vorite, if not of the crown, at all events
of the people. Before those happier days
came he had long " to shelter himself in
unenvied obscurity." During the seven
years which followed the accession of
George I., Swift continued, to use his
own words, " in the greatest privacy.
This manner of life," he added, " was
not taken up out of any sort of affection,
but merely to avoid giving offence, and
for fear of provoking party zeal."

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

159

" And oh ! how short are human schemes !
Here ended all our golden dreams."

It was in these lines that he mourned
the ruin which had come on himself and
his friends by the death of a foolish wo-
man. The blow surely was one which a
great man should have borne without a
lamentation prolonged from year to year.
Of Anne no one now thinks without a
certain feeling of good-natured contempt.
She is the last person whom we associate
with her own age. The age of Queen
Anne is the age of Marlborough, of
Addison and Steele, of Swift and Pope,
of Prior and Gay, and not of the weak,
silly woman who sat on the throne. In
nothing does Swift more show that vein
of baseness which ran through him than
in his dejection at her death and in his
estimate of her character. In his will he
described her as "of ever glorious, im-
mortal, and truly pious memory, — the
real nursing mother of her kingdoms."
In his sixty-third year he wrote to Lord
Bolingbroke, " I was forty-seven years
old when I began to think of death." It
was the queen's death, he implies, which
first turned his thoughts towards mor-
tality. In his lamentations over her we
seem to hear " a broken worldling wail."
The blow which had fallen upon him was
indeed severe. His great friends had
lost their places ; some of them had fled
across the sea, others were in the Tower,
while he himself was a suspected man.
Nevertheless, why should he have been
greatly troubled in mind ? Why should
he have given way to " reiterated wail-
ings " ? He was the proud patriot who
boasted that

" Fair liberty was all his cry ;
For her he stood prepared to die."

He was the Christian philosopher

" Who kept the tenour of his mind
To merit well of humankind."

His querulousness never came to an end,
not even when he had shaken off the
dread of prosecutions, and had gained
a high place, not among ministers and

Courtiers, but in the love of the people
among whom his lot was cast.

His correspondence withChetwode cov-
ers both these periods, — his downfall
and his dejection, his second elevation
and his haughty pride. It covers, too,
the rapid growth of that terrible malady
which far more even than disappointed
ambition clouded his, life. In the midst
of all his moody discontent and his suf-
ferings he shows that "fidelity in friend-
ship " for which he was praised by one
who knew him well. His advice and his
aid were for many years at Chetwocle's
service. It is true that their friendship
was at last dissolved in anger, but it
seems likely that the chief blame of the
rupture did not lie at Swift's door. In
the second year of their correspondence
he had to rebuke Chetwode for " an
ugly suspicion ; " as one " who has," he
added, " more of punctilio and suspicion
than I could wish." It was an ugly sus-
picion which parted them in the end.
The squire of Woodbrooke, as is shown
by the last letters which passed between
them, was a suspicious man. Swift, more-
over, was not an easy man to deal with.
" He predominated over his companions
with very high ascendancy, and probably
would bear none over whom he could
not predominate. To give him advice
was, in the style of his friend Delany,
' to venture to speak to him.' "

In preparing these letters for publica-
tion, I may justly claim some small share
of credit for my moderation in sparing
my readers most of the learned notes
which I had accumulated. Had I only
had them at my mercy between the cov-
ers of a book, I could have found it in
my heart to bestow on them all my te-
diousness. I could still find it ; but let
them be of good cheer : they are under
the safeguard of an editor who will not
tolerate dullness, even though it should
come robed in erudition.

*So much by way of introduction. It
is time to raise the curtain, and to let
Swift spaak for himself.

160

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

[To Knightley Chetwood Esqre at his House
near Port-Arlington in the Queen's County.]

[pr post.]

DUBLIN. Septr 27-1714.
SR [SiB], — The Person who brought
me your Letter delivered it in such a
Manner, that I thought I was at Court
again, and that the Bearer wanted a
Place ; and when I received it, I had
my answer ready to give him after Pem-
sall, that I would do him what service I
could. But I was easy when I saw your
Hand at the Bottom, and then I recol-
lected I was in Ireld [Ireland], that the
Queen was dead, the Ministry changed,
and I was onely the poor Dean of St.
Patricks. My Chapter joyns with me :
we have consulted a Lawyer, who (as it
is usuall) makes ours a very good Case ;
my desires in that point are very moder-
ate, onely to break the Lease, and turn
out nine Singing men. I should have
been with you before this time, if it had
been possible for me to find a Horse ; I
have had twenty sent to me ; I have got
one, but it is good for nothing ; and my
English horse was so ill I was forced to
send him to Grass. — There is another
Evil, that I want a Stock of Hay, and
I cannot get any : I remember Prince
Butler used to say, By my Soul there is
not a Drop of Water in the Thames for
me. This is my Case ; I have got a
Fool to lend me 50 Pounds, and now I
can neither get Hay nor Horse, and the
Season of the former is going. — How-
ever if I cannot soon get a Horse, I will
send for my own from Grass, and in two
days endeavour to reach you ; for I hear
Octobr is a very good month.

Jordan has been often telling my
Agent of some idle Pretence he has to a
bitt of one of my Parishes worth usually
about 5lb p. ami. [five pounds per annum],
and now the Queen is dead perhaps he
may talk warmer of it. But we in pos-
session always answer in those Cases, that
we must not injure our Successors. Those

idlej claims are usual in Irel'1, where there
ha^ been so much Confusion in Parishes,
bu't they never come to anything.

1 1 desire my humble Service may be
presented to Mrs Chetwood.
\ I am your most obedient

humble Servt

1 JON : SWIFT.

Bept. 28. This was writt last night not
knowing the Post day ; I now tell you
that by noise and Bone-fires I suppose
the Pacquets are come in with account
of -the King's arrivall.

The " singing men " of his cathedral
gave Swift some trouble. " My amuse-
ments," he wrote to Pope, " are defend-
ing my small dominions against the arch-
bishop and endeavouring to reduce my
rebellious choir."

His difficulty about getting a good
horse lasted at least seven years longer.
For providing post-horses he knew of a
simple expedient. More than a century
later, Miss Edgeworth accompanied Sir
Walter Scott and his son the captain on
a tour in Ireland. " When some diffi-
culty occurred about horses Sir Walter
said, ' Swift, in one of his letters, when
no horses were to be had, says, " If we
had but a captain of horse to swear for
us we should have had the horses at
once ; " now here we have the captain
of horse, but the landlord is not moved
even by him.' "

" Prince Butler " wag Brinsley Butler.
He and his brother Theophilus (after-
wards first and second Barons of New-
town) were at Trinity College, Dublin,
with Swift. " Brinsley " he cut down
to "Prince," "Theophilus" to "Ophy."

The pretense to a bit of one of his
parishes he thus humorously mentions
in a letter to Lord Bolingbroke : " I
would retire if I could ; but my country
seat, where I have an acre of ground,
is gone to ruin. The wall of my own
apartment is fallen down, and I want
mud to rebuild it, and straw to thatch it.
Besides a spiteful neighbour has seized

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

161

on six feet of ground, carried off my
trees, and spoiled my grove."

George I. arrived at Greenwich on
September 18, ten days before the news
reached Dublin.

n.
DUBLIN. Ocber 6th 1714

SR, — I acknowledge both your Let-
ters, and with any common Fortune
might have spared you the Trouble of
reading this by coming my self : I used to
value a good Revenue, because I thought
it exempted a man from the little sub-
altern Cares of Life ; and so it would if
the Master were wise, or Servants had
honesty and common Sense : A man who
is new in a House or an Office has so
many important Nothings to take up his
time, that he cannot do what he would
— I have got in Hay ; but my Groom
offended against the very letter of a Pro-
verb, and stackt it in a rainy day, so
that it is now smoaking like a Chimny ;
my Stable is a very Hospitall for sick
Horses. A Joyner who was to shelve a
Room for my Library has employed a
fortnight, and yet not finished what he
promised in six days. One Occasion I
have to triumph, that in six weeks time
I have been able to get rid of a great
Cat, that belonged to the late Dean, and
almost poisoned the House. An old
Woman under the same circumstances
I can not yet get rid of, or find a Maid.
Yet in Spight of all these Difficultyes, I
hope to share some part, of October at
Wood-brook. But I scorn your Coach —
for I find upon Tryall I can ride.

Indeed I am as much disquieted at the
Turn of publick Affairs as you or any
man can be. It concerns us Spirituall
men in a tender temporall Point. Every
thing is as bad as possible ; and I think
if the Pretender ever comes over, the pre-
sent men in Power have traced traced
[sic] him the Way — Yr Servant is just
come for this, and I am dressing fast for
Prayers.

Yr most obed* &c. J. S.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 11

Irish servants Swift attacked from
the pulpit. " Are our goods embezzled,
wasted and destroyed ? is our house
burnt to the ground ? It is by the sloth,
the drunkenness or the villany of ser-
vants. Are we robbed and murdered in
our beds ? It is by confederacy with our
servants. . . . Nay the very mistakes,
follies, blunders and, absurdities of those
in our service are able to ruffle and
discompose the mildest nature, and are
often of such consequence as to put whole
families into confusion."

He described his library as " a little
one. A great library always makes me
melancholy, where the best author is as
much squeezed and as obscure as a por-
ter at a coronation."

He was exact in his daily attendance
at the cathedral service. Three weeks
before the date of this letter, he wrote,
" I live a country life in town, see no-
body, and go every day once to prayers ;
and hope in a few months to grow as
stupid as the present situation of affairs
will require." He used to read prayers
every evening to his household, but so
secretly that a friend had lived with him
more than six months without discover-
ing it.

in.
DUBLIN. Octber 20th 1714.

SR, — The Bishop of Dromore is ex-
pected this night in Town on purpose to
restore his Cat, who by her perpetual
noise and Stink must be certainly a whig.
In complyance to yr observation of old
women's tenderness to each other, I have
got one as old and ugly as that the Bish-
op left, for the Ladys of my Acquaint-
ance would not allow me one with a
tolerable Face tho I most earnestly in-
terceded for it. If I had considered the
uncei'tainty of weather in our CHmat,
I should have made better use of that
short sunshine than I did ; but I was
amusing myself to make the Publick Hay
and neglected my own — Do you mean
my Lady Jenny Forbes that was ? I had
almost forgot her. But when Love is

162

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

gone, Friendship continues. I thought
she had not at this time of day been at
a loss how to bring forth a child. I find
you are ready" at kindling other peoples
bonfires than yr own. I had one last
night par maniere d'acquit, and to save
my windows.

Your closet of 18 foot square is a
perfect Gasconnade I suppose it is the
largest Room in yr House or rather two
Rooms struck out into one. I thank you
for your Present of it, but I have too
many rooms already, I wish you had all
I could spare, tho' I were to give you
money along with them. Since you talk
of your Cave de brique, I have bought
46 dozen Bottles and want nothing but
the Circumstance of Wine to be able to
entertain a Friend. You are mistaken,
I am no Coy Beauty but rather with sub-
mission like a Wench who has made an
Assignation and when the day comes,
has not a Petticoat to appear in. I am
plagued to death with turning away and
taking Servants, my Scotch groom ran
away from me ten days ago and robbed
me and several of the neighbourhood. I
cannot stir from hence till a great Vessell
of Alicant is bottled and till my Horse
is in a condition to travel and my chim-
ney piece made — I never wanted so
much a little country air, being plagued
with perpetual Colds and twenty Ayl-
ments yet I cannot stir at present as
things stand.

I am yr most obedient &c.

The Bishop of Dromore, Dr. John
Sterne, was " the late Dean " of a preced-
ing letter. Swift, in some lines written
on a window of the deanery house, de-
scribes the change which his promotion
had caused : —

" In the days of good John, if yon came here

to dine,
You had choice of good meat, but no choice

of good wine.

In Jonathan's reign, if you come here to eat,
You have choice of good wine, but no choice

of good meat."

Swift was fond of wine. In his old age
he wrote to a London alderman, " My
chief support is French wine, which,
although not equal to yours, I drink a
bottle to myself every day." " He was
always careful of his money," writes John-
son, " and was therefore no liberal en-
tertainer, but was less frugal of his wine
than of his meat. At last his avarice
grew too powerful for his kindness ; he
would refuse a bottle of wine, and in
Ireland no man visits where he cannot
drink." " You tell us," Swift himself*
once wrote to a friend, " your wine is
bad and that the clergy do not fre-
quent your house, which we look upon
as tautology."

In his abuse of the Whigs Swift almost
surpassed Johnson, who maintained that
the first Whig was the devil, and that
" the Whigs of America multiply with
the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes."
Nevertheless, the dean said, and said
with much truth, that " he was always a
Whig in politics." It was in church mat-
ters that he was a Tory.

The bonfire was kindled on account
of the coronation of George I. In some
towns in England the window - break-
ing was all the other way. The cry
of the Bristol rioters, for instance, was,
" Damn all foreign governments." In
Dublin the mob was Protestant and

Hanoverian.

IV.

[Indorsed, " A pencil note fr Wodebrook where
he came in K. C's [Knightley Chetwode's]
absence dining out."]

Not to disturb you in the good work
of a Godfather nor spoil yr dinner,
I onely design Mrs Chetwode and you
would take care not to be benighted ;
but come when you will you shall be
heartily welcome to my House. The
children's Tutor is gone out and so there
was no Pen and ink to be had.

WOODBROOK. Novr 6'*
past one in the afternoon.

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

163

[Indorsed, " This was my advice to a young
Lady."]

I look [sic] over the inclosed some
time ago, and again just now ; it con-
tains many good Things, and wants
many alterations. I have made one or
two, and pointed at others, but an Author
can only sett his own Things right.
Friday.

VI.

[per messenger.]

DUBLIN. Decbr 3. 1714.
SB, — Mr Graves never came to me
till this morning, like a vile Man as he
is. I had no Letters from Engld; to vex
me except on the publick Account, T am
now teazed by an impertinent woman,
come to renew her Lease, the Baron and
she are talking together — I have just
squired her down, and there is at pre-
sent no body with me but — yes now
Mr Wall is come in — and now another

— You must stay ; — Now I am full of
company again and the Baron is in hast,

— I will write to you in a Post or two.
Manly is not Commissnr nor expects it.
I had a very ingenious Tory Ballad sent
me printed, but receiving it in a Whig
house I suddenly read it, and gave it to
a Gentleman with a wink, and ordered
him to burn it, but he threw another Pa-
per into the Fire. I hope to send you
a Copy of it. I have seen nobody since
I came. Bolton's Patent for St. War-
braw is passed, and I believe I shall
find Difficultyes with the Chapter about
a Successor for him. I thought to give
the Baron some good Coffee, and they
made it so bad, that I would hardly give
it to Wharton. I here send some Snuff
to MrB Chetwood ; the Baron will tell
you by what Snatches I write this Paper.
I am yrs &c.

My humble Service to Dame Plyant.

Manley was Postmaster-General of
Ireland in 1718. Swift, in that year,
sending a letter by private hand, wrote

by way of explanation, " Mr Manley has
been guilty of opening letters that were
not directed to him."

The dean prided himself on his skill
in making coffee. He once said to a lady
who asked for a cup, " You shall have
some in perfection ; for when I was
chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, who
was in the government here, I was so
poor I was obliged to keep a coffee-
house, and all the nobility resorted to it
to talk treason." He thereupon made
the coffee himself. Lord Wharton, to
whom he would hardly have given the
bad coffee, had been Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland. " He was," said Swift, " the
most universal villain that I knew." His
son was scarcely less profligate. " One
day he recounted to the dean several
wild frolics he had run through. ' My
Lord,' said Swift, 'let me recommend
one more to you — take a frolic to be
good ; rely upon it, you will find it the
pleasantest frolic you ever were engaged
in.' "

" Dame Plyant " was no doubt Chet-
wode's wife.

VII.
[pr private -hand.]

Janry 3d 17}£

... I believe you may be out of the
Peace, because, I hear almost all our
Friends are so. I am sorry Toryes are
put out of the King's Peace : he may
live to want them in it again. My Vis-
itation is to be this day Sennight, after
which I soon intend for the county of
Meath : I design great Things at my
Visitation, and I believe my Chapter
will joyn with me : I hear they think
me a smart Dean : and that I am for
doing good : my notion is, that if a
man cannot mend the Publick he should
mend old shoes if he can do no better ;
and therefore I endeavor in the little
Sphere I am placed to do all the good it
is capable of. As for judicious John,
he is walked off : yr curssed good Ale
ruined him. He turned such a Drunk-
ard and Swaggerer, I could bear him no

164

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Sivift.'

longer : I reckon every visit I make you
will spoil a Servant. I shall come with
2 Servants and 3 Horses, but a Horse
and a Serv* I shall leave at Trim. I
hear an universall good Character of Mr
Davise ; but however I shall have my
eye over him and the lads. As for news,
the D 1 a bitt do I ever hear, or suf-
fer to be told me. I saw in a Print that
the K — - [King] has taken Care to
limit the Clergy what they shall Preach ;
and that has given me an Inclination to
preach what is forbid : for I do not con-
ceive there is any Law yet for it. My
humble Service to Dame Ply ant. You
talk of ye Hay but say nothing of ye
Wine. I doubt it is not so good as at
Woodbrook : and I doubt I shall not
like Martrey half so well as Wood-
brook. . . .

The government, threatened by inva-
sion from without and insurrection from
within, had no hesitation in removing
Tories from the magistracy. Three
even of the English judges lost their
places on the king's accession.

Trim, where Swift was to leave a
horse and a servant, is a small town
twenty miles from Dublin, pleasantly
mentioned in Thackeray's lines about
the Duke of Wellington : —

" By memory backwards borne,

Perhaps his thoughts did stray
To that, old house where he was born
Upon the first of May.

" Perhaps he did recall

The ancient towers of Trim ;
And County Meath and Dangan Hall
They did revisit him."

At Laracor, close by, was Swift's vicar-
age, where he spent some of his happi-
est days. In his absence it was com-
monly inhabited by Stella and her com-
panion ; when he returned they moved
into Trim. The garden which he laid
out, the willows which he planted, the
winding walk and the pool which he
made, have long disappeared. Of the
vicarage nothing is standing but the

fragment of an old wall. His duties as
parish priest were light. " I am this
minute very busy," he wrote, " being to
preach before an audience of at least
fifteen people, most of them gentle and
all simple."

VIII.
[private hand.]

DUBLIN Mar. 31. 1715.

SR, — I have been these ten weeks re-
solving every week to go down to Trim,
and "from thence to Martry ; and have
not been able to compass it, tho' my
Country Affairs very much required my
Presence. This week I was fully de-
termined to have been at Trim, but my
Vicars hinder me, their Prosecutions be-
ing now just come to an Issue, and I
cannot stir from hence till the end of
April, when nothing but want of Health
or Horses shall hinder me. I can tell
you no news. I have read but one
Newspaper since I left you. And I
never suffer any to be told me. I send
this by my Steward, who goes to Trim,
to look after my Rents at Laracor —
Pray present my most humble service to
Dame Plyant ; I suppose you do not very
soon intend to remove to the Queen's
County ; when I come to Trim I shall
after a few days there, stay awhile with
you, and go thence to Arthy [Athy] ; and
thence if possible to Connaught and half
round Ireld ; I hope yr little fire Side is
well. I am with great Truth and Es-
teem

Yr most obd1 humble ser1

J. S.

Is it impossible to get a plain easy
sound trotting Horse ?

The vicars under whose prosecutions
Swift suffered were the vicars-choral of
his cathedral, the " singing men " of his
first letter. Of his ignorance of public
news he protests somewhat too often and
too much. Some years later he wrote
to Pope : " I neither know the names
nor number of the Royal Family which
now reigns farther than the prayer-book

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

165

informs me. I cannot tell who is Chan-
cellor, who are Secretaries, nor with what
nations we are in peace or war."

IX.

DUBLIN. April 6th 1715.

SR, — Your Messenger brought me
yr Letter when I was under a very bad
Barbers hands, meaning my own ; I sent
for him up, because I heard he was some-
thing Gentlemannish, and he told me he
returned to-day ; so that I have onely
time to thank you for yr letter, and as-
sure you, that bar accidents I will be in
Trim in a fortnight — I detest the Price
of tbatHorseiyoujmention, and as for your
Mare I will never trust her ; my Grand-
mother used to say that good Feeding
never brings good Footing ; I am just
going to Church, and can say no more,
but my humble service to Dame Plyant.
I believe the fellow rather thinks me
mad than is mad himself ; 16lb ? why tis
an Estate, I shall not be master of it in
16 years.

I thought that Passage out of Shake-
spear, had been of my own Starting, and
that the Magistrate of Martry would not
have imagined it — How can you talk of
going a Progress of 200 miles.

I know nothing of any Shoes I left.
I am sure they are not pd for and so at
least I shall be no loser whatever you
may be. Adieu.

Whether the saying that Swift at-
tributes to his grandmother was really
hers may well be doubted. " He used
to coin proverbs and pass them off for
old. One day when walking in a gar-
den he saw some fine fruit, none of which
was offered him by its stingy owner.
' It was an old saying of my grandmo-
ther's,' he said ; ' always pull a peach
when it lies in your reach.' He accord-
ingly plucked one, and his example was
immediately followed by all the rest of
the company under the sanction of that
good old saying." Another day, seeing
a farmer thrown from his horse into a

slough, he asked him whether he was
hurt. " ' No,' he replied ; ' but I am
woundily bemired.' l You make good
the old proverb,' said Swift, ' the more
dirt, the less hurt.' The man seemed
much comforted with the old saying,
but said he had never heard of it be-
fore ; and no wonder, for the dean had
made it on the occasion."

[per post.]

DUBLIN. June 21. 1715.
I was to see Jordan, who tells me
something but I have forgot it, it was,
that he had a Letter ready and you were
gone, or something of that kind. I had
a terribly hot journey and dined with
Forbes, and got here by 9. I have been
much entertained with news of myself
since I came here, tis sd there was an-
other Packet directed to me, seised by
the Government ; but after opening sev-
eral Seals it proved onely plum-cake. I
was this morning with the A. Bp : [Arch-
bishop] who told me how kind he had
been in preventing my being sent to &c ;
I sd I had been a firm" friend of the last
Ministry, but thought it brought me to
trouble my self in little Partyes without
doing good, that I therefore expected
the Protection of the Government and
that if I had been called before them I
would not have answered one Syllable
or named one Person — He sd that would
have reflected on me, I answered I did
not value that ; that I would sooner suf-
fer more than let any body else suffer by
me — as some people did — The Letter
wch was sent was one from the great Ldy
[Lady] you know, and inclosed in one
from her Chaplin — my Friends got it,
and very wisely burned it after great
Deliberation, for fear of being called to
swear ; for wch I wish them half hangd
— I have been named in many Papers
as a proclaimed for 500Ib I want to be
with you for a little good meat and cold
Drink ; I find nothing cold here but the
Reception of my Friends. I sd a good

166

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

deal more to the A. Bp : not worth tell-
ing at this distance — I told him I had
several Papers, but was so wise to hide
them some months ago. A Gentleman
was run through in the Play-house last
night upon a squabble of their Footmen's
taking Places for some Ladyes. — My
most humble Service to Dame Plyant,
pray God bless her fireside.

They say the Whigs do not intend to
cut of Ld. [Lord] Oxford's head but
that they will certainly attaint poor Ld.
Bolingbroke.

Twelve years later Swift wrote to the
archbishop : " From the very moment
of the Queen's death your grace has
thought fit to take every opportunity of
giving me all sorts of uneasiness, with-
out ever giving me in my whole life one
single mark of your favour, beyond com-
mon civilities."

The "great Ldy" was the Duchess
of Ormond, whose husband had fled to
France. Though Swift, to use his own
words, " looked upon the coming of the
Pretender as a greater evil than any we
are likely to suffer under the worst Whig
ministry that can be found," neverthe-
less by the Protestant mob of Dublin he
was at this time treated as a Jacobite.
He never went abroad without servants
armed to protect him.

The misconduct of footmen was com-
mon enough in those days. In Swift's
Directions to Servants, " the last ad-
vice to the footman relates to his beha-
viour when he is going to be hanged."
In London, many years later, when an
effort was made to put an end to the
custom of guests giving servants vails
(presents of money), the footmen, night
after night, raised a riot in Ranelagh
Gardens, and mobbed some gentlemen
who had been active in the attempt.
" There was fighting with drawn swords
for some hours ; they broke one chariot
all to pieces."

Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, was
attainted of high treason, but after an

imprisonment of nearly two years in the
Tower he was acquitted. On his way
to the coronation " he had been hissed
by the mob ; some of them threw halters
into his coach." On his acquittal " the
acclamations were as great as upon any
other occasion." Bolingbroke escaped
to France.

XI.

DUBLIN. June 28. 1715.
I .write to you so soon again, contrary
to my nature and Custom which never
suffered me to be a very exact Corre-
spondent. I find you passed yr Time
well among Ladyes and Lyons and St.
Georges and Dragons — Yesterday's post

brought us an Ace* that the D of

O [Duke of Ormond] is voted to be

impeached for high Treason. You see
the Plot thickens ; I know not the pre-
sent Disposition of People in Engld but
I do not find myself disposed to be sorry
at this news — However in generall my
Spirits are disturbed, and I want to be
out of this Town. A Whig of this Coun-
try now in Engld has writt to his Friends,
that the Leaders there talk of sending
for me to be examined upon these Im-
peachments, I believe there is nothing
[in] it ; but I had tlrist notice from one
who said he saw the Letter or saw some-
body that saw it. I write this Post to
Dr Raymd [Raymond] to provide next
Sunday for Mr Sub, so I suppose he may
be at ease, and I wish I were with him.
I hope Dame has established her Credit
with you for ever, in the point of Valor
and Hardyness — You surprise me with
the Ace1 [account] of a Disorder in yr
head I know what it is too well and I
think Dame does so too. You must drink
less small beer, eat less sallad, think less,
walk and drink more, I mean Wine and
Ale, and for the rest, Emeticks and bit-
ters are certainly the best Remedyes.
What Length has the River walk to 30
foot bredth ? I hope 8 thousand at
least. If Sub. had no better a tast for
Bief and Claret than he has for Improve-
mts of Land, he should provide no Din-

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

167

ners for me — Does Madam gamble now
and then to see it ? How is the Dean's
field ? So it cost a bottle of wine exedy
[?] to dry poor Sub. I hope he some-
times loses his eyes to please Dame.
There is a Collegian found guilty of
speaking some words ; and I hear they
design in mercy to whip or Pillory him.
I went yesterday to the Courts on pur-
pose to show I was not run away. I had
warning given me to beware of a fel-
low that stood by while some of us were
talking — It seems there is a Trade go-
ing of carrying stories to the Govr — t
[Government], and many honest Folks
turn the Penny by it — I can not yet
leave this Place but will as soon as pos-
sible. Tom this minute brought me up
word that the Baron's man was here,
and that his master is in Town I hope
to see him, and give him half a breast
of mutton before he goes back. He is
now with a Lawyer. I believe old Lom-
bard Street is putting out money — The
Repoi-t of the Secret Committee is pub-
lished. It is a large volume. I onely
just saw it Manly [? at Manly's]. It is
but a Part, and probably there will be as
much more.

I do not believe or see one word is
offered to prove their old Slander of
bringing in the Pretender. The Trea-
son lyes wholly in making the Peace.
Ch. Ford is with Ld Bol— [Lord Boling-
broke] in Dauphine within a League of
Lyons, where his Ldship [Lordship] is
retired ; till he sees what the Secret Com-
mittee will do. That is now determined
and his Ldship will certainly be attainted
by Act of Parlm>t [Parliament]. The
Impeachm*8 are not yet carryed up to
the Ld8 [Lords]. I suppose they intend
to make one work of it.

Dr. Raymond was the vicar of Trim,
where Stella often was his guest. He
visited Swift in London. " Poor Ray-
mond," the dean wrote to her, " just
came in and took his leave of me ; he is
summoned by high order from his wife,

but pretends he has had enough of Lon-
don."

" Mr Sub " was the subdean of St.
Patrick's Cathedral.

The disorder in the head, of which
Swift knew what it was too well, marred
his whole life. " The two maladies of
giddiness and deafness from which he
suffered had their common origin in a
disease in the region of the ear, to which
the name of labyrinthine vertigo has
been given." " I got my giddiness," he
wrote, " by eating a hundred golden pip-
pins at a time." On this Johnson re-
marks : " The original of diseases is com-
monly obscure. Almost every boy eats
as much fruit as he can get without any
great inconvenience." Thinking little,
exercise, and wine were Swift's chief re-
medies. " Vive la bagatelle " was his fa-
vorite maxim.

On July 7 of this year the Archbishop
of Dublin wrote to Addison : " 'T is
plain there 's a nest of Jacobites in the
college ; one was convicted last term ;
two are run away, and, I believe, bills
are found against one or two more."
A master of arts was expelled for mak-
ing a copy of the pamphlet Nero Secun-
dus, and two bachelors of arts and two
students paid the same penalty for speak-
ing disrespectfully of the king. Of the
whipping or pillory with which Swift's
" collegian " was threatened I can find
no mention.

The Secret Committee of the House
of Commons had examined into the ne-
gotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht. As
the result, Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Or-
mond were impeached. " You know,"
Swift wrote to Pope, " how well I loved
both Lord Oxford and Bolingbroke, and
how dear the Duke of Ormond is to me.
Do you imagine I can be easy while
their enemies are endeavouring to take
off their heads ? ' I nunc, et versus te-
cum meditare canoros.' " Anne's Tory
ministers, he said, had not " designed
any more to bring in the Pretender than
the Great Turk."

168

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

XII.

DUBLIN July 7. 1715.

I had yr Letter tother day by Mr
Foxcroft who was so kind to call on me
this morning, but would not stay and
dine with me tlio' I offered him Mutton
and a Bottle of Wine. — I might have
been cheated of my Gingerbread for any
thing you sd [said] in your letter, for I
find you scorn to take notice of Dame's
kind Present ; but I am humbler and
signify to her that if she does not receive
by Mr Foxcroft a large tin pot well
crammed with the D. of Omds. [Duke
of Ormond's] snuff, holding almost an
ounce, she is wronged. I wish. Lough-
lin had not been mistaken when he saw
me coming into your Court, I had much
rather come into it than into the Court
of Engld — I used formerly to write Let-
ters by bits and starts as you did when
Loghlin thought I was coming ; and so
now I have been interrupted these 3
hours by company, and have now just
eaten a piece of Bief Stake spoiled in the
dressing, and drunk a Cup of Sour Ale,
and return to finish my Letter ; Walls
sate by me while I was at my dinner,
and saw me finish it in five minutes,
and has left me to go home to a much
better. . . . Sure you stretch ye Walk
when you talk of 5000 foot, but yr
Ambition is to have it longer than Mr
Rochfort's Canal, and with a little Ex-
pense it will be made a more beautif ull
thing. Are you certain that it was Ma-
dam's green Legs you saw by the River
Side, because I have seen in England a
large kind of green Grass hopers, not
quite so tall but altogether as slender,
that frequent low marishy grounds. The
Baron told me he was employd here,
by you in an Affair of Usury (of wch I
give you Joy) but did not tell me the
particulars. I believe the Affair of yr
English Uncle is true, I have had it from
many Hands. How is that worse than
the Bp of London's Letr [Letter] to his
Clergy and their Answer, both ov\ning

that the Tumults were in order to bring
in Popery and Arbitrary Power — a Re-
proach which the Rabble did not de-
serve ; and has done us infinite hurt. I
have not seen the Articles, I read no
news and hear little. There is no mercy
for the poor Collegian : and indeed as
he is sd to have behaved himself, there
could none be expected. The Report is
printed here but I have not read it. I
think of going for Engd (if I can get

leave) when Ld Sund [Lord Sunder-

land] comes over, but not before unless
I am sent for with a Vengeance. I am
not much grieved at yr being out of the
Peace ; I heard something of it the day
I left you, but nothing certain. Major
Champigne has hard usage, and I am
truly concerned for him and his Lady.
I am told here that some of our Army
is to be transported for Engld. I had a
Letter this Day from thence, from the
Person who sent me one from a Lady,
with great Satisfaction that hers to me
was not seized. That Letter talks doubt-
fully of the D. Ormd. [Duke of Or-
mond] that the Parlmt. resolves to carry
matters to the highest Extreems, and are
preparing to impeacli the D. Shrowsb-
[Duke of Shrewsbury] which the K.
[King] would not suffer at first, but at
length has complyed with. That Prior
is kept closer than Greg, to force him
to accuse Ld. Oxfrd [Lord Oxford] tho*
he declares he knows nothing ; and that
it is thought he will be hanged if he will
not be an Evidence, and that Ld. Oxfd
confounds them with his Intrepidity &c.
I think neither of yr Places is remote
enough for me to be att, and I have some
Project of going further, and am look-
ing out for a Horse ; I believe you will
be going for Engld by the Time I shall
be ready to leave this ; hasty foolish Af-
fairs of the Deanery keep me thus long
here. My humble Service to Dame, pray
God bless her and her Fireside. The
Baron gave me hopes of doing something
about Kilberry — Did he tell you how
I pulled Toms Locks the wrong way for

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

169

holding a Plate under his Arrnpitt and
what cursed Bacon we had with our
Beans ?
Adieu.

Swift wrote of snuff : "I believe it
does neither hurt nor good ; but I have
left it off, and when anybody offers me
their box I take about a tenth part of
what I used to do, and then just smell
to it, and privately fling the rest away :
I keep to my tobacco still." He never
smoked, but " he used to snuff up cut
and dry tobacco, which sometimes was
just coloured with Spanish snuff. He
would not own that he took snuff."

On Archdeacon Walls's vicarage Swift
wrote some charming verses. It was so
small that no one guessed it was for hu-
man habitation.

" The doctor's family came by,
And little miss began to cry,
Give me that house in my own hand !
Then madam bade the chariot stand,
Called to the clerk, in manners mild,
Pray reach that thing here to the child :
That thing, I mean, among the kale ; •
And here 's to buy a pot of ale.
The clerk said to her in a heat,
What ! sell my master's country seat ! "

Swift had described the Bishop of Lon-
don as having ;' a saint at his chin and
a seal at his fob." He was at that time
Dean of Windsor and Lord Privy Seal,
— one of the last Churchmen in Eng-
land who held high political office. The
" saint," I suppose, was the bands he
wore as a priest. He had not in his Let-
ter to his Clergy gone quite so far as
Swift says he had. " The disturbances,"
he had written, " will prove in the end
introductive of Popery and Arbitrary
Power."

The " D. Shrowsb " was the Duke of
Shrewsbury. Swift's spelling indicates
the proper pronunciation of the name of
the town. " I hope you say Shrews-
bury," an old gentleman who had spent
some of his early days there once said
to me. At the present time almost every-
body makes the first syllable rhyme with

" shoes," and not with " shows." The
duke was not impeached. He had held
high office ; nevertheless he said, '' Had
I a son, I would sooner breed him a cob-
bler than a courtier, and a hangman than
a statesman."

The poet Prior was one of the com-
missioners by whom the Peace of Utrecht
was made.

Gregg (not Greg), who in 1708 was
a clerk in the office of the Secretary of
State, was detected in treasonable corre-
spondence with France, and condemned
to death. While lying under sentence
he was examined in Newgate by " seven
lords of the Whig party." It was al-
ways said that had he implicated the
secretary (Harley, afterwards Earl of
Oxford) his life would have been spared.
He persisted, however, in taking the
whole guilt upon himself, and at the end
of a month he was executed.

Dr. Johnson was more patient with
his black servant Frank than Swift was
with his Irish Tom. Miss Reynolds tells
us how " one day, as his man was waiting
at Sir Joshua's table, he observed with
some emotion that he had the salver un-
der his arm." The emotion did not ex-
press itself in hostile acts.

XIII.

Aug. 2d 1715.

Considering how exact a Correspondent
you are, and how bad a one I am my
self, I had clearly forgot whether you
had answered my last Letter, and there-
fore intended to have writt to you today
whether I had heard from you or no :
because Mr Warburton told me you were
upon yr return to Martry. Tho it be
unworthy of a Philosopher to admire at
any thing, and directly forbidden by
Horace, yet I am every day admiring at
a thousand things. I am struck at the

D. of O [Duke of Ormond's] flight,

a great Person here in Power read us
some Letters last night importing that
he was gone to the Pretender, and that
upon his first Arrivall at Calais he talked

170

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

of the K. [King] only as Elector &c. But
this is laughed at, and is indeed wholly
unlike him, and I find his Friends here
are utterly ignorant where he is, and
some think him still in Engld — Aug. 4.
I was interrupted last post; but I just
made a Shift to write a few words to the
Baron. The Story of an Invasion is all
blown off ; and the Whigs seem to think
there will be no such Thing. They as-
sure us of the greatest Unanimity in
Engld to serve the K. and yet they con-
tinue to call the Toryes all Jacobites.
They say they cannot imagine why any
Tory should be angry, since there never
was the least Occasion given : and par-
ticularly they cry up their Mercy shown
to Bingley. There is no news of any
more People gone off : tho' Ld. Shrews'*
was named. The Suspending the Habeas
Corpus Act has frightened our Friends
in Engld. I am heartily concerned for
poor Jo, and should be more so if he
were not swallowed up by his Betters.

Give my Service to Dame Plyant, and
desire her to let you know what quantity
of Cherryes she has for Brandy ; you
may steep them in just enough to keep
them alive, and I will send you some
very good if I can and you will tell me
how much. But here I want Jo. I hope
Dame found the boys well and that she
gave them good Counsell upon the Sub-
ject of Gooseberryes and Codlings for I
hear the eldest had been a little out of
order.

I am glad to hear you and the
Doctr [Doctor] are grown so well to-
gether, and was not M™ R. the civilest
thing in the world ? I find you intend
to take some very sudden Resolution, and
truly I was like to be as sudden for
I was upon the Ballance two hours whe-
ther I should not take out a License of
Absence immediately upon a Letter I

received ; but at last I thought I was too
late by a week for the Design ; and so I
am dropt again into my old Insipidness :
And the weather has been so bad, that
together with my want of a Horse, and
my Steward using one Every day about
my Tythes, I have not been a Mile out of
Town these 5 weeks, except once on foot.

I hear Major Champigny was left half
pay ; and consequently that he will now
have whole : so that he may yet eat bread.

God preserve you and Dame and the
fire-side, believe me ever

entirely yrs &c.

Swift could not long have doubted
that the Duke of Ormond spoke of King
George as Elector of Hanover, for on
landing in France he joined the Pretend-
er's party. He had in vain urged Lord
Oxford to fly with him. " Farewell, Ox-
ford, without a head," he said. Oxford
answered, " Farewell, duke, without a
duchy." The duke lost his duchy, but
Oxford kept his head, and his earldom
as well.

Two days before Swift wrote " the
Story of an Invasion is all blown off,"
the Earl of Mar hadv stolen away from
London to raise the Highlands for King
James.

"Poor Jo" was Joseph Beaumont,
" an eminent tallow-chandler in Trim."

He is

" The grey old fellow, poet Jo,"

in Swift's verses on Archdeacon Walk's
house. He was a "projector," who hoped
to win the government reward for the
discovery of a method of ascertaining the
longitude. His disappointment, it was
believed, turned his brain, and he made
away with himself. Swift said that he
had known only two projectors, one of
whom ruined himself, and the other
hanged himself.

George Birkbeck Hill.

A Typical Kansas Community.

171

A TYPICAL KANSAS COMMUNITY.

FORTY years ago there were on the
map of Kansas a few red spots indicat-
ing the location of forts, and here and
there along the streams near the State's
eastern border were little circles indi-
cating towns. Many of the names upon
that early map remain, and designate
hopeless villages, the scenes of brave
deeds and patriotic efforts ; and a few of
the towns of a generation ago survive,
fulfilling in some small measure the
bright dreams of their founders. But
most of the old names, once familiar to
the whole nation, are forgotten. Could
some ghost of those stirring times come
back to call the roll, how many such
towns would fail to respond ! Quidaro ?
Gone ! Mariposa ? Gone ! Sumner ?
Gone ! Tecumseh ? Gone ! Minneola ?
Gone !

From 1870, for several years eastern
and central Kansas was a battle-ground
between man and nature. In those years
the desert was finally subdued. Dur-
ing the succeeding decade, men devoted
themselves to the occupation of running
up and down the newly made garden
with surveyors' chains, making squares
and parallelograms, and selling them to
one another, or to such strangers as
were drawn into the game by the entice-
ment of speculation. Fictitious values
prevailed. There was a very plague of
financial delusions. Men from all parts
of the world were victims of the disease,
and came to Kansas to satisfy their long-
ing to behave unwisely. Cities sprang
up in a month. Men ceased to be busi-
ness men, and became gamblers, with
land as the stakes. Then, nine years ago,
the crash came. Since that time, the
face of the Kansas town, and the heart
of it too, have changed. One might rea-
sonably call the present an era of home-
making. The gambler has gone. The
speculator finds his market unrespon-

sive. Another generation is reaching
maturity. This generation, which is not
native to the State, is trying to make
home more attractive ; indeed, the word
"home" has been -generally applied to
Kansas for the first time during the last,
five years. The present residents of the
State mean to remain. They are no
longer in camp. No one now talks of
going " back home " when his fortune
is made. To mention this condition as
remarkable may amuse the outside world,
but the experience is a new and delight-
ful one for Kansas.

Chiefly by reason of its newness and of
a certain cosmopolitan aspect, the Kan-
sas town differs from villages elsewhere
in the United States, and presents a few
interesting variations from the common
type. The largest town in the com-
monwealth has hardly forty thousand
inhabitants. Most of the county-seats in
the eastern half of the State, where the
rainfall is copious and where crops are
bountiful and regular, contain about three
thousand persons each. The county-seat
is in the strictest sense a country town.
The people live almost entirely upon the
tributary country. There are no fac-
tories. The money that the farmers of
the county spend for food, clothing, fuel,
and the comforts of the farm home is
the cash capital upon which the town
does its business. This capital is passed
from the grocers to the clothing mer-
chants, to the druggists, to the furniture
dealers, to the hardware sellers, and to
professional men. In the older commu-
nities of the Eastern and Middle States
necessity has developed factories, which
convert raw material into finished pro-
ducts, and money from the outside world
comes in. But Kansas is yet hardly a
generation old, and it has not entered
the manufacturing era of industry.

In Kansas towns the streets run at

172

A Typical Kansas Community.

right angles. The highways are as
straight as the surveyor's chain could
make them. Set back at regular dis-
tances from the sidewalks are the more
pretentious residences, built in the obtru-
sive architectural style of the "• boom "
days, complacent in their sham mag-
nificence. The paint has been washed
from many of them, and their faded ap-
pearance is almost tragic. The story of
these unpainted houses is written upon
the town, and in the leafless season it de-
presses the stranger ; but in early spring,
when the grass comes, nature covers up
the barren aspect. The smaller houses
of the village are less depressing. Per-
haps they do not cover such bitter disap-
pointment. They are like modest cot-
tages the world over.

There is in these towns an intense
social democracy, such as does not exist
in older American States. Class lines
are but indistinctly drawn. The term
u family," as used to distinguish the old
rich from the new rich, is meaningless.
There are of course gradations, lines
of difference, and distinction between
cliques and coteries, in the polite society
of any town. There are indeed the up-
per and the lower crusts in the social
formation. But there is no " dead-line."
In every Kansas community, society is
graded something after this fashion : the
" old whist crowd," the " young whist
crowd," the " literary crowd," the
" young dancing crowd," the " church
social crowd " or " lodge crowd," and the
" surprise party crowd." It often hap-
pens, in a family containing several
grown-up children, that one daughter at-
tends lodge socials, where there are
spelling-matches, and where she may en-
joy what the reporter for the country
paper calls " a literary and musical pro-
gramme." Perhaps the eldest daughter
attends the meeting of the Browning
Circle, where she is bored for an hour
or two ; she probably comes home with
a married couple who live on her street.
The son of the family goes across the rail-

road track, and dances a noisy quadrille
on a bare kitchen floor, to the music of
a cabinet organ and a fiddle. It is pos-
sible that the parents may be present
at the weekly meeting of the Bon Ton
Whist Club, where the festivities begin
with an elaborate seven o'clock supper.
At these stately functions, the awarding
of the gilt-edged copy of Ben-Hur and
the hand-painted smoking-set to the best
players forms an important part of the
evening's enjoyment.

This fictitious but typical instance
should -not be taken too literally, though
it is true enough to indicate the utter
absence in Kansas society of what in
older communities are called class lines.
One may almost choose his own compan-
ions. Wealth plays a minor part in the
appraisal of people. Indeed, the com-
mercial rating of the " lodge crowd " is
probably higher than that of the " old
whist crowd," although the " lodge
crowd " does reverence to the " old whist
crowd " by referring to it sneeringly as
" society." Since there are no old so-
cial standards, and since no one knows
anybody's grandfather's previous condi-
tion, young people find their own places.
The assorting occurs in the high school.
An ambitious mother, living on the
wrong side of the railroad, is glad to
find that her daughter has passed above
the " surprise party crowd," has gone
around the " church socials," and at the
end of her schooldays has planted her-
self firmly among the "entre-nous"
girls. There the young lawyer's wife
and the old cattleman's daughter meet.
A young woman in this group finds an
opportunity to marry into the " young
whist crowd." After the children are
in school she may be graduated easily
into the Bon Ton Whist Club. But if
she does not improve the opportunities
offered at the " entre-nous " gatherings,
in a few years she will begin to cultivate
her mind, and will drift naturally into
the Browning Circle. Then she will
appear occasionally at the quarterly town

A Typical Kansas Community.

173

dances, when the most exclusive wo-
men of the village wear their second-best
gowns as a rebuke to the men for invit-
ing such a mixed company.

Generally the church members do not
view these semi-public dances with alarm.
The Methodists are the strictest of the
popular sects in nearly every Kansas
community. When the State was safely
Republican by enthusiastic majorities, it
used to he said that the Methodist church
was the Republican church. In the old
days of the hoom, the Baptist church
was often called the Democratic church.
Even now the Baptists find their congre-
gations somewhat smaller than those of
the Presbyterians. In nearly every town
there is a struggling Episcopal chu'rch,
and in its folds gather the society lead-
ers, and the wives of the traveling men
who make their homes there. On the
outskirts of every important village are
to be found the humble meeting-houses
of worshipers after the old fashion, —
the Friends, the Free Methodists, the
United Brethren, and the Dunkards.
These churches gather their congrega-
tions from the one-story houses of the
town and from the farms near by. Fre-
quently waves of intense religious feel-
ing sweep over these flocks. In winter
they hold "protracted meetings," and
glow with a fervor all unknown to the
dwellers in the upper streets. In sum-
mer these simple worshipers hold camp-
meetings in the groves along the creeks,
and members of the more fashionable
churches drive from town in the cool of
the evening, and from their buggies watch
them with patronizing interest.

It is the occupants of the buggies who
give the town whatever intellectual repu-
tation it may have in the State. They
are the buyers and the readers of books.
Nothing else indicates the exact grade of
a town's intelligence so clearly as the
books which the people read. The town
in which I write is a fair example of
Kansas communities ; and here all the
most interesting new books in popular

literature and the best periodicals have
a good market. Yet our kinspeople in
the Eastern States carefully save their
year-old magazines and books to send
to us. In every Kansas town there is
a group of men and women who read
the best books, and who go regularly to
Chicago or to St. Louis every year to
hear the best music..

During the days of the boom innumer-
able " real estate " colleges sprang up.
They indicated the presence of men and
women whose ideals were high, and who,
when money was abundant, immediately
began to surround themselves with those
influences that would soften the hard
environments of the Western life, and
make " reason and the will of God "
prevail. Their zeal led these promoters
beyond the limits of sound judgment,
but it is to their credit that their inten-
tions were good. The colleges survive,
and they are the best things that have
outlived the boom. Only here and there
has one been abandoned ; on the other
hand, in many a Kansas town, the little,
debt-ridden college that has survived, af-
ter a struggle against great odds, is the
nucleus around which gathers whatever
light the community may have. The chil-
dren of the adjacent country are sent to
these schools ; for though they are not the
best possible, they are the best now ob-
tainable. One finds, for instance, their
instructors on the school boards and in
the city councils. They appear as dele-
gates to the state political conventions,
indicating by their presence that the vot-
ers in the towns bear no grudge against
a man for being careful of his " seens "
and " saws." whatever men in the coun-
try may think of such refinements of
speech.

The best manifestation of the influ-
ence of the college is found in the se-
curity and growth of the town public
library. It is worth a ward politician's
political life to talk about cutting down
library expenses. Generally a public
library contains from one thousand to

174

A Typical Kansas Community.

four thousand books. The schoolchil-
dren, black and white, spend their odd
moments in the reading-room. Women
from every social circle use the books.
E. P. Roe is still the favorite author, as
he is the favorite author of the frequent-
ers of libraries in some of the Eastern
States. On the other hand, in one public
library in Kansas the copy of Emerson's
First Series of Essays has been rebound
four times. In this village no bookseller
finds it profitable to keep the old-fash-
ioned dime novels, so popular among boys
ten years ago.

When Kansas goes to the theatre, how-
ever, it drops back into the dark ages.
Doubtless there are worse theatrical com-
panies than those that visit Kansas, but
no one has ever described them. The
best people leave the theatre to those who
like to hear the galleries echo with mer-
riment when the supernumeraries walk
before the curtain to light the gas foot-
lights. The opera-house is not a town
gathering-place, except when the gradu-
ating exercises of the high school are held
there, and when the townspeople come
together to hear the terrible annual con-
cert of the silver cornet band. On these
occasions one observes the absence of the
chaperon, and here, as elsewhere in the
town, young men and women meet upon
terms of equality.

There are three out - of - doors town
gatherings, — football games, baseball
games, and political meetings, — where-
at men play a more important part than
they play in the opera-house, for they
are not manacled by decorum. At the
political meetings the men predominate ;
but at the town games it is the women —
the younger women — who give the scene
the appearance which may have made
ancient tournaments so glorious. Here
there is a homely familiarity. When one
pounds whoever sits beside him on the
bench, at the climax of the game, it is with
the assurance that one is pounding an
old friend. The men take off their coats,
but the crowd is decorous. There is no

drinking. A drunken boy at a Kansas
game would cause nearly as much com-
ment as a drunken girl. The girls join
in the college yells, talk across the ropes
to the players in the field, surge up and
down the line with the boys, and no one
sneers.

There are no rich men in these Kan-
sas towns. The men who own a million
dollars' worth of property number less
than half a score in the whole State.
Those who control half a million dollars'
worth of property might ride together
in a sleeping-car, with an upper berth or
two to spare. Every town has its rich
man, measured by a local standard, who
is frequently a retired farmer turned
banker ; not one in five of these is rated
at $100,000, but each is the autocrat
of his county, if he cares to be. The
mainspring that moves the town's daily
machinery may be found in the back
room of the bank. There it is decided
whether or not the bonds shall be voted.
There it is often determined whether
there shall be eight or nine months of
school. There the village chronicles are
spread upon the great ledgers every day.
The town banker supplies the money for
every contest. If he is wise, he watches
his little corner of the world as a spider
watches from its web. The great trust
which he keeps requires a knowledge of
the details of the game that men are
playing around him. Yet with all his
power this town banker would be count-
ed a poor man in the city. Seldom is
his annual income as much as $10,000.
But he lives in the best house in the town.
The butcher saves his best cuts for him,
the grocer puts aside his best vegetables,
and the whole town waits to do his bid-
ding.

Next to the banker in economic im-
portance is the best lawyer. If the town
is a thriving one, the lawyer makes per-
haps $4000 a year. But he does not
receive all his income in cash. Some of
it he takes in trade : from the farmer
butter and eggs, from the storekeeper

A Typical Kansas Community.

175

his wares, from the editor printing.
There are from three to five lawyers, in
each good county town in Kansas, who
earn more than $1500 a year. When
a lawyer gets in debt to a respectable
minority of the influential people, he
may be elected county attorney, and
during his term of office he is expected
to pay his debts. If he fulfills the pub-
lic expectation, he has another season
of waiting, and at the end of it he is
made district judge, when the balance-
sheet with the town is supposed again
to be made up. A district judge, upon
retirement, can generally make a living.
The town doctor knows so many things
about so many people, and so many peo-
ple owe him money, that he too is al-
ways considered a safe man to put on
a local county ticket. Be it said to his
credit he makes an efficient officer ; there
is no man in better standing than he.

In a community where there is no large
source of outside revenue, where no fac-
tory pours its wages into the local com-
merce, much of the business is done on
credit. The storekeepers do so much
bartering that they have established a
system of currency of their own. A mer-
chant will issue sets of coupons, in one
dollar and five dollar books. The cou-
pons are of various decimal denomina-
tions, and they read, " This coupon is
good for cents in trade at Wither-

spoon's grocery." When the cash in the
drawer is low, and when the creditor
will accept them, these coupons pass
over the counter for cash. They pass
from one hand to another, and are usually
accepted at face value. The merchant
invests his earnings in local bank-stock,
farms, or farm mortgages, and after
a while he may retire from business to
lend his money : then he is on the way
to the presidency of the bank. The real
estate agent and insurance broker who
lends money in a small way is also in
the line of promotion to the banker's
desk. But before he reaches the goal
he lives many a shabby day, which he

hopes the grocer and the coal dealer have
forgotten.

The real estate agent's money comes in
lumps, and he lacks the peace of mind
which the storekeeper's clerk enjoys,
whose wages may be $20 or $40 or even
$80 a month ; for his wages come regu-
larly, and there is always the reasonable
hope that some day he may be a partner
in the business or have a store of his own.
In addition to this hope, the clerk's so-
cial position may be as good as any-
body's. His wife and daughter may find
friends among the most desirable peo-
ple in the community. If the clerk and
his son do not meet their employer at
the whist club, it may be only because it
is their night " off " and his night " on "
at the store. Prices of real estate are
so low that many a man earning $50
a month builds a cottage by the aid of
the Home Building and Loan Company
which flourishes in every town. Instead
of paying rent, he pays interest and a
few dollars of the principal every month.
On his own lot he may grow flowers for
the annual sweet-pea contest, and fortune
may send him such a bounty of bloom
as will give him the right to assume a
tolerant air when discussing floriculture
with the man who holds his note.

The tenement-house and the flat are
unknown in Kansas. Wages are not
high, but opportunities for saving are
many. The man who, rated by his wages,
in another State would be called a poor
man, in Kansas is fairly well-to-do. A
printer's wages, for instance, are rare-
ly more than eight dollars a week, yet
many a printer has made a start in life,
and has even bought the paper which em-
ployed him. There is a tradition that
the Kansas country editor is poor. The
truth is, he earns from $1200 to $3000
a year. He lives well ; and being a pol-
itician, he frequently shares the party
loaves and fishes. He is respected and
his credit is good at the bank, where he
is able, and generally willing, to give the
one good turn which deserves another.

176

A Typical Kansas Community.

It may be said in the editor's favor that
he is the only regular employer of skilled
labor in the community. The mason
and the carpenter work at odd times.
The village cobbler does repairing only.
There are no great factories that employ
hundreds of laborers. Here and there
is a town favored with a railroad-shop,
where a few score men find irregular
work repairing damaged cars. But the
dinner-pail is hardly seen in Kansas.

A well-known writer of Western sto-
ries, half a decade ago, drew a picture
of 'the hopeless faces of the women who
rode in a parade of the Kansas Farmers'
Alliance. The type in the story was
interesting, but the real Kansas women
who rode in the Alliance parade saved
it from being a clumsy and stupid af-
fair. By their very presence they made
it a cheering, good-natured, color-flecked
pageant. They rode on hay-racks cov-
ered with patriotic bunting, and they
were dressed in white and in yellow at
the ratio of sixteen to one, to symbolize
their financial creed. In all the parades
of any political party the women are an
important feature. But their participa-
tion in politics practically ends with the
parades. They vote only in municipal
and school elections. Now and then, at
a municipal election in a very small town,
it happens that, half in a jocose spirit,
the men elect a woman's ticket, when
there is absolutely nothing for the woman
elected to do. The incident is a neigh-
borhood joke, at which the women laugh ;
and the thrifty correspondents of Eastern
journals sell to their papers " stories "
about the " great fight between the men
and the women of Kansas, which ended
in the overthrow of the men." Women
are often elected to clerical positions in
the county and in the city. A woman
was once successful as assistant attorney-
general of the State. When the Kansas
woman becomes a bread-winner, her so-
cial position is not affected. There is
no social circle that the working woman
finds it impossible to enter. The steno-

grapher, with her $50 a month, may
snub the banker's daughter. The school-
teacher finds no door closed to her social
advancement.

Yet it is said that Kansas is governed
by petticoats. If by this it be meant
that women shape the public sentiment
of the Kansas town, the saying is true.
In most towns in other States, the cor-
ners of the principal streets are occupied
by dram-shops. In the town where this
paper is written, the influence of women
has been exerted so forcibly that three
of the four corners where the two main
streets cross are occupied by banks. In-
stead of Hogan's Retreat on the fourth
corner stands a bookstore. There the
boys and the young men of the town
find a meeting-place. There they make
their appointments. There they browse
through the weekly illustrated papers
and the magazines, and look through new
books. In this bookstore the football
games are bulletined, the baseball games
are talked over, and politics finds its fo-
rum. Among all the men and boys who
frequent this resort there is no habitual
drinker ; there is not one whose naYne
has been stained with scandal. These
young fellows are business men, clerks,
professional men, real estate brokers,
and college students. They are clean,
shrewd, active young men, who have
been brought up in a town where the
women make public sentiment, — in a
town of petticoat government, wherein a
woman has never held an administrative
municipal office. It is a town of eight
thousand inhabitants, without a saloon,
without a strange woman, without a town
drunkard.

Sloping down from a gentle hill to-
ward a creek, the Kansas town shows at
a distance its pointed steeples, its great
iron water-tower, and its massive school-
house, which stands above the elms and
cottonwoods and maples. No smoke-
stack pours its blackening flood over the
natural beauty of the grass and trees.
At night, the farmer across the valley

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

177

sees the town as a garden of lights. At
such a time, one does not recall the
geometrically exact angles of the streets
and the gray dust upon the unpainted

houses ; the night softens the garish
remnants of the boom. Then the sun-
burned Kansas town has a touch of ro-
mance.

William Allen White.

A MASSACHUSETTS SHOE TOWN.

BROMPTON was one of the earlier New
England settlements. Its cemeteries con-
tain numerous stones dating back almost
to the middle of the seventeenth century,
and the town celebrated its bicentennial
years ago. Its first meeting-house was
burned by Indians. In the Revolution-
ary era its citizens hurried away to the
earliest engagements around Boston ; and
of that period it preserves many me-
morials, notably two fine old taverns, in
which some of the most famous of the
Continental officers are known to have
lodged. But we are not now concerned
with its history, and I come directly to
the time, a decade or so before the civil
war, when the town, after having been
for more than a century and a half a
small farming community, for which all
necessary boot and shoe making and re-
pairing were easily done by a few cob-
blers, was beginning to make shoes on a
larger scale, for export.

Brompton has neither water - power
nor any of the other natural advantages
which would have made it possible to
predict a manufacturing community.
Indeed, most shoe towns lack natural
advantages. The Providence which de-
termined the establishment of the first
shoe-shop in a new locality was inscruta-
ble. The first person to make shoes in
Brompton for sale elsewhere was a na-
tive of the tdwn, who had returned
thither with a competence, after several
years of experience in the shoe trade in
a neighboring town. A very old man,
now a hermit on a farm in Maine, who
worked in this Brompton shop during

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 12

his early manhood, recently said to me :
" They 're always a-tellin' they 's a
powerful lot o' wonderful new machines
been invented sence I worked in the shop,
nigh fifty year agone, an' I 'm willin'
to believe 'em ; but I '11 bet anything
they 's one thing they can't never make,
with all their inventin', an' that 's a ma-
chine to peg shoes with." This, from a
shoemaker, nearly a generation after the
pegging-machine had come into general
use, serves better than any detailed state-
ment to illustrate the simplicity of the
shoemaking methods of the early time.
The shop did not employ more than a
dozen men, all acquaintances of the manu-
facturer. The sons of the resident farm-
ers were quick to take to the new oc-
cupation, and several other shops were
started before the outbreak of the civil
war. A number of them, remodeled into
cottages, barns, store - houses, even hen-
houses, still stand, reminders of the mea-
gre beginnings of a great industry.

The immigrants to Massachusetts from
the northern New England States, —
more especially from Maine, — who began
to come about this time, found their way
to Brompton, as soon as the supply of
workmen from the neighborhood became
inadequate. The newcomers were for
the most part enterprising, unattached
young men, of good habits and antece-
dents. They were cordially received.
Although the transformation from a farm-
ing town to a manufacturing town was
fast taking place, the community was yet
essentially homogeneous in race, customs,
and religion.

178

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

The first foreign immigrants were the
Irish, who, though they began work with
pick and shovel, speedily found employ-
ment in the shops. While not openly
maltreated by the native workmen, —
Brompton was a dignified and orderly
community, — they did not receive a
hearty welcome. The ill-omened Know-
Nothing movement came to embitter the
mutual dislike. Something of a communi-
ty of feeling was brought about, however,
by the later arrival of a common enemy,
the French Canadians, to whom, curiously
enough, the Irish, in spite of the iden-
tity of their religion, were quite as hos-
tile as the native Americans. In some
shops, the excitement waxed so fierce
that the Canadians were put to work in
rooms by themselves. Many devices were
employed by the jealous Irishmen to
make their lives miserable, one of which
was to dangle a big green-headed frog
on the end of a line before the windows
of their work-rooms ; the dangling being
accompanied, of course, by loud jeers re-
garding the traditional frog-eating pro-
clivities of Frenchmen. By a happy
chance, the first Frenchman who ven-
tured into Brompton is still living there ;
by a happier chance, he has a sense of
humor. He loves to tell of the mingled
curiosity and abhorrence his appearance
excited. " They had no notion of what
a Frenchman was like," he says. " They
stared at me and whispered about me as
if I were some strange animal. For a
long time they could n't make up their
minds whether I had horns under my
hat or not, but in the end they decided
that I had."

Early in the seventies — to choose a
period long enough subsequent to the
civil war for the exceptional war condi-
tions to be eliminated — Brompton had
grown from a farming town of two thou-
sand inhabitants' or less to a shoe town
of six thousand or more. A few wooden
blocks of business buildings were strung
along a central street, which was still
bordered in part by dwelling-houses and

open fields. There were a new and ex-
pensive town hall, the sole brick struc-
ture, a creditable soldiers' monument, and
a high-school building, lineal descendant
of the original academy. On the prin-
cipal streets were the town pumps. The
town had two Catholic churches (for
French and Irish respectively), five Pro-
testant churches, graded schools crowd-
ed into two large barnlike buildings,
the beginnings of a public library —
thanks to the generous thought of one of
its " forehanded " storekeepers — which
was kept in a room of the town hall,
lodges of several secret orders, a recent-
ly organized post of the Grand Army of
the Republic, a single weekly paper, a
volunteer militia company, two volunteer
fire companies, a brass band, a choral
society, a temperance reform club, and
the like. But the inner life of Bromp-
ton then was in every way significant.

Aside from the ready deference to
the ministers, doctors, lawyers, and edi-
tors, which was accorded always and
everywhere, Brompton was absolutely
without social distinctions. The typical
American shoemaker was under no so-
cial condemnation for the work he did.
He was able to associate on equal terms
with all the other people, including even
the families of his employers ; and while
the town was already of such a size that
it was not literally true that everybody
knew everybody else, it was at least true
that everybody could know everybody
else. The young man went courting
wherever his affections led him, and mar-
ried into whatever family he wished,
without question as to social privilege.
Then he rented an upstairs tenement, in
which his family lived on terms of equal-
ity and the greatest intimacy with the
family of the landlord, occupying the
ground floor, until such time as he could
buy or build a house for himself, the up-
per story of which could in its turn be
rented.

The newly married woman, trained in
the belief that it was her duty to do her

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

179

part in one way or another — either by
earning or by saving, or by both — to-
ward the support of the family, kept on
working in the shop, if she had been
employed there before marriage, until
the arrival of children forced her to
withdraw. Then she did shoe-work at
home ; for the development of machin-
ery, considerable as it had been, had not
gone so far as to preclude that possibili-
ty. If she had not been a shop-worker
before marriage, she found some imme-
diately remunerative home - work soon
after, — straw-sewing, perhaps ; for the
regular visitations of the " straw-men "
with wages and relays of work were an
important part of the daily routine on
many streets. She made her husband's
shirts and stockings, all the children's
clothes, and a large part of her own
millinery and dresses, and, except in
cases of invalidism or illness, did all her
housework, including the washing. How
she did all these things without neglect-
ing her children, or breaking down utter-
ly in health, is a mystery that only one
of these calculating, hard-working wo-
men could explain ; and then it would
be only another calculating hard-work-
ing woman who could understand the
explanation. That it meant no end of
aches, worries, and self-sacrifice is cer-
tain. Indeed, these women were as
true pioneers in their way as the wives
of the original settlers. There was no
great financial risk involved in marrying,
in those days. On the contrary, mar-
riage was likely to prove a good invest-
ment ; for such women saved their hus-
bands far more than they cost them.

The husband was no less devoted and
industrious after his fashion. Beside
working ten hours a day in the shop, he
toiled night and morning over a garden
plot. Many other things also he thought
he must do : there were ledges to be
cleared away ; uneven spots to be leveled ;
cellars to be banked ; wood to be sawed
and split ; grapevines, raspberry, cur-
rant, blackberry, and gooseberry bushes,

plum, peach, cherry, and apple trees, to
be set out and watched and pruned ; hens,
and sometimes a pig and a cow, to be
cared for. These out-of-shop activities
assured the family a bountiful supply of
fresh eggs, and fruit and vegetables in
larger variety than the average farmer
had, who devoted his attention to staple
crops. Furthermore, there was always
a surplus, greater or less, to be bartered
for meats and groceries. With an up-
stairs tenant more than providing for
the expense of repairs and taxes, the
orchard and garden going a long way
towards supplying food, and the thrifty
wife saving in a hundred ways, it was
possible for the shop-worker who owned
his house to put by a considerable part
of his wages. A description of the eco-
nomical devices of these workingmen's
households would fill a volume, and be
good reading all the way through, so re-
plete would it be with the humor and the
pathos of primitive living.

Sunday was scrupulously observed as
a day of rest even by, those who were
not members of the churches, the only
labor done being the rather formidable
getting ready for church, the prepa-
ration of meals, and the putting of the
clothes in soak for the Monday washing.
This conscientious observance of Sunday
is in all likelihood one reason why these
men and women did not succumb under
the strain of work to which they deliber-
ately subjected themselves.

The pleasures of their lives were of
the simplest, most inexpensive sort, so
homely as to seem hardly worth men-
tioning. In the winter, when the days
were too short to admit of much work
out of doors, and on occasional spare
evenings in the summer, the men strolled
down town, after supper, to attend their
lodges or to gossip in the stores and
markets, which still retained the tenden-
cy to sociability characteristic of coun-
try marts. A curious social feature of
the town was the gathering at the post-
office, to await the distribution of the

180

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

mails, of the business men, who made it
a point to be on the ground a full half-
hour too early, to chat together the
longer. Noteworthy, too, was the social
atmosphere of the shop, under the easy
supervision then in vogue. Good-na-
tured raillery and capital jokes did
much to vary the monotony of labor.
There was a healthy helpfulness among
the workers that felt no need of the ma-
chinery of organization. Financial mis-
fortune falling suddenly on any one of
their number evoked immediate and
generous subscriptions, and in cases of
serious sickness there were many volun-
teer watchers. "

Among the women neighborliness pre-
vailed to the fullest extent, and in this lay
a large share of their diversion. There
were continuous borrowings and lendings
of household supplies, shri-ll communica-
tions from window to window, and ex-
changes of confidence over the back
yard fences. Housewives sallied forth,
after the dinner dishes were cleared
away, sewing-work in hand, and as like
as not baby in arms, to sit and work
and rock and gossip with the neighbors.
Then there were the formal invitations
to " come and spend the afternoon and
stay to tea," the acceptance of which in-
volved " fixing up " and the substitution
of fancy-work for necessary sewing on
the part of both hostess and guest. The
church sewing-circle, the hospitalities of
which were often extended to non-mem-
bers, was another large feminine re-
source, and funerals were still another.

It was the era of croquet, surprise par-
ties, wedding anniversaries, church " so-
ciables " that did not belie their name,
baby-shows, singing-schools, school ex-
hibitions, Grand Army of the Republic
camp-fires open to the public, exciting
religious revivals, pledge-soliciting tem-
perance crusades almost as exciting, po-
litical rallies taken seriously, Election
Day militia musters, and annual prize
exhibitions and parades by the farmers
and tradesmen. Thanksgiving Day and

Fast Day had still some civil and reli-
gious significance ; the war was yet near
enough for the Decoration Day exercises
to provoke real emotion. The rivalry of
the two local fire companies with those
of the neighboring towns and with each
other prompted many challenges, high-
colored parades, and thrilling trials of
strength. An annual lecture course was
directed by a committee of the citizens,
and the choral society could be counted
on to give at least one concert a winter.
Not the least interesting of the events
of each year were the regular and spe-
cial town meetings, which gave to all the
men an opportunity of informing them-
selves and expressing themselves on
matters of town policy, and to the few
who were ambitious to become proficient
in public speaking and'debate an excel-
lent opportunity for practice. The town
meetings were undoubtedly a strong in-
fluence in arousing and keeping eager
an enlightened public spirit. In nearly
all the events and diversions, even the
town meeting, the children shared. Just
as they were taken to church long be-
fore the age of comprehension, so they
were taken to lectures, concerts, and so-
cial functions quite beyond them ; the
family, not the individual, being account-
ed the social unit.

The limitations of this life are appar-
ent, especially the limitations that come
from the narrowness of the church creeds
and from a too exclusive attention to the
acquisition of money for its own sake.
Protestants and Catholics despised one
another cordially, not as individuals, but
as Protestants and Catholics. Congrega-
tionalists and Unitarians were unwilling
to forget their ancient disputes and the
schism that had caused them to separate.
The evangelical denominations, though
united in scorn of Universalists and Uni-
tarians, were jealous of one another in
the pettiest conceivable ways ; and while
no one church claimed social superiority
over the others, church life was so dis-
proportionate a part of the whole life that

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

181

church lines were in too many cases the
lines of friendship, and even of acquaint-
ance. Cards, billiards, the dance, and
the theatre were held in abhorrence by
the members of the evangelical churches,

— though, with the humorous inconsis-
tency characteristic of narrowness, they
raised no objection to their children's
playing the most vulgar kissing-games,

— and it made no end of garrulous scan-
dal, especially at the sewing-circles, if a
church member was even suspected of
indulging in any of these amusements.

Economy often shriveled into pitiful
miserliness ; and even when it did not
turn out so badly, it became a fixed habit
which it was impossible to break after
the necessity for it had long passed away.
Every aspect of existence was somehow,
sooner or later, adjusted to a financial
standard ; even religion, which, translat-
ed into the vernacular, meant a hard,
methodical, assiduous " laying up of trea-
sure in heaven." Utility was everything;
beauty, emotion, were as nothing. Ve-
getable patches were allowed to invade
front yards ; hens were permitted every-
where except in the gardens ; the grass
around the houses was mown only at
long intervals because of its value as
hay ; and if a pet cat, though loved as a
child, was detected catching chickens, it
had to die, because chickens were worth
money, and cats were not. Such a habit
of life, while it assured an old age free
from danger of the poorhouse, also as-
sured a resourceless, joyless one.

It was a peculiar period, this of the
early seventies of Brompton, unfamiliar
enough already to most of us, though so
near in time. A simple, frugal, indus-
trious, earnest, honest, homely existence,
it was also a hard, narrow, sombre one.
Did the people take themselves alto-
gether too seriously ? Perhaps. At any
rate, whatever its merits and defects,
Brompton was to all intents and pur-
poses, at that time, a pure social demo-
cracy. Because it was a social democra-
cy it has been worth describing in detail.

Let us leap over a quarter of a cen-
tury. Brompton has to-day more than
twice the population it had in the earlier
period, and it is governed by a mayor
and aldermen instead of by a town meet-
ing and a board of selectmen. The
Irish and the French have continued to
come in, until they constitute a majority
of the population. . There has also been
a large immigration from the maritime
provinces of Canada. Other industries
than shoemaking have been introduced
from time to time, but, except those that
are cognate to shoemaking, they have not
been able to gain a permanent foothold.
Accordingly, Brompton remains, and for
a long time yet is likely to remain, a
town of a single industry.

Its streets now have sidewalks, and
they are lighted by electric lights and
traversed by electric cars. The main
street is an unbroken double row of well-
constructed brick blocks. There are a
hospital, a park, an opera-house, a water
supply, a sewerage system, and a mail
delivery service. The dwelling-houses
are almost pretentious, and their grounds
are scrupulously trim with velvety lawns.
The public schools are better housed and
better equipped than they used to be,
and the long-languishing district schools
have been happily suppressed ; the few
children still living in the outskirts are
brought into the centre daily at the city's
expense. The public library, much in-
creased in size, improved and supple-
mented by a complete reading-room, in
a beautiful memorial building of stone
adorned with works of art, is now sec-
ond in educational influence only to the
schools.

The early hostility between the French
and the Irish is extinct. Between the
Protestants and the Catholics something
of the old religious antagonism persists,
it is true, but it has ceased to have viru-
lence or any influence in town affairs.
It has well-nigh succumbed to the mu-
tual understanding and appreciation pro-
duced by long and constant association ;

182

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

and it is a significant if trifling fact that
the first one of the clergymen of Bromp-
ton to call upon the rector of a newly
founded Episcopal church was the Irish
priest. It is no uncommon thing for
all the churches to unite in a work of
general beneficence.

Sunday, without ceasing to be a day
of rest, has become a day of rational and
quiet pleasures also ; for Sunday is the
especial day for bicycling, driving, and
social visiting. Church -going has de-
creased relatively to the growth in popu-
lation, and the influence of the churches
upon the community has been even more
than correspondingly lessened. The au-
thority of the churches is but the shadow
of what it once was in Brompton. This
new independence, however, is a sign of
honest personal thinking rather than of
indifference to serious things. It is ac-
companied in many instances by an awak-
ening of intelligent interest in practical
charity, philanthropy, or social reform.

In the last twenty-five years, then,
Brompton has not only grown rapidly in
size and improved greatly in appearance,
but it has been " liberalized in theology
and life." The element of charm has
entered. Life has been softened, sweet-
ened, refined ; it has come to touch the
big world at more points and enjoy it at
more ; it is freer, fuller, brighter, more
graceful, — in a word, more civilized.

There have been other and more
radical changes. Tenement-houses have
become numerous ; not yet, fortunately,
those of the large city type, nor the
dreary, monotonous block-houses of mill
towns, but houses built to rent solely
as a speculation by non-resident as well
as resident owners. With the disappear-
ance of the upstairs tenement has disap-
peared also the old cordial social rela-
tion between landlord and tenant, which
has been replaced by a purely commer-
cial relation. It is no longer considered
respectable to belong to the class of man-
ual laborers. A young man, and even
more a young woman, who is employed

in a shoe-shop suffers a discrimination
which only an exceptional bonhomie or
social talent is sufficient to overcome.
Just as the young men of the farms
came to work in the shops of Brompton,
years ago, quite as much because they
felt themselves disgraced by farm labor
as because they hoped to mend their for-
tunes, so their sons, inflamed by the san-
guine circulars of commercial colleges
and flie braggart talk of " drummers,"
feel contempt for the metier of the fa-
thers, and are seeking positions as clerks
and salesmen. And just as the young
farmers found the young women of their
native places reluctant to become their
wives while they continued farmers, so in
Brompton the young men find the young
women slow to marry shop-workers.

How far the more and more complete
subdivision of labor through the multi-
plication of machines is a reason of the
loss of respect for the man who works
in the shop it is difficult to say. In the
shoe industry, however it may be in
other employments, it has probably been
a less important influence than it is usu-
ally thought to be. It requires as good
judgment and as great care, and in-
volves quite as much responsibility, to
run most of the machinery of a modern
shoe-shop as it did to do the hand-work
of former days ; the difference between
the old worker and the new being not
unlike that between the horse-car driver
and the electric-motor man.

Women who do their own work, not
to mention those who help the family
exchequer by earning money after the
former fashion, are considered as little
respectable as men who do manual labor.
Recently married women, no better off
financially than their mothers were at the
same period of their lives, contract large
bills for millinery and dressmaking, and
employ servants to do all the work, or
outsiders to come in for the harder part
of it ; while young husbands, no better
off than their fathers were, smoke ex-
pensive cigars, — whereas their fathers

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

183

smoked cheap pipes if anything, — and
hire laboring men to shake down their
furnaces and to mow their lawns. Sum-
mer outings in the country (though
Brompton itself is still country enough
to be a resort for city people) are re-
garded as an indispensable part of the
yearly programme of families who would
be considered comme ilfaut.

In further evidence of the social change
may be cited a socially exclusive club for
men, housed in a richly appointed club
building ; a similarly exclusive club for
women ; a supplanting of the old neigh-
borly running in and out by formal calls ;
the giving of conventionally stupid after-
noon teas and pretentious evening recep-
tions ; the entry, very recent, into the
latter, of the dress coat for men and the
decollete corsage for women ; the appear-
ance of the punch-bowl ; a general elabo-
ration of dress and house - furnishings,
and a decided amelioration of street,
drawing-room, and table manners. In
a word, the people of Brompton who do
not work with their hands imitate the
society of the large cities, and hold them-
selves aloof from those who do work with
their hands ; and those who work, hop-
ing against hope to secure social recogni-
tion, imitate the imitators, whose claims
to social superiority they acknowledge
only too readily.

More avenues of expense and relative-
ly fewer sources of income mean extrava-
gance, and extravagance means habitual
non-payment of debts, which in the end
saps integrity, as several firms at Bromp-
ton, obliged to go into bankruptcy, not
from dearth of custom, but from inability
to collect outstanding bills, would feel-
ingly testify. A part of the decrease of
integrity may be traced to the deceits
practiced in these later days in the mak-
ing of a shoe. Though the workmen hold
themselves no more responsible for these
deceits than the machines through whose
aid, as well as their own, they are effect-
ed, the influence in the long run can
hardly fail to be morally deleterious.

Under these conditions, cheating comes
easily to be regarded as a necessary and
legitimate business operation.

Greater extravagance has made mar-
riage a formidable thing, and it is ac-
cordingly postponed, with the inevitable
bad result on morals. An additional
cause of immorality and of other moral
disorders is the utter lack of rational even-
ing amusement for the young men and
young women who, owing to the insist-
ence on social distinctions, cannot go into
" society," and who, feeling that they
must go somewhere, frequent the most
available place, the street. The presence
of a branch of the Young Men's Chris-
tian Association is at once a confession
of this social destitution, and an attempt,
not too wisely nor too well directed, to
relieve it. Any evening, but especially
on Saturday evening, crowds of these
young men and young women, arrayed
in their "loudest" clothes, promenade
up and down the main street, ogling and
chaffing and flirting. That the ogling
and chaffing and flirting sometimes result
disastrously scarcely need be said ; that
they do not oftener result disastrously is
a marvel, to be explained only by the
proverbial virtue of the shop-girl.

Yet the transformation of Brompton
is far less complete than might appear
from these somewhat bald statements.
The life of the former Brompton has not
entirely disappeared. Such is not the
manner of social evolution. Always the
old persists within the new. The work-
ing men and women who established
themselves under the democratic regime
are still granted social consideration, how-
ever far from the genteel path their
course of life may be, and a portion of
this consideration is extended to their
children, whatever may be their means
of livelihood. There are still detached
families who have a simple, wholesome,
satisfying home life, and many parents
who are practicing a rigid, self-sacrifi-
cing economy. All classes of citizens
patronize the public schools, and in them

184

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

social democracy prevails almost as of
old, and it abides also in some of the
churches. But these and other traces of
the past are really exceptions to the rule.
Broadly speaking, Brompton has under-
gone an internal revolution, as a result
of which economy, simplicity, and social
equality have been superseded by extra-
vagance, display, and social distinctions.
The foreigners of Brompton deserve
separate and special consideration. The
improvement they have made in their
ways of living, particularly in the last
quarter of a century, is nothing short of
phenomenal. Originally, they were un-
tidy as well as wretchedly poor, and their
settlements — for, with the clannishness
characteristic of foreigners, they herded
together — were veritable slums in as-
pect. Their unpainted houses, little bet-
ter than shanties, and their grassless and
disorderly yards, swarmed with smutty,
frouzly - headed, half - naked children.
Now, their houses are so well built and
well painted, their grounds so well kept,
and their families so well groomed, that
it would not be easy for a stranger to
distinguish the abodes of the foreigners
from those of the American population.
Their children are sent to school, and are
capable, alert, and ambitious. So far as
the foreign young men are concerned,
they are more resolute, in appearance at
least, and they make more serious at-
tempts at self-teaching and general self-
improvement, than the young men of na-
tive parents. Indeed, it is not improba-
ble that the young Irishmen of Brompton
have to-day, as a class, the fullest por-
tion of the American spirit, as this term
used to be understood. It was my own
lot — if a single intimate personal refer-
ence may be pardoned — to grow up in
a shoe town similar to Brompton. When
I go back for occasional visits, I find
none among the young men of my ac-
quaintance whom I am every way hap-
pier to meet than my old Irish play-
mates and schoolmates, and none taking
a keener interest in the larger things of

life, or putting forth more honest and
earnest efforts to make the most of their
opportunities. The foreigners, moreover,
have contributed their due proportion
of successful manufacturers, merchants,
lawyers, doctors, and school-teachers, as
well as of skillful workmen, and they
have sent their due proportion out into
the world. As citizens they are. in pub-
lic spirit, the more zealous element, —
always ready to appropriate money for
the common weal, particularly for the
library and the schools. Hardly a public
improvement has been carried through,
since they came to be an important fac-
tor in the population, that has not en-
countered more active and serious op-
position from the native element than
from them.

In view of the race and religious pre-
judices current at the time, the entry of
the foreigners, first into unskilled and
later into skilled labor, was one of the
influences which brought manual work
into disrepute with the native popula-
tion. That it was not the only influence,
however, is shown by the fact that farm
labor fell into a similar disrepute a full
generation before foreigners began to
take up the farms. Brompton has un-
questionably done great things for its
foreign population ; and its foreign pop-
ulation, if it cannot as yet be said to
have done great things for Brompton,
has at least a lively sense of gratitude
for benefits received, and the desire, and
it is to be hoped the capacity, ultimate-
ly to repay them. On the other hand,
there are two or three things much to
the discredit of the foreigners, which
in all fairness should be mentioned. In
politics, they have always given the blind-
est, most unthinking, most servile alle-
giance to a single party. A great part
of the drunkenness with which the town
has been cursed has occurred among their
number. They have also furnished a
large proportion of the saloon-keepers,
— a fact which would not of itself be so
much to their disgrace, perhaps, if it

A Massachusetts Shoe Town.

185

were not true also that the saloon-keep-
ers have carried on their business badly.
The trade union is another factor of
the life of the community with which it
is hard to deal fairly. It is not too
much to say, however, that in the shoe-
shops of Brompton, as wherever the trade
union exists, notably in England, the ripe
result of the organization of labor has
made just as surely for industrial peace
as the groping, feeble beginnings of its
organization made for industrial disturb-
ance. This is a peace like the armed
neutrality of Europe, it is true, based on
the fear which the strength of each par-
ty inspires in the other ; nevertheless it
is a peace to be counted on. Thus, in the
later seventies, during the days of the
raw and badly organized Knights of St.
Crispin, there were serious labor trou-
bles at Brompton, leading to riot and to
personal violence ; but since the genuine,
closely organized trade union has become
powerful enough to be feared, labor ad-
justments have been achieved without
strikes, as a rule, and when strikes have
occurred, they have been of short du-
ration and free from violence. Under
the present re'gime of factories so large
that employers cannot have personal
knowledge of their employees and take
a personal interest in them even if they
wish ; of indifferent, non - resident em-
ployers who would not take notice of
their employees even if they could ; and
of a rapidly growing contempt for labor,
and social ostracism of the laboring man,
the trade union is for the Brompton
shop-worker an absolutely indispensable
weapon of self-defense.

In illustration of the changes taking
place in manufacturing New England,
I have chosen to present a shoe town,
partly because the shoe town employs a
comparatively high grade of labor, and
partly because I am familiar with its
life and growth. The history and pre-
sent status of Brompton are typical,

however, not only of the shoe towns,
but, mutatis mutandis, of all the manu-
facturing communities of New England ;
the only important difference between
them and the mill towns, for instance,
being, that in the mill towns the social
changes have been effected more rapidly,
and are consequently more complete.

The social stratification of the large
cities admits of no question. Now, if
it be true that the tendency in the rural
districts is towards the development of
an " aristocracy " attached to the land,
through the gradual transformation of
the summer visitor into the permanent
resident ; and if it be true also that the
manufacturing communities, which prac-
tically constitute the residue, are, like
Brompton, in a process of social stratifi-
cation, is it too bold to suggest that for
New England as a whole — which, after
all, is not greater in extent than many
a single State, nor greater in population
than the city of London — a highly civi-
lized society, so clearly stratified as to
have pronounced types like the civiliza-
tions of the Old World, may be the final
and not too remote outcome ?

Why not ? Is there any good reason
why such an outcome should be deplored ?
May it not be that class distinctions are
an inevitable product of civilization ?
Surely, social democracy, except in new,
raw pioneer communities such as Bromp-
ton once was, is as yet a pretty dream
which has never been realized. One must
needs be doctrinaire indeed to be sure
that a clearly stratified, highly civilized
society is necessarily inferior — unless
too much virility be lost in taking on the
graces — to a socially democratic but un-
lovely pioneer society, if the two be mea-
sured in all their bearings. Each may
be the best for its time. It may be a
question simply of age, after all. Strat-
ification is among the marks of matu-
rity, and New England is getting old
enough to have some of the characteris-
tics of maturity.

Alvan F. Sanborn.

186

Butterfield & Co.

BUTTERFIELD & CO.

IN TWO PARTS. PART ONE.

FOB nearly a hundred years " Butter-
field's " was as well known in the town
of Slumborough as the post-office, and
almost as much frequented. Before the
war the firm was represented by Joseph
Butterfield, a most comfortably prosper-
ous, mild man, who had succeeded to the
honors of his house as hereditary grocer .
there. Nominally a grocer, but if any
feminine stranger had chanced to be in
pressing need of, say, a hoopskirt, of the
kind in vogue then, she would probably
have been directed to Butterfield's, where
she would have found some of these ele-
gant and indispensable articles of dress
swinging gracefully from hooks in the
doorway of the store. For " Hang the
hoops in the do' of the sto' " was one of
the orders of the head of the firm, given
as regularly as the day came and the
" sto' " was opened. Had any mascu-
line stranger wished to provide himself
with a book, it was to Butterfield's that
he would have been sent by almost any-
body in the town, — either there or to
the chemist's ; and he would have found,
on a shelf flanked by ginger jars and all
the spices of Arabia, perhaps, or above a
meal-bin, very likely, his Bunyan, or his
Doddridge, or his Shakespeare, or even
the last elegant Book of Beauty or an-
nual in the time of the third Joseph, who
had a fondness for books, — or rather, af-
fected one, — and wore a velvet ribbon
above his queue on Christmas Day and
at Michaelmas and Easter, in imitation
of the local gentry. Did any child, na-
tive or foreign, need a doll, a whip, a
pair of skates, a top, or a ball, it was still
Butterfield who supplied it, and threw
in one of the large, yellow, toothsome
squares of gingerbread baked every Sat-
urday by Mrs. Butterfield in the seclu-
sion of the back premises.

From this it will be seen that Butter-
field's had a scope and range that made
it of far more value to a country town
than if it had confined itself rigidly to
what Mr. Butterfield called "its prime
line ; " and it must be further recorded
that the business was conducted not only
" on the fair and on the square, let an-
gels say to the contrary," again to quote
Mr. Butterfield, but in a spirit of gener-
osity which was uncalculating and genu-
ine, and the best advertisement that could
have been framed. It was the only one,
too ; for if there was a thing that Mr.
Butterfield was violently opposed to, it
was advertising. Ordinarily as soft and
yielding as his own butter in the month
of July, he became adamant the moment
the question of advertising was brought
up. " It ain't respectable, to begin with,"
he said. " We ain't never done it. We
ain't never going to do it. And it ain't
no use, either. Everybody knows what
we 've got in the sto' ; and if they don't,
they can find out mighty quick by ask-
ing ; and when they want anything they
are going to ask for it, — they ain't too
modest for that."

Mr. Butterfield's family was made up
of his wife — whose gingerbread has been
mentioned already, and whose principal
claim to his affection lay in her having
borne him a son " to carry on and hold
up and be ekil to Butterfield's," as he
put it — and that son. Kind and affec-
tionate in his ordinary relations with his
" Jinny," he petrified into the head of
the firm, and instantly ceased to be mere-
ly the head of the family, when it came
to the " sto'." Anything in her conduct
that militated against or injuriously af-
fected that institution was sternly re-
buked. She was up long before the sun
rose every day, reprinting butter, right-

Butterjield & Co.

187

ing the " sto'," scrubbing, dusting, mak-
ing ready for " the opening," of which
she spoke and which she regarded as a
great and solemn function, although it
consisted only of taking down a wooden
shutter and opening a small green door,
hanging the hoopskirts, and arranging a
tasteful heap of tomatoes, potatoes, and
the like beneath, — always excepting the
window. This Mr. Butterfield would not
have trusted her, would not have trusted
any living person but himself, to arrange.

It is not too much to say that all his
life long he had seen everything around
and about him through the medium of
that window's dozen green panes. What
would look well in it, what would never
do for it, what might be adapted for it,
what disfigured and spoiled it, — these
were the questions into which most other
questions resolved themselves in the alem-
bic of the Butterfield mind ; and the only
time in all his life that his wife ever saw
him "tumble" was when he marched
into her kitchen, one morning, and pas-
sionately flung down a loaf of her baking,
saying, " I found this here thing in But-
terfield's winder ! Do you call it fit to
set there ? Give it to the pigs, and never
do you put the like there agin, the long-
est day you live." She had profaned a
hallowed spot with her bad bread, and
it was not until she had invented and
popularized a bun that Judge Barton
(the gourmand of the little community)
declared to be the best he had ever put
into his mouth that she was quite for-
given.

A flourishing institution, too, was But-
terfield's ; that is, for Slumborough.
" We 've ordered from Baltimore as often
as twict in one week," said the head of
the house. " We 've sold imported pickles
over that counter, and sugar by the bar-
rel, without a grain of sand in it from
head to bottom. Before I would let a
pound of sugar leave Butterfield's mixed
with anything, if it was gold-dust, Jinny,
I 'd starve, and let the boy starve, which
is more."

The business methods of the firm, how-
ever, were not those generally adopted at
present throughout the country. They
would be considered remarkable, now-
adays, I am afraid, not to say eccentric.
Mr. Butterfield knew every creature in
Slumborough, black and white, to begin
with. He was full of the milk of human
kindness. He did not so much buy and
sell as sit in his gates, like a Spanish
alcalde, and adjudicate upon the claims
and demands presented to him. Did
Miss Sally Brown, who was sixteen, and
kept house, after a fashion, for an in-
valid mother, come in and want to buy
five pounds of candles, Mr. Butterfield
would say, " Why, Miss Sally, what kind
of a housekeeper are you, anyway ?
Your ma's got a whole box of candles
down from Baltimore. I saw them in the
cart in front of her do' last Saturday.
You don't want no candles ; you go home
and look in the storeroom, and I reckon
you '11 find them there," — which would
end the transaction, certainly, but was
not likely to make a " corner " in sperma-
ceti. Did Widow Lester come in, and,
after casting a hungry, humble look about
the place, deprecatingly ask for "rice,
two pounds, and never mind about the
weevil," or the red herrings and corn
meal on which she chiefly nourished
her orphan brood of six, what did Mr.
Butterfield do but give her four pounds
of the best " Carolina," and perhaps a
string of fresh fish, and always a parcel
of something as " a little extry." But
when the judge bought his month's stores
of " goodies " of all kinds, Mr. Butter-
field was severe with his weights and
balances, though always careful to stick
to market prices in his charges. " The
rich is them that ought to pay, mother,
for the poor's victuals, and I know when
and where to skimp, — well, not skimp,
either, but even up, — and when and
where to throw in and not see good," he
would say to his wife, his head on one
side and his mouth rigidly focused over
his scales.

188

Butterfield & Co.

As to children, it was preposterous, or
would have been to the hard-fisted, to
see Mr. Butterfield's dealings with them
in the guise of a business transaction.
" Take this box of figs and go 'long,
honey, go 'long home ; your ma 's done
sent here twict already this morning fur
yer. Take your five cents, too, Looisy ;
there ain't room in the till for no more
silver." Some inveterate youthful ha-
bitue" of the place falling asleep here or
there, on bale "or box, on warm days, Mr.
Butterfield would carry the child into the
back bedroom and lay him on his own
bed, put a net over him to keep the flies
from " pestering " him, and tip back to
the store, leaving him to enjoy a com-
fortable nap. Several times in every
season, when the skies were cloudy and
the weather " just right," Mr. Butter-
field, who loved a boy and loved to fish,
would shut up the store, and go off with
" the youngsters " down the valley to
catch bass ; and customers, coming to the
shop door to buy something much need-
ed, would find the stout green planks
adorned with no weak explanation of
that gentleman's defection. Butterfield's
belonged to Mr. Butterfield, and not to
the public ; to go or to come was the in-
herent right of a citizen generally pub-
lic-spirited enough to be a fixture behind
his counter, but quite at liberty to leave
it if he were so disposed.

Somehow nobody ever dreamed of tak-
ing offense, much less of resenting these
commercial eccentricities. Mrs. Perkins,
one of the first ladies of the place, would
cheerfully wait two weeks for something
that Mr. Butterfield was " out of " rather
than buy elsewhere ; and all the " regu-
lars," to a woman, showed the most de-
licate consideration for Mr. Butterfield's
feelings. When his jars and boxes began
to run low, they would apologetically ask
for " barely enough to get along with "
until his supplies should be replenished,
and would actually blush if, by some
thoughtless order, the very last fig was
torn from the drum, and the bareness of

Butterfield's stood revealed to the scoffer
of the opposition, a patron of Lecky's.

Little Miss Bradley, whose grandmo-
ther had " bought everything at Butter-
field's," always got near -sighted when
anything went wrong there, and turned
her back on empty barrels as if they had
been so many parvenues, and " would
not lower herself so far " as to try in tea
the, molasses bought there, as her friend
Miss Mastin (of the opposition) strongly
advised. Both these ladies lived at the
other end of the town, and usually came
down together in the car, a lumbering
ex-omnibus, that crawled down the main
street at somewhere about the same time
every day. There were people who com-
plained that it did not run oftener and
faster, but they were strangers, and most-
ly from the North. Slumborough folks
were quite content with it. Its pace was
the pace of Slumborough, indeed, and
suited them perfectly ; for it would cer-
tainly have been most disconcerting to
go rushing along on general and absurd
principles, simply in order to get over so
much ground in a'given time. It was al-
together more convenient for Miss Brad-
ley to doze comfortably on through the
outskirts, and when the principal thor-
oughfare was reached to call out to the
driver, " Are those sweet potatoes at
Finlay's ? Get off, will you not, if you
please, Hobson, and let me know the
price ? " When he returned she would
quietly make up her mind about the po-
tatoes, and either get off with Cynthia (a
small maid with a big basket, and a very
long and very white pinafore buttoned
up the back, the sole attendant of Miss
Bradley) and make her purchases (the
car waiting the while), or decline to do
so, saying, " Hobson, they look frost-bit-
ten ; you can go on, thank you." It of-
ten happened that Cynthia would waylay
the car, as it were, later in the day, on
a return trip, and would shake her kinky
locks at Hobson threateningly if he
showed symptoms of moving on after fif-
teen minutes' or so vain attendance on

Butterjield & Co.

189

Miss Bradley, protesting, " You ain't
goin' widout Miss Ellen, is you ? Don't
you know she takes dis here car always ?
She 's just gone round home a minute to
see her ma, and den to see 'bout gittin'
my shoes and to buy some sponge cake
for supper ; she '11 be along presently."
And sure enough, presently Miss Brad-
ley would come in sight, and advancing
at her usual pace would climb up the
step with Hobson's assistance, saying,
" I 'm afraid I have kept you waiting,
Hobson. I am obliged to you." To this
he would reply, " Lor', no, ma'am, you
ain't ! I give Bill and Bob [the horses]
a bite, and I ain't pressed for time ; "
while the passengers would all hasten
with one accord to assure the dear little
lady that they also had not minded in
the least, and were not pressed for time
either. It was one of the beauties of
Slumborough that everybody had as much
time as the patriarchs, and had nothing
to do that interfered with everybody's be-
ing always perfectly courteous to every-
body else.

There were occasions when Mr. But-
terfield's views as to times and seasons
were fully as placid, and opposed to any-
thing like slavish observance of routine
or unseemly haste. In the spring, for
instance, when he was deeply interested
in a small garden at the back of his
lot, which he cultivated himself, nothing
made him so angry as to be summoned
by his wife to wait on a customer ; and
if it turned out to be a man, he would
say, " What kind of a sort of a feller air
you, anyway, to come asking for herrings,
with my peas waiting to be stuck ? " or
(after ascertaining his sex) would keep
him waiting for half an hour, while he
transplanted his tomatoes in a leisurely
fashion, and shaded them from the sun.
Everything planted in " Uncle Jo's " gar-
den throve and flourished. (It was as
" Uncle Jo " that he was known to half
of Slumborough.) Everything that he
touched succeeded, during these years of
plenty, and trouble or want of any kind

seemed only the shadow, seen in other
lives, of a brilliant prosperity attending
everybody connected with Butterfield's.
Yet trouble there was, and to spare,
ahead of them all ; though on the sur-
face it would have appeared that hearts
and lives like theirs, so innocent, so kind-
ly, so useful, would present no target for
the slings and arrows of outrageous for-
tune. It came with the war, that fruit-
ful source of all manner of woes for all
manner of people. Mr. Butterfield had
no more military spirit or fire in him,
to begin with, than one of his own fir-
kins. The whole political situation, in-
deed, with him, resolved itself into sav-
ing Butterfield's, not the country. For
six months the milky sweetness of Uncle
Jo's thoughts was curdled by a grave
and painful doubt. Ought he to go into
the army, or ought he to stick to the
" sto' " ? That was the question. But
when man after man of his acquaintance,
friend after friend, neighbor after neigh-
bor, caught the fever ; when people took
to hinting that he was ." able-bodied,"
and talked scornfully of " stay-at-homes,"
and wanted to know what he gave his
substitute " to get killed for him ; " when
his minister asked him earnestly if he
was doing his duty by his home and his
country, this doubt became a sad burden,
and assumed every shape that a question
could. Was he letting other men give
their lives for Jinny and little Jo and
Butterfield's, while he stayed at home
and made money ? Was he a coward ?
Was he doing his duty ? At last this
mildest and least bloodthirsty of men
could stand it no longer. He shut up
the store for a day, and gave out that he
had gone fishing. He went out into the
country, and lay down behind a haystack
flat on his back, looking up into the sky
for more hours than he ever realized ;
and when he arose and dusted himself
off, that afternoon, and removed telltale
straws lest they should show which way
the wind had blown, he had come to a
conclusion. He announced it that even-

190

Butterfteld & Co.

ing to his wife, in tones not in the least
like those of Boanerges, Son of Thunder.

" Mother," said he, " don't you say a
word. It won't be no use. I 'm settled,
and bent, and determinated. I 'm go-
ing to this here war, though I ain't no
soldier, and you 've got to carry on But-
terfield's."

" My sakes alive ! have you gone plum
crazy, Jo ? Me carry on Butterfield's ! "
she shrieked, feeling as if the universe
had suddenly been handed over to her to
" carry on."

But that was just what he had meant,
and he declined to discuss the subject of
his plans with her. That very night he
drew up a sort of Code Butterfield for
the regulation and continuation of the
business, and two days later volunteered
to go with the Slumborough Guards to
the front, before his wife had sufficiently
recovered from her amazement to com-
bat vigorously such an extraordinary re-
solution. His last words to her were not
much like those accredited to the world's
heroes, but they would have done no dis-
credit to any of them, for they were the
words of an honest man.

" Mother," said he, with his arms
around his boy, while his comrades wait-
ed at the door, " do you always give 'em
the worth of their money every time.
Good goods at fair prices is what it 's
always been at Butterfield's ; and ef I
was to die, I could n't rest in my grave
if I thought there was a mite of sand
in a single pound of sugar sold over this
counter, or a bar'l of flour wheeled over
that there doorsill that warn't sugar-
house Looisiany. And don't you never
go distressing of the poor, — remember ;
nor troubling them that ain't got it to
pay, — that ain't Butterfield's ; nor keep-
ing open on Sundays, : — that ain't Butter-
field's ; nor falling low in qualities, nor
skimping in quantities, — that ain't But-
terfield's. And if I neve:~ come back,
bring up Jo, here, to know what Butter-
field's has been, and always was, and
always has got to be. . . . Good-by, now,

Jinny. I 've got my orders, and you 've
got yours. Go 'long with your ma, now,
Jo."

To this his wife made copious answers,
weeping the while, and vowing fidelity
and obedience as solemnly as she did on
the day of her marriage.

With Mr. Butterfield's career as a
soldier we have nothing whatever to do,
except to say that he did his duty in a
way scarcely to have been expected of a
man of his peaceful character, training,
and occupation. And his wife did hers.
She bought, and sold, and baked, and
cooked, and cleaned, like the faithful,
industrious creature that she was, and
would have held it a shameful thing not
to keep in spirit and letter to the instruc-
tions left by her husband. It was not
so much the business as the religion of
her life to carry them out. She showed
tact and skill in her management of
things and people, judgment and shrewd-
ness in her purchases, — a whole host
of qualities that had lain dormant in her
character, overshadowed by the authori-
ty of her spouse. If anybody could have
" carried on," made, saved, extended,
and perfected Butterfield's, it would have
been Jane Eliza, the devoted and inde-
fatigable. But alas ! and alas again !
Eighty - seven times was Slumborough
captured and recaptured during the next
four years ! Five times was Butterfield's
raided by friend and foe. The sixth
time, Jane, cowardly woman creature
that she was, stood in the door with an
axe and successfully warded off ruin.
Three times was the store set on fire,
with other houses in that part of the
town, and it was Jane who got help and
put out the flames. Over and over again
she bolted and barricaded herself and
little Joseph in for ten days at a time,
until it was safe to take down the shut-
ters.

But luck and pluck, — though they do
a great deal and wear through many a
rough day, — and even experience hardly

Butterjield & Co.

191

learned, cannot do everything, and so it
happened that a soldier succeeded in put-
ting the torch to Butterfield's, one bitter
winter's night, and utterly consuming it.
Jane, seizing her son by the hand, had
barely time to escape before the house
fell with a crash that to her was more
awful than the fall of an empire. But-
terfield's was no more ! Half distraught
with grief and rage, the poor soul haunt-
ed the spot for weeks afterwards, star-
ing at the charred beams and timbers
and bricks, poking in the ashes in a vain
hope of recovering some of the money
that she had left in the till, — something,
anything, that might have escaped the
flames. The neighbors, many of them
oppressed by woes of their own, took
pains to draw her from the spot, gave
her and her son a shelter, and did what
in them lay to soothe and comfort her.
But trouble was to be the worthy wo-
man's portion for many a day, for Joseph
(now grown a tall lad) was given em-
ployment in a cloth - mill, and shortly
after was caught in the machinery and
killed. His mother never held up her
head after this, but was always pitiful-
ly repeating, " He left the business and
the boy to me, and they are both gone !
gone ! gone ! " Three months later she
sickened and died.

So it came about that a battered and
tattered veteran, returning with other vet-
erans in no better case to Slumborough
after Appomattox, was to find how much
harder it is to have a bleeding heart than
feet that " track " the snow. He had
hopefully, if painfully, hobbled for many
a weary mile with blood oozing from the
strips of old carpet that served him for
shoes, without uttering such a groan of
despair as burst from him when he again
stood upon the spot that had once been
home. Communication between himself
and his wife had been interrupted, and
he had no knowledge of what had hap-
pened. Good husband though he was,
and good father, I am bound to say that
the thing which brought a sickening sense

of collapse, that made his head reel and
the world seem as unreal as the smoke
of a battlefield, was the fact that Butter-
field's was no more. For domestic be-
reavements his simple mind had perhaps
been prepared, but this was Night, Chaos,
Anguish !

Honest tears did Mr. Butterfield shed
over his wife and son in the Slumborough
churchyard, but the bitterest came one
day when he stumbled upon a blackened
tomato -can among the debris of what
had once been the " sto'." Habit, affec-
tion, regret, the hopes, pride, illusions,
honorable ambitions, and hereditary pre-
judices of his whole life and the lives of
his father and grandfather before him,
were all in that can, and his hands shook
as he picked it up and looked at it with
tragic intentness, then flung it from him,
and fell upon the earth, with his face
in the ashes of what had constituted his
world. He was still lying there, when
old Mrs. Nicodemus, leaning on her stick,
came slowly by, and stopped to see what
such a sight might mean..

" Get up, Joseph, get up from there,
and come along home with me ; I 'm
feeble and need help," she said, with
her woman's wit in such matters not in
the least dulled by age. " I don't know
what 's come to me ; I 've very near fell
twice this week, and three times last.
People are always telling me to give over
going about ; but how 'd they like it, is
what I say. Give me your arm ; no, not
this side, the other side, man ! " And
pretending to make of him a prop, this
artful, kindly old granny bore off the de-
feated and despairing one to her tiny
cottage, and forthwith announced one
thing : " You 're to live here with me,
Joseph, and take care of me, till my son
that you was brought up with, and has
been friends with you all your life, comes
home. And I don't mean to keep you
long ; mercy, I ain't a fool ! You '11 get
the money somehow, and build the sto'
up again before long, and have to mind
it, of course ; but not too soon, if I am

192

Butterjield & Co.

asked to give my say, for I won't be left
alone, and I tell you that flat, with no
pardons asked. Why don't you get me
a chair ? Don't you see me standing
here ? When I was young, old people
did n't have to beg and pray for chairs
to be given them ; they was offered.
Hang up your hat on that nail, Joseph,
and make up the fire, and we '11 have a
bite of something together ; and that lit-
tle place next ain't much more than a
cupboard, but I reckon you 've slept in
worse in the army, now ain't you ? And
I '11 make you comfortable."

Thus taken possession of, and com-
forted, and bullied, and encouraged, as
a man never is or can be except by a
woman of the right sort, poor Uncle Jo
gave a meek sigh and did as he was bid ;
and presently he was drinking some cof-
fee,— yes, and enjoying it, too, — and
the despairing mood of the morning was
gone, and life had again become — possi-
ble. A new motive power had been put
into him : Butterfield's should be rebuilt.
All was not lost, and he had still some-
thing to live for ; consideration of ways
and means he left to the future.

After this came a short season of heal-
ing quiet and comfort, in which it often
seemed to the old soldier as if he were
again a child, and Mother Nicodemus,
peremptory, benevolent, full of all kind-
ly care and thought for him, the mo-
ther whom he dimly remembered. He
called her " Mother Nicodemus," and for
her he never was or could be more than
six years old, — the age at which she
had first made his acquaintance. But
all the same he had no better friend,
and kinder treatment of a different sort
would not have been half as good for
him ; her bark was indeed just the ton-
ic that ho most needed, mixed as it was
with a real tenderness for him. Her
bright old eyes were not long in discov-
ering that he would relapse into his mel-
ancholy if he long remained dependent
upon her bounty. So after much thought
she concluded, one day, to consult her

lifelong patron, Miss Bradley. The very
next time that Miss Bradley came to see
her, therefore, she essayed to speak, al-
though it was not an easy task. Fluent
and even aggressive with her equals, she
had a respect so great for her " betters "
that, beyond rising and curtsying re-
peatedly and receiving their orders, she
generally preserved a silence that made
them consider her " a most respectful
and self-respecting quiet creature." She
was just tying on her plain poke bonnet
(guiltless of plumes and flowers) to go
to Wednesday afternoon service, when
Miss Bradley came to the door.

It was while they were discussing a
new set of caps for Miss Bradley, which
were to have rosettes in front, but " not
too high, for that would look positively
fast, I fear," that Mrs. Nicodemus intro-
duced the matter of Butterfield's ; for she
had it in mind to resurrect that commer-
cial Phosnix somehow through Miss Brad-
ley's influence. That lady was now in
an enviable position, for Slumborough ;
that is, a few thousand dollars had been
invested for her before the war, in Bal-
timore, and she was consequently enjoy-
ing a small but fixed and fairly comfort-
able income.

" Something must be done, I quite
agree with you, Mrs. Nicodemus ; it will
never do to let Butterfield's be wiped
out by the Federals," she answered, as if
" the late unnatural and fratricidal " had
been inaugurated and pursued solely with
a view to the annihilation of that estab-
lishment. " Yes, something shall be done.
It shall indeed, I assure you. I have
no control of my money ; my nephew in
Baltimore manages everything for me.
But there must be something that I can
do, and I shall most certainly take the
matter up, and see if I cannot put it be-
fore our leading families in a way that
will insure action. Make the frills full
at the back, if you please, Mrs. Nicode-
mus. Cynthia does not mind the trouble
of getting them up, and is quite vexed
if they are so plain as to be unbecoming.

Butterfield & Co.

193

And she thought two lilac ribbons of dif-
ferent shades for the morning-caps would
look well."

The little old lady pattered away home,
her mind full of her new mission ; and
for many a day afterward she found
pretty employment in it. But just then
the leading families were having very
hard work of it to restore their own
waste places and altars. After much
correspondence with the hard - headed
nephew in Baltimore, who would not let
her give any of her own money, she one
day bethought herself of a certain Colo-
nel Jackson. Miss Bradley was a good
Southerner and a loyal one, but she was a
better Christian, and this had led her to
take into her house and nurse a wounded
Federal officer, of whom she was wont to
say, " Of course it is very sad, his being
a Federal, but we should remember that
our place of birth, our youthful associa-
tions, and the prejudices of a whole com-
munity will affect any man's nature, how-
ever just and upright, and warp it from
the truth. I have no doubt that Illinois
is a highly respectable State ; it was once
a part of Virginia. And I will say that
he has, under trying circumstances, ever
comported himself like the true gentle-
man. And so he has become my valued
Friend." Miss Bradley seemed always
to talk in capitals, like one of Bulwer's
essays.

To the misguided colonel, then, with
whom she had preserved an affectionate
relation, Miss Bradley poured out her
plaint, in spite of Cynthia, grown the real
ruler of the house, a benevolent despot,
who interested herself in all that her soi-
disant mistress did.

" He ain't gwine give you nothin' for
no white man, Miss Ellen," said Cynthia.
" He 's one er dem Bobolitionists. You
tell him it 's to edgercate me, and den

you '11 git some swe ; and den you kin
spend it to suit yerself. You ain't smart,
Miss Ria ! "

" I, a Bradley, tell a deliberate false-
hood ! I get money under false pre-
tenses ! " exclaimed Miss Bradley, aghast
at this result of all her efforts to make
Cynthia " respectable " and " high-prin-
cipled." " Leave my presence, Cynthia !
Go!"

" If she had set her heart on restor-
ing Kenilworth, the dear old lady could
not write in a more historical, poeti-
cal, plaintive vein," thought the colonel,
when he got Miss Bradley's lengthy ap-
peal. " But since she has asked a kind-
ness of me — for the first time " —

Well, Miss Bradley got her checque ;
and upstairs, in a secret compartment of
an ancient chest of drawers, though no
one knew it, Miss Bradley had some gold
that helped matters on. In a month, a
little building, half house and half shan-
ty, fitted for a store and having a sort
of shed attachment at the back, was put
up. It is hard to say whether Miss
Bradley, or Mrs. Nicodemus, or Uncle
Jo was the happiest for seeing it there !
Butterfield's redwivus ! It was a great,
a delicious moment for them all. Miss
Bradley was so afraid of being thanked
that she scuttled off home as soon as
she had given up the key. Cynthia was
not so precipitate. She stayed behind
and filched a basket of eatables from the
counter.

Mrs. Nicodemus talked over the great
possibilities of the place, seated on an in-
verted lime-bucket left by the workmen,
and Uncle Jo laughed out for the first
time since Appomattox. They sang Miss
Bradley's praises, antiphonally, with all
their hearts, to Cynthia's Selah, " Dat's
so!"

Frances Courtenay Baylor.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478.

194

/Strivings of the Negro People.

STRIVINGS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLE.

BETWEEN me and the other world
there is ever an unasked question : un-
asked by some through feelings of deli-
cacy ; by others through the difficulty
of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless,
flutter round it. They approach me in
a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me cu-
riously or compassionately, and then, in-
stead of saying directly, How does it
feel to be a problem ? they say, I know
an excellent colored man in my town ;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville ; or, Do not
these Southern outrages make your blood
boil? At these I smile, or am interest-
ed, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as
the occasion may require. To the real
question, How does it feel to be a pro-
blem ? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange
experience, — peculiar even for one who
has never been anything else, save per-
haps in babyhood and in Europe. It is
in the early days of rollicking boyhood
that the revelation first bursts upon one,
all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me.
I was a little thing, away up in the hills
of New England, where the dark Housa-
tonic winds between Hoosac and Tagha-
nic to the sea. In a wee wooden school-
house, something put it into the boys' and
girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards
— ten cents a package — and exchange.
The exchange was merry, till one girl,
a tall newcomer, refused my card, —
refused it peremptorily, with a glance.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the
others ; or like, mayhap, in heart and
life and longing, but shut out from their
world by a vast veil. I had thereafter
no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through ; I held all beyond it in com-
mon contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering
shadows. That sky was bluest when I

could beat my mates at examination-time,
or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat
their stringy heads. Alas, with the years
all this fine contempt began to fade ; for
the world I longed for, and all its daz-
zling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.
But they should not keep these prizes, I
said ; some, all, I would wrest from them.
Just how I would do it I could never de-
cide : by reading law, by healing the sick,
by telling the wonderful tales that swam
in my head, — some way. With other
black boys the strife was not so fiercely
sunny : their youth shrunk into tasteless
sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the
pale world about them and mocking dis-
trust of everything white ; or wasted it-
self in a bitter cry, Why did God make
me an outcast and a stranger in mine
own house ? The " shades of the prison-
house " closed round about us all : walls
strait and stubborn to the whitest, but
relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable
to sons of night who must plod darkly on
in resignation, or beat unavailing palms
against the stone, or steadily, half hope-
lessly watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the
Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mon-
golian, the Negro is a sort of seventh
son, born with a veil, and gifted with
second-sight in this American world, —
a world which yields him no self -con-
sciousness, but only lets him see him-
self through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one's self through the eyes
of others, of measuring one's soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever
feels his two-ness, — an American, a Ne-
gro ; two souls, two thoughts, two unre-
conciled strivings ; two warring ideals in
one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Strivings of the Negro People.

195

The history of the American Negro is
the history of this strife, — this longing
to attain self - conscious manhood, to
merge his double self into a better and
truer self. In this merging he wishes
neither of the older selves to be lost.
He does not wish to Africanize Amer-
ica, for America has too much to teach
the world and Africa ; he does not wish
to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of
white Americanism, for he believes —
foolishly, perhaps, but fervently — that
Negro blood has yet a message for the
world. He simply wishes to make it pos-
sible for a man to be both a Negro and
an American without being cursed and
spit upon by his fellows, without losing
the opportunity of self-development.

This is the end of his striving : to be
a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to
escape both death and isolation, and to
husband and use his best powers. These
powers, of body and of mind, have in the
past been so wasted and dispersed as to
lose all effectiveness, and to seem like ab-
sence of all power, like weakness. The
double-aimed struggle of the black arti-
san, on the one hand to escape white con-
tempt for a nation of mere hewers of
wood and drawers of water, and on the
other hand to plough and nail and dig for
a poverty-stricken horde, could only re-
sult in making him a poor craftsman, for
he had but half a heart in either cause.
By the poverty and ignorance of his
people the Negro lawyer or doctor was
pushed toward quackery and demagog-
ism, and by the criticism of the other
world toward an elaborate preparation
that overfitted him for his lowly tasks.
The would-be black savant was confront-
ed by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to
his white neighbors, while the knowledge
which would teach the white world was
Greek to his own flesh and blood. The
innate love of harmony and beauty that
set the ruder souls of his people a-dan-
cing, a-singing, and a-laughing raised but
confusion and doubt in the soul of the

black artist ; for the beauty revealed to
him was the soul-beauty of a race which
his larger audience despised, and he could
not articulate the message of another peo-
ple.

This waste of double aims, this seek-
ing to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and
faith and deeds of eight thousand thou-
sand people, has sent them often wooing
false gods and invoking false means of
salvation, and has even at times seemed
destined to make them ashamed of them-
selves. In the days of bondage they
thought to see in one divine event the
end of all doubt and disappointment ;
eighteenth - century Rousseauism never
worshiped freedom with half the unques-
tioning faith that the American Negro
did for two centuries. To him slavery
was, indeed, the sum of all villainies,
the cause of all sorrow, the root of all
prejudice ; emancipatiqn was the key
to a promised land of sweeter beauty
than ever stretched before the eyes of
wearied Israelites. In his songs and ex-
hortations swelled one refrain, liberty;
in his tears and curses the god he im-
plored had freedom in his right hand.
At last it came, — suddenly, fearfully,
like a dream. With one wild carnival of
blood and passion came the message in
his own plaintive cadences : —

"Shout, O children!

Shout, you 're free !
The Lord has bought your liberty ! "

Years have passed away, ten, twenty,
thirty. Thirty years of national life,
thirty years of renewal and development,
and yet the swarthy ghost of Banquo
sits in its old place at the national feast.
In vain does the nation cry to its vastest
problem, —
" Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble ! ' '

The freedman has not yet found in free-
dom his promised land. Whatever of
lesser good may have come in these years
of change, the shadow of a deep disap-
pointment rests upon the Negro people,

196

Strivings of the Negro People.

— a disappointment all the more bit-
ter because the unattained ideal was un-
bounded save by the simple ignorance
of a lowly folk.

The first decade was merely a prolon-
gation of the vain search for freedom,
the boon that seemed ever barely to
elude their grasp, — like a tantalizing
will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and mislead-
ing the headless host. The holocaust of
war, the terrors of the Kuklux Klan,
the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorgan-
ization of industry, and the contradictory
advice of friends and foes left the be-
wildered serf with no new watchword
beyond the old cry for freedom. As
the decade closed, however, he began to
grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty
demanded for its attainment powerful
means, and these the Fifteenth Amend-
ment gave him. The ballot, which before
he had looked upon as a visible sign of
freedom, he nowr regarded as the chief
means of gaining and perfecting the lib-
erty with which war had partially en-
dowed him. And why not ? Had not
votes made war and emancipated mil-
lions ? Had not votes enfranchised the
freedmen ? Was anything impossible to
a power that had done all this ? A million
black men started with renewed zeal to
vote themselves into the kingdom. The
decade fled away, — a decade containing,
to the f reedman's mind, nothing but sup-
pressed votes, stuffed ballot-boxes, and
election outrages that nullified his vaunt-
ed right of suffrage. And yet that
decade from 1875 to 1885 held another
powerful movement, the rise of another
ideal to guide the unguided, another pil-
lar of fire by night after a clouded day.
It was the ideal of " book-learning ; " the
curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance,
to know and test the power of the cabalis-
tic letters of the white man, the longing
to know. Mission and night schools
began in the smoke of battle, ran the
gauntlet of reconstruction, and at last
developed into permanent foundations.
Here at last seemed to have been dis-

covered the mountain path to Canaan ;
longer than the highway of emancipation
and law, steep and rugged, but straight,
leading to heights high enough to over-
look life.

Up the new path the advance guard
toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly ; only
those who have watched and guided the
faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull
understandings, of the dark pupils of
these schools know how faithfully, how
piteously, this people strove to learn. It
was weary work. The cold statistician
wrote down the inches of progress here
and there, noted also where here and
there a foot had slipped or some one had
fallen. To the tired climbers, the hori-
zon was ever dark, the mists were often
cold, the Canaan was always dim and far
away. If, however, the vistas disclosed
as yet no goal, no resting - place, little
but flattery and criticism, the journey at
least gave leisure for reflection and self-
examination ; it changed the child of
emancipation to the youth with dawning
self -consciousness, self-realization, self-
respect. In those sombre forests of his
striving his own soul rose before him, and
he saw himself, — darkly as through a
veil ; and yet he saw in himself some faint
revelation of his power, of his mission.
He began to have a dim feeling that, to
attain his place in the world, he must be
himself, and not another. For the first
time he sought to analyze the burden he
bore upon his back, that dead-weight of
social degradation partially masked be-
hind a half-named Negro problem. He
felt his poverty ; without a cent, without
a home, without land, tools, or savings, he
had entered into competition with rich,
landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor
man is hard, but to be a poor race in a
land of dollars is the very bottom of
hardships. He felt the weight of his
ignorance, — not simply of letters, but
of life, of business, of the humanities ;
the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries
shackled his hands and feet. Nor was

Strivings of the Negro People.

197

his burden all poverty and ignorance.
The red stain of bastardy, which two
centuries of systematic legal defilement
of Negro women had stamped upon his
race, meant not only the loss of ancient
African chastity, but also the heredita-
ry weight of a mass of filth from white
whoremongers and adulterers, threaten-
ing almost the obliteration of the Negro
home.

A people thus handicapped ought not
to be asked to race with the world, but
rather allowed to give all its time and
thought to its own social problems. But
alas ! while sociologists gleefully count
his bastards and his prostitutes, the very
soul of the toiling, sweating black man
is darkened by the shadow of a vast de-
spair. Men call the shadow prejudice,
and learnedly explain it as the natural
defense of culture against barbarism,
learning against ignorance, piu-ity against
crime, the " higher " against the " low-
er " races. To which the Negro cries
Amen ! and swears that to so much of
this strange prejudice as is founded
on just homage to civilization, culture,
righteousness, and progress he humbly
bows and meekly does obeisance. But
before that nameless prejudice that leaps
beyond all this he stands helpless, dis-
mayed, and well-nigh speechless ; before
that personal disrespect and mockery,
the ridicule and systematic humiliation,
the distortion of fact and wanton license
of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the
better and boisterous welcoming of the
worse, the all-pervading desire to incul-
cate disdain for everything black, from
Toussaint to the devil, — before this there
rises a sickening despair that would dis-
arm and discourage any nation save that
black host to whom " discouragement "
is an unwritten word.

They still press on, they still nurse the
dogged hope, — not a hope of nauseating
patronage, not a hope of reception into
charmed social circles of stock-jobbers,
pork-packers, and earl-hunters, but the
hope of a higher synthesis of civilization

and humanity, a true progress, with which
the chorus " Peace, good will to men,"

" May make one music as before,
But vaster."

Thus the second decade of the Ameri-
can Negro's freedom was a period of con-
flict, of inspiration and doubt, of faith
and vain questionings, of Sturm und
Drang. The ideals of physical freedom,
of political power, of school training, as
separate all-sufficient panaceas for social
ills, became in the third decade dim and
overcast. They were the vain dreams of
credulous race childhood ; not wrong, but
incomplete and over-simple. The train-
ing of the schools we need to-day more
than ever, — the training of def fc hands,
quick eyes and ears, and the broader,
deeper, higher culture of gifted minds.
The power of the ballot we need in
sheer _self-defense, and as a guarantee
of good faith. We may misuse it, but
we can scarce do worse in this respect
than our whilom masters. Freedom, too,
the long-sought, we still seek, — the free-
dom of life and limb, the freedom to
work and think. Work, culture, and lib-
erty, — all these we need, not singly, but
together ; for to-day these ideals among
the Negro people are gradually coales-
cing, and finding a higher meaning in
the unifying ideal of race, — the ideal
of fostering the traits and talents of the
Negro, not in opposition to, but in con-
formity with, the greater ideals of the
American republic, in order that some
day, on American soil, two world races
may give each to each those character-
istics which both so sadly lack. Already
we come not altogether empty-handed :
there is to-day no true American music
but the sweet wild melodies of the Negro
slave ; the American fairy tales are In-
dian and African ; we are the sole oasis
of simple faith and reverence in a dusty
desert of dollars and smartness. Will
America be poorer if she replace her
brutal, dyspeptic blundering with the
light-hearted but determined Negro hu-
mility ; or her coarse, cruel wit with lov-

198

Within the Walls.

ing, jovial good humor ; or her Annie
Rooney with Steal Away ?

Merely a stern concrete test of the un-
derlying principles of the great republic
is the Negro problem, and the spiritual
striving of the freedmen's sons is the tra-

vail of souls whose burden is almost be-
yond the measure of their strength, but
who bear it in the name of an historic
race, in the name of this the land of their
fathers' fathers, and in the name of hu-
man opportunity.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.

WITHIN THE WALLS.

ON the green lawn in front of the
white stone hospital a man stood leaning
against a tree. Beside him, on the grass,
stretched out in one of the cradle-like
couches used for sunning the patients,
lay a white -robed figure, which might
have belonged to either sex, had it not
been for the smoothness of the. pallid
cheeks and the long black hair spread
tangled on the pillow.

" So you are all well again," the wo-
man said languidly. " Does your knee
hurt you at all ? "

" Not much," the man answered light-
ly ; " and it would n't be well even by
now," he continued, smiling, " if you
hadn't been here to put me in such
excellent spirits when we enjoyed the
sun together."

"It has been a very pleasant time
for me also," the woman said. " I don't
think I shall ever have as pleasant a one
again. The doctor does n't give me very
much time, so if it does come, it will have
to be soon."

She spoke despondently, in even tones,
as though what she said had been so
often the subject of her thoughts that it
had ceased to retain her interest, and re-
mained merely the cold, inevitable fact
against which, she had learned long ago,
it did no good to complain.

"Oh, come, come," he said cheeringly,
" it is n't as bad as that. You '11 be out
of here in less than six weeks."

" No, I 'm afraid not," the woman an-
swered, slightly shaking her head. "But

thank you all the same." She stopped
as she looked up at him, and saw in his
eyes the expression of deep concern.
" Don't bother about me, please," she
continued quickly ; " there are other
things outside — those things you told
me about — that will need all your at-
tention. So tell me, when do you go ? "

"This afternoon."

" This - Why, how glad I am ! "

She tried to laugh, to make him think
she was ; and in its purpose the laugh
succeeded, for the man, suddenly aroused
to interest in the active life he was soon
to resume after his two months' idle-
ness, rushed eagerly ahead in his plans
and prospects away to an after-life. The
woman listened dejectedly, running her
finger in a careless way along a fold in
the covering sheet. The man broke off
abruptly in the midst of his grand career.

" There," he said, " I tire you ; and
besides, it is time for me to be going."

He reached down and held her hand
for a moment.

"I — I wish you luck," she said slowly.

When he had walked away a few steps,
he turned with a sudden impulse and
came back to her.

" I thought you might like these. My
brother brought them to me this morn-
ing."

As he spoke, he took from his button-
hole a small bunch of violets and handed
them to her with a bow of laughing gal-
lantry. A light tinge of color showed in
her cheeks as she took them from him,

Within the Walls.

199

and again he started to walk across the
grass toward the gate.

And she, lying behind in her nar-
row wooden bed, looked sadly over the
curve of her pillow at the slow-moving
figure of the man. When at last he
disappeared through the gateway, she
still gazed after him for several minutes,
as though he were yet there ; then she
turned her eyes to the bunch of pur-
ple flowers she held, and brushed their
heads back lightly with her hand.

Not until then, with the lonesomeness
of her own poor existence fresh upon
her, did she realize that he had gone,
— gone into that outer world where she
would never follow. During the last
few weeks, with him to talk to and
amuse her, she had at times almost for-
gotten her pitiful condition in the little
pleasure it afforded, and had grown to
regard her afternoon sunning as the one
bright spot in the weary day. He had
so often lain beside her there in the sun,
and sat beside her when he was better,
that half involuntarily she moved her
head, as if to nod back her appreciation
of some bright jest or compliment, only
to see the empty lawn stretching clear to
the hospital wall.

But even in its emptiness it was yet
the place where she had laughed with
him from pure happiness alone, and she
smiled faintly at the leaves above her
as she thought of being brought out here
day after day, until — until that time, so
near at hand, when it would be necessa-
ry no longer.

" Come," said a soft voice, " it is time
for you to go in."

The woman looked up quickly into the
nurse's face.

" Can't I stay here a little longer ? "
she asked. " I should like to very much."

" But it 's growing damp, and it 's bad
for you."

" Bad for me ? " the woman said slow-
ly. " Why should that make any differ-
ence ? It 's all the same in the end, and
I want so much to stay."

The nurse seemed puzzled for an in-
stant, but seeing the flowers in the wast-
ed hand she nodded her head quietly
as though thinking to herself, and then
moved silently away.

So he had gone. The woman won-
dered if he would ever think of her, now
that he was outside the walls : two or
three times to-day, perhaps, once to-mor-
row, and then no more. But to her
these last few weeks had been so great
a part of the short time she had yet to
live, that whereas formerly in her sick-
ness her memories were all of her earlier
life, now she would look no farther back
than the time when he was there. And
so she thought whilst the remembrance
lived vivid in her mind, and the long,
distorted shadows crawled across the
lawn as the sun dropped down behind
the hospital.

Then as the afternoon drew to a close
she was carried in, and put to bed in her
room in the quiet ward.

" I think," she said wearily to the
nurse, " I '11 go to sleep. I don't care
for any supper to-night." She finished
speaking with her eyes already closed,
and as unconsciousness stole upon her
and her breathing softened down, the
hand that was holding the violets re-
laxed, letting the flowers fall scattered
to the floor.

When the nurse, a half-hour later,
came in and saw them lying there, she
gathered them deftly, and stuck them,
one by one, in the grasp of the half-
closed, sleeping fingers.

Guy If. Scull.

200

Out of Bondage.

OUT OF BONDAGE.

FRIEND LEMUEL VARNEY urged his
well-conditioned but tired mare along the
highway with a more impatient voice
than he was wont to use ; for the track
was heavy with the deep, unbeaten snow
of a recent storm, and Lemuel was in a
hurry to deliver an article of value which
» had been entrusted to his care. Except
that the article was somewhat bulky,
nothing could have been guessed of its
character from the irregular rounded
form vaguely shown by the buffalo skin
which covered it and the legs of the
driver, — and for the latter it left none
too much room in the ample bread-tray-
shaped body of the sleigh. The high
back of this conveyance hid from rear-
ward observation all the contents except
Lemuel's head, over which was drawn, for
the protection of his ears, a knit woolen
cap of un - Quakerly red, — a flagrant
breach of discipline which was atoned for
by the broad brim and the hard discom-
fort of the drab beaver hat which sur-
mounted and overshadowed it.

The light of the brief winter day, fur-
ther abbreviated by a cloudy sky, was
fading, and the pallid dusk of the longer
night was creeping over the landscape ;
blurring the crests of woodlands against
the sky, blending their nearer borders
with the dimmed whiteness of the fields,
and turning stacks, barns, and isolated
groups of trees to vague, undistinguish-
able blots upon the fields, whose fences
trailed away into obscurity.

Friend Lemuel carefully scanned the
wayside for landmarks by which to note
his progress, but looked more anxiously
behind when the jingle of sleigh-bells
approaching from that direction struck
his ear. It was a pleasant and cheerful
discord of high and low pitched tones
of Boston bells, but it seemed to have a

disquieting effect upon his accustomed
placidity.

" There comes the stage, sure enough.
I- did hope I could git tu where we turn
off tu Zeb'lon's afore it come along," he
said, with some show of irritation, and
not quite as if speaking to himself or to
the mare, which he now addressed as he
vigorously shook the reins : " Do git up,
thee jade, why don't thee ? I say for it,
if I had a whip, I should be almost tempt-
ed tu snap it at thee. But I know thee 's
tired, poor creatur', and I had n't ort tu
blame thee, if I be tried."

In response to the threat or the ex-
pression of sympathy the mare mended
her pace, as Lemuel cast another glance
behind and saw the stage and its four
horses, vaguely defined, moving briskly
down the descending road. He slight-
ly raised the edge of the buffalo, and,
bending toward ^t, said in a low voice,
" Thee 'd better fill thyself up with fresh
air as quick as thee can, for the stage is
comin', and I shall have tu cover thee
pretty clust till it gits past."

There was a slight movement under
the robe, but nothing became visible ex-
cept some quickly recurring puffs of
vapor steaming out upon the cold air.
After a moment Lemuel replaced the
robe and gave it a cautionary pat. " Now
thee must keep clust, for there 's no tellin'
who may be a-lookin' at us out o' that
stage."

The stage-sleigh, roofed and curtained,
was close behind him, the muffled driver
shouting imperative orders to the pri-
vate conveyance to get out of the road.
Lemuel pulled his mare out of the track
at some risk of a capsize, for the pack-
ing of successive snowfalls had raised
the beaten path considerably above the
general level of the road.

" Git aout o' the road, ol' stick-in-the-
mud ! " the driver called, as his horses

Out of Bondage.

201

came to a walk and the merry jangle of
the bells fell to a soberer chime.

" Thee '11 hafter give me a little time,"
Lemuel urged mildly ; " it 's consid'able
sidelin', an' I dare say, if thee had a bag
of pertaters in thy sleigh, thee would n't
want 'em upsot in the snow, this cold
night."

" Oh, blast your 'taters ! " the other
said. " What 's 'taters compared tu the
United States mail I 've got under my
laigs ? " And then, in better humor as
the bread-tray sleigh, after a ponderous
tilt, regained its equilibrium, " There, I
c'n git by naow, if ye '11 take off your
hat an' turn it up aidgeways. Say," con-
tinuing his banter in a tone intended only
for the Quaker's ear, as -he leaned toward
him from his lofty perch and cast a scru-
tinizing glance upon the sleigh, " your
'taters hain't niggertoes, be they ? "

Lemuel gave an involuntary upward
look of surprise, but answered quietly,
as the driver touched the leaders with
his long lash and the heavy passenger
sleigh swept past, " No ; long Johns."

He was chuckling inwardly at the hid-
den meaning of his ready answer, as the
mare climbed the bank to regain the
track at a steeper place than she had
left it, when the lurching sleigh lost its
balance and turned over upon its side,
tumbling out all its contents into tke
snow. Lemuel was upon his feet almost
instantly, holding up the frightened mare
with, a steady hand and soothing her with
a gentle voice, while the buffalo robe
seemed imbued with sudden life, tossing
and heaving in strange commotion as
a smothered, alarmed voice issued from
it : " 'Fore de Lawd, marse, is we done
busted ? " and then the voice broke in a
racking cough.

" Keep quiet, John," Friend Lemuel
said in a low tone, " an' git behind the
sleigh as quick as thee can. The stage
hain't out o' sight." As he righted the
sleigh, a tall, stalwart negro, creeping
from under the robe, took shelter behind
the high back till the path was regained,

and then resumed his place and was
again covered by the robe.

" 'Fore de Lawd, Marse Varney," he
whispered hoarsely, venturing his head a
little above the robe, " I was dat skeered
I 's jus' shook to pieces."

"John," exclaimed Lemuel, with se-
verity, " thee must n't call me or any
other man ' master,' as I 've told thee
more than once. I am thy friend and
brother, and thee must n't call me any-
thing else."

" 'Pears like I could n't get useter dat
away, nohow, Marse Frien' Varney."

" But thee will," said Lemuel decided-
ly, " when thee gets used tu the fact that
thee is thy own master, with no one over
thee but thy heavenly Father, the Lord
and Master of the highest and the low-
est of moi'tals. Now take a doste of
this hive surrup an' cover up thy head,
for this cold air won't help thy cough a
mite." So saying, he drew forth a vial
from the inner breast pocket of his tight-
fitting surtout and held it to the negro's
lips, then covered his head carefully, and
urged forward the tired mare.

II.

" What was it you were saying to that
old chap about niggahs ? " asked a dark,
keen-eyed man who shared the box with
the stage driver.

" Niggers ? Oh, niggertoes was what
I said," the driver laughed, and went on
to explain : " That 's the name of a kin'
o' 'taters they hev raound here. Pooty
good kind o' 'taters they be, tew, — good
yielders, an' cook up mealy ; but some
folks spleen agin 'em 'caount o' the' bein'
black, but I don't. I 've knowed some
tol'able dark - complected folks — yes,
rael niggers — 'at was pooty good sorter
folks."

" Co'se," assented the passenger. " Nig-
gahs are all right in their place. I would
n't object to ownin' a hundred likely
boys."

202

Out of Bondage.

" Wai," considered the driver, " I do'
know ezackly 'baout ownin' so many
folks. One 's 'baout all I c'n manage,
an' he 's gin me consid'able trouble sen I
come of age. Ownin' other folks kin' o'
goes agin my Yankee grain." Hearing
no answer, he recurred to the opening of
the conversation : " That was oP Uncle
Lem Varney, an' I was jes' a-jokin' on
him a leetle. They say 'at he lies deal-
in's wi' the undergraoun' railroad, an' I
was tryin' tu make him think 'at I s'mised
he hed a runaway nigger 'n under his
buffalo, but I hed n't no sech a idee."

The traveler turned in his seat and
looked back interestedly, while the driver
continued : —

" I do' know 's I should keer if he
hed, fer kerryin' that kind o' passengers
don't interfere much wi' my business.
The' was tew on 'em, though, on my
stage las' summer, jest the cutest. One
on 'em was as light-complected as what
you be, an' a tumble genteel lookin' an'
actin' feller, an' he made b'lieve he was
master tu t'other one, which he was so
black a coal would make a white mark on
him ; an' they rid right along as grand
as Cuffy, nob'dy s'pectin' nothin' till a
week arter. Then they was arter 'em
hot-foot f'm away daown tu Virginny ;
but Lord ! they was safe beyund Caner-
dy line days afore."

" And you people gen'ally favor that
sort o' thing ? " the stranger asked.

" Wai, no, not tu say favor. The
gen'al run don't bother 'emselves one
way ner t'other, don't help ner hender ;
an' then agin the' 's some 'at 's mean
'nough tu du anythin' fer pay."

" And they help the niggahs ? " sug-
gested the traveler.

" Bless ye, no. They help the ketch-
ers ; the' hain't no money in helpin' nig-
gers."

The other only said " H-m-m " in a
tone that might imply doubt or assent,
and seemed inclined to drop the conver-
sation, and the driver, after mentally
wondering for some time, commented,

" One of them blasted Southerners." The
stranger's speech was unfamiliar, soften-
ing the r's too much for a Yankee of the
Champlain Valley, and not as deliberate-
ly twisting the vowels as a Yankee of
any sort does, but giving them an illusive
-turn that type cannot capture, midway
between the nasal drawl of the New Eng-
lander and the unctuous roll of the New
Yorker.

The lights of a little hamlet began to
glimmer along the dusky road, and pre-
sently the steaming horses were haloed in
the broad glare of the tavern bar-room
and came.. to a halt before the wide stoop,
where the bareheaded landlord and lan-
tern-bearing hostlers bustled forth, with
a more leisurely following of loungers,
to welcome an arrival that lost nothing
in interest or importance through semi-
daily occurrence.

The driver threw down the mail-bag,
tossed the reins to a hostler, and, clam-
bering from his seat, stamped straight-
way into the bar-room. The landlord
opened the doo/of the coach, and invited
the passengers to alight while the horses
were changed, — an invitation which was
accepted with alacrity by all. He ushered
them into the welcome indoor warmth,
closed the door behind the last guest,
and fell to feeding the fire within the
huge box stove with a generous supply of
wood. With this clatter and the roar
of the opened draught he mingled com-
ments on the weather and words of hos-
pitable intent, and then made the most
of the brief time to learn what he might
of his guests, whence coming and whi-
ther going, according to the custom of
landlords in those days, when the coun-
try tavern had neither the name nor the
register of a hotel.

The outside passenger invited the com-
pany to drink at his expense, and every
one accepted save a stalwart Washing-
tonian ; for it was before the days of
prohibition, when many otherwise goodly
people drank unadulterated liquor pub-
licly in Vermont inns, without shame or

Out of Bondage.

203

fear of subpoenas. The stranger called
for Bourbon, to the bewilderment of
Landlord Manum.

" Borebone ? That must be some
furrin drink, suthin' like Bord O, meb-
by ? " he queried, with a puzzled face,
half resentful of a joke.

" Never heard of Boobon whiskey,
sir, the best whiskey in the wauld, sir?"
asked the stranger.

" Wai, if it 's good whiskey you want,
I 've got some Monongerhely 'at 's ten
year ol' ; " and the stranger accepted the
compromise with a look of approval,
while each of the others, according to
taste or predilection, warmed his interior
with Medford, Jamaica, gin, brandy, or
wine.

Then the driver began to muffle his
head in a voluminous comforter and slow-
ly to draw on his gloves, and when he
announced, " Stage ready, gentlemen,"
there was a general exodus of the com-
pany, but the outside passenger did not
remount ,to his place.

" Just chuck me my valise. I reckon
I '11 stop heah a day or so."

A cylindrical leathern portmanteau,
such as was in common use by horse-
back travelers, was tossed down upon the
stoop. The driver tucked himself in,
gathered up the reins, cracked his whip,
and with a sudden creak the sleigh start-
ed on its course and went jangling away
into the dusk. The landlord and the
hostlers watched it intently, as if to as-
sure themselves of its actual departure ;
then of one accord retreated from the
outer chill into the warmth of the bar-
room. The host helped the guest to rid
himself of his overcoat and hung it on a
hook, where it impartially covered the last
summer's advertisements of the Cham-
plain steamers and of a famous Morgan
stallion. The three or four remaining
idlers resumed their accustomed places.
The hostlers diffused an odor of the sta-
ble as they divested themselves of their
coats and began their ablutions at the
corner sink, where a soiled roller towel

and the common comb and brush, at-
tached to a nail by a long string, hung
on opposite sides of a corrugated little
looking-glass. The landlord closed the
draught of the stove, subduing its roar
to a whisper, and then blew out one of
the lights. The other two seemed to
burn more dimly, the smoky atmosphere
grew heavier, and the room took on
again its wonted air of dull expectancy
that rarely received a higher realization
than the slightly varied excitements of
the stage arrivals.

Having performed all other duties,
the landlord, who was also postmaster,
now took the mail -bag from the floor
where it had been tossed and had re-
mained an object of secondary interest,
carried it into the office adjoining the
bar, and began a deliberate sorting of
the mail, curiously watched through the
narrow loopholes of the boxes by sev-
eral of the loungers. The Washingtoni-
an drummed persistently on the window
of his box till he was given his copy of
the county paper, which he at once be-
gan reading, after comfortably seating
himself, with legs at full length, on the
bunk which was a table by day, a bed
by night. Others receiving their papers
pocketed them to await more leisurely
digestion at home. One who was given
an unexpected letter studied the post-
mark and address a long time, trying to
guess from whom it came, and then put-
ting it in his pocket still sat guessing,
oblivious of the conversation going on
about him.

A traveler who " treated " was one
whose acquaintance was worth cultivat-
ing by the bar-room loungers, and they
had already made some progress in that
direction when the landlord's announce-
ment of supper dispersed them reluctant-
ly to their own waiting meals, from which
they returned as soon as might be, with
reinforcements.

The free-handed stranger gave them
to understand that he was a Pennsylva-
nian, making a winter tour of the North-

204

Out of Bondage.

ern States and Canada for his own plea-
sure and enlargement of information,
and he quite won their hearts by his
generous praise of their State, its thrift,
its Morgan horses, its merino sheep, and
especially the bracing sub-arctic atmos-
phere, in which all true Vermonters take
pride.

The Washingtonian, still sitting on
the bunk, was so absorbed in the county
paper, read by the light of the small
whale-oil lamp, that he took no part in
the conversation till he had finished the
last item of news and glanced over the
probate notices. Then he laid the paper
across his outstretched legs and took off
his spectacles, but kept both in hand for
the contingency of immediate need, as he
remarked, with an inclusive glance of the
company, " Wai, it does beat all haow
they be a-agitatin' slav'ry, an' what ef-
forts they be a-makin' to diabolish it.
They 've ben a-hevin' a anti-slav'ry con-
vention up to Montpelier, an' they raised
a turrible rookery an' clean broke it up.
I jest ben a-readin' a piece abaout it
here in the paper."

" Sarved 'em right," declared a big,
burly, red-faced fellow who occupied a
place by the stove opposite the stranger.
" Blast the cussed Aberlitionists, they 'd
ort tu be 'bleeged tu quit meddlin' wi'
other folks' business."

" Wai, I do' know," said the reader,
laying aside the paper and putting his
spectacles into his pocket as he swung his
legs off the bunk. " It 's a free country,
an' folks has got a right to tell what they
think, an' to argy, an' hev the' argyments
met wi' argyments. Rotten aigs hain't
argymeiits, Hiel."

" Good 'nough argyments fer cussed
nigger-stealin' Aberlitionists," Hiel de-
clared, "a - interferin' wi' other folks'
prop'ty."

" Sho, Hiel, they hain't interferin' wi'
nobody's prop'ty. They b'lieve it hain't
right to hoi' slaves, an' they say so, —
that 's all," the other replied.

" Don't they ? " Hiel sneered. " They

're al'ys a-coaxin' niggers tu run away,
an' a-helpin' on 'em steal 'emselves, which
is the same as stealin'. Look of ol' Qua-
ker Barclay over here, Jacup Wright.
I '11 bet he everiges a dozen runaway
niggers hid in his haouse ev'y year 'at
goes over his head. Damn him ! he
don't du nothin' else only go tu nigger-
huggin' Boberlition meetin's."

" Exceptin' when he 's a-raisin' sub-
scriptierns to git caows fer folks 'at 's
lost theirn," said Jacob quietly.

" I never ast him tu raise no 'scrip-
tierns fer me, a caow," said Hiel James
quickly.

" He done it jest the same, a-headin'
on 't wi' five dollars," Jacob replied.

" Wai, if folks is a mineter gi' me a
caow, I hain't fool 'nough tu refuse it,"
Hiel said, dismissing the subject with a
coarse laugh. " Blast the runaway nig-
gers ! Let 'em stay where they b'long.
I 'd livser help ketch 'em an' take 'em
back 'an tu help 'em git away."

" Oh, sho, Hiel ! No, you would n't
nuther, Hiel ! That would be pooty
mean business fer a V'monter. 'T hain't
never ben in their line to send slaves
back to the' masters."

During the conversation a stalwart
young man had entered the room, and
after including the company in a common
salutation, he got his mail from the of-
fice, and stood at the bar to read a let-
ter. He had a brave, handsome face,
and his well-formed figure was clad in
garments of finer fashion, more easily
worn, than was the wont of young farm-
ers. Yet a shrewd guess would place
him as a prosperous member of that class.
He took no part in the conversation nor
gave it apparent heed, yet joined in the
general murmur of approval with which
Jacob's remark was received by all but
the non-committal landlord, the silent
stranger, whose keen, deliberate eyes
roved over the company, and Hiel, who
stoutly asserted, " I 'd jest as soon du it
as send a stray hoss er critter back tu the'
owner. Yis, sir, jest as soon aim a dollar

Out of Bondage.

205

a-ketchin' a nigger as any other sort o'
prop'ty."

" I think you would, Hiel," said the
newcomer, in a tone that for all its quiet-
ness did not conceal contempt ; and then
he went out, and his sleigh-bells were
already jingling out of hearing when
Hiel's slow retort was uttered : —

" That 'ere Bob Ransom cuts consid-
'able of a swath, but he '11 be consid'able
older 'n he is naow 'fore he gits ol' Qua-
ker Barclay's darter. Ketch him lettin'
his gal marry anybody aoutside o' the
Quaker an' Boberlition ring."

In some way, the brawny, coarse-fea-
tured Hiel seemed more than others to
attract the regard of the stranger, who
held him in casual conversation till the
rest had departed, and warmed his heart
with a parting glass of the landlord's
most potent liquor.

III.

The stage-coach had left Lemuel far
behind when he turned into a less fre-
quented road, which led him, after a mile
of uninterrupted plodding, to a group
of farm - buildings that flanked it on
either side, and clustered about a great
square unpainted house. From the un-
shuttered lower windows broad bands
of light shone hospitably forth into the
dim whiteness, revealing here the fur-
rows of a newly beaten track, there a
white-capped hitching-post, and above, a
shining square of snowy shed-roof, be-
neath which the mare made her way
.without guiding. Lemuel, disembarking
noiselessly, looked cautiously about be-
fore he uncovered his passenger, and
whispered to him to follow into the sta-
ble, whither he led as one familiar with
the place even in the darkness. Opening
the door of an inclosed stall, and assur-
ing himself by feeling that it was filled
with straw, he gently pushed the negro
in.

" Now thee cover thyself up an' keep

still till thee hears thy name called. Put
this medicine in thy pocket, and don't
let thyself cough. Thee '11 be made com-
fortable as soon as possible, but thee must
be patient."

With these whispered injunctions Lem-
uel silently closed the door upon his
charge, and, after blanketing the mare,
entered the house without other an-
nouncement than the stamping of his
snowy feet. The family were at supper
in the large kitchen, which was full of
the light and warmth of a wide fireplace,
and the savor of wholesome fare that the
chilled and hungry guest sniffed with ap-
preciative foretaste.

Zebulon Barclay, a man of staid, be-
nevolent mien, with kindly keen gray
eyes, sat at the board opposite Deborah,
his wife, a portly woman, whose calm
face, no less kindly than his own, wore
the tranquil dignity of self-conquest and
assured peace of soul. Beside her sat
their daughter Ruth, like her mother in
feature, and with promise of the attain-
ment of the maternal serenity in her
bright young face, yet with some harm-
less touches of worldly vanity in the fash-
ion of her dress. There were also Julia,
the hired girl, a brisk spinster of thirty-
five, and Jerome, the hired man, a rest-
less-eyed Canadian, both of whom were
of the world's people ; the one shocked
their employers by her levity, and the
other with his mild profanity.

" How does thee do, Deb'ry ? " said
the visitor, advancing straight to the
matron with outstretched hand, as she
turned in her seat and recognized him.
" Keep thy settin', keep thy settin'," he
protested against her rising to greet him,
and then bustled around to Zebulon, who
arose to give him welcome, and a glance
of intelligence passed between him and
his wife which the* daughter caught and
understood.

" Why, Lemuel," said the host hearti-
ly, " hpw does thee do ? And how are
Rebecca and the children ? "

As Lemuel replied he mumbled in an

206

Out of Bondage.

undertone, " I left a package in the stable
for thee."

" Oh, Rebecca is well, is she ? " Zebu-
Ion remarked with satisfaction, and with-
out apparent notice of the other informa-
tion. " And is it a general time of health
among Friends in your Quarter ? Well,
lay off thy greatcoat, and have some
supper as soon as thee 's warm enough.
Jerome will put out thy horse directly."

Lemuel hesitated, but began the ardu-
ous task of getting off his tight surtout
as the Canadian arose from the table and
took the tin lantern from its hook.

" I b'lieve I hain't seen thee afore, Je-
rome. Is thee tol'able well ? And I say
for it, if that hain't thee, Julia ! Thee
stays right by, don't thee ? Wai, that 's
clever." He paused in the struggle with
his surtout, when the Canadian went out,
to ask, with a nod toward the door that
had closed behind him, "Is he a safe
person, Zeb'lon ? "

" I 'm not quite clear, but I fear not,"
said Zebulon, laying hold of the stub-
born coat. " We '11 be on our guard.
While he 's out, Ruth, thee 'd better
carry some victuals up to the room, and
when he comes in I '11 get him out of
the way till we get our package upstairs.
Has thee had it in thy keeping long,
Lemuel ? "

" Goin' on a week, an' would ha' ben
glad tu a spell longer, for he 's got a
turrible cold an' cough ; but we 'spected
they was sarchin' for him, an' we dassent
keep him no longer, an' so I started at
four o'clock this mornin' ; an' I tell thee,
I found tough travelin' most o' the way."

" Well, I 'm glad thee 's got here safe,
Lemuel. Now sit right down to thy
supper. Theo '11 have a chance to step
out and bring in thy goods."

The Canadian entered hastily and in
evident trepidation. * Say, Me*sieu Bar-
cle," he burst out, " you s'pose ghos' can
cough, prob'ly ? "

" What 's thee talking about, Jerome ? "
Zebulon asked in surprise.

" Yas, sah, bah jinjo, Ah'm was hear

nowse in de barn zhus' sem lak some-
body cough, an' Ah b'lieve he was ghos'
of dat hoi' man come dead for 'sumption
on de village las' week 'go."

" Nonsense, Jerome ; it was a cat sneez-
ing that thee heard. Don't put out the
lantern, but come down cellar with me
and get some small potatoes for the
sheep."

" Cat ? Bah gosh, you '11 got cat sneeze
lak dat, Ah'm ant want for hear it yal-
ler, me," Jerome retorted, as he led the
way down cellar.

Lemuel's hand was on the latch, when
there was a sound of arriving sleigh-
bells.

" What be we goin' tu du ? " he asked,
turning a troubled face to the women.
" That poor creatur' must n't stay aout
in the cold no longer. Who 's that
a-comin' in, wi' bells on the' horse ? "

" Let me go," said Ruth, blushing red
as a rose. " I can bring the man in safe."

" Oh, it 's some friend of thine that 's
come ? " Lemuel asked ; but the shrewd
twinkle of his eyes showed that he need-
ed no answer. " Well, go intu the box
stall and call for John, and bring in the
one who answers."

Ruth hastily put on a hood and shawl
and went out. A tall figure advanced
from the shed to meet her with out-
stretched hands, which she clasped for an
instant as she said in a low voice, " Don't
speak to me. Don't see me, nor any
one I may have with me ; and wait a lit-
tle before thee comes in, Robert," and
she disappeared in the dark shadows of
the building.

Presently she came out with the shiv-
ering negro almost crouching behind
her, and led him into the house. In the
kitchen her mother met him with an as-
suring word of welcome, and guided him
from it so quickly into a narrow stair-
case that it seemed to the others as if
they had seen but a passing shadow, gone
before they could catch form or feature.

When Zebulon Barclay returned from
the cellar, Lemuel was quietly eating

Out of Bondage.

207

his supper, waited upon by the nimble-
handed Julia, Ruth sat by the fireplace
in decorous, low-voiced conversation with
Robert Ransom, and the quiet room gave
no hint of a recent unaccustomed pre-
sence. Lemuel pushed aside his plate
and supped the last draught of tea from
his saucer with a satisfied sigh before he
found time for much conversation.

" I s'pose thee 's heard what turrible
goin's-on the anti-slavery meetin' lied tu
Montpelier, Zeb'lon ? " he asked.

" Heard ? " his friend replied, his calm
face flushing and his eyes kindling. " I
saw it with my own eyes, and a shame-
ful sight it was to see in the capital of
this free State. Deborah and I were
there."

" Thee don't say so ! And was it as
bad as the papers tell for ? "

" Even worse than any papers but our
own report it. The Voice of Freedom
and the Liberator tell it as it was. Sev-
eral of the speakers were pelted with rot-
ten eggs, and there were threats of laying
violent hands upon some."

" But the' wa'n't nobody r'ally hurt ? "

" No, but Samuel J. May was serious-
ly threatened ; and I don't know what
might have happened if Deborah, here,
had n't taken his arm and walked out
through the mob with him. That shamed
them to forbearance."

" Thee don't say so ! " Lemuel again
ejaculated. " But I guess if Jonathan
Miller was there, he was n't very do-
cyle ? "

" Well, no," rejoined Zebulon, " Jona-
than is not a man of peace, and he called
the rioters some pretty hard names, and
faced them as brave as a lion."

Lemuel rubbed his hand in un-Quaker-
ly admiration of this truculent champion
of the oppressed, and said, with a not
altogether distressed sigh, " I 'm afeard
he would n't hesitate tu use carnal weep-
ons if he was pushed tew fur. He has
been a man of war, an' fit in Greece."

" Wat dat ? " asked Jerome, who had
been listening intently as he slowly cut

the sheep's potatoes, and now held his
knife suspended and stared in wide-eyed
wonder. " He was faght in grease ?
Ah'm was hear of mans, faght in snow,
an' faght in water, an' faght in mud, but
bah jinjo, faght in grease, Ah ant never
was hear so 'fore, me."

" Why, Jerome," explained Zebulon,
with an amused smile? " thee don't under-
stand. Greece is a country, away across
the sea, where this brave man went, ac-
cording to his light, to help the people
war against their oppressors, the Turks."

" Bah jinjo," said the Canadian, re-
suming his occupation, " dat mus' be
w'ere de folkses leeve on de fat of de
Ian', sem Ah'ms hear you tol' of sometam.
An' dey got turkey too, hein ? Ah'ms
b'lieve dat was good place for go, me."

"When it is quite convenient, Zeb'lon,"
Lemuel said, after some further talk of
anti-slavery affairs, diverging to the most
economic means of procuring free-labor
goods, " I want an opportunity tu open
my mind tu thee an' Deb'ry consarnin'
certain weighty matters."

" Come right in the other room," re-
sponded the host, rising and leading the
way. " I think Deborah is there."

The Canadian, presently finishing his
task and his last pipe, lighted a candle
and climbed the stairs to his bed in the
kitchen chamber, and Julia, having .set
the supper dishes away and hung her
wiping-cloths on the poles suspended
from the ceiling by iron hooks, with a
satisfied air of completion, discreetly
withdrew, and the young people had the
rare opportunity of being alone.

" Ruth, you must give me a glimmer
of hope," Robert Ransom pleaded.

"How can I when it would grieve
father and mother so to have me joined
to a companion who is not of our faith,
and has so little unity with us on the
question of slavery ? If thee could but
have light .given thee to see these mat-
ters as they are so clearly shown to us ! '

" If I would pretend to be a Quaker,
and meddle with affairs that don't con-

208

Out of Bondage.

cern me," he said bitterly, " I should be
all right, and they would give me their
daughter. But I can't pretend to believe
what I don't, even for such a reward.
As for the other matter of difference,
you know, Ruth, that I would n't hold a
slave or send one back to his master ;
but slavery exists under the law, and we
have no more business to interfere with
the slaveholders' rights than they with
ours."

" There can be no right to do wrong,
and it is every one's business to bear tes-
timony against evil-doing. Thee knows,
Robert, I would not take thee on any
pretense of belief. But if thee could
only have light ! "

" Oh, Ruth, you will not let these dif-
ferences of belief keep us apart ? What
are they, to stand in the way of our love ? "

" It would not be right to deny thee
is very dear to me, Robert, and that I
pray the way may be opened for us, but
I cannot see it clear yet." Ruth's eyes
met his with a look that was warmer than
her calm words.

" But you will, Ruth," he said, with
suppressed earnestness ; and then a stir
and louder murmur of voices were heard
in the next room. " The Friends have
' broke their meeting,' as your people say,
and it 's time for me to go. I want to
caution you, though, to keep a certain
person you have in the house very close.
I 'm afraid there are parties on the look-
out for him not far off."

" Oh, thank thee, Robert. Why does
thee think so ? " she asked in some alarm.

" From something I heard in the vil-
lage to-day, I think there 's a party of
slave-hunters prowling around in this
part of the State, and I saw a stranger at
Manum's to-night who is likely enough to
be one of them. It 's an odd season for
a man to be traveling for pleasure here.
There may be nothing in it, but tell your
father to be careful. Good-night."

Under cover of the noise of Ransom's
exit Jerome closed the disused stovepipe
hole in the chamber floor, at which he

had been listening, crept into bed, and
fell asleep while puzzling out the mean-
ing of what he had overheard.

Ruth Barclay lost no time in impart-
ing the caution to her parents and their
trusty friend Lemuel, and her father's
thoughtful face was troubled as he said,
" Our poor friend must have rest. Thy
mother has been ministering to him, and
says he is a very sick man. He cannot

J «/

go farther at present, but I wish he was
nearer Canada. Well, we will watch and
wait for guidance. Perhaps to-morrow
night I can take him to thy uncle Aaron's,
and then we can count on his safety. I
hope thee has not been indiscreet in let-
ting Robert into our secret, my child ? "

"Thee need not fear, father," Ruth
answered, with quiet assurance. " Rob-
ert is faithful."

" I am not quite clear," and the father
sighed. " Robert is not light or evil-
minded, but his father is a Presbyterian
and a Democrat, and very bitter against
Friends and anti-slavery people. I am
not quite clear .concerning Robert."

rv.

The next morning Jerome was en-
couraging the fire newly kindled from
the bed of coals on the hearth, and tip-
toeing between it and the wood-box in
his stockings, when Julia made her ap-
pearance in the kitchen, holding between
her compressed lips some yet unutilized
pins while she tied the strings of her
check apron.

" Morny, Julie," he saluted cheerily.
Her speech being restrained by the pins,
she nodded, and he went on interroga-
tively, as he seated himself and began
mellowing his stiff boots with thumb and
fingers : " Ah'ms toP you, Julie. W'at
you s'pose kan o' t'ing was be raoun' dese
buildin' for scairt me so plenty ? "

" Why, J'rome ? " Julia, like a true
Yankee, answered with a question, when
she had found a place in her dress for

Out of Bondage.

209

the last pin. " What hes ben a-scarin'
of you, I sh'd like tu know ? "

"Ah'ms can' tol' you, 'cause Ah'ms
can' see ; Ah'ms only zhus' hear. Las'
naght w'en Ah'ms go on de barn, Ah'ms
hear some nowse lak somebody cough,
cough, an' dere ant not'ing for see. W'en
Ah'ms go on de bed, Ah'ms hear it some
more upstair, cough, cough, zhus' de sem.
Ah'ms b'lieve it was ghos'."

Julia searched his face with a quick
glance, and compelled her own to express
no less fear and wonder. " Good land o'
massy ! You don't say ! " she exclaimed
in an awed undertone. " Where did it
'pear tu be, J'rome ? "

" All don' know if it be in de chim-
bley or behin' de chimbley, me. Ah'ms
'fraid for ex-amine."

" Examine ! Ketch me a-pokin' behind
that 'ere chimbley, if I c'd git there,
which it 's all closed up these I do'
know haow many year. No, sir, not for
all this world, in broad daylight, I would
n't ! " Julia protested, with impressive
voice and slow shakes of the head.

" Bah jinjo ! W'at you s'pose he
was ? " Jerome asked, under his breath.

" I 've hearn tell 't the Injuns er the
British killed some hired man there, 'way
back in Gran'f'ther Barclay's day," Julia
whispered ; and then, in a more reassur-
ing tone, " But you may depend it hain't
nothin' 'at '11 hurt us, if we let it alone,
J'rome."

" W'at for Zeb'lon try foolish me wid
cat-sneeze w'en he know it was be ghos' ?
Ah'ms ant s'pose Quaker mans was tol'
lie, prob'ly. Ah'ms hear dat Ramson
tol' Rut' he 'fraid somet'ing. Ah don'
know, me." And having pulled on his
boots after a brief struggle, he lighted
the lantern and went out to his chores.

" I wonder haow much the critter
heard," Julia soliloquized, as she leaned
on the broom and looked with unseeing
eyes at the door which had just closed
behind him, " an' if he mistrusts suthin' ?
I would n't trust him no furder 'n I 'd
trust a dog wi' my dinner."

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 14

When Deborah Barclay came into the
kitchen her usually placid face was trou-
bled, and it was not lightened when Ju-
lia told her suspicions, ending with the
declaration, " You can't never trust a
Canuck, man or womern, an' this 'ere
J'rome loves colored folks as a cat loves
hot soap. He 's al'ys an' forever a-goin'
on abaout 'em."

" Ah me ! " Deborah sighed. " The
way seems dark this morning. Zebulon
was taken with one of his bad turns in
the night and is n't able to get up, and
Lemuel is obliged to go home at once.
We heard last night that there are slave-
hunters about, and if it is needful to re-
move our poor friend upstairs to a safer
place we have no one that we can trust
to do it, — if indeed he can be removed
without endangering his life ; for he 's
in a miserable way, and needs rest and
nursing. But perhaps the way will be
made clear to us. It always has been in
these matters."

Friend Lemuel reernbarked on his
homeward voyage, in the huge bread-
tray, soon after the early breakfast, and
the Quaker household fell into more
than its wonted outward quiet. This
was scarcely disturbed when, in the af-
ternoon, Jehiel James drove past, and
halted a little for a chat with Jerome to
discuss the merits of the colt the latter
was breaking. It did not escape Julia's
sharp eyes that the two had their heads
together, nor did her ears fail to catch
Kiel's parting injunction : " Come over
tu the tarvern in the evenin' an' we '11
strike up a dicker for the cult."

" I guess suthin' 11 happen so 's 't
you won't go tu no tarvern tu-night,"
she said to herself. " I b'lieve there '11
be a way pervided, as aour folks says, tu
hender it," and she went about her work
considering the possible ways of Provi-
dence.

Not long afterward Jerome came in,
and on some pretext went up to his
sleeping-room. Julia, listening intently
while he moved stealthily to and fro, or

210

Out of Bondage.

maintained suspicious intervals of silence,
thought she detected once the cautious
opening of a door. When he reap-
peared there was an ill-concealed gleam
of triumph in his beady black eyes, and
they furtively sought hers as if to read
her thought.

" Ah'ms t'ink Ah'ms ant mos' never
goin' fan mah tobac," he said, ostenta-
tiously biting off a corner of a plug, and
then asked, " Haow was be Zeb'lon ? He
ant goin' be seek, don't it ? "

" I do' know, J'rome. He 's putty
bad off. He 's got a burnin' fever an' a
tumble pain acrost him. I should n't
wonder if you lied tu go arter the dark-
ter this evenin'."

" Ah'ms can' go dis evelin'," he an-
swered hastily. " Ah'ms gat some beesi-
nees, me. Wat for Ah can' go gat doc-
ter 'fore de chore, hein ? "

" You '11 hafter go right past the tar-
vern tu git the Thompsonian darkter,
which aour folks won't hev no other,"
she answered irrelevantly.

" More Ah'ms t'ink of it," Jerome
said, after a little consideration, " more
Ah'ms t'ink Ah'm could go."

" If I only hed sperits enough," Julia
communed with herself meantime, " I 'd
git you so all-fired minky, you would n't
know where tu go, an' would n't git there
if you did. But Mis' Barclay would n't
le' me hev enough tu du that, not tu save
all Afriky. Mebby, though," with a
flash of inspiration, " she 'd le' me hev
a good doste for medicine."

"J'rome," she said aloud, "what's
the motter ails ye ? Ye hain't a-lookin'
well."

" Me ? Ah'm was feel fus'-rate."

" But you hain't well, — I know you
hain't. You look pale 's you can, com-
plected as you be, and you 're dark 'n
under your eyes. I must git you suthin'
tu take. Mebby I c'n git a doste o' hot
sperits f'm Mis' Barclay."

Jerome's face was comical, with its
mixed expression of satisfaction and sim-
ulated misery. " Bah jinjo, Julie, Ah'ms

ant felt so well Ah'ms t'ink Ah was.
Ah'ms gat col' come, w'en Ah'ms chau-
pin'. Dey ant not'ing cure me so fas'
lak some whiskey."

" Don't you say nothin', an' I '11 see if
I c'n git you a doste afore supper."

Ruth was in close attendance upon
her father while her mother ministered
to the hidden fugitive, so the handmaid-
en had little opportunity for speech with
either till toward nightfall. At the first
chance, in a beguiling tone, she besought
Deborah : " I du hate tu ask you, but I
be so tuckered an' kinder all gone, I
wish 't you 'd gi' me a rael big squilch o'
sperits."

" Why, surely, thee poor child, if thee
needs it, thee shall have it. I '11 give
thee the bottle, and thee can help thy-
self. I know thee '11 be prudent," and
Deborah passed up the narrow staircase
with a steaming bowl of gruel.

When possessed of the spirits, Julia
fortified herself with a moderate dram,
"jest tu keep my word good," she said
to herself. " Now I '11 see what I can
du for the benefit of your health, Mr.
J'rome," and she poured out a bountiful
draught of the ripe old Jamaica, and
added to it, from a vial, a spoonful of
a dark liquid, carefully stirred the mix-
ture, and tasted it with critical deliber-
ation.

" That tinctur' o' lobele does bite, but
my sakes, he won't never notice. There
you come," as she heard Jerome stamp-
ing at the threshold. " I hope this 'ere
won't kill ye, not quite, but you '11 think
it 's goin' tu if you never took no lobele
afore. My senses ! " and she made a
disgusted face as she recalled her own
experiences of Thompsonian treatment.
A few minutes later she covertly handed
Jerome the glass, and with a sense of
righteous guilt watched his eager drain-
ing of the last drop.

" Oh, Julie," he whispered hoarsely,
with resounding smacks of satisfaction,
" you was good womans. Dat was cure
me all up."

Out of Bondage.

211

" I du hope it '11 du good," she re-
sponded, and mentally added, " an' keep
you f'm tellin' tales out o' school."

Warmed by the potent spirits, and
without the calm restraint of his em-
ployer's presence, Jerome was more than
usually garrulous at the supper-table, till
suddenly his tongue began to falter and
a ghastly pallor overspread his dark
face.

" Oh ! " he groaned, as his glaring eyes
sought imploringly the alarmed counte-
nances of the women, lingering longest
upon Julia's, " w'at you s'pose hail me ?
Oh, Ah'ms goin' to dead ! Mah hinside
all turn over ! Oh, Julie, was you pazzin
me wid bugbed pazzin ? " He pushed
himself from the table and staggered to-
ward the door, whither he was anxiously
followed by Deborah and Ruth.

" What is it, Jerome ? Is it a sickness
or a pain ? " Deborah inquired with con-
cern. " Shall I give thee some pepper
tea, or salt and water ? Thee 'd better
go upstairs and lie down."

" Oh, sacre, mon Dieu ! " he groaned.
" All Ah'ms want was for dead, so quick
Ah can ! Oh, Ah'ms bus' open ! Ah'ms
bile over ! Ah'ms tore up ! Dat damn
hoi' gal Julie spile me all up ! " and he
floundered out of doors, retching and
groaning.

Deborah was about to follow him, when
she was withheld by Julia. " Don't you
stir a step arter him, Mis' Barclay. He '11
come all right plenty soon 'nough. I
know what ails him. I only give him a
little doste o' medicine."

" Julia Peck," said Deborah severely,
" what has thee been doing ? "

" I '11 tell ye the hull truth, Mis' Bar-
clay, as true as I live an' breathe. I was
jes' as sure as I stan' here that him an'
that 'ere Hiel James was a-connivin' tu
help take that man we 've got in aour
chamber, an' Jerome was a - peekin'
raoun' this very arternoon tu find aout
if he was here ; an' I know by the look
of him he did find aout, an' he was
a-goin' tu the tarvern tu-night tu let 'em

know, an' I jest put a stop tu it; for
what was we a-goin' tu du, with Mr.
Barclay sick abed, an' nob'dy but us wo-
men ? Naow, I don't think he '11 go jest
yit."

Deborah smiled while she tried to ex-
press a proper degree of severity in her
words and voice. " Julia, I fear thee has
done wrong. I do. hope thee has n't
given the poor misguided man anything
very injurious ? "

" As true as I live an' breathe, it
hain't nothin' but tinctur' o' lobele, an'
it '11 clear aout his stomach an' du him
good."

" We will hope for the best. But ah
me, we are sore beset. We have no
way to get our friend to a place of safe-
ty to - night, and to - morrow the slave-
hunters may be here, and they will search
the whole house. Besides, the poor man's
cough would betray him wherever we hid
him. What can we do ? "

" Would n't Mr. Weeks help, if we c'd
git him word ? I c'd cut over there in
no time, if you say so," and Julia made
a move toward her hood and shawl be-
hind the door.

" Thee 's very kind. I 've thought of
him, but he 's gone across the lake to
visit Friends, and won't be back till Sev-
enth Day. And he 's the only Friend
here that 's in full unity with us in these
matters," and Deborah sighed.

" Could n't I take Tom and get the
man to uncle Aaron's before morning,
mother ? " asked Ruth.

" Oh, my child, if thee could, he is not
able to ride so far. No, dear ; yet I
know not what to do or which way to
turn," said the mother, and she walked
to the window, and stood looking out, as
if some guidance was to come to her out
of the growing shadows of evening.

" Mother," said Ruth earnestly, after
an unbroken silence of some length, " I
will get some one to help us. Julia, will
thee help me harness Tom ? Don't ask
me any questions, mother, but thee trust

212

Out of Bondage.

" I do trust thee, my child. But I
can't think who thee can get."

" I '11 harness or du anything, Reuth ;
but if that Canuck does turn hisself
wrong side aout an' die, don't you tell of
me. But I guess he wa'n't borned tu
die of Thompsonian medicine ; an' there
he comes. I 'm glad, for I al'ys did
spleen agin findin' corpses layin' raoun'
permiscus."

Jerome came into the room, and, woe-
begone of countenance and limp of form,
too sick to notice any lack of sympathy,
he crept ignominiously on all fours up
the stairs to bed. Julia gave a sigh of
relief as she closed the door behind the
abject figure.

" There, thanks be tu goodness and
lobele, he 's safte for this night. Naow,
Reuth, we '11 harness the hoss."

The faithful old family horse seemed
to understand the necessity of a swifter
pace than was employed in his jogging to
First Day and Fifth Day meetings, and
he took a smart trot with little urging
by his young mistress. The half -buried
fences and the trees drifted steadily
past, and the long shadows cast in the
light of the rising moon swung slowly
backward, while the jagged crests of the
distant hills marched forward in stately
procession ; yet in her anxiety the pro-
gress was slow to Ruth, the way never so
long. It was shortened by the good for-
tune of meeting Robert Ransom a half-
mile from his home, and she counted it no
less a favor to be saved the awkwardness
of seeking an interview with him.

She was not disappointed in his re-
sponse to her appeal, and it was not long
before he was at her father's bedside.
A short consultation was held concerning
the best means of baffling the slave-hunt-
ers whose descent upon this suspected
hiding-place of the fugitive might occur
at any time.

" I '11 carry the man anywhere you
say, Mr. Barclay. Mrs. Barclay says
he 's too weak to go far, and I '11 tell
you my plan. It 's to take him to our
sugar-house. No one ever goes there till
sugaring-time, after the wood is hauled,
and that 's just finished. It 's warm and
there 's a bunk in it, so that by carrying
along some buffaloes and blankets he can
be made almost as comfortable as in any
house."

" I don't know a safer place, for no one
would ever think of looking for a run-
away negro on thy father's premises,"
said Zebulon, with due deliberation, yet
with a humorous twinkle in his eye, and
then added, " My ! what would he say ? "

" I don't think it necessary to ask him,
and I '11 take the man there at once, if
you say so." The young man's kindly
face expressed an earnestness in which
there was no guile.

"I think thy plan is the only one we
can adopt, and the sooner we do so the
better. The women folks will provide
thee with blankets, and there must be
food and medicine. Deborah, does thee
think he will be able to keep his own
fire and wait on himself ? "

" He is not fit to leave his bed," she
answered ; " but he must, long enough
to get to a place of safety. Does thee
think I should go with him, Zebulon ?
I don't see the way clear to leave thee,
my dear, nor to let Ruth go, though she
would not shrink from it if it seemed
best."

Robert's face flushed, and he hastily
said, " Ruth go to nurse a sick " — The
offensive name " nigger," forbidden in
that household, though familiar enough
in his own, was barely withheld. " No,
it would n't be right for either to go,
Mrs. Barclay. I will take care of the
man."

Zebulon bestowed a grateful look upon
him, and stretched forth his hand to clasp
that of the young man. " Robert, I
never thought to look to thee for help
in such a case. Thee is very kind, and

Out of Bondage.

213

I shall not forget it in thee. If it is
ever in my power to serve thee, thee
must feel free to call on me."

Robert blushed almost guiltily as he
silently thought of the reward he most
desired, and quietly thanked the sick man
for his kindly expressions.

" Now, I think thee would better be
about the matter at once. Look out for
Jerome, and be sure that no one is watch-
ing the house when thee starts, Robert.
Farewell."

Deborah stayed a moment to adminis-
ter a dose of Thompsonian medicine
known as "No. 6," when Zebulon said,
getting his breath after the fiery draught,
" Well, help has come in an unexpect-
ed way. I did not expect so much from
Neighbor Ransom's son."

" It is indeed a favor," and there was
a hope in the mother's heart that the
way might also become clear for her
daughter's happiness.

The Canadian had fallen into such a
deep sleep from the reaction of Julia's
heroic treatment that he was not aroused
by any stir around the house. The fu-
gitive was taken from his hiding-place,
a snug little chamber back of the great
warm chimney, which had given safe and
comfortable shelter to many escaping
slaves, a use to which it was devoted.
With the help of his ready-handed female
assistants Robert soon had his charge
in the sleigh, with bedding, provisions,
and medicines.

When the sick man was carefully
wrapped in blankets and hidden under
the buffalo, Robert drove along the high-
way, swiftly and silently, till at last he
turned through a gap into a pathless field,
across which he made slower progress to
the dusky border of the woods. Guided
by familiar landmarks, he came to the
narrow portal of a wood-road that wound
its unbeaten but well-defined way among
gray tree -trunks, snow-capped stumps
and rocks, and thick haze of under-
growth. Inanimate material forms and
impalpable blue shadows assumed shapes

of fearful living things to the strained
imagination of the negro, who was now
permitted to free his head from the
robe. He shrank as if struck when a
tree snapped under stress of the cold, —
a noise unaccountable to him, but like the
click of a gun-lock, or the shot of a rifle,
or the crack of a whip.

With calm manner and reassuring
words Ransom again and again quieted
the often reawakened fears of the fugi-
tive, till at last they reached the sugar-
house. It was a picture of loneliness
and desertion, with smokeless, snow-
capped chimney and pathless approach.
When they entered, the bare interior re-
vealed by the light of a candle was dis-
mal and comfortless. The blankets and
pillows were soon arranged upon the
bunk, and, having made his guest as
easy as possible, Ransom kindled a fire
in the great arch over which the sap was
boiled, and put the stock of provisions
into the rude corner cupboard.

The yellow light of the candle and
the red gleams of the fire were reflected
by some tin utensils that hung on the
wall, by an old musket leaning in a cor-
ner, and by the piled tier of sap-buckets ;
the dancing shadows tripped to a less
solemn measure ; a genial warmth began
to pervade the room, and soon the place
assumed the cheerful homeliness of a
snug winter camp.

The troubled face of the negro bright-
ened as he looked around, watching his
companion's preparations with languid
interest.

" Dis yere 's a mighty nice place fur
layin' low," he said in a hoarse voice.
" You 's powerful good to fetch me here,
marster, an' I 's 'bleeged to ye."

" That 's all right, my man," Robert
replied, as he set an inverted sap-tub by
the bunk and placed a bottle of medicine
upon it. " Now here 's the medicine for
you to take, and my watch to show you
when to take it. Keep quiet, and I '11 be
back in a couple of hours ; " and after re-
plenishing the fire, he departed to take

214

Out of Bondage.

the horse home, and finally returned on
foot to his self-appointed post.

Perhaps the secrecy of the service, the
relish of baffling eager search, and the
possible chance of adventure made Ran-
som's task more congenial than the mere ,
sense of duty could have done, and he
plodded his way back over the snowy
road with a cheerful heart. When he
had ministered to his patient's needs
and fed the fire, he rolled himself in his
blankets and fell asleep.

VI.

Morning found Jerome recovered from
the last night's illness, but not restored
to good humor. He had satisfied him-
self that the negro had been removed
from the house, but how or where he
could not conjecture, and he was sav-
agely disappointed that the chance and
reward of betrayal had slipped beyond
his reach. As he plied his axe in Zeb-
ulon Barclay's woodlot, the strokes fell
with spiteful vigor ; and when a great tree
succumbed to them and went groaning
to the final crash of downfall, he gloated
over it as if it were a personal enemy.
As the echoes boomed their last faint re-
verberation and left him in the midst of
silence, his ear caught the sound of dis-
tant axe-strokes ; and when, across the
narrow cleared valley that lay between
him and the next wooded hillside, he saw
a column of smoke rising above the tops
of the maples, after a long, intent look he
asked himself, " Wat you s'pose some-
bodee was do on hoi' Ramson sugar-place,
dis tarn de year ? "

Unable to answer except by unsatisfac-
tory guesses, he resumed his chopping ;
but the itch of curiosity gave him no rest,
for he was as inquisitive as any native
of the soil ; and when it could no longer
be endured, he struck his axe into a
stump, and set forth in quest of the cer-
tain knowledge which should be its cure.
As he cautiously drew near the sugar-

house, in its rear, under cover of the great
maple trunks that stood about it on every
side, he heard low voices in broken con-
versation, and a moment later a racking,
distressful cough which excited his sus-
picions.

Stooping low, he crept from the near-
est tree to the one window, whose board
shutter was swung open for the admission
of light, and peered stealthily in. The
brief survey revealed Robert Ransom
looking anxiously down on the ghastly
face of the negro. There was no soften-
ing touch of pity in the malignantly tri-
umphant gleam of the Canadian's snaky
eyes as he returned to the cover of the
trees, gliding from one to another till he
regained the valley, and then resumed
his chopping.

Throughout the day, at the sugar-
house, the winter stillness was unbroken
save by the small voices of the titmice
and nuthatches and the subdued tapping
of the industrious woodpeckers, sounds
that harmonized with it and but inten-
sified it. The place seemed as secure
from enemies in its complete isolation as
it was remote from the reach of medical
aid, which Ransom felt was needed, and
of which he was often on the point of go-
ing in quest. The sick man was racked
with pain at times, his mind wandered,
and he talked incoherently.

" It 's mighty good to be free, Marse
Ransom, 'deed it is dat. Oh, but it 's col'
up dis away. Oh, de snow ! I 's wadin'
in de snow de hull endurin' time ! It 's
freezin' on me ! I 's comin to de sun-
shine ! I kin feel it a-warmin' ! I 's in
de eberlastin' snow, an' de dogs is arter
me ! I can't git ahead none ! Fur de
Lawd's sake, don' let 'em kotch me ! "

" Don't be afraid. Nothing shall harm
you. We 're safe here," Ransom would
repeat again and again in reassuring
tones, while great beads of perspiration
gathered on the dusky face, ashen gray
with sickness and terror, and the stalwart
form would now be shaken with ague,
now burned with fever.

Out of Bondage.

215

" Take a drink of hot stuff, John, and
let me cover you up warm and good,"
Ransom urged, bringing a steaming cup
of herb tea from the fire, saying to him-
self, "It 's old woman's medicine, but
it 's all I have."

In the afternoon the sick man became
easier, and fell into such a quiet sleep
that his nurse began to think the rest
and the simple remedies were working
a cure. When night fell and the multi-
tude of shadows were merged in univer-
sal gloom, he closed the window shutter,
lighted the candle, and made needful
preparations for the lonely night-watch.
As he sat by the bunk, ready to at-
tend to any want, there was no sound
but the regular labored breathing, the
crackling fire, the fall of a smouldering
brand, and the slow gnawing of a wood-
mouse behind the tier of tubs. He felt
a kind of exhilaration when he realized
that he was so interested in the welfare
of this poor waif that he thought no-
thing of his own weariness or ti'ouble, but
only how he could best serve the forlorn
stranger.

After the passing of some hours, his
charge still sleeping peacefully, Ransom
thought he himself might take a little
rest. He noiselessly replenished the fire
with the last of the wood, and quietly
stepped outside for more. He paused
on the log step a moment, listening for
one pulse of sound in the dead silence
of the winter night. Not a withered leaf
rustled in the bare treetops, not a buried
twig snapped under the soft footfalls of
. wandering hare or prowling fox. Ran-
som loosed his held breath and was about
to step into the moonlight, when he detect-
ed a stealthy invasion of the silence, and
recognized the sharp screech of sleigh-
runners and the muffled tread of horses.
His heart leaped at the probability of
coming help, for it could hardly be aught
else. Yet he would not be too sure, and,
reentering the house, he closed the door
softly.

He slipped aside the covering of a small

loophole in the door, made to afford the
sugar-maker the amusement of shooting
crows when time hung heavy on his
hands, and looked out upon the scene.
The full moon had climbed halfway to
the zenith, and its beams fell in broad
bands of white between the blue shad-
ows of the tree-trunks and full upon the
open space in front of the sugar-house.
Presently a sleigh came into the narrow
range of his vision. It halted, and three
men alighted. He started back in dis-
may, for at the first glance he recognized
the burly form and coarse features of
Hiel, and the dark-visaged traveler whom
he had seen at the tavern, while the third
figure was unknown. He hurriedly fas-
tened the door, for there could be no
doubt as to the purpose of the visitors.

Who could have betrayed the fugi-
tive's hiding-place ? Escape was impos-
sible, and successful resistance no less so.
What could he do ? As the unanswered
questions rapidly revolved in his mind,
his heart grew suddenly sick with the
thought that the Barclays might suspect
him of treachery. The fugitive's safety
had been entrusted to him on his own
offer. He was sharply recalled from
these swift thoughts by a stir in the bunk.
Aroused by the noise and instinctively
divining danger, the negro had started
up in terror and was staring imploringly
at Ransom.

" Dey 's arter me, marse. Don' let 'em
git me. Dey '11 wollup me. Dey '11 jes'
cut me to pieces. Don' let 'em kotch me."

" No, they shan't get you. Lie down
and keep quiet," said Ransom in a low,
reassuring tone, still engaged with watch-
ing the movements of those outside.

The negro sank back submissively,
with deep sighs and incoherent mutter-
ings.

The door was now violently tried and
loudly beaten upon, and a voice demand-
ed that it should be opened.

" Who 's there ? " asked Ransom.

" Never mind. You jest open the door
an' let us in," Kiel's voice answered.

216

Out of Bondage.

" What do you want ? "

" We want the nigger. Open the door,
or we '11 bust it. Come, naow, no foolin'."

" I won't open the door," said Ransom
firmly ; " break it in if you dare."

As his eyes searched the room almost
hopelessly for some means of defense or
deliverance, they fell upon the old mus-
ket in the corner, and in the same glance
he saw that a great and sudden change
had come upon the face of the negro.
The shock of fright had been too great,
and the stamp of death was already set
upon the drawn features. After the first
instant a strange exultation sprang up
in Ransom's heart. An invisible ally
would snatch the prey from their grasp,
if he could but hold the hunters at bay
for a while. He seized the musket and
ran to the door. Looking out from his
coign of vantage, he saw the three men
advancing, carrying a heavy stick from
the woodpile with the evident purpose of
using it as a battering-ram. He thrust
the rusty gun-muzzle through the loop-
hole and called out, " Drop that, or I '11
send a charge of shot into you ! "

The assailants hesitated only a moment
when they saw the threatening muzzle,
and then Ransom heard the log drop
in the snow. Soon, after some consulta-
tion, there was a sound of stealthy foot-
steps in the rear of the shanty, as of
some one reconnoitring in that quarter;
then the silence was broken by the gasp-
ing breath and whispers of the dying
man. Ransom set the gun by the door
and went to him.

" I 's mos' ober de ribber — de dogs
can't kotch me. De sun sliinin' — de
birds singin' — de bees hummin'. Good-
by, marse, I 's gwine."

The massive chest ceased its labored
heavings. The look of terror faded out
of the face, to give place to that expres-
sion of perfect rest which is the hopef ul-
est solution to the living of the awful
mystery of death.

Suddenly there were heavy blows on
the shuttered window, which crashed in
at once. At the same moment with this
diversion in the rear came an assault
upon the door. Ransom undid the fasten-
ing and threw it open. " You can come
in," he said quietly.

Hiel and the stranger whom Ransom
had first seen at the tavern entered cau-
tiously, as if suspecting a trap, the latter
with a cocked pistol in his hand.

" Don't be afraid, Hiel," Ransom said
contemptuously ; " the gun has n't been
loaded for a year."

" Damn putty business fer Square
Ransom's son, stealin' niggers is," Hiel
declared. " Where 's yer nigger, any-
way ? "

Ransom pointed to the bunk, and the
stranger, drawing a pair of handcuffs
from his pocket, advanced toward the
motionless figure. "Come, boy," he said
sharply, " the little game is up, an' it 's
no use playin' 'possum. Hold out your
hands." He roughly seized one of the
lifeless hands. " What the hell ! " he
exclaimed, recoiling from the icy touch.
After an intent look at the quiet, peace-
ful face of him who had escaped from
all bondage, he turned to Ransom, who
stood calmly regarding him. " Well, Mr.
Ransom, I reckon you 've played it ra-
ther low down on us, but you 've won
the game and the niggah 's yours. I
reckon I don't want him. Come, boys,
let 's be off."

Rowland E. Robinson.

The Holy Picture.

217

THE HOLY PICTURE.

IT is most curious how many untold
stories go to make up the sum of a single
story told, a single song sung, a single
painting completed. I was thinking of
this the other day as I stood before a
certain picture in the gallery of an art
exhibition. It was a very gentle, quiet
picture, and yet, after they had gone the
rounds of the rooms, people were quite
sure to turn back for another look ; and
often as they stood before it tears rose
unbidden to their eyes, not because the
picture was sad, but because it was beau-
tiful.

The title given in the catalogue read,
" And our Lord came to the Gateway of
the Little Garden."

" Whose little garden ? " I heard some
one ask ; and some one else replied, " Oh,
don't you know ? That is a quotation
from a poem." And the second speaker
added she was quite sure she should be
able to find the poem, and they would
look for it that evening.

I could have spared the vain search,
only what I knew about the picture was
altogether too much to tell in a public
place and at a moment's notice; its story
being made up of three others, — that of
my brother Edward, that of his friend
Janet, and that of Mary Morrison, " the
Winsome Lady."

Edward has his studio on the upper
floor of an old brick house halfway down
a crooked street: a most respectable
street, having only one saloon to its four
corners ; a picturesque street, on account
of the bend and of the curious collection
of carts drawn up along the sidewalk
toward evening and on Sundays and holi-
days; a merry, amusing street, always
something going on, — little boys and
girls playing, older boys and girls dancing
to the music of a hand-organ, scissors-
grinders, fishmongers, buyers of old rags,
venders of fruit, vegetables, small wares,

and plants in bloom, continually passing
and repassing.

On specified occasions the little girls
and boys climb the stairs to my brother's
studio, and look through the portfolios
of prints and photographs kept for their
especial entertainment. On other occa-
sions the men and women of the neigh-
borhood come, and the older children :
more pictures are shown and discussed,
light refreshments are passed, perhaps a
lantern-slide exhibition is held, or it rnay
be a concert is improvised by the guests.

Edward is. poor, naturally, being a
painter ; still, he is rich enough to do as
he pleases, which, all things considered,
is wealth indeed, and it pleases him to
paint in a manner as refined and deli-
cate and out of date as that of a Raphael
Madonna, and to live in what he calls a
" studio settlement."

His friend Janet occupied, until the
other day, two back rooms on the floor
below, and, as part of her busy life,
took charge of my brother's domestic
concerns. By profession, according to
her own definition, she was a " poor old
scrub ; " otherwise expressed, a washer-
woman. Edward had a habit of alluding
to her as a washerwoman by mistake, and
of insisting that her position admirably
illustrated the general upside-downness
of the world ; that nothing made him
more uncomfortable than to see such a
dainty little old lady trudging abroad
with her heavy bundles, whatever the
wind or the weather ; and that it was his
fixed intention to offer, on stormy nights,
his personal assistance in carrying home
the wash, — an intention which, I believe,
at various times he attempted to put
into execution, thereby causing himself
to be seriously reprimanded for what Ja-
net termed a lack of sense of propriety.

To go back half a century and more in
the little Scotchwoman's history, there

218

The Holy Picture.

was then, twenty -four miles out from
Glasgow, a wee whitewashed cottage
looking toward Ben Lomond ; and by
the kitchen window, within, the mother's
wheel went humming, and under the win-
dow, without, a little brook went rippling.
Here Janet was born, and having grown
up to " a bonnie lassie 0," she wandered
away and across the sea ; met Robin with
the blue eyes, the fair hair, and the smile
and bow that made one feel as if it were a
May morning and some one had brought
in a nosegay ; and in due course of time
Janet promised to marry Robin for richer
for poorer, it proving to be always for
poorer.

Once married, they built them a nest
in the old brick house of the crooked
street, and there lived bravely on through
many a toilsome year, until, in the home
country, the mother's wheel had long been
silent, the little brook had run dry, a rail-
road was speeding its way over the spot
where the whitewashed cottage had stood,
and their own youth and middle life had
been spent ; until a moment came when
Robin was taken ill and carried to a hos-
pital, where he died, and in the early
afternoon before New Year's Day the
church gave him his burial, he having
neglected to follow Janet's prudent ad-
vice and example, and having made no
previous provision for this last emer-
gency.

On the evening of New Year's Day
Mary Morrison knocked at Janet's door,
bearing in her hand a jar of marmalade,
which she had brought on the general
principle that it is easier to make a visit
of condolence if one carries some offer-
ing. She found Janet seated by the ta-
ble, the lamp lighted. Behind the latter,
neatly piled against the wall, were her
Bible, Prayer Book, Hymnal, and a little
gilt-clasped, gilt-edged, morocco-bound
copy of the New Testament, a souvenir of
girlish days in Scotland, with time-tinted
pages, and having in the back the Psalms
of David in metre " moro plain, smooth,
and agreeable than any heretofore," and

a collection of such old tunes as Kilmar-
nock, New Lydia, St. Mirrins, Tranquil-
lity, and Stroudwater. On top of the
little old book lay a rose. Edward had
placed it there that the room might seem
less sorrowful, toward which purpose the
rose helped, perhaps, in some slight de-
gree, and the jar of marmalade assisted.

Janet was gazing toward the wall above
the books on the table. " I am thinking
of death and the judgment," she said to
her visitor. " I am peering, as it were,
into eternity. I strain and I strain my
eyes, and I discover nothing."

Then she told of a custom inherited
from parents and grandparents through
many generations, — that of opening the
Bible at midnight on the eve of such
great festivals as Christmas, New Year's,
Easter, and Whitsunday, preceding the
opening of the book by repeating, " In
the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Ghost. Amen," — fer-
vently believing that the verse on which
the eye first rested would be one of espe-
cial significance. The verse to which she
had turned on the night before had been,
" In my Father's house are many man-
sions." And she said she feared Robin
would never be content in a mansion ; he
was used to having things compact and
cosy.

" If there are many of them," ob-
served Mary Morrison, " they are proba-
bly of many kinds, some large and some
small."

" A wee whitewashed cottage is what
I should prefer," said Janet, brightening
for a moment ; " and it must be over-
grown with roses, and on the hearth a
turf fire and a cricket to sing."

" And outside," suggested Mary Mor-
rison, " a little garden with bluebells and
heather."

" And a hawthorn hedge," Janet add-
ed, " and a sweetbrier bush, and a bed
of mignonette. Robin was always fond
of a sprig of mignonette for his button-
hole. And there must be cabbages and
onions."

The Holy Picture.

219

Mary Morrison said she hardly thought
there would be cabbages and onions in
heaven, though of course there might be.

"Nor shall I need them there," re-
turned Janet. " The spirit does not eat."
She spoke in a tone of severity, like one
suddenly realizing and rebuking an ir-
reverent turn in conversation, and, fold-
ing her hands, seemed trying to again
concentrate her mind on the subject of
her interrupted reflections.

This attempt she repeated evening af-
ter evening, thereby growing more and
more thought-entangled, helpless, and be-
wildered, until, notwithstanding the fact
that she considered Mary Morrison whol-
ly unreliable in her views touching a
future state, she came at last to seek
moments of refuge and distraction in the
fancy presented, and to talk of the pre-
tended existence of the little garden in
heaven, — disapprovingly, to be sure, but
still with evident interest: and in this way
she spoke of it to Edward, at the same
time tellingjhim something of Mary Mor-
rison herself, — that she was always put-
ting the most foolish ideas into one's
head, and that one could never be quite
sure whether she half believed what she
was saying, only, being such a winsome
lady, one was obliged to listen to her.

Shortly after this, in an idle moment,
Edward painted a picture of the Little
Garden with the hawthorn hedge about
it ; and within, the wee cottage, with its
roses and a sweetbrier bush growing by
the doorway, and under the window a
touch of green which he said was mignon-
ette. He made the picture purposely of
some size, that it might cover as much as
was possible of that portion of the wall
toward which Janet was accustomed to
gaze when she sat down, after the day's
work, and attempted to peer into eternity.

But when he proposed to hang it
above the table, Janet answered quickly,
" Not there, — that place is reserved ;
hang it to one side."

Then it appeared that Janet had a
long-cherished plan concerning this par-

ticular place, and had for years coveted,
and still hoped to possess, a holy picture
that should hang above her holy books,
thus converting the back of the table
into a sort of altar ; and that for this pur-
pose she had once been given a head of
Christ, which she had returned, not find-
ing the expression agreeable. " The face
of our Lord," said Janet, " should always
be a pleasant one."

The front of the table served as a
humble board from which were dispensed
the loving sacrifices of a never failing
and never lessening hospitality. At pre-
sent the guests especially favored were,
first, pretty Barbara, a young orphan
girl, getting along as best she could, with
no one of her own to watch over and
mother her ; secondly, Sarah Milligan,
to whom the occasional use of a corner
of Janet's table offered a highly desir-
able change in conditions of light and
air at meal - times, Sarah's abode be-
ing a small dark bedroom, — in Janet's
words, no better than -a clothes - press,
and she did n't know what Sarah meant
by treating herself in such an un-Chris-
tian manner; thirdly, Mrs. McNulty, who
occupied a portion of the basement, and
was in most necessitous circumstance,
made still more complicated by the pos-
session of what Janet described as a
" noble spirit," every effort to keep her
from the verge of starvation having to be
conducted with extreme discretion and
delicacy. Then there were numberless
others, all wanting something : it might
be a little washing and ironing for which
they were unable to offer remuneration,
or perhaps a little sympathy, a little ad-
vice, a friendly word, a welcome by a
warm fireside.

" Why do they all come to you ? " I
asked one day, having discovered pretty
Barbara, and Sarah of the dark bedroom,
and Mrs. McNulty of the noble spirit,
socially partaking at Janet's table of tea
and toast and herring.

" Possibly," was the reply, " because I
am good to them. When you are good to

220

The Holy Picture.

people, it is likely to keep them coming
as long as grass grows and water runs."

It was a hard winter, — little to do
and little money. Janet had work, it
was true, and pretty Barbara, who pasted
labels on bottles ; also Mary Morrison
and Sarah Milligan in their respective
professions, of whose nature we were ig-
norant, they being silent on this subject.
It was surmised, however, by Edward
and myself, that Mary Morrison had
work of some literary character, and it
was surmised by Janet that her friend
Sarah was connected with a certain down-
town theatre in the way of either mend-
ing or cleaning. Mrs. McNulty had no
work, and Mrs. McNulty's case repre-
sented one in thousands.

A sad state of things, verily ! Through
dying Robin had escaped much that was
pitiful.

There were two experiences in that
dreary winter which, as I now recall
them, stand out by themselves with the
fairness of mountain harebells growing
in some rocky crevice. They were very
simple experiences, things to feel rather
than to tell, to love rather than to show.
One was more particularly Edward's,
the other more particularly mine. Ed-
ward's was a discovery. After hanging
the Little Garden in Heaven on old
Janet's wall, he began to stroll uncon-
sciously and always farther and farther
into old Janet's heart, until he chanced
upon a nook where no one had been for
many a year, not even the owner herself,
and there found safely stored a treasure
of old tales, old songs, superstitions, re-
miniscences, and border ballads, fresh
and ready for his coming, — quite as if
he had brushed away a weight of dead
leaves, and beneath a sonsie brook ran
rippling, having its own violets to bend
over it, its own mavis to sing.

And now, when professional duties or
neighborly kindnesses brought my bro-
ther and Janet together, they were sure
to forget in a twinkling the vreal and
the woe of the world about them, to for-

get who was who and what was what ;
and Janet would call Edward " dearie "
and " darling " without the slightest sus-
picion of thus addressing him, since they
were both in their thoughts off and away,
perhaps in the Highlands, perhaps in the
Lowlands, perhaps remembering Robin,
as far even as there where " the day is
aye fair in the Land o' the Leal," — off
and away following Prince Charlie, he
of the fair yellow locks flowing over his
shoulders ; or else it might be in Rob
Roy's cave at a gathering of the clans,
or listening to the good Presbyterians
singing psalms in their hiding-places, or
parting with Highland Mary, or assisting
at the episode of Lord Ullin's daughter,
and Janet would exclaim, exactly as if
she had been present, " Oh, what a ter-
rible night it was ! how it thundered and
lightened ! " and then very likely they
would repeat in concert : —

" ' Now who be ye, would cross Lochgyle,

This dark and stormy water ? '
O, I 'm the chief of Ulva's isle,
And this Lord Ullin's daughter.' "

Like the music of old Scotch melodies,
the sound of their voices comes back to
me across the recollection of that sor-
rowful winter, and closely following is
the memory of my own experience, the
meeting and learning to know Mary Mor-
rison, Janet's Winsome Lady.

On evenings when it best suited our
convenience Edward and I were in the
habit of dining together at some pet Bo-
hemian restaurant ; on other evenings I
went alone to the pleasant little hotel
of St. Margaret, a sort of worldly con-
vent, being intended only for women,
the tables of whose dining-room were
daintily spread, each for four persons.
As a more or less frequent guest I soon
appropriated to myself an especial cor-
ner, and before long noticed that another
guest as regularly occupied the seat op-
posite. She was a slender, girlish wo-
man, having a face of singular grace and
tenderness. Our companions at the ta-

The Holy Picture.

221

ble varied with every meal. They were
strangers engaged in shopping and sight-
seeing, or college girls enjoying the free-
dom of a too brief vacation, or dressmak-
ers from out of town unfolding across
the table the merits of sundry establish-
ments where one might behold the most
modern creations of feminine attire ; or
they were artists full of comment and
criticism, or teachers, authors, musicians,
journalists, or now and then women in
the picturesque garb of some sisterhood,
or followers of the Salvation Army in
the brave red and blue.

Thus incidentally, my opposite neigh-
bor and I found ourselves attaining a
mutual store of most varied and exten-
sive information. The next development
of our acquaintance came through the
Torrey Botanical Society, to one of whose
meetings Edward had invited me to ac-
company him. We were a little late,
and as we entered heard the name of a
new member voted upon and accepted,
the name being Mary Morrison. The
paper that evening treated of rhododen-
drons, and in its discussion the question
was asked how far north they grew,
whereupon some one directly behind us
replied that she had found them on the
shores of Lake Sebago in Maine. The
speaker proved to be Mary Morrison,
the new member ; proved likewise to be
my opposite neighbor at dinner, and also
Janet's Winsome Lady, as Edward dis-
covered in the social period after the
discussion.

And now when Mary Morrison and I
met at St. Margaret's we fell into a way
of prolonging our dinner hour to a sec-
ond hour of rambling through favorite
streets, or of viewing the world from the
amusing position afforded by the top of a
Fifth Avenue stage ; or, taking a trolley
to the Battery, we watched the lights in
the ferry-boats, for the spring days were
at hand, and the twilights long and tempt-
ing ; and we talked of the books we had
read, the places we had seen, the people
we had observed in the dining-room of

the little hotel, — talked of the Torrey
Botanical Society, and of the shores of
Lake Sebago in Maine ; and perhaps for
lack of time, perhaps for some other rea-
son, we did not speak of Mary Morrison
herself.

Sometimes Edward joined us, and we
took longer rambles. On one of these
occasions — it was our last of the season
— we were just starting forth from the
old brick house in the crooked street,
which happened that day to be the ren-
dezvous, when on the steps we found
Alice and Josephine, two of the neigh-
borhood children, bending over a dead
canary. Alice, the younger, was weep-
ing bitterly.

" She wants it to sing again," said Jo-
sephine. " You can't sing again if you
are dead. My grandfather died the other
day. I went to the funeral."

Mary Morrison sat down by the chief
mourner, explaining how the song had
gone away, how the bird in the child's
hand was only something which had held
the song. There was a sound in her voice
that brought comfort and conviction.
Alice, being in sore need, accepted both,
although not immediately.

In the mean time, at Mary Morrison's
suggestion, Edward had gone up to his
studio, and returned with a small box
and a bit of cotton-wool, to which he had
added a violet bloomed out that morn-
ing in a diminutive fragment of country
field which he was cultivating on the
balcony of his fire-escape ; it being my
brother's custom, as soon as the spring
appeared in New England, to send thither
for a yard square of native earth stocked
with sample specimens of hepaticas, vio-
lets, ferns, grasses, buttercups, — all for
the joy and enlightenment of the chil-
dren in the crooked street, who were for
the most part unknowing of wild flowers.
We made a soft bed and laid the canary
upon it, the little head nestling against
the New England violet. Then we took
a last look, this being Josephine's sug-
gestion. At her grandfather's funeral

222

The Holy Picture.

every one had taken a last look. After
this Mary Morrison led us away from
Edward's street for the length of a block
or two ; at a corner drug-store she went
in, and reappeared with a key. Just be-
yond, in a low stone wall, was a door,
which Edward and I had passed hun-
dreds of times without suspecting that it
concealed what was left of a long-forgot-
ten graveyard, — a door to which few
came now, and behind which nothing
happened except the flitting of light and
shade, and the fall of the rain and snow.
" Very conveniently for us," said Mary
Morrison, unlocking the door in the
wall, "I was sent this way once to look
up some old inscriptions ; and so, in our
present need, I knew about the place and
where the key was kept."

We went in, and Edward dug a little
grave under a rose-bush.

" They say things at funerals," ob-
served Josephine, when the box had been
hidden from sight.

" Listen," said Mary Morrison, as a
bird alighted on the wall and began to
sing, " listen ; things are being said now.
It 's a thrush ; it 's on its way to the
woods in the North. I think it must
have stopped to sing at the canary's fu-
neral."

The children thought so, too, and Jo-
sephine wished to know where North was.
" North is Maine," replied Edward.
" Rhododendrons grow there on the
shores of Lake Sebago."

Then it became necessary to explain
at some length about Maine, and about
rhododendrons, and about the shores of
Lake Sebago ; and thus pleasantly con-
versing we conducted the children to
within sight of their doorway, and left
them wonderfully cheerful considering
the circumstances, the chief mourner be-
ing able to kiss her hand to us with a
smile.

Summer was at hand now, with its
changes of abiding-places. We did not
see Mary Morrison again until the fol-
lowing November, when the irregular

dining together at the little hotel was re-
newed ; and now and then we met at the
Torrey Botanical Society or had a cup of
tea in Edward's studio.

On one of the easels, generally covered
from sight, being unfinished, was a study
of the man Christ Jesus. As we were
looking at it one day, Mary Morrison said
she always wondered over a work of art
in the same way that she wondered over
a flower, and she thought a true painter
must be very much like a true gardener,

— a man who worked industriously,
waited patiently, lived honestly, kindly,
lovingly, until at the proper season he
would produce again and again things
so beautiful that no one could look upon
them unmoved ; and it would be said
they were done in a moment of inspi-
ration, whereas they were the result of
an unfolding as gloriously natural and as
gloriously mysterious as the blooming of
a flower.

" And suppose you were a painter,"
said Edward, " waiting for the blooming
of your flower, — to use your own little
simile, — and suppose you had attempt-
ed, as I have, the subject on the easel,
how would you think it out ? What would
be your conception of it ? "

" First of all," said Mary Morrison
presently, "I should try to make my
mind realize some very simple circum-
stance into which our Lord might come,

— as for instance he might come to the
gateway of Janet's Little Garden in Hea-
ven to welcome her, perhaps, after her
toilsome journey ; and as I painted I
should think of him familiarly, as of one
who would enjoy the hawthorn hedge,
and .the sweetbrier bush, and the mignon-
ette."

" And after that ? " said Edward.

" And after that I should think of
various sorrowful things connected with
Janet's life, — things which she has often
tried to tell me, but could never finish to
the end, they being too full of bitterness
for utterance ; and I should think that
when our Lord came to the Little Gar-

The Holy Picture.

223

den, it would be like the coming of One
who knew all that one had ever feared
and suffered, all that had been in one's
heart since the beginning, and there would
be perfect understanding with no pain
of explanation. Of course you don't be-
lieve in any Little Garden in Heaven,''
Mary Morrison went on more lightly, —
" you are too intelligent ; and Janet does
n't believe in it, either, though she does
believe in the judgment-seat ; and I sup-
pose we all believed once, more or less,
in golden crowns, and harps, and gir-
dles, and candlesticks, and never fading
flowers, and fields of living green."

" But I do believe in the Little Gar-
den," said Edward obligingly ; " that is,
in a general way. I believe in something
pleasant, and what is there pleasanter
than a garden ? Moreover, I believe it 's
a great mistake to be what you call intel-
ligent in these matters. One loses too
much. Besides, how can one be intelli-
gent about that ' which passeth all un-
derstanding ' ? It is n't possible, any
more than that a child should think the
thoughts of a man."

The winter went by, and still no more
than Janet knew of her friend Sarah Mil-
ligan's private life did we know of our
friend Mary Morrison's. Indeed, we
had long ceased to consider that she had
any life other than that which we in our
minds had bestowed upon her. Chance,
however, was now to enlighten us. My
brother happened to be passing through
a street, one of whose houses stood sadly
silent, its curtains drawn and a sign of
mourning on its door. As he approached
the house a woman came out, in whom he
recognized Mary Morrison. Two other
women followed. Edward was nearer
now, and heard one of them say that
never before had she seen things done
with such thoughtful and tender appreci-
ation of every circumstance ; that it was
like having a very dear friend appear
unexpectedly in a moment of sorrow.

" It was more like an angel sent from
heaven," the other woman answered.

The words awakened a train of thought
in my brother's mind, vague at first, but
gradually assuming shape until it reached
back as far as the canary bird's funeral.
He went into a shop and consulted a di-
rectory, and a little later found his way
to a door bearing the names " Morrison
& Morrison," and which Janet's Win-
some Lady had entered just before him.

" I have been hearing about you," he
said to her, " and I have come to hear
more. Have you time to tell me now,
and will you begin at the very begin-
ning ? "

" Then I must tell you first about fa-
ther and uncle," Mary Morrison replied,
offering him a chair, and seating herself
in the one opposite. Briefly narrated,
this is the account she gave : —

" Father and uncle and I lived in a
little village not far from the shores of
the lake where the rhododendrons grow.
Father and uncle kept the village store,
put on the village double windows in
the autumn, took them off in the spring,
mended people's furniture and furnaces,
— mended everything, in fact, except the
people themselves : the village doctor did
that when he could ; when he could n't,
and the minister had said what he had
to say, father and uncle did what was
left to do, they being the village under-
takers, — notwithstanding which no one
ever thought of connecting them with
things sad and gloomy, but rather with a
sense of security and peace.

" I had a curious childhood as far as
surroundings were concerned. I kept
my dolls in a large roomy box acquired
by way of business, and marked in star-
ing letters ' Bon Jour Shrouds.' From
that inscription I learned my first French
lesson. Back of the store stood an old
abandoned Methodist meeting - house,
bought and moved thither by father and
uncle, and adapted by them as a place of
storage for the hearse and coffins. To
us village children the coffins meant go-
ing to bed to sleep until the coming of
the angel of the resurrection.

224

The Holy Picture.

" I remember asking father what the
angel would say, and father asked uncle,
and uncle said it might be, ' Awake, thou
that sleepest, arise from the dead, and
Christ shall give thee light.' We chil-
dren thought it would be very beautiful
to have that said to us, only it seemed a
pity to be obliged to sleep so long ; we
felt that we had hardly time to sleep at
all, there was so much to do. Conse-
quently, we were not particularly inter-
ested in the coffins, but we were delighted
with the hearse. It made such a capital
place in which to play hide-and-seek.

" When I grew older I went to the
academy of the neighboring town, and
from there to college, and then accompa-
nied a family abroad to take charge of
the studies of two young girls. With
the latter I spent a number of pleasant
years, at the end of which father and
uncle both fell asleep, to wait, as they
were accustomed to say of others, for the
coming of the angel. I returned home
shortly after this, feeling very sad and
lonely. One day I met John Morrison,
a cousin of father's and uncle's, who was
also an undertaker. He told me, among
other things, of the death of his partner,
and how he was looking for some one to
replace him, and he asked, half seriously,
how I would like the position.

" I thought hard for a moment. I
knew the world to be filled to superflu-
ity with women teachers and women in
almost every occupation, but I had never
heard of a woman following John Mor-
rison's profession. I remembered, too,
how once, when a little English child had
died in a foreign hotel, and I had been
able to render the mother assistance in
the spirit of father and uncle, she had
said what a comfort it would be if always
at such a time there were some woman
upon whom one might call, whose pre-
sence would be' like that of a friend.
And so I accepted John Morrison's offer.
That was five years ago.

" And now I have told you everything,
just as you asked me."

For the first time in her long life old
Janet was very ill ; '" almost ready to go
to the Little Garden in Heaven," she ob-
served, as she lay down apparently to die.

The doctor and the minister, speedi-
ly summoned, arrived, and administered
each according to his profession. Mrs.
McNulty gave up such desultory occu-
pation as she was able to procure, and,
assuming the vacant place at the wash-
tub, saved inconvenience to every one
concerned, and to the little household in
particular any diminution of income ; for
not one penny would Mrs. McNulty ac-
cept in recognition of services rendered.
Sarah of the dark bedroom saw to it that
Mrs. McNulty was supplied with nourish-
ing food, Knd Edward that the basement
rent was paid ; pretty Barbara and the
Winsome Lady appeared regularly and
helpfully, as did other people ; in short,
the world, notwithstanding its well-estab-
lished reputation for ingratitude, conduct-
ed itself in a thoroughly commendable
manner.

Thus two weeks went by, and in the
little inner room old Janet awaited the
coming of that supreme moment when
she should straighten her own limbs and
close her own eyes, according to a pre-
viously announced determination ; which
latter, being generally known, kept those
about her in constant apprehension, and
some one continually stealing into the
room to see if anything had happened,
until Janet herself most unexpectedly re-
lieved the strain of the situation by say-
ing, " I will inform you, children, when
the end is at hand."

During the two weeks she remained
for the most part in a sort of stupor, sel-
dom speaking or rousing of her own ac-
cord, except when my brother entered
the room. Then she generally had some
dream to relate, — of once upon a time
in Scotland. One was of losing some
money at a fair, the sum of a year's eco-
nomies, saved it may have been to buy
some longed-for trinket or a bunch of
blue ribbons.

The Holy Picture.

225

" A basket of posies,
A garland of lilies, a gift of red roses,
A little straw hat to set off the blue ribbons."

Another dream — and this one had the
peculiarity of repeating itself — was of a
pair of wee shoes made for the child Ja-
net by her father, he being a shoemaker,
from a bit of the finest of fine kid left
over after making the Sunday shoes of the
six young ladies at the " grand house."
We had long known about the six young
ladies : that their names were Mary and
Flora and Jessie, and Charlotte and Ellen
and Elisabeth ; that when their fortunes
were dissipated by the wild young men
of the family, they had been obliged to
go out as governesses ; and we had often
deplored their fate, but never before felt
so near them as now through this fre-
quent mentioning of their Sunday shoes.
In Mrs. McNulty's words, " it was as if
Janet had shoes on the brain."

On the evening before Good Friday,
my brother had come in to make his usual
visit, and Mrs. McNulty, taking advan-
tage of his presence, had run down to
the corner grocery for some needed ar-
ticle.

Janet seemed to be sleeping. Sudden-
ly she opened her eyes and said in quite
the old voice that she helieved she was
improving, that she should like a good
bowl of barley broth, and that she felt as
if the swelling had gone out of her feet.

" Then you will soon be able to wear
your new shoes again," returned my bro-
ther, referring, not to the wee ones of her
dream, of course, but to another pair, the
immediate need of which, and whose in-
tended purchase, supposed by every one
to have been successfully accomplished,
had been discussed among us just before
Janet's illness.

" I have no new shoes," said Janet, in
rather a reluctant and shamefaced fash-
ion.

"But I met you going out to buy
them," insisted Edward, — " don't you
remember ? "

Yes, Janet remembered. She also re-

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 1 5

membered having met Mrs. McNulty a
few moments later ; and Mrs. McNulty
being in great need, she had given her
a portion of the sum she had gathered,
and the next day a trifle more, ?.nd the
same the next, and the next, until the
wherewithal for the purchase of new
shoes had completely vanished. " And
never shall I forget," continued Janet,
" how my feet ached with the cold the
last time I went out, although I walked
on the sunny side of the street, and how
when I came where there was a fire I
stood so close as to burn the leather of
the old things I was wearing without
once perceiving the heat ; and I am quite
well aware that I have fallen ill and
made great trouble on account of having
been too accommodating. Still, what is
one to do ? Has not our Lord enjoined
upon us to be kind to one another ? "
And then she added, commentingly, one
could be kind, but it was not necessary to
overstep.

When Edward went back presently to
his studio, he had in his hand the picture
of the Little Garden. He had taken it
from the wall as he passed through the
outer room, with a vague idea of making
some tall white lilies to bloom in it for
Easter morning. But the next day, as
he sat down before it, thinking half con-
sciously of Janet's gentle life, its courage,
its absence of bonnie things, its fullness
of weariness, its sweet consistency with
one of her own quaint sayings, — that
trouble is sent to us to see how graceful-
ly we can bear our cross, — instead of
the lilies he commenced the outline of a
figure standing at the gateway ; intend-
ing to make the figure that of an angel
bringing it might be a message, and to
give it a certain resemblance to Mary
Morrison. The thought of the latter sug-
gested other thoughts. Words drifted
through his mind, spoken that day in the
studio before the still unfinished study
of the man Christ Jesus : " I should
think of him familiarly, as of one who
would enjoy the hawthorn hedge, and

226

The Holy Picture.

the sweetbrier bush, and the mignonette.
... I should think that when our Lord
came to the Little Garden, it would be
like the coming of One who knew all
that one had ever feared and suffered,
all that had been in one's heart since the
beginning."

My brother put aside the picture taken
from Janet's wall and began another, and,
forgetting himself in his work, painted
all day until the light faded. When he
carried what he had done to Janet, she
asked how it was that he could paint our
Blessed Lord just as one would think
he must have looked, having never seen
him, and said her room was no place for
a picture like this, — it should rather
hang in a church ; only then there would
be the danger of disti'acting the attention
of the worshipers, who would be always
wondering about it, no mention being
made in the sacred Scriptures of a Little
Garden with a hawthorn hedge and a
bonnie wee house half hidden under roses.

My brother, however, left it hanging
over the table, above the holy books,
where, for fear of injury, it was always
kept carefully covered except on Sun-
days and in the evening.

Janet was right when she said she
believed she was improving. Not many
weeks after Easter she found herself able
to put on the strong new shoes which had
been provided for her recovery, and to
resume her customary calling. And life
went on as before in the old brick house
of the crooked street, except that after a
little the painter's studio was closed, it
being the time of summer holidays, —
the time when, according to popular par-
lance, every one is out of town and no
one in town, which really means, when
one counts numbers, that two or three
people are away and millions are left
behind.

Mary Morrison took her vacation, this
year, in late September and early Octo-
ber. On one of these early October days
she and Edward were straying together

along a wooded road, — my brother hav-
ing wandered so far north as the shores
of Lake Sebago in Maine, — when a boy
came running toward them with a mes-
sage sent by Mrs. McNulty ; entirely on
her own responsibility, as she explained
later, because she felt, if any one ought
to be notified, it was the painter.

The painter read the message, and
Mary Morrison read it. Then they
turned back to the village, breaking off as
they went along little branches of fir and
pine and bay with leaves turned crimson,
and stalks of goldenrod and purple as-
ters. In the village they found a bed
of lady's - delights, from whose flowers
Mary Morrison made a bonnie bunch by
themselves.

There had been no particular illness ;
" a general breaking up " was what the
doctor had pronounced it ; when one has
worked early and late for nearly seven-
ty years, there naturally comes a time
when all things wear out together. Ja-
net's own diagnosis was given in the
quiet remark, " The oil has gone out of
my joints, and I know of no place to get
more."

Her last words had been to call Mrs.
McNulty a foolish woman, advising her
to lie down and have a good night's rest :
this was when the latter declared her
intention of sitting up to watch. " In
fact," said Mrs. McNulty, " she appeared
quite displeased with me, but I was well
enough acquainted with her to know
that the displeasure was only outward."
The day before her death she had par-
taken of the Blessed Sacrament, and also
given certain directions. The Holy Pic-
ture was to be returned, carefully cov-
ered, to the painter's studio, and with
it her copy of Robbie Burns's poems, Ja-
net's one worldly book, which she hoped
the painter would be pleased to accept
as a keepsake. For the painter's sister
was to be set aside the little New Testa-
ment with the old tunes in the back, and
for the Winsome Lady a rosewood work-

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

227

box containing various girlish trinkets,
souvenirs of more prosperous days, pre-
ciously kept through days of poverty.
Then, after suitable disposition had been
made of Bible, Prayer Book, Hymnal,
flat-irons, articles of clothing, and furni-
ture, came the final bequest, — that the
sum of five dollars and seventy-five cents,
gathered toward the next month's rent,
be entrusted to the painter, and by him
bestowed on some needy and religious
old woman.

This last will and testament, faithfully
recorded in Mrs. McNulty's mind, and
from there transmitted to my brother
as he laid the bonnie bunch of lady's-
delights on his old friend's heart, and
above her feet the goldenrod and pur-

ple asters, the little branches of fir and
pine and bay with leaves turned crimson,
was duly reported to Mary Morrison that
night, with the amendment, " The Holy
Picture is yours. It was always yours,
painted by me in translation of your
thought, lent to Janet for a season."

These are the three stories of three
lives which go to make one story, and
which passed through my mind as, that
day at the art exhibition, standing before
the picture whose title in the catalogue
read, " And our Lord came to the Gate-
way of the Little Garden," I overheard
some one ask, " Whose little garden ? "
and some one else reply, " Oh, don't you
know ? That is a quotation from a poem."
Harriet Lewis Bradley.

THE PAUSE IN CRITICISM — AND AFTER.

WE are most of us conscious of an
insufficiency in literary criticism to-day.
Never were more opinions printed about
books than now ; the publishers' lists
swarm with the titles of manuals, essays,
compendiums ; our schools, our colleges,
pride themselves on providing instruc-
tion in literature ; even the daily press
rescues an occasional column from the
chronicles of crime and politics, and de-
votes it to notices of current publications.
And yet, despite all these evidences of
apparent critical activity, we are con-
scious of a lack, which few of us define.
Amid a babel of conflicting utterances,
we listen for an authoritative voice, but
we hear none. Why is this ?

One might dismiss the question with
the remark that great critics, like mas-
ters in any sphere, are rare, and that this
happens to be a time when none flour-
ish ; but it may be possible to indicate
a reason, more general in its nature and
less dependent on chance, which accounts
in part for the present condition of crit-

icism, without reference to the dearth
of great critics. Genius regarded singly
can never be explained, but from the
principles which guide workers we can
often deduce helpful conclusions as to
the success or failure of their work.

About the middle of this century, men
began to apply the methods of the evolu-
tionist to the study of literature. That
application gave a most salutary impetus
to criticism, but the time has come when
the stimulus has about spent itself. The
change wrought by the evolutionist meth-
od can be understood at a glance, if we
remember that fifty years ago critics were
disputing over the relative rank of au-
thors, — whether Homer were superior
to Dante, Wordsworth to Byron, Moliere
to Calderon ; and in the long run it ap-
peared that the verdict rested, not on
established laws, but on the taste of the
individual critic. " Is it not wonderful,"
asks Fitzgerald, after reading the Life of
Macaulay, " how he, Hallam, and Mack-
intosh could roar and bawl at one an-

228

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

other over such Questions as Which is
the Greatest Poet ? Which is the great-
est Work of that Greatest Poet ? etc., like
Boys at some Debating Society ? "

The evolutionist treatment put an end
to such questions, and busied itself ' in
tracing the historic development of lit-
erature, and in discovering the heredity
and environment of individual authors.
It inquired where a man belonged in
the historic series, whom he came after,
whom he preceded, — quite unconcerned
as to his standing on an arbitrary rank-
list. It compiled literary pedigrees, —
works which have a value similar to that
of herd-books and stud-books. Its inves-
tigations have been immensely profitable,
leading to the classification in proper
chronological order of the various world-
literatures, — a classification in which
both the serial interdependence of indi-
vi'dual authors and the mutual relations
between different literatures are clearly
set forth. To such good purpose has a
generation of scholars devoted itself to
this task that now the thinnest manual
suffices to contain the chief literary
pedigrees, and the formulas which were
strange and hard only a little while ago
are the commonplaces of our schoolrooms
to-day. A Freshman can tell you just
where each poet or novelist fits into his
sequence ; how Tennyson derives from
Keats and Wordsworth, and Aldrich
from Tennyson ; how Realism in fiction
descends from Stendhal to Zola ; how
the Italian Renaissance inspired first
Wyatt and Surrey, who communicated
the inspiration to Sidney and Spenser,
through whom it kindled one Elizabethan
after another, until its last bright glow
in Ben Jonson's Faithful Shepherdess
and in Milton's Comus.

Thus have the masterpieces of litera-
ture been ree'dited, the annals rewritten,
the conditions of production carefully
surveyed. A latter-day tyro can visualize
the skeleton over which each literature
has worn a body ; nay, with the evolu-
tionist formula to direct him, he can take

the skeleton apart, and mount it again,
bone by bone, in exact articulation. Cu-
vier confidently reconstructed an extinct
animal from a single fossil vertebra ; the
archaeologist will deduce a vanished civ-
ilization from two fingers and a toe of
an otherwise destroyed statue : not less
skillful than these, the literary anatomist
would not despair of reconstructing the
entire literature of a bygone race from
but one of its books. Skeptics, indeed, —
men who perceive that " our knowledge
is as a drop, and our ignorance is as an
ocean," — may be surprised that any one
can be so learned in details where every
one must be so ignorant of ultimates ;
but even skeptics heartily recognize the
great benefit which the application of
the evolutionist method to literature has
brought. The gain has been precious ;
it will be permanent ; for it has reduced
to convenient form many facts which
criticism may use for a further advance.
But progress never long pursues a
straight line. After going a certain dis-
tance in one direction, it turns and moves
in the opposite. The curve not more ex-
actly typifies beauty than the zigzag repre-
sents progress. The course changes from
generation to generation, but the men of
all generations have a common charac-
teristic in that they believe their own
course to be all-important. Theology and
science, classicism and romanticism, au-
thority and self-government, — these are
some of the ideals towards which the
ship of Progress has steered on its tacks
over the sea of life, yet not one of them
has led to the final haven. After a while,
it may be centuries, the wind changes,
the helm must be put about, and again
all on board thrill with the belief that
this new course surely will bring them
into port.

To apply this figure to criticism, can
we not discern in the present conditions
a sign that the evolutionist method has
sped us almost as far as it can, and that
we must soon look for a favoring breeze
from another quarter ? Is it not evident

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

229

that a process which seeks to prove the
continuity of a long series will pay great-
er heed to those points of resemblance
which enable each part to be fitted into
the series than to those qualities by which
each part differs from the rest ? If you
give an anatomist a heap of bones to
mount, he exerts himself to find where
the humerus joins the scapula or the
tibia the femur, without regard to their
special functions. In like manner, the
evolutionist critic not only emphasizes
the lines of junction or blending, whereby
he hopes at last to show the structural
continuity of literature, but he also mag-
nifies resemblances, and takes as little
note as may be of differences. He even
supplies missing links, hot from the forge
of analogy. And he labors so success-
fully that his system, emerging out of the
mists of theory, stands visible to us all.

When knowledge has reached this
stage, where it can be packed into for-
mulas, one of two things happens : either
the formulas are easily learned and re-
peated mechanically, which leads to pet-
rifaction, or they serve as new points of
departure from which the untrammeled
spirit sets out on a higher quest.

Of the former case we need no better
example than rhetoric. I do not recall
that a single master in literature men-
tions his obligation to the rhetoric books
as aids by which he moulded his style ;
yet the biographies of men of genius are
full of acknowledgments of their indebt-
edness to the poets and thinkers, the ro-
mancers and essayists, who fired their
imagination, spurred their ambition, or
taught them by example the art of ut-
terance. Is there in the non-professional
works of the expounders of rhetoric a
single passage, except perhaps a page
here and there in Whately, which rises
above self-conscious mediocrity? Read
but a little in any of them, and present-
ly the vision of an egg-dancer, painfully,
cautiously, picking his intricate way, will
float before your eyes. Take up Longi-
nus, and you will soon perceive that here

is the undertaker come to measure the
corpse of classic literature for its coffin.
Could you set Rudyard Kipling at one
table, and a coalition of all the rhetoric
teachers extant at another, from which
should you expect, at the end of a given
time, a vigorous, clear, charming, origi-
nal sketch ? Assuredly, all this does not
mean that the facts 'or laws of rhetoric
may not, conceivably, be of some use, or
that the rhetoric teacher may not be a
worthy member of society, — no one de-
nies the respectability or the usefulness
of the undertaker, — but it illustrates
how, when the laws of an art or of a
science have long been formulated, petri-
faction is likely to supervene. And in
passing be it remarked that the rhetoric
teacher can no more impart the secret
of living literature than can the dissector
who operates to such good purpose on a
cadaver create a living soul. The dissec-
tor, indeed, never pretends that he can
create living beings, but nearly all rheto-
ric teachers harbor the delusion that they
possess not only the art of dissection, but
also the secret of creation.

How different is the aspect of those
sciences and arts in which classification
neither implies arrested development,
nor marks the limit beyond which pro-
gress cannot be made ! We need cite
as an illustration only the mathematics,
one of the branches of knowledge in
which fixed laws were earliest formu-
lated, and the science above all others
in which absolute accuracy can be at-
tained at every step : age for it does not
mean senility ; rules are not shackles.
The laws of his science lift the mathe-
matician into the very empyrean of
knowledge. They enable the physicist
to bridge the Mississippi and to harness
Niagara. They give the astronomer
wings wherewith he follows comets in
their courses, tracks the constellations
weaving their patterns on the floor of
heaven, and moves a freeman among the
wonders of sidereal space and through
the vistas of incalculable time.

230

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

Let us ask, now, to which of these ex-
amples the evolutionist study of litera-
ture should be likened. Can there be
any doubt that, having demonstrated the
process of development, the structural
growth, the serial continuity, of litera-
ture, the evolutionist has accomplished
nearly all that his method is fitted to
accomplish in this field ? Evolution led
us out of the old and sterile formalism ;
but what will that avail us if it leaves
us in a formalism of its own ? Merely
to go on repeating results which nobody
denies cannot help us, — that is petri-
faction, not growth. Along which road,
then, can we advance ? One way beck-
ons very clearly, and it is this. Equipped
with the knowledge of the general growth
of literature which the evolutionist sup-
plies, let us proceed to the interpreta-
tion of representative masters as indi-
viduals. Instead of laying chief stress
on the analysis of externals, — of form,
of structure, of the accidents of time
and place, — let us seek to penetrate the
inner meaning, the spiritual significance,
the absolute value, of authors.

Many persons will doubtless urge that
the interpretative method has never been
abandoned ; they will assert that teach-
ers and critics of literature employ it at
least as often as the evolutionist method,
and they will quote one contemporary
writer or another to fortify their asser-
tion. But the evidence is against them :
the evidence, first, of the literary man-
uals and commentaries, which are al-
ways valuable indications of prevailing,
accepted methods, because orthodoxy
alone is permitted in the schools ; next,
the evidence of such recent critical es-
says as may be regarded as typical ; and
finally, the evidence furnished by the
very lack of an authoritative voice, the
tone of uncertainty, aiid the inharmoni-
ous mingling of various methods, obser-
vable in a great part of our current crit-
icism. Moreover, the way in which men
trained in one school practice the prin-
ciples of an opposite school can never

do full justice to the latter. The qual-
ity of the interpretation in recent works
must, accordingly, have been affected
by the evolutionist sources from which
it sprang. But in truth, since Lowell
and Arnold died, what great interpret-
er, writing in English, has arisen ? In
France, — unless we except M. Brune-
tiere, — have the successors of Taine,
the man of letters who, it seems to me,
got the richest possible results from the
evolutionist method, turned away from
his brilliant example ? Long is it since
Germany has bred a critic of interna-
tional reputation, but you need examine
only a small fraction of the commenta-
ries poured out each year by the pains-
taking German scholars in order to de-
tect the methods which dominate them.
The heredity and environment of an au-
thor, and his place in his series, are still
the chief concern of criticism.

Interpretation, — that, then, to state
much in a single word, is the means by
which advance is to be sought. The
evolutionist, aspiring to formulate gen-
eral laws, rightly investigates the com-
mon characteristics of great masses, and
extends his scrutiny over long periods.
But literature is the expression of indi-
viduals, — the domain where masses do
not count, the highest example of an
undebased aristocracy. By no addition
or multiplication of masses can you pro-
duce the equivalent of Shakespeare. To
understand him, you must approach him
as an individual, and not merely as a
writer occupying a certain place in the
development of the Elizabethan drama.
To know his structural significance is
interesting, and may be important, but
it is not indispensable. Only by treat-
ing him absolutely, as a poet of indi-
vidual utterance, who produces a differ-
ent effect on you than any or all others
produce, can you interpret him. Your
interpretation, moreover, will measure
yourself not less than him : it will re-
veal to us how much of Shakespeare
you are capable of holding. After all,

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

231

the test of utterance is, How does it af-
fect us ? The academic world is popu-
lous with men who can assign his proper
place to every author from Homer to
Hugo, but who have been stirred by none,
— a barren erudition ! For to know
where Burns belongs in the pedigree of
literature is as irrelevant to the effect his
songs produce on you as to know the or-
nithological pedigree of the oriole who
showers his inimitable lyrics from the elm
by your roadside. Who will deny that
this absolute treatment is the natural
treatment ? You do not look upon your-
self, and your father, and your friends as
simply units in a sequence, but as distinct
persons, each possessing qualities which
create for him an absolute individual-
ity. Neither can the great companions
to whom literature introduces us be com-
prehended until they mean more to us
than mere links in a chain.

It follows, therefore, that to the two ob-
jects of criticism promulgated by Taine,
and still pursued by most of the critics
of literature, we must add a third : be-
sides the moment and the milieu, we
must seek to understand the message.
Otherwise we cannot rise from the plane
of classification to that of interpretation.

The models left by the best critics ad-
monish us that this is the true method.
Goethe and Coleridge, Carlyle and Low-
ell and Arnold, were interpreters : some
of them lived and died before the doc-
trine of the milieu and the moment had
been broached, and yet their criticism
still stands. To Goethe, bent on pene-
trating to the very heart of Hamlet and
drawing out its message, such questions
as Shakespeare's place in the develop-
ment of the English drama, or who
were his ancestors, or what he ate and
wore, had but a casual interest, — such
an interest as he might have felt, when
he listened to a violoncello concerto, in
knowing what wood the instrument was
made of, or the maker's name and date.
In like manner, the interpretative critic
chooses to expound for us Dante's theo-

logy, rather than to add another to the
many discussions of how much of his
theology Dante borrowed from Thomas
Aquinas. To this method, also, we owe
Caiiyle's wonderful essay on Samuel
Johnson, and Emerson's transcendental
exposition of Plato and Montaigne ; out
of this came Arnold's revelations — for
such, indeed, they are — of Marcus Au-
relius and Joubert and Heine. Criti-
cism of this supreme sort is as the rod
wherewith Moses smote the rock in Ho-
reb and living waters gushed forth.

I need not dwell here upon the rare
qualities demanded of the critic as inter-
preter. Like every one who pierces be-
neath the outer shows of things, he must
have insight. The evolutionist's most
necessary faculty is observation ; the in-
terpreter requires imagination. Scan-
ning the masters of literature face to
face, dwelling with them as an individ-
ual among individuals, he cannot regard
them impassively, as he might count so
many telegraph-poles or links in a chain ;
neither will he see in them only illus-
trations of abstract laws, — formulas ill
concealed behind a thin veil of flesh ;
but he will recognize that they are the
highest embodiments of varied human
nature. Accordingly, his criticism will
be personal, human, concrete. Evolu-
tionist critics, on the contrary, end with a
mechanical classification ; they establish
the series they had in view ; they pay
their tribute to logic ; and yet they leave
us conscious of the lack of creative ge-
nius in themselves, and in their system
of the complexness and elasticity and
surprise of life. We may be nothing
but automata, society may be only a co-
lossal mechanism operated by inflexible
laws, but nature at least hides this from
us in an illusion of spontaneity. Critics
of the moment and the milieu, in making
too visible the boiler and piston and rods,
too audible the roar of wheels and the
hissing of valves, fall far short of nature.

Whenever a system arrives at the con-
clusion that man is a machine, we may

232

The Pause in Criticism — and After.

be sure that the system itself is mechani-
cal. For man is a spirit, and literature,
the supreme form of his self - manifes-
tation, must be interpreted spiritually.
When we appeal, therefore, for a return
to the method of interpretation, we do
not counsel a retreat ; we point to the
surest road for advance. The know-
ledge acquired in other schools will not
be wasted, but will contribute whatever
it can towards a higher interpretation.
We can foresee, of course, that among a
large number of interpretations few will
have value, and that there will seldom
be unanimity, even among the best. But
what of that ? Every so-called law was
originally only the opinion of one man.
I doubt whether any universal laws will
ever be deduced for literary criticism.
I suspect the critic who so confidently
trusts to a foot-rule. The utmost that
the best critic can do for me is to show
me the utmost he has found in a given
author ; I shall agree with him or not
according as my understanding and in-
sight and needs correspond to his. Vol-
taire saw little in Shakespeare ; conse-
quently his opinion of Shakespeare car-
ries no weight among those who see
much. Many readers think Don Quixote
only an amusing satire on books of chiv-
alry ; Coleridge discerned in it an alle-
gory of the conflict of the idealist with
a matter-of-fact world, — and his in-
terpretation will endure until somebody
shall suggest a better. The man who
tells us that Dante wrote the Inferno in
order to have the satisfaction of taking
vengeance on his enemies furnishes valu-
able elucidation — about himself.

That the interpretative method may
bear a large crop of extravagances and
absurdities argues nothing as to its va-
lidity. We do not judge a system by its
worst representatives. We do not de-
clare evolutionist criticism inadequate be-
cause it bears such works as Dilntzer's
Life of Goethe, in which the biographer,
patiently striving to " explain " Goethe

by his moment and his milieu, gravely
records the poet's bills of fare, and would
fain describe, if space permitted, the
mine which supplied silver for the poet's
shoe-buckles ; but when evolutionist crit-
icism, as practiced by a genius so clear
and learned and alert as Taine, con-
structs a vast machine and assures us
that this is life, — life, which is so plas-
tic, so immeasurable, so full of surprise
and mystery, — then we may well pro-
nounce it inadequate. And we need not
fear lest, having bidden forth interpret-
ers, we have in reality hastened the com-
ing of chaos in criticism. Better even
the whims and puerilities of a method
which may lead to the highest results
than the orderliness of a method which
does not aim at the highest.

If literature be no more to you than
amusement, then will you regard its
Shakespeares and Dantes as but toy-
makers ; if it be but a verbal quarry,
you will work in it, like the philologist
or the grammarian, for material to con-
struct a schoolhouse ; if it be but the re-
cord of serial development, then you will
make of it a museum like that wherein
the naturalist exhibits specimens, fossil
or recent, showing the growth of organ-
isms. But literature is more, infinite-
ly more, than any of these. It is the
book, more enduring than tables of stone,
wherein is written the revelation of man-
kind ; it is the memory of the race, mak-
ing the past present, without which the
experience of all our yesterdays would
profit us nothing, and we should begin,
each morning, like the Papuan, a dull
round of half-brutish life, incapable of
advance. To every one of us, even the
dullest or shallowest, come Joy and Grief,
Sin and Failure and Death, each with his
challenge., " What do I mean to you ? "
Literature embodies the replies which
the spokesmen of the race have given
to these supernal questioners. To inter-
pret their replies, — that is the mission
of the critic.

WUliam Roscoe Thayer.

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

233

THE DELINQUENT IN ART AND IN LITERATURE.

FROM the very beginning art has dealt
with crime and criminals, and for ages
it was art alone, poetic or pictorial, that
made known the physical and mental
features of the delinquent. It often suc-
ceeded by a wonderful intuition, and it
often failed for lack of scientific know-
ledge. But recently science has taken
the criminal in hand for investigation,
and it is the purpose of this essay to de-
termine how accurately poets and paint-
ers have anticipated or followed, in their
descriptions of some of the most famous
types of criminals, the knowledge gained
by the scientific study of them.

The older, or classical criminologists
occupied themselves with crime, and not
with criminals ; treating them, with the
rare exception of confirmed drunkards
and deaf mutes, as average men. They
worked to find the article of the penal
code best suited to the case that they
were considering. They made studies,
not of the man, but of the violation of
law of which he had been found guilty.
Experimental science, on the other hand,
has closely studied the diverse figures
of criminals themselves, until nearly all
criminologists now classify them into the
five sections in which I was the first to
arrange them.

The congenital criminal, the organic
and psychic monster whose existence
criminal anthropology has demonstrated,
was long ago dimly recognized by popu-
lar intuition, even while he remained un-
observed, or while his existence was de-
nied by the teachers of religious dogmas.
It is natural that this type should not
often be met in artistic creations until
our own time. Indeed, not even Shake-
speare, nor Dostoievsky in his personal
observations of Siberian criminals, nor
Eugene Sue in his studies of the dregs
of the Parisian mob, was able to deline-
ate him. But no sooner had criminal an-

thropology discovered him and identified
him than he became at once a subject
of contemporary art, thanks especially to
Zola. In these unmoral men, the con-
genital criminals, who lack all guiding
social instincts, there is usually a great
development of self-seeking impulses and
of mental astuteness, leading to successful
careers in a society based on free com-
petition, which is but a species of dis-
guised and indirect anthropophagia, and
which constitutes for the honest man a
hindrance rather than a help in the race
of life. It is precisely their apparent-
ly normal intelligence and sentiments,
masking their profound and secret moral
insensibility, which make this type so dif-
ficult for any but the scientifically trained
student to recognize. The mad criminal,
on the other hand, was always easy to
discern, and it was natural that he should
appear in art ; but art has generally dealt
only with real madmen, rarely with those
who because of some degeneration or
some congenital malformation are un-
hinged, though they have lucid intervals ;
for in cases of this kind it is not easy
to detect the external evidences. Infre-
quent, too, in art, except in those novels
and plays whose chief aim is the repre-
sentation of the criminal world, is the
figure of the habitual criminal, inasmuch
as he is an anti-social type, made by so-
ciety and our prison systems. He rarely
commits any great offense, but carries on
a miserable existence of petty delinquen-
cy, and belongs to the large class of the
socially submerged.

The artistic material in crime which
has been most frequently used consists of
the other two criminal types, the occa-
sional criminal and the passionate crim-
inal. The occasional criminal, who is
almost a normal man, lends himself par-
ticularly well to artistic representation.
We meet him as the adulterer, more or

234

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

less professional ; the swindler, more or
less circumspect ; the gambler, more or
less of a cheat ; the defamer, more or
less venomous. These characters are
the stock in trade of many novels and
plays constructed after certain formulae,
but, except in the hands of writers of
genius, they do not offer sufficient psy-
chological relief and contrast to warrant
a profound and minute artistic analysis.
Indeed, the occasional criminal belongs
to the numerous mediocrities of the anti-
social world, and is of an undecided qual-
ity, fluctuating between vice and virtue
according to his surroundings.

But since passions and sentiments are
the true materials of art, the criminal by
passion has always attracted the atten-
tion of artists. They like to deal with
crimes committed by men, often of whole-
some life, who, stung into violence by
some great injustice or some deep wrong
to their affections, rush into crime in
a tempestuous psychological fever ; and
mankind delights to follow the artist's
interpretation. An intimate knowledge
abides in the reader that he might be
similarly tempted under the same cir-
cumstances, and artists, with their fine-
strung sensibilities and highly developed
nerves, feel an elective affinity with the
man who has killed another for love or
jealousy, or some other passion.

After this rapid survey of the most
characteristic of the various types of de-
linquents, as revealed by the positive data
of the new criminal science, let us com-
pare them with some of the most noted
imaginary figures that art has delineated
with the intuition of genius. We shall
find that art, just because it has remained
close to life, even when the excesses of
an ascetic or philosophic idealism divert-
ed human interests from the earth to sub-
jective contemplation of a world beyond,
has portrayed in its greatest creations
the most marked characteristics of the
criminal type. Indeed, to his surprise,
the criminal anthropologist perceives that
the artist has often anticipated his most

definite observations. Thus the anthro-
pologist finds that in Bernini's Moor on
the fountain of the Piazza Navona in
Rome, and in the four Moors on the no-
ble monument erected in Leghorn to the
memory of the Grand Duke Ferdinand
I., the special physical traits of the Ne-
gro race are artistically recorded. Dr.
Charcot found that the physical charac-
teristics and the peculiar contortions of
the hysterical and the epileptic have been
reproduced in art. A remarkable exam-
ple is the boy possessed of a devil, in the,
foreground of Raphael's Transfiguration.
Criminal types, of course, are infre-
quently represented in painting and sculp-
ture. Of one hundred notable pictures,
not more than one or two have for their
principal theme or secondary episode the
image of a criminal, and the proportion
is even smaller in statues. But of one
hundred popular plays no fewer than
ninety elucidate some crime ; and the pro-
portion is even greater in novels. The
artist is not encouraged to fix with his
brush or chisel a repellent figure or deed.
Then, too, the painter and the sculptor
can catch only the passing act of one or
more persons, and the representation of
a crime is in great measure forbidden by
the necessity of restricting the expression
to a single moment. The emotions are
best aroused and kept in tension by de-
scriptions of the various psychological
moments which the soul of the delinquent
traverses. Such psychological descrip-
tions are possible only in descriptive art,
either analytic as in the novel, or syn-
thetic as in the drama. Yet painters
and sculptors have discovered some of
the characteristic traits. A careful study
of the busts of the Caesars reveals as a
family peculiarity the abnormal distance
of the eyes from the root of the nose, and
notably in the criminal Caesars, above
all in Nero and Caligula, the most com-
mon features of the criminal type. In
Caligula the upper lip is raised on one
side, like the lip of a wild beast about
to bite. This feature has been noted by

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

235

Darwin as frequently met with in mur-
derers.

Painting yields a richer harvest than
sculpture. The pictorial representations
of Cain and Abel, of Judith and Holo-
fernes, of the Murder of the Innocents,
of the Crucifixion of Christ, of the Chris-
tian Martyrs, of the Last Judgment, as
well as pictures from Christian hagiolo-
gy, portray murderers, executioners, trai-
tors, and villains with the well - known
traits of the criminal type, — large and
angular heads, asymmetric faces, small
and ravenous eyes, large square jaws,
Tow and receding foreheads, projecting
or pointed ears, abundance of stubbly
hair, and thin beards. In addition to
painters of pictures in which the crimi-
nal element is merely incidental, there
are painters who have chosen their prin-
cipal subjects from the criminal world.
Goya the Spaniard, who flourished in
the eighteenth century, became the court
painter, so to call him, of brigands and
highwaymen. In France, Prud'hon, be-
side a picture entitled Allegory of Justice,
which represents a delinquent brought to
court, painted Murder pursued by Re-
venge and Justice, in the conception of
which he fell into the common error that
remorse pursues every type of criminal.
Remorse is unknown to the congenital
and habitual criminal, and makes itself
but feebly felt in a few cases of irrespon-
sible and impulsive madness and of oc-
casional crime. It is vehement only in
criminals by passion. It is these who are
often impelled to commit suicide imme-
diately after the criminal paroxysm has
passed. Of other French painters of
criminal subjects, the most conspicuous is
GeVicault, whose picture The Head of a
Guillotined is justly famous. The painter
has put on his canvas all the abnormali-
ties that belong to the sanguinary crim-
inal type. In the famous Kiss of Judas,
by Ary Scheffer, Judas is represented
with all the characteristics of the swindler
and the liar ; and in the same way, Dela-
croix's Hamlet displays, not the traits of

a common criminal type, but a wander-
ing, restless, lunatic physiognomy. Ar-
tists of all times and lands have por-
trayed empirically various criminal types
by characteristics which science has re-
cently found to be exact. The criminal
type discovered by Lombroso, and ac-
curately studied by the Italian criminal
anthropological school, is perfectly drawn
in the artistic works of many centuries.

Let us now pass from the physiognomic
depiction of criminals in art to their psy-
chological delineation in the drama and
in literature. I shall disregard that great
army of minor delinquents who are the
material used in the manufacture of so
many second-rate novels and plays, but
who have been presented occasionally as
a true type which has become legendary,
such as the Don Juan of Byron, the Wan-
trin of Balzac, or the Don Marzio of
Goldoni. I shall omit political criminals
also, for similar reasons. But it is worth
remembering that the history of human
progress shows how many times the mad
genius or even the criminal, because less
enslaved than other men by the conven-
tionalism of mental and social habits, and
because less careful of his personal profit,
has given the decisive impetus to the re-
alization of reforms which were already
matured in the collective conscience, and
only awaited a final impulse.

In the Divine Comedy, the principal
theme of which may be said to be crimes
and punishments, we do not find types
of true delinquents, except perhaps such
figures as Vanni Fucci in the canto of the
thieves, and Francesca da Rimini among
the adulterers. Indeed, Dante's poem
deals almost wholly with political crimi-
nals. The evolution of criminality since
the Middle Ages shows conspicuously
the ever growing prevalence of crimes of
fraud over crimes of violence, and Dante
concerned himself with the crime rather
than with the criminal. For the crimino-
logists of the positive or anthropological
school, who are more occupied with the
criminal than with the crime, a much

236

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

richer mine of psychological observation
is found in tragedies and dramas which
present some decided type of criminal
man.

Crimes of blood have been the staple
material of the drama, and the Greek de-
stiny which drove a man into crime was
only the modern heredity. We pass over
the ancient drama, which need not detain
us, and come to the drama of modern
times. Here we encounter the frequent
delineation of the three characteristic fig-
ures, — instinctive criminals, criminals
by madness, homicides by passion, the
latter completing their due psychological
outlines by superadding remorse and sui-
cide.

The most marvelous description of
these three types is found in Shakespeare.
Macbeth is the instinctive or born crim-
inal ; Hamlet, the mad criminal ; Othello,
the criminal by passion. Shakespeare's
artistic work is such a mine that not only
students of art, but economists and even
criminologists may extract from it facts
and documents of vital historical inter-
est. Criminal psychology finds in his
three legendary types of homicides three
human documents in which the accuracy
of observation is no less wonderful than
the excellence of the art. Macbeth is
the type of the born criminal, a sad and
monstrous offshoot from the pathological
trunk of nervous and criminal epilepsy.
And in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth
is the true epileptic from his birth, — an
epileptic of the least apparent type, that
is called psychic or masked epilepsy, be-
cause it exists without the terrible muscu-
lar convulsions which we think of when
epilepsy is named, and because it is lim-
ited to a temporary insensibility, often
unnoticed, which is the psychic equiva-
lent of muscular convulsions.

" My lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth : pray you, keep

seat;

The fit is momentary ; upon a thought
He will again be well : if much you note him.
You shall offend him and extend his passion,"

says Lady Macbeth to her guests, sur-
prised at the strange attitude of their
royal host. The tragedy reveals still an-
other psychological intuition of Shake-
speare, which, lying somewhat aside from
the habitual rules of common psychology,
is rarely noted by superficial observers.
Only the intuitive art of a great genius
or the patient observation of a scientific
investigator would reach the truth, that
in the soul of the born criminal, however
much, apparently, he may resemble the
normal man because he shows no marked
external signs of madness, there exist
psychologic attributes and habits differ-
ent from those of other men. Scarcely has
Macbeth killed Duncan when he bursts
on the scene, brandishing his bloody wea-
pon, and telling his wife all he felt before
and after the deed. Tommaso Salvini,
one of the greatest interpreters of Mac-
beth, called this powerful scene unnatu-
ral, because it seems contrary to the care
every man takes to cover up his crime.
Certainly, according to the psychology of
normal men, his first act would be to hide
all evidences of his guilt ; but those who
have studied criminals know that the
imprudent revelation of their own dark
deeds, especially where murder is con-
cerned, is one of the surest data of crim-
inal psychology. So common, indeed, is
this trait that it is through it, rather than
through the miraculous sagacity of the
police, so vividly described in the police
novels, that murder is almost always re-
vealed. Criminals will speak of their
crime as an honest workman speaks of
his labor. Yet another great genius,
Ariosto, noted this trait, of which crimi-
nal annals furnish innumerable examples,
in his famous lines : —

" II peccator . . .

Che se medesmo, senz' altrui richesta,
luavvedutamente manifesta."

This " unnatural " Shakespearean scene,
then, is quite natural.

I may remark incidentally that I know
of no more fallacious criterion than that
of verisimilitude, which is almost always

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

237

contrary to truth, whether met with in
the halls of justice, where many errors
are committed in its name, or in the daily
and constantly erroneous judgments of
ordinary life. A similar example of er-
roneous application of the criterion of
verisimilitude, transporting into criminal
psychology the data of common psycholo-
gy, I find in the Phedre of Racine, where
the poet employs as Hippolytns's excuse
the same argument which the crimino-
logist Prospero Farinaccio put forward
some years ago as the basis for his cele-
brated defense of Beatrice Cenci : —

" Examinez ma vie et songez qui je snis.
Quelques crimes toujours precedent les grandes

crimes ;

Quiconque a pufranchir les bornes legitimes
Pent violer enfin les droits, les plus sacres ;
Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses degres ;
Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence
Passer subiternent a I'extrSme licence.
Un jour seul ne fait pas d'un mortel vertueux
Un perfide assassin, un lache incestueux."

This method of arguing, which we do
not find in the Plied ra of Euripides, we
meet in the Cosmopolis of Paul Bourget ;
while it may hold good for criminals by
acquired habit, it is not true, though it
sounds plausible, of congenital criminals,
who rush at once into the worst of crimes.

To return to Macbeth, I should like to
note another psychological intuition of
Shakespeare's, which is that women com-
mit fewer crimes than men ; but when
they commit them they are more cruel
and more obstinately recidivist than men.
Lady Macbeth, for example, is more in-
humanly ferocious than her husband.

It is easier to deal with the other two
Shakespearean murderers in accordance
with criminal psychology, though even to
them the criteria of common psychology
have too often been applied. Thus while
Hamlet is a perfect type of the criminal
madman as interpreted by the data of
criminal psychology, there have been
critics who maintained that he became
mad after feigning insanity. Hamlet is
really most masterfully delineated as a
criminal lunatic with lucid and even rea-

sonable intervals, — a type ignored by
those untrained observers who look on
all lunatics as necessarily raging and in-
coherent, but which the great English
psychologist comprehended by intuition.
The diagnosis of the psycho-pathological
symptoms in Hamlet could not be more
characteristic than Shakespeare's descrip-
tion of him, beginning with the halluci-
nation, when he sees the ghost, which is
a decisive feature of mental alienation.
The very simulation of madness, which
laymen interpret as a caprice or a trick,
marvelously agrees with scientific obser-
vation, because it is now known that sim-
ulated madness is a frequent symptom of
lunacy, in spite of the " dictum of com-
mon sense " that " he who feigns is not
mad." The madness of Hamlet belongs
precisely to that form of lucid madness
which permits the sufferer from time to
time to realize his own insanity. In his
letter to Ophelia Hamlet speaks of his sick
state, and after the murder of Polonius
he exclaims that "not Hamlet, but his
madness," has killed his friend. Ham-
let's madness is of the kind shown by
those whom the French school of crim-
inologists calls " superior degenerates,"
in distinction from idiots and imbeciles,
who are called "inferior degenerates."
Another symptom of Hamlet's condition
is a partial paralysis of the will. To this
pathological lack of will are attributable
all his hesitations in executing the ven-
detta of his father, together with an in-
stinctive repugnance to murder, which,
as I have shown elsewhere, survives in
lunatics of m®ral integrity even after
their intelligence has been shipwrecked.
Shakespeare's observation manifests it-
self in showing how Hamlet, an intel-
lectual youth, a university student, still
retained, even with a clouded brain, the
power to reason rightly ; as, for example,
in his moralizing over Yorick's skull, or
in his reflection that if he killed the king
while at prayer, he would send him to
heaven, and so miss revenge. But, how-
ever lucid and reasonable at times, Ham-

238

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

let is none the less mad because his deed
is inspired by a noble motive, and his
madness makes itself plainly manifest in
his gratuitous murder of old Polonius.

So true to life 'is Othello that he has
become the typical embodiment of homi-
cide by passion ; for though he is less
abnormal than Macbeth or Hamlet, he
is still a true homicidal criminal. This
view is confirmed by his suicide ; Shake-
speare, with his profound intuition, does
not permit either Macbeth or Hamlet to
die by his own hand. The immediate
reaction toward suicide, after a homi-
cidal attack, is a specific symptom of the
criminal by passion, whose moral sense,
momentarily obscured by the hurricane
of his passion, regains the upper hand,
and pushes him to self-destruction in his
spasm of instantaneous remorse. It is
just this subtle distinction, made plain by
criminal anthropology, that Shakespeare
perceived.

To come down to more recent times, a
successful instantaneous photograph of
the criminal world is found in Cavalleria
Rusticana, where we are hurried from
crime to crime in a whirlwind of rapidly
succeeding events. Or turn to fiction.
Some years ago, a class of novels dealing
with penal law proceedings — Gaboriau's
were chief among them — were much in
vogue. In these penal studies the crim-
inal takes a secondary place, and is near-
ly always a sort of lay figure used to
represent a mysterious crime. The real
hero is the police, personified in some spe-
cially astute agent who unravels the mys-
tery. Tabaret, the best of these agents,
is made, in L'Affaire Lerouge, to praise
his own craft of man-chasing, which he
declares to be much superior to animal-
hunting. He deplores that great crimes
are on the decrease, and that they have
given place to vulgar petty delinquen-
cies, — a very true observation, as is also
his remark that criminals nowadays sign
their deeds, so to speak, and leave their
visiting-cards behind them, t>o that dis-
covery is easy. Analogous to these nov-

els are the plays which revolve around
the discovery of some crime, usually hom-
icide, with the introduction of the usual
more or less definite judicial errors. Fer-
re*ol, by Victorien Sardou, is an excellent
example of this type. But these penal
law plays, most popular in folk theatres,
have less interest for us, whose purpose
it is to seek in the intuitions of art the
confirmation of the positive statements
of criminal anthropological science. It
is therefore enough to have named them
as an interesting variety and offshoot of
the artistic representation of delinquent
man.

A tragically acute and suggestive mo-
ment in the study of criminal man is his
execution. Yet, curiously enough, art
has scarcely ever attempted the repre-
sentation of this most highly dramatic
phase of criminal life. The exceptions
are the pathetic scenes of Mary Stuart
and Beatrice Cenci, and more recently,
the Dame de Challant, by Giacosa, and
the Tosca, by Sardou. Here, however,
we are in the domain of common, not of
criminal psychology, since we are deal-
ing only with criminals by passion and
political criminals. The wide sweep of
emotions felt by a criminal who passes
at once from the vigor of life to death,
in the flower of his years, tempted the
genius of Victor Hugo. In Les Mise'-
rables the hero is a criminal, but Jean
Valjean is only a fancy criminal, whom
no criminologist of the new school would
have condemned to prison. And be-
cause he is a pseudo-criminal Jean Val-
jean does those pitiful and heroic deeds
which his creator assigns to him. Vic-
tor Hugo wrote also about the last days
of a criminal condemned to death ; but
though eloquent and artistic, the descrip-
tion deals only with the superficial as-
pects of the life of a condemned man,
and in its psychology is not correct.
Penal annals have already given us a
number of documents bearing on crimi-
nal psychology, showing the apathetic at-
titude of the criminal and his congenital

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

239

physical and moral insensibility, — an
attitude which writers like Victor Hugo
mistake for courage.

At the middle of the present century,
imaginative literature found itself com-
pelled to choose between two supreme
necessities : it had either to reconstruct
itself or to perish. Balzac led the way
with the luminous Come'die Humaine.
Then followed Flaubert with his Madame
Bovary. Both writers sought in social
environment the reasons for individual
character. At almost the same time, the
true basis of positive science was laid by
the biology of Darwin and the philoso-
phy of Spencer. It was impossible that
contemporary fiction should not be af-
fected by such mighty and far-reaching
influences. The novelists soon forsook
the well-trodden conventional roads, and
hastened to study the human soul under
the new search-light of science. Hence
arose the naturalistic and the psycholo-
gical romance, some writers preferring
to study the determining causes of the
environment, while others were drawn
rather to the analysis of the soul of the
individual. All, however, were guided
by the influence of the new anthropo-
logical data which they thus helped to
popularize. But art is not science. Sci-
ence is above all things impersonal and
objective, while a work of art, as Zola
says, is a corner of nature seen through
a temperament. In this difference lies
the chance for the artist. Le Crime et le
Chatiment, by Dostoievsky, and La Bete
Humaine, by Zola, are for psycho-patho-
logy and criminal anthropology a propa-
ganda a thousand times more suggestive
than the laborious observations of sci-
ence, and they are at the same time
excellent artistic works ; for while they
paint truth boldly, they do not distort its
proportions. To miss the proper propor-
tion is the sin of inferior artists, and they
miss it in the very effort to make their
figures more veracious, as they think.

Zola, although in recent years he has
not steered clear of a tendency to yield to

commercial influences, is one of the great-
est contemporary writers. His works
are of undeniable importance as studies
of delinquency, notwithstanding the fact
that the caprices of decadent art point
to a reaction against the artistic value
of the naturalistic romance. With The
Rougen-Maquart Zola opened new hori-
zons to art. He was the first to intro-
duce the figure of the congenital criminal,
substituting it for the worked-out figure
of the mad criminal or the criminal by
passion. Since his success the novelists
of all lands have sought among anthro-
pological data for a vital basis on which
to build up the products of their fancy.
It is curious to note how even a modern
champion of the spiritual psychological
romance, like Paul Bourget, has in some
of his novels drawn on the sources of nor-
mal and criminal anthropology. Thus
in the preface of Cosmopolis Bourget
frankly admits that, " notwithstanding
the identity of the social environment in
which his idle group of cosmopolitans
are found, they always bear in their feel-
ings and in their actions the seal of the
race to which they belong ; " and since
race is for a people what temperament
is for an individual, it is easy to see that
the thesis of Cosmopolis coincides with
the fundamental conclusion of criminal
sociology, — that crime is a phenomenon
determined not alone by the conditions
of social environment, but also by bio-
logical conditions. In Le Disciple and
in Andre' Corne'lis, Bourget furnishes us
with the psychological description of two
quasi - delinquents. But he never goes
outside of common psychology. Crim-
inal psychology requires not only the
internal inspection of one's own con-
science, but the external and anatomic
observation of the criminal soul, both in
social life and in the prison and the mad-
house. By reason of his observations
Dostoievsky is among artists the Dante
of criminal psychology, as well when he
writes of the living sepulchre in which
he passed so many years, as when he

240

The Delinquent in Art and in Literature.

creates the Shakespearean figure of Ra-
skolinkopp in Le Crime et le Chatiment.
It is now about twelve years that
southern Europe has been powerfully
swayed by northern art in the drama and
in the novel. Ibsen, Tolstoi, and Dos-
toievsky are the trio who artistically re-
present delinquent man, and have set
the fashion. Of Ibsen's works, Ghosts
is the drama which above all others most
intensely follows the lines of human pa-
thology as revealed by modern science,
although the crime it involves is only
faintly indicated, and we are left uncer-
tain at the end whether the mother gives
to her son the liberating poison craved
by this victim of paternal vice. Another
confirmation of " the right to die " is
found in CoppeVs Bon Crime, showing
how this view is making headway among
higher thinkers. Ibsen's work is in-
spired by a rare knowledge of scientific
facts, reproduced with a more or less
philosophic precision. Thus Hedda Ga-
bler hews out as from a rude block the
figure of a neurotic woman, hysterical
and criminal. In The Wild Duck we
encounter the triumphant criminal and
swindler, a contemporary figure of haute
finance now too often met with. In The
Pillars of Society Ibsen depicts the so-
called great men of politics, at once crim-
inals and neurotics, who display in a dif-
ferent environment — the environment
of parliamentary life — the same tenden-
cies that influence the brigands of the
roads. In Ghosts, wherein the author
attempts to demonstrate the organic basis
of crime or madness, the picture of Os-
wald lacks somewhat the precision of
a hospital diagnosis, but the making of
diagnoses is not the function of art. It
suffices that it should ask of science the
fundamental facts of life, and then be
free to change the colors in order the
better to impose its real artistic creations

on the collective conscience. This effect
is attained by Ghosts, as it is also attained
by Zola's L'Assommoir, which has fixed
the disasters resulting from alcoholism,
just as Ghosts has made us comprehend
the hereditary transmission of paternal
degeneration, even though the inexorable
uniformity of this law is a little exagger-
ated.

Tolstoi, who has been as absurdly
praised as he has been absurdly con-
demned, furnishes us with two types of
homicides. In The Kreutzer Sonata we
encounter the familiar jealous husband,
who vindicates his violated right of pro-
perty in his wife by murdering her, in
accordance with the morality of those
savage tribes who punish adultery with
death, just as they punish theft. But
the character of the criminal is not well
studied. He is rather a lay figure, of
which the author makes use to expound
his curious thesis. Much abler and truer
are the criminal figures in The Powers
of Darkness, that graphic and vivid de-
scription of Russian peasant life. In the
title he has chosen, Tolstoi, once again
in agreement with science, means to sig-
nify how from the dark regions of the
unconscious there springs up. in the hu-
man soul the poison of those criminal
thoughts, sentiments, and acts which un-
fortunately play so lai-ge a part in life.

I have thus rapidly passed in review
a sanguinary and repulsive crowd, upon
whom art has wrought, giving too much
glorification to criminals. It is time it
should turn its light on the great mass
of suffering men and women, — ill-fed,
rude, and perverted, it may be, yet sim-
ple, laborious, and unconsciously altruis-
tiC} — who, despite their misery and hun-
ger, remain honest, and obey the human
sentiment that revolts against the idea
of doing violence to a fellow creature.
Enrico Ferri.

The Juggler.

241

THE JUGGLER.

XIII.

WHEN this crisis supervened, Lucien
Royce was at New Helvetia Springs, at
the bowling-alley. His resolution that
the beautiful girl, whom he had learned
to adore at a distance, should never see
him again in a guise so unworthy of him,
of his true position in life, and of his
antecedents, collapsed one day in an in-
cident which was a satiric comment upon
its importance. He met her unexpect-
edly face to face in the mountain woods,
within a few miles of the Cove, one of a
joyous young equestrian party, and riding
like the wind. The plainness of the black
habit, the hat, the high close white collar,
seemed to embellish her beauty, in that
no adornments frivolously diverted the
attention from the perfection of its detail.
The flush on her cheek, the light in her
eye, the lissome grace of her slender fig-
ure, all attested the breezy delight in the
swift motion ; her smile shone down upon
him like the sudden revelation of a star
in the midst of a closing cloud, when he
sprang forward and handed her the whip
which she had dropped at the moment
of passing, before the cavalier at her side
could dismount to recover it. A polite
inclination of the head, a murmur of
thanks, a broadside of those absolutely
unrecognizing eyes, and she was gone.

She evidently had no remembrance
of him. His alert intuition could have
detected it in her face if she had. For
her he had no existence. He thought,
as he walked on into the silence and the
wilderness, of his resolution and his self-
denial, and he laughed bitterly at the
futility of the one and the pangs of the
other. He need never wince to be so
lowly placed, so mean, so humble, for she
never thought of him. He need not fear
to go near her, to haunt, like the ghost
he was, her ways in life, for she would

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 16

never look at him, she would never real-
ize that he was near ; for most people are
thus insensible of spectral influences.

When he sat for the first time on a
bench against the wall, by the door of the
bowling-alley, with two or three moun-
taineers whose lethargic curiosity — their
venison or peaches having been sold —
was excited in a degree by the spectacle
of the game of tenpins, he had much
ado to control the agitation that beset
him, a certain sensation in his throat as
if some sharp blade grazed and rasped
it internally. But after this day he came
often, availing himself of the special
courtesy observed by the players in pro-
viding a bench for the mountaineers, as
spectators who were indeed never intru-
sive or out of place, and generally of most
listless and uninterested attitude toward
the freaks and frivolities of New Hel-
vetia. This attention seemed a gracious
and kindly condescension, and flattered
a conscious sentiment of noblesse oblige.
There were other spectators, of better
quality, on the other side of the long
low building, — the elders among the so-
journers at New Helvetia Springs, —
while down the centre, between the two
alleys, were the benches on which the
players were ranged.

She was sometimes among these, al-
ways graceful and girlish, with a look of
innocence in her eyes like some sweet
child's, but wearing her youth and beau-
ty like a crown, with that unique touch
of dignity suggestive of a splendid future
development, and that these days, lovely
though they might be, were not destined
to be her best. One might have pitied
the hot envy he felt toward the youths
who handed her the balls and applauded
her play, and hung about near her, and
talked in the intervals, — so foolish, so
hopeless, so bitter it was. Sometimes he
heard her responses : little of note, the

242

The Juggler.

talk of a girl of his day and world, but
animated with a sort of individuality, a
something like herself, — or did he fancy
it was like no one else ? He had met his
fate too late ; this was the one woman
in all the world for him. She could
have made of him anything she would.
His heart stirred with a vague impulse
of reminiscent ambitions that might have
been facts had she come earlier. He loved
her, and he felt that never before had he
loved. The slight spurious evanescent
emotion, evoked from idleness or folly or
caprice, in sundry remembered episodes
of his old world, or evolved in the desert
of his loneliness for Euphemia, — how
vain, how unreal, how ephemeral, how un-
justified ! But she who would have been
the supreme power in his life had come at
last — and come too late. How truly he
reasoned he knew well, as he sat in his
humble garb amongst his uncouth asso-
ciates on the segregated bench, and heard
the thunder of the balls and the swift
steps of the lightly passing figures at the
head of the alley ; but surely he should
not have been capable of an added pang
when he discerned, with a sense almost
as impersonal as if he were indeed the
immaterial essence he claimed to be, her
fate in the identity of a lately arrived
guest. This was a man of middle height
and slender, about thirty-five years of age,
with a slight bald spot on the top of his
well-shaped head. He had a keen nar-
row face, an inexpressive calm manner,
and was evidently a personage of weight
in the world of men, sustaining a high
social and financial consideration. He
did not take part in the game. He leaned
against a pillar near her, and bent over
her, and talked to her in the intervals of
her play. When he was not in attend-
ance on her he was with her parents. His
mission here was most undisguised, and
it seemed to the poor juggler that the
fortunate suitor was but a personified
conventionality, whom no woman could
truly love, and who could truly love no
woman.

When once he had acquired the sense
of invisibility, he put no curb on his poor
and humble cravings to see her, to hear
the sound of her voice albeit she spoke
only to others. Every day found him on
the mountaineers' bench at the bowling-
alley, sometimes alone, sometimes in gro-
tesque company, the ridicule, he knew, of
the young and thoughtless ; and he had
no care if he were ridiculed too. Some-
times she came, and he was drearily hap-
py. Frequently she was absent, and in
dull despair he sat and dreamed of her
till the game was done. He grew to love
the inanimate things she touched, the
dress she wore ; he even loved best that
which she wore most often, and his heart
lightened when he recognized it, as if the
sight of it were some boon of fate, and
their common preference for it a bond of
sympathy. Once she came in late from
a walk in the woods, wearing white, with
a purple cluster of the wild verbena at
her bosom. There was a blossom fallen
upon the floor after they were all gone.
He saw it as it slipped down, and he
waited, and then, in the absolute soli-
tude, with a furtive gesture he picked it
up, and after that he always wore it,
folded in a bit of paper, over his heart.

In the midst of this absorbing emotion
Lucien Royce did not feel the pangs of
supplantation till the fact had been re-
peatedly driven home. When, returning
from New Helvetia, he would find Jack
Ormsby sitting on the steps of the cabin
porch, talking to Euphemia, he welcomed
as a relief the opportunity to betake him-
self and his bitter brooding thoughts
down to the bank of the river, where he
was wont to walk to and fro under the
white stars, heedless of the joyous voices
floating down to him, deaf to all save
the inflections of a voice in his memory.
He began gradually to note with a dull
surprise Euphemia's scant, overlooking
glance when her eyes must needs turn
toward him ; her indifferent manner, —
even averse, it might seem ; her disaf-
fected languor save when Jack Orms-

The Juggler.

243

by's shadow fell athwart the door. In
some sort Royce had grown obtuse to
all except the sentiment that enthralled
him. Under normal circumstances he
would have detected instantly the flimsy
pretense with which she sought to stim-
ulate his jealousy, to restore his alle-
giance, to sustain her pride. She had not
dreamed that her hold upon his heart,
gained only by reason of his loneliness
and despair and the distastefulness of his
surroundings, had slackened the instant
a deep and real love took possession of
him. She had not divined this hopeless,
silent love — from afar, from infinite
lengths of despair ! — for another. She
only knew that somehow he had grown
oblivious of her, and was much absent
from her. This touched her pride, her
fatal pride ! And thus she played off
Jack Ormsby against him as best she
might, and held her head very high.

The sense of desertion inflicted upon
him only a dull pain. He said listlessly
to himself, his pride untouched, that she
had not really loved him, that she had
been merely fascinated for a time by the
novelty of the " readin's," and now she
cared for them and him no more. He
recalled the readiness with which she
had forsworn her earlier lover, when his
conscience had conflicted with her pride,
and this seeming fickleness was accented
anew in the later change. Royce tacitly
acquiesced in it, no longer struggling as
he had done at first with a sense of loy-
alty to her, but giving himself up to his
hopeless dream, precious even in its con-
scious futility.

How long this quiescent state might
have proved more pleasure than pain it is
hard to say. There suddenly came into
its melancholy serenities a wild tumult
of uncertainty, a mad project, a patent
possibility that set his brain on fire and
his heart plunging. He argued within
himself — with some doubting, denying,
forbidding instinct of self-immolation, as
it seemed, that had somehow attained
full control of him in these days — that

in one sense he was fully the equal of
Miss Fordyce, as well born, as well bred,
as she, as carefully trained in all the es-
sentials that regulate polite society. She
would sustain no derogation if he could
contrive an entrance to her social circle,
and meet her there as an equal. He had
heard from the fragmentary gossip men-
tion of people in New Orleans, familiars
of her circle, to whom he was well known.
He did not doubt that his father's name
and standing would be instantly recog-
nized by her father, Judge Archibald
Fordyce, — the sojourners at New Hel-
vetia were identifiable to him now by
name, — or indeed by any man of con-
sequence of his acquaintance. Under
normal circumstances the formality of an
introduction would be a matter of course.
If she had chanced to spend a winter in
St. Louis, he would doubtless have danced
with her at a dozen different places ; he
wondered blankly if he would then have
adequately valued the privilege ! He
felt now that he would give his life for
a touch of her hand, a look of her eyes
fixed upon him observingly ; how the
utter neutrality of her glance hurt him !
He would give his soul for the bliss of
one waltz. He trembled as he realized
how possible, how easily and obviously
practicable, this had become.

For the tableaux and fancy-dress ball
had been so relished by the more juvenile
element of New Helvetia that the succes-
sor of that festivity was already project-
ed. This was in the nature of a " calico
ball," to be a grotesquerie in costume
and mask, exclusively of facetious char-
acters. The masks were deemed essen-
tial by the small designers of the enter-
tainment, since the secrets of the various
disguises had not been carefully kept,
and these vizards were ingenuously re-
lied on to protect the incognito of certain
personages garbed, with the aid of sym-
pathetic elders, as Dolly Varden, Tilly
Slowboy (with a rag-doll baby furnished
with a head proof against banging on
door-frames or elbows), Sir John Fal-

244

The Juggler.

staff, three feet high, Robinson Crusoe,
and similar celebrities. The whole affair
was esteemed a tedious superfluity by the
youths of twenty and a few years upward, -
already a trifle blase", who sometimes lin-
gered and talked and smoked in the
bowling-alley after the game was finished
and the ladies had gone. It was from
overhearing this chat that Royce learned
that although the majority, tired with
one effort of devising costumes, had de-
clined to go in calico and in character,
still, in deference to the style of the en-
tertainment and the importunity of the
children who had projected it, they had
agreed to attend in mask. Their out-of-
door attire of knickerbockers and flannel
shirts and blazers ought to be deemed,
they thought, shabby enough to appease
the "tacky "requirements of the juve-
nile managers ; for they were pleased to
call their burlesque masquerade a " tacky
party," calico as a fabric not being de
rigueur.

Then it was that Royce realized his
opportunity. The knickerbockers and
flannel shirt, the red -and -black blazer
and russet shoes, in which he had entered
Etowah Cove, now stowed away in the
roof-room of Tubal Cain Sims's house,
were not more the worse for wear than
much of such attire at New Helvetia
Springs after a few weeks of mountain
rambles. Ten minutes in the barber-shop
of the hotel, at a late hour when it would
be deserted by its ordinary patrons,
would put him in trim for the occasion,
and doubtless its functionaries who had
never seen him would fancy him in this
dress a newly arrived guest of the hotel
or of some of the New Helvetia summer
cottagers. He had even a prevision of
the free and casual gesture with which
he would hand an attendant a quarter of
a dollar and send across the road to the
store for a mask. And then — and then
— he could feel already the rhythm of
the waltz music beating in every pulse ;
he breathed even now the breeze quick-
ening in the motion of the dance, en-

dowed with the sweetness of the zephyrs
of the seventh heaven. It was she —
she alone — whom he would care to ap-
proach ; the rest, they were as naught !
One touch of her hand, the rapture of one
waltz, and he would be ready to throw
himself over the bluff ; for he would have
attained the uttermost happiness that
earth could bestow upon him now.

And suddenly he was ready to throw
himself over the bluff that he should even
have dreamed this dream. For all that
his pulses still beat to the throb of that
mute strain, that his eyes were alight
with an unrealized joy, that the half
quiver, half smile of a visionary expec-
tation lingered at his lips, the red rush of
indignant humiliation covered his face
and tingled to the very tips of his fingers.
He was far on the road between the Cove
and the Springs, and he paused in the
solitude that he might analyze this thing,
and see where he stood and whither he
was tending. He, of all men in the
world, an intruder, a partaker of plea-
sures designed exclusively for others !
He to wear a mask where he might not
dare to show his face ! He to scheme to
secure from Her, — from Her! — through
false pretenses, under the mistake that
he was another, a notice, a word, chance
phrases, the touch of her confiding hand,
the ecstasy-of a waltz ! He had no words
for himself ! He was an exile and pen-
niless. He .had no identity. He could
reveal himself only to be falsely sus-
pected of a vile robbery in a position of
great trust ; any lapse of caution would
consign him to years of unjust im-
prisonment in a felon's cell. He was
the very sport of a cruel fate. He had
naught left of all the lavish earthly en-
dowments with which he had begun life
but his own estimate of his own sense of
honor. And this was still precious to
him. Bereft as he was, he was still a
gentleman at heart. He claimed that, —
he demanded of himself his own recog-
nition as such. Never again, he deter-
mined, as he began to walk slowly along

The Juggler.

245

the road once more, never again should
expert sophistries tempt him. He would
not argue his equality with her, his birth,
his education, the social position of his
people. It was enough to reflect that if
she knew all she would shrink from him.
He would not again seek refuge in the im-
possibility that his identity could be dis-
covered as a guest at the ball. He would
not contemplate the ignoble advantage.
He would not plead as a set-off against
the deception how innocent its intention,
how transient, how venial a thing it was.
And lest in his loneliness, — for since the
atmosphere of his old world had come
once more into his lungs he was as iso-
lated in the Sims household, he found
its air as hard to breathe, as if he were in
an exhausted receiver, — in his despair,
in the hardship of his lot, in the deep,
deep misery of the first true, earnest,
and utterly hopeless love of his life, some
fever of wild enterprise should rise like
a delirium in his brain, and confuse his
sense of right and wrong, and palsy his
capacity for resistance, and counsel dis-
guise, and destroy his reverent apprecia-
tion of what was due to Her, he would
put it beyond his power ever to mas-
querade in the likeness of his own self
and the status of his own true position
in the world ; he would render it neces-
sary that he should always appear be-
fore Her in the absolutely false and con-
temptible role of a country boor, an un-
couth, unlettered clown.

At this paradox of his conclusion he
burst into a grim laugh ; then — for he
would no longer meddle with these subtle
distinctions of right and wrong, where,
in the metamorphoses of deduction, the
false became true, and interchangeably
the true was false — he began to run,
and in the strong vivacity of his pride in
his physical prowess he was able to re-
flect that better time was seldom made
by an amateur, unless for a short spurt,
than the pace he kept to the Sims cabin.
He would not let himself think in the
roof-room while he rolled the clothes

into a bundle. He set his teeth and
breathed hard as he recognized a certain
pleasure which his finger-tips derived
from the very touch of the soft, fine
texture of the cloth, and realized how
tenuous was the quality of his resolution,
how quick he must needs be to carry into
effect the conclusions of his sober judg-
ment, lest he waver anew. He was out
again and a mile away before, he began
to debate the disposition which it would
be best to make of the bundle under his
arm. He thought with a momentary
regret of Mrs. Sims's kitchen fire, over
which doubtless Euphemiawas now bend-
ing, busy with the johnny-cake for the
evening meal. He dismissed the thought
on the instant. The feminine ideas of
economy would never suffer the destruc-
tion of so much good all wool gear,
whatever its rescue might cost in the
future. Moreover, it would be inex-
plicable. He could get a spade and
bury the bundle, — and dig it up, too, the
next time this mad, unworthy temptation
should assail him. He could throw it
into the river, and some one might fish
it out, recognize it as his property, and
call him to account for the mystery of
its destruction.

Suddenly he remembered the lime-kiln.
The greater portion of its product had
been used long ago, but the residue still
lay unslaked in the dry rock-house, and
more than once, in passing, he had noted
the great boulder rolled to the aperture
and securely closing it against the en-
trance of air and moisture. The place
was in the immediate vicinity, and some-
how, although he had been there often
since, the predominant impression in his
mind, when he reached the jutting pro-
montory of rock and gazed down at the
sea of foliage in the Cove, that surely
had once known the ebb and flow of tides
other than the spring bourgeonings and
the autumn desiccations, was the reminis-
cence of that early time in Etowah Cove
when he had stood here in the white glare
from the lime - kiln and watched that

246

The Juggler.

strange anamorphous presentment of the
lime-burner's face through the shimmer-
ing medium of the uprising heat. He
seemed to see it again, all unaware that
now, in its normal proportions, that face
looked down upon him from the height
of the cliff above, albeit its fright, its
surprise, its crafty intimations, its male-
volence, distorted it hardly less than the
strange effects of the writhing currents
of heat and air in that dark night so
long ago.

The young man hesitated once more
as he unrolled the garments. He had a
certain conscientious reverence for pro-
perty and order ; it was with a distinct
wrench of volition that he would destroy
aught of even small value. As he seated
himself on the ledge, shaking out the
natty biack-and-red blazer, he recognized
the melody that was mechanically mur-
muring through his lips, — again, still
again, the measures of a waltz, that waltz
through whose enchanted rhythms he had
fancied that he and she might dreamily
drift together. He sprang to his feet
in a panic. With one mighty effort he
flung the great boulder aside. Hastily
he dropped the garments into the rock-
house, and with a long staff stirred the
depths of the lime till it rose above them.
More than once he was fain to step back
from the scorching air and the smarting
white powder that came in puffs from
the interior.

" That 's enough," he muttered mock-
ingly after a moment, as he stood with
his muscles relaxed, sick with the senti-
ment of the renunciation of the world
which the demolition of the civilized garb
included in its significance. " I cannot
undertake to dance with any fine lady in
this toggery now ; she 'd think I had
come straight from hell. And," with a
swift change of countenance, " so I have !
— so I have ! "

Then, with his habitual carefulness
where any commercial interest, however
small, was concerned, he roused himself,
wrenched the great boulder back into its

place, noting here and there a crevice, and
filling it with smaller stones and earth
that no air might gain admission ; and
with one final close scrutiny of the en-
trance he took his way into the dense
laurel and the gathering dusk, all un-
aware of the peering, suspicious, fright-
ened face and angry eyes that watched
him from the summit of the cliff above.
The discipline of life had certain sub-
duing effects on Lucien Royce. He felt
very much tamed when next he took a
seat upon the bench placed aside in the
corner of the bowling-alley, to affect to
watch the game, but in truth to give his
humble ddspair what added pain it might
call pleasure and clutch as solace, by the
sight of her smiles won by happier men,
the sound of her voice, the meagre reali-
ties of the day to supplement the lavish
and fantastic visions of his dreams. He
had reached the point where expectation
fails. He looked only for the eventless
routine of the alley, — the hour of amuse-
ment for the others, the lingering separa-
tion, the silence of the deserted building,
and the living on the recollection of a
glance of the eye, a turn of the head, a
displaced tendril of hair, softly curling,
until to-morrow, or the next day, or the
next, should give him the precious privi-
lege of making such observations for the
sustenance of his soul through another
interval of absence. Suddenly, his heart,
dully beating on through these dreary
days, began to throb wildly, and he gazed
with quickening interest at the scene
before him : the long narrow shell of
a building with the frequent windows
where the green leaves looked in, the
brown unplastered walls, the dark rafters
rising into the shadowy roof, and the
crossing of the great beams into which
records of phenomenal successions of ten
strikes were cut by the vaunting win-
ners of matches, with their names and
the dates of the event, the year of the
Lord methodically affixed, as if these
deeds were such as were to be cherished
by posterity. Down the smooth and

The Juggler.

247

shining alley a ball was rolling. Miss
Gertrude Fordyce, wearing a sheer green-
and-white dress of simple lawn and a
broad hat trimmed with ferns, was stand-
ing at the head of the alley, about to
receive her second ball from the hands
of a blond young cavalier in white flan-
nels. Royce had seen him often since
the morning when he had observed him
giving his valuable advice as to the erec-
tion of the stage in the ballroom, and
knew that he was Millden Seymour, just
admitted to the bar, with a reputation
for talent, an intelligent face, and a
smooth and polished bonhomie of man-
ner ; he was given to witty sayings, and
was a little too intent upon the one he
was exploiting at this moment to notice
that the pins at the further end had not
been set up, the hotel functionary de-
tailed for that duty not having arrived.
She hesitated, with the ball in her hand,
in momentary embarrassment, the color
in her cheeks and a laugh in her eyes.

Royce sprang up, and running lightly
down by the side of the alley placed
the pins in readiness to receive her sec-
ond ball ; then stood soberly aside, his
hat in his hand, as if to watch the execu-
tion of the missile.

" How very polite ! " said one of the
chapei'ons over her knitting to another.
" I often notice that young man. He
seems to take so much interest in the
game."

This trifling devoir, however, which
he had not hesitated to offer to a lady,
savored of servility in its appropriation
by a man. Nevertheless, he was far too
discreet, too well aware of what was due
to Her, to allow the attention to seem a
personal tribute from him. He cursed
his officiousness, notwithstanding, as he
bent down to set the tenpins in place
for the second player, who happened to
be the smart young cavalier. Only with
an effort he conserved his blithe air and
a certain amiable alacrity as through a
round or two of the game he continued to
set up the pins ; but when the flustered

and hurried bell-boy whose duty he had
performed came panting in, Royce could
have broken the recreant's head with
right good will, and he would not re-
strain a tendency to relapse into his old
gait and pose, which had no savor of
meekness, as he sauntered up the side
of the alley to his former seat beside the
mountaineers, who had gazed stolidly at
his performance.

Royce noted that one or two of the
more athletic of the young men had
followed his movements with attention.
" Confound you ! " he said to himself ir-
ritably. " I am man enough to throw
you over that beam, and you are hardly
so stupid as to fail to know it."

Miss Fordyce had not turned her eyes
toward him, — no more, he said to him-
self, than if he had been the side of
the wall. And notwithstanding the in-
signia of civilization thrust out of sight
into the quicklime and the significance
of their destruction, and the flagellant
anguish of the discipline of hopelessness
and humiliation, he felt this as a burn-
ing injustice and grief, and the next in-
stant asked himself in disdain what could
such a man gain that she should look at
him in his lowly and humble estate ?

Royce brooded gloomily upon these
ideas during the rest of the game ; and
when the crowd had departed, and he had
risen to take leave of the scene that he
lived by, he noticed, with only the sense
that his way was blocked, several of the
young men lingering about the door.
They had been glancing at him, and as
one of them, — it was Seymour, — in a
very propitiatory manner, approached
him, he became suddenly awarfe that they
had been discussing the appropriateness
of offering him a gratuity for setting up
the tenpins in the heat and dust while
they played. Seymour was holding out
their joint contributions in his hand ; but
his affability was petrified upon his coun-
tenance as his mild eyes caught the fiery
glance which Royce flung at the group,
and marked the furious flush which suf-

248

The Juggler.

fused neck and face and ears as he real-
ized their intention. It was a moment
of mutual embarrassment. They meant
no offense, and he knew it. Had he been
what he seemed, it would have been
shabby in the last degree to accept such
friendly offices with no tender of remu-
neration. Royce's ready tact served to
slacken the tension.

" Here," he said abruptly, but despite
his easy manner his voice trembled, " let
me show you something."

He took a silver quarter of a dollar
from the handful of small change still
mechanically extended, and, turning to a
table which held a tray with glasses, he
played the trick with the goblet and the
bit of money that had so interested the
captain of the ill-fated steamboat on the
night when Lucien Royce perished so
miserably to the world. It was with
a good-natured feigning of interest that
the young men pressed round, at first,
all willing to aid the salving of the hon-
est pride which their offering had evi-
dently so lacerated. But this gave way
to an excitement that had rarely been
paralleled at New Helvetia Springs, as
feat succeeded feat. The juggler was
eager now to get away, having served his
purpose of eluding their bounty, but this
was more difficult than he had antici-
pated. He feared troublesome ques-
tions, but beyond a " Say, how in thun-
der did you learn all this ? " there were
none ; and the laconic response, " From
a traveling fellow," seemed to allay their
curiosity.

After a little he forgot their ill-starred
benevolence ; his spirits began to ex-
pand in tfiis youthful society, the tone of
which was native to him, and from which
he had long been an outcast. He began
to reflect subacutely that the idea of a
fugitive from justice would not occur to
them so readily as to the mountaineers,
who were nearer the plane of the ranks
from which criminals are usually recruit-
ed, being the poor and the humble. He
might seem to them, perhaps, a man edu-

cated beyond his prospects in life and
his station, and ashamed of both ; such
types are not altogether unknown. Or
perhaps he might be rusticating in this
humble fashion, being a person of small
means, or a man with some latent mal-
ady, sojourning here for health, and of
a lower grade of society. " For they
tell me," he said scornfully to himself,
" that such people have lungs and livers
like the best of us ! " He might be a
native touched by some unhallowed am-
bition, and, having tried his luck in the
outer world, flung back upon his de-
spised beginnings and out of a job. He
might be the schoolmaster in the Cove,
of a vastly higher grade than the na-
tive product, doubtless, but these young
swells were themselves new to the moun-
tains, and hardly likely to evolve accu-
rate distinctions. He felt sure that the
idea of crime would occur to these gay
butterflies the most remotely of all the
possible solutions of the anomalies of
his presence and his garb. He began to
give himself up unconsciously to the
mild pleasure of their association ; their
chatter, incongruously enough, revived
his energies and solaced his feelings like
some suave balm. But he experienced
a quick repulsion and a start of secret
terror when two or three, having consult-
ed apart for a few moments, joined the
group again, and called upon him to ad-
mire their " cheek," as they phrased it,
in the proposition they were about to
make, — no less than that he should con-
sent to perform some of his wonderful
feats of sleight of hand at an entertain-
ment which they proposed to give at
New Helvetia. They explained to him,
as if he had not grievous cause to know
already, that the young ladies had de-
vised ' a series of tableaux followed by
a ball ; that the children had scored a
stunning success in a " tacky party ; "
that the married people had preempted
the not very original idea of &fete cham-
petre, and to preclude any unmannerly
jumping of their claim had fixed the

The Juggler.

249

date, wind and weather permitting, and
had formally bidden the guests, all the
summer birds at New Helvetia Springs.
And now it devolved upon the young
men to do their part toward whiling
away time for the general pleasure, —
a task for which, oddly enough, they
were not so well equipped as one might
imagine. They were going to give a
dramatic entertainment upon the stage
erected for the tableaux in the ballroom,
which still stood, it being cheaper, the
proprietor remarked, to leave it there
than to erect it anew ; for no one could
be sure when the young people would
want it again. There would be college
songs first, glees and so forth, and they
made much of the prestige of a banjo-
player in their ranks. Some acrobatic
feats by the more athletic youths were
contemplated, but much uneasiness was
felt because a budding litterateur — this
was again Mr. Seymour — was giving to-
ken of a total breakdown in a farce he
was writing for the occasion, entitled The
New Woman, which, though beginning
with aplomb and brilliancy, showed no
signs of reaching a conclusion, — a flat-
tering tribute to the permanence of the
subject. Mr. Seymour might not have it
completed by the date fixed. The skill
of this amateur prestidigitator would
serve to fill the breach if the playwright
should not be ready ; and even if inspi-
ration should smile upon him and bring
him in at the finish, the jugglery would
enliven the long waits while the scenes
were being prepared and the costumes
changed.

Royce, with a sudden accession of pru-
dence, refused plumply ; a sentiment of
recoil possessed him. He felt the pres-
sure of the surprise and the uncertainty
like a positive pain as he sat perched on
the high window-sill, and gazed out into
the blank unresponsiveness of the un-
dergrowth of the forest, wilting in the
heat of a hazy noon. The young men
forbore to urge him ; that delicate point
of offering money, obviously so very

nettling to his pride, which seemed alto-
gether a superfluous luxury for a man
in his position, hampered them. He
might, however, be in the habit of giving
exhibitions for pay ; for aught they knew,
the discussion of the honorarium was in
order. But they had been schooled by
the incident of the morning ; even the
quarter of a dollar which had lent itself
to the nimble gyrations of legerdemain
had found its way by some unimagined
art of jugglery into the pocket of its
owner, and Millden Seymour, who had a
bland proclivity to smooth rough places
and enjoy a i-efined peace of mind, was
swearing by all his gods that it should
stay there until more appropriately eli-
cited.

An odd thing it was, the juggler was
feeling, that without a moment's hesita-
tion he should accept the box receipts
of the show in the Cove, on which he
had subsisted for weeks, and yet in his
uttermost necessity he could not have
brooked appearing as a juggler before
the sojourn ers at New Helvetia Springs
for his own benefit. The one audience
represented the general public, he sup-
posed, and was far from him. The other
he felt as his own status, his set ; and he
could as soon have handed around the
hat, after one of the snug little bachelor
dinners he used to be so fond of giving
in St. Louis, as ask remuneration for his
assistance in this amateur entertainment
of the young butterflies at New Helvetia.

He burst into abrupt and sardonic
laughter as he divined their line of cogi-
tation, and realized how little they could
imagine the incongruities of his respon-
sive mental processes. In the quick
change from a pondering gravity to this
repellent gayety there was something of
the atmosphere of a rude rebuff, and a
certain dignity and distance informed
the manner of the few who still lounged
about with their cigars. Royce hastened
to nullify this. They had shown much
courtesy to one of his low degree, and
although he knew — from experience,

250

The Juggler.

poor fellow — that it was prompted not
so much by a perception of his deserts as
by a realization of their own, it being
the conduct and sentiment which graced
them and which they owed to persons
of their condition, he had no wish to be
rude, even though it might seem that he
owed a man in his position nothing.

" Oh, I '11 help you," he said hastily,
" though we shall have to rig up some
sort of properties. But I don't need
much."

The talk fell upon these immediately,
and he forthwith perceived that he was
in for it. And why not ? he asked him-
self. How did it endanger him, or why
should he shun it? All the Cove and
the countryside for twenty miles around
knew of his feats of sleight of hand ; and
since accident had revealed his knack to
this little coterie of well-bred and well-
placed young men, why should he grudge
the exhibition to the few scores of ladies
and children at New Helvetia, to aid the
little diversion of the evening ? His scru-
ples could have no force now, for this
would bring him — the social pariah ! —
no nearer to them than when he sat by
the tenpin alley and humbly watched his
betters play. The episode of the jug-
glery, once past, would be an old story
and bereft of interest. He would have
had his little day, basking in the sun of
the applause of his superiors, and would
sink back to his humble obscurity at the
side of the bowling-alley. Should he
show any disposition to presume upon
the situation, he realized that they well
understood the art of repressing a for-
ward inferior. The entertainment con-
templated no subsequent social festivi-
ties. The programme, made out with
many an interlineation, had been calcu-
lated to occupy all the time until eleven
o'clock ; and Royce, looking at it with
the accustomed eye of a manager of pri-
vate theatricals, felt himself no prophet
to discern that midnight would find the
exhausted audience still seated, enjoying
that royal good measure of amusement

always meted out by bounteous amateurs.
Throughout the evening he would be im-
mured with the other young men in the
close little pens which served for dress-
ing and green rooms, — for all the actors
in the farce were to be men, — save for
the fraction of time when his jugglery
should necessitate his presence on the
stage. True, Miss Fordyce, should she
patronize the entertainment, might then
have to look at him somewhat more dis-
cerningly than she would look at the wall,
perhaps ! It could surely do her no
harm. She had seen worse men, he pro-
tested, jtvith eager self - assertion. She
owed him that much, — one glance, one
moment's cognition of his existence. It
was not much to ask. He had made a
great sacrifice for her sake, and all un-
known to her. He had had regard to
her estimate of her dignity and held it
dear. He had done her reverence from
the depths of his heart, regardless that
it cost him his last hope.

The powers of the air were gradually
changing at New Helvetia Springs. The
light of the days had grown dull and
gray. Masses of white vapor gathered
in the valley, rising, and rising, and fill-
ing all its depths and slopes, as if it were
the channel of some great river, till only
the long level line of the summit of the
opposite range showed above the impal-
pable tides in the similitude of the fur-
thest banks of the great stream. It was a
suggestive resemblance to Lucien Royce,
and he winced as he looked upon it. He
was not sorry when it had gone, for the
gathering mists soon pervaded the for-
ests, and hid cliffs and abysses and even
the familiar path, save for the step before
the eye, and in this still whiteness all the
world was lost ; at last one could only
hear — for it too shared the invisibili-
ties — the rain falling in its midst, stead-
ily, drearily, all the day and all the long,
long hours of the black night. The bowl-
ing-alley was deserted ; lawn-tennis had
succumbed to the weather ; the horses
stood in the stalls. One might never

The Juggler.

251

know that the hotel at New Helvetia
Springs existed except that now and
again, in convolutions of mist as it rolled,
a gable high up might reveal itself for a
moment, or a peaked turret, or a dormer
window ; unless indeed one were a ghost,
to find some spectral satisfaction in slip-
ping viewless through the white envelop-
ing nullity, and gazing in at the window
of the great parlor, where a log fire was
ruddily aflare and the elders read their
newspapers or worked their tidies, and
the youth swung in rocking-chairs and
exchanged valuable ideas, and played
cards, and read a novel aloud, and hung
in groups about the tortured piano. So
close stood a poor ghost to the window
one day, risking observation, that he
might have read, over the charming out-
line of sloping shoulders clad faultlessly
in soft gray cloth, the page of the novel
which Miss Fordyce had brought there
to catch the light ; so close that he might
have heard every syllable of the conver-
sation which ensued when the man in
whom he discovered her destiny — the
cold, inexpressive-looking, " personified
conventionality " — came and sat beside
her on the sofa. But the poor ghost had
more scruples than reality of existence,
and, still true to the sanctions that con-
trol gentlemen in a world in which he
had no more part, he turned hastily away
that no syllable might reach him. And
as he turned he ran almost into the arms
of a man who had been tramping heavily
up and down the veranda in the white ob-
scurities, all unaware of his propinquity.
It might have been better if he had !

XIV.

For there were strangers at New
Helvetia, — two men who knew nobody
and whom nobody knew. Perhaps in all
the history of the watering-place this in-
stance was the first. The patronage of
New Helvetia, like that of many other
secluded southern watering places, had

been for generations among the same
clique of people, all more or less allied
by kindred or hereditary friendship,
or close association in their respective
homes or in business interests, and the
traditions of the place were community
property. So significant was the event
that it could scarcely escape remark.
More than one of- the hereditary so-
journers observed to the others that the
distance of fifty miles from a railroad
over the worst stage-road in America
seemed, after all, no protection. And
around the flaring, flaring red fire, in the
heart of the sad, gray day, they all
hearkened with gloomy forecast to a
dread tale recounted by a knowing old
lady who came here on her bridal tour,
sixty years ago, of the sudden prosperity,
popularity, and utter ruin of a secluded
little watering-place some hundred miles
distant, which included the paradoxical
statement that nobody went there any
more, and yet that this summer it is so
crowded that wild rumors prevail that
they have to put men to sleep on the bil-
liard-tables and on the piano, only be-
cause a railroad had invaded the quiet
contiguous valleys. , There was no rail-
road near New Helvetia, yet here were
two strange men who knew nobody,
whom nobody knew, and who seemed
not even to know each other. They
were of types which the oldest inhabitant
failed to recognize. One was a quiet,
decorous, reserved person who might be
easily overlooked in a crowd, so null was
his aspect. The other had good, hearty,
aggressive, rural suggestions about him.
He was as stiffly upright as a ramrod,
and he marched about like a grenadier.
He smoked and chewed strong, rank to-
bacco. He flourished a red - bordered
cotton handkerchief. He had been care-
fully trimmed and shaved by his barber
for the occasion, but alas, the barber's
embellishments can last but from day to
day, and the rougher guise of his life was
betrayed in certain small habitudes, con-
spicuous among which were an oblivious-

252

The Juggler.

ness of many uses of a fork and an aston-
ishing temerity in the thrusting of his
knife down his throat at the dinner-table.
The two strangers appeared on the
evening of the dramatic entertainment
among the other guests of the hotel in
the ballroom, as spectators of the " Un-
rivaled Attraction " profusely billed in
the parlor, the office of the hotel, and the
tenpin alley. The rain dashed tempestu-
ously against the long windows, and the
sashes now and again trembled and clat-
tered in their frames, for the mountain
wind was rising. Ever and anon the
white mist that pressed with pallid pre-
sence against the panes shivered convul-
sively, and was torn away into the savage-
ry of the fastnesses without and the wild
night, returning persistently, as if with
some fatal affinity for the bright lights
and the warm atmosphere that would
annihilate its tenuous existence with but
a single breath. The blended sound of
the torrents and the shivering gusts was
punctuated by the slow dripping from
the eaves of the covered walks within
the quadrangle close at hand, that fell
with monotonous iteration and elastic re-
bound from the flagging below, and was
of dreary intimations distinct amid the
ruder turmoil of the elements. But a
cheerful spirit pervaded the well-housed
audience, perhaps the more grateful for
the provision for pleasantly passing the
long hours of a rainy eveningin the coun-
try, since it did not snatch them from al-
ternative pleasures ; from languid strolls
on moonlit verandas, or contemplative
cigars in the perfumed summer woods
under the stars, or choice conferences
with kindred spirits in the little observa-
tory that overhung the slopes. The Un-
rivaled Attraction had been opportunely
timed to fill an absolute void, and it could
not have been presented before more
leniently disposed spectators than those
rescued from the jaws of unutterable en-
nui. There was a continuous subdued
ripple of laughter and stir of fans and
murmur of talk amongst them ; but al-

though richly garbed in compliment to
the occasion, the brilliancy of their ap-
pearance was somewhat reduced by the
tempered light in which it was essential
that the audience should sit throughout
the performance and between the acts,
for the means at the command of the
Unrivaled Attraction were not capable
of compassing the usual alternations of
illumination, and the full and permanent
glare of splendor was reserved to suffuse
the stage. The audience was itself an
object of intense interest to the actors
behind the scenes, and there was no in-
terval in which the small rent made in
the curtain for the purpose of observa-
tion was not utilized by one or another
of the excited youths, tremulous with
premonitions of a fiasco, from the time
when the first groups entered the hall to
the triumphant moment when it became
evident that all New Helvetia was turn-
ing out to honor the occasion, and that
they were to display their talents to a
full house. It was only when the stir
of preparation became tumultuous — one
or two intimations of impatience from
the long-waiting audience serving to ad-
monish the performers — that Lucien
Royce found an opportunity to peer out
in his turn upon the scene in the dusky
clare-obscure. Here and there the yel-
low globes of the shaded lamps shed
abroad their tempered golden lustre, and
occasionally there came to his eye a
pearly gleam from a fluttering fan, or
the prismatic glitter of a diamond, or the
ethereal suggestion of a girl in a white
gown in the midst of such sombre inti-
mations of red and brown and deeply
purple and black in the costumes of the
dark-robed elders that they might hardly
be accounted as definite color in the scale
of chromatic values. With such a dully
rich background and the dim twilight
about her, the figure and face of the girl
he sought showed as if in the glamours
of some inherent light, reminding him of
that illuminating touch in the method
of certain painters whose works he had

The Juggler.

253

seen in art galleries, in which the radi-
ance seems to be in the picture, indepen-
dent of the skylight, and as if equally
visible in the darkest night. She wore a
light green dress of some silken texture,
so faint of hue that the shadows of the
soft folds appeared white. It was fash-
ioned with a long, slim bodice, cut square
in the neck, and a high, flaring ruff
of delicate old lace, stiff with a Medici
effect, which rose framing the rounded
throat and small head with its close and
high-piled coils of black hair, through
which was thrust a small comb of carved
coral of the palest possible hue. She
might have been a picture, so still and
silent she sat, so definitely did the light
emanate from her, so completely did the
effect of the pale, lustrous hues of her
attire reduce to the vague nullities of a
mere background the nebulous dark and
neutral tints about her. How long Royce
stood and gazed with all his heart in his
eyes he never knew. He saw naught
else. He heard naught of the stir of
the audience, or the wild wind without,
or the babel upon the stage where he
was. He came to himself only when he
was clutched by the arm and admonished
to clear the track, for at last, at last the
curtain was to be rung up.

What need to dwell on the tremulous
eagerness and wild despair of that mo-
ment, — the glee club all ranged in order
on the stage, and with heart-thumping
expectation, the brisk and self-sufficient
tinkle of the bell, the utter blank im-
movableness of the curtain, the subdued
delight of the audience ? Another tin-
tinnabulation, agitated and querulous ;
a mighty tug at the wings ; a shiver in
the fabric, a sort of convulsion of the
texture, and the curtain goes up in slow
doubt, — all awry and bias, it is true, but
still revealing the " musicianers," a trifle
dashed and taken aback, but meeting
a warm and reassuring reception which
they do not dream is partly in tribute to
the clownish tricks of the curtain.

Royce, suddenly all in heart, exhila-

rated by the mere sight of her. flung
himself ardently into the preparations
progressing in the close little pens on
either side and at the rear of the stage.
The walls of these were mere partitions
reaching up only some ten feet toward
the ceiling, and they were devoid of any
exit save through the stage and the eye
of the public. Hence it had been neces-
sary that all essentials should be careful-
ly looked to and provided in advance.
Now and then, however, a wild alarum
arose because of the apparent non-exist-
ence of some absolutely indispensable
article of attire or furniture, to be suc-
ceeded by embarrassed silence on the part
of the mourner when the thing in ques-
tion was found, and a meek submission
to the half-suppressed expletives of the
rest of the uselessly perturbed company.
It was a scene of mad turmoil. Young
men already half clad in feminine attire
were struggling with the remainder of
their unaccustomed raiment, — the actors
to take part in the farce The New Wo-
man. Others were in their white flan-
nel suits, — no longer absolutely white,
— hot, dusty, perspiring, the scene-shift-
ers and the curtain contingent, all lugu-
briously wiping their heated brows and
blaming one another. The mandolin and
banjo players, in faultless evening dress,
stood out of the rush and kept themselves
tidy. And now arose a nice question, in
the discussion of which all took part, be-
coming oblivious, for the time, of the au-
dience without and the tra-la-la-ing of
the glee singers, the boyish tones of ar-
gument occasionally rising above these
melodious numbers. It was submitted
that in case the audience should call for
the author of The New Woman, — and
it would indeed be unmannerly to omit
this, — the playwright ought to be in full
dress to respond, considering the circum-
stances, the place, and the full dress of
the audience. And here he was in his
white flannel trousers and a pink-and-
white striped blazer at this hour of the
night, and his room a quarter of a mile

254

The Juggler.

away in a pitching mountain rain, whither
certain precisians would fain have him
hie to bedizen himself. He listened to
this with a downcast eye and a sinking
heart, and doubtless would have acted
on the admonition save for the ludicrous
effect of emerging before the audience as
he was, and returning to meet the same
audience in the blaze of full-dress glory.

" It 's no use talking," he said at last,
decisively. " We are caught here like
rats in a trap. There is no way of get-
ting out without being seen. I wonder
I did n't think to have a door cut."

Repeatedly there rose on the air the
voice of one who was a slow study re-
peating the glib lines of The New Wo-
man ; and once something very closely
approximating a quarrel ensued upon
the discovery that the budding author,
already parsimonious with literary ma-
terial, had transferred a joke from the
mouth of one character to that of an-
other ; the robbed actor came in a bound-
ing fury and his mother's false hair,
mildly parted and waving away from his
fierce, keen young face and flashing eyes,
to demand of the author-manager its re-
storation. His decorous stiffly lined skirts
bounced tumultuously with his swift
springs forward, and his fists beneath
the lace frill of his sleeves were held in
a belligerent muscular adjustment.

" It 's my joke," he asseverated vehe-
mently, as if he had cracked it himself.
" My speech is ruined without it, world
without end ! I will have it back ! I
will ! I will ! " he declared as violently
as if he could possess the air that would
vibrate with the voice of the actor who
went on first, and could put his collar on
the syllables embodying the precious jest
by those masterful words, " I will ! "

The manager had talents for diplo-
macy, as well he should. He drew the
irate antique-seeming dame into the cor-
ner by the lace on the sleeve and, look-
ing into the wild boyish face, adjured
him, " Let him have it-, Jack, for the love
of Heaven. He does it so badly, and he

is such a slow study, that I 'm afraid the
first act will break down if I don't give
it some vim ; after you are once on, the
thing will go and I shan't care a red."

And so with the dulcet salve of a little
judicious flattery peace came once more.

Royce, as he took his place upon the
narrow stage, felt as if he had issued
from the tumultuous currents of some
wild rapids into the deep and restful
placidities of a dark untroubled pool.
The air of composure, the silence, the
courteous attention of the audience, all
marked a transition so abrupt that it had
a certain perturbing effect. He had
never felt more ill at ease, and perhaps
he had never looked more composed than
when he advanced and stood bowing at
the footlights. He had forgotten his as-
sumed character of a mountaineer, his
coarse garb, his intention to seek some
manner that might consist with both. He
was inaugurating his share of the little
amateur entertainment with a grace and
address and refinement of style that were
astonishing his audience far more than
aught of magic that his art could com-
mand, although his resources were not
slight. He seemed some well-bred and
talented youth of the best society, dressed
for a rural r6le in private theatricals.
Now and again, there was a flutter of
inquiry here and there in the audience,
answered by the whispered conclusions
of Tom or Jack, retailed by mother or
sister. For the youth of New Helvetia
Springs had accepted the explanation
that he was out of a position, " down on
his luck," and hoped to get a school in
Etowah Cove. He had gone by the
sobriquet of " the handsome mountain-
eer," and then " the queer mountaineer,"
and now, " He is no mountaineer," said
the discerning Judge Fordyce to a man
of his own stamp at his elbow.

What might have been the estimate of
the two strangers none could say. They
sat on opposite sides of the building, tak-
ing no note of each other, both stolidly
gazing at the alert and graceful figure

The Juggler.

255

and the handsome face alight with intel-
ligence, and made no sign. One might
have been more competent than the other
to descry inconsistencies between the sta-
tus which the dress suggested and the
culture and breeding which the manner
and accent and choice of language be-
spoke, but both listened motionless as if
absorbed in the prestidigitator's words.

Royce had made careful selection
among his feats in view of the character
of his audience, and the sustaining of
such poor dignity as he might hope to
possess in Miss Fordyce's estimation.
There were no uncouth tricks of swal-
lowing impossible implements of cutlery,
which sooth to say would have vastly
delighted the row of juvenile spectators
on the front bench. Perhaps they were
as well content, however, with the ap-
pearance of two live rabbits from the
folds of the large white silk handker-
chief of an old gentleman in the crowd,
borrowed for the purpose, and the little
boy who came up to receive the article
for restoration to its owner went into
an ecstasy of cackling delight, with the
whole front row in delirious refrain, to
find that he had one of the live rabbits in
each of the pockets of his jacket, albeit
the juggler had merely leaned over the
footlights to hand him back the hand-
kerchief. The audience applauded with
hearty good will, and a general ripple of
smiles played over the upturned faces.

" Ladies and gentlemen," said the jug-
gler, picking up a small and glittering
object from the table, " if I may ask
your attention, you will observe that each
chamber of this revolver is loaded " —

With his long, delicate, deft white
hands he had turned aside the barrel, and
now held the weapon up, the two parts
at right angles, each cartridge distinctly
visible to the audience.

But a sudden authoritative voice arose.
" No pistols ! " called out a sober pater-
familias, responsible for four boys in the
audience.

" No pistols ! " echoed Judge Fordyce.

There had been a momentary shrink-
ing among the ladies, whose curiosity,
however, was greater than their fear, and
who sustained a certain doubtful and dis-
appointed aspect. But the shadowy bul-
let-heads of the whole front row were
turned with one accord in indignant and
unfilial protest.

Royce understanding in a moment,
with a quick smile shifted all the car-
tridges out into his hand, held up the
pistol once more so that all might see the
light through the empty chambers, then
with an exaggerated air of caution laid
all the shells in a small heap on one of
the little tables and the pistol, still dis-
located, on another table, the breadth of
the stage between them ; and with a sa-
tiric " Hey ! Presto ! " bowed, laughing
and complaisant, to a hearty round of
applause from the elders. For although
his compliance with their behests had
been a trifle ironical, the youths of New
Helvetia were not accustomed to submit
with so good a grace or so completely.

The two elderly strangers accommo-
dated the expression of their views to
the evident opinion of those of their
time of life, applauding when the gen-
tlemen about them applauded, maintain-
ing an air of interest when they were
receptive and attentive. Was it pos-
sible, one might wonder in looking at
them, that they could conceive that dif-
ferences so essential could be unre-
marked — that it was not patent to the
most casual observer that they were not
among their kind ? The perspicacity of
the casual observer, however, was ham-
pered by the haze of the pervasive ob-
scurity ; from the stage each might seem
to the transient glance merely a face
among many faces, the divergences of
which could be discerned only when some
intention or interest informed the gaze.

Lucien Royce saw only that oasis in the
gloom where the high lights of her deli-
cately tinted costume shone in the dusk.
He was keenly mindful of a flash of girl-
ish laughter, the softly luminous glance

256

The Juggler.

of her eye, the glimmer of her white teeth
as her pink lips curled, the young delight
in her face. How should he care to note
the secret, down-looking countenance o'f
the one man, the grizzled stolid bourgeois
aspect of the other ?

The manager, keenly alive to the suc-
cess of the entertainment, advanced a
number of the programme since the pis-
tol trick was discarded. He handed
through the wings a flower-pot filled with
earth for a feat which it had been his
intention to reserve until after the first
act of The New Woman.

" Now, ladies • and gentlemen," said
the juggler, " oblige me by looking at
this acorn. It is considered quite harm-
less. True, it will shoot, too, if you give
it half a chance ; but I am told," with
a glance of raillery, " that its projectile
effects are not deleterious in any respect
to the human anatomy."

The ladies who had been afraid of
the pistol laughed delightedly, and the
guyed elderly gentlemen good-naturedly
responded in another round of applause,
so grateful were they to have no shooting
on the stage, and no possible terrifying
accidents to their neighbors, themselves,
and their respective families.

" There is nothing but pulverized soil
in this flower-pot," continued the jug-
gler, running his hand through the fine
white sand, and shaking off the particles
daintily, " a little too sandy to suit my
views and experience in arboriculture, but
we shall see 1 — what we shall see ! I
plant the acorn, thus ! I throw this cloth
over the flower-pot, drawing it up in a
peak to give air. And now, since we
shall have to wait for a few moments, I
shall, with your kind indulgence, beguile
the tedium, in imitation of the jongleurs
of eld, with a little song."

The audience sat patient, expectant.
A guitar was lying where one of the
glee singers had left it. Royce turned
and caught it up, then advanced down
toward the footlights, and paused in the
picturesque attitude of the serenader of

the lyric stage. He drew from the in-
strument a few strong resonant chords,
and then it fell a-tinkling again.

But what new life was in the strings,
what melody in the air? And as his
voice rose, the scene-shifters were silent
in the glare of the pens ; the actors-ex-
pectant thronged the wings ; the audi-
ence sat spellbound.

No great display of art, to be sure !
But the mountain wilds were without,
and the mountain winds were abroad,
and there was something strangely som-
bre, romantic, akin to the suggestion and
the sourid in the rich swelling tones of
the young voice so passionately vibrant
on the air. Though obviously an ama-
teur, he sang with a careful precision
that bespoke fairly good advantages am-
ply improved, but the singing was in-
stinct with that ardor, that love of the
art, that enthusiasm, which no training
can supply or create. The music and the
words were unfamiliar, for they were his
own. Neither was devoid of merit. In-
deed, a musical authority once said that
his songs would have very definite pro-
mise if it were not for a determined ef-
fort to make all the science of harmony
tributary to the display of Lucien Royce's
high A. A recurrent strain now and
again came, interfluent through the drift
of melody, rising with a certain ecstatic
elasticity to that sustained tone, which
was soft, yet strong, and as sweet as sum-
mer.

As his voice thus rang out into the si-
lence with all its pathos and its passion,
he turned his eyes on the eyes he had so
learned to love, and met those orbs, full
of delight and of surprise and a patent
admiration, fixed upon his face. The
rest of the song he sang straight at Ger-
trude Fordyce, and she looked at the
singer, her gaze never swerving. For
once his plunging heart in triumph felt
he had caught and held her attention ;
for once, he said to himself, she did not
look at him as impersonally as if he were
the side of the wall.

The Juggler.

257

It was over at last, and he was bow-
ing his acknowledgments to the wildly
applauding audience. The jugglery was
at a discount. He had drawn off the
white cloth from the flower-pot, where a
strongly rooted young oak shoot two feet
high appeared to have grown while he
sang. But the walls of the room re-
sounded with the turbulent clamors of
an insistent encore. Only the eyes of the
rustic-looking stranger were starting out
of his head as he gazed at the oak shoot,
and there came floating softly through
his lips the involuntary comment, " By
gum ! "

It was necessary in common courtesy
to sing at least the last stanza again,
and as the juggler did so he was almost
happy in singing it anew to her starry
eyes, and noting the flush on her cheeks,
and the surprise and pleasure in her beau-
tiful face. The miracle of the oak shoot
went unexplained, for all New Helvetia
was still clapping a recall when the jug-
gler, bowing and bowing, with the guitar
in his hand, and ever retreating as he
bowed, stepped off at the wings for in-
structions, and was met there by renewed
acclamations from his fellow entertainers.

" You 'd better bring on the play if
you don't want to hold forth here till
the small hours," he said, flushed, and
panting, and joyous once more.

But the author-manager was of a dif-
ferent mind. The child of his fancy
was dear to him, although it was a very
grotesque infant, as indeed it was neces-
sary that it should be. He deprecat-
ed submitting it to the criticism of an
unwilling audience, still clamoring for
the reappearance of another attraction.
However, there would not be time enough
to respond to this encore, and yet bring
the farce on with the deliberation essen-
tial to its success, and the effect of all its
little points.

" You seem to be the star of the even-
ing," he said graciously. " And I
should like to hear you sing again my-
self. But we really have n't time. As

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 478. 17

they are so delighted with you, suppose,
by way of letting them down gently, we
give them another sight of you by moving
up the basket trick on the programme, in-
stead of letting it come between the sec-
ond and third acts of the play, — we have
had to advance the feat that was to have
come between the first and second acts,
anyhow, — and have no jugglery between
the acts."

Royce readily agreed, but the man-
ager still hesitated while the house
thumped and clapped its recall in great
impatience, and a young hobbledehoy
slipped slyly upon the stage and face-
tiously bowed his acknowledgments, with
his hand upon his heart, causing spasms
of delight among the juvenile contingent
and some laughter from the elders.

Said the hesitating manager, uncon-
scious of this interlude, " I don't half
like that basket trick."

" Why ? " demanded the juggler, sur-
prised. " It 's the best thing I can do.
And when we rehearsed it, I thought we
had it down to a fine point."

"Yes," still hesitating, "but I'm
afraid it 's dangerous."

The juggler burst into laughter. " It 's
as dangerous as a pistol loaded with blank
cartridges ! See here," he cried joyously,
turning with outspread arms to the group
of youths fantastic in their stage tog-
gery, " I call you all to witness — if ever
Millden Seymour hurts me, I intended to
let him do it. Come on ! " he exclaimed
in a different tone ; " I 'm obliged to
have a confederate in this, and we have
rehearsed it without a break time and
again."

In a moment more they were on the
stage, side by side, and the audience,
seeing that no more minstrelsy was in
order, became reconciled to the display
of magic. A certain new element of in-
terest was infused into the proceedings
by the fact that another person was in-
troduced, and that it was Seymour who
made all the preparations, interspersing
them with jocular remarks to the audi-

258

The Juggler.

ence, while the juggler stood by, silent
and acquiescent. He seemed to be the
victim of the manager, in some sort,
and the juvenile spectators, with beating,
hearts and open mouths and serious eyes,
watched the proceedings taken against
him as his arms were bound with a rope
and then a bag of rough netting was
slipped over him and sewed up at the
end.

" I have him fast and safe now," the
manager declared. " He cannot delude
us with any more of his deceits, I am
sure."

The juggler was placed at full length
on the floor and a white cloth was thrown
over him. The manager then exhibited
a large basket some three feet long and
with a top to it, which he also thrust un-
der the cloth. Taking advantage of the
evident partisanship of the children for
their entertainer, he spoke for a few min-
utes in serious and disapproving terms of
the deceits of the eye, and made a very
pretty moral arraignment of these dubi-
ous methods of taking pleasure, which
was obviously received in high dudgeon.
He then turned about to lead his captive,
hobbled and bound, off the stage. Lift-
ing the cloth he found no trace of the
juggler ; the basket with the top beside
it was revealed, and on the floor was the
netting, — a complete case with not a
mesh awry through which he could have
escaped. The manager stamped about
in the empty basket and finally emerged
putting on the top and cording it up.
Whereupon one antagonistic youth in
the audience opined that the juggler
was in the basket.

"He is, is he?" said the manager,
looking up sharply at the bullet-headed
row. " Then what do you think of this,
and this, and this ? "

He had drawn the sharp bowie-knife
with which Royce had furnished him,
and was thrusting it up to the hilt here,
there, everywhere through the interstices
of the wickerwork. This convinced the
audience that in some inscrutable manner

the juggler had been spirited away, im-
possible though it might seem. The
stage, in the full glare of all the lamps
at New Helvetia Springs, was in view
from every part of the house, and it was
evident that the management of the Un-
rivaled Attraction was incapable of stage
machinery, trap-doors, or any similar ap-
pliance. In the midst of the discussion,
very general over the house, the basket
began to roll about. The manager viewed
it with the affectation of starting eyes
and agitated terror for a moment. Then
pouncing upon it in wrath he loosened
the cords, took off the top, and pulled
out the juggler, who was received with
acclamations, and, bowing and smiling
and backing off the stage, he retired, the
hero of the occasion.

Seymour at the wings was giving or-
ders to ring down the curtain to pre-
pare the stage for The New Woman.

" Don't do it unless you mean it for
keeps, Mill," remonstrated the proper-
ty-man. " The devil 's in the old rag, I
believe. It might not go up again easi-
ly, and I 'm sure, from the racket out
there, they are going to have the basket
trick over again."

For the front row of bullet-heads was
conducting itself like a row of gallery
gods and effervescing with whistlings
and shrill cries. The applause was gen-
eral and tumultuous, growing louder
when the over-cautious father called out
" No pistols and no knives ! "

" Oh, they can take care of them-
selves," said a former adherent of his
proposition, for the feat was really very
clever, and very cleverly exploited, and
he was ready to accredit the usual
amount of sagacity to youths who could
get up so amusing an entertainment.
No one was alert to notice — save his
mere presence as some messenger or
purveyor of properties — a dazed-looking
young mountaineer, dripping with the
rain and apparently drenched to the
skin, who walked down the main aisle
and stepped awkwardly over the foot-

The Juggler.

259

lights, upon the stage. He paused bewil-
dered at the wings, and Lucien Royce be-
hind the scenes, turning, found himself
face to face with Owen Haines. The
sight of the wan, ethereal countenance
brought back like some unhallowed spell
the real life he had lived of late into
the vanishing dream-life he was living
now. But the actualities are constrain-
ing. " You want me ? " he said, with a
sudden premonition of trouble.

" I hev s'arched fur you-uns fur days,"
Haines replied, a strange compassion in
his eyes, contemplating which Lucien
Royce felt his blood go cold. " But the
Simses deceived me ez ter whar ye be ;
they never told me till ter-night, an' then
I bed ter tell 'em why I wanted you-uns."

" Why ? " demanded Royce, spell-
bound by the look in the man's eyes, yet
almost overmastered by the revulsion of
feeling in the last moment, the quaking
of an unnamed terror at his heart.

Nevertheless, with his acute and ver-
satile faculties he heard the clamors of
the recall still thundering in the room,
he noted the passing of the facetiously
bedight figures for the farce. He was
even aware of glances of curiosity from
one or two of the scene-shifters, and had
the prudence to draw Haines, who heard
naught and saw only the face before him,
into a corner.

"Why?" reiterated Royce. "Why
do you want me ? "

" Bekase," said Haines, " Peter Knowles
seen ye fling them clothes inter the quick-
lime, an' drawed the idee ez ye bed
slaughtered somebody bodaciously, an'
kivered 'em thar too."

The juggler reddened at the mention
of the clothes and the thought of their
sacrifice, but he was out of countenance
before the sentence was concluded, and
gravely dismayed.

" Oh, pshaw ! " he exclaimed, seeking
to reassure himself. " They would have
to prove that somebody is dead to make
that charge stick."

Then he realized the seriousness of

such an accusation, the necessity of ac-
counting for himself before a legal in-
vestigation, and this, to escape one false
criminal charge, must needs lead to a
prosecution for another equally false.
The alternative of flight presented itself
instantly. " I can explain later, if neces-
sary, as well as now," he thought. " I 'm
a thousand times obliged to you for tell-
ing me," he added aloud, but to his
amazement and terror the man was
wringing his hands convulsively and his
face was contorted with the agony of a
terrible expectation.

" Don't thank me," he said huskily.
Then, with a sudden hope, " Is thar enny
way out'n this place 'ceptin' yon ? " he
nodded his head toward the ballroom on
the other side of the partition.

" No, none," gasped Royce, his nerves
beginning to comprehend the situation,
while it still baffled his brain.

"I'm too late, I'm too late!" ex-
claimed Haines in a tense, suppressed
voice. " The sher'ff 's thar, 'mongst the
others, in that room. I viewed him thar
a minit ago."

Assuming that he knew the worst,
Royce's courage came back. With some
wild idea of devising a scheme to meet
the emergency, he sprang upon the va-
cant stage, on which the curtain had
been rung down despite the applause,
still resolutely demanding a repetition of
the feat, and through the rent in the
trembling fabric swiftly surveyed the
house with a new and, alas, how differ-
ent a motive ! His eyes instantly fixed
upon the rustic face, the hair parted far
to the side, as the sheriff vigorously
stamped his feet and clapped his hands
in approbation. That oasis of refined,
ideal light where Miss Fordyce sat did
not escape Royce's attention even at this
crisis. Had he indeed brought this sorry,
ignoble fate upon himself that he might
own one moment in her thoughts, one
glance of her eye, that he might sing
his song to her ear ? He had certainly
achieved this, he thought sardonically.

260

The Juggler.

She would doubtless remember him to
the last day she should live. He won-
dered if they would iron him in the pre-
sence of the ladies. Could he count upon
his strong young muscles to obey his will
and submit without resistance when the
officers should lay their hands upon him,
and thus avoid a scene ?

And all at once — perhaps it was the
sweet look in her face that made all
gentle things seem possible — it occurred
to him that he despaired too easily. An
arrest might not be in immediate con-
templation, — the corpus delicti was im-
possible of proof. He could surely make
such disposition of his own property as
seemed to him fit, and the explanation
that he was at odds with his friends,
dead-broke, thrown out of business in
the recent panic, might pass muster with
the rural officer, since no crime could be
discovered to fit the destruction of the
clothes. Thus he might still remain un-
identified with Lucien Royce, who pre-
tended to be dead and was alive, who
had had in trust a large sum of money
in a belt which was found upon another
man, robbed, and perhaps murdered for
it The sheriff of Kildeer County had
never dreamed of the like of that, he
was very sure.

The next moment his heart sank like
lead, for there amongst the audience,
quite distinct in the glooms, was the
sharp, keen, white face of a man he had
seen before, — a certain noted detective.
It was but once, yet, with that idea of
crime rife in his mind, he placed the man
instantly. He remembered a court-room
in Memphis, during the trial of a cer-
tain notable case, where he had chanced
to loiter in the tedium of waiting for a
boat on one of his trips through the city,
and he had casually watched this man
as he gave his testimony. His presence
here was significant, conclusive, to be in-
terpreted far otherwise than any mission
of the sheriff of the county. Royce did.
not for one moment doubt that it was in
the interests of the marble company, the

tenants of the estate per autre vie, al-
though the criminal charge might ema-
nate directly from the firm whose funds
had so mysteriously disappeared from his
keeping, whose trust must now seem so
basely betrayed. There was no possible
escape ; the stanch walls of the building
were unbroken even by a window, and
the only exit from behind the partition
was through the stage itself in full view
of the watchful eyes of the officers. Any
effort, any action, would merely acceler-
ate the climax, precipitate the shame of
the arrest he dreaded, — and in her pre-
sence ! He felt how hard the heart of
the cestui que vie was thumping at the
prospect of the summary resuscitation.
He said to himself, with his ironical habit
of mind, that he had found dying a far
easier matter. But there was no re-
sponsive satire in the hunted look of
his hot, wild, glancing eyes, the qxiiver
of every muscle, the cold thrills that suc-
cessively trembled through the nervous
fibres. He looked so unlike himself for
the moment, as he turned with a violent
start on feeling the touch of a hand on
his arm, that Seymour paused with some
deprecation and uncertainty. Then with
a renewed intention the manager said
persuasively, " You won't mind doing it
over again, will you ? You see they won't
be content without it."

A certain element of surprise was
blended with the manager's cogitations
which he remembered afterward rather
than realized at the moment. It had to
do with the altered aspect of the man, —
a sudden grave tumultuous excitement
which his manner and glance bespoke ;
but the perception of this was subacute
in Seymour's mind and subordinate to
the awkward dilemma in which he found
himself as manager of the little enter-
prise. There was not time, in justice to
the rest of the programme, to repeat the
basket trick> and had the farce been the
work of another he would have rung the
curtain up forthwith on its first scene.
But the pride and sensitiveness of the

The Juggler.

261

author alike forbade the urging of his
own work upon the attention of an audi-
ence still clamorously insistent upon the
repetition of another attraction, and hard-
ly likely, if balked of this, to be fully
receptive to the real merits of the little
play.

Seymour remembered afterward, but
did not note at the time, the obvious effort
with which the juggler controlled his
agitation. " Oh, anything goes ! " he
assented, and in a moment more the
curtain had glided up with less than its
usual convulsive resistance. They were
standing again together with composed
aspect in the brilliance of the footlights,
and Seymour, with a change of phrase
and an elaboration of the idea, was dilat-
ing afresh upon the essential values of
the positive in life ; the possible perni-
cious effects of any delusion of the senses ;
the futility of finding pleasure in the
false, simply because of the flagrancy of
its falsity ; the deleterious moral effects
of such exhibitions upon the very young,
teaching them to love the acrobatic lie
instead of the lame truth, — from all of
which he deduced the propriety of tying
the juggler up for the rest of the evening.
But the bullet-heads were not as dense
as they looked. They learned well when
they learned at all, and the pauses of
this rodomontade were filled with callow
chuckles and shrill whinnies of appre-
ciative delight, anticipative of the won-
der to come. They now viewed with
eager forwarding interest the juggler's
bonds, little dreaming what grim pro-
phecy he felt in their restraint, and the
smallest boy of the lot shrilly sang out,
when all was done, " Give him another
turn of the rope ! "

Seymour, his blond face flushed by
the heat and his exertions to the hue of
his pink-and-white blazer, ostentatiously
wrought another knot, and down the jug-
gler went on the floor, encased in the
unbroken netting ; the cloth was thrown
over the man and the basket, and Sey-
mour turned anew to the audience and

took up the thread of his discourse. It
came as trippingly off his tongue as be-
fore, and in the dusky gray-purple haze,
the seeming medium in which the audi-
ence sat, fair, smiling faces, full of ex-
pectation and attention, looked forth
their approval, and now and again broke
into laughter. When, having concluded
by announcing that he intended to con-
vey the discomfited juggler off the stage,
he found naught under the cloth but the
empty net without a mesh awry, the man
having escaped, his rage was a trifle more
pronounced than before. With a wild
gesture he tossed the fabric out to the au-
dience to bid them observe how the vil-
lain had outwitted him, and then sprang
into the basket and stamped tumultuous-
ly all around in the interior, evidently
covering every square inch of its surface,
while the detective's keen eyes watched
with an eager intensity, as if the only
thought in his mind were the miracle of
the juggler's withdrawal. Out Seymour
plunged finally, and with dogged resolu-
tion he put the lid on and began to cord
up the basket as if for departure.

" Save the little you 've got left," whin-
nied out a squirrel-toothed mouth from
the front bench, almost too broadly a-grin
for articulation.

" Get a move on ye, — get a move ! "
shouted another of the callow youngsters,
reveling in the fictitious plight of the
discomfited manager as if it were real.

He seemed to resent it. He looked
f rowningly over the footlights at the front
row, as it hugged itself and squirmed on
the bench and cackled in ecstasy.

" I wish I had him here ! " he ex-
claimed gruffly. " I 'd settle him —
with this — and this — and this ! " Each
word was emphasized with the successive
thrusts of the sharp blade of the bowie-
knife through the wickerwork.

" That 's enough ! That 's enough ! "
the remonstrant elder in the audience ad-
monished him, and he dropped the blade
and came forward to beg indulgence
for the unseemly and pitiable position

262

The Juggler.

in which he found himself placed. He
had barely turned his back for a moment,
when this juggler whom he had taken so
much pains to secure, in order to pro-^
tect the kind and considerate audience
from further deceits of a treacherous art,
mysteriously disappeared, and whither
he was sure he could not imagine. He
hesitated for a moment and looked a
trifle embarrassed, for this was the point
at which the basket should begin to roll
along the floor. He gave it a covert
glance, but it was motionless where he
had left it. Raising his voice, he re-
peated the words as with indignant em-
phasis, thinking the juggler had not
caught the cue. He went on speaking
at random, but his words came less free-
ly ; the audience was silent, expectant ;
the basket still lay motionless on the
floor. Seeing that he must needs force
the crisis, he turned, exclaiming with up-
lifted hands, " Do my eyes deceive me,
or is that basket stirring, rolling on the
floor ? "

But no ; the basket lay as still as he
had left it. There was a moment of
tense silence in the audience, and then
his face grew suddenly white and chill,
his eyes dilated — fixed on something
dark, and slow, and sinuous, trickling
down the inclined plane of the stage.
He sprang forward with a shrill excla-
mation, and catching up the bowie-knife
severed with one stroke the cords that
bound the basket.

" Are you hurt ? " he gasped in a
tremulous voice to the silence beneath
the lid, and as he tossed it aside he re-
coiled abruptly, rising to his feet with a
loud and poignant cry, " Oh, my God !
he is dead ! he is dead ! "

The sudden transition from the pure-
ly festival character of the atmosphere
to the purlieus of grim tragedy told
heavily on every nerve. There was one
null moment blank of comprehension,
and then women were screaming, and
more than one fainted ; the clamor of
overturned benches added to the confu-

sion, as the men, with grim set faces
and startled eyes, pressed forward to the
stage ; the children cowered in ghastly
affright close below the footlights, except
one small creature who thought it a part
of the fun, not dreaming what death
might be, and was laughing aloud in
high-keyed mirth down in the dusky
gloom. A physician among the summer
sojourners, on a flying visit for a breath
of mountain air, was the first man to
reach the stage, and, with the terror-
stricken Seymour, drew the long lithe
body out and straightened it on the floor,
as the cuVtain was lowered to hide a
mise en scene which it might be terror
to women and children to remember.
His ready hand desisted after a glance.
The man had died from the first stroke
of the bowie-knife, penetrating his side,
and doubtless lacerating the outer tis-
sues of the heart. The other strokes
were registered, — the one on his hand,
the other, a slight graze, on the neck. A
tiny package had fallen on the floor as
the hasty hands had torn the shirt aside
from the wound : the deft professional
fingers unfolded it, — a bit of faded
flower, a wild purple verbena ; the phy-
sician looked at it for a moment, and
tossed it aside in the blood on the floor,
uninterested. The pericardium was more
in his line. He was realizing, too, that
he could not start to-morrow, as he had
intended, for his office and his rounds
among his patients. The coroner's jury
was an obstinate impediment, and his
would be expert testimony.

Upon this inquest, held incongruously
enough in the ballroom, the facts of the
information which Owen Haines had
brought to the juggler and the presence
of the officers in the audience were elicit-
ed, and added to the excitements inci-
dent to the event. The friends of young
Seymour, who was overwhelmed by the
tragedy, believed and contended that
since escape from prosecution for some
crime was evidently impossible, the jug-
gler had in effect committed suicide by

The Juggler.

263

holding up his left arm that the knife
might pierce a vital part. Thus they
sought to avert the sense of responsibil-
ity which a man must needs feel for so
terrible an accident wrought by his own
hand. But crime as a factor seemed
doubtful. The sheriff, indeed, upon the
representations of Sims, supplemented
by the mystery of the lime-kiln which
Knowles had disclosed, had induced the
detective to accompany him to the moun-
tains to seek to identify the stranger as
a defaulting cashier from one of the cities
for whose apprehension a goodly amount
of money would be paid. But in no re-
spect did Royce correspond to the per-
petrator of any crime upon the detective's
list.

" He need n't have been afraid of me,"
he observed dryly; "I saw in a minute
he was n't our fellow. And I was just
enjoying myself mightily."

The development of the fact of the
presence of the officers and the juggler's
knowledge that they were in the audi-
ence affected the physician's testimony
and his view of the occurrence. He ac-
counted it an accident. The nerve of
the young man, shaken by the natural
anxiety at finding himself liable to im-
mediate arrest, was not sufficient to carry
him through the feat. He failed to shift
position with the celerity essential to the
basket trick, and the uplifted position of
the arm, which left the body unprotected
to receive the blow, was but the first ef-
fort to compass the swift movements ne-

cessary to the feat. The unlucky young
manager was exonerated from all blame
in the matter, but the verdict was death
by accident.

Nevertheless, for many a day and all
the years since the argument continues.
Along the verge of those crags over-
looking the valley, in the glamours of a
dreamy golden haze, with the amethys-
tine mountains on the horizon reflecting
the splendors of the sunset sky, and with
the rich content of the summer solstice
in the perfumed air; or amongst the
fronds of the ferns about the fractured
cliffs whence the spring wells up with a
tinkling tremor and exhilarant freshness
and a cool, cool splashing as of the ver-
itable fountain of youth; or in the
shadowy twilight of the long, low build-
ing where the balls go crashing down
the alleys ; or sometimes even in the
ballroom in pauses of the dance when
the music is but a plaint, half-joy, half-
pain, and the wind is singing a wild and
mystic refrain, and the moonlight comes
in at the windows and lies in great blue-
white silver rhomboids on the floor de-
spite the dull yellow glow of the lamps,
— in all these scenes which while yet in
life Lucien Royce had haunted, with a
sense of exile and a hopeless severance,
as of a man who is dead, the mystery of
his fate revives anew and yet once more,
and continues unexplained. Conjecture
fails, conclusions are vain, the secret re-
mains. Hey ! Presto ! The juggler has
successfully exploited his last feat.

Charles Egbert Craddock.

264

A Great Biography: Mohan's Nelson.

A GREAT BIOGRAPHY: MAHAN'S NELSON.

THERE comes a period when the work
and character of a great man can be
fairly summed up for all time by the
biographer ; when the judgment is as
nearly in focus as ever the fallible hu-
man judgment can be ; when the dis-
tortion of passions and the multiplicity
of details inseparable from nearness of
view, and the obscuring, sometimes mag-
nifying effects of distance are both at a
minimum. Certainly that time had not
come for Nelson when Charnock and
Barker, or even Southey, wrote the life
of the great admiral. But the right
man does not always come at the right
time, and the world's general estimate
of its illustrious men not infrequently
remains without any adequate concrete
expression.

Individual judgments are necessarily
fallible and incomplete. They are either
strong and masterful, tainted by preju-
dices and warped by that constitutional
way of looking at things which we call
the personal equation, or weak and color-
less, the loose gathering up of that crude
public opinion which surrounds a great
name as the photosphere surrounds the
sun. Still, the general consensus of opin-
ion of great men, as of great books, is
not far out of the way. The critical
acumen of the scholar, the professional
knowledge of the expert, the feeling,
taste, and judgment of the few, and the
shrewd common sense of the many, —
something of all these is found in the
popular verdict ; and this composite pic-
ture, as it were, derived from so many
sources, is usually not far from right.
But just because, though so well defined,
it is so composite, the biographer who
can intelligently represent it is rare. " A
true delineation of the smallest man,"
says Carlyle, " is capable of interesting

1 The Life of Nelson, the Embodiment of the
Sea Power of Great Britain. By ALFRED

the greatest man." What an interest a
man would have for us if we knew that
he was thus to sum up for posterity our
life - work ! We should ask, not only,
What access has he to the record ? but
also, What professional capacity, what
temper of mind., what human experience
of life, will he bring to the analysis of
our motives, the judgment of our acts,
the weighing of our character ?

We had the right to expect much from
Captain Mahan, especially that he would
give us a critical estimate of Nelson's
genius from the point of view of the naval
expert, and that he would show us the
relations of Nelson's naval operations
to the general course of contemporary
events in that same original way in which
he had already made real for us, to a de-
gree no previous writer had done, the in-
fluence of sea power upon history. But
he has done very much more than this.
He has made the man Nelson live to us
as he has never lived before.1 Nelson we
knew already as a born fighter, heroic,
vain, affectionate, sensitive, nervous, yet
as a name rather than a man, — a name
symbolizing certain brilliant achieve-
ments, but a man only as he emerged
from the obscurity which belongs to the
sea, when the flash-light of glory was
turned upon him. We know him now a
man among men, a real human person-
ality, in a sense in which we have never
known him before.

It is not so easy to make the great
admiral thus real to us as it is the great
general. We know Grant better than
we know Farragut, as we know Welling-
ton, Marlborough, and Ney better than
Tromp, Rodney, or St. Vincent. The
sailor lives apart, in a round of profes-
sional duties which lie beyond the range
of our observation. Aside from the in-

THAYEB MAHAN. Boston : Little, Brown &
Co. 1897.

A Great Biography : Mahan' s Nelson.

265

terest due to the greater relative magni-
tude and diversity of land over sea op-
erations, the former are more intelligi-
ble and bring us into closer touch with
the actor because the drama in all its de-
tails takes place at our door. It is not
great achievements which tell us most of
character, but the minute details of daily
life, and it is through their revelation
of human nature that we know Napole-
on better before Austerlitz than Nelson
before Copenhagen. Brilliant exploits
give men a place in history, but they do
not tell us the story of their inner lives
or give them a place in our hearts. The
modern historical method, in aiming at
something more than the chronological
record of events, has reversed the say-
ing of Dr. Johnson that history sets forth
" the pomp of business rather than the
true and inward resorts thereof." Still
more true is it that in biography the
" pomp of business " is the mere outward
show. Captain Mahan says in his pre-
face : —

" It has not seemed the best way to
insert numerous letters, because, in the
career of a man of action, each one com-
monly deals with a variety of subjects,
which bear to one another little rela-
tion, except that, at the moment of writ-
ing, they all formed part of the multifold
life the writer was then leading. It is
true, life in general is passed in that
way ; but it is not by such distraction
of interest among minute details that a
particular life is best understood. Few
letters, therefore, have been inserted en-
tire ; and those which have, have been
chosen because of their unity of subject
and of their value as characteristic.
The author's method has been to make
a careful study of Nelson's voluminous
correspondence, analyzing it, in order
to detect the leading features of temper-
ament, traits of thought, and motives
of action ; and thence to conceive with-
in himself, by gradual familiarity even
more than by formal effort, the charac-
ter therein revealed. The impression

thus produced he has sought to convey
to others, partly in the form of ordinary
narrative, — daily living with his hero,
— and partly by such grouping of inci-
dents and utterances, not always, nor
even nearly simultaneous, as shall serve
by their joint evidence to emphasize par-
ticular traits or particular opinions more
forcibly than when such testimonies are
scattered far apart; as they would be,
if recounted in a strict order of time."

It is interesting to read this statement
of the author's method, for he has com-
pletely realized its purpose. Doubtless
the last word will never be said on so
fascinating a personality as Nelson, and
there are matters of opinion and infer-
ence on which readers will differ, — as,
for example, the direct influence of Tra-
falgar upon Moscow and Waterloo, —
but it is not probable that a more faith-
ful, complete, human portrait of Nelson
will ever be drawn.

There is one striking characteristic of
Captain Mahan's work, — the entire ab-
sence, from first to last, of anything like
an attempt to establish a point, a pre-
conceived theory. At no time does he
seem to be endeavoring to prove any-
thing, or to be seeking facts to support
propositions. His logic is the logic of
inference and induction. This is the
more noteworthy because there are acts
in both the official and the private life of
Nelson on which extreme positions may
be and have been taken. We never feel
that Captain Mahan is juggling with the
evidence, and he brings a sturdy com-
mon sense as well as a judicial temper to
its interpretation. There were certain
strongly marked traits in Nelson's char-
acter which brought him into conflict
with conventional maxims, and it is natu-
ral for the reader to turn with special
interest to the author's critical estimate
of those acts in Nelson's career which
have given rise to such widely differing
verdicts*

In three conspicuous instances Nelson
assumed the perilous responsibility of vi-

266

A Great Biography: Mahan' s Nelson.

olating a rule to which he himself gave
the first place in his advice to a young
midshipman : " You must always obey
orders, without attempting to form any
opinion of your own respecting their pro-
priety." The general rule of obedience
to superiors is one upon which a subordi-
nate may rely for justification, whatever
the outcome of such obedience may be.
He may, indeed, be criticised for failing
to rise to the level of a great opportu-
nity, for a deficiency in the moral cour-
age requisite for accepting exceptional
responsibilities, yet all obedience which
is not stupid adherence to the letter in
face of the clearest call to duty carries
with it immunity from official blame.
But to disobey is to exchange the immu-
nity offered by the general rule for the
precarious protection of its exception ; to
risk all, not upon success, — for to see
the one thing to be done and to do it is
always the right thing, whether it leads
to the wished-for success or not, — but
upon the hazard of its being the right
thing, upon the chance that one's own
opinion of the conditions in the case in
question may be the wrong one. " It
is difficult for the non-military mind to
realize how great is the moral effect of
disobeying a superior, whose order, on
the one hand covers all responsibility,
and on the other entails the most seri-
ous personal and professional injury if
violated without due cause ; the burden
of proving which rests upon the junior.
For the latter, it is, justly and necessa-
rily, not enough that his own intentions
and convictions were honest ; he has to
show, not that he meant to do right,
but that he actually did right in disobey-
ing in the particular instance." There
is no other test of obedience, and Cap-
tain Mahun applies it, though with dif-
ferent results, to the several instances in
which Nelson challenged it. One of
these occurred in the engagement with
the Spanish fleet, under Sir John Jervis,
when, by wearing out of the line of at-
tack as prescribed by the admiral ' for

which he had no authority by signal or
otherwise, Nelson entirely defeated the
Spanish movement ; " an act of which
Jervis said to Calder on the evening of
the victory, " If you ever commit such a
breach of orders, I will forgive you also."
" Success," says Captain Mahan, " covers
many faults, yet it is difficult to believe
that had Nelson been overwhelmed, the
soundness of his judgment and his reso-
lution would not equally have had the
applause of a man who had fought twen-
ty-seven ships with fifteen because ' a
victory was essential to England at that
moment.' "

The more dramatic instance of Nel-
son's disregard for orders, also occurring
in the heat of action, at the battle of
Copenhagen, — more dramatic because
an act of positive disobedience, and not
a mere assumption of authority, and be-
cause associated with the incident of his
applying the glass to his blind eye, ex-
claiming that he had the right to be
blind sometimes, and could not see Sir
Hyde Parker's signal to withdraw his di-
vision, — was another case of seeing the
right thing to do and doing it. " To
retire with crippled ships and mangled
crews, through difficult channels, under
the guns of the half -beaten foe, who
would renew his strength when he saw
the movement, would be to court destruc-
tion, — to convert probable victory into
certain, perhaps overwhelming disaster."
In both these cases Nelson's fighting
quality was united with sound judg-
ment, — a judgment almost intuitive in
the rapidity and tenacity with which he
seized upon opportunity and made the
most of it.

Captain Mahan brings out very clear-
ly not only Nelson's independence of
character, but also his accurate reasoning
on technical matters, in his account of
the controversy over the Navigation Act,
and of Nelson's refusal to admit the va-
lidity of Sir Joseph Hughes's order au-
thorizing an officer holding only a civil
appointment to exercise naval command

A Great Biography: Mohan s, Nelson.

267

when not attached to a ship in commis-
sion ; but he does not justify Nelson's
disobedience of Lord Keith's instruc-
tions to detach a part of his fleet for the
defense of Minorca. In his letters to
the Admiralty Nelson made the wholly
inadequate defense of the uprightness of
his intentions. As events proved, Keith
failed to meet with the enemy's fleet, and
the safety of Minorca was not imperiled.
It is useless, therefore, to speculate upon
the assistance that would have been af-
forded in either case by the cooperation
of Nelson had events turned out other-
wise. It nevertheless remains true that
in this instance Nelson assumed to de-
cide upon matters which were certainly
without his province, and that there was
nothing in his position which entitled
him to override the judgment of his su-
perior as to the relative importance of
Minorca and the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies to British influence in the Medi-
terranean.

Captain Mahan's review of the un-
fortunate events which took place at
Naples in June, 1799, is admirable in its
clearness and for its conclusions. It has
been maintained that English honor was
stained when Lord Nelson annulled the
capitulation ratified by Cardinal Ruffo as
vicar-general of Naples, and issued the
order for the execution of Prince Carac-
cioli. It is certainly unfortunate that he
held no written warrant from the king
for the authority he assumed. There is,
however, every reason to believe, on the
one hand that he had such authority,
and on the other that Ruffo had been
expressly forbidden to grant a capitula-
tion. The parallel drawn between what
has been called the " judicial murder "
of Caraccioli and the assassination of the
French ministers at Rastadt cannot be
maintained. Nor is there the slightest
evidence to show that Nelson's conduct
of the affair was determined by any
other considerations than those of right
and duty. " Saturated " he doubtless was
" with the prevailing court feeling against

the insurgents and the French," but that
he " yielded his convictions of right and
wrong, and consciously abused his power,
at the solicitation of Lady Hamilton, as
has been so freely alleged, is not pro-
bably true ; there is no proof of it."
Technically Nelson was justified in the
execution of Caraccioli, as probably he
was also in the annulment of Cardinal
Ruffo's agreement, yet for both he will
always be blamed, for those general rea-
sons which give the more magnanimous
spirit of justice precedence over its strict-
ly formal laws.

The part played by Lady Hamilton
in Nelson's life cannot be omitted by
his biographer. Whatever else it was,
Nelson's infatuation was at least no mere
intrigue, no low amour. And whatever
else Lady Hamilton may have done,
she certainly inspired in Nelson what
no other woman did, a great and lasting
passion. We know her so well from
other sources that his idealization of her
is almost unaccountable, and would be
altogether inconceivable if we did not
recognize the power of a great passion to
invest its object with qualities of its own
creation. When we smile at such ideal-
ization, it is not so much because of its
exaggerations, but because we assume
that it cannot endure. Its redeeming
quality is its persistence. As faith for-
sworn loses all its nobility, so idealization
once exhausted becomes ridiculous. We
resent the intrusion of this coarser na-
ture into a life so consecrated to duty,
its association with a character so con-
spicuous for its love of honor, its influ-
ence upon Nelson's public actions, and
its perversion of his views of right. We
could forgive so much more to a nobler
nature !

Whatever praise Captain Mahan may
receive for this biography, it must be ad-
mitted that Nelson furnishes the materi-
als for one. His was a career of brilliant
exploits, finished at its supreme moment,
before failing energies, possible misfor-
tunes, or the belittling commonplaces of

268

A Forest Policy in Suspense.

private life could tarnish its glory. He
had no Waterloo, no St. Helena. He
disappears in the smoke of victory at the
very moment he finally establishes Eng-
land's supremacy on the sea. This is
much, but it is not what endears him to
us. It is rather his possession of so large
a share of our common humanity, its
weaknesses as well as its strength. Weak
as he was, he was not ignoble. He was
vain, childishly fond of praise, sensitive
to blame, ambitious of personal renown,
but he was not selfish. Few great men
had his charm, and with all his faults he
had the right to his last words : " Thank
God I have done my duty — God and
my country." No one owed less than he
to the influence which opens doors to me-
diocrity ; no one owed his success less
to opportunity. There is such a thing
as opportunity, when fortune is thrust
upon us. But we have only to imagine,
as we reasonably may, what would pro-
bably have happened in the north seas
had Nelson been absent from the council
of war off Cronenburg, to realize in what
a true sense he created opportunity. And
although ever ready to take great chances
for great results, whether his course of
action was based upon close reasoning or
well-known conditions, as at the battle
of Copenhagen, or was an inspiration,

coming to him in the perplexity and
anguish of doubt, as in his pursuit of
the French fleet to the West Indies, he
neglected no precaution. He loved bat-
tle, he panted to lay his ship alongside
the enemy, his cardinal object was the de-
struction of the enemy's fleet ; but he was
prudent, and had a broad conception of
the relation of his particular act to the
general course of events, and it is im-
possible to limit his capacity to that of
the mere fighter simply because it was
by fighting that he achieved his ends.
" Responsibility," said St. Vincent, " is
the test of a man's courage." Emer-
gency, Captain Mahan well adds, is the
test of his faith in his beliefs.

There is nothing so interesting to man
as man's nature, and there is no revela-
tion of it so interesting as unconscious
self-revelation. What Captain Mahan
thinks of Nelson is vastly less important
than what Nelson himself thought and
felt. This is the crowning distinction of
this biography : that besides the narra-
tive, always clear and often brilliant ; be-
sides the personal judgment of the au-
thor, always candid yet moderate; be-
sides the critical estimate of the naval
historian, there is the story of Nelson's
" own inner life as well as of his exter-
nal actions," told by himself.

A FOREST POLICY IN SUSPENSE.

WHEN a superintendent of one of our
city parks causes some misshapen or half-
dead tree to be cut down for the benefit
of its neighbors, loud voices are raised in
protest against what so-called lovers of
nature describe as vandalism ; and this
untaught and false sentiment has so influ-
enced the guardians of public parks that
in nearly every American city the plea-
sure-grounds of the people are in seri-
ous danger of permanent injury from

the overcrowding of trees, although as a
nation we look with indifference on the
annual destruction of uncounted thou-
sands of acres of forests on the public
domain by unnecessary fires, the unlaw-
ful browsing of sheep, and the reckless
ravages of fraudulent cutting. There is
nothing new in this, for needless forest
destruction has been going on in the
West for more than a quarter of a cen-
tury, and the story which Mr. Muir tells

A Forest Policy in Suspense.

269

so well in this number of The Atlantic
Monthly is not a new one.

Western forests, however, are so re-
mote and difficult of access, being con-
fined for the most part to the slopes of
high mountain ranges, that it is hard to
make the people of the East understand
their importance or realize the dangers
which assail them ; and yet the preserva-
tion of the forests on the public domain
is of incomparably greater importance to
the well-being of this nation than the fu-
ture of the Cuban insurgents, the owner-
ship of Hawaii, or the settlement of the
tariff or the currency. A bad tariff and
a dangerous currency can be set right in
a few weeks, if their defects are fully
understood and the country is in earnest
to reform them ; but a forest, whose indi-
vidual trees often represent the growth
of centuries, when once destroyed cannot
be restored by an act of Congress, al-
though in the tiny streams flowing along
the rootlets of the trees which fires and
pilfering log-cutters are now exterminat-
ing is the life of western North America ;
and when these springs have dried up,
Western valleys, deprived of the water
which is needed for their irrigation, must
become wildernesses, and the fertility and
beauty of the land will be things of the
past.

It was considered, therefore, by stu-
dents of the rural economy of the West-
ern States and Territories, a hopeful sign
when the Honorable Hoke Smith, Secre-
tary of the Interior, in February, 1896,
asked the National Academy of Sciences
— the highest scientific tribunal in the
country, and by its constitution the sci-
entific adviser of the government — an
expression of opinion upon the following
points : —

(1.) "Is it desirable and practicable
to preserve from fire, and to maintain
permanently as forested lands, those por-
tions of the public domain now bearing
wood growth for the supply of timber ? "

(2.) " How far does the influence of
forest upon climate, soil, and water con-

ditions make desirable a policy of forest
conservation in regions where the public
domain is principally situated ? "

(3.) " What specific legislation should
be enacted to remedy the evils now con-
fessedly existing ? "

The president of the National Acad-
emy appointed a committee to prepare
replies to these questions, and its report,
signed by Charles S. Sargent, chairman,
Henry L. Abbot, A. Agassiz, William H.
Brewer, Arnold Hague, Gifford Pinchot,
and Wolcott Gibbs, has recently been
published. (Report of the Committee
appointed by the National Academy of
Sciences upon the Inauguration of a
Forest Policy for the Forested Lands of
the United States, May 1, 1897. Wash-
ington : Government Printing Office.)
Already familiar, by many previous visits
and by long studies, with Western for-
ests and the conditions of Western life,
the members of the committee further
prepared themselves for this labor by
a journey of many months through the
principal forested regions of the public
domain, and their recommendations,
therefore, are the result of ripe judgment
refreshed by special observations.

By an act of Congress approved
March 3, 1891, authority is given to the
President of the United States to set
apart and reserve parts of the public
domain bearing forests as public reser-
vations. Under this act a number of
forest reservations had been established
by Mr. Harrison and Mr. Cleveland pre-
vious to 1896, aggregating 17,500,000
acres, and the committee of the Nation-
al Academy, during its journey, having
become impressed with the importance
of increasing the reserved area, recom-
mended the establishment of thirteen ad-
ditional reservations with a total esti-
mated area of 21,379,840 acres ; some of
the reservations having been selected for
the influence of their forests on the flow
of streams important for irrigation, and
others for the commercial value of their
timber. The recommendations were

270

A forest Policy in Suspense.

made effective by Mr. Cleveland on the
22d of last February in a series of pro-
clamations, and the reserved forest land
was increased to nearly 40,000,000 acres,
exclusive of the national parks. This,
the last important act of Mr. Cleveland's
administration, it is needless to say was
unpopular with that part of the Western
people, always the noisiest, which lives
by pasturing sheep or stealing timber on
the public domain, and efforts were made,
during the final days of the last Congress,
to annul the action of the President. The
effort failed, but, renewed again under
the present administration, it has been
successful, and Mr. Cleveland's forest
reservations are suspended until the 1st
of March next. This simply means that
during the next eight months any one
who cares to take the trouble to do so can
establish claims in these forests which
the government will have to pay an ex-
orbitant price to abolish, if the reserva-
tions are ever reestablished, and that the
big mining companies will be able to lay
in timber enough, cut on the public do-
main, and of course not paid for, to last
them for several years ; and when the 1st
of March comes, if there is any valuable
timber left in Mr. Cleveland's reserva-
tions, uncut or unclaimed, no great diffi-
culty will be found in suspending the or-
der for another year or two.

All this is bad enough, but it is not
the greatest damage Congress has inflict-
ed on the reservations ; for an amendment
to the Sundry Civil Bill gives authority
to the Secretary of the Interior to per-
mit free use of all the reservations, but
it does not furnish him with any money
or machinery for enforcing such regu-
lations as he may think it necessary to
make for this purpose. To those familiar
with the present methods of the Inte-
rior Department it will be apparent that
this authority given to the Secretary will
mean that a man with sufficient pull can
now legally pasture his sheep in the re-
servations, or cut timber from them for
his own or commercial purposes ; and it

is evident that, unless some further legis-
lation can be obtained, the practical ex-
termination of the Western forests, so
far as their commercial and protective
value is concerned, will be a matter of
only a comparatively short time.

What this legislation should be, in the
opinion of the men who have given the
most careful study to the subject, and
whose experience and judgment entitle
their recommendations to careful con-
sideration, is found in the final pages
of Professor Sargent's report, in which
the questions submitted to the National
Academy by the Secretary of the Inte-
rior are "answered. The report finds that
it is not only desirable, but essential, to
protect the forested lands of the public
domain for their influence on the flow of
streams, and to supply timber and other
products ; and that it is practicable to
reduce the number and restrict the rav-
ages of forest fires in the Western States
and Territories, provided the army of the
United States is used for this purpose
permanently, or until a body of trained
forest rangers is organized for the ser-
vice. The committee does not believe,
however, that it is practicable or possi-
ble to protect the forests on the public
domain from fire and pillage with the
present methods and machinery of the
government. Doubting that the precip-
itation of moisture in any broad and
general way is increased by forests, the
committee believes that they are necessa-
ry to prevent destructive spring floods,
and corresponding periods of low water
in summer and autumn, when the agri-
culture of a large part of western North
America is dependent on irrigation.

In answer to Mr. Smith's third ques-
tion, the committee, mindful of the good
results which have followed the employ-
ment of soldiers in the Yellowstone Na-
tional Park, recommends that the Secre-
tary of War, at the request of the Secre-
tary of the Interior, be authorized and
directed to make the necessary details
of troops to protect the forests, timber,

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

271

and undergrowth on the forest reser-
vations, and in the national parks not
otherwise protected under existing laws,
until a permanent forest bureau in the
Department of the Interior has been
authorized and thoroughly organized.
Fully understanding the necessities of
actual settlers and miners and the de-
mands of commerce, and realizing that
great bodies of forested lands cannot be
withdrawn entirely from use without in-
flicting serious injury upon the com-
munity, the committee urges that the
Secretary of the Interior shall receive
authority to permit, under proper restric-
tions and the supervision of an organ-
ized forest service, farmers, miners, and
other settlers to obtain at nominal prices
forest supplies from the public domain.
It insists, however, that as the whole fu-
ture of the forests depends upon the char-
acter of the officers of the forest service
it proposes, in order to secure the highest
efficiency in this service, forest officers,
specially selected and educated, shall be
appointed for life and pensioned on re-
tirement? that the forest service may be
as permanent and highly esteemed as the
army and navy.

As long as the people of the West,

taught by the workings of defective and
demoralizing land laws, look upon the
public domain as their own property, to
plunder and devastate at will, and as long
as the Western States allow themselves
to be represented in Congress by the at-
torneys of a few great mining companies,
notorious plunderers of public property,
there is little hope that such legislation
as the gravity of the situation demands
can be secured in Congress ; but it cannot
be repeated too often that unless there is
a radical reform in the management of
the forests on the public domain, the
prosperity of the whole country west of
the one hundredth meridian must gradu-
ally diminish with the vanishing forests,
and that without active and energetic
military control nothing can save these
forests from extermination. The Na-
tional Academy of Sciences, in pointing
out the dangers which threaten the West
as natural results of the destruction of
its forests, and in suggesting simple and
economical measures by which these dan-
gers can be averted, has performed a dif-
ficult public service of first-rate impor-
tance, and the report should be careful-
ly read by every one interested in this
country.

VERSE UNDER PROSAIC CONDITIONS.

EVERY one remembers the striking
chapter^ Notre Dame in which Claude
Frollo muses on the effect of the new art
of printing upon architecture. Lifting
his eyes from the book to the cathedral,
he exclaims, " This will supplant that ! "
The words contain more truth than most
of Victor Hugo's aphorisms. It seems to
be a law of compensation that one form
of mental activity is bought at the price
of some other. Printing may have dis-
placed architecture ; the question now
arises, Has the steam-engine destroyed

poetry ? All admit that poetry is for the
present obscured ; many look forward to
a revival, as has happened before after
prosaic, periods. But reflection raises a
more serious doubt : Is the age of poetry,
too, gone ? Has the roar of the factory
drowned the music of verse ?

The question is not so extravagant as
may appear at first blush. Poetry, to be
a living art, must be a natural expression
of life, not an exotic adornment. In or-
der to become this, the daily routine of
life must be capable of presentation in

272

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

poetic form, enhanced to a certain ex-
tent by the imagination, but still sub-
stantially like the reality. Now, this can
happen only when the ordinary events
of the day and the various implements
employed are all close to man, instinct
with man's activity and feeling, yet suf-
ficiently removed from the coarseness of
savage habit to be susceptible of beau-
ty. Without gainsay, the age of Homer
fulfilled these conditions more perfectly
than any other, and this is one reason
among several why the Homeric poems
have a peculiar fullness of interest which
has never been equaled. Critics have
asked why the mere sailing of a ship
is poetical in Homer in a way different
from anything in modern writing ; why
the mere putting on and off of clothing
has its charm. This is partly due, no
doubt, to the melodious sound of the
Greek language, but still more to the
nearness of these actions to man. The
simple sailing-vessel of Homer, every
part of which was shaped immediately
by the builder's craft, which was pro-
pelled by the winds and governed direct-
ly by the pilot's hand, is, pace Mr. Kip-
ling and MacAndrew's Hymn, a fitter
subject of poetry than an Atlantic steam-
er. So, too, a human interest clings to a
robe woven in the prince's halls by An-
dromache and her maidens, such as a gar-
ment of Worth's can scarcely possess.

M. Bourget tells humorously his ex-
perience in the Waldorf hotel in New
York, the impression its magnificence
made on him, and then his sense of be-
wilderment at the thought of all the
tubes, wires, and other mechanical de-
vices hidden within its frescoed walls.
It is a similar invasion of machinery
into all parfs of human activity that
renders modern life complicated, inter-
esting in many ways, but not poetical.
Indeed, any unimpassioned survey of re-
cent verse must enforce this truth. After
reading half a dozen or more volumes of
the day, one is ready to ask in despair
whether it were not wiser to acknow-

ledge frankly the fact, and turn our en-
ergy to other more fruitful tasks. So
true is this that the chief interest for the
critical reader in such works is the psy-
chological study of the different means
employed by various writers to escape
this prosaic necessity. If of somewhat
cynical disposition, he might establish
four pretty well - defined groups, — the
grotesque, the amateur, the dilettante,
and the decadent, — and find his pleasure
in so classifying the volumes of verse
that fell into his hands. Generally a
glance would suffice to determine the
genus.

Noticeable at present are the writers
of what, for want of better title, may
be called the grotesque, — writers who
make no pretension to original percep-
tion of beauty, but are inspired by an
inverted appreciation of the poems of
others. By catching the style of these
and exaggerating its mannerisms they
produce a grotesque effect very amusing
for the nonce. Calverley was the master
in this art, and clever imitation of his
work has been abundant down to the re-
cent volume of Mr. Seaman. But why,
might be asked in passing, is Swinburne
so admirable a mark for this foolery ?
And why do the English so excel in this
kind of writing ? Is it because the prac-
tical nature of the English is a little
ashamed of sentiment and pretty words ?

Other writers of the grotesque turn
their powers of parody to low forms of
life, whose crudeness and eccentricities
they magnify with more or less good
humor. Coarse dialect, or bad English
simply, brutality, the reeking wit of the
barrack -room or the gutter, are easily
caught. When these are warmed with
genuine human sympathy and redundant
picturesqueness of style, as in the case of
Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads, the re-
sult is pretty close to real poetry. We
have the nearness to man's life, however
much the celestial graces may be want-
ing. But take away this consummate

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

273

knowledge and skill, and the verse, as
seen in Kipling's imitators, may amuse
for a moment, but can hardly lay claim
to serious consideration. Such a book,
clever enough of its kind, is Mr. Cham-
bers's With the Band.1 The humor of
his army pieces has a pleasant rollicking
freshness, and may represent very well
life with the band ; at least, we all seem
to have seen Private McFadden drilling,
in the militia if not in the regular army,
and we can sympathize heartily with the
corporal.

"Sez Corporal Madden to Private McFadden :
' Yer figger wants padd'n' —
Sure, man, ye 've no shape !
Behind ye yer shoulders
Stick out like two bowlders ;
Yer shins is as thin
As a pair of pen-holders !
Wan — two !
Wan — two !

Yer belly belongs on yer back, ye Jew !
Wan — two !
Time ! Mark !

I 'm dhry as a dog — I can't shpake but I
bark ! ' "

It is a, pity Mr. Chambers has not
filled his volume with this roistering fun,
for the bits of tragic prose-poetry at the
end can hardly entertain any one.

" We passed into the forest, dim, vast,
vague with the swaying mystery of mist
and shadow ; and I heard her whisper,
' Dream no more.'

" I touched her lids, low, drooping :
' Dream ! dream ! for Faith is dead/ I
said.

" Then a blue star flashed," etc.

What amorphous thing is this, that has
not even the tone of genuine decadence
which it would simulate, but hovers in
the limbo of the amateur ?

It is perhaps hardly correct to say of
the gentle tribe of amateurs that their
effusions are debarred the true fields of
song by the complexity of modern ex-
istence. It might rather be said of them

1 With the Band. By ROBEKT W. CHAM-
BERS. New York : Stone & Kirnball. 1896.
VOL. LXXX. NO. 478. 18

as George Sand wrote to Flaubert,
" Our works are worth what we our-
selves are worth." A hard saying, often
repeated, yet constantly forgotten. In
these gentlemen, appreciation of poetry
is keen, ambition petulant, but the art
is lacking. Either the metre limps, or
the grammar is uncertain, or the ideas
are commonplace, — unless indeed all
three traits are found united. There
should seem to be a large number of
persons, mostly young, who read verse
with avidity, and, mistaking apprecia-
tion for inspiration, believe they could
create what they can understand. Alas,
the Muse is the most exacting of mis-
tresses ! They forget that the mere
mastery of the technique demands stren-
uous devotion ; they forget that high
poetry cannot be written unless the life
is passed in high thought, that great
passions can rarely be portrayed unless
such passions are indulged in. Hardly
shall a man spend the day at other tasks,
and then in the evening, when the brain
is fagged, turn easily to creative work.
Literature produced under such circum-
stances is generally honest enough in pur-
pose, healthy in sentiment, but flat and
unraised.

A noteworthy example of the better
writing of this kind is given us in Fu-
gitive Lines, by Henry Jerome Stockard.2
Some of the sonnets in his volume rise
distinctly above the common level, and
awaken regret that so many of the poems
are disfigured by crudities. Were they
all as admirable in expression as the son-
net entitled My Library, the captious ear
would not so often take offense : —

" At times these walls enchanted fade, it seems,
And, lost, I wander through the Long

Ago,—

In Edens where the lotus still doth grow,
And many a reedy river seaward gleams.
Now Pindar's soft-stringed shell blends with

my dreams,

And now the elfin horns of Oberon blow,
Or flutes Theocritus by the wimpling flow

2 Fugitive Lines. By HENRY JEROME STOCK-
ARD. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1897.

274

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

Of immemorial amaranth-margined streams.
Gray Dante leads me down the cloud-built

stair,
And parts with shadowy hands the mists

that veil
Scarred deeps distraught by crying winds

forlorn ;

By Milton stayed, chaotic steps I dare,
And, with his immaterial presence pale,
Stand on the heights flushed in creation's
morn ! "

Despite the doubtful characterization
of Pindar, this is, we think, decidedly bet-
ter than most of the modern verse pub-
lished ; but, on the other hand, too much
of the work is of a sort which, to bor-
row an epithet from the book itself, may
be called fountain-pen poetry, —

" My fountain pen, wherewith I write
This would-be poetry to-night."

Mr. Stockard was cruel to himself when
he printed these lines. They call to
mind a story of Leconte de Lisle, who
complained to some of the younger poets
of the uncertain quality of their verse.
" But we 're groping " (nous tdtonnons),
they explained. " Very well, but don't
grope in print," replied the master. A
philosopher might reflect with melan-
choly^on the invasion of the fountain pen
into the realms of Parnassus. The gray
goose-quill has a certain poetical tang ;
but the fountain pen imports into the very
workshop of the Muses the machinery
which benumbs the lyric sense.

in.

The effort to escape prosaic surround-
ings is more evident in a third group
who flee to Nature for refuge. The re-
sult is a kind of dilettante-nature poetry,
often exquisite in form and delicate in
sentiment, but lacking in virile human
sympathy. Here it behooves one to
speak cautiously. Since Wordsworth's
advent the Nature cult has become so
firmly established that the skeptic is like
to suffer the penalties of a new Inquisi-
tion. But the question forces itself upon
us, Is it, after all, a very high form of
art which ignores human passion for the

contemplation of the inanimate world ?
If we may judge from the past, the pre-
dominance of descriptive writing signi-
fies a sure decay of creative force.

It is instructive to note with what con-
summate skill the great classic authors
used nature as a background for human
action ; how it was identified with the
mood of the agent, yet never overshad-
owed him ; how some aspect of the visi-
ble world was employed as a symbol of
the action, yet never intruded into the
narration. The sea in Homer has a
haunting? half-mystical affinity with the
moods of his heroes. We remember
the priest of Apollo walking in silence
by the shore of the many-sounding sea.
We remember that Achilles was the
child of an ocean goddess, apd see him
in his sullen wrath looking out over the
tumultuous waters. Odysseus, too, when
we first meet him, is sitting on the
beach, after his wont, gazing homeward
over the unharvested sea, wasting his
heart with tears and lamentations. And
throughout his wanderings, to the last
prophecy that his rest is to come after
establishing the worship of Poseidon in
a far inland country, always the ocean
is interwoven with his destiny. In both
poems the " murmurs and scents of the
infinite sea " are never far away ; and
yet how little of descriptive writing they
contain ! Action and emotion every-
where predominate. By Virgil and his
contemporaries Nature was introduced
more for her own sake, more after the
modern fashion. Yet here again two
things are to be noted : natural scenery
is less employed in its lonelier aspects
than as reflecting the works of man, and
the admiration of nature is intimately as-
sociated with a peculiar phase of search
for truth. Who does not cherish in mem-
ory the verses of the second Georgic,
which draw their inspiration from Lu'
cretius, ending with the famous

" Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere caussas " ?
Through Lucretius, Propertius, Virgil,

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

275

and others can be traced the enthusias-
tic belief that by means of the scientific
study of phenomena a philosophy was to
be discovered which should free the soul
from the sadness of life and the terrors
of death. In modern thought, a neces-
sary divorce has taken place between
man and nature on the one hand, between
contemplation and science on the other.
We love, or pretend to love, best scenes
unmarred by the hand of man ; we have
learned sadly, or think we have learned,
that no mystery of faith is to be wrung
from the study of physical laws.

In Shelley and Wordsworth, the mod-
ern high priests of Nature, the more pre-
cise philosophy of antiquity is replaced by
a dim, mystical pantheism which would
cheat the inquiring spirit into acquies-
cence. But this phase too has passed
away, and at present we are entertained
by a choir of songsters who treat us to
poems woven of tag-ends of description,
mostly brought together in a haphazard
fashion, and whose highest thought is
a mildly brooding reverie which may
soothe the ear, but hardly quickens the
imagination.

To be sure, this kind of poetry has
quite often a certain charm and even
justification of its own. The volume by
Harriet Prescott Spofford, named from
the introductory poem, In Titian's Gar-
den,1 is a notable instance of this. Re-
dundancy of epithets — a common trait
of the dilettante - nature school — vexes
the reader at times ; some of the poems
— the Story of the Iceberg, for exam-
ple— being little more than a jumble
of brilliant adjectives. Here and there
a lapse of taste distresses the ear, as in
the gruesome line,

" Oh, then the poet feels him part of all the
lovesome stirring thing."

Occasionally the verses fall into sheer
bathos. Thus, it is a pretty conceit,
however trite, to tell of the Making of

1 In Titian's Garden, and Other Poems. By
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. Boston : Cope-
land & Day. 1897.

the Pearl in an oyster; but is there
not something a little humorous in such
stanzas as these ?

" A tiny rasping grain of sand

It was, whose never-ceasing prick
Dispelled the charm of summer seas
And pierced him to the very quick.

" Ah, what a world_ of trouble now !

But straight he bent him to the strife,
And poured around that hostile thing
The precious ichor of his life.

" And storms could stoop and stir the deeps

To blackness, but he heeded not, —
The universe had nothing now
For him but that one fatal spot."

Yet such criticism is hardly just. The
book as a whole is pretty reading. It
leaves an impression on the mind like
that of an evening stroll along a coun-
try lane, when twilight throws a mellow
charm over the fields, and as we walk the
succession of pleasant sights and sounds
brings a gracious feeling of rest to the
heart. A fairer specimen of the author's
ability is The Violin, an expansion of the
happy motto, —

" Viva fui in sylvis,
Dum vixi tacui.
Mortua dulce cauo."

The conceit is ingenious, and justifies
the tendency to describe natural scenes
linearly ; that is, by a chain of impres-
sions loosely linked together.

" All the leaves were rustling in the forest,

All the springs were bubbling in the moss ;
What light laughter where the brooks were

spilling,
What lament I heard the branches toss,

Ah, what pipings gave me thrill on thrill !
All the world was wild with broken music —
I alone was silent, I was still.

" White the moonbeam wove its weird about

me,
Starshine clad my boughs with streaming

flame,

Mighty winds caressed me out of heaven,
Storm-clouds in a fleece upon me came,

Earth's deep juices fed me all my fill —
Strains swept through me fit for sovran sing-
ing—
I, alas, was silent, I was still."

Into the heart of the tree pass all the

276

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

melodies of the forest ; beneath its shade
lovers whisper their tale, and there in
the deep bracken at its root the wander-
er spends his soul with weeping, but the
tree is silent. Came the woodman with
his stroke ; came the craftsman with his
cunning, and framed the perfect instru-
ment ; and then at last

" Came the Master — drew his hand across

me —
Oh, what shocked me, what great throb of

bliss

Wakened me to pulse on pulse of rapture —
Soul my soul, I never dreamed of this !

Breath of horn and silver fret of flute,
Compass of all nature's various voices,

I was singing — I who once was mute !

" Winding waters, silken breezes blowing,
Fragrances of morning filled my tune,
Glimpses of the land where dreams arc man-
tled,
East o' the sun and rearward of the moon,

Songs from music's ever-swelling tide,
Music beating up the walls of heaven —
I had never sung had I not died ! "

IV.

Confronting the volume of New Po-
ems by the English poet Francis Thomp-
son,1 we have quite a different problem
to solve. The spirit of the book is so
wantonly contorted, yet lighted here and
there by such flashes of starry beauty,
that the mind of the reader is bewil-
dered. Let us admit frankly at the out-
set that we really comprehend almost all
Mr. Thompson has written. This is a
large confession ; for it means that time
and thought have been expended upon
him which might suffice for a pretty
careful reading of the whole of Shake-
speare. And then, having devoted so
much labor to the task, one is in doubt
whether to indulge in the satisfaction of
having mastered a difficult subject, or to
feel resentment that so much good time
has been filched away. Yet we would
not so humiliate our author as to boast
that all his work is comprehensible.
When a clever poet converts the old

1 New Poems. By FRANCIS THOMPSON. Bos-
ton: Copeland & Day. 1897.

axiom " Ars celare artem " into " Ars
celare sensum," something must be con-
ceded to his cunning. Mr. Thompson
himself has said of one of the poems, —

" This song is sung and sung not, and its words
are sealed ; "

and the reader adds reverently, "Who is
worthy to open the book, and to loose
the seals thereof ? "

What can be said of such willful ob-
scurity ? Its best excuse is that it is not
peculiar to the writer, but characteristic
of one large branch of the decadent school
to which he belongs. It is pathological.
In an age normally poetical, the common
daily happenings easily pass into song,
and poetry is the expression of a com-
plete life. The man of contorted, half-
dazed intelligence will hardly be received
as a poet, however he may pique curi-
osity as an oracle. But in a mechani-
cal prosaic period, when the current of
healthy activity turns strongly in another
direction, the singer is too often not the
strong man, the wise sane seer, but one
whose nerves are tingling with abnormal
excitement, and whose imagination is tor-
mented by unseizable phantasmagoria.
In place of poetry that is a true criti-
cism of life, various schools of decadence
start up, appealing each to its own co-
terie. Unintelligibility here is a seal of
genuineness, and escapes censure.

This obscurity, moreover, is one of
the signs of that general dissolution, or
confusion, of the mind and senses which
permeates decadent writing. First of all,
the language loses its firm mould, archaic
expressions jostle side by side with neo-
logisms, common words take on uncom-
mon meanings, compounds are formed
contrary to all recognized linguistic laws.
From the book before us a rich harvest
of such solecisms might be gathered. A
small sheaf may serve as specimens :
fledge-foot, ensuit, gardenered, skiey-gen-
dered, liberal-leaved, Weakening, spurted
(for stained), transpicuous, blosmy, pined
(used transitively), huest, sultry (as a
verb),perceivingness, etc. Mr. Thomp-

Verse under Prosaic Conditions.

277

son's vocabulary would appear to be
modeled after Elizabethan usage, show-
ing a predilection for the more dubious
eccentricities of that period, and after
the jargon of certain recent authors of
France. But it is not language alone
which suffers. A further confusion may
be observed in the curious interchange
of the attributes and epithets of the sev-
eral senses, especially of sight and hear-
ing. Any one familiar with the works of
Mallarme' and his compeers will recog-
nize this characteristic mark. The blind,
it is said, substitute for colors the vari-
ous sensations of sound, the word " red,"
in one case at least, producing an im-
pression like the blare of trumpets. It
is not uninteresting to compare this phe-
nomenon with the following : —

" So fearfully the sun doth sound
Clanging up behind Cathay."

' ' Though I the Orient never more shall feel
Break like a clash of cymbals."

Still deeper than this confusion of lan-
guage and sensation is the atony of mind
that is the very creating spirit of decad-
ence. Two tendencies may be observed :
a proneness to neurotic sensuality on the
one hand, and a hankering after mysti-
cism on the other ; both springing from
relaxation of the will, and a consequent
loss of grip on realities. These tenden-
cies may appear singly, or may be united
as in the case of Verlaine. In Mr.
Thompson sensuality is the last reproach
to be offered ; he shows, indeed, every-
where entire purity of feeling. Mysti-
cism, however, pervades the book from
beginning to end. Now, mysticism is
not rashly to be condemned when based
on a foundation of virile reflection ; but
in these New Poems, along with a vein
of genuine ideality, there is, we fear, a
good deal of vague reverie which arises
rather from super-excited nerves than
from strong self-restrained thought.

Yet it is pleasanter, in the case of
Mr. Thompson, to dwell on the nobler
side of his mysticism ; and nowhere does

his song rise higher than when describ-
ing the sacred office of the bard himself.
Pardoning the first line, how subtle is
this passage from Contemplation ! —

"For he, that conduit running wine of song,
Then to himself does most belong,
When he his mortal house unbars
To the importunate and thronging feet
That round our corporal walls unheeded

beat ;

Till, all containing, he exalt
His stature to the stars, or stars
Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault :
When, like a city under ocean,
To human things he grows a desolation,
And is made a habitation
For the fluctuous universe
To lave with unimpeded motion."

In The Mistress of Vision his refined
pantheism is worked out with cunning
skill. Admirable is this expression of
the terror of his vision : —

" Where is the land of Luthany,
And where the region Elenore ?
I do faint therefor.
' When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly

To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star ;
When thy song is shield and mirror
To the fair snake-curled Pain,
Where thou dar'st affront her terror
That on her thou may'st attain
Persian conquest ; seek no more,
O seek no more !

Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region
Elenore ! ' "

After all, we cannot lay down the vol-
ume without feeling that we have heard
strains of true singing, however much
obscured. It is the cry of a noble spirit,
that beholds the sky through prison-bars
and beats in vain against his cage.

"Ah!

If not in all too late and frozen a day
I come in rearward of the throats of song,
Unto the deaf sense of the aged year
Singing with doom upon me ; yet give heed !
One poet with sick pinion, that still feels
Breath through the Orient gateways closing fast,
Fast closing t'ward the undelighted night ! "

278

Illustrations of North American Butterflies.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF NORTH AMERICAN BUTTERFLIES.

IN the early part of 1868, Mr. W. H.
Edwards began the issue of an icono-
graphic serial publication on North
American butterflies.1 Planned as a
quarterly, but with no expectation of ex-
tending beyond a single volume, it has
appeared at irregular intervals up to the
present time, when, having in twenty-
nine years completed three quarto vol-
umes, with fifty or more colored plates
each, the veteran author lays down his
pen, quoting Spenser's lines : —

" And now we are ariued at the last
In wished harbour where we meane to rest ;

For now the Sunne low setteth in the West."

It is the story of a remarkable achieve-
ment. The only previous attempt to is-
sue such a work, by Titian Peale, had
ended with a first number, and Peale
was his own artist. Edwards, when he
began, had been known but a few years
as an entomologist ; he had to pay all
the charges of printer, draughtsman,
lithographer, and colorist, and could
hardly expect any adequate support from
a limited and generally impoverished
group of naturalists. Not a man of
wealth himself, he met with financial
losses during the progress of the work
which severely crippled him, and would
have utterly daunted any one less per-
sistent and enthusiastic than he ; and it
is only by the aid of grants from scien-
tific funds that he has been able to com-
plete his third volume.

Nevertheless, by great sacrifices he
has given to the world, at the cost of
many thousand dollars, what is on the
whole the finest series of illustrations of
butterflies that has ever appeared in any
country ; and if we take into proper ac-
count the proportion and character of
the figures which illustrate the history

1 The Butterflies of North America. By
W. H. EDWARDS. In three volumes. With

of butterflies, we may say, incomparably
the most valuable. This is due in very
large measure to his good fortune and
good sense in securing the services of
Miss (afterward Mrs.) Mary Peart, who
has not only drawn for him as needed all
the illustrations of the early stages,*first
on paper and afterward (excepting most
of the third volume) on stone, but has
also drawn- on stone all the butterflies of
the first two volumes, excepting the five
plates of the initial part. No drawings of
butterflies, whether in their early stages
or in the final stage, have ever been
made which surpass these for faithful
portrayal, delicate finish, and artistic ar-
rangement, and they have seldom been
equaled anywhere.

The work makes no pretense at being
a complete treatise, and the butterflies
are not treated in systematic order. It
was proposed at the start " to publish
a sufficient number of new or hither-
to unfigured or disputed species." No
Hesperids are treated of, and only a
few Lycaenids, which are confined to the
earlier parts. It is curious, also, to no-
tice that the Satyrids, which figure so
largely in the last volume, occupying in-
deed nearly half the plates, were not
considered at all in the first volume,
and but slightly in the second. Great
prominence is given to the genera Ar-
gynnis (33 species), Chionobas (19),
Colias (15), and Papilio (14), and rea-
sonably so, for they are dominant groups
of wide distribution, the species of which
are much disputed. In all, one hundred
and sixty - five species are illustrated
(about a fourth of our known fauna),
referred to twenty-eight genera, — more
than half the genera and nearly two
thirds the species being Nymphalidae ;
but it should be remembered that the

152 Colored Plates. Boston and New York:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1868-1897.

Illustrations of North American Butterflies.

279

author uses genera in a very broad sense,
while his attitude toward species is ra-
ther the reverse.

In his announcement in the first part,
Mr. Edwards said, "It is a matter of
regret that in so few instances I shall be
able to say anything of the larvae." Un-
til the seventh part of his work (1871)
no figure of any of the early stages
appeared on his plates ; but since then
only two parts have been issued (out of
thirty-four) in which some early stages
are not shown, and more than half of
the plates are used to some extent for
their illustration. The reason for this
is largely a happy discovery by Mr. Ed-
wards, in 1870, that by imprisoning
gravid females alive over their food-plant
they could be persuaded to lay any num-
ber of eggs. This discovery has com-
pletely changed our mode of studying
the life-histories, and placed us in this
country well in advance of our Euro-
pean brethren, who have been slow to
adopt this facile method ; one instance
of this will shortly be given. By ex-
periment he also proved that caterpillars
can be reared to maturity under condi-
tions very different from those natural
to them ; so that in his retired little cor-
ner in the Kenawha Valley, in West Vir-
ginia, he has been able to rear, and so to
draw and study in every stage, butterflies
from such distant and varied points as
the Rocky Mountains, California, British
Columbia, Canada, and Texas, simply
by having packages of fresh -laid eggs
sent him through the mail by collectors
at these points. It seems to have been
of little hindrance that his artist lived at
Philadelphia, more than three hundred
miles away ; for she too had her vivari-
um with its tiny inhabitants, which were
fed on plants constantly forwarded by
her indefatigable patron.

To this discovery, and particularly to
Mr. Edwards's persistence in carrying it
out, we owe our present minute know-
ledge of a very large proportion of our
butterflies. They are now easily studied

from the egg onward, and though fail-
ures perplex and thwart us, patience and
perseverance can win the entire field at
no very distant day. A previous know-
ledge of the food-plant is desirable, and
in many cases essential, but that can be
learned in the field by carefully watch-
ing the female at laying-time. Mr. Ed-
wards has thus pufc every part of the
country under contribution. No better
illustration of this can be given than
by citing Chionobas (the snow-rover, to
translate the term), a genus of butter-
flies peculiar to very elevated regions and
the far north. Up to the present time
hardly a figure has been published of
the early stages of any European species.
On the other hand, Mr. Edwards has
given a complete, or almost complete se-
ries of figures (amounting in all to two
hundred and sixty) of twelve of our spe-
cies, besides partial series of two others,
and nearly every one of these is given by
him for the first time. Yet not one of
them has Mr. Edwards seen alive in its
native haunts ; each had to be specially
sought for by some agent on high moun-
tain top, or region distant — often very
distant — from human habitation and
difficult of access. The agent had to re-
main on the inclement or wild spot long
enough, often days, to secure eggs free-
ly laid by an imprisoned female, whose
moods are dependent on sunshine and a
certain warmth. This is but one instance
out of many of our author's indomitable
perseverance.

But if Mr. Edwards has done so much
in pointing out the road to successful
study of the histories and life-stages of
butterflies, he has placed us under deeper
obligation by the generous way in which
he has translated his efforts into picto-
rial representation. Allusion has been
made to the large proportion of plates
illustrating the histories. It is of more
significance that these histories are shown
in such wonderful and almost lavish de-
tail. No less than sixty-nine species, or
nearly forty-two per cent, are so illus-

280

Illustrations of North American Butterflies.

trated, Belonging to twenty-four of the
twenty-eight genera, and there are near-
ly eleven hundred figures of the early
stages, mostly colored, or an average of
over fifteen to each species. Figures of
the butterfly are also given with equal
generosity, to show variation of color or
markings, or to illustrate polymorphic
species. There are more than eight hun-
dred and fifty colored figures of but-
terflies, or an average of more than five
figures for each species represented ; and
it is just the butterflies whose life-his-
tories are shown in the fullest detail
that are most lavishly illustrated in the
perfect stage. There are indeed ten but-
terflies (belonging to seven different gen-
era) which average sixteen figures each
of the butterfly and twenty-two of the
early stages, the climax being reached in
Lyccena pseudargiolus, of which thirty-
seven figures of the butterfly are given
and thirty-five of the early stages ; no
other butterfly in any part of the world
has ever received such copious treatment
as this.

This wonderful picture-book of na-
ture has done even more for us, for it
has been the means the author has taken
of depicting his highly interesting and
important discoveries in dimorphism and
polymorphism, the minutest details in
proof of which are given in the text.
These discoveries have been a fruitful
stimulus to similar studies in all parts of
the world, and in consequence the pre-
sent work may already be regarded as a
classic. Mr. Edwards's patient investi-
gation, year after year, of Papilio ajax,

Grapta interrogationis, Grapta comma,
Phyciodes tharos, and Lyccena pseudar-
giolus, and his trip to Colorado, when
past seventy years of age, for the pur-
pose of working out on the spot the com-
plicated story of Papilio bairdii-orego-
nia, can but elicit our warmest enthusi-
asm. They have placed science under
deep obligation to him.

May it not also be said that this real-
ly sumptuous work has its place in quick-
ening a popular interest in the study of
insect life ? As seen in public libraries
it ought to arouse the latent enthusiasm
of the young, even more perhaps than
the orderly arrangement of preserved
specimens of the same butterflies ; for in
looking at the several stages, brought to-
gether on the same plate, and in reading
the text, one is in imagination in a well-
ordered museum, under the guidance of
the director. It is from hours thus spent
that contagious interest spreads.

Although Mr. Edwards has arrived at
an age when it is hardly fair to expect
that he will feel inclined to continue
this costly publication, it is scarcely to be
looked for that he will intermit labors
that have been the enjoyment of his life.
Some means should be found by his
friends for the issue through existing
agencies of the considerable store of un-
published material still in his hands, the
incomparable work of Mrs. Peart. We
can but hope that some way may be
found for its publication during his life-
time and under his care. The Smith-
sonian Institution could undertake no
more fitting task.

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

281

THE CONFESSION OF A LOVER OF ROMANCE.

ONE half the world does not know
what the other half reads ; but good peo-
ple are now taught that the first requi-
site of sociological virtue is to interest
themselves in the other half. I there-
fore venture to call attention to a book
that has pleased me, though my delight
in it may at once class me with the
" submerged tenth " of the reading pub-
lic. It is The Pirate's Own Book.

By way of preface to a discussion of
this volume, let me make a personal ex-
planation of the causes which led me to
its perusal. My reading of such a book
cannot be traced to early habit. In my
boyhood I had no opportunity to study
the careers of pirates, for I was confined
to another variety of literature. On
Sunday afternoons I read aloud a book
called The Afflicted Man's Companion.
The unfortunate gentleman portrayed in
this work had a large assortment of af-
flictions, — if I remember rightly, one
for each day of the month, — but among
them was nothing so exciting as being
marooned in the South Seas. Indeed,
his afflictions were of a generalized and
abstract kind, which he could have borne
with great cheerfulness had it not been
for the consolations which were remorse-
lessly administered to him.

If I have become addicted to tales
of piracy, I must attribute it to the lit-
erary criticisms of too strenuous realists.
Before I read them, I took an innocent
pleasure in romantic fiction. Without
any compunction of conscience I rejoiced
in Walter Scott ; and when he failed I
was pleased even with his imitators. My
heart leaped up when I beheld a solitary
horseman on the first page, and I did
not forsake the horseman, even though I
knew he was to be personally conducted
through his journey by Mr. G. P. R.
James. Fenimore Cooper, in those days,
before I was awakened to the nature of

literary sin, I found altogether pleasant.
The cares of the world faded away, and
a soothing conviction of the essential
Tightness of things came over me, as the
pioneers and Indians discussed in delib-
erate fashion the deepest questions of
the universe, between shots. As for sto-
ries of the sea, I never thought of being
critical. I was ready to take thankfully
anything with a salty flavor, from Sind-
bad the Sailor to Mr. Clark Russell. I
had no inconvenient knowledge to inter-
fere with my enjoyment. All nautical
language was alike impressive, and all
nautical manoeuvres were to me alike
perilous. It would have been a poor
Ancient Mariner who could not have en-
thralled me, when

He held me with his skinny hand ;
" There was a ship," quoth he.

And if the ship had raking masts and
no satisfactory clearance papers, that was
enough ; as to what should happen, I left
that altogether to the author. That the
laws of probability held on the Spanish
Main as on dry land, I never dreamed.
But after being awakened to the sin
of romance, I saw that to read a novel
merely for recreation is not permissible.
The reader must be put upon oath, and
before he allows himself to enjoy any
incident must swear that everything is
exactly true to life as he has seen it. All
vagabonds and sturdy vagrants who have
no visible means of support, in the pre-
sent order of things, are to be driven
out of the realm of well-regulated fiction.
Among these are included all knights in
armor ; all rightful heirs with a straw-
berry mark ; 'all horsemen, solitary or
otherwise ; all princes in disguise ; all
persons who are in the habit of saying
" prithee," or " Odzooks," or " by my
halidome ; " all fair ladies who have no
irregularities of feature and no realistic
incoherencies of speech ; all lovers who

282

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

fall in love at first sight, and who are
married at the end of the book and live
happily ever after ; all witches, fortune-
tellers, and gypsies ; all spotless heroes'
and deep-dyed villains ; all pirates, buc-
caneers, North American Indians with
a taste for metaphysics ; all scouts, hunt-
ers, trappers, and other individuals who
do not wear store clothes. According to
this decree, all readers are forbidden to
aid and abet these persons, or to give
them shelter in their imagination. A
reader who should incite a writer of fic-
tion to romance would be held as an ac-
cessory before the fact.

After duly repenting of my sins and
renouncing my old acquaintances, I felt
a preeminent virtue. Had I met the
Three Guardsmen, one at a time or all
together, I should have passed them by
without stopping for a moment's con-
verse. I should have recognized them
for the impudent Gascons that they were,
and should have known that there was
not a word of truth in all their adven-
tures. As for Stevenson's fine old pi-
rate, with his contemptible song about a
" dead men's chest and a bottle of rum,"
I should not have tolerated him for an
instant. Instead, I should have turned
eagerly to some neutral-tinted person
who never had any adventure greater
than missing the train to Dedham, and
I should have analyzed his character,
and agitated myself in the attempt to
get at his feelings, and I should have
verified his story by a careful reference
to the railway guide. I should have
treated that neutral-tinted character as a
problem, and I should have noted all
the delicate shades in the futility of his
conduct. When, on any occasion that
called for actioii, ,he did not know his
own mind, I should have admired him
for his resemblance to so many of my
acquaintances who do not know their
own minds. After studving the problem
until I came to the last chapter, I should
suddenly have given it up, and agreed
with the writer that it had no solution.

In my self - righteousness, I despised
the old-fashioned reader who had been
lured on in the expectation that at the
last moment something thrilling might
happen.

But temptations come at the unguard-
ed point. I had hardened myself against
romance in fiction, but I had not been
sufficiently warned against romance in
the guise of fact. When in a bookstall
I came upon The Pirate's Own Book, it
seemed to answer a felt want. Here at
least, outside the boundaries of strict fic-
tion, I could be sure of finding adven-
ture, and feel again with Sancho Panza
" how pleasant it is to go about in ex-
pectation of accidents."

I am well aware that good literature
— to use Matthew Arnold's phrase — is
a criticism of life. But the criticism of
life, with its discriminations between
things which look very much alike, is
pretty serious business. We cannot keep
on criticising life without getting tired
after a while, and longing for something
a little simpler. There is a much-ad-
mired passage in Ferishtah's Fancies, in
which, after mixing up the beans in his
hands and speculating on their color, Fe-
rishtah is not able to tell black from
white. Ferishtah, living in a soothing
climate, could stand an indefinite amount
of this sort of thing ; and, moreover, we
must remember that he was a dervish,
and dervishry, although a steady occu-
pation, is not exacting in its require-
ments. In our more stimulating climate,
we should bring on nervous prostration
if we gave ourselves unremittingly to the
discrimination between all the possible
variations of blackishness and whitish-
ness. We must relieve our minds by oc-
casionally finding something about which
there can be no doubt. When my eyes
rested on the woodcut that adorns the
first page of The Pirate's Own Book, I
felt the rest that comes from perfect cer-
tainty in my own moral judgment. Fe-
rishtah himself could not have mixed me
up. Here was black without a redeem-

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

283

ing spot. On looking upon this pirate,
I felt relieved from any criticism of life ;
here was something beneath criticism.
I was no longer tossed ahout on a chop
sea, with its conflicting waves of feeling
and judgment, but was borne along tri-
umphantly on a bounding billow of moral
reprobation.

As I looked over the headings of the
chapters I was struck by their straightfor-
ward and undisguised character. When
I read the chapter entitled The Savage
Appearance of the Pirates, and compared
this with the illustrations, I said, " How
true ! " Then there was a chapter on
The Deceitful Character of the Malays.
I had always suspected that the Malays
were deceitful, and here I found my im-
pressions justified by competent authori-
ty. Then I dipped into the preface, and
found the same transparent candor. " A
piratical crew," says the author, " is gen-
erally formed of the Desperadoes and
renegades of every clime and nation."
Again I said, " Just what I should have
expected. The writer is evidently one
who ' nothing extenuates.' " Then fol-
lows a further description of the pirate :
" The pirate, from the perilous nature
of his occupation, when not cruising on
the ocean, that great highway of nations,
selects the most lonely isles of the sea
for his retreat, or secretes himself near
the shores of bays and lagoons of thick-
ly wooded and uninhabited countries."
Just the places where I should have ex-
pected him to settle.

" The pirate, when not engaged in rob-
bing, passes his time in singing old songs
with choruses like,

' Drain, drain the bowl, each fearless soul !

Let the world wag as it will ;
Let the heavens growl, let the devil howl,
Drain, drain the deep bowl and fill ! '

Thus his hours of relaxation are passed
in wild and extravagant frolics, amongst
the lofty forests and spicy groves of the
torrid zone, and amidst the aromatic and
beautiful flowering vegetable products of
that region."

Again : " With the name of pirate is
also associated ideas of rich plunder, —
caskets of buried jewels, chests of gold
ingots, bags of outlandish coins, secreted
in lonely out-of-the-way places, or buried
about the wild shores of rivers and un-
explored seacoasts, near rocks and trees
bearing mysterious marks, indicating
where the treasurers hid." " As it is
his invariable practice to secrete and
bury his booty, and from the perilous life
he lives being often killed, he can never
revisit the spot again, immense sums re-
maining buried in these places are irre-
vocably lost." Is it any wonder that,
with such an introduction, I became in-
terested ?

After a perusal of the book, I am in-
clined to think that a pirate may be a
better person to read about than some
persons who stand higher in the moral
scale. Compare, if you will, a pirate and
a pessimist. As a citizen and neighbor
I should prefer the pessimist. A pessi-
mist is an excellent and highly educated
gentleman, who has been so unfortunate
as to be born into a world which is inad-
equate to his expectations. Naturally he
feels that he has a grievance, and in air-
ing his grievance he makes himself un-
popular ; but it is certainly not his fault
that the universe is no better than it is.
On the other hand, a pirate is a bad char-
acter ; yet as a subject of biography he
is more inspiring than the pessimist. In
one case, we have the impression of one
good man in a totally depraved world ;
in the other case, we have a totally de-
praved man in what but for him would
be a very good world. I know of no-
thing that gives one a more genial ap-
preciation of average human nature, or
a greater tolerance for the foibles of
one's acquaintances, than the contrast
with an unmitigated pirate.

My copy of The Pirate's Own Book
belongs to the edition of 1837. On the
fly-leaf it bore in prim handwriting the
name of a lady who for many years must
have treasured it. I like to think of

284

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

this unknown lady in connection with
the book. I know that she must have
been an excellent soul, and I have no
doubt that her New England conscience
pointed to the moral law as the needle
to the pole ; but she was a wise woman,
and knew that if she was to keep her
conscience in good repair she must give
it some reasonable relaxation. I am sure
that she was a woman of versatile phil-
anthropy, and that every moment she
had the ability to make two duties grow
where only one had grown before. Af-
ter, however, attending the requisite num-
ber of lectures to improve her mind, and
considering in committees plans to im-
prove other people's minds forcibly, and
going to meetings to lament over the
condition of those who had no minds to
improve, this good lady would feel that
she had earned a right to a few min-
utes' respite. So she would take up The
Pirate's Own Book, and feel a creepy
sensation that would be an effectual coun-
ter irritant to all her anxieties for the
welfare of the race. Things might be
going slowly, and there were not half
as many societies as there ought to be,
and the world might be in a bad way ;
but then it was not so bad as it was in the
days of Black Beard ; and the poor peo-
ple who did not have any societies to be-
long to were, after all, not so badly off
as the sailors whom the atrocious Nicola
left on a desert island, with nothing but
a blunderbuss and Mr. Brooks's Family
Prayer Book. In fact, it is expressly
stated that the pirates refused to give
them a cake of soap. To be on a desert
island destitute of soap made the com-
mon evils of life appear trifling. She
had been worried about the wicked peo-
ple who would not do their duty, how-
ever faithfully they had been prodded
up to it, who would not be life members
on payment of fifty dollars, and who
would not be annual members on pay-
ment of a dollar and signing the consti-
tution, and who in their hard and im-
penitent hearts would not even sit on

the platform at the annual meeting ; but
somehow their guilt seemed less extreme
after she had studied again the picture of
Captain Kidd burying his Bible in the
sands near Plymouth. A man who would
bury his Bible, using a spade several
times too large for him, and who would
strike such a world-defy ing attitude while
doing it, made the sin of not joining the
society appear almost venial. In this
manner she gained a certain moral per-
spective ; even after days when the pub-
lic was unusually dilatory about reforms,
and the wheels of progress had begun to
squeak, she would get a good night's
sleep. Contrasting the public witli the
black background of absolute piracy, she
grew tolerant of its shortcomings, and
learned the truth of George Herbert's
saying, that " pleasantness of disposition
is a great key to do good."

Not only is a pirate a more comfort-
able person to read about than a pessi-
mist, but in many respects he is a more
comfortable person to read about than a
philanthropist. The minute the philan-
thropist is introduced, the author begins
to show his own cleverness by discovering
flaws in his motives. You begin to see
that the poor man has his limitations.
Perhaps his philanthropies are of a dif-
ferent kind from yours, and that irritates
you. Musical people, whom I have heard
criticise other musical people, seem more
offended when some one flats just a little
than when he makes a big ear-splitting
discord ; and moralists are apt to have
the same fastidiousness. The philan-
thropist is made the victim of the most
cruel kind of vivisection, — a character-
study.

Here is a fragment of conversation
from a study of character : " ' That was
really heroic,' said Felix. ' That was
what he wanted to do,' Gertrude went
on. ' He wanted to be magnanimous ;
he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure ;
he made up his mind to do his duty ;
he felt sublime, — that 's how he likes to
feel.' "

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

285

This leaves the mind in a painful state
of suspense. The first instinct of the un-
sophisticated reader is that if the person
has done a good deed, we ought not to
begrudge him a little innocent pleasure
in it. If he is magnanimous, why not let
him feel magnanimous ? But after Ger-
trude has made these subtle suggestions
we begin to experience spmething like
antipathy for a man who is capable of
having a fine moral pleasure ; who not
only does his duty, but really likes to do
it. There is something wrong about him,
and it is all the more aggravating because
we are not sure just what it is. There is
no trouble of that kind in reading about
pirates. You cannot make a character-
study out of a pirate, — he has no char-
acter. You know just where to place
him. You do not expect anything good
of him, and when you find a sporadic
virtue you are correspondingly elated.

For example. I 'am pleased to read of
the pirate Gibbs that he was " affable and
communicative, and when he smiled he
exhibited a mild and gentle countenance.
His conversation was concise and perti-
nent, and his style of illustration quite
original." If Gibbs had been a philan-
thropist, it is doubtful whether these so-
cial and literary graces would have been
so highly appreciated.

So our author feels a righteous glow
when speaking of the natives of the
Malabar coasts, and accounting for their
truthfulness : " For as they had been
used to deal with pirates, they always
found them men of honor in the way
of trade, — a people enemies of deceit,
and that scorned to rob but in their own
way."

He is a very literal-minded person,
and takes all his pirates seriously, but of-
ten we are surprised by some touch of
nature that makes the whole world kin.
There was the ferocious Benevedes, who
flourished on the west coast of South
America, and who, not content with sea
power, attempted to gather an army. It
is said that " a more finished picture of

a pirate cannot be conceived," and the
description that follows certainly bears
out this assertion. Yet he had his own
ideas of civilization, and a power of ad-
aptation that reminds us of the excel-
lent and ingenious Swiss Family Robin-
son. When he captures the American
whaling-ship Herculia, we are prepared
for a wild scene of -carnage ; but instead
we are told that Benevedes immediately
dismantled the ship, and "out of the
sails made trousers for half his army."
After the trousers had been distributed,
Benevedes remarked that his army was
complete except in one essential particu-
lar, — he had no trumpets for the caval-
ry : whereupon, at the suggestion of the
New Bedford skipper, he ripped off the
copper sheets of the vessel, out of which
a great variety of copper trumpets were
quickly manufactured, and soon " the
whole camp resounded with the warlike
blasts." While the delighted pirates were
enjoying their instrumental music, the
skipper and nine of the crew took oc-
casion to escape in a boat which had
been imprudently concealed on the river-
bank.

Most of the pirates seem to have con-
ducted their lives on a highly romantic,
not to say sensational plan. This repre-
hensible practice, of course, must shut
them off from the sympathy of all real-
ists of the stricter school, who hold that
there should be no dramatic situations,
and that even when a story is well be-
gun it should not be brought to a finish,
but should " peter out " in the last chap-
ters, no one knows how or why. Some-
times, however, a pirate manages to come
to an end sufficiently commonplace to
make a plot for a most irreproachable
novel. There was Captain Avery. He
commenced the practice of his profes-
sion very auspiciously by running away
with a ship of thirty guns from Bristol.
In the Indian Ocean he captured a trea-
sure-ship of the Great Mogul. In this
ship, it is said, " there were several of the
greatest persons of the court." There

286

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

was also on board the daughter of the
Great Mogul, who was on a pilgrimage
to Mecca. The painstaking historian
comments on this very justly : "It is
well known that the people of the East
travel with great magnificence, so that
they had along with them all their sla-ves,
with a large quantity of vessels of gold
and silver and immense sums of money.
The spoil, therefore, that Avery received
from that ship was almost incalculable."
To capture the treasure - ship of the
Great Mogul under such circumstances
would have turned the head of any or-
dinary pirate who had weakened his
mind by reading works tinged with ro-
manticism. His companions, when the
treasure was on board, wished to sail
to Madagascar, and there build a small
fort ; but " Avery disconcerted the plan
and rendered it altogether unnecessary."
We know perfectly well what these
wretches would have done if they had
been allowed to have their own way :
they would have gathered in one of the
spicy groves, and would have taken up
vociferously their song, —

" Drain, drain the bowl, each fearless soul !
Let the world wag as it will."

Avery would have none of this, so when
most of the men were away from the
ship he sailed off with the treasure, leav-
ing them to their evil ways and to a
salutary poverty. Here' begins the real-
ism of the story. With the treasures of
the Great Mogul in his hold, he did
not follow the illusive course of Captain
Kidd, " as he sailed, as he sailed." He
did not even lay his course for the
" coasts of Coromandel." Instead of that
he made a bee-line for America, with
the laudable intention of living there
" in affluence and honor." When he got
to America, however, he did not know
what to do with himself, and still less
what to do with the inestimable pearls
and diamonds of the Great Mogul. An
ordinary pirate of romance would have
escaped to the Spanish Main, but Avery
did just what any realistic gentleman

would do : after he had spent a short
time in other cities — he concluded to go
to Boston. The chronicler adds, " Ar-
riving at Boston, he almost resolved to
settle there." It was in the time of
the Mathers. But in spite of its educa-
tional and religious advantages, Boston
furnished no market for the gems of the
Orient, so Captain Avery went to Eng-
land. If he had in his youth read a few
detective stories, he might have known
how to get his jewels exchanged for
the current coin of the realm ; but hia
early education had been neglected, and
he was of a singularly confiding and
unsophisticated nature — when on land.
After suffering from poverty he made
the acquaintance of some wealthy mer-
chants of Bristol, who took his gems on
commission, on condition that they need
not inquire how he came by them. That
was the last Avery saw of the gems of
the Great Mogul. A plain pirate was
no match for financiers. Remittances
were scanty, though promises were fre-
quent. What came of it all ? Nothing
came of it ; things simply dragged along.
Avery was not hanged, neither did he
get his money. At last, on a journey to
Bristol to urge the merchants to a set-
tlement, he fell sick and died. What
became of the gems ? Nobody knows.
What became of those merchants of Bris-
tol ? Nobody cares. A novelist might,
out of such material, make an ending
quite clever and dreary.

To this realistic school of pirates be-
longs Thomas Veal, known in our his-
tory as the " Pirate of Lynn." To turn
from the chapter on the Life, Atroci-
ties, and Bloody Death of Black-Beard
to the chapter on the Lynn Pirate, is
a relief to the overstrained sensibilities.
Lynn is in the temperate zone, and we
should naturally reason that its piracies
would be more calm and equable than
those of the tropics, and so they were.
" On one pleasant evening, a little after
sunset, a small vessel was seen to anchor
near the mouth of the Saugus River.

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

287

A boat was presently lowered from her
side, into which four men descended and
moved up the river." It is needless
to say that these men were pirates. In
the morning the vessel had disappeared,
but a man found a paper whereon was a
statement that if a quantity of shackles,
handcuffs, and hatchets were placed in a
certain nook, silver would be deposited
near by to pay for them. The people
of Lynn in those days were thrifty folk,
and the hardware was duly placed in
the spot designated, and the silver was
found as promised. After some months
four pirates came and settled in the woods.
The historian declares it to be his opin-
ion (and he speaks as an expert) that it
would be impossible to select a place
more convenient for a gang of pirates.
He draws particular -attention to the fact
that the " ground was well selected for
the cultivation of potatoes and common
vegetables." This shows that the New
England environment gave an industri-
al and agricultural cast to piracy which
it has not had elsewhere. In fact, after
reading the whole chapter, I am struck
by the pacific and highly moral charac-
ter of these pirates. The last of them
— Thomas Veal — took up his abode in
what is described as a " spacious cavern,"
about two miles from Lynn. " There
the fugitive fixed his residence, and prac-
ticed the trade of a shoemaker, occasion-
ally coming down to the village to obtain
articles of sustenance." By uniting the
occupations of market- gardening, shoe-
making, and piracy, Thomas Veal man-
aged to satisfy the demands of a frugal
nature, and to live respected by his neigh-
bors in Lynn. It must have been a great
alleviation in the lot of the small boys,
when now and then they escaped from
the eyes of the tithing-men, and in the
cave listened to Mr. Veal singing his
pirate's songs. Of course a solo could
give only a faint conception of what the
full chorus would have been in the trop-
ical forests, but still it must have curdled
the blood to a very considerable extent.

There is, I must confess, a certain air
of vagueness about this interesting nar-
ration. No overt act of piracy is men-
tioned. Indeed, the evidence in regard
to the piratical character of Mr. Veal, so
far as it is given in this book, is largely
circumstantial.

There is, first, the geographical argu-
ment. The Saugus River, being a wind-
ing stream, was admirably adapted for
the resort of pirates who wished to prey
upon the commerce of Boston and Salem.
This establishes the opportunity and mo-
tive, and renders it antecedently proba-
ble that piracy was practiced. The river,
it is said, was a good place in which to
secrete boats. This we know from our
reading was the invariable practice of
pirates.

Another argument is drawn from the
umbrageous character of the Lynn woods.
We are told with nice particularity that
in this tract of country " there were many
thick pines, hemlocks, and cedars, and
places where the rays of the sun at noon
could not penetrate." Such a place would
be just the spot in which astute pirates
would be likely to bury their treasure,
confident that it would never be discov-
ered. The fact that nothing ever has
been discovered here seems to confirm
this supposition.

The third argument is that while a
small cave still remains, the " spacious
cavern " in which Thomas Veal, the pi-
ratical shoemaker, is said to have dwelt
no longer exists. This clinches the evi-
dence. For there was an earthquake
in 1658. What more likely than that,
in the earthquake, " the top of the rock
was loosened and crushed down into the
mouth of the cavern, inclosing the unfor-
tunate inmate in its unyielding prison"?
At any rate, there is no record of Mr.
Veal or of his spacious cavern after that
earthquake.

No one deserves to be called an anti-
quarian who cannot put two and two to-
gether, and reconstruct from these data
a more or less elaborate history of the

288

The Confession of a Lover of Romance.

piracies of Mr. Thomas Veal. The only
other explanation of the facts presented,
that I can think of as having any degree
of plausibility, is that possibly Mr. Veal
may have been an Anabaptist, escaped
from Boston, who imposed upon the peo-
ple of Lynn by making them believe that
he was only a pirate.

I must in candor admit that the Plu-
tarch of piracy is sometimes more edi-
fying than entertaining. He can never
resist the temptation to draw a moral,
and his dogmatic bias in favor of the
doctrine of total depravity is only too
evident. But his book has the great
advantage that it is not devoid of inci-
dent. Take it all in all, there are worse
books to read — after one is tired of
reading books that are better.

I am inclined to think that our novel-
ists must make home happy, or they may
drive many of their readers to The Pi-
rate's Own Book. The policy of the
absolute prohibition of romance, while ex-
cellent in theory, has practical difficul-
ties in the way of enforcement. Perhaps,
under certain restrictions, license might
be issued to proper persons to furnish
stimulants to the imagination. Of course
the romancer should not be allowed to
sell to minors, nor within a certain dis-
tance of a schoolhouse, nor to habitual
readers. My position is the conserva-

tive one that commended itself to the
judicious Rollo.

« ' Well, Rollo,' said Dorothy, ' shall I
tell you a true story, or one that is not
true ? '

" ' I think, on the whole, Dorothy, I
would rather have it true.' "

But there must have been times —
though none are recorded — when Rollo
tired even of the admirable clear think-
ing and precise information of Jonas.
At such times he might have tolerated
a story that was not so very true, if only
it were interesting. There are main
thoroughfares paved with hard facts
where the intellectual traffic must go on
continually. There are tracks on which,
if a heedless child of romance should
stray, he is in danger of being run down
by the realists, those grim motor-men of
the literary world. But outside the con-
gested districts there should be some
roadways leading out into the open
country where all things are still pos-
sible. At the entrance to each of these
roads there ought to be displayed the
notice, " For pleasure only. No heavy
teaming allowed." I should not permit
any modern improvements in this dis-
trict, but I should preserve all its natural
features. There should be not only a
feudal castle with moat and drawbridge,
but also a pirate's cave.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
a jftaga^ine of literature, Science, art> anD

VOL. LXXX. — SEPTEMBER, 1897. — No. CCCCLXXIX.

MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION: THE NEW YORK POLICE FORCE.

IN New York, in the fall of 1894,
Tammany Hall was overthrown by a
coalition composed partly of the regular
Republicans, partly .of anti-Tammany
Democrats, and partly of Independents.
Under the last head must be included
a great many men who in national poli-
tics habitually act with one or the other
of the two great parties, but who feel
that in municipal politics good citizens
should act independently. The tidal
wave, which was running high against
the Democratic party, was undoubtedly
very influential in bringing about the
anti - Tammany victory ; but the chief
factor in producing the result was the
widespread anger and disgust felt by
decent citizens at the corruption which
under the sway of Tammany had honey-
combed every department of the city gov-
ernment, but especially the police force.
A few well - meaning persons have at
times tried to show that this corruption
was not actually so very great. In reality
it would be difficult to overestimate the
utter rottenness of many branches of the
city administration. There were a few
honorable and high-minded Tammany
officials, and there were a few bureaus
which were conducted with some mea-
sure of efficiency, although dishonestly.
But the corruption had become so wide-
spread as seriously to impair the work
of administration, and to bring us back
within appreciable distance of the days
of Tweed.

The chief centre of corruption was the
police department. No man not inti-

mately acquainted with both the lower
and the humbler sides of New York life
— for there is a wide distinction between
the two — can realize how far this cor-
ruption extended. Except in rare in-
stances, where prominent politicians made
demands which could not be refused,
both promotions and appointments to-
wards the close of Tammany rule were
almost solely for money, and the prices
were discussed with cynical frankness.
There was a well-recognized tariff of
charges, ranging from two or three hun-
dred dollars for appointment as a patrol-
man, to twelve or fifteen thousand dol-
lars for promotion to the position of cap-
tain. The money was reimbursed to those
who paid it by an elaborate system of
blackmail. This was chiefly carried on
at the expense of gamblers, liquor sellers,
and keepers of disorderly houses ; but
every form of vice and crime contributed
more or less, and a great many respect-
able people who were ignorant or timid
were blackmailed under pretense of for-
bidding or allowing them to violate ob-
scure ordinances, and the like. From top
to bottom the New York police force was
utterly demoralized by the gangrene of
such a system, where venality and black-
mail went hand in hand with the basest
forms of low ward politics, and where
the policeman, the ward politician, the
liquor seller, and the criminal alternate-
ly preyed on one another and helped one
another to prey on the general public.

In May, 1895, I was made president
of the newly appointed police board,

290

Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force.

whose duty it was to cut out the chief
source of civic corruption in New York
by cleansing the police department. The
police board consisted of four members ;
all four of the new men were appointed
by Mayor Strong, the reform mayor,
who had taken office in January.

With me was associated as treasurer
of the board Mr. Avery D. Andrews.
He was a Democrat and I a Republican,
and there were questions of national poli-
tics on which we disagreed widely ; but
such questions could not enter into the
administration of the New York police,
if that administration was to be both
honest and efficient ; and as a matter of
fact, during my two years' service, Mr.
Andrews and I worked in absolute har-
mony on every important question of
policy which arose. The prevention of
blackmail and corruption, the repression
of crime and violence, the safeguarding of
life and property, securing honest elec-
tions, and rewarding efficient and punish-
ing inefficient police service, are not, and
cannot properly be made, questions of
party difference. In other words, such a
body as the police force of New York
can be wisely and properly administered
only upon a non-partisan basis, and both
Mr. Andrews and myself were quite in-
capable of managing it on any other.
There were many men who helped us in
our work ; and among them all, the man
who helped us most, by advice and coun-
sel, by stalwart, loyal friendship, and by
ardent championship of all that was good
against all that was evil, was Jacob A.
Riis, the author of How the Other Half
Lives.

Certain of the difficulties we had to
face were merely those which confronted
the entire reform administration in its
management of the municipality. Many
worthy people expected that this reform
administration would work an absolute
revolution, not merely in the govern-
ment, but in the minds of the citizens as
a whole ; and felt vaguely that they had
been cheated because there was not an

immediate cleansing of every bad influ-
ence in civic or social life. Moreover,
the different bodies forming the victori-
ous coalition felt the pressure of conflict-
ing interests and hopes. The mass of
effective strength was given by the Re-
publican organization, and not only all
the enrolled party workers, but a great
number of well - meaning Republicans
who had no personal interest at stake ex-
pected the administration to be used to
further the fortunes of their own party.
Another great body of the administra-
tion's supporters took a diametrically
opposite view, and believed that the
municipality should be governed without
the slightest reference whatever to party.
In theory , they were quite right, and
I cordially sympathized with them ; but
in reality the victory could not have been
won by the votes of this class of people
alone, and it was out of the question to
put their theories into complete effect.
Like all other men who actually try to
do things instead of confining themselves
to saying how they should be done, the
members of the new city government
were obliged to face the facts, and to do
the best they could in the effort to get
some kind of good result out of the con-
flicting forces. They had to disregard
party so far as was possible ; and yet
they could not afford to disregard all
party connections so utterly as to bring
the whole government to grief.

In addition to these two large groups
of supporters, there were other groups,
also possessing influence, who expected
to receive recognition distinctly as Demo-
crats, but as anti-Tammany Democrats ;
and such members of any victorious co-
alition are always sure to overestimate
their own services, and to feel that they
are ill-treated.

It is of course an easy thing to show
on paper that the municipal administra-
tion should have been conducted with-
out any regard whatever to party lines,
and if the bulk of the people saw things
with entire clearness, the truth would

Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force. 291

seem so obvious as to need no demon-
stration. But the great majority of those
who voted the new administration into
power neither saw this nor realized it,
and in politics, as in life generally, con-
ditions must be faced as they are, and
not as they ought to be. The regular
Democratic organization, not only in the
city, but in the State, was completely un-
der the dominion of Tammany Hall and
its allies, and they fought us at every step
with wholly unscrupulous hatred. In the
State and the city alike, the Democratic
campaign was waged against the reform
administration in New York. The Tam-
niany officials who were still left in power
in the city, headed by the comptroller,
Mr. Fitch, did everything in their power
to prevent the new administration from
giving the city an efficient government.
The Democratic members of the legis-
lature acted as their faithful allies in all
such efforts. Whatever was accomplished
by the reform administration — and a
very great deal was accomplished — was
due to the action of the Republican ma-
jority in the Constitutional Convention,
and especially to the Republican gov-
ernor, Mr. Morton, and the Republican
majority in the legislature, who enacted
laws giving to the newly chosen mayor,
Mr. Strong, the great powers necessary
for properly discharging the duties of his
office. Without these laws the mayor
would have been very nearly powerless.
He certainly could not have done a tenth
part of what actually was done.

Now, of course, the Republican poli-
ticians who gave Mayor Strong all these
powers, in the teeth of violent Demo-
cratic opposition to every law for the
betterment of civic conditions in New
York, ought not, under ideal conditions,
to have expected the slightest reward.
They should have been contented with
showing the public that their only pur-
pose was to serve the public, and that
the Republican party wished no better
reward than the consciousness of having
done its duty by the State and the city.

But as a whole they had not reached
such a standard. There were some who
had reached it ; there were others who,
though perfectly honest, and wishing to
see good government prosper, yet felt
that somehow it ought to be combined
with party advantage of a tangible sort ;
and finally there were yet others who
were not honest at all and cared nothing
for the victory, unless it resulted in some
way to their own personal advantage.
In short, the problem presented was of
the kind which usually is presented when
men are to be dealt with as a mass. The
mayor and his associates had to keep in
touch with the Republican party, or they
could have done nothing ; and, on the
other hand, there was much that the Re-
publican machine asked which could not
be granted, because a surrender on cer-
tain vital points meant the abandonment
of the whole effort to obtain good gov-
ernment.

The undesirability of breaking with
the Republican organization was shown
by what happened in the management
of the police department. This, being
the great centre of power, was the espe-
cial object of the Republican machine
leaders. Toward the close of Tam-
many rule, of the four police commis-
sioners, two had been machine Republi-
cans, whose actions were in no wise to
be distinguished from those of their
Tammany colleagues ; and immediately
after the new board was appointed to
office the machine got through the legis-
lature the so-called bi-partisan or Lexow
law, under which the department is at
present conducted ; and a more foolish
or vicious law was never enacted by
any legislative body. It modeled the
government of the police force some-
what on the lines of the Polish Parlia-
ment, and it was avowedly designed
to make it difficult to get effective ac-
tion. It provided for a four - headed
board, in which it was hard to get a
majority anyhow ; but, lest we should
get such a majority, it gave each mem-

292 Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force.

her power to veto the actions of his col-
leagues in certain very important mat-
ters ; and, lest we should do too much
when we were unanimous, it provided
that the chief, our nominal subordi-
nate, should have entirely independent
action in the most essential matters, and
should be practically irremovable except
for proved corruption, so that he was
responsible to nobody. The mayor was
similarly hindered from removing any
police commissioner: when one of our
colleagues began obstructing the work of
the board, and thwarting its effort to re-
form the force, the mayor in vain strove
to turn him out. In short, there was a
complete divorce of power from respon-
sibility, and it was exceedingly difficult
either to do anything, or to place any-
where the responsibility for not doing it.
If by any reasonable concessions, if
indeed by the performance of any act
not incompatible with our oaths of office,
we could have stood on good terms with
the machine, we would assuredly have
made the effort, even at the cost of sac-
rificing many of our ideals ; and in al-
most any other department we could
probably have avoided a break ; but in
the police force such a compromise was
not possible. What was demanded of
us usually took some such form as the
refusal to enforce certain laws, or the
protection of certain lawbreakers, or
the promotion of the least fit men to
positions of high power and grave re-
sponsibility ; and on such points it was
not possible to yield. We were obliged
to treat all questions that arose purely
on their merits, without reference to the
desires of the politicians. We went into
this course with our eyes open, for we
knew the trouble it would cause us per-
sonally, and, what was far more impor-
tant, the way in which our efforts for
reform would consequently be hampered.
However, there was no alternative, and
we had to abide by the result. We had
counted the cost before we adopted our
plan, and we followed it resolutely to

the end. We could not accomplish all
that we should have liked to accomplish,
for we were shackled by preposterous
legislation, and by the opposition and in-
trigues of the basest machine politicians,
which cost us the support, sometimes of
one, and sometimes of both, of our col-
leagues. Nevertheless, the net result of
our two years of work was that we did
more to increase the efficiency and hon-
esty of the police department than had
ever previously been done in its history.

Besides suffering, in aggravated form,
from the ^difficulties which beset the
course of the entire administration, the
police board had to encounter — and
honest and efficient police boards must
always encounter — certain special and
peculiar difficulties. It is not a pleasant
thing to deal with criminals and purvey-
ors of vice. It is very rough work, and
it cannot always be done in a nice man-
ner. The man with the night stick, the
man in the blue coat with the helmet, can
keep order and repress open violence on
the streets ; but most kinds of crime and
vice are ordinarily carried on furtively
and by stealth, perhaps at night, perhaps
behind closed doors. It is possible to
reach them only by the employment of
the man in plain clothes, the detective.
Now the function of the detective is pri-
marily that of the spy, and it is always
easy to arouse feeling against a spy. It
is absolutely necessary to employ him.
Ninety per cent of the most dangerous
criminals and purveyors of vice cannot
be reached in any other way. But the
average citizen who does not think deep-
ly fails to realize the need for any such
employment. In a vague way he desires
vice and crime put down ; but, also in a
vague way, he objects to the only possible
means by which they can be put down.
It is easy to mislead him into denoun-
cing what is unavoidably done in order
to carry out the very policy for which he
is clamoring.

The Tammany officials of New York,
headed by the comptroller, made a sys-

Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force. 293

tematic effort to excite public hostility
against the police for their warfare on
vice. The lawbreaking liquor seller, the
keeper of disorderly houses, and the
gambler had been influential allies of
Tammany, and head contributors to its
campaign chest. Naturally Tammany
fought for them ; and the effective way
in which to carry on such a fight was
to portray with gross exaggeration and
misstatement the methods necessarily
employed by every police force which
honestly endeavors to do its work. The
methods are unpleasant, just as the
methods employed in any surgical op-
eration are unpleasant ; and the Tam-
many champions were able to arouse a
good deal of feeling against the police
board for precisely the same reason that
a century ago it was easy to arouse what
were called " doctors' mobs " against
surgeons who cut up dead bodies. In
neither case is the operation attractive,
and it is one which readily lends itself
to denunciation ; but in both cases the
action must be taken if there is a real
intention to get at the disease.

Tammany found its most influential
allies in the sensational newspapers. Of
all the forces that tend for evil in a great
city like New York, probably no other is
so potent as the sensational press. Until
one has had experience with them it is
difficult to realize the reckless indiffer-
ence to truth or decency displayed by
papers such as the two that have the
largest circulation in New York city.
Scandal forms the breath of the nostrils
of such papers, and they are quite as
ready to create as to describe it. To
sustain law and order is humdrum, and
does not furnish material for flaunting
woodcuts ; but if the editor will stoop,
and make his subordinates stoop, to rak-
ing the gutters of human depravity, to
upholding the wrongdoer and furiously
assailing what is upright and honest, he
can make money, just as other types of
pander make it. The man who is to do
honorable work in any form of civic

politics must make up his mind (and if
he is a man of properly robust charac-
ter he will make it up without difficulty)
to treat the assaults of papers like these
with absolute indifference, and to go his
way unheeding. He will have to make
up his mind to be criticised also, some-
times justly, and more often unjustly,
even by decent people ; and he must not
be so thin-skinned as to mind such criti-
cism overmuch.

In administering the police force, we
found, as might be expected, that there
was no need of genius, nor indeed of
any very unusual qualities. What was
required was the exercise of the plain, or-
dinary virtues, of a rather commonplace
type, which all good citizens should be
expected to possess. Common sense,
common honesty, courage, energy, reso-
lution, readiness to learn, and a desire
to be as pleasant with everybody as was
compatible with a strict performance of
duty, — these were the qualities most
called for. We soon found that, in spite
of the widespread corruption which had
obtained in the New York police depart-
ment, most of the men were heartily
desirous of being honest. There were
some who were incurably dishonest, just
as there were some who had remained
decent in spite of terrific temptation and
pressure, but the great mass came in
between. Although not possessing the
stamina to war against corruption when
the odds seemed well-nigh hopeless, they
were, nevertheless, heartily glad to be de-
cent, and they welcomed the change to a
system under which they were rewarded
for doing well, and punished for doing ill.

Our methods for restoring order and
discipline were simple, and hardly less so
were our methods for securing efficiency.
We made frequent personal inspections,
especially at night, going anywhere, at
any time. In this way we soon got an
idea of whom among our upper subor-
dinates we could trust and whom we
could not. We then proceeded to pun-
ish those who were guilty of shortcom-

294 Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force.

ings, and to reward those who did well,
refusing to pay any heed whatever to
anything except the man's own charac-
ter and record. A very few promotions
and dismissals sufficed to show -our sub-
ordinates that at last they were dealing
with superiors who meant what they said,
and that the days of political " pull "
were over while we had the power. The
effect was immediate. The decent men
took heart, and those who were not decent
feared longer to offend. The morale of
the entire force improved steadily.

A similar course was followed in refer-
ence to the relations between the police
and citizens generally. There had for-
merly been much complaint of the brutal
treatment by police of innocent citizens.
This was stopped peremptorily by the
obvious expedient of dismissing from the
force the first two or three men who
were found guilty of brutality. On the
other hand, we made the force under-
stand that in the event of any emergen-
cy requiring them to use their weapons
against either a mob or an individual
criminal, the police board backed them
up without reservation. Our sympathy
was for the friends, and not the foes, of
order. If a mob threatened violence, we
were glad to have the moh hurt. If a
criminal showed fight, we expected the
officer to use any weapon that was re-
quisite to overcome him on the instant,
and even, if it became needful, to take
life. All that the board required was
to be convinced that the necessity really
existed. We did not possess a particle
of that maudlin sympathy for the crimi-
nal, disorderly, and lawless classes which
is such a particularly unhealthy sign of
social development ; and we were deter-
mined that the improvement in the fight-
ing efficiency of the police should keep
pace with the improvement in their moral
tone.

To break up the system of blackmail
and corruption was less easy. It was
not at all difficult to protect decent peo-
ple in their rights, and this result was

effected at once. But the criminal who
is blackmailed has a direct interest in
paying the blackmailer, and it is not
easy to get information about it. Never-
theless, we put a complete stop to most
of the blackmail by the simple process of
rigorously enforcing the laws, not only
against crime, but against vice.

It was the enforcement of the liquor
law which caused most excitement. In
New York, we suffer from the altogether
too common tendency to enact any law
which a certain section of the communi-
ty wants, and then to allow that law to
become very nearly a dead-letter if any
other section of the community objects
to it. The multiplication of laws by the
legislature and their partial enforcement
by the executive authorities go hand in
hand, and offer one of the many serious
problems with which we are -confronted
in striving to better civic conditions.
New York State felt that liquor should
not be sold on Sunday. The larger part
of New York city wished to drink liquor
on Sunday. Any man who studies the
social condition of the poor knows that
liquor works more ruin than any other
one cause. He knows also, however,
that it is simply impracticable to extir-
pate the habit entirely, and that to at-
tempt too much often results merely in
accomplishing too little ; and he knows,
moreover, that for a man alone to drink
whiskey in a bar-room is one thing, and
for men with their families to drink
light wines or beer in respectable restau-
rants is quite a different thing. The
average citizen, who does not think at all,
and the average politician of the baser
sort, who thinks only about his own
personal advantage, find it easiest to dis-
regard these facts, and to pass a liquor
law which will please the temperance
people, and then trust to the police de-
partment to enforce it with such laxity
as to please the intemperate.

The results of this pleasing system
were evident in New York when our
board came into power. The Sunday

Municipal Administration : The New York Police Force. 295

liquor law was by no means a dead-let-
ter in New York city. On the contrary,
no less than eight thousand arrests for
its violation had been made under the
Tammany regime the year before we
came in. It was very much alive, but
it was executed only against those who
either had no political pull or refused to
pay blackmail.

The liquor business does not stand on
the same footing with other occupations.
It always tends to produce criminality in
the population at large, and lawbreaking
among the saloon-keepers themselves.
It is absolutely necessary to supervise it
rigidly, and to impose restrictions upon
the traffic. In large cities the ' traffic
cannot be stopped, but the evils can at
least be minimized. In New York, the
saloon-keepers have always stood high
among professional politicians. Nearly
two thirds of the political leaders of Tam-
many Hall have been in the liquor busi-
ness at one time or another. The saloon
is the natural club and meeting-place for
the ward heelers and leaders, and the
bar-room politician is one of the most
common and best recognized factors in
local government. The saloon-keepers
are always hand in glove with the pro-
fessional politicians, and occupy toward
them such a position as is not held by
any other class of men. The influence
they wield in local politics has always
been very great, and until our board took
office no man ever dared seriously to
threaten them for their flagrant viola-
tions of the law.. The powerful and in-
fluential saloon-keeper was glad to see
the shops of his neighbors closed, for it
gave him business. On the other hand,
a corrupt police captain, or the corrupt
politician who ^controlled him, could al-
ways extort money from a saloon-keeper
by threatening to close his place and let
his neighbor's remain open. Gradually
the greed of corrupt police officials and
of corrupt politicians grew by what it fed
on, until they began to blackmail all but
the very most influential liquor sellers ;

and as liquor sellers were numerous and
the profits of the liquor business great,
the amount collected was enormous.

The reputable saloon-keepers them-
selves found this condition of blackmail
and political favoritism almost intoler-
able. The law which we found on the
statute books had been put on by a Tam-
many legislature, three years earlier. A
couple of months after we took office,
Mr. J. P. Smith, the editor of the liquor
dealers' organ, The Wine and Spirit
Gazette, gave out the following inter-
view, which is of such an extraordinary
character that I insert it almost in
full : —

" The governor, as well as the legis-
lature of 1892, was elected upon dis-
tinct pledges that relief would be given
by the Democratic party to the liquor
dealers, especially of the cities of the
State. In accordance with this promise,
a Sunday-opening clause was inserted in
the excise bill of 1892. The governor
then said that he could not approve
the Sunday-opening clause ; whereupon
the Liquor Dealers' Association, which
had charge of the bill, struck the Sunday-
opening clause out. After Governor
Hill had been elected for the second
term, I had several interviews with him
on that very subject. He told me, ' You
know I am the friend of the liquor deal-
ers and will go to almost any length to
help them, and give them relief ; but do
not ask me to recommend to the legisla-
ture the passage of - the law opening the
saloons on Sunday. I cannot do it, for
it will ruin the Democratic party in the
State.' He gave the same interview to
various members of the State Liquor
Dealers' Association, who waited upon
him for the purpose of getting relief
from the blackmail of the police, stating
that the lack of having the Sunday ques-
tion properly regulated was at the bot-
tom of the trouble. Blackmail had been
brought to such a state of perfection,
'and had become so oppressive to the
liquor dealers themselves, that they com-

296 Municipal Administration : The New York Police Force.

municated first with Governor Hill and
then with Mr. Croker. The Wine and
Spirit Gazette had taken up the subject
because of gross discrimination made by
the police in the enforcement of the Sun-
day-closing law. The paper again and
again called upon the police commission-
ers to either uniformly enforce the law
or uniformly disregard it. A commit-
tee of the Central Association of Liquor
Dealers of this city then took up the
matter and called upon Police Commis-
sioner Martin.1 An agreement was
then made between the leaders of Tam-
many Hall and the liquor dealers, ac-
cording to which the monthly blackmail
paid to the police should be discontin-
ued in return for political support. In
other words, the retail dealers should
bind themselves to solidly support the
Tammany ticket in consideration of the
discontinuance of the monthly blackmail
by the police. This agreement was car-
ried out. Now what was the conse-
quence ? If the liquor dealer, after the
monthly blackmail ceased, showed any
signs of independence, the Tammany
Hall district leader would give the tip
to the police captain, and that man would
be pulled and arrested on the following
Sunday."

Continuing, Mr. Smith inveighed
against the law, but said : —

" The (present) police commissioners
are honestly endeavoring to have the
law impartially carried out. They are
no respecters of persons. And our in-
formation from all classes of liquor deal-
ers is that the rich and the poor, the
influential and the uninfluential, are re-
quired equally to obey the law."

There is really some difficulty in com-
menting upon the statements of this in-
terview, statements which were never
denied.

The law was not in the least a dead-
letter ; it was enforced, but it was cor-
ruptly and partially enforced. It was

1 My predecessor in the presidency of the
police board. The italics are my own.

a prominent factor in the Tammany
scheme of government. It afforded a
most effective means for blackmailing a
large portion of the liquor sellers, and
for the wholesale corruption of the po-
lice department. The high Tammany
officials and police captains and patrol-
men blackmailed and bullied the small
liquor sellers without a pull, and turned
them into abject slaves of Tammany
Hall. On the other hand, the wealthy
and politically influential liquor sellers
controlled the police, and made or
marred captains, sergeants, and patrol-
men at their pleasure. In some of the
precincts most of the saloons were closed ;
in others almost all were open. The
rich and powerful liquor seller, who had
fallen under the ban of the police or the
ward boss, was not allowed to violate the
law at all.

Under these circumstances, the new
police board had one of two courses to
follow : We could either instruct the po-
lice to allow all the saloon-keepers to
become lawbreakers, or else we could
instruct them to allow none to be law-
breakers. We followed the latter course,
because we had some regard for our
oaths of office. For two or three months
we had a regular fight, and on Sundays
had to employ half the men to enforce
the liquor law ; the Tammany legisla-
tors had drawn the law so as to make
it easy of enforcement for purposes of
blackmail, but not easy of enforcement
generally, certain provisions being de-
liberately inserted with the intention to
make it difficult of universal execution.
However, when once the liquor sellers
and their allies understood that we had
not the slightest intention of being bul-
lied, threatened, or cajoled out of follow-
ing the course which we had laid down,
resistance practically ceased. During
the year after we took office, the num-
ber of arrests for violation of the Sun-
day liquor law sank to about one half of
what they had been during the last year
of the Tammany rule ; and yet the sa-

Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force. 297

loons were practically closed, whereas
under Tammany most of them had been
open. We adopted no new methods,
save in so far as honesty could be called
a new method. We did not enforce the
law with unusual severity ; we merely
enforced it against the man with a pull
just as much as against the man without
a pull. We refused to discriminate in
favor of influential lawbreakers.

The professional politicians of low
type, the liquor sellers, the editors of
some German newspapers, and the sen-
sational press generally, attacked us with
a ferocity which really verged on insan-
ity. We went our way without regard-
ing this opposition, and gave a very
wholesome lesson to the effect that a
law should not be put on the statute
books if it was not meant to be enforced,
and that even an excise law could be hon-
estly enforced in New York if the pub-
lic officials so desired. The rich brew-
ers and liquor sellers, who had made
money rapidly by violating the excise law
with the corrupt connivance of the po-
lice, raved with anger, and every cor-
rupt politician and newspaper in the city
gave them clamorous assistance ; but the
poor man, and notably the poor man's
wife and children, benefited very greatly
by what we did. The hospitals found
that their Monday labors were lessened
by nearly one half, owing to the star-
tling diminution in cases of injury due to
drunken brawls ; and the work of the
magistrates who sat in the city courts on
Monday, for the trial of the offenders of
the preceding twenty-four hours, was cor-
respondingly decreased; while many a
tenement-house family spent Sunday in
the country because for the first time the
head of the family could not use up his
money in getting drunk. The one all
important element in good citizenship in
our country is obedience to law, and no-
thing is more needed than the resolute
enforcement of law. This we gave.

There was no species of mendacity to
which our opponents did not resort in

the effort to break us down in our pur-
pose. -For weeks they eagerly repeated
the tale that the saloons were as wide
open as ever ; but they finally abandoned
this because the counsel for the Liquor
Dealers' Association admitted in open
court, at the time when we secured the
conviction of thirty of his clients, and
thereby brought the fight to an end, that
over nine tenths of the liquor dealers
had been rendered bankrupt by our
stopping that illegal trade which gave
them the best portion of their revenue.
Our opponents then took the line that by
devoting our attention to enforcing the
liquor law we permitted crime to increase.
This of course offered a very congenial
field for newspapers like the World, which
exploited it to the utmost ; all the more
readily since the mere reiteration of the
falsehood tended to encourage criminals,
and so to make it not a falsehood. For
a time the cry was not without influence,
even with decent people, especially if
they belonged to the class of the timid
rich ; but it simply was not true, and so
this bubble went down stream with the
others. For six or eight months the cry
continued, first louder, then lower ; and
then it died away. A commentary upon
its accuracy was furnished toward the end
of our administration ; for in February,
1897, the judge who addressed the grand
jury of the month was able to congratu-
late them upon the fact that there was
at that time less crime in New York
relatively to the population than ever be-
fore ; and this held true for our two
years' service.

In reorganizing the force the board
had to make, and did make, more pro-
motions, more appointments, and more
dismissals than had ever before been
made in the same length of time. We
were so hampered by the law that we
were not able to dismiss many of the men
who should have been removed, but we
did turn out two hundred men ; more
than four times as many as ever had
been turned out in a similar period be-

298 Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force.

fore. All of them were dismissed after
formal trial, and after having been given
full opportunity to be heard in their own
defense. We appointed about seventeen
hundred men all told, — again more than
four times as many as ever before, — for
we were allowed a large increase of the
police force by law. We made one hun-
dred and thirty promotions ; more than
had been made in the six preceding
years.

All this work was done in strictest ac-
cord with what we have grown to speak
of as the principles of civil service re-
form. In making removals we paid
heed merely to the man's efficiency and
past record, refusing to consider outside
pressure ; under the old regime no po-
liceman with sufficient influence behind
him was ever discharged, no matter what
his offense. In making promotions we
took into account not only the man's
general record, his faithfulness, industry,
and vigilance, but also his personal prow-
ess as shown in any special feat of dar-
ing, whether in the arresting of crimi-
nals or in the saving of life ; for the
police service is military in character,
and we wished to encourage the mili-
tary virtues. In making appointments
we found that it was practical to employ
a system of rigid competitive examina-
tions, which, as finally perfected, com-
bined a very severe physical examina-
tion with a mental examination such as
could be passed by any man who had at-
tended one of our public schools. Of
course there was also a rigid investiga-
tion of character. Theorists have often
sneered at civil service reform as " im-
practicable ; " and I am very far from
asserting that written competitive exam-
inations are always applicable, or that
they may not sometimes be merely stop-
gaps, used only because they are better
than the methods of appointing through
political indorsement ; but most certain-
ly the system worked admirably in the
police department. We got the best body
of recruits for patroliiaen that had ever

been obtained in the history of the force,
and we did just as well in our examina-
tions for matrons and police surgeons.
The uplifting of the force was very no-
ticeable, both physically and mentally.
The best men we got were those who
had served for three years or so in the
army or navy. Next to these came the
railroad men. One noticeable feature of
the work was that we greatly raised the
proportion of native-born, until of the last
hundred appointed ninety-four per cent
were Americans by birth. Not once in
a hundred^ times did we know the politics
of the appointee, and we paid as little
heed to this as to his religion.

Another of our important tasks was
seeing that the elections were conducted
honestly. Under the old Tammany rule
the cheating was gross and flagrant, and
the police were often deliberately used
to facilitate fraudulent practices at the
polls. This came about in part from
the very low character of the men put in
as election officers. By instituting a
written examination of the latter, and
supplementing this by a careful inquiry
into their character, in which we invited
any decent outsiders to assist, we very
distinctly raised their calibre. To show
how necessary our examinations were, I
may mention that before each election
held under us we were obliged to reject,
for moral or mental shortcomings, over
a thousand of the men whom the regu-
lar party organizations, exercising their
legal rights, proposed as election officers.
We then merely had to make the police
thoroughly understand that their sole
duty was to guarantee an honest election,
and that they would be punished with
the utmost rigor if they interfered with
honest citizens on the one hand, or failed
to prevent fraud and violence on the
other. The result was that the elections
of 1895 and 1896 were by far the most
honest and orderly ever held in New
York city.

There were a number of other ways
in which we sought to reform the po-

Municipal Administration: The New York Police Force. 299

lice force, less important, and yet very
important. We paid particular heed to
putting a premium on specially merito-
rious conduct, by awarding certificates
of honorable mention, and medals, where
we were unable to promote. We intro-
duced a system of pistol practice by
which for the first time the policemen
were brought to a reasonable standard
of efficiency in handling their revolvers.
The Bertillon system for the identifica-
tion of criminals was adopted. A bicy-
cle squad was organized with remarkable
results, this squad speedily becoming a
kind of corps d'elite, whose individual
members distinguished themselves not
only by their devotion to duty, but by
repeated exhibitions of remarkable dar-
ing and skill. One important bit of re-
form was abolishing the tramp lodging-
houses, which had originally been started
in the police stations, in a spirit of un-
wise philanthropy. These tramp lodg-
ing-houses, not being properly super-
vised, were mere nurseries for pauperism
and crime, tramps and loafers of every
shade thronging to the city every winter
to enjoy their benefits. We abolished
them, a municipal lodging-house being
substituted. Here all homeless wander-
ers were received, forced to bathe, given
nightclothes before going to bed, and
made to work next morning ; and in ad-
dition they were so closely supervised
that habitual tramps and vagrants were
speedily detected and apprehended.

There was a striking increase in the
honesty of the force, and' there was a like
increase in its efficiency. It is not too
much to say that when we took office the
great majority of the citizens of New York
were firmly convinced that no police force
could be both honest and efficient. They
felt it to be part of the necessary order of
things that a policeman should be cor-
rupt, and they were convinced that the
most efficient way of waging war upon
certain forms of crime — notably crimes
against person and property — was by
enlisting the service of other criminals,

and of purveyors of vice generally, giv-
ing them immunity in return for their
aid ; the ordinary purveyor of vice was
allowed to ply his or her trade unmo-
lested, partly in consideration of paying
blackmail to the police, partly in consid-
eration of giving information about any
criminal who belonged to the unprotect-
ed classes. We at. once broke up this
whole business of blackmail and protec-
tion, and made war upon all criminals
alike, instead of getting the assistance
of half in warring on the other half.
Nevertheless, so great was the improve-
ment in the spirit of the force, that,
although deprived of their former vi-
cious allies, they actually did better work
than ever before against those criminals
who threatened life and property. Re-
latively to the population, fewer crimes
of violence occurred during our admin-
istration of the board than in any previ-
ous year of the city's history in recent
times ; and the total number of arrests
of criminals increased, while the number
of cases in which no arrest followed the
commission of crime decreased. The
detective bureau nearly doubled the num-
ber of arrests made, compared with the
year before we took office ; obtaining,
moreover, 365 convictions of felons and
215 convictions for misdemeanors, as
against 269 and 105 respectively for the
previous year. At the same time every
attempt at riot or disorder was summa-
rily checked, and all gangs of violent
criminals were brought into immediate
subjection ; while the immense mass
meetings and political parades were han-
dled with such care that not a single
case of clubbing of any innocent citizen
was reported.

The result of our labors was of value
to the city, for we gave the citizens better
protection than they had ever before re-
ceived, and at the same time cut out the
corruption which was eating away civic
morality. We showed conclusively that
it was possible to combine both honesty
and efficiency in handling the police.

300

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer?

We were attacked with the most bitter
animosity by every sensational newspa-
per and every politician of the baser
sort, not because of our shortcomings,
but because of what we did that was
good. We enforced the laws as they
were on the statute books, we broke up
blackmail, we kept down the spirit of
disorder and repressed rascality, and we
administered the force with an eye sin-
gle to the welfare of the city. In doing
this we encountered, as we had expect-
ed, the venomous opposition of all men
whose interest it was that corruption
should continue, or who were of such
dull morality that they were not willing
to see honesty triumph at the cost of
strife.

Our experience with the police depart-
ment taught one or two lessons which
are applicable to the whole question of
municipal reform. Very many men put
their faith in some special device, some
special bit of legislation or some official
scheme for getting good government. In
reality good government can come only
through good administration, and good
administration only as a consequence of

a sustained — not spasmodic — and ear-
nest effort by good citizens to secure hon-
esty, courage, and common sense among
civic administrators. If they demand the
impossible, they will fail ; and, on the
other hand, if they do not demand a good
deal, they will get nothing. But though
they should demand much in the way of
legislation, they should make their spe-
cial effort for good administration. We
could have done very much more for the
police department if we had had a good
law ; but we actually accomplished a
great deal"1 although we worked under a
law very much worse than that under
which Tammany did such fearful evil.
A bad law may seriously hamper the best
administrator, and even nullify most of
his efforts ; but a good law is of no value
whatever unless well administered. In
other words, all that a good scheme of
government can do is to give a chance
to get the good government itself, and if
the various schemes stand anywhere near
on an equality, the differences between
them become as naught compared with
the difference between good and bad
administration.

Theodore Roosevelt.

ARE THE RICH GROWING RICHER AND THE POOR POORER?

THERE is a great deal of pathetic
talk of unrest under our modern civili-
zation. Yet a casual reading of history
shows the existence of unrest at all times,
the difference between that of our times
and that of previous times being only in
degree and in the conditions which cause
it. But everywhere and at all times
the causes of unrest have been ethical
and economical in their character, its
essential factors being more ethical, be-
cause whatever economic relations may
be established primarily between men
as individuals, or between men and the
community in which they live, the lasting

relations are ethical. Ethics defines the
equitable relations between individuals
who limit one another's spheres of action
and who achieve their ends by coopera-
tion ; and, beyond justice between man
and man, justice between each man and
the aggregate of men has to be dealt
with by ethics.1 Thus the examination
of wages, the standard of living, working
time, the cost of living, education, interest
in religion, in literature, in art, and in all
things concerning common man, leads to
the conclusion that the industrial situa-
tion has more to do with social conditions
1 Herbert Spencer, in Data of Ethics.

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer? 301

than any other factor. The industrial
power contains in itself the moral, intel-
lectual, and physiological elements which
are the three essential factors of human
life, and so the most essential factors in
ethics and in social organization. To
them logically, then, we must look for
the chief elements which result in social
unrest. The alleged causes taken to-
gether make a kaleidoscopic mass, ever
shifting with every turn of industrial
status. When a man asserts, therefore,
that this or that is the prime source of
the prevailing unrest at any period, he is
simply ignoring the relationship of one
cause to another, and probably of cause
to effect.

Among all the varied causes which
are specifically assigned for the unrest
of our times, the assertion that the rich
are growing richer and the poor poorer
has for some reason taken more com-
plete possession of the popular mind
than any other single one. The doc-
trine contained in it is a false one, false
in its premises and misleading in its in-
fluence, for it has so deceived the people
during the last few years as to develop
a sharp and a growing antagonism be-
tween those who do not prosper to the
extent of their ambition and those who
have carried wealth far beyond the rea-
sonable ambition of any man. No one,
pessimist or optimist, would for a mo-
ment suppose that the chief cause of pop-
ular discontent, if there be a paramount
one, lies in any lack of the production of
useful and necessary things. It may be
held, however, that there is an inequal-
ity in the distribution of the products
of industry, and upon an analysis of the
various discussions which have been put
forth, it is easily seen that it is this
question of distribution which affects
the popular mind. It is legitimate, from
any point of view, to question the jus-
tice of the distribution of wealth. But
when we reflect that by the use of the
telegraph credits can now be placed in
any part of the world, and thus affect

prices of commodities and of exchange
and influence the whole machinery of
commerce ; that a given quantity of pro-
duction is secured in much less time to-
day than of old ; and that transportation
has been so perfected as to bring to the
doors of the poor man, as well as of
the rich, the results of the industry of
far-away people, the quarrel over distri-
bution resolves itself simply into an in-
cident of modern development. This
development has resulted in the sharp
juxtaposition of the very fortunate and
the very poor in city life. When the rich
man's wealth consisted in lauds which
were cultivated by his poorer neighbors,
the demarcation of conditions was not so
sharp, and the sources of unrest had to
be sought in other directions than those
which now come under consideration.
The very rich, with their fine mansions,
their private cars, and sometimes with
their obtrusive and almost impertinent
display of wealth, cause the ordinary man
to feel that he has in some way been
robbed to make possible the wealth-shows
which irritate him. And unfortunately
for the truth, this irritation has been
intensified by the constant use of this
epigrammatic assertion that the rich are
growing richer and the poor poorer. We
need not attempt to trace its origin ; it
is a wandering phrase, without paternity
or date. De Laveleye, the Belgian econo-
mist, attributes it to Gladstone ; others
credit it to La Salle. Its origin does
not matter ; its familiarity has given it
weight. To very many persons, who con-
sider only one side of a proposition, it
expresses the whole truth ; to others, who
examine superficially ethical and econo-
mical questions, it has some truth ; to the
investigator, who cares only for the truth
itself, it is as a whole untrue, while one
half is true. To the investigator the
real statement should be, The rich are
growing richer, many more people than
formerly are growing rich, and the poor
are growing better off. In combating
the familiar assertion as not represent-

302 Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer ?

ing the whole truth, I shall endeavor to
establish the real truth of the expression
as I have formulated it ; but in so doing
it is my purpose to limit my statements
to conditions in this country.

It is to be regretted that statistics do
not establish clearly the relations of per-
sonal to aggregate wealth. The gov-
ernment has never seen lit as yet to ask
individuals about their property holdings,
except for purposes of taxation, and
these reports rarely give the value of in-
dividual estates. The State of Massa-
chusetts and some other States ask for
returns as to incomes that are taxable,
and during the civil war the United
States government taxed incomes, but
the statistics drawn from these returns
are not of sufficiently good quality to
constitute a basis for conclusions relating
to property ; nor would they be service-
able if entirely trustworthy, for many
men who have little or no property have
taxable incomes. So the classification
of fortunes is almost entirely a matter
of assumption, usually being varied ac-
cording to the attitude of its compiler.
Nevertheless, common observation and
such facts as are obtainable lead directly
to the assumption that there are more
large fortunes at the present time than
at any other period of our history, and
that there are more people having inde-
pendent fortunes than at any other time.
Let this be admitted, then, at the out-
set.

This admission, however, does not
prove that the poor are becoming poor-
er. It does not follow that because there
is a larger number of great fortunes and
a larger number of men having inde-
pendent fortunes, the poor are growing
poorer. It is not enough to establish the
fact beyond a reasonable controversy
that less than half the families in Amer-
ica are propertyless ; or, that seven
eighths of the families hold but one
eighth of the wealth, while one per cent
of the families hold more than the re-
maining ninety-nine per cent ; or, if fig-

ures be used, that 1,500,000 families
own $56,000,000,000, while the other
11,000,000 families own $9,000,000,000
of the nation's wealth ; or, that twelve
per cent of the families own eighty-six
per cent of the wealth, and the other
eighty-eight per cent of the families own
only fourteen per cent.1

Granting all these conclusions to be
fairly correct, it must still be demon-
strated that the poor are growing poorer,
that is to say, are not as well off now as
at some previous time a generation or
two ago. If wealth were stationary, it
would be true that the poor are in poor-
er circumstances. Under suqh a condi-
tion, the absorption of vast fortunes into
the hands of a few could not take place
without a corresponding drainage from
the many. But wealth is not stationary.
Taking the true valuation of the real
and personal estate of this country for
each decade beginning with 1850, we
find that the total wealth was : in 1850,
$7,135,780,228, or $308 per capita ; in
1860, $16,159,616,068, or $514 per
capita; in 1870, $30,068,518,507, or
$780 per capita; in 1880, $43,642,-
000,000, or $870 per capita; and in
1890, $65,037,091,197, or $1036 per
capita.

It is conceded that these figures are
far more accurate during the later years
than in the earlier ; nevertheless, the
indication is absolute that wealth in-
creases rapidly, and that the wealth per
capita now is at least three times what
it was in the fifties. There is, then, a
very large margin in the increased ag-
gregate wealth from which the rich can
grow richer, and more men may grow
wealthy without draining from the poor.
It is not proposed here to discuss whether
the poor get their relative proportion of
the increased aggregate wealth. Em-
phatically they do not. The purpose is
to show whether their condition is de-
generating, or whether they are growing
poorer in the presence of this great in-
1 Popular estimates and statements.

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer f

303

crease of aggregate wealth ; and for
our conclusions we must depend upon
such facts as are obtainable, regretting,
as in the case stated above, that as yet
statistics do not present the full condi-
tions of the people. Statistical science,
however, is becoming more exact, and as
time goes on all such questions as that
involved in the dictum that the rich are
growing richer and the poor poorer can
be solved, and solved to the satisfaction
of all who care to study them.1

Society may be compared to a pyra-
mid, the base representing its lower
stratum, and the apex the few in whose
hands are to be found the vast fortunes,
the cleavage between being horizontal.
This has been and probably is to-day a
fairly true figure by which to represent
society at large, only the form of the
pyramid is changing, the apex broaden-
ing and the base becoming restricted.

In 1870 there were 12,505,923 per-
sons engaged in supporting themselves
and the remainder of the people ; that is
to say, 32.43 per cent of the total popu-
lation were so engaged. In 1880 the
number of breadwinners was 17, 392,099,
or 34.67 per cent of the total population.
In 1890 this number had risen to 22,-
735,661, or 36.31 per cent of the total
population. By " breadwinners " is
meant all who were engaged either as
wage-earners, or salary receivers, or pro-
prietors, of whatever grade or descrip-
tion, and all professional persons, — in
fact, every one who was in any way em-
ployed in any gainful pursuit. The fig-
ures quoted show that the proportion of
the total population thus "employed is
constantly increasing. Analyzing the
statistics, we find, some remarkable re-
sults : and in general, that the number

1 The returns of the savings banks of the
country sustain this view. In 1840 the amount
due each depositor was $178 ; in 1850, $172 ;
in 1860, $215 ; in 1870, $337 ; in 1880, $350 ;
in 1890, $358 ; in 1893, $369, and in 1896,
$376. These figures convince us that during
the recent depression, notwithstanding the in-
fluences of the change of investments, the aver-

engaged in the lowest walks of business,
laborers and the like, is decreasing in
proportion, while those employed in the
higher walks are increasing in number
relatively to the whole population. For
purposes of demonstration, the popula-
tion may be classified in four groups.

Making one group of farmers and
planters who are proprietors, bankers,
brokers, manufacturers, merchants and
dealers, and those engaged in profes-
sional pursuits, we find that they consti-
tuted 10.17 per cent of the whole popu-
lation in 1870, 11.22 per cent in 1880,
and 11.97 per cent in 1890, showing a
steady gain in the proportion of this high
class of breadwinners to the whole popu-
lation.

Making another group, composed of
agents, collectors, commercial travelers,
bookkeepers, clerks, salesmen, and others
in kindred occupations, we find that in
1870 they constituted 0.91 per cent of
the whole population ; that in 1880 the
percentage rose to 1.25, and that in 1890
it reached 2.15, showing that in this
class of persons there was also a con-
stant increase in relative proportion.

Making still another group, including
the skilled workers of the community,
such as clothing-makers, engineers and
firemen, food preparers, leather workers,
those engaged in the mechanical trades,
metal workers, printers, engravers and
bookbinders, steam railroad employees,
textile workers, tobacco and cigar factory
operatives, woodworkers, and those in
similar mechanical pursuits, we find that
of the whole population they constituted
6.59 per cent in 1870, 7.18 per cent in
1880, and 8.75 per cent in 1890, show-
ing, again, in the skilled trades a con-
stantly increasing relative proportion.

age deposits in the savings banks have con-
stantly increased. The total deposits at the
present time in the savings banks of the coun-
try are about two billion dollars, one half of
which, as has been demonstrated, belongs to
wage-earners. See the reports of the Massa-
chusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor for
.1873 and 1874.

304 Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer?

Making, now, a fourth group, includ-
ing agricultural laborers, boatmen, fish-
ermen, sailors, draymen, hostlers, ordi-
nary laborers, miners and quarrymen,
messengers, packers, porters, servants,
and all other pursuits of like grade, we
find the reverse to be true. That is, al-
though in 1870 this class of workers
constituted 14.76 per cent of the total
population, in 1890 it reached but 13.44
per cent, thus demonstrating what I have
stated — that the base of the pyramid,
so far as this country is concerned, is be-
ing gradually restricted, while the apex
is gradually broadening. As a result,
society, which has been represented like
Figure 1, is gradually approaching the
form shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

So, while it is admitted that there are
more rich than formerly, it must be con-
ceded that the proportion of the skilled
workers of the community and of those
engaged in the higher classes of employ-
ments is also increasing.

But it may be argued that while this
is true, the earnings of the people are
not what they were. My own contention
has always lyeen that the popular asser-
tions relative to the unemployed are not
really representative of industrial con-
ditions. There is always a very large
percentage of unemployed, whether in
" good " or in " bad " times. The argu-
ment may be made that even with an

increased proportion of the people em-
ployed as breadwinners, their bread-
winning is not of the value of bread-
winning in the past. For this purpose it
is well to examine the course of rates of
wages and also of earnings and prices.
Fortunately, there are facts at hand
which can be used in this examination,
and statements that cannot be contro-
verted.

The report by Senator Aldrich, of the
Senate Committee on Finance, submitted
in March, 1893, gives the course of
wholesale prices and of wages from 1840
to 1891, inclusive, a period of fifty-two
years. The report deals with seventeen
great branches of industry, and they are
the principal ones in the country. By
it we find that, taking 1860 as the stan-
dard at 100, rates of wages rose from
87.7 in 1840 to 160.7 in 1891 ; that is,
an increase of 60.7 per cent from 1860,
and of seventy-three per cent from 1840.
Taking an average according to the im-
portance of the industries, that is to say,
of each industry relative to all indus-
tries, it is found that the gain from 1840
to 1891 was eighty-six per cent. On the
other hand, the hours of labor have been
reduced 1.4 hours in the same period in
the daily average. In some industries
the reduction of hours has been much
greater, while in others it has been less.

An increase in rates of wages means
more or less according to the increase
or decrease in prices. If prices decrease
or remain stationary, the increase in the
rates of wages is a positive gain. Ac-
cording to the same report, taking all
articles on a wholesale basis and as
compared with the standard of the year
1860, the prices of 223 articles were 7.8
per cent lower in 1891 than in 1860 ;
and taking 1840 as the standard, with
eighty-five articles the difference was 3.7
per cent. Examining prices of articles
on the basis of consumption, leaving rent
out of consideration, the cost of living is
shown to have been between four and
five per cent less than in 1860 ; and tak-

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer ?

305

ing all prices, rents and everything, into
consideration, it must be concluded that
living was not much, if any, higher in
1891 than in 1840, while the rates of
wages had increased as stated. Very
much might be said on this point with
specific illustrations, but the statement of
the general tendency and trend is suffi-
cient for the present consideration.

It should be clearly understood that
the quotations of wages for the compu-
tations from which the foregoing results
were reached were from actual pay-rolls,
while the price-quotations were of whole-
sale prices rather than of retail prices, as
being more truly indicative of the course
of prices generally, and were taken from
actual quotations for the years named.

It is often contended that the increase
in rates of wages does not indicate the
true social conditions of the wage-earner,
that rates of wages belong to economics,
and that earnings themselves are the
surest indication of social progress. This
is quite true. Nevertheless, it must be
conceded that rates of wages are indica-
tive of industrial conditions. Rates can-
not be increased if industrial conditions
are degenerating, nor can they be in-
creased or sustained in the presence of
a very large body of unemployed really
seeking employment. If, therefore, rates
constantly increase, — and they have in-
creased steadily in the economic history
of this country, — the conclusion is inevi-
table that conditions themselves have im-
proved. The falling back owing to a
brief period of industrial depression here
and there can have nothing whatever to
do with the general tendency, and the
general tendency of wages is upward,
while that of prices is downward.

1 These statements for the United States can
be supplemented by the figures for the State of
Massachusetts. By the report of the Massa-
chusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor on the
annual statistics of manufactures (1895), it is
found that for 2427 establishments in 1885
and 1895, wages were reported which, divided
among their employees, amounted to $361.62 in
the former year and $418.99 in the latter year.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 20

But, fortunately, we are not obliged
to depend upon the increase of rates of
wages to show that the ordinary man is
better off than at any former period in
our history, because our censuses report
aggregate earnings and also the number
of persons among whom the earnings
are divided. Looking to this side of the
problem, we find that in 1850 the aver-
age annual earnings of each employee
engaged in manufacturing and mechani-
cal pursuits, including men, women, and
children, in round numbers were $247 ;
in i860, S289 ; in 1870, $302 ; in 1880,
$347 ; and in 1890, $445.' Here is a
steady, positive increase in the average
annual earnings of the employees in our
great industrial pursuits. The statement
is not mathematically accurate, because
the divisor used is not always a sure one.
The total amount of wages paid at each
of the periods named is a fixed quantity,
and is one of the most certain elements
of the industrial censuses, but the aver-
age is obtained by dividing the total
wages paid by the average number of
employees during the year. Some wri-
ters contend that the divisor should be
the greatest number of employees in-
stead of the average number, but the
greatest number would secure a more er-
roneous quotient than that derived from
the average number, because the total
number involves each individual who has
been employed during the year in a
single establishment ; and one man may
work three months, another three months,
and another six months, thus making
three individuals where only one position
has been filled. The average number
represents more clearly the number of
positions filled in the establishments, and

These figures compare very well with the Unit-
ed States figures. It is true that, according to
the census of Massachusetts for 1885, the aver-
age wages paid in all industries in 1875 were
$392.82 (in gold), and in 1885, $351.02, showing
a *decrease of 10.64 per cent, but this was a
• temporary reaction from the inflated conditions
subsequent to the war.

306

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer ?

thus is the safer divisor. Accordingly,
it seems to me that the averages given
above are more clearly indicative of the
social and economic condition of the
wage-earners in manufacturing and me-
chanical industries than any other state-
ment that can be made. With rates
of wages increasing constantly, barring,
of course, depressions, with constantly
increasing average earnings, and with
prices, on the whole, remaining station-
ary, or fairly so, the conclusion cannot
be avoided that the economic condition
of wage-earners has improved vastly dur-
ing the last fifty or sixty years. The
few years when there have been varia-
tions or a falling off do not affect the
general results.

It would be wearisome to take up in-
dividual industries, callings, and condi-
tions, especially when the results; so far
as I know them, would lead to the same
conclusion which is reached from the
general statements that have been made.
The results all show that the base of the
pyramid is being contracted ; that the
number of people in the higher and
more skilled walks in life is increasing
faster relatively than the population ;
that the houi'S of labor of wage-receiv-
ers are being shortened ; that rates of
wages and earnings are constantly in-
creasing, and that the prices of commod-
ities either remain quite stationary or
fall. The prices of some things, like
rent and meats, have increased in our
Eastern States, but clothing and the gen-
eral articles which enter into family con-
sumption are being constantly lowered
in price. These things are taught us by
statistics. Observation teaches us much
more, but since statistics are chiefly use-
ful in verifying observation, they must
be looked to for the most convincing evi-
dence.

A generation or more ago men were
employed under the so-called iron law
of wages. That is, wages were paid on
the basis of preserving the efficiency of
the working human machine, and they

could not, under that so-called law, ex-
ceed the needs for the preservation of
efficiency. Food, shelter, and clothing
in sufficient quantities to keep the man
in good working order were considered
a fair gauge of the rate of wage which
should be paid him. This was Ricar-
do's announcement of the iron law. To-
day the demand of the working man is
not alone for the things which shall pre-
jserve his working efficiency under such
a law. His demand is for something
beyond that, and it has been met to the
extent of a- margin of from ten to fif-
teen percent surplus, which surplus goes
to the support of his spiritual nature ;
that is to say, he requires and he de-
mands a wage sufficient to meet not only
the conditions under the iron law, but
the conditions under the higher spiritual
law ; one which shall give him amuse-
ment, recreation, music, something of art,
and the better elements of life itself.
He desires to surround himself with com-
forts, conveniences, and a fair propor-
tion of even the luxuries of life. This
is his contention to-day, and every right-
minded person must admit that it is a
proper contention. He has now secured,
as stated, a margin above the iron law
sufficient to enable him to gratify his
tastes and ambitions to some extent.
His demand will grow, and will become
more emphatic in these directions. He
contends that he has a right to some-
thing more than subsistence ; that he
has been taught to consider himself as
one of the social and political elements
of the community, and must therefore
have some of the things that belong to
such conditions. He is educated in the
schools ; he seeks legislative experience ;
he takes part in the politics of the coun-
try, and the whole basis of a democratic
government requires that he shall be in-
telligent enough to take an intelligent
part. All this means better conditions,
and he is gradually securing them. He
is not growing poorer, but better off, as
time progresses and he overcomes more

Are the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer? 307

and more the exactions of the iron law
of wages. The economic man of Ri-
cardo is gradually developing into the
social man. The number of those en-
gaged in the upper grades or callings
and the skilled trades is constantly re-
cruited from the lowest ranks.

Looking back still farther, we find that
this country was settled more to secure
employment for England's unemployed
than for any other one reason. Never
mind the religious enthusiasm which
first brought our forefathers here ; never
mind the persecutions which drove them
out of their home country ; never mind
the misfortunes of men in the mother-
land who came here of their, own ac-
cord, — there was, nevertheless, on the
part of the government of the mother
country an earnest and energetic desire
to rid itself of the presence of great
bodies of unemployed people. This story
is so completely told by the historian
that it need only be referred to. Hak-
luyt, in his Discourse concerning West-
ern Planting, and Sir William Petty, in
his famous Political Arithmetic, have
shown such conditions just prior to the
settlement of this country that one won-
ders that there could have been any
peace, or any prosperity, or any happi-
ness at that time. It is all summed up
in one paragraph by John Winthrop, the
first governor of Massachusetts, who in
1629 stated the following among other
reasons for leading emigrants out of
overburdened England : — •

" This land grows weary of her in-
habitants, so as man, who is the most
precious of all creatures, is here more
vile and base than the earth we tread
upon, and of less price among us than a
horse or a sheep. Many of our people
perish for want of sustenance and em-
ployment ; many others livei miserably
and not to the honor of so bountiful a
housekeeper as the Lord of heaven and
earth is, through the scarcity of the
fruits of the earth. All of our towns
complain of the burden of poor people,

and strive by all means to rid any such
as they have, and to keep off such as
would come to them. I must tell you
that our dear mother finds her family so
overcharged as she hath been forced to
deny harbor to her own children, — wit-
ness the statutes against cottages and in-
mates. And thus it is come to pass that
children, servants, and neighbors, espe-
cially if they be poor, are counted the
greatest burthens, which, if things were
right, would be the chief est earthly bless-
ings."

What a contrast compared with the
present ! The poor of the present day
should be thankful that they have es-
caped the conditions of the past. Poor
as they are, the poverty of the present
is not the poverty of the past. Pauper-
ism, even, is not as abject. In the lan-
guage of Ira Steward, by " poverty " is
meant something more than pauperism.
Pauperism is a condition of entire de-
pendence upon charity or upon the pub-
lic purse, while poverty is a condition of
want, of lack, of being without, though
not necessarily a condition of complete
dependence. It is in this sense that it
is declared that the poverty of to-day is
not the poverty of the past. The con-
dition of want, of lack, of being without,
is a condition of less want, of less lack
than of old. Bad enough always, stigma
enough always upon any civilization, it
has improved, and the public has but lit-
tle sympathy with the sentiment, that
the poor we have with us always. We
do have the poor with us always, but we
should not rest upon the idea that they
must always be with us. Their condi-
tions must be bettered, and are being
bettered. The statistics prove that their
number is decreasing, for in 1850 the
paupers in almshouses were 2171 to
each million of the population, while in
1890 they were 1166 to each million.

The organization of man proves that
Ke is a social animal, designed by nature
to live in society. In this state of so-
ciety there are no rights without duties,

308

A re the Rich growing Richer and the Poor Poorer ?

no duties without rights. The right of
self-preservation implies the right to pro-
perty ; but the faculties of man are by,
nature unequal, which gives rise to a
natural inequality of conditions. It is
these unequal faculties which give us
unequal fortunes, and so long as they
exist the inequality of conditions result-
ing must lead to unequal surroundings.

Property is desirable, is a positive
good in the world. That some are rich
shows that others may become rich, and
hence is encouragement to industry and
enterprise. Let no man who is homeless
pull down the house of another, but let
him work diligently and build one for
himself.

When wealth is used productively
there can be little difference in the re-
sult to the community, whether it be
contributed by thousands to the common
stock, or manipulated by a small asso-
ciation of men owning the bulk of it.
If a man be worth ten million dollars
and if he use this as productive capital,
the community practically owns it, for
capital itself, no matter whether the title
of it be in one man or in a thousand,
fcannot be sacrificed ; only the usufruct
is ever secured by the community at
large. Productive capital, or capital
productively employed, can never, then,
in any sense, be the cause of any pre-
vailing unrest. It is what may be called
the criminal use of wealth, that is, its
unproductive employment, that irritates
the public mind. And here, in discuss-
ing the question as to whether the rich
are growing richer and the poor poorer,
we should make an important and a
clear discrimination. The use of wealth
for display is often justified, because it
gives employment to a great number of
people ; but such employment is spas-
modic, is not productive, does not give
stability of condition, or increase the
standard of living of those engaged in
it ; and it must be contended, from a
moral point of view, that even the con-
tinuous giving of great balls, for instance,

or any other ostentatious employment of
wealth, would in the long run demoral-
ize the recipients of the wages paid in
such display, because of the enervating
luxury into which all would ultimately
fall. But wise, fair, and continuous em-
ployment of the greatest number of per-
sons in the production of things which
enter into legitimate consumption for the
actual use of the people — for cheapen-
ing the cost of living, and for the ele-
vation of the standard of living itself,
through making possible the attainment
of some of the higher things in life, like
the productions of art, education, mu-
sic, everything that beautifies and helps
and stimulates — has no demoralizing
influence, and does not affect in an un-
healthy way the public conscience, nor
tend to irritate that of the individual.

A poor man may make a criminal use
of wealth as well as the rich. He may
use it in the purchase of those things
that perish with the use, and result in
no good to himself or to his family. He
may spend it in some form of riotous liv-
ing, or in the insane attempt to keep up
appearances which are not legitimate.

The poor do not object to the wealth
of the rich ; they object to its misuse.
They do not like the display of enervat-
ing luxury. They know well that the
world is better off with some rich than
it would be with all poor. There can
be no contention on this point. Progress
would cease, industry stop, civilization
itself be retarded, were it not for the
rich. There never was a time, moreover,
when the rich did so much for society
and for the poor as they are doing at
the present time. God speed the day
when the wealthy will fully comprehend
that their wealth is held in trust ; that
they are but the means of helping the
world, and that riches have been given
them for this purpose. The world is re-
cognizing this. Millionaires are under-
standing it more and more, and so those
of low estate are securing the benefit.

The competition of our age is intel-

A New Organization for the, New Navy.

309

lectual more than physical, but with the
unequipped man the attempt is made to
bring muscle into competition with brain.
As a result brain succeeds, and the man
who has attempted to compete with it
on a physical basis suffers. The mental
competition of to-day means a large class
of left-over men and women who cannot
keep up to the present requirements.
These help to keep the body of the poor
unhappily large, although it is being re-
stricted from generation to generation in
its breadth, and the pyramid is rising into
a different form. Miserable conditions
are found everywhere. The effort of the
rich is to remove them. The activity of
governments in improving slum districts
in cities, the moral effects of rapid transit
in taking the population out of the con-
gested parts of great cities into subur-
ban homes, where they meet the incom-
ing thousands from the country homes,
constitute great factors in alleviating
present conditions. This suburban popu-

lation itself is solving many problems,
both of city and of farm.

As wealthy men understand these
things, as they join hands in disseminat-
ing knowledge, in founding institutions,
thus securing the very elements of a de-
mocratic government to the people at
large, there is less and less quarrel about
wealth ; but there is an increased quar-
rel about some classes of wealth and some
classes of wealthy people. It is this
which" gives emphasis to the assertion that
the rich are growing richer and the poor
poorer. If it be true, religion is a fail-
ure, education a snare, industry an enemy
of man, and civilization a delusion. The
statement, I reiterate, is not true, as a
whole, but it is true that the rich are
growing richer, and the poor are growing
better off ; and with increased under-
standing of the true uses of wealth, the
proportion in which the rich are growing
richer and the poor better off will assume
more just and equitable relations.

Carroll D. Wright.

A NEW ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEW NAVY.

" I bad the happiness to command a band
of brothers." — NELSON to Lord Howe.

THE growth of the navy during the
last few years has been a source of grati-
fication to the American people, especial-
ly because it has been achieved by the
use of materials produced entirely in
their own country, and has signified an
enormous increase in their power to build
ships and fortifications. This period has
marked the complete break, perhaps for-
ever, with the old line of battle-ship de-
pendent for its motion upon an unre-
liable element, and the adoption of the
powerful hull driven by a machine whose
reliability depends only upon the care
and foresight of men. The Massachu-
setts alone could probably have destroyed
the whole American navy at the end of

the rebellion. We* all know how this
change has come, and we are filled with
thankfulness for the added strength given
to us in the steam-engine, but it never
occurs to us to ask if our men have been
properly trained to deal intelligently
with this new element. We forget what
is really the most essential part of the
navy in the noisy declamation over ma-
terial advancement.

Any one will see that readjustment
must inevitably follow the introduction
of a new force into society. We are
face to face with an industrial struggle
going on about us, but we are accus-
tomed to thinking of the army and navy
as things organized for exceptional con-
ditions, and consequently under differ-
ent laws of development and growth

310

A New Organization for the New Navy.

from those of civil life. We find, how-
ever, the same ferment and disturbance
in our navy, and the same tendencies to-
wards the breaking up of old relations.
We frequently see articles on line and
staff troubles, and we usually lay them
aside with a bored feeling that the quar-
rels of the officers might better be set-
tled by the Department and kept out of
the papers ; but the subject is not to be
dismissed in that way, if we are to have
an effective arm on the sea. The navy
discontent is really only part of a great
national problem, an indication of a re-
alignment of men to grapple with new
forces. Many parallels exist in history,
even in the history of navies. The same
kind of a struggle and readjustment oc-
curred three or four hundred years ago,
and will no doubt occur again in the
coming centuries. All problems involved
in the change of the relative importance
of individuals are delicate, and the navy
should have the aid and support of every
good citizen in reaching a satisfactory
solution of the difficulties connected with
the personnel. It is our due that we may
have efficient ships, and theirs that they
may have every cause for pride in the ser-
vice and for gratitude to their country.

In writing on this subject, it seems
necessary to dwell more upon the rela-
tion of the engineer to the naval service
than upon the position of the officers on
deck, not because he is more deserving
as a man than they, but because he is
the newcomer and must justify his po-
sition as a military officer.

Naval organization has two ends in
view : to provide materials and ships,
and to train and direct men to manage
them in times of peace and of war. Oth-
er matters may be important, but they
are not necessarily peculiar to a naval
service. We have every reason to feel
proud of the rehabilitation of our navy
during the past twelve years. Yet with
all the advance in materials and con-
struction, it is a serious question whether
we have any cause for pride in our per-

sonnel. Notwithstanding the lessons of
the war, and the advice of Gideon Welles,
who conducted our naval forces through
that war, in the education of our young
officers we are clinging to memories and
traditions. We are lashed hard and fast
to a sentiment. Seamanship and sails
are still considered the proper training
for men who will command our ships
twenty years hence. The superintendent
of the Naval Academy has recently asked
for sailing-vessels in which to educate
the cadets who will see service on ships
that have not a rag of sail.

The personnel of a navy divides itself
naturally under three heads : adminis-
tration, officers, and enlisted men ; and
while all of these departments need im-
provement or remodeling, the condition
of the officers is far worse than anything
else in the service. Let reorganization
be effected with them, and everything
else follows. The truth is, that we are
passing through a period of transition
when the organization of neither officers
nor men quite fits the ships, and it be-
hooves the Department and Congress to
proceed to a careful study of the sub-
ject in order that our people may be sure
that all matters connected with national
defense have been adequately considered.

It must not be forgotten that our new
ships are designed largely on theory.
Their weaknesses have not been devel-
oped by war. They are therefore pro-
ducts of the brain, and not of experi-
ence. The rebellion gave us some use-
ful lessons in naval warfare under steam
and without sails ; but the improvements
in armor, guns, and machinery since
1865 have been too great for any cer-
tain application of those lessons to pre-
sent conditions. The battle of the Yalu
in the Japan-China war, though a great
victory in fleet-fighting, teaches us lit-
tle except to avoid wood and other in-
flammable materials in the decks and
bulkheads of a ship. For two or three
centuries during the sailing period, ex-
perience had demonstrated just the kind

A New Organization for the New Navy.

311

of casualty the sailor might look for.
He had acquired by warfare, shipwreck,
and hazard on every sea that seamanship
which enabled him to prepare before-
hand with almost mathematical exactness
for emergencies. But our question is,
Is modern seamanship the same as it
was in Nelson's or even in Farragut's
time ? The answer is almost self-evi-
dent. It cannot be, for the modern ship
is a machine, and its casualties can best
be foreseen by men with engineering edu-
cation. We know by experience that
when a ship suffers detention, it is be-
cause a shaft, or a boiler, or a valve has
given out. What will happen on a bat-
tle-ship in action ? Will a shell jam
one of the turrets so that it cannot be
turned ? Will the communication be-
tween the bridge and the engine-rooms
be cut by a shot ? Will the splitting of
a boiler-tube, a breakage in the steering-
engine, the bursting of a steam-pipe, or
the filling of a compartment render the
ship helpless ? We do not know. But
we do know that the ship whose parts
are in the most perfect order, so that
every nerve responds promptly to the
call of the commanding officer, will stand
the best chance ; and we do know, be-
sides, that the crew must be fitted to the
machinery if all parts, guns, dynamos,
torpedoes, and engines, are to be kept in
this complete readiness for service, and
if the effects of casualty are to be most
quickly minimized.

For thirty years there has been a strug-
gle between the line and the staff of the
navy, or those officers who may succeed
to the command of ships and those who
may not. This struggle has developed
the greatest bitterness between the line
and the engineer corps, inasmuch as their
duties, which essentially affect the fight-
ing efficiency of the ships, have clashed
at many points. Neither can be spared,
for although other men may be sent out
of the ships without decreasing their ef-
fectiveness, the men in the compartments
containing guns and ammunition, and

the men in the engine and boiler rooms
must stay. They belong to the fighting-
machine. What is more, they must
work in entire harmony towards the
same ends, if we are to attain the high-
est qualities in our ships. For the sake
of peace and good fellowship, questions
between the line and the engineers are
carefully avoided at most well regulated
mess tables ; but let any one imagine
himself penned up in the crater of a vol-
cano for three years with the absolute
certainty that it may become active at
any moment, and it will be readily un-
derstood why so many graduates of the
Naval Academy have left the service.

This antagonism, which is entirely of-
ficial, has existed so long that Congress
is tired of hearing about it, and has come
to expect it as a part of the navy discon-
tent in time of peace. The disposition
is to " let them alone," for " they will
sink their differences in the presence of
a common danger." The trouble is that
past difference may sink them and their
ships. It takes three years to build a
modern ship, and nearly as long to train
the men, and the country cannot afford
to overlook differences which are under-
mining the discipline and efficiency of a
service destined to take the first shock
of war, and whose effective preparation
and readiness form the surest guarantee
of peace.

Leaving out the long series of contro-
versies between the line and the engi-
neers, the cause of friction is not far to
seek. On every ship there are two sets
of officers and men, more or less numer-
ous according to the class of the ship.
They are divided, sometimes in almost
equal numbers, between the deck, where
they man the guns, and the machinery,
where they drive engines and boilers.
The officers are graduates of the same
school ; and yet if accident happens to a
deck officer, an engineer cannot by law
take his place, whatever be the emergen-
cy ; on the other hand, if an engineer
is disabled, a deck officer would be en-

312

A New Organization for the New Navy.

tirely at a loss what to do in his place.
This separation by law and custom forces
upon them different interests. The line
officer, who alone has the right to com-
mand men and ships, will sometimes use
his power for the benefit of a class ; and
the engineer overruled, in many cases
connected with his men and machinery,
has nevertheless to take the responsibil-
ity for the result. The auxiliary ma-
chinery which is put into the ships by
three or four bureaus is managed by as
many officers, and yet the chief engineer
is by naval regulations held responsible
for all repairs and adjustments, without
having had any voice in the training of
the men, or the care of this machinery,
to prevent accident. It would seem that
the naval regulations tend to invite con-
troversy and bad feeling, and to instill
into officers the conviction that their
corps interest must be supreme. In the
entire separation of the two corps, the
country is found to be the loser, and no
ship will be studied as a unit until they
are brought together. The remedy was
suggested by Secretary Welles, in his re-
ports for 1864 and 1865. 'The case can-
not be stated better than in his own
words : —

" Preliminary measures have been
taken to carry into effect the law of the
last session of Congress authorizing the
education at the Naval Academy of ca-
det engineers.

" Before this plan shall be put into
operation, it 1rs respectfully submitted,
in view of tba radical changes which
have been wrought by steam as a motive
power for naval vessels, whether steam
engineering should not be made to con-
stitute hereafter a necessary part of the
education of all midshipmen, so that in
our future navy every line officer will be
a steam engineer and qualified to have
complete command and direction of his
ship. Hereafter every vessel of war
must be a steam vessel. . . . The De-
partment is not aware that any line offi-
cer, whatever attention may have been

given by him to the theoretical study of
steam, is yet capable of taking charge of
an engine, nor are all steam-engine dri-
vers capable of taking charge of a man-
of-war, navigating her, fighting her guns,
and preserving her discipline. . . . Half
the officers of a steamship cannot keep
watch, cannot navigate her, cannot ex-
ercise the great guns or small arms, nor,
except as volunteers under a line officer,
take any part in any expedition against
the enemy. On the other hand, the
other half of the officers are incapable
of managing the steam motive power
or of taking charge of the engine-room
in an emergency, nor can the command-
er of a vessel, though carefully taught
every duty of a sailor and drill officer,
understand of his own knowledge whe-
ther the engineers and firemen are com-
petent or not. The remedy for all this
is very simple, provided the principle
were once recognized and adopted of
making our officers engine drivers as
well as sailors. . . . Objection may be
made that the duties are dissimilar, and
that steam-engine driving is a specialty.
The duties are not more dissimilar than
seamanship and gunnery. . . .

" Fortunately, our naval officers are
taught seamanship, gunnery, and the in-
fantry drill, and the service saved from
distinct organizations in these respects,
which would inevitably have impaired
its efficiency. It only remains to com-
mence at this time, and, as preparatory
to the future of the navy, to teach the
midshipman steam engineering as ap-
plied to running the engine. This would
be independent of the art of designing
and constructing, which is purely a spe-
cialty, and nowise necessary in the man-
agement and direction of the ship. And
to this specialty, as a highly scientific
body of officers, would the present corps
of engineers be always required as in-
spectors and constructors of machinery.
With the adoption of the suggestions
here made, we shall in due time have a
homogeneous corps of officers, who will

A New Organization for the New Navy.

313

be masters of the motive power of their
ships in the future as they have been of
seamanship in the past. By this ar-
rangement there will be in each ship
double the number of officers capable of
fighting and running the vessels without
additional appointments or expense. In-
numerable other advantages commend
the plan as worthy of trial, and it is pre-
sented for favorable consideration."

The report of 1865 adds : " The naval
vessel is no longer dependent on the
winds, nor is she at the mercy of cur-
rents ; but the motive power which pro-
pels and controls her movements is sub-
ject to the mind and will of her com-
mander, provided he is master of his
profession in the future as he has been
in the past. To retain the prominence
which skill and education gave him when
seamanship was the most important ac-
complishment, the line officer must be
qualified to guide and direct this new
element or power. Unless he has these
qualities, he will be dependent on the
knowledge and skill of him who manipu-
lates and directs the engine. To confine
himself to seamanship without the abil-
ity to manage the steam-engine will re-
sult in his taking a secondary position
as compared with that which the accom-
plished naval officer formerly occupied."

Mr. Welles was the ablest secretary
that the Navy Department has ever had,
and it is our misfortune that his advice
has not been followed, and that no mate-
rial change of the old system has • been
made even though the sails of his day
have been stripped from the ships. The
only solution of the matter lies, as he
intimated, in fusing together the line
and the engineers, and in making them
all the line except a small number se-
lected for high technical attainment in
engineering to do the duties of chief
engineers on board and on shore. All
officers except the chief engineer, sur-
geon, and paymaster would then be avail-
able for deck or machinery duties. As
Mr. Welles says, it is not too much to

ask of the deck officers to learn to drive
machinery and, it may be added, to take
care of it under the direction of a com-
petent head. The navy could not fail to
gain enormously by the greater engineer-
ing knowledge of the commanding officer
and the increased interest of the chief
engineer, in whose hands must be placed
everything connected with machinery,
whatever be its nature, on board a ship.

Similar changes and combinations have
taken place in the past, and we find a
very fair historical parallel in the Eng-
lish navy during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. Before that the sailor
occupied somewhat the place of our en-
gineer, and the soldier the place of our
sailor.

A man-of-war in the Greek and Roman
period was carried into action by means
of oars. The crew was divided into
two distinct parts, those on the rowers'
benches and those bearing arms on the
more elevated parts of the ship. A sea
fight consisted in laying alongside and
boarding so that soldiers might meet on
the decks hand to hand as they would on
shore. The soldier element commanded,
and the master and his rowers were im-
pressed or employed for transportation
purposes. This organization answered
very well so long as it had for its main
object the transportation of troops to
shores not far distant or the interception
of landing parties. The captain did not
require a knowledge of navigation, and
he was a soldier purely and simply.

The introduction of sails, guns, and
the bowline created as great a revolution
in the fifteenth century as steam has cre-
ated in the nineteenth. Genuine naval
tactics made possible, a new system of
warfare grew up in which fleets manoeu-
vred for position, and attacked each
other from a distance. With the growing
importance of sails, the seamen became
more numerous and their duties more
responsible, although still subordinate,
and the soldier element, or that part of
the crew which commanded and fought,

314

A New Organization for the New Navy.

grew less essential to the ships. The
inevitable struggle between soldier and
sailor began, lasted for two centuries,
and finally ended in the welding of the
two into one ; but tradition and custom
survive long on the sea, and we still
have the old soldier element in the small
detail of marines carried by our own
ships. The command is, however, in the
hands of the man who knows seaman-
ship. He inherits the knight's pennant
which every commanding officer now
flies at the mast. At times the quarrel
between the gentleman officer and Jack
Tarpaulin grew more bitter than the
present misunderstanding between the
line and the engineers. The consolida-
tion did not come by the sailor's driving
the soldier out of the ship, but by the
gradual acquirement of each other's du-
ties. Some of the soldiers learned sea-
manship, and some of the sailors learned
the handling of guns, so that it was sea-
manship rather than the sailor that cap-
tured the command. Holland first felt
the effect of this union, but England
had adopted it so thoroughly by the end
of the sixteenth century that her sailors
soon obtained the mastery of the sea,
and their descendants still hold it.

Too little prominence is given to this
change in the English system, in the his-
tories of the defeat of the Spanish Arma-
da. Queen Elizabeth had been shrewd
enough to intrust her fleet to genuine
sailors, as the names of Drake, Hawkyns,
and Frobisher attest, while the Spaniards
had clung to the ancient system, with
soldiers in control, and seamen subordi-
nate and despised. The poor equipment
of the Spanish ships, and the ease with
which they were rounded up like a herd
of cattle, forms one of the most melan-
choly pages in history.

A few lines from Admiral Sir William
Monson's Naval Tracts, written in the
early part of the seventeenth century,
exhibit this phase of the subject very
forcibly : —

"In the year 1588, there was not

above one hundred and twenty sail of
men-of-war to encounter that Invincible
Armada of Spain, and not above five of
them all, except the queen's great ships,
were two hundred tons burthen, and did
not exceed those rates in all Queen Eliza-
beth's time ; so that our seamen were by
their experience and courage rather the
cause of victory than the ships ; but if
we should attribute these misfortunes to
ships which are made all of one sort of
wood and iron, and after one manner of
building, it were great folly ; but give
Caesar his due, and allow the ships their
due ; for a ship is but an engine of force
used for offense or defense, and when
you speak of the strength of ships, you
must speak of the sufficiency of men
within her. The Spaniards have more
officers in their ships than we : they
have a captain in their ship, a captain
for their gunners, and as many captains
as there are companies of soldiers, and,
above all, they have a commander in the
nature of a colonel above the rest. This
breeds a great confusion, and is many
times the cause of mutinies among them ;
they brawl and fight commonly aboard
their ships, as if they were ashore. Not-
withstanding the necessity they have of
sailors, there is no nation less respectful
of them than the Spaniards, which is the
principal cause of their want of them ;
and till Spain alters this course, let them
never think to be well served at sea.
Our discipline is far different, and in-
deed quite contrary, as I have showed
before."

He refers in the last sentence to part
of an essay on seamen and officers which
is worth quoting almost entire : —

" The experienced valiant sea soldier
and mariner who knows how to manage
a ship and maintain a sea fight judicial-
ly for defense of himself and offense of
his enemy is only fit to be a captain or
commander at sea ; for without good ex-
perience, a man otherwise courageous
may soon destroy himself and his com-
pany. . . .

A New Organization for the New Navy.

315

" The seaman's desire is to be com-
manded by those that understand their
labor, laws, and customs, thereby ex-
pecting reward or punishment according
to their deserts.

" The seamen are stubborn or per-
verse when they receive their command
from the ignorant in the discipline of
the sea, who cannot speak to them in
their own language.

" That commander who is bred a sea-
man and of approved government, by
his skill in choice of his company will
save twenty in the hundred, and per-
form better service than he can possibly
do that understands not perfectly how
to direct the officers under him.

" The best ships of war in the known
world have been commanded by captains
bred seamen ; and merchants put their
whole confidence in the fidelity and abil-
ity of seamen to carry their ships and
goods through the hazard of pirates,
men-of-war, and the danger of rocks and
sands, be they of never so much value ;
which they would never do under the
charge of a gentleman or an inexperi-
enced soldier for his valor only.

" The seamen are much discouraged
of late times by preferring of young,
needy, and inexperienced gentlemen cap-
tains over them in their own ships ; as
also by placing lieutenants above the
masters in the king's ships, which have
never been used until of late years.

" The seaman is willing to give or re-
ceive punishment deservedly according
to the laws of the sea, and not otherwise
according to the fury or passion of a
boisterous, blasphemous swearing com-
mander.

" I must say, and with truth, that
all her majesty's ships are far under-
manned : for when people come to be
divided into three parts, the one third to
tackle the ship, the other to ply their
small shot, and the third to manage their
ordnance, all the three services fail for
want of men to execute them. Neither
do I see that more men can be contained

in the queen's ships to the southward, for
want of storage for victuals and room to
lodge in.

" And lastly, for the men that sail in
the ships, without whom they are of no
use, their usage has been so ill at the
end of their voyages that it is no marvel
they shew their unwillingness to serve
the queen ; for if they arrive sick from
any voyage, such is the charity of the
people ashore that they shall sooner die
than find pity, unless they bring money
with them."

To a large extent we are following in
the footsteps of our ancestors. The en-
gineers and firemen occupy much the
same position as the masters and seamen
of old. The boisterous, blasphemous,
swearing commander is gone as our of-
ficers have become better educated and
more enlightened ; and the logical growth
of our service is toward the same kind
of a union which occurred during Queen
Elizabeth's reign. The machine is here.
Even our guns are called machine guns,
and the tendency is inevitably towards a
homogeneous crew to handle them. " The
sailor will not swallow the engineer, nor
the engineer the sailor." It will be the
triumph of steam over sails, and the vic-
tory of engineering over that seamanship
upon which we shall always be proud to
look back as one of the chief factors in
the formation of our country. The line
officers fear that the engineers wish to
command the ships. Let the command-
ing officers become engineers, and let
engineers rule our ships, then all fears
will be dispelled, and the navy will quick-
ly become a unit.

There are now two bills before Con-
gress for the improvement of the per-
sonnel, one relating to promotions in the
line, and the other to an increase of
numbers of engineers, with a better defi-
nition of their status and rank. Neither
of .these bills has any prospect of pass-
ing both Houses, on account of the line
and staff quarrel. Many officers are

316

A New Organization for the New Navy.

ready to endure martyrdom for what
seems to them a principle, forgetting
that the true principle to die for is the
future welfare of our country, and not
the triumph of a corps in the navy.
When the cases are examined, it will be
found that sentiment plays a large part
in the discussion, and that the wisest
reforms can best be effected by a fair
and considerate examination of the sub-
ject in the Navy Department, under the
personal direction of the Secretary or
Assistant Secretary. No serious effort
has been made in the past to deal ade-
quately with the organization of the men
as a whole to fight the ships, for most
questions have been decided by the line
without consultation, or by boards whose
members have not possessed one anoth-
er's confidence. The late Board of Vis-
itors to the Naval Academy recommend-
ed that all cadets shall pursue the same
course of studies, in order that officers
may be educated alike for deck and en-
gine-room duties. At first blush, this
plan seems to the older officers of the
service a process of converting the aspir-
ing cadet into an anaconda, but a little
experience would without doubt prove
it to be extremely practical and sensi-
ble. All the problems on a modern bat-
tle-ship are engineering in their nature,
and there is no problem which cannot
be solved by the man whose early edu-
cation has been largely in mechanics
and engineering. Questions of organi-
zation of men, tactics, and international
law must be learned by study and ex-
perience after graduation, and in these
matters the graduates from a school
where engineering is emphasized would
be as well off as those from a school of
seamanship.

The present system at the Naval
Academy does not supply the needs of a
modern navy, and it too often instills into
the youthful minds of the cadets the vi-
cious notion that the commanding officer
is above the knowledge of every detail
of his own ship. During the course,

considerable attention is given to mathe-
matics, seamanship, gunnery, and naviga-
tion, and a comparatively small amount
to engineering, language, and the natu-
ral sciences. At the end of three years,
the cadets are separated into two divi-
sidns, one of line cadets and one of en-
gineer cadets. The latter receive one
year in engineering, and the former an
additional year in seamanship, naviga-
tion, and gunnery. By seamanship is
here meant the handling of a ship un-
der sail. Those who pass the examina-
tions graduate at the end of their fourth
year, and serve two years at sea before
receiving commissions. These two years
are supposed to give the graduates a
more practical knowledge of their pro-
fessions. The line cadets usually find
themselves on sailless vessels, and pro-
ceed to pick up what they can about
boats, guns, and the management of men
on deck. They are required to spend
some time in the engine-rooms when the
ship is steaming, but without responsi-
bilities or duties, very much as tourists
crossing the Atlantic visit the engine-
room. After two years at sea, they are
ordered home for examination, and re-
ceive commissions in the line of the ma-
rine corps, if vacancies can be found
for them. The engineer cadets pass
through the same stage, except that their
two years at sea are spent with the ma-
chinery. They receive commissions as
assistant engineers. Two or three " star "
graduates are yearly transferred to the
Corps of Naval Constructors and remain
on shore for duties at navy yards and
at the Department, in connection with
the design and building of the hulls of
ships.

The division into line and engineer
cadets at the end of the third year is
on the basis of aptitude and preference.
This does not work out well in practice.
Few young men at the age of twenty
really exhibit marked aptitude for line
or staff duties, and it is impossible for
the Academic Board to divide the class

A New Organization for the New Navy.

317

by aptitude. Then, the men who stand
highest in the class have the first choice,
and preference discloses a lamentable
outlook for engineering in the navy- No
young man will go into a corps which
seems to him discredited from the start.
He knows, from what he hears of the
service, that his standing as an officer
of a military force will not be fixed so
definitely that a foolish commanding of-
ficer cannot humiliate him in the sight
of his own men. When President McKin-
ley visited the Naval Academy in the
spring, the engineer cadets were shut up
in their rooms, because the commanding
officer either could not, or would not,
find a place for them in a review before
the commander-in-chief. Preference can
be exercised where pride does not influ-
ence the choice, and where the rewards
are equal, and no young man will ex-
press a preference for a corps in which
he is sure to become the victim of tradi-
tion. This is not fancy ; for the Board
of Visitors to the Naval Academy have
had brought plainly before them the
difficulty of getting volunteers for the
engineer corps. Only those cadets who
cannot help themselves enter the corps,
and even then too often with a men-
tal reservation to resign as soon as pos-
sible. To borrow a phrase from Sir
William Monson, " Let them never think
to be well served at sea " in their en-
gineering matters so long as this con-
dition lasts. The country may well ask
for improvement here, even though .of-
ficers of the service do not see fit to
devise a better method of selection or
rewards for the engineer corps, which
will make it equally attractive with the
line and marine corps.

Another consideration which necessa-
rily weighs with every young man is the
hope of reaching high rank in command
of other men, and of obtaining the op-
portunity to distinguish himself before
his countrymen. There is no reason why
this road should not be open to every
graduate of the Naval Academy, at least

until he has learnt that credit is earned
by faithfulness and zeal, and that high
rank is not necessarily a distinction, or
even a worthy ambition, when it may
often be achieved simply by entering the
navy young and living sixty-two years.
After men have been some years in the
line, and have reached an age when their
aptitudes declare themselves, it is time
to set some of them apart in a staff corps
which does not command ships, but which
does have the higher ranks and pay
open to it. While the union of the two
corps as above indicated would remove
the grievance of the young engineer by
removing him to the line, and would
promote the harmony of shipboard life,
an engineer corps would still be an ab-
solutely essential part of the organiza-
tion. The number in the present corps
could be reduced by half, as all subor-
dinate positions would be filled by the
younger officers of the line. Its mem-
bers would serve as chief engineers of
ships, and as designers and constructors
of machinery for the navy. They should
be men of first-rate engineering ability,
and all responsibility for technical mat-
ters connected with materials on board
ship and machinery on shore should be
placed upon them. The law should be
changed so as to give them rank and
command over men in divisional and
other ship duties, while the succession to
the command of the ships should remain
in the line as at present.

The engineer question once settled,
the most complete and efficient organiza-
tion of the .crew would follow, as the
same officers would have had experience
both above and below decks ; but a very
sore spot would still remain in the pro-
motion during peace. The young gradu-
ate commissioned ensign in the line finds
himself in a sorry position. His pay is
small, and he is confronted with a hope-
less stagnation in promotion. A man of
twenty-eight with a wife and children,
and still an ensign on twelve or fourteen
hundred dollars a year, is not a cheering

318

A New Organization for the New Navy.

spectacle ; and he gets this pay only at
sea away from his family. If he has
duty on shore, and lives with them, his
pay is even less. The long list of lieu1
tenants, lieutenant-commanders and com-
manders, brought in just at the end of
the war, blocks the way for many years
to come. They are themselves passing
through a slough of despond out of which
they will emerge more fit to dandle their
grandchildren than to command ships.
The writer assisted a few years ago in
the celebration of a brother officer's at-
taining his majority on the lieutenant's
list. Twenty-one years of his life had
been literally thrown away on the deck
of a ship in a subordinate grade, without
any prospect of reaching command rank
under fifty or fifty-five. Can the coun-
try expect much zeal and energy from
an old gentleman doing duty as senior
watch officer, when he ought to be in
command of a fleet ?

When men form the essential part of
a naval force, it is their promotion which
gives life to the deadly monotony of
ship routine and drill, and which turns
their energies into work rather than dis-
contented wrangling with other corps,
or other parts of their own corps. Even
in business and social life, we are all
stimulated by the hope of promotion in
one form or another, and, if we are to
obtain the greatest efficiency, the coun-
try must recognize this fact in its own
service. There is not a more conscien-
tious, willing body of men in the world
than the officers of the navy, both line
and staff. Notwithstanding their very
trying surroundings, their separation
from their families for long periods and
their inadequate promotion and pay, we
know that our flag is still borne with
honor by gentlemen who will not discredit
their country in the sight of foreigners.
It is our shame that their rewards are
so few.

The Navy Department and the offi-
cers have petitioned Congress times in-
numerable to regulate\by statute the flow

of promotion ; but as all the plans sug-
gested involve an increase of the retired
list and the establishment of a reserve
list for men who have grown too old in
the lower grades to make responsible
commanding officers, Congress has held
off through fear of increased appropria-
tion for the navy. It may be well to
note that the increase will not be great,
as the officers will go on the retired list
in the lower grades where their pay will
be less ; besides, the resulting improve-
ment in zeal and effectiveness will save
more in cost of materials than the ad-
ditional outlay on personnel. The whole
cost must be reckoned, not a part.

Another grave difficulty in our service
is the lack of strong military control.
The influence of politicians is too often
felt in matters which vitally affect disci-
pline and legitimate service. When the
cruiser Charleston returned from the
chase of the Itata, she was detailed to
visit all the watering-places along the
coast of California in order to demon-
strate that, although located upon the
open coast, they possessed excellent har-
bors and very desirable booms in real
estate.

At present we have no body of officers
charged with the preparation of plans
for war. We have a War College, which
is doing much in a general way to en-
courage the study of strategy, tactics,
history, and international law ; a naval
intelligence office, to collect information
about foreign ships and naval defenses ;
and a board of bureau chiefs to decide
upon contracts and the types of ships for
national defense. What we really need
is a general staff to coordinate the three.
In spite of the anomalies and conflicts
in the duties of the bureaus, the present
division of the Department into indepen-
dent bureaus for details of building and
manning the navy would be fairly effi-
cient if we had besides a naval staff to
whom might be referred all questions of
types, strategy, and tactics. The plans
heretofore put forward to this end have

A New Organization for the New Navy.

319

failed through the fear that such a staff
might in course of time absorb all the
functions of the Navy Department, to the
great detriment of efficiency in details of
personnel and materials. If the officers
of this staff were made simply the mili-
tary advisers of the Secretary, with du-
ties limited by law to the preparation of
plans for war and the general movements
of ships for defense and attack, and with
no authority over the technical details
allotted to the bureaus, the danger would
be remote. The chief of staff should be
a man who has served with distinction in
the command grade at sea for a number
of years.

To state briefly the present require-
ments of the naval personnel, there are
three or four principles which must be
recognized in a reorganization for the
new ships. These are, the amalgamation
of the line and engineers, the selection
of an engineer corps from the line after
some years of service with the machin-
ery and on deck, the regulation of the
flow of promotion, and the formation of
some kind of a general staff. Nearly
every bill in Congress has looked at the
subject from the point of view of a corps,
and it is high time for the Department
to suggest legislation for the general good
of the navy.

The following project has been sug-
gested as promising much towards this
desirable end : —

1. To make the course at the Naval
Academy the same for all cadets, with a
strong emphasis on engineering.

2. To give all graduates, except those
entering the marine and construction
corps, commissions as ensigns in the line.

3. To require all line officers to spend
their first six years at sea, equally divided
between responsible duties on deck and
in the machinery department.

4. To permit any line officer to spe-
cialize in engineering during his second
six years as a commissioned officer, and
at the end of this time to transfer him

to the engineer corps after thorough
examination in engineering.

5. To require at least one officer of
the engineer corps on every ship, and
to place under his charge all that per-
tains to machinery on board, including
the men required for engineering mat-
ters.

6. To give all watch duties connected
with repairing and driving machinery to
line officers under the direction of the
chief engineers.

7. To promote all officers of the line
and engineer corps at the same rate and
to the same ranks.

8. To make the total number of line
officers and engineers together what it
is now by law, with a minimum of about
one hundred officers in the engineer
corps.

9. To regulate the flow of promotion
by permitting a limited number of of-
ficers to retire after thirty years' service.

10. To provide a " reserve list " for
officers who do not reach command rank
young enough to be effective.

11. To promote all ensigns after three
years' service in that grade.

12. To transfer to the line all officers
of the present engineer corps who have
held their commissions less than twelve
years.

13. To establish a general staff in
whose hands shall be placed all mat-
ters connected with the preparation for
war.

It is not to be expected that these
changes would eradicate all the troubles
incident to military service or to infirmi-
ties of temper, but they would tend to-
ward the complete unification of the two
corps which must bear the burdens of the
ships in time of peace and the brunt of
action in time of war. The increase of
harmony among our officers would like-
wise lead to clearer views on the organi-
zation of enlisted men, and to higher
efficiency, and thus to the greater glory
of our flag and country.

Ira N. Hollis.

320

On Being Human.

ON BEING HUMAN.

" THE rarest sort of a book," says Mr.
Bagehot slyly, is " a book to read ; " and
" the knack in style is to write like a hu-
man being." It is painfully evident, upon
experiment, that not many of the books
which come teeming from our presses
every year are meant to be read. They
are meant, it may be, to be pondered ;
it is hoped, no doubt, they may instruct,
or inform, or startle, or arouse, or re-
form, or provoke, or amuse us ; but we
read, if we have the true reader's zest
and palate, not to grow more knowing,
but to be less pent up and bound within
a little circle, — as those who take their
pleasure, and not as those who laborious-
ly seek instruction, — as a means of see-
ing and enjoying the world of men and
affairs. We wish companionship and re-
newal of spirit, enrichment of thought
and the full adventure of the mind ; and
we desire fair company, and a large world
in which to find them.

No one who loves the masters who may
be communed with and read but must
see, therefore, and resent the error of
making the text of any one of them a
source to draw grammar from, forcing
the parts of speech to stand out stark and
cold from the warm text ; or a store of
samples whence to draw rhetorical in-
stances, setting up figures of speech sin-
gly and without support of any neighbor
phrase, to be stared at curiously and
with intent to copy or dissect ! Here is
grammar done without deliberation : the
phrases carry their meaning simply and
by a sort of limpid reflection ; the thought
is a living thing, not an image ingenious-
ly contrived and wrought. Pray leave
the text whole : it has no meaning piece-
meal ; at any rate, not that best, whole-
some meaning, as of a frank and ge-
nial friend who talks, not for himself or
for his phrase, but for you. It is ques-
tionable morals to dismember a living

frame to seek for its obscure fountains of
life!

When you say that a book was meant
to be read, you mean, for one thing, of
course, that it was not meant to be stud-
ied. You do not study a good story,
or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or
a love ballad, or any moving narrative,
whether it be out of history or out of
fiction, — nor any argument, even, that
moves vital in the field of action. You
do not have to study these things ; they
reveal themselves, you do not stay to see
how. They remain with you, and will not
be forgotten or laid by. They cling like
a personal experience, and become the
mind's intimates. You devour a book
meant to be read, not because you would
fill yourself or have an anxious care to be
nourished, but because it contains such
stuff as it makes the mind hungry to
look upon. Neither do you read it to kill
time, but to lengthen time, rather, add-
ing to it its natural usury by living the
more abundantly while it lasts, joining
another's life and thought to your own.

There are a few children in every
generation, as Mr. Bagehot reminds us,
who think the natural thing to do with
any book is to read it. " There is an
argument from design in the subject,"
as he says ; " if the book was not meant
for that purpose, for what purpose was
it meant ? " These are the young eyes
to which books yield up a great treasure,
almost in spite of themselves, as if they
had been penetrated by some swift, en-
larging power of vision which only the
young know. It is these youngsters to
whom books give up the long ages of his-
tory, " the wonderful series going back
to the times of old patriarchs with their
flocks and herds," — I am quoting Mr.
Bagehot again, — " the keen-eyed Greek,
the stately Roman, the watching Jew,
the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the

On Being Human.

321

settled picture of the unchanging East,
the restless shifting of the rapid West,
the rise of the cold and classical civiliza-
tion, its fall, the rough impetuous Mid-
dle Ages, the vague warm picture of our-
selves and home. When did we lea*rn
these ? Not yesterday nor to-day, but
long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in
the original flow of fancy." Books will
not yield to us so richly when we are
older. The argument from design fails.
We return to the staid authors we read
long ago, and do not find in them the
vital, speaking images that used to lie
there upon the page. Our own fancy is
gone, and the author never had any. We
are driven in upon the books meant to
be read.

These are books written by human be-
ings, indeed, but with no general quality
belonging to the kind, — with a special
tone and temper, rather, a spirit out of
the common, touched with a light that
shines clear out of some great source of
light which not every man can uncover.
We call this spirit human because it
moves us, quickens a like life in our-
selves, makes us glow with a sort of ardor
of self-discovery. It touches the springs
of fancy or of action within us, and
makes our own life seem more quick and
vital. We do not call every book that
moves us human. Some seem written with
knowledge of the black art, set our base
passions aflame, disclose motives at which
we shudder, — the more because we feel
their reality and power ; and we know
that this is of the devil, and not the fruit-
age of any quality that distinguishes us
as men. We are distinguished as men
by the qualities that mark us different
from the beasts. When we call a thing
human we have a spiritual ideal in mind.
It may not be an ideal of that which is
perfect, but it moves at least upon an up-
land level where the air is sweet ; it holds
an image of man erect and constant,
going abroad with undaunted steps, look-
ing with frank and open gaze upon all the
fortunes of his day, feeling ever and again

" the joy

Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things."

Say what we may of the errors and the
degrading sins of .our kind, we do not
willingly make what is worst in us the
distinguishing trait of what is human.
When we declare, with Bagehot, that the
author whom we love writes like a human
being, we are not sneering at him ; we
do not say it with a leer. It is in token
of admiration, rather. He makes us like
our humankind. There is a noble pas-
sion in what he says ; a wholesome hu-
mor that echoes genial comradeships ; a
certain reasonableness and moderation in
what is thought and said ; an air of the
open day, in which things are seen whole
and in their right colors, rather than of
the close study or the academic class-
room. We do not want our poetry from
grammarians, nor our tales from philo-
logists, nor our history from theorists.
Their human nature is subtly transmuted
into something less broad and catholic
and of the general world. Neither do we
want our political economy from trades-
men nor our statesmanship from mere
politicians, but from those who see more
and care for more than these men see or
care for.

Once, — it is a thought which troubles
us, — once it was a simple enough mat-
ter to be a human being, but now it is
deeply difficult ; because life was once
simple, but is now complex, confused,
multifarious. Haste, anxiety, preoccu-
pation, the need to specialize and make
machines of ourselves, have transformed
the once simple world, and we are ap-
prised that it will not be without effort
that we shall keep the broad human traits
which have so far made the earth habita-
ble; We have seen our modern life ac-
cumulate, hot and restless, in great cities,
— and we cannot say that the change is

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479.

322

On Being Human.

not natural : we see iji it, on the contra-
ry, the fulfillment of an inevitable law
of change, which is no doubt a law of
growth, and not of decay. And yet we
look upon the portentous thing with a
great distaste, and doubt with what al-
tered passions we shall come out of it.
The huge, rushing, aggregate life of a
great city, — the crushing crowds in the
streets, where friends seldom meet and
there are few greetings ; the thunderous
noise of trade and industry that speaks
of nothing but gain and competition, and
a consuming fever that checks the natural
courses of the kindly blood ; no leisure
anywhere, no quiet, no restful ease, no
wise repose, — all this shocks us. It is
inhumane. It does not seem human.
How much more likely does it appear
that we shall find men sane and human
about a country fireside, upon the streets
of quiet villages, where all are neighbors,
where groups of friends gather easily,
and a constant sympathy makes the very
air seem native ! Why should not the
city seem infinitely more human than the
hamlet ? Why should not human traits
the more abound where human beings
teem millions strong ?

Because the city curtails man of his
wholeness, specializes him, quickens some
powers, stunts others, gives him a sharp
edge and a temper like that of steel,
makes him unfit for nothing so much
as to sit still. Men have indeed writ-
ten like human beings in the midst of
great cities, but not often when they
have shared the city's characteristic life,
its struggle for place and for gain. There
are not many places that belong to a
city's life to which you can " invite your
soul." Its haste, its preoccupations, its
anxieties, its rushing noise as of men
driven, its ringing cries, distract you.
It offers no quiet for reflection ; it per-
mits no retirement to any who share its
life. It is a place of little tasks, of nar-
rowed functions, of aggregate and not of
individual strength. The great machine
dominates its little parts, and its Soci-

ety is as much of a machine as its busi-
ness.

" This tract which the river of Time
Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border'd by cities, and hoarse
With a thousand cries is its stream.
And we on its breast, our minds
Are confused as the cries which we hear,
Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

" And we say that repose has fled
Forever the course of the river of Time,
That cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker, incessanter line ;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain ^where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead,
That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,
Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

" But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

" Haply, the river of Time —
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream —
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

" And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast —
As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."

We cannot easily see the large mea-
sure and abiding purpose of the novel
age in which we stand young and con-
fused. The view that shall clear our
minds and quicken us to act as those
who know their task and its distant con-
summation will come with better know-
ledge and completer self-possession. It
shall not be a night-wind, but an air
that shall blow out of the widening east
and with the coming of the light, that
shall bring us, with the morning, " mur-
murs and scents of the infinite sea." Who

On Being Human.

323

can doubt that man has grown more and
more human with each step of that slow
process which has brought him know-
ledge, self-restraint, the arts of inter-
course, and the revelations of real joy ?
Man has more and more lived with his
fellow men, and it is society that has hu-
manized him, — the development of soci-
ety into an infinitely various school of dis-
cipline and ordered skill. He has been
made more human by schooling, by grow-
ing more self-possessed, — less violent,
less tumultuous ; holding himself in hand,
and moving always with a certain poise
of spirit ; not forever clapping his hand
to the hilt of his sword, but preferring,
rather, to play with a subtler skill upon
the springs of action. This is our con-
ception of the truly human man : a man
in whom there is a just balance of facul-
ties, a catholic sympathy, — no brawler,
no fanatic, no Pharisee; not too credulous
in hope, not too desperate in purpose ;
warm, but not hasty ; ardent and full of
definite power, but not running about to
be pleased and deceived by every new
thing.

It is a genial image, of men we love,
— an image of men warm and true of
heart, direct and unhesitating in cour-
age, generous, magnanimous, faithful,
steadfast, capable of a deep devotion and
self-forgetfulness. But the age changes,
and with it must change our ideals of
human quality. Not that we would give
up what we have loved : we would add
what a new life demands. In a new
age men must acquire a new capacity,
must be men upon a new scale and with
added qualities. We shall need a new
Renaissance, ushered in by a new " hu-
manistic " movement, in which we shall
add to our present minute, introspective
study of ourselves, our jails, our slums,
our nerve-centres, our shifts to live, al-
most as morbid as mediaeval religion, a
rediscovery of the round world and of
man's place in it, now that its face has
changed. We study the world, but not
yet with intent to school our hearts and

tastes, broaden our natures, and know
our fellow men as comrades rather than
as phenomena ; with purpose, rather, to
build up bodies of critical doctrine and
provide ourselves with theses. That,
surely, is not the truly humanizing way
in which to take the air of the world.
Man is much more than a " rational be-
ing," and lives more by sympathies and
impressions than by conclusions. It
darkens his eyes and dries up the wells
of his humanity to be forever in search
of doctrine. We need wholesome, ex-
periencing natures, I dare affirm, much
more than we need sound reasoning.

Take life in the large view, and we
are most reasonable when we seek that
which is most wholesome and tonic for
our natures as a whole ; and we know,
when we put aside pedantry, that the
great middle object in life, — the object
that lies between religion on the one
hand, and food and clothing on the other,
establishing our average levels of achieve-
ment, — the excellent golden mean, is,
not to be learned, but to be human be-
ings in all the wide and genial meaning
of the term. Does the age hinder ? Do
its mazy interests distract us when we
would plan our discipline, determine our
duty, clarify our ideals ? It is the more
necessary that we should ask ourselves
what it is that is demanded of us, if we
would fit our qualities to meet the new
tests. Let us remind ourselves that to
be human is, for one thing, to speak and
act with a certain note of genuineness,
a quality mixed of spontaneity and in-
telligence. This is necessary for whole-
some life in any age, but particularly
amidst confused affairs and shifting stan-
dards. Genuineness is not mere sim-
plicity, for that may lack vitality, and
genuineness does not. We expect what
we call genuine to have pith and strength
of fibre. Genuineness is a quality which
we sometimes mean to include when we
spe'ak of individuality. Individuality is
lost the moment you submit to passing
modes or fashions, the creations of an

324

On Being Human.

artificial society ; and so is genuineness.
No man is genuine who is forever trying
to pattern his life after the lives of other
people, — unless indeed he be a genuine
dolt. But individuality is by no means
the same as genuineness ; for individu-
ality may be associated with the most
extreme and even ridiculous eccentricity,
while genuineness we conceive to be al-
ways wholesome, balanced, and touched
with dignity. It is a quality that goes
with good sense and self-respect. It is
a sort of robust moral sanity, mixed of
elements both moral and intellectual. It
is found in natures too strong to be mere
trimmers and conf ormers, too well poised
and thoughtful to fling off into intem-
perate protest and revolt. Laughter is
genuine which has in it neither the shrill,
hysterical note of mere excitement nor
the hard metallic twang of the cynic's
sneer, — which rings in the honest voice
of gracious good humor, which is inno-
cent and unsatirical. Speech is genu-
ine which is without silliness, affectation,
or pretense. That character is genuine
which seems built by nature rather than
by convention, which is stuff of inde-
pendence and of good courage. Nothing
spurious, bastard, begotten out of true
wedlock of the mind ; nothing adulter-
ated and seeming to be what it is not ;
nothing unreal, can ever get place among
the nobility of things genuine, natural,
of pure stock and unmistakable lineage.
It is a prerogative of every truly human
being to come out from the low estate
of those who are merely gregarious and
of the herd, and show his innate powers
cultivated and yet unspoiled, — sound,
unmixed, free from imitation ; showing
that individualization without extrava-
gance which is genuineness.

But how ? By what means is this self-
liberation to be effected, — this emanci-
pation from affectation and the bondage
of being like other people ? Is it open
to us to choose to be genuine ? I see
nothing insuperable in the way, except
for those who are hopelessly lacking in

a sense of humor. It depends upon the
range and scale of your observation whe-
ther you can strike the balance of genu-
ineness or not. If you live in a small
and petty world, you will be subject
to its standards ; but if you live in a
large world, you will see that standards
are innumerable, — some old, some new,
some made by the noble-minded and
made to last, some made by the weak-
minded and destined to perish, some
lasting from age to age, some only from
day to day, — and that a choice must
be made amongst them. It is then that
your sense of humor will assist you. You
are, you will perceive, upon a long jour-
ney, and it will seem to you ridiculous
to change your life and discipline your
instincts to conform to the usages of a
single inn by the way. You will dis-
tinguish the essentials from the acci-
dents, and deem the accidents something
meant for your amusement. The strong-
est natures do not need to wait for these
slow lessons of observation, to be got by
conning life : their sheer vigor makes it
impossible for them to conform to fash-
ion or care for times and seasons. But
the rest of us must cultivate knowledge
of the world in the large, get our offing,
reach a comparative point of view, be-
fore we can become with steady confi-
dence our own masters and pilots. The
art of being human begins with the prac-
tice of being genuine, and following stan-
dards of conduct which the world has
tested. If your life is not various and
you cannot know the best people, who
set the standards of sincerity, your read-
ing at least can be various, and you
may look at your little circle through
the best books, under the guidance of
writers who have known life and loved
the truth.

And then genuineness will bring se-
renity, — which I take to be another
mark of the right development of the
true human being, certainly in an age
passionate and confused as this in which
we live. Of course serenity does not al-

On Being Human.

325

ways go with genuineness. We must
say of Dr. Johnson that he was genuine,
and yet we know that the stormy tyrant
of the Turk's Head Tavern was not se-
rene. Carlyle was genuine (though that
is not quite the first adjective we should
choose to describe him), but of serenity
he allowed cooks and cocks and every
modern and every ancient sham to de-
prive him. Serenity is a product, no
doubt, of two very different things, name-
ly, vision and digestion. Not the eye
only, but the courses of the blood must be
clear, if we would find serenity. Our
word " serene " contains a picture. Its
image is of the cairn evening, when the
stars are out and the still night comes
on ; when the dew is on the grass and
the wind does not stir ; when the day's
work is over, and the evening meal, and
thought falls clear in the quiet hour.
It is the hour of reflection, — and it is
human to reflect. Who shall contrive to
be human without this evening hour,
which drives turmoil out, and gives the
soul its seasons of self-recollection ? Se-
renity is not a thing to beget inaction.
It only checks excitement and uncalcu-
lating haste. It does not exclude ardor
or the heat of battle : it keeps ardor
from extravagance, prevents the battle
from becoming a mere aimless melde.
The great captains of the world have
been men who were calm in the moment
of crisis ; who were calm, too, in the
long planning which preceded crisis ;
who went into battle with a serenity in-
finitely ominous for those whom they at-
tacked. We instinctively associate se-
renity with the highest types of power
among men, seeing in it the poise of
knowledge and calm vision, that supreme
heat and mastery which is without splut-
ter or noise of any kind. The art of
power in this sort is no doubt learned
in hours of reflection, by those who are
not born with it. What rebuke of aim-
less excitement there is to be got out of
a little reflection, when we have been in-
veighing against the corruption and de-

cadence of our own days, if only we have
provided ourselves with a little know-
ledge of the past wherewith to balance
our thought ! As bad times as these, or
any we shall see, have been reformed,
but not by protests. They have been
made glorious instead of shameful by
the men who kept their heads and struck
with sure self-possession in the fight.
No age will take hysterical reform. The
world is very human, not a bit given to
adopting virtues for the sake of those
who merely bemoan its vices, and we are
most effective when we are most calmly
in possession of our senses.

So far is serenity from being a thing
of slackness or inaction that it seems
bred, rather, by an equable energy, a
satisfying activity. It may be found in
the midst of that alert interest in affairs
which is, it may be, the distinguishing
trait of developed manhood. You dis-
tinguish man from the brute by his in-
telligent curiosity, his play of mind be-
yond the narrow field of instinct, his
perception of cause and effect in matters
to him indifferent, his appreciation of
motive and calculation of results. He is
interested in the world about him, and
even in the great universe of which it
forms a part, not merely as a thing he
would use, satisfy his wants and grow
great by, but as a field to stretch his
mind in, for love of journeyings and ex-
cursions in the large realm of thought.
Your full-bred human being loves a run
afield with his understanding. With
what images does he not surround him-
self and store his mind ! With what
fondness does he con travelers' tales
and credit poets' fancies ! With what
patience does he follow science and pore
upon old records, and with what eager-
ness does he ask the news of the day !
No great part of what he learns immedi-
ately touches his own life or the course
of his own affairs : he is not pursuing a
business, but satisfying as he can an
insatiable mind. No doubt the highest
form of this noble curiosity is that which

326

On Being Human.

leads us, without self-interest, to look
abroad upon all the field of man's life
at home and in society, seeking more
excellent forms of government, more
righteous ways of labor, more elevating
forms of art, and which makes the greater
among us statesmen, reformers, philan-
thropists, artists, critics, men of letters.
It is certainly human to mind your neigh-
bor's business as well as your own. Gos-
sips are only sociologists upon a mean
and petty scale. The art of being hu-
man lifts to a better level than that of
gossip ; it leaves mere chatter behind,
as too reminiscent of a lower stage of
existence, and is compassed by those
whose outlook is wide enough to serve
for guidance and a choosing of ways.

Luckily we are not the first human
beings. We have come into a great
heritage of interesting things, collected
and piled all about us by the curiosity
of past generations. And so our interest
is selective. Our' education consists in
learning intelligent choice. Our energies
do not clash or compete : each is free to
take his own path to knowledge. Each
has that choice, which is man's alone, of
the life he shall live, and finds out first
or last that the art in living is not only
to be genuine and one's own master, but
also to learn mastery in perception and
preference. Your true woodsman needs
not to follow the dusty highway through
the forest nor search for any path, but
goes straight from glade to glade as if
upon an open way, having some privy
understanding with the taller trees, some
compass in his senses. So there is a
subtle craft in finding ways for the mind,
too. Keep but your eyes alert and your
ears quick, as you move among men and
among books, and you shall find your-
self possessed at last of a new sense,
the sense of the pathfinder. Have you
never marked the eyes of a man who has
seen the world he has lived in : the eyes
of the sea-captain, who has watched his
life through the changes of the heavens ;
the eyes of the huntsman, oiature's gos-

sip and familiar ; the eyes of the man of
affairs, accustomed to command in mo-
ments of exigency ? You are at once
aware that they are eyes which can see.
There is something in them that you do
not find in other eyes, and you have read
the life of the man when you have di-
vined what it is. Let the thing serve as
a figure. So ought alert interest in the
world of men and thought to serve each
one of us that we shall have the quick
perceiving vision, taking meanings at a
glance, reading suggestions as if they
were expositions. You shall not other-
wise get full value of your humanity.
What good shall it do you else that the
long generations of men which have gone
before you have filled the world with
great store of everything that may make
you wise and your life various ? Will
you not take usury of the past, if it may
be had for the taking? Here is the
world humanity has made : will you take
full citizenship in it, or will you live in
it as dull, as slow to receive, as unen-
franchised, as the idlers for whom civili-
zation has no uses, or the deadened toil-
ers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts the
door on choice ?

That man seems to me a little less
than human who lives as if our life in
the world were but just begun, thinking
only of the things of sense, recking no-
thing of the infinite thronging and as-
semblage of affairs the great stage over,
or of the old wisdom that has ruled the
world. That is, if he have the choice.
Great masses of our fellow men are shut
out from choosing, by reason of absorb-
ing toil, and it is part of the enlighten-
ment of our age that our understandings
are being opened to the workingman's
need of a little leisure wherein to look
about him and clear his vision of the
dust of the workshop. .We know that
there is a drudgery which is inhuman,
let it but encompass the whole life,
with only heavy sleep between task and
task. We know that those who are
so bound can have no freedom to be

On Beiny Human.

327

men, that their very spirits are in bond-
age. It is part of our philanthropy —
it should be part of our statesmanship
— to ease the burden as we can, and en-
franchise those who spend and are spent
for the sustenance of the race. But
what shall we say of those who are free
and yet choose littleness and bondage,
or of those who, though they might
see the whole face of society, neverthe-
less choose to spend all a life's space
poring upon some single vice or blem-
ish ? I would not for the world discredit
any sort of philanthropy except the
small and churlish sort which seeks to
reform by nagging, — the sort which ex-
aggerates petty vices into great ones,
and runs atilt against windmills, while
everywhere colossal shams and abuses
go unexposed, unrebuked. Is it because
we are better at being common scolds
than at being wise advisers that we pre-
fer little reforms to big ones ? Are we
to allow the poor personal habits of
other people to absorb and quite use up
all our fine indignation ? It will be a
bad day for society when sentimentalists
are encouraged to suggest all the mea-
sures that shall be taken for the better-
ment of the race. I, for one, some-
times sigh for a generation of " leading
people " and of good people who" shall
see things steadily and see them whole ;
who shall show a handsome justness and
a large sanity of view, an opportune
tolerance for the details that happen to
be awry, in order that they may spend
their energy, not without self-possession,
in some generous mission which shall
make right principles shine upon the
people's life. They would bring with
them an age of large moralities, a spa-
cious time, a day of vision.

Knowledge has come into the world
in vain if it is not to emancipate those
who may have it from narrowness, cen-
soriousness, fussiness, an intemperate
zeal for petty things. It would be a
most pleasant, a truly humane world,
would we but open our ears with a more

generous welcome to the clear voices
that ring in those writings upon life and
affairs which mankind has chosen to
keep. Not many splenetic books, not
many intemperate, not many bigoted,
have kept men's confidence; and the
mind that is impatient, or intolerant, or
hoodwinked, or shut in to a petty view,
shall have no part in carrying men for-
ward to a true humanity, shall never
stand as examples of the true human-
kind. What is truly human has always
upon it the broad light of what is ge-
nial, fit to support life, cordial, and of a
catholic spirit of helpfulness. Your true
human being has eyes and keeps his bal-
ance in the world ; deems nothing unin-
teresting that comes from life ; clarifies
his vision and gives health to his eyes by
using them upon things near and things
far. The brute beast has but a single
neighborhood, a single, narrow round
of existence ; the gain of being human
accrues in the choice of change and va-
riety and of experience far and wide,
with all the world for stage, — a stage set
and appointed by this very art of choice,
— all future generations for witnesses
and audience. When you talk with a
man who has in his nature and acquire-
ments that freedom from constraint
which goes with the full franchise of hu-
manity, he turns easily from topic to
topic ; does not fall silent or dull when
you leave some single field of thought
such as unwise men make a prison of.
The men who will not be broken from a
little set of subjects, who talk earnestly,
hotly, with a sort of fierceness, of cer-
tain special schemes of conduct, and look
coldly upon everything else, render you
infinitely uneasy, as if there were in them
a force abnormal and which rocked to-
ward an upset of the mind ; but from
the man whose interest swings from
thought to thought with the zest and
poise and pleasure of the old traveler,
eager for what is new, glad to look again
upon what is old, you come away with
faculties warmed and heartened, — with

328

On Being Human.

the feeling of having been comrade for
a little with a genuine human being.
It is a large world and a round world,
and men grow human by seeing all its'
play of force and folly.

Let no one suppose that efficiency is lost
by such breadth and catholicity of view.
We deceive ourselves with instances, look
at sharp crises in the world's affairs,
and imagine that intense and narrow
men have made history for us. Poise,
balance, a nice and equable exercise of
force, are not, it is true, the things the
world ordinarily seeks for or most ap-
plauds in its heroes. It is apt to esteem
that man most human who has his qual-
ities in a certain exaggeration, whose
courage is passionate, whose generosity
is without deliberation, whose just action
is without premeditation, whose spirit
runs towards its favorite objects with an
infectious and reckless ardor, whose wis-
dom is no child of slow prudence. We
love Achilles more than Diomedes, and
Ulysses not at all. But these are stan-
dards left over from a ruder state of soci-
ety : we should have passed by this time
the Homeric stage of mind, — should
have heroes suited to our age. Nay, we
have erected different standards, and do
make a different choice, when we see in
any man fulfillment of our real ideals.
Let a modern instance serve as test.
Could any man hesitate to say that Abra-
ham Lincoln was more human than Wil-
liam Lloyd Garrison ? Does not every
one know that it was the practical Free-
Soilers who made emancipation possible,
and not the hot, impracticable Aboli-
tionists ; that the country was infinitely
more moved by Lincoln's temperate sa-
gacity than by any man's enthusiasm,
instinctively trusted the man who saw
the whole situation and kept his balance,
instinctively held off from those who re-
fused to see more than one thing ? We
know how serviceable the intense and
headlong agitator was in bringing to their
feet men fit for action ; but we feel un-
easy while he lives, and vouchsafe him

our full sympathy only when he is dead.
We know that the genial forces of na-
ture which work daily, equably, and
without violence are infinitely more ser-
viceable, infinitely more admirable, than
the rude violence of the storm, however
necessary or excellent the purification it
may have wrought. Should we seek to
name the most human man among those
who led the nation to its struggle with
slavery, ajid yet was no statesman, we
should of course name Lowell. We
know that his humor went further than
any man's passion towards setting toler-
ant men a-tingle with the new impulses
of the day. We naturally ihold back
from those who are intemperate and can
never stop to smile, and are deeply re-
assured to see a twinkle in a reformer's
eye. We are glad to see earnest men
laugh. It breaks the strain. If it be
wholesome laughter, it dispels all suspi-
cion of spite, and is like the gleam of
light upon running water, lifting sullen
shadows, suggesting clear depths.

Surely it is this soundness of nature,
this broad and genial quality, this full-
blooded, full-orbed sanity of spirit, which
gives the men we love that wide-eyed
sympathy which gives hope and power
to humanity, which gives range to every
good quality and is so excellent a creden-
tial of genuine manhood. Let your life
and your thought be narrow, and your
sympathy will shrink to a like scale. It
is a quality which follows the seeing mind
afield, which waits on experience. It is
not a mere sentiment. It goes not with
pity so much as with a penetrative under-
standing of other men's lives and hopes
and temptations. Ignorance of these
things makes it worthless. Its best tu-
tors are observation and experience, and
these serve only those who keep clear
eyes and a wide field of vision.

It is exercise and discipline upon such
a scale, too, which strengthen, which for
ordinary men come near to creating, that
capacity to reason upon affairs and to
plan for action which we always reckon

On Being Human.

329

upon finding in every man who has stud-
ied to perfect his native force. This
new day in which we live cries a chal-
lenge to us. Steam and electricity have
reduced nations to neighborhoods ; have
made travel pastime, and news a thing
for everybody. Cheap printing has made
knowledge a vulgar commodity. Our
eyes look, almost without choice, upon
the very world itself, and the word " hu-
man " is filled with a new meaning. Our
ideals broaden to suit the wide day in
which we live. We crave, not cloistered
virtue, — it is impossible any longer to
keep to the cloister, — but a robust spirit
that shall take the air in the great world,
know men in all their kinds, choose its
way amidst the bustle with all self-posses-
sion, with wise genuineness, in calmness,
and yet with the quick eye of interest and
the quick pulse of power. It is again
a day for Shakespeare's spirit, — a day
more various, more ardent, more provok-
ing to valor and every large design even
than " the spacious times of great Eliza-
beth," when all the world seemed new ;
and if we cannot find another bard, come
out of a new Warwickshire, to hold once
more the mirror up to nature, it will not
be because the stage is not set for him.
The time is such an one as he might
rejoice to look upon ; and if we would
serve it as it should be served, we should
seek to be human after his wide-eyed
sort. The serenity of power ; the natu-
ralness that is nature's poise and mark
of genuineness : the unsleeping interest
in all affairs, all fancies, all things be-
lieved or done ; the catholic understand-
ing, tolerance, enjoyment, of all classes
and conditions of men ; the conceiving

imagination, the planning purpose, the
creating thought, the wholesome, laugh-
ing humor, the quiet insight, the uni-
versal coinage of the brain, — are not
these the marvelous gifts and qualities
we mark in Shakespeare when we call
him the greatest among men ? And shall
not these rounded and perfect powers
serve us as our ideal of what it is to be
a finished human being ?

We live for our own age, — an age
like Shakespeare's, when an old world is
passing away, a new world coming in, —
an age of new speculation and every new
adventure of the mind ; a full stage, an
intricate plot, a universal play of passion,
an outcome no man can foresee. It is to
this world, this sweep of action, that our
understandings must be stretched and fit-
ted ; it is in this age we must show our
human quality. We must measure our-
selves by the task, accept the pace set
for us, make shift to know what we are
about. How free and liberal should be
the scale of our sympathy, how catholic
our understanding of the world in which
we live, how poised and masterful our
action in the midst of so great affairs !
We should school our ears to know the
voices that are genuine, our thought to
take the truth when it is spoken, our
spirits to feel the zest of the day. It is
within our choice to be with mean com-
pany or with great, to consort with the
wise or with the foolish, now that the
great world has spoken to us in the lit-
erature of all tongues and voices. The
best selected human nature will tell in
the making of the future, and the art of
being human is the art of freedom and
of force.

Woodrow Wilson.

330

A /Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

A SOUTHERNER IN THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR.

I HAD intended to call this study Two
Wars, but I was afraid last I should be
under the domination of the title, and
an elaborate comparison of the Pelopon-
nesian war and the war between the
States would undoubtedly have led to no
little sophistication of the facts. His-
torical parallel bars are usually set up
for exhibiting feats of mental agility.
The mental agility is often moral sup-
pleness, and nobody expects a critical
examination of the parallelism itself.
He was not an historian of the first rank,
but a phrase-making xhetorician, who is
responsible for the current saying, His-
tory is philosophy teaching by example.
This definition is about as valuable as
some of those other definitions that ex-
press one art in terms of another : poet-
ry in terms of painting, and painting in
terms of poetiy. " Architecture is frozen
music " does not enable us to understand
either perpendicular Gothic or a fugue
of Bach ; and when an historian defines
history in terms of philosophy, or a phi-
losopher philosophy in terras of history,
you may be on the lookout for sophisti-
cation. Your philosophical historian
points his moral by adorning his tale.
Your historical philosopher allows no
zigzags in the march of his evolution.

In like manner, the attempt to express
one war in terms of another is apt to
lead to a wresting of facts. No two
wars are as like as two peas. Yet as
any two marriages in society will yield
a certain number of resemblances, so
will any two wars in history, whether
war itself be regarded as abstract or con-
crete, — a question that seems to have
exercised some grammatical minds, and
ought therefore to be settled before any
further step is taken in this disquisi-
tion, which is the disquisition of a gram-

marian. Now most persons would pro-
nounce war an abstract, but one excellent
manual with which I am acquainted sets
it down as a concrete, and I have often
thought that the author must have known
something practically about war. At
all events, to those who have seen the
midday sun darkened by burning home-
steads, ajid wheatfields illuminated by
stark forms in blue and gray, war is suf-
ficiently concrete. The very first dead
soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes
war forever out of the category of ab-
stracts.

When I was a student abroad, Ameri-
can novices used to be asked in jest, " Is
this your first ruin ? " " Is this your
first nightingale?" I am not certain
that I can place my first ruin or my first
nightingale, but I can recall my first
dead man on the battlefield. We were
making an advance on the enemy's po-
sition near Huttonsville. Nothing, by
the way, could have been more beauti-
ful than the plan, which I was privileged
to see ; and as we neared the objective
point, it was a pleasure to watch how col-
umn after column, marching by this road
and that, converged to the rendezvous.
It was as if some huge spider were gath-
ering its legs about the victim. The
special order issued breathed a spirit of
calm resolution worthy of the general
commanding and his troops. Nobody
that I remember criticised the tautological
expression, " The progress of this army
must be forward." We were prepared
for a hard fight, for we knew that the
enemy was strongly posted. Most of us
were to be under fire for the first time,
and there was some talk about the chances
of the morrow as we lay down to sleep.
Moralizing of that sort gets less and less
common with experience in the business,
and this time the moralizing may have
seemed to some premature. But wher-

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

331

ever the mini^ ball sang its diabolical
mosquito song there was death in the
air, and I was soon to see brought into
camp, under a flag of truce, the lifeless
body of the heir of Mount Vernon, whose
graceful riding I had envied a few days
before. However, there was no serious
fighting. The advance on the enemy's
position had developed more strength in
front than we had counted on, or some
of the spider's legs had failed to close in.
A misleading report had been brought
to headquarters. A weak point in the
enemy's line had been reinforced. Who
knows ? The best laid plans are often
thwarted by the merest trifles, — an in-
significant puddle, a jingling canteen.
This game of war is a hit or miss game,
after all. A certain fatalism is bred
thereby, and it is well to set out with a
stock of that article. So our resolute
advance became a forced reconnaissance,
greatly to the chagrin of the younger and
more ardent spirits. We found out ex-
actly where the enemy was, and declined
to have anything further to do with him
for the time being. But in finding him
we had to clear the ground and drive in
the pickets. One picket had been posted
at the end of a loop in a chain of valleys.
The road we followed skirted the base
of one range of hills. The house which,
served as the headquarters of the picket
was on the other side. A meadow as
level as a board stretched between. I
remember seeing a boy come out and
catch a horse, while we were advancing.
Somehow it seemed to be a trivial thing
to do just then. I knew better after-
wards. Our skirmishers had done their
work, had swept the woods on either side
clean, and the pickets had fallen back
on the main body ; but not all of them.
One man, if not more, had only had time
to fall dead. The one I saw, the first,
was a young man, not thirty, I should
judge, lying on his back, his head too
low for comfort. He had been killed
outright, and there was no distortion of
feature. No more peaceful faces than

one sees at times on the battlefield, and
sudden death, despite the Litany, is not
the least enviable exit. In this case there
was something like a rnild surprise on
the countenance. The rather stolid face
could never have been very expressive.
An unposted letter was found on the dead
man's body. It was written in German,
and I was asked to interpret it, in case
it should contain any important informa-
tion. There was no important informa-
tion ; just messages to friends and kin-
dred, just the trivialities of camp life.

The man was an invader, and in my
eyes deserved an invader's doom. If
sides had been changed, he would have
been a rebel, and would have deserved a
rebel's doom. I was not stirred to the
depths by the sight, but it gave me a les-
son in grammar, and war has ever been
concrete to me from that time on. The
horror I did not feel at first grew stead-
ily. " A sweet thing," says Pindar, " is
war to those that have not tried it."

ii.

Concrete or abstract, there are gen-
eral resemblances between any two wars,
and so war lends itself readily to allego-
ries. Every one has read Bunyan's Holy
War. Not every one has read Spangen-
berg's Grammatical War. It is an in-
genious performance, which fell into my
hands many years after I had gone forth
to see and to feel what war was like. In
Spangenberg's Grammatical War the
nouns and the verbs are the contending
parties. Poeta is king of the nouns, and
Amo king of the verbs. There is a regu-
lar debate between the two sovereigns.
The king of the verbs summons the ad-
verbs to his help, the king of the nouns
the pronouns. The camps are pitched,
the forces marshaled. The neutral pow-
.er, participle, is invoked by both parties,
but declines to send open assistance to
either, hoping that in this contest between
noun and verb the third party will ac-
quire the rule over the whole territory of
language. After a final summons on the

332

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

part of the king of the verbs, and a fierce
response from the rival monarch, active
hostilities begin. We read of raids and
forays. Prisoners are treated with con-
tumely, and their skirts are docked as in
the Biblical narrative. Treachery adds
excitement to the situation. Skirmishes
precede the great engagement, in which
the nouns are worsted, though they have
come off with some of the spoils of war ;
and peace is made on terms dictated by
Priscian, Servius, and Donatus. Span-
genberg's Grammatical War is a not un-
interesting, not uninstructive squib, and
the salt of it, or saltpetre of it, has not
all evaporated after the lapse of some
three centuries. There are bits that re-
mind one of the Greco-Turkish war of a
few weeks ago.

But there is no military science in Bun-
yan's Holy War nor in Spangenberg's
Grammatical War : why should there
be? Practical warfare is rough work.
To frighten, to wound, to kill, — these
three abide under all forms of military
doctrine, and the greatest of these is
frightening. Ares, the god of war, has
two satellites, Terror and Affright. Fear
is the Gorgon's head. The serpents are
very real, very effective, in their way,
but logically they are unessential tresses.
The Gorgon stares you out of counte-
nance, and that suffices. The object is
the removal of an obstacle. Killing and
wounding are but means to an end. Hand-
to-hand fighting is rare, and it would be
easy to count the instances in which cav-
alry meets vhe shock of cavalry. Cross-
ing sabres is not a common pastime in
the red game of war. It makes a fine
picture, to be sure, the finer for the rarity
of the thing itself.

To frighten, to wound, to kill, being
the essential processes, war amounts to
the same thing the world over, world of
time and world of space. Whether death
or disability comes by Belgian ball or
Spencer bullet, by the stone of a Balearic
slinger, by a bolt from a crossbow, is a
matter of detail which need not trouble

the philosophic mind, and the ancients
showed their sense in ascribing fear to
divine inspiration.

If the processes of war are primitive,
the causes of war are no less so. It has
been strikingly said of late by a Scandi-
navian scholar that " language was born
in the courting-days of mankind : the
first utterance of speech [was] some-
thing between the nightly love-lyrics of
puss upon the tiles and the melodious
love-songs of the nightingale." " T^ar,
the father of all things," goes back to
the same origin as language. The sere-
nade is matched by the battle-cry. The
fight between two cock - pheasants for
the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its
last analysis, in its primal manifestation.
Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It
is the hell-fire to which we owe the heat
that is necessary to some of the noblest
as to some of the vilest manifestations
of human nature. Righteous indigna-
tion, sense of injustice, sympathy with the
oppressed, consecration to country, fine
words all, fine things, but so many of
the men who represent these fine things
perish. It wrings the heart at a dis-
tance of more than thirty years to think
of those who have fallen, and love still
maintains passionately that they were the
best. At any rate, they were among the
best, and both sides are feeling the loss
to this day, not only in the men them-
selves, but in the sons that should have
been born to them.

Any two wars, then, will yield a suffi-
cient number of resemblances, in killed,
wounded, and missing, in the elemental
matter of hatred, or, if you choose to
give it a milder name, 'rivalry. These
things are of the essence of war, and the
manifestations run parallel even in the
finer lines. One cock-pheasant finds the
drumming of another cock - pheasant a
very irritating sound, Chanticleer ob-
jects to the note of Chanticleer, and the
more articulate human being is rasped
by the voice of his neighbor. The Attic
did not like the broad Boeotian speech.

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

333

Parson Evans's " seese and putter " were
the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's
dose of humiliation. " Yankee twang "
and " Southern drawl " incited as well
as echoed hostility.

Borderers are seldom friends. " An
Attic neighbor " is a Greek proverb.
Kentucky and Ohio frown at each other
across the river. Cincinnati looks down
on Covington, and Covington glares at
Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in his mocking
way, attributes the Peloponnesian war to
a kidnapping affair between Athens and
Megara. The underground railroad pre-
ceded the aboveground railroad in the
history of the great American conflict.

There were jealousies enough between
Athens and Sparta in the olden times,
which correspond to our colonial days,
and in the Persian war, which was in a
sense the Greek war of independence.
In like manner the chronicles of our Re-
volutionary period show that there was
abundance of bad blood between North-
ern colonies and Southern colonies. The
Virginian planter whom all have agreed
to make the one national hero was after
all a Virginian, and Virginians have not
forgotten the impatient utterances of the
" imperial man " on the soil of Massa-
chusetts and in the streets of New York.
Nobody takes Knickerbocker's History,
of New York seriously, as owlish histo-
rians are wont to take. Aristophanes.
Why not ? We accept the hostility of
Attica and Bceotia, of Attica and Mega-
ra ; and there are no more graphic chap-
ters than those which set forth the enmity
between New York and Maryland, be-
tween New Amsterdam and Connecticut.

Business is often more potent than
blood. Nullification, the forerunner of
disunion, rose from a question of tariff.
The echoes had not died out when I woke
to conscious life. I knew that I was the
son of a nullifier, and the nephew of a
Union man. It was whispered that our
beloved family physician found it pru-
dent to withdraw from the public gaze
for a while, and that my uncle's windows

were broken by the palmettos of a nulli-
fication procession ; and I can remember
from my boyhood days how unreconciled
citizens of Charleston shook their fists at
the revenue cutter and its " foreign flag."
Such an early experience enables one to
understand our war better. It enables
one to understand the Peloponnesian war
better, the struggle, between the union
of which Athens was the mistress and
the confederacy of which Sparta was the
head. Non-intercourse between Athens
and Megara was the first stage. The fa-
mous Megarian decree of Pericles, which
closed the market of Athens to Megari-
ans, gave rise to angry controversy, and
the refusal to rescind that decree led to
open war. But Megara was little more
than a pretext. The subtle influence
of Corinth was potent. The great mer-
chant city of Greece dreaded the rise of
Athens to dominant commercial impor-
tance, and in the conflict between the
Corinthian brass and the Attic clay, the
clay was shattered. Corinth does not
show her hand much in the Peloponne-
sian war. She figures at the beginning,
and then disappears. But the old mole
is at work the whole time, and what the
Peloponnesians called the Attic war, and
the Attics the Peloponnesian war, might
have been called the Corinthian war.
The exchange, the banking-house, were
important factors then as now. " Sinews
of war " is a classical expression. The
popular cry of " Persian gold " was heard
in the Peloponnesian war as the popular
cry of " British.gold " is heard now.

True, there was no slavery question in
the Peloponnesian war, for antique civi-
lization without slavery is hardly think-
able ; but after all, the slavery question
belongs ultimately to the sphere of eco-
nomics. The humanitarian spirit, set
free by the French Revolution, was at
work in the Southern States as in the
Northern States, but it was hampered by
economic considerations. Virginia, as
every one knows, was on the verge of be-
coming a free State. Colonization flour-

334

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

ished in my boyhood. A friend of my
father's left him trustee for his " ser-
vants," as we called them. They were
quartered opposite our house in Charles-
ton, and the pickaninnies were objects of
profound interest to the children of the
neighborhood. One or two letters came
from the emigrants after they reached
Liberia. Then silence fell on the Afri-
can farm.

Some of the most effective anti-slavery
reformers were Charlestonians by birth
and breeding. I cannot say that Grimke'
was a popular name, but homage was paid
to the talent of Frederick, as I remember
only too well, for I had to learn a speech
of his by heart, as a schoolboy exercise.
But the economic conditions of the South
were not favorable to t"he spread of the
ideas represented by the Grimke's. The
slavery question kept alive the spirit that
manifested itself in the tariff question.
State rights were not suffered to slumber.
The Southerner resented Northern dicta-
tion as Pericles resented Lacedaemonian
dictation, and ouv Peloponnesian war
began.

in.

The processes of the two wars, then,
were the same, — killing, wounding,
frightening. The causes of the two
wars resolved themselves into the ele-
ments of hatred. The details of the two
wars meet at many points ; only one must
be on one's guard against merely fanciful,
merely external resemblances.

In 1860 I spent a few days in Hol-
land, and among my various excursions
in that fascinating country I took a soli-
tary trip on a treckschuit from Amster-
dam to Delft. Holland was so true to
Dutch pictures that there was a retro-
spective delight in the houses and in the
people. There was a charm in the very
signs, in the names of the villas ; for
my knowledge of Dutch had not passed
beyond the stage at which the Nether-
landish tongue seems to be an English-
German Dictionary, disguised in strong
waters. But the thing that struck me

most was the general aspect of the coun-
try. Every where gates. Nowhere fences.
The gates guarded the bridges and the
canals were the fences, but the canals and
the low bridges were not to be seen at a
distance, and the visual effect was that
of isolated gates. It was an absurd land-
scape even after the brain had made the
necessary corrections.

In the third year of the war I was
not far from Fredericksburg. The coun-
try had been stripped, and the forlorn
region was a sad contrast to the smug
prosperity of Holland. And yet of a
sudden the Dutch landscape flashed upon
my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like
Holland, was dotted with fenceless gates.
The rails of the inclosures had long be-
fore gone to feed bivouac fires, but the
great gates were too solidly constructed
to tempt marauders. It was an absurd
landscape, an absurd parallel.

Historical parallels are often no bet-
ter. When one compares two languages
of the same family, the first impression
is that of similarity. It is hard for the
novice to keep his Italian and his Span-
ish apart. The later and more abiding
impression is that of dissimilarity. A
total stranger confounds twins in whom
the members of the household find but
vague likeness. There is no real resem-
blance between the two wars we are con-
templating outside the inevitable fea-
tures of all armed conflicts, and we must
be on our guard against the sophistica-
tion deprecated in the beginning of this
study. And yet one coming fresh to a
comparison of the Peloponnesian war and
the war between the States might see a
striking similarity, such as I saw between
the Dutch landscape and the landscape
in Spottsylvania.

The Peloponnesian war, like our war,
was a war between two leagues, a North-
ern Union and a Southern Confedera-
cy. The Northern Union, represented
by Athens, was a naval power. The
Southern Confederacy, under the leader-
ship of Sparta, was a land power. The

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

335

Athenians represented the progressive
element, the Spartans the conservative.
The Athenians believed in a strong cen-
tralized government. The Lacedaemo-
nians professed greater regard for auto-
nomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal of
hardihood, might multiply such futilities
indefinitely. In fact, it would be possi-
ble to write the story of our Peloponne-
sian war in phrases of Thucydides, and
I should not be surprised if such a task
were a regular school exercise at Eton
or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other
day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin,
translated a passage from Lowell's Big-
low Papers into choice Aristophanese.

Unfortunately, such feats, as I have
already said, imperil one's intellectual
honesty, and one would not like to imi-
tate the Byzantine historians who were
given to similar tricks. One of these gen-
tlemen, Choricius by name, had a seaport
to describe. How the actual seaport lay
mattered little to Choricius, so long as the
Epidamnus of Thucydides was at hand ;
and if the task of narrating our Pelopon-
nesian war were assigned to the ghost of
Choricius, I have no doubt that he would
open it with a description of Charleston
in terms of Epidamnus. Little matters
of topography would not trouble such
an one. To the sophist an island is an
island, a river a river, a height a height,
everywhere. Sphacteria would furnish
the model for Morris Island ; the Ache-
lous would serve indifferently for Poto-
mac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for Mis-
sionary Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the
harbor of Syracuse for Hampton Roads ;
and Thucydides' description of the naval
engagement and the watching crowds
would be made available for the fight
between Merrimac and Monitor.

The debates in Thucydides would be
a quarry for the debates in either Con-
gress, as they had been a quarry for cen-
turies of rhetorical historians. And as for
the " winged words," why should they
have wings if not to flit from character to
character ? A well-known scholar, at a

loss for authentic details as to the life
of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apoph-
thegms attributed to his hero, and in so
doing maintained the strange doctrine
that apophthegms were more to be trust-
ed than any other form of tradition.
There could not have been a more hope-
less thesis. The general who said that
he would burn his coat if it knew his
plans has figured in all the wars with
which I have been contemporary, was a
conspicuous character in the Mexican
war, and passed from camp to camp in
the war between the States. The mot, fa-
miliar to the classical scholar, was doubt-
less attributed in his day to that dashing
sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed
to both leaders in the final battle of
Armageddon. The hank of yarns told
about Socrates is pieced out with tabs
and tags borrowed from different peri-
ods. I have heard, say, in the after-
noon, a good story at the expense of a
famous American revival preacher which
I had read that morning in the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large
stock of anecdotes made to screw on
and screw off for the special behoof of
college presidents and university profes-
sors. Why hold up Choricius to ridi-
cule ? He was no worse than others of
his guild. It was not Choricius, it was
another Byzantine historian who con-
veyed from Herodotus an unsavory re-
tort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon
chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes,
where he keeps so much of his high game.
The Greek historian of the Roman em-
pire, the Roman historian of every date,
are no better, and Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus, who has devoted many pages to
the arraignment of Thucydides' style,
cribs with the utmost composure from the
. author he has vilipended. Still, we must
not set down every coincidence as bor-
rowing. Thucydides himself insists on
the recurrence of the same or similar
events in a history of which human na-
ture is a constant factor. " Undo this
button " is not necessarily a quotation

336

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

from King Lear. " There is no way but
this" was original with Macaulay, and
not stolen from Shakespeare. " Never
mind, general, all this has been my fault,"
are words attributed to General Lee af-
ter the battle of Gettysburg. This is
very much the language of Gylippus
after the failure of his attack on the
Athenian lines before Syracuse. How
many heroic as well as unheroic natures
have had to say " Mea culpa, mea maxi-
ma culpa."

Situations may recur, sayings may re-
cur, but no characters come back. Na-
ture always breaks her mould. " I
could not help muttering to myself,"
says Coleridge in his Biogrscphia Litera-
ria, " when the good pastor this morning
told me that Klopstock was the German
Milton ' a very German Milton, in-
deed ! ! ! ' " and Coleridge's italics and
three exclamation points may answer for
all parallelisms. When historical char-
acters get far enough off it may be pos-
sible to imitate Plutarch, but only then.
Victor Hugo wrote a passionate protest
against the execution of John Brown, in
which he compared Virginia hanging
John Brown with Washington putting
Spartacus to death. What Washington
would have done with Spartacus can read-
ily be divined. Those who have stood
nearest to Grant and Sherman, to Lee
and Jackson, the men, fail to see any
strong resemblance to leaders in other
wars. Nicias, in the Peloponnesian war,
whose name means Winfield, has nothing
in common with General Scott, whose
plan of putting down the rebellion, the
" Anaconda Plan," as it was called, bears
some resemblance to the scheme of De-
mosthenes, the Athenian general, for
quelling the Peloponnese. Brasidas was
in some respects like Stonewall Jackson,
but Brasidas was not ft, Presbyterian
elder, nor Stonewall Jackson a cajoling
diplomatist.

IV.

This paper is rapidly becoming what
life is, — a series of renunciations, — and

the reader is by this time sufficiently en-
lightened as to the reasons why I gave
up the ambitious title Two Wars, and
substituted A Southerner in the Pelo-
ponnesian War. If I were a military
man, I might have been tempted to draw
some further illustrations from the his-
tory of the two struggles, but my short
and desultory service in the field does
not entitle me to set up as a strategist.
I went from my books to the front, and
went back from the front to my books,
from the-. Confederate war to the Pelo-
ponnesian war, from Lee and Early to
Thucydides and Aristophanes. I fancy
that I understood my Greek history and
my Greek authors better for my expe-
rience in the field, but some degree of
understanding would have come to me
even if I had not stirred from home.
For while my home was spared until the
month preceding the surrender, every
vibration of the great struggle was felt
at the foot of the Blue Ridge. We
were not too far off to sympathize with
the scares at Richmond. There was the
Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in
the war all Richmond was stirred by
the absurd report that the Pawnee was
on its way up James River to lay the
Confederate capital in ashes, just as all
Athens was stirred, in the early part of
the Peloponnesian war, by a naval de-
monstration against the Piraeus. The
Pawnee war, as it was jocularly called,
did not last long. Shot-guns and revol-
vers, to which the civilian soul naturally
resorts in every time of trouble, were
soon laid aside, and the only artillery to
which the extemporized warriors were
exposed was the artillery of jests. Even
now survivors of those days recur to the
tumultuous excitement of that Pawnee
Sunday as among the memorable things
of the war, and never without merriment.
Perhaps nobody expected serious resist-
ance to be made by the clergymen and
the department clerks and the business
men who armed themselves for the fray.
Home guards were familiar butts on both

A Southerner in the Pdoponne&ian War.

337

sides of the line, but home guards have
been known to die in battle, and death
in battle is supposed to be rather tragic
than otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made
less tragic by the age of the combatant.
The ancients thought a young warrior
dead something fair to behold. To
Greek poet and Roman poet alike an
aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. No
one is likely to forget Virgil's Priam,
Tyrtaeus' description of an old soldier on
the field of battle came up to me more
than once, and there is stamped forever
on my mind the image of one dying
Confederate, " with white hair and hoary
beard, breathing out his brave soul in the
dust " on the western bank of the fair
Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before,
that same old Confederate, as a member
of the awkward squad, would have been
a legitimate object of ridicule ; and so
the heroes of the Pawnee war, the belted
knights, or knights who would have been
belted could belts have been found for
their civic girth, were twitted with their
heroism.

But our scares were not confined to
scares that came from Richmond. One
cavalry raid came up to our very doors,
and Custer and his men were repelled
by a handful of reserve artillerymen.
Our home guard was summoned more
than once to defend Rockfish Gap, and I
remember one long summer night spent
as a mounted picket on the road to Pal-
myra. Every battle in that " dancing
ground of war " brought to the great
Charlottesville hospital sad reinforce-
ments of wounded men. Crutch-races
between one-legged soldiers were organ-
ized, and there were timber-toe quadrilles
and one - armed cotillons. Out of the
shelter of the Blue Ridge it was easy '
enough to get into the range of bulletsl
A semblance of college life was kept up
at the University of Virginia. The stu-
dents were chiefly maimed soldiers and
boys under military age ; but when things
grew hot in front, maimed soldiers would
edge nearer to the hell of battle and the

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 22

boys would rush off to the game of pow-
der and ball. One little band of these
college boys chose an odd time for their
baptism of fire, and were put into action
during the famous fight of " the bloody
angle." From the night when word was
brought that the Federals had occupied
Alexandria to the time when I hobbled
into the provost marshal's office at Char-
lottesville and took the oath of allegiance,
the war was part of my life, and it is
not altogether surprising that the memo-
ries of the Confederacy come back to me
whenever I contemplate the history of the
Peloponnesian war, which bulks so large-
ly in all Greek studies. And that is all
this paper really means. It belongs to
the class of inartistic performances of
which Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It
has no unity except the accidental unity
of person. A Southerner in the Pelo-
ponnesian War has no more artistic right
to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or
A Scholar in Politics, and yet it may
serve as a document. But what will not
serve as a document to the modern his-
torian ? The historian is no longer the
poor creature described by Aristotle. He
is no annalist, no chronicler. He is jiot
dragged along by the mechanical sequence
of events. " The master of them that
know " did not know everything. He did
not know that history was to become as
plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.

The war was a good time for the study
of the conflict between Athens and Spar-
ta. It was a great time for reading and
re-reading classical literature generally,
for the South was blockaded against new
books as effectively, almost, as Megara
was blockaded against garlic and salt.
The current literature of those three or
four years was a blank to most Confeder-
ates. Few books got across the line. A
vigorous effort was made to supply our
soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bi-
ble, and large consignments ran the block-
ade. Else little came from abroad, and

338

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

few books were reprinted in the Con-
federacy. Of these I recall especially
Bulwer's Strange Story ; Victor Hugo's
Les Mise"rables, popularly pronounced
" Lee's Miserables ; " and the historical
novels of Louise Miihlbach, known to the
Confederate soldier as " Lou Mealbag."
All were eagerly read, but Cosette and
Fantine and Joseph the Second would not
last forever, and we fell back on the old
stand-bys. Some of us exhumed neg-
lected treasures, and I remember that I
was fooled by Bulwer's commendation of
Charron into reading that feebler Mon-
taigne. The Southerner, always conser-
vative in his tastes and no great admirer
of American literature, which had be-
come largely alien to him, went back to
his English classics, his ancient classics.
Old gentlemen past the military age fur-
bished up their Latin and Greek. Some
of them had never let their Latin and
Greek grow rusty. When I was serving
on General Gordon's staff, I met at Mill-
wood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of
the old school who declaimed with fiery
emphasis, in the original, choice passages
of Demosthenes' tirade against JEschines.
Not Demosthenes himself could have
given more effective utterance to " Hear-
est t.liou. ^Eschines ? " I thought of my
old friend again not so very long ago,
when I read the account that the most
brilliant of modern German classicists
gives of his encounter with a French
schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870, dur-
ing the Franco-Prussian war, and of the
heated discussion that ensued about the
comparative merits of Euripides and Ra-
cine. The bookman is not always killed
in a man by service in the field. True,
Lachmann dropped his Propertius to take
up arms for his country, but Reisig an-
notated his Aristophanes in camp, and
everybody knows the story of Courier,
the soldier Hellenist. But the tendency
of life in the open air is to make the
soul imbody and imbrute, and after a
while one begins to think scholarship a
disease, or, at any rate, a bad habit ; and

the Scythian nomad, or, if you choose, the
Texan cowboy, seems to be the normal,
healthy type. You put your Pickering
Homer in your kit. It drops out by rea-
son of some sudden change of base, and
you do not mourn as you ought to do.
The fact is you have not read a line for
a month. But when the Confederate vol-
unteer returned, let us say, from Jack's
Shop or some such homely locality, and
opened his Thucydides, the old charm
came back with the studious surround-
ings, and th« familiar first words renewed
the spell.

" Thucydides of Athens wrote up the
war of the Peloponnesians and Atheni-
ans." " The war of the Peloponnesians
and Athenians " is a somewhat lumber-
ing way of saying " the Peloponnesian
war." But Thucydides never says " the
Peloponnesian war." Why not ? Per-
haps his course in this matter was de-
termined by a spirit of judicial fairness.
However that may be, either he employs
some phrase like the one cited, or he
says " this war " as we say " the war,"
as if there were no other war on record.
" Revolutionary war," " war of 1812,"
" Seminole war," " Mexican war," — all
these run glibly from our tongues, but we
also lumber when we wish to be accurate.
The names of wars, like the names of dis-
eases, are generally put off on the party
of the other part. We say " French
and Indian war " without troubling our-
selves to ask what the French and In-
dians called it, but " Northern war "
and " Southern war " were never popu-
lar designations. " The war between the
States," which a good many Southern-
ers prefer, is both bookish and inexact.
" Civil war " is an utter misnomer. It
was used and is still used by courteous
people, the same people who are careful
to say " Federal " and " Confederate."
" War of the rebellion," which begs the
very question at issue, has become the
official designation of the struggle, but
has found no acceptance with the van-
quished. To this day no Southerner uses

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

339

it except by way of quotation, as in Re-
bellion Record, and even in the North it
was only by degrees that " reb " replaced
" secesh." " Secession " was not a word
with which to charm the " old-line Whigs "
of the South. They would fight the bat-
tles of the secessionists, but they would
not bear their name. " The war of seces-
sion " is still used a good deal in foreign
books, but it has no popular hold. '; The
war," without any further qualification,
served the turn of Thucydides and Aris-
tophanes for the Peloponnesian war. It
will serve ours, let it be hoped, for some
time to come.

VI.

A Confederate commentary on Thu-
cydides, projected on the scale of the re-
marks just made on the name of the war,
would outrun the lines of this study and
the pages of this magazine. Let us pass
from Thucydides to the other contem-
porary chronicler who turns out some
sides of the " Doric war " about which
Thucydides is silent. The antique Clio
gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over
rubbishy details that are the delight of
the comic poet and the modern Muse of
History. Thucydides,* it is true, gives
us a minute account of the plague. That
was a subject which commended itself to
his saturnine spirit, and in his descrip-
tion he deigns to speak of the " stuffy
cabooses " into which the country people
were crowded when the Lacedaemonians
invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes
touches the same chapter, he goes into
picturesque details about the rookeries
and the wine-jars inhabited by the new-
comers. Diogenes' jar, commonly mis-
named a tub, was no invention, and I
have known less comfortable quarters
than the hogshead which I occupied for
a day or two in one of my outings dur-
ing the war.

The plague was too serious a matter
for even Aristophanes to make fun of,
and the annalist of the war between the
States will not find any parallel in the
chronicles of the South. There was no

such epidemic as still shows its livid
face in the pages of Thucydides and the
verses of Lucretius. True, some diseases
of which civic life makes light proved to
be veritable scourges in camp. Measles
was especially fatal to the country-bred,
and for abject misery I have never seen
anything like those cases of measles in
which nostalgia had supervened. Nos-
talgia, which we are apt to sneer at as a
doctor's name for homesickness, and to
class with cachexy and borborygmus, was
a power for evil in those days, and some
of our finest troops were thinned out by it,
notoriously the North Carolinians, whose
attachment to the soil of their State was
as passionate as that of any Greeks, an-
cient or modern, Attic or Peloponnesian.
But the frightful mortality of the
camp does not strike the imagination so
forcibly as does the carnage of the bat-
tlefield, and no layman cares to analyze
hospital reports and compare the medical
with the surgical history of the war.
Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is
not so easily forgotten, and the dominant
note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the
dominant note of life in the Confederacy,
civil as well as military. The Con-
federate soldier was often on short ra-
tions, but the civilian was not much bet-
ter off. I do not mean those whose
larders were swept by the besom of the
invaders. " Not a dust of flour, not an
ounce of meat, left in the house," was
not an uncommon cry along the line of
march ; but it was heard elsewhere, and
I remember how I raked up examples
of European and Asiatic frugality with
which to reinforce my editorials and
hearten my readers, — the scanty fare of
the French peasant, the raw oatmeal of
. the Scotch stone-cutter, the flinty bread
of the Swiss mountaineer, the Spaniard's
cloves of garlic, the Greek's handful of
olives, and the Hindoo's handful of rice.
The situation was often gayly accepted.
The not infrequent proclamation of fast-
days always served as a text for mutual
banter, and starvation-parties were the

340

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

rule, social gatherings at which apples
were the chief refreshment. Strange
streaks of luxury varied this dead level
of scant and plain fare. The stock of
fine wines, notably madeiras, for which
the South was famous, did not all go to
the hospitals. Here and there provident
souls had laid in boxes of tea and bags
of coffee that carried them through the
war, and the chief outlay was for sugar,
which rose in price as the war went on,
until it almost regained the poetical char-
acter it bore in Shakespeare's time.
Sugar, tea, and coffee once compassed,
the daintiness of old times occasionally
came back, and I have been assured by
those who brought gold with them that
Richmond was a paradise of cheap and
good living during the war, just as the
United States will be for foreigners when
our currency becomes as abundant as it
was in the last years of the Confederacy.
Gresham's law ought to be called Aris-
tophanes' law. In all matters pertaining
to the sphere of civic life, merry Aristoph-
anes is of more value than sombre Thu-
cydides, artd if the gospel of peace which
he preaches is chiefly a variation on the
theme of something to eat, small blame
to hun. Critics have found fault with
the appetite of Odysseus as set forth by
Homer. No Confederate soldier will
subscribe to the censure, and there are no
scenes in Aristophanes that appeal more
strongly to the memory of the Southern-
er, civilian or soldier, than those in which
the pinch of war makes itself felt.

Farmers and planters made their moan
during the Confederacy, and doubtless
they had much to suffer. " Impressment "
is not a pleasant word at any time, and
the tribute that the countryman had to
yield to the defense of the South was
ruinous, — the indirect tribute as well as
the direct. The farmers of Virginia
were much to be pitied. Their houses
were filled with refugee kinsfolk ; wound-
ed Confederates preferred the private
house to the hospital. Hungry soldiers,
and soldiers who forestalled the hunger

of weeks to come, laid siege to larder,
smoke-house, spring-house. Pay, often
tendered, was hardly ever accepted. The
cavalryman was perhaps a trifle less
welcome than the infantryman, because
of the capacious horse and the depleted
corn-bin, but few were turned away. Yet
there was the liberal earth, and the
farmer did not starve, as did the wretched
civilian whose dependence was a salary,
which did not advance with the rising
tide of the currency. The woes of the
war clerks in Richmond and of others are
on record, and important contributions
have been, made to the economical history
of the Confederate States. I will not
draw on these stores. I will only tell
of what I have lived, as demanded by
the title of this paper. The income of
the professors of the University of Vir-
ginia was nominally the same during the
war that it was before, but the purchas-
ing power of the currency steadily di-
minished. If it had not been for a grant
of woodland, we should have frozen as
well as starved during the last year of
the war, when the quest of food had
become a serious matter. In our direst
straits we had not learned to dispense
with household service, and the house-
hold servants were never stinted of their
rations, though the masters had to con-
tent themselves with the most meagre
fare. The farmers, generous enough to
the soldiers, were not overconsiderate of
the non-combatants. Often the only way
of procuring our coarse food was by
making contracts to be paid after the
war in legal currency, and sometimes
payment in gold was exacted. The con-
tracts were not always kept, and the un-
fortunate civilian had to make new con-
tracts at an enhanced price. Before my
first campaign in 1861, I had bought a
little gold and silver, for use in case of
capture, and if it had not been for that
precious hoard I might not be writing
this sketch. But despite the experience
of the airy gentlemen who alighted in
Richmond during the war, even gold and

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

341

silver would not always work wonders.
Bacon and corned beef in scant measure
were the chief of our diet, and not always
easy to procure. I have ridden miles and
miles, with silver in my palm, seeking
daintier food for the women of my house-
hold, but in vain. There was nothing
to do except to tighten one's belt, and to
write editorials showing up the selfish-
ness of the farming class and prophesy-
ing the improvement of the currency.

No wonder, then, that with such an
experience a bookish Confederate should
turn to the Aristophanic account of the
Peloponnesian war with sympathetic in-
terest. The Athenians, it is true, were
not blockaded as we were, and the Athe-
nian beaux and belles were not reduced
to the straits that every Confederate man,
assuredly every Confederate woman, can
remember. Our blockade-runners could
not supply the demands of our popula-
tion. We went back to first principles.
Thorns were for pins, and dogwood sticks
for toothbrushes. Rag-bags were ran-
sacked. Impossible garments were made
possible. Miracles of turning were per-
formed, not only in coats, but even in
envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave
it to his womankind in order to make
the body of a riding-habit. Dainty feet
were shod in home-made foot-gear which
one durst not call shoes.. Fairy fingers
which had been stripped of jeweled
rings wore bone circlets carved by idle
soldiers. There were no more genuine
tears than those which flowed from the
eyes of the Southern women resident
within the Federal lines when they saw
the rig of their kinswomen, at the ces-
sation of hostilities. And all this gro-
tesqueness, all this dilapidation, was shot
through by specimens of individual fine-
ry, by officers who had brought back re-
splendent uniforms from beyond seas, by
heroines who had engineered themselves
and their belongings across the Potomac.

Of all this the scholar found nothing
in the records of the Peloponnesian war.
The women of Megara may have suf-

fered, but hardly the Corinthian women ;
and the Athenian dames and damsels
were as particular about their shoes and
their other cordwainer's wares as ever.
The story that Socrates and his wife had
but one upper garment between them is
a stock joke, as I have shown elsewhere.
" Who first started the notable jest it is
impossible, at this distance of time, to
discover, just as it is impossible to tell
whose refined wit originated the concep-
tion of the man who lies abed while his
solitary shirt is in the wash." The story
was intended to illustrate, not the scarci-
ty of raiment in the Peloponnesian war,
but the abundance of philosophy in the
Socratic soul. All through that war the
women of Athens seem to have had as
much finery as was good for them. The
pinch was felt at other points, and there
the Confederate sympathy was keen.

In The Acharnians of Aristophanes,
the hero, Dicseopolis, makes a separate
peace on his individual account with the
Peloponnesians and drives a brisk trade
with the different cantons, the enthusi-
asm reaching its height when the Boeo-
tian appears with his ducks and his eels.
This ecstasy can best be understood by
those who have seen the capture of a
sutler's wagon by hungry Confederates ;
and the fantastic vision of a separate
peace became a sober reality at many
points on the lines of the contending
parties. The Federal outposts twitted
ours with their lack of coffee and sugar ;
ours taunted the Federals with their lack
of tobacco. Such gibes often led, despite
the officers, to friendly interchange. So,
for instance, a toy-boat which bore the
significant name of a parasite familiar
to both sides made regular trips across
the Rappahannock after the dire strug-
gle at Fredericksburg, and promoted in-
ternational exchange between "Yank"
and " Johnny Reb." The day-dream of
Aristophanes became a sober certainty.

The war was not an era of sweetness
and light. Perhaps sugar was the arti-
cle most missed. Maple sugar was of

342

A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.

too limited production to meet the popu-
lar need. Sorghum was a horror then,
is a horror to remember now. It set our
teeth on edge and clawed off the coats
of our stomachs. In the army sugar
was doled out by pinches, and from the
tables of most citizens it was banished
altogether. There were those who so-
laced themselves with rye coffee and
sorghum molasses regardless of ergot
and acid, but nobler souls would not be
untrue to their gastronomic ideal. Neces-
sity is one thing, mock luxury another.
If there had been honey enough, we
should have been on the antique basis ;
for honey was the sugar of antiquity,
and all our cry for sugar was but an
echo of the cry for honey in the Pelopon-
nesian war. Honey was then, as it is
now, one of the chief products of Attica.
It is not likely that the Peloponnesians
took the trouble to burn over the beds of
thyme that gave Attic honey its peculiar
flavor, but the Peloponnesians would not
have been soldiers if they had not robbed
every beehive on the march ; and, sad
to relate, the Athenians must have been
forced to import honey. When Dicaeopo-
lis makes the separate peace mentioned
above, he gets up a feast of good things,
and there is a certain unction in the tone
with which he orders the basting of sau-
sage-meat with honey, as one should say
mutton and currant jelly. In The Peace,
when War appears and proceeds to make
a salad, he says, —

" I '11 pour some Attic honey in."
Whereupon Trygaeus cries out, —
" Ho, t lit;iv. I warn you use some other honey.
Be sparing of the Attic. That costs sixpence."

Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans
molasses ; " those molasses," as the arti-
cle was often called, with an admiring
plural of majesty.

But a Confederate student, like the
rest of his tribe, could more readily re-
nounce sweetness than light, and light
soon became a serious matter. The Amer-
ican demands a flood of light, and won-

ders at the English don who pursues
his investigations by the glimmer of
two candles. It was hard to go back to
primitive tallow dips. Lard might have
served, but it was too precious to be used
in lamps. The new devices were dismal,
such as the vile stuff called terebene,
which smoked and smelt more than it
illuminated, such as the wax tapers which
were coiled round bottles that had seen
better days. Many preferred the old
way, and read by flickering pine-knots,
which cost many an old reader his eyes.
Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers,
terebenq, pine-knots, were all represented
in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil,
one of the great staples of Attica, be-
came scarcer as the war went on. " A
bibulous wick " was a sinner against do-
mestic economy ; to trim a lamp and
hasten combustion was little short of a
crime. Management in the use of oil
— otherwise considered the height of
niggardliness — was the rule, and could
be all the more readily understood by
the Confederate student when he reflect-
ed that oil was the great lubricant as
well ; that it was the Attic butter, and
to a considerable extent the Attic soap.
Under the Confederacy butter mounted
to the financial milky way, not to be
scaled of ordinary men, and soap was
also a problem. Modern chemists have
denied the existence of true soap in an-
tiquity. The soap-suds that got into the
eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion
of his Saturday-night scrubbing were not
real soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for
desperate cases. The oil-flask was the
Athenian's soap-box. No wonder, then,
that oil was exceeding precious in the
Peloponnesian war, and no wonder that
all these little details of daily hardship
come back even now to the old student
when he reopens his Aristophanes. No
wonder that the ever present Pelopon-
nesian war will not suffer him to forget
those four years in which the sea of
trouble rose higher and higher.

Basil L. Gildersleeve.

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

343

SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF DEAN SWIFT.

II.

SWIFT began his correspondence with
his friend with such briskness that his
first thirteen letters were written within
a period of little more than ten months.
We are now coming to a great gap ; for
in the next three years he wrote but
twice, — once to Mrs. Chetwode after her
husband had left for England, and once
to Mr. Chetwode himself at an address
in London. After this, we have not a
single letter between December 17, 1715,
and September 2, 1718, when we find
Chetwode once more in London. In the
interval he had been out of the country.
I am informed by the present owner of
Woodbrooke that " he was a great Jaco-
bite, and found it well to spend a good
deal of his time abroad. In the library
here, there are many books bought by
him in different foreign towns." If on
his travels he heard from Swift, it is
likely enough that on his way home he
destroyed the letters, for fear of bring-
ing his friend into trouble. So strict was
the search after Jacobite papers that the
coffin of Bishop Atterbury, who died in
France, was opened when it reached Eng-
land, in the expectation that in it would
be found treasonable correspondence.

XIV.

[TO MBS. CHETWODE.]

Oct. 7. 1715.

MADAM, — I find you are resolved to
feed me wherever I am. I am extreme-
ly obliged to your Care and Kindness,
but know not how to return it other wise
than by my Love and Esteem for you.
I had one Letter from Mr Chetwode from
Chester, but it came late, and he talked of
staying there onely a Week. If I knew
where to write to him I would. I said
a good deal to him before he went. And
I believe he will keep out of harms way

in these, troublesome Times. God knows
what will become of us all. I intend
when the Parlmt [Parliament] meets
here, to retire some where into the Coun-
try : Pray God^ bless and protect you,
and your little fire side : believe me to
be Ever with true Esteem
Madam

Your most obed' humble Serv*
J. SWIFT.

How troublesome these times were
Swift shows in a letter written a little
later. The Parliament sitting in Dublin
had passed a bill authorizing the govern-
ment " to imprison whom they please for
three months, without any trial or exam-
ination. I expect," continues Swift, " to
be among the first of those upon whom
this law will be executed. I am gather-
ing up a thousand pounds, and intend to
finish my life upon the interest of it in
Wales." Of the Irish Parliament he al-
ways spoke with scorn. He described the
members as " those wretches here who
call themselves a parliament. They im-
itate the English Parliament after the
same manner as a monkey does a human
creature." When they met in 1735, he
wrote, " I determine to leave the town as
soon as possible, for I am not able to live
within the air of such rascals."

xv.

[To Knightley Chetwode Esqr. at ye Pell-
Mell Coffee House in Pell-Mell — London.]

Deer. 17. 1715.

I have had 3 Lettrs [Letters] from
you, one from Chester, another round a
Printed Paper, and the 3rd of the 6th in-
stant : The first I could not answer for
it came late, and you sd you were to leave
Chester in a week, neither did I know
how to direct to you till yr 2nd came, and
that was so soon followed by the 3rd that

344

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

now I answer both together. I have
been miserably ill of a cruell cold, be-
yond the common pains and so as to
threaten me with ill consequences upon
my health : else you should have heard
from me 3 weeks sooner. I have been
10 clays and am still at Mr Grattan's
4 miles from the Town, to recover my-
self ; and am now in a fair way — I like
the Verses well. Some of them are very
well tho' agst my Friends : but I am
positive The Town is out in their Guess
of the Author. I wonder how you came
to see the Dr — n [Dragon] for I am
told none of his nearest Relations have
that Liberty, nor any but his Solicitors.
Had I been directed to go over some
months ago, I might have done it, be-
cause I would gladly have been service-
able but now I can not : and agree with
you and my other Friends that I am safer
here. I am curious to know how lie car-
ryes himself, whether he is still easy and
intrepid : whether he thinks he shall lose
his Head, or whether it is generally
thought so — I find you have ferreted
me out in my little private Acquaintance,
but that must be Entre nous. The best
of it is you cannot trace them all. My
Service to them, and say I give a great
deal to be among you. I do not under-
stand the Rebus, I would apply it to my-
self, but then what means narrow in
flight ? I am sorry at heart for poor
Ben : He had in his Life been so Sple-
netick that it was past a Jest : He should
ride, and live in the Country and leave
of his Trade, for he is rich enough. As
much as I hate News, I hear it in spight
of me, not being able to govern the
Tongues of yr Favorite and some others ;
we are here in horrible Fears, and make
the Rebells ten times more powerfull and
the Discontents greater than I hope they
really are, Nay 'tis said the Pretender is
landed or landing with Ld [Lord] knows
how many thousands. I always knew
my Friend Mr Attorney would be as
great as he could in all changes. When
Cole of the Oaks comes to Town assure

him of my humble Service and that when
Storms are over I will pass some time
with his Leave among his Plantations.
Dame Plyant and I have had some Com-
merce, but I have not been able to go
there, by foolish Impediments of Busi-
ness here. She has been in pain about
not hearing from you. I lately heard
your Boys were well. The Baron called
to see me here in the Country yester-
day, and sd you had lately writt to him.
There is one period in yr Letter very
full of kind Expressions, all to introduce
an ugly Suspicion of Somebody that told
you I know not what. I had no Ac-
quaintance with you at all till I came
last to this Kingdom : and tis odd if I
should then give my self the Liberty of
speaking to yr Disadvantage. Since that
time you have used me so well, that it
would be more than odd if I gave my-
self that Liberty. But I tell you one
thing, that when you are mentioned by
my self or any body else, I presently add
some Expressions, that he must be a rude
Beast indeed who would lessen you be-
fore me, so far am I from doing it my-
self ; and I should avoid it more to you
than another, because you are a man anx-
ious to be informed, and have more of
Punctilio and Suspicion than I could
wish. I would say thus much to few
men. Because generally I expect to be
trusted, and scorn to defend my self ;
and the Dr — n thought it the best Com-
pliment to him he ever heard, when I
said I did not value what I sd to him,
nor what I sd of him. So much upon
this scurvy Subject. You may direct to
S. H. at M™ Holt's over ag6t the Church
in Brides Street. The Parlmt here are
as mad as you could desire them ; all
of different Partyes are used like Jaco-
bites and Dogs. All Conversation with
different Principles is dangerous and
Troublesome. Honest People get into
Corners, and are as merry as they can.
We are as loyall as our Enemyes, but
they will not allow us to be so — If what
they sd were true, they would be quickly

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

345

undone : Pray keep yrself out of harms
way : 'Tis the best part a private man
can take unless his Fortune be desperate
or unless he has at least a fair Hazzard
for mending the Publick. My humble
Service to a much prouder man than

my self ; I mean yr Uncle. Dr Pr

shewed me a Letter from you about 3
weeks ago : He is well I suppose for I
am a private' country Gentleman, and
design to be so some days longer. Be-
lieve me to be ever with great Truth and
Esteem yrs etc.

I direct to the Pell Mell Coffee house,
because you mention changing Lodgings.

" The Dragon was Lord Treasurer
Oxford, so called by the Dean by contra-
ries ; for he was the mildest, wisest and
best minister that ever served a prince."
He was at this time a prisoner in the
Tower.

" Poor Ben " was perhaps the book-
seller, Benjamin Motte, who published
Gulliver's Travels. He corresponded
with Swift.

When the dean writes, " we are here
in horrible Fears," by "we" he means
the Protestants. In Ireland, when he
speaks of " the nation," he always means
the English settlers. In all his writings
it would not be easy to find a passage
where he shows any strong feeling for
the Roman Catholic Irish ; in this he
was like other Englishmen. " The Eng-
lish," he wrote, " know little more of Ire-
land than they do of Mexico ; further
than that it is a country subject to the
King of England, full of bogs, inhabited
by wild Irish papists, who are kept in
awe by mercenary troops ; and their
general opinion is, that it were better for
England if the whole island were sunk
into the sea." Even the Protestant Irish
were slighted. To a friend who sent
him an account of a " mayor squabble "
in Dublin he wrote back from London,
" We regard it as much here as if you
sent us an account of your little son play-
ing at cherry stones."

XVI.

[To Knightley Chetwode Esqr at Mr Took's
shop, at the Middle-Temple Gate in Fleet-
street. London.]

DUBLIN. Sept 2d. 1718.
I received your first of Aug 13h when
I was just leaving Galstown — from
whence I went to -a Visitation at Trim.
I saw Dame. I stayd two days at Lara-
cor, then 5 more at a Friends, and came
thence to this Town, and was going to
answer yr Lett, [your Letter] when I
received the 2nd of Aug 23rd. I find it is
the^opinion of yr Friends that you should
let it be known as publickly here as can
be done, without overacting, that you
are come to London, and intend soon for
Ireland, and since you have sett [? let]
Woodbrooke I am clearly of opinion
that you should linger out some time at
Trim, under the notion of staying some
time in order to settle ; you can be con-
veniently enough lodged there for a time,
and live agreably and cheap enough, and
pick up rent as you are able ; but I am
utterly opposite to your getting into a Fig-
ure all on a Sudden, because every body
must needs know that travelling would
not but be very expensive to you, to-
gether with a scattered Family, and such
conduct will be reckoned prudent and
discreet, especially in you whose Mind is
not altogether suited to yr Fortune. And
therefore tho' I have room enough in an
empty Coach-house wh is at yr service
yet I wish you would spare the Expences,
and in return you shall fill the Coach-
house with anything else you please. — I
fear you will return with great contempt
for Ireld where yet we live tolerably quiet,
and our enemyes seem to let us alone
mearly out of wearyness. It was not my
fault that I. was not in Engld last June,
— I doubt you will make a very uneasy
Change from Dukes to Irish Squires and
Parsons, wherein you are less happy than
I, who never loved great company, when
it was most in my Power, and now I hate
every thing with a Title except my Books,

346

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

and even in those the shorter the Title
the better — And (you must begin on the
other side for I began this Letter the
wrong Way) whenever you talk to nie
of Regents or Grandees I will repay you
with Passages of Jack Grattan and Dan
Jackson : I am the onely man in this
Kingdom who is not a Politician, and
therefore I onely keep such Company as
will suffer me to suspend their Politicks
and this brings my Conversation into very
narrow Bounds. Jo Beaumont is my
Oracle for publick Affairs in the coun-
try, and an old Presbyterian Woman in
Town. I am quite a Stranger td all
Schemes and have almost forgot the dif-
ference between Whig and Tory, and
thus you will find me when you come
over — Adieu. My true love to Ben —

Theje are passages in this letter which
greatly strengthen the suspicion that
Chetwode had been plotting among the
Jacobites abroad. He had, we read, to
make a " change from Dukes to Irish
Squires," and his talk was likely to run
on " Regents or Grandees." He would
have visited the Duke of Ormond, who
by the help of a lady of great beauty,
but easy morals, vainly hoped to win over
the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France,
to the Pretender's cause. He would have
passed on to Spain, where Cardinal Al-
beroni, the prime minister, was scheming
to send an expedition to Scotland under
Ormond's command. He had scarcely
set foot in England when the news ar-
rived of the sea-fight off Sicily between
an English and a Spanish squadron, de-
scribed by an English captain in the brief-
est of dispatches : " Sir, we have taken
and destroyed all the Spanish ships which
were upon the coast ; the number as per
margin."

When Swift says that he is not a poli-
tician, it is true of this period of his life.
During almost six years after his return
to Ireland he kept his resolution of not
meddling at all with public affairs. In
the following lines he expresses the con-

tempt he felt not only for Irish squires,
but also for Irish lords : —

" In exile with a steady heart
He spent his life's declining part ;
Where folly, pride and faction sway,
Remote from St. John, Pope and Gay.
His friendships there to few confined
Were always of the middling kind ;
No fools of rank, a mongrel breed,
Who fain would pass for lords indeed ;
Where titles give no right or power,
And peerage is a withered flower ;
He would have held it a disgrace
If such a wretch had known his face.
On rural squires, that kingdom's bane,
He vented oft his wrath in vain."

That he " never loved great company "
even in London he thus boasts : —

" He never thought an honour done him,
Because a duke was proud to own him ;
Would rather slip aside and choose
To talk with wits in dirty shoes."

XVII.

[To Knightley Chetwode Esqr to be left at Mr
Took's shop at the middle Temple Gate in
Fleetstreet London.]

DUBLIN. Novr 25. 1718.

I have had your Letters, but have
been hindred from writing by the illness
of my head, and eyes, which still afflict
me. I have not been these five months
in the Country, but the People from Trim
tell me that yours are all well.

I do not apprehend much consequence
from what you mention about Informa-
tions etc. I suppose it will fall to no-
thing by Time — You have been so long
in the grand monde that you find it dif-
ficult to get out. I fear you mistook it
for a Compliment, when you interpret
something that I said as if you had a
Spirit above your Fortune. I hardly
know anybody but what has the same,
and it is a more difficult Virtue to have
a Spirit below our Fortune, which I am
endeavouring as much as I can, and dif-
fer so far from you, that instead of con-
versing with Lords (if any Lord here
would descend to converse with me) that
I wholly shun them for People of my
own Level, or below it, and I find Life

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

347

much easyer by doing so ; but you are
younger and see with other eyes. The
Epigram you mention is but of two Lines.
I have done with those Things. I de-
sired a young Gentleman to paraphrase
it, and I do not much like his Perform-
ance, but if he mends it I will send it to
Ben, not to you — I think to go soon
into the Country for some weeks for my
Health, but not towards Trim I believe
— Mr Percivall is dead and so is poor
Parvisol. This is a bad Country to write
news from Ld Archibald Hamilton is
going to be marryed to one Lady Ham-
ilton the best match in this Kingdom —
Remember me to Ben and John when
you see them — Neither my Head nor
Eyes will Suffer me to write more, nor
if they did have I anything materiall to
add but that I am yr &c.

" Poor Parvisol " had been Swift's
tithe-agent at Laracor. Of him he had
written, four years earlier : " Such a
rascal deserves nothing more than rigor-
ous justice. He has imposed upon my
easiness, and that is what I never will
forgive. I beg you will not do the least
thing in regard to him but merely for
my interest, as if I were a Jew, and let
who will censure me."

XVIII.

[To Knightley Chetwode Esqr at his House at
Woodbrooke near Portarlington.]

DUBLIN. Apr 29th 1721.
SR, — Your Servant brought your
Lettr when I was abroad, and promised
, to come next morning at 8 but never
called : so I answer it by Post ; you
have been horribly treated, but it is a
common Calamity. Do you remember
a Passage in a Play of Moliere's Mais qu
Diable avoit il a faire dans cette Galere ?
What had you to do among such com-
pany ? I shew'd your Lettr yesterday to
the A. Bp. [Archbishop] as you desire : I
mean I read the greatest Part to him —
He is of opinion you should take the

Oaths ; and then complain to the Gov-
ern' [Government] if you thought fit.
But I believe neither — nor any body
can expect you would have much Satisfac-
tion — considering how such complaints
are usually received. For my own Part
I do not see any Law of God or Man
forbidding us to give security to the
Powers that be t and private men are
not [to] trouble themselves about Titles
to Crowns, whatever may be their par-
ticular Opinions. The Abjuration is un-
derstood as the Law stands ; and as the
Law stands, none has Title to the Crown
but the present Possessor ; By this Ar-
gument more at length, I convinced a
young Gentleman ^of great Parts and
Virtue ; and I think I could defend my
self by all the Duty of a Christian to
take Oaths to any Prince in Possession.
For the word Lawfull, means according
to present Law in force ; and let the Law
change ever so often, I am to act accord-
ing to Law ; provided it neither offends
Faith nor Morality. You will find a
sickly man when you come to Town ; and
you will find all Partyes and Persons out
of humour ; I envy your Employm18 of
improving Bogs; and yet I envy few
other Employments : present my humble
service to Mrs Chetwode and believe me
to be, ever, sincerely yours &c.

Swift was thinking of the passage in
Les Fourberies de Scapin where the fa-
ther exclaims, " Que diable allait-il faire
dans cette galere ? " " I forsook the
world and French at the same time," the
dean writes on December 5 of this year.
His French seems to have forsaken him
when he wrote " qu " for " que." " He
was," says John Forster, " accomplished
in French." Sir William Temple more
justly said of him that " he has Latin
and Greek, some French."

High Churchman though he was, he
cared nothing for the divine right of
kings. " I always declared myself," he
wrote, " against a popish successor to
the crown, whatever title he might have

348

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

by the proximity of blood : neither did
I ever regard the right line except upon
two accounts ; first, as it was established
by law, and secondly as it has much
weight in the opinions of the people."

When he wrote to Chetwode, " I envy
your Employmts of improving Bogs,"
this was no passing caprice. Into the
mouth of the king of Brobdingnag he
put sentiments which he really felt, when
he made him say that " whoever could
make two ears of corn, or two blades of
grass to grow upon a spot of ground
where only one grew before, would de-
serve better of mankind, and do more
essential service to his country than the
whole race of politicians put together."

XIX.

[Indorsed by Chetwode, " upon ye Subject of
my quarrell with Coll. at Maryborough

Assizes."]

DUBLIN. May 9. 1721.

SR, — I did not answer your last be-
cause I would take time to consider it I
told the Ar. Bp what you had done, that
you had taken the Oaths &c. and then
I mentioned the Fact about Wall who
brought a Challenge &c. tho you do not
tell from whom : and whether you should
apply to have him put out of the Com-
mission ; the A. Bp said he thought you
ought to let the matter rest a while, and
when you have done so, and get your
Materialls ready and that it appears not
to be a sudden Heat, he did hope the
Chancellr would do you Justice.

As to the Business of Sandis going
about for hands I know not what to say.
That was rather a Scoundrell than an
illegal Thing, and probably will be
thought merit and zeal rather than a
Fault ; I take your Part to be onely de-
spising it ; as you ought to do the Bra-
very of his Brother, and his manner of
celebrating it ; For my own Part (and I
do not say it as a Divine) there is no-
thing I have greater contempt for than
what is usually stiled Bravery, which
really consists in never giving just of-

fence, and yet by a generall Demeanour
make it appear that we do not want
Courage, though our Hand is not every
Hour at our Hilt — I believe your Cour-
age has never been suspected, and be-
fore I knew you I had heard you were
rather much too warm, and you may
take what Sandis said, as a Complmt
that his Brother's Bravery appeared by
venturing to quarrell with you.

You are to know that few persons have
less Credit with the present Powers than
the A. Bp and therefore the Redress you
are to expect must be from the justice of
those who have it in their way to do you
right ; I mean those at the Helm or ra-
ther who have their little finger at the
helm, which however is enough for your
use, if they will but apply it ; But in great
Matters of Governm' the Ld. Ll [Lord
Lieutenant] does all, and these Folks can
not make a Vicar or an ensign.

I am yr &c. J. S.

My humble Service to yr Lady.

The name of the colonel with whom
Knightley Chetwode quarreled I have
omitted at the request of the present
owner of Woodbrooke.

Thomas Sheridan, writing of Dublin
a few years earlier than the date of
Swift's letter, says, " At that time party
ran very high, but raged no where with
such violence as in that city, insomuch
that duels were every day fought there
on that score."

xx.

[Indorsed, "Swift dated at Dublin. June 10.
1721 the A. Bishop's and his own opinion of
the Prosecution agst me."]

DUBLIN. June 10th 1721.
SR, — I received both your Letters,
and the Reason why I did not answer
the first was because I thought I had said
all I had to say upon the occasion, both
as to the A. Bp's opinion and my own,
but if that reason had not been sufficient
there was another and a Better, or rather
a Worse ffor I have been this last Fort-

/Some Unpublished Letters of Dean /Swift.

349

night as miserable as a Man can possibly
be with an Ague, and after vomiting
sweeting and Jesuits Bark, I got out to
Day, but have been since my beginning
to recover, so seized with a Daily Head-
ake, that I am but a very scurvy recov-
ered Man : I suppose you may write to
the ChancelF and tell him the full story,
and leave the rest to him.

As to your Building I can onely ad-
vise you to ask advice, to go on slowly,
and to have your House on Paper be-
fore you put it into Lime and Stone. I
design in a very few Days to go some-
where into the Country, perhaps to Galls-
town, I have been 7 years getting a
Horse and have lost 100lb by buying
without Success ; Sheridan has got his
Horses again — and I recovered one that
my SeiV had lost — Everybody can get
Horses but I ; There is a Paper called
Mist come out, just before May 29th ter-
ribly Severe : It is not here to be had ;
the Printer was called before the Com-
mons — it apply [? applied] Cromwell
and his son to the present Court — White
Roses we have heard nothing of to-day.
I am your most obdt J. S.~

My head is too ill to write or think.

The prosecution mentioned in Chet-
wode's indorsement was most likely con-
nected with some Jacobite plot in which
he had been engaged. As will be seen
in the letters that were written two years
later he was again in dread of the gov-
ernment.

" Mist" was the name of the printer of
a Jacobite journal. In the number for
May 27 there is a lamentation over the
ugliness of the king's German, mistresses.
" We are ruined by trulls, nay, what is
more vexatious, by old ugly trulls, such
as could not find entertainment in the
most hospitable hundreds of Old Drury."
This paper was published " just before
May 29th," because on that day the Re-
storation of Charles II. was commemo-
rated. Mist was fined and imprisoned.
Imprisonment in those days was a dread-

ful punishment, unless for people who had
money enough to pay for food and lodg-
ing. In one London jail " a day seldom
passed without a death ; and upon the
advancing of the spring, not less than
eight or ten usually died every twenty-
four hours." Nevertheless Mist still ven-
tured to publish his paper, under the title
of Fog's Journal. The white roses, of
which Swift had heard nothing, were
worn by the Jacobites on June 10 (the
day on which he was writing), the birth-
day of the Pretender.

XXI.

[Indorsed, " a humorous pleast letter."]
GALSTOWN. Septr 14th 1721.

SK, — I have been here these three
months, and I either answered yr for-
mer Letter, or else it required no an-
swer. I left the Town on a sudden, and
came here in a Stage Coach meerly for
want of Horses. I intend a short Jour-
ney to Athlone, and some Parts about it,
and then to return to Dublin by the end
of this Month, when the weather will
please to grow tolerable ; but it hath been
so bad for these ten weeks past that I
have been hindred from severall Ram-
bles I intended.

Yours of the 5 instant was sent here
last Post ; It was easy for you to con-
ceive I was gone out of Town consider-
ing my State of Health, and it is not
my Talent to be unkind or forgetfull,
although it be my Misfortune as the
World runs, to be very little Serviceable ;
I was in hopes that yr Affair by this
time had come to some Issue, or at least,
that you who are a warm Gentleman,
like others of your Temper, might have
cooled by Degrees. For my own Part,
I have learned to bear Every thing, and
not to Sayl with the Wind in my Teeth.
I think the Folke in Power, if they had
any Justice, might at least give you
some honorary Satisfaction : But I am
a Stranger to their Justice and all their
good Qualityes, having onely received
Marks of their ill ones —

350 Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

I had promised and intended a Visit
to Will Pool, and from thence would
have called at Woodbrook. But there ,
was not a Single Intervall of Weather
for such an Expedition. I hope you
have good Success with your Drains
and other Improvements, and I think
you will do well to imitate oilr Land-
lord here, who talks much of Building,
but is as slow as possible in the Exe-
cution.

Mr Jervas is gone to Engld, but when
I go to Town I shall Enquire how to
write to him, and do what you desire ; I
know not a more vexatious Dispute than
that about Meres and Bounds, nor more
vexatious Disputants than those Right-
eous : I suppose upon the Strength of
the Text, that the Righteous shall inherit
the Land.

My humble Service to Your Lady.
I am your most humble &c.

J. S.

The " honorary Satisfaction " that
might have been given to Chetwode was
perhaps that English peerage in claim-
ing which his grandfather had ruined
himself.

" Our Landlord here " was George
Rochefort, of whose house Dr. Sheridan
wrote : —

" 'T is so little, the family live in a press in 't,
And poor Lady Betty has scarce room to

dress in 't ;
'T is so cold in the winter, you can't bear to

lie in 't,
And so hot in the summer, you are ready to

fry in 't.
'T is so crazy, the weather with ease beats

quite through it,
And you 're forced every year in some part

to renew it."

A fortnight later than the date of the
letter, Swift wrote : " I row after health
like a waterman, and ride after it like
a postboy, and find some relief ; but
' subeunt morbi tristisque senectus.' . . .
I am deep among the workmen at Roche-
fort's canals and lakes."

XXII.

DUBLIN. Novr llth 1721.
SR, — I received yours yesterday. I
writ to Mr Jervas from the Country,
but have yet received no answer, nor do
find that any one of his Friends hath
yet heard from him, so that some of
them are in a good deal of pain to know
where he is, and whether he be alive. I
intend however to write a second time,
but I thought it was needless to trouble
you till J could say something to the
Purpose. But indeed I have had a
much better or rather a much worse Ex-
cuse, having been almost three weeks
pursued with a Noise in my Ears and
Deafness that makes me an unsociable
Creature, hating to see others, or be seen
by my best Friends, and wholly confined
to my Chamber — I have been often
troubled with it but never so long as
now, which wholly disconcerts and con-
founds me to a degree that I can nei-
ther think nor speak nor Act as I used
to do, nor mind the least Business even
of my own, which is an Apology I should
be glad to be without. I am ever

Yr &c. J. S.

The deafness of which he complains
in this letter grew worse and worse, till
at last it cut him off from all society.
Five years before his death he wrote to
his cousin : " I have been very misera-
ble all night, and to-day extremely deaf
and full of pain. I am so stupid and
confounded that I cannot express the
mortification I am under both in mind
and body. I hardly understand one
word I write. I am sure my days will
be very few ; few and miserable they
must 1 >f." A little later his mind failed
rapidly, and Swift became

"A driveller and a show."

XXIII.

DUBLIN. Decembr 5<A 1721.
SR, — When I received your French
Letter I was going to write you an Eng-

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean /Swift.

351

lish one. I forsook the World and French
at the same time, and have nothing to do
with the Latter further than sometimes
reading or gabbling with the French
olergy who come to me about business of
their Church car je parle a peindre, mais
pour 1'ecrire je n'en songe guere depuis
que j'ay quitt^ le politique. I am but
just recovered of my Deafness which put
me out of all Temper with my self and
the rest of Mankind. My Health is not
worth a Rush nor consequently the Re-
maining Part of my Life.

I just now hear that Dr Prat Dean
of Down, my old Acquaintance is dead,
and I must here break off to go to his
Relations.

— 9. The poor Dean dyed on Tues-
day, and was buried yesterday, he was
one of the oldest Acquaintance I had,
and the last that I expected to dy. He
has left a young Widow, in very good
Circumstances. He had Scheems of
long life, hiring a Town-house, and build-
ing a Countrey, preparing great Equi-
pages and Furniture. What a ridicu-
lous Thing is Man — I am this moment
inevitably stoppt this moment [sic] by
company, and cannot send my Letter till
next Post.

— 12. I have writ twice to Mr Jer-
vas, and got no Answer, nor do I hear
that any one has ; I will write again
when I. can be informed where to reach
him ; you hear the Bank was kicked out
with Ignominy last Saturday — This
Subject filled the Town with Pamphlets
. and none writt so well as by Mr Rowley
though he was not thought to have many
Talents for an Author. As to my own
Part, I mind little what is doing out of .
my proper Dominions, the Libertyes 6f
the Deanery ; yet I thought a Bank
ought to be established, and would be so
because it was the onely ruinous Thing,
wanting to the Kingdom, and therefore
I had not the least Doubt but the Parlm'
would pass it.

I hope you are grown regular in your
Plantations, and have got some skill to

know where and what Trees to place,
and how to make them grow. For want
of better I have been planting Elms in
the Deanery Garden, and what is worse,
in the Cathedrall Churchyard where I
disturbed the Dead, and angered the
Living, by removing Tomb stones, that
People will be at a Loss how to rest with
the Bones of their Ancestors.

I envy all you that lived retired out
of a world where we expect nothing but
Plague, Poverty, and Famine which are
bad words to end a Letter with, there-
fore with wishing Prosperity to you and
your Family, I bid you Adieu.

" The French clergy " belonged to the
Huguenot congregation, which used to
meet for worship in the Lady chapel of
St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The " Bank " which " was kicked out
with Ignominy " was the bill to establish
a National Bank in Ireland, — "a thing
they call a bank," Swift described it.
"Bankrupts," he said, "are always for
setting up banks ; how then can you
think a bank will fail of a majority in
both houses ? " "I have often wished,"
he wrote, " that a law were enacted to
hang up half a dozen bankers every year,
and thereby interpose at least some short
delay to the farther ruin of Ireland."
A year earlier than the date of this let-
ter, he wrote some lines entitled The
Run upon the Bankers, in which he thus
depicted the condition of a banker at the
Day of Judgment : —

" How will the caitiff wretch be scared,

When first he finds himself awake
At the last trumpet, unprepared,
And all his grand account to make !

" When other hands the scales shall hold,

And he, in men's and angels' sight
Produced with all his bills and gold,

Weighed in the balance and found light."

These lines would have quite a modern
ring about them were they carved on the
walls of the church lately built " To the
glory of God and in memory of Jay
Gould."

352

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

XXIV.

[Indorsed, " a very droll and pleast letter."]

DUBLIN. Jany SQth 1721-2.'

SK, — I have been these five weeks and
still continue so disordered with a Noise
in my Ears and Deafness that I am ut-
terly unqualifyed for all Conversation or
thinking. I used to be free of these Fits
in a fortnight but now I fear the Disease
is deeper rooted, and I never Stir out, or
Suffer any to See me but Trebbles and
countertennors, and those as Seldom as
possible.

I have often thought that a Gentleman
in the Country is not a bit less happy
for not having Power in it, and that an
Influence at Sizes and Sessions, and the
like, is altogether below a wise man's Re-
gard, especially in such a dirty obscure
nook of the World as this Kingdom. If
they break open your Roads, they can-
not hinder you from going through them.
You are a King over your own District
though the neighbouring Princes be your
Enemyes. You can pound the Cattle that
trespass on your Grounds, tho' the next
Justice replevins them : you are thought
to be quarrelsom enough and therefore
peacefull people will be less fond of
provoking you. I do not value Bussy's
maxim of Life, without the Circumstances
of Health and Money : — Your Horse is
neither Whig nor Tory, but will carry
you safe unless he Stumbles or be foun-
dered — By the way, I am as much at
a loss for one as ever, and so I fear
shall continue till my riding days are
over.

I should not much mislike a Present-
ment against your going on with your
House, because I t«m a mortal Enemy to
Lime — and Stone, but I hope yours
moves slowly upwards.

We are now preparing for the Plague,
which every body expects before May ;
I have bespoke two pair of Shoes ex-
traordry. Every body else hoards up their
Money, and those who have none now,
will have none. Our great Tradesmen

break, and go off by Dozens, among the
rest Archdeacon Bargons Son.

Mr Jervas writes me Word, that Mor-
ris Dun is a Person he has turned off
his Lands, as one that has been his con1-
stant Enemy &c, and in short gives him
such a Character as none can be fond of.
So that I believe you were not apprized
on what foot that Man stands with Mr Jer-
vas. — I am quite weary of my own Ears,
so with Prayers for you and your Fire
Side, I remain yr &c.

The " Trebbles and countertennors "
were, I suppose, the vicars-choral of his
cathedral, from whose prosecutions he
had suffered at an earlier date.

Sir Roger de Coverley did not share
contempt of "an influence at sizes and
sessions." The Spectator tells us how,
at an assize, " the court was sat before
Sir Roger came ; but notwithstanding all
the justices had taken their places upon
the bench, they made room for the old
knight at the head of them ; who for his
reputation in the country took occasion
to whisper in the judge's ear that he was
glad his lordship had met with such good
weather in his circuit."

How much Ireland was regarded as
an " obscure nook of the World " is
shown by Pope when he writes to Swift,
" I look upon a friend in Ireland as upon
a friend in the other world, whom (pop-
ishly speaking) I believe constantly well-
disposed towards me, and ready to do
me all the good he can in that state of
separation."

" Bussy Rabutin," writes Swift, " the
politest person of his age, when he was
recalled to Court after a long banish-
ment, appeared ridiculous there."

The plague had devastated Marseilles.
Pope celebrated the devotion of the bish-
op who, undismayed, had ministered to
the dying : —

"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer

breath,

When nature sickened, and each gale was
death ? "

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

353

By the English Parliament an act was
passed for the building of pest-houses,
to which not only the infected, but even
the healthy members of an infected fami-
ly were to be removed. Round any town
or city visited by the plague lines were
to be drawn which no one was to pass.
Happily, the British Isles escaped the
visitation. Twelve years later Swift wrote
to a London merchant : " Oppressed beg-
gars are always knaves ; and I believe
there hftrdly are any other among us.
They had rather gain a shilling by knav-
ery than five pounds by honest dealing.
They lost £30,000 a year for ever in the
time of the plague at Marseilles, when
the Spaniards would have bought all
their linen from Ireland ; but the mer-
chants and the weavers sent over such
abominable linen, that it was all returned
back, or sold for a fourth part of the
value."

xxv.

[Indorsed, " a very merry pleast letter."]
DUBLIN. Mar 13tk 1721-2.

SIR, — I had a letter from you. some
time ago, when I was in no Condition
for any Correspondence or Conversation ;
But I thank God for some time past I
am pretty well recovered, and am able
to hear my Friends without danger of
putting them into Consumptions. My
Remedy was given me by my Tayler,
who had been four years deaf, and cured
himself as I have done, by a Clove of
Garlick Steeped in Honey, and put into
his Ear, for wch I gave him half a Crown
after it had cost me 5 or 6 Pounds in
Drugs and Doctors to no Purpose —
Surely you in the Country have got the
London Fancy, that I am Author of all
the Scurvy Things that come out here,
the Slovenly Pages called the Benefit
of was writt by one Dobbs a Sur-
geon. Mr Sheridan sometimes entertains
the World and I pay for all. So that
they have a Miscellany of my works in
England, whereof you and I are equally
Authors. But I lay all those Things at
the Back of my Book, which swells so

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 23

much, that I am hardly able to write any
thing on the Forepart.

I think we are got off the Plague, tho
I hear an Act of Parlmt was read in
Churches (not in mine) concerning it,
and the Wise say, we are in more danger
than ever, because infected Goods are
more likely to be brought us. For my
Part, I have the Courage of a Coward,
never to think of Dangers till they ar-
rive, and then I shall begin to squeak.
The Whigs are grown such disaffected
People that I dare not converse with
them ; and who your Britton Esqr is, I
cannot tell. I hear there is an Irish Pa-
per called the Reformer. I saw part of
one Paper, but it did not encourage me
to enquire after more : I keep the few-
est Company of any man in this Town,
and read nothing that hath been written
on this Side 1500 Years ; So you may
judge what an Intelligencer I am like to
be to a Gentleman in the Country, who
wants to know how the World goes.

Thus much for your first Letter, your
last which came just now is a Condo-
lence on my Deafness. Mr Le brunt was
right in my Intentions, if it had contin-
ued, but the Effect is removed with the
Cause. My Friends shall see me while
I am neither troublesome to them nor
my self. I was less melancholy than I
thought I should have been, and less
curious to know what people said, when
they talked before me ; but I saw very
few, and suffered hardly any to stay : —
People whisper here too, just as they
have whispered these 30 years, and to as
little Purpose.

I have the best Servant in the World
dying in the House, which quite discon-
certs me. He was the first good one I
ever had, and I am sure will be the last.
I know few greater Losses in Life.

I know not how little you may make
of Stone walls. I am onely going to dash
one in the Garden, and think I shall be
undone.

I hope yr Lady and Fire side are well
I am ever &c.

354

The American Notion of Equality.

Swift, it is said, only once directly
owned any piece of writing as his. " Since
I left England," he wrote, " such a parcel
of trash has been there fathered upon
me, that nothing but the good judgment
of my friends could hinder them from
thinking me the greatest dunce alive."

The book " which swells so much "
was probably Gulliver's Travels, of which
much was already written, though it was

not published till four years later. His
servant died within a few days. He
buried him in the cathedral, and read the
service over him with tears in his eyes.
In the epitaph which he wrote for him he
had spoken of himself as " his grateful
friend and master. " "A gentleman of his
acquaintance, much more distinguished
for vanity than wisdom, prevailed upon
him to leave out the word ' friend.' "
George Birkbeck Hill.

THE AMERICAN NOTION OF EQUALITY.

THE essence of the aristocratic system
is that it separates people into castes.
First, it divides all men into the two
castes of gentlemen by birth and breed-
ing and non-gentlemen ; and then there
are the minor castes created by rank,
station, and occupation. It is hard for
an American to understand the respect
paid in England to every member of
the gentleman class, independently of his
particular qualities. In describing the
conduct of a tradesman whom the vicar
of the parish was endeavoring to influ-
ence in a certain direction, Anthony
Trollope says, " There was, however, a
humility about the man, a confession on
his part that in talking to an undoubted
gentleman he was talking to a superior
being." And yet this same superior be-
ing was so far inferior to a marquis that
the Marquis of Trowbridge (with whom,
as the reader may remember, the vicar
had quarreled) is represented as think-
ing of him in these terms : " And now,
this infidel clergyman had dared to al-
lude to his lordship's daughters. Such
a man had no right even to think of wo-
men so exalted. The existence of the
Ladies Stoute must no doubt be known
to such men, and among themselves prob-
ably some allusion in the way of faint
guesses might be made as to their mode
of living, as men guess at kings and

queens, and even at gods and goddesses."
Allowance must be made for the humor-
ous exaggeration in this passage, but still
it indicates a real feeling. These rigid
distinctions of class necessarily produce
a great deal of what in this country we
call servility ; and servility, no doubt,
it is in many cases, but in other cases
" respect " would be a better word than
" servility " to describe the attitude held
by members of one class towartl members
of a higher class.

A far worse evil which aristocracy pro-
duces is insensibility to the sufferings of
other people, when those people belong
to a lower order. One of the new im-
pressions which an American receives
upon his first visit to England is of the
equanimity, of the perfect detachment,
one might say perhaps of the faint curi-
osity, with which well-dressed people,
rolling by in carriages, regard those
spectres in human form which wander
occasionally from the East End of Lon-
don to Hyde Park or its vicinity. In
former years, the country gentlemen of
England suffered laborers upon their
estates to live, and to fall sick and die,
in cottages not fit for pigs to inhabit.
This was possible because of the great
gulf fixed by law and custom between
Hodge and his landlord. Their com-
moti humanity was almost lost sight of,

The American Notion of Equality.

355

and the points in which they resembled
each other — though the most important
— were completely overshadowed by the
points in which they differed. There
is a good illustration of this feeling in
Mrs. Humphry Ward's novel, Marcella.
Marcella, it will be remembered, had been
ministering to the wife and children of a
farm hand, who was in jail on a charge
of murder ; and her conduct is thus dis-
cussed by Lady Winterbourne and Miss
Raeburn, the elderly sister of Lord Rae-
burn : -—

" ' Do you mean to say, Agneta, that
one can't sympathize, in such an awful
thing, with people of another class, as one
would with one's own flesh and blood ? '
Miss Raeburn winced. She felt for a
moment the pressure of a democratic
world — a hated, formidable world —
through her friend's question. Then she
stood to her guns. ' I dare say you '11
think it sounds bad,' she said stoutly,
' but in my young days it would, have
been thought a piece of posing, of senti-
mentalism, something indecorous and un-
fitting, if a girl had put herself in such a
position.' "

This is one aspect of an aristocratic
society. It might be said, without much
exaggeration, that aristocracy produces
servility in every class but the highest,
and inhumanity in every clas^ but the
lowest. However, I shall not enlarge
* upon this aspect of the subject ; we are
all familiar with what can be said against
the aristocratic system, but seldom, in-
deed, in this country, do we consider
what can be said for it. We ought to
remember that although the aristocratic
or caste system assigns most men to low
positions in society, it guarantees some
position to every man ; and within his own
position or caste each man has free play
for spontaneousness and self - respect.
Lord Buchan declined to accept the post
of secretary to the English embassy at
Lisbon, because the ambassador was in-
ferior to him in rank ; and Dr. Johnson
commended his refusal. Had the earl

done otherwise, said the doctor, he would
have been a traitor to his rank and
family. The same obligation rests upon
the servant not to discharge any office
which, according to the custom of Eng-
lish society, belongs to servants of an in-
ferior class. Swift's coachman, when he
refused to fetch a pail of water from the
well, was certainly in the right ; and hia
master, in ordering him to drive to the
well with coach and four, took a humor-
ous but hardly a just revenge. The se-
curity of the caste system, the sacred-
ness of the laws and customs which hedge
it about, make it possible for members
even of a low caste to have a certain dig-
nity of speech and conduct. " English-
women of the lower classes," wrote Mr.
Hawthorne, " have a grace of their own,
not seen in each individual, but never-
theless belonging to their order, which
is not to be found in American women
of the corresponding class. The other
day, in the police court, a girl was put
into the witness-box, whose native graces
of this sort impressed me a good deal.
She was coarse, and her dress was none
of the cleanest and nowise smart. She
appeared to have been up all night, too,
drinking at the Tranmere wake, and had
since ridden in a cart, covered up with
a rug. She described herself as a ser-
vant - girl out of place ; and her charm
lay in all her manifestations, — her tones,
her gestures, her look, her way of speak-
ing, and what she said being so appro-
priate and natural in a girl of that class ;
nothing affected ; no proper grace thrown
away by attempting to appear ladylike,
which an American girl would have at-
tempted, and she would also have suc-
ceeded in a certain degree. If each class
would but keep within itself, and show
its respect for itself by aiming at nothing
beyond, they would all be more respect-
able. But this kind of fitness is evident-
ly not to be expected in the future, and
something else must be substituted for it."
Such being its practical operation, what
is the rationale, the intellectual basis, of

356

The American Notion of Equality.

the aristocratic or caste system ? It is
the recognition by law of certain dif-
ferences between one man and another.
These differences exist independently of
law, and perhaps they are more insisted
upon in democratic than in aristocratic
countries. People who belong to what
is called the " best society " in large
towns or cities are usually quite uncon-
scious of the fact that society is graded
just as minutely beneath them as it is in
the plane with which they are familiar.
But, in fact, every individual in a complex
society, down to the beggar in the street
or the tramp on the highway, has his
" social position." The city missiona-
ries of Boston report, with some aston-
ishment, that a great social gap exists
between the peanut-vender on the side-
walk and the peripatetic organ-grinder,
and that the children of the former are
forbidden by their parents to play with
the children of the latter. It is indeed
asserted, and with considerable truth,
that mere wealth is a passport 'to the
best society ; but this is less true in Amer-
ica than it is in England, and less true
in Australia than it is in America. The
reason is that in England the best socie-
ty is a state institution, and therefore is
more sure of its position and can afford
to be less exclusive, — to be more hospi-
table not only to wealth, but also to intel-
lect and originality, than is possible for
the corresponding class in a democratic
country. Moreover, even from the most
aristocratic point of view, a good reason
can be given for accepting wealth as a
substitute for birth. The fact that a
man has made much money implies, as
a rule, that both his mind and his physi-
cal strength are far above the average.
From what better stock, then, could the
best society be recruited ? This, of
course, is not the motive of the rich man's
reception in good society : it might better
be described as nature's reason for per-
mitting the anomaly. The same traits of
courage and of executive ability which
render a great contractor rich may reveal

themselves, a generation or two later, on
the quarter-deck of a man-of-war ; and
probably it could be shown that no small
part of the aptitude for state business
displayed by the English nobility was in-
herited from ancestors who had exhibit-
ed a similar talent in trade.

The aristocratic principle at work in
almost all societies is therefore more ra-
tional, more logical, than it appears to be
at first sight. And if we ask what mo-
tive, what instinct, is at the bottom of this
segregation, — why does the peeress, why
does the huckster's wife, value so highly
and guard so fiercely her " social posi-
tion," — perhaps the true answer would
be that the instinct of self-preservation is
concerned. Man knows himself to be
an extremely imitative, a very easily de-
based creature, and consequently he has
an instinctive desire to defend his society
— the society in which his children are
to be brought up, and in which they will
have an inherited place — from contami-
nation by inferior persons.

The aristocratic or caste system is,
then, nothing more than a legal recogni-
tion by the state, of certain differences
between people which, whether the state
recognizes them or not, are always en-
forced. Why, then, should the state med-
dle with them ? Why not allow these
matters to regulate themselves, instead
of drawing hard-and-fast lines of divi-
sion which result in that great evil, ser-
vility ? There is an answer to this ob-
jection. Boswell relates a conversation
between Dr. Johnson and several other
persons about equality and inequality,
which one of 'those present endeavored to
sum up as follows : " The result is that
order is better than confusion." " Why,
no," said the sage ; " the result is that
order cannot be had but by subordina-
tion."

Now, it might be said, just as there
can be no order without subordination,
so also there can be no personal dignity
without subordination. Man is consti-
tuted in such a manner that unless re-

The American Notion of Equality.

357

spect for others is demanded from him,
he will not demand or invite respect for
himself. Human nature has to be helped
out in this regard. Left to themselves,
as in a democratic society, men disinte-
grate ; they cease to respect themselves
or one another. Plato declared that in a
democratic state the very dogs and horses
in the street wear a look of impudence.
On the other hand, in an aristocratic so-
ciety, all are bound up together. Each
man has his niche : something is due
from him, and something is due to him.
Every citizen occupies, or at least every
class of citizens occupy, a particular round
on the ladder, and they are under obli-
gations to concede just so much to their
superiors, and to exact just so much from
their inferiors. Hence, to belong to an
aristocratic society is to undergo a con-
tinual education in the feeling both of
personal dignity and of respect for others.
" There is a reciprocal pleasure in gov-
erning and being governed."

Such, roughly sketched, is the philo-
sophic basis of the aristocratic or caste
system. It proceeds upon the assumption
that man's natural tendency is to social
anarchy ; that subordination is the con-
dition not only of order, but of person-
al dignity ; and that this subordination
must be found in the very structure of
the state.

Let us glance now at a democratic
society, or at the nearest approach to it
which this»country affords. . The demo-
cratic spirit, even in the United States,
is a recent development, for we were not
emancipated from the aristocratic tradi-
tion until the close of the civil war. It
is a fact, often cited, that in the last cen-
tury, both at Harvard and at Yale, the
names of the students were arranged in
the catalogue, not alphabetically, but in
the supposed order of family importance.
Seats in church were assigned upon the
same principle ; and I have been told by
a man now living how in his young days
a stranger, who had moved into town,
having been put at the back of the meet-

ing-house in the same pew with a negro,
was so incensed that he forswore church-
going altogether.

In the little town of Amherst, New
Hampshire, there lived (and died in
1853) a lawyer named Atherton, whose
appearance is thus described in a history
of the New Hampshire Bar : " Erect, dig-
nified, and handsomely clad, with ruffled
shirt, hanging watch-chain and seals, and
all the other adornments of his station,
at a time when the dress was a distinctive
badge of the different classes of society,
he was recognized at a glance as belong-
ing to what might be called the patrician
order."

The aristocratic tradition was, how-
ever, gradually giving way, under pres-
sure of a democratic political system, and
the civil war greatly hastened this pro-
cess. Since then it would be true to say,
I think, that in the United States good
birth and good breeding, apart from
wealth or talent, do not confer upon their
possessor any real distinction in the view
of people in general. With the close
of the civil war there came a new influ-
ence and a new spirit, — the influence
and the spirit of plutocracy. That was
the era of the Mansard roof and of the
Saratoga trunk. The tone of American
society was at that time perceptibly low-
ered. Immense wealth had fallen into
hands unfit to receive, or at least to dis-
pense it. There has been an improve-
ment in taste since then ; but the spirit
of plutocracy, with all its selfishness and
aloofness, remains, and gathers strength
day by day.

Nevertheless, here and there equality
has been realized in the United States as
perhaps it never was realized before in
the history of the world. What is equali-
ty ? In what sense can men be called
equal, when we consider what vast dif-
ferences there are between them in re-
spect to character, intellect, education,
and refinement ? Two men are equal
when they meet freely and pleasantly,
without condescension on one side or sus-

358

The American Notion of Equality.

picion on the other, and when the consid-
eration which each shows for the other
is not dependent upon or qualified by'
the station or outward circumstances of
either. This condition prevails in some
New England towns, especially in those
remote from the railway, and I presume
that it prevails also in most parts of the
West. In s.uch communities, every man
who is not a criminal or an outcast does
feel himself to be in a very real sense the
" equal " of every other man. Wealth,
though it is respected as a source of power,
is never thought of as conferring " social
position ; " in fact, that hideous phrase
is not found in the rural vocabulary ;
and as to the word " snob," it would be
difficult to make its meaning understood
among the people whom I have in mind.
Among them an employer of labor would
of course expect those whom he employed
to obey his orders; but it would strike
him as ludicrous beyond expression that
his hired man should wear a particular
kind of dress, touch his hat when he was
spoken to, and in general comport him-
self as if he belonged to an inferior order.
Under such conditions want of respect is
undoubtedly carried too far, but equality
is attained ; and that self-respect which
the feeling of equality produces makes
the best members of the community equal
to any society ; it gives them simplicity
and sincerity. Take them to New York
or Boston, and no magnificence or dis-
play, no society of rich or eminent per-
sons, will put them out.

It is only in small country towns that
such absolute equality prevails, but even
in our large cities, even taking us at our
worst, there is at least an absence of ser-
vility which distinguishes the American
from the English social structure. In
a memoir of Cardinal Newman it is re-
lated that once, while he was a tutor at
Oxford, a carter whom he met riding on
the shaft fell, shortly after Mr. New-
man had passed him, was run over, and
killed. After that, the biographer states,
Mr. Newman made it a rule, whenever he

met a man riding in that dangerous posi-
tion, to compel him to get off and walk.
Now, if an Amei'ican gentleman should
issue a command of this sort to an Amer-
ican laborer, it would probably evoke
some such reply as was once made to a
certain dignified and portly judge. The
court was in process of removal from
one building to another, and a porter en-
gaged in the work inquired of a subor-
dinate official, " Who is that fat man sit-
ting on the bench in the court-room ? "

" Oh," was the answer, " that is Judge
. He is busy with some papers, be-
fore court opens. But why do you want
to know ? "

" Well," said the porter, " I was carry-
ing a big armful of books into the room,
with my hat on, just now, and that man
told me never to come into his presence
without taking my hat off."

" And what did you say ? "

" Oh," said the fellow, with perfect
nonchalance, and as if he had done the
only thing proper under the circum-
stances, " I told him to go to hell."

This retort, considering that it was
made in ignorance of the judge's official
capacity, seems to me to indicate a better
state of society than does the subservi-
ency of the English carter.

" America," as Mr. Leslie Stephen ex-
claims in an unwonted burst of enthu-
siasm, •• is still the land of hope . . .
where, in spite of some superficially gro-
tesque results, every man can speak to
every other man without the oppressive
sense of condescension ; where a civil
word from a poor man is not always a
covert request for a gratuity and a tacit
confession of dependence." In other
words, America is, to some extent, the
land of equality.

It is most interesting to note the im-
pression made upon the English mind by
the late J. A. MacGahan, the famous
war correspondent, who was the son of
an Ohio farmer. His English friend and
fellow worker, Mr. Archibald Forbes,
writes of him as follows : —

The American Notion of Equality.

359

" I never saw such a fellow for mak-
ing himself at home among high officials.
In his manner there was no flavor of im-
pudence or presumption. I question whe-
ther of that word, indeed, he understood
the meaning. It was as if he, in the
character of a man and a Republican
man, had reasoned the matter down to
bare principle. ' I am a man,' seemed
to me to be his attitude, ' and I am a man
who honestly and legitimately, for a spe-
cific purpose of which you are aware,
or of which I shall be glad to make you
aware, want something. That something
— be it information, be it a passport, be
it what it may — you can give me best :
therefore I ask you for it. It is immate-
rial to the logic of the position I virtually
take whether you are an office messenger
or the chancellor of an empire, a lieu-
tenant or the commander-in-chief.' "

No wonder, then, that, as another friend
of his put it, " MacGahan could do any-
thing he liked with Ignatieff, calmly made
love to Madame Ignatieff, rather patro-
nized Prince Gortschakoff, and nodded
affably to the Grand Duke Nicholas."

It is to be observed that in writing the
description which I have quoted, Mr.
Forbes had no design of making a gener-
al statement, much less of analyzing the
American notion of equality. He was
simply indicating in his acute, straight-
forward manner what he conceived to
be MacGahan's attitude toward all the
world. " It was as if he, in the charac-
ter of a man and a Republican man, had
reasoned the matter down to bare prin-
ciple. ' I am a man ! ' ' That describes
exactly the American notion, the notion
of equality which I am attempting to ex-
amine. " It is immaterial to the logic of
the position I virtually take whether you
are an office messenger or the chancellor
of an empire." Such was MacGahan's
logic, and such is the logic of the Amer-
ican idea of equality. That a man could
so feel and act seems to have come upon
Mr. Forbes, even in these democratic
days, as a kind of revelation. It does

not strike us so, and this proves that, in
some measure, we have realized the no-
tion of equality.

But let us come to closer quarters with
our subject. When and under what con-
ditions does this mysterious thing, equal-
ity, exist ? Many philosophers, many
clever essayists, many statesmen, have
declared that equality is a mere delusion.
I suppose that the weight of educated
opinion is, and always has been, against
it. And yet the passion for equality is
deeply planted in the human heart ; it
was one cause — some historians tell us
the main cause — of the French Revolu-
tion, and it has been for ages a source
of hope and inspiration. It is not so
much a theory as an instinct. It is, I
believe, an instinctive perception of the
fact that in the one thing of importance,
namely, in moral freedom, men are equal.
I say advisedly the one thing of impor-
tance. Nobody can read Matthew Ar-
nold's characterization of " conduct " as
amounting to " three fourths " of life
without being conscious, though dimly,
perhaps, of some latent absurdity in the
remark. The absurdity lies in compar-
ing conduct on equal terms with anything
else. It would hardly be more absurd to
say that of the pleasure in living three
fourths consisted in doing one's duty, and
the remaining fourth in drinking good
old rum. Equality is the practical re-
cognition of this fundamental truth that
in the one thing of real importance, in
the thing which chiefly distinguishes man
from the brutes, in the thing which
alone, despite of weakness and sin, gives
a sublime aspect to human nature, name-
ly, in moral freedom, all classes of men
are alike. The ultimate equality, there-
fore, the equality instinctively sought af-
ter by the human race, is an equality in
self-respect, because self-respect is found-
ed solely upon moral freedom, and upon
the right exercise of moral freedom.
Self-respect has nothing to do with what
a man possesses, nor even with his pro-
ficiency in any kind of human achieve-

360

The American Notion of Equality.

ment, mental or physical. No man has
self-respect because of what he knows,
or of what he has, or of what he can
do. These things may inspire him with
pride or with vanity, but if he attempts
to build self-respect upon them or to
exact respect from others on account of
them, his folly is obvious. Thus if a
man plumes himself upon his wealth, we
call him purse-proud ; if he prides him-
self upon his learning or cultivation, we
call him pedant or prig, as the case may
be ; if he is vain of his clothes, he is set
down as a fop, if -of his manners, as
a coxcomb. Pride and vanity may rest
upon these foundations, but self-respect
depends ultimately on the fact that man
is a free moral agent, and therefore it
is, or might be, a universal possession.
We cannot imagine a man so poor, so
weak, so friendless, so ignorant, as, of
necessity, to be lacking in self-i'espect.
On the contrary, we often find self-re-
spect in men who are conspicuously des-
titute.

I do not mean, of course, that one
individual is equal to another individual,
but that moral freedom is the possession
of man as man, and is not the possession
of any class or kind of men in particu-
lar. Equality lies in the recognition of
this fact, and of all that it implies. The
only explanation which we in the United
States can give of ourselves politically
and socially, the only ground upon which
we can stand, is that here we undertook,
as a people, to substitute for the princi-
ple of aristocracy the principle of demo-
cracy, and democracy in its social aspect
is equality.

But we have not been faithful to this
ideal. " Our great crime," as Mr. How-
ells once declared, " is that we have been
false to the notion of equality." What,
then, are the hindrances to equality in
the United States? The most obvious
hindrance, and perhaps the most impor-
tant, is the great and ever-increasing in-
equality in the distribution of wealth.
One per cent of the families in the Unit-

ed States possess more property than is
possessed by all the remaining ninety-
nine per cent.1 The growth of a pluto-
cracy among us would not be so bad if
the plutocratic class exercised a good in-
fluence, but they exercise a bad influence.
Their lives are spent, for the most part,
in the pursuit of material pleasures, and
they foster low ambitions in the public
at large. What standards, what ideals,
must be instilled in the mind of a young
girl, the daughter of a mechanic, for in-
stance, who reads the " society " news
in the Sunday papers, and contemplates
the "best" people in the city as she
sees them in the street, and perhaps at
the theatre or in church now and then !
She must learn to think that the highest
ambition of a young woman is not to be
gentle, to be modest, to give pleasure to
those around, and especially to those be-
neath her, but to be a conspicuous object
at the horse show, to wear costly gar-
ments, to take part in costly entertain-
ments, and finally to marry a foreign
nobleman, and forsake her own country
forever.

In short, if we may trust experience,
great wealth in the hands of private
persons is incompatible with equality. It
is so for two reasons : first, because it
makes a gap between those who have it
and those who have it not ; and, second-
ly, because its effect is, among people at
large, to lower and confuse their ideals,
to make a man respectable and respect-
ed, not for what he is, but for what he
has. In a town or city like Newport,
for example, young men stigmatized as
" natives " may be observed, dressed usu-
ally in clothes of the " shabby-genteel "
order, who bear upon their faces a look
of conscious inferiority, painful enough
for an American to see. They have this
look because in the community in which
they live false and tawdry notions, which
they are not strong enough to resist,
prevail ; because in that community to

1 See The Present Distribution of Wealth in
the United States, by Spahr.

The American Notion of Equality.

361

have money and to be in " society " are
regarded — consciously or unconsciously
— as the foundations of self-respect and
of respect for others. In a matter so
delicate as the adjustment of human re-
lations the differences between one man
and another are far less important than
the estimate which each man puts, and
is aware that the other puts, upon those
differences. Great inequality in wealth
tends to establish the plutocratic spirit,
and the essence of that spirit is to ignore
the real, the underlying, the substantial
equality between one man and another,
and to magnify those inequalities which
wealth directly and indirectly produces.
But there is another spirit which ig-
nores the real inequalities between one
man and another, and places equality
upon a wrong basis. One cannot pro-
duce equality by asserting that it exists ;
and if a man tries to make himself equal
to his superior by asserting himself equal,
the effect is exactly the opposite of -what
he intends. In the minds of a great
many Americans equality means this :
never, at least by outward word or act, to
acknowledge their inferiority to anybody
else. True, another man may have in-
herited culture, may have enjoyed better
society, may have had and may have uti-
lized far more opportunities for cultiva-
tion ; and yet they think that they are
bound not to admit any kind of inferiori-
ty to him. They assert — perhaps only
to themselves — that they are this man's
equals ; and if they really believed 'the
assertion, such a belief would go far to
create the equality which it assumes. But
they are conscious, or partly conscious,
that the assertion is false, and hence
an element of insincerity is introduced,
than which nothing is more vulgarizing.
These evils come from ignoring the real,
the essential equality, — the equality in
moral freedom between one man and an-
other, — and from attempting to achieve
equality by denying obvious inequalities.
It is an abandonment of the true ground
of self-respect.

If a man lacks equality, if he is vul-
gar, the whole nation is in a conspiracy
to keep hjm ignorant of the fact. Let
us take as an example the case of com-
mercial travelers or drummers. The
comic papers have many jokes about
them, about their " cheek," their impu-
dence, their self-assertion ; and these
jokes have a solid -basis of fact. Never-
theless, no newspaper, no minister, no
lecturer, no moralist, ever presumes to
tell the drummers that their occupation
is in most cases a degrading one. That
it should be so is largely the fault of us
who are not drummers. If we had good
nature and good manners, it would not
be necessary for drummers to have bad
manners. And so of book, life insur-
ance, and other peripatetic agents. An
agent, or a mere peddler, it may be,
comes to me to sell his wares, and I, be-
ing busy and ill-tempered, revile him.
Two courses are then open to him : he
can pocket the affront, as a means to-
ward the selling of his wares, or he can
revile me back ; and in neither case does
he survive the encounter without a cer-
tain degradation. I do not say that an
exceptional man might not go through
the drummer's or the book agent's expe-
rience scathless, but for the ordinary man
to do so is almost impossible. Nobody,
however, tells the drummer this, and the
community as a whole do not even per-
ceive it. The result is that the typical
drummer prides himself upon his worst
faults. He considers that to be " cheeky,"
to call bar-tender-s by their first names,
to drink strong liquors and to smoke big
cigars, to sit with his feet up, and .to talk
loudly in the office of a second-rate ho-
tel, — to do these things, he considers, is
to be an admirable man of the world.
All that the drummer needs is a differ-
ent ideal, a different standard ; what he
needs is to respect himself as a man in-
stead of as a drummer, to guard against
the particular faults to which he is liable
instead of cherishing them as virtues.
But, as I say, we are all in a conspiracy

362

The, American Notion of Equality.

to keep the drummer ignorant upon these
vital points.

What is true of drummers as a class
is true also, in varying degrees, of a great
many other perfectly honest and repu-
table persons. It is commonly admitted
that a man cannot be a dealer in second-
hand clothes without having the finer
susceptibilities of his nature somewhat
blunted; and the same evil attaches to
almost all forms of buying and selling.
Trade, whether at wholesale or at retail,
is, in modern times, almost inevitably de-
grading. A small success in trade can
perhaps be made by one whose ambition
is to buy at a fair price and to sell again
at a fair price, taking only that profit
which his services as a middleman are
worth. But great success in trade de-
pends upon buying cheaper and selling
dearer than is for the advantage of the
persons with whom one deals ; it depends,
in short, upon getting the better of other
people, and surely that process cannot be
an elevating or humanizing one. There
are also incidental evils connected with
trade as it is now pursued which tend to
vulgarize. Such an evil is the excessive
advertising and puffery which we see on
every hand.

Several years ago, when it was an-
nounced that a son of the Duke of Ar-
gyll was going into trade, the intelligence
was received in this country and in Eng-
land too with a chorus of approbation.
This defection was looked upon as a step
toward breaking down an ancient and un-
wholesome prejudice. But it was a pre-
judice having some foundation in reason
and experience ; and I am sure that a man
can be a good American and a thorough
believer in equality without shutting his
eyes to the dangers — dangers to char-
acter and manners — which must be in-
curred by tradesmen and merchants. In
regard to certain forms of trade, we all
perceive these dangers. We perceive
them, for instance, as I have suggested al-
ready, in respect to traffic in old clothes.
Horse-dealers, again, are looked upon

somewhat askance ; and there is a feel-
ing abroad that plumbers, in order to
remain honest men, must put a great
constraint upon themselves. Most peo-
ple, also, have a certain repulsion to
undertakers. The undertaker's employ-
ment is such that he must necessarily
lose, in part at least, his sense of the aw-
f ulness of death and of the sacredness of
the human body. The repulsion toward
him is, therefore, a natural one ; it is at
bottom the same instinct which, in an ex-
aggerated and fanatical form, caused the
Egyptian paraschistes to be despised and
avoided. But to say this in public, to
declare that anything which any Ameri-
can can lawfully do for a living is in any
sense degrading, would be accounted a
sort of treason, — a treason to the Amer-
ican idea of equality. This, however,
would be a mistake. It is the men, not
their employments, that are or might be
equal. The case of the undertaker is an
extreme one ; but even the undertaker,
if he were on his guard, if he endeavored
to fortify his nature in those points where
it is most endangered, might attain that
equality which is our ideal.

The great thing is that we should be
honest not only with ourselves, but with
one another ; that we should admit that
all men do not have the same advantages
of birth or training, and that all occupa-
tions are not equally civilizing and de-
sirable. In short, instead of trying to
ignore the various inequalities between
one man and another, we should frankly
acknowledge them ; and having done so,
we can give due and practical weight to
the essential equality between one man
and another, — to their equality in moral
freedom.

What will be the ultimate result —
whether Plutocracy will crush out equal-
ity in the United States, or whether the
democratic ideal will triumph, and equal-
ity will be established upon a large scale
for the first time in the history of the
world — can hardly be conjectured.
Some philosophers hold, De Tocqueville

Our Soldier.

363

and Mr. Bvyce among them, that if equal-
ity should prevail, the result would be
to raise the average of human intellect
and character, but to prevent the produc-
tion of really notable persons. There
would be no more Sir Philip Sidneys ;
there would be no more of that spirit ex-
pressed by the maxim Noblesse oblige.
This view is a plausible one, and yet it
does not sufficiently take into account
the extreme elasticity of human nature.
In a nation of MacGahans, we may be
sure that some ideal of character and
manners would be developed, — differ-

ent perhaps from the feudal ideal, but
not the less fine or admirable. There
is a profound remark made by Coleridge
which has a bearing upon the subject of
equality : " We ought to suspect reason-
ing founded wholly on the differences of
man from man, not on their common-
nesses, which are infinitely greater."
The theory of equality is founded upon
the " commonnesses " of human nature.
It would seem, therefore, to be founded
upon justice ; and if that be true, there
need be no anxiety as to its ultimate
effects.

Henry Childs Merwin.

OUR SOLDIER.

THERE was a door directly opposite
my seat in the dining-room, and to it as
we, the other guests of the house, sat at
lunch or at dinner, a maid regularly went
with a tray, waiting a moment until a
key turned on the other side and she was
admitted.

I asked the Signora if any one were ill.

On the contrary, she answered, the
occupant of the room enjoyed most ex-
cellent health. He was an Englishman.
He had been an inmate of her house a
dozen years or more. He made -no ac-
quaintances, and had no associates un-
less one counted herself and the gondo-
liers and the Armenian brothers on the
island of San Lazzaro, who had taught
him Italian. Every morning he went
out to paint, taking with him three camp-
stools of different heights, that he might
place himself most favorably to his work.
He never showed what he had painted.
A great many people made pictures in
Venice which they did not care to show,
at least not in Venice itself. She did
not know his story. She never asked
questions. There were plenty of reasons
why one might wish to leave a past and
its memories. She believed he had once

lived in Australia, but she could give no
exact information.

And did he never write or receive let-
ters, or plan for the future ?

Oh yes, he wrote letters twice a year,
when his money was sent from England.
She did not think that he wrote them at
any other time. Now and then, too, he
went on little journeys for his pleasure,
and he read many books, and he was most
amiable and gentle, and they all loved
him, she, and the maids, and the gondo-
liers, and the priests of San Lazzaro,
and he was evidently intending to live
'as at present until the day when, accord-
ing to a desire which he had communi-
cated to her, he should be borne on his
last little journey to the Campo Santo at
San Michele ; and she wondered more
people of means did not spend the even-
ing of their life in a similar manner.
Surely nothing could be so agreeable or
so calm. Had I never heard a remark
which some one had made speaking of
St. Peter's in Rome and their own St.
Mark's — " In St. Peter's the heart goes
up to God, in St. Mark's God comes
down to the heart " ?

Soon after this conversation I went

364

OUT Soldier.

into the garden. A man of elderly ap-
pearance was sitting on the bench under
the jasmine bush. As I stopped to pick
some of the white blossoms, I said to
him, what every one that day, quite as
a matter of course, was saying to every
one else, " It is very hot, is n't it ? "

" Yes," he assented in a tone that was
not unfriendly, yet not meant to encour-
age further intercourse.

Then I noticed by his side three camp-
stools of different heights, and I under-
stood who it was.

A week later we met again at the
same place. He held in his hand a
Venetian daily paper. On the first page,
which he had evidently just finished read-
ing, was a portrait and an account of a
fireman, who, at the recent burning of a
Franciscan monastery, had perished at-
tempting to save a valuable manuscript.
Thereupon, when my interest in the sub-
ject caused me to forget the possible
danger of losing my listener, for the Sig-
nora had told me that if a stranger ad-
dressed her Englishman he would some-
times rise abruptly and go away, I
began to relate how a friend and I, drift-
ing that morning through a side canal,
had seen coming out of a church a pro-
cession of priests and choir-boys, followed
by the firemen of Venice, bearing the
body of their comrade ; how at the water-
steps a barge was waiting, hung with
black cloth and garlands of flowers ; how
the firemen placed their burden upon
this, grouping themselves about it ; how
a gondola containing two priests in flow-
ered satin robes and a third one in pur-
ple went on before, a few other gondolas,
our own among them, forming in a line
behind, and thus we glided across to
San Michele, where Franciscan friars
came to the landing to meet us ; how we
heard the good-by prayers in the chapel
on the island, and stood by the grave,
while a priest with a deep rich voice
read a eulogy through which the words
bravo, coraggiosissimo ran like a re-
frain ; how when the last mourner had

turned away we came back from the
other side of the Campo, to which we
had wandered, and making a wreath of
white clover left it on the fireman's grave ;
and how we had done this, partly be-
cause we recalled that it was Decoration
Day in our own land, partly too because
as little children we had been accustomed
at this time to bring field flowers as our
especial tribute, and that we used to
have a great many decoration days in
a summer, because we were so fond of
observing them.

" And did you have many graves to
decorate ? " inquired the Signora's Eng-
lishman.

I answered that most of the people in
our village were women, children, and
old men, and that there had been only
one man of suitable age to send at the
call of our civil war, and that he also was
bravo, coraggiosissimo. He had fallen
in a great battle, the Battle of the Wilder-
ness. It was in honor of his memory
that we as children kept our frequent
decoration days.

" I suppose your graveyard is very
different from the Campo Santo at San
Michele ? " said my companion.

" Very different. On either side are
old houses, not so old of course as these
in Venice, but still very old. They are
white, and have green blinds, and porches
with little windows looking up and down
the road. The doors are painted green
like the blinds, and have shining brass
knockers, and each house has its little
front garden with a hedge of cinnamon
roses, and a bed of lilies-of-the-valley,
and lilac bushes, and a grass-grown path
leading to the gate. Behind the grave-
yard flows a winding river with wooded
shores, and there are willow-trees all
about, and in front of the graveyard is
a view toward a hollow where there is a
second river, one that ebbs and flows
with the sea, and here are salt marshes,
and an old bridge and a mill, and on ac-
count of its situation the village is called
Two Rivers."

Our Soldier.

365

The man had turned towards me, and
was listening intently.

Afterwards I remembered having no-
ticed a curious change in his appear-
ance, as if he had suddenly become much
younger.

"And beyond the bridge/' he said,
speaking at first with a certain hesita-
tion and always with an absent sound
in his voice, — " beyond the bridge, the
road winds upward away from the vil-
lage, past a rambling inn shaded by elm-
trees, past more old houses until it comes
to a corner where a mile-stone stands,
and an old parsonage with a row of pop-
lar-trees at the side, and behind the house
is wet, swampy ground, always blue in
June with fleurs-de-lys, and not far away
is a church, also white with green blinds,
and it too has a porch."

" The old inn was burned," I said,
" many years ago, and the poplar-trees
have been cut down. I am sorry, for I
loved the poplar-trees."

" I am sorry, too," said the man, "it
was wrong to destroy them."

After this -he related anecdotes con-
nected with Two Rivers, some of which
were familiar to me, some of which I
had never heard. He told of going for
pond-lilies on the river with wooded
shores, and of fishing for smelt on the
river that ebbed and flowed with the
sea ; and he told of another and larger •
river in a neighboring township where
he had once, at the risk of life, swam
his horse after a freshet.

The absent sound in his voice became
more and more apparent. One felt that
he was wholly unconscious of what he
was saying. All at once he reached out
gropingly as one lost in the dark, took
my hand, raised it to his forehead, held
it there for a moment in a strange si-
lence, and presently put it gently down.

With the movement he seemed to re-
cover his quiet distant self, folded his
paper, wished me a grave good-morning,
and with his three camp-stools under
his arm he went into the house.

I told the Signora.

" It is very simple," she said ; " if a
man has once been in Australia, why not
in America, which is so much nearer?"

" But this is such a hidden village, no
one ever goes there."

" How was it possible to know that ?
One would think you had sat from morn-
ing till evening on the highway watch-
ing. See what occurred unceasingly in
Venice. Was not one always arriving
and giving one's self much inconvenience
in order to visit forgotten places, entire-
ly in the country where the Venetians
themselves never dreamed of going ? If
one were a painter, no spot could be
too remote or difficult of access. Was
there nothing in your village to attract
a painter ? "

" Oh yes," I said, " the willows, the
river-banks, the old houses, the mill, the
bridges, and the salt marshes, and peo-
ple often went there to paint."

" Then it is explained," returned the
Signora. " See how easy of comprehen-
sion ! As for the sudden discontinuance
of conversation and the little mental con-
fusion, they do not astonish me. The
astonishing thing is that there should
have been a conversation, and that one
does not more often become confused
when speaking of events a long time
past."

When I related at Two Rivers what
had been said that May morning in
Venice, much discussion ensued. It was
asserted that the only man likely to have
expressed himself in the way described
was at rest in the soldier's grave under
the willows, although some one remarked,
his body had never been sent home.
Yet since sufficient proof of his death
existed for the erection of a stone, he
was spoken of as resting there.

Next, an interesting bit of informa-
tion was discovered in the form of a
vague report which declared that our
soldier, seen by the eyes of reliable wit-
nesses to fall in battle, had been seen by

366

Benedicite.

the eyes of other witnesses, equally reli-
able, a prisoner at Andersonville, and re-
duced to so pitiable a condition through
suffering and exposure as to be utterly
unable to recall his own identity.

All light on the subject stopped here.
There could be found no hint suggesting
in what strange manner this life, the
Venetian part of which had so curiously
come to me, might have attained its pre-
sent ease and forgetfulness of earlier ex-
perience. A few persons tried to fill the
void with pages of their own invention,
but the village as a whole preferred not
to trouble itself about the matter. When
one's soldier had been actually seen to
fall in battle, when his pension had
been properly paid, his loss lamented,
his memory honored, where was the use
of discrediting a record of such apparent
authenticity in order to put one's trust
in a supposition? Moreover, what was to
be done about it, and who had the right
to do anything, there being no near of
kin to disturb a peace evidently enjoyed
and desired ?

And thus it is that on Decoration Days
at Two Rivers, and on make-believe
decoration days as well, our village chil-
dren continue to carry their flowers, and
to sp^ell out the inscription, " Fell in the
Battle of the Wilderness." Meanwhile,
in Venice a quiet elderly man goes on
taking his meals in solitude behind a
closed door, paints his pictures which
no one sees, chats with the Armenian
brothers under their cypress - trees and
cedars, is cared for in his daily life and
welcomed back from his little journeys
by the Signora, and the maids, and the
friendly gondoliers, goes on living in
his pleasant unconscious exile, and will
doubtless thus continue to live, until the
day when he shall take his last jour-
ney, this time through the narrow canals
across to the clover-scented meadow, the
Holy Field of the Venetians, when he
shall fall asleep and awake, it may be,
to find that which he gave for his coun-
try has been given back, and that he
was once a soldier of the Union, bravo,
coraggiosissimo.

Harriet Lewis Bradley.

BENEDICITE.

THE waves in prostrate worship lie, and cease
To count the pebbles on their rosary ;
Over the scourged rocks a smile of peace

Deepens the hushed expectancy.
Each small, lost flower lifts her fragrant brow;
Forgotten flocks turn toward the rosy west ;
Day drops her anchor off the world, and now
Awaits her shriving, all her ways confessed.
The patriarchal mountains stand apart ;
Far hills are kneeling ; birds arrest their flight.
Then the real Presence crowds all Nature's heart,

And benediction falls with night !

Martha Gilbert Dickinson.

Butterfield & Co.

367

BUTTERFIELD & GO.

IN TWO PAKTS. PART TWO.

BUTTERFIELD'S was formally reopened
on a Monday, in spite of the fact that
there was nothing — or almost nothing
— in it. The proprietor settled into the
adjoining shed with his personal posses-
sions, for which he had no difficulty to
find room.

"When I shut my eyes I can just
believe I 'm back in the same old sto',
Mother Nicodemus, and ain't never been
burnt out nor lost nothing at all," he
said to his friend, who, in spite of her
years and her lameness, insisted on scrub-
bing the shelves and counter. " And
when I open 'em I says to myself, ' Well,
anyway, it 's Butterfield'.s.' "

The pair almost had a quarrel that
first day over the arrangement of " the
goods," as they called an absurd collec-
tion of things that for a long while con-
stituted the stock in trade. It consisted
chiefly of a barrel of lime, a basket of
apples, two glass jars of peppermint can-
dy, a few bundles of " kindling," a string
of onions festooned about the door, an-
other string across the window fastened
with clothes-pins, a mustard tin (empty),
two loaves of bread, and some elegant
additions in the way of watercresses or
radishes, not to be depended upon at all
seasons.

Such as it was, though, nothing could
have exceeded the delight of Uncle Jo
in disposing and arranging it to the best
advantage, except the satisfaction Mrs.
Nicodemus got from altering all of his
arrangements as soon as they were made,
to suit her own ideas of what was conve-
nient and attractive. Perhaps Uncle Jo
did not enjoy getting up that first night
(when Mrs. Nicodemus had been obliged
perforce to quit the field), and lighting
his candles, and putting everything back
into the exact places and positions origi-

nally chosen by himself ! This done, he
surveyed the whole effect, decided that he
" must have a box" of blacking," thought
of a dozen other things that must be
" added," as he sat on the reversed lime-
bucket, and almost hugged himself when
he reflected that he was now "in busi-
ness again." Poor soul ! he had not the
remotest idea of " business," as that term
had come to be understood in the years
since the destruction of his shop. In
every month, week, day, and moment,
though, of the next ten years it became
clearer and clearer even to him, as it did
to the class he represented ; for they were
all affected by the great changes made
by new men, new methods. A complete
alteration had taken place in the spirit
and purpose and policy of the commer-
cial element in Slumborough. Cash, hard
cash (and very hard cash it was to get
sometimes) was demanded of everybody.
It was not now " Live, and let live," but
" Every man for himself," and a certain
person might take the hindmost. And
" Put money in thy purse, honestly if
'thou canst, — but get rich " was the new
gospel.

Simple-minded Uncle Jo had very nat-
urally supposed that the public would be
as much interested in the revival of his
business as he himself was. He rose
at daylight every morning, shaved scru-
pulously, dressed himself as neatly as
he could, and stood in his door rubbing
his hands and bowing low to those of
the passers-by whom he knew, according
to his ancient custom. He shifted his
lime -barrel, and apples, and blacking,
and clothes-pins here, there, and every-
where, and waited with an eager heart,
and a smile that froze stiffer and stiffer
on his poor old lips, for the customers
who he had thought would come crowd-

368

Butterfield & Co.

ing back. He rubbed off his counter so
often that the wood, though coarse in
grain, took on a high polish ; he dusted his
empty shelves and arranged his empty
boxes, and busied himself elaborately
about any thing and nothing, that he might
not have " the look of being idle ; " split-
ting and resplitting his " kindling " and
doing it up into ever smaller and smaller
fagots ; wiping off his apples, and eating
one occasionally to give himself an air of
bogus festivity and prosperity ; denying
himself everything that he might " keep
up supplies and keep down expenses ; "
affecting to keep " books," with a rusty
pen, a copy-book, and an empty inkstand,
at the back of the store ; making his own
paper bags at night, and putting with-
ered cabbages or a few pounds of bran
in them that they might lie around or-
namentally and effectively on the coun-
ter, and look as if purchased and on the
point of being sent home in hot haste.

Butterfield's was his ideal, and he
clung desperately to it. After hours he
would lock his door and hunt about,
without seeming to do so, for other work
and ways of earning money ; and if he
got a dollar, he would be sure to spend
it in the one way, and bring home some-
thing " inviting." If caught helping to
move a piano, or varnishing furniture, or
whitewashing, he was always deeply an-
noyed, and either said in a confidential
whisper that he was " adding to his in-
come," or affected to refuse payment, at
first ; accepting it later, however, under
protest, " seeing business was slack."

He could not make out what had be-
come of his customers, either. But " some
were dead, and some had fled," and some
had transferred their allegiance and cus-
tom ; and some came a few times, and
languidly looked at the lime-barrel and
bought a quarter's worth of something,
or nothing, and went away again. A few
of his old patrons, in direst distress, sent
to him when they could get nothing else-
where, and were welcomed delightedly,
and served as bountifully as if they had

been the most valuable of paying cus-
tomers ; were shown very plainly that
they were at liberty to take all he had,
little though it was. As long as Mr.
Butterfield was tying up packages he was
happy, whether they were paid for or
not. He had never been a man to worry
about payments in his palmiest days, and
old habits stuck by him after his eclipse.
Miss Bradley elaborately bought back
most of the things that she sent him,
too, but that could not go on forever.

Mother Nicodemus got her groceries
of him, and so did a few of her friends,
but that amounted to very little. There
was never a day in which children were
not to be found in the store, but they
only represented a terrible conflict for-
ever going on in Mr. Butterfield's soul
between his pride in keeping his glass
jars filled and his love of children. " I
can't, I ain't never, I won't do sich a
low-down thing as to let no child pay me
for peppermint candy, — no, nor buns !
When that time comes I reckon I 'd
better give up Butterfield's and shoot my-
self," he would say. The judge's daugh-
ter would come in sometimes, and look
about, trying to find something to buy,
and put a few dollars in his purse, and
warm his poor old heart by her kind
speeches. But Butterfield's was a ghost,
and Uncle Jo was a ghost ; Butterfield's
was dearer to him than ever, only he
loved it as a father does the son who
breaks his heart.

For five years Mother Nicodemus lived
with him. Her son never came home,
nor did she ever hear what had become
of him. Her health failed, and when
she could no longer work she had a visit
from Uncle Jo one day, in which he
said, " Now, Mother Nicodemus, you 've
got to quit this and come keep house for
me and help me manage the business.
It 's just booming now like the Missis-
sippi, business is ! Why, I sold a quart
of vinegar, yesterday, and three pounds
of candles, and two pumpkins, to one
customer ! And I 've got that recipe of

Butterfield & Co.

369

Mary's for them buns of hers, and if you
can make them, they '11 go off as fast as
you can turn them out of the oven."

That afternoon he moved down her
chest of drawers, rocking-chair, bed,
table, and other small possessions, and
installing them and her in his shed, fell
back himself with great cheerfulness on
the counter, on which he professed that
he slept " 'most too sound." He got
much comfort from her presence, though
she was anything but thankful or grate-
ful, took up an idea that " Jo, who was
always a bad, troublesome boy," had
turned her out of the stone cottage, and
would have been thought a trying com-
panion enough by most people. His
only grief was, not that he had to eat a
crust (or go without) that she might dine
or sup ; not that he had to rise early,
and late take rest, that she might have
leisure to roundly abuse him, safely shel-
tered under his roof ; but that he could
not always have fresh fish and good but-
ter for her, or get some other coveted
luxury such as "a silk quilt, and lace
mittens, and a Paisley shawl, like my
mother's," for which the poor old soul
longed.

Never a bun did Mother Nicodemus
bake, from first to last. She was but an
added care, as he had known she would '
be, but she did him good all the same.
To have lost faith in his ideal Butter-
field's would have been to lose all heart
and hope, and she was a valuable coun-
ter-irritant when things went persist-
ently wrong. He knew that she was
fond of him, too ; he never forgot what
she had done for him, and she gave mean-
ing and motive to a self -denial that
might otherwise have narrowed into mere
miserliness.

One day when he was sadly thinking
that it was his fault that the business did
not succeed better, when his soul was ad-
ditionally discouraged by Mother Nico-
demus wailing out fretfully all the morn-
ing, "I want my mother. Call my mo-
ther. Don't you hear me say I want my

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 24

mother ? " and the conviction that she
was in her second childhood had forced
itself upon him, he suddenly heard the
fire alarm and a sound of hurrying feet
outside. With the soldier's instinct of
prompt action, he ran out into the street
and joined the tide of people setting in
a certain direction. The town jail was
on fire, and great was the excitement.
When he reached the place he found
that half the population had turned out ;
scores of men, women, and children were
standing around the building gaping and
exclaiming and trampling over the hose,
under the impression that they were help-
ing the firemen to put out the flames.

Mr. Butterfield's usual modesty and
nervousness and deprecation of respon-
sibility quite vanished when he heard
that there was a woman in the second
story ; and presently he saw her, as the
smoke blew aside, holding up a child,
and heard her shriek out, " Save my
child ! Save my child ! " in the tones
that we hear and never forget. Bravely
responding to this agonized appeal, he
rushed into the building, and soon re-
appeared, white and resolute, bearing a
little boy in his arms. Other men tried
to rescue the mother, and two negroes,
the only prisoners, but they failed as far
as she was concerned. It was long one
of the sickening horrors of the kindly lit-
tle community that the poor creature
perished before their very eyes.

When the sun had sunk, and the com-
motion was over, and the fire engines had
rattled home, and the crowd was dispers-
ing, Uncle Jo looked down at the child
he had saved, who was holding his hand,
and said, " Well, sonny, what 's to be-
come of you ? "

" I 'm going home with you" replied
the boy promptly.

The only thing to be done, just then,
seemed to be to accept this solution of the
problem, and home together they start-
ed accordingly. Uncle Jo's thoughts
were hot the most cheerful in the world
as he looked at -him. The child repre-

370

Butterfield & Co.

sented another burden for Butterfield's
and might " swamp the business," which
he knew — nobody better — to be in its
death-throes. He almost regretted hav-
ing gone to the fire ; he did not dream
that the very element which had laid
Butterfield's low was now, by a curious
caprice of Fate, to build it up again. He
took a good look at his trouvaille. The
child's walk was manly almost to the
point of swagger. His little head was
covered with short black curls, and his
large dark eyes were as irresistible in
their appeal as his mother's voice had
been, when he looked up at his protec-
tor and smiled brightly, not realizing at
all what had happened, apparently quite
content to be going off with a stranger
to regions unknown.

" What 'syour name, anyway ? " asked
his new friend.

" Jake, — Jake Lazarus. And I live
at 127 Green Street," replied the child,
parrot-fashion, and smiled again.

" Lazarus ! That 's a Jew name. He
favors my boy. He 's about the size of
my little Jo ; just about what he was when
I left to go to the war," thought Uncle
Jo, and aloud he said, " It is, is it ? Well,
Jake, how long had you been there ? "
nodding backward in the direction of
the jail.

" I don't know," said Jake. " I 'm
hungry. Ain't we most there ? "

" I '11 see the jailer to-morrow and give
him up to the town," thought Uncle Jo, •
and turning to Jake he said, " Yes, hon-
ey, we are. I reckon you are beat out.
I '11 just carry you."

By the time he got home the boy was
sound asleep in his arms, and he had
concluded not to give him up to the
authorities until " the day after to-mor-
row. That '11 be a plenty of time," he
argued, as he took the child through the
dark, unlit shop and into the shed, where
he laid him down gently on Mother Nic-
odemus's bed (she being asleep too), and
proceeded to get supper for the party.

This daily duty took on a new aspect

at once and became a sort of festival, in
consequence of the unexpected addition
to the family being not only unexpected,
but a child. The soft feel of the little
body had cast a spell over Uncle Jo's
softer heart ; Jake's regular breathing
from the bed was so full of interest that
he several times went over on tiptoe to
hear how he was doing it. Then there
was a chair to be found, and then an
empty soap box proved just the thing to
make it the right height. And when
the table was laid, and the tea drawn,
and the bread cut, and a herring apiece
set sumptuously out, it was with keen
pleasure that Uncle Joseph took his own
cup and filled it with hot milk and bread
for " the boy." Already the claims of the
town to the child seemed impertinent and
odious.

Presently the sleepers awoke ; at least
Mother Nicodemus did ; the child had
to be aroused by Uncle Jo, who half
expected that he would cry and make a
scene, and fully expected that Mother
Nicodemus would be displeased to find
him there, and would make another
scene.

But little Jacob was not the least bit
sad or fretful ; he was in a state of radi-
ant good humor, on the contrary. He al-
lowed Uncle Jo to " h'ist " him up on the
soap box without making the slightest ob-
jection except to yawn as if rather bored
by a regular preliminary. He took no
notice when Mr. Butterfield's best hand-
kerchief (a superb yellow affair — part
of his stock in trade — stamped patrioti-
cally with the American flag and pictures
of Lincoln and Grant) was whisked un-
der his chin and pinned behind, bib-fash-
ion, as deftly as any woman could have
done it. As for Mother Nicodemus,
when she saw that laughing pair of most
mischievous black eyes, all tangled up
about the lashes, and those cheeks rosier
than any apple ever sold over Butter-
field's counter; when she caught the
gleam of a small and incomplete row
of teeth, and heard the spoilt youngster

Butterfield & Co.

371

banging on the table with his spoon, and
frankly, boldly, demanding the sugar in
the bowl, the herrings, the bread, —
everything that was and much that was
not there, — it was a sight to see all the
dead woman in her rise out of its grave
at a bound. Her dim eye burned, fairly,
in its socket, and dilated as she looked ;
her withered old face flushed with de-
light ; and her hands trembled as she
pointed to him, saying, " Why don't you
give Al a fish if he wants it ? Help the
child first, of course, Joseph. Yes, honey,
you shall have it right this minute." She
had given him the name of one of her
little brothers who had died when she
was a child.

Uncle Joseph cleared out a place un-
der the counter, and whistling, with a
heart lighter than the feathers he shook
up, he made a snug little resting-place
for the child, very like the beds one sees
in Scotch cottages, brought him in ten-
derly, and deposited him in it. He made
up a bed for himself close by on the floor,
with an old rug under him and some bag-
ging over him. His last look that night
at the child was a long one ; his thought
was, " I hope they won't find out I 've
got him for the longest ! " His glance
rested on, or rather, roamed about the
store before he fell asleep, and the bare-
ness and desolation of the spot, the trans-
parent delusion of his life, the mockery
of "the business," the hopelessness of
his task, pressed more sorely than ever
upon him for a few minutes as he lay
there. He had turned down the lamp
and put it behind the lime-barrel, from
which place it threw gruesome shadows
on the empty shelves, the one stick of
candy in the biggest jar, the half flitch
of country bacon o"h its nail near the
window, the box from which he had ab-
stracted the herrings for tea, the show-
case with its bunch of shoe-strings and
matches and yeast-cakes.

" If I was let to keep him, I don't see
how Butterfield's can carry him," he
thought dismally. And then, "If he

ain't claimed, though, I'll try to keep
him. I 've been living too high, anyway,
here lately, and it won't take much to
feed him, — that little fellow ! Maybe
I can get some extry work, and I don't
need no milk in my coffee. Some say
it ain't a good thing to take at all, and
gives the dyspepsy. And that handker-
chief would 'most . make him a coat ;
't won't take nothing at all to clothe that
mite of a child, — nothing at all." And
thus deprived of most of his few com-
forts, and busily planning to get rid of
the remainder, Uncle Joseph too fell
asleep, nor dreamed that it was the child
who was to " carry " Butterfield's on and
up to a glorious consummation, such as
his wildest dreams had never contemplat-
ed ; that the firm had taken in a sleeping
partner in curly-locks under the counter,
whose genius was in due time to be re-
cognized far beyond the limits of Slum-
borough ; that in obeying a humane in-
stinct he had saved and gained the desire
of his heart.

From the very first the child brought
him good fortune, as often in after life
he used to relate. The neighbors crowd-
ed in curiously to see him, and pitied
him, and asked him a great many ques-
tions about himself, to which he cheer-
fully made answer in his childish fash-
• ion. The women all fell in love with him,
and so did most of the men ; and hav-
ing come to gaze and talk, they ended
by buying. That curly head brought in
five dollars the first week. It was agreed,
too, that Mr. Butterfield had behaved
well at the fire ; and if there were those
who were as angry with him for keep-
ing little Jake as if it had been his set
purpose to do so at their expense, there
were others who thought it natural and
commendable.

The town authorities never once trou-
bled themselves about the child, although
for months Mr. Butterfield lived in a
chronic fear and fever of anxiety lest
they should. Jake's mother had been
sentenced for shoplifting ; she was a

372

Butterfield & Co.

stranger in the place ; there was no one
to claim the boy or care for him. Sad
to say, the poor mother was not even
missed by the one creature that might,
should, would have grieved for her if he
had not been too young to know what
sorrow meant. For a few days he asked
for her often, and prattled about her in
a merry, careless way that touched Uncle
Joseph's heart, and led him to silence
Jake or divert his attention.

" It 's the first Jew ever I heard of
on the wrong side of a jail door, and I
reckon she warn't much of a woman to
boast of, but she was a mother for all
that ; she loved the little chap, and I '11
be dog-goned if I can stand hearing him
talk like that. I would n't have chose
him a Jew ; no, indeed ! I 've always
been set against the whole tribe, ma'am.
But a prettier, or a brighter, or a smart-
er, or a sweeter child I never see nor
hope to see belonging to nobody," he
said to Miss Bradley. " You 've only to
look at him yourself to see it. Maybe
it won't come out on him," he added
rather anxiously, as if it were a question
of measles rather than of race. " He 's
mighty young, and he won't see nor hear
nothing of 'em, and he '11 be brought up
as good a deep-water Baptist as there is.
You must see him. I '11 call him. Here,
Jake ! Come here ! "

Out struted the child from the shed
with his hands in his pockets. His com-
ical, swaggering air of independence did
not please Miss Bradley, who believed in
a style of child as dead as Julius Caesar ;
and if that had been all, she would have
rebuked him promptly in a stately way ;
but his laughing eyes and that irresisti-
ble curly head so mitigated his "bold-
ness " that she took him up instead and
put him on the counter before her. The
back view of Jake's trousers and small
person generally would have amused the
great " unamusable " Napoleon — after
Waterloo, say — and softened the Iron
Duke. The pair eyed each other amia-
bly. Jacob's attention being attracted

by Miss Bradley's brooch, he made a
dash at it, saying, "What did you pay
for it ? Where did you get it ? What 's it
worth? Brass, ain't it? It's pretty.
Why don't you sell it to Uncle Jo ?
Hainh ? I '11 give you my apple for it.
I like breastpins. My mother, — she's
burnt up, — she had two. Both of 'em
was n't gold, though. She got one from
a Christian, and he cheated her. She
did n't know the difference. / know the
difference. You smell 'em before you
buy 'em, always."

" Dear me ! how you do talk, child !
You must not be so forward. It is
highly improper to be giving your opin-
ions in the presence of your elders and
betters. I do hope Mr. Butterfield is not
committing the folly of being over-indul-
gent, and that he remembers your station
in life. No, it is not brass. No Virginian
gentlewoman ever wears anything that is
not absolutely genuine, Jacob."

" Are you a Christian ? " asked Jacob.

" A Christian ? I am a Virginian, Ja-
cob," replied Miss Bradley, with dignity,
inclusively, as covering the whole ground.

" I ain't. I am a Jew. But I 'm going
to be a Baptist, 'cause Uncle Jo, he 's
one. And I 'm going to tie up the par-
cels and run arrants and sell goods all
the time."

" Yes, yes, of course ; but you must
have the rudiments of an education as
well, Jacob." ("I'll speak to Cynthia
about it," she thought. She had once
owned Cynthia, but the tables were turned
now, and Cynthia emphatically owned
her.)

" I don't want to. I 'm going to keep
store. I 'm going to buy a whole lot of
oranges and boil 'em. Two for fifteen
cents," replied Jake. " I get it every
time. They swell so." He inflated his
cheeks to show how much.

" Mr. Butterfield, do you hear that ?
Who — who has poisoned this youthful
mind and instilled such perversions of
principle into this guileless bosom ? I
am unspeakably shocked, Jacob, to hear

Butterfield & Co.

373

you talk in this way." ("No matter
what Cynthia says, it is now my duty to
instruct him," she thought.) "You can
get down now."

" All right," assented Jacob, and got
down and trotted back again into the
shed.

" An attractive child, I grant you, Mr.
Butterfield, but one requiring to be judi-
ciously reared. I trust Mrs. Nicodemus
has been the better for the seasonable
weather ? Cynthia will bring her down
a tray this afternoon, and I shall be dis-
appointed if she does not find something
on it that she can relish. We all like
a change in pasture, you know. Good-
morning," said the dear little lady, taking
her leave, and Mr. Butterfield executed
his grand bow as she stood on the door-
sill, and another when she got outside.
Less than these he never failed to be-
stow on a customer.

"Why don't you eat your bun, honey?"
asked Mr. Butterfield of Jacob that even-
ing.

"I don't want to," was the reply.
" I 'm going to swap it for a cocoanut
with Bill Jenkins, and sell the cocoanut.
But you '11 see, Uncle Jo ! "

And if you will believe me, that mite of
a manikin put that bun into a cocoanut, '
and that cocoanut into candy, which he
sold to all the boys in the neighborhood,
clearing seventy-five cents by the trans-
action, and managing to get his share
of the sweets beside. This was a straw,
but it showed what the little Jacob was.

Mr. Butterfield lost no time in taking
him to the chapel he attended and begin-
ning the process that was to end in his be-
coming a deep-water Baptist. He taught
him a verse from the New Testament
every morning. As the years went on
he gradually inoculated the child with
all his own unjust prejudice against the
race from which he sprang. But all the
same, the trading instinct, the shrewd-
ness, the intelligence, the self-reliance
of a thousand generations of Israelites
dwelt under the cap that covered that

curly head, and became more and more
apparent every day. If you had taken
Jacob and- shut him up in the Bastille for
life, he would have traded successfully
with the keepers. If you had sent him
to Siberia, he would have made money
out of handcuffs and knouts. If you had
put him in a lighthouse, he would have
made a neat thing of it with the govern-
ment. With him, to breathe was to gain,
and get, and keep, and invest, and re-
invest, and so on over and over again.
Naturally, he attracted other children,
and it was wonderful to see how instinc-
tively he spread his chaff to suit his
birds, and, what is more, caught them.
It was a constant surprise, a continual
amazement, to Uncle Joseph to see him
do it ; the ease, the skill, with which he
made money often struck him dumb.

" I never see the like ; he beats 'em
all. I ain't got no anxiety now about
Jake, little as he is. He '11 get along.
You should just see him, hear him talk to
me 'bout what he 's going to do. Why,
after the first three years he 's made
his own keep, pretty much. Think of
it ! I can't see how he does it," said
Mr. Butterfield admiringly to a friend.
" He 's got a wonderful head, that boy,
* — jest wonderful." And it was wonder-
ful, just as it is wonderful to see an
oriole build its nest, deftly weaving in
twigs, wool, cloth, hair, whatever mate-
rials come to hand. The play of instinct
was the same with the boy as with the
bird.

Mr. Butterfield went in, one evening
in March, when the boy was about eight
years old, and found him seated before
a big table, very earnest and flushed, and
busily at work. " What in the land are
you doing now, Jake, my son ? " Mr. But-
terfield asked, and, with his roguish eyes
dancing in his head, Jake replied, " I 'm
making fifty-cent kites for ten, Uncle
Jo, and can't do 'em fast enough. Miss
Bradley brought me one from Washing-
ton, and there ain't none here like it,
and I 've took it for a pattern. I spoiled

374

Butterfield & Co.

two at first, but now I can do 'em, I tell
you ! Look here, — ain't it pretty ?
Ain't this one of Bill's a beauty ? I 'ye
made two dollars by 'em already, and
I 'm not near done. I make 'em pay
extry for the red-tailed ones ; they 're
made to look like birds, you see. Lend
me your knife, won't you ? "

When ice was " holding " on Melton's
Pond, the following winter, what did
Jake do, but get up a particular kind of
strap for buckling on skates, and make a
tidy little sum out of that too. On the
4th of July he was up at daylight, and,
having provided himself plentifully with
firecrackers on the 3d, did a flourishing
little business before Uncle Jo was up ;
and when Mr. Butterfield did come into
the shed-room Jake and his friends were
letting off a couple of bunches on the
kitchen stove. "I 've had all the fun I
wanted. And I 've made a dollar be-
sides," said Jake, running to embrace
him, and whispering this last item. He
let off the last bunch on the back of
Mother Nicodemus's cap that afternoon,
and when the sun went down had put
three dollars in the till and brought the
key to Mr. Butterfield with another em-
brace and a radiant face. The child
was as affectionate as he was enterpris-
ing and industrious, and he had caught
the Butterfield fever.

In Jake's ninth year Mother Nicode-
mus died, and one day soon after her
funeral Jake, seeing that Uncle Joseph
looked very downcast and sad, slipped
into his lap and said, "Look here, Uncle
Jo. Don't you worrit ; me and you '11
build up Butterfield's together. See if I
don't ! You can have my dog, too, if
you want it. I was going to trade. But
it don't matter." By the time Jake was
ten he had a decided influence upon the
business. Parents had begun to follow
the lead of the children. And there
never was anything like Jake's talent
for meeting their demands, his shifts, de-
vices, ways, means, general readiness for

emergencies. With Cynthia's qualified
assent, Miss Bradley had kept her word,
and for several years taught Jake so
carefully and well that in manner and
speech he became much superior to most
boys of his class. But the kernel of
the whole matter lay in this : he had
a genius for shopkeeping. At twelve
he was noted as one of the " smartest,"
neatest, most civil youngsters in all
Slumborough. People said of him that
" he might easily be taken for a gentle-
man's son," and that " that boy of But-
terfield's was a credit to him and would
get on, certain." His bright face, his
politeness, and his invincible amiability
made him a general favorite.

As for Uncle Joseph, he doted on the
boy. What he would have done after
Mother Nicodemus's death but for this
busy, cheery-wise little companion, Hea-
ven only knows. At first he would say,
" What 's that ? " or " Go 'long, Jake ;
you must be crazy," when " the small
chap " made suggestions about the busi-
ness and its management ; but before
long it was, "Well, I reckon that would
be a good plan," or " I '11 try that, my
boy. How did you ever come to think
of it ? " It was Jake who rubbed up the
red apples until they shone, and sorted
them, and asked enough for the biggest
to pay for all, and got it, too» It was
Jake who wrapped the oranges in tissue-
paper to make them " look fine " and
would not let them touch one another
" for fear that they would rot," and sold
only one bunch of bananas, but those of
the finest, and so got up the name of the
store for good fruit.

He had a talent for asking questions,
among his other talents. He knew what
everything in his line sold for in other
stores, and what those stores had. The
tricks of the trade he did not altogether
disdain, as when, hearing that eggs were
scarce, he bought twelve dozen from a
farmer's wagon one morning, scared Un-
cle Joseph dreadfully, and sold the lot
to the hotel before noon. Uncle Joseph

Butterfield & Co.

375

taught the lad how to shoot and fish.
Presently fresh fish were to be seen
for sale at Butterfield's all during Lent.
And Jake having chanced to come upon
a stranger who was out shooting black-
birds for the wings, which he sent off
to a New York house, took the address,
and sold his slaughtered hundreds in
all ; the money he put into paint and fix-
tures, fancy bags, and gas-pipes for But-
terfield's. He shot partridges, too, and
trapped rabbits, which he dressed and
sold at an advance on the undressed ones
of his neighbors. He made Uncle Joseph
buy pink onions because they " looked
pretty. ' ' He cut open a watermelon every
day and let it stand in the doorway, its
own invitation to the thirsty passer-by.
" It ain't waste, Uncle Jo. It 's adver-
tising. You let me be. You '11 see ! I
watch 'em. They go by the other stores ;
but when they see that melon they walk
right in."

From his fifteenth to his twentieth
year, Jake did nothing but add to the
attractions of Butterfield's. He got a
parrot by trading, and kept it in the
store because people stopped to listen,
and it put them in a good humor. Un-
cle Joseph had struggled for years to
keep his two jars half supplied with
peppermint candy. " The public school
is being built on the square above. I '11
get in some dates, and figs, and mar-
bles, and candies," said Jake breezily.
" I '11 order down a big supply from
Washington."

It was a small order as some shops
count, but to Mr. Butterfield it seemed
fraught with peril and destruction.
" Jake ! Jake ! Where will you stop !
Three barrels of sugar, and now all
these sweets ! " he cried in real distress.
" You '11 never be able to pay for them
in the world."

" Only one barrel of sugar ; the oth-
ers are blinds, nailed up to keep people
from finding it out, Uncle Jo. And I
bet you in two weeks there won't be a
box of goodies left in the store. The

children have got to pass this way, and
I give a carnelian marble or a thimble
with every .box. I know what I 'm about,
Uncle Jo. Don't you get scared."

" You 'd better stick to groceries, Jake.
Stick to groceries, I say."

" Stick to groceries ! I say, sell what-
ever people want to buy. I 'm not go-
ing to have anything stick to me except
customers. You 've got to take risks in
business, Uncle Jo, if you want to make
money. Just you wait ! You '11 see,"
replied Jacob. He always ended their
discussions with this confident speech.

By degrees he revolutionized every-
thing about the business except Mr. But-
terfield himself. Mr. Butterfield could
not be born again, and nothing less rad-
ical would have made him what Jake
considered a business man. On another,
ante-bellum planet and under another,
extinct system he had once done business
successfully ; and he had age on his side,
— presumably, experience. Yet here
was Jake knocking the store and all that
appertained to it about his ears, as if
business were a game of ninepins. It
often tried the old man dreadfully, dear-
ly as he loved the lad. What he did not
' suspect was that he was equally trying to
Jacob, dearly as the lad loved the old
man.

" If he would just turn it all over to
me, and let me manage, and not inter-
fere at all," Jake said once to his great
friend, Bill Jenkins. " I can't bear to
hurt his feelings, or for him to think
himself useless. But he comes into the
store and tells the truth about everything,
when there is no need. And he gives
away the fresh eggs and nicest butter to
the dead-beats, and leaves our best cus-
tomers without any, and he won't send
a bill to any of the old families ; he says
they 've always dealt honorable with him,
and always will, and it ain't proper to
pester 'em like a fly with bills every
month. If anybody wants a receipt, he
asks them what they take him for, and
says he 's been a poor man for a good

376

Butterfield & Co.

many years, but ain't never been dis-
honest enough to send a bill again that 's
been settled. He 's just the dearest old
uncle that ever lived, but you can't do a
tiling with him, and he would swamp
the Treasury at Washington. If I don't
get hold of the books, Butterfield's will
never hold up its head again, and I am
just bent and determined on seeing it
the biggest and best store in the State."

Jake was about fifteen at this time.
Things were not going very well at the
store, and in a fit of impatience Jake went
off and " peddled.stuff " on the train for
three months, after some sharp words
with the head of the firm. He came back
with a nice little sum, embraced Mr. But-
terfield and kissed him as he had always
done, sat on his lap, and talked so large-
ly, hopefully, affectionately, that Mr. But-
terfield could not hold out. "You can
take the books, my boy. It will all be
yours, anyway, some day," he said, " and
I reckon you might as well come into the
firm now as later." This practically was
Mr. Butterfield's abdication, and Charles
V. of Spain did not feel the event to be
a whit more solemn when he retired from
his business because it was not a paying
one.

" Well, I reckon I 'd better, pappy,"
said Jake. " But you '11 be here to keep
me straight, and it '11 all go right. You '11
see ! I 've got an idea ! Lots of 'em !
Just you wait ! "

" Yes, I '11 keep the supervision and see
that it is all managed right," said Mr.
Butterfield in perfect good faith, and if
Jake smiled it was very sweetly.

Next day Jake had a place railed off
at the back of the store, put a desk and
a high chair there, got a huge book, an
inkstand, post-cards, pens, stamps, and
blotting-paper.

" You don't need all them ! What a
waste of money, my son ! " remonstrated
Mr. Butterfield.

" No, it ain't, Uncle Jo ; got 'em on
purpose, — and got 'em big on purpose.
I ain't going to stand at the door bowing,

I can tell you. I like it in you, pappy.
But I 'm going to be always sitting in
that pen yonder, so busy I can't hear 'em
call for five minutes, and keep 'em wait-
ing."

" It ain't polite. It don't become you,
Jake, in your position. You are here to
serve 'em well and quick."

" Yes, yes, I know that, Uncle Jo.
But politeness don't pay its dividends
always. I know what I 'm about.
There 's a time to hear, and a time to be
as deaf as a post."

Jake was behind the railing one day,
shortly after this, when Miss Bradley
came in. She looked about her at the
shelves, freshly painted, and well filled,
and smiled, well pleased. " Why, Jacob,
this is very nice to see, — Butterfield's
arising like another Phrenix from its
ashes. This is really delightful ! " she
said.

" What 's a Phoanix, ma'am ? " asked
Jacob, and was told the history of that
classic fowl in words of six syllables.
Miss Bradley then made known her er-
rand. " If you could, without inconveni-
ence, Jacob, oblige me by sending around
a dozen cakes of fresh yeast, during the
day, I shall be obliged, and Cynthia
grateful. Nowhere else can one get as
good. It has always been a secret of
Butterfield's. I have heard my grand-
mother remark that she was very desir-
ous at one time to get the recipe, and
make it."

" Yes 'm. Thank you, ma'am. That
will be all right. The yeast will be at
the house in ten minutes sharp. Good-
morning," said Jacob, and the dear old
lady gathered up her skirts and parcels,
and was bowed out respectfully by Mr.
Butterfield.

" That 's the very thing ! " cried Jake,
when she had gone. " We '11 call it the
' Phffinix Yeast,' and advertise it. Hur-
rah ! I know how to do it ! "

" Butterfield's yeast don't need no ad-
vertising. It 's never been known not
to rise, and everybody in Slumborough,

Butterfield & Co.

377

pretty much, knows it, and what more do
you want ? Don't talk to me of adver-
tising, Jacob. We ain't never spent a
cent that way. We Ve always been a re-
spectable firm," replied Mr. Butterfield.

Jacob was silent, but his lower jaw
looked as if it had made up its mind to
advertise, and so it had. In a week,
flaming red bills were in the window and
on the street, with a Phoenix rising from
a sort of dust -heap, labeled "Butter-
field's," and everybody was adjured by
every selfish consideration to buy the
great, original, peerless, perfect, celebrat-
ed " Butterfield's Bijou Phoanix Yeast."

In a month all the country roads lead-
ing to the town were ablaze with bills,
and Jacob's soul was satisfied. " We 've
got a specialty," he said. " You can't
do anything without a specialty." Fresh
ways of making the yeast known to the
general public fermented continually in
his mind. The Pho3nix legend was soon
emblazoned on everything, and became
his Excelsior, inscribed on all his ban-
ners, hung on his outer walls, and plant-
ed on the tower of the citadel.

Mr. Butterfield, returningfrom a day's '
fishing not long after this, was struck by
the appearance of a very extraordinary
dog that came running down the street to
meet him, as if they were old acquaint-
ances. It was a poodle of the shaggiest
description, and had been snow - white.
It had been dyed red. A broad band
had been shaved around its body, and on
its back appeared in large letters, " Buy
Butterfield's Bijou Phoenix Yeast." It
was Jacob's legend, Jacob's dog. For
once mild Uncle Joseph lost his temper
completely. His grandmother's — But-
terfield's — respectable Virginia yeast,
used by the leading families for half a
century and more, openly, shamelessly
heralded forth on the main street of
Slumborough on the back of a red poo-
dle ! It drove him wild to think of it !
He caught up the animal (which was
never again seen in that guise in public)
and went home and had a scene with Ja-

cob, who was perfectly amazed to have
stirred up such a tempest by a device
upon whic.h he had prided himself not a
little.

" What is a Byjoo, anyway, I 'd like
to know?" demanded Uncle Joseph fu-
riously. " I ain't no Jew ! It 's But-
terfield's Family Yeast, and always has
been, and always "will be ; and this is
your doings, Jacob. If you ever turn
that dog out again to insult me, and the
family, and the firm in the town where
we Ve always lived and been respected
by high and low, I'll shoot him dead
and give up Butterfield's and go away
somewhere and die among strangers."

In vain had Uncle Joseph bred his
bird up a barnyard fowl — a Baptist — a
Butterfield ! Blood had been too strong
for him. And a blessed thing it was
too, a blessed day, when this offshoot
from one of the oldest yet still one of
the most vigorous races among the chil-
dren of men was driven into his tent for
shelter, and under his wing for love and
protection. In a few months the demand
for Phoenix Yeast was so great that it
Avas as much as they could do (simple
as the recipe really was) to supply it.
Every night Uncle Joseph and Jake sat
around the big table in the little shed-
room, and made it, having first locked
the door and pulled down the blind so
that the great secret might not get out.
Uncle Joseph was so nervously afraid
of this that in summer he always looked
up the wide-mouthed chimney before set-
tling to his work, to make sure that there
was not " a chiel among them takin'
notes." Jake would laugh mischievous-
ly at this, and Uncle Joseph would say,
" It 's better to be on the safe side, Ja-
cob. It 's a good deal easier to keep a
bird in its cage than to catch it again
once it gets out." Just for fun, what
should Jake do one night but get up
that chimney on purpose that he might
be caught. Uncle Joseph, stooping down,
with his hands on his knees, and peer-
ing up, received a galvanic shock, and

378

Butterfield & Co.

thought he had " got him at last." He
hunted up his old ramrod, and was about
to give some vigorous lunges in that quar-
ter when Jake slipped down almost into
his arms, to his intense astonishment and
Jake's intense delight.

When the poodle episode was over,
Uncle Joseph felt that he had been hasty
with the lad, and then for the first time
solemnly admitted him to the firm as a
" full partner " by way of making amends.
Jake was extremely pleased. He squared
himself at the table that evening, and
gave his whole mind to a new sign, which
he designed entirely himself, with ink
and cardboard and fancy papers, decid-
ing at last on a gilt Phoenix with " But-
terfield & Co." in red letters below, on a
green scroll.

" I 'm Co., pappy," he said when it
was mounted, " and you are Butterfield.
Ain't it grand ? Ain't it elegant ? I
mean to have that bird on every cake of
soap that leaves the store, before I 'm
done, and on every barrel of flour, and
on every pot of butter, and on every sin-
gle blessed thing we sell, as sure as my
name is Co ! See if I don't. That bird 's
going to make Lecky and all of 'em
screech yet ! He looked like a buzzard
until it struck me to have him gilt. I 'm
going to put him on the buttons of my
coat ! Now we '11 just swoop over them
all, won't we ? " he said, addressing the
fowl in question.

" Remember, Jake, you are a full
partner," repeated Mr. Butterfield, when
he bade him good-night, and with solem-
nity he laid his hand on Jacob's head,
still curly, though Jake had tried and
tried to make his locks straight. " There
is n't many men as 'd give such a big
responsibility to a boy, nor many boys
fit to have it laid on them. My father
was fifty before he became that in But-
terfield's. But I reckon I 've done well,
and you '11 be under my eye all the time,
where you can get advice and be showed
what to do. And do you always remem-
ber what it is to be in such a firm and

such a business, and never do you dis-
grace Butterfield's, the longest day you
liVs, sir."

" I will — I won't Uncle Joseph, I
promise," declared Jake, quite affected
by his new dignity. And then he began
laughing. With all Jake's schemes and
talents, his laugh was a better advertise-
ment than anything he could have in-
vented for the new firm.

The two partners were not always
agreed after this, happily as their quarrel
had ended. There was one very black
day when Jake sold a customer (from a
leading family whose name had always
been on the Butterfield books in palmy
days) a tea-caddy, asked three prices for
it with his most delightful smile, and so
sweetly declined to charge it that it was
quite a pleasure to hear him, — it sounded
almost like a compliment.

Mr. Butterfield was horrified and in-
dignant. This was worse than advertis-
ing ; revolutionary, atrocious, dishonest.

" But she said she would n't have any-
thing that was cheap. I did n't want
to sell to her at all, for she can't afford
to buy much. She can't afford it. So
I set a fancy price, hoping to scare her
off. And I don't mean to charge any-
thing to anybody. I sell only for cash."

" You ain't fit to be a partner in But-
terfield's nor no other house," cried Mr.
Butterfield. "I am ashamed of you,
insulting a Mordaunt, that has had hun-
dreds from us charged before now. And
trying to cheat her beside. And calling
it ' business.' It 's rascality ! It 's that
there Jew blood in you, Jacob. Leave the
sto'." He was in a white heat.

As for Jake, he went off and cried his
eyes out, for he had a most affectionate
heart, and was not only much hurt, but
very rebellious.

So keen was Mr. Butterfield's chagrin
at this incident that he paid a trembling
visit to Miss Augusta Mordaunt to ex-
plain away the insult. " That boy of
mine is a good boy," he said, " and he 's
got some good ideas about business. But,

Butterfield & Co.

379

Miss Augusta," — he approached her as
he spoke, — " he warn't born a Butter-
field. He warn't born in Slumborough
at all. I don't know that he was born in
Virginia even."

" Ah," said Miss Mordaunt, with a
sigh, as if she had been given the clue to a
great mystery, " that accounts for every-
thing." After further apologies the of-
fense was forgiven, and Mr. Butterfield
went away, feeling that his honor was
vindicated, even if he could not yet ac-
quit Jacob of an unspeakable crime.

"Jacob," he said when he reached
home, " you ain't got no call nor claim to
be impudent to the lowest in this town,
for you don't rightly belong here, only
through me. And you are a foreigner,
though it ain't throwed up to you through
being my son by adoption ; you ain't
even asked where you came from. All
that is overlooked ; but if you go to mak-
ing war on your betters, you '11 come out
the small end of the horn. You can't
have no business without them. Oh yes,
I reckon you can make money, but money
ain't Butterfield 's ! "

" You know I love you better than any-
thing in this world, Uncle Jo," sobbed
Jacob. " I 'd do anything in the world
for you. But I can't do business your
way. I can't, daddy. It 's no use talk-
ing ; I don't know how, and when you
get mad with me (boo-hoo !) and talk to
me like you 've done (boo-hoo !) it 'most
breaks my heart ! I ain't a Jew at all,
either. I 'm a Butterfield, and your
boy."

" I know, I know my son," Uncle Jo-
seph replied, affected by his embraces
and tears and passionate protestations.
" We won't say no mo'. But do you
remember that you warn't born here,
but have come in, a foreigner, and have
got to live it down, and not go stirring
up all Slumborough against you."

The town, which knew Jacob only as a
most resolute, self-reliant youth, bubbling
over with cheerfulness, and small jokes,
and enterprise, and audacity, would have

been surprised to see him with his head
down on Uncle Joseph's shoulder, sob-
bing like a child. But if Jacob had the
Jewish vice of making money coute que
cofite, he had every Jewish virtue, too :
the strong affections and generous quali-
ties, the industry and cleverness and abil-
ity of many kinds that make the race
conspicuous in far other and higher fields
than even Butterfield's.

By no means all the talks between the
old man and the young one were of this
distressing nature. No indeed ! There
was one day, when the business, under
Jake's Midas touch, first gave a vigor-
ous bound in the right direction, that
neither of them ever quite forgot. Mr.
Butterfield had been off in the next coun-
ty visiting one of his respected and re-
spectable Baptist brothers, though it was
the busiest season of the year, in ac-
cordance with his ancient and admirable
theory as to the proper way of conduct-
ing any and every business. Jake had
taken advantage of his absence to carry
out a certain plan, and had got in boxes
and boxes and boxes from Baltimore and
' Philadelphia and New York. For three
days he had been whistling their con-
tents into place, and in the joy of his
heart even his hair seemed to share, for
it curled in the most luxuriant and splen-
did fashion all about his shapely head,
and he was much too busy to " take
the Jew " out of it, as he thanklessly
called its natural and beautiful wave.
He was casting his eye down the bill
of lading, with a thoughtful frown, and
debating with quick eye and wit what
would " take," and on what he would
" make," and how he should conceal little
"dodges " from his "daddy," when the
door opened and Mr. Butterfield walked
in. Jake ran forward and embraced him,
only taking time to stick his pencil be-
hind his ear ; but in spite of the support-
ing arnij Mr. Butterfield sank on the
nearest seat.

" Jacob ! " he exclaimed. " Pickles
again, — a whole row of them. And

380

Butterfield & Co.

olives ! And Sultana raisins ! And pre-
serves in glass ! The whole side of the
sto' — Get me a glass of water. Quick,
Jacob, and — put something in it."

A happy evening that was, and Jacob,
who loved the sound of his own tongue,
and naturally was full of honest ad-
miration for the admirable results of his
talents, chirped and chattered away for
hours, and showed every white tooth in
his head as he threw it back to laugh,
and made himself vastly entertaining as
he opened his budget to show how it had
all come about.

" I had n't thought to see pickles from
Belfast again on my shelves, my boy,
while I lived, much less fruit in glass.
And them raisins ! It 's just wonderful,
Jake. I don't see how you do it, for the
life of me, and taking things so easy,
too ! You are a good boy, Jake, and de-
serve well of Butterfield's. You ought
to have been born here, I declare," was
Uncle Joseph's comment, — with which
praise Jake was quite content. He would
not have been so well pleased if he had
seen the old man later, when, unable to
sleep, he got up, took his lamp and lux-
uriated in another look at the shelves,
then rubbed his chin, and said to the
bunch of Sultana raisins in his hand,
" I would n't have chose him a Jew. But
it 's lucky for Butterfield's, I do reckon."

Jacob had a struggle of it, sometimes,
to keep the business going according to
his ideas. But a merry heart is a good
member of any firm, and goes not only
all the day, but for many a year. When
Fouche' complained of the discontent of
Paris, Napoleon curtly advised him to
" give them more fireworks." Jacob
likewise took to fireworks when business
flagged, and recognized the fact that
Slumborough was dull, and needed an
occasional sensation ; also that it could,
and did, and always would enjoy and
appreciate shooks from the world's great
electric battery. The town abounded
in spinsters and widows and girls, and
the reportorial capacity of a woman's

tongue cannot be overrated. Jacob, ever
polite, plucky, and pleasant, saw that ex-
citfement was " a long felt want " of all
country towns, and undertook to supply
it, as he would have supplied anything
for which there was any demand from
a match to a mummy. He divined, too,
by instinct, the most universal of pas-
sions in the human breast — a passion
for getting something for nothing. With
these two levers, it became an easy task,
as soon as they were properly adjusted,
to lift Butterfield's up to any level de-
sired. He added a soda-fountain ; he add-
ed an oyster saloon that soon blossomed
into a restaurant; he added a bakery
and a confectionery department. The
store was always bulging out in fresh di-
rections. In five years he sent his Pho3-
n ix crackers to South America, Mexico,
and Cuba. He sold Phrenix Bijou Yeast
in a dozen States. He provided nearly
all the hotels of the five neighboring
cities with Phrenix butter. In a little
while no lady in Slumborough felt that
the day had begun until she had seen
what was going on at Butterfield's ; and
once at the windows she was irresistibly
drawn within doors by a gift, a bargain,
a novelty. Money flowed in to the till
in a way that quite frightened and scan-
dalized Mr. Butterfield.

" Are you running a sto' or are you
running a circus, Jacob ? That 's what
I want to know," he would ask. And
Jake would laugh, and say it was " a
theatre." Miss Bradley 's loan was re-
paid with interest. Lecky was perfectly
crushed by such a rival. Moses, Solo-
mons & Co. willingly let Jacob have all
the money he wanted, and asked him to
their respective homes. Slumborough be-
came for the summer visitor and in the
commercial world just a synonym for
Butterfield's.

A great deal of comment was natural-
ly roused in the community, first and
last, by the success of Jacob. Mr. Mor-
daunt remarked to Mr. Bradley one day
on the street : " I have always said that

Butterfield & Co.

381

slavery as practiced in Virginia was a
source of justifiable emolument to the
upper class, and a good thing for the
negroes. They fared as well as any la-
boring class in the world. But as a
source of revenue, take all Africa, Brad-
ley, and give me a dozen Israelites. If
one turned them out every morning on
'Change, and emptied their pockets every
night, one would soon have enough to live
like a gentleman again, and need never
give money another thought. It is that
Jewish strain in the lad coming out, you
may depend upon it ! I am credibly in-
formed that he comes of that race."

At last a great day dawned for Mr.
Butterfield, a great day for Jacob. For
the business had burst all its bounds,
so to speak. There was money laid by
in the bank, where Jake was always
called " Mr. Butterfield," most respect-
fully, now, and it was decided to rebuild.
In a year there was a new Butterfield's,
indeed ! It had a front like the bank,
and ran up six stories, and back indefi-
nitely. It was all built of pressed brick,
and tiles, and plate-glass ! It had a life*-
size Phoenix over the door, as big as a
condor. It had electric lights, and ele-
vators, and bells, and punches, and tubes,
and pipes. It had a gorgeous office that
might have been that of the governor of
the State. It was as full of clerks as it
could hold, and a good deal fuller, often,
of customers, to be Hibernian ; for on
field-days there was always a large crowd
before the door unable to get in. It was
no longer necessary, when business was
hopelessly dull, for Jake to light a few
matches and papers in the front of the
store overnight, and do just the right
amount of scorching and blackening, and
have a " sacrifice sale " next day, and
clear seventy-five dollars, with a laugh in
his sleeve that was worth as much more.

The counters at Butterfield's were all
of natural woods now, and the show-
cases of plate-glass mounted in nickel,
which Mr. Bortswick, the Baptist minis-
ter in Slumborough, said was " a wicked

waste of the precious metals of heaven."
Jake was perfectly radiant and tri-
umphant when he gazed about him and
thought of what he had accomplished,
and of all the way from the shanty with
the lime-barrel, the apple-basket, and
the fagots of kindling to this. He re-
flected that he was not yet thirty-two ; he
looked down at his fashionable trousers ;
he looked across with a warmer and bet-
ter feeling at his beloved " daddy,"
" PaPPv?" " Uncle Jo," as he variously
called Mr. Butterfield, " dressed as good
as any gentleman in Slumborough " and
carrying a gold-headed cane, his own
gift at Christmas ; he thought of their
rooms which he had lately furnished in
a high-chromo style that would have
killed an aesthete outright, but in which
were represented all the comforts and
luxuries that either of them had ever
coveted in the old days of poverty ; and
his cup was full. He had no regrets. He
determined to marry soon. Not Rachel
Schmidt, though she was very pretty,
which was nice, and would have money,
which was certainly no objection, though
Mr. Schmidt had taken a good deal of
notice of him lately, and had always
been kind and had lent him money in
several of his straits, without security
too. No, Jacob could not get his own
consent to marry a Jewess ; he never
owned to himself that he was a Jew, not
even in the dark, in the middle of the
night. He disliked the race particularly,
though most unreasonably. He would
marry Nanny Nicodemus, and give away
twenty-five " bridal tea-sets," sweet af-
fairs of six pieces in white-and-gold with
rosebuds on a clear ground, and get back
all the expenses of his wedding and a
nice little sum " to boot." No wonder
Jacob's face was bright as he walked
down the grand entrance with his arm
around Mr. Butterfield's neck, and only
clouded for a moment when a lazy clerk
got in the way. He pushed him aside,
saying, " Don't you see my father com-
ing ? " He was on the easiest terms, as

382

Butterfield & Co.

a rule, with his employes, though he was
always master. But he demanded that
the most exaggerated respect should be
shown his adopted father.

Mr. Butterfield, too, often looked about
him at the miracles wrought by Jacob.
It was all wonderful to him, very won-
derful. Jacob still appeared to him a
mere boy. How had he done it ? " It 's
as easy as turning his hand over for
him," he mused. He enjoyed the in-
creased respect that his changed position
had brought him. He was grateful to
Jake for all his love and thought and
care. He admired his industry, and
marveled at his enterprise : But this
grand store, this hive, this place of per-
petual sensations and fireworks and brag
and blind, of traps, excitements, contin-
ual changes, continual displacements, of
noise and hurry and general hurrah !
What was it, after all ? He remembered
a long room with a low ceiling, as quiet
as a church, where nobody was ever in
haste, and a voice was rarely raised. He
remembered a green stone jug that had
been in the window for fifty years, and
that he would no more have sold than he
would have sold his own father. He re-
membered leisurely patrons, quietly and
respectfully served. Patrons do I say ?
Friends rather of a lifetime, whom it
would be shameful to deceive, who al-
ways asked after his health and were in-
terested in the well-being of the family,
and with whom his father had discussed
the politics of the country and the news
of the neighborhood. Not a greedy mob,
eager to buy and be gone, and to save
a nickel, without so much as a " good-
morning," with an appetite for novelties
that never was satisfied, and with death
or a bailiff always at their heels appar-
ently. The old man remembered the
world before the flood, in short, as he
sat near the new gilt register, wiping
his face with the red bandanna which
he would not give up, not even to please
Jacob. " Jacob says it 's business" he
thought sadly, his mind and eye and heart

wearied by the blaze and glare and glit-
ter that surrounded him, and all his soul
prptesting against the group of clerks off
duty at the back of the premises, engaged
in horse - play? and smoking cigarettes
with their heels up well above their heads.

It was Miss Mordaunt who formulated
his disjointed though ardent impressions.
They met one day in front of the store,
where she had been stopped by Jacob,
whom she had never altogether liked.
He had run after her to give her a re-
ceipt for a bill paid. She shook her
head and pushed his hand away, but he
said, "You must take it; it's a rule
of the house," and finally stuck it in the
flap of her reticule laughingly and went
indoors again. Miss Mordaunt pettish-
ly took it out, tore it up, and threw
down the pieces. " I never took a re-
ceipt from you in all my life, Mr. But-
terfield," she said, " and I never will —
there ! "

" No, of course not," replied Mr. But-
terfield. " That 's right, Miss Augusta.
I 'd have known better than to offer it.
It 's that Jacob of mine. He will have
his own way. I hope you will be so
kind as to excuse his faults. He 's made
a fine place of it, has n't he, now ? "

They both looked up at the gilt Phoe-
nix above them ; at the huge shop win-
dows with Phosnixes in every material
that was ever known, from gold to gin-
gerbread ; at the blue-label hams of the
Phoanix brand hanging on pegs ; at the
rows of bottled ale with red Phoenix
labels ; at the boxes of soap of the green
Phoanix brand.

" You have got a mighty fine estab-
lishment here," she said, " mighty fine !
But it is n't Butterfield's. Oh dear, no,
it is n't Butterfield's ! "

It was not, it never would be again,
and Mr. Butterfield knew it. Jacob had
done wonders, but he could not call back
again the day that was past. Their eyes
met and filled with tears, that past was
so clear to them both. Mr. Butterfield
stood watching her for some moments

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

383

as she picked her way home along the
muddy sidewalk with her delicate, cat-
like grace of movement. He looked back
at the store, and a picture in the window
caught his eye, a caricature of the Presi-
dent, wretchedly vulgar, familiarly la-
beled, set there to please " the garlic-
breathed many."

" She 's right. It ain't Butterfield's,"
he thought, and never in the deepest
depths of poverty and misfortune had
he felt a keener pang than now pierced
his heart on the height of " Fortune's
crowning slope : " " Butterfield's is dead,
and I might as well be too." From
that day and hour the old man visibly
relaxed his hold on life. In vain did
Jake send him here, and send him
there ; in vain did he try to interest him
in what was going on at the store, or in

his plans for the future of the business.
That idol was dethroned forever, and
lying prone in the dust.

So was' the poor high priest of the
Butterfield religion, a year from that
date. The old man called Jake to his
bedside as he lay dying in the smart
chromo room. " Go down — that pic-
ture — take it out of the window. The
chief magistrate of the nation — take
it out, or I can't die in peace," he panted.

Jacob hastened to obey, and com-
ing back knelt down by him, saying,
" That 's all right. I took it out. I '11
do anything for you, daddy, anything."
Joseph received his kiss, took his hand,
turned over on his side, and with a long-
drawn patient sigh went out of the great
business of life, quietly honoring the very
last draft upon Butterfield's.

Frances Courtenay Baylor.

A CAROLINA MOUNTAIN POND.

STEWART'S POND, on the Hamburg
road a mile or so from the village of High-
lands, North Carolina, served me, a visit-
ing bird-gazer, more than one good turn :
selfishly considered, it was something to
be thankful for ; but I never passed it,
for all that, without feeling that it was a
defacement of the landscape. The Cul-
lasajah River is here only four or five
miles from its source, near the summit
of Whiteside Mountain, and already a
land-owner, taking advantage of a level
space and what passes among men as
a legal title, has dammed it (the reader
may spell the word as he chooses —
" dammed " or " damned," it is all one
to a mountain stream) for uses of his
own. The water backs up between a
wooded hill on one side and a rounded
grassy knoll on the other, narrows where
the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and
immediately broadens again, as best it
can, against the base of a steeper, for-

est-covered hill just beyond. The shape-
lessness of the pond and its romantic
surroundings will in the course of years
give it beauty, but for the present every-
thing is unpleasantly new. The tall old
trees and the ancient rhododendron
bushes, which have been drowned by the
brook they meant only to drink from,
are too recently dead. Nature must
have time to trim the ragged edges of
man's work and fit it into her own plan.
And she will do it, though it may take
her longer than to absorb the man him-
self.

When I came in sight of the pond
for the first time, in the midst of
my second day's explorations, my first
thought, it must be confessed, was not
of its beauty or want of beauty, but of
sandpipers, and in a minute more I was
leaning over the fence to sweep the wa-
tei'-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there
they were, five or six in number, one

384

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

here, another there ; solitary sandpipers,
so called with only a moderate degree
of appropriateness, breaking their long
northward journey beside this mountain
lake, which might have been made for
their express convenience. I was glad
to see them. Without being rare, they
make themselves uncommon enough to
be always interesting ; and they have,
besides, one really famous trait, — the
extraordinary secrecy of their breeding
operations. Well known as they are,
and wide as is their distribution, their
eggs, so far as I am aware, are still un-
represented in scientific collections ex-
cept by a single specimen found almost
twenty years ago in Vermont ; a " re-
cord," as we say in these days, of which
Totanus solitarius may rightfully be
proud.

About another part of the pond, on
this same afternoon (May 8), were two
sandpipers of a more ordinary sort :
spotted sandpipers, familiar objects, we
may fairly say, the whole country over.
Few American schoolboys but have
laughed at their absurd teetering mo-
tions. In this respect the solitary sand-
piper is better behaved. It does not tee-
ter — it bobs; standing still, as if in deep
thought, and then dipping forward quick-
ly (a fanciful observer might take the
movement for an affirmative gesticula-
tion, an involuntary " Yes, yes, now I
have it ! ") and instantly recovering it-
self, exactly in the manner of a plover.
This is partly what Mr. Chapman means,
I suppose, when he speaks of the soli-
tary sandpiper's superior quietness and
dignity ; two fine attributes, which may
have much to do with their possessor's
almost unparalleled success in eluding
the researches of oological collectors.
Nervousness and loquacity are poor hands
at preserving a secret.

Although my first brief visit to Stew-
art's Pond made three additions to my
local bird-list (the third being a pair of
brown creepers), I did not go that way
again for almost a fortnight. Then

(May 21) my feet were barely on the
bridge before a barn swallow skimmed
spast me. Swallows of any kind in the
mountains of North Carolina are like
hen - hawks in Massachusetts, — rare
enough to be worth following out of
sight. As for barn swallows, I had not
expected to see them here at all. I kept
my eye upon this fellow, therefore, with
the more jealousy, and happily for me
he seemed to have found the spot very
much to his mind. If he was a strag-
gler, as I judged likely in spite of the
lateness of the season, he was perhaps
all the readier to stay for an hour or
two on so favorable a hunting-ground.
With him were half a dozen rough-
wings, — probably not stragglers, —
hawking over the water ; feeding, bath-
ing, and now and then, by way of vari-
ety, engaging in some pretty spirited
lovers' quarrels. In one such encoun-
ter, I remember, one of the contestants
received so heavy a blow that she quite
lost her balance (the sex was matter of
guesswork) and dropped plump into the
water ; and more than once the fun was
interrupted by an irate phoebe, who
dashed out upon the makers of it with
an ugly snap of his beak, as much as to
say, " Come, now, this is my bridge."
Mr. Stewart himself could hardly have
held stricter notions about the rights of
property. The rough-wings frequently
perched in the dead trees, and once, at
least, the barn swallow did likewise ;
something which I never saw a bird of
his kind do before, to the best of my re-
collection. For to-day he was in Rome,
and had fallen in with the Roman cus-
toms.

As I have said already, his presence
was unexpected. His name is not in-
cluded in Mr. Brewster's North Caro-
lina list, and I saw no other bird like
him till I was approaching Asheville,
a week later, in a railway train. • Then
I was struck almost at the same mo-
ment by two things — a brick chimney
and a barn swallow. My start at the

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

385

sight of red bricks made me freshly
aware with what quickness the mind
puts away the past and accustoms itself
to new and strange surroundings. Man
is the slave of habit, -we say ; but how
many of us, even in middle age, have
altered our modes of living, our control-
ling opinions, or our daily occupations,
and in the shortest while have forgotten
the old order of things, till it has be-
come all like a dream, — a story heard
long ago and now dimly remembered.
Was it indeed we who lived there, and
believed thus, and spent our days so?
This capacity for change augurs well for
the future of the race, and not less for
the future of the individual, whether in
this world or in another.

In a previous article I mentioned as
provocative of astonishment the igno-
rance of a North Carolina man, my
driver from Walhalla, who had no Idea
of what I meant by " swallows." His
case turned out to be less singular than
I thought, however, for when I spoke
of it to an exceptionally bright, well-in- *
formed farmer in the vicinity of High-
lands, he answered that he saw nothing
surprising about it ; he did n't know
what swallows were, neither. Martins
he knew, — purple martins, — though
there were none hereabout, so far as
I could discover, but " swallow," as a
bird's name, was a novelty he had never
heard of. Here on Stewart's bridge I
might have tested the condition of an-
other resident's mind upon the same
point, but unfortunately the experiment
did not occur to me. He came along
on horseback, and I called his attention
to the swallows shooting to and fro over
the water, a pretty spectacle anywhere,
but doubly so in this swallow-poor coun-
try. He manifested no very lively in-
terest in the subject ; but he made me a
civil answer, — which is perhaps more
than a hobby-horsical catechist, who trav-
els up and down the world cross-exam-
ining his busy fellow mortals, has any
good reason for counting upon in such a

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 25

case. With so many things to be seen
and done in this short life, it is obvi-
ous that all men's tastes cannot run to
ornithology. " Yes," the stranger said,
glancing at the swallows, " I expect they
have their nests under the bridge." A
civil answer I called it, but it was better
than that ; indicating, as it did, some ac-
quaintance with the -rough-wing's habits,
or a shrewd knack at guessing. But the
man knew nothing about a bird that
nested in barns.

A short distance beyond the bridge,
in a clearing over which lay scattered
the remains of a house that had former-
ly stood in it (for even this new country
is not destitute of ruins), a pair of snow-
birds were chipping nervously, and near
the same spot my ear caught the lisping
call of my first North Carolina brown
creeper. No doubt it was breeding
somewhere close by, and my imagina-
tion at once fastened upon a loose clump
of water-killed trees, from the trunks of
which the dry bark was peeling in big
sun-warped flakes, as the site of its prob-
able habitation. This was on my first
jaunt over the road, and during the busy
days that followed I planned more than
once to spend an hour here in spying
upon the birds. A brown creeper's nest
would be something new for me. Now,
therefore, on this bright morning, when
I was done with the swallows, I walked
on to the right point and waited. A
long time passed, or what seemed a long
time. With so many invitations press-
ing upon one from all sides in a vaca-
tion country, it is hard sometimes to be
leisurely enough for the best naturalistic
results. Then, suddenly, I heard the
expected tseep, and soon the bird made
its appearance. Sure enough, it flew
against one of the very trees that my
imagination had settled upon, ducked
under a strip of dead bark, between it
and the bole, remained within for half
a minute, and came out again. By this
time the second bird had appeared, and
was waiting its turn for admission.

386

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

They were feeding their young ; and so
long as I remained they continued their
work, going and coming at longer or
shorter intervals. I made no attempt to
inspect their operations more nearly ;
the tree stood in rather deep water, and
the nest was situated at an altitude of
perhaps twenty feet ; but I was glad to
see for myself, even at arm's length, as
it were, this curious and highly charac-
teristic abode of a bird which in general
I meet with only in its idle season. I
was surprised to notice that the pair had
chosen a strip of bark which was fas-
tened to the trunk at the upper end and
hung loose below. The nest was the
better protected from the weather, of
course, but it must have been wedged
pretty tightly into place, it seemed to
me, unless it had some means of sup-
port not to be guessed at from the
ground. The owners entered invariably
at the same point, — in the upper cor-
ner. The brown creeper has been flat-
tening itself against the bark of trees for
so many thousand years that a very nar-
row slit suffices it for a doorway.

While I was occupied with this inter-
esting bit of household economy, I heard
a clatter of wheels mingled with youth-
ful shouts. Two boys were coming
round a bend in the road and bearing
down upon me, seated upon an axle-
tree between a pair of wheels drawn by
a single steer, which was headed for the
town at a lively trot, urged on by the
cries of the boys, one of whom held the
single driving-rope and the other a whip.
" How fast can he go ? " I asked, as
they drew near. I hoped to detain
them for a few minutes of talk, but they
had no notion of stopping. They had
never timed him, the older one — not the
driver — answered, with the merriest of
grins. I expressed wonder that they
could manage him with a single rein.
" Oh, I can drive him without any line
at all." " But how do you steer him? "
said I. "I yank him and I pull him,"
was the laconic reply, which by this time

had to be shouted over the boy's shoul-
sder ; and away the crazy trap went, the
wobbling wheels describing all manner
of eccentric and nameless curves with
every revolution ; and the next minute I
heard it rattling over the bridge. Un-
doubtedly the young fellows thought me
a green one, not to know that a yank
and a steady pull are equivalent to a gee
and a haw. " Live and learn," said I to
myself. It was a jolly mode of travel-
ing, at all events, as good as a circus,
both for the boys and for me.

On my way through the village, at
noon, I passed the steer turned out to
grass by the roadside, and had a better
look at the harness, a simple, home-
made affair, including a pair of names.
The driving-rope, which in its original
estate might have been part of a clothes-
line or a bed-cord, was attached to a
chain which went round or over the
creature's head at the base of the horns.
The lads themselves were farther down
the street, and the younger one nudged
the other's elbow with a nod in my di-
rection as I passed on the opposite side-
walk. They seemed to have sobered
down at a wonderful rate since their ar-
rival in the " city." I should hardly have
known them for the same boys ; but no
doubt they would wake the echoes again
on the road homeward. I hoped so,
surely, for I liked them best as I saw
them first.

As far as the pleasure of life goes, boys
brought up in this primitive mountain
country have little to complain of. They
may lack certain advantages ; in this im-
perfect world, where two bodies cannot
occupy the same space at once, the pre-
sence of some things necessitates the ab-
sence of others ; but most certainly they
have their full quota of what in youth-
ful phrase are known as " good times."
The very prettiest sight that I saw in
North Carolina, not excepting any land-
scape or flower, — and I saw floral dis-
plays of a splendor to bankrupt all de-
scription, — was a boy whom I met one

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

387

Sunday morning in a steep, disused road
outside of the town. I was descending
the hill, picking my steps, and he was
coming up. Eleven or twelve years old
he might have been, cleanly dressed, fit
for any company, but bare-legged to the
knee. I wished him good-morning, and
he responded with the easiest grace im-
aginable. " You are going to church ? "
said I. " Yes, sir," and on he went up
the hill, " progressing by his own brave
steps ; " a boy, as Thoreau says, who
was " never drawn in a willow wagon ; "
straight as an arrow, and with motions
so elastic, so full of the very spirit of
youth and health, that I stood still and
gazed after him for pure delight. His
face, his speech, his manner, his car-
riage, all were in keeping. If he does
not make a good and happy man, it will
be an awful tragedy.

This boy was not a " cracker's " child,
I think. Probably he belonged to one
of the Northern families, that make up
the village for the most part, and have
settled the country sparsely for a few
miles round about. The 'lot of the na-
tive mountaineers is hard and pinched,
and although flocks of children were
playing happily enough about the cabin
doors, it was impossible not to look upon
them as born to a narrow and cheerless
existence. Possibly the fault was partly
in myself, since I have no very easy gift
with strangers, but I found them, young
and old alike, rather uncommunicative.

I recall a family group that I over-
took toward the end of an afternoon ; a
father and mother, both surprisingly
young-looking, hardly out of their teens,
it seemed to me, with a boy of perhaps
six years. They were resting by the
roadside as I came up, the father poring
over some written document. " You
must have been to the city," said I ; but
all the man could answer was " Howdy."
The woman smiled and murmured some-
thing, it was impossible to tell what.
They started on again at that moment,
the grown people each with a heavy bag,

which looked as if it might contain meal
or flour, and the little fellow with a big
bundle. They had four miles still to go,
they said ; and the road, as I could see
for myself, was of the very worst, steep
and rugged to the last degree. Partly
to see if I could conquer the man, and
partly to please myself, I beckoned the
youngster to my si4e and put a coin into
his hand. The shot took effect at once.
Father and mother found their voices,
and said in the same breath, " Say thank
you ! " How natural that sounded ! It
is part of the universal language. Every
parent will have his child polite. But
the boy, poor thing, was utterly tongue-
tied, and could only smile ; which, after
all, was about the best thing he could
have done. The father, too, was still
inclined to silence, finding nothing in
particular to say, though I did my best
to encourage him ; but he took pains to
keep along with me, halting whenever I
did so, and making it manifest that he
meant to be with me at the turn in the
'road, about which I had inquired (need-
lessly, there is no harm in my now con-
fessing), so that I should by no possibil-
ity go astray. Nothing could have been
more friendly, and at the corner both he
and his wife bade me good-by with sim-
ple heartiness. " Good-by, little boy,"
said I. " Tell him good-by," called both
father and mother ; but the boy could
n't, and there was an end of it. " He 's
just as I was at his age ; bashful, that 's
all." This little speech set matters
right. The parents smiled, the boy did
likewise, and we went our different
ways, I still pitying the woman, with
that heavy bag under her arm, having
to make a packhorse of herself on that
tiresome mountain road.

However, it is the mountain woman's
way to do her full share of the hard work,
as I was soon to see farther exemplified ;
for within half a mile I heard in front
of me the grating of a saw, and pre-
sently came upon another family group,
in the woods on the mountain, side, — a

388

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

woman, three children, and a dog. The
woman, no longer young, as we say in
the language of compliment, was at- one
end of a cross-cut saw, and the largest
boy, ten or eleven years old, was at the
other. They were getting to pieces a
huge fallen trunk. " Wood ought to be
cheap in this country," said I ; and the
woman, as she and the boy changed
hands to rest themselves, answered that
it was. In my heart I thought she was
paying dearly for it ; but her voice was
cheerful, and the whole company was
almost a merry one, the younger chil-
dren laughing at their play, and the dog
capering about them in high spirits.
The mountain family may be poor, but
not with the degrading, squalid poverty
of dwellers in a city slum ; and at the
very worst the children have a royal
playground.

Mountain boys, certainly, I could
never much pity ; for the girls it was
impossible not to wish easier and more
generous conditions. Here at Stewart's
Pond I detained two of them for a
minute's talk : sisters, I judged, the
taller one ten years old, or thereabout.
I asked them if there were many fish in
the pond. The older one thought there
were. " I know my daddy ketched five
hundred and put in there for Mr. Stew-
art," she said. Just then the younger
girl pulled her sister's sleeve and point-
ed toward two snakes which lay sunning
themselves on the edge of the water,
where a much larger one had shortly be-
fore slipped off a log into the pond at
my approach. " They do no harm ? "
said I. " No, sir, I don't guess they
do," was the answer ; a strange-sound-
ing form of speech, though it is exactly
like the " I don't think so " of which
we all continue to make hourly use, no
matter how often some crotchety amateur
grammarian — for whom logic is logic,
and who hates idiom as a mad dog hates
water — may write to the newspapers
warning us of its impropriety. Then
the girls, barefooted, both of them,

turned into a bushy trail so narrow that
it had escaped my notice, and disap-
peared in the woods. I thought of the
villainous-looking rattlesnake that I had
seen the day before, freshly killed and
tossed upon the side of the road, within
a hundred rods of this point, and of the
surprise expressed by a resident of the
town at my wandering about the country
without leggins.

As to the question of snakes and the
danger from them, the people here, as
is true everywhere in a rattlesnake coun-
try, held widely different opinions.
Everybody recognized the presence of the
pest, and most persons, whatever their
own practice might be, advised a mea-
sure of caution on the part of strangers.
One thing was agreed to on all hands :
whoever saw a " rattler " was in duty
bound to make an end of it ; and one
man told me a little story by way of il-
lustrating the spirit of the community
upon this point. A woman (not a moun-
tain woman) was riding into town, when
her horse suddenly stopped and shied.
In the road, directly before her, a snake
was coiled, rattling defiance. The wo-
man dismounted, hitched the frightened
horse to a sapling, cut a switch, killed
the snake, threw it out of the road, re-
mounted, and went on about her busi-
ness. It is one advantage of life in
wild surroundings that it encourages
self-reliance.

In all places, nevertheless, and under
all conditions, human nature remains a
paradoxical compound. A mountain
woman, while ploughing, came into close
quarters with a rattlesnake. To save
herself she sprang backward, fell against
a stone, and in the fall broke her wrist.
No doctor being within call, she set the
bone herself, made and adjusted a rude
splint, and now, as the lady who told me
the story expressed it, " has a pretty good
arm." That was plucky. But the same
woman suffered from an aching tooth
some time afterward, and was advised
to have it extracted. She would do no

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

389

such thing. She could n't. She had
had a tooth pulled once, and it hurt her
so that she would never do it again.

Anthropology and ornithology were
very agreeably mingled for me on the
Hamburg road, — though it seems im-
possible for me to stay there, the reader
may say, — where passers-by were fre-
quent enough to keep me from feeling
lonesome, and yet not so numerous as to
disturb the quiet of the place or inter-
fere unduly with my natural historical
researches. The human interview to
which I look back with most pleasure
was with a pair of elderly people who
appeared one morning in an open buggy.
They were driving from the town, seat-
ed side by side in the shadow of a big
umbrella, and as they overtook me, on
the bridge, the man said " Good-morn-
ing," of course, and then, to my sur-
prise, pulled up his horse and inquired
particularly after my health. He hoped
I was recovering from my indisposition,
though I am not sure that he used that
rather superfine word. I gave him a
favorable account of myself, — wonder-
ing all the while how he knew I had
been ill, — whereupon he expressed the
greatest satisfaction, and his good wife
smiled in sympathy. Then, after a word
or two about the beauty of the morning,
and while I was still trying to guess who
the couple could be, the man gathered
up the reins with the remark, " I 'm go-
ing after some Ilex monticola for Char-
ley." " Yes, I know where it is," he
added, in response to a question. Then
I knew him. I had been at his house a
few evenings before to see his son, who
had come home from Biltmore to collect
certain rare local plants — the mountain
holly being one of them — for the Van-
derbilt herbarium. The mystery was
cleared, but it may be imagined how
taken aback I was when this venerable
rustic stranger threw a Latin name at me.

In truth, however, botany and Latin
names might almost be said to be in the
air at Highlands. A villager met me

in the street, one day, and almost before
I knew it, we were discussing the spe-
cific identity of the small yellow lady's-
slippers, — whether there were two spe-
cies, or, as my new acquaintance believed,
only one, in the woods round about. At
another time, having called at a very
pretty unpainted cottage, — all the pret-
tier for the natural color of the weathered
shingles, — I remarked to the lady of
the house upon the beauty of Rhodo-
dendron Vaseyi, which I had noticed in
several dooryards, and which was said to
have been transplanted from the woods.
I did not understand why it was, I told
her, but I could n't find it described in
my Chapman's Flora. " Oh, it is there,
I am sure it is," she answered ; and go-
ing into the next room she brought out
a copy of the manual, turned to the page,
and showed me the name. It was in
the supplement, where in my haste I had
overlooked it. I wondered how often, in
a New England country village, a stran-
ger could happen into a house, painted
or unpainted, and by any chance find the
mistress of it prepared to set him right
on a question of local botany.

On a later occasion — for thus encour-
aged I called more than once afterward
at the same house — the lady handed
me an orchid. I might be interested in
it ; it was not very common, she believed.
I looked at it,_ thinking at first that I
had never seen it before. Then I seemed
to remember something. "Is it Pogo-
nia verticillata ? " I asked. She smiled,
and said it was ; and when I told her
that to the best of my recollection I had
never seen more than one specimen be-
fore, and that upwards of twenty years
ago (a specimen from Blue Hill, Massa-
chusetts), she insisted upon believing that
I must have an extraordinary botanical
memory, though of course she did not put
the compliment thus baldly, but dressed
it in some graceful, unanswerable, femi-
nine phrase which I, for all my imagi-
nary mnemonic powers, have long ago
forgotten.

390

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

The same lady had the rare Shortia
galacifolia growing — transplanted — in
her grounds, and her husband volun-
teered to show me one of the few places
in the neighborhood of Highlands (this,
too, on his own land) where the true lily-
of-the-valley — identical with the Euro-
pean plant of our gardens — grows wild.
It was something I had greatly desired
to see, and was now in bloom. Still an-
other man — but he was only a summer
cottager — took me to look at a speci-
men of the Carolina hemlock (Tsuga,
Caroliniana), a -tree of the very exist-
ence of which I had before been igno-
rant. The truth is that 'the region is
most exceptionally rich in its flora, and
the people, to their honor be it recorded,
are equally exceptional in that they ap-
preciate the fact.

A small magnolia-tree (M. Fraseri),
in bloom everywhere along the brook-
sides, did not attract me to any special
degree till one day, in an idle hour at
Stewart's Pond, I plucked a half-open
bud. I thought I had never known so
rare a fragrance ; delicate and whole-
some beyond comparison, and yet most
deliciously rich and fruity, a perfume
for the gods. The leaf, too, now that I
came really to look at it, was of an ele-
gant shape and texture, untoothed, but
with a beautiful " auriculated " base, as
Latin-loving botanists say, from which
the plant derives its vernacular name, —
the ear-leaved umbrella-tree. The waxy
blossoms seemed to be quite scentless,
but I wished that Thoreau, whose nose
was as good as his eyes and his ears,
could have smelled of the buds.

The best thing that I found at the
pond, however, by long odds the most
interesting and unexpected thing that I
found anywhere in North Carolina (I
speak as a hobbyist), was neither a tree
nor a human being, but a bird. I had
been loitering along the river-bank just
above the pond itself, admiring the mag-
nolias, the silver-bell trees, the lofty
hemlocks, — out of the depths of which

a " mountain boomer," known to simple
Northern folk as a red squirrel, now and
then emitted his saucy chatter, — and
the Indian paint-brush (scarlet painted-
cup), the brightest and among the most
characteristic and memorable of the
woodland flowers ; listening to the shouts
of an olive-sided flycatcher and the music
of the frogs, one of them a regular Karl
Formes for profundity ; and in general
waiting to see what would happen. No-
thing of special importance seemed like-
ly to reward my diligent idleness, and I
turned back toward the town. On the
way I halted at the bridge, as I always
did, and presently a carriage drove over
it. Inside sat a woman under an enor-
mous black sunbonnet. She did me,
without knowing it, a kindness, and I
should be glad to thank her. As the
wheels of the carriage struck the plank
bridge, a bird started into sight from
under it or close beside it. A sandpiper,
I thought ; but the next moment it
dropped into the water and began swim-
ming. Then I knew it for a bird I had
never seen before, and, better still, a bird
belonging to a family of which I had
never seen any representative, a bird
which had never for an instant entered
into my North Carolina calculations, it
was a phalarope, a wanderer from afar,
blown out of its course, perhaps, and ly-
ing by for a day in this little mountain
pond, almost four thousand feet above
sea level.

My first concern, as I recovered my-
self, was to set down in black and white
a complete account of the stranger's
plumage ; for though I knew it for a
phalarope, I must wait to consult a book
before naming it more specifically. It
would have contributed unspeakably to
my peace of mind, just then, had I been
better informed about the distinctive
peculiarities of the three species which
compose the phalarope family ; as I cer-
tainly would have been, had I received
any premonition of what was in store for
me. As it was, I must make sure of

A Carolina ^fountain Pond.

391

every possible detail, lest in my igno-
rance I should overlook some apparently
trivial item that might pi-ove, too late,
to be all important. So I fell to work,
noting the white lower cheek (or should
I call it the side of the upper neck ?),
the black stripe through and behind the
eye, the white line just over the eye,
the light-colored crown, the rich reddish
brown of the nape and the sides of the
neck, the white or gray-white under
parts, the plain (unbarred) wings, and
so on. The particulars need not be re-
hearsed here. I was possessed by a
recollection, or half recollection, that the
marginal membrane of the toes was a
prime mark of distinction (as indeed it
is, though the only manual I had brought
with me turned out not to mention the
point) ; but while for much of the time
the bird's feet were visible, it never for
so much as a second held them still, and
as the water was none too clear and the
bottom was muddy, it was impossible for
me to see how the toes were webbed, or
even to be certain that they were webbed
at all. Once, as the bird was close to
the shore, and almost at my feet, I
crouched upon a log, thinking to pick
the creature up and examine it ; but it
moved quietly away for a yard or so,
just out of reach, and though I could
probably have killed it with a stick, —
as a friend of mine killed one some years
ago on a mountain lake in New Hamp-
shire,1 — it was happily too late when
the possibility of such a step occurred to
me. By that time I was not on collect-
ing terms with the bird. It was " not
born for death," I thought, or, if it was,
I was not born to play the executioner.
Its activity was amazing. If I had
not known this to be natural to the phal-
arope family, I might have thought the
poor thing on the verge of starvation,
eating for dear life. It moved its head
from side to side incessantly, dabbing
the water with its bill, picking some-

1 The case is recorded in The Auk, vol. vi.
page 68.

thing, — minute insects, I supposed, —
from the surface, or swimming among
the loose grass, and running its bill down
the green blades one after another. Sev-
eral times, in its eagerness to capture a
passing insect, it almost flew over the
water, and once it actually took wing
for a stroke or two, with some quick,
breathless notes, like cut, cut, cut. One
thing was certain, wit did not care for
polliwogs, shoals of which darted about
its feet unmolested.

Once a horseman frightened it as he
rode over the bridge, but even then it
barely rose from the water with a star-
tled yip. The man glanced at it (I was
just then looking carelessly in another
direction), and passed on — to my re-
lief. At that moment the most interest-
ing mountaineer in North Carolina would
have found me unresponsive. As for my
own presence, the phalarope seemed hard-
ly to notice it, though I stood much of the
time within a distance of ten feet, and
now and then considerably nearer than
that, — - without so much as a grass-blade
for cover, — holding my glass upon it
steadily till a stitch in my side made the
attitude all but intolerable. The lovely
bird rode the water in the lightest pos-
sible manner, and was easily put about
by slight puffs of wind ; but it could
turn upon an insect with lightning quick-
ness. It was never still for an instant
except on two occasions, when it came
close to the shore and sat motionless in
the lee of a log. There it crouched upon
its feet, which were still under water,
and seemed to be resting. It preened
its feathers, also, and once it rubbed its
bill down with its claw, but the motion
was too quick for my eye to follow,
though I was near enough to see the
nostril with perfect distinctness.

I was in love with the bird from the
first minute. Its tameness, the elegance
of its shape and plumage, the grace and
vivacity of its movements, these of them-
selves were enough to drive a bird-lover
wild. Add to them its novelty and un-

392

A Carolina Mountain Pond.

expectedness, and the reader may judge
for himself of my state of mind. It was
the dearest and tamest creature I had
ever seen, I kept saying to myself, for-
getful for the moment of two blue-headed
vireos which at different times had al-
lowed me to stroke and feed them as
they sat brooding on their eggs.

Another thing I must mention, as
adding not a little to the pleasure of the
hour. The moment I set eyes upon the
phalarope, before I had taken even a
mental note of its plumage, I thought
of my friend and correspondent, Celia
Thaxter, and of her eager inquiries about
the " bay bird," which she had then seen
for the first time at the Isles of Shoals
— " just like a sandpiper, only smaller,
and swimming on the water like a duck."
And as the bird before me darted hither
and thither, so amazingly agile, I re-
membered her pretty description of this
very trait, a description which I here
copy from her letter : —

" He was swimming about the wharf
near the landing, a pretty, dainty crea-
ture, in soft shades of gray and white,
with the ' needle-like beak/ and a rapid-
ity of motion that I have never seen
equaled in any living thing except a
darting dragon-fly or some restless in-
sect. He was never for one instant still,
darting after his food on the surface of
the water. He seemed perfectly tame,
was n't the least afraid of anything or
anybody, merely moving aside to avoid
an oar-blade, and swaying almost on to
the rocks with the swirl of the water. I
watched him till I was tired, and went
away and left him there still cheerfully
frisking. I am so glad to tell you of
something you have n't seen ! "

A year afterward (May 29, 1892),
she wrote again, with equal enthusiasm :
" If I only had a house of my own here
I should make a business of trying de-
sperately hard to bring you here, if only
for one of your spare Sundays, to see
the ' bay birds ' that have been round
here literally by the thousands for the

last month, the swimming sandpipers —
so beautiful ! In great flocks that wheel
and turn, and, flying in long masses over
the water, show now dark, now dazzling
silver as they careen and show the white
lining of their wings, like a long bril-
liant, fluttering ribbon. I never heard
of so many before, about here."

The birds seen at the Isles of Shoals
were doubtless either red phalaropes or
northern phalaropes, — or, not unlikely,
both, — "sea snipe," they are often called ;
two pelagic, circumpolar species, the pre-
sence of which in unusual numbers off
our Atlantic coast was recorded by other
observers in the spring of 1892. My
bird here in North Carolina, if I read its
characters correctly, was of the third spe-
cies of the family, Wilson's phalarope,
larger and handsomer than the others ;
an inland bird, peculiar to the American
continent, breeding in the upper Missis-
sippi Valley and farther north, and oc-
curring in our Eastern country only as
a straggler.

That was a lucky hour, an hour worth
a long journey, and worthy of long re-
membrance. It brought me, as I began
by saying, a new bird and a new family ;
a family distinguished not more for its
grace and beauty than for the strange-
ness — the " newness," as to-day's word
is — of its domestic relations ; for the
female phalarope not only dresses more
handsomely than the male, but is larger,
and in a general way assumes the rights
of superiority. She does the courting —
openly and ostensibly, I mean — and, if
the books are to be trusted, leaves to her
mate the homely, plumage-dulling labor
of sitting upon the eggs. And why not ?
Nature has made her a queen, and dow-
ered her with queenly prerogatives, one
of which, by universal consent, is the
right to choose for herself the father of
her royal children.

Like Mrs. Thaxter, I stayed with my
bird till I was tired with watching such
preternatural activity ; and the next day
I returned to the place, hoping to tire

After the, Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

393

myself again in the same delightful man-
ner. But the phalarope was no longer
there. Up and down the road I went,
scanning the edges of the pond, hut the

bird had flown. I wished her safely
over the mountains, and a mate to her
heart's liking at the end of the jour-
ney.

Bradford Torrey.

AFTER THE STORM: A STORY OF THE PRAIRIE.

WHEN the men drove up for supper,
they found the table unset, the fire out,
and the woman tossing on the bed.

There were six of. the men, besides
Tennant, the Englishman, who, " by the
bitter road the younger son must tread,"
had come to Nebraska and the sandhill
country, ranching, and who was put over
the rest of the men because he did not
get drunk as often as they did.

Sharpneck, the cattleman, was in town.
So was his daughter, whose hungry cats
darted about the disorderly room, cry-
ing to be fed.

The men were astonished at the con-
dition of affairs. The woman had never
failed them before in all the months that
she had cooked, and made beds, and
washed and scrubbed for them. They
swore hungry oaths, for the autumn air
gets up a sharp appetite when a man is
in saddle all day.

" Poor old prairie dog," said Fitzger-
ald, who was rather soft-hearted, " she 's
clean petered out! "

Tennant had been feeling her head.

" Get in your saddles again," he said,
" and ride down to Smithers' for some-
thing to eat. You, Fitzgerald, go on to
town and get the doctor. Get Sharp-
neck, too — if you can. And you might
look up Kitty."

Kitty was the daughter who owned
the cats. These animals appeared to be
voracious. Their eyes shone with evil
phosphorescence as Tennant sent the
men off and closed the door. He lit a
fire in the stove, and then tried to make
the woman more comfortable. Her toil-

stained clothes were twisted about her ;
her wisps of hair straggled about her
face.

" Poor old prairie dog ! " he mur-
mured, repeating Fitzgerald's words.
" Not one of us noticed at noon that she
was not as usual — and why should we ?
What do we care ? "

He had his own reasons for being out
of love with his kind, and with himself,
and he smiled sardonically, as, in mak-
ing her more comfortable on the bed, he
• noticed the wretched couch, the poor
garments smelling of smoke, the uncared-
for body.

" She has borne two sons and a daugh-
ter," he went on, " and known the brutal
boot of that drunken Dutchman, and,
after all, she lies here alone, dies here
alone, perhaps — and it does n't make
any difference."

The sick woman was a stranger to
him. To be sure, he had known her for
three months. He had eaten at her ta-
ble three times a day. Her little brown
parchment-like face looked familiar to
him from the first, not because he had
seen it before, but because some things
have, for certain persons, an indefinable
familiarity. Besides doing the house-
work, she milked three cows, fed the pigs
and chickens, and made the butter. Ten-
nant had often seen her working far into
the night. When he was on the night
shift with the cattle, he had seen her
moving about noiselessly, while the oth-
ers slept.

As for Sharpneck, the proprietor of
the land, the cattle, and her, he was a

394

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

big fellow from Pennsylvania, who got
drunk on vile compounds. Tennant
never heard him address her except to
give an order, and he usually gave it
with an oath. Once Tennant had brought
her some bell-like yellow flowers that he
picked among the tall grasses. She
nodded her thanks hurriedly, — she was
cooking cakes for the men, — and put
the blossoms in a glass. Her husband
got up and tossed the flowers out of the
window. Tennant did not find it worth
his while even to be angry. After that,
however, he thought it the part of kind-
ness to leave her alone.

He lit his pipe now, and sat down
near her. The hours passed, and the
men did not return. Tennant guessed,
with a good deal of accuracy, that in the
allurements of a rousing game of poker
they had forgotten him and his charge.
It was not surprising ; on the contrary,
it seemed perfectly natural. Tennant
decided to bend his energies to the get-
ting up of a meal for himself. He found
some bacon, which he fried, and some
cold prune sauce, and plenty of bread.
Then he made tea, and persuaded the
sick woman to take a little of it by giv-
ing it to her a teaspoonf ul at a time. He
placated the cats, too, but they would
not sleep. He drove them all from the
house, but they ran in again through
holes they had scratched in the struc-
ture, near the floor — for the shack was
built of sod. Their eyes, red and green,
seemed to light the whole place with a
baleful radiance. Once, in anger, Ten-
nant hurled a glowing brand at them,
but furious, they rushed up the sides of
the room, hissing and spitting, and mak-
ing themselves much more hideous than
before.

Toward morning, he could see that
the sick woman was sinking into a state
of coma. He grew seriously worried,
and wondered if Fitzgerald had forgot-
ten to go for the doctor. When it came
time for the men to be at their places,
he signaled them, and Fitzgerald came

in answer to his summons. He had seen
the physician, who had said he would
be along in the course of the day. Sharp-
neck had been fool-drunk, and in no
mood to listen to anything. Kitty said
she would be home in the morning. But
the whole forenoon passed without word
from any of them. In the afternoon,
however, Dr. Bender came out. He was
a young man, with avaricious eyes and a
sensual mouth. His long body was lank
and ill-constructed. His hair was red,
and an untidy mustache gave color to an
otherwise colorless face. When he saw
the unconscious figure on the bed, so in-
ert, so mortally stricken, a peculiar gleam
came to his eye.

. "Her chance is small, I'm afraid,"
said Tennant, " but do what you can.
She is here with you and me, and none
beside. We must n't fail her, you know,
by Jove ! "

The physician leered at him, stupidly.
He looked the woman over, put some
powders in a glass of water, and arose
to go.

" Then you don't know what is the
matter with her ! " exclaimed Tennant
roughly. " You 're going to leave her
to her fate ? "

" I 've done all there is to do," said
the doctor sullenly. " I ought to have
been called sooner."

"You were called sooner, you fool! "
almost shouted Tennant. " Get out, will
you ? I 'd take more interest in a dy-
ing cow than you do in this woman."

There was a sort of menace in the
man's white face as he quitted the place,
but Ralph Tennant was not worrying
about expressions of countenance. He
gave the stuff the doctor had left — mere-
ly to satisfy his conscience, and watched
the road for Sharpneck. About three
o'clock, the woman's breathing became
so slight, he could no longer hear it.
He tried to arouse her with stimulants,
but it was of no avail. The last spark
of life presently went out.

He rode four miles for a neighbor

After the, Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

395

woman, who came and performed the
last offices for the poor creature. She
got supper for Tennant, too, and then
left him. He had to sit up all night to
keep off the cats, and one of the other
fellows sat up with him ; the two men
played poker gloomily, occasionally va-
rying the monotony by throwing brands
at the cats, which, smelling death, were
seized with some grim carnivorous ata-
vism. The jungle awoke in them, and
they were wild beasts, only more con-
temptible.

When morning came, Tennant set about
making preparations for the funeral. He
imagined how dismal the whole thing
would be ; he never dreamed that events
would shape themselves otherwise than
monotonously and drearily. But to his
astonishment, the men came in their best
clothes. They were, in fact, in a state
of fine excitement.

"I'll be riding down to Gester's to
see if they have a spring seat to give us
the loan of," said young Fitzgerald, who
was the first to appear in the morning.
The "other men were close behind him.
They had all breakfasted at Smithers' ;
Smithers' was a place which sometimes
served as a road-house, and they were
well fed and in form for some novel
entertainment.

" Spring seats ? " gasped Tennant.
" What is wanting with spring seats ? "

" To accommodate the mourners, to
be sure ! You don't want the mourners
to ride on boards, do you, man ? "

" Mourners ! " Tennant's voice was
almost hollow. He felt a terrible kin-
ship with the " poor little prairie dog,"
who, a small mass of mortality, lay un-
der the cold sheet in her miserable home.
" Who in God's name are the mourn-
ers?"

" We are the mourners ! " cried Fitz-
gerald-, with grandiloquence, sweeping
his hand around to indicate his com-
panions.

" And the cattle, and the other work
— who, pray, will attend to them ? "

Tennant put this question more to drown
the sardonic guffaw that was ready to
leap out, than because of any care for
Sharpneck's possessions.

" In times of mourning," said the
Irishman, winking to his companions,
but drawing a lugubrious face to Ten-
nant, " other matters have to go to the
wall."

The men nodded. Tennant wanted
to roar — or would, if he had not want-
ed to weep. So he went back to his
watch, and to fighting the cats, and let
the humans have their way.

There had not been so much riding
in that part of the country since Ten-
nant came into it. Gester sent up two
spring seats, which Fitzgerald and Dun-
can brought home across their horses'
backs* Abner Farish dashed to town
with the news of the event — no one, it
seemed, considered the death a catas-
trophe — and encountered Sharpneck on
• the way. Sharpneck made back for town,
to interview his brother, Martin Sharp-
neck, the undertaker, and then turned
his face homeward again. With him
came his daughter, silent and straight,
carrying in her lap a black crape hat
she had borrowed for the occasion.
There was a keg of something in the
rear of the wagon calculated to raise the
spirits of the mourners, and the sight of
this insured Sharpneck a welcome from
his men.

The air was indeed charged with ex-
citement. The horses were combed and
brushed, the wagons were washed. A
missionary clergyman, who happened to
be passing through the next town west,
was sent over by the thoughtful neigh-
bors, who had somehow learned of Mrs.
Sharpneck's demise, and he was warm-
ly received. The house swarmed with
people. There were even a number of
women present, though few or none had
come to see the lonely little creature
while she still lived. Tennant would
have fled from it all and got out with
the cattle, only he felt as if he could not

396

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

desert that pitiful body. He stayed to
appease his conscience, which cried out
to him that he was on guard.

Kitty Sharpneck showed a bright red
spot on each cheek, but her eyes were
dry. The Englishman could not make
her out at all. He had sometimes seen
her about the house, though she spent
most of her time in town, where she was
serving a sort of apprenticeship with a
milliner. She was little and brown, like
her mother, with the same restless, ner-
vous glance that she had had. The cats
all rubbed up against her as she entered,
and leaped to her shoulders and her lap.
The women poured questions upon her ;
the men regarded her fixedly. Every
one was alert to see what her deport-
ment would be, and was quite willing
that there should be a scene. They were
disappointed. The girl, after a few mo-
ments' rest, brushed away her pets, and,
walking over to the place where the form
of her mother was lying in a cold inner
room, lifted the sheet and looked at the
face. The body had been wrapped in a
clean sheet.

" Mother used to have a shawl," she
said to Tennant ; " I '11 see if I can find
it."

She searched about in the drawers
and finally drew it forth, a great shawl
of gray silk, delicately brocaded.

" It was her wedding shawl," said
Kitty. " It came from Holland."

The women made a shroud of it. Ten-
nant still kept watch. His presence was
a check on the conversation and kept it
within bounds. The women baked a
great meal, and they all sat down to it
— except Kitty, who could not be found.
The men were convivial. It was part
of the inevitable programme, apparently.
Tennant needed sleep, but when night
came, every one went away, and he was
left there alone again. Kitty could not
be found even now. He had been up two
nights, and being a young fellow with a
fixed habit of sleeping, the strain was
telling on him a little. But the red eyes

of the cats showed through the holes in
the shack, and his aversion to the crea-
tures keyed him to his task.

About midnight he heard some one
cautiously approaching the shack from
the outside. The door opened softly.
Kitty Sharpneck came in. She stole past
Tennant and into the room where her
mother lay. She closed the door behind
her, and there was silence. Presently
she came out. There were no tears in
her eyes ; a look of peculiar hardness
marred her young face.

She went up to Tennant and stood
before him, looking at him.

" You have been good," she whispered.
" Why ? "

" Why not ? " said Tennant, horribly
afraid of sentiment. But he need not
have feared it from Kitty.

" No doubt you had your reason," she
said sharply. " Now go to sleep. I '11
watch."

Tennant demurred.

" Get over there on the settle, I say,
and go to sleep. I '11 watch."

He obeyed her and lay on the settle.
She took his seat before the fire, and
from time to time made flourishes at the
cats, even as he had done. Periodically
she went to the inner room to change the
cloths on the dead woman's face. The
rest of the time she sat still, looking
straight before her, and as she looked,
her little brown face hardened ever more
and more. Sometimes for a moment
bright red spots would burn on her
cheeks, and then die away again.

Tennant had passed the point where
he was sleepy. He lay awake, watching
the girl. Her low brow, her thin, deli-
cately curved lips, her shapely nose, the
high cheek bones and dainty chin, the
pretty ears and sloping shoulders, all in-
dicated femininity and intelligence. It
was difficult to account for the fineness
of her quality. And yet, who could tell
what the " poor little prairie dog " might
have been ? Women make strange mar-
riages and travel strange roads. Tennant

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

397

knew by what devious paths a human
creature could tread. He himself — But
that had nothing to do with the case,
and he banished thoughts of self, for
they were not pleasant. Anyhow, what
was the use of reminiscence ? Here he
was, with one good lung and one not
quite so good, out in the semi-arid belt,
on horseback from twelve to sixteen
hours a day, eating like a Zulu, and wait-
ing for events. He reflected that the
things which affected him personally he
looked upon as events. Those which
touched him indirectly, such as the death
of Maria Sharpneck, he looked upon as
episodes. Such is the involuntary ego-
tism of man.

" I 'm not sleeping," Tennant an-
nounced to the girl.

" I know it," she said.

" What are you thinking about ? " he
asked.

Her eye involuntarily went toward the
room where the silent Thing was.

" The cats, of course," said she, her
lip curling a trifle.

" Don't be angry with me," pleaded
Tennant. " I feel very sorry for you."

" You need n't."

" Why not ? "

" It 's none of your funeral."

She had meant merely to use the
slang, not to refer to the actual event.

" Shall I keep still ? "

" Yes, I guess you 'd better."

The minutes passed. Outside, silence
— silence — silence. It reaches so far
on the plains, does silence. The sky is
higher above the earth than in other
places. The night is of velvet. Vast
breaths of wind and mystery blow back-
ward and forward.

This night a wolf bayed, and gave the
voice of life. Dismal as was the sound,
it was not so bleak as the utter stillness
had been.

" You were with mother when she
died ? " asked the girl suddenly.

She arose and stood near Tennant,
looking down into his eyes.

" I was with her."

"Tell me what happened."

He told her.

" I 'm glad she 's dead. Of course
you know I 'm glad."

" If you loved her, I know you must
be glad."

" I ought to have stayed with her."

" Yes."

" But — well, it was — Oh, you know
what it was."

" I can guess."

" You know what I did. I went to
town and worked for my board. My
father is a rich man. I washed dishes
in another woman's kitchen and went to
school. Then I went to the milliner. I
apprenticed myself to her. But I was
sorry. I did not like her, nor the other
girls, nor things that happened. I did
not like the town. I dared not come
home. Father was worse then. We al-
ways quarreled. He and mother quar-
reled about me."

" I never heard your mother say any-
thing."

" No, she did n't say much, except
when father pitched on me. But it was
different — once."

She turned, went into the inner room,
opened a drawer, and took something
out. When she came back, she placed
it in Tennant's hand. It was an ambro-
type of a young girl with a face like
that of the girl before him. The hair
was parted smoothly from the low, love-
ly brow. Alert dark eyes looked gen-
tly from the picture. Around the bared ,
neck was a coral necklace with a gold
clasp, and the miniature-maker had gild-
ed the clasp and tinted the cheeks and
lips, and made the coral its natural tint.
A dainty low-necked gown and big puffed
sleeves confessed to the coquetry of the
wearer.

" That was mother," said Kitty.

And then the storm broke at last, and
she was on the floor, face downward,
in a passion of weeping, and the young
man — he who had trod the bitter road

398

After the, Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

— felt his own frame quiver at sight of
her woe, at thought of his own, at know-
ledge of the world's big burden.

By and by, when Kitty lay on the set-
tle and Tennant sat beside her, she grew
confidential, and told him in detail the
life at which he had guessed.

"He'll expect me to be the drudge
now," she said in conclusion, referring
to her father. "Now I'll be the one
to get breakfast and dinner and supper,
and breakfast and dinner and supper,
and stay here at home forever, and wear
dirty clothes, arid scrub and wash and
iron ! I know how it will be. That is —
if" —

" If what ? "

" If I stay."

" What else can you do ? Go back to
the millinery shop ? "

" No. He would n't give me a min-
ute's peace there. He never comes to
town that he does n't make me ashamed
of him. I suppose you wonder why I
didn't come out as soon as you sent
word that mother was sick. Well, he
would n't let me. He sat himself down
there, and swore I ought to stay. Miss
Hiner, the milliner, was having' her fall
opening, and she got round him and
said I ought to stay. So I stayed."

She set her teeth hard and looked
unutterable protest at the young man.

Teunarit was a gentleman, and not
given to parading his own troubles, yet
now, in the desolation and silence, with
the dead within and the wolves without,
it seemed natural that he should tell the
girl something of his own life. It was a
familiar tale. Thousands of young Eng-
lishmen, crowded out of their own land
and their own families, who come here to
wring something from fortune's greedy
grasp, could tell a similar one. But given
the personal quality, it seemed unique,
particularly to the inexperienced girl
who listened. The two had a communi-
ty of suffering and deprivation and lone-
liness. They looked at each other with
eyes of profound sympathy. Each felt

so deep a pity for the other that for a
time self-pity was submerged.

Morning dawned. Presently the men
came from the adjoining buildings for
breakfast. Kitty had risen to the emer-
gency,— the emergency of breakfast ; she
had it ready, — corn bread, salt pork,
potatoes, eggs, and black coffee. In her
fear lest she should not have enough to
satisfy these men of prodigious appetite,
she had cooked even more than they
could eat. She had set the table just as
her mother had been in the habit of do-
ing. Everything was cluttered together.
As she worked, imitating in each most
trifling particular the ways of the dead
woman, a gray look settled about her
face. Tennant, who had both sympathy
and imagination, knew she was looking
down the long, long road of monotonous
and degrading toil which lay before her.
He saw her soul shuddering at the cap-
tivity to which it was doomed. Now and .
then she cast at him a glance of mute
horror.

The men were excited, and eager to
do anything to help to the success of the
day. Sharpneck himself was restless.
His little green eyes rolled around in their
fleshy sockets. He shuffled about con-
stantly, and at last said he was going to
town to make the final arrangements,
but would be back soon. A number of
men immediately offered to go for him.
In spite of all they knew of the truth,
they had created a fiction regarding him
now in this supreme hour, and had actu-
ally persuaded themselves that he was
a sufferer. He insisted on making the
journey himself, and some of the simple
fellows chose to believe this to be an evi-
dence of devotion.

Kitty did not share this belief. She
cast an apprehensive glance at Ten-
nant. He looked as reassuring as he
could. They both feared he was going
to get drunk and shirk the funeral alto-
gether. But he was back in a wonder-
fully short time, wearing a new suit of
clothes. Kitty had the house cleared up,

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

399

and the neighbors began to arrive. The
coffin came, — a brilliantly varnished
coffin, with much nickel plate on it. It
was placed in the front room. The men
stood around, the big sombreros in their
hands, their pretty, high -heeled boots
carefully cleaned. Five women were pre-
sent. Their sobs, oddly enough, were
genuine, and at moments became even
violent, though none of them had known
the dead woman well. But who could
know that silent and inscrutable crea-
ture?

The minister wore squeaky boots, and
had a red beard, which claimed much of
his attention. Fitzgerald, who found the
whole proceeding tamer than it ought to
have been, took him into an inner room
and braced him for his melancholy du-
ties. The clergyman had never met
Mrs. Sharpneck, but he seemed to be
cognizant of all her virtues, and exploit-
ed them in tones at once strident and
nasal. Poor Kitty, behind her crape veil,
grew hard and angry, and Tennant knew
that the quivering of her frame did not
denote grief so much as inarticulate rage
and revolt. The girl's passion was set-
ting her apart from her world in his
estimation. Something tragic in her sur-
roundings and her soul put her above
the others.

The men did not appear to be at all
surprised at the way the women wept.
They considered weeping the function of
women at a funeral. That they were
weeping from self-pity did not once occur
to them. The minister neglected none
of his duties, and they included an ad-
dress lasting forty-five minutes and two
prayers, one of thirty minutes' duration.
The people sang Nearer, my God, to
Thee. At this Kitty grew almost rigid,
and at last, her misery passing all bounds,
she caught Tennant's hand in hers — he
was sitting near her — and pressed it in
a bitter grasp.

" What is it ? What is it ? " he whis-
pered.

"The song!" she managed to say.

" As if she knew anything about God,
or ever thought " —

" Hush ! Hush ! Perhaps it was n't
as bad as you think. She did her duty
well, you know, and may be she will be
rewarded."

Kitty looked about the room, — at the
stove where she had seen the soiled lit-
tle figure of her mbther standing these
years and years, at the pots she had
patiently scoured, at the low walls, the
deep windows, the unstable sandhills be-
yond, the wind-stricken pool where the
cattle stood, — she looked at it all, and
thought of the slave bound to it, loaded
with heavy chains, starved in the midst
of It, and her eyes turned to meet those
of Tennant, big with knowledge which
knew no words.

Since Ralph Tennant put the world
behind him and came out into the wil-
derness with the cattle and the men who
•herd them, he had never seen so com-
prehensive a glance, or been so conscious
of the fact of mind. Though the hour
was so hideous, though the poor girl be-
side him was bowed with shame and tor-
tured with inexpressible grief, yet a joy
came to his heart at finding once more
the human soul, sane, susceptible, respon-
sive, courageous. He drew his chair a
little closer, as if he would protect her
from the facts that confronted her.

But the people, watching him and her,
while the minister droned on and on
in dull explanation to his Creator, saw
in his sympathy only what was natural
and the outcome of the occasion. They
guessed at nothing more.

The getting of the coffin into the wagon
was no easy task.

" By the saints, it ought to go in feet
first," said Fitzgerald, who was one of
the pall-bearers. " You '11 not be launch-
in' the woman head foremost into her
own grave ! "

" It goes head on, you fool ! " replied
Watson.

The six men stood still, arguing.

" Oh, what 's the difference ? " asked a

400

After the, Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

bystander. But Watson, who had been
an Englishman some time or other, — or
at least the father before him had, —
was not one to yield to a man who had
once called the British jack a dirty rag,
as Fitzgerald had, more than once, in
the heat of argument. So the discus-
sion waxed hot, and might have ended
in a manner more or less sensational, for
the men had had a taste of novelty and
their appetites were whetted by it, had
it not been for Tennant, who came out,
leaving Kitty standing in the door, and
pointed a stern finger at the wagon ; and
poor Maria Sharpneck was laid in, head
foremost as it happened. It was thought
proper that Sharpneck should rider in
this wagon, but he was somewhat loath
to do so, as the owner of the team, who
insisted on driving his own horses, was
not of the same politics as himself, and
was, moreover, stone-deaf. He had an
offensive way of airing his own opin-
ions, and he was so deaf — or affected
to be — that he never could hear any-
thing his opponent might say. There
was only one bond of sympathy between
them, and that was plug tobacco. Some
sympathizing friend, endeavoring to mit-
igate present woes, loaded Sharpneck up
with this succulent commodity, and, thus
placated, the enemies sat side by side in a
semblance of amicability. Behind came
two wagon-loads of chief mourners, com-
posed of the men of the ranch, and Kitty.
After them came five or six loads of
neighbors who took this opportunity to
enjoy an outing, to which they consid-
ered themselves entitled after weeks of
monotonous toil. It happened that the
horses which drew the wagon containing
the coffin were very frisky, and it was
not long before this wagon was well in
advance of the others, the coffin bumping
meantime from side to side.

" Hold on, man ! " cried Sharpneck
to his deaf driver, " hold on, I say !
There 's reasons why I don't want that
there coffin scratched up. Hold in the
horses, I say ! "

The driver did not hear, and the horses
were really too excitable for Sharpneck
to risk meddling with the reins.

The mourners were soon left well
behind, though they did their utmost to
urge on their animals. In fact, the
Dickeys, who had some freshly broken
colts of their own raising, had taken an-
other road to town, boasting confidently
to the Abernethys that their colts would
get them there before the far-famed
black team of the Abernethys saw the
first church spire. The Abernethys were
behind the mourners, and when it de-
veloped that the off horse on the second
wagon was winded, and it was proved to
be impossible for one team to get ahead
of another on the steep grade of the road,
indignation ran high. The Abernethys
fumed, knowing that their neighbors were
amused at their predicament.

The mourners were not very far dis-
tant, and, being on a rise of ground, they
could see the Sharpneck wagon brought
to a halt by a horseman who had dashed
out from town.

" It 's Martin Sharpneck. It 's the
undertaker," the men made out. He
had apparently brought out a big rubber
cloth to protect the coffin, for it was be-
ginning to look like rain, and by the time
the others were up with the group, the
coffin was wrapped from sight.

Tennant began to wonder what this
could mean. Not a man living would
have ridden out that way to meet the
"poor little prairie dog " in her lifetime
— not a man !

" You 're to come around to my place
after it 's over," the undertaker said.
" You '11 need to steady your nerves a bit.
Come around as soon as you can, boys.
You must be about used up." He looked
with solicitude at the strapping bronzed
men in the wagons.

Tennant glanced sharply at Kitty.
Was she not conscious that there was
something in the wind ? But she watched
the wheels rolling in the sand, — watched
them turning and dripping the sallow

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

401

granules from the wheels, as if she dared
look neither behind nor before, — and
she did not see his look.

The minister had not accompanied the
cortege to the cemetery. (One always
refers to a cortege in the West, on even
a very slight provocation.) So the cof-
fin, shining and gleaming with its nickel
plate, was dropped gently into the grave,
and then, presently, the undertaker was
urging all the boys to come around to his
place and brace up, and they all went
— Tennant with the rest. Etiquette in
such matters is imperative in that sec-
tion of the country. Tennant could not
have refused without paying the penalty
of a quarrel, and it was no time for self-
assertion. So he cast a look of appeal
and apology at Kitty, and went. Sharp-
neck followed them. There was no one
left save the gravedigger, who insisted
that he knew his business and did not
need any one to help him.

The women drove the wagons back
to town, and went into the stores to gos-
sip and trade. Kitty accompanied them.
She had no place to go to except the
millinery shop, and it had never seemed
more dreadful to her than this day. She
felt she could not endure the scrutiny of
the girls. She crept out of the big store
at the back, and sat on a pair of stairs
which made their way to the upper story.
The day was growing bleak, and gray
shadows trailed along the plain. Kitty
was not warmly clothed, and the wind
sifted through her black garments and
chilled her. She had not an idea of
what was to happen next. She did not
know whether her father would look for
her or not. She did not believe Tennant
would remember to seek her. Indeed,
why should he ? She had known him
no better than she had known the other
men in her father's employ. She had,
of course, always felt him to be differ-
ent. No one could help noticing that he
was not a part of his environment. But,
after all, young English gentlemen were
not an uncommon sight in the sandhill

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479. 26

country, and every one was quite aware
that of all fools an Englishman was the
worst, and could go to the dogs generally
with a rapidity which none could rival.
With the reasons for this the natives did
not trouble themselves. These poor tra-
gedies merely amused them, or awoke
their contempt.

The afternoon grew late. Kitty still
sat crouched upon the stairs. She was
facing her future. She was looking into
the eyes of her destiny — and it was a
fearsome thing to do.

The base drudgery of the ranch pre-
sented itself to her vision with no com-
pensation. The life at the little millinery
shop, with its temptations, its wretched
scandal, it petty, never-ending talk, came
before her too. On every side there
seemed to be only what was unspeakably
distasteful and disgustingly common.
Romance and youth were fair and fleet-
.ing things ; they were as the mirage
which in August days trembled on the
heat-misted horizon.

In the midst of all this she saw Ten-
nant crossing over from the millinery
shop, which stood, almost solitary, on
the street behind the main one. He
was looking for her. Kitty ran to meet
him, glad to set aside her terrible scru-
tiny of the future. Perhaps he repre-
sented a change or a possibility.

His face was white. He had been
drinking a little, but some sudden know-
ledge had banished all trace of it, save
that in the shock his face had suffered.

" We went with your uncle," he be-
gan at once, too full of his theme to use
judgment or mercy, — " we all went with
him, and he ' braced us up,' though God
knows why ! I scented something in the
wind — else why such generosity ? It is
n't your uncle's way — no, nor your fa-
ther's — to give something for nothing.
The others drank heavily. I drank
some, but not enough to dull my curi-
osity. I got out unnoticed, Miss Kitty,
and went back to — to the grave."

" Well — well ? " gasped Kitty.

402

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

" Well, it was already empty ! "

"What?"

" Yes, the coffin was " —

" Where ? "

" Back in Martin Sharpneck's shop,
by God ! "

" And the — and my " —

"And the red-headed doctor had —
had the rest ! "

The wind blew the sand into dirty
yellow spirals, and these danced in
drunken fashion about the two who stood
there. Down the street could be heard
the voices of the- drunken men. Kitty
saw her father come out of his brother's
shop and reel along the street. The
women who had ridden to the funeral
were coming out of the stores with their
arms full of parcels. Their vociferous
husbands were about to join them.

" Shall I go to the doctor," asked
Tennant, " and " —

" No. What does it matter ! It is
of a piece with the rest."

Ralph Tennant felt a sudden revul-
sion. The girl seemed — but, after all,
how could he judge her?

" There 's no use in trying to do any-
thing. We couldn't. There's no one
to help us. Besides, father can do what
he pleases — with his own."

" But if he was exposed ? "

" No one would care — it would only
give them something to talk about.
They would pretend to care — but they
would n't, really."

" Then you are going back, to-night,
of course, with " —

" I 'm not going back with anybody.
I am never going back."

At the last her resolution was taken
quite suddenly.

" What will you do, then ? "

" In half an hour the train will be
here. I am going to take it."

" I '11 take it with you."

They were very young ; they were
half-mad with horror and disgust. They
stood alone, and they were in revolt.
This accounted for it.

" Very well," said Kitty.

" It is impossible to stay here longer,"
said the poor younger son, who might,
had things been different, have wooed
some sweet and well-bred girl in Eng-
land, instead of this poor, angry savage
of the sand wastes.

" It is impossible," said she. " We
will go away."

" I have a little money with me."

" I have a little."

" I know the men on the freight, due
here in an hour. If you like " —

" Do you think we could manage
it?"

" I feel sure of it."

" Then we can save our money."

" Yes. We will go to Omaha."

" As you please."

The gray sky showed a gleam of pale
gold at the horizon. The sun was set-
ting. The wagons were driving out of
town. Tennant and Kitty saw her fa-
ther looking for her, and she and Ten-
nant hid in a coal-shed, till Sharpneck's
patience being exhausted he drove furi-
ously out of town, cursing.

" He thinks I have gone home with
some of the others," said Kitty.

The passenger train rushed into the
town and out again. After a time they
heard the freight in the distance, and ran
down to the little station. Every one was
home at supper. Only the station agent
saw them talking with the conductor of
the freight.

" Goin' away, Miss Sharpneck ? " he
asked. He did not blame her, but he
wanted to know.

" I 'm going away," she replied stead-
ily, but hardly hearing him.

Tennant looked too severe to be ques-
tioned. He helped the girl into the
caboose. She was famished with cold,
hunger, and misery. He and the blowzy
Irishman on the train built up a brisk
fire, and laid her down on a bench near
it, wrapped in their cloaks. The Irish-
man shared his luncheon with them, and
made coffee on the stove.

After the Storm : A /Story of the Prairie.

403

Kitty felt no anticipation. She looked
forward to the morning with no emotion
whatever. She did not taste the food
she put in her mouth. But little by lit-
tle the warmth of the friendly fire
reached her, and she fell asleep and lay
as still as — her mother.

" Better come on to Council Bluffs,"
said the conductor when they reached
Omaha.

" Why not ? " said Tennant, and
laughed.

" Why not ? " echoed Kitty.

Both " why nots " sounded bitter.
These young persons were adventurers
by force of circumstances.

Council Bluffs is a charming place.
Part of it lies on a flat lowland, beyond
which are the bottom-lands of the river.
The rest of the town is built on serrated
bluffs, covered with foliage. Although the
yellow Missouri separates it from the
great American plain, yet it has the sky
of the plain, which is a throbbing and
impenetrable blue. Its abrupt bluffs
have made precipitous and irregular
streets. Some of them are almost in
the shape of a scimitar ; some run like a
creek between high terraces ; others look
up to heights which drip with vineyards ;
many of them present yellow clay banks
which the graders have cut like gigan-
tic cheeses to make way for practical
thoroughfares. In these clay cuts the
swallows burrow industriously, and per-
forate the face of the cut with innumer-
able Zufii-like residences. The squir-
rels chatter in the fine old trees. Charm-
ing houses stand in the " dells," that is,
in the umbrageous cul-de-sacs where the
graded streets terminate in bluffs too bold
to be penetrated.

Why nature is more prolific there than
across the river it would be hard to say ;
but it is a fact that flowers and vines,
and, no doubt, vegetables and fruit, grow
better in that locality than in the great
grain State over the way. It often hap-
pens in America that natural beauty

fails to instruct the people who live in
the midst of it. This has not been the
case at Council Bluffs. From the time
when the Mormons first settled there
in their historical hegira and built their
odd little huts with the numerous out-
side doors, — cutting an entrance for
each housewife, — there has been some-
thing involuntarily quaint about the ar-
chitecture of the place. Roofs slope off
into the bluffs, houses are built on green
ledges of earth, and back yards shoot
skyward, so that the vineyards grow at
an angle of forty-five degrees, and he
who goes to look at his garden must
needs take an alpenstock in his hands.
Hammocks hang under the trees ; cot-
tages riot in porches ; old mansions wan-
der with a sort of elegant negligence
over ground which has never been held
at a fictitious value. An exclusive and
self-conscious aristocracy looks down
.upon the ostentation of the fashionable
set of Omaha, and lives its quiet life of
sociable exclusion, making much of mu-
sic and ceramics, and attaching no very
great importance to commercial aggres-
sion or to literature.

Into this peaceful town the adventur-
ers came one bleak autumn day, when
the leaves were skirring about the nar-
row and tortuous streets and the nuts
were rattling to the ground. Coming
as they did from the treeless region, the
place was enchanting to them. No sooner
had they sat down to their breakfast
than things began to wear a rosier hue.
They ate in a fascinating restaurant,
where a steel engraving of the destruc-
tion of Johnstown, with innumerable re-
marques, hung above them. Kitty had
never eaten a breakfast just like it, and
even Tennant, who had known flesh-pots,
found it delicious.

As they sipped their coffee, they talked,
scrutinizing each other all the time.
Tennant was thinking the situation en-
chanting. Kitty was waiting — waiting
for events — for life ! She did not re-
flect. Her hour was a subjective one.

404

After the Storm : A Story of the Prairie.

11 What shall we do after breakfast ? "
asked Kitty.

" We must be married," said Ten-
nant decidedly. The girl paled, then
blushed and paled again.

" Oh no, no ! " she gasped.

" There is nothing else to do," went
on Tennant decidedly. " You need n't
worry about it a bit. You need n't
pay any particular attention to me, you
know. But we 've got to be married,
my dear. We have cut loose from every
one and everything. We must go into
partnership. Perhaps you don't love me
now, — how could you ? — but we have
cast in our lot together, and we 're
coming out on top, somehow. We 're
going to succeed. Moreover, I don't
mind telling you that I 'm happier and
more contented with you here, this morn-
ing, and was happier and more content-
ed all last night, while we were rushing
along through the darkness escaping
from all manner of hideous things, than
I have been since — well, since I was a
little boy, and thought my mother was
greater than the Queen of England and
lovelier than the angels."

The blush came gently back to the
girl's cheeks and stayed there this time.
She ventured on her confession, too.

" I never felt — well — safe, I guess
you call it, before in all my life. Until
that night when I talked with you (and
I was so cross at first), there in the shack,
with poor mother, I never told any one
the whole truth about anything, or cared
what they thought, or was glad to have
them understand what I was thinking."

" What made you so cross with me ? "

"Oh, I don't know. You bothered
me. You made me want to be different.
I thought you were hating me."

" I thought all the time you were hat-
ing me."

" I guess we were just hating the
world."

" Probably that was it. Anyhow, fate
has thrown us together. It 's a case of
united we stand."

They looked about the town after
breakfast, and found a tiny cottage with
three rooms on the side of a hill. A
grassy bluff rose immediately behind it,
and the roof of the kitchen ran into the
bluff. Grapevines rioted down the side.
Catalpas grew on the level ledge of
ground, and straggling up the hill, hold-
ing on tenaciously by their roots, were
great chestnut-trees. The little house
was painted green, and in summer, Kit-
ty could imagine, it would seem quite to
melt into the hill.

" We can have a hammock up there,"
cried Tennant, after he had arranged to
rent it for a trifle, and forgetful that win-
ter was coming. There was actually a
rude brick fireplace in the front room —
indeed, the place had been the summer
retreat of an artist. This filled the young
Englishman with delight, and he was off
to order some wood.

" To tliink that we shall have a wood
fire ! " he exclaimed over and over again.
" I will put my pipe on the shelf, and
smoke evenings, eh ? "

" Yes," cried Kitty. Then she was
silent, and something troubled came into
her face.

" Well," said Tennant, seeing it,
" what is it, my child ? "

" I was thinking."

" Yes ? "

" Well, please don't be offended with
me. But — well, I don't like drink-
ing."

" Don't you, my dear ? Well, neither
do I."

" But " —

" Oh, I know. But what else was
there to do out there ? You don't know
how lonely I was. You need n't worry
about that now ! "

They had a wonderful day. They
bought a pine table and three pine chairs,
and a little second-hand cook-stove, and
some shades for the window. Then Ten-
nant asked every man he met for work.
He would have made a nuisance of him-
self if he had not been so excited and

Willow Dale.

405

generally filled with anticipation that
the people pardoned him for his effer-
vescence.

" I 've got to have work," he declared
to every one. " Anything — anything

— manual, clerical, it makes no differ-
ence to me. I '11 chop wood, or keep
books, or coach for college, or work on
the road — but I 've got to have work ! "

He got it — never mind what it was.
It was not the sort he was destined to do
by and by, but it served for bread and
butter, and a little more. Incidentally,
that day, he and Kitty were married.
Tennant would have a clergyman per-
form the ceremony, though Kitty, poor
little heathen, was indifferent about it.
So they stood before the altar of a curi-
ous church up one of the tortuous streets,
and were married by a young Episcopal
priest, while the merry wind sang out-
side and red leaves tumbled down the
wild hills beyond. They told a bit of
their story to the young priest, and he
took them to his home, which was on
the very top of one of the hills, and they
had dinner there, and met the young
man's wife, who was a lovely girl from
the East, and who took to Kitty at once.
That was the beginning of many things

— friendships, and little gayeties, and
hours of study, — but it is easy to guess
what could happen.

Ah, how bare the little green cottage
was ! But what of it ? What of it ?

Frequently Kitty spent an hour of her
day up at the little wind-haunted recto-
ry, hemming tablecloths and pillow-cases,
and she learned to keep a potted fern
on her table, — the minister's wife taught
her that, — and to have the hearth swept
at night, and the 'big chunks of wood
blazing. Then Tennant smoked, and
she read to him in the evening.

It was delightful to watch the new
home grow ! Neat clothes finally were
hung up in the closets, and the demure
little lady who was Kitty's friend taught
her all manner of things that could not
be learned in books. She helped her
buy her furniture bit by bit, and Tennant
and Kitty would sit a whole evening and
look at a new chair in amazement at the
knowledge that it was their own.

Presently they had their hospitalities
.arid their institutions and their beaten
paths. It was quite wonderful how
quickly they became an orderly part of
the community — these two from the
wilderness. Moreover, they were very
happy. It was all simple and common-
place enough ; but it was their life, and
they lived it with honesty and with cour-
age. Still, perhaps that is not remark-
able either. Honesty and courage are
so common — in the West.

Elia W. Peattie.

WILLOW DALE.

THE water slipped the falls all day,
And clear beyond the little wood
The cuckoo's monotone held sway,
Until we almost understood

Why willow, wave, and far-off throat
Hold the same instinct, strange and sad,
That vibrates in the human note
As haunting sorrow when most glad.

Lucy S- Conant,

406

A Second Marriage.

A SECOND MARRIAGE.

AMELIA PORTER sat by her great open
fireplace, where the round, consequential
black kettle hung from the crane and
breathed out a steamy cloud to be at
once licked up and absorbed by the heat
from a snatching flame below. It was
exactly a year and a day since her hus-
band's death, and she had packed her-
self away in his own corner of the settle,
her hands clasped across her knees, and
her red-brown eyes brooding on the near-
er embers. She was not definitely spec-
ulating on her future, nor had she any
heart for retracing the dull and gentle
past. She had simply relaxed hold on
her mind ; and so, escaping her, it had
gone wandering off into shadowy pro-
phecies of the immediate years. For,
as Amelia had been telling herself for
the last three months, since she had be-
gun to outgrow the habit of a dual life,
she was not old. Whenever she looked
in the glass, she could not help noting
how free from wrinkles her swarthy face
had been kept, and that the line of her
mouth was still scarlet over white, even
teeth. Her crisp black hair, curling in
those tight fine rolls which a bashful ad-
mirer had once commended as " full of
little jerks," showed not a trace of gray.
All this evidence of her senses read her
a fair tale of the possibilities of the mor-
row ; and without once saying, " I will
take up a new life," she did tacitly ac-
knowledge that life was not over.

It was a " snapping cold " night of
early spring, so misplaced as to bring
with it a certain dramatic excitement.
The roads were frozen hard, and shone
like silver in the ruts. All day sleds
had gone creaking past, set to that fine
groaning which belongs to the music of
the year. The drivers' breath ascended
in steam, the while they stamped down
the probability of freezing, and yelled to
Buck and Broad until that inner fervor

raised them one degree in warmth. The
smoking cattle held their noses low and
swayed beneath the yoke.

Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight
house, had felt the power of the day
without sharing its discomforts ; and her
eyes deepened and burned with a sense
of the movement and warmth of living.
To-night, under the spell of some vague
expectancy, she had sat still for a long
time, her sewing laid aside and her
room scrupulously in order. She was
waiting for what was not to be acknow-
ledged even to her own intimate self.
But as the clock struck nine she roused
herself, and shook off her mood in impa-
tience and a disappointment which she
would not own. She looked about the
room, as she often had of late, and be-
gan to enumerate its possibilities in case
she should desire to have it changed.
Amelia never went so far as to say that
change should be ; she only felt that
she had still a right to speculate upon
it, as she had done for many years, as
a form of harmless enjoyment. While
every other house in the neighborhood
had gone from the consistently good to
the prosperously bad in the matter of
refurnishing, John Porter had kept his
precisely as his grandfather had left it
to him. Amelia had never once com-
plained ; she had observed toward her
husband an unfailing deference, due, she
felt, to his twenty years' seniority ; per-
haps, also, it stood in her own mind as
the only amends she could offer him for
having married him without love. It
was her father who made the match ; and
Amelia had succumbed, not through the
obedience claimed by parents of an elder
day, but from hot jealousy and the pique
inevitably born of it. Laurie Morse had
kept the singing-school that winter. He
had loved Amelia ; he had bound himself
to her by all the most holy vows sworn

A /Second Marriage.

407

from aforetime, and then in some wanton
exhibit of power — gone home with an-
other girl. And for Amelia's responsive
throb of feminine anger she had spent
fifteen years of sober country living with
a man who had wrapped her about with
the quiet tenderness of a strong nature,
but who was not of her own generation
either in mind or in habit ; and Laurie
had kept a music-store in Saltash, seven
miles away, and remained unmarried.

Now Amelia looked about the room,
and mentally displaced the furniture, as
she had done so many times while she
and her husband sat there together. The
settle could be taken to the attic. She
had not the heart to carry out one secret
resolve indulged in moments of impatient
bitterness, — to split it up for firewood.
But it could at least be exiled. She would
have a good cook-stove, and the great
fireplace should be walled up. The tin
kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in ^
shining quaintness, should also go into the
attic. The old clock — But at that in-
stant the clash of bells shivered the frosty
air, and Amelia threw her vain imagin-
ings aside like a garment, and sprang to
her feet. She clasped her hands in a
spontaneous gesture of rapt attention ;
and when the sound paused at her gate,
with one or two sweet, lingering dingles,
" I knew it ! " she said aloud. Yet she
did not go to the window to look into the
moonlit night. Standing there in the
middle of the room, she awaited the knock
which was not long in coming. It was
imperative, insistent. Amelia, who had
a spirit responsive to the dramatic exi-
gencies of life, felt a little flush spring
into her face, so hot that, on the way to
the door, she involuntarily put her hand
to her cheek and held it there. The door
came open grumblingly. It sagged upon
the hinges, but, well used to its vagaries,
she overcame it with a regardless haste.

" Come in," she said at once to the man
on the step. " It 's cold. Oh, come in ! "

He stepped inside the entry, removing
his fur cap, and disclosing a youthful

face charged with that radiance which
made him, at thirty-five, almost the coun-
terpart of his former self. It may have
come only from the combination of curly
brown hair, blue eyes, and an aspiring
lift of the chin, but it always seemed to
mean a great deal more. In the kitchen
he threw off his heavy coat, while Ame-
lia, bright-eyed and breathing quickly,
stood by, quite silent. Then he looked
at her.

" You expected me, did n't you ? " he
asked.

A warmer color surged into her cheeks.
" I did n't know," she said perversely.

" I guess you did. It 's one day over
a year. You knew I 'd wait a year."

" It ain't a year over the services,"
said Amelia, trying to keep the note of
vital expectancy out of her voice. " It
won't be that till Friday."

" Well, Saturday I '11 come again."
He went over to the fire and stretched out
his hands to the blaze. " Come here,"
he said imperatively, " while I talk to
you."

Amelia stepped forward obediently,
like a good little child. The old fascina-
tion was still as dominant as at its birth,
sixteen years ago. She realized, with a
strong, splendid sense of the eternity of
things, that always, even while it would
have been treason to recognize it, she had
known how ready it was to rise and live
again. All through her married years
she had sternly drugged it and kept it
sleeping. Now it had a right to breathe,
and she gloried in it.

" I said to myself I would n't come
to-day," went on Laurie, without looking
at her. A new and excited note had
come into his voice, responsive to her
own. He gazed down at the fire, mus-
ing the while he spoke. " Then I found
I could n't help it. That 's why I 'm so
late. I stayed in the shop till seven, and
some fellows come in and wanted me to
play. I took up the fiddle, and begun.
But I had n't more 'n drew a note be-
fore I laid it down and put for the door.

408

A /Second Marriage.

' Dick, you keep shop,' says I. And I
harnessed up, and drove like the devil."

Amelia felt warm with life and hope ;
she was taking up her youth just where
the story ended.

" You ain't stopped swearin' yet ! " she
said, with a little excited laugh. Then,
from an undercurrent of exhilaration,
it occurred to her that she had never
laughed so in all these years.

" Well," said Laurie abruptly, turn-
ing upon her, " how am I goin' to start
out ? Shall we hark back to old scores ?
I know what com* between us. So do
you. Have we got to talk it out, or can
we begin now ? "

" Begin now," replied Amelia faintly.
Her breath choked her. He stretched
out his arms to her in sudden passion.
His hands touched her sleeves, and, with
an answering rapidity of motion, she
drew back. She shrank within herself,
and her face gathered a look of fright.
" No ! no ! no ! " she cried strenuously.

His arms fell at his sides, and he
looked at her in amazement.

" What 's the matter ? " he demanded.

Amelia had retreated, until she stood
now with one hand on the table. She
could not look at him, and when she an-
swered her voice shook.

" There 's nothin' the matter," she
said. " Only you must n't — yet."

A shade of relief passed over his face,
and he smiled.

" There, there ! " he said, " never you
mind. I understand. But if I come
over the last of the week, I guess it will
be different. Won't it be different,
Milly ? "

" Yes," she owned, with a little sob
in her throat, "it will be different."

Thrown out of his niche of easy friend-
liness with circumstance, he stood there
in irritated consciousness that here was
some subtle barrier which he had not
foreseen. Ever since John Porter's
death, there had been strengthening in
him a joyous sense that Milly's life and
his own must have been running parallel

all this time, and that it needed only a
little widening of channels to make them
join. His was no crass certainty of find-
ing her ready to drop into his hand ; it
was rather a childlike, warm - hearted
faith in the permanence of her affection
for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd esti-
mate of his own lingering youth com-
pared with John Porter's furrowed face
and his fifty-five years. But now, with
this new whiffling of the wind, he could
only stand rebuffed and recognize his own
perplexity.

" You do care, don't you, Milly ? " he
asked, with a boy's frank ardor. " You
want me to come again ? "

All her own delight in youth and the
warm naturalness of life had rushed back
upon her.

" Yes," she answered eagerly. " I '11
tell you the truth. I always did tell you
the truth. I do want you to come."

" But you don't want me to-night ! "
He lifted his brows, pursing his lips
whimsically ; and Amelia laughed.

" No," said she, with a little defiant
movement of her own crisp head, " I
don't know as I do want you to-night ! "

Laurie shook himself into his coat.
" Well," said he, on his way to the door,
" I '11 be round Saturday, whether or no.
And Milly," he added significantly, his
hand on the latch, " you 've got to like
me then ! "

Amelia laughed. " I guess there won't
be no trouble ! " she called after him dar-
ingly-

She stood there in the biting wind,

while he uncovered the horse and drove
away. Then she went shaking back to
her fire ; but it was not altogether from
cold. The sense of the consistency of
love and youth, the fine justice with which
nature was paying an old debt, had raised
her to a stature above her own. She
stood there under the mantel, and held
by it while she trembled. For the first
time, her husband had gone utterly out
of her life. It was as though he had not
been.

A Second Marriage.

409

" Saturday ! " she said to herself.
" Saturday ! Three days till then ! "

Next morning the spring asserted it-
self ; there came a whiff of wind from
the south and a feeling of thaw. The
sled-runners began to cut through to the
frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks,
where thin crusts of ice were sparkling,
came a faint musical sound of trickling
drops. The sun was regnant, and little
brown birds flew cheerily over the snow
and talked of nests.

Amelia finished her housework by nine
o'clock, and then sat down in her low
rocker by the south window, sewing in
thrifty haste. The sun fell hotly through
the panes, and when she looked up the
glare met her eyes. She seemed to be
sitting in a golden shower, and she liked
it. No sunlight ever made her blink or
screw her face into wrinkles. She throve
in it like a rose-tree. At ten o 'clock,
one of the slow-moving sleds out that day
in premonition of a " spell o ' weather "
swung laboriously into her yard and
ground its way up to the side-door. The
sled was empty save for a rocking-chair
where sat an enormous woman enveloped
in shawls, her broad face surrounded by
a pumpkin hood. Her dark brown front
came low over her forehead, and she wore
spectacles with wide bows, which gave
her an added expression of benevolence.
She waved a mittened hand to Amelia
when their eyes met, and her heavy face
broke up into smiles.

" Here I be ! " she called in a thick,
gurgling voice, as Amelia hastened out,
her apron thrown over her head. " Did
n't expect me, did ye ? Nobody looks
for an old rheumatic creatur'. She 's
more out o' the runnin' 'n a last year's
bird's-nest."

" Why, aunt Ann ! " cried Amelia in
unmistakable joy. " I 'm tickled to death
to see you. Here, Amos, I '11 help get
her out."

The driver, a short thick-set man of
neutral ashy tints and a sprinkling of
hair and beard, trudged round the oxen

and drew the rocking-chair forward with-
out a word. " He never once looked in
Amelia's direction, and she seemed not
to expect it ; but he had scarcely laid
hold of the chair when aunt Ann broke
forth : —

" Now, Amos, ain't you goin' to take
no notice of 'Melia, no more 'n if she
wa'n't here ? She ain't a bump on a
log, nor you a born fool."

Amos at once relinquished his sway
over the chair, and stood looking ab-
stractedly at the oxen, who, with their
heads low, had already fallen into that
species of day-dream whereby they com-
pensate themselves for human tyranny.
They were waiting for Amos, and Amos,
in obedience to some inward resolve,
waited for commotion to cease.

" If ever I was ashamed, I be now ! "
continued aunt Ann, still with an expres-
sion of settled good nature, and in a voice
all' jollity though raised conscientiously
to a scolding pitch. " To think I should
bring such a creatur' into the world, an'
set by to see him treat his own relations
like the dirt under his feet ! "

Amelia laughed. She was exhilarated
by the prospect of company, and this do-
mestic whirlpool had amused her from
of old.

" Law, aunt Ann," she said, " you let
Amos alone. He and I are old cronies.
We understand one another. Here,
Amos, catch hold ! We shall all get our
deaths- out here, if we don't do nothin'
but stand still and squabble."

The immovable Amos had only been
awaiting his cue. He lifted the laden
chair with perfect ease to one of the pi-
azza steps, and then to another ; when it
had reached the topmost level, he dragged
it over the sill into the kitchen, and, leav-
ing his mother sitting in colossal triumph
by the fire, turned about and took his
silent way to the outer world.

" Amos," called aunt Ann, " do you
mean to say you 're goin' to walk out o'
this house without speakin' a civil word to
anybody ? Do you mean to say that ? "

410

A Second Marriage.

" I don't mean to say nothin'," con-
fided Amos to his worsted muffler, as he
took up his goad and began backing the
oxen round.

Undisturbed and not at all daunted by
a reply for which she had not even lis-
tened, aunt Ann raised her voice in cheer-
ful response : " Well, you be along 'tween
three an' four, an' you '11 find me ready."

" Mercy, aunt Ann ! " said Amelia,
beginning to unwind the visitor's wraps,
" what makes you keep houndin' Amos
that way ? If he has n't spoke for thirty-
five years, it ain't likely he 's goin' to be-
gin now."

Aunt Ann was looking about her with
an expression of beaming delight in un-
familiar surroundings. She laughed a
rich, unctuous laugh, and stretched her
hands to the blaze.

" Law," she said contentedly, " of
course it ain't goin' to do no good. Who
ever thought 't would ? But I 've been
at that boy all these years to make him
like other folks, an' I ain't goin' to stop
now. He never shall say his own mo-
ther did n't know her duty towards him.
Well, 'Melia, you air kind o' snug here,
arter all ! Here, you hand me my bag,
an' I '11 knit a stitch. I aiu't a mite
cold."

Amelia was bustling about the fire,
her mind full of the possibilities of a
company dinner.

" How 's your limbs ? " she asked,
while aunt Ann drew out a long stocking
and began to knit with an amazing ra-
pidity of which her fat fingers gave no
promise.

" Well, I ain't allowed to forgit 'em
very often," she replied comfortably.
" Rheumatiz is my cross, an' I 've got to
bear it. Sometimes I wish 't had gone
into my hands ruther 'n my feet, an'
I could ha' got round. But there ! if
't ain't one thing, it 's another. Mis' Eben
Smith 's got eight young ones down with
the whoopin'-cough. Amos dragged me
over there yisterday ; an' when I heerd
"em tryin' to see which could bark the

loudest, I says, ' Give me the peace o'
Jerusalem in my own house, even if I
don't stir a step for the next five year no
more 'n I have for the last.' I dun no
what 't would be if I had n't a darter.
I 've been greatly blessed."

The talk went on in pleasant ripples,
while Amelia moved back and forth from
pantry to table. She brought out the
mixing-board, and began to put her bread
in the pans, while the tin kitchen stood
in readiness by the hearth. The sunshine
flooded all the room, and lay insolently
on the paling fire ; the Maltese cat sat
in the broadest shaft of all, and, having
lunched from her full saucer in the cor-
ner, made her second toilet for the day.

" 'Melia," said aunt Ann suddenly,
looking down over her glasses at the tin
kitchen, " ain't it a real cross to bake in
that thing ? "

" I always had it in mind to buy me
a range,'" answered Amelia reservedly,
" but somehow we never got to it."

" That 's the only thing I ever had
ag'inst John. He was as grand a man
as ever was, but he did set everything
by such truck. Don't turn out the old
things, I say, no more 'n the old folks ;
but when it comes to makin' a woman
stan' quiddlin' round doin' work back
side foremost, that beats me."

" He 'd have got me a stove in a min-
ute," burst forth Amelia in haste,
" only he never knew I wanted it ! "

" More fool you not to ha' said so ! "
commented aunt Ann, unwinding her
ball. " Well, I s'pose he would. John
wa'n't like the common run o' men.
Great strong creatur' he was, but there
was suthin' about him as soft as a wo-
man. His mother used to say his eyes 'd
fill full o' tears when he broke up a settin'
hen. He was a good husband to you, —
a good provider an' a good friend."

Amelia was putting down her bread
for its last rising, and her face flushed.

"Yes," she said gently, "he was
good."

" But there ! " continued aunt Ann,

A Second Marriage.

411

dismissing all lighter considerations, " I
dimno 's that 's any reason why you
should bake in a tin kitchen, nor why
you should need to heat up the brick
oven every week, when 't was only done
to please him, an' he ain't here to know.
Now, 'Melia, le's see what you could do.
When you got the range in, 't would al-
ter this kitchen all over. Why don't
you tear down that old-fashioned man-
telpiece in the fore-room ? "

" I could have a marble one," respond-
ed Amelia in a low voice. She had taken
her sewing again, and she bent her head
over it as if she were ashamed. A flush
had risen in her cheeks, and her hand
trembled.

" Wide marble ! real low down ! "
confirmed aunt Ann in a tone of tri-
umph. " So fur as that goes, you could
have a marble - top table." She laid
down her knitting, and looked about her,
a spark of excited anticipation in her
eyes. All the habits of a lifetime urged
her on to arrange and rearrange, in
pursuit of domestic perfection. People
used to say, in her first married days,
that Ann Doby wasted more time in plan-
ning conveniences about her house than
she ever saved by them " artcr she got
'em." In her active years, she was, in
local phrase, " a driver." Up and about
early and late, she directed and man-
aged until her house seemed to be a
humming hive of industry and thrift.
Yet there was never anything too ur-
gent in that sway. Her beaming good
humor acted as a buffer between her
and the doers of her will ; and though
she might scold, she never rasped and
irritated. Nor had she really suc-
cumbed in the least to the disease which
had practically disabled her. It might
confine her to a chair and render her
dependent upon the service of others,
but over it also was she spiritual victor.
She could sit in her kitchen and issue
orders ; and her daughter, with no initi-
ative genius of her own, had all aunt
Ann's love of "springin' to it." She

cherished, besides, a worshipful admira-
tion for her mother ; so that she asked
no more than to act as the humble
hand under that directing head. It was
Amos who tacitly rebelled. When a boy
in school he virtually gave up talking,
and thereafter opened his lips only when
some practical exigency was to be filled.
But once did he vouchsafe a reason for
that eccentricity. It was in his fifteenth
year, as aunt Ann remembered well, when
the minister had called ; and Amos, in
response to some remark about his hope
of salvation, had looked abstractedly out
of the window.

" I 'd be ashamed," announced aunt
Ann, after the minister had gone, —
" Amos, I would be ashamed, if I could
n't open my head to a minister of the
gospel ! "

" If one head 's open permanent in a

house, I guess that fills the bill," said

. Amos-, getting up to seek the woodpile.

" I ain't go in' to interfere with nobody

else 's contract."

His mother looked after him with
gaping lips, and for the space of half
an hour spoke no word.

To-day she saw before her an allur-
ing field of action ; the prospect roused
within her energies never incapable of
responding to a spur.

" My soul, 'Melia ! " she exclaimed,
looking about the kitchen with a domi-
nating eye, " how I should like to git
hold o' this house ! I al'ays did have
a hankerin' that way, an' I don't mind
tellin' ye. You could change it all round
complete."

" It 's a good house," said Amelia
evasively, taking quick, even stitches,
but listening hungrily to the voice of
outside temptation. It seemed to con-
firm all the long-suppressed ambitions of
her own heart.

" You 're left well on 't," continued
aunt Ann, her shrewd blue eyes taking
on a speculative look. " I 'm glad you
sold the stock. A woman never under-
takes man's work but she comes out the

412

A Second Marriage.

little eend o' the horn. The house is
enough, if you keep it nice. Now,
you 've got that money laid away, an'
all he left you besides. You could live
in the village, if you was a mind to."

A deep flush struck suddenly into
Amelia's cheek. She thought of Salt-
ash and Laurie Morse.

" I don't want to live in the village,"
she said sharply, thus reproving her own
errant mind. " I like my home."

" Law, yes, of course ye do," replied
aunt Ann easily, returning to her knit-
ting. " I was only spec'latin'. The land,
'Melia, what you doin' of ? Repairin' an
old coat ? "

Amelia bent lower over her sewing.
" 'T was his," she answered in a voice
almost inaudible. " I put a patch on it
last night by lamplight, and when day-
time come I found it was purple. So
I 'm takin' it off, and puttin' on a black
one to match the stuff."

" Goin' to give it away ? "

" No, I ain't," returned Amelia, again
with that sharp, remonstrant note in her
voice. " What makes you think I 'd do
such a thing as that ? "

" Law, I did n't mean no harm. You
said you was repairin' on 't, — that 's all."

Amelia was ashamed of her momenta-
ry outbreak. She looked up and smiled
sunnily.

"Well, I suppose it is foolish," she
owned, — " too foolish to tell. But I Ve
been settin' all his clothes in order to
lay 'em aside at last. I kind o' like to
do it."

Aunt Ann wagged her head, and ran
a knitting-needle up under her cap on a
voyage of discovery.

" You think so now," she said wisely,
" but you '11 see some fcime it 's better
by fur to give 'em away while ye can.
The time never '11 come when it 's any
easier. My soul, 'Melia, how I should
like to git up into your chambers ! It 'B
six year now sence I 've seen 'em."

Amelia laid down her work and con-
sidered the possibility.

"I don't know how in the world I
could h'ist you up there," she remarked,
from an evident background of hospita-
ble good will.

" H'ist me up ? I guess you could
n't ! You 'd need a tackle an' falls.
Amos has had to come to draggin' me
round by degrees, an' I don't go off the
lower floor. Be them chambers jest the
same, 'Melia ? "

" Oh yes, they 're just the same.
Everything is. You know he did n't
like changes."

" Blue spread on the west room bed ? "

"Yes."

"Spinnin'-wheels out in the shed cham-
ber where his gran'mother Hooper kep'
'em ? "

" Yes."

" Say, 'Melia, do you s'pose that little
still 's up attic he used to have such a
royal good time with, makin' essences ? "

Amelia's eyes filled suddenly with hot,
unmanageable tears.

" Yes," she said ; " we used it only
two summers ago. I come across it yes-
terday. Seemed as if I could smell the
peppermint I brought in for him to pick
over. He was too sick to go out much
then."

Aunt Ann had laid down her work
again, and was gazing into vistas of rich
enjoyment.

" I '11 be whipped if I should n't like
to see that little still ! "

" I '11 go up and bring it down after
dinner," said Amelia soberly, folding her
work and taking off her thimble. " I 'd
just as soon as not."

All through the dinner hour aunt Ann
kept up an inspiring stream of question
and reminiscence.

" You be a good cook, 'Melia, an' no
mistake," she remarked, breaking her
brown hot biscuit. " This your same
kind o' bread, made without yeast ? "

" Yes," answered Amelia, pouring the
tea. " I save a mite over from the last
risin'."

Aunt Ann smelled the biscuit critically.

A Second Marriage.

413

" Well, it makes proper nice bread,"
she said, " but seems to me that 's a ter-
rible shif'less way to go about it. How-
ever 'd you happen to git hold on 't ? You
wa'n't never brought up to 't."

"His mother used to make it so.
'T was no great trouble, and 't would
have worried him if I 'd changed."

When the lavender - sprigged china
had been washed and the hearth swept
up, the room fell into its aspect of af-
ternoon repose. The cat, after another
serious ablution, sprang up into a chair
drawn close to the fireplace, and coiled
herself symmetrically on the faded
patchwork cushion. Amelia stroked her
in passing. She liked to see puss appro-
priate that chair ; her purr from it re-
newed the message of domestic content.

"Now," said Amelia, "I'll get the

•tin."

" Bring down anything else that 's an-
cient ! " called aunt Ann. " We 've
pretty much got red o' such things over
t' our house, but I kind o' like to see
'em."

When Amelia returned, she staggered
under a miscellaneous burden : the still,
some old swifts for winding yarn, and a
pair of wool-cards.

" I don't believe you know so much
about cardin' wool as I do," she said in
some triumph, regarding the cards with
the saddened gaze of one who recalls an
occupation never to be resumed. " You
see you dropped all such work when new
things come in. I kept right on because
he wanted me to."

Aunt Ann was abundantly interested
and amused.

" Well, now, if ever ! " she repeated
over and over again. " If this don't
carry me back ! Seems if I could hear
the wheel hummin' an' gramma Balch
steppin' 'back an' forth as stiddy as a
clock. It 's been a good while sence
I 've thought o' such old days."

"If it's old days you want" — be-
gan Amelia, and she sped upstairs with
a new light of resolution in her eyes.

It was a long time before she returned,
— so long that aunt Ann exhausted the
still, and turned again to her thrifty
knitting. Then there came a bumping
noise on the stairs, and Amelia's shuf-
fling tread.

" What under the sun be you doin'
of ? " called her aunt, listening, with
her head on one side. " Don't you fall,
'Melia ! Whatever 't is, I can't help ye."

But the stairway door yielded to pres-
sure from within : and first a rim of
wood appeared, and then Amelia, scar-
let and breathless, staggering under a
spinning-wheel.

" Forever ! " ejaculated aunt Ann,
making one futile effort to rise, like
some cumbersome fowl whose wings are
clipped. " My land alive ! you '11 break
a blood-vessel, an' then where '11 ye be ? "

Amelia triumphantly drew the wheel
to the middle of the floor, and then blew
upon her dusty hands and smoothed her
'tumbled hair. She took off her apron
and wiped the wheel with it rather tender-
ly, as if an ordinary duster would not do.

" There ! " she said. " Here 's some
rolls right here in the bedroom. I card-
ed them myself, but I never expected to
spin any more."

She adjusted a roll to the spindle,
and, quite forgetting aunt Ann, began
stepping back and forth in a rhythmi-
cal march of feminine service The low
hum of her spinning filled the air, and
she seemed to be wrapped about by an
-atmosphere of remoteness and memory.
Even aunt Ann was impressed by it ;
and once, beginning to speak, she looked
at Amelia's face and stopped. The purr-
ing silence continued, lulling all lesser
energies to sleep, until Amelia, pausing to
adjust her thread, found her mood broken
by actual stillness, and gazed about her
like one awakened from dreams.

" There ! " she said, recalling herself.
"Ain't that a good smooth thread? I 've
sold lots of yarn. They ask for it in
Sudleigh."

" 'T is so ! " confirmed aunt Ann cor-

414

A Second Marriage.

dially. "An' you 've al'ays dyed it your-
self, too ! "

" Yes, a good blue ; sometimes tea-
color. There, now, you can't say you
ain't heard a spinnin'-wheel once more ! "

Amelia moved the wheel to the side
of the room, and went gravely back to
her chair. Her energy had fled, leaving
her hushed and tremulous. But not for
that did aunt Ann relinquish her quest
for the betterment of the domestic world.
Her tongue clicked the faster as Amelia's
halted. She put away her work alto-
gether, and sat, with wagging head and
eloquent hands, still holding forth on the
changes which might be wrought in the
house : a bay window here, a sofa there,
new chairs, tables, and furnishings. Ame-
lia's mind swam in a sea of green rep,
and she found herself looking up from
time to time at her mellowed four walls
to see if they sparkled in desirable yet
somewhat terrifying gilt paper.

At four o'clock, when Amos swung into
the yard with the oxen, she was remorse-
fully conscious of heaving a sigh of re-
lief ; and she bade him in to the cup of tea
ready for him by the fire with a sympa-
thetic sense that too little was made of
Amos, and that perhaps only she, at that
moment, understood his habitual frame
of mind. He drank his tea in silence,
the while aunt Ann, with much relish,
consumed doughnuts and cheese, having
spread a wide handkerchief in her lap
to catch the crumbs. Amelia talked rap-
idly, always to her, thus averting a ver-
bal avalanche from Amos, who never va-
ried in his role of automaton. But she
was not to succeed. At the very moment
of parting, aunt Ann, enthroned in her
chair, with a clogging stick under the
rockers, called a halt just as the oxen
gave their tremulous preparatory heave.

" Amos ! " cried she. "I '11 be whipped
if you 've spoke one word to 'Melia this
livelong day ! If you ain't ashamed, I
be ! If you can't speak, I can ! "

Amos paused, with his habitual resig-
nation to circumstances, but Amelia sped

forward and clapped him cordially on
the arm ; with the other hand she dealt
one of the oxen a futile blow.

" Huddup, Bright ! " she called, with
a swift, smiling look at Amos. Even
in kindness she would not do him the
wrong of an unnecessary word. " Good-
by, aunt Ann ! Come again ! "

Amos turned half about, the goad over
his shoulder. His dull-seeming eyes had
opened to a gleam of human feeling, be-
traying how bright and keen they were.
Some hidden spring had been touched,
though only they would tell its story.
Amelia thought it was gratitude. And
then aunt Ann, nodding her farewells in
assured contentment with herself and all
the world, was drawn slowly out of the
yard.

When Amelia went indoors and
warmed her chilled hands at the fire,
the silence seemed to her benignant.
What was loneliness before had miracu-
lously translated itself into peace. That
worldly voice, strangely clothing her own
longings with form and substance, had
been stilled ; only the clock, rich in the
tranquillity of age, ticked on, and the cat
stretched herself and curled up again.
Amelia sat down in the waning light and
took a last stitch in her work ; she looked
the coat over critically with an artistic
satisfaction, and then hung it behind the
door in its accustomed place, where it
had remained undisturbed now for many
months. She ate soberly and sparingly
of her early supper, and then, leaving the
lamp on a side - table, where it brought
out great shadows in the room, she took
a little cricket and sat down by the fire.
There she had mused many an evening
which seemed to her less dull than the
general course of her former life, while
her husband occupied the hearthside
chair and told her stories of the war.
He had a childlike clearness and sim-
plicity of speech and a self - forgetful
habit of reminiscence. The war was the
war to him, not a theatre for boastful
individual action; but Amelia remem-

A Second Marriage.

415

bered now that he had seemed to hold
heroic proportions in relation to that im-
mortal past. One could hardly bring
heroism into the potato • field and the
cow-house ; but after this lapse of time
it began to dawn upon her that the
man who had fought at Gettysburg and
the man who marked out for her the
narrow rut of an unchanging existence
were one and the same. And as if
the moment had come for an expected
event, she heard again the jangling of
bells without, and the old vivid color
rushed into her cheeks, reddened before
by the fire-shine. It was as though the
other night had been a rehearsal, and as
if now she knew what was coming. Yet
she only clasped her hands more tightly
about her knees and waited, the while
her heart hurried its time. The knocker
fell twice with a resonant clang. She did
not move. It beat again the more insist;
ently. Then the heavy outer door was
pushed open, and Laurie Morse came in,
looking exactly as she knew he would
look : half angry, wholly excited, and
dowered with the beauty of youth re-
called. He took off his cap and stood be-
fore her.

" Why did n't you come ? " he asked
imperatively. " Why did n't you let me
in ? "

The old wave of irresponsible joy rose
in her at his presence ; yet it was now
not so much a part of her real self as
a delight in some influence which might
prove foreign to her. She answered him,
as she was always impelled to do, dra-
matically, as if he gave her the cue, call-
ing for words which might be her sincere
expression, and might not.

" If you wanted it enough, you could
get in," she said perversely, with an
alluring coquetry in her mien. " The
door was Unfastened."

" I did want to enough," he responded.
A new light came into his eyes. He
held out his hands toward her. "Get
up off that cricket ! " he commanded.
" Come here ! "

Amelia rose with a swift, feminine
motion, but she stepped backward, one
hand upon her heart. She thought its
beating could be heard.

" It ain't Saturday," she whispered.

" No, it ain't. But I could n't wait.
You knew I could n't. You knew I 'd
come to-night."

The added years had had their effect
on him ; possibly, too, there had been
growing up in him the strength of a long
patience. He was not an heroic type of
man ; but, noting the sudden wrinkles in
his face and the firmness of his mouth,
Amelia conceived a swift respect for him
which she had never felt in the days of
their youth.

" Am I goin' to stay," he asked stern-
ly, " or shall I go home ? "

As if in dramatic accord with his
words, the bells jangled loudly at the
gate. Should he go or stay ?

"-I suppose," said Amelia faintly,
11 you 're goin' to stay."

Laurie laid down his cap and pulled
off his coat. He looked about impa-
tiently, and then, moving toward the
nail by the door, he lifted the coat to
place it over that other one hanging
there. Amelia had watched him ab-
sently, thinking only, with a hungry an-
ticipation, how much she had needed
him ; but as the garment touched her
husband's, the real woman burst through
the husk of her outer self and came to
life with an intensity that was pain. She
sprang forward.

" No ! no ! " she cried, the words
ringing wildly in her own ears. " No !
no ! don't you hang it there ! Don't
you ! don't you ! " She swept him
aside, and laid her hands upon the old
patched garment on the nail. It was
as if they blessed it, and as if they de-
fended it also. Her eyes burned with
the horror of witnessing some irrevoca-
ble deed.

Laurie stepped back in pure surprise.
" No, of course not," said he. " I '11
put it on a chair. Why, what 's the

416

A Second Marriage.

matter, Milly ? I guess you 're nervous.
Come back to the fire. Here, sit down
where you were, and let 's talk."

The cat, roused by a commotion which
was insulting to her egotism, jumped
down from the cushion, stretched into a
fine curve, and made a silhouette of her-
self in a corner of the hearth. Amelia,
a little ashamed, and not very well un-
derstanding what it was all about, came
back, with shaking limbs, and dropped
upon the settle, striving now to remem-
ber the conventionalities of saner living.
Laurie was a kind man. At this mo-
ment, he thought only of reassuring her.
He drew forward the chair left vacant
by the cat and beat up the cushion.

" There," said he, " I '11 take this, and
we '11 talk."

Amelia recovered herself with a spring.
She came up straight and tall, a conclud-
ed resolution in every muscle. She laid
a hand upon his arm.

" Don't you sit there ! " said she.
" Don't you ! "

" Why, Amelia ! " he ejaculated, in a
vain perplexity. " Why, Milly ! "

She moved the chair back out of his
grasp, and turned to him again.

" I understand it now," she went on
rapidly. " I know just what I feel and
think, and I thank my God it ain't too
late. Don't you see I can't bear to have
your clothes hang where his belong ?
Don't you see 't would kill me to have
you sit in his chair ? When I find puss
there, it 's a comfort. If 't was you —
I don't know but I might do you a mis-
chief ! " Her voice sank in awe of her-
self and her own capacity for passionate
emotion.

Laurie Morse had much swift under-
standing of the human heart. His own
nature partook of the feminine, and he
shared its intuitions and its fears.

" I never should lay that up against
you, Milly," he said kindly. " But we
would n't have these things. You 'd come
to Saltash with me, and we 'd furnish all
new."

"Not have these things ! " called Ame-
lia, with a ringing note of dismay, —
s" not have these things he set by as he
did his life ! Why, what do you think
I 'm made of, after fifteen years ? What
did / think I was made of, even to
guess I could? You don't know what
women are like, Laurie Morse, — you
don't know ! "

She broke down in piteous weeping.
Even then it seemed to her that it would
be good to find herself comforted with
warm human sympathy ; but not a
thought of its possibility remained in her
mind. She saw the boundaries beyond
which she must not pass. Though the
desert were arid on this side, it was her
desert, and there in her tent must she
abide. She began speaking again be-
tween sobbing breaths : —

" I did have a dull life. I used up
all my young days doin' the same things
over and over, when I wanted somethin'
different. It was dull ; but if I could have
it all over again, I 'd work my fingers to
the bone. I don't know how it would
have been if you and I 'd come together
then, and had it all as we planned ; but
now I 'm a different woman. I can't
any more go back than you could turn
Sudleigh River and coax it to run uphill.
I don't know whether 't was meant my
life should make me a different woman ;
but I am different, and such as I am,
I 'm his woman. Yes, till I die, till I 'm
laid in the ground 'longside of him ! "
Her voice had an assured ring of tri-
umph, as if she were taking again an in-
dissoluble marriage oath.

Laurie had grown very pale. There
were forlorn hollows under his eyes ;
now he looked twice his age.

" I did n't suppose you kept a place for
me," he said, with an unconscious dignity.
" That would n't have been right, and
him alive. And I did n't wait for dead
men's shoes. But somehow I thought
there was something between you and
me that could n't be outlived."

Amelia looked at him with a frank

A Second Marriage.

417

sweetness which transfigured her face
into spiritual beauty.

" I thought so, too," she answered, with
that simplicity ever attending' our ap-
proximation to the truth. " I never once
said it to myself ; but all this year, 'way
down in my heart, I knew you 'd come
back. And I wanted you to come. I
guess I 'd got it all planned out how we 'd
make up for what we 'd lost, and build
up a new life. But, so far as I go, I
guess I did n't lose by what I 've lived
through. I guess I gained somethin' I 'd
sooner give up my life than even lose
the memory of."

So absorbed was she in her own spi-
ritual inheritance that she quite forgot
his pain. She gazed past him with an
unseeing look ; and, striving to meet and
recall it, he faced the vision of their di-
vided lives. To-morrow Amelia would
remember his loss and mourn over it
with maternal pangs ; to-night she was
oblivious of all but her own. Great hu-
man experiences are costly things ; they
demand sacrifice not only of ourselves
but of those who are near us. The room
was intolerable to Laurie. He took his
hat and coat and hurried out. Amelia
heard the dragging door closed behind
him. She realized, with the numbness
born of supreme emotion, that he was
putting on his coat outside in the cold ;
and she did not mind. The bells stirred,
and went clanging away. Then she drew

a long breath, and bowed her head on
her hands in an acquiescence that was
like prayer.

It seemed a long time to Amelia, be-
fore she awoke again to temporal things.
She rose, smiling, to her feet, and looked
about her as if her eyes caressed every
corner of the homely room. She picked
up puss in a round, comfortable ball
and carried her back to the hearthside
chair ; there she stroked her until her
touchy ladyship had settled down again
to purring content. Then Amelia, still
smiling, and with an absent look, as if
her mind wandered through lovely pos-
sibilities of a sort which can never be
undone, drew forth the spinning-wheel
and fitted a roll to the spindle. She
began stepping back and forth as if she
moved to the measure of an unheard song,
and the pleasant hum of her spinning
broke delicately upon the ear. It seemed
to, waken all the room into new vibra-
tions of life. The clock ticked with an
assured peace, as if knowing it marked
eternal hours. The flames waved soft-
ly upward without their former crackle
and sheen ; and the moving shadows
were gentle and rhythmic ones come to
keep the soul company. Amelia felt her
thread lovingly.

" I guess I '11 dye it blue," she said,
with a tenderness great enough to com-
pass inanimate things. " He always set
by blue, did n't he, puss ? "

Alice Brown.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 479.

418

In Quest of a Shadow.

IN QUEST OF A SHADOW: AN s ASTRONOMICAL EXPERIENCE

IN JAPAN.

BEARS, the barbarous Ainu, the Im-
perial Agricultural College at Sapporo,
and the fine harbor of Hakodate, where
the men-of-war of various nationalities
are apt to take refuge from the summer
heats of Yokohama, — these comprise
practically everything that the average
traveler in the Mikado's empire connects
with the great northern island of Yezo.
Indeed, few of the Japanese themselves
know much of this island, with its in-
tensely cold winters, its deep snows, and
its general life, so different from the plea-
sure-loving, semi-tropical existence of the
lower provinces. A missionary may be
encountered here and there in southern
Yezo, and still more rarely, perhaps, a
foreign or Japanese ethnologist or natu-
ralist makes his somewhat difficult inves-
tigations around Volcano Bay or along
the southern coast. But the island is
largely an unknown region. It is one of
the few places in a supercivilized world
where primitive nature prevails, where
rude aborigines still pursue their unmo-
lested way, and where many hundred
miles of trackless forest await the first
step from an outer civilization.

Across this island the slender shadow
of the sun's total eclipse rushed in its
swift passage over the earth in August of
last year. Toward localities of the very
existence of which few had been aware,
scientific men turned, so soon as the
track of anticipated darkness was found
to lie along those unexplored shores ; and
for three years the meteorological condi-
tions in the provinces of Kitami, Kushi-
ro, and Nemuro had been the subject
of careful investigation by the Imperial
Weather Service, at the request of an
American astronomer.

Japan is emphatically a country of
moisture and decorative cloud-effects, of
soft warmth and fitful sunshine. Yet in

its remote northern regions the astrono-
mical conditions were more favorable,
and the observations in July and August
of 1893, 1894, and 1895 showed the
chances of clear skies to be equal to the
chance of clouded skies. And so it fell
out that a scientific expedition from
Massachusetts and another from France
wended their way in July of 1896 toward
this remote portion of the globe, and
threw their flags for the first time to
breezes blowing straight to Yezo from
the island of Saghalien, over the tossing
waves of the sea of Okhotsk.

An overland journey to Esashi, the ob-
jective point in Kitami province, would
have been impossible, involving the trans-
portation of several tons of apparatus
by packhorse over roadless mountains,
through unexplored forests, and across
bridgeless rivers ; but the Japanese gov-
ernment, with characteristically generous
courtesy, ordered the detail of a steam-
ship especially to convey the American
expedition from Yokohama to whatever
point it might select for the observing-
station ; giving free transportation to its
members and instruments, and affording
every facility for the successful comple-
tion of its mission.

Early in July, 1896, an American set-
tlement sprang up in the midst of a great-
ly surprised little fishing-hamlet. Tele-
grams from the central government to
the chief ruler of the island, and from him
to the local authorities, placed practically
the entire resources of the region at our
disposal. Guards and interpreters, a tel-
egraph operator who understood English,
an empty schoolhouse as headquarters,
a tract of land adjoining for setting up
instruments, and every intelligent Japa-
nese resident as willing assistant so far
as possible, were the pleasant outcome of
kindliness in high places.

In Quest of a Shadow.

419

Esashi itself has a few characteristic
Japanese features — tea - houses, whose
little attendant maids were quite as dain-
tily dressed as those in the far south ;
while a gnarled tree-trunk formed the
street-lamp pillar just outside my win-
dow, — a picturesque corner decoration.
Strolling pilgrim beggars in dingy white
solicited alms. Attempts were made at
temple festivals, where, instead of the
gorgeous floats of Kyoto, the devotees,
supposably riding in grandeur, were real-
ly walking amid artificial cherry blos-
soms, in little floorless in closures under
canopies, simulating rolling cars, — a pa-
thetic deception deceiving nobody ; and
more secular festivals occurred, when
booths were erected and plays were per-
formed. As no other foreign lady had
ever visited Esashi, curiosity was even
more active than is usual in remote Jap-
anese villages. Children, young people
of both sexes, and even a few withered
grandparents formed a procession when
I walked abroad, and three ecstatic little
boys marched close at my side blowing
tin trumpets. Truly I had never before
made so triumphant a progress. The
crowds were chiefly Japanese, but on the
outskirts lurked a few of the shy and
" hairy " Ainu, who had come to this
metropolis from a neighboring village,
the men distinguishable at any distance
by their bushy black hair and enormous
beards, the women tattooed in imitation
of their lords.

The most picturesque spot in Esashi
was a small Shinto temple with a neatly
kept graveled courtyard and two hand-
some torii, one of fine granite. The
ministering priest, an odd-looking Jap-
anese with a sparse beard and an indif-
ferent expression, was often to be seen
watering various handsome plants grow-
ing in vases around the temple. Near
by, a little lighthouse rose abruptly from
the rocks of the shore, in which every
evening a student - lamp was dutifully
lighted. The narrow platform around
the summit, reached by an open outside

ladder, was the point where I was to draw
the long and faint streamers of the coro-
na during the precious two minutes and
forty seconds of totality on August 9th.

Just beyond our eclipse camp, Pro-
fessor Deslandres, of Paris, had located
his expedition, with a fine collection of
spectroscopes for attacking coronal pro-
blems ; and in the' offing lay a French
man-of-war to carry away the instru-
ments and members of his expedition
after the eclipse should have come and
gone. Out in the scrub bamboo, per-
haps half a mile from the village, Pro-
fessor Terao had established his party
from the Imperial University J and our
own instruments — twenty telescopes and
spectroscopes, all attached to one great
central polar axis and operated by elec-
tricity — were daily becoming more per-
fectly adjusted for the eclipse. In leav-
ing the south we had apparently left the
region of low -lying fogs and constant
cloud. Here the sunsets were clear and
yellow like autumnal skies in New Eng-
land, the nights cool after hot and bril-
liant days. One long storm had been
discouraging, but afterward the air was
clearer and quieter.

Nothing could have exceeded the in-
terest and courtesy of the leading inhab-
itants. The mayor, or " chief officer,"
even gave orders that on eclipse day no
fires were to be lighted anywhere in town.
No chance smoke should be suffered to
make the air thick or unsteady. All
cooking should be done the day before,
or else only the hibachi-.wiih its glowing
charcoal could be used ; and if dry wea-
ther had prevailed, the streets were all
to be cafef ully watered against the risk
of rising dust.

Early in the morning, just as the sun
was rising, and sleep had been effectual-
ly banished by the awkward waltzes of
the crows on the shingled roof over our
heads, was the favorite time for official
calls. A knock preceded the immediate
entrance of our interpreter with members
of the Board of Education and govern-

420

In Quest of a Shadow.

ment officials who had come to Esashi
to see the eclipse and to assist in dedi-
cating a new schoolhouse. So with ante-
breakfast coffee prepared by our smiling
cook, and gifts of the interesting fossils
and jasper of the region from them, these
occasions could not fail to be mutually
gratifying.

We received these visitors in the office
or headquarters of the chief of the expe-
dition. Around the walls, on convenient
shelves, were eyepieces, lenses, electrical
appliances, a few books, object-glasses
in their shining -brass holders, levels, a
transit, photographic plates, and other
valuable paraphernalia of an astrono-
mical expedition. During one of these
impromptu receptions at five in the morn-
ing, the mayor, glancing about the apart-
ment, gave utterance to a long and elab-
orate speech, duly accompanied by low
bows and the most friendly smiles. It
must have lost much of its grace in trans-
lation, but it seemed to be to the effect
that on those shelves the children in for-
mer days had been wont to keep their
shoes. He hoped a sort of reflex action
from the wonderful objects now filling
the same space might extend to every
child whose straw or wooden clogs had
once occupied it, giving them something
of the scientific and devoted spirit that
animated the famous men who had come
so far for a sublime celestial spectacle.

On Friday the 7th no callers arrived ;
it rained heavily. The next day, too,
no one came through the storm. But in
the evening a glorious sunset filled the
sky ; the clouds broke into shreds of pink
and salmon and lavender against a yel-
low background, and all the g\iests of
distinction in the village, with the mayor
and the leading citizens, came in together.
Elaborate speeches were made again,
wherein they said that while it rained for
two days their hearts had failed them ;
they could not bear to look at all the fine
apparatus and the extensive preparations,
with the prospect of cloud on Sunday.
But now, in the face of the sunset glory,

they came joyfully, with congratulations
from all the fishermen, who knew the
signs of the sky ; and with hopeful por-
tents from a book of prophecy, and a
local oracle just interrogated at a neigh-
boring shrine. In truth, everything pro-
mised well. Stars enough came out in
the evening for testing the instruments,
and hearts more contented slept than
awoke once again to the sound of rain.

The nerve - tension of that Sunday
morning was beyond what one would of-
ten be able to endure. Shower succeed-
ed sunshine, cloud followed blue sky,
northwest wind supplanted a damp breeze
from the south full of scudding vapor.
The hours rolled on toward two o'clock
and "first contact." The chief astro-
nomer kept calmly at work, giving final
directions to each person for every in-
strument, keeping each of the multitudi-
nous details in mind, with a philosophy
as imperturbable as if the skies had been
unchangingly clear, and cloudless totali-
ty were a celestial certainty. The vaga-
ries of the western horizon, the moods of
the wind, and the prevailing drift of cir-
rus and cumulus had no further charm.
Time was too precious. It remained for
the unofficial member of the party to feel
the alternations of hope and despair.

At one o'clock almost half the sky was
blue ; two o'clock, and the moon had al-
ready bitten a small piece from the bright
disk of the sun, slightly obscured by a
drifting vapor ; half after two all the
people of the town were ranged along the
fence about our inclosure, looking once in
a while at the narrowing crescent of the
sun, but generally at the instruments,
the sober faces in curious contrast to
the sooty decorations made by looking
through the wrong side of smoked glass.
And still the drifting vapor passed, —
sometimes so thin as to be hardly percep-
tible, often heavy, but constantly chang-
ing.

Then perceptible darkness began to
creep onward. Everything grew quiet.
The black moon was stealing her silent

In Quest of a Shadow.

421

way over the sun, until the crescent grew
thin and wan. The Ainu suppose an
eclipse to be the fainting or dying of the
sun, and they whisk drops of water from
sacred god-sticks toward him, as they do
in the face of a fainting person. But no
one spoke.

Just before totality, to occur at two
minutes after three o'clock, I went over
to the little lighthouse, taking up my ap-
pointed station on the summit, an ideal
vantage-ground for a spectacle beyond
anything else I ever witnessed. Grayer
and grayer grew the day, narrower and
narrower the crescent of shining sun-
light. The sea faded to leaden nothing-
ness. Armies of crows which had pre-
tended entire indifference, fighting and
flapping as usual on gables and flag-poles
with unabated fervor, finally succumbed,
and flew off with heavy haste to the pine
forest on the mountain side. The French
man - of - war disappeared in gloom, the
junks blended in colorlessness ; but grass
and verdure suddenly turned strangely,
vividly yellow-green.

It was a moment of appalling suspense ;
something was being waited for, the very
air was portentous. The flocks of cir-
cling sea-gulls disappeared with strange
cries. One white butterfly fluttered by,
vaguely.

Then an instantaneous darkness leaped
upon the world. Unearthly night envel-
oped all things. With an indescribable
outflashing at the same second, the co-
rona burst forth in wonderful radiance.
But dimly seen through thinly drifting
cloud, it was nevertheless beautiful, a
celestial flame beyond description. Si-
multaneously the whole northwestern sky
was instantly flooded with a lurid and
startlingly brilliant orange, across which
floated clouds slightly darker, like flecks
of liquid flame, while the west and south-
west gleamed in shining lemon-yellow.
It was not like a sunset ; it was too
sombre and terrible.

Still the pale circle of coronal light
glowed peacefully, while Nature held her

breath for the next stage in the amazing
spectacle. • It might well have been the
prelude to the shriveling and disappear-
ing of the whole world. Absolute silence
reigned. No human being spoke. No
bird twittered. Even the sighing of the
surf breathed into silence ; not a ripple
stirred the leaden sea. One human be-
ing seemed so small, so helpless, so slight
a part of all the mystery and weirdness.

It might have been hours, for time
seemed annihilated ; and yet when the
tiniest possible globule of sunlight, like
a drop, a pin-hole, a needle-shaft, reap-
peared, the fair corona and all the color
in sky and cloud flashed from sight, and
a natural aspect of stormy twilight filled
all the wide spaces of the day. Then
the two minutes and a half in memory
seemed but a few seconds, — like a
breath, a tale that is told.

The fine detail of the corona was lost
iri the thick sky, but its brilliance must
have been unusual to show so plainly
through cloud ; and it was remarkably
flattened at the solar poles, and extend-
ed equatorially, thus indicating to the
astronomer new lines of research for
eclipses in the future. A few photo-
graphs of the corona were taken, — too
misty through vapors for much subse-
quent scientific study. One or two hand-
drawings give its general outline well ;
and a most interesting experiment seems
to indicate the presence of Roentgen
radiations in the corona, — singularly
enough, since they appear to be absent
in sunlight.

But the invention, the perfect working,
and the manifest advantage of an auto-
matic system of celestial photography,
operated electrically, by which twenty
telescopes can be manipulated by one ob-
server and his assistant, and between four
and five hundred coronal photographs
secured in two or three minutes, was the
most practical result of the expedition,
only hindered from its fullest success by
cloud at the critical moment.

Just after totality, a telegram came

422

A Man and the Sea.

from the astronomer royal of England,
far away on the southeastern coast :
" Thick clouds. Nothing done."

Nature knows how to be cruel, —
though it may be mere indifference. But
until, in his search for the unknown, man
learns to circumvent clouds, I must still
feel that she keeps the advantage. On
that Sunday afternoon, the sun, emerging
from the partial eclipse, set cheerfully in
a clear sky ; the next morning dawned
cloudless and sparkling.

The astronomer must keep his hope
perennial. The heavens remain, and sun
and moon still pursue their steady cycle.
In celestial spaces shadows cannot fail to
fall, and the solid earth must now and
then intercept them. In January of 1898,
India will be darkened ; in 1900, our own
Southern States ; in 1901, Sumatra and
Celebes will be the scientific Mecca for
six wonderful minutes of totality. Some-
where the shadow will be caught, bene-
ficently falling through unclouded skies.
Mabel Loomls Todd.

A MAN AND THE SEA.

ON the great shiny plain of the At-
lantic, hushed and passive as though rest-
ing after the gale, the dismasted, storm-
stricken hull of a vessel rolled sickishly
from side to side in the trough of the
sluggish swells. Her decks, previously a
tar-lined stretch of boards shadowed by
the sails above, now lay desolate beneath
the sun, strewn with broken bits of plank-
ing from the shattered deck-house and
covered with a meshwork of tangled ropes
and spars. The after-part of the star-
board gunwale had been washed away,
leaving the deck in that section open to
the sea ; and facing the gap, propped up
against the jagged stump of the mam-
mast, sat a man.

There had been six of them in all when
the vessel cleared from Rio Janeiro.
Five the sea had already taken. This
one had yet to wait. He was a large
man, well along in middle age. His face
was dark, heavy-featured, almost hard ;
with a bold, self-contained look about the
black eyes that showed him to be a man
determined to have his own way in all
things, and accustomed to dominate over
his fellow men. But a falling yard-arm
had broken his leg, and he remembered,
with a half -cynical smile on his pain-
drawn lips, how, when the gale was

screeching and seething about him, he
had seen the fifth man sweep down the
deck in the swash of the boarding sea,
hurled straight through that gap in the
gunwale ; and how he had sat there pow-
erless even to cast the poor devil a rope.

So all through the morning of the
calm he gazed stupidly out over the illim-
itable heaving level of the sea to where
the blue dome of the heavens bent down
to the sun-white water, drawing at the
imagined meeting the curved and delu-
sive line of the horizon. He seldom
moved, for the pain in his leg was less
intense when he kept very still ; but he
knew the sea was the same behind him,
and over the bows, and over the stern
the same.

Now and again he heard a strange
bumping, and felt the shocks tremble
through the hull. At first he thought it
some hindrance in the ceaseless clank-
ing of the wheel-gear ; then it occurred to
him it was the end of the mainmast, held
close to the vessel by the ratlines, thump-
ing against her quarter. After that he
waited for the shocks. But they came
irregularly. When two of them followed
each other in quick succession it startled
him ; when a longer spell of quiet inter-
vened, he thought he must snatch up the

A Man and the Sea.

423

great spar from the water and smash
it against the planking. He reasoned
against it. The thirst and heat, he told
himself, were drying him up, and it was
only natural that the spar should pound.
His teeth came together hard for a min-
ute ; then he grew calmer, and waited no
more for the shocks.

The morning passed slowly away.
The sun, almost directly overhead now,
shone blazing from the sky and softened
the tar in the decking, so that the man
could poke shallow holes in the black lines
with his stubby finger. Then a blotch of
cloud crept up from behind the edge of
sea before him, wafted along in an up-
per draft of air. It grew larger as it
approached, changing in form. Finally
it reached the sun and cast its shadow
over the deck. The man breathed deep
in the cool it afforded, thankful for the
respite from the stifling heat. The rag-
ged end of the cloud, however, was draw-
ing near on the water. It came to the
vessel, drifting in silence over the litter
of boards and ropes. Just one more
breath in the cool. He must have it.
Instinctively he stretched out his hands as
if he could hold the line back. But the
cloud above was moving fast, the shadow
moved with it, and as the man inhaled
he sucked into his aching throat the
warm, dry air of the sunshine.

A whimpering cry broke from his lips,
and in sheer desperation at his helpless-
ness he picked up the end of a board
and hurled it into the sea. A slight
splash, and the circle of little waves
scampered outward over the water. Lar-
ger and larger grew the arch of the
circle, the little waves less distinct. The
man watched the wrinkles intently, —
watched them until they disappeared.
But what had become of them ? Had
they quietly sunk back again into the
ocean, or were they still spreading, some-
where outside the range of sight, running
toward the distant horizon, and beyond?

The sun sank lower in the west, and
at last dropped into the sea. A great

red daub of varying color lingered in the
sky, which simmered in reflection on the
water and streaked the glaring surface
prettily with pink. Thus the water ap-
peared to the eye, in the sunset. Below,
unconscious of sunset, storm, or calm, the
unknown depths of the ocean lay hidden
in ominous mystery.

The swells had quieted down. The
spar must have drifted from under the
vessel's quarter, for the bumping had
ceased. Only the uneasy squeaking of
the helm and the splashing chuckle of
the water on the sides of the hull broke
upon the silence of the evening.

As the still night came on, the man
watched the dim horizon narrow in to
vanish in the black of the water along-
side, and saw the multitude of stars grow
in the heavens. Then after a little while
he fell into a turbulent sleep, whilst the
huge night hung thick about him.

He awoke some hours later with the
pain in his leg. And there before him,
as if suspended from a star, a chain of
bright red lights ran down obliquely to
the sea. He rubbed his eyes wondering-
ly, but the lights remained hanging bril-
liant against the blackness of the sky.
He remembered how a former shipmate
of his, in mid - ocean, had seen lights
along the shore before turning insane,
and the fear of madness choked his
lungs. A nameless something was creep-
ing stealthily upon him ; in from the sea,
squirming along the deck, and sliding
down the stump of spar at his back.
Not a sound now disturbed the stillness.
The large man, unmindful of his broken
leg, cowered before it. He tried to crawl
away. But on came the thing, noiseless
and slimy, like the closing in of the fog.
He could almost feel it touch him. Then
of a sudden the well-known bump of the
mast-end, with its vibrating shock, shat-
tered the strain, and he fell backward
upon the deck with a groan.

The pounding continued, less frequent,
still irregular ; but now in the dark it
came as a friendly companionship to the

424

Men and Letters.

man. Each time the spar struck the quar- v
ter he smiled contentedly to himself ;
each time it waited longer than usual he
became afraid lest it had slipped away.

After a while the dawn appeared in
the east and widened rapidly over the
sky. Every moment it grew lighter. The
stars above paled out and disappeared ;
the gray and misty sea stretched below.
The spar all the time had been thump-
ing at the planking. He noticed that the
vessel, when she rolled, seemed clumsy
and awkward in the movement, and he
heard the slopping of the water inside.
As the morning broke clear the vessel
sank lower and lower.

So the end of it all was near. He
tried to think, — tried to collect his
senses and find out what the sinking
meant. It came to him that as he had
been a swimmer since his childhood he
would not drown at once ; that he would
be left behind on that vast plain of sea.
It would not be long, for his broken
leg would soon exhaust him, but while it
lasted the great sky and indefinite ocean
would be worse than the dark and the
crawling thing of madness. And another

fear, that of being alone in his universe,
rushed upon him, and rolling to where
a rope lay, made fast to a belaying-pin
at the gunwale, he tied the end hastily
about his waist.

He stopped suddenly with his hand
upon the knot, gazing fixedly over the
stern. The fear was still upon him, but
a certain quiet had come over him in
which he was made to realize that he
was afraid. Again, as on the day before,
when the pounding of the mast-end was
torturing him, his teeth clicked sharply
together. He began tugging at the knot
to unloosen it, trembling lest he should
not free himself in time. As the rope fell
from about his waist he dragged himself
up until he stood on one foot, leaning
against the battered gunwale, — a man
alone beneath the morning light, staring
desperately over the vastness of the space
before him.

Then the hull staggered and plunged
bow first. A green wall of water poured
over the gunwale with a clinging chill,
throwing him to the deck, and the suc-
tion of the sinking vessel dragged him
down.

Guy H. Scull.

MEN AND LETTERS.

MRS. OLIPHANT.

MARGARET OLIPHANT WILSON OLI-
PHANT, who died at Wimbledon on the
25th of June, was in many respects the
most remarkable woman of our time. No
other woman of any time, indeed, has ever
written both so much and so well. For
nearly half a century, from her twenty-
first year to her seventieth, her invention
never flagged, nor her industry, nor her
rt ady command of pure and fitting Eng-
lish ; while that which was undoubtedly
the highest quality of her mind, and
hardly less a moral than an intellectual

one, her deep insight into human nature
and sympathetic divination of human
motive, seemed to grow in strength and
gentle assurance as the long, laborious
years went by. It was to this quality
that her success as a story-teller and
her yet more striking success, in some
instances, as a biographer was mainly
due. She was naturally more analytic
than dramatic, but knew where her own
weakness lay, and her fine literary con-
science led her to fortify herself exactly
there ; so that the best of her tales are
scarcely more remarkable as character-
studies than for ingenuity of plot and

Men and Letters.

425

liveliness of action. She had that which
is so rare among women, even clever
ones, that it is often summarily denied
them all, — spontaneous and abundant
humor ; a humor not dry and sarcastic,
as that of her nation is apt to be (for
Mrs. Oliphant was a loyal Scotchwoman),
and still less having any sub-flavor of
bitterness or acidia, but broad, genial,
sunshiny, a quality which, more than any
other human endowment, helps its pos-
sessor to see human things in their true
proportions and relations, their large
natural masses of light and shade.

Her works were so numerous — about
a hundred volumes in all, of fiction, bio-
graphy, history, and criticism — that one
is compelled in a brief notice like this to
regard them in classes rather than indi-
vidually. Her novels are almost all sto-
ries of modern English or Scottish life ;
that life of which the setting is so mellow
and harmonious, the class-distinctions so
picturesque, the historic background so
deep, and the soil so prolific of strong
character-types that the artist with a good
eye and a moderately well-trained hand
works easily at its representation and un-
der specially favorable conditions. " No
wonder the English water - colors are
good," we say,, or used to say while they
were still the height of artistic fashion ;
" all England' is a water-color."

Mrs. Oliphant will probably be thought
to have touched the height of her crea-
tive and dramatic power in the Chroni-
cles of Carlingford, stories of the quiet,
decorous, and yet concentrated life of an
old-fashioned English provincial town,
in several of which the same characters
reappear. In their manner of treatment,
midway between the demure convention-
alism and half-unconscious drolleries of
Miss Austen and the labored intellectu-
ality and excessive research of the more
imposing George Eliot, they seem to me
among the soundest, sweetest, fairest
fruits we have of the unforced feminine
intelligence. Mrs. Oliphant was on the
summit of her own life and in the ripe-

ness of her. power when she wrote these
charming tales ; and to the same rich
years between thirty-five and forty belong
also the most moving of her admirable
biographies, the Life of Edward Irving
and the remarkably brilliant series of
literary studies first published in Black-
wood's Magazine and afterward collected
under the title of Historical Sketches of
the Reign of George II. The chapter on
Queen Caroline,, which I have not seen,
it must be confessed, for more years than
I care to number, remains in my memory
as something very near perfection in that
style of portraiture.

Mrs. Oliphant was for many years a
member of the regular corps of able
and accomplished but always anonymous
contributors to Maga, and many of her
best stories first appeared in the ever
welcome pages of the fine old Edinburgh
periodical. The name of her novels is
legion, and their merits, upon the whole,
are wonderfully even, though a few de-
tach themselves from the rest, as excel-
ling in the mingled humor and pathos
of their situations, in a well-prepared cli-
max of interest, or in the irresistible effect
of a never obtruded moral. Such are
The Story of Valentine and his Brother,
In Trust, The Greatest Heiress in Eng-
land, He that Will not when he May,
A House divided against Itself, and, in
later years, Kirsteen, which lacks but
little of the distinction of Stevenson or
the local color of Barrie and his follow-
ers, and The Cuckoo in the Nest. Each
of these titles recalls others, half forgot-
ten in the ungrateful haste of modern
life or the breathless pursuit of modern
publications, until one doubts, after all,
whether one has done more than put on
record a personal bias.

I myself attempted in these pages,
about a dozen years ago, a rather elabo-
rate review of Mrs. Oliphant's work as
it then stood. I was in the main, I be-
lieve, very laudatory ; I dare say imper-
tinently so; but I thought it my duty
discreetly to intimate that so enormous

426

Men and Letters.

a production as hers must needs imply
something of haste and carelessness. Her
inimitably graceful and amiable acknow-
ledgment of my ambitious critique lies
before me, addressed, not to myself, but
to Mr. Aldrich, who was then editing
The Atlantic Monthly : —

" I feel inclined to explain that I don't
really work at the breakneck pace my
kind reviewer supposes, but am, in fact,
very constant, though very leisurely, in
my work, . . . and my faults must be
set down to deficiencies less accidental
than want of time. The occasions, now
and then, when I am hurried are those
on which I usually do my best. ... I
have had a long time to do my work in,
and I always feel inclined to apologize
for having written so much, or, indeed,
sometimes for having written at all. But
I have always tried, though never entire-
ly to my own satisfaction, to do the best
I know."

One can no more doubt the transpar-
ent truth of this than question its beauti-
ful modesty, and one reconsiders, almost
abashed, one's own most confident opin-
ions. If the Life of Edward Irving is
the most thrilling of the half dozen bio-
graphies which all deserve a permanent
place in English literature, both those of
Count Charles de Montalembert and of
Mrs. Oliphant's own erratic but most
interesting kinsman, Laurence Oliphant,
show a larger knowledge of the world
and of men and a more exquisite poise
of judgment, while that of Jeanne d'Arc,
her last effort in the line where she had
so rare a gift, is a model in the way of
patiently amassed and carefully sifted
testimony ; and it is undervalued by cer-
tain pedants merely because the author
firmly declines to advance any rational-
izing theory or hasty explanation of the
mystic and spiritual side of the Maid's
extraordinary career.

Herself, Mrs. Oliphant, had faith in
faith as St. Augustine had love for love.
And this brings us to another group of
writings which are, at least, among the

most original which she produced. The
series called collectively Studies of the
Unseen began, almost twenty years ago,
with the highly imaginative and impres-
sive story of The Beleaguered City, and
closed only last winter by a solemn medi-
tation upon the possibilities of a future
state, which may have been written with
full knowledge that the " last necessity "
was near at hand for the author, and the
great secret very soon to be disclosed.

The Studies of the Unseen can leave
no reader quite indifferent. To some
few, I suppose, they have been almost a
revelation. To others they are specially
touching from the proof they seem to
afford of race instincts and the tem-
peramental proclivity to mysticism and
" second sight " of the long-descended
Scot, awakening and gathering strength
as life declines. All must acknowledge
the immense literary merit of some of
them, the serious and reverent courage,
the candor, the entire absence of any-
thing hysterical or fancifully sentimental
with which the writer's imagination is
disciplined to the most solemn of its pos-
sible uses, and the inevitable unknown
scrutinized and interrogated.

I have spoken above of the essentially
feminine character of Mrs. Oliphant's
great talent, and I return to the point,
for it seems to me full of significance
and, in a certain way, of admonition. I
cannot help thinking that her power of
sustained effort and production, her ex-
ceptional clearness and sanity of spirit,
and the elastic vigor which her faculties
retained for threescore years and ten,
were due most of all to the fact that her
mind was suffered to grow and develop
in freedom ; not compelled into any aca-
demic groove, nor teased to overpass its
native limitations ; that her precious in-
tellectual instincts, in short, were not
smothered and slain in the enforced ser-
vice of an uncertain reason. She was a
lady and a writer of that old school which
gave a better training in some few es-
sentials than all the new colleges, and a

Men and Letters.

427

cachet which their diplomas do not con-
fer. She was highly endowed, but found
scope and use for all her generous gifts
under the antiquated conditions of pri-
vate and domestic life.

She dwelt, indeed, in so dignified a
seclusion that one hesitates even now,
when all is over, to pry into the circum-
stances which she preferred to withhold.
We know that her life was a full as
well as a long one ; rich in affection, but
crowded with care, and that the joy of
excellent achievement was often dimmed,
for her, by shadows of heavy trouble.
She worked always under the pressure
of a tyrannous, if not sordid necessity,
and she worked bravely, with indomi-
table spirit and untiring pains. One by
one her natural props and comforts were
withdrawn, until the death, in 1894, of
her last surviving son left her almost
alone to confront the spectre of incur-
able disease. The hour of evensong had
struck, and the heroically busy pen might
at last be laid aside.

For several years Mrs. Oliphant had
lived at Windsor, where her royal neigh-
bor came to know and have a warm re-
gard for her, and had showed her such
sympathy when her children died as a
mother and a queen may do. Now, at
the very moment of the aged sovereign's
jubilee, amid the bells and salvos and
loyal acclamations which hailed the long-
est and most blameless reign in English
history, the uncrowned queen received
her quiet summons into that far country
which she had so often visited in thought,
and heard, we may hope, over all the
exultant noise abroad, that voice of a yet
more satisfying welcome and surpassing
commendation, "Well done, good and
faithful servant ! "

. Harriet Waters Preston.

CONCERNING A BED WAISTCOAT.

Hero-worship is appropriate only to
youth. With age one becomes cynical, or
indifferent, or perhaps too busy. Either
the sense of the marvelous is dulled, or

one's boys are just entering college and
life is agreeably practical. Marriage
and family cares are good if only for
the reason that they keep a man from
getting bored. But they also stifle his
yearnings after the ideal. They make
hero-worship appear foolish. How can
a man go mooning about when he has
just had a good cup of coffee and a
snatch of what purports to be the news,
while an attractive and well-dressed wo-
man sits opposite him at breakfast-table,
and by her mere presence, to say no-
thing of her wit, compels him to be re-
spectable and to carry a level head ?
The father of a family and husband of
a federated club woman has no business
with hero-worship. Let him leave such
folly to beardless youth.

But if a man has never outgrown the
boy that was in him, or has never mar-
ried, then may he do this thing. He
will be happy himself, and others will be
happy as they consider him. Indeed,
there is something altogether charming
about the personality of him who proves
faithful to his early loves in literature
and art ; who continues a graceful hero-
worship through all the caprices of liter-
ary fortune ; and who, even though his
idol may have been dethroned, sets up a
private shrine at which he pays his de-
votions, unmindful of the crowd which
hurries by on its way to do homage to
strange gods.

Some men are born to be hero-wor-
shipers. The'ophile Gautier is an exam-
ple. If one did not love Gautier for his
wit and his good-nature, one would cer-
tainly love him because he dared to be
sentimental. He displayed an almost
comic excess of emotion at his first meet-
ing with Victor Hugo. Gautier smiles
as he tells the story ; but he tells it ex-
actly, not being afraid of ridicule. He
went to call upon Hugo with his friends
Gerard de Nerval and Pe"trus Borel.
Twice he mounted the staircase leading
to the poet's door. His feet dragged as
if they had been shod with lead instead

428

Men and Letters.

of leather. His heart throbbed ; cold
sweat moistened his brow. As he was
on the point of ringing the bell, an idiotic
terror seized him, and he fled down the
stairs, four steps at a time, GeVard and
Pe*trus after him, shouting with laughter.
But the third attempt was successful.
Gautier saw Victor Hugo — and lived.
The author of Odes et Ballades was just
twenty-eight years old. Youth worshiped
youth in those great days.

Gautier said little during that visit,
but he stared at the poet with all his
might. He explained afterwards that
one may look at gods, kings, pretty wo-
men, and great poets rather more scru-
tinizingly than at other persons, and this
too without annoying them. " We gazed
at Hugo with admiring intensity, but he
did not appear to be inconvenienced."

What brings Gautier especially to mind
is the appearance within a few weeks of
an amusing little volume entitled Le
Romantisme et I'e'diteur Renduel. Its
chief value consists, no doubt, in what
the author, M. Adolphe Jullien, has to
say about Renduel. That noted pub-
lisher must have been a man of unusual
gifts and unusual fortune. He was a
fortunate man because he had the luck
to publish some of the best works of
Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, The*ophile
Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Gdrard de
Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Paul La-
croix ; and he was a gifted man because
he was able successfully to manage his
troop of geniuses, neither quarreling
with them himself nor allowing them
to quarrel overmuch with one another.
Renduel's portrait faces the title-page
of the volume, and there are two por-
traits of him besides. There are fac-
similes of agreements between the great
publisher and his geniuses. There is a
famous caricature of Victor Hugo with
a brow truly monumental. There is a
caricature of Alfred de Musset with a
figure like a Regency dandy, — a figure
which could have been acquired only by
much patience and unremitted tight-

lacing ; also one of Balzac, which shows
that that great novelist's waist-line had
long since disappeared, and that he had
long since ceased to care. What was a
figure to him in comparison with the
flesh-pots of Paris !

One of the best of these pictorial
satires is Roubaud's sketch of Gautier.
It has a teasing quality, it is diabolically
fascinating. It shows how great an art
caricature is in the hands of a master.

But the highest virtue of a good new
book is that it usually sends the reader
back to a good old book. One can hard-
ly spend much time upon Renduel ; he
will remember that Gautier has de-
scribed that period when hero-worship
was in the air, when the sap of a new
life circulated everywhere, and when he
himself was one of many loyal and en-
thusiastic youths who bowed the head at
mention of Victor Hugo's name. The
reader will remember, too, that Gautier
was conspicuous in that band of Roman-
ticists who helped to make Hernani a
success the night of its first presentation.
Gautier believed that to be the great
event of his life. He loved to talk about
it, dream about it, write of it.

There was a world of good fellowship
among the young artists, sculptors, and
poets of that day. They took real plea-
sure in shouting Hosanna to Victor Hugo
and to one another. Even Zola, the
Unsentimental, speaks of ma tristesse as
he reviews that delightful past. He can-
not remember it, to be sure, but he has
read about it. He thinks ill of the pre-
sent as he compares the present with
" those dead years." Writers then be-
longed to a sort of heroic brotherhood.
They went out like soldiers to conquer
their literary liberties. They were kings
of the Paris streets. " But we," says Zola
in a pensive strain, " we live like wolves
each in his hole." I do not know how
true a description this is of modern
French literary society, but it is not dif-
ficult to make one's self think that those
other days were the days of magnificent

Men and Letters.

429

friendships between young men of genius.
It certainly was a more brilliant time
than ours. It was flamboyant, to use
one of Gautier's favorite words.

Youth was responsible for much of the
enthusiasm which obtained among the
champions of artistic liberty. These
young men who did honor to the name
of Hugo were actually young. They re-
joiced in their youth. They flaunted it,
so to speak, in the faces of those who
were without it. Gautier says that young
men of that day differed in one respect
from young men of this day ; modern
young men are generally in the neigh-
borhood of fifty years of age.

Gautier has described his friends and
comrades most felicitously. All were
boys, and all were clever. They were
poor and they were happy. They swore
by Scott and Shakespeare, and they
planned great futures for themselves.

Take for an example Jules Vabre,
who owed his reputation to a certain Es-
say on the Inconvenience of Conven-
iences. You will search the libraries in
vain for this treatise. The author did
not finish it. He did not even commence
it, — only talked about it. Jules Vabre
had a passion for Shakespeare, and want-
ed to translate him. He thought of
Shakespeare by day and dreamed of
Shakespeare by night. He stopped peo-
ple in the street to ask them if they had
read Shakespeare.

He had a curious theory concerning
language. Jules Vabre would not have
said, As a man thinks so is he, but, As a
man drinks so is he. According to Gau-
tier's statement, Vabre maintained the
paradox that the Latin languages needed
to be "watered" (arroser) with wine,
and the Anglo - Saxon languages with
beer. Vabre found that he made ex-
traordinary progress in English upon
stout and extra stout. He went over to
England to get the very atmosphere of
Shakespeare. There he continued for
some time regularly " watering " his
language with English ale, and nourish-

ing his body with English beef. He
would not look at a French newspaper,
nor would he even read a letter from
home. Finally he came back to Paris,
anglicized to his very galoshes. Gautier
says that when they met, Vabre gave
him a " shake hand " almost energetic
enough to pull the arm from the shoulder.
He spoke with so strong an English ac-
cent that it was difficult to understand
him ; Vabre had almost forgotten his
mother tongue. Gautier congratulated
the exile upon his return, and said, " My
dear Jules Vabre, in order to translate
Shakespeare it is now only necessary for
you to learn French."

Gautier laid the foundations of his
great fame by wearing a red waistcoat the
first night of Hernani. All the young
men were fantastic in those days, and
the spirit of carnival was in the whole
Romantic movement. Gautier was more
courageously fantastic than other young
men. His costume was effective, and
the public never forgot him. He says
with humorous resignation : " If you pro-
nounce the name of TheVphile Gautier
before a Philistine who has never read
a line of our works, the Philistine knows
us, and remarks with a satisfied air, ' Oh
yes, the young man with the red waist-
coat and the long hair.' . . . Our poems
are forgotten, but our red waistcoat is re-
membered." Gautier cheerfully grants
that when everything about him has
faded into oblivion this gleam of light
will remain, to distinguish him from lit-
erary contemporaries whose waistcoats
were of soberer hue.

The chapter in his Histoire du Roman-
tisme in which Gautier tells how he went
to the tailor to arrange for the most spec-
tacular feature of his costume is lively
and amusing. He spread out the mag-
nificent piece of cherry-colored satin, and
then unfolded his design for a " pour-
point," like a " Milan cuirass." Says
Gautier, using always his quaint editorial
we, "It has been said that we know a
great many words, but we don't know

430

Men and Letters.

words enough to express the astonishment
of our tailor when we lay before him our
plan for a waistcoat." The man of shears
had doubts as to his customer's sanity.

" Monsieur," he exclaimed, " this is
not the fashion ! "

" It will be the fashion when we have
worn the waistcoat once," was Gautier's
reply. And he declares that he deliv-
ered the answer with a self-possession
worthy of a Brummel or " any other ce-
lebrity of dandyism."

It is no part of this paper to describe
the innocently absurd and good-natured-
ly extravagant things which Gautier and
his companions did, not alone the first
night of Hernani, but at all times and in
all places. They unquestionably saw to
it that Victor Hugo had fair play the
evening of February 25, 1830. The
occasion was a historic one, and they with
their Merovingian hair, their beards,
their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm
helped to make it an unusually lively
and picturesque occasion.

I have quoted a very few of the good
things which one may read in Gautier's
Histoire du Romantisme. The narrative
is one of much sweetness and humor.
It ought to be translated for the benefit
of readers who know Gautier chiefly by
Mademoiselle de Maupin, and that for
reasons among which love of literature
is perhaps the least influential.

It is pleasant to find that Renduel
confirms the popular view of Gautier's
character. M. Jullien says that Ren-
duel never spoke of Gautier but in
praise. " Quel bon garcon ! " he used to
say. " Quel brave co3ur ! " M. Jullien
has naturally no large number of new
facts to give concerning Gautier. But
there are eight or nine letters from Gau-
tier to Renduel which will be read with
pleasure, especially the one in which the
poet says to the publisher, " Heaven pre-
serve you from historical novels, and your
eldest child from the smallpox."

Gautier must have been both gener-
ous and modest. No mere egoist could

have been so faithful in his hero-worship
or so unpretentious in his allusions to
himself. One has only to read the most
superficial accounts of French literature
to learn how universally it is granted
that Gautier had skillful command of
that language to which he was born.
Yet he himself was by no means sure
that he deserved a master's degree. He
quotes one of Goethe's sayings, — a say-
ing in which the great German poet de-
clares that after the practice of many
arts there was but one art in which he
could be said to excel, namely, the art
of writing in German ; in that he was
almost a master. Then Gautier ex-
claims, " Would that we, after so many
years of labor, had become almost a
master of the art of writing in French !
But such ambitions are not for us ! "

Yet they were for him ; and it is a sat-
isfaction to note how invariably he is ac-
counted, by the artists in literature, an
eminent man among many eminent men
in whose touch language was plastic.
Leon H. Vincent.

A MATINEE PERFORMANCE.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the
tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was about
to be performed. For an elderly per-
son like myself the situation was strange
enough. Rows on rows of young girls in
their new spring dresses filled the thea-
tre, — blondes and brunettes, city girls
and suburban girls, with a sprinkling of
country cousins. Hardly a male form
dared to show itself in the orchestra
chairs, and the average age of the whole
audience could scarcely have exceeded
nineteen years. Four " pigtails " de-
pended immediately in front of me, and
at the head of their wearers sat a noble
maiden, a chaperon for the nonce, tall
and beautifully formed, with brows such
as Joan of Arc might have had, — more
robust than Juliet, not quite so passion-
ate, but fit to be the mother of heroes.

How grave the youthful audience was !
I confess that I felt almost like an inter-

Men and Letters.

431

loper at some sacred ceremony. These
girls knew what they were about : they
were drawn hither by Nature herself ;
they knew that the business in hand was
the chief business of their lives. Love
and marriage ! Pedagogues and parents
might prate about books and accomplish-
ments, about music and culture, the art
class and Radcliffe College ; but the own-
er of the shortest pigtail there knew in
her secret heart that Juliet and Juliet's
experience were of more moment to her
than all the learning of the schools. And
she was right. At twenty, and there-
about, the romance of life is duly appre-
ciated ; at twenty-five or thirty, the man,
not the woman, begins to think that the
world has something of more value and
importance in store for him ; but when
he has quaffed the cup of life to the bot-
tom, he realizes that the first taste was
the best.

Up rose the curtain, and disclosed the
Romeo and the Juliet of the occasion.
No need for paint or padding here !
There stood the immortal lovers, young
and beautiful, as Shakespeare himself
might hare imagined them. The audi-
ence gasped simultaneously. What a
voice Juliet had ! — rich, full, young, but
with such a melancholy ring in it that
every word she spoke presaged the end.
Well might she say, —

" O God, I have an ill-divining soul ! "

•

It is a thought precipitate, the court-
ship of Romeo and Juliet, — at least it
seems so to elderly persons who go cau-
tiously about their affairs ; but youth
and Shakespeare know better. The pig-
tails before me exhibited not a quiver of
surprise when Juliet cried to the nurse,
some twenty minutes after she had first
laid eyes on Romeo, —

" Go, ask his name : if he be married,

My grave is like to be my wedding bed."
Then came the balcony scene. You
could have heard the fall of a ribbon,
so still was the theatre. Flushed faces
and parted lips bent toward the stage,

as Juliet's melodious and pathetic voice
spoke those 'exquisite lines : —

" Thou know'st the mask of night is on my

face,

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-
night.

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke : but farewell compli-
ment ! "

A tear quivered in the young chape-
ron's eye as these words dropped like
pearls from Juliet's lips. What better
school for a girl could there be than that
which Shakespeare keeps ? Even Juliet,
with all her youthful passion, in spite of
her scant fourteen years, has a true wo-
man's sense of what is right and fitting.
There are no lines in the whole play more
touching than those with which she takes
leave of Romeo on that first night : —

" Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night ;
ft is too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden ;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say, ' It lightens.' Sweet, good-
night ! "

Between the acts I felt the strange-
ness of my situation most acutely, so
difficult were the questions put to me.
The fact is — I have had no opportunity
to mention it till now — I had been sent
to the theatre as escort for a girl from
the country, no older than Juliet ; a tall,
blue-eyed, flaxen - haired Anglo-Saxon
maiden, — the beauty of a village which
lies among the hills of remote New Eng-
land, fourteen miles from a railroad.
Sad was the havoc wrought in her acute
but untutored mind by the scenic repre-
sentation of Romeo and Juliet. At an
early period in the play, she wisely con-
jectured that " Romeo's folks could n't
get on with Juliet's folks." And it was
easy for me to reply that she was quite
right. But later, after Romeo had been
banished from Verona for killing Tybalt,
what was I to say, when she inquired with
the utmost seriousness, " Was it wrong
for Romeo to kill Tybalt ? " God knows.
Fourteen years of study and thought at

432

Men and Letters.

a German university would not have en-
abled me to answer the question, and
here was I called upon to settle it off-
hand ! The feudal system, chivalry,
the duel, the theory of Honor, and its
relation to ethics and to Christianity, —
a few trifling matters like these had first
to be disposed of before I could pro-
nounce upon Romeo's conduct. I hesi-
tated, and the blue eyes of rustic Ju-
liet beside me dilated with astonishment.
The question was a simple one, — as it
seemed to her ; why could not I, a per-
son, like Friar Laurence, of " long-expe-
rienced time," give it a simple answer ?
At last I replied, with the awkwardness
of conscious ignorance, " I don't know,
but the Prince thought he was wrong."
The answer was not satisfactory, and she
turned away with a sigh, as if for the
first time it occurred to her that perhaps
life was more complex than it appeared
as she had been wont to view it from her
home in North Jay.

As the play progressed and the trage-
dy began to deepen, a kind of awe set-
tled down upon the youthful audience,
now sitting almost in darkness, for the
lights had been extinguished. The pig-
tails within my view hung tense and rigid,
and my young companion frowned, as
she endeavored to follow the working of
Juliet's mind.

There is a beautiful simplicity, an utter
absence of affectation or self-conscious-
ness, in Juliet's declaration of what she
would rather do than be false to Romeo.
An answering fire kindled in the eyes of
the youthful chaperon, and the four pig-
tails in the same row trembled with hor-
ror when the climax was reached in these
lines : —

" Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud ;
Things that, to hear them told, have made

me tremble ;

And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an nnstain'd wife to my sweet love."

But Juliet was capable not only of
courageous action, but of despair ; and

that is the last test of an heroic mind.
The ordinary person cannot endure to
look despair in the face ; he shuffles, en-
deavors to compromise, pretends to him-
self, against his reason, that the end has
not been reached, and takes refuge in
any form of evasion that presents itself.
Not so with Juliet.

" If all else fail, myself have power to die."

Moreover, it was the peculiarity of the
Elizabethan age, — perhaps one should
say, of the age of chivalry, — that any
high and difficult course of conduct pre-
sented itself to the mind of the actor not
merely as a matter of duty, but as a
matter of honor. This identification of
duty with honor gave to conduct an ar-
tistic as well as a moral element, and
invested human speech and act with an
ideal dignity. Thus Juliet exclaimed to
Friar Laurence : —

" Give me some present counsel, or, behold,
'Twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife
Shall play the umpire, arbitrating that
Which the commission of thy years and art
Could to no issue of true honour bring."

There lies the moral of the story. Mer-
cutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet,
all young and vigorous persons, with the
world before them, preferred " true hon-
our " to life. But Juliet had the hardest
part to play. It is probable that Shake-
speare in his modesty never dreamed that
the words which he puts in the mouth of
Montague would come true of himself :

" For I will raise her statue in pure gold ;
That while Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet."

The audience passed demurely out,
after the horrors of the final scene, with
a gentle rustle of silken skirts. Outside,
the sun still rode high in heaven, and
the bells on the electric cars still pro-
faned the air ; but the spell which the
great poet had cast over the witnesses of
the tragedy shut out the light of com-
mon day — even to my elderly percep-
tions — till night had fallen.

MESSRS. CURTIS & CAMERON, Boston, publishers ot the COPLEY PRINTS,
will be glad to send their new Illustrated Christmas Catalogue to any address upon
receipt of six cents in stamps. The above reproduction of Mr. Elihu Vedder's
"Minerva," in the New Library of Congress, is from one of the prints.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
iftaga?ine of Literature, Science, art, anD

VOL. LXXX.— OCTOBER, 1897. — No. CCCCLXXX.

TWO PRINCIPLES IN RECENT AMERICAN FICTION.

NOT very long ago, — some twenty-
five or thirty years, — there reached our
fiction a creative movement that must
be identified as a wave of what is known
in the art of the world as the Feminine
Principle. But what are three essential
characteristics of the Feminine Princi-
ple wherever and whenever it may have
made its appearance as a living influ-
ence in a living literature ? They are
Refinement, Delicacy, Grace. Usually,
and markedly in the case now to be
considered, it will put forth three other
characteristics, closely akin to the fore-
going and strictly deducible from them :
Smallness, Rarity, Tact.

Each of these two groups of charac-
teristics applies to the Feminine Princi-
ple in determining the material it shall
choose no less than the methods it shall
employ upon the material it may have
chosen. Thus, whenever a writer has
passed under its control, and, being so
controlled, begins to look over human
life for the particular portion of truth
that he shall lay hold upon as the pecul-
iar property of his art, he invariably
selects the things that have been sub-
dued by refinement, the things that have
been moulded by delicacy, the things that
invite by grace, the things that secrete
some essence of the rare, the things that
exhibit the faultless circumspection to-
ward all the demeanors of the world
that make up the supremely feminine
quality of tact. And when, having

chosen any or all of these things, he
thereupon looks within himself for some
particular method to which they shall
be matecj during transformation from
the loose materials of life to the con-
structive materials of his art, he inva-
riably and most reasonably selects the
method that answers to them as their
natural counterpart : that is, to things
refined he will apply only a method of
refinement, to things delicate a method
of delicacy ; he will treat with grace the
things that are graceful, he will invest
things minute with their due minute-
ness ; what is rare he will not despoil of
its rarity, in what is tactful he will pre-
serve the fitting tact. The Feminine
Principle, then, is twofold in its operation
and significance : it is a law of selec-
tion, it is a law of treatment. Like the
real Woman it is, if it once be allowed
to have its will, it must have its way.

Having thus reached our literature as
a tidal wave might reach the coast of
our country, it proceeded to spread
abroad this law of choice and this law
of method. It brought certain Ameri-
can novelists and short-story writers of
that day under its domination, and they,
being thus dominated, at once began to
lay sympathetic fingers on certain re-
fined fibres of our civilization, and to
weave therefrom astonishingly refined
fabrics ; they sought the coverts where
some of the more delicate elements of our
national life escaped the lidless eye of
publicity, and paid their delicate tributes
to these ; on the clumsy canvases of our

434

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

tumultuous democracy they watched to
see where some solitary being or group
of beings described lines of living grace,
and with grace they detached these and
transferred them to the enduring can-
vases of letters ; they found themselves
impelled to look for the minute things
of our humanity, and having gathered
these, to polish them, carve them, com-
pose them into minute structures with
minutest elaboration ; they were inex-
orably driven across wide fields of the
obvious in order to reach some strip of
territory that would yield the rare ; and
while doing all things else, they never
omitted from the scope of their explora-
tions those priceless veins of gold from
which human nature perpetually adorns
itself for the mere comity of living.

When this law of selection and this law
of method had been rigorously enforced
for some years, the result declared itself
in a body of American novels and short
stories, — quite definite, quite new, quite
unlike anything we had produced before,
and to us of quite inestimable value. In
the main and for a while the world of
critics and the world of readers were sur-
prised, were delighted, were grateful, —
though perhaps never grateful enough.
Here, beyond question, was a literature
of the imagination that embodied certain
fixed, indispensable elements of our com-
mon humanity ; here was a literature that
embodied certain fresh and characteristic
elements of our New World ways ; and
here, whether concerning itself about the
one or about the other, here was a liter-
ature that held itself fast, and that held
us fast, to those primary standards of
good taste, good thought, and good breed-
ing which we can no more afford to do
without in our novels than we can afford
to do without them in our lives.

But for the reason that the work of the
Feminine Principle is always definite in
any art, and was very definite here, it was
of necessity so far partial, so far inade-
quate and disappointing, when viewed as
a full portrayal of American civilization ;

and very soon, therefore, this department
of our fiction began to encounter, and
more and more to provoke, that tenjper
of dissatisfaction with which the human
spirit must in the end regard every ex-
pression of itself that is not complete.
Any complete expression of itself in any
art the human spirit can of course never
and nowhere have. The very law of
its own existence is the law of constant
growth and change, so that what is most
true of it to-day will be most false to-
morrow. But though doomed never to
attain anything like complete expression,
it is none the less doomed forever to strive
toward it ; and thus its entire history
throughout the centuries behind us is a
long restless passage from one art to an-
other art, and within each art from one
phase of that art to another phase of that
art, — always disappointed of entire self-
realization, yet always hoping for the full
peace of the millennial ages.

This universal, this eternal, this per-
fectly natural temper of dissatisfaction,
having turned upon the operations of
the Feminine Principle in our fiction
and upon the works it had produced, be-
gan to discredit them for what they
were never meant to be, to upbraid them
for the lack of what they could not pos-
sibly contain. Refinement, it objected,
is a good quality as far as it goes ; but
if you left out of American fiction every-
thing that was not refined, you left out
most of the things of value that were
truly American. Delicacy, — yes ; but
there was something better than delica-
cy, — Strength. Grace, — true ; yet of
how little value are things graceful, in
the United States, as compared with a
thousand and one that are clumsy or
misshapen, but that are vital ! The lit-
tle things of our human nature and of
our national society, — are they to be
preferred to the large things? As for
the rare, give us rather the daily bread
of the indispensable. And regarding the
matter of tact, — that ceaseless state of
being on guard, of holding one's self in

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

435

and holding one's self back, and of see-
ing that not a drop overflows the artistic
banks, — have done with it and away
with it ! Let us try for a while the lit-
erary virtues and the literary materials
of less self-consciousness, of larger self-
abandonment, and thus impart to our fic-
tion the free, the uncaring, the tremen-
dous fling and swing that are the very
genius of our time and spirit.

Dropping for a moment the subject
of this plea and of this reaction, and re-
turning to the further consideration of
the work of the Feminine Principle, the
writer is of the opinion that it wrought
for American literature at least one ser-
vice to be universally acknowledged as
of the highest value. Out of those same
characteristics, — out of all that delicacy,
that refinement, that grace, that minute
and patient and loving toil over little
things, that sense of rarity and that sense
of tact, — out of all these things valued
as standards and as ends, the Feminine
Principle became for us, as a nation of
imaginative writers, the beneficent Mo-
ther of Good Prose.

Before it began its work, the literature
of our fiction was well - nigh barren of
names that stood accepted both at home
and abroad as those of masters of style.
There was Irving, there was Hawthorne,
there was Poe : who, with the assurance
that his claim would everywhere pass un-
challenged, could add to these a fourth ?
More significant still, there prevailed no
universal either conscious or unconscious
recognition of style as an attainment vi-
tally inseparable from the writing of any
acceptable American short story or any
acceptable American novel. Now, on
the contrary, it is not too much to say that
whether or not any new master of style
has been produced by this movement,
there is absolutely no abiding-place in the
literature of our country for an author of
indifferent prose. All the most success-
ful writers of our day, whether viewed
together as a generation, or viewed apart
as the adherents of especial schools, have

at least this in common : that they have
carried their work to its high and uni-
form plane of excellence mainly by rea-
son of the high and uniform excellence
of their workmanship. And if there is
anywhere in this land any youthful as-
pirant who may be tripping it joyously,
carelessly, from afar toward our nation-
al Temple of Letters; let him understand
in advance that if he will not consent to
learn first of all things the sacred use
of language as masterfully as a painter
learns the sacred use of brush and pig-
ment, or a sculptor the sacred use of chisel
and marble, or a violinist the sacred use
of strings, there will be no possible en-
trance, no possible audience, for him. He
may, indeed, be listened to on the outside
of the walls by many loiterers, merely
for what he has to say and for the caprice
or amusement of the hour ; but he will
not be greatly respected even by these,
and very soon he will most surely be for-
gotten.

There can be no doubt that this great
change, this widespread development
among us of the purely artistic appre-
ciation of literature in its form and fin-
ish, has been directly and indirectly the
work of the Feminine Principle ; and
while, therefore, some may choose to de-
cry the substance of the whole move-
ment on account of its polishing and
adornment of the little things of life, —
little ideas, little emotions, little states
of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes
and denouements, little comedies and
tragedies played quite through or not
quite played through by little men and
women on the little stages of little play-
houses, — it is but fair, it is but reason-
able, to remember that this same Age
of the Carved Cherry-Stones brought in
the taste and the patience to do so much
with so little, and to do it with such high
art ; introduced into the literature of our
impatient Western world of to-day the
conscientiousness of the Oriental and of
the mediaeval craftsman, firing us to fin-
ish the work behind the altar as the work

436

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

before the altar, the point of deepest
shadow as the point of highest light ; in
a word, established among us the reign
— may it be long and prosperous ! — the
reign and the national era of adequate
prose. However wisely or unwisely,
therefore, the scoffer may repudiate the
material embodied in this department of
our fiction, he will at least not deny that
it is well written. It is a shapely, highly
wrought drinking - cup, although to one
the cup may be empty, although another
may not care for its wine. Or if the
historian of our literature should here-
after come severely to regard it as but a
thin moss which served rather to hide the
deep rocks of American character, still
he will never be able to deny that the
moss was a natural, a living verdure, and
that it grew thriftily and fitly wherever
it was planted.

II.

No undue conclusion should be drawn
from all this as to the passing of the
Feminine Principle ; fortunately, it still
remains an active tendency in one part
of our fiction. But the contention here
put forth is that, as respects the choice
and the handling of material, this prin-
ciple has for the time ceased to be the
governing influence to which the mind
of the nation once looked most curiously
and expectantly for the further develop-
ment of American letters. Some thirty
years ago it entered upon its solitary
course. It has described its path, it has
closed its orbit. It may continue to trav-
erse this curve, it may describe again and
again this beautiful orbit, but the eye re-
fuses to follow it with the same zest of
discovery or with the same accession of
fascinating knowledge.

Meantime, a novelty has made its ap-
pearance among us, and the curiosity, the
enthusiasm, and the faith of the nation
stand ready to be transferred to it. This
stranger, this new favorite, approaches
us under the guise of what is known in
the art of the world as the Masculine
Principle.

Before any attempt can be made to
trace this obscure presence and as yet
most dubious influence in our recent fic-
tion, it will be well to state as clearly
as brevity will permit what are three es-
sential characteristics of the Masculine
Principle, and what are the three rela-
tions any one of which it may sustain to
the Feminine.

These characteristics are Virility as op-
posed to Refinement, Strength as opposed
to Delicacy, Massiveness as opposed to
Grace. Usually during the course of its
operations three other qualities become
disengaged, closely akin to those just
mentioned and strictly deducible from
them: Largeness as opposed to Small-
ness, Obviousness as opposed to Rarity,
Primary or Instinctive Action as opposed
to Tact, which is always Secondary or Pre-
meditated Action : and all these things
are true of this principle whether it be
regarded as a law determining the choice
of material, or as a law determining the
choice of method. Thus, whenever and
wherever a writer in any age or civili-
zation has been brought under the sway
of the Masculine Principle, whether by
virtue of his own temperament, or by
race or environment, or by any or all of
these combined, and being thus swayed
looks out upon life for the things where-
from he shall fabricate his peculiar cre-
ations, always and primarily he chooses
the Virile, — those life-holding, life-giv-
ing forces of the universe which scatter
abroad and perpetuate the forms of lead-
ership and of mastery ; the Strong, —
those types that represent both the dy-
namic builders and the static pillars by
whose hands are fashioned and on whose
shoulders rest the foundations and roofs
of things ; the Massive, — the bulk and
weight of which, not the fibre and shape,
are the properties he demands and must
consider ; the Large, — in the survey and
grasp of which the imagination may real-
ize at once the triumph of its capabilities
and the pathos of its limitations ; the Ob-
vious, — those outer and inner elements

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

437

of experience that beleaguer sadly our
common lot, or that attend as a gay pa-
geant upon the issues of our destiny ; the
Instinctive, — those primitive impulses,
actions, passions, that lie always close to
the beating of the heart and the action of
the muscles. Having chosen any or all
of these things for his materials, as re-
gards his methods he will need only to
match worthily kind with kind.

Such, then, being the main character-
istics of the Masculine Principle, what
are the three relations any one of which
it may possibly hold to the Feminine ?
First, it may make its appearance in
any literature — for let the illustration
be narrowed to literature — before the
Feminine, and be followed by the Femi-
nine as a reaction pledged to accomplish
what it did not ; secondly, it may make
its appearance after the Feminine, be-
coming itself, in this case, the reaction
pledged to accomplish what the Femi-
nine did not ; or thirdly, it may make
its appearance at the same time as the
Feminine, and the two may either work
against each other as enemies, or work
with each other as friends.

The last situation is most seldom real-
ized. Most rare, most happy the land,
happy the people, in which it has been
witnessed. To one race alone on our
planet has it been given to celebrate the
ideal nuptials of this mighty pair, and
afterwards to dwell surrounded by the
offspring of their perfectly blended pow-
ers, — the Greeks. In Greek art alone,
in its sculpture, in its literature, virili-
ty and refinement achieved and main-
tained a perfect balance. There strength
was made to gain by reason of delicacy,
and delicacy to be founded on strength.
There the massive could be graceful, and
the graceful could be massive. There
the obvious was so ennobled that it be-
came the rare, and the rare was revealed
in lineaments so essential to the human
soul that it was hailed as the obvious.
There the smallest things of life were so
justly valued that they grew large to the

eye and heart, and the largest things —
even the divinest images of the imagina-
tion— were brought down to the plane
of the little and became the every-day
treasures of the humble. There instinct
and tact, all the primary elements of life
and all the secondary elements of culture,
— the low earth of. humanity and the
high heaven of thought, — were present-
ed each in its due relation, as naturally as
the ground in a landscape stretches itself
under the sky, or the sky stretches itself
above the ground.

Outside the Greeks, no race has ever
known what it is to celebrate a perfect
union of the Masculine and Feminine
Principles in its art. Without a doubt
some races have always been preponder-
antly masculine in their genius, and their
masterpieces have been widely and deep-
ly stamped with the evidences of this
bias ; other races have as surely been
rather feminine in their genius, with a
prevalence of corresponding aesthetic ex-
pression. In yet others, whose history
lies revealed as drawn unbrokenly across
many centuries, these two mighty tenden-
cies exhibit themselves on a vast scale
of operation, as by turn succeeding each
other, and as accomplishing, either alone
or together, but a partial work.

Of this kind is the imperfect art his-
tory of our own Anglo-Saxon race ; for
be its limitations what they may, it has
never proposed to itself any lesser end
than to conquer and occupy the whole
realm of mortal art for the heritage of
its spirit, as it has resolved to win the en-
tire earth for the measure of its strength.
It has never thus far achieved such a
triumph in any art but one, nor in the
case of any man but one. On the throne
of that universe which was Shakespeare's
mind these two august principles sat side
by side as coequal sovereigns, entitled
each to rule over half a realm, but con-
senting both to rule each half conjointly.
His art came thus to include all that is
most feminine in woman, all that is most
masculine in man. For the first time in

438

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race,
and possibly for the last, perfect virility
and perfect refinement, strength and de-
licacy, massiveness and grace, things the
vastest and things the most minute, things
close to the common eye and things drawn
for an instant into the remotest ether
of human ken, the deepest bases of life
and the loftiest insubstantial pinnacles of
cloudlike fancy, — each of these old pairs
of artistic opposites, which were lashed
together in friendliness, but have so lived
at variance, laid aside their enmity, and
wrought each for the good of the other,
and each for the good of all.

Shakespeare excepted, what man or
woman can be named, in the imaginative
literature of the race, whose genius has
not been masculine rather than femi-
nine, or feminine rather than masculine,
and whose writings do not fall mainly
on the one side or the other side of this
line of vital classification ? Is it not true,
likewise, of the definite movements or
schools or ages in the history of our racial
literature, that each represents the tem-
porary supremacy of one of these princi-
ples rather than the other, or the clash
and inadequate expression of both ?

in.

In the opinion of the writer, then, the
peculiar state of American fiction at the
present time is due to the fact that it is
passing through one of those intervals
which separate the departing supremacy
of one principle from the approaching
supremacy of the other.

During such intervals — such inter-
regna of both critical authority and crea-
tive obedience — there are two phases of
activity by which the change of dynasty
is always effected. The first of these
is a destructive work : it sums up those
evidences of impatience, displeasure, and
revolt — all the injustice and unkindness
— with which the latest ruler is over-
turned and banished. The second is a
constructive work : it sums up those signs
and preparations of approval with which

the coming sovereign is to be received.
If our existing literary situation is closely
analyzed, it will be found to comprise
exactly these two components, these two
phases of activity.

As to the first, reference has already
been made to a general and ever grow-
ing temper of dissatisfaction with the
operations of the Feminine Principle in
our fiction and with the works it has pro-
duced. If we state in its most radical
form the substance of the protest, we con-
ceive it to be as follows : —

"You American novelists and short-
story writers, as the result of following
the leadership of this principle, have suc-
ceeded in producing a literature of what
kind ? Of effeminacy, of decadence. For
in the main it is a literature of the over-
civilized, the ultra - refined, the hyper-
fastidious ; of the fragile, the trivial, the
rarefied, the bloodless. All your little
comedies and tragedies, played through
or not played through by little actors
and actresses on the little stages of little
playhouses, — what do they amount to in
the end ? What kind of men are these,
what kind of women ? Gather this en-
tire body of your fiction into one library,
and what adequate relation does it bear
in its totality to the drama of the Anglo-
Saxon race in its civilization of the New
World ? Or what satisfying relation to
the human soul, which more and more
looks to literature for delight and guid-
ance in its present, for wisdom and con-
solation as to its past, for the fresh wings
of hope and faith on which to breast
evermore its viewless future ?

" And meantime what has become of
the greater things of our land, of our
race, of our humanity ? The greater ac-
tions and passions and ideals, the greater
comedies and tragedies played by greater
men and women on the greater stages of
the greater playhouses of the imagina-
tion ? Henceforth, for a while, at least,
we will work to embody these in the liter-
ature of our country, our race, our de-
stiny."

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

439

Such is the protest : he who has not
heard it of late in some form, in many
forms, has had no ear for the decisive
voices of his time. But what is this
protest, with its ingratitude, its unfair-
ness, its forgetf ulness of genuine services
otherwise rendered, — what is this new
cry but the old, old cry with which the
human spirit has time and again turned
away from the Feminine Principle, hav-
ing tried it and found it wanting, and
taken up the Masculine Principle which
promises it completer self-liberation ?

If, on the other hand, we consider the
remaining phase of our transitional ac-
tivity, that second component of our liter-
ary situation which is made up of pledges
of allegiance to the new tendency, we
shall come upon something more signifi-
cant still ; for we shall discover that these
pledges already lie embodied in our latest
fiction itself. .

Entering upon this subject of our lat-
est fiction as a whole, we shall readily
note that it consists of a certain miscel-
laneous portion, which cannot be said to
lie within any zone of tendency what-
ever ; and this, as foreign to the imme-
diate purpose in hand, may be at once
and finally disregarded. Then there is
a second portion, which continues on and
on under the leadership of the Feminine
Principle ; and this is likewise to be set
aside. But finally there is a third por-
tion, which does lie within a definite zone
of tendency, yet does not fall under the
leadership of the Feminine Principle ;
and it is this that we are now to study,
as containing the germs of our future
development, as exhibiting already the
earliest buds of tendency.

At first glance, it is true, this third por-
tion does not appear to reveal any pre-
valent characteristics or to be susceptible
of classification. It has sprung up quite
naturally and unconsciously in unrelated
parts of the nation as independent cen-
tres ; it continues no artistic traditions ;
it has no common subject matter ; it has
no common form ; it ranges in scope

from a short story to a full-sized novel ;
in method it is either realistic or roman-
tic ; while as to personal leadership, alas,
it is like a flock of sheep without a shep-
herd, a school of pupils without a master.

Upon a second and closer inspection,
however, this part of our fiction does re-
veal a group of characteristics that give
it a certain sameness of kind and defi-
niteness of boundary. For one thing, it
has lost something of the refinement of
the older work. Beyond a doubt it is
less delicate, less graceful. Nor does
it give such heed to little things, fon-
dle them with such patience and loving
toil in order to make sure that they
shall each be exquisitely polished, exqui-
sitely mounted. It is less strenuous in
its quest of the rare, less imperious in
demand for mere quality. Withal, it is
not so finely mannered, either, so held
in and held down, so self-mastered, nor,
as respects its materials, so precise and
unrelaxed in its mastery of these. Fi-
nally, and in consequence, it is not so well
written, the prose of it is not so good
prose.

What do all these things denote in com-
mon if not a distinct falling away from
devotion to the Feminine Principle ?
What but a disposition to value as of less
than prime importance the canons and
standards of the preceding craftsmen?
As respects those canons and standards,
therefore, this newest body of our fiction
is marked by a set of purely negative
characteristics : it shows simply a letting
down, a lessening, in respect to every ar-
tistic virtue that they have been uphold-
ing and magnifying as supreme.

A final and yet closer inspection of
this same part of our literature reveals
a second group of characteristics, not neg-
ative at all, — rather, most positive ; and
it is these that constitute its last differ-
entia, its true distinction. For there is
in it, first of all, more masculinity and
also more passion ; and being at once
more masculine and more passionate, it is
more virile. Then, again, it is resolutely

440

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

working for strength, — for strength as
a quality freshly to be cultivated and
achieved in our literature, freshly to be
enjoyed ; a present need, an everlasting
stand-by. Quite as surely, also, it is bent
upon treating its subjects rather in the
rough natural mass than in graceful de-
tail ; bent upon getting truth, or beauty,
or whatever else may be wanted, from
them as a whole, instead of stretching
each particular atom on a graceful rack
of psychological confession, and bending
the ear close to catch the last faint whis-
pers of its excruciating and moribund
self-consciousness. It is striking out
boldly for larger things, — larger areas
of adventure, larger spaces of history,
with freer movements through both : it
would have the win'gs of a bird in the
air, and not the wings of a bird on a wo-
man's hat. It reveals a disposition to
place its scenery, its companies of players,
and the logic of its dramas, not in rare,
pale, half - lighted, dimly beheld back-
grounds, but nearer to the footlights of
the obvious. And if, finally, it has any
one characteristic more discernible than
another, it is the movement away from
the summits of life downward toward the
bases of life ; from the heights of civili-
zation to the primitive springs of action ;
from the thin-aired regions of conscious-
ness which are ruled over by Tact to
the underworld of unconsciousness where
are situated the mighty workshops, and
where toils on forever the Cyclopean
youth, Instinct.

It is by no means an easy matter, of
course, to trace even thus imperfectly
the evidences of all these things in this
portion of our newest literature ; but cer-
tainly they are there, recognizable as the
earliest buds of development, as a com-
mon growth toward the common light of
a single tendency ; and it is because, in
the opinion of the writer, they do thus
exhibit themselves in this common guise
and do possess this common character,
that he has ventured to gather them to-
gether as the first embodied pledges of

our allegiance to the Masculine Princi-
ple.

If this reasoning be true and this con-
clusion just, then we are fairly in a po-
sition to understand exactly what stage
we have reached in our literary evolu-
tion. There is, first, a miscellaneous por-
tion of our fiction that does not contain
or indicate any tendency at all ; there is
a second portion that continues its de-
velopment under the leadership of the
Feminine Principle ; and there is a third
portion that constitutes our first litera-
ture of reaction, as a rise of another
movement, a Masculine School. From
this point of view, likewise, we should
be in a position to watch henceforth
with clearer understanding the recipro-
cal behavior of these two old artistic an-
tagonists, now encountering each other
among us. Will the one wane apart,
fade out, disappear ? Will the other
wax, become omnipresent, omnipreva-
lent ? Or will they, as sometimes hap-
pens, will they later on haply and happily
blend ? Can it be possible that we are
on the verge of one of those most wide-
minded, peaceful eras of the imagination,
during which it is granted these two prin-
ciples to dwell together in unity, and to
bring forth their doubly endowed chil-
dren ?

Whatever the future may reveal in
this regard, one thing has been made
very clear to us by our present and by
our past: we have never, as a nation,
been able to handle the Masculine Prin-
ciple alone in fiction with the same suc-
cess that we have handled the Feminine ;
and never with so much success as our
kindred across the sea. Our best novels,,
our best short stories, are in the main an
expression of feminine rather than of
masculine genius, and bear the marks of
the one rather than the other. That is,
our consummate and most valued works
of prose imaginative art are such by rea-
son of their refinement, their delicacy,
their grace, their slightness of compass
and texture, their fineness of quality, and

Two Principles in Recent American Fiction.

441

their subtlety of insight joined to exqui-
sitely poised reflection, rather than by the
tremendous vigor, the colossal strength,
the nobler massiveness, the simple big-
ness in everything, the more palpable
truth, and the deeper instinctive energy,
on all which rest both the earliest and
the latest masterpieces of masculine Eng-
lish fiction.

Among American books there may
be found, of course, some novels of un-
doubted masculinity ; but the question is,
To how many such novels can we point
as taking high rank in our literature to
the glory of our art? In how many
memorable instances have we solved the
problem of being at once wholly mascu-
line and thoroughly artistic ?

It may well be, therefore, that we are
now about to be tested, as never in the
past, for our ability to wield with entire
success this mighty principle in its soli-
tary exercise. If so, the latest output of
our masculine fiction does not yet bring
us the comforting assurance that we have
become its masters. For the admission
must in candor be made that, on the score
of art pure and simple, this is below the
level of the feminine literature that lies
just behind it. Furthermore, there can
be no question that sometimes, in seek-
ing to be virile, this literature has merely
become vulgar ; in seeking strength, it
has acquired rather violence and coarse-
ness. On the other hand, a woeful day
it will be for us when the grace of the
work of our predecessors becomes the
tender grace of a day that is dead.

If, then, it should strangely turn out
that we as a nation prove ourselves but
poor artists in the mastery of all those
qualities that underlie the fiction of dis-
tinctive masculinity, there could be no
happier issue imaginable out of our dis-
comfiture than that we should thus be
thrown back upon the qualities of the
feminine, and should be made to recon-
cile and to blend the two principles.

For they are not irreconcilable. In

life there is no antagonism between vi-
rility and refinement, between strength
and delicacy, as any gentleman may
know. There is none between them in
art, as the greatest art of the world will
bear witness. In truth, what better con-
clusion could await this brief paper on
so vast a theme than the actual citation
of a newest piece of literature in which
they should be exhibited as inseparably
inwrought with perfect balance and per-
fect harmony ? The specimen that the
writer ventures to introduce for this pur-
pose is not, indeed, American ; it would
be invidious if it were. Nor is it prose ;
an illustration in prose would be too spa-
cious. But it is all the better for being
poetry, and for being the work of an Eng-
lishman, since he, among all young liv-
ing writers of the Anglo-Saxon race, is
believed to represent, both in his poetry
. and in his prose, the utmost expression of
the Masculine Principle, and to stand to
us in the New World as the authoritative
exponent of its living tendency. But in
this his very latest, probably his noblest
and most enduring poetic achievement,
Mr. Kipling has gone farther than that :
he has interfused the Masculine with the
Feminine ; he has achieved a triumph
through them both and for them both.

A faithful analysis of his remarkable
poem, Recessional, is needed to confirm
this with the force of a demonstration.
It is virile, — nothing that he ever wrote
is more so ; yet is refined, — as little else
that he has ever written is. It is strong,
but it is equally delicate. It is massive
as a whole ; it is in every line just as
graceful. It is large enough to compass
the scope of British empire ; it creates
this immensity by the use of a few small
details. It may be instantly understood
and felt by all men in its obviousness ;
yet it is so rare that he alone of all the
millions of Englishmen could even think
of writing it. The new, vast prayer of
it rises to the Infinite ; but it rises from
the ancient sacrifice of a contrite heart.
James Lane Allen.

442

The French Mastery of Style.

THE FRENCH MASTERY OF STYLE.1

" THE natural bent, the need, the ma-
nia, to influence others is the most salient
trait of French character. . . . Every
people has its mission ; this is the mis-
sion of the French. The most trifling
idea they launch upon Europe is a bat-
tering-ram driven forward by thirty
million men. Ever hungering for suc-
cess and influence, the French would
seem to live only to gratify this craving ;
and inasmuch as a nation cannot have
been given a mission without the means
of fulfilling it, the French have been
given this means in their language, by
which they rule much more effectually
than by their arms, though their arms
have shaken the world." This praise,
possibly the highest the French language
has ever received, cannot be said to ema-
nate from one who was an entire for-
eigner : he was a native of Savoy, and
everybody knows what affection, fre-
quently chiding and captious, the Savoy-
ards, from Vaugelas to Francois Buloz,
have shown toward the French language.
On the other hand, it can hardly be called
the utterance of a Frenchman, coming
as it does from Joseph de Maistre', am-
bassador from his Majesty the King of
Sardinia to his Majesty the Tsar of all
the Russias : and that is why I ven-
ture to quote it. There are things that
modesty forbids us to say ourselves, but
which we have the right to appropriate
when others have said them, especially
when their way of saying them makes
us feel that there is a little jealousy min-
gled with the genuineness of their ad-
miration. This same Joseph de Maistre
writes furthermore : " I recollect having
read formerly a letter of the famous ar-
chitect Christopher Wren, in which he
discusses the right dimensions for a
church. He fixes upon them solely with

1 Author's manuscript translated by Irving
Babbitt.

reference to the carrying power of the
human voice, and he sets the limits be-
yond which the voice for any English
ear becomes inaudible ; ' but,' he says on
this point, ' a French orator would make
himself heard farther away, his pronun-
ciation being firmer and more distinct.' "
And finally, de Maistre adds by way
of comment on this quotation : " What
Wren has said of oral speech appears to
me still truer of that far more penetrat-
ing speech heard in books. The speech
of Frenchmen is always audible farther
away." Let us take his word for it.

What, then, is the reason of this fact ?
It is a question which has seemed to me
worth discussing, now that all the great
American universities are organizing
their " departments of Romance lan-
guages " on a more liberal scale than they,
have done hitherto. If, speaking from
the other side of the Atlantic, I could
give them good reasons for persevering
in this path, I should possibly be render-
ing them a service. For, these reasons
being purely literary, the American uni-
versities would doubtless then grant to
" literature " proper an attention that
several of them seem up to the present
to have reserved entirely for " philolo-
gy." We, for our part, should gain
through coming into closer relations
with these universities, and thereby with
what is best in the American democra-
cy. It is hard to see who in Europe or
America could take exception to this
exchange of kindly offices, at least if it
be true that the French language and
literature possess the distinctive features
which I shall attempt to show.

Let us put aside at the start all
thought of any superiority in French
as a natural organism over other lan-
guages, especially over the other Ro-
mance languages. If our language has
its native points of excellence, other Ian-

The French Mastery of Style.

443

guages have theirs : Italian, for instance,
is sweeter, and Spanish more sonorous.
Sonorousness and sweetness are neither
of them points of excellence which we
can afford to despise in a language ; and
because they are to a certain extent
"physical," they are none the less real
or unusual. A fine voice, too, is only a
fine voice ; and yet how much does it
not contribute to the success of a great
orator. It may even be said almost lit-
erally of Demosthenes and Cicero that
they are the " greatest voices " that have
been heard among men. It must be con-
fessed that the physical properties of the
French language are not at all out of the
common ; and the truth is that, before
turning them to account, most of our
great writers in prose and verse have
had a preliminary struggle to surmount
them.

We must not be led, either, into think-
ing that we 'have had greater -writers
than the English or the Germans. This
would be mere impertinence. If we
could be tempted into believing it, all the
labor of criticism for more than a hun-
dred years would have been thrown away.
Victor Hugo is a great poet, but Goethe
and Shakespeare are great poets also.
Genius has no national preferences.

But what may be truthfully said is
that in France, from the very start, and
especially during the last four hundred
years, everybody has conspired to make
of the French language that instrument
of international exchange and univer-
sal communication which it has become.
Noble ladies, from Marguerite de Valois,
author of the Heptameron, to the Mar-
quise de Rambouillet ; ministers of state,
like the Cardinal de Richelieu ; princes
and kings. Francis I., Charles IX. (the
protector and rival of Ronsard), Louis
XIV., have formed, as it were, part of
a conspiracy which had as its definite
object to gain for French universal ac-
ceptance in place of the classics. The
French Academy was founded with no
other purpose ; its charter attests the

fact, as also its membership, which, hap*
pily, has never been entirely confined to
men of letters. Our writers, in order to
conform to this design, have usually con-
sented to give up a part of their origi-
nality. It has not been enough for them
to understand themselves, or to be un-
derstood by their countrymen and with-
in the limits of their frontiers. They
believed long before Rivarol said it —
in an Essay on the Universal Diffu-
sion of the French Language, a subject
for the best treatment of which the Ber-
lin Academy had offered a prize in
1781 — that " what is not clear is not
French." To achieve this transparent
and radiant clearness, to make some ap-
proach, at least, to this universal diffu-
sion, so that in Germany and England,
in Italy and America, the knowledge of
the French language is a sign of cul-
ture, a mark of education, — to arrive
at these results, I do not deny that they
have been forced to make some sacri-
fices. These, however, I shall choose to
ignore for the present, and I propose
simply to discuss here two or three of the
principal means that these conspirators
of a somewhat unusual kind have taken
to compass their end.

In the first place, for three or four
hundred years back, French writers, and
we the public in common with them, have
treated our language as a work of art.
Let us have a clear understanding of
the meaning of this word " art." The
Greeks in antiquity, the Italians of the
Renaissance, gave an artistic stamp or
character to the commonest utensils, —
to an earthen jar or a tin plate, an am-
phora, a ewer. It is a stamp of a similar
kind that our writers from the time of
Ronsard have tried to give the French
language. They have thought that every
language, apart from the services it ren-
ders in the ordinary usage and every-day
intercourse of life, is capable of receiv-
ing an artistic form, and this form they

444

The French Mastery of /Style.

have desired to bestow upon our own
language. Read with reference to this
point the manifesto of the Ple'iade, The
Defense and Ennoblement of the French
Language by Joachim du Bellay, which
bears the date of 1549, and you will see
that such is throughout not merely its
general spirit, but its special and par-
ticular object. Since then not only have
French prose writers and poets had the
same ambition, but all their readers,
even princes themselves, have encour-
aged it, have made it almost a question
of state ; and the consequence is that no
literary revolution or transformation has
taken place in France which did not
begin by being, knowingly and deliber-
ately, a transformation or a modifica-
tion of the language. This is what Mal-
herbe, after Ronsard and in opposition
to him, desired to do : namely, to give
to the French language a precision and
a clearness of outline, a musical ca-
dence, a harmony of phrase, and finally
a fullness of sense and sound, which
seemed to him to be still lacking in the
work of Ronsard ; and along with Mal-
herbe, by other means, but in a parallel
direction, this was likewise the aim of
the precieuses. The same is true of
Boileau, as well as of Moliere. It was
through language, since it was by the
means of style and the criticism of style,
as is seen in works like the Satires
and the Precieuses Ridicules, that they
brought the art of their time back to the
imitation of nature. Even in our own
days, what was romanticism, what were
realism and naturalism, at the start ?
The answer is always the same : they
were theories of style before being doc-
trines of art ; ways of writing before
being ways of feeling or thinking ; a re-
form of the language and an emancipa-
tion of the vocabulary, the striving after
a greater flexibility of syntax, before it
was known what use would be made of
these conquests.

There is, then, in French, in the meth-
od of handling the language, a continu-

ous artistic tradition. By very different
and sometimes even opposing means, our
writers have desired to please, in the best
sense of the word, — to please themselves
first of all, to please the public, to please
foreigners ; to make of their language a
universal language, analogous in a fash-
ion to the language of music, to that of
sounds or colors ; and as the crowning
triumph to make of a page of Bossuet
or Racine, for instance, a monument of
art, for qualities of the same order as a
statue of Michael Angelo or a painting
of Raphael.

From our great writers, and the cul-
tivated and intelligent readers who are
their natural judges, this concern for art
has spread to the whole race, if indeed it
were not truer to say that it was a mat-
ter of instinct. Who is not familiar with
the phrase, " Dnas res . . . gens Gallica
industriosissime persequitur : rem milita-
rem et argute loqui " ? " Argute loqui,"

— this is to be artistic in one's speech,
and this everybody has been and tries to
be among us ; and nowhere, surely, pos-
sibly not even in Greece, in the Athenian
cafe's, would you come across more " ele-
gant talkers " (beaux parleurs) than in
France : they are to be met with in the
villages ; they are to be found in the work-
shops. Some of them, I am well aware,
are insufferable withal, as for example
the druggist Homais in Madame Bovary,
and again the illustrious Gaudissart in
the Come'die Humaine of Honore" de
Balzac. But what medal is without its
reverse ? If we have so many " elegant
talkers," it is because, in our whole sys-
tem of public education, and even in our
primary schools, this concern for art pre-
vails. The fact is worthy of remark.
What our little children learn in the
schools under the name of orthography

— the word itself, when connected with
its etymology, expresses the idea clearly
enough — is to see in their language a
work of art, since it is to recognize and
enjoy what is well written. It is not
possible, indeed, to fix in the memory

The French Mastery of Style.

445

the outer form of a word, its appearance,
its physiognomy, so as not to confuse it
with any other word, without its exact
meaning being also stamped in the mind.
In this respect, the oddities, or, as we
sometimes call them, the " Chinese puz-
zles " (chinoiserles) of orthography help
to preserve shades of thought. The same
may be said of the peculiarities of syntax.
You will not teach children that Goliath
was a tall man (un homme grand), and
David a great man (un grand homme),
without teaching them at the same time
a number of ideas that are epitomized in
these two ways of placing the adjective.
You will not explain to little Walloons
or to little Picards that a bonnet blanc
is a white cap, and that a blanc bonnet
is a woman, in their patois, without their
deriving some profit even from this pas-
time or playing on words. Need I speak
of the rules of our participles, — those
participles which, as the vaudeville says,
are always getting one into a muddle,1 so
much apparent fancifulness and caprice
there is in their agreements ; and is it
necessary for me to show that the most
delicate analysis of the relations of ideas
is implied in these very rules ? The
whole question here is not whether our
farmers or our workingmen have need of
all this knowledge, whether it would not
be more profitable for them to learn other
things, and whether they might not give
less time to picking up the peculiarities of
orthography or the exceptions of French
grammar. I am not passing judgment ;
I am simply taking cognizance of the
facts, and trying to arrive at an explana-
tion. Whatever qualities, then, are to
be peculiarly admired in French, we may
say without hesitation, are due less to
the language itself, to its original nature,
than to the intensive cultivation which it
has always received at every step of our
educational system, and which, for my
part, I hope it may long continue to re-
ceive.

1 Ces participes avec lesquels, comme dit le
vaudeville, on ne sait jainais quel parti prendre.

Not that .this cultivation may not
have and has not had its dangers, like
those to which " euphuism," "Marinism,"
and " Gongorism " haye, in their time,
exposed English, Italian, and Spanish.
So much importance must not be at-
tached to form as to lead to the sacrifice
of substance ; more than one writer in
French could be named who has fallen
into this mistake, — for it is a mistake.
They are the writers to whom we have
given the name of precieux. How-
ever, before condemning them in a lump
on the authority of Moliere, it is well to
remember that we find in their number
men like Fontenelle, Marivaux, Massil-
lon, and Montesquieu. But it remains
true that to treat a language as a work
of art is to run the risk of seeing in it,
sooner or later, only itself. Its words
take on a mystical value, independent
and entirely apart, as it were, from the
iddas they are meant to convey. " Ex-
amine," said Baudelaire, " this word,"
— any ordinary word. "Is it not of a
glowing vermilion, and is the heavenly
azure as blue as that word ? Look : has
not this word the gentle lustre of the
morning stars, and that one the livid
paleness of the moon ? " And Flaubert
has written : "I recollect that my heart
throbbed violently . . . from looking at
a wall of the Acropolis, a perfectly bare
wall ! . . . The question occurs to me,
then, Cannot a book, quite apart from
what it says, produce the same effect ?
Is there not an intrinsic virtue in the
choiceness of the materials, in the nicety
with which they are put together, in the
polish of the surfaces, in the harmony
of the total effect ? " They both failed
to remember one thing, — which is that
words express ideas before having a
" color " or " virtue " peculiar to them-
selves, and that they are precise and lu-
minous only with the clearness or the
precision of these ideas. But Flaubert
and Baudelaire are consistent with the
principles of their school, and they show
us what a man comes to when he no

446

The French Mastery of Style.

longer sees in language anything more
than a work of art. Like them, he values
words for themselves, for their appear-
ance, for the sound they render, for va-
rious reasons which have nothing to do
with the art of thinking. He detects
genius in the turn of a phrase. Style
becomes something intrinsic and myste-
rious, existing in and for itself. Virtu-
osity, which is only the indifference to
the content of forms, gets possession of
art, makes a plaything of it, perverts it
or corrupts it;. and through the sheer
desire " to write well," one finally comes,
as George Sand pointed out to Flaubert,
to write only for a dozen initiates ; even
they do not always understand one, and
besides, they never admire one for the
reasons one would prefer.

II.

In what way may we avoid this dan-
ger ? Is it possible to point out several
ways, or is there perhaps only one ? In
any case, we can easily define and char-
acterize the one our great writers have
taken, although not always of their own
accord. They have understood, or have
been made to understand, that language,
though a work of art, still continues to
be above all a medium for the communi-
cation of thoughts and feelings, — what
may be called their instrument of ex-
change, their current coin ; and that con-
sequently perfect art cannot be conceived
or sought for apart from those attributes
which are the attributes of thought itself.

In French, as in English or German,
and I presume also in Chinese, both prose
writers and poets have always tended to
make of their art an image or expres-
sion of themselves. It is for this very
reason that they are writers, — because
the things that had been said did not
satisfy them, or because they wished to
say them in another way, or else to say
things that had not been said. Only in
France, the court, " society," criticism,
have reminded them that if they wrote,
it was in order to be understood. From

Ronsard to Victor Hugo, they have had
imposed upon them, as a rule, the two-
fold condition to remain themselves, and
at the same time to talk the language of
everybody. The interest which they had
inspired in a whole people for the things
of literature turned in some sort against
them. Having themselves invited all the
cultivated minds about them to become
judges of art, they were not allowed,
when the fancy came over them later, to
arrogate to themselves the right to be
the sole judges of art. Public opinion,
in return for the admiration and ap-
plause they solicited from it, felt con-
strained to ask of them certain definite
concessions, — concessions which they
consented to make ; and doubtless they
were right in so doing, after all, since
they were thus enabled to give, not only
to French literature, but to the French
language, that social character which it
possesses in so high a degree.

It was in this wise, in fact, that there
found its way into our literature — or if
the reader prefers, into our rhetoric —
that tenet which Buff on summed up at the
end of the classic period in the recom-
mendation never to name things except
by " the most general terms." Those
who have ridiculed this phrase have mis-
understood it ; they have quibbled about
the words ; they have feigned to believe,
and possibly they really have believed,
that the most general terms are the most
abstract, the vaguest, the most colorless,
the opposite of the exact, appropriate,
and special term. Yet it would have
been enough for them to read more care-
fully Buffon himself, and Voltaire, and
Racine, and Moliere, and Bossuet, and
Pascal ! They would then have seen
that the most general terms are the
terms of ordinary usage, those in every-
body's vocabulary, — terms that are in-
telligible without any need of going to
the dictionary, that are not the peculiar
dialect of a trade or the jargon of a
coterie. "If in talking of savages or of
the ancient Franks," Taine writes some-

The French Mastery of Style.

447

where, " I say the ' battle-axe,' every one
understands at once ; if I say the ' tomar
hawk ' or the ' francisca,' a great many
people will fancy I am talking Teutonic
or Iroquois." And this strikes him as
extremely amusing. It is natural that
it should, harboring, as he does, the su-
perstition of " local color " and of the
" technical term." But he is wrong, and
to prove it I need only seven lines of Boi-
leau, from the tenth Satire : —

" Le doux charme pour toi de voir, chaque

join-ne'e,
De nobles champions ta femme environne'e,

S'en aller me'diter une vole au jeu d'hombre,
S'e*crier sur un as mal a propos jete",
Seplaindre d'un gano qu'on n 'a point ecoute,
Ou querellant tout bas le ciel qu'elle regarde,
A la bite gemir d'un roi venu sans garde."

Whereby, it seems to me, two things are
made plain : the one, that upon occasion
Boileau — Boileau himself ! — called
things by their names, did not shrink
from technical terms ; and the other,
that in thus using technical terms in his
verse, and because he did use them, he
has rendered himself unintelligible to
every one who is not acquainted with
the game of ombre. Is a cultivated man
required to know the game of ombre ?
Therein lies the danger of technical
terms. In the first place, few persons
understand them ; and when it happens
that everybody does understand them,
they are no longer technical. This is
what Buffon meant : Use general terms,
because if you do not use them, you con-
demn yourself by your own act to be
understood by only a small number of
readers ; because technical terms, in so
far as they are technical, are a stum-
bling-block in the way of expressing gen-
eral truths, which alone constitute the do-
main of -literature. Nay, more : try by
means of general terms to bring into this
very domain as much as possible of what
is technical ; do what Descartes did for
philosophy. Pascal for theology, Mon-
tesquieu for politics, or what I myself,
Buffon, have done for natural history.

— Such has. been the practice of our
great writers ; and doubtless nothing
has contributed more to the success of
the French language than its having be-
come, thanks to them, the best fitted for
the expression of general ideas.

It has likewise become the most " ora-
torical;" and by this word I do not
mean at all the most .eloquent or the most
grandiloquent, — Spanish might claim
this honor, — but, on the contrary, the
nearest to conversation and to the spoken
language. We are sometimes told that
we must not write as we talk. This is a
mistake, against which, in case of need,
our whole classic literature would pro-
test. To write as we talk is precisely
what we should do, with the proviso, of
course, that we talk correctly. Vaugelas,
who, as everybody knows, was the great
French grammarian of the classic period,
has said so expressly : " The spoken word
is the nrst in order and in dignity, in-
asmuch as the written word is only its
image, as the other is the image of
thought." Possibly this may seem an
odd bit of reasoning ; it may even strike
one as an amusing application of the
law of primogeniture to criticism ; and
one is quite free to deny that the digni-
ty of the different kinds of composition
and literary forms is to be measured by
their age. But what, on the other hand,
is certain, and what I recollect to have
pointed out more than once, in conform-
ity with Vaugelas's suggestion, is that all
the blunders with which puristical and
pedantic grammarians are fond of re-
proaching Moliere and La Fontaine,
Pascal and Bossuet, are not even ir-
regularities ; on the contrary, they are
seen to be the most natural and expres-
sive form of their thought, as soon as we
" speak " their comedies or sermons in-
stead of " reading " them. In verse, as
in prose, the grand style of the seven-
teenth century was a spoken style. Its
merits are the merits of the conversation
of well-bred people.

Or again, to use the language of ex-

448

The French Mastery of Style.

perimental psychology of the present day,
if it is true that writers are to be divid-
ed into " hearers " (auditifs) who hear
themselves speak, and " visualizers " (vi-
suels) who see themselves write, the great-
er part of the French writers of the
seventeenth century belong to the first
class. The ear, and not the eye, was
their guide. It was not of their paper
that they thought in writing, but of a
body of hearers ; and just as they use
the most general terms to make them-
selves better understood by these hearers,
so they strive to give to their " discourse,"
as they call it, the swing, the flexibility,
and, it would not be too much to say, the
familiar tone of conversation. Their way
of arranging this discourse, which seems
artificial to us, is, on the contrary, the
most natural, since it follows the very
movement of the thought. Their long
periods, which we suppose to be premedi-
tated and balanced by dint of laborious
application, are, in truth, only the ne-
cessary form of sustained improvisation.
If they happen to raise their voices, as
do Pascal in his Thoughts and Bossuet
in his Sermons, it is because the grandeur
or the seriousness of the subject calls for
it ; and as a matter of fact, neither God
nor death is to be spoken of lightly. But
Moliere in his great comedies and La
Fontaine in his Fables give us the illu-
sion of what is least set and formal in
daily conversation. " You might think
that you were there yourself ; " you will
see, too, if you scrutinize them closely,
that their sentence structure does not
differ from that of Bossuet and Pascal.
That is what is meant when French is
said to be of all modern languages the
most " oratorical," the most similar when
written — I mean, of course, when well
written — to what it is when spoken, and
consequently the most natural.

It is also '• the most exact and the
clearest : " the clearest, because what is
obscure is precisely what is peculiar,
special, or technical, the speech of the
artilleryman or that of the sailor, the

dialect of the factory or workshop ; the
most exact, because conversation would
become a monologue if its finest shades
of meaning were not caught, understood,
and taken up immediately and as fast as
the words fall from the lips. We can-
not wait a quarter of an hour to laugh
at a joke, and an epigram or a madrigal
should have no need of commentary.

This clearness, moreover, is a result
of the oratorical character of the French
language as it has just been defined. We
must think of other men, since we are
speaking to them or for them, and spare
no effort to give them ready access to
our thought. This, again, is thoroughly
French. Great writers, especially poets
and philosophers, Carlyle and Browning
in English, Schelling and even Goethe
in German, have thought less of being
intelligible to others than to themselves.
" I have just finished reading Sordello,"
wrote Carlyle to his wife, " without being
able to find out whether Sordello was a
poem, a city, or a man ; " and who will
deny that there is some obscurity — will-
ful and deliberate obscurity, it is true —
in Sartor Resartus and in the famous lec-
tures on Hero Worship ? But a French
writer always speaks to his reader as he
would to a hearer, or to one with whom
he is conversing. He believes with Boi-
leau that " the mind of man teems with
a host of confused ideas and vague half-
glimpses of the truth," and also that " we
like nothing better than to have one of
these ideas well elucidated and clearly
presented to us." His endeavor is, not
to veil his thought, but, on the contrary,
to lay it bare. He does not try to screen
it, as it were, from the eyes of the pro-
fane, but, on the contrary, he takes every
pains to render it accessible to them.
He does not keep his secret jealously to
himself, but he desires rather to impart
it to everybody, — to his countrymen, to
foreigners, to the world. "The only
good works," Voltaire has said, "are
those that find their way into foreign
countries and are translated there." Is

The French Mastery of Style.

449

it surprising, then, that French, the one
modern language having this ambition,
has succeeded, so far as it has realized
its purpose, only by divesting itself of all
ambiguity ; only by filtering its ideas, so
to speak, and ridding them of all im-
purities which would sully their trans-
parent clearness ; and sometimes, too,
by sacrificing everything which calls for
too close reflection ? That is why, as I
said, its precision and clearness did not
come to it from any special or innate pro-
perty, from any virtue which it brought
with it as a natural dower, but from the
application, the toil, the conscious effort,
of its great writers. I may add that
in this particular, the greatest of these
writers, reserving for themselves other
means of originality, have followed ra-
ther than guided public opinion.

What is indeed remarkable about-
these characteristics, which have come
with time to belong to the French lan-
guage, is that the demands of public
opinion, its watchfulness and persistency,
have done no less than the talent or
even the genius of the individual writer
in fixing and establishing them. . Who
took the first step, the public or the wri-
ter ? It would be difficult to find an an-
swer for the question stated thus barely :
at one time it has chanced to be the pub-
lic, at another time the writer, who has
taken the lead. Yet it will be observed
that nearly all the literary revolutions in
France have been anticipated, desired,
and encouraged before a Ronsard, a
Pascal, or a Hugo has appeared to bring
them about. The revolution once be-
gun, the public has always taken pains
to see that the writer did not indulge
his idiosyncrasies too far. Free to
choose their thought, — this our writers
have rarely been ; they have rarely even
been more than half free in their man-
ner of expressing this thought. They
have been brought back, as often as they
showed signs of wishing to depart from
it, to the respect of an ideal, or rather to
the working out of a design which was

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 29

that of a whole race. To use the fine
expression of Bossuet, praising this very
feature in Greek literature, and admir-
ing it there above all others, they have
been forced to labor to " the perfecting
of civil life." They have not been forced
to confound art with morality, but they
have not been allowed to forget that in
a highly organized civilization literature
is in some sort a social institution. They
have even been rather sharply reminded
of the fact, at times, when they have
seemed to forget it. What they may
have lost by being forced to bend to
these requirements is not at present for
me to say, concerned as I am with what
they have gained : this is to have made
of French literature a literature eminent-
ly human.

in.

"Men's passions," it has been truly
said, " everywhere originally the same,
live amidst the ices of the pole as well
as under the tropical sun. The Cossack
Poogatchef was ambitious, like the Ital-
ian Masaniello, and the fever of love
burns the Kamschatkan no less than the
African." These are the " original "
passions which the greatest of the
French writers have studied in man.
Other writers may have portrayed them
more energetically, but surely no one
has penetrated more thoroughly their
innermost workings, or has had a closer
knowledge of their psychology. This,
we venture to say, is what foreigners like
or value in our great writers. They are
vaguely grateful to them, almost uncon-
sciously so, for this effort to observe and
note in man what is most general and
most permanent. For in this way a
particular literature has passed beyond
its own boundaries, not in order to en-
croach on the boundaries of other liter-
atures, or to appropriate qualities which
did not belong to it, but to adapt them
to its uses, and thereby establish itself,
as it were, outside of space and time.
It has not specially affected either its
own ideas or those of others ; but with

450

The French Mastery of Style.

the ideas of others and with its own
mingled, fused together, and made to
correct one another, freed from what
was transitory in some of them and in
some local, and consequently in either
case accidental, French literature has
tried to attain to an universal ideal
which should be as lasting as the form
in which it was clothed. Is not this
very much what Italian painting of the
Renaissance and Greek sculpture of the
great period had done before ? And is
not that why tlie tragedies of Racine
and the sermons of Bossuet, like the
marbles of Phidias and the paintings of
Raphael, speak very nearly the same
language to everybody ? Andromaque
is for the drama what the Madonnas of
Raphael are in the history of painting ;
and in like manner, the Funeral Oration
of Henrietta of England holds a position
in oratory not unlike that of the Daugh-
ters of Niobe in sculpture.

The result has been a tendency in
French literature, and secondarily a spe-
cial fitness in the language, to discuss
what are called nowadays " social pro-
blems." Whether the rights of man in
general, or those of woman in particular,
are being debated, we have in French a
large vocabulary more suitable than any
other, more precise and more extensive,
to plead for them ; we have what the
ancients called loci, — a store of ready-
made phrases on which the orator and
the publicist have only to draw. If we
must turn to the English for arguments
and even for words to discuss the " rights
of the individual," and to the Germans
for reasons to uphold the " rights of as-
sociation," no literature has found more
generous accents than ours, nor any lan-
guage words more capable of expressing
the rights of man so far as he is a sub-
ject for justice and charity. No loftier
strains of eloquence kave ever been
uttered, to remind men of their equality
in the presence of pain and death, than
by our great preachers, Bossuet, Bour-
daloue, Massillon ; and this in language

of marvelous strength, simplicity, and
harmony. And where has all that can
be said to make the powers of this world
tremble for the validity of their claims
been expressed in a keener or more im-
passioned form than in some of the pam-
phlets of Voltaire or in the fiery discourses
of Rousseau?

Nothing, again, was more characteris-
tic of the French press for many years,
— I say "was," for of late things have
changed somewhat, — as compared with
the English or American press, for exam-
ple, than the satisfaction, the copiousness,
and the perfect clearness with which it
treated those doctrinal questions which
are the point of contact, or, if I may be
allowed the expression, the point of in-
tersection of morals and politics. The
reason is that French journalism found
in the language an instrument ready for
its use, and had only to draw on the com-
mon stock of literary tradition. If it
wanted, for instance, to show the iniqui-
ty of slavery, it had only to remember
the Philosophic History of the two In-
dias or the Spirit of Laws. If it wished
to remind wealth of its duties, it could
consult, not Rousseau merely, but Mas-
sillon in his sermon on Dives, or Bossuet
in his sermon on the Eminent Dignity
of the Poor. Rather, it had no need
of consulting the latter or remembering
the former ; the dictionary of every-day
speech was sufficient. Two hundred
years of literature had made social pro-
blems circulate in the very veins of the
language ; it had embodied them in its
words. It had made of French the con-
spiracy spoken of by Joseph de Maistre :
" Omnia quse loquitur populus iste con-
juratio est." Even to-day no other lan-
guage has a power of propaganda like
French, and so long as it keeps this
power we need have no fear of its being
neglected. To assure its position in the
world, we have only to guard against
giving up lightly the qualities it still re-
tains ; the abandonment of them, so far
from being a progress, as some of the

The French Mastery of Style.

451

" symbolists " have supposed, would be a
retrogression toward the origins.

Need I add here, to reassure those
who may possibly see in the French lan-
guage only an instrument of socialistic
propaganda, that it is possible to give a
good meaning to the word " socialism ; "
or should I not say rather that nothing
is more dangerous than to leave the mo-
nopoly of the word to those who abuse
it? This is to do violence to its etymo-
logy ! It would be better to point out
that social problems, comprising as they
do all that is of interest or concern to
society, include in their number the pro-
blems of the " polite world." And so,
for the same reasons that have made
French the language of social discussion,
.it has become, in the hands of our great
writers, the language of polite conversa-
tion. This is one of the rare services
we owe to the salons, — not to those
most in repute, the salon of Madame
Geoffrin or that of Madame Tencin, but,
on the contrary, to those most ridiculed,
especially to the salon of the Marquise
de Rambouillet. Now, inasmuch as " so-
ciety," or what passes under that name,
has no other object than the putting in
common of all that is deemed agree-
able, elegant, and noble in life in order
to enjoy it more fully, we can readily
imagine what vivacity, flexibility, and
ease two hundred years of society must
have given to the French language. It
was there, in society, and in the salons
where women held sway, that a litera-
ture till then too pedantic and too mas-
culine was forced to bend and yield, to
learn to have respect for their modesty
or for their delicacy, and to adorn it-
self, so to speak, with some, at least, of
the virtues of their sex. It was there
that due stress, and at times a little
more than due stress, was laid on the art
of enhancing what one says by the way
of saying it. It was there that the plan
was formed to make of French a uni-
versal language in place of the classics,
and to this end to give it the qualities it

still lacked. It was there, too, that the
fact was realized that, language being a
human product, it was the duty of men
to rescue it from the fatality of its nat-
ural development, and to subordinate it
not only to the requirements of art, but
also to the necessities of social progress.
In conclusion, it is well to remember
that Horace's line is only half true : —

" Usus

Quern penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma
loquendi."

No! Usage is not wholly this master
or this capricious tyrant of language.
Granting that it were, its fluctuations or
its peculiarities would still have their
history, this history its reasons, and these
reasons their explanation ; or rather,
usage is only a name which serves to
hide our ignorance of the causes, and
if, instead of taking it for granted, we
analyze it, languages are found to be
the work of those who write them. The
example of French would be enough to
prove this. It was not naturally clearer
than any other language ; it has become
so. It was no better fitted than any other
language for the expression of general
ideas ; it has become so. It was not a
work of art in the time of the Strasburg
Oaths or the Canticle of St. Eulalia, and
yet it has become so. I have tried to
show how, by what means, in virtue of
what united effort, and I hope I have
made it clear. Americans, I fancy, will
not be sorry to see thus restored to the
domain of the will what philologians or
linguists had unjustly taken away from
it, — if indeed this be not, in their eyes,
an additional reason for valuing our lan-
guage. They are supposed to prize no-
thing more highly than the victories of
the will: the diffusion of the French
language in the world is one of these
victories ; and may I not say that what
renders it more precious is the fact —
evident, I trust, from the foregoing —
that our writers have won it only by iden-
tifying the interests of their self-love with
the interests of art and of humanity?
F. Brunetibre.

452

Caleb West.

CALEB WEST.

THE CAPE ANN SLOOP.

WHEN Sanf ord signed the contract for
the building of Shark Ledge Light off
Keyport Harbor, he found himself con-
fronted with a problem.

The Light was to be erected on a
mass of rough stone which had been
placed over a sunken ledge to form an
artificial island. This was situated eight
miles from land, and breasted a tide run-
ning six miles an hour. The govern-
ment plans provided that this island
should be protected not only from sea
action, but from the thrust of floating
ice as well. This was to be done by
paving the under-water slopes of the ar-
tificial island with huge granite blocks
forming an enrockment. The engineer-
in-chief of the Lighthouse Board at
Washington had expressed grave doubts
as to the practicability of the working
plans which Sanf ord had submitted, ques-
tioning whether these protecting enrock-
ment blocks, weighing twelve tons each,
could be swung overboard from the deck
of a vessel while moored in a six-mile
current. As, however, the selection of
the methods to be employed lay with the
contracting engineer, and not with the
Board, Sanf ord's working plans had been
accepted, and the responsibility for their
success rested with him.

So soon, therefore, as the notification
to begin work had come from Washing-
ton, Sanford had telegraphed to Captain
Joe Bell, his foreman of construction, at
Keyport, to secure a sloop at once, with
hoisting-engine and boiler of sufficient
power to handle the heavy stones, and to
report to him at his apartments in New
York. The sloop was to be of so light a
draught that she could work in the roll-
ing surf on the shoal of the Ledge, and

yet be stanch enough to sustain the strain
of a derrick and boom rigged to her
mast. If such a sloop could be found,
Sanford's problem would solve itself ;
the rest would depend on the pluck and
grit of his men.

Sanford received Captain Joe in his
working office, separated by a small ves-
tibule from his bachelor apartments.

" Are you sure she '11 handle the
stones ? " were the first words that San-
ford in his eagerness addressed to the
captain. There were no formalities be-
tween these men ; they knew each other
too well. " Nothing but a ten - horse
engine will lift them from the dock.
What 's the sloop's beam ? "

" Thirty foot over all, an' she 's stiff 's
a church," answered Captain Joe, tug-
ging at his stubby chin-beard with his
thole-pin fingers. " I see her cap'n 'fore
I come down yesterday. Looks 's ef he
bed th' right stuff in him. Says he ain't
afeard o' th' Ledge, an' don't mind lay-
in' her broadside on, even ef she does
git a leetle mite scraped."

" How 's her boiler ? "

" I ain't looked her b'iler over yit, but
her cylinders is big enough. If her
steam gives out, I '11 put one of our own
aboard. She '11 do, sir. Don't worry
a mite ; we '11 spank that baby when we
git to 't," — his leathery, weather-tanned
face cracking into smiles as he spoke.

Sanford laughed. He found his anx-
ieties disappearing before the cheerful
courage of this man, whose judgment of
men never failed him, and whose know-
ledge of sea-things made him invaluable.

" I 'm glad you like her skipper," he
said, taking from a pigeonhole in his
perfectly appointed desk, as he spoke,
the charter-party of the sloop. " I see
his name is Brandt, and the sloop's name
is the Screamer. The charter-party, I
think, ought to contain some allusion to

Caleb West.

453

the coast -chart, in case of any protest
Brandt may make afterwards about the
shoaliness of the water. Better have him
put his initials on the chart," he added,
with the instinctive habit of caution which
always distinguished his business meth-
ods. " Do you think the shoals will scare
him ? " he continued, as he crossed the
room to a row of shelves filled with me-
chanical drawings, in search of a round
tin case holding the various charts of
Long Island Sound.

Captain Joe moved back the pile of
books from the middle of the table with
the same consideration he would have
shown to so many bricks ; corked a bot-
tle of liquid ink for safety ; flattened with
his big hands the chart which Sanford
nad unrolled, weighted the four corners
with a T square and some color-pans, and
then, bending his massive head, began
studying its details with all the easy con-
fidence of a first officer on a Cunarder.
He had not yet answered Sanf ord's ques-
tion.

As the light from the window fell
across his head, it brought into stronger
relief the few gray hairs which silvered
the short brown curls crisped about his
neck and temples. These hairs marked
the only change seen in him since the
memorable winter's day, when off Hobo-
ken he had saved the lives of the pas-
sengers on the sinking ferry-boat by calk-
ing with his own body the gash left in
her side by a colliding tug. He was the
same broad-as-he-was-long old sea-dog;
tough, sturdy, tender-eyed, and fearless ;
his teeth were as white, his mouth was as
firm, his jaw as strong and determined.
It was only around his temples and neck
that time had touched him.

The captain placed his horn -tipped
finger on a dot marked " Shark's Ledge
Spindle," obliterating in the act some
forty miles of sea-space ; repeated to him-
self in a low voice, " Six fathoms — four
— one and a half — hum, 't ain't nothin' ;
that Cape Ann sloop can do it ; " and then
suddenly remembering Sanford's ques-

tion, he answered, with quick lifting of
his head and with a cheery laugh, " Scare
him ? Wait till ye see him, sir."

When the coast-chart had been rolled
and replaced in the tin case, to be taken
to Keyport for the skipper's initials, both
men resumed their seats by Sanford's
desk.

" Anything left of the old house, cap-
tain ? " asked Sanford, picking up a
rough sketch of the new shanty to be
built on the Ledge, — the one used the
previous year, while the artificial island
was being built, having been injured by
the winter storms.

" Not much, sir : one side 's stove in
an' the roof 's smashed. Some o' the
men are in it now, gittin' things in shape,
but it 's purty rickety. I 'm a-goin' to
put the new one here," — his finger on
the drawing, — " an' I 'm goin' to make
it o' tongue-an' -grooved stuff an' tar the
roof ter git it water-tight. Then I '11 hev
some iron bands made with turnbuckles
to go over the top timbers an' fasten it
all down in the stone - pile. Oh, we '11
git her so she '11 stay put when hell
breaks loose some night down Montauk
way ! " and another hearty laugh rang
out as he rolled up the drawing and
tucked it in the case for safety.

" There 's no doubt we '11 have plenty
of that, captain," said Sanford, joining
in the laugh. "And now about the
working force. Will you make many
changes ? "

" No, sir. We '11 put Caleb West in
charge of the divin' ; ain't no better
man 'n Caleb in er out a dress. Them
enrockments is mighty ugly things to set
under water, an' I won't trust nobody
but Caleb to do it. Lonny Bowles '11
help tend derricks ; an' there 's our regu-
lar gang, — George Nickles an' the rest
of 'em. I only got one new man so far :
that 's a young feller named Bill Lacey.
He looks like a skylarkin' chap, but I
kin take that out o' him. But he kin
climb like a cat, an' we want a man like
that to shin the derricks. He 's tended

454

Caleb West.

divers, too, he says, an' he '11 do to look
after Caleb's life-line an' hose when I
can't. By the way, sir, I forgot to ask
ye about them derricks. We got to
hev four whackin' big sticks to set them
big stone on top o' the concrete when we
git it finished, an' there ain't no time to
lose on 'em. I thought may be ye 'd
order 'em to-day from Medford ? "

Sanford wrote a telegram to a ship-
builder at Medford ordering " four,
clean, straight, white pine masts not less
than twenty inches at the butt," called
his negro servant, Sam, from the adjoin-
ing room, and directed the dispatch sent
at once.

Captain Joe had risen from his chair
and put on his Derby hat, without which
he never came to New York, — it was
his one concession to metropolitan ex-
actions.

"But, Captain Joe," said Sanford,
looking up, " breakfast will be ready in
a minute. Young Mr. Hardy is coming,
whom you met here once before. You
must n't go."

" Not this mornin', sir. I Ve got a lot
o' things to look after 'fore I catch the
3.10. I 'm obleeged to ye all the same."
As he spoke he humped his arms and
shoulders into his pea-jacket and picked
up the tin case.

" Well, I wish you would." Sanford's
hand now rested on the captain's shoul-
der. "But you know best," he said,
with real disappointment in his tone.

The tie between these two men was
no ordinary one. They had worked to-
gether long enough to believe in each
other. What one lacked, the other pos-
sessed. There was, too, a feeling of close
comradeship between them, which had
strengthened in the years of their ac-
quaintance to downright affection. San-
ford shook the big brown hand of the
captain and followed him to the top of
the stairs, where he stood watching the
burly figure descending the spiral stair-
case, the tin case under his arm, spy-glass
fashion.

" You '11 see me in the morning, cap-
tain," Sanford called out, not wanting
him to go without another word. " I '11
come by the midnight train."

The captain looked up and waved his
hand cheerily in lieu of a reply.

When he had finally disappeared, San-
ford turned, and, drawing the heavy cur-
tains of the vestibule, passed through it
to his private apartments.

II.

A MORNING'S MAIL.

Sanford drppped into a brown leather
chair, and Sam, with the fawning droop
of a water spaniel, placed the morning
paper before him, moved a small table
nearer, on which his master could lay
the morning's mail as it was opened,
adjusted the curtains so as to keep the
glare from his eyes, and with noiseless
tread withdrew to the kitchen.

Whatever the faults of this product of
reconstruction might have been, — and
Sam had many, — neglect of Sanford's
comfort was not one of them. While he
dressed with more care on Sunday after-
noons than his master, — generally in that
gentleman's cast-off clothes, and always
in his discarded neckties and gloves ;
while he smoked his tobacco, purloined
his cigars, and occasionally drank his
wine, whenever the demands of his so-
cial life made such inroads on Sanford's
private stock necessary to maintain a cer-
tain prestige among his ebonized breth-
ren, he invariably drew the line at his
master's loose change and his shirt-studs.
He had, doubtless, trickling down through
his veins some drops of blood, inherited
from an old family butler of an ancestor,
which, while they permitted him the free
use of everything his master ate, drank,
and wore, — a common privilege of the
slave days, — debarred him completely
from greater crimes. He possessed,
moreover, certain paramount virtues : he

Caleb West.

455

never burned a chop, overcooked an egg,
or delayed a meal.

His delinquencies — all of them per-
fectly well known to Sanford — never
lost him his master's confidence. He
knew the race, and never expected the
impossible. Not only did he place his
servant in charge of his household ex-
penditures, but he gave him entire su-
pervision as well of his rooms and their
contents.

Sam took the greatest pride in the
young engineer's apartments. They were
at the top of one of those old-fashioned,
hip-roofed, dormer-windowed houses still
Jx> be found on Washington Square, and
consisted of five rooms, with dining-room
and salon. Of them all, the salon was by
far the most spacious. It was a large,
high-ceiled room with heavy cornices and
mahogany doors ; with wide French win-
dows, one of which opened on a balco-
ny overlooking the square. Against the
walls stood low bookcases, their tops cov-
ered with curios and the hundred and one
knickknacks that encumber a bachelor's
apartment. Above these again hung a
collection of etchings and sketches in and
out of frames ; many of them signed by
fellow members of the Buzzards, a small
Bohemian club of ten who often held
their meetings here.

Under the frieze ran a continuous
shelf, holding samples of half the pots
of the universe, from a Heidelberg beer-
mug to an East Indian water-jar ; and
over the doors were grouped bunches of
African arrows, spears, and clubs, and
curious barbaric shields ; while the centre
of the room was occupied by a square
table covered with books and magazines,
ash-trays, Japanese ivories, and the like,
and set in among them was an umbrella-
lamp with a shade of sealing-wax red.
At intervals about the room were small-
er tables, convenient for decanters and
crushed ice, and against the walls, facing
the piano, were wide divans piled high
with silk cushions.

Within easy reach of reading-lamp

and chair rested a four-sided bookcase
on rollers. This was filled with works
on engineering and books of reference ;
while a high, narrow case between two
doors was packed with photographs and
engravings of the principal marine struc-
tures of our own and other coasts.

Late as was the season, a little wood
fire smouldered in the open fireplace, —
one of the sentiments to which Sanford
clung, — while before it stood the brown
leather chair in which he sat.

" Captain Bell will not be here to
breakfast, Sam, but Mr. Hardy is com-
ing," said Sanford, suddenly recollecting
himself.

"Yaas, sah; everything's ready, sah,"
replied Sam, who, now that the telegram
had been dispatched and the morning
papers and letters delivered, had slipped
into his white jacket again.

Sanford glanced at the shipping news,
ran over the list of arrivals to see if any
vessels bringing material for the Light
had reached Key port, picked up the pack-
age of letters, a dozen or more, and be-
gan cutting the envelopes. He read most
of them rapidly, marked them in the mar-
gin, and laid them in a pile beside him.
There were two which he placed by them-
selves without opening them. One was
from his friend Mrs. Morgan Leroy, in-
viting him to luncheon the following day,
and the other from Major Tom Slocomb,
of Pocomoke, Maryland, informing him
of his approaching visit to New York,
accompanied by his niece, Miss Helen
Shirley, of Kent County, — "a daugh-
ter, sir, of Colonel Talbot Shirley, one
of our foremost citizens, whom I be-
lieve you had the honor of meeting
during your never-to-be-forgotten visit
among us."

The never-to-be-forgotten visit was one
Sanford had made the major the winter
before, when he was inspecting the site
for a stone and brush jetty he was about
to build for the government, in the Ches-
apeake. This jetty was to be near the
major's famous estates which he had in-

456

Caleb West.

herited from his wife, " the widow of
Major Talbot, suh."

Sanford's daily contact with the major
during his visit had rather endeared him
to the young engineer. Under all the
Pocomokian's veneer of delightful men-
dacity, utter shiftlessness, and luxurious
extravagance he had detected certain
qualities of true loyalty to those whom
he loved, and a very tender sympathy
for the many in the world worse off than
himself. The major's conversion from
a vagabond with gentlemanly instincts to
a gentleman with strong Bohemian ten-
dencies, Sanford felt, might have been
easily accomplished had a little more
money been placed at the Pocomokian's
disposal. Given an endless check-book
with unlimited overdrafts, and with set-
tlements made every hundred years, the
major would have been a prince among
men.

The niece to whom the major referred
in his letter lived on an adjoining estate
with a relative much nearer of kin. Like
many other possessions of this acclimated
Marylander, she was really not his niece
at all, but another heritage from his de-
ceased wife. Her well-bred air and her
lovely face and character had always
made her a marked figure wherever she
went. The major first saw her on horse-
back, in a neat-fitting riding-habit which
she had made out of some blue army
kersey bought at the country store. The
poise of her head, the easy grace of her
seat, and her admirable horsemanship
decided the major at once. Hencefor-
ward her name was emblazoned on the
scroll of his family tree.

It was not until Sanford had finished
his other letters that he turned to that
from Mrs. Leroy. He looked first at the
circular postmark to see the exact hour
at which it had been mailed ; then rising
from the big chair, he threw himself on
the divan, tucked a pillow under his head,
and slowly broke the seal. The envelope
was large and square, decorated with the
crest of the Leroys in violet wax, and

addressed in a clear, round, almost mas-
culine hand. It contained only half a
dozen lines, beginning with " My dear
Henry, — If you are going to the Ledge,
please stop at Medford and see how my
new dining-room is getting on. Be sure
to come to luncheon to-morrow, so we can
talk it over," etc., and ending with the
hope that he had not taken cold when
he left her house the night before.

When Mrs. Leroy's letter, which San-
ford held for some time before him, had
been placed at last in its envelope and
thrust under the sofa-pillow, he picked
up again that of the major, looking for
the date of Helen Shirley's arrival.

"Jack Hardy will be glad," he said,
as he threw the major's epistle on the
table. Then glancing again at the date
and initials of Mrs. Leroy's missive, he
put the envelope, as well as the letter, in
his pocket, and began pacing the room.

He was evidently restless. He threw
wide the sashes of the French window
which opened on the iron balcony, let-
ting in the fresh morning air. He looked
for a moment over the square below, the
hard, pen-line drawing of its trees blurred
by the yellow-green bloom of the early
spring, rearranged a photograph or two
on the mantel, and, picking up a vase
filled with roses, inhaled their fragrance
and placed them in the centre of the
dainty breakfast - table, with its snowy
linen and polished silver, that Sam had
just been setting near him. Then reseat-
ing himself in his chair, he called again
to the ever watchful darky, who had been
following his movements through the
crack of the pantry door. " Sam."

" Yaas, 'r," came a voice apparently
from the far end of the pantry; " comin',
sah."

" Look over the balcony again and see
if Mr. Hardy is on his way across the
square. It 's after ten now," he said,
consulting the empire clock with broken
columns which decorated the mantel.

" I 'spec's dat 's him a-comin' up now,
sah. I yeared de downstairs do' click a

Caleb West.

457

minute ago. Dar he is, sah," drawing
aside the curtain that hid the entrance
to the outer hall.

" Sorry, old man," came a voice in-
creasing in distinctness as the speaker
approached, " but I could n't help it. I
had a lot of letters to answer this morn-
ing, or I should have been on time. Don't
make any difference to you ; it 's your
day off."

" My day off, is it ? I was out of bed
this morning at six o'clock. Captain Joe
stopped here on his way from the train ;
he has just left ; and if you had stayed
away a minute more, I'd have break-
fasted without you. And that is n't the
worst of it. That Cape Ann sloop I told
you of has arrived, and I go to Keyport
to-night."

" The devil you do ! " said Jack, a
shade of disappointment crossing his
face. "That means, I suppose, you
won't be back this spring. How long
are you going to be building that light-
house, anyhow ? "

" Two years more, I 'm afraid," said
Sanford thoughtfully. " Breakfast right
away, Sam. Take the seat by the win-
dow, Jack. I thought we 'd breakfast
here instead of in the dining-room ; the
air 's fresher."

Jack opened his cutaway coat, took a
rose from the vase, adjusted it in his
buttonhole, and spread his napkin over
his knees.

He was much the younger of the two
men, and his lot in life had been far
easier. Junior partner in a large bank-
ing-house down town, founded and still
sustained by the energy and business tact
of his father, he had not found it a dif-
ficult task to sail through life without a
jar.

" What do you hear from Crab Island,
Jack ? " asked Sanford, a sly twinkle in
his eye, as he passed him the muffins.

" They 've started the new club-house,"
said Jack, with absolute composure. "We
are going to run out that extension you
suggested when you were down there

last winter."' He clipped his egg lightly,
without a change of countenance.

" Anything from Helen Shirley ? "

" Just a line, thanking me for the
magazines," Jack answered in a casual
tone, not the faintest interest betray-
ing itself in the inflections of his voice.
Sanford thought he detected a slight
increase of color on 'his young friend's
always rosy cheeks.

" Did she say anything about coming
to New York ? " Sanford asked, looking
at Jack quizzically out of the corner of
his eye.

" Yes ; now I come to think of it, I
believe she did say something about the
major's coming, but nothing very defi-
nite."

Jack spoke as if he had been aroused
from some reverie entirely foreign to the
subject under discussion. He continued
to play with his egg, flecking off the
broken bits of shell with the point of his
spoon, but with all his pretended com-
posure he could not raise his eyes to
those of his host.

"What a first-class fraud you are,
Jack ! " said Sanford, laughing at last
He leaned back in his chair and looked
at Hardy good - humoredly from under
his eyebrows. " I would have read you
Slocomb's letter, lying right before you,
if I had n't been sure you knew every de-
tail in it. Helen and the major will be
here next week, and you have been told
the very hour she '11 arrive, and have
staked out every moment of her time.
Now don't try any of your boy's games
on me. What are you going to do next
Tuesday night ? "

Jack laughed, but made no attempt to
parry a word of Sanford's thrust. He
looked up at last inquiringly over his
plate and said, " Why ? "

" Because I want you to dine here
with them. I '11 ask Mrs. Leroy to ma-
tronize Helen. Leroy is still abroad, and
she can come. We '11 get Bock, too, with
his 'cello. What ladies are in town ? "

Jack's face was aglow in an instant.

458

Caleb West.

The possibility of dining in Sanford's
room, with its background of rich color
and with all the pretty things about that
Helen he knew would love so well, lent
instant interest to Sanford's proposition.
He looked about the room. He saw at a
glance just where he would seat her after
dinner : the divan nearest the curtains
was the best. How happy she would be,
and how new it would all be to her ! He
could have planned nothing more de-
lightful for her. Then remembering that
Sanford had asked him a question, he
nonchalantly gave the names of several
young women he knew who might be
agreeable guests. After a moment's si-
lence he suggested that Sanford leave
these details to Mrs. Leroy. Jack knew
her tact, and he knew to a nicety just
how many young girls Mrs. Leroy would
bring. The success of bachelor dinners,
from Hardy's standpoint, was not due
to half a dozen young women and two
men ; quite the reverse.

The date for the dinner arranged, and
the wisdom of leaving the list of guests
to Mrs. Leroy agreed upon, the talk
drifted into other channels : the Whis-
tler pastels at Klein's ; the garden-party
to be given at Mrs. Leroy's country-seat
near Medford when the new dining-room
was finished and the roses were in bloom ;
the opportunity Sanford might now en-
joy of combining business with pleasure,
Medford being a short run from Shark
Ledge ; the success of Smearly's last por-
trait at the Academy, a photograph of
which lay on the table ; the probable
change in Slocomb's fortunes, now that,
with the consent of the insurance com-
pany who held the mortgage, he had
rented what was left of the Widow Tal-
bot's estate to a strawberry planter from
the North, in order to live in New York ;
and finally, under Jack's guidance, back
to Helen Shirley's visit.

When the two men, an hour later,
passed into the corridor, Sanford held
two letters in his hand ready to mail :
one addressed to Major Slocomb, with

an inclosure to Miss Shirley, the other
to Mrs. Morgan Leroy.

Sam watched them over the balcony
until they crossed the square, cut a double
shuffle with both feet, admired his black
grinning face in the mirror, took a corn-
cob pipe from the shelf in the pantry,
filled it with some of Sanford's best to-
bacco, and began packing his master's
bag for the night train to Keyport.

III.

CAPTAIN BOB HOLDS THE THROTTLE.

It was not yet five o'clock, though the
sun had been up for an hour, when San-
ford arrived at Keyport. He turned
quickly toward the road leading from
the station to Captain Joe's cottage, a
spring and lightness in his step which
indicated not only robust health, but an
eagerness to reach at once the work ab-
sorbing his mind. When he gained the
high ground overlooking the cottage and
dock, he paused for a view that always
charmed him with its play of light and
color, and which seemed never so beau-
tiful as in the early morning light.

Below him lay Keyport village, built
about a rocky half-moon of a harbor,
its old wharves piled high with rotting
oil-barrels and flanked by empty ware-
houses. Behind these crouched low, gray-
roofed houses, squatting in a tangle of
streets, with here and there a slender
white spire tipped with a restless weather-
vane. Higher, on the hills, nestled some
old houses with sloping roofs and wide
porches, and away up on the crest of the
heights, overlooking the sea, stood the
more costly structures with well-shaved
lawns.

The brimming harbor itself was dotted
with motionless yachts and various fish-
ing - craft, all reflected upside down in
the still sea, its glassy surface rippled
now and then by the dipping buckets of
men washing down the decks, or by the

Caleb West.

459

quick water-spider strokes of some lob-
ster-fisherman pulling homeward with
his catch, the click of the rowlocks pul-
sating in the breathless morning air.

On the near point of the half-moon
stood Keyport Light, an old-fashioned
factory chimney of a light, built of brick,
but painted snow-white with a black
cigar band around its middle, its top
surmounted by a copper lantern. This
flashed red and white at night, over a ra-
dius of twenty miles. Braced up against
its base, for a better hold, was a little
building hiding a great fog-horn, which
on thick days and nights bellowed out
its welcome to Keyport's best. On the
far point of the moon — the one oppo-
site the Light, and some two miles away
— stretched sea - meadows broken with
clumps of rock and shelter-houses for
cattle. Between these two points, al-
most athwart the mouth of the harbor,
like a huge motionless whale, its back-
bone knotted with summer cottages, lay
Crotch Island. Beyond the island away
out under the white glare of the risen sun
could be seen a speck of purplish-gray
fringed with bright splashes of spray
glinting in the dazzling light. This was
Shark's Ledge.

As Sanford looked toward the site of
the new Light a strange sensation came
over him. There lay the work on which
his reputation would rest and by which
he would hereafter be judged. Every-
thing else he had so far accomplished
was, he knew, but a preparation for this
his greatest undertaking. Not only were
the engineering problems involved new
to his experience, but in his attitude in
regard to them he had gone against all
precedents as well as against the judg-
ments ,of older heads, and had relied
almost alone on Captain Joe's personal
skill and pluck. The risk, then, was
his own. While he never doubted his
ultimate success, there always came a
tugging at his heartstrings whenever
he looked toward the site of the light-
house, and a tightening of his throat

which proved, almost unconsciously to
himself, how well he understood the
magnitude of the work before him.

Turning from the scene, he walked
with slackened step down the slope that
led to the long dock fronting the cap-
tain's cottage. As he drew nearer he
saw that the Screamer had been moored
between the captain's dock (always lum-
bered with paraphernalia required for
sea-work) and the great granite-wharf,
which was piled high with enormous
cubes of stone, each as big as two pianos.

The sloop was just such a boat as
Captain Joe had described, — a stanch,
heavily built Eastern stone-sloop, with a
stout mast and a heavy boom always used
as a derrick. On her forward deck was
bolted a hoisting-engine, and thrust up
through the hatch of the forecastle was
the smoke-stack of the boiler, already
puffing trial feathers of white steam into
the morning air. Captain Joe had evi-
dently seen no reason to change his mind
about her, for he was at the moment on
her after-deck, overhauling a heavy coil
of manilla rope, and reeving it in the
block himself, the men standing by to
catch the end of the line.

When Sanford joined the group there
was no general touching of hats, — out-
ward sign of deference that a group of
laborers on land would have paid their
employer. In a certain sense, each man
was chief here. Each man knew his
duty and did it, quietly, effectually, and
cheerfully. The day's work had no limit
of hours. The pay was never fixed by
a board of delegates, one half of whom
could not tell a marlinespike from a mon-
key-wrench. The men had enlisted for
a war with winds and storms and chan-
ging seas, and victory meant something
more to them than pay once a moWn
and plum duff once a week. It meant
hours of battling with the sea, of tugging
at the lines, waist-deep in the boiling surf
that rolled in from Montauk. It meant
constant, unceasing vigilance day and
night, in order that some exposed site

460

Caleb West.

necessary for a bedstone might be cap-
tured and held before a southeaster could
wreck it, and thus a vantage-point be
lost in the laying of the masonry.

Each man took his share of wet and
cold and exposure without grumbling.
When a cowardly and selfish spirit
joined the force, Captain Joe, on his
first word of complaint, handed him his
money and put him ashore. It was
only against those common enemies, the
winds and the seas, that murmurs were
heard. " Drat that wind ! " one would say.
" Here she 's a-haulin' to the east'rd agin,
an' we ain't got them j'ints [in the ma-
sonry] p'inted." Or, " It makes a man
sick to see th' way this month 's been
a-goin' on, — not a decent day since las'
Tuesday."

Sanford liked these men. He was al-
ways at home with them. He loved their
courage, their grit, their loyalty to one
another and to the work itself. The
absence of ceremony among them never
offended him. His cheery " Good-morn-
ing " as he stepped aboard was as cheeri-
ly answered.

Captain Joe stopped work long enough
to shake Sanford's hand and to present
him to the newcomer, Captain Bob Brandt
of the Screamer.

" Cap'n Bob ! " he called, waving his
hand.

" Ay, ay, sir ! " came the ready re-
sponse of his early training.

"Come aft, sir. Mr. Sanford wants
ye." The " sir " was merely a recogni-
tion of the captain's rank.

A tall, straight, blue-eyed young fellow
of twenty-two, with a face like an open
book, walked down the deck toward
where Sanford stood, — one of those per-
fectly simple, absolutely fearless, alert
men found so often on the New England
coast, with legs and arms of steel, body
of hickory, and hands of whalebone :
cabin-boy at twelve, common sailor at
sixteen, first mate at twenty, and full
captain the year he voted.

Sanford looked him all over, from his

shoes to his cap. He knew a round man
when he saw him. This one seemed to
be without a flaw. He saw too that he
possessed that yeast of good nature with-
out which the best of men are heavy and
duU.

" Can you lift these blocks, Captain
Brandt ? " he asked in a hearty tone,
more like that of a comrade than an
employer, his hand extended in greet-
ing.

" Well, I can try, sir," came the mod-
est reply, the young man's face light-
ing up as he looked into Sanford's eyes,
where he read with equal quickness a
ready appreciation, so encouraging to
every man who intends to do his best.

Captain Brandt and every member of
the gang knew that it was not the mere
weight of these enrockment blocks which
made the handling of them so serious a
matter ; twelve tons is a light lift for
many boat - derricks. It was the fact
that they must be loaded aboard a vessel
not only small enough to be easily han-
dled in any reasonable weather, but with
a water-draught shoal enough to permit
her lying safely in a running tide along-
side the Ledge while the individual stones
were being lowered over her side.

The hangers-on about the dock ques-
tioned whether any sloop could do this
work.

" Billy," said old Marrows, an as-
sumed authority on stone-sloops, but not
in Sanford's employ, although a constant
applicant, " I ain't sayin' nothin' agin her
beam, mind, but she 's too peaked f orrud.
'Nother thing, when she 's got them stones
slung, them chain -plates won't hold 'er
shrouds. I would n't be s'prised to see
that mast jerked clean out'er her."

Bill Lacey, the handsome young rig-
ker, leaned over the sloop's rail, scanned
every bolt in her plates, glanced up at
the standing rigging, tried it with his
hand as if it were a tight-rope, and with
a satisfied air remarked: "Them plates
is ! all right, Marrows, — it 's her b'iler
that 's a-worryin' me. What do you say,

Caleb West.

461

Caleb ? " turning to Caleb West, a broad-
shouldered, grizzled man in a sou'wester,
who was mending a leak in a diving-
dress, the odor of the burning cement
mingling with the savory smell of frying
ham coming up from the galley.

"Wall, I ain't said, Billy," replied
Caleb in a cheery voice, stroking his
bushy gray beard. " Them as don't
know better keep shet."

There was a loud laugh at the young
rigger's expense, in which everybody ex-
cept Lacey and Caleb joined. Lacey's
face hardened under the thrust, while
Caleb still smiled, a quaint expression
overspreading his features, — one that
often came when something pleased him,
and which by its sweetness showed how
little venom lay behind his reproofs.

" These 'ere sloops is jes' like women,"
said George Nickles, the cook, a big,
oily man, with his sleeves rolled up above
his elbows, a greasy apron about his
waist. He was dipping a bucket over-
board. " Ye can't tell nothin' about 'em
till ye tries 'em."

The application of the simile not be-
ing immediately apparent, nobody 'an-
swered. Lacey stole a look at Nickles
and then at Caleb, to see if the shot had
been meant for him, and meeting the di-
ver's unconscious clear blue eyes, looked
seaward again.

Lonny Bowles, a big derrickman from
Noank quarries, in a red shirt, discolored
on the back with a pink Y where his sus-
penders had crossed, moved nearer and
joined in the discussion.

" She kin h'ist any two on 'em," he
said, " an' never wet 'er deck combin's.
I seen them Cape Ann sloops afore, when
we wuz buildin' Stonin'ton breakwater.
Yer would n't believe they had it in 'em
till ye - see 'em work. Her b'iler 's all
right."

" Don't you like the sloop, Caleb ? "
said Sanford, who had been listening,
moving a rebellious leg of the rubber
dress to sit the closer. " Don't you think
she '11 do her work ? "

" Well, sir, of course I ain't knowed
'er long 'nough to swear by yit. She 's
fittin' for loadin' 'em on land, may be,
but she may have some trouble gittin'
rid of 'em at the Ledge. Her b'iler
looks kind o' weak to me," said the mas-
ter diver, stirring the boiling cement
with his sheath-knife, the rubber suit
sprawled out over, his knees, the awk-
ward, stiff, empty legs and arms of the
dress flopping about as he patched its
many leaks. " But if Cap'n Joe says
she 's all right, ye can pin to her."

Sanford moved a little closer to Ca-
leb, one of his stanchest friends among
the men, holding the pan of cement for
him, and watching him at work. He
had known him for years as a fearless
diver of marvelous pluck and endur-
ance ; one capable of working seven
consecutive hours under water. He had
done this only the year before, just after
entering Sanford's employ, — when an
English bark ran on top of Big Spindle
Reef and backed off into one hundred
and ten feet of water. The captain and
six of the crew were saved, but the cap-
tain's wife, helpless in the cabin, was
drowned. Caleb went below, cleared
away the broken deck that pinned her
down, and brought her body up in his
arms. His helmet was spattered inside
with the blood that trickled from his
ears, owing to the enormous pressure of
the sea.

The constant facing of dangers like
these had made of the diver a quiet, reti-
cent man. There was, too, a gentleness
and quaint patience about him that al-
ways appealed to Sanford. Of late his
pate blue eyes seemed to shine with a
softer light, as if he were perpetually hug-
ging some happiness to himself. Since
he had joined Sanford's working force
he had married a second and a younger
wife, — a mere child, the men said, —
young enough to be his daughter, too
young for a man of forty-five. But those
who knew him best said that all this hap-
py gentleness had come with the girl wife.

462

Caleb West.

His cabin, a small, two-story affair,
bought with the money he had saved
during his fifteen years on the Lightship
and after his first wife's death, lay a
short distance up the shore above that
of Captain Joe, and in plain sight of
where they both sat. Just before San-
ford had taken his seat beside the diver,
he had seen him wave his hand gayly in
answer to a blue apron tossing on its
distant porch. Bill Lacey had seen the
apron too, and had answered it a mo-
ment later with a little wave of his own.
Caleb did not notice Billy's signal, but
Captain Joe did, and a peculiar look
filled his eye that the men did not often
see. In his confusion Lacey flushed
scarlet, and upset the pan of cement.

When the men turned to wash their
hands for breakfast, Sanford slipped his
clothes and plunged overboard, one of
the crew holding the sail flat to shield
him from the shore. His frequent dips
always amused Captain Joe. who was
so often overboard without his consent
and in his clothes, that he could never
understand why any other man should
take to the element from choice, even
if he left his garments on board ship.

Captain Joe soused a bucket over-
board, rested it on the rail and plunged
in his hands, the splashing drops glisten-
ing in the sunlight.

" Come, Mr. Sanford, — breakfast 's
ready, men," he called. Then, waving
his hand to Caleb and the others, he said
laughing, " All you men what 's gittin'
skeery 'bout the Screamer kin step
ashore. I 'm a-goin' to load three o'
them stone aboard the sloop after break-
fast, if I roll her over bottom side ujv"

Sanford sat at the head of the table,
his back to the companionway, the crew's
bunks within reach of his hand. He was
the only man who wore a coat. Before
him were fried eggs sizzling in squares
of pork ; hashed potatoes, browned in
what was left of the sizzle ; saleratus bis-
cuit, full of dark spots ; and coffee in
tin cups. There was also a small jug of

molasses, protected by a pewter top, and
a bottle of tomato catsup, its contents
repeatedly spattered over every plate.

Long years of association had famil-
iarized Sanford with certain rules of eti-
quette to be always observed at a meal
like this. Whoever finished first he knew
must push back his stool out of the way
and instantly mount to the deck. In
confined quarters, elbow-room is a luxu-
ry, and its free gift a courtesy. He also
knew that to leave anything on his plate
would have been regarded as an evidence
of extreme bad manners, suggesting be-
side a reflection upon the skill of the
cook. It was also a part of the code to
wipe one's knife carefully on the last piece
of bread, which was to be swallowed im-
mediately, thus obliterating all traces of
the repast, except, of course, the bones,
which must be picked clean and piled
on one side of the plate. Captain Joe
never neglected these little amenities.

Sanford forgot none of them. He
drank from his tin cup, and ate his eggs
and fried ham apparently with the same
zest that he would have felt before one
of Sam's choicest breakfasts. He found
something wonderfully inspiring in watch-
ing a group of big, strong, broad-breast-
ed, horny-handed laboring men intent on
satisfying a hunger born of fresh air and
hard labor. There was an eagerness
about their movements, a relish as each
mouthful disappeared, attended by a
good humor and sound digestion that
would have given a sallow-faced dyspep-
tic a new view of life, and gone far to-
ward converting a dilettante to the belief
that although forks and napkins were
perhaps indispensable luxuries, existence
would not be wholly desolate with plain
fingers and shirt-cuffs.

Captain Joe was the first man on
deck. He had left his pea-jacket in the
cabin, and now wore his every-day out-
fit— the blue flannel shirt, long since
stretched out of shape in its efforts to
accommodate itself to the spread of his
shoulders, and a pair of trousers in

Caleb West.

463

which each corrugated wrinkle outlined
a knotted muscle twisted up and down
his sturdy rudder-posts of legs.

" Come, men ! " he called in a com-
manding voice, with none of the gentler
tones heard at the breakfast - table.
" Pull yourselves together. Bill Lacey,
lower away that hook and git them
chains ready. Fire up, Cap'n Brandt,
and give 't every pound o' steam she '11
carry. Here, one or two of ye, run this
'ere line ashore and make her bow fast.
Drop that divin'-suit, Caleb ; this ain't
no time to patch things."

These orders were volleyed at the
men one after another, as he stepped
from the sloop to the wharf, each man
springing to his place. Sanford, stand-
ing by him, gave suggestions in lowered
tones, while the sloop was made ready
for the trial.

Captain Joe moved down the dock
and adjusted with his own hands the
steel " Lewis " that was to be driven into
the big trial stone. Important details
like this he never left to others. If this
Lewis should slip, with the stone sus-
pended over the sloop's deck, the huge
block would crush through her timbers,
sinking her instantly.

The sloop was lying alongside the
wharf, with beam and stern lines made
fast to the outlying water-spiles to steady
her. When the tackle was shaken

•

clear, the boom was lowered at the pro-
per angle ; the heavy chain terminating
in an enormous S-hook, which hung im-
mediately over the centre of one of the
big enrockment blocks.

The Screamer's captain held the
throttle, watching the steadily rising
steam-gauge.

" Give 'er a turn and take up the
slack ! " shouted Captain Joe.

" Ay, ay, sir ! " came the quick an-
swer of the skipper, as the cogs of the
hoisting-engine began to move, winding
all the loose slackened " fall " around
the drum, until it straightened out like
a telegraph wire.

"What's 'she carryin' now, Cap'n
Bob ? " again shouted Captain Joe.

" Seventy-six pounds, sir."

" Give 'er time — don't push 'er."

A crowd began to gather on the dock :
fishermen and workmen on their way to
the village, idlers along the shore road,
and others. They all understood that
the trial of the sloop was to be made
this morning, and great interest was felt.
The huge stones had rested all winter
on this wharf, and the loungers around
every tavern stove in Keyport had dis-
cussed and rediscussed their size, until
each one outweighed the Pyramids.
Loading such pieces on board a vessel
like the Screamer had never been done
in Keyport before.

Old Marrows's whispered misgivings,
as he made fast a line far up on the
wharf, were soon shared by others. Some
of the onlookers moved back across the
road, yielding to the vague fear of the
inexperienced. Bets were offered that
" her mast would be tore clean out of
her ; " or that " she 'd put her starboard
rail under water afore she 'd start 'em ; "
and that " she 'd sink where she lay."

The needle of the gauge on the sloop's
boiler revolved slowly until it registered
ninety pounds. Little puffs of blue va-
porless steam hissed from the safety-
valve. The boiler was getting ready to
do its duty.

Captain Joe looked aloft, ordered the
boom topped a few inches, so that the
lift would be plumb, sprang upon the
sloop's deck, scrutinized the steam-gauge,
saw that the rope was evenly wound on
the drum, emptied an oil-can into the
sunken wooden saddle in which the butt
of the boom rested, followed with his
eye every foot of the manilla fall from
the drum through the double blocks to
the chain hanging over the big stone,
called to the people on the dock to get
out of harm's way, and saw that every
man was in his place ; then rang out the
order, clear and sharp, —

" Go ahead ! "

464

Caleb West.

The cogs of the drum of the hoisting-
engine spun around until the great
weight began to tell ; then the strokes
of the steam-pistons slowed down. The
outboard mooring-lines were now tight
as standing rigging. The butt of the
boom in the sunken saddle was creaking
as it turned, a pungent odor from the
friction-heated oil filling the air. The
strain increased, and the sloop careened
toward the wharf until her bilge struck
the water, drawing taut as bars of steel
her outboard shrouds. Ominous clicks
came from the new manilla as its twists
were straightened out.

Captain Bob Brandt still stood by the
throttle, one of his crew firing, some-
times with cotton waste soaked in kero-
sene. He was watching every part of
his sloop then under strain to see how
she stood the test.

The slow movement of the pistons
continued. The strain became intense.
A dead silence prevailed, broken only
by the clicking fall and the creak of the
roller blocks. Twice the safety-valve
blew a hoarse note of warning.

Slowly, inch by inch, the sloop settled
in the water, — stopped suddenly, — qui-
vered her entire length, — gathered her-
self together, like a strong man getting
well under his load ; the huge stone
canted a point, slid the width of a dock
plank, and with a hoarse, scraping sound
swung clear of the wharf.

A cheer went up from the motley
crowd on the dock. Not a word es-
caped the men at work. Not a man
moved from his place. The worst was
yet to come. The swinging stone must
yet be lowered on deck.

" Tighten up that guy," said Captain
Joe quietly, between his teeth, never
taking his eyes from the stone ; his hand
meanwhile on the fall, to test its strain.

Bill Lacey and Caleb ran to the end
of the dock, whipped one end of a line
around a mooring-post, and with their
knees bent to the ground held on with
all their strength. The other end of the

guy was fastened to the steel S-hook that
held the Lewis in the stone.

" Easy — ea-s-y ! " said Captain Joe,
a momentary shadow of anxiety on his
face. The guy held by Caleb and La-
cey gradually slackened. The great
stone, now free to swing clear, moved
slowly in mid-air over the edge of the
wharf, passed above the water, cleared
the rail of the sloop, and settled on her
deck as gently as a grounding balloon.

The cheer that broke from all hands
brought the fishwives to their porches.

IV.

AMONG THE BLACKFISH AND TOMCODS.

Hardly had the men ceased cheering
when the boom was swung back, another
huge stone was lifted from the wharf,
and loaded aboard the sloop. A third
followed, was lowered upon rollers on
the deck and warped amidships, to trim
the boat. The mooring-lines were cast
off, and the sloop's sail partly hoisted for
better steering, and a nervous, sputter-
ing little tug tightened a tow-line over
the Screamer's bow.

The flotilla now moved slowly out of
the harbor toward the Ledge. Captain
Brandt stood at the wheel. His face
was radiant. His boat had met the test,
just as he knew she would. Boat and
captain had stood by each other many
a time before ; that night at Rockport
was one, when they lay bow on to a gale,
within a cable's length of the break-
water. This saw-toothed Ledge could
not scare him.

Yet not a word of boasting passed his
lips. Whatever the risk to come might
be, while she lay to these new floating
buoys of Captain Joe's, he meant to put
the stones where the captain wanted
them, if the sloop's bones were laid be-
side them. Captain Joe, he well knew,
never sent another man's vessel where he
would not have sent his own. So Cap-

Caleb West.

465

tain Brandt spun his wheel and held his
peace.

Close association with Captain Joe al-
ways inspired this confidence ; not only
among his own men, but in all the others
who sprang to his orders. His personal
magnetism, his enthusiasm, his seeming-
ly reckless fearlessness, and yet extreme
caution and watchful care for the^ safety
of his men, had created among them a
blind confidence in his judgment that al-
ways resulted in immediate and unques-
tioned obedience to his orders, no matter
what the risk might seem.

When the open harbor was reached,
the men overhauled the boom -tackle,
getting ready for the real work of the
day. Bill Lacey and Caleb West lifted
the air-pump from its case, and oiled
the plunger. Caleb was to dive that day
himself, and find a bed for these first
three stones as they were lowered under
water. Work like this required an ex-
perienced hand. Lacey was to tend the
life-line.

As the tug and sloop passed into the
broad water, Medford Village could be
seen toward the southeast. Sanford ad-
justed his marine-glass, and focused its
lens on Mrs. Leroy's country-house. It
lay near the water, and was surmounted
by a cupola he had often used as a look-
out when he had been Mrs. Leroy's
guest, and the weather had been too
rough for him to land at the Ledge. He
saw that the bricklayers were really at
work, and that the dining-room exten-
sion was already well under way, the
scaffolding being above the roof. He
meant, if the weather permitted, to stop
there on his way home.

Soon the Ledge itself loomed up, with
its small platforms, and what was left of
last year's shanty. The concrete men
were evidently busy, for the white steam
from the mixers rose straight into the
still air.

An hour more and the windows on
the lee side of the shanty could be dis-
tinguished, and a little later, the men on

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 30

the platform as they gathered to await
the approaching flotilla. When they
caught sight of the big blocks stored on
the Screamer's deck, they broke into
a cheer that was followed by a shrill
saluting whistle from the big hoisting-
engine on the Ledge. This was an-
swered as cheerily by the approaching
tug. Work on the" Ledge could now
begin in earnest.

If Crotch Island was like the back of
a motionless whale, Shark's Ledge was
like that of a turtle, — a turtle say one
hundred and fifty feet long by a hun-
dred wide, lying still in a moving sea,
and always fringed by a ruffling of surf
curls, or swept by great waves that rolled
in from Montauk. No landing could
ever be made here except in the eddy
formed by the turtle itself, and then
only in the stillest weather.

The shell of this rock-incrusted turtle
had been formed by dumping on the
original Ledge, and completely covering
it, thousands of tons of rough stone, each
piece as big as a bureau. Upon this stony
shell, which rose above high-water mark,
a wooden platform had been erected for
the proper storage of stone, sand, bar-
rels of cement, hoisting-engines, concrete
mixers, tools, and a shanty for the men.
It was down by the turtle's side — down
below the slop of the surf — that the big
enrockment blocks were to be placed,
one on the other, their sides touching
close as those on a street pavement. The
lowest stone of all was to be laid on the
bottom of the sea in thirty feet of water ;
the top one was to be placed where its
upper edges would be thrust above the
sea. In this way the loose rough stones
of the turtle's shell would have a cover,
and the finished structure be protected
from the crush of floating ice and the
fury of winter gales.

By a change of plan the year before,
a deep hole nearly sixty feet in diame-
ter had been made in the back of this
turtle. This hole was now being filled
with concrete up to low-water level and

466

Caleb West.

retained in form by circular iron bands.
On top of this enormous artificial bed-
stone was to be placed the tower of the
lighthouse itself, of dressed stone, many
of the single pieces to be larger than
those now on the Screamer's deck. The
four great derrick-masts with " twenty-
inch butts " which had been ordered by
telegraph the day before in Sanford's
office — the telegram Sam took — were
to be used to place these dressed stones
in position.

The nearest land to the Ledge was
Crotch Island, two miles away. To the
east stretched the wide sea, hungry for
fresh victims, and losing no chance to
worst the men on the Ledge. For two
years it had fought the captain and his
men without avail. The Old Man of
the Sea hates the warning voice of the
fog-horn and the cheery light in the tall
tower — they rob him of his prey.

The tug continued on her course for
half a mile, steered closer, the sloop
following, and gained the eddy of the
Ledge out of the racing tide. Four men
from the platform now sprang into a
whaleboat and pulled out to meet the
sloop, carrying one end of a heavy haw-
ser which was being paid out by the men
on the Ledge. The hawser was made
fast to the sloop's cleats and hauled
tight. The tug was cast loose and sent
back to Keyport. Outboard hawsers
were run by the crew of the whaleboat
to the floating anchor-buoys, to keep the
sloop off the stone-pile when the enrock-
ment blocks were swung clear of her
sides.

Caleb and Lacey began at once to
overhaul the diving-gear. The air-pump
was set close to the sloop's rail ; a short
ladder was lashed to her side, to enable
the diver to reach the water easily. The
air-hose and life-lines were then uncoiled.
Caleb threw off his coat and trousers, that
he might move the more freely in his
diving-dress, and with Lonny Bowles's
assistance wormed himself into his rub-
ber suit, — body, arms, and legs being

made of one piece of air and water tight
rubber cloth.

By the time the sloop had been moored,
and the boom-tackle made ready to lift
the stone, Caleb stood on the ladder
completely equipped, except for his cop-
per helmet, which Captain Joe always
adjusted himself. On his breast and be-
tween his shoulders hung two lead plates
weighing twenty-five pounds each, and
on his feet were two iron-shod shoes of
equal weight. These were needed as bal-
last, to overbalance the buoyancy of his
inflated dress, and enable him to sink
or rise at his pleasure. Firmly tied to
his wrist was a stout cord, — his life-
line, — and attached to the back of the
copper helmet was a long rubber hose,
through which a constant stream of fresh
air was pumped inside his helmet and
dress.

In addition to these necessary ap-
pointments there was hung over one
shoulder a canvas haversack, containing
a small cord, a chisel, a water-compass,
and a sheath-knife. The sheath-knife is
the last desperate hope of the diver when
his air-hose becomes tangled or clogged,
his signals are misunderstood, and he
must either cut his hose in the effort to
free himself and reach the surface, or
suffocate where he is.

Captain Joe adjusted the copper hel-
met, and stood with Caleb's glass face-
plate in his hand, thus leaving his helmet
open for a final order, before he lowered
him overboard. The cogs of the Scream-
er's drum began turning, followed by the
same creaking and snapping of manilla
and straining of boom that had been
heard when she was loaded.

Between the sea and the sloop a fight
was now raging. The current which
swept by within ten feet of her bilge
curled and eddied about the buoy-floats,
tugging at their chains, while wave after
wave tried to reach her bow, only to fall
back beaten and snapping like hungry
wolves.

The Cape Ann sloop had fought these

Caleb West.

467

fights before. All along her timber rail
were the scars of similar battles. If she
could keep her bow-cheeks from the teeth
of these murderous rocks, she could laugh
all day at their open jaws.

When the hoisting-engine was started
and the steam began to hiss through the
safety-valve, the bow-lines of the sloop
straightened like strands of steel. <• Then
there came a slight, staggering move-
ment as she adjusted herself to the shift-
ing weight. Without a sound, the stone
rose from the deck, cleared the rail, and
hung over the sea. Another cheer went
up — this time from both the men on
board the sloop and those on the Ledge.
Captain Brandt smiled, with closed lips.
Life was easy for him now.

" Lower away," said Captain Joe in
the same tone he would have used in
asking for the butter, as he turned to
screw on Caleb's face-plate, shutting out
the fresh air, and giving the diver only
pumped air to breathe. Screwing on the
glass face-plate is the last thing done
before a diver goes under water.

The stone sank slowly into the sea,
the dust and dirt of its, long storage dis-
coloring the clear water.

"Hold her," continued Captain Joe,
his hand still on Caleb's face-plate, as
he stood erect on the ladder. " Stand
by, Billy. Go on with that pump, men,
— give him plenty of air."

Two men began turning the handles
of the pump. Caleb's dress filled out
like a balloon ; Lacey took his place
near the small ladder, the other end of
Caleb's life-line having been made fast
to his wrist, and the diver sank slowly
out of sight, his hammer in his hand, the
air bubbles from his exhaust-valve mark-
ing his downward course.

As Caleb sank, he hugged his arms
close to his body, pressed his knees to-
gether, forcing the surplus air from his
dress, and dropped rapidly toward the
bottom. The thick lead soles of his
shoes kept his feet down and his head
up, and the breast-plates steadied him.

At the depth of twenty feet he touched
the tops of the sea-kelp growing on the
rocks below, — he could feel the long
tongues of leaves scraping his legs. Then,
as he sank deeper, his shoes struck an
outlying boulder. Caleb floated around
this, measured it with his arms, and set-
tled to the gravel. He was now between
the outlying boulder and the Ledge.
Here he raised himself erect on his feet
and looked about : the gravel beneath
him was white and spangled with star-
fish ; little crabs lay motionless, or scut-
tled away at his crunching tread ; the
sides of the isolated boulder were smooth
and clean, the top being covered with
waving kelp. In the dim, greenish light
this boulder looked like a weird head, —
a kind of submarine Medusa, with her
hair streaming upward. The jagged
rock-pile next it resembled a hill of pur-
ple and brown corn swaying in the
ceaseless current.

Caleb thrust his hand into his haver-
sack, grasped his long knife, slashed at
the kelp of the rock-pile to see the bot-
tom stones the clearer, and sent a quick
signal of " All right — lower away ! "
through the life-line, to Lacey, who stood
on the sloop's deck above him.

Almost instantly a huge green shadow
edged with a brilliant iridescent light
fell about him, growing larger and larger
in its descent. Caleb peered upward
through his face - plate, followed the
course of the stone, and jerked a second
signal to Lacey's wrist. This signal was
repeated in words by Lacey to Captain
Brandt, who held the throttle, and the
shadowy stone was stopped within three
feet of the gravel bottom. Here it swayed
slowly, half turned, and touched on the
boulder.

Caleb watched the stone carefully un-
til it was perfectly still, crept along,
swimming with one hand, and measured
carefully with his eye the distance be-
tween the boulder and the Ledge. Then
he sent a quick signal of " Lower — all
gone," up to Lacey's wrist. The great

468

Caleb West.

stone dropped a chain's link ; slid half-
way the boulder, scraping the kelp in its
course ; careened, and hung over the
gravel with one end tilted on a point of
the rocky ledge. As it hung suspended,
one end buried itself in the gravel near
the boulder, while the other end lay aslant
up the slope of the rock-covered ledge.

Caleb again swam carefully around
the stone, opened his arms, and inflating
his dress rose five or six feet through the
green water, floated over the huge stone,
and grasping with his bare hand the low-
ering chain by which the stone hung,
tested its strain. The chain was as rigid
as a bar of steel. This showed that the
stone was not fully grounded, and there-
fore dangerous, being likely to slide off
at any moment. The diver now sent a
telegram of short and long jerks aloft,
asking for a crowbar ; hooked his legs
around the lowering chain and pressed
his copper helmet to the chain links to
listen to Captain Joe's answer. A series
of dull thuds, long and short, struck by
a hammer above — a means of commu-
nication often possible when the depth
of water is not great — told him that the
crowbar he had asked for would be sent
down at once. While he waited motion-
less, a blackfish pressed his nose to the
glass of his face-plate, and scurried off
to tell his fellows living in the kelp how
strange a thing he had seen that day.

A quick jerk from Lacey, and the
point of the crowbar dangled over Ca-
leb's head. In an instant, to prevent
his losing it in the kelp, he had lashed
another and smaller cord about its middle,
and with the bar firmly in his hand laid
himself flat on the stone. The diver
now examined carefully the points of
contact between the boulder and the hang-
ing stone, inserted one end of the bar
under its edge, sent a warning signal
above, braced both feet against the low-
ering chain, threw his whole strength on
the bar, and gave a sharp, quick pull.
The next instant the chain tightened ;
the bar, released from the strain, bound-

ed from his hand ; there was a headlong
surge of the huge shadowy mass through
the waving kelp, and the great block
slipped into its place, stirring up the bot-
tom silt in a great cloud of water-dust.

The first stone of the system of en-
rockment had been bedded !

Caleb clung with both hands to the
lowering chain, waited until the water
cleared, knocked out the Lewis pin that
held the S-hook, thus freeing the chain,
and signaled " All clear — hoist." Then
he hauled the crowbar towards him by
the cord, signaled for the next stone,
moved away from the reach of falling
bodies, and sat down on a bed of sea-
kelp as comfortably as if it had been a
sofa-cushion.

These breathing spells rest the lungs
of a diver and lighten his work. Being
at rest he can manage his dress the bet-
ter, inflating it so that he is able to get
his air with greater ease and regularity.
The relief is sometimes so soothing that
in long waits the droning of the air-valve
will lull the diver into a sleep, from which
he is suddenly awakened by a quick jerk
on his wrist. Many divers, while wait-
ing for the movements of those above,
play with the fish, watch the' crabs, or
rake over the gravel in search of the
thousand and one things that are lost
overboard and that everybody hopes to
find on the bottom of the sea.

Caleb did none of these things. He
was too expert a diver to allow himself
to go to sleep, and he had too much to
think about. He sat quietly awaiting
his call, his thoughts on the day of the
week and how long it would be before
Saturday night came again, and whether,
when he left that morning, he had ar-
ranged everything for the little wife, so
that she would be comfortable until his
return. Once a lobster, thinking them
some tidbit previously unknown, moved
slowly up and nipped his red fingers
with its claw. The dress terminates at
the wrist with a waterproof and air-tight
band, leaving the hands bare. At an-

Caleb. West.

469

other time two tomcods came sailing past,
side by side, flapped their tails on his
helmet, and scampered off. But Caleb,
sitting comfortably on his sofa-cushion of
seaweed thirty feet under water, paid
little heed to outside things.

In the world above, a world of fleecy
clouds and shimmering sea, some changes
had taken place since Caleb sank out of
the sunlight. Hardly had the second
stone been made ready to be swung over-
board and lowered to Caleb, when there
came a sudden uplifting of the sea. One
of those tramp waves preceding a heavy
storm had strayed in from Montauk and
was making straight for the Ledge.

Captain Joe sprang on the sloop's rail
and looked seaward, and a shade of dis-
appointment crossed his face.

" Stand by on that outboard guy ! " he
shouted in a voice that was heard all over
the Ledge.

The heavy outboard hawser holding
the sloop whipped out of the sea with the
sudden strain, thrashed the spray from
its twists, and quivered like a fiddle-
string. The sloop staggered for an in-
stant ; plunged bow under, careened to
her rail, and righted herself within oar's
touch of the Ledge. Three feet from her
bilge streak crouched a grinning rock
with its teeth set !

Captain Joe smiled and looked at Cap-
tain Brandt.

" Ain't nothin' when ye git used to 't,
Cap'n Bob. I ain't a-goin' ter scratch
'er paint. The jig 's up now till the tide
turns. Got to bank yer fires. Them
other two stone '11 have to wait."

" Ay, ay, sir," replied the skipper,
throwing the furnace door wide open.
Then he walked down the deck and said
to Captain Joe in a tone as if he were
only asking for information, but without
a shade of nervous anxiety, "If that
'ere hawser 'd parted, Cap'n Joe, when
she give that plunge, it would 'a' been all
up with us, — eh ? "

" Yes, — 'spec' so," answered the cap-

tain, his mind, now that the danger had
passed, neither on the question nor on the
answer. Then suddenly awakening with
a look of intense interest, " That line was
a new one, Cap'n Bob. I picked it out
a-purpose ; them kind don't part."

Sanf ord, who had been standing by the
tiller, anxiously watching the conflict,
walked forward and. grasped the skip-
per's hand.

" I want to congratulate you," he
said, " on your sloop and on your pluck.
It is not every man can lie around this
stone-pile for the first time and keep his
head."

Captain Brandt flushed like a bashful
girl, and turned away his face. " Well,
sir — ye see " — He never finished the
sentence. The compliment had upset
him more than the escape of the sloop.

All was bustle now on board the
Screamer. The boom was swung in
aboard, lowered, and laid on the deck.
Caleb had been hauled up to the surface,
his helmet unscrewed, and his shoes and
breast-plate taken off. He still wore his
dress, so that he could be ready for the
other two stones when the tide turned.
Meanwhile he walked about the deck
looking like a great bear on his hind
legs, his bushy beard puffed out over his
copper collar.

During the interval of the change
of tide dinner was announced, and the
Screamer's crew went below to more siz-
zle and dough-balls, and this time a piece
of corned beef, while Sanford, Captain
Joe, Caleb, and Lacey sprang into the
sloop's yawl and sculled for the shanty,
keeping close to the hawser still holding
the sloop.

The unexpected made half the battle
at the Ledge. It was not unusual to see
a southeast roll, three days old, cut down
in an hour to the smoothness of a mill-
pond by a northwest gale, and before
night to find this same dead calm fol-
lowed by a semi-cyclone. Only an ex-
pert could checkmate the consequences

470

Caleb West.

of weather manoeuvres like these. Be-
fore Captain Joe had filled each man's
plate with his fair porportion of cabbage
and pork, a whiff of wind puffed in the
bit of calico that served as a curtain for
the shanty's pantry window, — the one
facing east. Captain Joe sprang from
his seat, and, bareheaded as he was,
mounted the concrete platforms and
looked seaward. Off towards Block
Island he saw a little wrinkling line of
silver flashing out of the deepening haze,
while toward Crotch Island scattered
flurries of wind furred the glittering sur-
face of the sea with dull splotches, —
as when one breathes upon a mirror.
The captain turned quickly, entered the
shanty, and examined the barometer. It
had fallen two points.

"Finish yer dinner, men," he said
quietly. " That 's the las' stone to-day,
Mr. Sanford. It 's beginnin' ter git
lumpy. It '11 blow a livin' gale o' wind
by sundown."

A second and stronger puff now swayed
the men's oilskins, hanging against the
east door. This time the air was colder
and more moist. The sky overhead had
thickened. In the southeast lay two sun-
dog clouds, their backs shimmering like
opals, while about the feverish eye of the
sun gathered a reddish circle like an in-
flammation.

Sanford was on the platform, reading
the signs of the coming gale. It was
important that he should reach Keyport
by night, and he had no time to spare.
'As the men came out one after another,
each of them glanced toward the horizon,
and quickening his movements fell to

work putting the place in order. The
loose barrow planks were quickly racked
up on the shanty's roof, out of the wash
of the surf ; an extra safety - guy was
made fast to the platform holding the
hoisting - engine, and a great tarpaulin
drawn over the cement and lashed fast.
Captain Joe busied himself meanwhile
in examining the turnbuckles of the iron
holding -down rods, which bound the
shanty to the Ledge, and giving them
another tightening twist. He ordered
the heavy wooden shutters for the east
side of the shanty to be put up, and saw
that the stovepipe that stuck through
the roof was taken down and stored in-
side.

The Screamer tugged harder at her
hawser, her bow surging as the ever-in-
creasing swell raced past her. Orders to
man the yawl were given and promptly
obeyed. Captain Joe was the last to
step into the boat.

" Keep everything snug, Caleb, while
I 'm gone," he shouted. " It looks soapy,
but it may be out to the nor'ard an' clear
by daylight. Sit astern, Mr. Sanford.
Pull away, men, we ain't got a min-
ute."

When the Screamer, with two unset
stones still on her deck, bore away from
the Ledge with Sanford, Captain Joe,
and Lacey on board, the spray was fly-
ing over the shanty roof.

Caleb stood on the platform waving
his hand. He was still in his diving-
dress.

" Tell Betty I '11 be home for Sun-
day," the men heard him call out, as they
flew by under close reef.

F. Hopkinson Smith.

(To be continued.)

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 471

FOREVER AND A DAY.

A SONG.

I LITTLE know or care

If the blackbird on the bough

Is filling all the air

With his soft crescendo now ;

For she is gone away,

And when she went she took

The springtime in her look,

The peachblow on her cheek,

The laughter from the brook,

The blue from out the May —

And what she calls, a week

Is forever and a day !

It 's little that I mind

How the blossoms, pink or white,

At every touch of wind

Fall a-trembling with delight ;

For in the leafy lane,

Beneath the garden boughs,

And through the silent house

One thing alone I seek.

Until she come again

The May is not the May,

And what she calls a week

Is forever and a day!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS' PROGRESS IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA.

A FULL account of the extraordinary If the reader will take the trouble to
advances made in Africa during the last lay a sheet of tracing-paper on the now
twenty-five years would require volumes, crowded map of Africa, mark out a track
and in a single magazine article I can from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganika, and
give but a re"sum£ of the progress which from about the centre of that line an-
has taken place in the equatorial portion other running north to the Victoria Nyan-
of the continent. I begin with 1872, for za, then draw a curving line of march
in July of that year I returned to Eng- through the intra-lake region to the out-
land with the six years' journals and let of the lake on the north side and add
latest news of Dr. Livingstone. the eastern coast of Lake Albert, he will

472 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa.

realize far better than from any verbal
description how little of Equatorial Af-
rica was known at that time. He will see
that nine tenths of inner Africa remained
unexplored. The tracks drawn will illus-
trate what Burton and Speke, Speke and
Grant, and Sir Samuel Baker had accom-
plished in seven years, 1857-64.

In September, 1872, I was requested
to meet the British Association at Brigh-
ton, to tell its geographical section what
new discoveries Livingstone had made
during his six years' absence between
Lakes Nyassa, Mweru, and Tanganika,
and along the Lualaba River. At that
meeting one geographer insisted that,
since domestic swine were unknown in
Africa, the " Old Traveler " must have
lost his wits when he declared that he had
found natives who kept tame pigs. The
president observed that it was his duty
to " veto " stories of that kind, because
a geographical society discussed facts,
not fictions. Sir Henry Rawlinson was
inclined to believe that the great river
discovered by Livingstone, if not the
Congo, emptied into some vast marsh
or swamp. The kindly way in which
Livingstone had referred to the amiable
Manyuemas was suspected by some of
those present to be an attempt on his
part to create a favorable impression of
the people, from among whom, it was
said by Captain Burton, he had taken a
princess for a wife. When the audience
filed out from the hall, I was mobbed
by persons who were curious to know if
Zanzibar was an island !

But the way in which Americans re-
ceived the news of Livingstone's achieve-
ments was the most amusing of all.
They did not resort to personal detrac-
tion of Livingstone, but turned their
powers of raillery upon me. Every hu-
morous expression in the Old Traveler's
letters to the New York Herald was
taken to be a proof that I must have
concocted the fables about " winsome
Manyuema girls," and so on. One jour-
nalist went so far as to assert that he

had reason to know I had never left
New York city, and that I was a married
man with a large family, who occasion-
ally relieved my imagination by attempts
to rival Defoe. Mark Twain dealt me
the worst stroke of all. He wrote in the
Hartford Courant, with the most perfect
assurance, that when I found Living-
stone, I was urged by him to relate first
what great national events had happened
during the long years in which he had
been wandering, and that after describ-
ing how the Suez Canal had been opened,
reporting the completion of the Amer-
ican transcontinental railway, the elec-
tion of General Grant to the presidency,
and the Franco - German war, I began
to tell how Horace Greeley had become
a candidate for the presidential honor,
whereupon Livingstone exclaimed sud-
denly, " Hold on, Mr. Stanley ! I must
say I was inclined to believe you at first,
but when you take advantage of my
guilelessness and tell me that Horace
Greeley has been accepted as a candi-
date by the American people, I '11 be

if I can believe anything you say

now." The English papers reprinted
this solemn squib, and asked " if Mr.
Stanley could be surprised that people
expressed doubt of his finding Living-
stone when he attributed such profanity
to a man so noted for his piety " !

All this seems to me to have occurred
ages ago. It will be incredible to many
in this day that my simple story was re-
ceived with such general unbelief. But
such was the obscurity hanging over the
centre of Africa in 1872 that, befogged
by stay-at-home geographers, the public
did not know whom to believe. Nine
tenths of Equatorial Africa, as we have
seen, were unknown, and the tenth that
was known had required fifteen years
for Burton, Speke, Baker, and Living-
stone to explore. At such a rate of pro-
gress it would have taken 135 years to
reveal inner Africa. Several things had
conspired to keep Africa dark. In the
first place, the public appeared to con-

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 473

aider that the exploration of continents
and oceans should be reserved for gov-
ernments or Yor wealthy societies. Then
geographical associations regarded pri-
vate enterprises with suspicion, or as im-
pertinent intrusions upon their domain.
The maps of Africa were generally ac-
cepted as drawn from authentic surveys
and accurate observations, whereas in
reality they were mere inferences based
upon native reports and exaggerated es-
timates of distances. Traditions of dis-
astrous expeditions also discouraged pio-
neers. Mungo Park's violent death on
the Niger closed that river for over forty
years. The fatalities attending Tuckey's
expedition on the Congo in 1816 preju-
diced every one against that river for
sixty-two years. The failure of Mac-
gregor Laird's mission at Lukoja, on
the Lower Niger, in 1841 turned men's
thoughts away from that river for an-
other forty years. The misfortunes which
followed Bishop Mackenzie's mission to
the Zambesi in 1863-64 suspended mis-
sion work inland for twelve years. The
singularly bad repute of the West Coast,
the murders of Van der Decken and Le
Saint on the East Coast, contributed to
make Africa a terror to explorers. An-
other strong deterrent, I think, was the
impression, derived from the books of
travelers, that Africa had a most deadly
climate, which only about six per cent of
those who braved it could survive. Bur-
ton's book, The Lake Regions of Central
Africa, was enough to inspire horror in
any weak mind. To him the aspect of
the interior " realized every preconceived
idea at once hideous and grotesque, so
that the traveler is made to think a corpse
lies hidden behind every bush, and the
firmament a fitting frame to the picture
of miasma."

My experience during the search for
Livingstone had proved to me that these
were morbid and puerile stories, and
when Livingstone's death occurred, in
1873, I was easily induced to undertake
a second journey to Africa.

It was during this journey to the un-
explored Victoria Nyanza, in 1874, that
it first dawned upon me that Africa had
been sadly neglected, and deserved a
better future than to be kept as a conti-
nental reserve for the benefit of explor-
ers and geographical societies ; and once
this idea became fixed in my mind I
found myself regarding the land and
people with kindlier eyes. Ebullitions of
temper from a few tribes, chance acci-
dents and misadventures in a savage
land, did not prejudice me against the
region, for balm soon succeeded bane,
and the next view and the next experi-
ence generally compensated me for past
sufferings. During the voyage around
Lake Victoria the ever varying shores
and the character of the natives devel-
oped this considerate judgment, and by
the time I had completed the survey of
the fountain head of the Nile, I was pos-
sessed by the belief that Africa should be
explored for its purely human interest as
much as for its geographical features.

In 1876 I came at last to " Living-
stone's farthest " on the mighty Lualaba.
The first glance at the magnificent stream
fascinated me, and I felt that I had be-
fore me a problem the solution of which
would settle once and for all time whe-
ther the heart of Africa was to remain
forever inaccessible.

The nine months occupied in descend-
ing 1800 miles to the ocean gave me am-
ple time to consider the question from
every point of view, and when I reached
the Atlantic my conclusions were sug-
gested in the last sentence of the last
letter I wrote to the journals which had
dispatched the expedition. " I feel con-
vinced," I then wrote, " that this mighty
waterway will become an international
question some day. It is bound to be
the grand highway of commerce to Cen-
tral Africa. A word to the wise is suf-
ficient."

In pursuit of this idea, I devoted the
greater part of 1878 to addressing Eng-
lish commercial communities upon the ne-

474 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa.

cessity of taking possession of this " No
Man's Land " before it should be too
late. But my connection with journal-
ism was invariably associated by busi-
ness men with a " want of ballast " and
general impracticableness. Geographers
were also wanting in breadth of mind in
their estimates of the value of the river.
One day in April of that year Colonel
Grant and Lord Houghton visited my
rooms, and after exchanging some gen-
eral remarks the latter asked, " How
many years will elapse before another
traveler will see Stanley Falls ? "

" Two, perhaps," I answered.

" Two ! " he exclaimed. " I should
have thought fifty years would have been
nearer the mark."

"Ah, Lord Houghton," I said, "you
may be sure that twenty-five years hence
there will scarcely be one hundred square
miles left unexplored."

" What ! " cried Colonel Grant. " I
would .like to make a small bet on
that."

" Done ! " I said. " What do you say
to making a note of it, and letting ten
pounds be the forfeit ? "

The bet was accepted, and we both
laughingly recorded it.

Nineteen years have passed since that
date, and we have still six years before
us. Meantime, sixteen travelers have
crossed Africa ; the Congo basin has
been thoroughly explored ; the horn of
East Africa from the Red Sea to Masai
Land has been several times traversed ;
countless travelers have been up and
down the Masai region ; the intra-lake
region has been fairly mapped out, and
military stations have been founded in
it ; the Germans know their East Af-
rican colony thoroughly ; Mozambique
Africa is almost as well known as Mas-
sachusetts ; and French explorers have
repeatedly crossed the Congo-Shari wa-
tershed to Lake Chad. To-day there is
scarcely a thousand-square-mile plot of
inner Africa left unpenetrated, and con-
sidering that there are over 2800 white

men in the central Africa which in 1877
contained only myself, I think I shall be
able to claim my forfeit.

The process of waking Europe to the
value of Africa was slow at first, and
had it not been for the king of the Bel-
gians it might have lasted fifty years
longer. As probably I should not have
returned to Africa after the finding of
Livingstone but for the universal skep-
ticism, so this«new and general unbelief
contributed to induce me to accept the
commission of King Leopold by which
I was to prove, by actual practice, that
African lands were habitable, their can-
nibal aborigines manageable, and legiti-
mate commerce possible. The reports
of our steady progress during the first six
years so stimulated the European nations
that, in 1884, they were at fever-heat,
and the scramble for African territory
began. At the close of the Congo Con-
ference in February, 1885, France, Ger-
many, Italy, Portugal, and finally Great
Britain, were prepared to imitate the ex-
ample of King Leopold, in conformity
with the regulations laid down by that
great assembly of ambassadors.

Since that period the whole of Equato-
rial Africa has been annexed as follows :

Sq. Miles.

Population.

The Congo State . . .

905,900

16,300,000

Congo Francaise . . .

496,290

8.950,000

Portuguese Africa . .

810,450

5,140,000

German East Africa and

Cameruns ....

544,610

7,370,000

British Central Africa,

Zanzibar and Pemba,

Uganda and White

Nile, East Africa . .

954,540

9,568,000

Italian Somal and Galla

277,330

800,000

Total

3,989,120

48,128,000

It will be seen that this area is equal
to the whole of the United States, includ-
ing Alaska, and two thirds of Mexico, put
together. Yet, outside of Angola and a
thin fringe of coast, Livingstone and my-
self were the only whites within this ter-
ritory between 1866 and 1872 ; between

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 475

1874 and 1876 there were only Cameron
and myself within it ; in 1877 I was the
sole white there ; between 1877 and 1884
our own expedition and some missiona-
ries had increased the number to one
hundred Europeans.

The first body to move toward Africa
in answer to my appeals was the Church
Missionary Society, which sent five Eng-
lish missionaries to Uganda. A year
later, these were followed by the French
Fathers. The third expedition was sent
by the International Association ; the
fourth, by the Belgian Socie'te' d'Etudes
du Haut Congo ; the fifth was the Eng-
lish Baptist mission ; the sixth was M.
de Bruzza's political mission to what is
now Congo Franchise, after which nu-
merous religious societies followed, and
European powers began the work of an-
nexation.

The honor of first mention must be
accorded to the Uganda mission, not
only because it preceded the army of
missionaries now at work, but for the
splendid perseverance shown by its mem-
bers, and the marvelous success which
has crowned their efforts. The story of
the Uganda missionary enterprise is an
epic poem. I know of few secular en-
terprises, military or otherwise, deserv-
ing of greater praise. I am unable to
view it with illusions, for I am familiar
with the circumstances attending the
long march to Uganda, the sordid pa-
gans who harassed it at every camp, the
squalid details of African life, the sinis-
ter ambitions of its rivals, the atmo-
sphere of wickedness in which it labored ;
when I brush these thoughts aside, I
picture to myself band after band of
missionaries pressing on to the goal,
where they are to be woefully tried, with
their motto of " Courage and always
forward," each face imbued with the
faith that though near to destruction
"the gates of hell shall not prevail"
against them. For fifteen years after
they had landed in Uganda we heard
frequently of their distress : of tragedy

after tragedy, of deaths by fever, of hor-
rible persecution, the murder of their
bishop, the massacre of their followers,
the martyrdom of their converts, and
finally of their expulsion. Still a glori-
ous few persevered and wrestled against
misfortune, and at last, after twenty
years' work, their achievements have
been so great that the effect of them must
endure.

The letter which invited this mission
was written by me April 14, 1875, and
was published on the following 15th of
November in the London Daily Tele-
graph. The editor, in commenting
upon it, was almost prophetic when he
said : "It may turn out that the letters
which bring this strange and earnest ap-
peal to Christendom, saved from oblivion
by a chance so extraordinary, had this
as their most important burden ; and
that Mr. Stanley may have done far
more than he knew." My letter had
been committed to Colonel Linant de
Bellefonds, who with his entire com-
pany of thirty-six Soudanese soldiers
was murdered by the Baris. Near the
body of the colonel it was found by Gen-
eral Gordon, blood-stained and tattered.
The care of the message from Uganda,
as well as the wonderful results which
followed its publication, was wholly due
to another. .

Eight days after the appearance of
my appeal in the Telegraph the Church
Missionary Society was stimulated by
an offer of $25,000 to undertake the
enterprise. A few days later the fund
was increased to $75,000. In the fol-
lowing March the mission left England,
and on the 30th of June, 1877, while I
was yet six weeks from the Atlantic
Ocean, the missionaries entered Uganda.
For five years they labored with poor
results. • In the seventh year twenty-one
converts partook of the Lord's Supper,
and seventy-five had been baptized. In
the eighth year the baptized numbered
108. After eleven years' work the mis-
sionaries were expelled from Uganda by

476 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa.

the young Nero, the son of King Mtesa
who had received them. In 1890 they
reoccupied it, and by January, 1891, the
Christians here numbered 2000. By Jan-
uary, 1897, Uganda contained twenty-
three English Protestant clergymen, 699
native teachers, 6905 baptized Chris-
tians, 2591 communicants, 57,380 read-
ers, 372 churches, and a cathedral which
can hold 3000 worshipers.

These figures do not represent the
whole of what has been achieved by the
zealous missionaries, for the church of
Uganda imitates the example of the par-
ent church in England, and dispatches
native missionaries to all the countries
round about. Nasa in Usukuma, south
of Lake Victoria, has become a centre
of missionary effort. In Usoga, east of
the Nile, native teachers impart instruc-
tion at nine stations. Unyoro, to the
north of Uganda, has been invaded by
native propagandists. Toro, to the west,
has been so moved that it promises to
become as zealous as Uganda ; and Koki
witnesses the power of native eloquence
and devotion to the cause. What is most
noticeable among all these people around
the lake is their avidity for instruction.
Every scrap of old paper, the white mar-
gins of newspapers, the backs of enve-
lopes, and parcel wrappers are eagerly
secured for writing purposes. Books and
stationery find ready purchasers every-
where. The number of converts has be-
come so formidable that it would task
the powers of a hundred white mission-
aries to organize, develop, and supervise
them properly.

The French Roman Catholics in Bud-
du, west of the lake, have also been
most successful, but the statistics of their
operations are not so accessible. The
number of their proselytes is estimated at
20,000. The Catholic field is just emer-
ging from the transitional stage conse-
quent upon the transfer of the diocese
to the English. Under French superin-
tendence there existed a constant sore-
ness between them and the Protestants,

owing to the inclination of the Fathers
for politics ; but since the arrival of the
English Roman Catholic bishop the na-
tives have become tranquilized.

The line of stations founded by the
International Association is in German
East Africa, and need not be alluded to
here.

The next to be mentioned is, there-
fore, the Congo Free State. In August,
1879, 1 began operations at the mouth of
the Congo with thirteen European of-
ficers and sixty-eight Zanzibaris. At the
date of my departure in 1884, my force
had increased to 142 European officers,
780 colored troops, and 1500 native car-
riers. There were also twenty-two mis-
sionaries occupying seven stations.

Between the years 1884 and 1897 the
state has made such rapid progress in
every branch that, for brevity's sake,
I must be statistical only. When I sur-
rendered my command to my successor
we had launched three steamers and
three barges on the Upper Congo, one
large stern wheeler was a third of the
way on the overland route, and one mis-
sion steamer was on the stocks at Stan-
ley Pool. It will be remembered, of
course, that the Lower Congo is separat-
ed from the Upper Congo by a 230-mile
stretch of rapids and cataracts which
make a land transport past the rapids
inevitable. Everything, therefore, de-
stined for the upper river must be con-
veyed by porters in loads not exceeding
sixty pounds in weight. Since there are
now forty-five steamers and twice as
many barges, or rowboats of steel, afloat
on the Upper Congo, these represent,
with their fittings, a total of nearly one
hundred thousand porter loads. Of these
steamers, twenty belong to the Congo
State, four to France, eight to the Bel-
gian Commercial Company, four to the
Dutch Company, one to an Anglo-Belgian
Company, four to Protestant missions,
and three to Roman Catholic missions.
The length of navigable rivers above
Stanley Pool exceeds eight thousand

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 477

miles. Being a region remarkable for
its natural produce of gums, oils, rubber,
ivory, and timber of the finest descrip-
tion, the Upper Congo must, a few years
hence, present such a sight of steamboat
navigation as the Mississippi used to ex-
hibit before the civil war.

Until 1890 the Congo State had very
little commerce, but by December, 1896,
the value of its imports and exports
amounted to $6,226,302. The principal
exports were groundnuts, coffee, rubber,
gum copal, palm-oil, nuts, and ivory.
Since 427,491 coffee plants and 87,896
cocoa plants are now thriving, a great
forest of 400,000 square miles has scarce-
ly been tapped for its rubber or timber,
and a vast area has not been searched
for its gums, it is probable that, after
the completion of the railway past the
rapids, the chief exports will consist of
coffee, cocoa, gum, rubber, and timber.

The revenue in 1896 had increased to
$1,873,860, of which $600,000 consists
of subsidies given by King Leopold and
Belgium. The expenditure naturally ex-
ceeds the revenue annually, for a new
country requires to be developed. The
frontiers which stretch to a length of 4500
miles must be policed, as well as the main
avenues of commerce. England, France,
and Germany need be under no anxiety
as to their African frontiers : their power
commands sufficient respect for their pos-
sessions. But a state which is a depend-
ency of the king of the Belgians must
vindicate its ability to meet its obligations
according to the rules of the Brussels
Conference, and therefore the sovereign
must have an observant eye against pos-
sible trespassers.

The supreme power of the state is
vested in -the sovereign, King Leopold II.
He is assisted by a secretary of state, a
chief of cabinet, a treasurer-general, and
three secretaries - general, who conduct
foreign affairs, finances, and internal
matters. The local government has its
seat at Boma, the principal town on the
Lower Congo. It is administered by a

governor-general, an inspector of state, a
secretary-general, and several directors-
general. The state is divided into four-
teen administrative divisions, guarded by
115 military stations or small forts and
seven camps of instruction. The army
at present consists of 8000 Congoese
militia, 4000 native volunteers, and 2000
soldiers from other African countries.
There are, besides, a special force raised
for the defense of the railway line, and
three special police corps for the security
of public order at Matadi, Boma, and
Leopoldville. Post-offices are established
at fifty-one stations, and the number of
letters which passed through them last
year aggregated 227,946. The telegraph
line extends from Boma, the capital, to
the head of the railway. It crosses the
Congo where the river is but 877 yards
wide. A cable to connect the Congo with
St. Thomas Island is about to be con-
structed at a cost of $350,000.

The white population of the Congo
State, which in 1884 consisted of 142 of-
ficials and twenty-two missionaries, had
increased by December, 1896, to 1277
officials and traders, and 223 missionaries
representing fifteen different missionary
societies. In 1895 there were 839 Bel-
gians, eighty-eight British, eighty-three
Portuguese, seventy - nine Swedes and
Norwegians, forty-nine Italians, forty-
five Americans, forty-two French, thirty-
nine Dutch, twenty-one Germans, and
forty of other nationalities. The mis-
sionaries are established at sixty-seven
stations, the larger number belonging to
the Catholics, through whom about 5000
children receive instruction. The Pro-
testants have also been singularly suc-
cessful, and have made a greater number
of converts. From results in East and
West Africa one is inclined to think that
a mission makes scarcely any serious im-
pression on the native mind before the
sixth year of work, but there have been
several remarkable instances of whole-
sale conversion in a later period.

In 1878 I began agitating for a rail-

478 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa,

way to connect the Lower with the Upper
Congo, but although I nearly succeeded
that year in forming a company, it was
deemed best to defer its organization
until my expedition of 1879-84 had
demonstrated more clearly the practica-
bility of the project. After the Berlin
Conference of 1884-85 I renewed the
attempt, and by the spring of 1886 I
was so far advanced that a charter was
drawn up, and over a million dollars
were subscribed. There was, however,
one article in the-charter which was pro-
nounced inadmissible by the capitalists,
and since the king was inflexible the idea
was abandoned. Subsequently the suc-
cess of the Emin Relief Expedition re-
vived interest in the project, and soon
after my return from Africa in 1890 a
Belgian company was formed, and a
surveying party was sent out. In 1891
the first twenty kilometres of the rail-
way were laid. The line is to be 247
miles long, extending from Matadi on
the Lower Congo to the port at Stanley
Pool. At the piers at Matadi the ocean
steamers will discharge their freight, and
at the terminus on the Pool, well above
the Cataracts, the Upper Congo steamers
will receive their cargoes. At last ac-
counts the line was in running order for
165 miles, and it is confidently stated
that by June, 1898, the entire line will
be opened for traffic. I had estimated
the cost of construction at $25,000 a
mile, and I find that the actual cost of the
247 miles will not exceed $6,000,000, a
little under my estimate. In some parts
the difficulties have been so great that a
mile has cost nearly $50,000, but the
many stretches of level plateau between
the various gorges and rocky defiles
were railed at comparatively slight ex-
pense.

Congo Franchise did not exist before
the advent of M. le Comte de Brazza
on the river in 1880. He had been com-
missioned by the International Associa-
tion to form a line of stations from the
Ogowai River to Stanley Pool, but his

method differed from mine. He took
with him a number of French officers,
whom he distributed along the route, and
delegating to them the task of building,
he marched lightly to his destination,
making treaties with the natives as he
went. Since these treaties were made
on behalf of France, it was only then
discovered that the International Asso-
ciation had no control over the territory
acquired by De Brazza, and on this
basis, Congo Franchise was founded. It
has now expanded to an area covering
half a million square miles, and has be-
come a confirmed possession of the
French by treaties with Germany and
the Congo Free State.

The white population of the territory
numbers to-day over 300, exclusive of
the coast garrisons. The Gaboon por-
tion, however, was settled as early as
1842, and in 1862 the mouth of the
Ogowai was occupied by the administra-
tion. Twenty-seven stations are estab-
lished in the interior, eleven of which are
along the Ogowai. The seat of govern-
ment is at Brazzaville, at Stanley Pool.
Although France has not been over-lib-
eral toward her new colony, the settle-
ment exhibits the aptitudes of the French
for giving a civilized appearance to what-
ever they touch. From all accounts, the
houses are better built and the gardens
and avenues are finer than those on the
Belgian side, although the practical re-
sults are not so favorable.

The French missionaries have estab-
lished twenty schools, which contain
nearly one thousand pupils. There are
thirty-one post-offices in the territory.
The revenue of Congo Franchise for
1895 was $618,109, while the expendi-
ture was only $439,572. The surplus
shows the difference of method pursued
by the French as compared with that of
the Belgians. The name of France is
a sufficient bulwark against aggression,
while the poor Congo State must possess
substantial defenses. The French ex-
pect their colonies to remunerate them

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 479

for their outlay, while the Belgians are
bent more upon stimulating develop-
ment.

In considering the progress of Portu-
guese Africa we must not include that
made in Angola and Mozambique, for
both these colonies are comparatively old.
Yet it is undoubted that the neighbor-
hood of the Congo State to Angola has
given the latter a great impetus, just as
the proximity of Nyassa Land to Mo-
zambique has added thousands to the
revenue of that colony. For until the
eighties the condition of Angola and Mo-
zambique was deplorable. They were
hedged around by high protective duties
which stifled enterprise ; their officials
were so meanly paid that the adminis-
tration was corrupt. Of late, however,
the examples furnished to these colonies
by their progressive neighbors have ma-
terially changed them for the better.
Within seven years the trade of Angola
has doubled, and it is now valued at
$7,650,000. Its revenue amounts to
$2,050,000, while the expenditure is only
$1,920,000. Mozambique north of the
Zambesi, stimulated by the enterprise of
the British Lakes Company, shows now
a trade worth $1,520,000, — a remark-
able showing when it is considered that
seven years ago it reached scarcely a
third of that amount.

German East Africa dates from the
Berlin Conference of 1885. The advent
of Germany into the Dark Continent
would have been hailed with more plea-
sure had she appeared with less violence.
East Africa became German by the sim-
ple process of Bismarck's laying his hands
on the map and saying, " This shall be
mine." He was not challenged, because
France had not recovered from her ter-
ror, and England was paralyzed by Glad-
stonism. Of such moral right as explo-
ration, discovery, protection of natives,
establishment of religious missions, or
philanthropic sympathy gives, Germany
had none. Might was right in her case.
But, indirectly, this forcible acquisition

of the territory first made known to the
world by Burton, Speke, and myself
had a beneficial influence on England ;
for without this determined aggressive-
ness of Germany it is doubtful whether
Great Britain would have stirred at all
in Equatorial Africa. She had abso-
lutely refused to move in the matter of
the Congo ; she had turned a deaf ear to
the reproaches of her pioneers in East
Africa, and she had miserably equivo-
cated in Southwest Africa, although for
forty-four years she had patrolled the
two coasts, had been the protector of
Zanzibar for nearly fifty years, had ex-
plored the interior, and had planted all
the missions in Equatorial Africa. For-
tunately, before it was too late, Lord
Salisbury was roused to write a few dis-
patches which saved for England a small
portion of East Africa, and it may be
that we are indebted for this small mercy
as much to admiration of Germany's
energy as to the entreaties of English-
men. We ought, certainly, to be grate-
ful that Germany is our neighbor, for
she is likely to be as stimulative in the
future as she has been since 1890. In-
deed, without the influence of her ex-
ample, I doubt if England would have
treated Uganda any better than Portugal
has treated Angola.

The Germans in East Africa now num-
ber 378. In the Tanga district there are
151, who are engaged in cultivation ; in
the Kilimanjaro district there are twenty-
six, on the shores of the Victoria Nyanza
eighteen, in Kilossa twelve ; and there
are 171 officials in the constabulary
force. The troops number about 2000,
with fifty-eight pieces of artillery. In the
Christianizing of the natives seven Pro-
testant and three Roman Catholic mis-
sions are engaged. Thirty miles of rail-
way have been laid from Tanga to the
interior, and it is asserted that this line
will be continued as far as the lakes.

Ujiji, now the principal port on Lake
Tanganika, is the place where I met
Livingstone in November, 1871. Ac-

480 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa.

counts received from it as late as last
March state that the place has quite a
civilized appearance. The government
buildings are of stone, pointed with lime,
and two stories high. One long, wide
street runs through the entire length of
the town, and a large number of mango-
trees serve to beautify and shade it. The
population is about 20,000, and order
is maintained by a garrison of 200 sol-
diers.

The trade of- German East Africa is
valued at $2,907,500. The revenue
reaches the sum of $1,092,500, while
the expenditure is $1,517,450.

The Caineruns, also German, which
ought to be included in Equatorial Afri-
ca, has a white population of 236, and a
trade which figures up to $2,419,220.

Of the British territories we must first
consider the British Central African Pro-
tectorate, which has a native population
of 845,000, and covers an area of 285,-
900 square miles. It has sprung mainly
from the reverence which Scotchmen
bear the memory of Livingstone. In
the year 1856 the British government
confided to Livingstone the task of open-
ing the region about the Nyassa Lake to
trade, and at the same time the universi-
ties sent out a mission under Bishop Mac-
kenzie to avail itself of Livingstone's ex-
perience in missionary work, in which he
had spent sixteen years in South Africa.
The region at that time was very wild,
owing to slave raids and internecine wars.
Through overzeal the missionaries were
soon drawn into strife with the natives,
and what with fatal fevers and other ac-
cidents due to their ignorance of African
habits, few survived long. According-
ly, Livingstone was withdrawn, and the
Universities mission was transferred to
Zanzibar. In 1881 Bishop Steere un-
dertook a journey to Nyassa Lake, and,
being more practical than his two pre-
decessors, saw enough to justify him in
reestablishing the Universities mission in
Nyassa Land. The Livingstonia Free
Church mission planted itself at Blan-

tyre as early as 1875 j the Church of
Scotland mission followed in 1876 ; then
came the Dutch Reformed Church in
1889, the Zambesi industrial mission
in 1892, and the Baptist industrial mis-
sion the same year. Altogether, there
are now thirty-six white clergy and five
white women teachers, who, with 129
native teachers, conduct fifty-five schools
in which 6000 children are taught.

Meantime commercial Scotchmen had
not been idle. Led by a worthy gentle-
man named James Stevenson, they had
founded the African Lakes Company to
assist the secular business of the mis-
sions and the development of trade gen-
erally. The company has been eminent-
ly successful, and is now the mainstay
of the Protectorate.

The British government took charge
of the region in 1891, with the assist-
ance of' an annual subsidy of $50,000
from the famous Cecil Rhodes. Al-
though the administration has been only
six years at work, principally under Sir
H. H. Johnston, the signs of prosperity
are numerous. The white population
numbers 289, the British Indians 263.
Twenty post-offices have been established,
through which 29,802 letters and parcels
have passed. The exports for 1895-96
reached $99,340, while the imports
amounted to $512,140.

The Protectorate possesses, on Lake
Tanganika, one steamer and one boat ;
on Lake Nyassa, five steamers and one
boat ; on the Upper Shire, two steamers
and fifteen boats ; on the Lower Shire
and Zambesi, sixteen steamers and forty-
five boats : altogether, twenty-four steam-
ers and sixty-two steel boats or barges.
The public force of the administration
is composed of two hundred Sikh sol-
diers from India, and five hundred na-
tive police.

British East Africa extends along the
Indian Ocean from German territory to
the Juba River, and inland as far as the
Victoria Nyanza and Usoga. It is di-
vided into four administrative districts,

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 481

under the chief control of the consul-
general at Zanzibar. Mombasa, an old
Arabo-Portuguese town, situated on an
island in the midst of a deep bay which
forms an excellent natural harbor, is the
capital. Its beginning as a British Af-
rican territory dates from a trifling con-
cession granted to Sir H. H. Johnston
by the African chief of Taveta. Upon
this as a basis, Sir William Mackinnon,
Mr. J. F. Hutton, and I formed a small
limited liability company in December,
1885. Its utility is proved by the agree-
ment of December 3, 1886, which marks
out the line of demarcation between the
Gertnan district of Chagga and the
British district of Taveta. Two years
later, this small district was merged in
the East African concessions obtained by
Mackinnon from the Sultan of Zanzibar,
upon which the Imperial British East
African Company was formed with a
capital of $5,000,000. Between 1889
and 1892 this chartered company ex-
pended enormous sums in expanding its
possessions. By 1892 the British sphere
of influence included all the native lands
from the Indian Ocean to Lake Albert
Edward and the Semliki River, and from
the German frontier to north latitude
eight degrees ; and it covered an area
of about 750,000 square miles. In that
year the Radical administration of Lord
Rosebery came into power, and the op-
erations of the "I. B. E. A.," as the
company was called, received a check.
The company had already spent about
$2,000,000 in rescuing this territory
from the grasp of the Germans, and had
neglected its own duties of developing
its concessions in its zeal for furthering
the imperial cause. Convinced by par-
liamentary criticism that the Rosebery
administration did not intend to support
it, the company made the fact known
that it intended to withdraw from the
interior, and devote itself to its own
proper commercial business. Hence be-
gan an agitation throughout England
for the retention of Uganda under im-
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 31

perial protection, to prevent the utter
collapse of the missionary work, which,
under the company's rule, had made such
striking progress. Large subscriptions
from the public prolonged for a year
the occupation of Uganda by the com-
p^ny's troops, but at the end of March,
1893, the final withdrawal was made, and
shortly after Uganda became an imperial
protectorate. In the middle of 1895 the
government assumed entire control of
the company's territory, at an expense
of only $250,000 to the British nation.

The region acquired by the Mackin-
non company now forms the two pro-
tectorates of British East Africa and
Uganda. The customs revenue of the
first is about $86,000, while the trade
is valued at $1,093,750. During the
session of 1895 the Unionist Parliament
voted $15,000,000 for the ^construction
of a railway from the port of Mombasa
to Lake Victoria, of which, at last ac-
counts (May 18, 1897), fifty-eight miles
have been laid.

Since July, 1896, the Uganda pro-
tectorate has included all that interme-
diate country lying between Lakes Vic-
toria, Albert Edward, and Albert, with
Usoga. The administration is supported
by a subsidy from the British govern-
ment, which last year amounted to $250,-
000. The trade for 1896, despite the
fact that the produce and goods had to be
transported by porters a thousand miles
overland, amounted to nearly $150,000.
Although the commerce is meagre,
Uganda being the youngest and most
distant protectorate, the results from a
moral and Christian point of view ex-
ceed those obtained from all the rest
of Equatorial Africa. Until Uganda is
connected with civilization by the rail-
way there can be no great expansion of
trade ; but I believe that its unique geo-
graphical position, coupled with the re-
markable intelligence of the people, will
make it, upon the completion of the line,
as brilliant commercially as it was re-
nowned in pagan days for its martial

482 Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa.

prowess, and is to-day remarkable for its
Christian zeal. Uganda is preeminently
the Japan of Africa.

I do not think I need mention the
Italian possessions in Equatorial Africa,
for since the disaster at Adowa a blight
seems to have fallen upon them, which
will probably soon result in their com-
plete abandonment.

The tabular summary below may en-
able the reader more clearly to realize the
difference between the tropical Africa of
1872-77 — in which Livingstone, Cam-
eron, and I were the only white visitors,
and which had neither mission, school,
church, convert, nor any trade — and the
Equatorial Africa of January, 1897, ex-
hibiting the following results : —

NAME or STATE OB
TBBBITOBY.

White
Population.

Railway
in

Miles.

Missions,
Schools, or
Churches.

Christian
Converts.

Value of
Trade in

Dollars.

Revenues
including
Subsidies.

Uganda Protectorate . .

372

97,575

$142,000

$250,000

British East Africa. . . .

600

1,094,000

86,000

British Central Africa .

289

—

5,000

611,480

100,000

Congo Free State

1,500

165

10,000

6,226,302

1,873,860

Congo Francaise

300

2,500

2,261,414

618,109

German East Africa . . .

378

2,500

2,907,500

1,092,500

German Cameruns ....

236

—

900

2,419,220

176,705

Total..*

2,861

263

545

119,075

$15,661,916

$4,197,174

It is only about twenty-five years ago
that Monteiro said he could see no hope
of the negro ever attaining to any con-
siderable degree of civilization, and that
it was impossible for the white race to
people his country sufficiently to enforce
his civilization. Burton wrote, a few
years before, that the negro united the
incapacity of infancy with the unpliancy
of age, the futility of childhood with the
skepticism of the adult and the stubborn-
ness of the old. As soon as travelers
returned from Africa they either joined
the Burtonian clique or ranged them-
selves on the side of Livingstone, who
held a more favorable opinion of the
African. The old Athenians employed
similar language regarding all white bar-
barians beyond Attica, and the Roman
exquisites in the time of Claudius as con-
temptuously underrated our British an-
cestors. We know to-day how grossly
mistaken they were.

When I think of the cathedral church
of Blantyre, which, without exaggera-
tion, would be a credit to any provincial
town in New England, and which has
been built by native labor; or of the

stone and brick mission buildings on the
shores of Lake Tanganika or of the ex-
tensive establishments in brick erected
on the Upper Congo by the Bangalas,
who so late as 1883 were mere ferocious
cannibals ; or of the civilized - looking
town of Ujiji; or of Brazzaville's neat
and picturesque aspect ; or of the ship-
building yards and foundries of Leopold-
ville, where natives have turned out forty-
five steel steamers, — when I contemplate
such achievements, I submit that Burton
and Monteiro must have been somewhat
prejudiced in their views of Africa and
her dark races.

Twenty-five years ago the outlook for
Africa was dark indeed. Its climate
was little understood, and inspired terror
in the white pioneer. But to-day trav-
elers go and return by fifties, and they
have ceased to generalize in a bitter style.
The white men retain kindly memories
of the Africans among whom they have
lived and labored, and their dearest wish
is to return, at the end of their furloughs,
to the land once so dreaded. The post-
bags are weighted with the correspond-
ence which they maintain with their dark

Twenty-Five Years' Progress in Equatorial Africa. 483

friends. It is only the new and casual
white who speaks of the African as a
" nigger," and condemns the climate of
the tropics. The whites have created
valuable interests in the land ; they un-
derstand the dialects of their workmen ;
and they know that the black who distin-
guished himself in his village, by his self-
taught art and industry, in fashioning his
fetish god, his light canoe, his elegant
assegai or sword, may be taught to turn a
screw at the lathe, to rivet a boiler-plate,
to mould bricks, to build a stone wall or
a brick arch. No one now advocates,
like Monteiro, the introduction of coo-
lies, or Chinese or European " navvies,"
to show the native African how to work.
There are 7200 native navvies on the
Congo railway, and all the stone piers
and long steel structures which bridge the
ravines and rivers, and the gaps cleft in
the rocky hills, have been made by them.

Twenty-five years ago, the explorer
might land on any part of east or west
Equatorial Africa, unquestioned by any
official as to whither he was bound and
what baggage he possessed. To-day, at
every port there are commodious custom-
houses, where he must declare the nature
of his belongings, pay duties, and obtain
permits for traveling. In 1872, the
whole of Central Africa, from one ocean
to the other, was a mere continental slave-
park, where the Arab slave -raider and
Portuguese half-caste roamed at will, and
culled the choicest boys and girls, and
youths of both sexes, .to be driven in
herds to the slave-marts of Angola and
Zanzibar. To-day, the only Arabs in
Africa, excepting some solitary traders
who observed the approach of civilization
in time, are convicts, sentenced to hard
labor for their cruel devastations.

Twenty-five years ago it took me eight
months to reach Ujiji from the coast,
whereas now it takes a caravan only
three months. Up to four years ago it
required five months to reach Uganda
from the coast, but to-day loaded por-
ters do the journey m less than ninety

days, while bicyclists have performed it
in twenty -one days. Fourteen years
ago the voyage from Stanley Pool to
Stanley Falls was made by me, in the
first steamer that was floated in the Up-
per Congo, in 379 hours. Now steamers
acco'mplish the distance in 120 hours.
In 1882-83 I was forty-six days going
from Europe to Stanley Pool. The or-
dinary passenger in these times requires
but twenty -five days; and two years
hence the trip will take only twenty days.

Throughout the region now known as
the Congo State death raged in every
form, twenty -five years ago. Once a
month, on an average, every village, of
the hundred thousand estimated to be in
the state, witnessed a fearful tragedy of
one kind or another. In each case of
alleged witchcraft, upon the death of a
chief, a sudden fatality, the outbreak of
a pest, the evil effects of debauch or
gluttony, the birth of twins, a lightning
stroke, a bad dream, the acquisition of
property, a drought or a flood, ill luck
or any mischance, native superstition de-
manded its victims according to savage
custom. The Mganda, or witch-doc-
tor, had but to proclaim his belief that
expiation was necessary, and the victims
were soon haled to the place of death.
I should not be far wrong if I placed
these public murders at a million a year
for the state, and two millions for the
whole of Equatorial Africa. Added to
these was the fearful waste of human
life caused by intertribal wars, the whole-
sale exterminations under such sangui-
nary chiefs as Mtesa, Kabba Rega, Mi-
rambo, Nyungu, Msidi, the destructive
raids of such famous slavers as Said bin
Habib, Tagamoyo, Tippu-Tib, Abed bin
Salim, Kilonga-Longa, and hundreds of
others. In fact, every district was a bat-
tlefield, and every tribe was subject to
decimation.

I do not say that the awful slaughters
resulting from native lawlessness and
superstition have ceased altogether, but
the 540 missions, schools, and churches,

484 Recent Discoveries respecting the, Origin of the Universe.

and as many little military forts that have
been planted across the continent with
the aid of the steam flotillas of the Con-
go and the swift cruisers which navigate
the great lakes, have completely extirpat-
ed the native tyrants and the Arab free-
booters ; and wherever military power
has established itself or religion has lent
a saving hand, the murderous witch-
doctor can no longer practice the cruel

rites of paganism. But although in parts
of the far interior there yet remains
many a habitation of cruelty awaiting
the cleansing light of civilization, there
is every reason for believing confidently
that the time is not far distant when
Africa, neglected for so long, shall as
fully enjoy the blessings of freedom,
peace, and prosperity as any of her
sister continents.

Henry M. Stanley.

RECENT DISCOVERIES RESPECTING THE ORIGIN OF THE

UNIVERSE.

THE origin of the heavenly bodies
was one of the earliest philosophical sub-
jects which engaged the attention of the
Greeks. With their keen sense of the
beautiful and the orderly, and their gen-
uine admiration of surrounding nature
and of all celestial phenomena, they were
the first to realize that the processes of
cosmical evolution, by which the existing
order of things has come about, must ever
be regarded as one of the ultimate pro-
blems of the inquiring mind. Whence
and how came the beautiful cosmos ?
was the question of the Ionian nature-
philosophers of the seventh century. Yet
with even so keen an interest in natural
phenomena, the undeveloped state of the
physical sciences in the pre-Socratic age
permitted the acute reasoning of Anaxi-
mander and Anaxagoras, and also of
Democritus and Plato at a later date,
to reach only the general conclusion that
the earth and other heavenly bodies
had gradually arisen from the falling
together of diffused atoms. After the
decline of the ancient civilization and
the advent of the less philosophical races
and ideas which continued dominant till
modern times, further advances in a
purely speculative, not practical or moral

question could hardly be expected ; and
we meet with no important cosmogonic
inquiry till the publication of Kant's
Natural History and Theory of the Hea-
vens, in 1755. In this work we have
a distinct advance, based upon the laws
of mechanics and of gravitation discov-
ered in the preceding age by Galileo,
Huyghens, and Newton ; and hence the
work of Kant is to be regarded as the
first speculation founded upon exact phy-
sical laws. But in that age the whole
question of cosmogony was so complete-
ly unfathomed, and so little was known
of the universe of fixed stars, that Kant
not unnaturally limited his inquiries to
the most simple phenomena, and gave
little consideration to the manifold de-
tail with which all nature abounds. His
most important contribution to cosmo-
gonic thought consisted in the assump-
tion (at that time nearly incredible) that
the universe had not been created in a
day or a week, but was the outgrowth
of indefinite ages, under the operation
of natural mechanical laws. Important
as was this conception, and suggestive as
was his theory of the formation of the
planets from an extensive nebula origi-
nally including the whole solar system, it
could hardly be expected that such hetero-
dox ideas would get much consideration

Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe. 485

in the circles of court philosophy domi-
nating the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Accordingly, they gained little or
no authority, or even notice, for many
years.

In the meantime France had become
the centre of the philosophic world, and
the great geniuses who adorned the Acad-
emy of Sciences just before and after
the French Revolution — that strong im-
petus to new ideas, even though some
should not survive the turbulent times
in which they arose — were destined to
arouse and to fix philosophic attention
on the sublime question of the formation
of the heavenly bodies. Five celebrated
geometers — Clairaut, Euler, d'Alem-
bert, Lagrange, and Laplace — in the
course of fifty years had well-nigh per-
fected the mathematical theory of gravi-
tation ; and Laplace, who had solved the
problems which all his illustrious prede-
cessors and contemporaries had declared
to be insoluble, became above all others
the dominant power in the scientific
world. He had explained all known
anomalies in the motion of the planets
and the moon by the simple law of grav-
itation, and now for the first time it
was possible to assign the exact places
of the heavenly bodies in the most re-
mote ages, account being taken of their
mutual gravitation according to the New-
tonian law.

Lagrange and Laplace had proved,
under certain conditions holding among
the planets, that the solar system would
never be destroyed by the mutual gravi-
tation of its parts, and hence they found
no difficulty in conceiving its existence
during past millions of years. After his
unrivaled career of discovery, Laplace
formed the design of presenting in his
Systeine du Monde (published in 1796)
a concise and luminous popular account
of the existing state of astronomy, which
he had done so much to perfect ; and as
if to add one more laurel to his brow, he
inserted at the end of this work a Sev-
enth and Last Note. This was the cel-

ebrated nebular hypothesis, which from
its origin at once commanded the atten-
tion of the age. In a short note of
eleven pages the author of the Mdcanique
Celeste has condensed his theory of the
formation of the planets and satellites.
He conceives that at some remote epoch
in the past the matter now constituting
our system was expanded into a vast
rotating fiery nebula extending beyond
the limits of the outermost planet, and
that as the heat radiated into surround-
ing space the mass gradually contracted,
and by the law of the conservation of
areas began to rotate more rapidly. As
the mass accelerated its rotation by its
gravitational condensation, the whole as-
sumed the form of an oblate spheroid,
a disk, or a double convex lens ; final-
ly, at the periphery of the disk the cen-
trifugal force became equal to the force
of gravity, and as the contraction contin-
ued a ring of particles was left behind,
revolving freely around the central mass.
The condensation of this ring of matter
would form the first planet, and so on
for the other planets nearer the sun,
as the nebula condensed. The planetary
masses condensing and rotating in like
manner would give birth to their satel-
lites. This simple mechanical concep-
tion would account for the motion of all
the planets in the same direction around
the sun and nearly in the plane of its
equator, and also for the rotations of
the planets and satellites in the same
direction in which they revolve in their
orbits. The rings of Saturn were cited
as a case of an un condensed satellite, a
model which had been left undisturbed
to show us just how the system had
formed.

The nebular hypothesis as thus out-
lined by the profound dynamical judg-
ment and imaginative genius of Laplace
was supported by Sir William Herschel's
contemporary and independent discovery
of all classes of celestial objects between
the finished star and the embryo nebula,
and this testimony to the truth of the

486 Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe.

nebular hypothesis was afterward con-
firmed by Sir John Herschel's more crit-
ical survey of the nebulae of the whole
face of the heavens. But while both the
mechanical speculations and the obser-
vations of the younger Herschel tended
to support Laplace's views, the huge re-
flector of Lord Rosse, erected about the
middle of the century, began to turn the
scale of evidence the other way. Under
the power of Lord Rosse's six-foot spec-
ulum some of the so-called nebulae of
Herschel were resolved into clusters, and
the conclusion seemed imminent that un-
der sufficient power perhaps all nebulae
might be resolved into discrete stars.
Fortunately, the invention of the spectro-
scope about 1860, and Huggins's applica-
tion of it to the heavenly bodies, showed
that many of the nebulae are masses of
glowing gas gradually condensing into
stars, and so far as possible realized the
postulates laid down by Laplace. The
confirmation arising from the demon-
strated existence of real nebulae in the
sky was supplemented by Helmholtz's
proof that the heat of the sun is main-
tained by the contraction of its own
mass, and that our central luminary is
therefore the core of the nebula first
conceived by Laplace in 1796. The theo-
retical possibility of Laplace's assump-
tion was further established by Lane's
investigation of the condensation of gas-
eous masses, wherein it was proved that
a cold nebula or diffused body of gas
condensing under its own gravitation
would rise in temperature ; also by Lord
Kelvin's researches on the age of the
sun and the duration of the sun's heat ;
and by various researches into the actu-
al conditions of the planets of the solar
system.

But while all sound speculations since
Joule's discovery of the mechanical equi-
valent of heat have confirmed the es-
sential parts of the nebular hypothesis,
other recent investigations have intro-
duced modifications of which Laplace
took no account. It is particularly of

these later discoveries, which throw an
entirely new light upon the general pro-
blems of cosmogony, that we shall treat
in this paper.

Prior to the year 1875 the labors
of astronomers and mathematicians had
been devoted to the questions raised by
Laplace over three quarters of a century
before, and very little, if any, advance
had been attempted on new lines, though
many new researches and observations
had been accumulating which confirmed
the sagacity of the bold conceptions em-
bodied in the Seventh and Last Note
to the Systeme du Monde. About this
time, the young mathematician G. H.
Darwin, son of the illustrious naturalist,
became occupied with certain tide-reduc-
tions undertaken by Lord Kelvin for
determining the rigidity of the earth,
and in the course of this work was led
to develop the mathematical theory of
the bodily tides which would arise in the
earth on the supposition that it is not
highly rigid as at present, but fluid, as,
according to Laplace, it must have been
at some past age. These researches were
presented to the Royal Society between
1878 and 1882, and led to the conclu-
sion that bodily tidal friction, as it is
called, had played a prominent part in
the cosmogonic history of the earth and
the moon.

By tidal friction is meant the grav-
itational reaction arising from change of
form due to tidal distortion of figure,
with the resulting effects on the motions
of bodies revolving around the tidally
distorted mass ; for the attraction of a
heavenly body depends upon its form
as well as upon its mass and distance.
Now, when the moon raises tides in the
earth, the form of the latter (in case it
were fluid throughout) would not be
spheroidal, but ellipsoidal or egg-shaped,
with one end of the ellipsoid pointed
somewhere in advance of the moon in
its orbit. This tidal apex in the earth ex-
ercises a disturbing force on the moon's

Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe. 487

motion, and in fact tends to accelerate
the velocity in the orbit, which results in
an increase in the moon's distance, and
at the same time renders her orbit more
eccentric, so that the earth is relatively
nearer one end of her orbit the next
time the moon goes round. This action
is very minute, and, like the mills of
God, grinds slowly, but in the course
of immense ages, millions of years, the
effects become very conspicuous and the
whole character of the orbit is changed.
In this way, by a most profound analy-
sis, Darwin showed that the moon was
formerly much nearer the earth, and in-
deed a part of our globe, the whole prob-
ably rotating in about two hours and
forty-one minutes ; that the moon, after
parting from Mother Earth, had been
gradually driven away to its present dis-
tance by the tidal action of the fluid globe
working over a great space of time. He
was enabled to explain all the essential
features of the system of the earth and
moon, and, encouraged by this novel and
unexpected result, wherein tidal friction
had modified the course of evolution as
predicted by Laplace, he tried to extend
his new theory to other parts of the solar
system. But while he found that tidal
friction had played some part in the other
planets of our system and in the system
as a whole, the effects in general were
much less considerable than in the case
of the earth and moon, where the satel-
lite is relatively quite, large, amounting
to one eightieth of the planet's mass ;
elsewhere the satellites are very small
compared to the planet, and all the plan-
ets are very small compared to the sun.
Where the attendant bodies are so small
compared to the central body, the effects
of tidal friction are greatly diminished ;
for, among other things, the effects de-
pend on the mass and rotational velocity
of the body in which the tides are raised.
The mathematical methods which Dar-
win employed in his researches are ex-
tremely elegant, and in their line as
appropriate as the proofs devised by his

father in the Origin of Species, but it
would be vain to attempt any popular
account of them. It must suffice to say
that we can trace our moon through the
most' remote ages by a simple process of
computation.

After Darwin had developed the the-
ory of bodily tides and applied it to the
planets and satellites, he gave his atten-
tion to other researches on the figures of
equilibrium of rotating masses of fluid,
with a view to finding out exactly what
process is involved in the birth of a sat-
ellite from a planet. Just 'prior to the
publication of his paper a similar inves-
tigation was made in France by Poin-
care*. Both geometers had essentially
the same object in view, namely, the test-
ing of Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and
their results were identical in proving
that a rotating mass (like the fluid earth
when the moon was formed) would not
break up into two extremely unequal
parts, but that the two bodies would be
fairly equal, or at least comparable, in
size. Nor would the separation neces-
sarily lead to the formation of a ring;
the detached satellite might, and prob-
ably would, take instead the form of a
lump or globular mass without the inter-
vention of the annular form assumed by
Laplace and previous investigators.

Comparing these results with the facts
of the solar system, neither Darwin nor
Poincare' could see that his profound re-
searches had thrown much light upon
the theories of cosmogony ; for the satel-
lites are quite small compared to their
planets, and the planets are insignificant
compared to the sun. I may remark
here that the sun has a mass 1047 times
larger than that of Jupiter, the largest
planet, and 746 times the mass of all
the planets combined. In the formation
of our system, therefore, substantially all
the matter has" gone into the sun. Here
the case rested in the year 1888, with
no indication of further advance along
either old or new lines. Indeed, such
advance might be considered the more

488 Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe.

improbable as the problem had well-nigh
baffled the efforts of two of the foremost
mathematicians of the age, — one of them
the successor of Newton, the other of La-
place.

in.

Apparently 'this was only the calm be-
fore a more decisive step than any which
had yet been taken. Having always felt
a deep interest in cosmogonic inquiries,
and without knowledge of the results of
Darwin and Poincare', I ventured to ap-
proach the general question of cosmogony
from a new point of view. The first ef-
fort was elementary, of course, since it
was made when I was still an undergrad-
uate at the Missouri State University ; yet
it contained the germ of the researches
which have since occupied my attention.
All previous investigators from the time
of Laplace had fixed their eyes steadily
upon the planets and satellites, and had
given no attention to the universe of fixed
stars. It se6med to me that something
should be done to throw light upon the
formation of the stellar systems, and
therefore I set about the problem of ex-
plaining the formation of the double and
multiple stars.

At first there were few results avail-
able for a careful study of the stellar
systems, as the researches were scattered
in all manner of publications, and no
one had ever reduced the observations
to a homogeneous form and sifted the
wheat from the chaff. When this work
had been hastily done, I found that the
orbits are very eccentric, and in this re-
spect totally unlike the nearly circular
orbits of the planets and satellites. It
was evident that it would not be possible
to explain the formation of these systems
if we could not account for the high ec-
centricities ; and it occurred to me as if
by intuition that as the stars are melted
fluid masses, not cold solid bodies like
the earth, the mutual gravitation of two
neighboring suns would raise enormous
bodily tides, and the secular working of
the tidal friction in the bodies of the

stars would render the orbits eccentric.
I had not then read or seen Darwin's
papers, and had only heard of them by
popular reports which ignored their most
important results. Before I got access
to his works, I succeeded in proving that,
under the conditions probably existing
among the stars, the eccentricity of the
orbits would steadily increase. To my
surprise and to my delight, I afterwards
found that Darwin had reached the same
result ten years before, though it had
attracted no attention, and was but little
known. Indeed, no one had thought of
the changes in the eccentricity except in
connection with the orbit of the moon,
and as this orbit is almost circular the
matter was passed over in silence.

The subsequent investigation was based
upon Darwin's method, and consisted in
showing that if two fluid stars were ro-
tating about axes perpendicular to the
plane of their orbital motion and in the
same direction in which they revolve in
their orbits, the tides raised in either
star would react upon the other star,
and by the action of tidal friction con-
tinued over great ages their orbits would
be rendered more and more eccentric,
so that they would finally resemble the
elongated orbits of the periodic comets
rather than the circular orbits of the plan-
ets and satellites. Now, continued inves-
tigation has proved that the orbits of the
double stars are on the average twelve
times as eccentric as those of the planets
and satellites, and this is shown by my
recent researches to be a fundamental
law of nature, so far as we yet under-
stand the visible universe. We reach,
then, the remarkable result that tidal
friction, working over millions of years,
has elongated the orbits of the stars, and
at the same time has expanded their di-
mensions, so that their paths are both
larger and more eccentric than formerly.
Going back in time, we reach an age
when their orbits must have been small-
er and rounder than at present, and at
last when the two stars were parts of the

Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe. 489

same nebula. The agency of tidal fric-
tion, which Darwin showed to be of small
importance in our system, except in the
case of the moon, is thus shown to be
of general application and of the vastest
significance in the universe at large, be-
cause the bodies constituting the stellar
systems are not solid, but fluid, not very
unequal, but equal or comparable in mass,
so that the tidal effects are enormously
increased. The stellar systems are thus
different from our system in two re-
spects : —

(1.) The orbits are highly eccentric,
on the average twelve times more elon-
gated than those of the planets and sat-
ellites.

(2.) The components of the stellar
systems are frequently equal and always
comparable in mass, whereas our satel-
lites are insignificant compared to their
planets, and the planets are equally
small compared to the sun.

I may add here that about ten thousand
double stars have been discovered since
the time of Sir William Herschel, and
that of this number about five hundred
objects are known to be in motion. In
the course of the past century only about
forty have shown sufficient motion to en-
able us to fix the.ir orbits accurately, while
about twenty more may be determined
approximately. The longest-period bi-
nary star known with certainty is Sigma
Coronae Borealis, which completes its im-
mense circuit in about three hundred and
seventy years ; it has thus made but little
more than one revolution since Columbus
landed in America. Other systems have
periods ranging from two hundred and
thirty to eighty years ; while others are
still more rapid, completing their orbits
in only twenty-five, eighteen, eleven, and
five and a half years. This last is the
period of a small star just visible to the
naked eye, situated in the constellation
Orion ; its rapid motion, detected by me
during the present year, has now made
it the most interesting of all double stars.
It is known as Burnham 883, from the

astronomer who first noticed its duplicity
in 1879. Since that time it has made
more than three revolutions, yet so dif-
ficult is the object that it can be investi-
gated only with very powerful telescopes.
Our observations last year with the Low-
ell twenty-four-inch refractor were the
first to furnish the key to its mysterious
movement.

The known periods of the binary stars,
therefore, vary from five and a half to
about three hundred and seventy years.
In other cases, yet to be investigated, it
is certain that thousands of years are
required for a single revolution, while
some of the close and difficult stars now
being discovered are likely to give peri-
ods even shorter than five years. The
distances of some of the systems from the
earth have been carefully measured, and
we are thus enabled to compare them
with our solar system. The companion
of Sirius, for example, completes its pe-
riod in about fifty years, and moves in
an orbit somewhat larger than that of
Uranus, the mean distance from the cen-
tral star being twenty-one times the dis-
tance of the earth from the sun. In the
case of 70 Ophiuchi the period is eighty-
eight years, and the mean distance about
twenty -eight times the distance of the
sun. This system is celebrated for the
long period over which it has been ob-
served, and the perturbation by which its
motion is affected ; there is some dark
body or other cause disturbing the regu-
larity of its elliptical motion, but hereto-
fore all efforts to see it with the telescope
have been unsuccessful. Alpha Centauri,
the nearest of all the fixed stars, is re-
moved from us 275,000 times farther
than the sun ; the companion is found to
revolve around the central star in an or-
bit with dimensions which are about a
mean between those of Uranus and Nep-
tune. Its period is eighty-one years, and
each of the stars is just equal to our sun
in mass. In the case of Sirius the mass
is 3.47, and in that of 70 Ophiuchi it is
2.83 ; the combined mass of the sun and

490 Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe.

earth being unity. It is thus seen that
the stellar systems are grand almost be-
yond conception, and the investigation
of such glorious natural phenomena may
well occupy our attention.

How, then, did the double stars origi-
nate ? By the breaking up of a Laplacean
ring ? Certainly not. It had always
been a favorite objection of those who
did not accept the process of separation
outlined by Laplace to say that there are
only a few ring nebulae in the heavens,
and that what few exist are by no means
so regular as the rings of Saturn ; but
at this point the objectors ceased. In
my earliest essay, before I was acquaint-
ed with the researches of Darwin and
Poincare' on rotating masses of fluid, I
suspected that the double stars arose
from double nebulae by a division into
two nearly equal masses. As soon as I
ascertained from the papers of Darwin
and Poincar^ that such a division was
theoretically possible, I no longer hesi-
tated to affirm that if their results were
inapplicable in the solar system, they
were of the widest application among
the stars ; and this conviction was made
a certainty when I found from the
drawings of Sir John Herschel that
double nebulae exactly resembling the
figures computed by the mathematicians
actually exist in the heavens. These ad-
mirable sketches of Herschel had been
published in the Philosophical Transac-
tions of the Royal Society for 1833, and
were now almost forgotten. Darwin
and Poincar£ had looked for applications
of their results in the solar system, but
it was only among the stars and nebulae
of remote space, with the details of
which neither was acquainted, that the
real discovery was to be made ; and it
was possible only to one who held in
mind the results of mathematical analysis
on the one hand and those of Herschel's
observations on the other. We may con-
clude, then, that the annular process by
which Saturn's rings were separated,
while a theoretical possibility, is not

generally realized in the actual universe,
but that the nebulae divide into two near-
ly equal parts by a process externally
resembling "fission" among the protozoa.
When the rotating mass has thus divid-
ed into two nearly equal parts, each
part will begin to rotate on its own axis,
and the tides raised in either mass by
the attraction of the other will cause the
orbit to grow gradually larger as well
as more eccentric, and in the course of
some millions of years we shall have a
double star such as Alpha Centauri or
70 Ophiuchi.

It may be pointed out here that not-
withstanding all the labors of astrono-
mers on double and multiple stars since
the time of Sir William Herschel, they
have not yet recognized in all the im-
mensity of the heavens a single system
in any way resembling our own. The
obstacle to seeing such insignificant bod-
ies as our planets at the distance of the
fixed stars is at present insurmountable
even with our largest telescope; and
hence we must not conclude that sys-
tems like our own — a star with a large
number of small dark planets — do not
exist in the heavens, but only that all
such bodies would be invisible even if
the power of our telescopes were in-
creased a hundredfold, and consequent-
ly no such systems are known.

On the contrary, we do know of
several thousands of stellar systems of a
radically different type ; indeed, I my-
self have augmented by several hundred
the number of such systems during the
past year, in the course of a survey of
the southern heavens undertaken by the
Lowell Observatory. These systems are
composed of two or more self-luminous
suns moving under the law of gravita-
tion, and subject to the tidal effects de-
scribed above. It is very singular that
no visible system yet discerned has any
resemblance to the orderly and beauti-
ful system in which we live ; and one
is thus led to think that probably our
system is unique in its character. At

Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe. 491

least it is unique among all known sys-
tems. Our observations during 1896-97
have certainly disclosed stars more dif-
ficult than any which astronomers had
seen before. Among these obscure ob-
jects about half a dozen are truly wonder-
ful, in that they seem to be dark, almost
black in color, and apparently are shining
by a dull reflected light. It is unlikely
that they will prove to be self-luminous.
If they should turn out dark bodies in
fact, shining only by the reflected light of
the stars around which they revolve, we
should have the first case of planets —
dark bodies — noticed among the fixed
stars. The difficulties of seeing these ob-
jects may be imagined when we recall
that they are visible only in the black-
est and clearest sky, when the atmosphere
is so still that the definition of the great
telescope is perfect ; even then they are
recognized by none but the trained ob-
server.

These reflections, as well as investi-
gations on the perturbation of certain
stellar systems, lead us to suppose that
there are many dark bodies in the hea-
vens ; but not even such bodies furnish
us evidence of any other system similar
to our own, as respects complexity and
orderly arrangement. It must therefore
strike every thoughtful person as aston-
ishing that all the previous cosmogonic
investigations should be based upon facts
derived from the planetary system, which
is now shown to be absolutely unique
among the thousands of known systems,
and in the present state of our know-
ledge appears to be an exceptional for-
mation. In like manner it cannot fail
to surprise us to recall the historical fact
that it took two centuries after Newton
detected the cause of the oceanic tides
upon the earth's surface for any one to
conceive the existence of bodily tides ;
and after Darwin had developed his
theory of tidal friction, it still apparently
had little place in philosophic thought
till it was extended and applied to the
stellar systems observed in the immen-

sity of space. Aside from this delay,
it is alike gratifying and honorable to
the human mind to recall that the tidal
oscillations first noticed by the naviga-
tors of our seas are at last found to be
but a special case of cosmic phenomena
as universal and almost as important as
gravitation itself, and that by the known
laws of these phenomena we are enabled
to interpret the development of the uni-
verse, — a great mystery extending over
millions of years, and therefore forever
sealed to mortal vision.

These recent cosmogonic investigations
have also enabled us to realize for the
first time that the visible universe is
composed mainly of fluid bodies, self-
luminous stars and nebulae, and that
some day celestial mechanics will be-
come a science of the equilibrium and
motions of fluids. To the theory of the
mutual action of solid bodies according
to the old theories must be added secu-
lar tidal friction, which by its cumulative
effects may in time enormously modify
the figures and motions of the heavenly
bodies.

It may not be inappropriate to add
that these recent researches among the
stars have thrown a new light upon the
formation of the planets and satellites.
If the nebulae as a class do not shed
rings which form into stars, but divide
into globular masses, as mentioned above,
may it not be that the planets and satel-
lites also were separated in the form of
lumpy masses ? It is now known, by in-
vestigations made since the time of La-
place, that such a separation is a mathe-
matical possibility ; and as this avoids
the necessity of explaining how a regu-
lar ring would condense, — a thing not
easy to understand, — and as the planets
now have a globular form, it is the most
acceptable explanation that can be made.
The objection has frequently been raised
by mathematicians that a great outspread
ring, such as Laplace imagined, would
rapidly cool off, and become a swarm of
small particles like those now constitut-

492 Recent Discoveries respecting the Origin of the Universe.

ing Saturn's rings, and that such parti-
cles could never get together to form a
single large body. To me this reason-
ing appears valid, and hence I take it
that rings such as Laplace supposed
never existed in the solar system, except
in the case of Saturn's rings and possi-
bly the asteroidal zone between Mars and
Jupiter.

It follows from the researches of Dar-
win and Poincare" that if the rotating
nebula be extremely heterogeneous, very
dense in the centre and very rare at the
surface, the portion detached would be
much smaller than in case the mass were
homogeneous. Hence if in the beginning
the solar nebula were very heterogene-
ous, it might detach small masses such
as the planets and satellites ; and on
this view the formation of our system
would be exceptional only as regards the
primitive condition of the solar nebula.
Since we find that the number of the
asteroids is unlimited, and that they are
scattered over a very wide belt, it seems
fairly certain that by whatever process
they were formed, the matter was ori-
ginally diffused over the whole zone
now occupied by them. A ring such as
Laplace conceived would probably con-
dense into just such a multitude of small
masses. In the case of Saturn's rings
another cause comes into play, and pre-
vents them from ever forming one or
more large bodies. This is the tidal ac-
tion of the planet upon bodies near its
surface, — or within a certain distance
called Roche's limit, — and it happens
that the rings of Saturn are actually
within this critical distance. Even if
the particles of the rings were to get to-
gether within this region, the tidal action
of Saturn upon the resulting mass would

tear it to pieces, and the particles would
again be diffused into rings such as we
now find about the planet. The rings
of Saturn will therefore never form a
satellite.

For the same reason satellites or planets
could not exist too near the surface of
Jupiter or the sun. All the known satel-
lites are without this limit for their re-
spective planets, but Jupiter's fifth satel-
lite, discovered by Barnard in 1892, is
perilously near the danger -line within
which it would be disintegrated by the
tidal action of Jupiter.

It will be clear from the foregoing
that the principal hope of cosmogony
lies in the study of the systems of the
universe at large rather than that of
our own unique system, though the cor-
rect explanation of the planetary cosmo-
gony will always be a desideratum of
science. What is needed is a profound
investigation of the stellar systems, of the
double nebulae, and of certain branches
of celestial mechanics, particularly the
theories of the figures of equilibrium
and of the bodily tides of gases and
liquid masses and their secular effects
under conditions such as exist in the
heavens. The time has now come when
it is no longer sufficient to be able to
predict the motions of the heavenly
bodies in the most remote centuries ; we
must essay to trace the systems of the
universe back through cosmical ages,
and to investigate from laws and causes
known to be at work in the heavens just
how the present order of things has come
about. The solution of this sublime pro-
blem, even if it takes centuries for its
full realization, will be an achievement
not unworthy of the past history of phy-
sical astronomy.

T. J. J. See.

Sargasso Weed. 493

SARGASSO WEED.

i
OUT from the seething Stream

To the steadfast trade-wind's courses,
Over the bright vast swirl

Of a tide from evil free, —
Where the ship has a level beam,

And the storm has spent his forces,
And the sky is a hollow pearl

Curved over a sapphire sea.

Here it floats as of old,

Beaded with gold and amber,
Sea-frond buoyed with fruit,

Sere as the yellow oak,
Long since carven and scrolled,

Of some blue-ceiled Gothic chamber
Used to the viol and lute .

And the ancient belfry's stroke.

Eddying far and still

In the drift that never ceases,
The dun Sargasso weed

Slips from before our prow,
And its sight makes strong our will,

As of old the Genoese's,
When he stood in his hour of need

On the Santa Maria's bow.

Ay, and the winds at play

Toy with these peopled islands,
Each of itself as well

Naught but a brave New World,
Where the crab and sea-slug stay

In the lochs of its tiny highlands,
And the nautilus moors his shell

With his sail and streamers furled.

Each floats ever and on

As the round green Earth is floating
Out through the sea of space,

Bearing our mortal kind,
Parasites soon to be gone,

Whom others be sure are noting,
While to their astral race

We in our turn are blind.

Edmund Clarence Stedman.

494

A Russian Experiment in Self -Government.

A RUSSIAN EXPERIMENT IN SELF-GOVERNMENT.

IN the extreme northern part of the
Chinese Empire, about one thousand
miles from the city of Pekin and an
equal distance from the coast of the Pa-
cific, there is a wild, mountainous, dense-
ly wooded, and almost trackless region,
known to Chinese geographers as Khe-
lun-tsan. It forms a part of the great
frontier province of Manchuria, and lies,
somewhat in the shape of an equilateral
triangle, between the rivers Argun and
Amur, which separate it from eastern Si-
beria on the north, and the rivers Ur-son,
Khalga-gol, and Sungari, which bound it
on the south. A post-road leads along
its southern frontier from Khailar to the
capital town of Tsitsikhar, and there is a
fringe of Cossack stations and Manchu
pickets on the rivers Argun and Amur,
which form the other two sides of the
triangle ; but the vast region bounded by
these thin lines of settlement is a wilder-
ness of forests and mountains, traversed
only by Tongus or Manchu hunters, and
as little known to the Chinese who own
it as to the Russians whose territory it
adjoins. Near the apex of this triangle,
between two lateral spurs of the Great
Khingan Mountains, there is a deep,
wooded valley called the Zhelta, through
which flows a shallow tributary of the
small Manchurian river Albazikha. It
is an insignificant ravine, only ten or fif-
teen miles in length, and, from a topo-
graphical point of view, it does not differ
in any essential respect from thousands
of other nameless ravines which lie
among the wooded mountains of Man-
churia and the Trans-Baikal ; but it has
a distinction not based upon topography
and not dependent upon geographical
situation, — a distinction arising out of
its relation to human interests and hu-
man institutions. In this wild, lonely
valley was born, a little more than twelve
years ago, the first and only true repub-

lic that ever existed on the continent of
Asia, and its birthplace was a Tongus
grave.

In the year 1883 a Tongus hunter and
trapper called Vanka, who spent most of
his life roaming through the forests and
over the mountains of Manchuria and
the Trans-Baikal, came, with a bundle of
furs, to the shop of a merchant named
Seredkin, in the little Cossack post of
Ignashina on the upper Amur, and re-
ported that while digging a grave in the
valley of the Zhelta for his mother, who
had died during a temporary stay there,
he had found, at a depth of three or four
feet in the gravelly soil, a number of
small flakes and nuggets of yellow metal
which had the appearance of gold. He
wished the merchant to examine them
and tell him what they were worth. Se-
redkin looked at the specimens, subject-
ed them to a few simple tests, and soon
satisfied himself that gold they were.
He purchased them at a good price, pro-
mised Vanka a suitable reward if he
would act as guide to the place where
they were found, and immediately made
preparations to equip and send into Man-
churia a small prospecting party, under
the direction of a trusted and experi-
enced clerk named Lebedkin. Two or
three days later this party crossed the
Amur, marched eighteen or twenty miles
through the forest to the valley of the
Zhelta, and began digging a short dis-
tance from the grave in which the Ton-
gus had buried his mother and out of
which he had taken the gold. From the
vety first panful of earth washed they
obtained a quarter of a teaspoonful or
more of the precious dust, and the deeper
they sank their prospecting pits the rich-
er the gravel became. In a dozen or
more places, and at various depths ran-
ging from ten to fourteen feet, they found
gold in amazing quantities ; and Lebed-

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

495

kin, the chief of the party, became so ex-
cited — not to say crazed — by the vision
of sudden wealth that he drank himself
to the verge of delirium trernens, and was
finally carried back to Ignashina in a
state of alcoholic coma and complete phy-
sical collapse. The laborers who had
been digging under his direction there-
upon threw off their allegiance to their
employer, formed themselves into an ar-
tel,1 and proceeded to prospect and mine
on their own joint account and for their
own common benefit.

Seredkin tried to keep the matter a
secret while he organized and equipped
a second party ; but the news of the dis-
covery of a wonderfully rich gold placer
on Chinese territory, only fifteen or
twenty miles from the Amur, was too
important and too exciting to be either
suppressed or concealed. From the vil-
lage of Ignashina it was carried to the
neighboring Cossack post of Pokrofka,
from there to Albazin, from Albazin to
Blagoveshchinsk, and thence to all parts
of eastern Siberia. Before the end of
the spring of 1884 gold-seekers bound
for the new Eldorado were pouring into
Ignashina at the rate of one hundred and
fifty a day, and the little Cossack settle-
ment was suddenly transformed into a
pandemonium of noise, tumult, drunken-
ness, fighting, and wild, feverish excite-
ment. In vain the Russian authorities
at Chita and Blagoveshchinsk tried to
stop the frenzied rush of miners and pro-
spectors into Manchuria, first by threaten-
ing them with arrest, and then by forbid-
ding station-masters on the government
post-roads to furnish them with trans-
portation. The tide of migration could
no more be stopped in this way than the
current of the Amur could be arrested or
diverted by means of a paper dam. The

1 An artel is a Russian form of labor union,
in which from six to fifty or more men unite
to do a particular piece of work, or to labor
together for a certain specified time. It is
virtually a small joint stock company, whose
members share equally in the work, expenses,

excited gold-seekers paid no attention
whatever to official proclamations or
warnings, and if they could not obtain
horses and vehicles at the post-stations,
they hired telegas2 from the muzhiks,
or canoes from the Amur Cossacks, and
came into Ignashina, by land and by
water, in ever increasing numbers. As
fast as they could obtain food and equip-
ment they crossed the Amur in skiffs,
shouldered their picks, shovels, and
bread-bags, and plunged on foot into the
wild, gloomy forests of Manchuria. Be-
fore the 1st of September, 1884, the Ton-
gus grave in the valley of the Zhelta was
surrounded by the tents and log huts of
at least three thousand miners ; and a
more motley, heterogeneous, and lawless
horde of vagabonds and adventurers
never invaded the Chinese Empire.
There were wandering Tongus from the
mountains of the Trans-Baikal ; runaway
Russian laborers from the east-Siberian
mines of Butin Brothers, Niemann, and
the Zea Company ; Buriats and Mongols
from the province of Irkutsk ; discharged
government clerks and retired isprav-
niks 3 from Nerchinsk, Stretinsk, Verkh-
ni Udinsk, and Chita ; exiled Polish Jews
from the Russian Pale of Settlement ;
Chinese laborers and teamsters from Ki-
akhta and Maimachin ; a few nondescript
Koreans, Tatars, and Manchus from the
lower Amur ; and finally, more than one
thousand escaped convicts — thieves, bur-
glars, highwaymen, and murderers —
from the silver-mines of Nerchinsk and
the gold-mines of Kara.

As the valley of the Zhelta lies outside
the limits and beyond the jurisdiction of
Russia, and is separated by hundreds of
miles of trackless wilderness from the
nearest administrative centre in China,
its invaders were not subject to any au-

and profits of the enterprise in which they are
engaged.

2 Small, springless, four-wheeled carts, drawn
usually by a single horse.

8 Local officials who act as chiefs of police
and magistrates in a Russian district.

496

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

thority nor bound by any law ; and its
history, for a time, was little more than
a record of quarreling, claim- jumping,
fighting, robbery, and murder. Gradu-
ally, however, the better class of Russian
miners, impelled by the instinct of associ-
ation and cooperation which is so marked
a characteristic of the Slavonic race, be-
gan to organize themselves into artels,
whose members contributed equally to
the common treasury, worked together
for the common weal, shared alike in the
product of their industry, and defended
as a body their individual and corporate
rights. As these little groups or associ-
ations, united by the bond of a common
interest, began to grow stronger and more
coherent, they took counsel together and
drew up a series of regulations for the
uniform government of the artels and for
the better protection of their members.
These regulations, however, did not have
the force of a constitution, binding upon
all citizens of the camp, nor were they
intended to take the place of a civil or
criminal code. They resembled rather,
in form and effect, the by-laws of a char-
tered corporation ; and they had no re-
cognized or enforceable validity outside
the limits of the artels that adopted and
sanctioned them. In the camp at large,
every man who was not a member of an
artel defended himself and his property
as best he could, without regard to law
or authority. For some months after the
establishment of the camp there was no
law except the law of might, and no re-
cognized authority other than the will of
the strongest ; but as the feeling of soli-
darity, fostered by the artels, gradually
permeated the whole mass of the popu-
lation, an attempt was made to establish
something like a general government.
The logic of events had convinced both
honest men and criminals that unless
they secured life and property within
the limits of the camp, they were all
likely to starve to death in the course of
the winter. Traders would not come
there with food, and merchants would

not open shops there, unless they could
be assured of protection for themselves
and safety for their goods. Such assur-
ance could be given them only by an or-
ganized government, willing and able to
enforce the provisions of a penal code.
At the suggestion, therefore, of some of
the artels, the whole body of miners was
invited to assemble in what is known to
the Russian peasants as a " skhod," a
Slavonic variety of the New England
town-meeting. At this skhod, which was
largely attended, the situation was fully
and noisily discussed. Robbery and mur-
der were declared to be crimes of which
the camp, as a community, must take
cognizance ; a penal code was adopted,
providing that robbers should be flogged
and murderers put to death ; and a com-
mittee of safety, consisting of one repre-
sentative from the artels, one from the
escaped convicts, and one from the unat-
tached miners, was appointed to govern
the camp, enforce the law, and act gen-
erally as the executive arm of the skhod.
The effect of this action was to dimin-
ish, for a time, the frequency of robbery
and murder, and greatly to increase the
population and promote the prosperity
of the camp. The news that a govern-
ment had been organized and three sta-
rostas elected to maintain order and pun-
ish crime in the " Chinese California "
soon spread throughout eastern Siberia,
and gave a fresh impetus to the tide of
migration across the Manchurian fron-
tier. Russian peasant farmers from the
Trans-Baikal — a much better and stead-
ier class than the runaway mining labor-
ers — caught the gold fever, and started
for the camp; merchants from Nerchinsk,
Stretinsk, and Chita sent thither caravans
of horses and camels laden with bales of
dry goods, hardware, and provisions ; ac-
tors, jugglers, gamblers, musicians, and
amusement-purveyors of all sorts from
the east - Siberian towns, joined in the
universal rush, and before midwinter the
gold-placer of Zheltuga, as it was then
called, had grown into a rough, noisy,

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

497

turbulent mining-town of more than five
thousand inhabitants.

To a traveler ascending the Zhelta
River from the Amur, in the autumn of
1884, the site of the town presented itself
as a nearly level valley-bottom about a
quarter of a mile in width, strewn with
water-worn boulders and heaps of gravel
from the pits and trenches of the gold-
diggers, and bounded on its northwestern
and southeastern sides by high hills cov-
ered with forests of spruce, pine, and sil-
ver birch. In the foreground was a flat,
grassy plain, known to the miners as
" Pitch-Penny Field," where the under-
lying gravel was not rich enough to pay
for working, and where the surface, con-
sequently, had not been much disturbed.
From this field stretched away, on the
right-hand side of the valley, under the
shadow of the mountain, a double line of
tents, yourts,1 bologans,2 and log houses,
to which the miners had given the name
Millionaire Street, for the reason that
it adjoined the richest part of the placer.
This street was a mile and a half or more
in length, and along it, at short intervals,
were scattered the principal shops of the
town, each surmounted by a flag ; twen-
ty or thirty drinking-saloons with ever-
green boughs nailed over their doors;
and about a dozen hotels and " houses
for arrivers," whose rudely painted sign-
boards bore such names as The Assem-
bly, The Marseilles, The Zheltuga, The
California, and The Wilderness Hotel.
Filling the spaces between the semi-pub-
lic buildings, on both sides of the nar-
row, muddy street, stood the shedlike
barracks of the artels, the flat - roofed,
earth-banked yourts of the convicts, and
the more carefully built houses of the
well -to --do Russian peasants, all made
of unhewn logs chinked with moss, and
provided with windows of cheap cotton
sheeting. But Millionaire Street, al-

1 Quadrangular log huts, shaped like deeply
truncated pyramids, and banked and roofed
with sods or earth.

though it was the business and aristo-
cratic quarter of the town, did not by any
means comprise the whole of it. On the
opposite or southeastern side of the val-
ley there was a straggling encampment
of skin tents, birch • bark lodges, and
wretched hovels, tenanted by poor Chi-
nese, Tongus, and Buriats, who were
employed as day laborers by the artels ;
and from the southeastern end of Mil-
lionaire Street there was a thin, broken
line of detached huts and cabins, extend-
ing up the Zhelta almost to its source.
The camp, as a whole, therefore, occu-
pied an area about a quarter of a mile
wide and four miles long, with the head
of the ravine at one end, Pitch-Penny
Field at the other, and a desert of stones,
gravel, ditches, flumes, and sluices be-
tween.

At the beginning of the winter of
1884-85, there had been staked out,
within the productive limits of the placer,
about four hundred claims, more than
two thirds of which were being worked.
The stratum of gravel and sand from
which the gold was obtained probably
formed at one time the bed of the Zhel-
ta River. It lay at an average depth
of about twelve feet, under a covering
of alluvial soil known to the miners as
" torf," which, doubtless, in the course of
ages, had been gradually washed down
into the valley from the circumjacent
hills. This thick superficial layer of torf
had to be removed, of course, before
the auriferous sand could be reached ;
and as the labor of taking it away was
very great, all the individual miners,
and nearly all the artels, had adopted
what was then known in Siberia as the
" orta," or subterranean method of
working a deep placer. By this method,
the torf, instead of being removed, was
undermined. The digger sunk a shaft
to the bottom of the auriferous stratum,

2 Conical structures of logs, roughly resem-
bling wigwams or tepees, and sometimes
mounted on four high posts and reached by a
ladder.

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480.

498

A Hussion Experiment in Self- Government.

and then drove tunnels through the pay-
gravel in every direction to the boun-
dary lines of his claim, leaving the torf
intact above as a roof, and supporting
it, if necessary, with timbers. The
gravel taken out of these subterranean
tunnels and chambers was hoisted to the
surface through the shaft by means of a
large wooden bucket attached either to
a windlass or to an old-fashioned well-
sweep, and the gold was then separated
from the sand by agitation with water
in shallow pans, troughs, or cradles.
The pay-gravel of Zheltuga yielded, on
an average, about four ounces of gold
per ton ; and the precious metal was
worth on the spot from twelve to six-
teen dollars an ounce. In many cases
the yield was much greater than this.
One fortunate digger unearthed a mass
of virgin gold weighing five pounds ;
and lucky finds of nuggets varying in
weight from one ounce to ten ounces
were of frequent occurrence. Even in
parts of the placer that were compara-
tively barren, isolated " pockets " were
sometimes found that yielded gold at
the rate of twelve ounces to the Russian
pud, or more than fifty-five pounds to
the ton. In the early part of 1885 it
was estimated that the Zheltuga placer,
as a whole, was yielding about thirty-
five pounds of gold per day, and the ac-
cumulated stock on hand weighed 3600
pounds and represented a cash value of
nearly $1,000,000.

The currency of the camp, for the
most part, was gold-dust, whi6h, when
transferred from hand to hand, was
weighed in improvised balances with or-
dinary playing-cards. An amount of
dust that would just balance four cards,
of standard size and make, was every-
where accepted as a zolotnik,1 and the
zolotnik was valued at about $1.75: v
One card of dust, therefore, represented
forty-four cents. This was practically
the unit of the Zheltuga monetary sys-
tem ; but if a buyer or seller wished to
1 One ninety-sixth part of a pound troy.

give or receive a smaller sum than this,
the card used as a weight was cut into
halves or quarters, — a method that sug-
gests the " bit " of the American miners
on the Pacific Coast. A pound of sugar,
for example, was valued in the Zheltuga
currency at " two bits " of a quartered
playing-card ; that is, at one eighth of
a zolotnik in dust. Russian paper money
circulated to some extent, but the sup-
ply was insufficient, and gold-dust was
the ordinary medium of exchange.

Once a week, on Saturday, the lower
part of the valley, near Pitch - Penny
Field, was turned into a great market
or bazaar, where traders and Cossacks
from the neighboring settlements sold
meat, flour, hard-bread, tea, sugar, soap,
candles, clothing, and hardware, and
where thousands of miners, from all
parts of the placer, assembled to pur-
chase supplies. In no other place and
at no other time could the population
and life of the great mining - camp be
studied to better advantage. The field
was dotted with white cotton tents and
rude temporary booths, erected to shel-
ter the goods of the traders ; scores of
telegas, filled with produce and provi-
sions, were drawn up in long parallel
lines, with shaggy Cossack ponies teth-
ered to their muddy wheels ; the strident
music of hand-organs and concertinas
called the attention of the idle and the
curious to yourts and bologans where
popular amusement was furnished in the
form of singing, juggling, or tumbling ;
and in and out among these tents, booths,
wagons, and bologans surged a great
horde of rough, dirty, unshaven miners :
some munching bread or cold meat as
they elbowed their way from one booth to
another ; some crowding around a wagon
loaded with apples and dried Chinese
fruits from the valley of the Ussuri ; some
stuffing their multifarious purchases into
big gray bags of coarse Siberian linen ;
[ and all shouting, wrangling, or bargain-
in half a dozen Asiatic languages.

No American mining-camp, probably,

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

499

ever presented such an extraordinary
diversity of types, costumes, and nation-
alities as might have been seen any
pleasant Saturday afternoon in that
Manchurian market. Thin-faced, keen-
eyed Polish Jews, in skull-caps and loose
black gabardines, stood here and there
in little stalls exchanging Russian paper
money for gold-dust, which they weighed
carefully with dirty playing-cards in
apothecaries' balances ; sallow, beard-
less Tongus hunters, whose fur hoods,
buckskin tunics, and tight leather leg-
gings showed that they had just come
from the mountain fastnesses of the
Trans-Baikal, offered gloves, mittens,
and squirrel-skin blankets to red-shirted
Russian peasants in flat caps and high-
topped boots ; wrinkle - eyed Mongol
horsemen, dressed in flapping orange
gowns and queer dishpan - shaped felt
hats, rode through the crowded market-
place on wiry ponies, leading long files
of solemn, swaying camels laden with
goods from Verkhni Udinsk or Nerchin-
ski Zavod ; uniformed Siberian Cos-
sacks, standing at the tail-boards of the
small four-wheeled wagons in which they
had brought rye flour and fresh fish from
the Amur, exchanged loud greetings or
rough jokes with the runaway convicts
who strolled past, smoking home-made
cigarettes of acrid Circassian tobacco
rolled in bits of old newspaper ; and now
and then, strangely conspicuous in black
frock coat and civil service cap, might be
seen a retired ispravnik, or a government
clerk from Chita, buying tea and white
loaf sugar at the stall of a Chinese trader.
On the outskirts of the bazaar amuse-
ments and diversions of all kinds were
provided in abundance, and from half a
dozen different directions came the dis-
cordant music of hand-organs and bal-
lalaikas 1 calling attention to lotteries,
peep-shows, exhibitions of trained Chi-
nese monkeys, and large circular tents in

1 A Russian variety of guitar, with three or
four strings and a triangular sounding-board of
thin seasoned wood.

which acrobats and tumblers performed
feats of strength or agility before crowds
of shouting and applauding spectators.
In one place, a huge tiger, caught in a
trap on the lower Amur and confined in
an iron cage, was an object of wonder
and admiration to a throng of swarthy,
bullet-headed Buriats ; in another, a pro-
fessional equestrian in dirty spangled
tights exhibited the horsemanship of the
haute ecole to a circle of hard-featured
ruffians in gray overcoats, who were easi-
ly recognizable as escaped convicts from
the Siberian mines, and who still wore on
their backs, in the shape of two yellow
diamonds, the badge of penal servitude.

Taken as a whole, the great bazaar,
with its unpainted booths, its white cot-
ton tents, its long lines of loaded wagons,
its piles of merchandise, its horses, cat-
tle, and double-humped Bactrian camels,
its music, its vari-colored flags, and its
diversified population of traders, miners,
Cossacks, Russian peasants, runaway con-
victs, and Asiatic nomads, formed a pic-
ture hardly to be paralleled in all the
Chinese Empire, and a picture strangely
out of harmony with the solemn moun-
tains and primeval forests of the lonely
Manchurian wilderness in which it was
framed.

The government of so heterogeneous
and lawless a population as that assem-
bled in the valley of the Zhelta present-
ed, of course, a problem of extraordinary
difficulty ; and it is not at all surprising
that the first attempt of the artels to
provide the camp with a civil adminis-
tration proved to be a failure. The
three starostas elected by the skhod
were not men of much education or char-
acter ; their authority was not backed,
as it should have been, by an adequate
police force ; and even when their in-
tentions were good and their orders ju-
dicious, they were virtually powerless to
carry them into effect. The runaway
convicts from the mines in east Siberia,
who composed at least a third of the
whole population, soon discovered that

500

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

the starostas had neither the nerve nor
the power to enforce order and honesty
in the only way in which they could be
enforced, — with the hangman's rope and
the lash, — and therefore they promptly
resumed their criminal activity. Theft,
claim-jumping, fighting, and robbery with
violence soon became as common as ever ;
the influence and authority of the admin-
istration steadily declined as one board
of starostas after another was discharged
for cowardice or inefficiency ; men of
good character from the artels refused
to take positions which no longer had
even the semblance of dignity or power ;
and finally the government itself became
criminal, the latest board of starostas
participated in a crime and fled across
the Siberian frontier with their plunder,
and the camp lapsed again into virtual
anarchy.

This state of affairs continued for sev-
eral weeks, in the course of which time
no attempt was made either to reestablish
the ineffective and discredited adminis-
tration of the starostas, or to substitute
for it a form of government better adapt-
ed to the circumstances of the case.
Petty crimes of various sorts were com-
mitted almost daily in all parts of the
placer ; but as the sufferers from them
were, for the most part, the weaker and
less influential members of the commu-
nity, public feeling was not roused to
the point of renewed action until the lat-
ter part of December, 1884, when a bru-
tal murder, in the very heart of the
camp, brought everybody to a sudden
realization of the dangers of the situa-
tion. One of the members of an artel
of escaped convicts, who was known to
have had in his possession a consider-
able quantity of gold - dust, was found
one morning in his tent, dead and cold,
with his head and face beaten into an al-
most unrecognizable mass of blood, hair,
brains, and shattered bones. From the
position and appearance of the body, it
was evident that the murderer had crept
into the tent at a late hour of the night,

and killed his victim, while asleep, with
repeated blows of a heavy sledge-ham-
mer, which was found, lying in a pool of
half-frozen blood, beside the bed. The
dead man's gold-dust had disappeared,
and there was no clue to the identity of
the assassin.

The news of this murder spread in a
few hours to all parts of the placer ; and
thousands of miners, attracted either by
morbid curiosity or by a desire to verify
the statements they had heard, came to
look at the disfigured corpse, and to dis-
cuss with one another means of prevent-
ing such crimes. In the absence of an
authorized and responsible government,
no one ventured to remove or bury the
body, and for nearly a week it remained
untouched, just where it had been found,
as a ghastly and impressive object-lesson
to the citizens of the camp. Meanwhile,
the need of a strdng and effective gov-
ernment, to maintain order, protect life,
and punish crime, was earnestly and
noisily discussed in hundreds of tents
and cabins throughout the valley ; and
the outcome of the discussion was the
calling of another skhod, composed of
delegates representing the four great
classes into which the population of the
camp was divided, — the artels, the con-
victs, the unattached miners, and the
Asiatics. At this skhod it was decided
to organize a republican form of govern-
ment, with a single chief or president,
who should be authorized to draft a code
of laws, and who should be supported in
the rigorous enforcement of them by the
full -armed strength of the camp. As
the starostas elected under the previous
regime had been common peasants,
wholly without administrative experience
or training and almost wholly without
education, and as the result of their ef-
forts to maintain order had been general
dissatisfaction and disappointment, it
was resolved that the president to be
chosen in the second experiment should
bfe a man of character and ability from
tl.e cultivated class, and, if possible, a

A Russian Experiment in Self-Government.

501

man who had had some experience as
an administrative or executive officer.
The number of such men in the commu-
nity was extremely small ; but among
them there happened to be a retired gov-
ernment official — a clerk from one of
the provincial departments of Siberia —
named Fasse, whose personal bearing,
dignity, and upright character had at-
tracted general attention, and who had
the respect and confidence of all the best
men in the camp. Upon Fasse the choice
of the skhod fell ; and a deputation, bear-
ing a plate of bread and a small cup of
salt on a wooden tray, was sent to ap-
prise him of the assembly's action, and
to congratulate him upon his unanimous
election as " first President of the Zhel-
tuga Republic."

Fasse, who was not ambitious of dis-
tinction in this field, and who fully ap-
preciated the serious nature of the re-
sponsibilities that would devolve upon
the "first President," was disposed to
decline the honor ; but when the skhod
agreed in advance to sanction any laws
that he might suggest, to recognize and
obey any assistants whom he might ap-
point, and to give him the fullest pos-
sible cooperation and support, he decided
that it was his duty, as a good citizen, to
waive personal feeling, accept the posi-
tion, and give the community the benefit
of all the knowledge and experience he
had. His first official act was to divide
the territory which constituted the placer
into five districts (subsequently known
as " states "), and to invite the residents
of each district to elect two starshinas,
whose duty it should be to act in their
respective localities as justices of the
peace, and who should together consti-
tute the President's Council.

In the course of three or four days,
starshinas were elected in all of the dis-
tricts (two of them Chinese from the
Asiatic quarter of the camp), certificates
of election were duly signed and returned
to the President, and the Council was
summoned to draw up a code of laws and

regulations for the government of the re-
public. The result of their deliberations
was th'e following constitution, which was
submitted to the skhod at a special meet-
ing, and adopted without dissent : —

•

On this day of , in the year

of our Lord 188— ^ we, the Artels and
Free Adventurers of the Zheltuga Com-
mand, imploring the blessing of Almighty
God upon our undertaking, do hereby
promise and swear implicit obedience to
the authorities elected by us at this
skhod, and to the rules and regulations
drawn up by them for the government
of the camp, as follows : —

1. The territory belonging to the Zhel-
tuga Command shall be known as the
" Amur California," and shall be divided
into five districts or states.

2. The officers of the republic shall
be a President and ten starshinas, who
shall be elected by the skhod, and who
shall hold office for a period of four
months, or until the skhod relieves them
from duty. Executive and judicial au-
thority, in each one of the five districts,
shall be vested in two starshinas, and the
ten starshinas together shall constitute the
President's Council. These officers of
the government shall wear on their left
arms, as evidence of their official authori-
ty, brass badges bearing in incised letters
the words " Starshina of the Amur Cali-
fornia, th District." The President

shall receive a salary of four hundred
rubles, and each starshina a salary of
two hundred rubles, per month.

3. Every artel and every miner in
the camp shall come to the assistance of
the starshinas at the first call, by night
or day, and shall aid them in enforcing
the law and maintaining order. Cooper-
ation in the infliction of punishment for
crime, under direction and by order of
the President, the Council, or the star-
shinas, shall be an imperative obligation
of every citizen.

4. The lightest punishment that shall
be inflicted for an offense committed

502

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

within the territorial limits of the Amur
California shall be banishment from the
camp without right of return. More seri-
ous crimes shall be punished by flogging,
with whip or rods, the number of blows
to be proportioned to the criminal's
health or strength, but not to exceed in
any case five hundred. Murder shall be
punished in accordance with the Mosaic
law of "an eye for an eye," and the
murderer shall be put to death in the
same manner and with the same weapon
that he employed in killing his victim.
Every sentence of the authorities shall
be executed, if possible, forthwith, and
in no case shall punishment be delayed
more than twenty-four hours.

5. Starshinas, in their respective dis-
tricts, shall have the right to punish, up
to one hundred blows, at their own dis-
cretion and without consulting either the
President or the Council ; but they shall
make to the President, at a fixed hour
every day, a report of all such cases, and
an official statement of the condition of
affairs in their districts.

6. The authorities shall have the right
to put any person suspected of criminal
conduct under the surveillance of any
artel or individual, paying the latter for
such supervision at the rate of one ruble
per day ; and the artel or individual
shall be held responsible for such sus-
pect's safeguard and good behavior.

7. The selling of spurious and manu-
factured gold, and also the wearing of
a starshina's badge without authority,
as a means of intimidating or extorting
money from any person, shall be pun-
ished with five hundred blows of a black-
thorn rod.

8. In gambling with cards, the wa-
gering of clothing, tools, implements, or
other like objects of absolute necessity
is strictly prohibited, upon penalty of
severe punishment, as is also the pledg-
ing or pawning of such objects for a loan
or debt.

9. The firing of a gun or pistol, at
any hour of the day or night, without

sufficient and legal cause, and the carry-
ing of deadly weapons while in a state
of intoxication, are strictly forbidden.

10. Among those who have recently
come to the Amur California, ostensibly
to work, are a large number of persons
who have no regular occupation, and
who hang about restaurants and saloons,
living a drunken and disorderly life
or maintaining themselves by dishonest
card-playing. Their evil example exerts
a demoralizing influence upon the great
mass of honest and industrious miners,
and the citizens of the camp are request-
ed, in their own interest and for the sake
of public tranquillity, to point out such
persons to the authorities, in order that
they may be banished from the placer.

11. Every artel or individual miner
who employs, or ostensibly employs, la-
borers shall personally see that such la-
borers are actually at work, or shall make
a report of them to the district star-
shinas, so that the latter may either set
them at work or expel them from the
settlement.

12. In view of the fact that many
persons who have come here are unable,
for various reasons, to acquire mining
territory or find work, and are therefore
in a suffering condition, and in view of
the further fact that certain artels are
nominally in possession of much more
territory than they are able to develop,
it has been decided to regard all unoc-
cupied and unworked claims as public
lands, and to distribute them among hon-
est and sober citizens who have not been
able to find either work or unclaimed
ground. Such distribution will begin in
seven days from the date hereof. Hence-
forth the number of claims that artels
will be permitted to hold in reserve with-
out development shall be limited to two
for an artel of nine men, four for an
artel of eighteen men, and six for an
artel of twenty-seven men. Relying upon
the generosity and'humanity of all Rus-
sians, the government hereby gives no-
tice that undeveloped and unworked

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

503

claims held by artels in excess of the
numbers above set forth will hereafter
be treated as public lands, and will be
distributed in accordance with the best
interests of the community among the
poorer members thereof.

13. A fund to defray the expenses of
the government shall be raised by means
of taxes imposed at the discretion of the
skhod upon all liquor-sellers, restaurant-
keepers, traders, and merchants.

14. Every person who has a store,
shop, or trading-place within the limits
of the placer shall cause a flag to be dis-
played on the building in which such
business is carried on. Failure to do so
within three days from the date hereof
shall be punished with a fine of from
twenty-five to one hundred rubles.

15. Every merchant or trader who
pays a tax or license fee for the right to
carry on his business shall obtain from
the person authorized to collect the tax a
duly executed receipt for the same, bear-
ing the seal of the government and the
signature of the President, and shall post
this receipt in a prominent place in his
shop, store, restaurant, or saloon.

16. The sale of spirituous liquor
within the limits of the camp by persons
who have no regular place of business is
strictly and absolutely forbidden. Per-
sons who have regular places of business
shall not sell spirituous liquor until they
have obtained special permission to do
so. For every bottle sold without such
permission the seller shall pay a fine of
from twenty-five to one hundred rubles.

17. The laws of the Zheltuga Free Ad-
venturers shall apply without exception
to all citizens of the camp, regardless of
rank, condition, nationality, or previous
allegiance. Officers of the government,
however, chosen by election, shall not be
punished for illegal actions until they
shall have been tried by the Council,
found guilty, and dismissed from the ser-
vice. They shall then be tried and pun-
ished as private citizens under the gen-
eral law.

18. Every artel or individual coming
hereafter within the territorial limits of
the Amur California shall appear within
three days at the headquarters of the
government to read and sign these laws.
Those who fail to make such appearance
within three days from the time they
cross the Amur will.be proceeded against
as persons unwilling to submit to the au-
thority and obey the laws of the Zhel-
tuga Command of Free Adventurers of
the Amur California.

19. As evidence that the President
and starshinas referred to herein have
been chosen by us of our own free will,
we append hereto our signatures, and we
hereby promise to treat them with honor
and respect. Those of us who fail to do
so shall be severely punished as disturb-
ers of the peace and insulters of the offi-
cers whom the Command has trusted as
honest and impartial guardians of its
safety and tranquillity.

(Signed) '

Electors.

Five copies of the constitution, or code
of laws, were prepared in manuscript,
and delivered to the starshinas of the five
districts, who called local meetings and
read the documents aloud to the electors.
They were then signed by representatives
of the latter and returned to the Presi-
dent, who affixed to them the seal of the
Amur California, and deposited them in
a place of security as the organic law of
the Chinese republic.

With the beginning of the year 1885
the new government entered upon the
discharge of its duties, and the inevitable
conflict arose between law and authority
on one side and lawlessness and crime
on the other. If there were any doubt
of the ability of the new administration
to maintain its existence and enforce its
decrees, such doubt was speedily removed
by the boldness, promptness, and ener-
gy with which the new officials acted.
Supported by a majority of the citizens,

504

A Russian Experiment in Self-Government.

backed by a strong posse comitatus, and
accompanied by an adequate force of
zealous executioners, the starshinas pa-
trolled their districts from morning to
night, listening to complaints, settling dis-
putes, punishing crimes, and administer-
ing justice generally in accordance with
the summary processes of a drum-head
court-martial. Evil-doers who thought
they could deal with the starshinas as
they had dealt with their predecessors,
the starostas, soon discovered their mis-
take. The new officials enforced order
and justice, by means of the lash, without
fear, favor, or mercy, and punishment
followed crime with as much certainty as
if the sequence were a fixed law of na-
ture.

The place of execution was a frozen
pond in the lower part of the valley, near
Pitch-Penny Field, where half a dozen
able-bodied Russian peasants, armed with
flexible rods and formidable rawhide
whips, carried the decrees of the star-
shinas into effect. The regular formula
of condemnation was, " To the ice with
him ! " And from this sentence there
was no appeal. The criminal thus con-
demned was taken forthwith to the frozen
pond, and, after having been stripped to
the hips, was laid, face downward, on
the ice. One executioner then sat on his
head, another on his legs, and a third,
with a rod or rawhide plet, covered his
naked back with the crisscross lacing of
swollen crimson stripes which is known
to Siberian hard-labor convicts as " the
bloody gridiron."

In the sentences of the starshinas no
partiality whatever was shown to crim-
inals of any particular class or social
rank. For stealing a keg of hard-bread
a Russian peasant was given five hun-
dred blows with a birch rod, and was
then expelled from the camp ; but at the
same time a clerk for a well-known firm
of Blagoveshchinsk merchants, a gentle-
man and a man of some education, re-
ceived two hundred blows for unneces-
sarily firing a revolver. Doubtless in

many cases the punishments inflicted
were cruel and excessive, but desperate
ills required desperate remedies, and in
dealing with a heterogeneous population,
composed largely of runaway convicts
from the Siberian mines, it was thought
better to err on the side of severity than
to show a leniency that might be attrib-
uted to weakness or fear.

For a period of two weeks or more
the dread order "To the ice with him ! "
might have been heard almost hourly in
every part of the camp, and the snow on
the frozen pond was trampled hard by
the feet of the executioners and stained
red with blood from the lacerated backs
of condemned criminals. But the dishon-
est and disorderly class finally learned
its lesson. After three men had been put
to death, scores expelled from the settle-
ment, and hundreds mercilessly flogged
with rods or the plet, even the boldest
and hardiest of the runaway convicts
were cowed, and the whole population of
the camp was brought for the first time
to a realization of the fact that a govern-
ment resting on the will and consent of
the governed, and supported by a posse
comitatus of free citizens, may be quite
as powerful and formidable in its way,
and quite as great a terror to evil-doers,
as a government based on the divine
right of an anointed Tsar, and supported
by an armed force of soldiers and police.

Before the 1st of February, 1885, the
triumph of the honest and law-abiding
class in the Amur California was virtu-
ally complete. The petty crimes which
had so long harassed and disquieted the
camp became less and less frequent ; the
supremacy of the law was everywhere
recognized with respect or fear ; the ex-
periment of popular self-government was
admitted to be successful ; and the skhod
and its executive officers, having estab-
lished order, were at liberty to turn their
attention to minor details of civil organ-
ization. Adequate revenue for the sup-
port of the government was obtained by
means of a judiciously framed tariff on

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

505

imports ; a post-office department was or-
ganized, and provision made for a daily
mail between the camp and the nearest
station in Siberia ; houses were built or
set apart in the several districts for
the accommodation of the starshinas and
their clerks ; a free public hospital was
opened, with a staff of two physicians
and half a dozen nurses, and was main-
tained at a cost of nearly thirty thousand
rubles a year ; the organic law was re-
vised and amended to accord with the
results of later experience, and the gov-
ernment of the republic gradually as-
sumed a form which, if not comparable
with that of older and more advanced
communities, was at least more civilized
and modern than that which then pre-
vailed in Siberia. Intelligent and dispas-
sionate Russians who had just come from
the Amur California told me, when I met
them at Chita, Nerchinsk, and Stretinsk
in 1885, that life and property were
absolutely safer in the Chinese republic
than in any part of the Russian empire.
" Why," said one- of them, " ydu may
leave a heap of merchandise unguarded
all night in the streets ; nobody will
touch it ! "

The first result of the establishment
of a really strong and effective govern-
ment in the valley of the Zhelta was a
remarkable increase in the population
and the prosperity of the camp. Miners,
prospectors, merchants, mechanics, and
" free adventurers " flocked to it from
all parts of eastern Siberia. New gold-
fields were discovered and developed in
neighboring valleys ; a large area of new
territory was annexed ; new administra-
tive districts were organized ; and before
the 1st of June, 1885, the Chinese repub-
lic had a population of more than ten
thousand free citizens, including six hun-
dred women and children, and contained
fifty hotels, three hundred shops and
stores, and nearly one thousand inhabit-
ed buildings.

The development of so strong and
well organized a community as this in

the wildest part of Manchuria, absolute-
ly without advice, assistance, or encour-
agement from any outside source, is an
interesting and noteworthy proof of the
capacity of the Russian people for self-
government, and it is for this reason,
mainly, that the story has seemed to me
worth telling. Here was a population
as heterogeneous, as uneducated, and as
lawless as could be found anywhere in
the Russian empire. Nearly a third of
it consisted of actual criminals, of the
worst class, from the Siberian mines and
penal settlements, and fully a quarter of
the non-criminal remainder were igno-
rant Asiatics, belonging to half a dozen
different tribes and nationalities. Never,
perhaps, was the experiment of popular
self-government tried under more un-
favorable conditions. The experiment-
ers had no precedents to guide them, no
record of previous success to encourage
them, and, at first, no trained or edu-
cated men to lead them. Relying solely
on the good sense and self-control of the
majority, they extended the right of suf-
frage to criminals and Asiatics as well
as to honest men and Russians, sum-
moned a skhod in which every citizen
of the camp had a voice and a vote,
gave the criminals and aliens their share
of official authority by electing two con-
victs and two Chinese as members of
the Council, and then, on the basis of
manhood suffrage, free speech, equal
rights, and the will of the majority, they
established their republic, enacted their
laws, and carried to a successful termi-
nation their unique experiment. As an
evidence of the ability of the Siberian
people to govern themselves, and as an
indication of the form which their insti-
tutions would be likely to take if they
could escape from the yoke of the Rus-
sian despotism, the history of the Amur
California seems to me to be full of in-
terest and instruction. But be that as
it may, it is certainly a curious and sig-
nificant fact that the first true republic
ever established east of the Caspian Sea

506

A ^Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

and the Urals was founded by repre-
sentatives of the most despotically gov-
erned nation in Europe, upon the ter-
ritory of the least progressive and the
least enterprising nation in Asia, and was
modeled after the government of the
strongest and most successful nation in
America.

What would have been the future of
the Chinese republic if the Zheltuga
Free Adventurers had been left to their
own devices we- can only conjecture.
They had already demonstrated their
ability to deal successfully with internal
disorders, and if their growth and pro-
gress had not been checked by external
forces too strong to be resisted, they
might ultimately have conquered and
occupied a large part of northern Man-
churia ; but of course neither Russia nor
China could afford to permit the estab-
lishment of a free and independent state
in the valley of the Amur. China pro-
tested against the invasion of her terri-
tory as soon as she became aware of it,
and called upon the governor-general of
the Amur to interfere. The latter sim-
ply replied that the invasion was unau-
thorized ; that he had no control over the
invaders, who were a mere horde of va-
grants and runaway convicts ; and that
the Chinese authorities were at liberty
to treat them as brigands and drive them
out of the country. This, however, the
Chinese authorities were utterly unable
to do : partly because they had no force
in northern Manchuria strong enough
to cope with the Zheltuga Free Adven-
turers, and partly because the region oc-
cupied by the latter was an almost inac-
cessible wilderness. All that they could
do was to send an officer up the Amur,
with a small escort, to find out exactly
where the invaders were, to ascertain
their strength, and to threaten them with
severe punishment if they refused to with-
draw.

This was done in the winter of 1884—
85, soon after the organization of the
republic and the election of Fasse as

President. A Chinese official, with an
escort of thirty-six soldiers, came up the
Amur from Aigun on the ice, visited the
camp, and found, to his surprise, that it
contained a population of more than
seven thousand men, fully one third of
whom were armed. Seeing that it would
be futile, if not dangerous, to threaten so
strong and well organized a community
as this, the Chinese envoy had a brief in-
terview with President Fasse, and a few
days later, without having accomplished
anything, returned to- Aigun. The Chi-
nese government thereupon renewed its
protest, and insisted that Russia should
take adequate measures to compel the
withdrawal of the Free Adventurers from
Manchurian territory. Protests and com-
plaints were also received from district
governors, proprietors of mines, and in-
fluential citizens in various parts of east-
ern Siberia, who alleged that the Man-
churian gold fever was exciting and de-
moralizing the Siberian population ; that
the export of provisions to the Chinese
republic was raising the prices and in-
creasing the scarcity of food products
in all the adjacent Siberian provinces ;
and that if the emigration to Manchu-
ria were not speedily checked, work in
many of the Siberian mines would have
to be suspended for want of laborers.

At a conference of the territorial gov-
ernors of Irkutsk, the Amur, and the
Trans-Baikal, held at Blagoveshchinsk
early in the summer of 1885, these pro-
tests and complaints were duly consid-
ered, and a decision was reached to break
up the Chinese republic by cutting off
its supply of provisions. A few weeks
later, Captain Sokolofski, with an ade-
quate force of cavalry, was sent from
Chita to Ignashina, with orders to estab-
lish a military cordon along the Siberian
frontier from Albazin to the mouth of
the river Shilka, to arrest all persons at-
tempting to cross that frontier in either
direction, to confiscate the gold or mer-
chandise found in their possession, and
to take such other steps as might be

A Russian Experiment in Self- Government.

507

necessary to compel the withdrawal of
all Russian subjects from Chinese terri-
tory. This was a death-blow to the Chi-
nese republic. Its population of more
than ten thousand persons, relying upon
its ability to procure supplies from the
north, had made no attempt to cultivate
the soil, and it could not maintain it-
self in the Manchurian wilderness for a
single month after its communications
with Siberia had been severed. Fasse,
the President of the republic, was or-
dered by the Russian government to re-
sign his position and return to his coun-
try upon pain of penal servitude ; the
starshinas, deprived suddenly of their
chief, and apprehensive of future punish-
ment for themselves, became demoral-
ized and abandoned their posts ; while
the panic - stricken Free Adventurers,
hoping to evade the cordon by crossing
the Amur above or below it, packed up
hastily their gold-dust, merchandise, and
other valuables, and silently vanished in
the forests. In less than a week the
population of the Amur California had
fallen from ten thousand to three thou-
sand, and in less than a month the camp
had been virtually abandoned by all ex-
cept a few hundred desperate runaway
convicts, who preferred the chance of
starvation in Manchuria to the certainty
of arrest and deportation to the mines
in Siberia.

The Chinese made no attempt to oc-
cupy the almost deserted gold placer
until December, 1885, when they sent a
force of manegri, or frontier cavalry,
up the Amur River on the ice, with or-
ders to drive out the remaining miners
and destroy the camp. The soldiers
reached their destination, in a temper-
ature 'of thirty degrees below zero, on
the 6th of January, 1886. The only oc-
cupants of the place at that time were
about three hundred runaway convicts,
fifty or sixty Chinese and Manchus, and a

few Russian peasants lying ill in the hos-
pital. The convicts, at the approach of
the trbops, formed in a compact body on
Pitch-Penny Field and boldly marched
out to meet the enemy, playing a march
on three battered clarionets, and carry-
ing high above their heads, on a cross-
shaped flagstaff, a sort of ecclesiastical
banner made out of a white cotton sheet,
upon which they had painted rudely in
huge black capital letters the words

ALEXANDER
THIRD.

The Chinese cavalry, overawed by this
extraordinary banner, or perhaps uncer-
tain as to the result of a contest with
the desperate ruffians who carried it, al-
lowed the convicts to pass without mo-
lestation, and they marched away in the
direction of the Amur, keeping step to
the music of the clarionets, and relying
upon the protection of a flag which com-
bined the majesty of the Tsar with the
sanctity of an emblem of truce.

When the convicts had disappeared in
the forest, the Chinese entered the camp
with fire and sword, burned all its build-
ings to the ground, and put every living
occupant to death, — not sparing even
the sick in the hospital. Some were be-
headed, some were stabbed and thrown
into the flaming ruins of the burning
buildings, and a few were stripped naked,
tied to trees, and showered with bucket-
ful after bucketful of cold water from
the Zhelta River, until death had put an
end to their sufferings, and their stiffened
bodies had become white statues of ice.
When the sun rose over the wooded
Manchurian hills on the following morn-
ing, a few hundred piles of smoking
ruins and a few ghastly naked bodies tied
to trees and encased in shrouds of ice
were all that remained of the Chinese
republic.

George Kennan.

508

Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO, THE NOVELIST.

" TOM JONES and Gray's Elegy in a
Country Churchyard are both excellent,
and much spoke of by both sex, particu-
larly by the men." This statement by
Marjorie Fleming has abundant confir-
mation in the history of English litera-
ture for the last hundred and fifty years.
And although this nineteenth century
of ours has enjoyed throwing a great
many stones at the eighteenth, we must
acknowledge that we cannot find in
English literature another novel and an-
other poem that, taken together, give
us a fuller knowledge of English-speak-
ing men. There are times, in the twi-
lights of the day and of the year, in the
closing in of life, when we all contem-
plate death ; and the Elegy tells all our
thoughts in lines that possess our memo-
ries like our mothers' voices. It shows
simple folk in sight of death, calm, nat-
ural, serious, high-minded. Thomas a
Kempis, Cato the younger, the cavaliers
of the Light Brigade, may have thought
upon death after other fashions, but for
most of us the thoughts of our hearts
have been portrayed by Gray.

Tom Jones is the contemplation of
life in ordinary Englishmen. In the
innocent days before Mr. Hardy and
some other writers of distinction Tom
Jones was reputed coarse, — one of
those classics that should find their places
on a shelf well out of reach of young
arms. The manners of Squire Western
/ and of Tom himself are such as often
/ are best described in the Squire's own
language. But who is the man, as Thack-
eray says, that does not feel freer af-
ter he has read the book ? Fielding,
in his rough and ready way, has de-
scribed men as they are, made of the
dust of the earth, and that not carefully
chosen. We no longer read it aloud to
our families, as was the custom of our
great-grandfathers ; but we do not all

read Mr. Hardy aloud to our daughters.
Tom Jones is a big, strong, fearless, hon-
est book ; it gives us a hearty slap on the
back, congratulating us that we are alive,
and we accept the congratulation with
pleasure. Its richness is astonishing.
It has flowed down through English lit-
erature like a fertilizing Nile. In it we
find the beginnings of Sheridan, Dick-
ens, Thackeray, George Eliot. In it we
have those wonderful conversations be-
tween Square and Thwackum, which
remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza. Mrs. Seagrim talks for half a
page, and we hold our noses against the
smells in her kitchen.

The power of the book is its eulogy
upon life. Is it not wretched to be
stocks, stones, tenants of Westminster
Abbey, mathematicians, or young gen-
tlemen lost in philosophy ? Is not the
exhilaration of wine good ? Is not dinner
worth the eating ? Do not young women
make a most potent and charming gov-
ernment ? Fielding takes immense plea-
sure in the foolishness, in the foibles of
men, and he finds amusement in their
vices, but over virtue and vice, over wis-
dom and folly, he always insists upon
the joy and the value of life.

When we shall have re-read Tom Jones
and repeated Gray's Elegy to ourselves,
then we shall be in the mood in which
we can best determine the value of for-
eign novels for us. And so, with this
avowal of our point of view, we approach
the stories of the distinguished Italian
novelist, Gabriele d'Annunzio.

Men of action who apply themselves
to literature are likely to have a gener-
ous confidence that skill will follow cour-
age ; that if they write, the capacity to
write effectively will surely come. Plays,
novels, editorials, sonnets, are written by
them straight upon the impulse. They
plunge into literature as if it were as

Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

509

buoyant as their spirit, and strike out
like young sea creatures. Gabriele d'An-
nunzio is a man of another complexion.
He is not a man of action, but of reflec-
tion. He is a student ; he lives in the
world of books. Through this many-
colored medium of literature he sees men
and women ; but he is saved from an
obvious artificiality by his sensitiveness
to books of many kinds. He .has sub-
mitted to laborious discipline ; he has sat
at the feet of many masters. His early
schooling may be seen in a collection of
stories published in 1886 under the name
of the first, San Pantaleone. One story
is in imitation of Verga, another of
de Maupassant ; and in La Fattura is
an attempt to bring the humor of Boc-
caccio into a modern tale. Even in the
Decameron this renowned humor has
neither affection nor pity for father ; in
its own cradle it mewls like an ill-man-
nered foundling. In the hands of d'An-
nunzio it acquires the ingenuous charm
of Mr. Noah Claypole. We believe that
d'Annunzio, consciously or unconscious-
ly, became aware of his native antipathy
to humor, for we have not found any
other attempt at it in his work. It is in
this absence of humor that we first feel
the separation between d'Annunzio and
the deep human feelings. In Italian lit-
erature there is no joyous, mellow, mer-
ry book, in which as a boy he might have
nuzzled and rubbed off upon himself
some fruitful pollen. One would as soon
expect to find a portrait of Mr. Pick-
wick by Botticelli as the spirit of Dickens
in any cranny of Italian literature. M.
de Vogile' has said that d'Annunzio is
born out of time ; that in spirit he is one
of the cinquecentisti. There is some-
thing ferocious and bitter in him. The
great human law of gravitation, that
draws man to man, does not affect him.
Nevertheless, these stories have much
vigor and skillful description. In San
Pantaleone, d'Annunzio depicts the fren-
zy and fierce emotions of superstition in
southern Italy. Savage fanaticism inter-

ests him. The combination of high im-
agination and the exaltation of delirium
with the stupidity and ignorance of beasts
has a powerful attraction for him. The
union of the intellectual and the bestial
is to him the most remarkable phenome-
non of life.

This early hookas interesting also in
that it shows ideas in the germ and in
their first growth which are subsequent-
ly developed in the novels, and in that
it betrays d'Annunzio's notion that im-
personality — that deliverance from the
frailty of humanity to which he would
aspire — is an escape from compassion
and affection, and is most readily come
at through contempt.

D'Annunzio has spared no pains to
make his language as melodious and ef-
ficient an instrument as he can. Italian
prose has never been in the same rank
with Italian poetry. There have been
no great Italians whose genius has forced
Italian prose to bear the stamp and im-
press of their personalities. In the six-
teenth century this prose was clear and
capable, but since then it has gradu-
ally shrunk to fit the thoughts of lesser
men. D'Annunzio has taken on his back
the task of liberating the Italian tongue ;
he will give it " virtue, manners, free-
dom, power." Not having within him
the necessity of utterance, not hurried
on by impetuous talents, he has applied
himself to his task with deliberation and
circumspection. He has studied Boc-
caccio and Petrarch and many men of
old, so that his vocabulary shall be full,
and his grammar as pure and flexible as
the genius of the language will permit.
He purposes to fetch from their hiding-
places Italian words long unused, that
he shall be at no'loss for means to make
plain the most delicate distinctions of
meaning. He intends that his thoughts,
which shall be gathered from all intel-
lectual Europe, shall have fit words to
house them.

At the time of his first novels, d'An-
nunzio turned to Paris, the capital of

510

Gctbriele d' Annunzio, the Novelist.

the Latin world, as to his natural school.
In Paris, men of letters (let us except a
number of gallant young gentlemen dis-
dainful of readers) begin by copying and
imitation, that they may acquire the
mechanical parts of their craft. They
study Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupas-
sant; they contemplate a chapter, they
brood over a soliloquy, they grow lean
over a dialogue. They learn how the
master marshals his ideas, how he winds
up to his climax, what tricks and devices
he employs to take his reader prisoner.
From time to time voices protestant are
raised, crying out against the sacrifice of
innocent originality. But the band of
the lettered marches on. Why should
they forego knowledge gathered together
with great pains ? Shall a young man
turn against the dictionary ?

In Paris d'Annunzio found a number
of well-established methods for writing
a novel. Some of these methods have
had a powerful influence upon him ;
therefore it may be worth while to re-
mind ourselves of them, in order that
we may the better judge his capacity for
original work and for faithful imitation.

The first method is simply that of the
old - fashioned novel of character and
manners, and needs no description.

The second method, the familiar philo-
real or philo-natural, hardly may be said
to be a method for writing a novel ; it is
a mode of writing what you will ; but it
has achieved its reputation in the hands
of novelists. This method is supposed
to require careful, painstaking, and accu-
rate observation of real persons, places,
and incidents ; but in truth it lets this
duty sit very lightly on its shoulders,
and commonly consists in descriptions,
minute, elaborate, prolix. It pretends
to be an apotheosis of fact ; it is a verbal
ritual. It has been used by many a
man unconscious of schools. In practice
it is the most efficacious means of caus-
ing the illusion of reality within the reach
of common men. By half a dozen pages
of deliberate and exact enumeration of

outward parts, a man may frequently
produce as vivid and memory-haunting
a picture as a poet does with a metaphor
or an epithet. M. Zola, by virtue of his
vigor, his zeal, and his fecundity, has won
popular renown as leader of this school.

The third method is the psychologi-
cal. It consists in the delineation in de-
tail of thoughts and feelings instead of
actions, the inward and unseen in place
of the outward and visible. The novel-
ist professes an intimate knowledge of
the wheels, cogs, cranks of the brain,
and of the airy portraiture of the mind,
and he describes them with an embel-
lishment of scientific phrase, letting the
outward acts take care of themselves as
best they may. The danger of this
method is lest the portrayal of psychic
states constitute the novel, and lest the
plot and the poor little incidents squeeze
in with much discomfort. Perhaps M.
Bourget is the most distinguished mem-
ber of this school.

The fourth mode is that of the Sym-
bolistes. These writers are not wholly
purged from all desire for self-assertion ;
they wish room wherein openly to dis-
play themselves, and to this end they
have withdrawn apart out of the shadow
of famous names. They assert that they
stand for freedom from old saws ; that
the philosophic doctrine of idealism up-
sets all theories based upon the reality
of matter ; that the business of art is
to use the imperfect means of expression
at its command to suggest and indicate
ideas ; that character, action, incidents,
are but symbols of ideas. They hold
individuality sacred, and define it to be
that which man has in himself unshared
by any other, and deny the name to all
that he has in common with other men.
Therefore, this individuality, being but
a small part, a paring, as it were, of an
individual, shows maimed and unnatural.
And thus they run foul of seeming op-
posites, the individual and the abstract ;
for the revered symbol is neither more
nor less than an essence abstracted from

Gdbriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

511

the motley company of individuals, fil-
tered and refined, which returns decked
out m the haberdashery of generalities,
under the baptismal name of symbol.
In order to facilitate this latter process
of extracting and detaching unity from
multiplicity, they murmur songs of mys-
tic sensuality, as spiritualists burn tapers
of frankincense at the disentanglement
of a spirit from its fellows in the upper
or nether world. One of the best known
of these is Maurice Maeterlinck.

There is, moreover, a doctrine that
runs across these various methods, like
one pattern across cloths of divers ma-
terials, which affects them all. It is
that the writer shall persistently obtrude
himself upon the reader. Stated in this
blunt fashion, the doctrine is considered
indecent ; it is not acknowledged ; and,
in truth, these Frenchmen do not reveal
their personality. It may indeed be
doubted if they have any such encum-
brance. In its place they have a bunch of
theories tied up with the ribbon of their
literary experience ; and the exhalations
of it, as if it were a bunch of flowers,
they suffer to transpire through their
pages. These theories are not of the
writer's own making ; they are the no-
tions made popular in Paris by a number
of distinguished men, of whom the most
notable are Taine and Renan. The in-
evitable sequence of cause and effect
and its attendant corollaries, vigorously
asserted and reiterated by M. Taine, and
the amiable irony of M. Renan, have
had success with men of letters out of
all proportion to their intellectual value.
Their theories have influenced novels
very much, and life very little. Why
should the dogmas of determinism and
of unskeptical skepticism affect men in
a novel more obviously than they affect
men in the street ?

Into this world of Parisian letters, in
among these literary methods, walked
young d'Annunzio, sensitive, ambitious,
detached from tradition, with his ten
talents wrapped up in an embroidered

and scented napkin, with his docile ap-
prentice, habit of mind, and straightway
set himself, with passion for art and the
ardor of youth, to the task of acquiring
these French methods, that he should
become the absolute master of his tal-
ents, and be able to put them out at the
highest rate of usury. Young enough to
be seduced by the blandishments of nov-
elty, he passed over the old-fashioned
way of describing character, and studied
the methods of the realists, the psycho-
logists, the symbolists. With his clear,
cool head he very soon mastered their
methods, and in the achievement quick-
ened and strengthened his artistic capa-
cities, his precision, his sense of pro-
portion, his understanding of form. But
the nurture of his art magnified and
strengthened his lack of humanity. Lack
of human sympathy is a common charac-
teristic of young men who are rich in
enthusiasm for the written word, the de-
lineated line, the carving upon the cor-
nice. Devotion to the minute refine-
ments of art seems to leave no room
in their hearts for human kindliness.
The unripeness of youth, overwork, dis-
gust with the common in human beings,
help to separate them from their kind.
In their weariness they forget that the
great masters of art are passionately
human. D'Annunzio . does not wholly
admit that he is a human unit, and his
sentiment in this matter has made him
all the more susceptible to literary influ-
ences. We find in him deep impressions
from his French studies. He has levied
tribute upon Zola, Bourget, and Loti.

In 1889 d'Annunzio published II Pia-
cere. He lacks, as we have said, strong
human feelings ; he does not know the
interest in life as life ; he has no zeal to
live, and from the scantiness and bar-
renness of his external world he turns
to the inner world of self. M. deVogtle*
has pointed out that his heroes, Sperelli,
Tullio Hermil, and Georgio Aurispa, are
all studies of himself. D'Annunzio does
not deny this. He would argue that it

512

Gabriele cFAnnunzio, the Novelist.

would be nonsense to portray others, as
we know ourselves best. Sperelli, the
hero of II Piacere, is an exact portrait of
himself. He is described as "the per-
fect type of a young Italian gentleman
in the nineteenth century, the true repre-
sentative of a stock of gentlemen and
dainty artists, the last descendant of an
intellectual race. He is saturated with
art. His wonderful boyhood has been
nourished upon divers profound studies.
From his father he acquired a taste for
artistic things, a passionate worship of
beauty, a paradoxical disdain for preju-
dice, avidity for pleasure. His education
was a living thing ; it was not got out of
books, but in the glare of human real-
ity. ' ' The result was that " Sperelli chose,
in the practice of the arts, those instru-
ments that are difficult, exact, perfect,
that cannot be put to base uses, — versi-
fication and engraving ; and he purposed
strictly to follow and to renew the forms
of Italian tradition, binding himself with
fresh ties to the poets of the new style
and to the painters who came before the
Renaissance. His spirit was formal in
its very essence. He valued expression
more than thought. His literary essays
were feats of dexterity ; studies devoted
to research, technique, the curious. He
believed with Taine that it would be
more difficult to write six beautiful lines
of poetry than to win a battle. His
story of an hermaphrodite was imitative,
in its structure, of the story of Orpheus
by Poliziano ; it had verses of exquisite
delicacy, melody, and force, especially in
the choruses sung by monsters of double
form, — centaurs, sirens, sphinxes. His
tragedy La Simona, composed in lyrical
metre, was of a most curious savor. Al-
though its rhymes obeyed the old Tuscan
models, it seemed as if it had been be-
gotten in the fancy of an Elizabethan
poet by a story from the Decameron ; it
held something of that music, rich and
strange, which is in some of Shakespeare's
minor plays."

II Piacere is a study of the passion of

love. Sperelli's love for Elena, and af-
terwards for Maria, is made the subject
of an essay in the guise of a novel upon
two aspects of this passion. The first is
the union of mind, almost non-human as
if new-born, unacquainted with life, with
the fact of sex. D'Annunzio takes this
fact of sex in its simplest form, and por-
trays its effects upon the mind in the
latter's most sequestered state, separate
and apart, uninfluenced .by human things,
divorced from all humanity. He ob-
serves the isolated mind under the do-
minion of this fact, and describes it in
like manner as he depicts the sea blown
upon by the wind. The shifting push
of emotion, the coming and going of
thought, the involutions and intricacy of
momentary feeling, the whirl of fantas-
tic dreams, the swoop and dash of mem-
ory, the grasp at the absolute, the rocket-
like whir of the imagination, — all the
motions of the mind, like the surface of
a stormy sea, toss and froth before you.
Sperelli's love for Maria, at least in
the beginning, is as lovely as a girl could
wish. It may be too much akin to his
passion for art, it may have in it too
much of the ichor that flowed in Shel-
ley's veins. It is delicate, ethereal ; it is
the passion of a dream man for a dream
maiden. It feeds on beauty " like a
worm i' the bud." " But long it could not
be, till that " his baser nature " pull'd
the poor wretch from its melodious lay
to muddy death." Yet the book is full
of poetry. We hardly remember chapters
in any novel that can match in charm
those that succeed the narrative of the
duel. We must free ourselves from
habit by an effort, and put out of our
simple bourgeois minds the fact that
Maria has made marriage vows to an-
other man ; and we are able to do this,
for the husband has no claims upon her
except from those vows, and the poetry
of the episode ends long before those
vows are broken.

This novel, like the others, is decorated,
enameled, and lacquered with cultivation.

Gabriele d' Annunzio, the Novelist.

513

They are all like Christmas trees laden
with alien fruit, — tinsel, candles, confec-
tionery, anything that will catch the eye.
England, France, Germany, Russia, con-
tribute. Painting, sculpture, architec-
ture, music, poetry, are called upon to
give color, form, structure, sound, and
dreaminess to embellish the descriptions.
The twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fif-
teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centu-
ries parade before us in long pageant,
— " L'uno e 1'altro Guido," Gallucci,
Memling, Bernini, Pollajuolo, Pintu-
ricchio, Storace, Watteau, Shelley, Ra-
meau, Bach, Gabriel Rossetti, Bizet. The
charm of a woman for him is that she
resembles a Madonna by Ghirlandajo,
an intaglio by Niccol6 Niccoli, a quat-
rain by Cino. His ladies are tattooed
with* resemblances, suggestions, propor-
tions, similarities. The descriptions of
their attractions read like an index to
The Stones of Venice. He does not
disdain to translate Shelley's verse into
Italian prose without quotation marks.
This passion for art is d'Annunzio's
means of escaping the vulgarity of com-
mon men ; it is his refuge, his cleft in
the rock, whither he may betake himself,
and in which he may enjoy the pleasures
of intellectual content and scorn. This
taste emphasizes his lack of human kind-
liness, and it heightens the effect of un-
reality. At best it limits and clips off the
interest of the common reader. D'An-
nunzio is like Mr. Pater in his nice tastes.
He has noticed that the sentences of
men who write from a desire to go hand
in hand with other men, from an eager-
ness to propagate their own beliefs,
trudge and plod, swinging their clauses
and parentheses like loosely strapped
panniers ; that they observe regulations
that should be broken, and break rules
that should be kept. Therefore he girds
himself like a gymnast, and with dainty
mincing periods glides harmonious down
the page ; but his grace sometimes sinks
into foppishness. He would defend him-
self like Lord Foppington in the play.
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 33

" Tom'. Brother, you are the prince
of coxcombs.

"Lord Foppington. I am praud to
be at the head of so prevailing a party."

But even d'Annunzio's great skill can-
not rescue him from obvious artificiality. *
He is like Mr. Henry James ; he lives in
a hothouse atmosphere of abnormal re-
finement, at a temperature where only
creatures nurtured to a particular de-
gree and a half Fahrenheit can survive.
Sometimes one is tempted to believe
that d'Annunzio, conscious of his own
inhumanity, deals with the passions in
the vain hope to lay hand upon the hu-*
man. He hovers like a non-human crea-
ture about humanity, he is eager to know
it, he longs to become a man ; and Sete-
bos, his god, at his supplication turns
him into a new form. The changeling
thinks he is become a man ; but lo ! he
is only an intellectual beast.

Our judgment of d'Annunzio's work,
however, is based upon other considera-
tions than that of the appropriate subor-
dination of his cultivation to his story.
It depends upon our theory of human
conduct and our philosophy of life, upon
our answers to these questions : Has the
long, long struggle to obtain new inter-
ests — interests that seem higher and
nobler than the old, interests the record
of which constitutes the history of civili-
zation — been mere unsuccessful folly ?
Are the chief interests in life the pri-
mary instincts ? Are we no richer than
the animals, after all these toiling years
of renunciation and self-denial ? Is the
heritage which we share with the beasts
the best that our fathers have handed,
down to us ? There seem to be in some
corners of our world persons who an-
swer these questions in the affirmative,
saying, " Let us drop hypocrisy, let us
face facts and know ourselves, let Eng-
lish literature put off false traditions and
deal with the realities of life," and much
more* all sparkling with brave words.
Persons like Mr. George Moore, who
have a profound respect for adjectives,

514

Gdbriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

say these instincts are primary, they are
fundamental, and think that these two
words, like " open sesame," have admit-
ted us into the cave of reality. We are
unable to succumb to the hallucination.
• The circulation of the blood is eminently
primary and fundamental, yet there was
literature of good repute before it was
dreamed of. For ourselves, we find the
interests of life in the secondary instincts,
in the thoughts, hopes, sentiments, which
man has won through centuries of toil,
— here a little, there a little. We find
the earlier instincts interesting only as
* they furnish a struggle for qualities later
born. We are bored and disgusted by
dragons of the prime until we hear the
hoofs of St. George's horse and see St.
George's helmet glitter in the sun. The
dragon is no more interesting than a
cockroach, except to prove the prowess
of the hero. The bucking horse may
kick and curvet ; we care not, till the
cowboy mount him. These poor primary
instincts are mere bulls for the toreador,
bears for the baiter ; they are our mea-
sures for strength, self-denial, fortitude,
courage, temperance, chastity. The in-
stinct of self-preservation is the ladder
up which the soldier, the fireman, the
lighthouse-keeper, lightly trip to fame.
What is the primary and fundamental
fear of death? With whom is it the
most powerful emotion ? " O my son
Absalom, my son, my son Absalom !
would God I had died for thee ! " Is it
with mothers ? Ask them.

D' Annunzio, with his predilections for
aristocracy, thinks that these primary
instincts are of unequaled importance
and interest because of their long de-
scent. He forgets that during the last few
thousand years power has been changing
hands ; that democracy has come upon
us ; and that a virtue is judged by its
value to-day, and not by that which it
had in the misty past. Literature is one
long story of the vain struggles of the
primary instincts against the moral na-
ture of man. From CEdipus Tyrannus to

The Scarlet Letter the primary passions
are defeated and ruined by duty, religion,
and the moral law. The misery of bro-
ken law outlives passion and tramples
on its embers. The love of Paolo and
Francesca is swallowed up in their sin.
It is the like in Faust. Earthly passion
cannot avail against the moral powers.
This network of the imagination binds a
man more strongly than iron shackles.
Tragedy is the conquest of passion by
more potent forces. The relations of
our souls, of our higher selves, to these
instincts, are what absorb us. We are
thrilled by the stories in which these
moral laws, children of instinct, have
arisen and vanquished their fathers, as
the beautiful young gods overcame the
Titans. If duty loses its savor, life no
longer is salted. The primary passions
may continue to hurl beasts at one an-
other ; human interest is gone. Were
it not for conscience, honor, loyalty, the
primary instincts would never be the
subject of a story. They would stay in
the paddocks of physiological textbooks.
" What apiece of work is man " that he
has been able to cover a fact of animal
life with poetry more beautifully than
Shakespeare dresses a tale from Ban-
dello ! He has created his honor as won-
derful as his love ; soldiers, like so many
poets, have digged out of cruelty and
slaughter this jewel of life. Where is the
instinct of self-preservation here ? At
Roncesvaux, when Charlemagne's rear-
guard is attacked by overwhelming num-
bers, Roland denies Oliver's request that
he blow his horn for help. His one
thought is that poets shall not sing songs
to his dishonor : —

" Male cancan n'en deit estre cant^e."
And is the belief in chastity, which
has run round the world from east to
west, nothing but a superstition born of
fear ? Has it lasted so long only to be
proved at the end a coward and a dupe ?
Is this sacrifice of self mere instinctive
folly in the individual ? Does he gain
nothing by it ? Are the worship of the

Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

515

Virgin Mary, the praise of Galahad, the
joys of self-denial, no more than monkish
ignorance and timidity ?

We are of the opinion that I'art de la
pourriture is popular because it is easily
acquired. It deals with the crude, the
simple, the undeveloped. It has nothing
to do with the complicated, intertwined
mass of relations that binds the individ-
ual to all other individuals whether he
will or not. It does not try to unravel
the conglomerate sum of human ties. It
does not see the myriad influences that
rain down upon a man from all that was
before him, from all that is contempora-
neous with him ; it does not know the
height above him, the depth beneath, the
mysteries of substance and of void. It
deals with materials that offer no resist-
ance, no difficulty, and cannot take the
noble and enduring forms of persisting
things. It ignores the great labors of
the human mind, and the transforming
effect of them upon its human habitation.
This art cannot give immortality. One
by one the artists who produce it drop
off the tree of living literature and are
forgotten. The supreme passion of love
has been told by Dante : —

" Quel giorno piti non vi leggenuno avante."
Does d'Annunzio think that he would
have bettered the passage ? In the great
delineation of passion, vulgarity and in-
decency, insults to manners, the monoto-
ny of vice, are obliterated ; the brutality
of detail slinks off in silence.

In 1892 d'Annunzio published L'ln-
nocente. In this novel, as M. de Vogue"
has pointed out, he has directed his
powers of imitation towards the great
Russian novelists. But his spirit and
talents are of such different sort from
those of Tourgenieff, Tolstoi, and Dos-
toiewsky that the copy is of the outside
and show. D'Annunzio's faculties have
not been able to incorporate and to as-
similate anything of the real Slav ; they
are the same, and express themselves in
the same way, in L'Innocente as in II
Piacere. We therefore pass to his most

celebrated novel, II Trionfo della Morte,
published in 1894. A translation of it —
that is, of as much of it as was meet for
French readers — was soon after pub-
lished in the Revue des Deux Mondes.
This novel won the approval of M. de
Vogue", and has made Gabriele d'Annun-
zio a famous name throughout Europe.

The plot, if we may use an old-fash-
ioned word to express new matter, is
this : Georgio Aurispa, a young man of
fortune, who leads a life of emptiness in
Rome, one day meets Ippolita, the wife
of another man. On this important day
he has gone to hear Bach's Passion Mu-
sic in a private chapel, and there he sees
the beautiful Ippolita. Bored and dis-
gusted by coarse pleasures, he throws
himself with rapture into a poetical pas-
sion for this pale-faced, charming, slen-
der Roman woman. The story begins
just before the second anniversary of
their meeting in the chapel. The hus-
band has absconded, and Ippolita lives
with her family. No suggestion of a pos-
sible marriage is made, although Au-
rispa frequently meditates with anguish
on the thought that she may forsake
him. He is wholly given to examining
his mind and feelings ; he follows their
changes, he explains their causes, he an-
ticipates their mutations. He picks up
each sentiment delicately, like a man
playing jackstraws, holds it suspended,
contemplates it from this side and from
that, balances it before the faceted mir-
ror of his imagination, and then falls into
a melancholy. He dandles his sentiment
for her, he purrs over it, he sings to it
snatches of psychical old tunes, he min-
isters to it, fosters it, cherishes it, weeps
over it, wonders if it be growing or de-
creasing.

For some reasons of duty Ippolita is
obliged to be away from Rome from
time to time, once in Milan with her sis-
ter. Aurispa hears of her, that she is
well, that she is gay. " She laughs ! Then
she can laugh, away from me ; she can
be gay ! All her letters are full of sor-

516

Gdbriele d'Annunzio^ the Novelist.

row, of lamentation, of hopeless long-
ing." The English reader is taken back
to that scene in The Rivals where Bob
Acres tells Faulkland that he has met
Miss Melville in Devonshire, and that
she is very well.

" Acres. She has been the belle and
spirit of the company wherever she has
been, — so lively and entertaining ! So
full of wit and humor !

"Faulkland. There, Jack, there. Oh,
by my soul! there is an innate levity
in woman that nothing can overcome.
What ! happy, and I away ! "

Aurispa is peculiarly sensitive ; the
bunches of nerve fibres at the base of his
brain, the ganglia in his medulla oblonga-
ta, are extraordinarily alert, delicate, and
powerful. Every sensation runs through
them like a galloping horse ; memory
echoes the beating of its hoofs, and ima-
gination speeds it on into the future, till
it multiplies, expands, and swells into a
troop. Aurispa yearns to lose himself
in happiness, and then droops despond-
ent, for a sudden jog of memory reminds
him that he was in more of an ecstasy
when he first met Ippolita than he is to-
day. " Where are those delicate sensa-
tions which once I had ? Where are
those exquisite and manifold pricks of
melancholy, those deep and twisted pains,
wherein I lost my soul as in an endless
labyrinth ? "

In the zeal of his desire for fuller,
more enduring pleasure, he takes Ippo-
lita to a lonely house beside the sea that
shall be their hermitage.

Aurispa feels that there are two con-
ditions necessary to perfect happiness :
one that he should be the absolute mas-
ter of Ippolita, the other that he should
have unlimited independence himself.
" There is upon earth but one enduring
intoxication : absolute certainty in the
ownership of another, — certainty fixed
and unshakable." Aurispa proposes to
attain this condition. He puts his intel-
ligence to slavish service in discovery
of a method by which he shall win that

larger life and perfect content of which
almost all men have had visions and
dreams. Long ago Buddha sought and
thought to attain this condition. Long
ago the Stoics devised plans to loose them-
selves from the knots that tie men to the
common life of all. Long ago the Chris-
tians meditated a philosophy that should
free them from the bonds of the flesh,
that they might live in the spirit. Heed-
less of their experience, Aurispa endea-
vors to find his content in sensuality ; but
once in their hermitage, he soon perceives
that the new life he sought is impossible.
He feels his love for Ippolita dwindle and
grow thin. He must physic it quickly
or it will die ; and if love fail, nothing is
left but death. Sometimes he thinks of
her as dead. Once dead, she will become
such stuff as thoughts are made of, a part
of pure idealism. " Out from a halting
and lame existence she will pass into a
complete and perfect life, forsaking for-
ever her frail and sinful body. To de-
stroy in order to possess, — there is no
other way for him who seeks the abso-
lute in love."

That was for Aurispa a continuing
thought, but first his fancy turned for
help to the religious sensuousness of his
race. " He had the gift of contempla-
tion, interest in symbol and in allegory,
the power of abstraction, an extreme
sensitiveness to suggestions by sight or
by word, an organic tendency to haunt-
ing visions and to hallucinations." He
lacked but faith. At that time, super-
stition like a wind swept over the south-
ern part of Italy ; there were rumors
of a new Messiah ; an emotional fever
infected the whole country round. A
day's journey from the hermitage lay
the sanctuary of Casalbordino. Once the
Virgin had appeared there to a devout
old man, and had granted his prayer,
and to commemorate this miracle the
sanctuary had been built ; and now the
countryfolk swarmed to the holy place.
Georgio and Ippolita go thither. All the
description of this place, as a note tells

Gdbriele d'Annunzio^ the Novelist.

517

us, is the result of patient observation.
About the sanctuary are gathered to-
gether men and women from far and
near, all in a state of high exaltation.
Troop upon troop, singing,
" Viva Maria !
Maria Ewiva ! "

trudge over the dusty roads. These peo-
ple d'Annunzio depicts with the quick
eye and the patient care of an Agas-
siz. Monstrous heads, deformed chests,
shrunken legs, club-feet, distorted hands,
swollen tumors, sores of many colors, all
loathsome diseases to which flesh is heir
and for which d'Annunzio's medical dic-
tionary has names, are here set forth.
" How much morbid pathology has done
for the novelist ! " he is reported to have
said. Certainly its value to d'Annunzio
cannot be rated too high. Aurispa and
Ippolita, excited by the fanatic exalta-
tion, fight their way into the church.
There a miserable mass of huddled hu-
manity, shrieking for grace, struggles
toward the altar rail. . Behind the rail,
the fat, stolid-faced priests gather up the
offerings. The air is filled with nau-
seous smells. The church is a hideous
charnel-house roofing in physical disease
and mental deformity. Outside, mounte-
banks, jugglers, gamesters, foul men and
women, intercept what part of the offer-
ings they can. The memory of this day
made Aurispa and Ippolita sick, — her
for human pity, him for himself ; for he
became conscious that there is no power
which can enthrall absolute pleasure. He
had turned toward heaven to save his
life, and he has proved by experience his
belief in the emptiness of its grace.

With instinctive repulsion from death,
he looks for escape to thought. Thought
which has enslaved him may set him free.
He ponders over some maxims of Zoro-
aster on good and evil. Away with the
creeds of weakness, the evangel of impo-
tence ! Assert the justice of injustice, the
righteousness of power, the joy of crea-
tion and of destruction ! But Aurispa
cannot. Nothing is left him but death.

He abandons all wish for perfect union
with Ippolita, yet jealousy will not suf-
fer him to leave her alive. His love
for her has turned into hate. In his
thoughts it is she that hounds him to
death like a personal d.emon. He grows
supersensitive. He cannot bear the red
color of underdone beef. He is ready to
die of a joint, in juicy pain. He gathers
together in a heap and gloats over all
that he finds disagreeable and repellent
in Ippolita. What was she but his crea-
tion ? " Now, as always, she has done
nothing but submit to the form and im-
pressions that I have made. Her inner
life has always been a fiction. When the
influence of my suggestion is interrupted,
she returns to her own nature, she be-
comes a woman again, the instrument of
base passion. Nothing can change her,
nothing can purify her." And at last, by
treachery and force, he drags her with
him over a precipice to death beneath.

Such is the plot, but there is no pre-
tense that the plot is interesting or im-
portant except as a scaffold on which to
exhibit a philosophy of life. That philo-
sophy is clearly the author's philosophy.
D'Annunzio's novel shows in clear view
and distinct outline how the whirligig of
time brings about its revenges.

Bishop Berkeley made famous the
simple theory of idealism, — that a man
cannot go outside of the inclosure of his
mind; that the material world is the
handiwork of fancy, with no reality, no
length, nor breadth, nor fixedness ; that
the pageant of life is the march of
dreams. Berkeley expected this theory
to destroy materialism, skepticism, and
infidelity. It did, in argument. Many
a man has taken courage in this unan- \
swerable retort to the materialist. He
slings this theory, like a smooth pebble
from the brook, at the Goliaths who
advance with the ponderous weapons of
scientific discovery.

The common idealist keeps his philo-
sophy for his library, and walks abroad
like his neighbors, subject to the rules,

518

Gdbriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

beliefs, and habits of common sense. But
d'Annunzio, who has received and adopt-
ed a bastard scion of this idealism, is,
as befits a man of leisure and of letters,
more faithful to his philosophy. He has
set forth his version of the theory in
this novel with characteristic clearness.
Aurispa looks on the world as an instru-
ment that shall serve his pleasure. He
will play upon it what tunes he can that
he may enjoy the emotions and passions
of life. He is separate from his family
and of a private fortune. His world is
small and dependent upon him. In this
world Aurispa has no rival ; in it there
is no male thing to bid him struggle for
supremacy ; it is his private property,
and the right of private property is fixed
as firm beyond the reach of question as
the fact of personal existence. Gradu-
ally a transformation takes place ; this
well-ordered and obedient world changes
under the dominion of Aurispa's thought.
Little by little object and subject lose
their identity ; like the thieves of the
Seventh Bolge in the Inferno, they com-
bine, unite, form but one whole. In this
change the material world is swallowed
up, and out from the transformation
crawls the ideal world of Aurispa's
thought : —

" Ogni primaio aspetto ivi era casso ;
Due e nessun 1' imagine perversa
Parea, e tal sen gia con lento passo."

This ideal world is Aurispa's. It varies
with his volition, for it is the aggregate
of his thoughts, and they are the ema-
nations of his will. In this dominion he
stands like a degenerate Caesar, drunk
with power, frenzied with his own po-
tent impotence. Everything is under his
control, and yet there is a something im-
perceptible, like an invisible wall, that
bars his way to perfect pleasure. He
wanders all along it, touching, feeling,
groping, all in vain. Think subtly as he
will, he finds no breach. Yet his deep-
est, his only desire is to pass beyond.
Perhaps life is this barrier. He will
break it down, and find his absolute plea-

sure in death. And in exasperation of
despair before this invisible obstacle he
has recourse to action. In the presence
of action his ideal world wrestles once
more with reality, and amid the strug-
gles Aurispa finds that the only remedy
for his impotent individuality is to die.
Both idealism and fact push him towards
death.

If we choose to regard Aurispa as liv-
ing in a real world, as a man responsi-
ble for his acts, as a member of human
society, we have little to say concerning
him. He is a timid prig, a voluptuous
murderer, an intellectual fop, smeared
with self-love, vulgar to the utmost re-
finement of vulgarity, cruel, morbid, a
flatterer, and a liar.

For poor Ippolita we have compassion.
Had she lived out of Aurispa's world,
with her alluring Italian nature she might
have been charming. There is a rare
feminine attractiveness about her : had
she been subject to sweet influences, had
she been born to Tourgenieff, she would
have been one of the delightful women
of fiction. All that she does has an at-
tendant possibility of grace, eager to be-
come incorporate in action. Delicacy,
sensitiveness, affection, fitness for the
gravity and the gayety of life, hover like
ministering spirits just beyond the covers
of the book ; they would come down to
her, but they cannot. This possibility
died before its birth. Ippolita's unborn
soul, like the romantic episode in II Pia-
cere, makes us feel that d'Annunzio may
hereafter break loose from his theories,
free himself from his cigarette-smoking
philosophy, smash the looking-glass in
front of which he sits copying his own
likeness, and start anew, able to under-
stand the pleasures of life and prepared
to share in the joys of the struggle.
Surely M. de Vogue" is looking at these
indications of creative ability and poetic
thought, and not at accomplishment,
when he hails d' Annunzio as the leader
of another Italian Renaissance. It is
hope that calls forth M. de Vogue's

Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

519

praise. A national literature has never
yet been built upon imitation, sensuality,
and artistic frippery.

After finishing the last page of The
Triumph of Death, quick as a flash we
pass through many phases of emotion.
In the instant of time before the book
leaves our hand, our teeth set, our mus-
cles contract, we desire to hit out from
the shoulder. Our memory teems with
long-forgotten physical acts, upper-cuts,
left-handers, swingers, knock-outs. By
some mysterious process, words that our
waking mind could not recall surge up
in capital letters ; all the vocabulary of
Shakespearean insult rings in our ears,
— base, proud, shallow, beggarly, silk-
stocking knave, a glass - gazing finical
rogue, a coward, a pander, a cullionly
barber-monger, a smooth-tongued bolt-
ing-hutch of beastliness. Our thoughts
bound like wild things from prize-fights
to inquisitors, from them to Iroquois, to
devils. Then succeeds the feeling as of
stepping on a snake, a sentiment as of a
struggle between species of animals, of
instinctive combat for supremacy ; no
sense of ultimate ends or motives, but the
sudden knowledge that our gorge is ris-
ing and that we will not permit certain
things. We raise no question of reason ;
we put aside intelligence, and say, The
time is come for life to choose between
you and us. The book, after leaving our
hand, strikes the opposite wall and flut-
ters to the floor. We grow calmer ; we
draw up an indictment ; we will try Au-
rispa-d'Annunzio before a jury of Eng-
lish-speaking men. Call the tale. Colo-
nel Newcome ! Adam Bede ! Baillie
Jarvie! Tom Brown! SamWeller! But
nonsense ! these men are not eligible.
Aurispa-d'Annunzio must be tried by a
jury of his peers. By this time we have
recovered our composure, and rejoice in
the common things of life, — shaving-
brushes, buttoned boots, cravats, count-
ing-stools, vouchers, ledgers, newspapers.
All the multitude of little things, for-
giving our old discourtesy, heap coals

of fire upon our heads with their glad
proofs of reality. For a moment we
can draw aside " the veil of familiarity "
from common life and behold the poetry
there ; we bless our simple affections and
our daily bread. The dear kind solid
earth stands faithful and familiar under
our feet. How beautiful it is !

' ' Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag."

D'Annunzio's latest novel, Le Vergini
delle Rocce, was published in 1896. In
it he appears as a symbolist, and by far
the most accomplished of the school.
The story is not of real people, but con-
cerns the inhabitants of some spiritual
world, as if certain instantaneous ideas
of men, divorced from the ideas of the
instant before and of the instant after,
and therefore of a weird, unnatural look,
had been caught there and kept to in-
habit it, and should thenceforward live
after their own spiritual order, with no
further relations to humanity. These
figures bear no doubtful resemblance
to the men and women in the pictures
of Dante Rossetti and of Burne-Jones.
One might fancy that a solitary maid
gazing into a beryl stone would see three
such strangely beautiful virgins, Mas-
similla, Anatolia, Violante, move their
weary young limbs daintily in the crys-
tal sphere.

The landscape is the background of
an English preraphaelite painter. Here
d'Annunzio's style is in its delicate per-
fection. It carries these three strange
and beautiful ladies along as the river
that runs down to many-towered Game-
lot bore onward the shallop of the Lady
of Shalott. It is translucent ; everything
mirrors in it with a delicate sensitiveness,
as if it were the mind of some fairy
asleep, in which nothing except what
is lovely and harmonious could reflect,
and as if the slightest discord, the least
petty failure of grace, would wake the
sleeper and end the images forever.
D'Annunzio's sentences have the quality

520

Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Novelist.

of an incantation. This is the work of
a master apprentice. But there the mas-
tery ends. A story so far removed from
life, a fairy story, must have order and
law of its own, must be true to itself,
or else it must move in some fairy plane
parallel to human life, and never pre-
termit its correspondence with humanity.
Claudio, the teller of the story, is a
scion of a noble Italian family, of which
one Alessandro had been the most illus-
trious member. .When the tale begins
Claudio is riding over the Campagna,
thinking aloud, as it were. His mind
is full of speculation. What is become
of Rome ? — Rome, the home of the domi-
nant Latin race, born to rule and to bend
other nations to its desires. What is
the Pope ? What is the King ? Who,
who will combine in himself the triune
powers of passion, intellect, and poetry,
and lift the Italian people back to the
saddle of the world ? By severe self-
discipline Claudio has conceived his own
life as a whole, as material for art, and
has succeeded to so high a degree that
now he holds all his power of passion,
intellect, and poetry like a drawn sword.
He will embody in act the concept of
his life. He reflects how the Nazarene
failed, for he feared the world and know-
ledge, and turned from them to igno-
rance and the desert; how Bonaparte
failed, for he had not the conception of
fashioning his life as a great work of
art ; and Claudio's mind turns to his
own ancestor, the untimely killed Ales-
sandro, and ponders that he did not live
and die in vain, but that his spirit still
exists, ready to burst forth in some child
of his race. Claudio's duty is to marry
a woman who shall bear a son, such that
his passion, intellect, and poetry shall
make him the redeemer of the world,
and restore Rome mistress of nations.
As he rides he calls upon the poets to
defend the beautiful from the attacks of
the gross multitude, and upon the patri-
cians to assume their rightful place as
masters of the people, to pick up the

fallen whip and frighten back into its
sty the Great Beast that grunts in par-
liament and press.

Filled with these images of his desire,
Claudio goes back to his ancestral do-
main in southern Italy. An aged lord,
at one time friend to the last Bourbons
of Naples, dwells in a neighboring castle
with his three virgin daughters. About
this castle we find all the literary devices
of Maeterlinck. " The splendor falls
on castle walls," but it is a strange light,
as of a moon that has overpowered the
sun at noon. The genius of the castle
is the insane mother, who wanders at
will through its chambers, down the paths
of its gardens, rustling in her ancient
dress, with two gray attendants at her
heels. She is hardly seen, but, like a
principle of evil, throws a spell over all
the place. In front of the palace the
fountain splashes its waters in continu-
ous jets into its basin with murmurous
sounds of mysterious horror. Two sons
hover about, gazing in timid fascination
upon their mother, wondering when the
inheritance of madness shall fall upon
them. One is already doomed ; the oth-
er, with fearful consciousness, is on the
verge of doom. The three daughters
have each her separate virtue. Massi-
milla is a likeness of Santa Clara, the
companion of St. Francis of Assisi. She
is the spirit of the love that waits and
receives. Her heart is a fruitful garden
with an infinite capability for faith.
Anatolia is the spirit of the love that
gives. She has courage, strength, and
vitality enough to comfort and support
a host of the weak and timid. Violante is
the tragical spirit of the power of beau-
ty. The light of triumph and the beau-
ty of tragedy hang over her like a veil.
From among these three beautiful vir-
gins Claudio must choose one to be the
mother of him who, composed of pas-
sion, power, and poetry, shall redeem the
disjointed world, straighten the crooked
course of nature, and set the crown of
the world again on the forehead of Rome.

Gabriele d' Annunzio, the Novelist.

521

He chooses Anatolia, and here the book
enters the realm of reality. Anatolia is
a real woman; she feels the duties of
womanhood, her bonds to her father,
her mother, and her brothers, and in a
natural and womanly way she refuses to
be Claudio's wife. There the book ends,
with the promise of two more volumes.
Anatolia is a living being in this strange
world of fantasy, and though she is not
true to the spirit of the story, she is one
of the indications of d' Annunzio's power.

The faults of the book are great. But
all books are not meant for all persons.
Who shall judge the merits of such a
book ? The men who live in a world of
action, or the men who live in a world half
made of dreams ? Shakespeare has writ-
ten The Tempest for both divisions, but
other men must be content to choose one
or the other. This book is for the latter
class. Yet even for them it has great
faults. The mechanical contrivances, the
solitary castle, the insane mother, the
three virgins, the chorus of the fountain,
the iteration of thought, the repetition
of phrase, are all familiar to readers of
Maeterlinck. The element of the heroic,
the advocacy of a patrician order, the
love of Rome, the adulation of intellec-
tual power, are discordant with the mys-
terious nature of the book. Claudio full
of monster thoughts — of a timid Christ,
of an ill - rounded Napoleon, of the
world's dominion restored to Rome —
sits down to flirt with Massimilla in the
attitude of a young Baudelaire. The
reader feels that he has been watching a
preraphaelite opera bouffe.

We cannot be without some curiosity
as to what is d' Annunzio's attitude to-
wards his own novels. In Bourget's
Le Disciple we had a hero in very much
the same tangle of psychological theory
as is Aurispa. The disciple wandered
far in his search for experience, for new
fields and novel combinations of senti-
ment. His world lost all morality. There
was neither right nor wrong in it, but it
still remained a real world. In the pre-

face, the only chapter in which, under the
present conventionalities of novel-writ-
ing, the writer is allowed to speak in his
own voice, Bourget, with Puritan earnest-
ness, warns the young men of France to
beware of the dangers which he describes,
to look forward to the terrible conse-
quences in a world in which there is nei-
ther right nor wrong, to turn back while
yet they may. It seems reasonable to
look to the prefaces to learn what d' An-
nunzio's attitude towards his own books
is, and we find no consciousness in them
of right and wrong, of good and evil,
such as troubled Bourget. All d' Annun-
zio's work is built upon a separation be-
tween humanity — beings knowing good
and evil — and art.

Nevertheless, d'Annunzio has a creed.
He believes in the individual, that he
shall take and keep what he can ; that
this is no world in which to play at al-
truism and to encumber ourselves with
hypocrisy. He believes that power and
craft have rights better than those of
weakness and simplicity ; that a chosen
race is entitled to all the advantages
accruing from that choice ; that a patri-
cian order is no more bound to consider
the lower classes than men are bound to
respect the rights of beasts. He pro-
claims this belief, and preaches to what
he regards as the patrician order his
mode of obtaining from life all that it
has to give. Art is his watchword, the
art of life is his text. Know the beau-
tiful ; enjoy all that is new and strange ;
be not afraid of the bogies of moral law
and of human tradition, — they are idols
wrought by ignorant plebeians.

He finds that the main hindrance to
the adoption of this creed is an uneasy
sense of relativity of life. Even the pa-
trician order entertains a suspicion that
life — the noblest material for art to
work in — is not of the absolute grain
and texture that d' Annunzio's theory
presupposes. The individual life, wrought
with greatest care, and fashioned into a
shape of beauty after d'Annunzio's model,

522

Gabriele d1 Annu nzio, the Novelist.

may seem to lose all its loveliness when
it is complete and the artist lies on his
deathbed. And therefore, in order to
obtain disciples, d'Annunzio perceives
that he must persuade his patricians to
accept the phenomena of life, which the
senses present, as final and absolute. The
main support for the theory of the rela-
tivity of life is religion. In long proces-
sion religious creeds troop down through
history, and on every banner is inscribed
the belief in an Absolute behind the
seeming. D'Annunzio must get rid of all
these foolish beliefs. He would argue,
" They are a train of superstition, igno-
rance, and fear. They have failed and
they will fail because they dare not face
truth. What is the religious conception
of the Divine love for man, and of the
love of man for God ? God's love is a
superstitious inference drawn from the
love of man for God ; and man's love of
God in its turn is but a blind deduction
from man's love for woman. In the
light of science man's love for woman
shrinks to an instinct. This Divine love
that looks so fair, that has made heroes
and sustained mystics, is mere senti-
mental millinery spun out of a fact of
animal life. This fact is the root of the
doctrine of relativity. From it has sprung
religion, idealism, mysticism. Examine
this fact scientifically ; see what it is,
and how far, how very far, it is from
justifying the inferences drawn from
love, and without doubt the whole intel-
lectual order of patricians must accept
my beliefs." Another man might say :
" Suppose it be so ; suppose this animal
fact be the root from which springs the
blossoming tree of Divine love : this in-
herent power of growth dumfounds me
more, makes me more uncertain of my
apparent perceptions, than all the priest-
ly explanations."

In d'Annunzio's idolatry of force there
is a queer lack of the masculine ; his
voice is shrill and sounds soprano. In
his morbid supersensitiveness, in his odd

fantasy, there is a feminine strain ; and
yet not wholly feminine. In his incon-
gruous delineation of character there
is a mingling of hopes and fears, of
thoughts and feelings, that are found
separate and distinct in man and woman.
In all his novels there is an unnatural
atmosphere, which is different from that
in the books of the mere decadents.
There is the presence of an intellectual
and emotional condition that is neither
masculine nor feminine, and yet partak-
ing of both. There is an appeal to some
elements in our nature of which thereto-
fore we were unaware. As sometimes
on a summer's day, swimming on the
buoyant waters of the ocean, we fancy
that once we were native there, so in
reading this book we have a vague sur-
mise beneath our consciousness that once
there was a time when the sexes had
not been differentiated, and that we are
in ourselves partakers of the spiritual
characteristics of each ; and yet the feel-
ing is wholly disagreeable. We feel as
if we had been in the secret museum at
Naples, and we are almost ready to bathe
in hot lava that we shall no longer feel
unclean.

We do not believe that a novel of the
first rank can be made out of the mate-
rials at d'Annunzio's command. Instead
of humor he has scorn and sneer ; in
place of conscience he gives us swollen
egotism ; for the deep affections he prof-
fers lust. We are human, we want hu-
man beings, and he sets up fantastic
puppets ; we ask for a man, and under
divers aliases he puts forth himself.
We grow weary of caparisoned para-
graph and bedizened sentence, of clever
imitation and brilliant cultivation ; we
demand something to satisfy our needs
of religion, education, feeling ; we want
bread, and he gives us a gilded stone.
There are great regions of reality and
romance still to be discovered by bold ad-
venturers, but Gabriele d'Annunzio will
not find them though he stand a-tiptoe.
Henry D> Sedgwick, Jr.

Martha's Lady.

523

MARTHA'S LADY.

ONE day, many years ago, the old
Judge Pyne house wore an unwonted
look of gayety and youthfulness. The
high-fenced green garden beyond was
bright with June flowers. In the large
shady front yard under the elms you
might see some chairs placed near to-
gether, as they often used to be when the
family were all at home and life was
going on gayly with eager talk and plea-
sure-making ; when the elder judge, the
grandfather, used to quote his favorite
Dr. Johnson and say to his girls, " Be
brisk, be splendid, and be public."

One of the chairs had a crimson silk
shawl thrown carelessly over its straight
back, and a passer - by who looked in
through the latticed gate between the tall
gate-posts, with their white urns, might
think that this piece of shining East
Indian color was a huge red lily that
had suddenly bloomed against the syrin-
ga bush. There were certain windows
thrown wide open that were usually shut,
and their curtains were blowing free in
the light wind of a summer afternoon ;
it looked as if a large household had re-
turned to the old house to fill the prim
best rooms and find them pleasant.

It was evident to every one in town
that Miss Harriet Pyne, to use the village
phrase, had company. She was the last
of her family, and was by no means old ;
but being the last, and wonted to live
with people much older than herself, she
had formed all the habits of a serious
elderly person. Ladies of her age, a lit-
tle past thirty, often wore discreet caps in
those days, especially if they were mar-
ried, but being single, Miss Harriet clung
to youth in this respect, making the one
concession of keeping her waving chest-
nut hair as smooth and stiffly arranged
as possible. She had been the dutiful

companion of her father and mother in
their latest years, all her elder brothers
and sisters having married and gone, or
died and gone, out of. the old house. Now
that she was left alone it seemed quite the
best thing frankly to accept the fact of
age at once, and to turn more resolutely
than ever to the companionship of duty
and serious books. She was more serious
and given to routine than her elders them-
selves, as sometimes happened when the
daughter* of New England gentlefolks
were brought up wholly in the society
of their elders. At thirty she had more
reluctance than her mother to face an
unforeseen occasion, certainly more than
her grandmother, who had preserved
some cheerful inheritance of gayety and
worldliness from colonial times.

There was something about the look
of the crimson silk shawl in the front
yard to make one suspect that the sober
customs of the best house in a quiet New
England village were all being set at de-
fiance, and once when the mistress of
the house came to stand in her own door-
way she wore the pleased but somewhat
apprehensive look of a guest. In these
days New England life held the necessi-
ty of much dignity and discretion of be-
havior ; there was the truest hospitality
and good cheer in all occasional festivi-
ties, but it was sometimes a self-conscious
hospitality, followed by an inexorable re-
turn to asceticism both of diet and of
behavior. Miss Harriet Pyne belonged
to the very dullest days of New England,
those which perhaps held the most prig-
gishness for the learned professions, the
most limited interpretation of the word
" evangelical," and the pettiest indiffer-
ence to large things. The outbreak of a
desire for larger religious freedom caused
at first a most determined reaction to-
ward formalism and even stagnation of
thought and behavior, especially in small

524

Martha's Lady.

and quiet villages like Ashford, intently
busy with their own concerns. It was high
time for a little leaven to begin its work,
in this moment when the great impulses
of the war for liberty had died away and
those of the coming war for patriotism
and a new freedom had hardly yet be-
gun, except as a growl of thunder or a
flash of lightning draws one's eyes to the
gathering clouds through the lifeless air
of a summer day.

The dull interior, the changed life of
the old house whose former activities
seemed to have fallen sound asleep, real-
ly typified these larger conditions, and
the little leaven had made its* easily re-
cognized appearance in the shape of a
light-hearted girl. She was Miss Har-
riet's young Boston cousin, Helena Ver-
non, who, half -amused and half-impatient
at the unnecessary sober-mindedness of
her hostess and of Ashford in general,
had set herself to the difficult task of
gayety. Cousin Harriet looked on at
a succession of ingenious and, on the
whole, innocent attempts at pleasure, as
she might have looked on at the frolics
of a kitten who easily substitutes a ball
of yarn for the uncertainties of a bird or
a wind-blown leaf, and who may at any
moment ravel the fringe of a sacred cur-
tain-tassel in preference to either.

Helena, with her mischievous appeal-
ing eyes, with her enchanting old songs
and her guitar, seemed the more delight-
ful and even reasonable because she was
so kind to everybody, and because she
was a beauty. She had the gift of most
charming manners. There was all the
unconscious lovely ease and grace that
had come with the good breeding of her
city home, where many pleasant persons
came and went; she had no fear, one
had almost said no respect, of the indi-
vidual, and she did not need to think of
herself. Cousin Harriet turned cold with
apprehension when she saw the minister
coming in at the front gate, and won-
dered in agony if Martha were properly
attired to go to the door, and would by

any chance hear the knocker ; it was
Helena who, delighted to have anything
happen, ran to the door to welcome the
Reverend Mr. Crofton as if he were a
congenial friend of her own age. She
could behave with more or less propriety
during the stately first visit, and even
contrive to lighten it with modest mirth,
and to extort the confession that the
guest had a tenor voice though sadly out
of practice, but when the minister de-
parted a little flattered, and hoping that
he had not expressed himself too strong-
ly for a pastor upon the poems of Em-
erson, and feeling the unusual stir of
gallantry in his proper heart, it was
Helena who caught the honored hat of
the late Judge Pyne from its last resting-
place in the hall, and holding it securely
in both hands, mimicked the minister's
self-conscious entrance. She copied his
pompous and anxious expression in the
dim parlor in such delicious fashion, that
Miss Harriet, who could not always ex-
tinguish a ready spark of the original
sin of humor, laughed aloud.

" My dear ! " she exclaimed severely
the next moment. " I am ashamed of
your being so disrespectful ! " and then
laughed again, and took the affecting
old hat and carried it back to its place.

" I would not have had any one else
see you for the world," she said sorrow-
fully as she returned, feeling quite self-
possessed again, to the parlor doorway ;
but Helena still sat in the minister's
chair, with her small feet placed as his
stiff boots had been, and a copy of his
solemn expression before they came to
speaking of Emerson and of the guitar.
" I wish I had asked him if he would
be so kind as to climb the cherry-tree,"
said Helena, unbending a little at the
discovery that her cousin would consent
to laugh no more. " There are all those
ripe cherries on the top branches. I
can climb as high as he, but I can't reach
far enough from the last branch that will
bear anybody. The minister is so long
and thin " —

Martha's Lady,

525

" I don't know what Mr. Crofton
would have thought of you ; he is a very
serious young man," said cousin Harriet,
still ashamed of her laughter. "Mar-
tha will get the cherries for you, or one
of the men. I should not like to have
Mr. Crofton think you were frivolous,
a young lady of your opportunities " —
but Helena had escaped through the hall
and out at the garden door at the men-
tion of Martha's name. Miss Harriet
Pyne sighed anxiously, and then smiled,
in spite of her deep convictions, as she
shut the blinds and tried to make the
house look solemn again.

The front door might be shut, but the
garden door at the other end of the broad
hall was wide open into the large sunshiny
garden, where the last of the red and
white peonies and the golden lilies, and the
first of the tall blue larkspurs lent their
colors in generous fashion. The straight
box borders were all in fresh and shining
green of their new leaves, and there was
a fragrance of the old garden's inmost
life and soul blowing from the honey-
suckle blossoms on a long trellis. Now
it was late in the afternoon, and the sun
was low behind great apple-trees at the
garden's end, which threw their shadows
over the short turf of the bleaching-
green. The cherry-trees stood at one side
in full sunshine still, and Miss Harriet,
who presently came to the garden steps
to watch like a hen at the water's edge,
saw her cousin's pretty figure in its white
dress of India muslin hurrying across
the grass. She was accompanied by the
tall, ungainly shape of Martha the new
maid, who, dull and indifferent to every
one else, showed a surprising willingness
and allegiance to the young guest.

"Martha ought to be in the dining-
room already, slow as she is ; it wants
but half an hour of tea-time," said Miss
Harriet, as she turned and went into the
shaded house. It was Martha's duty to
wait at table, and there had been many
trying scenes and defeated efforts to-
ward her education. Martha was cer-

tainly very clumsy, and she seemed the
clumsier because she had replaced her
aunt, a most skillful person, who had but
lately married a thriving farm and its
prosperous owner. It must be confessed
that Miss Harriet was a most bewildering
instructor, and that her pupil's brain was
easily confused and^ prone to blunders.
The coming of Helena had been some-
what dreaded by reason of this incom-
petent service, but the guest took no no-
tice of frowns or futile gestures at the
first tea-table, except to establish friend-
ly relations with Martha on her own ac-
count by a reassuring smile. They were
about the same age, and next morning,
before cousin Harriet came down, Hele-
na showed by a word and a quick touch
the right way to do something that had
gone wrong and been impossible to un-
derstand the night before. A moment
later the anxious mistress came in with-
out suspicion, but Martha's eyes were as
affectionate as a dog's, and there was a
new look of hopefulness on her face ;
this dreaded guest was a friend after all,
and not a foe come from proud Boston
to confound her ignorance and patient
efforts.

The two young creatures, mistress and
maid, were hurrying across the bleach-
ing-green.

" I can't reach the ripest cherries,"
explained Helena politely, " and I think
that Miss Pyne ought to send some to
the minister. He has just made us a
call. Why Martha, you have n't been
crying again ! "

" Yes, 'm," said Martha sadly. " Miss
Pyne always loves to send something to
the minister," she acknowledged with in-
terest, as if she did not wish to be asked
to explain these latest tears.

" We '11 arrange some of the best
cherries in a pretty dish. I '11 show you
how, and you shall carry them over to
the parsonage after tea," said Helena
cheerfully, and Martha accepted the em-
bassy with pleasure. Life was begin-

526

Martha's Lady.

ning to hold moments of something like
delight in the last few days.

" You 11 spoil your pretty dress, Miss
Helena," Martha gave shy warning, and
Miss Helena stood back and held up her
skirts with unusual care while the coun-
try girl, in her heavy blue checked ging-
ham, began to climb the cherry-tree like
a boy.

Down came the scarlet fruit like bright
rain into the green grass.

" Break some nice twigs with the cher-
ries and leaves together ; oh, you 're a
duck, Martha ! " and Martha, flushed
with delight, and looking far more like
a thin and solemn blue heron, came rus-
tling down to earth again, and gathered
the spoils into her clean apron.

That night at tea, during her hand-
maiden's temporary absence, Miss Har-
riet announced, as if by way of apology,
that she thought Martha was beginning
to understand something about her work.
" Her aunt was a treasure, she never had
to be told anything twice ; but Martha
has been as clumsy as a calf," said the
precise mistress of the house. " I have
been afraid sometimes that I never could
teach her anything. I was quite ashamed
to have you come just now, and find me
so unprepared to entertain a visitor."

" Oh, Martha will learn fast enough
because she cares so much," said the
visitor eagerly. " I think she is a dear
good girl. I do hope that she will never
go away. I think she does things bet-
ter every day, cousin Harriet," added
Helena pleadingly, with all her kind
young heart. The china-closet door was
open a little way, and Martha heard
every word. From that moment, she
not only knew what love was like, but
she knew love's dear ambitions. To have
come from a stony hill-farm and a bare
small wooden house was like a cave-
dweller's coming to make a permanent
home in an art museum ; such had
seemed the elaborateness and elegance
of Miss Pyne's fashion of life, and
Martha's simple brain was slow enough

in its processes and recognitions. But
with this sympathetic ally and defender,
this exquisite Miss Helena who believed
in her, all difficulties appeared to vanish.

Later that evening, no longer home-
sick or hopeless, Martha returned from
her polite errand to the minister, and
stood with a sort of triumph before the
two ladies who were sitting in the front
doorway, as if they were waiting for
visitors, Helena still in her white muslin
and red ribbons, and Miss Harriet in a
thin black silk. Being happily self-for-
getful in the greatness of the moment,
Martha's manners were perfect, and she
looked for once almost pretty and quite
as young as she was.

" The minister came to the door him-
self, and sent his thanks. He said that
cherries were always his favorite fruit,
and he was much obliged to both Miss
Pyne and Miss Vernon. He kept me
waiting a few minutes, while he got this
book ready to send to you, Miss Helena."

" What are you saying, Martha ? I
have sent him nothing ! " exclaimed Miss
Pyne, much astonished. " What does
she mean, Helena ? "

"Only a few of your cherries," ex-
plained Helena. " I thought Mr. Crof-
ton would like them after his afternoon
of parish calls. Martha and I arranged
them before tea, and I sent them with
our compliments."

" Oh, I am very glad you did," said
Miss Harriet, wondering, but much re-
lieved. " I was afraid " —

" No, it was none of my mischief,"
answered Helena daringly. " I did not
think that Martha would be ready to go
so soon. I should have shown you how
pretty they looked among their green
leaves. We put them in one of your
best white dishes with the openwork
edge. Martha shall show you to-mor-
row ; mamma always likes to have them
so." Helena's fingers were busy with
the hard knot of a parcel.

" See this, cousin Harriet ! " she an-
nounced proudly, as Martha disappeared

Martha's Lady.

527

round the corner of the house, beaming
with the pleasures of adventure and suc-
cess. " Look ! the minister has sent me
a book : Sermons on what ? Sermons
— it is so dark that I can't quite see."

" It must be his Sermons on the Seri-
ousness of Life ; they are the only ones
he has printed, I believe," said Miss
Harriet, with much pleasure. " They
are considered very fine ; remarkably
able discourses. He pays you a great
compliment, my dear. I feared that he
noticed your girlish levity."

" I behaved beautifully while he
stayed," insisted Helena. " Ministers
are only men," but she blushed with
pleasure. It was certainly something to
receive a book from its author, and such
a tribute made her of more value to the
whole reverent household. The minister
was not only a man, but a bachelor, and
Helena was at the age that best loves
conquest; it was at any rate comfortable
to be reinstated in cousin Harriet's good
graces.

" Do ask the kind gentleman to tea !
He needs a little cheering up," begged
the siren in India muslin, as she laid the
shiny black volume of sermons on the
stone doorstep with an air of approval,
but as if they had quite finished their
mission.

" Perhaps I shall, if Martha improves
as much as she has within the last day
or two," Miss Harriet promised hope-
fully. "It is something I always dread
a little when I am all alone, but I think
Mr. Crofton likes to come. He con-
verses so elegantly."

II.

These were the days of long visits,
before affectionate friends thought it
quite worth while to take a hundred
miles' journey merely to dine or to pass
a night in one another's houses. Helena
lingered through the pleasant weeks of
early summer, and departed unwillingly

at last to join her family at the White
Hills, where they had gone like other
households of high social station, to
pass the month of August out of town.
The happy - hearted young guest left
many lamenting friends behind her, and
promised each that she would come back
again next year. She left the minister
a rejected lover, as well as the preceptor
of the academy, but with their pride un-
wounded, and it may have been with
wider outlooks upon the world and a less
narrow sympathy both for their own
work in life and for their neighbors'
work and hindrances. Even Miss Har-
riet Pyne herself had lost some of the
unnecessary provincialism and prejudice
which had begun to harden a naturally
good and open mind and affectionate
heart. She was conscious of feeling
younger and more free, and not so lone-
ly. Nobody had ever been so gay, so
fascinating, or so kind as Helena, so full
of social resource, so simple and unde-
manding in her friendliness. The light
of her young life cast no shadow on
either young or old companions, her
pretty clothes never seemed to make
other girls look dull or out of fashion.
When she went away up the street in
Miss Harriet's carriage to take the slow
train toward Boston and the gayeties of
the new Profile House, where her mother
waited impatiently with a group of
Southern friends, it seemed as if there
would never be any more picnics or
parties in Ashford, and as if society had
nothing left to do but to grow old and
get ready for winter.

Martha came into Miss Helena's bed-
room that last morning, and it was easy
to see that she had been crying ; she
looked just as she did in that first sad
week of homesickness and despair. All
for love's sake she had been learning to
do many things, and to do them exactly
right ; her eyes had grown quick to see
the smallest chance for personal service.
Nobody could be more humble and de-

528

MarthcCs Lady.

voted ; she looked years older than Hele-
na, and wore already a touching air of
caretaking.

" You spoil me, you dear Martha ! "
said Helena from the bed. " I don't
know what they will say at home, I am
so spoiled."

Martha went on opening the blinds
to let in the brightness of the summer
morning, but she did not speak.

" You are getting on splendidly, are
n't you ? " continued the little mistress.
" You have tried so hard that you make
me ashamed of myself. At first you
crammed all the flowers together, and
now you make them look beautiful. Last
night cousin Harriet was so pleased when
the table was so charming, and I told her
that you did everything yourself, every
bit. Won't you keep the flowers fresh
and pretty in the house until I come
back ? It 's so much pleasanter for Miss
Pyne, and you '11 feed my little spar-
rows, won't you ? They 're growing so
tame."

" Oh yes. Miss Helena ! " and Mar-
tha looked almost angry for a moment,
then she burst into tears and covered
her face with her apron. " I could n't
understand a single thing when I first
came. I never had been anywhere to
see anything, and Miss Pyne frightened
me when she talked. It was you made
me think I could ever learn. I wanted
to keep the place, 'count of mother and
the little boys ; we 're dreadful hard
pushed at home. Hepsy has been good
in the kitchen ; she said she ought to
have patience with me, for she was awk-
ward herself when she first came."

Helena laughed ; she looked so pretty
under the tasseled white curtains.

" I dare say Hepsy tells the truth,"
she said. ' ' I wish you had told me about
your mother. When I come again, some
day we '11 drive up country, as you call it,
to see her. Martha ! I wish you would
think of me sometimes after I go away.
Won't you promise ? " and the bright
young face suddenly grew grave. " I

have hard times myself ; I don't always
learn things that I ought to learn, I don't
always put things straight. I wish you
would n't forget me ever, and would just
believe in me. I think it does help more
than anything."

" I won't forget," said Martha slow-
ly. "I shall think of you every day."
She spoke almost with indifference, as if
she had been asked to dust a room, but
she turned aside quickly and pulled the
little mat under the hot water jug quite
out of its former straightness ; then she
hastened away down the long white en-
try, weeping as she went.

III.

To lose out of sight the friend whom
one has loved and lived to please is to
lose joy out of life. But if love is true,
there comes presently a higher joy of
pleasing the ideal, that is to say, the
perfect friend. The same old happi-
ness is lifted to a higher level. As for
Martha, the girl who stayed behind in
Ashford, nobody's life could seem duller
to those who could not understand ; she
was slow of step, and her eyes were al-
most always downcast as if intent upon
incessant toil ; but they startled you when
she looked up, with their shining light.
She was capable of the happiness of hold-
ing fast to a great sentiment, the ineffa-
ble satisfaction of trying to please one
whom she truly loved. She never thought
of trying to make other people pleased
with herself ; all she lived for was to do
the best she could for others, and to con-
form to an ideal, which grew at last to
be like a saint's vision, a heavenly figure
painted upon the sky.

On Sunday afternoons in summer,
Martha sat by the window of her cham-
ber, a low -storied little room, which
looked into the side yard and the great
branches of an elm-tree. She never sat
in the old wooden rocking-chair except

Martha's Lady.

529

on Sundays like this ; it belonged to the
day of rest and to happy meditation. She
wore her plain black dress and a clean
white apron, and held in her lap a little
wooden box, with a brass hinge on top
for a handle. She was past sixty years
of age and looked even older, but there
was the same look on her face that it
had sometimes worn in girlhood. She
was the same Martha ; her hands were
old-looking and work-worn, but her face
still shone. It seemed like yesterday
that Helena Vernon had gone away, and
it was more than forty years.

War and peace had brought their
changes and great anxieties, the face of
the earth was furrowed by floods and
fire, the faces of mistress and maid were
furrowed by smiles and tears, and in the
sky the stars shone on as if nothing had
happened. The village of Ashford add-
ed a few pages to its unexciting history,
the minister preached, the people lis-
tened ; now and then a funeral crept
along the street, and now and then the
bright face of a little child rose above
the horizon of a family pew. Miss Har-
riet Pyne lived on in the large white
house, which gained more and more dis-
tinction because it suffered no changes,
save successive repaintings and a new
railing about its stately roof. Miss Har-
riet herself had moved far beyond the un-
certainties of an anxious youth. She had
long ago made all her decisions, and set-
tled all necessary questions ; her scheme
of life was as faultless as the miniature
landscape of a Japanese garden, and as
easily kept in order. The only impor-
tant change she would ever be capable
of making was the final change to an-
other and a better world ; and for that
nature itself would gently provide, and
her own innocent life.

Hardly any great social event had ruf-
fled the easy current of life since Helena
Vernon's marriage. To this Miss Pyne
had gone, stately in appearance and carry-
ing gifts of some old family silver which
bore the Vernon crest, but not without

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 34

some protest in her heart against the
uncertainties of married life. Helena
was so equal to a happy independence
and even to the assistance of other lives
grown strangely dependent upon her
quick sympathies and instinctive deci-
sions, that it was hard to let her sink
her personality in the affairs of another.
Yet a brilliant English match was not
without its attractions to an old-fash-
ioned gentlewoman like Miss Pyne, and
Helena herself was amazingly happy ;
one day there had come a letter to Ash-
ford, in which her very heart seemed
to beat with love and self-forgetfulness,
to tell cousin Harriet of such new hap-
piness and high hope. " Tell Martha all
that I say about my dear Jack," wrote
the eager girl ; " please show my letter
to Martha, and tell her that I shall come
home next summer and bring the hand-
somest and best man in the world to
Ashford. I have told him all about the
dear house and the dear garden ; there
never was such a lad to reach for cherries
with his six foot two." Miss Pyne, won-
dering a little, gave the letter to Martha,
who took it deliberately and as if she
wondered too, and went away to read it
slowly by herself. Martha cried over it,
and felt a strange sense of loss and pain ;
it hurt her heart a little to read about
the cherry-picking. Her idol seemed to
be less her own since she had become the
idol of a stranger. She never had taken
such a letter in her hands before, but
love at last prevailed, since Miss Helena
was happy, and she kissed the last page
where her name was written, feeling
overbold, and laid the envelope on Miss
Pyne's secretary without a word.

The most generous love cannot but
long for reassurance, and Martha had
the joy of being remembered. She was
not forgotten when the day of the wed-
ding drew near, but she never knew that
Miss Helena had asked if cousin Harriet
would not bring Martha to town; she
should like to have Martha there to see
her married. " She would help about

530

Martha's Lady.

the flowers," wrote the happy girl ; " I
know she will like to come, and I '11 ask
mamma to plan to have some one take
her all about Boston and make her have
a pleasant time after the hurry of the
great day is over."

Cousin Harriet thought it was very
kind and exactly like Helena, but Mar-
tha would be out of her element ; it
was most imprudent and girlish to have
thought of such a thing. Helena's mo-
ther would be far, from wishing for any
unnecessary guest just then in the busiest
part of her household, and it was best
not to speak of the invitation. Some day
Martha should go to Boston if she did
well, but not now. Helena did not for-
get to ask if Martha had come, and was
astonished by the indifference of the an-
swer. It was the first thing which re-
minded her that she was not a fairy
princess having everything her own way
in that last day before the wedding. She
knew that Martha would have loved to
be near, for she could not help under-
standing in that moment of her own hap-
piness the love that was hidden in an-
other heart. Next day this happy young
princess, the bride, cut a piece of the
great cake and put it into a pretty box
that had held one of her wedding pre-
sents. With eager voices calling her, and
all her friends about her, and her mo-
ther's face growing more and more wist-
ful at the thought of parting, she still
lingered and ran to take one or two tri-
fles from her dressing-table, a little mir-
ror and some tiny scissors that Martha
would remember, and one of the pretty
handkerchiefs marked with her maiden
name. These she put in the box too ; it
was half a girlish freak and fancy, but
she could not help trying to share her
happiness, and Martha's life was so plain
and dull. She whispered a message, and
put the little package into cousin Har-
riet's hand for Martha as she said good-
by. She was very fond of cousin Har-
riet. She smiled with a gleam of her
old fun ; Martha's puzzled look and tall

awkward figure seemed to stand sud-
denly before her eyes, as she promised
to come again to Ashford. Impatient
voices called to Helena, her lover was at
the door, and she hurried away leaving
her old home and her girlhood gladly.
If she had only known it, as she kissed
cousin Harriet good-by, they were never
going to see each other again until they
were old women. The first step that she
took out of her father's house that day,
married, and full of hope and joy, was
a step that led her away from the green
elms of Boston Common and away from
her own country and those she loved
best, to a brilliant much-varied foreign
life, and to nearly all the sorrows and
nearly all the joys that the heart of one
woman could hold or know.

On Sunday afternoons Martha used to
sit by the window in Ashford and hold
the wooden box which a favorite young
brother, who afterward died at sea, had
made for her, and she used to take out
of it the pretty little box with a gilded
cover that had held the piece of wed-
ding-cake, and the small scissors, and
the blurred bit of a mirror in its silver
case; as for the handkerchief with the
narrow lace edge, once in two or three
years she sprinkled it as if it were a
flower, and spread it out in the sun on
the old bleaching-green, and sat near by
in the shrubbery to watch lest some bold
robin or cherry-bird should seize it and
fly away.

IV.

Miss Harriet Pyne was often congrat-
ulated upon the good fortune of having
such a helper and friend as Martha. As
time went on this tall gaunt woman, al-
ways thin, always slow, gained a digni-
ty of behavior and simple affectionate-
ness of look which suited the charm and
dignity of the ancient house. She was
unconsciously beautiful like a saint, like
the picturesqueness of a lonely tree which
lives to shelter unnumbered lives and to

Martha's Lady.

531

stand quietly in its place. There was
such rustic homeliness and constancy
belonging to her, such beautiful powers
of apprehension, such reticence, such gen-
tleness for those who were troubled or
sick ; all these gifts and graces Martha
hid in her heart. She never joined the
church because she thought she was not
good enough, but life was such a passion
and happiness of service that it was im-
possible not to be devout, and she was al-
ways in her humble place on Sundays, in
the back pew next the door. She had
been educated by a remembrance ; Hel-
ena's young eyes forever looked at her
reassuringly from a gay girlish face.
Helena's sweet patience in teaching her
own awkwardness could never be for-
gotten.

" I owe everything to Miss Helena,"
said Martha half aloud as she sat alone
by the window ; she had said it to her-
self a thousand times. When she looked
in the little keepsake mirror she always
hoped to see some faint reflection of
Helena Vernon, but there was only her
own brown old New England face to look
back at her wonderingly.

Miss Pyne went less and less often to
pay visits to her friends in Boston ; there
were very few friends left to come to Ash-
ford and make long visits in the summer,
and life grew more and more monoto-
nous. Now and then there came news
from across the sea and messages of re-
membrance, letters that were closely
written on thin sheets of paper, and that
spoke of lords and ladies, of great jour-
neys, of the death of little children and
the proud successes of boys at school, of
the wedding of Mrs. Dysart's only daugh-
ter ; but even that had happened years
ago. These things seemed far away and
vague, as if they belonged to a story and
not to life itself ; the true links with the
past were quite different. There was the
unvarying flock of ground-sparrows that
Helena had begun to feed ; every morn-
ing Martha scattered crumbs for them
from the side doorsteps while Miss Pyne

watched from the dining-room window,
and they were counted and cherished
year by year.

Miss Pyne herself had many fixed hab-
its, but little ideality or imagination, and
so at last it was Martha who took thought
for her mistress, and gave freedom to her
own good taste. After a while, without
any one's observing the change, the every-
day ways of doing things in the house
came to be the stately ways that had once
belonged only to the entertainment of
guests. Happily both mistress and maid
seized all possible chances for hospitality,
yet Miss Harriet nearly always sat alone
at her exquisitely served table with its
fresh flowers, and the beautiful old china
which Martha handled so lovingly that
there was no good excuse for keeping it
hidden on closet shelves. Every year
when the old cherry-trees were in fruit,
Martha carried the round white Limoges
dish with a fretwork edge, full of point-
ed green leaves and scarlet cherries, to
the minister, and his wife never quite un-
derstood why every year he blushed and
looked so conscious of the pleasure, and
thanked Martha as if he had received
a very particular attention. There was
no pretty suggestion toward the pursuit
of the fine art of housekeeping in Mar-
tha's limited acquaintance with newspa-
pers that she did not adopt ; there was
no refined old custom of the Pyne house-
keeping that she consented to let go.
And every day, as she had promised,
she thought of Miss Helena, — oh, many
times in every day : whether this thing
would please her, or that be likely to
fall in with her fancy or ideas of fit-
ness. As far as was possible the rare
news that reached Ashford through an
occasional letter or the talk of guests
was made part of Martha's own life, the
history of her own heart. A worn old
geography often stood open at the map
of Europe on the light-stand in her room,
and a little old-fashioned gilt button, set
with a piece of glass like a ruby, that
had broken and fallen from the trimming

532

Martha's Lady.

of one of Helena's dresses, was used to
mark the city of her dwelling-place. In
the changes of a diplomatic life Martha
followed her lady all about the map.
Sometimes the button was at Paris, and
sometimes at Madrid ; once, to her great
anxiety, it remained long at St. Peters-
burg. For such a slow scholar Martha
was not unlearned at last, since every-
thing about life in these foreign towns
was of interest to her faithful heart. She
satisfied her own mind as she threw
crumbs to the tame sparrows ; it was all
part of the same thing and for the same
affectionate reasons.

One Sunday afternoon in early sum-
mer Miss Harriet Pyne came hurrying
along the entry that led to Martha's room
and called two or three times before its
inhabitant could reach the door. Miss
Harriet looked unusually cheerful and
excited, and she held something in her
hand. " Where are you, Martha ? " she
called again. " Come quick, I have some-
thing to tell you ! "

" Here I am, Miss Pyne," said Mar-
tha, who had only stopped to put her
precious box in the drawer, and to shut
the geography.

" Who do you think is coming this
very night at half past six ? We must
have everything as nice as we can ; I must
see Hannah at once. Do you remember
my cousin Helena who has lived abroad
so long ? Miss Helena Vernon, the Hon-
orable Mrs. Dysart, she is now."

" Yes, I remember her," answered
Martha, turning a little pale.

" I knew that she was in this country,
and I had written to ask her to come for
a long visit," continued Miss Harriet,
who did not often explain things, even to
Martha, though she was always conscien-
tious about the kind messages that were
sent back by grateful guests. " She tele-
graphs that she means to anticipate her

visit by a few days and come to me at
once. The heat is beginning in town, I
suppose. I daresay, having been a for-
eigner so long, she does not mind trav-
eling on Sunday. Do you think Han-
nah will be prepared ? We must have
tea a little later."

" Yes, Miss Harriet," said Martha.
She wondered that she could speak as
usual, there was such a ringing in her
ears. " I shall have time to pick some
fresh strawberries ; Miss Helena is so
fond of our strawberries."

"Why, I had forgotten," said Miss
Pyne, a little puzzled by something quite
unusual in Martha's face. " We must
expect to find Mrs. Dysart a good deal
changed, Martha ; it is a great many
years since she was here ; I have not
seen her since her wedding, and she has
had a great deal of trouble, poor girl.
You had better open the parlor cham-
ber, and make it ready before you go
down."

" It is all ready, I think," said Martha.
" I can bring some of those little sweet-
brier roses upstairs before she comes."

" Yes, you are always thoughtful,"
said Miss Pyne, with unwonted feeling.

Martha did not answer. She glanced
at the telegram wistfully. She had
never really suspected before that Miss
Pyne knew nothing of the love that had
been in her heart all these years ; it was
half a pain and half a golden joy to keep
such a secret ; she could hardly bear this
moment of surprise.

Presently the news gave wings to her
willing feet. When Hannah the cook,
who never had known Miss Helena,
went to the parlor an hour later on some
errand to her old mistress, she discov-
ered that this stranger guest must be a
very important person. She had never
seen the tea-table look exactly as it did
that night, and in the parlor itself there
were fresh blossoming boughs in the old
East Indian jars, and lilies in the pan-
eled hall, and flowers everywhere, as if
there were some high festivity.

In Majesty.

533

Miss Pyne sat by the window watch-
ing, in her best dress, looking stately and
calm ; she seldom went out now, and it
was almost time for the carriage. Mar-
tha was just coming in from the gar-
den with the strawberries, and with more
flowers in her apron. It was a bright
cool evening in June, the golden robins
sang in the elms, and the sun was going
down behind the apple-trees at the foot
of the garden. The beautiful old house
stood wide open to the long expected
guest.

" I think that I shall go down to the
gate," said Miss Pyne, looking at Martha
for approval, and Martha nodded and
they went together slowly down the broad
front walk.

There was a sound of horses and
wheels on the roadside turf : Martha
could not see at first ; she stood back in-
side the gate behind the white lilacs as
the carriage came. Miss Pyne was there ;
she was holding out both arms and taking
a tired, bent little figure in black to her

heart. " Oh, my Miss Helena is an old
woman like me ! " and Martha gave a
pitiful sob ; she had never dreamed it
would be like this ; this was the one thing
she could not bear.

"Where are you, Martha?" called
Miss Pyne. " Martha will bring these
in ; you have not . forgotten my good
Martha, Helena ? " Then Helena looked
up and smiled just as she used to smile
in the old days. The young eyes were
there still in the changed face, and Miss
Helena had come.

That night Martha waited in her lady's
room just as she used, humble and silent,
and went through with the old unfor-
gotten loving services. The long years
seemed like days. At last she lingered
a moment trying to think of something
else that might be done, then she was
going silently away, but Helena called
her back.

" You have always remembered, have
n't you, Martha dear ? " she said.
" Won't you please kiss me good-night ? "
Sarah Orne Jewett.

IN MAJESTY.

ONCE in thy life, thou too, or small or great,

Sin-stained or white, sage, foolish, free or bound,

'Neath what strange star, beyond what ocean found, —

Thou too, ignoring time, defying fate,

One fleeting hour shalt dwell in prouder state

Than any king's, with sovereign power girt round,

Thy silent brow with pallid glory crowned.

Once in thy life, some time, or soon or late,

Thou too — Yet hold ! Oh, strange conceit ! Ah me !

In that brief triumph thou shalt not rejoice,

Nor find it profit thee ; thou shalt not see

The reverent awe, nor mark the bated breath

Wherewith all mankind's universal voice

Pays homage to the Majesty of Death!

Stuart Sterne.

534

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

THE UPWARD MOVEMENT IN CHICAGO.

THE opportunity to attempt a mar-
shaling and a review of some of the
elements prominent in the composition
of a large, new, and conspicuous com-
munity is not one to be accepted in a
spirit of easy self-confidence ; and when
these elements are at once comprehen-
sive in range, discordant in character,
and so overcharged with peculiarities as
to be rendered susceptible to a rather
wide variety of interpretation, then the
commentator can only approach them in
a certain spirit of self-distrust.

The civic shortcomings of Chicago are
so widely notorious abroad and so deeply
deplored at home that there is little need
to linger upon them, even for the pur-
pose of throwing into relief the worthier
and more attractive features of the local
life. The date of the Fair was the pe-
riod at once of the city's greatest glory
and of her deepest abasement. But at
the very moment when the somewhat
naif and officious strictures of foreign
visitors seemed to present Chicago as
the Cloaca Maxima of modern civiliza-
tion, the best people of the town found
themselves, for the first time, associated
in a worthy effort under the unifying
and vivifying impetus of a noble ideal.
The Fair was a kind of post-graduate
course for the men at the head of Chi-
cago's commercial and mercantile inter-
ests ; it was the city's intellectual and
social annexation to the world at large.
The sense of shame and of peril aroused
by the comments of outside censors
helped to lead at once to a practical
associated effort for betterment, ahd
scarcely had the Columbian Exposition
drawn to a close when many of the
names that had figured so long and
familiarly in its directorate began to ap-
pear with equal prominence in the coun-
cils of the Civic Federation.

Life in Chicago continues to be — too

largely, too markedly — a struggle for
the bare decencies. Justly speaking,
such may be, perhaps must be, the case
with every young city ; but never, surely,
has the struggle been conducted upon
so large and striking a scale, for never
before have youth and increase gone so
notably together. We are obliged to
fight — determinedly, unremittingly —
for those desirable, those indispensable
things that older, more fortunate, more
practiced communities possess and enjoy
as a matter of course. As a commu-
nity, we are at school ; we are trying to
solve for ourselves the problem of living
together. All the best and most strenu-
ous endeavors of Chicago, whether prac-
tical or aesthetic, whether directed toward
individual improvement or toward an
increase in the associated well - being,
may be broadly bracketed as educational.
Everything to be said about the higher
and more hopeful life of the place must
be said with the learner's bench dis-
tinctly in view. The two gratifying
phases of the situation are to be found
in an increased capacity for effective
organization, and in an intense desire
for knowledge, for personal improve-
ment, for the mastery of that which else-
where has already been mastered and
passed by. This rush of momentum to
make up lost time and to get over hitherto
untraversed ground justifies the surmise
that the goal may be not only reached,
but overreached, and that there may be
a propulsion of the new and vigorous
Western type past the plane of mere ac-
quired culture, on toward the farther and
higher plane of actual creative achieve-
ment.

It would be unadvisable to enter upon
an extended presentation of Chicago's
efforts toward the amenities and adorn-
ments of life without first having safe-
guarded her reputation for common

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

535

sense by giving a few notes illustrative
of her struggle to secure some of the
simple decencies of life. This struggle
may best be indicated by a re'sume' of
the recent activities of two of her re-
presentative reform organizations, the
Civic Federation and the Woman's
Club.

The Civic Federation of Chicago —
conspicuously the most important and
promising of existing agencies for the
improvement of local conditions, and
the prototype (past or future) of nu-
merous organizations in smaller towns
throughout the West — took shape dur-
ing the closing months of 1893. Its
object, formally stated, is " to gather
together in a body, for mutual counsel,
support, and combined action, all of the
forces for good, public or private, which
are at work in Chicago." It is non-
partisan, non-political, non-sectarian. It
consists of a central council and of sub-
ordinate ward and precinct councils, and
its field throughout the city is practical-
ly coincident with that occupied by the
recognized political parties. Its work
is in the hands of a number of standing
committees, and a brief indication of its
recent labors may be readily anticipated
by any one who will recall for a moment
the familiar evils common to all Amer-
ican cities. Its health committee has
concerned itself with the foulnesses of
bake-shops and with the chemical analy-
sis of food products ; its committee on
morals has organized and prosecuted a
vigorous warfare upon the gambling in-
terest, causing the closing of hundreds
of gamblers' resorts and " bucket shops;"
and of all the race-tracks ; its commit-
tee on the work of street-cleaning has
brought about a better service at lower
figures, — indeed, it has shown, by a
practical demonstration of its own, ex-
tending over a period of six months,
that it is within the range of physical
possibility to keep the streets of the cen-
tral down-town district reasonably clean ;
its department of philanthropy has or-

ganized a bureau of associated charities,
whose object is the systematization and
consolidation of philanthropic work ; its
committee on political action has dealt
through its own secret service depart-
ment with fraudulent naturalization,
colonization, and registration, has in-
spected the qualifications of election
judges and clerks, and has endeavored
to improve the character of the Cook
County grand juries ; and proper de-
partments have concerned themselves
with the irregularities of garbage con-
tractors, with the iniquitous dealing in
franchises on the part of aldermen, with
endeavors to apply the principle of arbi-
tration to the acuter crises in the labor
world, and with a thoroughgoing investi-
gation of the city pay-rolls that resulted
in sending numerous offenders to the pen-
itentiary.

But the most signal service rendered
by the Federation is that which was
accomplished two years ago by about
half a dozen of its members (in conjunc-
tion with an equally small representa-
tion from the Civil Service Reform
League) at Springfield : the passage of
a bill by the legislature, and its adop-
tion at the next election by the city of
Chicago, whereby the entire civil ser-
vice of the city (and of the county as
well) was placed solidly upon the merit
system, which is in full operation to-
day. This achievement, by reason of
its suddenness and thoroughness, may
well rank among the miracles of mod-
ern legislation, and the adoption of the
bill by a majority of fifty thousand was
accepted all over the country as one of
the most hopeful signs of the times.

The Citizens' Association, an older
though less conspicuous organization, has
been working for some years on similar
lines. The Municipal Voters' League, a
younger body, has made strong efforts to
improve the character of the city coun-
cil by a rigid scrutiny of aldermanic can-
didates.

Side by side with the Civic Federa-

536

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

tion stands the Chicago Woman's Club.
This notable force in the better life of
the city was organized in 1876 with a
view to " mutual sympathy and counsel,
and united effort toward the higher
civilization of humanity." For several
years the club was content to occupy
itself with domestic matters, and with
the literary and artistic interests com-
mon to women's clubs all over the coun-
try. Later on it determined to make
itself felt in practical work, and its
most valuable services have been effect-
ed through its recently organized com-
mittees on philanthropy and reform.
Among its other activities, this club has
secured women physicians for the Cook
County Insane Asylum and for the State
Hospital at Kankakee ; has established
a free kindergarten, a women's physio-
logical institute, and a protective agency
for women and children ; and on one
occasion it sent a delegation to Wash-
ington to urge upon the President the
reinstatement of women employees in
the internal revenue offices. Upon oc-
casion the club has entertained the Gen-
eral Federation of Women's Clubs, and
its organization has served as a model
for numerous other clubs throughout the
West and Northwest.

As already stated, almost everything
to be said about the upward movement
in Chicago may be directly arrayed un-
der the one general head of " education."
There is to be shown first, then, what
Chicago is doing for her own children
and for those who come to her from out-
side ; and afterward there is to be indi-
cated the active propaganda which she is
conducting with a gallant spirit through-
out her tributary territory.

It is difficult, I admit, to put forward
as an educational centre a city which
habitually sends the best of its youth,
boys and girls alike, far away from
home for instruction ; it is here, indeed,
that the colleges and seminaries of Mas-
sachusetts and Connecticut become ab-
solutely obtrusive. Nothing better can

be done, in such a case, than to fall back
upon the mass and weight of mere num-
bers : a few figures will serve to show
the support accorded to half a dozen
of Chicago's own representative educa-
tional institutions. The Chicago Con-
servatory (musical and dramatic) has
some six hundred pupils ; the Lewis In-
stitute (technological) has instructed
during its first year, just ended, close
upon seven hundred ; the Armour In-
stitute (also technological) had last year
about twelve hundred ; the Chicago
Athenaeum (day and night school) in-
structs about fourteen hundred ; the
Art Institute, seventeen hundred ; the
University of Chicago had last year a
total enrollment in excess of twenty-four
hundred ; while that of the Northwest-
ern University, in a northern suburb,
with important departments in the city
itself, rose as high as twenty-eight hun-
dred. Never has a young city shown
itself more liberal in founding and
developing public institutions for in-
struction ; this is one of the most favor-
able turns taken by the new democracy
of the West.

Such figures as those cited imply
scale ; such scale implies the high exer-
cise of practical ability ; and practical
ability, in the West, implies success —
and appreciation. In this New World,
the respect gained by the educator, the
clergyman, the professional man in gen-
eral, comes almost completely, not from
his mere education, his mere book know-
ledge, his mere practice of an acquired
art, but from his virtu (as the Italians
of the Renaissance expressed it), from
his masterful dealing with things, cir-
cumstances, and his fellow men. The
hearty and ungrudging respect of the
community goes to the college president
— who interests the millionaire intent
upon endowment ; to the preacher — who
fills the house and removes the mort-
gage ; to the legal practitioner — who
draws from the thick air of trusts and
syndicates something more than his

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

537

mere formal professional fee ; and at the
epoch of the Fair it seemed pleasantly
possible for the mere artist (or at least
the architect) to gain the good-natured
tolerance of a practical community —
provided he operated upon a sufficiently
extensive scale, and showed a large and
manlike adequacy in dealing with prac-
tical affairs.

It will be impossible to give due re-
cognition to the merits of each of the
half dozen institutions lately cited, but
the brilliant and felicitous career of the
new University of Chicago demands a
few lines. No institution of learning
in the country has been more signal-
ly favored by donations, endowments,
and bequests. The extent of the en-
dowments, original and supplementary,
made by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, is
widely known; and the recent magnifi-
cent gift of an entire group of buildings,
by the Hull estate, for biological pur-
poses, but follows (though on a larger
scale) the example already set by many
wealthy and well-disposed citizens. The
university seems an immense magnet,
which draws to itself not only money
and lands, but subordinate educational
institutions as well : again and again we
hear that this school, that academy, or
such a seminary, in the city itself, or in
the suburbs, or outside of city and county
altogether, has yielded to the process of
absorption or affiliation, — so many in-
dications that the name of the university
for an assured permanence and a busi-
nesslike practicality is spreading every
day.

The university is in session all the
year round. The faculty number close
upon one hundred and seventy-five. One
third of the students come from Chicago
and vicinity ; another third, from the
Middle West ; and the remaining third
includes a significant proportion from
the East and even from Europe. The
last summer quarter attracted thirteen
hundred students, of whom one third
were women. Nearly six hundred wo-

men, furthermore, attended the 1897
sessions of the Chicago Normal Sum-
mer School ; they came from all parts
of the country, from Canada, and from
Mexico.

A notable feature of the work of the
university is to be found in its exten-
sion division. This - department, active
last year through a range of eight States,
carries on its work by three methods of
study, — by lecture, by class, and by cor-
respondence. The class study section,
operative in the university itself or any-
where in the city and suburbs upon the
request of six persons, had last year an
attendance of eighteen hundred stu-
dents. The extension division cooperates
with the Chicago Board of Education,
gives evening instruction at several con-
venient points in the down-town busi-
ness district, and arranges for lectures
at a number of churches, high schools,
and libraries.

The lecture idea, indeed, is as firm-
ly rooted in the Chicago of to-day as it
was in the Boston of a generation ago.
Free courses of lectures are given an-
nually in the Field Columbian Museum
(the former Art Building at Jackson
Park) ; at the Academy of Sciences
(the Laflin Memorial), in Lincoln Park ;
in the assembly hall of the Art Insti-
tute, on the Lake Front ; and a fourth
series has lately been inaugurated in
connection with the new Haskell Ori-
ental Museum of the University of Chi-
cago. Lectures are also given at the
Kindergarten College, which for nine or
ten years past has been accustomed to
hold an annual " literary school." The
name of the organization affords little
clue to the class of subjects to which the
school gives its attention. These sub-
jects are, in fact, such standard ones
as Homer, Dante, Goethe, and Shake-
speare ; and the school is considered by
visiting lecturers to be almost unique
in its alert sympathy and in its fideli-
ty to the highest standards of culture.
The same organization also arranges for

538

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

an Annual Convocation of Mothers, which
aims to promote the physical, mental,
and moral well-being of children. The
autumn convocation of 1897 will devote
two or three of its sessions to symbolism
in art and literature, and in the kinder-
garten.

The extension division of the univer-
sity may be paralleled, in a way, by the
college extension classes of Hull House.
This admirable institution has been so
long and so conspicuously the typical
" settlement " of the whole country that
any characterization of it would be
quite unnecessary. Stress will be laid
only upon its educational aspects. Reg-
ular instruction is provided in chemis-
try, mathematics, and electrical science ;
in music, drawing, and painting ; in em-
broidery and cooking ; in Latin and the
modern languages ; and the literary
courses include Emerson, Browning,
George Eliot, and — once more —
Shakespeare and Dante. The Hull
House Bulletin gives multifarious details
regarding lectures, recitals, readings,
conferences, and receptions, and it de-
votes ample space to the interests and
doings of some forty clubs that assem-
ble under the one roof beneath which
most of them have been generated.
Hull House, in brief, is one of the typi-
cal local agencies for bridging over the
wide gulf between the fortunate and the
less fortunate, the native and the alien.
Chicago has felt in its full force the flood
of foreign immigration. How soon the
vast body of newcomers may conscious-
ly achieve a national allegiance is a ques-
tion ; their civic allegiance, thanks to the
compelling personality of the city itself,
is instant and complete. They may not
all make good Americans just yet, but
they certainly do make loyal Chicagoans,
— the next best thing, perhaps.

The Chicago Commons, on lines not
dissimilar to those of Hull House, is
active in another neighborhood of like
nature and necessities. Its organ, The
Commons, presents a comprehensive pic-

ture of " settlement " interests through-
out the country.

The four great libraries of the city

— chief among its educational factors

— have frequently been celebrated, se-
parately and together. The oldest, lar-
gest, and most generally serviceable is
the Public Library itself, which was
created by the city in 1872, shortly
after the great fire, and which has been
accommodated for some years on the
upper floor of the City Hall. This col-
lection, now comprising some 230,000
volumes, which are circulated through
the city by means of more than thirty
delivery-stations, is upon the point of
removal to more suitable quarters, — its
own building (the corner-stone of which
was laid during the Fair) on the Lake
Front. All the interior arrangements
of this new structure were planned by
practical librarians ; to its architects, as
architects, it owes little more than its
envelope of brick and stone. It is not
to be claimed that this peculiar piece of
cooperation has produced an impeccable
architectural organism, but the practical
requirements of a great library are be-
lieved to have been met more success-
fully than ever before. The stack sys-
tem (with an ultimate capacity of 2,000,-
000 volumes) has been adopted ; two
thirds of all the demands for books can
be met from a stack within ten feet of
the delivery-counter. In its reading-
room, reference - room, delivery - room,
and grand staircase, the building af-
fords large opportunities for decoration.
No effort has been made, however, to
enlist the individual talents of sculptors
and painters ; the decorations will be
done by the impersonal cooperation in-
herent in the contract plan, and depend-
ence will be placed chiefly on marbles
and mosaics, the use of which promises
to be most lavish and brilliant. The
annual income of the library is about
$250,000. Tickets are held by 60,000
book-borrowers, and the circulation is the
largest in the country.

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

539

The Newberry Library is on the North
Side, and is wholly for reference pur-
poses. Half of the building ultimately
looked for is already constructed, of
granite, in a graceful Romanesque style,
and there is abundant room for the pre-
sent collection of 140,000 volumes. The
Newberry is especially strong in music,
medicine, Americana, and hymnology,
and has recently made the purchase of
1200 works on China.

The third of the large libraries is that
of the University of Chicago, which occu-
pies temporarily a rough brick building
on the university campus, — the single
interruption to the general reign of gray-
stone scholastic Gothic. This collec-
tion was purchased en bloc from a book-
seller in Berlin, with funds contributed on
a sudden philanthropic impulse by sev-
eral gentlemen of wealth and public
spirit. It is understood to include some
290,000 books and pamphlets, and to
abound in duplicates, students' theses,
and German commentaries on the Latin
authors.

The last of the four libraries, the
Crerar, is devoted to science, — science
in a wide and general sense. This col-
lection, numbering at present 25,000
volumes, occupies temporary quarters in
a mercantile building only a few steps
distant from the new Public Library it-
self, until a site shall have been deter-
mined upon for a permanent structure.
It is meant, however, that books shall
come before building ; and the librarian,
Mr. Clement W. Andrews, late of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
has recently been engaged in extensive
purchases abroad. The directors of the
Crerar rank among the best and most
representative citizens of Chicago, the
funds at their disposal run up into the
millions, and the institution is expected
to take at once a high position among
the local aids to culture.

Education in music proceeds apace
with education in other fields. Here the
city's chief dependence is upon the Chi-

cago Orchestra, — eighty-five men, The-
odore Thomas conductor, — which last
spring rounded out prosperously its sixth
season. Mr. Thomas's efforts (than which
nothing could be more persistently and
laboriously educational) are supported by
a large and patient body of guarantors,
and by the resignation, if not delight, of
large and earnest audiences, — large, in
part, no doubt, because of the practical
withdrawal of the better element from
the theatres. The orchestra's past sea-
son has consisted of twenty-two concerts
and the same number of rehearsals, and
the annual deficit has been smaller than
ever before. The delusive character of
Mr. Thomas's "popular " nights and "re-
quest " programmes has long been re-
cognized, but the public always rallies to
the frank exposition of Beethoven and
of Wagner, while the announcement of
a soloist of reputation, vocal or instru-
mental, will always fill the great hall of
the Auditorium to overflowing. The
chief feature of the past two seasons has
been Brahms, and the public — now
upon the verge of a weak surrender —
are wondering what, if anything, can lie
beyond.

The cause of vocal music in Chicago
is most conspicuously represented by the
Apollo Club, which is just entering upon
its twenty-sixth season. This organiza-
tion, as the name would indicate, began
as a Mannerchor ; but for some years
past its four hundred voices have been
equally divided between the sexes. It
gives three or four concerts during the
winter and spring, chiefly in the way
of oratorio and cantata. Its Christmas
performance of the Messiah has become
one of the landmarks of the local musical
season.

Both the orchestra and the Apollo
Club make use of the Auditorium, and
within the same building is the repre-
sentative musical school of the West, the
Chicago Conservatory. In scope, size,
and character it may suggest the New
England Conservatory of Boston. Many

540

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

of the instructors have more than a local
reputation ; the course of its year is
marked by a great number of concerts,
recitals, and dramatic matinees; and
pupils are drawn toward it from all parts
of the West. The Chicago Musical Col-
lege enjoys an equal reputation and pro-
minence.

The distinctively social side of Chi-
cago's musical life is represented by the
Amateur Musical Club, an organization
composed exclusively of ladies, who fol-
low a rigorous ideal in both vocal and
instrumental departments, and who rely
almost entirely upon one another for their
entertainment, though occasionally a dis-
tinguished soloist from outside may be
heard. This club is approaching its three
hundredth recital.

The activity in art is no less marked
than that in music. The focus of all
this endeavor is the Art Institute. The
new building on the Lake Front — the
third occupied by the growing institute
within ten years — is well known from
having been the scene of so many con-
gresses during the year of the Fair. It
was built on public ground by an ar-
rangement between the institute and the
city, with the title vested in the latter.
The Art Institute is to retain possession
as long as it shall fulfill the purposes of
an art museum. Three days in the week
admission is free, and the number of
visitors is half a million annually. The
number of annual members is about twen-
ty-five hundred.

The collections of the Art Institute
can hardly be called extensive, neither
is the building itself completed ; but they
are valuable out of proportion to their
size, and they represent, however sketchi-
ly, most of the departments of interest
that receive recognition in institutions
of the sort. The picture-gallery is rein-
forced by the permanent exposition of
several loan collections ; there is a strong
representation of the Dutch and Flemish
masters of the seventeenth century and
an adequate display of the modern French

painters most in favor with American
purchasers. There are extensive collec-
tions of casts from the antique and the
Renaissance ; there is a room of repro-
ductions of Pompeian bronzes, a collec-
tion of eighteen thousand of the Braun
photographs, an historical collection of
casts of French works of sculpture and
architecture, the gift of the French gov-
ernment, and considerable in the way of
Egyptian antiquities, and of embroider-
ies and textiles.

The programme of the Art Institute
comprises a series of exhibitions, lectures,
concerts, and receptions running through
the greater part of the year. There is
a long range of apartments suited to the
uses of transient displays, — works of
Eastern or of foreign painters, works of
local painters, sculptors, and architects ;
and the annual exhibitions include those
given by the pupils of the institute itself,
as well as those of the work of the art
classes in the public schools.

Activity in art circles is further pro-
moted by the women's clubs, which oc-
casionally make an offer of prizes or
arrange a reception for the artists them-
selves. Through such agencies more
than one real but unsuspected talent has
been brought to light. More grateful
opportunities are sometimes presented
when the owners of the great office build-
ings are found disposed to decorate their
properties with works of art. In this
way Mr. Lorado Taf t has been enabled
to make a set of bronze panels illustra-
tive of the travels of Columbus, and Mr.
Hermon A. MacNeil another illustrative
of those of Pere Marquette. Mr. Jo-
hannes Gelert has contributed reliefs and
medallions* for the decoration of more
than one public auditorium ; and to Mr.
Edward Kemeys are due the lions placed
in front of the Art Institute. The fig-
urines of Miss Bessie Potter are unique
in American art.

Reference might be made here to the
peripatetic art-gallery connected with
Hull House, — some fifty framed repro-

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

541

ductions, such as the colored prints of
the Arundel Society, and photographic
renderings of the work of men like Mil-
let and Bastien-Lepage. These pictures
are loaned for a fortnight, like books
from a library. The most popular sub-
jects are those of a religious nature.

Public art in Chicago is represented
by a number of statues and fountains ;
most of these are placed in the parks.
Some of them are admirable ; others of
them are abominable. Some have been
removed ; others might follow. The com-
missioners of Lincoln Park, the quarter
most favored by donors, were consider-
ing, a year or two ago, the question of an
art commission to sit upon such matters.
As the public parks are the only portions
of Chicago that possess any beauty or
ever can possess any, the value of such
a commission may readily be realized.
It is to be hoped that Chicago's parks
may be kept beautiful, for Chicago's
streets can never become so. The asso-
ciated architecture of the city becomes
more hideous and more preposterous with
every year, as we continue to straggle
farther and farther from anything like
the slightest artistic understanding. No-
where is the naif belief that a man may
do as he likes with his own held more
contentiously than in our astounding and
repelling region of "sky-scrapers," where
the abuse of private initiative, the pe-
culiar evil of the place and the time, has
reached its most monumental develop-
ment. All the vagaries of this move-
ment, along with developments of a more
creditable sort, will be found recorded
year by year in the Inland Architect,
which " compares favorably," as we are
still fond of saying in the West, with the
best of -similar publications in the East.
The most striking manifestation of the
Fair was an architectural one ; but that
any improvement in the external aspect
of Chicago has been wrought in conse-
quence, — this would be too much to
claim. We hear, indeed, of advances
in other directions, outside : from one

quarter comes evidence, as educed by a
competition for a new state capitol, of a
return to a chastened classicism ; from
another, of a better and more rational
taste in the draughting of a municipal
edifice ; from a third, that one of our
local magnates has presented to his na-
tive New England town a public library
building planned and decorated on the
model of one of the most admired of the
minor structures at Jackson Park. But
Chicago itself is too large readily to be
affected, and has been too closely de-
voted, through too many years, to ideals
essentially false. Then, too, the average
is certain to fall far short of any ideal
of style, however just ; while the degree
to which opportunity always lags behind
practice, good or bad, constitutes one of
the real crosses of the architectural pro-
fession. But, in brief, the damage has
been done. Possessed of a single sheet
of paper, we have set down our crude,
hasty, mistaken sketch upon it, and we
shall have the odds decidedly against us
in any attempt to work over this sketch,
made on the one surface at our disposal,
into the tasteful and finished picture that
we may be hoping finally to produce.
There are those who consider that the
manifest destiny of the city is to become
the largest aggregation of human beings
on the globe, and its ultimate metropolis ;
such a metropolis should have an aspect
in accord with its primacy. Now, Chi-
cago has an unlimited field for expan-
sion, and the unimpeded march of her
streets in every direction (save one) is
led by the county surveyor with the same
unhesitating precision that marks the
spread of the township idea through the
newest territories of the Far West. But
the breadth and lucidity and regularity
of plan possible only to a city the bare
mention of whose name suggests rather
evocation than mere growth have suf-
fered in the detailed carrying-out. Too
much work of a public character has been
devised with haste and incompetence,
and executed with haste and dishonesty.

542

The Upward Movement in Chicago,

Furthermore, for^the first time in the
rearing of a vast city, the high and the
low have met together, the rich and the
poor have built together : each with an
astonishing freedom as to choice, taste,
expenditure ; each with an extreme, even
an undue liberty to indulge in whatever
independences or idiosyncrasies might
be suggested by greed, pride, careless-
ness, or the exigency of the passing mo-
ment, — democracy absolute manifested
in brick, stone, tiinber. The sociological
interest of such an exhibit is necessarily
great ; its artistic value is nil. One must
make the regretful acknowledgment that
the picturesque flagrancy which still
marks the conduct of Chicago's munici-
pal affairs is amply figured in the asso-
ciated effect of Chicago's architecture,
and that the extent of our failure in the
art of living together is fully typified by
our obvious failure in the art of build-
ing together. The general effect of the
city, under the dual domination of Greed
and of Slouch, must continue for many
years to be that of a mere rough im-
promptu.

The social aspects of the town — the
town taken by and large — will also con-
tinue for some years fairly to deserve
the same characterization. The social
range is wide enough to include the best
as well as the worst, but its wealth is
fully equaled by its disorder : a bound-
less heaving of human activities that is
practically unregulated, in the main, by
anything like tradition, authority, forms,
and precedents. Society, in its technical
sense, has assuredly come into existence,
and is able to. present a competent re-
production of the most esteemed social
forms ; and there is as assuredly a year-
ly increase in the number of " good
houses," where one finds an easy com-
mand of the best elements and opportu-
nities of life, a grateful survival, in their
best form, of the real Western frankness,
kind-heartedness, and informality, and a
clever understanding of the use of wealth
as an unobtrusive lubricant to the wheels

of culture. Social intercourse remains
reasonably unaffected, unartificial ; so-
cial cruelty is very rare. The back door
of the social edifice looks out upon the
farm, its side porch gives on the country
town ; and for another generation, at
least, wholesome breezes from these quar-
ters may be depended upon to remedy
any sophistication of atmosphere conse-
quent upon the ambitions and rivalries
of a population lately and largely rustic,
and now undergoing crystallization into
urban forms. The city, speaking in a
general way, possesses at once a high
standard and a low average, and the
safest and most favorable presentation
of its social characteristics would be ac-
complished by the exhibition (here, as
elsewhere) of its educational endeavors
as carried on through the medium of a
multiplicity of clubs. Everything that
is done at all is done through these or-
ganizations, and when it has been said
that their number is fully in correspond-
ence with the broad and much-divided
area of the city and the extent and va-
riety of its population, further insistence
upon the general prevalence of the club
habit becomes unnecessary.

The most prominent and promising of
these organizations are, of course, those
conducted by women ; and among them
the first mention is perhaps due to the
Fortnightly, which was founded in 1873,
with the object of " intellectual and so-
cial culture." The Fortnightly carries
no dead-weight; all of its members —
about one hundred and seventy-five —
are pledged to the writing of. essays, or
to participation in the discussion of the
themes with which the essays deal. The
Fortnightly is occasionally addressed by
distinguished strangers, men as well as
women, indulges now and then in recep-
tions and open meetings, and was duly
prominent in a social way at the time
of the literary congress held during the
Columbian Exposition.

The Woman's Club is bigger in body
— it has between five and six hundred

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

543

members — and more determined in dis-
position. Its civic services have already
been touched upon, but some indication
of its lighter labors should not be omit-
ted. Within recent years its department
of philosophy and science has been busy
upon the " results of recent investiga-
tion in the sciences," its educational de-
partment has considered through several
months " the fundamental principles of
education," and its art study class has
studied in (theoretical) detail the elabo-
rate technique of painting. During the
coming season the club will study the
history of sculpture, the evolution of
modern music, and the masterpieces of
English poetry. The club (in whole or
in part) meets weekly throughout the
greater portion of the year, and wields
an influence in just accord with such
determined and unremitting efforts and
so thorough a scheme of organization.

The Friday Club resembles the Fort-
nightly, and is said to draw its member-
ship even more distinctly from the ranks
of " society." The Junior Fortnightly,
the Wednesday, and others are clubs
of a similar sort organized among the
younger set. The Archd Club, with a
membership of six hundred, meets in
the neighborhood of Jackson Park and
the Field Museum, and pursues its liter-
ary and artistic studies under the leader-
ship of a lecturer.

The " new woman," as is readily seen,
must stand well in the foreground of
any picture of to-day's society in Chica-
go ; happily, she is coming to take her-
self a little more for granted. May not
the influence of her advent be figured
more or less successfully from analogous
cases, — from the introduction of toler-
ance into religion, from the introduction
of democracy into politics ? The wo-
man movement seems but another link
added to one general chain. An exag-
gerated emphasis on sex may moderate
itself, as the exaggerated enforcements
of bigotry and the exaggerated claims
of social privilege have moderated them-

selves already ; and we may find that
the abolition of a number of arbitrary
and invidious distinctions between man
and woman marks but one more step
toward the general solidification of the
body politic.

Compared with the bustling and am-
bitious aggregations just named, the
men's clubs must infallibly suffer; as
we enter them we find ourselves among
the helots whose labors make possible
the mental expansion of the feminine
aristocracy. The down-town club is used
chiefly as a lunching convenience and
for the discussion of business affairs,
being little frequented save at midday.
The Union League Club, however, has
distinct political leanings, and its annual
celebration of Washington's Birthday
has added point and interest to one of
the few conspicuous dates in the Ameri-
can calendar. The first of its meetings
upon this anniversary was addressed by
James Russell Lowell. Recent speak-
ers have been the Hon. Theodore Roose-
velt and Mr. Frederic R. Coudert. The
socio-political clubs, with houses situated
in the widely scattered residential quar-
ters, — one may instance the Marquette,
the Hamilton, and the Ashland, — fre-
quently entertain visiting political celeb-
rities, and also cooperate steadily in the
cause of reform and good government.
The Chicago Literary Club, a homoge-
neous body of professional men, holds
weekly meetings throughout a large part
of the year, and has recently begun the
practice of issuing in pamphlet form
such of its papers as provoke a demand
for publication. The Caxton Club, re-
sembling the Grolier of New York, gives
an annual exhibition of books and book-
bindings.

All 'this, however, does not go far in
comparison with the activities of the
other sex, and the balance should be re-
stored by some reference to the bene-
factions of individual citizens. Half a
dozen examples (added to the number
already indicated) will suffice. The

544

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

ground upon which the University of
Chicago stands and the funds necessary
for the establishment of the Columbian
Museum are alike the gift of Mr. Mar-
shall Field ; the Armour Institute and
Mission, together with the extensive
range of adjoining tenements, the income
from which supports them, the city owes
to Mr. P. D. Armour ; the construction of
the observatory at Lake Geneva, Wiscon-
sin, for the University of Chicago, and
its equipment with the largest telescope
in the world, are to be credited to Mr.
C. T. Yerkes ; the development and
prosperity of the Art Institute are due
in great part to the energy, enthusiasm,
and public spirit of Mr. Charles L.
Hutchinson, its president ; and an end-
less series of widespread donations has
made the name of Dr. D. K. Pearsons
a household word throughout the educa-
tional world.

Among the clubs of mixed member-
ship — most of them mediating between
literature and society — may be men-
tioned the Twentieth Century Club, an
organization of wealthy people with a
taste for private views of passing celeb-
rities. This practice, mutatis mutandis,
is pretty widely diffused throughout Chi-
cago ; a nice discrimination is not inva-
riably shown by every minor association,
and the docility and credulity of our
eager neophytes, when brought face to
face with stranger evangelists of limit-
ed value, cannot yet be classed among
vanishing phenomena. The Contribu-
tors' Club, active at the period of the
Fair, wrote and published its own mag-
azine, until the demand for bricks out-
ran the supply of straw. Its most no-
table achievement was the publication
of a number made up wholly of arti-
cles (accompanied by facsimiles in many
strange languages) contributed by dis-
tinguished foreigners who were associ-
ated with the Exposition. The Chicago
Chapter of the University Guild of the
Northwestern University has been ac-
customed to hold each winter a series of

meetings at the houses of persons promi-
nent in society ; it thus bridges over the
thirteen miles that separate Evanston
from Chicago, and gives added cohesion
to a great institution whose topographical
dispersedness is surpassed only by its
enormous enrollment. I may note here,
in passing, that the property of this uni-
versity amounts in value to more than
four million dollars.

Literature proper in Chicago is re-
presented by The Dial ; here, too, the
special slant is toward the educational.
The Dial is well known and much es-
teemed by the schools and libraries of
the whole country. It is as irreproach-
able in its ideals as in its typography ;
but its tone of somewhat cold correct-
ness causes one to feel that there is a
certain lack of temperament.

" Literary Chicago," thanks to the
successive advents of many emissaries
from both East and West, is finally con-
scious of itself ; its consciousness has
once or twice taken the form of an " au-
thors' reading," — with moderate in-
terest on the part of the public. The
literary people of Chicago, freed from
rivalry by the absence of prizes to strug-
gle for, live together in a sympathetic
and companionable spirit that has been
more than once remarked by visitors
who have themselves borne the burden
and heat of effort in the Eastern arena.

Chicago is said to be the largest book-
manufacturing city in the country ; its
number of " publishers " is in proportion.
However, we need not pause over its
tons of school-books, nor its mountains
of German and Scandinavian Bibles in-
tended for the farmhouses of the North-
west, nor its cheap and sometimes un-
authorized editions of authors favorably
or unfavorably known, but destined in
either case for the railway train and
the news-stand. Yet Chicago possesses
at least one old-established and conser-
vative publishing firm of high rank (to-
gether with the largest book-shop in the
country), and one or two newer firms

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

545

that stand for a notably delicate and re-
fined practice in book-making. Chicago
also enjoys the further celebrity that
comes from the publication of the quaint
Chap -Book. This highly individual
semi-monthly, having lately enlarged it-
self and subdued the intensity of a yel-
low tone reflected from London, may
now be fully accepted as an embodied
response to Chicago's long and earnest
prayer, — that for a magazine.

From such educational exactions as
have occupied the preceding pages the
public have but two apparent refuges, —
the parks and the theatres. Within the
past few years the idea of the value of
leisure and recreation has been steadily
gaining ground ; the Saturday half-holi-
day has become quite general during the
summer months, and the great system
of public parks now yields the fullest
service that even the most prophetic of
its originators could have foreseen. A
Saturday afternoon in August spent in
Washington Park is recommended with
confidence to the casual tourist, in place
of the "Levee," the Stockyards, and the
contemplation of the "submerged tenth,"
all of which have been too much favored
of late by the stranger eye.

The park area of Chicago is soon
to be increased by the enlargement of
the Lake Front to two hundred acres.
Four fifths of this area will be obtained
by filling in beyond the shore line, and
the material will come from the excava-
tions for the great drainage canal, upon
which work has been prosecuted for
the past five years. This undertaking
— said to be the most extensive piece of
engineering now doing in the world —
will eventually turn the waters of Lake
Michigan into the Mississippi River, and
will give a final solution to Chicago's
vexatious sewage problem. Roughly
speaking, the canal will be thirty miles
long, and will cost thirty million dollars.
The enterprise has thus far escaped the
contamination of partisan politics.

A splendid project to connect the Lake

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480.

Front with Jackson Park by a six-mile
boulevard along the lake shore has lately
received a serious official check, but will
probably be revived upon the coming of
better times — or of a better governor.
The city, in its increasing aptitude for
relaxation, is learning, despite this check,
to turn the lake to ^proper account. A
score of yachts, anchored within the
" breakwater," point to the opportunities
for one kind of pleasure, and for the past
two or three seasons the south shore has
witnessed a determined effort toward an-
other kind. Lake-bathing, after many
years of failure, has at last been estab-
lished ; and on a summer Sunday the
half-mile stretch of piers, kiosks, and
bungalows along the beach is thronged by
bathers enjoying the fresh-water equiva-
lent of Nantasket and Coney Island.

Little can be said for the local theatre,
which sinks lower in the esteem of the
better class as it rises higher in the es-
teem of the populace. However, a dirty
dollar contains as many cents as a clean
one, and the dirty dollars are in the
large majority, besides. Not much can
be found for approval beyond the efforts
of Miss Anna Morgan, of the Chicago
Conservatory, who gives infrequent per-
formances of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and
the like, — a work which she carries on
with great enthusiasm and optimism,
despite the indifference of the middle
public and the resentment of the news-
paper press. When one has noted a
Greek play brought to town by a coun-
try college, and has recalled that the
most respectable successes in the way of
American light opera originated in Chi-
cago, little more remains to justify atten-
tion. Certainly, no one need remember
the immense effort and mistaken expen-
diture undergone to make Chicago a
"producing centre " of — extravaganza.

To the many active educational agen-
cies already mentioned, add, of course,
the public schools, the parochial schools,
and the variety of small and dispersed
private establishments that, even in a

546

The Upward Movement in Chicago.

town so rampantly democratic, must live
their own lives and enter into the gen-
eral count. Education, education, and
again education. Is education the safe-
guard of the res publica ? Then perhaps
we are safe. Is character ? Then per-
haps we 'are not. Instruction is booming ;
principle is hardly holding its own. The
recklessness and conscieneelessness of the
earlier Western day were barely showing
some sign of abatement, when the voice
of a proletariat, disappointed in the ef-
ficacy of its own fetish and disposed
to a clamorous and summary revision of
meum and tuum. began to make itself
heard. Although the city of Chicago, a
year ago, indeed pronounced most out-
spokenly for honor and principle, still
the persistent agitation of such matters
could have but one effect upon a com-
munity that, for the first time within a
quai'ter of a century, was suffering a se-
rious check in its course of unparalleled
prosperity : a partial disintegration of
its moral fibre, a serious slackening of
the sense of obligation and of the integ-
rity of contract, and a diminished adhe-
sion to the principles of common com-
mercial honesty. This lapse may be
but temporary ; certainly the only basis
upon which a great and complicated com-
munity can conduct its affairs is not far
to seek nor difficult to find.

It remains to state the effort which
the city is putting forth on behalf of the
whole Middle West, — a propaganda of
music, art, and literature which is little
suspected in the East, and not fully real-
ized at home.

The Public Library of Chicago has
become a bureau of inquiry for the whole
country ; it is constantly furnishing data
on all sorts of subjects, dignified or triv-
ial, to all sorts of people. The coun-
try editor, the country physician, the ex-
Chicagoan, and the new woman appear
to be the chief beneficiaries ; not a day
passes in which information is not fur-
nished (at a moderate charge) to persons

far beyond the designated scope of the
institution. It is here that the club wo-
man comes most fully into view, and aids
to her study in history, art, language,
and literature are provided on the most
extensive scale.

The extension system of the Univer-
sity of Chicago reaches through eight
States, — from Minnesota to Kentucky,
from Ohio to Nebraska. Eighty-five of
the courses in its lecture study depart-
ment are conducted outside of the city
itself. The correspondence study depart-
ment engages the services of sixty in-
structors, and meets the requirements of
six hundred students.

The musical propaganda has been con-
ducted in large part by the Chicago
Orchestra, which has been in the habit of
interrupting its home series of concerts
two or three times during the season
to give performances in outside towns.
These concerts have usually been secured
on the basis of a guarantee fund, and
the orchestra has appeared in places as
distant and as far apart as Pittsburg,
Toronto, St. Paul, Omaha, and Louisville.

A similar service for painting is per-
formed by the Central Art Association,
originated by Mr. Hamlin Garland and
Mr. Lorado Taft, and headed at present
by Mr. Halsey C. Ives. This association
aims to aid the progress of the student
and art-lover in interior towns by giving
lectures on art, by suggesting courses of
reading on related subjects, by sending
out reproductions in pictorial form of
the great masterpieces, and (chiefly) by
arranging circulating exhibitions of the
best obtainable examples of recent Amer-
ican art. It also conducts Arts for
America, a periodical in which archi-
tecture, decoration, and ceramics are dis-
cussed, as well as painting and sculpture.
This association, devoted to Western art
and to the plein air idea, has brought to
light fresh talent in Indiana, Colorado,
and Texas, and has given to these work-
ers, as well as to many home painters, a
wide currency through the West by send-

The Training of Teachers.

547

ing small but carefully composed collec-
tions to many towns in the Mississippi
Valley and beyond. In future a more
pronounced cooperation on the part of
Eastern artists is assured, and it should
seem an easy matter for any Western
community that wishes to inform itself
about the most recent and peculiar devel-
opments of American art to gratify its
desire. The latest organization in this
field is the Society of Western Artists,
which has established a " circuit " com-
prising half a dozen of the largest West-
ern towns, and undertakes perambula-
tory displays of contemporary art.

The foregoing pages may serve to
show the stage that has been reached by
the Chicago of to-day, and to indicate
what the city is doing for itself, for the
West, and for the world at large. That
further and more remarkable stages are
yet to be arrived at may well be grant-
ed to an energy, ambition; and initiative
in which no hint of failure or of pause
is to be detected. Sixty years ago the
Pottawatomies held their last war-dance
within a few steps of the site of Chicago's

city hall ; to-day the centre of popula-
tion of the United States is but a few
miles south of our limits. The bulk of
Chicago already shuts off Eastern pro-
spects from Western eyes, and indica-
tions abound that the city is coming to
assume an equal importance in the eyes
of the South. The increasing centrality
of her position, coupled with the widen-
ing exercise of her powers, appears to
her confident and rather arrogant mind a
sufficient earnest of her final supremacy,
commercial, intellectual, and political.
Material prosperity is already won ; a
high intellectual status seems assured ;
and her principal concern for another
generation — the extirpation of the moral
and civic evil that has reared itself be-
hind the back of a resolute but too pre-
occupied endeavor — will be prosecuted,
let it be hoped, in that spirit of civic re-
generation whose signs are just now so
encouraging and so abundant. The ab-
sence of such signs would be doubly dis-
couraging in a day wherein a city life
seems indicated with growing certainty
as the future condition of the greater
part of the American people.

Henry B. Fuller.

THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS : THE OLD VIEW OF CHILDHOOD,

AND THE NEW.

DURING the Middle Ages, it was a
pastime of philosophical monks to write
treatises closing up " mental and moral
science." In similar fashion, in our own
day, it is assumed by many schoolmen
that there is a definite and final " code
of principles " of education. In educa-
tion as in theology, it is granted, there
may be sects, but the general impression
exists that there are certain fundamental
laws that are final, and certain definite
principles with which teachers may be
fitted out for their work. This it is fair
to call the old, even mediaeval view of

education ; and the modern or scientific
view is in such sharp contrast to it that,
at this late time, it ought not to be ne-
cessary to explain the difference. To
get some first-hand knowledge of what
the normal schools are doing in this mat-
ter, and to ascertain to what extent the
new conception of education has been
accepted by them and is now followed
in the training of teachers, I have re-
cently visited all the normal schools of
Massachusetts.

As an illustration of the mediaeval con-
ception of the mind and of the proper

548

The Training of Teachers.

method of training it, I quote from the
catalogue of one of the best of these
schools an explanation of the method
whereby teachers are trained there. In
this explanation the tone of mediaeval
dogmatism — the tone of certainty and
finality — is obvious. The italics are
mine.

"The control of conduct of others
through an appeal to their wills, of their
wills through their feelings, and of their
feelings through ' their intelligence, is
made a matter of clear knowledge. The
relation of free will to moral responsi-
bility is revealed. The law of the de-
velopment of power and of formation of
habits by the activity of pupils them-
selves is traced from the simplest forms
of perception through memory, imagina-
tion, reason, and all other kinds of men-
tal action, even to the development of
character by means of self-direction and
self-control. The principles which de-
termine the best methods of teaching are
carefully grounded upon the necessary
sequence of the different kinds of psy-
chical action. The principles which de-
termine the rational government of chil-
dren are based upon the laws of the
creation of power and habits through
self-activity."

The principles and many methods of
education, one would infer from such an
announcement, can be easily distributed
among teachers ; and thus equipped, they
may go forth prepared to practice the
most difficult work that man or woman
can undertake.

I visited, among others, a normal
school which stands, in the practical
school world, for all that is sound and
modern. There are few schools supe-
rior to it in the perfection of detail in
equipment. Its teachers are earnest, and
devoted to education. I listened to a
recitation in work which covers the sub-
jects that usually appear under the head
of psychology and principles of educa-
tion. The following is an account of the
recitation, slightly abbreviated : —

" What is conscience ? " was the teach-
er's first question.

" Conscience," said the pupil who was
called upon, " is the power by which we
know the moral quality of our choices,
and feel the approbation or guilt which
follows choice."

" Is conscience an infallible guide ? "

This question caused some confusion,
but the following answer finally won ap-
proval : —

" In one sense conscience is infallible,
and in another it is not. Conscience is
not infallible in judging what is the
highest good ; it is infallible in affirm-
ing that we should choose in accordance
with our sense of obligation."

" How, then, are we to avoid the dan-
ger of erring judgment ? "

" We must take the utmost pains to
know what is the highest good, and then
we must follow this highest good as a
choice."

" How do we feel when we make right
choice ? "

" We feel that we are doing right."

" And in the case of a wrong choice ? "

" We feel that we are doing wrong."

" Always ? "

An interesting discussion, admirably
conducted as an illustration in the art of
teaching, followed. Some pupils volun-
teered original views, and without an-
swering them or otherwise curbing them
for a time, the teacher allowed free dis-
cussion. One girl said she knew another
girl who maintained that if a person did
what her conscience told her was right,
she did right. Another pupil told of
her Sunday-school teacher, who, when
asked whether theatre-going was right
or wrong, replied that theatre-going was
not right for her own conscience, but if
her pupils' consciences approved such
conduct, it was right for them.

Finally, the teacher observed that there
are evidently many notions of what things
are right and what things are wrong, as
the members of the class had indicated.
" Since there are so many human stan-

The Training of Teachers.

dards, what are we to do about it ? May
these luuiKin standards all be wrong ? "

Class (iu chorus) : " Yes, sir."

" Is there any such thing, then, as an
absolute right?"

Class : " Yes, sir."

" Where shall we find this absolute
standard ? " asked the teacher, calling
upon an individual.

"In the Word of God."

" The Word of God, then, makes a
revelation of God's will, and gives us a
standard of absolute right ? "

Class : " Yes, sir."

At this moment the Unexpected Pupil
held up her hand and took part in the
proceedings. She wanted to know what
people who do not have the Bible at
hand are going to do in making choices.
There are many thousands of such peo-
ple in the world. There are the Chinese,
for example.

The teacher waved off the interrup-
tion with his hand. " That is a minor
matter," he said.

"I can't see that it is," replied the
girl, trembling, but standing her ground
bravely. " I can't see how, on this theo-
ry, these people ever know what to do."

" Is there a God ? " demanded the
teacher solemnly.

" Yes, sir," she said, with more as-
surance in her words than in her accent.

" Is there a Word of God ? " was the
next deep-toned question.

" Yes, sir."

" Well, then ! "

*' But these people have no Bible."

" Well, we have, have we not ? "

" Yes, sir, but " —

" Well, let us take what we have, and
follow it. We are sure of this. That
is enough for us. Let the other matter
rest."

The hand waved off further discus-
sion of the subject authoritatively. The
Unexpected Pupil sat down, and looked
at her hands gravely.

Some illustrations were offered at this
point by the class, and when the teacher

again took up the thread of his argu-
ment, he quoted Whately's analogy, writ-
ing on the blackboard the following : —

Sun Watch Business

Word of God Conscience Character

In explanation of this scheme, the
teacher pointed out that the business
man regulates his business affairs by the
time of his watch, and the time of the
watch is regulated by comparing it with
the sun time. This sun time is given
by the sun-dial, and the teacher brought
into the class a sun-dial to illustrate this
point objectively. So also is it with con-
science. Man is regulated in his char-
acter by his conscience, as the watch
regulates the business man's appoint-
ments. But neither conscience nor watch
is absolute. They must be regulated by
a higher power. As the business man
regulates and corrects his watch by the
sun-dial, so we must regulate and cor-
rect our consciences by consulting the
Bible. We must see to it that our con-
sciences are in harmony with the Bible,
as the business man sees to it that the
watch agrees with the sun-dial, for God
directly reveals himself through the
Bible as the sun reveals itself through
the agency of the sun-dial.

The Unexpected Pupil was again upon
her feet. There was a quiver of ado-
lescent fervor, as she nervously demand-
ed, " Is the sun-dial infallible ? The
sun-dial does not give to the watch the
time that we use."

The teacher's hand waved her off.
However, she stood firm, and insisted
that the time which we use is not the sun
time. The sun-dial is not the infallible
guide. We modify the sun-dial time
before the business man uses it.

The teacher, more in sorrow than in
anger, suffered the interruption, and ad-
mitted that what she said was true ; that
there is a difference between sun and
watch time. He intended to be kind
and gentle in his manner, and this eager
questioner was at last quieted. She did

550

The Training of Teachers,

not press her point, and the teacher pro-
ceeded to drive home and to clinch his
point. There is no absolute human
standard, but we have an absolute stan-
dard at hand in the Word of God, if we
search it in the right spirit. Moreover,
we must proceed in this way, for " that
servant which knew his lord's will, and
prepared not himself, neither did ac-
cording to his will, shall be beaten with
many stripes. But he that knew not,
and did commit things worthy of stripes,
shall be beaten with few stripes."

"What, then, is the position of con-
science ? " asked the teacher finally, sum-
ming up.

" The conscience acts when we choose :
hence it implies the action of the intel-
lect, sensibility, and will."

"What are the marks of a strong
will ? "

" Strength of will is shown by self-
control — that is, by the control of the
natural impulses when they are in oppo-
sition to conscience — and by controlling
other minds."

" How is the will cultivated ? "

" The will is cultivated by cultivating
the intellect, which enables the mind to
judge more wisely what is the highest
good ; by listening to the voice of con-
science in regulating the natural im-
pulses ; by resolving to do always what
ought to be done."

In the same manner, a number of
principles relative to what is learned
from the study of the will were stated
in accurate form. Finally this question
was put : " What does the moral train-
ing of the child require ? "

" Knowledge," was the exact reply,
" that he may know what he ought to do,
and, later on, that he may know why he
ought to do it."

" How would you go about teaching a
child what he ought to do ? "

There was some fumbling for an an-
swer. One pupil thought a child learned
largely by imitation.

" But what would you do first ? "

" Tell and show him what to do."

" Suppose he would not do it then ? "

The pupil hesitated.

" Require him to do it ? " asked the
teacher suggestively. " Would not you
have him do the thing ? "

" Yes."

" And as he grows able to understand,
then " —

" Explain why he ought to do the
thing."

"Yes, correct," said the teacher ap-
provingly. " You would teach the child,
in other words, to control himself. By
requiring him to do it, by his doing it,
and finally by explaining it, the moral
training is accomplished. How many of
you now see the principle in the moral
training of children ? "

Nearly all hands were raised. The
hand of the Unexpected Pupil was
among the exceptions, but she kept her
own counsel.

" What are the steps in the moral
training of children ? "

" Right motives to induce them to
choose correctly, the exertion of the will
in doing what is right, practice till good
habits are established."

The recitation concluded with a brief
recapitulation of the study of the sensi-
bilities and the will.

At the close of the recitation, printed
leaflets were passed to the members of
the class, containing th» material for the
next lesson. The teacher explained that,
in preparing the lesson, the pupils should
first think out for themselves the laws
therein contained, and after thinking
them out thoroughly by this introspective
method they should carefully memorize
the definitions, in the precise form that
they would find upon the paper. He
especially wished that this form should
be accurately memorized, for these laws
of thought were of the utmost impor-
tance, and the pupils should have them
stored away in their minds in a form
that they could never forget.

The Training of Teachers.

551

This illustration gives a clearer idea
than any description could give how one
of the principles of education, the im-
portant principle of moral training, is
administered. In the school referred to,
this course includes what usually goes
under the head of psychology and peda-
gogy. It begins with the natural en-
vironment of man, and proceeds to an
analysis of the physical laws of his being,
then to the modes of his spiritual ac-
tivity, that the student may acquire " a
knowledge of the conditions and products
of the mind's activity, and the ability to
use this knowledge in the education of
children."

While the recitation and the work in
this course may suggest many things,
the reason for introducing the incident
here is to illustrate the underlying as-
sumption that there are established prin-
ciples, and that the preparation of teach-
ers consists in handing down to them a
code. This purpose constitutes one part
of normal work ; the other part deals
with the application of the principles, in
the form of methods for teaching, with
special reference to the various subjects
of the common school curriculum. It
is clear that if there is any flaw in the
original principles, the value of this
elaborate system of method-teaching will
be undermined.

Of the six other normal schools of
Massachusetts which I visited, all main-
tain an elaborate system of teaching
methods dependent upon this assumed
code of established principles ; but the
departments of pedagogy in two of these
schools do not recognize the existence of
such a code, — an opposing tendency that
will be discussed later. In one of the
four others, the instructor in psychology
and pedagogy on the occasion of my visit
was attempting to analyze, by the intro-
spective method, the elements of moral
consciousness. The leaflet system was
not in use, and while there was less evi-
dence of blind memorizing and the dis-
cussions were freer, nevertheless, the es-

sential .dogma, that principles of educa-
tion directly applicable to the teaching
of children could be derived by analysis
of adult consciousness, was the basis of
the work. At a third school, the in-
struction in psychology and principles of
education was not in progress at the
time of my visit, but the plan as outlined
to me by the instructor was in accord
with those previously described. The
system of the fifth school was practically
identical with that of the school first de-
scribed. One recitation that I heard was
upon the formation of judgments.

" What is a judgment ? " asked the
teacher, as he picked off a card from a
pack containing the names of the mem-
bers of the class.

" A judgment," replied the pupil upon
whom the lot fell, " is a relation between
concepts."

" What is the act of judging ? " was
asked as a fresh card was turaed.

"The act of judging," said the pupil,
" is the act of knowing that the concept
of the species is included in the concept
of the genus."

" Give an example."

" In the judgment ' a dog is an an-
imal,' the act of judging is the act of
knowing that the concept ' dog ' is in-
cluded in the concept ' animal.' "

" In what two ways may concepts be
compared ? "

" Concepts may be compared in two
ways, — as to content and as to extent."

" What is a judgment of content ? "

" A judgment of content is the know-
ing that the content of one judgment is
Included in the content of another."

The wording of this answer was not
considered quite correct by the attentive
class, and a correction was made.

" What two kinds of judgment of ex-
tent are there ? " asked the teacher.

" The two kinds of judgment of extent
are common judgments of extent and
scientific judgments of extent."

" What is a common judgment of ex-
tent ? " and the turning of the card

552

The Training of Teachers.

brought to her feet a ruddy-faced young
woman, who said with considerable ra-
pidity, " A common judgment of extent
is the knowing that judgment of extent is
included in the concept of another, with-
out genii or species."

A titter admonished her, and she has-
tily corrected her statement : " I mean,
without genii or specie!."

A peal of laughter followed, and the
teacher kindly tried to smooth matters.
Thus encouraged, the ruddy-faced young
psychologist tried again. " A common
judgment of extent is the knowing," she
said carefully, " that the judgment of ex-
tent is included in the concept of another,
without generalized species."

This answer caused a second peal of
laughter, and a turn of the cards brought
a fresh contestant, who said in a tone of
convincing certainty, " A common judg-
ment of extent is the knowing that one
judgment of extent is included in the
judgment of another, without thinking
them as genus or species."

" Are you sure you are correct ? "

" I think I am."

Another card was turned, and the fresh
recruit said, feeling her way from word
to word, " A common judgment of ex-
tent is the knowing that one judgment
of extent is included in the judgment of
another without being included as a spe-
cies of the genus."

This seemed the correct answer, and
the inquiry into scientific judgments was
next taken up in the same manner.

Space is given to the unfortunate con-
tretemps that occurred, not as an evi-
dence that lessons are not always learned,
for accidents will occur in the best reg-
ulated schools, but as an illustration of
the means by which these lessons are ac-
quired. The course in principles in this
school comprises one hundred and eighty
recitations in psychology, sixty in the
principles of education, forty in logic,
and forty in the history of education.
All of the teaching, with the exception
of that in the history of education, is

done by the gentleman who conducted
the recitation quoted.

The purpose of this article is not to
deal with the problem of the preparation
of teachers in its local aspects, but the
illustrations are taken from schools in
Massachusetts upon the assumption that
the problem as it is in Massachusetts is
typical of general tendencies throughout
the nation. A limited area of observa-
tion was chosen to warrant concrete and
specific statement, and Massachusetts was
selected for the historical reason that this
State has been a leader in the systems of
preparing teachers. More than one third
of the graduates of the normal schools in
Massachusetts have passed through the
courses in the first and last of the schools
where the recitations that I have quoted
were heard, and I venture to say that,
with the exception of the graduates of
one other school, practically all the nor-
mal school graduates in Massachusetts
up to the year 1896 memorized similar
definitions, and were drilled systemati-
cally in these pretensions of settled prin-
ciples of education under the name of
" psychology and principles of educa-
tion." The ruling tendency in the pre-
paration of teachers proceeds on the as-
sumption that a code of principles has
been absolutely established upon the basis
of the so-called introspective psychology,
with its tastefully worded definitions and
artistic classifications.

Now, this form of psychology was in
the zenith of its popularity during the
Middle Ages, — just after the time when
a number of the sedate monks wearily
withdrew from the mathematical dis-
putes over the number of dancing de-
mons a needle-point could comfortably
accommodate, and fell to revealing, from
their inner consciousness, the construc-
tive principles by which God made the
universe. The same view of psychology
is the basis of much of the work done to-
day in education, — in practice and the-
ory, — although it has long since been

The Training of Teachers.

553

abandoned in almost all other practical
applications of the phenomena of mind.
The teachers who promulgate these pre-
tensions of the firm establishment of edu-
cational principles are honest and sin-
cere to the core, and they are confident
of the efficacy of the principles when pro-
perly applied according to the specific
recipes which normal schools give their
pupils. They believe what they say with
the same fervid enthusiasm with which
the ancients believed in the flatness of
the earth. They come by these concep-
tions honestly and legitimately, for they
were taught to accept them by their
teachers as they are now retailing them
to their own pupils. Thirty years ago
this was the psychology of reputable col-
leges, and when the normal schools be-
gan to expand, it was considered proper,
since teaching had to do with the train-
ing of the soul, to give instruction in the
science which deals with the soul. Con-
sequently a cargo of this old college psy-
chology was shoveled into the normal
schools, without much, if any, selection.
The modern world has inherited this
medieval psychology as the horse has in-
herited his fetlock, not because he has
any use for it, but simply because his
ancestor had one.

But the cause of education is too im-
portant to the highest interests of the
state, and of the individuals who com-
pose it, to permit personal respect for
good men and women to obscure the fact
that the preparation of teachers is con-
ducted upon a basis of the hallucinations
of mediaeval mysticism, — on the assump-
tion that the problems of mind have all
been solved, and that classification and
definition constitute the solution. It was
a puerile ' confusion even in the Middle
Ages, for Aristotle had pointed out, cen-
turies before, that there is an essential dis-
tinction between the state of possessing
wealth and the ability to define wealth.
Of course, a large amount of the time de-
voted to this obsolete psychology is spent
in making harmless definitions and clas-

sifications which bear the same relation
to modern psychology as those of Lin-
naeus bear to modern botany. Except
for the loss of time and energy that might
be usefully applied, there can be no great
objection to classifying judgments as
those of " extent " and " content ; " a
farmer might, without injury to his pro-
duce, separate his pea-pods for market
into those which contain an even num-
ber of peas and those which contain an
odd number.

On the other hand, there are certain
positive reasons why the institutions
which pretend to prepare teachers and
to lay the foundation for our educational
system and methods should not be re-
stricted in their work to the dogmas of
defunct scholasticism. The development
of the modern sciences of biology, an-
thropology, history, and genetic psycho-
logy has brought to light facts in radical
conflict with most of the old principles,
in the absolute and universal form in
which they are promulgated. One of the
fundamental conflicts between the old
and the new arises from the fact that
none of the older philosophies conceived
the possibility that the child in its de-
velopment from infancy to maturity could
proceed on any other than a straight,
unbroken line, or that at any stage of its
growth it could essentially change in
character. Consequently, an analysis was
made of the mind simply at maturity,
and education has proceeded upon the
naif assumption that these laws must ap-
ply equally well to any stage of growth.
If this assumption be not true, and if the
child in process of development is es-
sentially different from the adult, then
it is unfortunately clear that mediaeval
psychology and the pedagogical methods
derived from it, which now constitute the
stock in trade for the preparation of
most teachers, rest on dogmatic founda-
tions that are false.

Embryology throws some suggestive
light upon the radical difference of child-
hood from maturity. The human foetus

554

The Training of Teachers.

roughly follows the disjointed line of
development which marks the evolution
of animal life. Up to four months be-
fore birth the organism is essentially
an aquatic animal, provided with ru-
dimentary gill slits and the developed
nerves of equilibration characteristic of
aquatic life. At a later stage it has a
coat of hair, and a tail longer than its
legs, with the necessary muscles for
moving this organ. This class of sin-
gular phenomena constantly appear dur-
ing the embryological period ; they are
nourished and grow rapidly for a time,
as if the whole destiny of the organism
were to become some one of the lower
forms of animal life. Then the purpose
is more or less suddenly changed. New
forms and new organs appear, displa-
cing or absorbing the old, and the or-
ganism seems to obtain a new destiny,
which in turn may wholly or partly dis-
appear. Some of these forms do not
wholly disappear, and physiologists now
enumerate in the adult human organism
more than one hundred parts of the
body which have no known function, and
whose presence cannot be explained ex-
cept upon the theory that they are rem-
ants, or rudimentary organs, of some
of these broken tendencies through
which the organism has passed. Such
is the pineal gland, which was declared
by Descartes to be the seat of the soul,
but is now recognized as the remnant
of the organ of vision as still found in
lower reptiles. The semi-lunar fold at
the internal angle of the eye is the rem-
nant of the third eyelid of marsupials.
The vermiform appendage, which is
such a menace* to human life, is the
remnant of an enormous organ in herbi-
vora. The ear muscles, which in few
people are functional, are recognized as
rudiments of muscles of much use to
lower animals. In the earlier stages of
the human fo3tus, the brain is made up
of three parts, of which the hinder part
is by far the longest, as in the case of
lower animals. There is then no trace

of the cerebral hemispheres which con-
stitute so large a part of the adult brain,
just as there is 110 trace in the lower or-
ders. The mid-brain later shows the same
enlargement for the centres of sight and
hearing that these portions have in birds
and certain fishes. Still later the pro-
portions are reversed : the hind-brain
dwindles away relatively, to become the
slight enlargement of the spinal cord at
the base of the brain, known as the me-
dulla, oblongata ; the mid-brain shrivels,
to become the small nodules known as
the quadrigemina ; and the narrow neck
connecting the fore-brain and the mid-
brain swells, to become the huge cerebral
hemispheres. Embryological growth is
clearly not a harmonious development.
The line of growth is broken, proceed-
ing in one direction for a time, and then
suddenly turning off in a new direction,
as if the organism were continually mak-
ing mistakes and correcting them before
it is too late. The path of growth is
strewn with the remnants of these aban-
doned tendencies.

Moreover, the rate of growth is not
constant, but proceeds by fits and starts.
It would be patently absurd, in embry-
ology, to attempt to apply the laws of
activity of the matured foetus to any of
the lower stages. There is a species
of land salamander provided with lungs
instead of gills, but which is an evolu-
tionary product of the common aquatic
salamander that breathes by means of
gills. If the young of this land sala-
mander be cut from the mother at a
certain period before normal birth, and
thrown into the water, they swim and
breathe through their gills ; but if they
be thrown into water after normal birth,
they drown. In the early stage they are
water animals, and the laws of water
animals govern them ; but if left to ma-
ture they become land animals. The
same principle, we must admit, applies
to the development of the human child.

In biology, the phenomenon of birth
is merely a stage in a process, and im-

The Training of Teachers.

555

plies nothing of a revolutionaiy nature
in the sense in which scholasticism has
regarded it. In fact, as respects changes
in internal structure of the organism
and in psychic phenomena, birth is in
all probability of far less momentous sig-
nificance than adolescence, which takes
place years after birth. The same pro-
cess of growth, by uncompleted tenden-
cies, is everywhere observable. Up to
the seventh or eighth year there is a
very rapid growth of the body in height
and weight ; but from this time until
the beginning of the pubertal changes,
growth is relatively very slow. At the
end of the third year, the brain has
reached two thirds of its size at matu-
rity, and from this period until the sev-
enth or eighth year the rate of growth
is slower. At the latter age the brain
has practically reached its maximum,
though growth does not actually cease
until late in life. The senses of touch,
taste, and smell are tolerably well de-
veloped at birth, but hearing is not ac-
quired for some days, and the complete
coordination of the eyes is not accom-
plished until several months have passed.
There are distinct periods for learning
to creep, to walk, and to talk, and each
advance for a time almost monopolizes
the organism's attention and energy.
Some of these accomplishments are not
wholly, nor essentially, the result of
training ; swallows kept caged until af-
ter their usual time for learning to fly,
and then released, fly readily. The feats
are the developed results of forces which
" ripen " internally at approximately
definite times.

Training, to be beneficial, and not
positively injurious, must follow closely
the lines of these internal forces. In
the matter of speech development, Lu-
kens, Tracy, Steinhal, Schultze, Kuss-
nuuil, Preyer, and others have worked
out very clearly the details that illus-
trate the internal development of muscle
and nerve. In these coarser forms of
education, at least, the teacher's function

is identical with that of the nurseryman,
who, though he cannot make trees grow,
can yet assist their growth by providing
proper food and cultivation. The peda-
gogue's notion that he can teach chil-
dren to observe, to compare, to judge,
and to reason, at any time or period of
development he pleases, is a pretty con-
ceit, very like the conceit of the farmer
who deludes himself with the notion that
it is he who makes trees grow. Muscles
come into functional maturity by periodic
growths ; the larger and more fundamen-
tal muscles arrive at maturity before the
smaller. Yet the present principles of
education require nearly all hand-work
as now taught in the schools to be given
in the reverse order. Hancock has shown
by careful experiments that the function-
al development of the fine muscles, used
in much of the kindergarten and primary
school work, does not reach its height
until much later in childhood than our
school principles have provided for. Dr.
Elmer E. Brown, Miss Shinn, and Dr.
Lukens, in their studies of children's
spontaneous drawings, repeatedly chron-
icle periods of intense activity, almost
approaching a mania for drawing, sepa-
rated by periods in which there is slight
interest in the exercise.

There appears during the time of rapid
brain and body growth of children up to
the seventh or eighth year a number of
distinct classes of psychic phenomena,
as singular in their way as are the ru-
dimentary organs on the physical side.
Some of these phenomena, such as doll-
playing by girls, have a distinct bearing
upon adult activities ; but there are
others which seem to have no destiny
whatever in the adult activities of civ-
ilized man. Frequently they appear in
opposition to his best interests, just as
the water-breathing habit of the embry-
onic land salamander appears in oppo-
sition to the activities of its matured
destiny. Among the tendencies which
manifest themselves in the early stages
of childhood, and later dwindle away or

556

The Training of Teachers.

wholly disappear, are the bullying and
teasing proclivities of children, instincts
to fight without adequate provocation,
to fear imaginary monsters of the dark,
to fear feathers and fuzzy things, to
imagine life in inanimate things, to wor-
ship fetishes in a rudimentary way, and
to maintain generally a most singular
parallelism with early stages of growth
of civilization in the race. President
G. Stanley Hall, Professor Earl Barnes,
their students, arid others have collected
a mass of curious phenomena of this sort,
which is forcibly suggestive of the well-
ing up into early childhood of ancestral
traits, that come and go as did the gill
slits in the embryo, and are directed in
time and method of appearance by forces
beyond the jurisdiction of the school-
master. In embryology, the view is now
commonly accepted that these succeeding
tendencies, though opposing, bear a ne-
cessary functional relation one to the
other. The tail of the polliwog is neces-
sary to the development of the legs of
the frog. If the tail be cut off or seri-
ously injured, the animal never reaches
the frog stage.

The conclusion to which these studies
are significantly pointing is the mainte-
nance of a similar law in the psychic
development of the child. These curious
phenomena are not mistakes of nature
nor errors in economy, — a view that scho-
lasticism has impressed upon methods of
education. They are stages of growth
functional and necessary to the healthy
development of the next stages. Dawson,
in his monograph upon human monstros-
ities, develops this law in detail. He
finds that the occurrence of one deform-
ity in embryological growth tends to
make others appear, and that human
monstrosities are largely the result of
arrested development at some one stnge.
If this law is general and is applicable
to the period of childhood, as classified
facts now strongly indicate, the dogmas
of present school work which make a
business of suppressing and maiming the

tadpole tails of child nature, because
they seem of no use to the adult period,
need critical overhauling. The kinder-
garten, for example, takes away the
child's doll, and gives it block pyramids
to play with ; and the whole effort is
distinctly to suppress the emotional, and
to develop the intellectual, according to
the codes and forms of adult thinking.
These conditions indicate clearly that
there is now urgently needed a pedagogy
of the instincts, which will necessarily
be radically different from the pedagogy
of adult human reason that has been
forced upon childhood by introspective
psychology.

From the seventh or eighth year,
when the body materially slackens its
rate of growth and the brain practically
reaches its maximum size, until the pu-
bertal changes begin to appear, there is
an enigmatic period upon which investi-
gation has as yet shed little light further
than to show that it is a period distinctly
different in essential features from that
which precedes and from that which fol-
lows. Accurate measurements of thou-
sands of children in various countries, by
Bowditch, Pagliani, Hertel, Erismann,
Hansen, Roberts, and others, demonstrate
that growth of the body at this time is
relatively slow. From the psychic point
of view there are few evidences of the
appearance of new tendencies, and many
already established manifest a dwindling
process. Studies which have been made
of children's progress in drawing, in his-
tory, in arithmetic, during this period, by
several different investigators, agree that
psychic advance is on a dead level, as
is physical growth. Yet current edu-
cation under the established principles
has taken no note of this singular fact.
Dr. A. Caswell Ellis, in his study of the
progressive stages of a child's develop-
ment, suggests of this stage that it is
probably a time of preparation for the
adolescent upheaval. As an animal
pauses before its critical leap to gather
all its forces, so the organism for the

The Training of Teachers.

557

time seems motionless as it draws in all
its available energy preparatory to the
real birth of man.

It would be impossible to summarize
even the main features of the adolescent
period. The adolescent seems to obtain
his heritage from his ancestors in a mad-
dening and perplexing flux and fervor.
There is a violent surging upward of
interests, hopes, ideals, duties new to the
individual, but probably old to the race.
In the early pubertal changes there is
a rapid acceleration in growth, with the
appearance of a large number of new
organs and functions, followed later by a
period of retarded growth as the changes
draw near completion. There are numer-
ous alterations in size, form, and relative
position of the bones and muscles, and
of the heart and arteries, but of course
the crucial changes are those of the sex-
ual organs, the functions of which have
lain dormant throughout childhood. Key
and Hartwell, from studies of thousands
of children and of juvenile death-rates,
find that the periods of maximum growth
are also the periods of maximum power
to resist chronic diseases. Such studies
as those of children's interest in drawing
and history, and their comprehension of
arithmetic, agree in showing an accel-
erated activity in these lines. Lancas-
ter finds, from a study of the biographies
of one hundred musicians, that ninety-
five gave significant evidence of rare
talent before the age of sixteen years.
Of fifty artists, the average age at which
a marked success was achieved was sev-
enteen years ; of one hundred actors,
eighteen years ; of fifty poets, eighteen
years ; of one hundred scientists, eighteen
years ; of one hundred professional men,
twenty-four years ; of one hundred wri-
ters, thirty-one years; of fifty inventors,
thirty-three years. The average time
for leaving home of fifty missionaries was
twenty-two years, and of one hundred
pioneers seventeen years.

Such are a few illustrations of the
more salient contributions that biology

offers education. Other sciences, like
anthropology and history, are equally
rich. It needs no further argument to
show that a mind which gravely accepts
as a psychology for these varying periods
of childhood the classifications of the
adult mind, without even rolling up the
trousers, taking in the waistband, or cut-
ting off the sleeves, cannot be trusted to
establish fixed principles of education.
The fundamental conception of the soul
which flourished when men believed that
it resided in the pineal gland, as the her-
mit crab resides in its borrowed shell,
dominates our education to-day. The
new conception of the child is so radi-
cally different from the old that grave
conflicts occur at the very beginning of
the work of determining methods of
training. We can no longer assert as a
finality, for example, that the logical or-
der, so manifest in adult thinking, is the
order employed throughout the stages of
child development. The facts already
gathered about children's thought pro-
cesses-point to the conclusion that while
much of adolescent thinking and some
of child thinking is by the formal order
of observation, comparison, and judg-
ment, as laid down by the old logicians,
yet the great mass of processes by which
a child's conclusions and actions are
produced belongs to a different order,
the data for which we must seek in the
thought processes of uncivilized man,
and perhaps to some extent in those of
animals. The indications are that the
child is made up of blind instincts and
impulses which well up from within, and
that he jumps to conclusions in a way
that shows the labored processes of the
logical order not only meaningless, but
injurious to the full development of the
processes that follow. The numerous
and careful studies in children's draw-
ings made by Barnes, Brown, Shinn, Lu-
kens, Sully, Ricci, Maitland, and many
others emphatically agree in showing that
the subject does not unfold in the logi-
cal order from observation and compari-

558

The Training of Teachers.

son by synthesis to a conception of the
whole, but, on the contrary, by the reverse
process. Similarly, our present methods
in arithmetic, in science, in music, in
language, assume that the order of the
development of instincts is logical. Ex-
perience has shown that there is some-
thing askew in the matter. Studies in
child psychology are revealing the causes
of this difficulty in the work of instruc-
tion. If there is an order of thinking
which does not appear in adult logic, our
primary methods are in need of revision.
The principles of language-teaching
are giving no end of trouble in practice.
One code of principles asserts that every-
thing that the senses convey to the child's
mind must be immediately drawn out
again in the form of language. I quote
from the code : " The power of language
must keep step with the power of acqui-
sition to hold thought for use." This
dictum is undoubtedly true for some pe-
riods of development. But the scientific
studies of the subject so far made strong-
ly confirm the view that there are cer-
tain growing periods when the mind
seeks to take in much, and to discharge
little in the form of language. The
modern conception of mentality derived
from the facts of the sciences of neuro-
logy and genetic psychology is becoming
enlarged, and we are now not so ready
to declare that consciousness occupies the
whole field of mentality. There are evi-
dences of necessary building processes
in the sphere of mentality that must be
permitted to work a long time before
they rise to the threshold of conscious-
ness, and still longer, perhaps, before con-
sciousness is prepared to put them forth
in language. There is proof that there
are thousands of impressions of sense
which are not sufficient, through lack of
force or immaturity of nerve conduc-
tion, to set up a conscious state, but
which nevertheless accomplish significant
changes in the nervous mechanism be-
low the threshold of consciousness. In
the face of facts of this character, we are

not able to assert, as this old code of
principles asserts, that in all periods of
the child's growth he must be able to ex-
press in language every detail that his
senses take in. There are evidences,
too, of periods that are distinctly absorb-
ent, when there is a paralysis of expres-
sive power, and there are periods when
the reverse is true.

There is another principle, sound and
respectable within its own limits, which
is forced at times by this spirit of uni-
versalizing principles of education to do
injury. It is the principle of habit. It
is true, as the code says, that habits are
formed early in life. At least some
habits are, such as sucking and walking ;
others do not come in until adolescence.
Some, as walking, are useful throughout
the entire life ; others, as sucking, serve
their function, and then die. There are
hundreds of these habits, welled up by
the forces of instinct at approximately
definite periods, of the same character,
which probably perform as essential
though perhaps not as manifest func-
tions, and disappear in the same way.
At their times of activity they probably
are as necessary as the tail-wagging habit
of the tadpole. Yet our education by
the principles of the mediaeval concep-
tion of the soul is constantly at war with
these habits. A list of habits used by
adult man is picked out, consecrated as
virtuous, and taught to babes, in many
cases years before the internal forces
which give these habits a license to live
are developed. Other habits not found
in this class, though in every way, it may
be, as essential to the development of the
child's next stage, are condemned and
crushed by all the artifices known to the
schoolmaster. Habit is a principle, but
not a universal one ; it needs interpreta-
tion for each stage of growth.

It is not needful to multiply illustra-
tions of this necessary conflict between
the old conception of childhood and the
new. In conclusion, therefore, let me
flatly ask : Does the code of so-called

The Training of Teachers.

559

principles, by which many normal schools
for the preparation of teachers work,
rest upon a substantial foundation ? Has
the science of education in these schools
kept abreast of the development of its
sister sciences, and in touch with them ?
If we must answer these questions nega-
tively, what shall we say of the methods
of teaching deduced from them, methods
which the teachers are trained to learn,
trained to believe in, and trained to de-
fend ? But let me emphasize the warn-
ing that the new contributions of science
cannot be offered as substitute dogmas
for the old dogmas. They are not com-
plete nor sufficient, nor by their very na-
ture can they ever be sufficient, to con-
stitute a code of principles for fitting out
teachers as automatons.

Yet it would be untrue to leave the
pessimistic impression that this mediaeval
tendency, which has been described, is an
absolute one, although it is unquestion-
ably the dominant one in normal school
work. In certain schools in different
parts of the country, a tendency based
upon modern conceptions of mind is gain-
ing ground. In two of the nonnal schools
of Massachusetts, for example, the de-
partments of pedagogy and psychology
have abandoned the assumption that prin-
ciples derived from an adult conception
of mind are directly applicable to the
child. It is true that in the methods of
teaching the instruction still proceeds
upon the old lines, but the work in
methods is largely controlled, at least
in Massachusetts, by the demands of
the school officers who engage teachers.
School superintendents naturally believe
in the tenets of faith in which they have
been schooled.

Of these two schools whose pedagogical
and psychological departments form ex-
ceptions to the dominant tendency, the
Westfield Normal School is attempt-
ing constructively and systematically to
work out a course in psychology in con-
sonance with modern views of the child's
development. One recitation that I

heard at this school was in the psy-
chology of childhood. The class was
concluding a study of children's reason-
ing. This study had been begun at
some previous recitation, and a member
was now making a report to the class
upon Superintendent Hancock's study of
children's reasoning, which had recently
been published. Mr. Hancock, as chair-
man of a committee appointed by the
Colorado Teachers' Association, had is-
sued a series of arithmetical questions
for solution by schoolchildren, and had
received replies from two thousand pupils
of various ages. The student gave an
account of this test, the manner in which
the data had been collated, and the in-
ferences which Superintendent Hancock
had drawn. The report showed that
among boys the percentage of error in
reasoning increases from six to nine
years, and decreases thereafter, while
among girls the percentage of error in-
creases until the age of ten years, and
then steadily decreases. This rate of in-
crease and decrease for the two sexes
was illustrated to the class upon large
charts by means of curves. Attention
was drawn to the coincidence between
the result of this study and the tabu-
lations by Dr. Donaldson of the facts
about the physical growth of children,
indicating that the curve of accelerated
growth in children is practically identi-
cal with the curve for accelerated activi-
ty in reasoning. As I was afterwards
informed, a somewhat similar study had
been made, by the pupils of the class,
of data obtained from schoolchildren,
and this report was given as a basis for
comparison of results. The next topic
taken up was the matter of growth in
the weight and the height of children.
Large curves had been drawn upon
charts by members of the class from the
data gathered by Dr. Bowditch, of Bos-
ton, Roberts, of London, and the teach-
ers of Oakland, California, representing
the heights and weights of several thou-
sand children. These charts were com-

560

The Training of Teachers.

pared and discussed by the class under
the direction of the teacher. The com-
parison of the curves from data of these
different investigators showed a remark-
able coincidence in the rates of growth
of children.

The work in psychology and pedagogy
in this school had been only a few months
under the direction of the teacher who
was then in charge, and was yet largely
a matter of plan. The course, as outlined
to me by the instructor, proposes, during
the first year, to introduce the subject of
pedagogy by a series of studies in remi-
niscences of childhood activities. Topics
are assigned, and each member of the
class writes as much as he can remember
of his mental states and conduct as a
child. This exercise, it is considered,
will give the pupils a personal feeling of
acquaintance with the chief mental phe-
nomena ; and this work, conducted on
an inductive basis, will then lead to a
study of the nervous system and general
psychology, presented topically by ma-
terial gathered from a number of au-
thorities. In the final year, a course in
special child psychology, upon the plan
of the work already illustrated, is given.
Under arrangements with certain school
superintendents in the vicinity, series of
questions, prepared by the normal school
instructor, are submitted to the school-
children as topics for exercises in com-
position. Among the topics which have
thus been arranged in the form of ques-
tions, to draw out the children's ideas,
are the geographical interests of children,
their historic sense, fear, reasoning, imi-
tation, and many others. The returns
from the questions, which have ranged in
number from two thousand to forty-five
hundred individual papers, are given to
the members of the normal school class,
to arrange with reference to age, sex,
and the ideas expressed. The results
are compiled and reported to the class
for discussion. Later, reports are pre-
sented upon similar studies which have
been made by other persons, like the re-

port on Superintendent Hancock's study,
already described. The topics chosen
are usually such as have previously been
studied in other institutions or by indi-
vidual investigators, and thus the bene-
fit of comparison of results is obtained.
These studies, as I heard them discussed
by the pupils, were treated in an ad-
mirable spirit. Conclusions were not
regarded as established truths, but ra-
ther as possible suggestions toward the
solution of a difficult problem. An
additional requirement of all pupils is
that during one of their vacations they
shall systematically observe some child,
and record the facts which they ascer-
tain.

No special course is given in the "prin-
ciples of education." A critical study
of the history of education takes its
place. Rousseau's Emile, Comenius's
School of Infancy, Montaigne's Educa-
tion of Children, Pestalozzi's Leonard
and Gertrude, and Froebel's Education
of Man are subjected to critical class
study. The attitude assumed toward
these books, the instructor informed me,
is that of a search for the culture mate-
rial contained in the lives and ideals of
these educational reformers. The prin-
ciples which are put forth were care-
fully studied as showing the path along
which education has traveled, not as final
dogmas.

We have here a tentative first step.
The work of the preparation of teach-
ers has before it an inviting future. Me-
diaevalism will necessarily be sloughed
off. With the mass of facts which the
industry of sister sciences has laid at the
door of pedagogy, and the inspiration
which comes with personal investigation,
there is a force which bodes well for the
future of education. But at present one
thing is critically needed. In this pioneer
age of reconstruction, the work of the
schools demands teachers of discretion-
ary intelligence and the power of sus-
pended judgment, able to deal with work-
ing hypotheses. Not all the old is useless,

Penelope's Progress.

561

but the old comes down to us in the ter-
minal moraine of a glacier of mediaeval
metaphysics, now evaporating, and mod-
ern pedagogues must do what modern
scientists, modern philosophers, and mod-
ern theologians are doing, — proceed to
pick up from this detritus any odds and
ends of precious metal for which the
new world offers a market.

The great trouble caused by the old
conception and method now is that prin-
ciples are stated in universal form which
in fact have only a limited application ;
and the danger from the new spirit is
that possible hypotheses are sometimes
set forth as axioms. Pedagogy must be

submitted to the same crucial process of
Aufklarung, in the light of all the facts
that the correlative modern sciences are
offering, to which all other forces of
civilization are subjected. To this spirit
and method the normal school must open
its doors. It must become, to some ex-
tent, a work-shop" of first-hand investi-
gators, not a retail junk-shop for the dis-
posal of the catechisms of the Mahatmas
who once lived on the Mountain, serene-
ly contemplating the world and life as
an unbroken plain, breathing an atmo-
sphere of universality, and thinking in
terms of reverberating definitions and
ornamental classifications.

Frederic Burk.

PENELOPE'S PKOGRESS.

HER EXPERIENCES IN SCOTLAND.

PART FIKST. IN TOWN.

" Edina, Scotia's darling seat !
All hail thy palaces and towers ! "

EDINBURGH, April, 189-.
22, Breadalbane Terrace.

WE have traveled together before, Sa-
lemina, Francesca, and I, and we know
the very worst there is to know about
one another. After this point has been
reached, it is as if a triangular marriage
had taken place, and, with the honey-
moon comfortably over, we slip along in
thoroughly friendly fashion. I use no
warmer word than " friendly," because,
in the first place, the highest tides of feel-
ing do not visit the coast of triangular
alliances ; and because, in the second
place, " friendly " is a word capable of
putting to the blush many a more pas-
sionate and endearing one.

Every one knows of our experiences
in England last year, for we wrote vol-

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 480. 36

umes of letters concerning them, the
which were widely circulated among our
friends at the time and read aloud under
the evening lamps in the several cities of
our residence.

Since then few striking changes have
taken place in our history.

Salemina returned to Boston for the
winter, to find, to her amazement, that
for forty-odd years she had been rather
overestimating it.

On arriving in New York, Francesca
discovered that the young lawyer whom
for six months she had been advising to
marry somebody " more worthy than
herself " was at last about to do it.
This was somewhat in the nature of a
shock, for Francesca has been in the
habit, ever since she was seventeen, of
giving her lovers similar advice, and up
to this time no one of them has ever
taken it. She therefore has had the not
unnatural hope, I think, of organizing

562

Penelope's Progress.

at one time or another all these disap-
pointed and faithful swains into a celi-
bate brotherhood ; and perhaps of driv-
ing by the interesting monastery with her
husband and calling his attention modest-
ly to the fact that these poor monks were
filling their barren lives with deeds of
piety, trying to remember their Creator
with such assiduity that they might, in
time, forget Her.

Her chagrin was all the keener at
losing this last aspirant to her hand in
that she had almost persuaded herself
that she was as fond of him as she was
likely to be of anybody, and that, on the
whole, she had better marry him and
save his life and reason.

Fortunately she had not communicated
this gleam of hope by letter, feeling, I
suppose, that she would like to see for
herself the light of joy breaking over
his pale cheek. The scene would have
been rather pretty and touching, but
meantime the Worm had turned and dis-
patched a letter to the Majestic at the
quarantine station, telling her that he
had found a less reluctant bride in the
person of her intimate friend Miss Rosa
Van Brunt ; and so Francesca's dream
of duty and sacrifice was over.

Salemina says she was somewhat con-
strained for a week and a trifle cynical
for a fortnight, but that afterwards her
spirits mounted on ever ascending spirals
to impossible heights, where they have
since remained. It appears from all this
that although she was piqued at being
taken at her word, her heart was not in
the least damaged. It never was one
of those fragile things which have to be
wrapped in cotton, and preserved from
the slightest blow — Francesca's heart.
It is made of excellent stout, durable
material, and I often tell her with the
care she takes of it, and the moderate
strain to which it is subjected, it ought
to be as good as new a hundred years
hence.

As for me, the scene of my love story
is laid in America and England, and has

naught to do with Edinburgh. It is far
from finished ; indeed, I hope it will be
the longest serial on record, one of those
charming tales that grow in interest as
chapter after chapter unfolds, until at
the end we feel as if we could never part
with the dear people.

I should be, at this very moment, Mrs.
William Beresford, a highly respectable
young matron who painted rather good
pictures in her spinster days, when she
was Penelope Hamilton of the great
American working-class, Unlimited ; but
first Mrs. Beresford's dangerous illness
and then her death have kept my dear
boy a willing prisoner in Cannes, his
heart sadly torn betwixt his love and
duty to his mother and his desire to be
with me. The separation is virtually
over now, and we two, alas, have ne'er
a mother, or a father between us, so we
shall not wait many months before be-
ginning to comfort each other in good
earnest.

Meantime Salemina and Francesca
have persuaded me to join their forces,
and Mr. Beresford will follow us to
Scotland in a few short weeks when we
shall have established ourselves in the
country.

We are overjoyed at being together
again, we three womenfolk. As I said
before, we know the worst of one an-
other, and the future has no terrors.
We have learned, for example, that : —

Francesca does not like an early morn-
ing start. Salemina refuses to arrive
late anywhere. Penelope prefers to stay
behind and follow next day.

Francesca hates to travel third class.
So does Salemina, but she will if urged.

Penelope likes substantial breakfasts.
Francesca dislikes the sight of food in
the morning.

Francesca would like to divide a pint
of claret with Salemina. Salemina would
rather split a bottle of beer with Penelope.

Penelope hates a four-wheeler. Sale-
mina is nervous in a hansom. Francesca
prefers a victoria.

Penelope's Progress.

563

Salemina likes a steady fire in the
grate. Penelope opens a window and
fans herself.

Salemina inclines to instructive and
profitable expeditions. Francesca loves
processions and sightseeing. Penelope
abhors all of these equally.

Salemina likes history. Francesca
loves fiction. Penelope adores poetry
and detests facts.

This does not sound promising, but it
works perfectly well in practice by the
exercise of a little flexibility.

As we left dear old Dovermarle Street
and Smith's Private Hotel behind, and
drove to the station to take the Flying
Scotsman, we indulged in floods of re-
miniscence over the joys of travel we had
tasted together in the past, and talked
with lively anticipation of the new ex-
periences awaiting us in the land o'
heather.

While Salemina went to purchase the
three first-class tickets, I superintended
the porters as they disposed our luggage
in the van, and in so doing my eye
lighted upon a third-class carriage which
was, for a wonder, clean, comfortable,
and vacant. Comparing it hastily with
the first-class compartment being held by
Francesca, I found that it differed only
in having no carpet on the floor, and a
smaller number of " squabs " or buttons
in the upholstering. This was really
heart-rending when the difference in fare
for three persons would be at least twen-
ty dollars. What a delightful sum to
put aside for a rainy day ; that is, you
understand, what a delightful sum to put
aside and spend on the first rainy day ;
for that is the way we always interpret
the expression.

When Salemina returned with the
tickets, she found me, as usual, bewail-
ing our extravagance.

Francesca descended suddenly from
her post, and, snatching the tickets from
her duenna, exclaimed, " ' I know that I
can save the country, and I know no
other man can ! ' as William Pitt said

to the Duke of Devonshire. I have had
enough of this argument. For six months
of last year we discussed traveling third
class and continued to travel first. Get
into that clean, hard -seated, ill- uphol-
stered third-class carriage immediately,
both of you ; save room enough for a
mother with two babies, a man carrying
a basket of fish, and an old woman with
five pieces of hand-luggage and a dog;
meanwhile I will exchange the tickets."

So saying, she disappeared rapidly
among the throng of passengers, guards,
porters, newspaper boys, golfers with
bags of clubs, young ladies with bicycles
and old ladies with tin hat-boxes.

" What decision, what swiftness of
judgment, what courage and energy ! "
murmured Salemina. " Is n't she won-
derfully improved ? "

Francesca rejoined us just as the guard
was about to lock us in, and flung herself
down, quite breathless from her unusual
exertion.

" Well, we are traveling ' third ' for
once, and the money is saved, or at least
it is ready to spend again at the first
opportunity. The man did n't wish to
exchange the tickets at all. He says it
is never done. I told him they were
bought by a very inexperienced Amer-
ican lady (that is you, Salemina) who
knew almost nothing of the distinctions
between first and third class, and natu-
rally took the best, believing it to be
none too good for a citizen of the great-
est republic on the face of the earth.
He said the tickets had been stamped
on. I said so should I be if I returned
without exchanging them. He said it
was a large sum of money for a railway
company to return. I said it was a large
sum for three poor Americans to expend
simply for a few ' squabs.' I said that
was extremely dear for game at any
season. He was a very dense person,
and did n't see my joke at all, but that
may have been because ' squabs ' is an
American upholsterism or an upholster-
er's Americanism, and perhaps squabs

564

Penelope's Progress.

are not game in England ; and then
there were thirteen men in line behind
me, with the train starting in three min-
utes, and there is nothing so debilitating
to a naturally weak sense of humor as
selling tickets behind a grating, so I am
not really vexed with him. There ! we
are quite comfortable, pending the arri-
val of the babies, the dog, and the fish,
and certainly no vender of periodic lit-
erature will dare approach us while we
keep these books in evidence."

She had Royal Edinburgh, by Mrs.
Oliphant; I had Lord Cockburn's Me-
morials of his time ; and somebody had
given Salemina, at the moment of leav-
ing London, a work on " Scotia's darling
seat " in three huge volumes. When all
this printed matter was heaped on the
top of Salemina's hold-all on the plat-
form, the guard had asked, " Do you
belong to these books, mam ? "

" We may consider ourselves injured
in going from London to Edinburgh in
a third - class carriage in eight or ten
hours, but listen to this," said Salemina,
who had opened one of her large vol-
umes at random when the train started.

" ' The Edinburgh and London Stage-
Coach begins on Monday, 13th October,
1712. All that desire ... let them
repair to the Coach and Horses at the
head of the Canongate every Saturday,
or the Black Swan in Holborn every
other Monday, at both of which places
they may be received in a coach which
performs the whole journey in thirteen
days without any stoppage (if God per-
mits), having eighty able horses. Each
passenger paying £4 10s. for the whole
journey, alowing each 20 Ibs. weight and
all above to pay 6d. per Ib. The coach
sets off at six in the morning ' (you could
never have caught it, Francesca !), ' and
is performed by Henry Harrison.' And
here is a ' modern improvement,' forty-
two years later. In July, 1754, the
Edinburgh Courant advertises the stage-
coach drawn by six horses, with a postil-
ion on one of the leaders, as a ' new, gen-

teel, two -end glass machine, hung on
steel springs, exceeding light and easy,
to go in ten days in summer and twelve
in winter. Passengers to pay as usual.
Performed (if God permits) by your du-
tiful servant, Hosea Eastgate. Care is
taken of small parcels according to their
value.' "

"It would have been a long, weari-
some journey," said I contemplatively ;
" but, nevertheless, I wish we were mak-
ing it in 1712 instead of a century and
three quarters later."

" What would have been happening,
Salemina ? " asked Francesca politely.

" The Union had been already estab-
lished five years," began Salemina in-
telligently.

" Which Union ? "

" Whose Union ? "

Salemina is used to these interruptions
and eruptions of illiteracy on our part.
I think she rather enjoys them, as in the
presence of such complete ignorance as
ours her lamp of knowledge burns all
the brighter.

" Anne was on the throne," she went
on with serene dignity.

"What Anne?"

" I know the Anne ! " exclaimed Fran-
cesca excitedly. " She came from the
Midnight Sun country, or up that way.
She was very extravagant, and had some-
thing to do with Jingling Geordie in The
Fortunes of Nigel. It is marvelous how
one's history comes back to one ! "

"Quite marvelous," said Salemina
dryly ; " or at least the state in which it
comes back is marvelous. I am not a
stickler for dates, as you know, but if you
could only contrive to fix a few periods
in your minds, girls, just in a general
way, you would not be so shamefully be-
fogged. Your Anne of Denmark was
the wife of James VI. of Scotland, who
was James I. of England, and she died a
hundred years before the Anne I mean,
— the last of the Stuarts, you know.
My Anne came after William and Mary,
and before the Georges."

Penelope's Progress.

565

" Which William and Mary ? "

"What Georges?"

But this was too much even for Sale-
mina's equanimity, and she retired be-
hind her book in dignified displeasure,
while Francesca and I meekly looked up
the Annes in a genealogical table, and
tried to decide whether " b. 1665 " meant
born or beheaded.

The weather that greeted us on our
unheralded arrival in Scotland was of
the precise sort offered by Edinburgh
to her unfortunate queen, when

" After a youth by woes o'ercast,
After a thousand sorrows past,
The lovely Mary once again
Set foot upon her native plain."

John Knox records of those memo-
rable days : " The very face of heaven
did manifestlie speak what comfort was
brought to this country with hir — to
wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all
impiety — for in the memorie of man
never was seen a more dolorous face of
the heavens than was at her arryvall
. . . the myst was so thick that skairse
micht onie man espy another ; and the
sun was not seyn to shyne two days be-
foir nor two days after."

We could not see Edina's famous
palaces and towers because of the haar,
that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping
fog or mist which the east wind sum-
mons from the sea ; but we knew that
they were there, shrouded in the heart
of the opaque mysterious grayness, and
that before many hours our eyes would
feast upon their beauty.

Perhaps it was the weather, but I
could think of nothing but poor Queen
Mary ! She had drifted into my im-
agination with the haar, so that I could
fancy her homesick gaze across the wa-
ter as she murmured, " Adieu, ma chere
France ! Je ne vous verray jamais
plus ! " — could fancy her saying as in
Allan Cunningham's verse : —

" The sun rises bright in France,

And fair sets he ;

But he has tint the blithe blink he had
In my ain countree."

And then I recalled Mary's first good-
night in Edinburgh : that " serenade of
500 rascals with vile fiddles and re-
becks ; " that singing, " in bad accord,"
of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd
beneath the palace windows, while the
fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering
gleams of welcome through the dreary
fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary,
half Frenchwoman and all Papist !

It is but just to remember John Knox's
statement, " the melody lyked her weill
and she willed the same to be contin-
ewed some nightis after." For my
part, however, I distrust John Knox's
musical feeling, and incline sympathet-
ically to the Sieur de Brantome's ac-
count, with its " vile fiddles " and " dis-
cordant psalms," although his judgment
was doubtless a good deal depressed by
what he called the si grand brouillard
that so dampened the spirits of Mary's
French retinue.

Ah well, I was obliged to remember,
in order to be reasonably happy myself,
that Mary had a gay heart, after all ;
that she was but nineteen ; that, though
already a widow, she did not mourn her
young husband as one who could not be
comforted ; and that she must soon have
been furnished with merrier music than
the psalms, for another of the sour com-
ments of the time is, " Our Queen wear-
eth the dule [weeds], but she can dance
daily, dule and all ! "

These were my thoughts as we drove
through invisible streets in the Edin-
burgh haar, turned into what proved,
next day, to be a Crescent, and drew
up to an invisible house with a visible
number 22 gleaming over a door which
gaslight transformed into a probability.
We alighted, and though we could scarce-
ly discern the driver's outstretched hand,
he was quite able to discern a half-crown,
and demanded three shillings.

566

Penelope's Progress.

The noise of our cab had brought
Mrs. M'Collop to the door, — good (or
at least pretty good) Mrs. M'Collop, to
whose apartments we had been com-
mended by English friends who had
never occupied them.

Dreary as it was without, all was com-
fortable within doors, and a cheery (one-
and-sixpenny) fire crackled in the grate.
Our private drawing-room was charm-
ingly furnished, and so large that not-
withstanding the, presence of a piano,
two sofas, five small tables, cabinets,
desks, and chairs, — not forgetting a
dainty five-o'clock tea equipage, — we
might have given a party in the remain-
ing space.

" If this is a typical Scotch lodging
I like it ; and if it is Scotch hospitality
to lay the cloth and make the fire be-
fore it is asked for, then I call it simply
Arabian in character ! " and Salemina
drew off her damp gloves, and extended
her hands to the blaze.

" And is n't it delightful that the bill
does n't come in for a whole week ? "
asked Francesca. " We have only our
English experiences on which to found
our knowledge, and all is delicious mys-
tery. The tea may be a present from
Mrs. M'Collop, and the sugar may not
be an extra ; the fire may be included
in the rent of the apartment, and the
piano may not be taken away to-morrow
to enhance the attractions of the dining-
room floor." (It was Francesca, you re-
member, who had " warstled " with the
itemized accounts at Smith's Private
Hotel in London, and she who was al-
ways obliged to turn pounds, shillings,
and pence into dollars and cents before
she could add or subtract.)

" Come and look at the flowers in my
bedroom," I called, " four great boxes
full ! Mr. Beresford must have ordered
the carnations, because he always does ;
but where did the roses come from, I
wonder ? "

I rang the bell, and a neat white-
aproned maid appeared.

" Who brought these flowers, please ? "

"I couldna say, mam."

" Thank you ; will you be good
enough to ask Mrs. M'Collop ? "

In a moment she returned with the
message, " There will be a letter in the
box, mam."

" It seems to me the letter should be
in the box now, if it is ever to be," I
thought, and I presently drew this card
from among the fragrant buds : —

" Lady Baird sends these Scotch roses
as a small return for the pleasure she
has received from Miss Hamilton's pic-
tures. Lady Baird hopes that Miss
Hamilton and her party will dine with
her some evening this week."

" How nice ! "

" The celebrated Miss Hamilton's un-
distinguished party presents its humble
compliments to Lady Baird," chanted
Francesca, " and having no engagements
whatever, and small hope of any, will
dine with her on any and every evening
she may name. Miss Hamilton's party
will wear its best clothes, polish its men-
tal jewels, and endeavor in every pos-
sible way not to injure the gifted Miss
Hamilton's reputation among the Scot-
tish nobility."

I wrote a hasty note of acceptance
and thanks to Lady Baird, and rang the
bell.

" Can I send a message, please ? " I
asked the maid.

" I couldna say, mam."

" Will you be good enough to ask
Mrs. M'Collop, please ? "

Interval ; then : —

"The Boots will tak' it at acht
o'clock, mam."

" Thank you ; is Fotheringay Cres-
cent near here ? "

" I couldna say, mam."

" Thank you ; what is your name,
please ? "

I waited in well-grounded anxiety,
for I had no idea that she knew her
name, or that if she had ever heard
it, she could say it ; but, to my sur-

Penelope's Progress.

567

prise, she answered almost immediately,
" Susanna Crum, mam ! "

What a joy it is in a vexatious world,
where things " gang aft agley, " to find
something absolutely right.

If I had devoted years to the subject,
having the body of Susanna Crum be-
fore my eyes every minute of the time
for inspiration, Susanna Crum is what
I should have named that maid. Not
a vowel could be added, not a conso-
nant omitted. I said so when first I
saw her, and weeks of intimate acquaint-
ance only deepened my reverence for
the parental genius that had so described
her to the world.

III.

When we awoke next morning the
sun was shining in at Mrs. M'Collop's
back windows.

We should have arisen at once to
burn sacrifices and offer oblations, but
we had seen the sun frequently in
America, and had no idea (poor fobls !)
that it was anything to be grateful for,
so we accepted it, almost without com-
ment, as one of the perennial provi-
dences of life.

When I speak of Edinburgh sunshine
I do not mean, of course, any such
burning, whole-souled, ardent warmth of
beam as one finds in countries where
they make a specialty of climate. It is,
generally speaking, a half-hearted, uncer-
tain ray, as pale and as transitory as a
martyr's smile, but its faintest gleam,
or its most puerile attempt to gleam, is
admired and recorded by its well-disci-
plined constituency. Not ofily that, but
at the first timid blink of the sun the
true Scotsman remarks smilingly, " I
think now we shall be having settled
weather ! " It is a pathetic optimism,
beautiful but quite groundless, and leads
one to believe in the story that when
Father Noah refused to take Sandy into
the ark, he sat down philosophically out-
side, saying, " I '11 no be fashed ; the

day 's jist aboot the ord'nar', an' I would-
na won'er if we saw the sun afore nicht! "

But what loyal son of Edina cares for
these transatlantic gibes, and where is
the dweller within her royal gates who
fails to succumb to the sombre beauty of
that old gray town of the North ? " Gray !
why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray
and gold and blue, or gray and gold and
blue and green, or gray and gold and
blue and green and purple, according as
the heaven pleases and you choose your
ground ! But take it when it is most
sombrely gray, where is another such
gray city ? "

So says one of her lovers, and so the
great army of lovers would say, had
they the same gift of language ; for

" Even thus, methinks, a city reared should

be, ...

Yea, an imperial city that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee. . . .
Thus should her towers be raised ; with vi-
cinage
Of clear bold hills, that curve her very

streets,

As if to indicate, 'mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature's majesty."

We ate a hasty breakfast that first
morning, and prepared to go out for a
walk into the great unknown, perhaps the
most pleasurable sensation in the world.
Francesca was ready first, and having
mentioned the fact several times osten-
tatiously, she went into the drawing-room
to wait and read The Scotsman. When
we went thither a few minutes later we
found that she had disappeared.

" She is below, of course," said Sale-
mina. " She fancies that we shall feel
more ashamed at our tardiness if we
find her sitting on the hall bench in si-
lent martyrdom."

There was no one in the hall, how-
ever, save Susanna, who inquired if we
would see the cook before going out.

" We have no time now, Susanna,"
I said. " We are anxious to have a walk
before the weather changes, but we shall
be out for luncheon and in for dinner,
and Mrs. M'Cbllop may give us any-

568

Penelope's Progress.

thing she pleases. Do you know where
Miss Francesca is ? "

"I couldna s — "

" Certainly, of course you could n't ;
I wonder if Mrs. M'Collop saw her ? "

Mrs. M'Collop appeared from the
basement, and vouchsafed the informa-
tion that she had seen " the young leddy
rinnin' after the regiment."

" Running after the regiment ! " re-
peated Salemina automatically. " What
a reversal of the laws of nature ! Why,
in Berlin, it was always the regiment
that used to run after her ! "

We learned in what direction the sol-
diers had gone, and pursuing the same
path found the young lady on the cor-
ner of a street near hy. She was quite
unabashed. " You don't know what you
have missed ! " she said excitedly. "Let
us get into this tram, and possibly we can
head them off somewhere. They may
be going into battle, and if so my heart's
blood is at their service. It is one of
those experiences that come only once in
a lifetime. There were pipes and there
were kilts ! (I did n't suppose they ever
really wore them outside of the thea-
tre !) When you have seen the kilts
swinging, Salemina, you will never be the
same woman afterwards ! You never
expected to see the Olympian gods walk-
ing, did you ? Perhaps you thought they
always sat on practicable rocks and made
stiff gestures from the elbow, as they do
in the Wagner operas ? Well, these gods
walked, if you can call the inspired gait
a walk ! If there is a single spinster
left in Scotland, it is because none of
these ever asked her to marry him. Ah,
how grateful I ought to be that I am
free to say ' yes,' if a kilt ever asks me
to be his ! Poor Penelope, yoked to your
commonplace trousered Beresford ! (I
wish the tram would go faster !) You
must capture one of them, by fair means
or foul, Penelope, and Salemina and I
will hold him down while you paint him.
There they are ! they are there some-
where, — don't you hear them ? "

There they were indeed, filing down
the grassy slopes of the Gardens, swing-
ing across one of the stone bridges, and
winding up the Castle Hill to the Espla-
nade like a long, glittering snake ; the
streamers of their Highland bonnets wav-
ing, their arms glistening in the sun, and
the bagpipes playing The March of the
Cameron Men. The pipers themselves
were mercifully hidden from us on that
first occasion, or we could never have
borne the weight of ecstasy that pos-
sessed us.

It was in Princes Street that we had
alighted, — named thus for the prince
who afterwards became George IV. ; and
I hope he was, and is, properly grateful.
It ought never to be called a street, this
most magnificent of terraces, and the
world has cause to bless that interdict
of the Court of Sessions in 1774, which
prevented the Gradgrinds of the day
from erecting buildings along its south
side, — a sordid scheme that makes one
shudder in retrospect.

It was an envious Glasgow chiel who
said grudgingly, as he came out of Wa-
verley Station, and gazed along its splen-
did length, "Weel, wi' a' their yam-
merin' aboot it, it 's but half a street,
onyhow!" — which always reminded me
of the Western farmer who came from
his native plains to the beautiful Berk-
shire hills. " I 've always heard o' this
scenery," he said. " Blamed if I can
find any scenery ; but if there was, no-
body could see it, there 's so much high
ground in the way ! "

To think that not so much more than
a hundred years ago Princes Street was
naught but a. straight country road, the
" Lang Dykes " as it was called.

We looked down over the grassy
chasm that separates the New from the
Old Town ; looked our first on Arthur's
Seat, — that grand and awful slope of
hill, that crouching lion of a mountain ;
saw the Corstorphine hills, and Calton
Heights, and Salisbury Crags, and final-
ly that stupendous bluff of rock that

Penelope's Progress.

569

culminates so majestically in the Castle.
There is something else which, like
Susanna drum's name, is absolutely and
ideally right ! If there is a human crea-
ture who can stand in Princes Street for
the first time and look at Edinburgh
Castle without being ready to swoon with
joy, he ought to be condemned to live in
a prairie village for the rest of his life.

The men who would have the courage
to build such a castle in such a spot are
all dead ; all dead, and the world is infi-
nitely more comfortable without them.
They are all gone, and no more like unto
them will ever be born, and we can most
of us count upon dying safely in our beds,
of diseases bred of modern civilization.
But I am glad that those old barbari-
ans, those rudimentary creatures work-
ing their way up into the divine likeness,
when they were not hanging, drawing,
quartering, torturing, and chopping their
neighbors, and using their heads in con-
ventional patterns on the tops of gate-
posts, did devote their leisure intervals
to rearing fortresses like this. Why, Ed-
inburgh Castle could not be conceived,
much less built, nowadays, when all our
energy is consumed in bettering the con-
dition of the "submerged tenth"! What
did they care about the " masses," that
" regal race that is now no more," when
they were hewing those blocks of rugged
rock and piling them against the sky-line
on the top of that great stone mountain !
It amuses me to think how much more
picturesque they left the world, and how
much better we shall leave it ; though if
an artist were requested to distribute in-
dividual awards to different generations,
you could never persuade him to give
first prizes to the centuries that produced
steam laundries and sanitary plumbing.

What did they reck of peace con-
gresses and bloodless arbitrations when
they lighted the bale-fires on the beacons,
flaming out to the gudeman and his sons
ploughing or sowing in the Lang Dykes
the news that their " ancient enemies of
England had crossed the Tweed " !

I am the most peaceful person in the
world, but the Castle was too much for
my imagination. I was mounted and
off and away from the first moment I
gazed upon its embattled towers, heard
the pipers in the distance, and saw the
old 79th swinging up the green steeps
where the huge fortress " holds its state."
The modern world had vanished, and
my steed was galloping, galloping back
into the place-of-the-things-that-are-past,
traversing centuries at every leap.

" To arms ! Let every banner in Scot-
land float defiance to the breeze ! " (So I
heard my new-born imaginary spirit say
to my real one.) " Yes, and let the Dea-
con Convener unfurl the sacred Blue
Blanket, under which every liege burgher
of the kingdom is bound to answer sum-
mons ! The bale-fires are gleaming, giv-
ing alarm to Hume, Haddington, Dunbar,
Dalkeith, and Eggerhope. Rise, Stirling,
Fife, and the North ! All Scotland will
be under arms in two hours. One bale-
fire : the English are in motion ! Two :
they are advancing ! Four in a row :
they are of great strength ! All men in
arms west of Edinburgh muster there !
All eastward, at Haddington ! And every
Englishman caught in Scotland is lawful-
ly the prisoner of whoever takes him ! "
(What am I saying ? I love English-
men, but the spell is upon me !) " Come
on, Macduff ! " (The only personal chal-
lenge my warlike tenant can summon
at the moment.) " I am the son of a
Gael! My dagger is in my belt, and
with the guid broadsword at my side I
can with one blow cut a man in twain !
My bow is cut from the wood of the
yews of Glenure ; the shaft is from the
wood of Lochetive, the feathers from the
great golden eagles of Lochtreigside !
My arrowhead was made by the smiths
of the race of Macphedran ! Come on,
Macduff ! And cursed be he who first
cries, ' Hold, enough ! ' '

And now a shopkeeper has filled his
window with royal Stuart tartans, an.d I
am instantly a Jacobite.

570

Penelope's Progress.

" The Highland clans wi' sword in hand,

Frae John o' Groats to Airly,
Hae to a man declar'd to stand

Or fa' wi' Royal Charlie.

Come through the heather, around him gather,
Come Ronald, come Donald, come a' thegither,
And crown your rightfu', lawfu' king,

For wha '11 be king but Charlie ? "

It is the eve of the battle of Preston-
pans. Is it not under the Bock of Dun-
sappie on yonder Arthur's Seat that our
Highland army will encamp to-night ?
At dusk the prince will hold a council
of his chiefs and nobles (I am a chief
and a noble), and at daybreak we shall
march through the old hedgerows and
woods of Duddingston, pipes playing and
colors flying, bonnie Charlie at the head,
his claymore drawn and the scabbard
flung away ! (I mean awa' !)

" Then here 's a health to Charlie's cause,

And be 't complete an' early ;
His very name my heart's blood warms
To arms for Royal Charlie ! "

(O shades of Washington, Lincoln, and
James K. Polk, forgive me ! I am not
responsible ; I am under the glamour !)

" Come through the heather, around him gather,
Come Ronald, come Donald, come a' thegither,
And crown your rightfu', lawfu' king,
For wha '11 be king but Charlie ? "

I hope that those in authority will
never attempt to convene a peace con-
gress in Edinburgh, lest the influence of
the Castle be too strong for the delegates.
They could not resist it nor turn their
backs upon it, since, unlike other ancient
fortresses, it is but a stone's throw from
the front windows of all the hotels. They
might mean never so well, but they would
end by buying dirk hat-pins and claymore
brooches for their wives, their daughters
would all run after the kilted regiment
and marry as many of the pipers as asked
them, and before night they would all be
shouting with the noble Fitz-Eustace,
" Where 's the coward who would not dare
To fight for such a land ? "

While I was rhapsodizing, Salemina
and Francesca were shopping in the Ar-

cade, buying some of the cairn-gorms
and Tarn o' Shanter purses and models
of Burns's cottage and copies of Mar-
mion in plaided tartan covers and thistle
belt-buckles and bluebell penwipers, with
which we afterwards inundated our na-
tive land. I sat down on the steps of
the Scott monument and watched the
passers-by in a sort of waking dream. I
suppose they were the usual professors
and doctors and ministers who are wont
to walk up and down the Edinburgh
streets, with a sprinkling of lairds and
leddies of high degree and a few Amer-
icans looking at the shop windows to
choose their clan-tartans ; but for me they
did not exist. In their places stalked the
ghosts of kings and queens and knights
and nobles : Columba, Abbot of lona ;
Queen Margaret and Malcolm — she the
sweetest saint in all the throng ; King
David riding towards Drumsheugh for-
est on Holy Rood-day with his horns and
hounds and huntsmen following close be-
hind ; Anne of Denmark and Jingling
Geordie ; Mary Stuart in all her girlish
beauty with the four Maries in her train ;
John Knox in his black Geneva cloak;
Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora Mac-
donald ; lovely Annabella Drummond ;
Robert the Bruce ; James I. carrying
The King's Quair; Oliver Cromwell ; and
a long line of heroes, martyrs, humble
saints, and princely knaves.

Behind them, regardless of precedence,
came Robbie Burns and the Ettrick Shep-
herd, Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Dr. John
Brown and Thomas Carlyle, Lady
Nairne and Drummond of Hawthorn-
den, Allan Ramsay and Sir Walter ; and
is it not a proof of the Wizard's magic
art that side by side with the wraiths of
these real people walked, or seemed to
walk, the Fair Maid of Perth, Jeanie
Deans, Meg Merrilies, Guy Mannering,
Ellen, Marmion, and a host of others so
sweetly familiar and so humanly dear
that the very street laddies could have
named and greeted them as they passed ?
K ate Douglas Wiggin.

(To be continued.)

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly,

571

FORTY YEARS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

WITH this number The Atlantic Month-
ly ends its fortieth year.

On the 29th of April, 1857, Longfel-
low wrote in his journal : " Lowell was
here last evening to interest me in a
new magazine, to be started in Boston
by Phillips and Sampson. I told him I
would write for it if I wrote for any
magazine." A week later the journal
contained this entry : " Dined in town at
Parker's, with Emerson, Lowell, Motley,
Holmes, Cabot, Underwood, and the pub-
lisher Phillips, to talk about the new
magazine the last wishes to establish.
It will no doubt be done ; though I am
not so eager about it as the rest." The
eagerness of Phillips himself did not re-
ceive its full impetus until Mrs. Stowe
promised him her cordial support. That
there was at least one other dinner for
the discussion of the project before it was
definitely adopted, Longfellow's journal
gives further testimony. In Pickard's
Life of Whittier the following passage
is found : " At a dinner given by Mr.
Phillips, the publisher, in the summer
of 1857, there were present Longfel-
low, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes,
Motley, Edmund Quincy, and other wri-
ters of high reputation. The plans for
the new magazine were discussed and ar-
ranged at this dinner. Mr. Underwood
nominated Lowell as editor-in-chief, and
his name was received with enthusiasm.
Holmes suggested the name The Atlan-
tic Monthly. The success of the enter-
prise was assured from the start, and a
new era in American literature was in-
augurated."

Lowell had shrewdly insisted as " a
condition precedent " that Dr. Holmes
should be engaged as the first contribu-
tor. He demurred, but yielded to his
friend's urgency, and in later years could
say of Lowell that he " woke me from a
kind of literary lethargy in which I was

half slumbering, to call me to active ser-
vice." Mr. F. H. Underwood was chosen
assistant editor.

Ten of the fourteen authors who made
the principal contributions to the first
number were Motley, Longfellow, Em-
erson, Charles Eliot Norton, Holmes,
Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, J. T. Trowbridge,
Lowell, and Parke Godwin. Whittier
and Longfellow each contributed a poem ;
Lowell, his sonnet The Maple, the verses
on The Origin of Didactic Poetry, and
editorial pages of prose ; Emerson gave,
besides the essay Illusions, four short
poems, of which two were Days and
Brahma ; Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Trow-
bridge were represented by short stories ;
and there was the first installment of
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.
All the articles were unsigned, and it is
no wonder that every one asked • him-
self and his neighbor who this Autocrat
might be, with his offhand introduction,
" I was just going to say, when I was
interrupted ; " for there could not have
been one reader in a thousand who re-
called that in the old New England Mag-
azine for 1831 and 1832 there were two
papers of an Autocrat of the Breakfast-
Table by a young student of medicine ;
and the whimsicality of going on after
an interruption of twenty -five years
would have puzzled even the knowing
ones of a generation which had not yet
learned the Autocrat's habit of thought.
The authorship of the articles was evi-
dently an open secret in some quarters,
for the Boston correspondent of the
Springfield Republican was able to send
his paper immediately an ascription of
all the articles to their several writers.

These notes about the first number of
The Atlantic — for this paper is a bun-
dle of random notes rather than formal
history — are set down to recall the se-
rious and clear aim of the projectors of

572

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly.

the magazine : they were making Amer-
ican Literature. It was not as a mere
publishing enterprise, but as an institu-
tion, that they regarded it. Nearly all
the other American magazines that were
then in existence have perished, and
those that have survived have radically
changed their character. Holding fast
to the faith of its founders, that Litera-
ture is one of the most serious concerns
of men, and that the highest service to
our national life is the encouragement
and the production of Literature, The
Atlantic has never had owner or edi-
tor who was tempted to change its stead-
fast course by reason of any changing
fashion. The first volume contained sev-
eral articles which are curiously paral-
leled by contributions of the past twelve
months. It would be extremely inter-
esting to develop this parallelism, but it
must suffice here to give two lists of
titles, representing respectively the first
volume of The Atlantic and the seventy-
ninth : (1) Stranger, Intellectual Char-
acter, The Winds and the Weather,
Notes on Domestic Architecture, The
Kansas Usurpation, Mr. Buchanan's Ad-
ministration, The Financial Flurry, Flo-
rentine Mosaics, Our Birds and their
Ways; (2) Ferdinand Brunetiere and
his Criticism, On Being Civilized too
Much, Mercury in the Light of Recent
Discoveries, Two Interpreters of Na-
tional Architecture, A Typical Kansas
Community, Mr. Cleveland as President,
The Good and the Evil of Industrial
Combinations, Notes of a Trip to Izumo,
Young America in Feathers.

In 1857 there were not wanting those
who were on a keen lookout for hetero-
doxy in matters of religious belief in the
pages of the new magazine. Of the very
first number one of the sectarian papers,
published in Boston, said, " We shall ob-
serve the progress of the work not with-
out solicitude." Their watchfulness was
soon rewarded in a measure, for of the
third number they declared, " The only

objectionable article is one by Emerson
on Books, in which the sage of Concord
shows his customary disregard of the
religious opinions of others and of the
fundamental laws of social morality."
The next month it was a little better :
" With the exception of a slur at the doc-
trine of eternal retribution, in the Liter-
ary Notices, we do not recall anything
really exceptionable in its pages." The
curious reader may find the slur in a
single sentence of Dr. Holmes's review
of Mrs. Lee's Parthenia, — a sentence
which, aside from its great length, has
nothing astonishing about it except the
fact that forty years ago its sentiments
could not pass unchallenged.

It was, indeed, especially in the writ-
ings of Dr. Holmes that the seeds of
danger were believed to be planted. In
a letter written to Motley in 1861, he ex-
claimed, apropos of The Atlantic, " But
oh! such a belaboring as I have had from
the so-called ' evangelical ' press for the
last two or three years, almost without
intermission ! There must be a great
deal of weakness and rottenness when
such extreme bitterness is called out by
such a good-natured person as I can claim
to be in print." Even the New York
Independent, which was printing every
week the sermons of Henry Ward Beech-
er, said of The Professor at the Break-
fast-Table when it appeared as a book :
" We presume that we do but speak the
general conviction, as it certainly is our
own, when we say that that which was
to have been apprehended has not been
avoided by the ' Professor,' but has been
painfully realized in his new series of ut-
terances. He has dashed at many things
which he does not understand, has suc-
ceeded in irritating and repelling from
the magazine many who had formerly
read it with pleasure, and has neither
equaled the spirit and vigorous vivacity
nor maintained the reputation shown and
acquired by the preceding papers."

Writing of these papers nearly twenty-
five years after their first publication,

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly.

573

Dr. Holmes himself said : " It amuses
me to look back on some of the attacks
they called forth. Opinions which do not
excite the faintest show of temper at this
time from those who do not accept them
were treated as if they were the utter-
ances of a Nihilist incendiary."

The reverential liberality of religious
thought, expressed by Emerson and Dr.
Holmes, each in his own way, became
(as it could not fail to become) charac-
teristic of the magazine. James Free-
man Clarke wrote for The Atlantic most
of his Ten Great Religions, and at a later
time John Fiske published here The Idea
of God, a study in religion from an evo-
lutionist's point of view, which forms part
of a series that is not yet concluded.

In 1862 scientific articles by Agassiz
began to appear, and a long succession
of his writings was brought to an end
by a paper published in 1874, just after
his death. Even if The Atlantic had
done nothing else in the field of science
this record would be worth making ; but
the great achievements of these later
years have always formed an important
part of its contents, and have been re-
lated by men like Rodolfo Lanciani, Per-
cival Lowell, N. S. Shaler, G. F. Wright,
and T. J. J. See, who has a notable arti-
cle in the present number.

The choice of Lowell as editor com-
mitted The Atlantic at once to the high-
est standards in literature and politics.
The first number showed clearly its views
with regard to the overwhelming social
and political problems of the time. In
an article on the Financial Flurry Parke
Godwin wrote of " the Slave Power,
which consults no interest but its own
in the management of government, and
which will never make a concession to
the manufacturers or the merchants of
the North, unless it be to purchase some
new act of baseness, or bind them in
some new chains of servility." To the
second number Edmund Quincy contrib-

uted a spirited denunciation of the out-
come of slavery, in an article under the
title Where Will it End ? It was to the
use of such articles as these that Mr. Un-
derwood referred when he wrote, " The
public understood and felt that this was
the point of the ploughshare that was to
break up the old fields."

When the war began, the spirit of the
magazine was shown by its ceasing to
print on its cover the rather melancholy
woodcut of John Winthrop, and putting
in its place the flag of the Union, which
is to be found on the title-pages of the
bound volumes as late as 1873. But
the real patriotism of The Atlantic was
written in every kind of contribution to
its pages. As one of the many forms of
expression which it took, it is pleasant
to recall that here for the first time ap-
peared Barbara Frietchie, The Man with-
out a Country, Battle Hymn of the Re-
public, Our Orders, and the second series
of The Biglow Papers. The list might
be almost indefinitely extended, to in-
clude writings passing beyond the war-
time, through all the troublous days that
followed, and into these later decades
charged with new problems of their own.

In dealing with all these new problems,
— of reconstruction, of civil service re-
form, of our foreign relations, of a sound
currency, — liberality and vigor, we hope
it can be said, have marked the course
of The Atlantic. Certainly, one impor-
tant fact has never been forgotten, —
that political questions are, and have
always been, material for good literary
work. It is but a few years since the
ringing lines of Mr. Aldrich's Unguarded
Gates carried on the tradition of the
magazine in bringing the art of the poet
to bear upon a matter of the highest
moment to the citizen ; and during the
last twelve months, E. J. Phelps, Charles
W. Eliot, E. L. Godkin, Albert Shaw,
Francis C. Lowell, and Theodore Roose-
velt have added to our political litera-
ture articles on Arbitration and our Re-
lations with England, American Liquor

574

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly.

Laws, the Real Problems of Democracy,
the Nominating System, Greater New
York, Legislative Shortcomings, and
Municipal Administration.

The first important change in The At-
lantic's history followed the breaking up,
in 1859, of the firm of Phillips, Sampson
& Co., through the death of the principal
partners. It passed then into the hands
of Ticknor & Fields. From them it has
descended, through the succession of
firms which has followed, to the present
publishers. For more than a year after
the transfer to its new proprietors Low-
ell remained its editor. His correspond-
ence, through all the period of editor-
ship, is full of references to The Atlantic.
" To be an editor is almost as bad as
being President," he says, at a time when
he was " at work sometimes fifteen hours
a day."

In 1864, when The North American
Review, of which Lowell was at that time
one of the editors, also passed into the
hands of Ticknor & Fields, he wrote to
Mr. Fields : " It 's a great compliment
you pay me that, whenever I have fairly
begun to edit a journal, you should buy
it." In 1861 he had handed over to
Mr. Fields himself the editorship of The
Atlantic, with this philosophical conclu-
sion to a most cordial letter : " Nature
is equable. I have lost The Atlantic,
but my cow has calved as if nothing
had happened." All the good wishes
that he made for the success of the new
editor were abundantly realized. Mr.
Fields possessed, to an exceptional de-
gree, the power of establishing and
maintaining intimate personal relations
with such men and women as those who
had been associated with The Atlantic
from the first. By the use of the same
gift the circle of opportunity was ex-
tended year by year, and all the results
were inevitably to the advantage of The
Atlantic and its publishers. In record-
ing his recollections of Mr. Fields, John
Fiske has said that "in his youth he

used to surprise his fellow clerks by di-
vining beforehand what kind of a book
was likely to be wanted by any chance
customer who entered the store."

If one should go through the volumes
between 1861 and 1871, the decade in
which Mr. Fields conducted the maga-
zine, and transcribe the names of most
frequent recurrence, together with some
of the titles to which they are joined, the
result would be merely a list of many of
the best known authors and their works.
Lowell himself remained a constant con-
tributor of the best things that came from
his pen, as for example The Cathedral
and the Commemoration Ode. It was al-
most as if he had a vision of the future
that when he sent his successor the poem
from which the lines are cut into the gran-
ite beneath St. Gaudens's imperishable
monument to Shaw, he wrote, " I wanted
the poem a little monumental."

Besides the names that have already
been recited, there were other shining
ones steadily reappearing. Among them,
that of Hawthorne, under the writings
published in his last years and posthu-
mously, must stand alone. From the
earliest days of the magazine, when
Lowell wrote to Mr. Higginson, not yet
a colonel, that he thought his contribu-
tions " the most telling essays we have
printed," there was an infinite variety
of work from the pen which within the
present year has been recording those
Cheerful Yesterdays. Professor Charles
Eliot Norton, who wrote for the first
number, has been a contributor at inter-
vals ever since ; only a few months ago
he wrote about Kipling's latest volume
of verse. Beginning almost as early, and
continuing virtually as late, have been
the contributions of Dr. Edward Everett
Hale. In the earlier days the names of
E. P. Whipple and Richard Grant White
were constantly in evidence, and by the
side of Mrs. Stowe, in the long list of not-
able women who in this early time wrote
for The Atlantic, stood Miss Prescott,
now Mrs. Spofford, Miss Rose Terry,

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly.

575

afterwards Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Thaxter,
Miss Lucy Larcom, Miss Rebecca Hard-
ing, now Mrs. Davis, and Helen Hunt.
This brilliant group of women were the
forerunners of many more, among them
Mrs. Fields, Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps Ward, Mrs. Catherwood, Mrs.
Deland, Mrs. Foote, Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe, Mrs. Kirk, Mrs. Miller, Mrs.
Wiggin, Miss Jewett, Miss Murfree,
Miss Preston, Miss Repplier, Blanche
Willis Howard, "Octave Than et," Miss
Baylor, Miss Alice Brown, Miss Sophia
Kirk, Miss Vida Scudder, and Miss
Eliza Orne White. But a catalogue of
Homeric completeness would attain Ho-
meric dimensions.

As the magazine was inaugurated at
a dinner-table, and owed still more to a
certain Breakfast-Table, it is not surpris-
ing that a sort of social bond was felt
to exist between the publishers, editors,
and principal contributors. Longfellow
and Underwood have both recorded the
meetings of an Atlantic or Magazine
Club which met for dinner at about
the time The Atlantic was issued each
month. Later, the publishers of The At-
lantic celebrated the seventieth birthdays
of Whittier, Holmes, and Mrs. Stowe,
by giving " breakfasts " or garden-parties
of an importance and a significance great-
er by as much as the fame of the writers
they sought to honor had grown during
the interval.

Even in the days of the monthly At-
lantic Dinner — which was made possi-
ble by the fact that most of the con-
tributors lived in the neighborhood of
Boston — the magazine was not local.
It attracted to itself writers from all
sides, and soon had many contributors
at distances which forbade their partici-
pating in Boston festivities. It is sel-
dom now that a number appears which
does not show the cooperation of authors
in many parts of the country, — if not,
also, from other lands.

After the passing of its first group of
great writers, The Atlantic continued to
hold a supremacy which was generally
conceded. The year 1866 was marked
by the coming to Boston of the two men
whose names for the next twenty-four
years were to be most closely associated
with the magazine, Mr. T. B. Aldrich and
Mr. W. D. Howells. When Mr. Fields
retired from the editorship, Mr. Howells
succeeded him. Lowell wrote to him
about " sitting in the seat of the scorn er
where I used to sit." From 1871 until
1880, when he gave place to Mr. Aldrich,
he was not only the editor, but so con-
stantly a contributor that perhaps no one
person in the whole history of the maga-
zine has given more to its pages. Mr.
Aldrich, too, has published in these pages,
before and since his period of editorship
as well as during that period, much of
his permanent work in prose and verse.
Mr. Horace E. Scudder, who became
editor in 1890, had already done much
work as a contributor of both signed and
editorial articles.

There is a long list of other famous
names : in Fiction, for instance, besides
Howells and Aldrich and the brilliant
women already named, Henry James,
Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Thomas Har-
dy, F. Marion Crawford, Arthur S.
Hardy, Frank R. Stockton, S. Weir
Mitchell, Gilbert Parker, F. Hopkinson
Smith, and many more. In later years,
too, and down into the present volume,
has come the unique work of Lafcadio
Hearn. Of other kinds of literature
may be mentioned, in a passing list that
makes no pretensions to completeness
even in the enumeration of the great-
est names, Mr. Fields's Yesterdays with
Authors, Mrs. Kemble's Reminiscences,
Dr. Hale's A New England Boyhood,
Mrs. Lathrop's Memories of Hawthorne,
Colonel Higginson's Cheerful Yesterdays,
Dr. Birkbeck Hill's A Talk over Auto-
graphs, and the many contributions, both
prose and verse, of John Hay, Charles
Dudley Warner, E. C. Stedman, R. H.

576

Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly.

Stoddard, G. E. Woodberry, John Bur-
roughs, and Bradford Torrey.

In Politics and History The Atlantic
has never lost sight either of the founda-
tions of our national life or of the great
questions of current interest. Parkman
in his studies of colonial history, and
Fiske in a great variety of historical pa-
pers, afterwai'd gathered into his sev-
eral books, are among the contributors
in this field. They call to mind, also,
Carl Schurz's Abraham Lincoln, James
C. Carter's Tilden, Royce's Fremont,
Mahan's series of the companions of
Nelson, Ropes's General Sherman, Dr.
Allen's Phillips Brooks, J. N. Denison's
General Armstrong, Senator Dawes's
Recollections of Stanton, Woodrow Wil-
son on President Cleveland, Fiske on
Arbitration, Eliot on Five American
Contributions to Civilization, and a long
line of articles by Charles Francis Ad-
ams, Edward Atkinson, William Everett,
Henry Cabot Lodge, and F. B. Sanborn.

As is sure to be the case in note-mak-
ing, one of the most important subjects
of many papers in The Atlantic has not
yet even been mentioned. The contru
butions to Education that have been pub-
lished in the magazine began earlier than
President Eliot's formulation of the New
Education in 1869, and have continued
in an unbroken succession down to the
present. Conspicuous, but not alone
among the notable papers on Education
have been Mr. Scudder's which furthered
the revolutionary movement for the use
of complete pieces of literature in the
schools.

The conditions of American life have
changed greatly since the early days of
The Atlantic, and the task of a maga-
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terpretation of American life is a very
different task from what it was forty
years ago. Not only is life much more
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ent, — unlike what they were even a

dozen years ago. The increased vol-
ume of production that has followed the
cheapening of manufacture and the less-
ened cost of distribution has not unnatu-
rally led to much confusion of thought.
We sometimes hear that the day of a
high literary standard and of definite
literary aims is past. Yet fair compar-
ison of the literary work done in the
United States to-day with the work that
was going on in 1857 will show that
there has been no real decline except in
Poetry. In Fiction, if Hawthorne be
set aside (as it is fair to set aside any
great genius), there is much more work
done now of the grade next to the very
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in History there has been as great an
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a wider and surer grasp in these days
of fuller knowledge ; in Politics and
Social Science there has been no fall-
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the field is larger and the spirit of lib-
erality more generous ; and by the Ex-
act Sciences new worlds full of revela-
tion and romance have been discovered
since Agassiz first wrote for The At-
lantic. The conspicuous changes that
have taken place are two : we have no
single group of men of such genius as
the group that contributed to the early
numbers ; and as a result of the spread
of culture no man of less than the very
highest rank can now hold as prominent
a position as a man of the same quali-
ties held when good writers were fewer.
There are in fact more contributors to
the present volume of The Atlantic who
have made literature the chief work of
their lives, whose standard is high, whose
aims are definite, and who have won suc-
cess, than there were to the first volumes ;
and the range of subjects treated now
is wider. But amid all the changes of
these forty years the magazine has tried
not to forget the purpose of its early days,
— to hold Literature above all other hu-
man interests, and to suffer no confusion
of its ideals.

MESSRS. CURTIS & CAMERON, Boston, publishers of the COPLEY PRINTS,
wil be glad to send their new Illustrated Christmas Catalogue to any
address upon receipt of six cents in stamps. The above reproduction
of Mr. Abbott Thayer's " Caritas " is from one of the prints.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
Jttasa$ine of literature, Science, art, ana

VOL. LXXX. — NO VEMBER, 1897. — No. CCCGLXXXI.

THE LIFE OF TENNYSON.

" IP I may venture to speak of his spe-
cial influence on the world," writes Lord
Hallam Tennyson in the preface to his
biography of his father, " my conviction
is that its main and enduring factors are
his power of expression, the perfection
of his workmanship, his strong common
sense, the high purport of his life and
work, his humility, and his open-hearted
and helpful sympathy, —

' Fortezza, ed umilitade, e largo core.' "

Filial piety has not often been more
reverent of a great fame, and at the same
time more self - restrained and tactful,
than in the biography of the poet whom
all men are practically agreed in regard-
ing as the central figure of the Victo-
rian age. It would have been easy to
blur the outlines of the portrait by too
free and intimate a touch ; it would
have been easy to give the figure aca-
demic accuracy and remoteness by too
great a formality of manner. The per-
ils which beset the biographer, and so
often mar the beauty and endanger the
fidelity of his work, have been skillfully
avoided. Hallam Tennyson has written
of his father wisely, generously, frank-
ly ; he has neither ignored nor exploited
the kinship which fitted him more than
any other man of his time to perform
this delicate task, and at the same time
made the task far more difficult than it
would have been in the hands of an-
other. He has escaped the danger of
feeling that he was discharging a great
literary function in writing the biogra-
phy of the foremost man in English lit-

erature in the last half-century ; he has
done his work modestly, simply, and
with a reverence which is the more ef-
fective in awakening a kindred feeling
in the mind of the reader because it is
unstudied, genuine, and restrained.

It has fallen to the lot of few biogra-
phers to deal with a richer nature, a
finer genius, a life more harmoniously
adjusted to the higher claims of art, a
nobler group of friends, or a more in-
teresting period. Alfred Tennyson was
not only a child, but a favorite, of the
Muses, if these conditions are taken into
account ; and the more sensitive the gift,
the more important the conditions under
which it is tempered, tested, and used.
In one sense the man of genius is more
independent of his surroundings than the
man of lesser endowment, but in an-
other sense he is far more dependent
upon them. The light will shine, no
matter how opaque the medium through
which it sends its rays ; but its clarity,
its steadiness, its power of illumination,
are dependent upon what may be called
the accidents of its place, its time, and
the circumstance in which it is set.

In these respects Tennyson was for-
tunate beyond most men of his quality.
He was well-born in the truest sense of
the word. The rectory at Somersby,
on the slope of a Lincolnshire wold, was
a nest of singing birds ; for of the twelve
children born to the Eev. Dr. George
Clayton Tennyson, nearly all were poets
by instinct, and at least three by practice.
The woodbine climbed to the nursery

578

The Life of Tennyson.

lattice ; the stained-glass windows made
what Charles Tennyson called " butterfly
souls " on the walls ; the stone chimney-
piece had been carved by the father ;
the drawing-room was lined with books ;
larch, sycamore, and wych-elms over-
shadowed the lawn. Here the future
Laureate made one of his earliest songs ;
and at the foot of the garden which
sloped to the field ran the brook whose
music never ceased to haunt him. To
this stream, Hallam Tennyson tells us,
the poem beginning, " Flow down, cold
rivulet, to the sea," was specially dedi-
cated. On the right of the lawn was the
orchard, a place fragrant in the memory
of the poet, as the orchard has always
been fragrant in the poetry of the world.
"'How often," he said, " have I risen in
the early dawn to see the golden globes
lying in the dewy grass among those
apple-trees ! " A little further from the
rectory were shaded lanes, such as make
England a bower of delight when the
hedges are in bloom. Close at hand
were the little church, the quiet church-
yard with its ancient Norman cross, the
wooded hollows, the hidden springs, the
ferns and flowers and mosses. It is a
fair picture as one looks at it through
the haze of years, — a rich and whole-
some background for a poet's childhood.
The father was a man of striking pre-
sence, a scholar by instinct and habit ;
spirited, sensitive, with a genius for con-
versation. The mother has had loving
portraiture in the poem entitled Isabel.
" A remarkable and saintly woman," her
son said of her ; and Edward Fitzgerald
described her as " one of the most in-
nocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever
saw."

The children were high-spirited, ima-
ginative, and merry. They matched the
world about them with another world of
their own making, and they were equal-
ly at home in both worlds. The touch
of fancy was in their games : they were
knights and ladies, whose perils and
adventures were as frequent and varied

as those recorded by Sir Thomas Mal-
ory. They were story-tellers of high
degree ; and Alfred was their master
craftsman in this charming art. Some-
times an old English play was acted ;
sometimes, as Cecilia Tennyson, after-
wards Mrs. Lushington, narrates, Alfred
would take her on his knee in the win-
ter firelight, with the younger children
grouped about him, beguiling and be-
witching them with stories of heroes
performing feats of valor in behalf of
distressed ladies, fighting dragons, and
doing all manner of brave and noble
deeds.

Behind all this play of the imagination,
however, there was a solid ground of
reality in 'the life at the rectory. With
all his exquisite taste and refinement,
Tennyson had, in later life, a notable
faculty of putting strong things in a
strong way ; his talk had quite as much
picturesque directness and force as Car-
lyle's. The boy learned plain speech
in his own home and among the blunt
Lincolnshire folk of the neighborhood.
They were a sturdy, frank people, who
did not hesitate to speak their minds.
The Somersby cook, Lord Tennyson tells
us, in a rage against her master and mis-
tress, was once heard to say, " If you
raaked out hell with a smaal tooth
coamb you weant find their likes." There
was no lack of humor in the household,
although it was sometimes unconscious.
The poet's aunt, Mrs. Bourne, who was
a rigid and " consistent Calvinist," — to
quote an old-time And over phrase, —
once said to him, " Alfred, Alfred, when
I look at you, I think of the words of
Holy Scripture, — Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire." There
were books of the right sort within reach
of these children : books with the stuff of
life in them, books full of reality and
vitality, the books which liberate the
imagination and give the growing mind
its proper food and direction. Shake-
speare, Milton, Goldsmith, Burke, Addi-
son, Swift, Cervantes, and Bunyan were

The Life of Tennyson.

579

the natural companions and guides of
boys and girls who were awake in body
and soul to the wonder and romance and
tragedy of life.

Of the grammar school at Louth,
with its " tempestuous, flogging master,"
to which the poet was sent when he was
seven years old, his chief recollections
seem to have preserved merely exterior
circumstances : such as being cuffed for
the crime of being a new boy, taking
part in a procession in honor of George
IV., standing on a wall to make apoliti-
cal speech to his fellows, and being called
down by an usher, who brutally asked
him whether he wished to be the parish
beadle. " How I did hate that school !
The only good I ever got from it was
the memory of the words sonus desili-
entis aquce, and of an old wall covered
with wild weeds opposite the school win-
dows," were the words in which the
man recorded the boy's impressions.
His real educational opportunity was his
father's companionship and teaching.

It is interesting to find him, in his
twelfth year, writing a letter of formal
literary comment and criticism on
Samson Agonistes to his aunt Mari-
anne Fytche. " To an English reader,"
he says gravely, " the metre of the
Chorus may seem unusual, but the diffi-
culty will vanish when I tell him that it
is taken from the Greek." His earliest
attempt at poetry antedated this epistle
by four years. " According to the best
of my recollection, when I was about
eight years old I covered two sides of a
slate with Thomsonian verse in praise of
flowers for my brother Charles, who was
a year older than I was ; Thomson then
being the only poet I knew. Before I
could read, I was in the habit, on a
stormy day, of spreading my arms to the
wind and crying out, ' I hear a voice
that 's speaking in the wind ! ' and the
words ' far, far away ' had always a
strange charm for me. About ten or
twelve Pope's Homer's Iliad became a
favorite of mine, and I wrote hundreds

and hundreds of lines in the regular
Popeian metre, — nay, even could impro-
vise them ; so could my two elder bro-
thers, for my father was a poet and could
write regular metre very skillfully."
Four years later the future Laureate was
writing a long epic, full of battles, ad-
venture, and sea and mountain scenery.
The lines were often shouted in the fields
at night ; for the boy was already show-
ing that sensitiveness to sound which
went so far toward making him the con-
summate artist he became. The earliest
published verse from his hand showed,
indeed, a training of the ear in advance
of that of the imagination. The belief
that the boy had the stuff of real poetry
in him took root in the minds of the
family at an early day. After reading
one of these youthful productions, Dr.
Tennyson declared that if Alfred died,
" one of our greatest poets will have
gone." On another occasion he was
heard to say that he " should not won-
der if Alfred were to revive the great-
ness of his relative William Pitt." But
this faith was not unchallenged ; there
were doubters in the home, as there al-
ways are. " Here is half a guinea for
you," said Alfred's grandfather, on read-
ing a poem which the boy had written
on his grandmother's death : " the first
you have ever earned by poetry, and,
take my word for it, the last." It ought
to be added that two lines of verse by
this critic are still extant, describing
a goat drinking out of a stream on a
crest : —

" On yonder bank a goat I spy ;

To sip the flood he seems to try."
It was due to a caprice of this unpoetic
grandfather that Dr. Tennyson, who was
his oldest son, was disinherited in favor
of his brother Charles, who subsequently
took the name of d'Eyncourt.

The boy was constantly improvising,
and acquired great dexterity in metre
and rhyme. He was given to roaming
through the woods, to watching the stars,
to keen observation of plants and trees

580

The Life of Tennyson.

and flowers. He was training his eye
to that marvelous accuracy which his
descriptive verse shows in every detail.
There were those stirrings of the imagi-
nation, too, which announce the unfold-
ing of a poet's mind. On a certain oc-
casion when his brother Frederick was
expressing a great shyness with regard
to a dinner-party to which he had been
bidden, Alfred said, " Fred, think of
Herschel's great star-patches, and you
will get over alt that." Not a bad phi-
losophy of life, and one which Emerson
has expounded with great beauty and
persuasiveness. It was at this time that
the boy formed that acquaintance with
the sea which ripened into a lifelong
intimacy. The passion for the sea was
in his blood, and he delighted in its wild-
est tumult. For this reason he found
special satisfaction in the North Sea,
whose waves are tremendous in stormy
weather ; the breakers on the Lincoln-
shire coast sending their thunderous roar
far inland.

In March, 1827, the slender volume of
Poems by Two Brothers appeared, the
authors being promised the goodly sum
of twenty pounds ; with the proviso, how-
ever, that they were to take half of this
amount in books from the publisher's
shop. It was a youthful venture, for
Charles was between sixteen and eighteen,
and Alfred between fifteen and seven-
teen. The poets were not unmindful of
the gravity of their enterprise, and their
preface says, " We have passed the
Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate,
though its edict may create a fruitless
regret that we ever emerged ' from the
shade ' and courted notoriety." It was
characteristic of the authors that on the
afternoon of the day of publication they
spent some of the money thus earned on
carriage hire, drove fourteen miles to
the seashore, and " shared their triumph
with the winds and waves."

At this point in his biography Lord
Tennyson begins the introduction of a

large number of unpublished poems left
in manuscript by his father. The diffi-
cult question of dealing with work which,
although falling below the highest stan-
dards, often has great interest of another
kind is thus very wisely settled. By this
use of unprinted work Lord Tennyson
has set an example which literary editors
and biographers will do well to follow.
The greatest injustice has been done
more than one writer of the keenest crit-
ical discernment by including in later
editions of his work prose or verse which,
after careful deliberation, had been re-
jected. If a man's decision on matters
which are in the deepest sense within the
scope of his judgment is to be respected
at all, it ought to be accepted as final
when it relates to the work by which he
wishes to be known and judged. In in-
stances too recent to need more than al-
lusion, such decisions have been set aside
when the victim could no longer protect
himself. Work of this kind often has
very great psychological interest ; in
many instances, indeed, it has very great
literary interest. In the case of so fas-
tidious an artist as Tennyson, it was to
be expected that much would be with-
held which the world would be glad to
possess. This is abundantly illustrated
in many of the verses which are given to
the world for the first time in these vol-
umes. In point of artistic workmanship
and of human interest they are on the
level of much of the best work from the
same hand. Lines and verses which will
seem to the reader integral parts of well-
known poems were omitted from these
poems because, in the opinion of the
poet, they were redundant, or made the
pieces from which they were detached too
long. These selections form, therefore,
a very considerable and important addi-
tion to the poet's work, — an addition so
valuable and interesting that Lord Ten-
nyson's loyal obedience to his father's
decisions must have been adhered to in
the face of temptations to which many
editors and biographers would have

The Life of Tennyson.

581

fallen victims. It would have been easy
to put these pieces into a separate volume,
and to give them a place in the complete
works of the Poet Laureate ; there would
have been some criticism from a few
fastidious people — but there would have
been a great sale of the volume.

Lord Tennyson has introduced these
unpublished pieces w.here they belong, in
his father's biography. Here they are
shown in their natural order : they mark,
in the earlier years, the growth of his
mind and art ; and in the later years
they bring out very instructively the
searching application of his artistic con-
science to his work. The earlier verse,
I standing by itself, would not mean much
or promise much ; but in its time and
place one finds it suggestive of the intel-
lectual experience through which the boy
was passing, while at intervals there are
lines which seem to foreshadow the style
which was later to captivate two genera-
tions. In a fragment of a long poem
entitled The Coach of Death, full of all
kinds of immaturity, the eye is arrested
by such lines as these : —

" When the shadow of night's eternal wings

Envelops the gloomy whole,
And the mutter of deep-mouth'd thunderings
Shakes all the starless pole."

In the main, this boyish verse, like all
boyish verse, is merely a record of ex-
ercise and discipline, and is interesting,
as the earlier studies of a great painter
are interesting, because it indicates the
path by which apprenticeship was slowly
but surely merged into mastery of the
materials and tools of art.

When Tennyson went to Cambridge
with his brother Charles and matric-
ulated at Trinity College, in 1828, he
was a shy and reserved youth, but he
soon made the acquaintance of a group
of young men who were later to become
distinguished for many kinds of ability.
He was strikingly handsome. Edward
Fitzgerald described him as " a sort of
Hyperion." Another friend drew this
sketch of him : " Six feet high, broad-

chested, strong-limbed ; his face Shake-
spearean, with deep eyelids ; his forehead
ample, crowned with dark wavy hair ; his
head finely poised ; his hand the admira-
tion of sculptors, long fingers with square
tips, — soft as a child's, but of great size
and strength. What struck me most
about him was the union of strength with
refinement." He impressed every one
who came in contact with him as a man
of singular attractiveness and promise.
Lord Tennyson reports that on seeing his
father first come into the hall at Trinity,
Thompson, who afterwards became the
Master of the college, exclaimed, "That
man must be & poet ! " In that hall now
hangs the noble portrait by Mr. Watts,
and in the library of the college is the
bust by Woolner, — studies made at
different periods, but both giving the
most authoritative report of the poet's
impressive face and head. When one
remembers that among the men with
whom the Tennysons soon became inti-
mate were Spedding, Milnes, Trench,
Alford, Merivale, Charles Butler, Ten-
nant, and Arthur Hallam, Lord Hough-
ton appears to have spoken with modera-
tion when he said, many years later, " I
am inclined to believe that the members
of that generation were, for the wealth
of their promise, a rare body of men
such as this university has seldom con-
tained."

They had the high spirits, the large
hopes, and the generous enthusiasms of
young men of original force. They hated
rhetoric and sentimentalism, Lord Ten-
nyson tells us, and they were full of en-
thusiasm for literature. Tennyson had
these qualities in ample measure ; but he
had a cool, clear judgment as well, and
was already a prime judge of character,
his criticism going to the very heart in
a few trenchant phrases. He took a
deep interest in the tempestuous politics
of the time, and his sympathies were with
the party of progress, but he hated vio-
lence ; he read the classics, natural sci-
ence, and history, and he wrote Latin and

582

The Life of Tennyson.

Greek odes and English verse. When
asked what his politics were, he replied,
"I am of the same politics as Shake-
speare, Bacon, and every sane man." Of
those days of young hope and exalted
ideals he has left an imperishable im-
pression in more than one beautiful sec-
tion of In Memoriam. After the an-
nouncement that his poem in blank verse
had won the prize medal, Arthur Hal-
lam wrote to Mr. Gladstone, " I consider
Tennyson as promising fair to be the
greatest poet of our generation, perhaps
of our century."

When the volume of Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical, appeared, in 1830, faith in the
poet's genius was as firmly established
in the minds of his friends as in those
of his family. The serious temper with
which he regarded poetry at this time,
and the spiritual outlook which opened
before him, are clearly disclosed in the
verse "which Lord Tennyson now prints
for the first time. These lines have the
vision of a true poet in them : —

"Methinks I see the world's renewed youth

A long day's dawn, when Poesy shall bind
Falsehood beneath the altar of great Truth :
The clouds are sundered towards the morn-
ing-rise ;
Slumber not now, gird up thy loins for

fight,

And get thee forth to conquer. I, even I,
Am large in hope that these expectant eyes
Shall drink the fullness of thy victory,

Tho' thou art all unconscious of thy might."

The friendship with Arthur Hallam,
already deep and intimate, was strength-
ened, after Tennyson left the university,
by Hallam's engagement to his sister
Emily ; and his " bright, angelic spirit
and his gentle, chivalrous manner " ap-
preciably enriched the life of the circle
at Somersby, from which death had re-
moved Dr. Tennyson. The young men
took long walks and had longer talks
together. Hallam was reading law ; Ten-
nyson was reading, meditating, writing,
and smoking in his attic in the rectory.
There were walking-tours later, meetings
in London, a trip in the Rhine pro-

vinces. The year 1832 came, and with
it the second volume of the poems.
Many who were still doubtful of the
young poet's genius surrendered to the
charm of The Lady of Shalott, CEnone,
The Miller's Daughter, and The Palace
of Art. The question was asked at the
Cambridge Union, " Tennyson or Milton,
which is the greater poet ? "

The Quarterly Review was character-
istically insolent and brutal ; for those
were the aays when, in the minds of many
Englishmen, criticism was still identified
with slashing condemnation, and vio-
lence and bitterness were mistaken for
vigor and authority. Tennyson was al-
ways supersensitive to criticism which
seemed to him ignorant or unjust, and
the sneers of the Quarterly cut him to the
quick. It must not be forgotten that the
Quarterly was still a great force ; Ten-
nyson was once assured by a Lincoln-
shire squire that " the Quarterly was the
next book to God's Bible." He could
not conceal his sensitiveness, and neither
then nor later did he make the attempt.
" I could not recognize one spark of
genius or a single touch of true humor
or good feeling," he said of the truculent
criticism. He thought of going abroad
to live and work, for he fancied that he
should never find appreciation in Eng-
land. While this mood of depression
was on him came the news of Hallam's
sudden death at Vienna. It was a
crushing blow to many hopes, for Hal-
lam had awakened in the minds of all
his friends not only the deepest affec-
tion, but the most brilliant expectations.
Dean Alford said of him, " I long ago
set him down for the most wonderful
person I ever knew," and Mr. Glad-
stone has expressed substantially the
same feeling. In the hour when the
poet most sorely needed the swift com-
prehension, the delicate sympathy and
sustaining faith of this rare nature, his
friend vanished from his side and left
him desolate. In those melancholy days
of the early winter of 1834, he wrote

The Life of Tennyson.

583

in his scrap-book the fragmentary lines
which, his biographer tells us, proved to
be the germ of In Memoriam : —

" Where is the voice I loved ? Ah, where
Is that dear hand that I would press ?
Lo ! the broad heavens cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress! "

" The vapor labors up the sky,

Uncertain forms are darkly moved !
Larger than human passes by

The shadow of the man I loved,
And clasps his hands, as one that prays."

Oat of this deep grief came The Two
Voices and the earliest sections of In
Memoriam. To this period belongs the
first draft of Morte d' Arthur, and an
unpublished poem of great interest en-
titled The Statesman. A verse from
this characteristic work will not only in-
dicate its quality, but will also bring out
the Tennysonian conception of progress :

" Not he that breaks the dams, but he
That thro' the channels -of the state
Conveys the people's wish is great ;
His name is pure, his fame is free."

Tennyson's nature was too virile to
remain long under the shadow of deep
depression, and he was gradually brought
back to his normal mood by work. He
was not only keenly sensitive to criti-
cism, but he was also keenly critical of
himself. It is doubtful if any poet of
the time has had a sounder judgment of
the quality of his own verse. His ear
had acquired extraordinary sensitiveness ;
his feeling for words was quite as deli-
cate as his sense of sound ; and this in-
stinctive perception of the musical quali-
ties in sounds and words had been trained
with the highest intelligence and the ut-
most patience. If to natural aptitude
and trained skill there are added great
power of expression and depth and vol-
ume of thought, it is evident that all the
elements of the true poet were present.
Poe had a magical command of sounds ;
Tennyson had the same magic with a far
wider knowledge of the potencies and
mysteries of words. No detail escaped
him ; nothing was insignificant in that

perfection of expression toward which
he consciously and unweariedly pressed.
His artistic instinct is seen in nothing
more clearly than in his passion to match
his thought with the words which were
elected from all eternity to express it.
If he did not alwqjps feel the inevitable-
ness of every word in a perfect style, as
Flaubert felt it and worked for it with
a kind of heart-breaking passion, he was
alive to that subtle adjustment of sound
to sense which makes a true style in
its entirety as resonant of the deepest
thought of a writer as Westminster is
resonant of every note of its organ.

Out of this mastery of sound and
speech, with that deep and prolonged
brooding on his own thought which made
it bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,
came that rich and musical style which
has been the joy and refreshment of two
generations, and is likely to be heard in
times more sympathetic with art than
ours. The perfection of form which is
characteristic of Tennyson at his best
did not come at once. There was a slow
ripening not only of the poet's mind, but
of his art ; and on this development this
admirable biography sheds abundant
light, both by the publication of early
verse, and by the preservation of the
various readings of many later poems
which, for one reason or another, the
poet rejected. The changes made in
the volume which was issued in 1832
show how exacting his taste had al-
ready become, and with what conscience
his work was done.

The partial neglect of the two vol-
umes which had now appeared, and the
distinct note of depreciation heard among
certain people who were supposed to
have the making of literary opinion in
their keeping, drove the poet back upon
himself at a fortunate moment. If the
later success had come at the beginning,
there would have been no compromise
with the artist's conscience, no conces-
sion to the taste of the moment, but

584

The Life of Tennyson.

some deeper notes might not have been
sounded, some greater chords might not
have been swept. For Tennyson had now
entered into the communion of human
sorrow, and had become partaker of the
heritage of human experience. He was
beginning to touch ^humanity through
kinship of suffering, and to know his
time in its doubts and uncertainties and
questionings. He was living for the
most part at Somersby, studying Ger-
man, Italian, Greek, theology, the sci-
ences ; he was writing and smoking,
blowing hundreds of lines " up the chim-
ney with his pipe-smoke," or throwing
them into the fire because they were not
perfect enough. He was drawing near
to his age and his race through the
broadening of his vision and the deepen-
ing of his nature. The years of silence
which intervened between the publica-
tion of the volume of 1832 and that of
1842 were years of intense activity. The
poet was not only entering through sym-
pathy and imagination into the life of
his time in such a way as to become its
interpreter, but he was also testing and
studying his own resources and powers.
Sensitive as he had shown himself to un-
sympathetic criticism, he was much more
concerned with the quality of his work
than with the impression it made upon
readers at large. " I do not wish to be
dragged forward again in any shape be-
fore the reading public at present," he
wrote to Spedding in 1835, " particular-
ly on the score of my old poems, most of
which I have so corrected as to make
them much less imperfect."

In 1830, on a path in a wood at
Somersby, Tennyson came unexpectedly
upon a slender, beautiful girl of seven-
teen, and impulsively said to her, " Are
you a dryad or an oread wandering
here ? " Six years later he met Emily
Sell wood again, on the occasion of the
marriage of his brother Charles to her
youngest sister. The friendship ripened
into love, but for lack of means the
marriage did not take place until June,

1850, the month in which In Memo-
riam was published. The cake and
dresses came too late, and the wedding
was so quiet that Tennyson declared it
was the nicest wedding he had ever at-
tended. Many years later he said of
his wife, " The peace of God came into
my life before the altar when I wedded
her." Of this marriage the son writes:
" It was she who became my father's
adviser in literary matters. ' I am proud
of her intellect,' he wrote. With her he
always discussed what he was working
at ; she transcribed his poems ; to her,
and to no one else, he referred for a final
criticism before publishing. She, with
her ' tender, spiritual nature ' and in-
stinctive nobility of thought, was always
by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous,
wise, and sympathetic counselor. It was
she who shielded his sensitive spirit from
the annoyances and trials of life, an-
swering (for example) the innumerable
letters addressed to him from all parts
of the world. By her quiet sense of
humor, by her selfless devotion, by ' her
faith as clear as the heights of the June-
blue heaven,' she helped him also to the
utmost in the hours of his depression and
his sorrow ; and to her he wrote two of
the most beautiful of his shorter lyrics,
' Dear, near and true,' and the dedica-
tory lines which prefaced his last volume,
The Death of CEnone."

The years of waiting were rich not
only in study and work, but in friend-
ships of the kind which stimulate and
enrich as well as console and refresh him
to whom they are given. The letters of
this period are full of vivacity, warm
feeling, and keen criticism. The bits of
talk with which the biography is gen-
erously furnished show the quickest hu-
mor and the surest discernment in lit-
erary matters. It is a pleasure to know
that the young poet not only felt to the
full the wonderful beauty of Keats's
poetry, but also discerned in him that
spiritual quality which so many critics
have failed to discover. His son reports

The Life of Tennyson.

585

him as saying that " Keats, with his high
spiritual vision, would have been, if he
had lived, the greatest of us all (though
his blank verse was poor), and there is
something magic and of the innermost
soul of poetry in almost everything he
wrote."

He was often in London, finding end-
less delight in the ,stir and roar of the
Strand and Fleet Street, in Westminster
Abbey and St. Paul's, in the glimpses
of the city from the bridges. Carlyle,
Thackeray, Dickens, Forster, Landor,
Rogers, Leigh Hunt, and Campbell had
been added to the earlier group of
friends. Tennyson's interests were wide,
and he touched many men on many
sides ; his talk and reading ranged over
the fields of modern theology, scientific
discovery, politics, economics, and the
questions of the day. Chartism and so-
cialism were moving England widely, if
not deeply, and there was great alarm
in conservative circles. Tennyson took
the larger view of the situation, and be-
lieved that the difficulties should be met,
not by repression, but by universal edu-
cation, by freedom of trade, and by a
more sympathetic attitude among those
who called themselves Christians. His
chief concern, however, was his art, and
much of his most characteristic work be-
longs to this period. His imagination
was stirred by incidents and happenings
which would have been passed unnoted
by a nature less responsive and an ear
less sensitive. When he went from Liver-
pool to Manchester, the steady running
of the wheels, becoming a kind of tune,
suggested that line in Locksley Hall, —

"Let the great world spin for ever down the
ringing grooves of change."

His mind was full of rhymes ; verses
making themselves, as it were. Then, as
later, he composed before he put pen to
paper, and was always reciting the lines
upon which he was brooding. It was
this habit of constant composition and re-
vision, of testing accent and rhythm by

vocal repetition, which gave the impres-
sion that he was wholly absorbed in his
own work. The same charge, it will be
remembered, was brought against Words-
worth, nine tenths of whose verse was
probably composed out of doors, much of
it on the old road which ran across the
hills from Dove Cottage to Rydal. " This
is my master's library where he keeps his
books," said the servant to the visitor
whom he was showing through Rydal
Mount ; " his study is outdoors." Both
men were self - contained ; both gave
themselves completely to their art ; but
both were men of profound humility.

When the volumes of 1842 were pub-
lished, and the world read for the first
time Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Day-
Dream, The Two Voices, The Gardener's
Daughter, Sir Galahad, The Vision of Sin,
and "Break, break, break," — which Lord
Tennyson tells us was made " between
blossoming hedges in a Lincolnshire lane,
at five o'clock in the morning," — it was
at once seen that a new poet had appeared.
It is true Carlyle told him that he was
"a life-guardsman spoiled by making po-
etry ; " but Carlyle can be forgiven much,
for he has given us a portrait of the poet
at this period which deserves to rank
with the representations of Watts and
Woolner : " One of the finest-looking
men in the world. A great shock of
rough dusky dark hair ; bright, laughing
hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most
massive, yet most delicate ; of sallow
brown complexion, almost Indian-look-
ing ; clothes cynically loose, free-and-
easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice
is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter
and piercing wail, and all that may lie
between ; speech and speculation free
and plenteous. I do not meet in these
late decades such company over a pipe !
We shall see what he will grow to."
And Mrs. Carlyle, who was as keen a
judge of men as her tempestuous hus-
band, said of him that he was not only
" a very handsome man," but " a very
noble-hearted one, with something of the

586

The Life of Tennyson.

gypsy in his appearance, which for me
is perfectly charming."

The tide of thought and feeling was
running deep in those days, and melodies
were rising like a mist out of the invis-
ible stream of his meditation. " Tears,
idle tears," which the world has known
by heart these many years, was com-
posed in the mellow autumn at Tintern
Abbey, a place which has evoked two
imperishable poems. " Come down, O
maid," was called out by the heights
about Lauterbrunnen ; " Blow, bugle,
blow," by the echoes at Killarney.

The Princess, which appeared in 1847,
had been long in the making, but not so
long as In Memoriam, which was pub-
lished three years later, and upon which
the poet had been at work, consciously
or unconsciously, since the death of
Hallam in 1833. It must be remem-
bered, he wrote, " that this is a poem,
not an actual biography. ... It was
meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia
ending with happiness. The sections
were written at many different places,
and as the phases of our intercourse
came to my memory and suggested
them. I did not write them with any
view of weaving them into a whole,, or
for publication, until I found that I had
written so many. The different moods
of sorrow, as in a drama, are dramati-
cally given, and my conviction that fear,
doubts, and suffering will find answer
and relief only through faith in a God
of love." He believed himself to be
the originator of the metre, until after
the publication of the poem, when his
attention was called to the fact that Ben
Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used
it.

It was fortunate that Tennyson's bio-
graphy was not prepared by a biogra-
pher who was anxious to minimize the
religious element in his life ; on the con-
trary, it is thrown into the boldest relief,
and the reader is let into those profound
convictions which gave the Laureate's
poetry such depth and spiritual splen-

dor. The whole subject is dealt with,
in connection with In Memoriam, with
the most satisfying fullness. " In this
vale of Time, the hills of Time often
shut out the mountains of Eternity,"
Tennyson once said. The nobility of
his verse had its springs in those moun-
tains, and they inclosed and glorified the
landscape of life as he looked over it.
He refused to formulate his faith, but
he has given it an expression which is
at once definite and poetic, illuminating
and enduring. " I hardly dare name
His Name," he writes ; " but take away
belief in the self-conscious personality of
God, and you take away the backbone
of the world." And again, " On God
and God-like men we build our trust."
A week before his death, his son tells
us, he talked long of the personality
and love of God, — " that God Whose
eyes consider the poor," " Who catereth
even for the sparrow." " For myself,"
he said on another occasion, " the world
is the shadow of God." In his case,
as in Wordsworth's and Browning's,
poetry issued out of the deepest springs
of being ; and he made it great by com-
mitting to it the expression of the high-
est truth.

To a young man going to a univer-
sity he said, " The love of God is the
true basis of duty, truth, reverence,
loyalty, love, virtue, and work ; " and
he added characteristically, " But don't
be a prig." Through his verse, as
through his life, there ran this deep
current of faith ; but the expression of
it was free from the taint and distortion
of dogmatic or ecclesiastical phrase. In
the whole of it there is not a single
phrase which reminds one of what the
French call the patois de Canaan. In
his imagination, religious truth was as
clearly and naturally reflected as the
truth of nature, of experience, of obser-
vation. It was not a phase of being
distinct from other aspects of life ; it
was the fundamental conception which
included all phenomena, and gave them

The Life of Tennyson.

587

coherence, order, and significance. And
this conception was expressed in terms,
not of philosophy or theology, but of art.
The broad treatment of the great theme
of immortality in In Memoriam, based
as it was on profound knowledge and
insight, has made the poem one of the
most significant utterances of the centu-
ry, while its deep rfnd searching beauty
has given it place among those few and
famous poems of philosophic quality
which are not only admired as classics,
but loved as intimate confessions of the
spirit. Both qualities are present in
these unpublished verses : —

" Another whispers sick with loss :
' Oh, let the simple slab remain !
The " Mercy Jesu " in the rain !
The " Miserere " in the moss ! "

" ' I love the daisy weeping dew,

I hate the trim-set plots of art ! '
My friend, thou speakest from the heart,
But look, for these are nature too."

The idea of immortality was rooted so
deep in all his thinking that he refused
to qualify or limit it in any way. Lord
Tennyson tells us that when his father
spoke of " faintly trusting the larger
hope," he meant by the phrase " larger
hope " the final purification and salva-
tion of the whole human race. He would
not believe that Christ preached everlast-
ing punishment. On an October day, in
his eighty-first year, he wrote Crossing
the Bar, explaining to his son that the
Pilot is " that Divine and Unseen Who
is always guiding us ; " and a few days
before his death he enjoined his son to
print the poem at the end of all editions
of his works. It will stand, therefore,
in its beautiful simplicity and trustful-
ness, as the final confession of his faith.
When the monodramatic lyric Maud,
which Lowell called " the antiphonal
voice to In Memoriam," was published
in 1855, it was widely misunderstood and
sharply criticised. Many readers, in-
cluding some who, like Mr. Gladstone,
were in deep sympathy with Tennyson's
genius and work, failed to perceive that

it was in no sense autobiographical, but
entirely objective and dramatic. The
tone of much of this criticism irritated
the poet, and drew from him some vig-
orous expressions of opinion with re-
gard to the insight and discernment of
contemporary critical opinion. He said
that while, in a certain way, " poets
and novelists, however dramatic they
are, give themselves in their works, the
mistake that people make is that they
think the poet's poems are a kind of
catalogue raisonne of his very own self,
and of all the facts of his life ; not
seeing that they often only express a
poetic instinct, or judgment on charac-
ter real or imagined, and on the facts
of lives real or imagined." It was, no
doubt, the objective, dramatic quality in
Maud which gave it such a great place
in Tennyson's affection, — an affection
fanned by the hostile criticism which
met it at every turn. He took the keen-
est delight in reading or reciting it to
the very close of his life, and to hear
his rendering was to receive an entirely
new conception of the poem. Dr. Jow-
ett, who contributes many characteristic
passages to this biography in the form
of selections from his letters, wrote Lady
Tennyson : " And as to the critics, their
power is not really great. Wagon-loads
of them are lighting fires every week
on their way to the grocers."

When The Idylls of the King ap-
peared, four years later, they were more
generally understood; the reviewers were
appreciative, and the public interest, as
evidenced by the sales of the volume, was
widespread. The Duke of Argyle wrote :
"The applause of the Idylls goes on
crescendo, and so far as I can hear with-
out exception. Detractors are silenced."
Even Macaulay was moved to admira-
tion by the reading of Guinevere. The
poet was gratified, and did not conceal
his pleasure : " Doubtless Macaulay's
good opinion is worth having, and I am
grateful to you for letting me know it,
but this time I intend to be thick-

588

The Life of Tennyson.

skinned ; nay, I scarcely believe that I
should ever feel very deeply the pen-
punctures of those parasitic animalcules
of the press, if they kept themselves to
what I write, and did not glance spite-
fully and personally at myself : " which
shows plainly enough that he did care,
in spite of his contempt. Such sensi-
tiveness often goes with the delicacy of
taste which was so marked in Tennyson ;
and the fact that much of the criticism
to which he was subjected was unintel-
ligent, and therefore of no possible sig-
nificance to anybody, did not lessen the
sting.

The Holy Grail had long been germi-
nating ; at twenty-four Tennyson had
determined to write an epic or drama
about King Arthur. When the poem
appeared, he declared it to be one of
the most imaginative of his works. " I
have expressed there my strong feeling
as to the reality of the Unseen. The
end, when the King speaks of his work
and of his visions, is intended to be the
summing up of all in the highest note
by the highest of human men." " Of
all the Idylls of the King," writes Lord
Tennyson, " The Holy Grail seems to me
to express the most of my father's high-
est self. Perhaps this is because I saw
him, in the writing of this poem more
than in the writing of any other, with
that far-away rapt look on his face,
which he had whenever he worked at a
story that touched him greatly, or be-
cause I vividly recall the inspired way
in which he chanted to us the different
parts of the poem as they were com-
posed."

In answer to the criticism which was
offended by the moral significance of
the Idylls, and became somewhat hys-
terical in its urgence of " art for art's
sake," the poet quoted those fine words
of George Sand : " L'art pour art est un
vain mot : 1'art pour le vrai, 1'art pour
le beau et le bon, voila la religion que
je cherche ; " and composed these vigor-
ous and plain-spoken lines : —

"Art for Art's sake! Hail, truest Lord of

Hell!

Hail, Genius, master of the Moral Will !
' The filtliiest of all paintings painted well
Is mightier than the purest painted ill ! '
Yes, mightier than the purest painted well,
So prone are we toward the broad way to
Hell."

Tennyson's interest in the drama had
been keen from boyhood, — at fourteen
he had written plays ; he knew dramatic
literature ; he believed in the humaniz-
ing influence of the drama, and he felt
deeply that the great English historical
plays should form part of the education
of the English people. He was not
blind to his own lack of knowledge of
the technique of play-writing, and he
wrote with the intention that his dramas
should be edited for the stage by actors
who could understand and preserve their
poetic quality. It is interesting to note
the breadth of view with which, at the
very summit of his success and fame,
he undertook to create in a field that
was both untried and full of difficulties.
Of Harold, Becket, and Queen Mary he
wrote, " This trilogy portrays the mak-
ing of England." In Harold he strove
to represent dramatically the struggle
between the Danes, Saxons, and Nor-
mans for mastery in England, and the
awakening of the English people ; in
Becket, the conflict between Church and
Crown ; in Queen Mary, the downfall of
Romanism and the dawning of the age
of free individuality ; and in The For-
esters, the transition period when the
barons and the people stood together for
English liberty.

Three times the baronetcy was of-
fered to Tennyson, and as many times
he refused it. When, therefore, one
day in 1883, Mr. Gladstone said to the
Laureate's son that, for the sake of lit-
erature, he wished to offer his father the
higher distinction of a barony, there was
grave doubt about its acceptance. The
only difficulty which the Prime Minister
thought insurmountable was the possible
insistence by Tennyson on his right to

The Life of Tennyson.

589

wear his wide-awake in the House of
Lords ! Tennyson was so well beyond
the mere flattery of an offer of the peer-
age that he took the friendly urgence of
Mr. Gladstone with great calmness, and
at first was not to be moved from his
determination to remain plain Mr. Ten-
nyson to the end of his days. He was
finally persuaded, however, that, as the
foremost representative of literature in
England, he ought not to put aside a dis-
tinction which would mark the formal
recognition of the place and function of
literature in the life of a great people.
"I cannot but be touched," he wrote to
Mr. Gladstone, " by the friendliness of
your desire that this mark of distinction
should be conferred on myself, and I
rejoice that you, who have shown such
true devotion to literature, by pursuing
it in the midst of what seems to most of
us overwhelming and all-absorbing busi-
ness, should be the first thus publicly to
proclaim the position which literature
ought to hold in the world's work."

In the long history of English litera-
ture there is no picture of old age more
beautiful and satisfying than that which
appears in this biography, — an old age
rich in fame and honor, but richer still
in the fulfillments and fruition of a life-
long devotion to the highest ends of
art ; an age free from envy, generous
in appreciation, fresh in feeling, and
moving steadily forward into larger and
clearer vision of truth. Tennyson was
no more free from the imperfections of
a strong nature than are men of smaller
grasp and gift ; but his life was stamped
by a genuine nobility of spirit. He put
aside all the subtle temptations which

popularity brings to the artist by artistic
instinct, and by the force and steadfast-
ness of his character. He valued fame,
and knew how to separate it from its
counterfeit popularity. Matthew Arnold
once said to Hallam Tennyson with char-
acteristic humor, " Your father has been
our most popular- poet for over forty
years, and I am of opinion that he fully
deserves his reputation." In Tennyson's
case, as in that of Arnold himself in
lesser degree, popularity rested upon a
sound instinct, if not upon clear intelli-
gence ; and neither poet was indifferent
to an applause which was both heartfelt
and respectful. In his friendships, es-
pecially, the largeness of Tennyson's na-
ture revealed itself in the most uncon-
scious and beautiful way, and the story
of his intimacy with Browning and of
the noble generosity of admiration which
knit them together will be remembered
as long as the famous friendship between
Goethe and Schiller, and with kindred
reverence. Such passages illuminate
the painful history of the race with a
splendor not born of these lower skies.

When all has been said about the beau-
ty and significance of Tennyson's work,
it may be seen that his finest contribu-
tion to civilization was, not his poetry, but
his life. In his case there was no schism
between the art and the artist ; the work
disclosed the man, and the man lives im-
perishable in the work. In these days
of confused and conflicting ideals of the
artist's place and function among men,
this biography becomes something more
than the record of an illustrious career ;
it is an authoritative revelation of the
aims, the method, and the development
of a great creative spirit.

Hamilton Wright Mabie.

590

The Frigate Constitution.

THE FRIGATE CONSTITUTION.

DURING the past twenty-five years
there have been centennial celebrations
of many battles, and of other events con-
nected with the foundation of the re-
public ; but none has greater significance
for us as a nation capable of defending
our rights and of resisting pressure from
without, than the centenary of the launch-
ing of the Constitution in Boston on Oc-
tober 21, 1797. She marks the begin-
ning of our navy. Two other ships were
launched a few days earlier than she,
but neither has won such a place in our
affections or in our history.

Up to 1798, the navy, which had no
ships, was supposed to be a branch of
the War Department, and on May 21
of that year the first Secretary of the
Navy was appointed, in accordance with
a recent law of Congress establishing a
separate department. As the Constitu-
tion went into commission about that
time, the naval service may be said to
have come into existence with her. Her
exploits have been the chief addition to
its fame. During the earlier years of
the frigate our foreign relations became
more and more unsatisfactory, and some
of our ablest statesmen were abroad, un-
successfully endeavoring to make treaties
acceptable to the nation's self-respect.
We were paying tribute in the shape of
men to England, of ships and their car-
goes to France, and of money to the Bar-
bary powers. While France and Eng-
land were at war, each strove to outdo
the other in its restrictions upon our
commerce. The system of impressment
begun by England could not be endured
by an independent nation, but France
would have followed even in that impo-
sition, had it not been impossible to prove
an American sailor to be a Frenchman.
As it was, her minister to the United
States attempted to ride roughshod over
our laws, and our ministers to France

were insulted and browbeaten. The treat-
ment accorded to one of our ships which
grounded on the French coast, and was
stripped of her cargo by direction of the
government, was enough to make us for-
get the friendship of France during the
Revolutionary War. It was such a world
as this into which the Constitution was
born. The child of our country in its
weakness and poverty, she has survived
to a destiny unrivaled in all the annals
of naval warfare. She has accomplished
without a single failure every task as-
signed to her, and in a long life has
never brought discredit to an officer or
a man serving on board of her. Most
of our great commanders in the first
half of the century began or found their
careers upon her decks. Preble, Rod-
gers, Hull, Decatur, Bainbridge, and
Stewart in turn commanded her during
the first twenty years of her existence.
It was a happy coincidence that she re-
ceived the name of the great bulwark of
our republic.

The frigate was authorized by act of
Congress on March 27, 1794, together
with five other frigates, to be used against
the Barbary States in the protection of
our merchant shipping, and in the deliv-
erance of American captives held for
ransom ; but in consequence of a treaty
purchased by the payment of tribute to
the dey of Algiers, the work on these
ships was stopped. After some consid-
eration of the subject, Congress directed
the completion of the three most ad-
vanced, one of them being the Constitu-
tion. By this delay the timbers were
allowed two years for seasoning, and be-
came so hard as to earn for her, fifteen
years later, the name " Old Ironsides."
Her completion was hurried forward by
the expected war with France. The two
main arguments for the new navy were,
therefore, the suppression of piracy and

The Frigate Constitution.

591

the maintenance of our rights as neutrals.
The impressment of seamen on the high
seas did not become a burning question
until later.

The design and model of the Consti-
tution were made by Joshua Humphreys,
of Philadelphia, and sent to Boston for
use in the construction of the ship. The
materials were carefully selected wher-
ever they could be found, and all the
best features of the English and French
ships were adopted, without regard to
expense. Her builder, Colonel George
Claghorn, kept her fully three years in
the shipyard near what is now Constitu-
tion Wharf in Boston, from the time of
laying the keel to the final equipment.
It is interesting to note that Paul Revere
supplied all the copper fastenings. The
first day set for the launch was Septem-
ber 20, and the President, John Adams,
and the governor of the State were pre-
sent to see her off ; but the settling of
the ways under the moving load checked
her twenty-seven feet from the start. It
was not deemed prudent to use rams or
tackles on her, and the builder spent one
month shoring up the ways. She final-
ly slid into the water on October 21,
1797. The United States had been
launched on July 10 of the same year,
at Philadelphia, and the Constellation
on September 7, at Baltimore. Admiral
Preble in his History of the Flag says,
however, that " the Constitution was the
first of the new frigates to carry the fif-
teen stars and fifteen stripes upon the
deep blue sea." This flag was hoisted
just before the launch by a workman
named Samuel Bentley. Captain Nich-
olson, the inspecting officer, had re-
served that honor for himself ; but Bent-
ley, with the assistance of a man named
Harris, took advantage of his absence at
breakfast to work oft' an old grudge by
quietly running up the flag.

The ship cost, ready for sea, about
three hundred thousand dollars. She
was one hundred and seventy-five feet
long, forty-three and a half feet in beam,

and fourteen and a half feet deep, with
a tonnage of 1576 by measurement.
Her power and classification were dis-
tinctly below those of a line-of-battle
ship, but she had greater speed under
sail, and was thus better fitted to escape
from a too powerful antagonist. In re-
lation to modern navies, the armored
cruiser New York probably comes near-
est to a similar position among the ships
of her time. She had less than one half
the length of the New York, only two
thirds the beam, and about three fourths
the draught, — making her not far from
one of our gunboats in size. It is said that
many of her first guns were purchased
in England. She was called a forty-four
gun frigate in accordance with the com-
mon practice of that day, though the bat-
teries actually consisted of thirty long
24-pounders on the main deck, and twen-
ty-two 32-pound carronades on the spar-
deck. Two 24-pounders were at times
carried on the forecastle as bow-chasers.
These guns were heavier than those
usually carried on frigates of her own
class in foreign navies, and she had only
one gun-deck instead of two. In con-
nection with the interminable controver-
sy which subsequently arose over the su-
periority of the Constitution and her
class to the English frigates captured
during the war of 1812, it is well to re-
member that Mr. Humphreys intended
his three larger frigates to be a little
better in every respect than English or
French ships of the same rating. He
aimed at advantages similar to those we
are now seeking in our new battle-ships
and cruisers : better guns, greater speed,
and greater cruising capacity. His rea-
sons, stated in a letter to Robert Mor-
ris, still apply. He says : " The situa-
tion of our coast and depth of water in
our harbors are different in some degree
from those of Europe, and as our navy
must be for a considerable time inferior
in the number of vessels to theirs, we
are to consider what size ships will be
most formidable, and be an overmatch

592

The Frigate Constitution.

for those of an enemy. If we build
our ships of the same size as the Euro-
peans, they having so great a number of
them, we shall always be behind them.
I would build them of a larger size than
theirs, and take the lead of them, which
is the only safe method of commencing
a navy."

Herein lies the secret of our success.
It belongs as much to our fame as does
the splendid discipline of our men. The
humane principle in war is never to fight
on equal terms ; otherwise two armies or
two ships will be exterminated instead
of one. There are always causes behind
the results in war, and valuable lessons
to be learned. The Constitution re-
ceived only the reward given to those
who have the foresight to provide a bet-
ter ship, better guns, and a better crew
than their opponents. Her victories
cannot be explained as accidents. In
the fight with the Guerriere she fired
a broadside weighing 684 against the
Guerriere's 556 pounds. Two guns
were removed before the engagement
with the Java, and her broadside was
654 against 576 pounds. Her crew was
larger in both instances.

The first duty of the Constitution,
as was anticipated, proved to be in the
war of reprisal against the French, whose
depredations on our commerce had be-
come unendurable. Overrating their in-
fluence in America, they had begun by
seizing English ships in our waters, and
had ended by capturing our own ships as
well, — so determined were they to force
us into an alliance. Our government
had no alternative but a return in kind,
and in August, 1798, Captain Nicholson,
sailed from Newport with the Constitu-
tion and four revenue cutters for a cruise
along the coast south of Cape Henry, to
pick up French cruisers, privateers, and
merchantmen. Towards the end of the
year she was assigned to a squadron in
the West Indies, where she remained
until near the close of the war with
France, serving part of the time as Cap-

tain Talbot's flag-ship. Her career dur-
ing this period does not present much
that is exciting, as she captured only a
few insignificant prizes. The Constel-
lation had the fortune to be the only
frigate which saw really serious service
against ships of her own class.

Two events, however, were full of pro-
mise for the future. The first was a
friendly race with an English frigate.
The two ships happened to meet at sea
not far from San Domingo, and the Eng-
lish captain went on board the Constitu-
tion to see Captain Talbot. He looked
over the ship and expressed great ad-
miration for her, but declared that his
own ship could outsail her on the wind.
As he had come out by way of the Ma-
deiras, he offered to bet a cask of wine
against an equivalent in money on the
result, if Captain Talbot would meet
him thereabouts some weeks later. He
was going into port to clean bottom and
refit. The agreement was made. When
the Englishman came out and closed
with the Constitution, the two captains
dined together, and arranged all the con-
ditions of the next day's race. They
kept near each other during the night,
and at dawn made sail upon the firing
of a gun. All day long the race con-
tinued in short tacks to windward.
Isaac Hull sailed the American frigate,
watching for every possible opportunity
and advantage. His skill in handling
the ship under sail gained him a last-
ing reputation. The men were kept on
deck all day, moving from side to side
to bring the ship to an even keel on the
different tacks. As Cooper says, " the
manner in which the Constitution eat
her competitor out of the wind was not
the least striking feature of the trial."
When the gun was fired at sunset, the
Englishman was hull down to leeward.
The Constitution, accordingly, squared
away before the wind, and joined him
just after dark. A boat was waiting,
and the English captain came on board
like a true sportsman, with his cask of

The Frigate Constitution.

593

Madeira. It is a pleasant picture to see
the two captains meeting over a social
glass of wine in celebration of the event ;

especially since English ships did not at
all mind impressing an occasional Amer-
ican as a recruit.

The next and not very creditable ex-
ploit of the Constitution was unfortunate
in its ultimate effects. In May, 1800,
a party of sailors and marines, under
the leadership of Hull, was sent into
a Spanish port to cut out a French let-
ter of marque, Sandwich. The party
numbered about ninety, all of whom,
with the exception of six or seven, were
hidden in the hold of the sloop Sally,
armed for the purpose by the Constitu-
tion. They ran alongside the Sandwich
in broad daylight, and in two minutes
had captured her. The marines were
sent on shore to spike the guns of the
Spanish fort, while sails were bent and
she was made ready to leave the harbor.
Although this part of the undertaking
consumed.several houi'S,she escaped with-
out the loss of a single man. No expe-
dition was ever better planned and car-
ried out, but in the end it cost the crew
dear ; for they lost all their prize-money
in paying damages for the illegal cap-
ture in a neutral port ; besides, the
Sandwich was returned to her original
owners.

From March, 1801, to May, 1803, the
Constitution lay at Boston, dismantled,
but in September of the latter year we
find her in Gibraltar, on the way to Tri-
poli, as Commodore Preble's flag-ship.
The war with Tripoli would make a long
story, and since it was principally carried
on with the smaller ships, only an outline
will be given here ; but the courage and
daring of the American sailors stand
out in two or three incidents which can-
not be passed over in silence. The de-
tails of every expedition were planned
on the Constitution, and the young com-
manding officers who came over her side
to see Preble (" boys " he called them)
must have gathered courage and inspira-
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 38

tion from the great commander. The
flag-ship was too large for effective ser-
vice against fortifications protected by
shoals and uncertain winds, and the
blockade was conducted by small ships
from America and gunboats procured in
Messina from the Sicilian government.
From time to time Tripolitan ketches
were captured, and fitted out to aid in
the service.

Just before Preble's arrival off Tripoli,
while in chase of a small vessel at the
mouth of the harbor, the Philadelphia
had run on the rocks ; and as she could
not be got off, Captain Bainbridge and
his whole crew surrendered. They were
prisoners in the castle during the two
years of the war, and were in as much
danger from their countrymen's guns as
was the Turk. The Philadelphia had
been floated off and brought into the
harbor, where she was being fitted up.
All the guns were in place and ready for
use, when Captain Bainbridge managed
in some way to communicate with Pre-
ble, giving information about her, and
suggesting that she be destroyed, as she
was undoubtedly intended for service
against her old flag. The subject was
broached to Lieutenant Stephen Decatur,
who at once volunteered to go in with
his own ship, the Enterprise, and capture
her by boarding. The plan was so far
modified by Commodore Preble as to
substitute for the Enterprise, in this haz-
ardous service, a Ti-ipolitan ketch that
Decatur had captured a few days before.
The ketch, rechristened the Intrepid, and
fitted out specially for the undertaking,
was manned by volunteers from Decatur's
ship, with some additions from the Con-
stitution. In this wretched boat, rigged
for sixteen oars, and hardly larger than
a fair-sized sailing yacht, seventy-four
men left the fleet, accompanied by the
brig Siren under Lieutenant Command-
ant Stewart, and headed for a passage
through the rocks to the inner harbor.

She arrived in sight of the town in the
afternoon, and anchored off the entrance

594

The Frigate Constitution.

at nightfall ; but a sudden and violent
gale swept her to the eastward, and both
she and the Siren had to ride out at sea
the terrific storm that lasted six days and
nights. At times it was feared that the
Intrepid could not last through it ; but
the seventh day found both vessels near
the harbor, once more in favorable wea-
ther. The Siren, well disguised, did
not approach within sight of the coast
during daylight, 4)ut the Intrepid sailed
calmly for the port as if on an ordinary
trading voyage. Decatur had made all
his arrangements to burn the Philadel-
phia, and then to escape by towing or
rowing the Intrepid out of the harbor
under cover of the darkness. Every
man had his allotted station and task,
and as soon as the frigate was taken each
was to rush with combustibles to a speci-
fied place. The greater part of the crew
lay hidden behind the bulwarks, as the
ketch drifted slowly down in the half-
darkfiess of a new moon to the anchor-
age.

It is well to stop a moment to consider
what one mistake would have cost them.
The Philadelphia had a full crew, all her
guns were loaded, and she was surround-
ed by Tripolitan gunboats. Not one of
the Americans could have escaped if the
slightest suspicion had been aroused be-
fore boarding ; yet they went boldly on
to within a few feet of the Philadelphia,
and saying that the ketch was a Maltese
trader that had lost her anchors in the
storm, they asked for a line, and begged
permission to tie up astern overnight.
She lay only forty yards from the port
battery, and in the range of every gun.
While Decatur coolly sent a boat to
make fast to the forechains of the Phil-
adelphia, some of the latter's crew came
out with a line from the stern, and as-
sisted them in making fast there also.
A few minutes of cautious pulling on the
bow-line, then a wild cry of " Ameri-
canos ! " from the Turks who were look-
ing over the bulwarks, and the Ameri-
cans were springing up the side in a

scramble to see who could be first on the
frigate's deck. In a mad panic the crew
were either cut down or driven into the
sea. Everything worked exactly as De-
catur had planned it, and within twenty
minutes the ship was ablaze. His men
were fairly driven back into their boat
by the flames.

The return was even more perilous
than the entrance, as all the forts and
gunboats had taken the alarm. Their
shots were falling around the Intrepid
and dashing the spray into the faces of
her men, as she swept down the harbor
under sixteen long oars. The flames of
the Philadelphia, with the roaring of
her guns as they went off one by one in
the intense heat, the blinding flashes of
the Turkish guns, and the uproar in the
town made the night one never to be
forgotten ; a fit ending to what Nelson
pronounced " the most bold and dar-
ing act of the age." Decatur rejoined
Stewart, who was waiting for him out-
side, and the two set sail for Syracuse.

Nine months later, the little Intrepid
left a lasting and melancholy memory
in our service by her mysterious and
fatal ending. She was.fitted as a float-
ing mine, to be carried into the midst of
the dey's flotilla, and then blown up.
One hundred barrels of powder and one
hundred and fifty shells were placed in
her, with a train leading to a convenient
spot near the stern. Captain Richard
Somers and Lieutenant Henry Wads-
worth, with a few volunteers, went in her.
They had two small boats in tow for the
escape after lighting the fuse. As it
was part of their plan not to permit
themselves or the ship to be taken by
the enemy, who were greatly in need of
powder, Somers's idea is said to have
been to blow her up in case they were
boarded before reaching the proposed
position. The night was very dark when
they put out from the Nautilus and dis-
appeared within the harbor. Three gun-
boats were hanging about the entrance
at the time. To those waiting to pick

The Frigate Constitution.

595

up the returning party the suspense was
intense, although it lasted only a few
minutes. The Turks had taken alarm
at something, and were firing in every
direction. Suddenly the Intrepid's mast
and sail were seen to lift within a sheet
of flame, and a frightful concussion
shook even the ships of the American
fleet outside. The crew of the Nautilus
waited in vain for the return of their
comrades, but none of them came back.
So far as was ever known the Intrepid
did no damage, and the cause of the ex-
plosion is a mystery to this day.

Amid such scenes as these, varied with
hand-to-hand conflicts in the harbor, the
Constitution passed two years. In one
attack, Decatur fought single-handed
with a giant Turk, whom he finally killed
by reaching around his body and firing
a shot into his back. The ball passed
through him, and lodged in Decatur's
clothing. It was during this struggle
that Decatur's life was saved by a young
sailor, who lost his arm by interposing it
between his captain and the sword of an
assailant. No story has been oftener
told to American children.

The incessant activity of Preble seems
remarkable when we consider the char-
acter of the service, so far from home,
and at all times distant from the base of
supplies. He traveled thousands of miles
in his voyages between Syracuse and
Tripoli, with an occasional visit to Tunis
for the purpose of overawing the bey,
who was not to be trusted. The Consti-
tution bombarded the fortifications three
times, and on one occasion, while sup-
porting a general attack on the fleet in
the harbor, silenced all the Tripolitan
guns. The dey was finally forced into
signing a treaty of peace, giving Ameri-
can ships entire freedom of commerce in
the Mediterranean ; but Preble did not
stay to see the end. He was relieved
of his command by Commodore Barren,
who, on account of sickness, was soon suc-
ceeded by Captain Rodgers. The treaty
was drawn up in the cabin of the Con-

stitution, under Rodgers's directions.
By a demonstration of the whole fleet
before Tunis, the bey likewise was fright-
ened into making a treaty.

The importance of this war was two-
fold : • it gave our merchant - ships com-
parative safety in the Mediterranean,
and it formed the nursery in which our
naval officers were trained for the more
difficult tasks before them. Nearly all
the great names of the next war appear
in connection with Tripoli. Whatever
may be said of England's greatness on
the sea at this time, it was America,
the new nation of the West, which freed
Christendom of its scourge in North
Africa.

The Constitution reached New York
in the latter part of 1807, and was kept
on the home coast until the summer of
1811, in expectation of trouble with
England. She made a voyage to Cher-
bourg, however, to carry over the United
States envoy to France, and returned to
Washington in the spring of 1812, after
having touched at ports in Holland and
England. The crew was discharged,
and the ship placed for overhauling in
the hands of Nathaniel Haraden, her old
sailing-master under Preble. Her cap-
tain complained that she had fallen off
in sailing qualities, and requested that
she be hove out for repairing the copper.
Mr. Haraden, who knew her thoroughly,
at anchor and at sea, not only patched
up the copper, but also completely re-
stowed her ballast, leaving about one
third of it on shore. The result was
magical, and no doubt contributed to
her escape from an entire squadron soon
after. She dropped down the Potomac
in June, with only half her crew and
several of the old officers, and, when
news of the war came, went to Annapolis
to complete her equipment. On July 5
she sailed with a green crew, some of
whom had never been to sea, and many
of whom had not even been stationed at
the guns and sails.

Captain Hull's marvelous power of

596

The Frigate Constitution.

organization is exhibited in the adven-
ture which befell him twelve days later.
We may call this the first of the great
international races outside of New York
harbor, with the Constitution as prize.
It has become memorable in the navy for
the use of the kedge-anchor in the shal-
low water off the Jersey coast. To this
day, if one asks an American tar how
Hull escaped from the British in 1812,
he will reply, " He kedged."

At two o'clock on the afternoon of July
17, when about forty miles east of Cape
May, heading for New York, four sails
were discovered to the north. Hull im-
mediately tacked to the northeast, and
the squadron, which consisted of the
Shannon, the Belvidera, the Africa, and
the ^Eolus, under Commodore Broke of
the British navy, gave chase. At four
o'clock a fifth sail was made out to
windward, bearing northeast in a favor-
able position to close with the Consti-
tution. This ship was the Guerriere.
Fortunately the wind shifted at sunset,
which placed the Constitution to wind-
ward ; but for forty-eight houi's there
was either a calm or hardly more than
enough wind to give steerageway. Hull
employed every expedient known to the
seaman to get away, except that of throw-
ing his provisions, guns, and boats over-
board. He lost nothing but two thou-
sand gallons of water pumped out to
lighten the hull. During the calm, both
the English and the Americans resorted
to towing by means of boats ; but as the
former had five frigates to draw upon
for men, it was only a question of time
how the struggle would end. One of the
ships drew up uncomfortably close, when
Hull and his first lieutenant suddenly
conceived the idea of fastening all their
spare ropes and cables together and
paying them out to an anchor carried
half a mile ahead. By pulling on the
ropes the American walked mysteriously
away from the Englishman, who never
afterwards got near enough to throw a
shot into the Constitution. The sails

were trimmed to take advantage of
every catspaw of wind. The men were
shifted from one side of the deck to the
other, to favor her sailing, and not a man
slept in his bunk for nearly three days.
All guns were loaded, ready for action,
several having been placed to give a fire
directly astern. The Shannon, the Bel-
videra, and the Guerriere opened fire at
long range, as fortune of wind and sea
brought one or the other within firing
distance, but no shot took effect. At
one time, during a puff of wind, Captain
Hull expected to be overtaken by the
Belvidera, so close had she come on the
quarter, and he prepared to cripple her,
if possible, before her consorts could
come up ; but it was not to be.

The chase really ended on the even-
ing of the third day, when a heavy rain-
squall came up from the south. Hull
saw it, and, with the men in readiness,
let everything go by the run at the in-
stant it struck. As soon as his ship was
obscured by the rain, he quickly short-
ened sail, and went off on the starboard
tack at eleven knots. The English, some
miles to leeward, deceived by the appar-
ent confusion on the American ship, let
go their sails before the wind struck them,
and went off more to leeward on different
tacks. One hour later, when the squall
had passed, the Constitution was hull
down, and too far away for any possi-
bility of capture. The chase was aban-
doned next morning, when daylight found
the American almost out of sight. No-
thing in the annals of our navy has ever
exhibited more perfect seamanship, ready
resource, and constant cheerfulness than
this chase, in which our ship was pitted
against a whole fleet under some of the
best English captains.

Her next cruise was the shortest and
most fateful in her long life of one hun-
dred years, and the whole country was
soon to resound with her exploits. Our
people were thoroughly discouraged over
the outlook on land. The war with
England was unpopular, and nowhere

The Frigate Constitution.

597

more so than in New England, the chief
sufferer from the embargo. Yankee ports
were filled with Yankee ships complain-
ing bitterly that their trade had been de-
stroyed. Incompetence reigned in the
army, and the campaign against Canada
had proved a miserable failure. Yet here
was a ship going out alone to battle with
the greatest navy of the world, at a time
when England had reached the very sum-
mit of her power on the sea. A large
squadron was off the coast, as Hull well
knew. It had been thought advisable
in Washington to have all naval vessels
safely anchored in port and dismantled,
in order to prevent the English blockad-
ing fleet from getting them. Fortunate-
ly, Captains Bainbridge and Stewart,
both of whom afterwards commanded the
Constitution in successful actions against
the British, were able to dissuade the de-
partment from this foolish step. Orders
were sent, however, to keep the Consti-
tution in Boston ; but Hull had already
sailed, in anticipation of some such out-
come of the controversy. It is said he
feared that the blockade might shut him
in, or that he might be relieved by Cap-
tain Bainbridge, his senior in command ;
at any rate, he got away on August 2,
1812, just before the orders reached
Boston. He stood to eastward around
Nova Scotia to the mouth of the St.
Lawrence River, and then to the south
and east, but made no important capture.
On the morning of the 18th Captain
Hull learned from a Salem privateer
that a large British frigate had been
sighted the day before to the south.
The Constitution was accordingly head-
ed in that direction, and at two o'clock
on the afternoon of the 19th a strange
sail was made out to the east by south,
— too far away, however, for any clear
indication of her character and nation-
ality. The Constitution was at this
time about seven hundred miles due
east of Boston, with ample room for
the interview which Captain Dacres of
the Guerriere — as the ship turned out to

be — had desired for months. He had
been so eager as to indorse on the regis-
ter of the ship John Adams, from Liver-
pool, a letter to the commander of the
American squadron, expressing a wish
to meet a United States frigate of the
same force as the President outside of
Sandy Hook "fora tete-a-tete." In
Isaac Hull, the man who would rather
fight than eat, he found everything that
was lively and hearty. Many genera-
tions of American boys have gloried over
the fight between the Constitution and
the Guerriere, and Cooper has drawn a
vivid picture of the scene.

Hull ran down before the wind to
take a look at the stranger, and found
him with his main topsail aback, waiting
for the Constitution to come up. Both
ships cleared for action, and when the
Constitution was still far astern the
Guerriere began firing at long range.
Only two or three shots were fired in
return, and then the American bore
down upon the Englishman in silence.
Nothing shows more forcibly the perfect
discipline of the ship than this hour of
waiting, with men standing at quarters
and their comrades falling around them.
Even Mr. Morris, the first lieutenant,
found it hard to restrain his impatience,
and he asked to be allowed to fire. Not
till the ships were fairly abreast and
within pistol-shot of each other was the
word finally given. The effect was al-
most instantaneous as a whole broadside
struck the Guerriere, followed quickly
by a second staggering blow. Her miz-
zenmast went overboard, and the Con-
stitution was able to pass around the
Guerriere's bow, where she delivered a
raking fire which cut away the foremast
and much of the rigging. In wearing
to return across her bow, the Guerriere's
starboard bow fouled the port quarter
of the Constitution. It was while in this
position that both sides tried to board,
and Lieutenant Bush of the marine
corps was killed, and Lieutenant Morris
was dangerously wounded. Two guns

598

The Frigate Constitution.

in the bow of the Guerriere were fired
point-blank into the cabin of the Consti-
tution and set fire to the ship. The
danger was grave, but the wind and sea
swept them clear, and Lieutenant Hoff-
man put out the fire. As the ships
separated, the Guerriere's foremast and
mainmast went by the board, leaving
her a helpless hulk in the trough of the
sea. Captain Dacres's interview was
over, having lasted, from the first broad-
side of the Constitution, just thirty min-
utes. He was wounded, seventy-nine
of his men out of a crew of two hundred
and seventy-two were killed and wound-
ed, and not a stick was left standing on
his deck. There was no need to haul
down the flag ; it was gone with the rig-
ging, and Captain Dacres surrendered
perforce. The Constitution had lost
fourteen men and had sustained com-
paratively small injury. Within a few
hours she was ready for another fight.
The Guerriere was so cut to pieces that
she could not be taken into port, and
Hull burned her. The last act, after
removing the prisoners and wounded,
gives one a glimpse of the Christianity
and chivalry of these two captains who
spoke the same tongue and in whose
veins flowed the same blood. Captain
Hull asked Captain Dacres if there was
anything he would like to save from
his ship. He said yes, his mother's Bi-
ble, which he had carried with him for
years. An officer was sent to get it.
Thus began a friendship between these
enemies which lasted till Hull's death
in 1843.

Many stories are told of this fight,
which was one of the most dramatic
in history, both in its action and in
its immediate effects upon the country.
In the Guerriere's crew there were ten
Americanik, who, to the honor and credit
of the English, were sent below. One
of them, a merchant-ship captain, was
standing near Captain Dacres while the
Constitution was approaching. The Guer-
riere was pouring out shot after shot, and

broadside after broadside, as the other
came like death upon an unsuspecting
victim. The silence was appalling, and
Captain Dacres asked the American
what it could mean. " Do you think
she will strike without firing a shot ? "
As the story goes, the American an-
swered, " No ; and if you will permit
me, sir, I will join the doctor in the
cockpit, where I can be of use in tak-
ing care of the wounded." The English
captain's reply, "Go, if you wish, but
there are not likely to be many wound-
ed," found speedy contradiction. With-
in a few minutes after the American
reached the cockpit, and while he was
waiting in agonizing suspense, a terrific
roar sounded above the English guns,
and the Guerriere staggered under blow
after blow. In a few minutes all was
silence, and the American, passing a line
of wounded, .stuck his head up through
the hatch to find the Guerriere a hope-
less wreck. Tradition has it that in this
fight the Constitution obtained her so-
briquet " Old Ironsides." When struck
by a shot from the Guerriere, the out-
side planking did not yield, and the shot
fell into the sea. One of the seamen
shouted, " Huzza ! her sides are made of
iron ! " It is also said that Hull, who
was a short, fat man, stooped down to
give his first order to fire, and split his
breeches from keel to truck.

Upon Captain Hull's arrival in Bos-
ton, the news of his victory was received
with exultation. It had followed close
upon the surrender of Detroit, and was
like a bright gleam in the darkness. Our
people could now feel that the navy,
though small, was not impotent against
the greatest sea power of the world, and,
ship for ship, we had nothing to fear.
Standing by itself, the destruction of the
Guerriere amounted to nothing. It was
the moral effect which gave it great and
lasting importance. The surprise and
gloom produced in England by the dis-
aster were equaled only by the inability
to explain it. In one English newspa-

The Frigate Constitution.

599

per we find this conclusion : " From it
the inference may be drawn that a con-
test with the Americans is more worthy
of our arms than was at first sight
imagined." The London Times said :
" It is not merely that an English frig-
ate has been taken, after what we are
free to confess may be called a brave
resistance, but that it has been taken
by a new enemy, — an enemy unaccus-
tomed to such triumphs, and likely to be
rendered confident by them. He must
be a weak politician who does not see
how important the first triumph is in
giving a tone and character to the war."

A dinner, in which men of all polit-
ical parties united, was given to Hull
and his officers at Faneuil Hall on Sep-
tember 5. They marched in procession
with a great number of prominent citi-
zens up State Street, in the middle of
the afternoon, and sat down to what the
Palladium called an " excellent dinner,"
which must have been interminable, for
seventeen toasts were drunk. From these
the following are selected as an evidence
of the effect of the victory upon " all po-
litical parties : " —

" The American Nation — May dan-
ger from abroad insure union at home."

" Our Infant Navy — We must nur-
ture the young Hercules in his cradle, if
we mean to profit by the labors of his
manhood."

" The Victory we Celebrate — An in-
valuable proof that we are able to de-
fend our rights on the ocean."

" No Entangling Alliance — We have
suffered the injuries and insults of des-
potism with patience, but its friendship
is more than we can bear."

The next action in which Old Iron-
sides engaged followed in less than five
months, with a ship practically her equal.
The command had been turned over to
Captain Bainbridge, who sailed, in com-
pany with the Hornet, for the West In-
dies on October 26. At San Salvador
they fell in with an English ship, which
they challenged to come out and fight

the Hornet. She agreed at first, but de-
layed so long that Captain Bainbridge
finally left the Hornet waiting outside of
the harbor, and sailed to the southeast
along the coast of Brazil. On Decem-
ber 29, about thirty miles off the coast,
two sails were sighted : one a small vessel
standing in towards the land, and the
other a larger ship, which had headed up,
apparently to examine the new arrival.
Satisfied that the larger ship was a Brit-
ish frigate, Captain Bainbridge headed
offshore to get more sea-room. The
fight between the Constitution and the
Java then began, with the latter in chase,
— just the reverse of the action with the
Guerriere. The firing opened with broad-
sides from both ships, the Java being on
the port quarter of the Constitution and
about a mile to windward. As the Eng-
lish frigate was the faster sailer in the
light wind which prevailed, she constant-
ly overreached the Constitution, so that
there was much manoeuvring to avoid
being raked. The battle lasted a little
over two hours, and both sides displayed
splendid seamanship, but the end found
the Java dismasted and helpless. As
usual, the American gunnery had been
vastly superior to that of the English,
although the Constitution's rigging was
so badly cut up that she returned to
the United States for repairs. Captain
Bainbridge did not consider it practica-
ble to get the Java home, and he accord-
ingly burned her. Lieutenant Hoffman,
who set fire to her, had performed the
like duty for the Guerriere. After a few
days near Sarx Salvador with the Hornet,
whose intended victim had not yet come
out, the Constitution laid her course for
Boston, which she reached February 27,
1813, bearing the news of her own vic-
tory. She and her crew were received
with the wildest enthusiasm, and the
town turned out to do honor to the vic-
tors. What was better than all to Jack
Tar, he received his prize-money for two
ships captured within four and a half
months.

600

The Frigate Constitution.

After extensive repairs, under the di-
rection of Captain Charles Stewart, who
went in command of her, Old Ironsides
got to sea again on January 1, 1814, for
a cruise towards the Barbadoes. She
captured a few small prizes and attempt-
ed to overhaul a British frigate, and was
herself chased into the harbor of Mar-
blehead on April 3 by two frigates on
the blockade of the New England coast.
Captain Stewart had to throw overboard
a quantity of old rigging, provisions,
and other heavy articles, to escape. He
moved down to Boston shortly after-
wards, where the ship remained until
December.

Her last cruise during the war began
on December 17, 1814, with a long reach
to the Bay of Biscay by way of the Ber-
mudas and the Madeiras. The morning
of February 20, 1815, off the coast of
Morocco, opened with a light mist over
the sea and a variable wind. At one
o'clock in the afternoon a sail hove in
sight, followed within an hour by a sec-
ond. They proved to be the British ships
Cyane and Levant, carrying in all fifty-
five guns, firing a broadside weighing 754
pounds against the Constitution's 654.
The Constitution made all sail to over-
haul them, and opened fire on the Cy-
ane, the sternmost ship, at four minutes
past six. By fine manoBuvring and rap-
id handling of guns she played havoc
with both English ships without permit-
ting herself to be raked. At one time,
when she had forged ahead enough to
fire into the Levant, the Cyane attempt-
ed to pass astern of her to rake ; but
Captain Stewart braced the yards flat to
the masts and literally backed through
the smoke to a position alongside of the
Cyane, into which he poured a wither-
ing fire. The Cyane surrendered at ten
minutes to seven, and left the Consti-
tution free to pursue the Levant. The
prisoners were first removed and dam-
ages were repaired, so that it was two
hours before the action began again. The
Levant surrendered at ten o'clock. This

whole action, covering about four hours,
was fought by moonlight, and exhibits
the wonderful agility of the Constitution
under sail. Captain Stewart's seaman-
ship enabled him to manage two ships
without suffering materially himself. The
smoke from the guns obscured much of
the movement. The British ships lost
seventy-seven in killed and wounded, and
the Constitution fourteen.

The next day Captain Stewart made
sail for Port Praya, Cape Verde Islands,
the nearest neutral port, where he ar-
rived with his two prizes seventeen days
later. The discipline and readiness of
the American sailors are again well de-
monstrated by an occurrence on the very
day after anchoring, when three frigates
appeared in the offing. Not knowing
what they were, and feeling sure that
English ships would not respect the neu-
trality of the port, Captain Stewart made
sail to get out of the harbor before the
strangers came in. Within seven minutes
after the first alarm his ships were all
under weigh, standing out to sea. Thus
began another of those lucky escapes for
which the Constitution had become as
famous as for her victories. She and
her two prizes hugged the north shore
of the island close hauled on the port
tack, with the English squadron follow-
ing and almost within gunshot. In fact,
they tried firing at long range. While
the Constitution .easily held her own
to windward, her antagonists weathered
the Cyane and Levant. Hoping to di-
vide their forces, Captain Stewart sig-
naled to the Cyane to tack to the north-
west, which she did, and in this way
escaped. She reached New York without
further incident. The same manoauvre
was tried with the Levant, but the whole
English squadron immediately turned in
pursuit, and left the Constitution to sail
away. She landed her prisoners at Ma-
ranham and sailed for Porto Rico, where
the news of peace reached her. Her
last cruise during the war ended at New
York on May 17, 1815.

The Frigate Constitution.

601

In the meantime, the Levant, finding
escape impossible, had put into her an-
chorage at Port Pray a, and was there
retaken by the British ships, whose offi-
cers learned to their chagrin that it was
the Constitution which had been thus
deserted in order tp retake an English
prize.

The subsequent career of Old Iron-
sides is soon told. Her period of in-
tense activity had passed, and she had
won eternal fame by three great victo-
ries and three wonderful escapes. After
six years of rest she was to carry her
country's flag to distant ports for the
protection of American merchant-ships
in peaceful pursuits, until superseded by
the new agent, which was even then be-
ginning to change the construction of
ships and to render them independent
of wind and wave. Between the years
1821 and 1838 she made two long
cruises to the Mediterranean, for the
purpose of holding the piratical states
on the southern shore to their treaties.
The really critical point in her life ar-
rived in 1828, during a prolonged stay
in Boston, when the Secretaiy of the
Navy came near accomplishing what no
enemy had ever succeeded in doing, —
forcing her to strike her flag. He re-
commended to the navy commissioners
that she be broken up, as the cost of
repairing her hull promised to equal
her original cost. The popular clamor
aroused by the publication of this de-
cision resulted in the saving of the frig-
ate. Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem,
Old Ironsides, dashed off in the heat
of indignation, did much to create an ir-
resistible public sentiment. It was pub-
lished in every newspaper through the
land, and circulated in handbills at Wash-
ington.

" Ay, tear her tattered ensign down !

Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That hanner in the sky."

The necessary money was appropriated,
and the ship was practically rebuilt at

Boston without alteration of model or
plan.

No sooner had the excitement sub-
sided than she was plunged once more
into a discussion more bitter than ever.
There had been no difference of opin-
ion about breaking her up, but there was
a very rancorous difference about the pro-
priety of Andrew Jackson as a figure-
head. The commandant of the Navy
Yard, thinking to please the President
and his admirers, had procured a finely
carved statue of him, and had placed it
under the bowsprit. It raised a great
storm of indignation in Boston, and Com-
modore Elliott put a guard over the ship
to protect her against threatened attack.
On a dark night, however, during a heavy
rain, Samuel Dewey crossed the Charles
in a small boat, and, within sight of a sen-
try posted near by, sawed off the head,
which he brought away as a trophy of his
exploit. He subsequently carried it to
Washington. A new figure-head of Jack-
son, put on immediately afterwards, re-
mained until 1876.

From 1838 to 1855 the ship was suc-
cessively in the Atlantic, the Asiatic, the
Mediterranean, and the African squad-
rons, with occasional visits to home ports
for repairs. Her commander in China
was Captain John Percival, who, as a
boy of seventeen before the mast, had
been impressed by the English from an
American merchant-ship. By his intel-
ligence and energy Percival rose in the
English service, and was captain of the
foretop on Nelson's flag-ship at Trafal-
gar. As the Constitution went out to
China by the way of Cape Horn, and
returned through the India seas, her
voyage extended completely around the
globe. Her cruising days may be said
to have ended with her return to Ports-
mouth, N. H., in 1855, where she lay
housed over until the outbreak of the
rebellion, when she was taken to Anna-
polis. Once more she made one of her
miraculous escapes. She was nearly de-
fenseless, and the opportune arrival of

602

The Frigate Constitution.

the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment, un-
der General Butler, saved her from fall-
ing into the hands of the Confederates.
Her moorings were slipped, and she was
towed over the bar by a steamer seized
from Confederate owners. A tug from
Havre de Grace carried her to New York,
whence she was taken to Newport as a
school-ship for the Naval Academy. In
1871 she was moved to Philadelphia, and
there rebuilt for the Exposition of 1876.
She made a voyage to Havre in 1878
for the purpose of transporting goods
to the Paris Exposition, and her return
early in 1879 was, as usual, full of inci-
dent. With a cargo of goods on board
she ran aground at Ballard's Point, Eng-
land, only a few hours out from Havre,
and had to be taken to an English dock-
yard for examination. A few days later,
when clear of the Channel, her rudder-
head was wrenched off, and she put into
Lisbon for repairs. The voyage to New
York ended on May 24, 1879. After
use for a short time as a training-vessel
for naval apprentices, she was taken to
Portsmouth, N. H., where she remained,
housed over as a receiving-ship, until she
was brought to Boston on September 18,
1897. Frequent rebuilding and renewal
of parts have changed her hull much as
the human body is said to change with
time, though the keel and floor timbers
are those which thrilled with the shock
of the old guns, and floated under Preble,
Hull, Bainbridge, Stewart, and a host of
other gallant seamen. The model has
been carefully preserved.

In reckoning up the services of the
Constitution, it is well to consider the
condition of the country during the pe-
riod of her greatest activity. When she
was built, the nation was only a hand-
ful of scattered colonies, without experi-
ence in wielding the instrument of gov-
ernment framed with infinite pains by
our forefathers to foster and strengthen
common interests and common action.
There were no railroads or telegraph

wires to bind us closer together, and to
bring our States within easy reach of
one another. Any measure by the chief
executive and legislative powers which
affected adversely the commerce of a sec-
tion was certain to be followed by talk
and threats of separation. We had no
background of history to draw upon as
a reserve force in national crises. If
the war of 1812 was the second war of
independence, it was likewise the first
for the Union. It was thought by many
to be unnecessary, but it changed us from
provincials to citizens of one great coun-
try, and it taught us something about the
relation of the separate States to the cen-
tral government in the organization for
war, and thus strengthened the North to
withstand the shock of fifty years later.
During the first eight years of our exist-
ence as a nation we had no navy, and
we could not be taken seriously even by
the countries with which hundreds of
our ships traded. The merchant-ships
were prey to any armed vessel which
chose to take out of them either men or
money. The spectacle of a frigate loaded
down with a valuable cargo of merchan-
dise and dollars, and sent as a present
to the dey of Algiers to purchase a
peaceful trade in the Mediterranean, is
the most humiliating in our whole his-
tory. The manning of such a vessel
by former American slaves of Algiers
was the last touch required to complete
the picture. Until we had proven our
ability to strike hard blows, we were
scarcely better off with the European
powers. Our rights as neutrals were to-
tally disregarded, and American seamen
were taken out of our merchant-ships,
and even our war-ships, to a slavery dif-
ferent only in kind from that in the Bar-
bary States.

As the flag-ship of a squadron which
effectually broke up the system of trib-
ute to a nest of pirates, the Constitu-
tion will forever deserve our gratitude ;
and as the chief actor in a war which
united the country in the maintenance

The Frigate Constitution.

603

of its rights as a neutral power and of the
immunity of its sailors from capture on
the high seas, she must be handed down
in bodily presence to our children. Let
us take the words of a foreigner for an
unprejudiced view of our position in na-
val matters. An accomplished French
admiral writes as follows : " When the
American Congress declared war on
England in 1812, it seemed as if this
unequal conflict would crush her navy in
the act of being born ; instead, it but fer-
tilized the germ. . . . The English cov-
ered the ocean with their cruisers when
this unknown navy, composed of six frig-
ates and a few small craft hitherto hard-
ly numbered, dared to establish its cruis-
ers at the mouth of the Channel, in the
very centre of the British power. But
already the Constitution had captured
the Guerriere and the Java, the United
States had made a prize of the Mace-
donian, the Wasp of the Frolic, and the
Hornet of the Peacock. The honor of
the new flag was established."

It is small wonder we exulted, perhaps
too extravagantly, over Hull's victory.
May we not say that this triumph so early
in the war exerted a strong influence in
turning the common people of Massachu-
setts against the wild talk of separation ?
The Boston Centinel, which had con-
demned the war most unsparingly, heart-
ily rejoiced in the achievements " which
placed our gallant officers and hardy tars
on the very pinnacle of the high hill of
honor, and which established the neces-
sity and utility of a navy." " This honor
and usefulness must thunder in the ears
of the navy-haters in high places. Give
us a navy." This ship, launched from a
Boston shipyard, commanded by a Yan-
kee sailor, and flying the stars and
stripes, had brought home as a trophy
the standard of the invincible navy. The
charm was broken, and other victories
on the sea followed fast, to prove to the
world the existence of an independent
nation on this side of the Atlantic. If
the first triumph had given a " tone and

character to the war," the Constitution
had done more : she had given tone and
character to the nation for all time.
Although the treaty at the close of the
war of 1812 left us very much where
we were before, the actual result was to
give us standing before the world and
complete freedom on the sea. The
English have ever been a brave and
chivalrous people, but their respect and
consideration have been measured large-
ly by the power of a nation to strike
back. Our forefathers' children on both
sides of the water have met in friend-
ship and mutual good feeling on the
deck of Old Ironsides many times since
1815.

The old ship cannot be dismissed
without some reference to her successor
in the annals of our history after sails
had lost their importance. The Consti-
tution and the Monitor have certain cu-
rious points of resemblance and of differ-
ence. Both were departures in type from
what had gone before, and both wrought
great changes in the construction of war-
vessels for the navies of Europe. One
stands to-day as the most beautiful ex-
ample of the old sailing frigate ; the
other was but the crude beginning of
the modern battle-ship. Both gained
their victories over people of the same
race and blood and the same maritime
traditions. The Constitution went bold-
ly out from Boston in the face of tre-
mendous odds, and the Monitor left New
York as a forlorn hope. It is strange
that both should have sailed just before
a. change of orders could reach them.
One is almost persuaded to see in this
the hand of a good Providence which fa-
vored our country.

The most important effect of victory
in both conflicts was a moral one : in
the first case putting heart into the na-
tion, and in the second infusing hope and
courage into the North. Washington
took a deep interest in the construction
of the Constitution, and Lincoln's favor-
able opinion secured the trial of the Mon-

604 Fair England.

itor. Both ships have served in the f ul- rial of the nation's glory. Let those who

fillment of our destiny as a great and fear the temptations of a growing navy

united nation. contrast our foreign relations before the

Monuments in wood were thought by coming of the Constitution and our

the Greeks to be fitting memorials of present position in the family of na-

strife between people of the same blood, tions. The lack of ships then carried

The Constitution still survives, — a hull us swiftly into war, as the possession of

which has renewed itself with every them now will form the surest pledge

generation as our most precious memo- of peace.

Ira N. Hollis.

FAIR ENGLAND.

WHITE England shouldering from the sea,
Green England in thy rainy veil,

Old island-nest of Liberty
And loveliest Song, all hail!

God guard thee long from scath and grief!

Not any wish of ours would mar
One richly glooming ivy-leaf,

One rosy daisy-star.

What ! phantoms are we, spectre-thin,
Unfathered, out of nothing born?

Did Being in this world begin
With blaze of yestennorn ?

Nay ! sacred Life, a scarlet thread,

Through lost unnumbered lives has run ;

No strength can tear us from the dead ;
The sire is in the son.

Nay! through the years God's purpose glides,
And links in sequence deed with deed ;

Hoar Time along his chaplet slides
Bead after jewel-bead.

0 brother, breathing English air!

If both be just, if both be free,
A lordlier heritage we share

Than any earth can be :

If hearts be high, if hands be pure,
A bond unseen shall bind us still, —

The only bond that can endure,
Being welded with God's will!

Democracy and the Laboring Man. 605

A bond unseen ! and yet God speed

The apparent sign, when He finds good ;

When in His sight it types indeed
That inward brotherhood.

For not the rose-and-emerald bow

Can bid the battling storm to cease,
But leaps at last, that all may know

The sign, not source, of peace.

Oh, what shall shameful peace avail,

If east or west, if there or here,
Men sprung of ancient England fail

To hold their birthright dear?

If west or east, if here or there,

Brute Mammon sit in Freedom's place,
And judge a wailing world's despair

With hard, averted face ?

O great Co-heir, whose lot is cast

Beside the hearthstone loved of yore !
Inherit with us that best Past

That lives for evermore !

Inherit with us ! Lo, the days

Are evil ; who may know the end ?
Strike hands, and dare the darkening ways,

Twin strengths, with God to friend!

Helen Gray Cone.

DEMOCRACY AND THE LABORING MAN.

THE unexpected weakness of demo- As a consequence, no other field of our

cratic government is its belief in the experimenting affords such interest to

efficiency of law-making. It seems pos- the student of society. Quite singularly

sessed with the idea that statutes can here have we got down to first princi-

amend both nature and human nature, pies ; and those basic propositions which

The state legislatures even more than usually appear as mere generalities in

Congress have erred in this particular, the bills of rights of the several state

and the error has not been confined, or constitutions or in the first general set

mainly confined, to either political party, of amendments to the national Constitu-

There is no class in the community tion, or even those of the Declaration

so well organized, politically speaking, as of Independence itself, are now actually

that of industrial labor ; that is, there is discussed in our courts as they are

no large body of voters so ready to de- called upon to test statutes which seek to

mand and so able to effect legislation, control the whole of our citizens for the

606

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

well-being of a part. Through our ear-
nest desire to ameliorate the condition
of the handicraftsman, we are in dan-
ger of reviving mediaeval restrictions,
or of refurbishing musty contrivances of
old guilds or devices of feudal lords, to
suit the immediate purpose of the more
thoughtless leaders of the masses.

It results from the essential, funda-
mental nature of this movement that no
other branch of- our law - making has
been so much questioned upon constitu-
tional grounds. The growth of consti-
tutional law in the state and federal
courts of this country in the past decade
has probably equaled that of the entire
century preceding. Not only that, but
the courts have had to discuss first prin-
ciples, which had hardly been thought of
since they lay in the minds of Hamil-
ton and Jefferson, Marshall and Bushrod
Washington, at the period when our con-
stitutions were adopted. Our legislatures
are somewhat impatient of experience,
particularly of the experience of other
nations or of older times, — the more
that they all have big brothers in the
shape of their state supreme courts to fall
back upon when they err. As a conse-
quence, the courts have had to do an
amount of nullifying work not contem-
plated by the makers of our Constitu-
tion. If this is disagreeable to the men
who pass the laws, it is certainly more
disagreeable to the judges. Worse than
this, large numbers of our people, and
notably those who represent the labor
interests, are showing signs of impa-
tience, and complaining that the courts
are hostile to them.

The figures that follow must be taken
as approximate, but a somewhat careful
investigation of our legislation has shown
that at least 1639 laws affecting labor
interests have been passed in the States
and Territories during the past ten years.
As many of these statutes are several
pages long in mere bulk, the legislation is
not inconsiderable. In fact, however, it
is confined to a small number of princi-

ples ; that is, to efforts in a few particular
directions to regulate human relations,
and in still fewer to punish interference
with them. But of the statutes attempt-
ing to embody these principles in law, a
large proportion have been held unconsti-
tutional in some of the States, while of
the principles themselves a greater pro-
portion have met this objection.

The broad difficulty with this sort of
legislation which has compelled the courts
to reject it is a curious one, and may come
with something of surprise to those who
have not studied it. It is that these stat-
utes have been restrictive of liberty ; that
is, of private liberty, of the right of a free
citizen to use his own property and his
own personal powers in such way as he
will, if so be that he do not injure others,
and to be protected by the state in so
doing. It should surprise us now, and
it would have surprised our forefathers
very much, to learn that this proves to
be the direction in which our legislatures
most often err. But there is no doubt
that democracies in other nations than
our own, when suddenly entrusted with
sovereign powers, betray a distinct incli-
nation to tyrannize ; of course, as they
suppose, for the general good.

There is no department in which the
science of legislation is progressive to-
day, in which new laws are being formu-
lated and new principles recognized or
enacted into law, except the one that in a
general way we may term " sociology ; "
the department which governs the social
relations and provides for the material
well-being of the masses of the people.
Therefore, it should not discourage us to
learn that of the 1639 laws above men-
tioned as having been passed in the last
ten years, 114 specific statutes have been
declared unconstitutional ; while of the
forty-three lines of action in which legis-
lation has been essayed, the constitution-
ality of no less than twenty -three is,
speaking mildly, in doubt.

It is the purpose of this article to
study the lines upon which the state has

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

607

thus far intervened in the labor ques-
tion ; which means, to sketch those lines
in which legislation has been tried and
has succeeded, or has been nullified by
the courts. At first sight, the lines of
such interference by law do not appear
very strange, nor the statutes themselves
especially subversive. The largest class
of these statutes is made up of the de-
tailed laws for regulating the sanitary
condition of factories, the constitutional-
ity of which was established in England,
though against great opposition, some
sixty years ago, and, in the case of large
factories, has never been questioned in
this country. It includes the immense
number of statutory regulations aimed at
the preservation of the health or morals
of factory employees. Of such statutes
there have been enacted at least a thou-
sand octavo pages in bulk, throughout
the country, in the last ten years. They
exist in all States except a few in the
South and West, where there are practi-
cally no factories, and, curiously enough,
New Hampshire ; and they comprise not
fewer than 146 chapters of legislation.
There has been no decision holding any
one of these unconstitutional ; but in the
case of the regulation of mines, about
which laws are almost equally numerous
(sixty-five chapters of statutes in thirty-
three States), a recent Pennsylvania stat-
ute, which provided for the enforced em-
ployment of a state inspector, not chosen
by the mine-owner, and then made the
latter liable to his operatives for damages
due to the inspector's negligence, has
been recently declared unconstitutional
by a lower state court.

The most important line in which the
aid of legislation has been sought by the
labor interests is that of enforced restric-
tion by the state of hours of labor. There
has been so much loose discussion of eight
or nine hour laws, for the last few years,
that the public have possibly been led into
a delusion as to the position of free coun-
tries on this question. It seems to be
commonly supposed that laws making it

criminal or penal to employ the labor of
male citizens of full age more than a
certain fixed period per day have been
usual in countries enjoying constitutional
liberty ; whereas the exact contrary is the
case. An autocratic government, like
that of the German emperor, may doubt-
less do what it likes ; but, with the pos-
sible exception of New Zealand, where
a policy nearly approaching to state so-
cialism has been adopted by popular
majorities, no English-speaking state has
yet submitted itself to laws whereby the
liberty of a freeman of full age to work
as long as he chooses has been thus cur-
tailed ; and in our country, as we shall
see, such laws, when attempted, have al-
ways hitherto been held unconstitutional.
The misconception has arisen from the
fact that the constitutionality of laws lim-
iting the labor of women and minor chil-
dren, who are in theory favored by the
special protection of the state, was long
ago sustained in England, and in some
of the United States. Such laws, ap-
plying mainly to labor in factories and
workshops, have existed in both countries
for forty or fifty years, and have doubt-
less had the indirect effect of limiting
male laborers of full age in factories to
the same working-day hours as women ;
the reason being that the bulk of factory
labor is that of women and children, and
that it is not economical — often it is im-
possible — to employ the small number of
adult males after the other hands have
been dismissed. When people speak of
eight or nine hour laws, they usually mean
thise laws which apply exclusively to fac-
tory labor, not to agricultural or domes-
tic or individual service, and only to such
factory labor as is furnished by women
or children. Where laws go beyond this
(subject to a few minor exceptions in-
stituted in the interest of the public safe-
ty, which will be discussed later), they
are exceptional, if not unconstitutional ;
and in this country, even such laws as
apply only to the labor of women of full
age may be unconstitutional, under the

608

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

theory that a woman is a full citizen,
entitled to all the rights that a man has,
except where expressly limited by con-
stitutions or constitutional statutes.

Only two of the States and Territories
have hitherto made any effort to prohibit
all men from laboring as many hours
per diem as they choose to contract for.
These States are Nebraska and Colora-
do ; and in Nebraska the statute made
an exception of farm or agricultural la-
bor, and did not actually prohibit labor
overtime, but merely provided that it
should be paid double rates. In Colo-
rado the movement did not even get so
far as a statute ; but the legislature in-
quired of the Supreme Court of Colo-
rado, as they had a constitutional right
to do, whether a bill which provided
that " eight hours shall constitute a legal
day's work for all classes of mechanics,
working men, or laborers employed in
any occupation in the State of Colorado "
was constitutional, and also whether an
amendment proposed, which limited the
act to laborers employed in mines, fac-
tories, and smelting-works, would render
it constitutional ; and the court decided
both questions in the negative, holding
that it was not competent for the legis-
lature to single out certain industries and
impose upon them restrictions from which
men otherwise engaged were exempt,
and also that both bills violated the rights
of parties to make their own contracts,
— "a right guarantied by our Bill of
Rights, and protected by the fourteenth
amendment to the Constitution of the
United States." The Supreme Court of
Illinois has also pronounced against laws
limiting the hours of labor of adult cit-
izens, male or female. Georgia is the
only other State which has said anything
about hours of labor in general ; but as
the statute of that industrious community
limits the length of the working-day to
the time between sunrise and sunset, the
law has gone unchallenged, though it
would probably be declared unconstitu-
tional if the question were raised as to

industries where it is necessary to work
in the night. These cases have un-
doubtedly given a quietus in the United
States to any attempt to limit generally
the time that a grown man may labor.

In several States, however, there is a
statute which provides what shall be the
length of a working-day, in the absence
of a special contract to the Contrary or
a general usage of any particular trade.
There are others where such a period is
prescribed, in the absence of contract,
as to general industrial or mechanical
labor ; that is, to labor by the day, and
not to farm labor or domestic service.
But even this statute has inferentially
been held unconstitutional in Nebraska
and Illinois, and directly so in Ohio,
where the statute applied to the em-
ployees of a mine or railroad only, and
required that they should work not more
than ten hours per diem, and should re-
ceive extra pay for overtime ; the court
holding that " statutes may be, and they
sometimes are, held to be unconstitution-
al, although they contravene no express
word of the constitution, as where they
strike at the inalienable rights of the
citizen so as to infringe the spirit of the
instrument, though not its letter." The
court held, however, that this one did
infringe the letter of the Ohio constitu-
tion. Otherwise its position would have
been somewhat extreme ; for the idea
that there is anything in the " spirit "
of the constitutions which the courts are
to preserve has been strongly denied by
the supreme courts of other States, no-
tably that of Massachusetts.

When we get to the attempts of the
labor interests to limit the work of men
employed by the State or by cities or
counties or public municipalities, or even
by contractors for them, we find little
more encouragement from the courts.
No less than nineteen statutes have been
passed, by eleven States, limiting the
length of the labor day upon all public
work to eight hours, or, in Massachu-
setts and Texas, to nine hours. It ap-

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

609

pears clear that the government of a
State or city may voluntarily choose to
employ its workmen for as short a work-
ing-day as it pleases. One would hard-
ly suppose that such statutes were un-
constitutional ; and they have been held
not to be so, as to United States laws,
by the United States Supreme Court.
Laws of this kind, to be of any effect,
must impose a penalty upon the con-
tractor or laborer working more than
eight hours, — that is, must make such
labor a criminal offense ; and our courts
are indisposed to allow mere industry to
be made a crime. Thus, although Cali-
fornia has a constitutional provision mak-
ing eight hours a legal day in all public
work, and requiring city contracts to be
made on that basis, when one Kuback,
having suffered his workmen to work
overtime, was indicted as for a crimi-
nal offense, the court, with much indig-
nation, held that this part, of the stat-
ute was unconstitutional. So, in New
York, it was held that a similar statute
could not be the basis of a criminal
indictment for misdemeanor, — which
practically nullifies the law. The re-
sult is that we may guess these laws to
be unconstitutional in at least six of the
eleven States referred to, and possibly in
more. The length to which legislatures
may go in fostering private interest at
the expense of the public is curiously
shown in another statute of California,
which absolutely forbids any work to be
done by contract on public buildings be-
longing to the State, and makes it neces-
sary for every one, architects apparently
included, to be employed by the day ;
still another provision makes it a felony
for a contractor to pay a laborer less than
the contractor receives for his work, — a
provision which would seem to wipe out
the contractor's profits, and reduce him
to the condition of merely receiving
wages for superintendence of work.

But, generally speaking, the great body
of legislation on this subject is concerned
with the labor of women and children

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 39

in factories. The labor of women of
full age is restricted to a certain num-
ber of hours per day in fifteen States
by thirty-seven statutes. Such statutes
exist throughout New England, with the
exception of Vermont, and in Virginia,
South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.
In New England the law ordinarily lim-
its such factory labor to ten hours a day,
or sixty hours a week ; the same is the
case in all the other States mentioned
except South Carolina and Georgia,
which allow eleven hours per day ; but
Massachusetts allows only fifty -eight
hours per week, Saturday being a short
day. There is probably no more vital
point than this now disturbing the labor
organizations of the country, if not the
legislatures. It is the key to the whole
problem of the working-day, because the
hours of factory labor, even if only of
women and minors, largely influence the
length of the working-day of other per-
sons in other employments. Although
this statute has existed fifty years in
England, where at first it aroused the
greatest opposition, and was affirmed as
constitutional by the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts many years ago, it is still
* doubtful whether it is valid as applied to
women of full age in other States. The
Supreme Court of Illinois has recently
rendered a most elaborate opinion, de-
claring it to be unconstitutional on the
somewhat unexpected ground that a wo-
man being a full citizen under the mod-
ern theory (save only as expressly re-
lieved by statute of onerous duties, such
as serving in the militia or upon juries),
she has all the rights that a man has ;
and consequently her right to work more
than eight hours a day, if she wishes,
may not (as handicapping her in the in-
dustrial race with persons of the other
sex) be arbitrarily taken from her.

It is a picturesque, possibly unexpect-
ed, but certainly logical result of the
agitation for women's rights that women
should lose some of their privileges ; and
it is very likely that until the Illinois

610

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

decision the right to be exempt from
factory labor for more than a short
working-day, under serious penalty to
the employer, was regarded as a privi-
lege and not a handicap. Even under
the women's rights movement, no State
has yet hazarded or indeed proposed a
statute that in matters of private con-
tract a woman's labor should be paid at
the same rate per day as a man's. The
restriction of her.working-day, therefore,
does not serve as an excuse to the em-
ployer for paying her less ; for this he
already does, has always done, and in
most employments would doubtless con-
tinue to do, on the sex distinction alone ;
but, be it privilege or handicap, it is
certainly gone forever in Illinois, and
probably in the other States whose con-
stitutions follow the modern theory that
a woman is a citizen like a man, and
not capable of any special protection un-
der the law. The Supreme Court of Illi-
nois practically held that any legislation
which protected women and did not ap-
ply to men was class legislation. It de-
nied that men and women could be cre-
ated into classes under the Constitution.
"Male and female created He them,"
but the court of Illinois re-created them
otherwise, — an extraordinary conclu-
sion, surely, but not illogical. The de-
cision has been received by the woman
suffrage associations with a silence that
is positively oppressive.

A still more striking illustration of
modern theories conflicting with ancient
ideas is shown in the attempt at pro-
hibiting women by law from serving in
occupations injurious to their health or
morals. One would suppose that this
matter might be considered covered by
the police jurisdiction of legislatures ;
yet it has been questioned, and in Cal-
ifornia an ordinance of the city of San
Francisco, providing that no woman
should be employed to serve liquor in
retail liquor-shops, was held unconstitu-
tional. Only four States have adopted
such a statute ; and in Louisiana it has

apparently been sustained, as well as in
the two recent cases arising in the States
of Washington and Ohio ; one may hope
that these will be followed in future de-
cisions. Upon a similar basis must rest
the statute, now being rapidly adopted
throughout the country, requiring that
seats shall be supplied to female em-
ployees in shops, stores, and factories,
and providing for separate toilet-rooms,
stairways, etc. Thirty-four such statutes
have been passed in twenty-two States,
and no court has questioned them.

When we come to the limiting of the
working-day of minors, male or female,
in factories, we have at last no consti-
tutional difficulty to face ; and at least
sixty-seven statutes with this aim have
been passed in twenty-two States. Even
here the question of policy comes up, and
the conflict of opinion in various sec-
tions of the country is very striking. Be-
sides the States mentioned as limiting
the factory day for women of full age,
New England and the North generally
have statutes which apply to minors only,
while most of the Pacific, Rocky Moun-
tain, and Southern States have no such
laws. The fact has already been ad-
verted to that Massachusetts has a work-
ing period shorter by two hours in the
week than that of any other State. The
labor unions themselves have come to
the conclusion that they cannot go fur-
ther in Massachusetts without injuring
its industry in comparison with that of
other States ; and many bills introduced
for the purpose of reducing the day's
labor below ten hours have been defeat-
ed in the last few years, largely by the
influence of the unions ; on the other
hand, they are with propriety seeking to
persuade the States which have no such
statutes to adopt them.

Now, nearly all the States in the
Union have established boards of com-
missioners for bringing about uniformi-
ty of law throughout the States, whose
duties are to meet and devise statutes
identical in terms upon subjects wherein

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

611

uniformity may wisely be desired ; and
having prepared such statutes, to use
their influence for the adoption of them
in their respective States. Two years
ago, urged thereto by the labor unions,
the Massachusetts legislature passed a
resolution instructing its Commissioners
upon Uniformity of Legislation to bring
before the next national conference the
desirability of factory legislation in other
States ; that is, of inducing the South
and West to adopt what is commonly
known as the ten-hour law. The Mas-
sachusetts commissioners brought this up
in the national conference which was
held at Detroit in the summer of 1895,
but they met with the vigorous and near-
ly unanimous opposition of the Southern
and Western States. The fact is that
while the labor interest is strong enough
to bring about reasonable legislation in
some States, it cannot overcome the de-
sire of the States which have no large
manufactories to establish new indus-
tries by allowing a freer hand to capital ;
and the result is that, particularly in the
South, mill-owners may work their op-
eratives eleven or twelve hours a day,
or even more. Not only this, but most
of the legislation which forms the sub-
ject of this article, and which undoubted-
ly has the effect somewhat to hamper
employers, does not exist in those States ;
and there is even an extraordinarily lib-
eral exemption from taxation for new in-
dustrial enterprises, often lasting as long
as ten years. Hence, the labor reform-
ers have got to a point in New England
where it is unsafe for them to proceed
further until they have secured the adop-
tion of their ideas in the rest of the
country. ,

" Sweat-shops " are defined to be rooms
or residences, not factories, in which in-
dustrial occupations are carried on. The
general health regulation of cities takes
up an immense body of legislation, which,
as it concerns ordinary sanitary matters
rather than labor, we need not consider
in this article ; but several States have

already adopted laws, and in others laws
are pending, which interfere with the
conduct of certain industries, or some-
times any industry, in a house or tene-
ment. Now, " an Englishman's house is
his castle'; " moreover, the dearest hope
of philanthropists, in _ the early half of
this century, was to do away with the
factory system, and to reintroduce do-
mestic labor, as by power-wheels, looms,
or lathes, in a man's own home, — a
hope that now seems more than ever pos-
sible of realization, owing to the facility
of cheaply subdividing electrical power.
It is easy to see that any statutes aimed
at sweat-shops will be apt to cover also
labor in a man's own home.

Up to the beginning of this year le-
gislation of this sort had been begun in
Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Illinois ; it is gener-
ally aimed at labor upon special com-
modities, such as clothing, tobacco, and
artificial flowers, and makes any dwell-
ing-house or tenement where such work
is carried on subject to official inspection,
— providing that no room occupied for
sleeping or eating purposes can be used
for manufacturing except by members of
the family living therein, and sometimes
prohibiting the manufacture of certain
articles, such as cigars, upon a floor any
part of which is occupied for residence.
In New York and Illinois the statute
was pronounced unconstitutional. The
question, What is a tenement ? is, of
course, important in connection with such
legislation. In New York a statute was
passed declaring that any building occu-
pied by more than three families should
be held to be a tenement-house, and sub-
ject to regulation. It is probable that
in the future the sanitary regulation of
sweat-shops, properly so called, — that is,
houses or rooms where a considerable
number of operatives not in residence in
the house are employed, — will be pretty
freely admitted ; but a law which pre-
vents a person or his family from con-
ducting any work they choose in their

612

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

own home or tenement will not be likely
to stand unless the occupation itself is
positively dangerous to the health of the
community.

Perhaps the most surprising direction
in which our labor leaders have secured
legislation is that of the regulation by
the State of the labor contract itself, and
the strengthening of restrictive unions
and combinations by the hands of the
law. The whole history of the past is
summed up in the emancipation of the
individual freeman from the guild, of
the trader from restraints of trade, of
the town merchant from the chartered
companies. The economic history of
the past consists in the throwing down
of all barriers by which laborers were
excluded from the labor market ; in the
wiping out of the interminable and vex-
atious restrictions and regulations which
hampered trade as between man and
man, between town and country, between
master and apprentice, between the priv-
ileged member of a guild and the ordi-
nary freeman. There should be a pro-
verb, " As short as the memory of an
agitator ; " for it was as late as August
4, 1789, that this reform was accom-
plished in France under the tocsin of
the Revolution, while in England, owing
to the greater liberty citizens had previ-
ously enjoyed, its completion took place
fifty years later. A French historian
speaks of " the glorious night of the
4th of August, which made good the
demands of the laboring classes for the
freedom of individuals as against absolu-
tism, and for the abstinence from every
encroachment by a positive economic le-
gislation upon free economic life." It
took a millennium to bring this about ;
but apparently a century has sufficed to
turn labor unions against it.

As constitutions speak primarily for
freedom, — freedom of the man against
the mass to-day, as formerly for freedom
of the mass against the man, — it is not
surprising to find this kind of progress
backward condemned by the courts most

often of all our crude attempts at outworn
solutions of perduring problems.

The interference of the State with la-
bor contracts is growing to be something
extraordinary throughout the Union.
Ten laws, in nine States, provide that
when an employer requires from an em-
ployee a day's or week's or month's no-
tice of quitting employment, he may not
discharge the employee, although drunk
or incompetent, without giving him corre-
sponding notice or payment of wages for
the full time, even when written consent
is given to such an arrangement. These
laws have been declared unconstitution-
al by express decision in one State, and
by implication in two others. Ohio and
Massachusetts provide against the with-
holding of wages for bad work, as by
fines to weavers, or penalties for damage
of machinery and tools. The Massachu-
setts court at first held this provision un-
constitutional, and the statute was slight-
ly amended to meet its views ; but under
the stricter Western view it is undeni-
ably class legislation, and the Ohio stat-
ute is probably invalid.

Next, we come to the mass of legis-
lation which attempts to prescribe the
time, money, and nature of payment of
the workman by his employer. It is
well known that the most prolific cause
of strikes in recent years, except per-
haps the employment of non-union men,
is the insistence of railroads or corpora-
tions, which is at first sight reasonable,
upon their right to pay a skilled workman
higher wages than a bungler. Union
labor is intolerant of excellence ; it seeks
an average. In the same way, it is very
impatient of all payment which is reck-
oned, not upon the number of days' la-
bor, but upon the value of its output.
Mining companies, in particular, have
evoked its resistance on this point, from
their desire to pay the miner for the
weight of coal his day's work has actu-
ally turned out at the pit's mouth. On
the other side, it must be said that there
is doubtless some fraud in the rejecting

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

613

of coal or ore under the plea that it is
not up to standard. No less than thir-
teen States have passed laws regulating
or forbidding payment by weight of coal
or ore, or providing that it shall be
weighed before being screened, or sifted,
or appraised ; with a system of state in-
spection, weighing and measuring, at the
employer's expense ; so that the parties
cannot evade these provisions even by
voluntary contract. These statutes have
been expressly annulled in four States
out of the thirteen, and by implication in
eight others, leaving only one where the
law is probably valid.

Then there is a mass of legislation as
to the time when or the currency in which
the employer shall pay, — weekly, fort-
nightly, or at least monthly. Undoubt-
edly such statutes seem wise, despite the
inconvenience of requiring an employer
to pay everybody — as, for instance, his
coachman or his trusted clerk — by the
week instead of by the month. Yet the
danger of interfering in small affairs
with human freedom was curiously shown
in this very matter in the panic of 1893
in Chicago. The great employers of
that city found themselves absolutely
without cash, and hundreds of thousands
of workmen were in danger of starving ;
for even if the mills and workshops were
kept open, wages could not be paid in
money. As a benevolent act, a number
of employers got together, and at a mass
meeting announced, amid the cheers of
the multitude, that the danger of closing
the mills had been averted, and that
money enough had been obtained to in-
sure the payment of wages, — fifty per
cent in cash, and fifty per cent in checks
or orders which were as good as cash.
The wage-earners went home happy, —
only to find on the next morning that the
wise legislature which represented them
had made such an arrangement between
master and workman a criminal com-
pact, for which the former was liable to
be heavily mulcted, and even to be im-
prisoned.

After some months, when the legis-
lature met, the law was repealed ; but
in the meantime the Supreme Court of
Illinois had found it unconstitutional.
Such legislation has since been declared
unconstitutional in five other States ex-
pressly, and by implication in three more,
and has been affirmed in only three of
the seventeen States in which it exists,
— among them, however, Massachusetts.
There are no less than forty-two laws
upon this subject in our country ; and
there are fifty - five other statutes re«-
quiring that all wages and salaries shall
be paid in money, legal tender, not in
checks, or orders for supplies, or credit
upon a store or for rents or for any com-
modity.

The intention of these statutes is most
excellent ; they are aimed against the es-
tablishment of a credit tyranny over the
workmen. Yet out of eighteen States
only one has sustained such legislation,
while six expressly, ten impliedly, have
annulled it as against the freedom of the
American citizen. Still more reason-
able seems the intent of seventeen other
statutes in sixteen States, against the
maintenance of general stores by employ-
ers of labor, at which the workman is
tacitly invited to trade and run up an
account. But so great is the conserva-
tism of our Western courts, or at least
so unwilling are they to put it out of
the power of an American citizen to do
anything he chooses or to trade where
and how he will, that in four States the
lav has been annulled ; and, by impli-
cation, it is bad in eleven of the others.

The task would be endless to go
through all the kinds of tinkering which
our legislatures have sought to impose
on the industrial relations of their con-
stituents. Dozens of bills are introduced
in our state legislatures every year where
one is enacted ; of those that are enacted
probably more than half turn to waste
paper in the courts, and it was known
that this would be their fate when they
were first engrossed. Yet every legis-

614

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

lature has its demagogue who makes po-
litical capital of such bills, and its ma-
jority of cowards who refuse to go on
record as objecting to them, relying con-
sciously on the greater courage of judges,
upon whom unjustly, and against all
meaning of our constitution of govern-
ment, this duty of " Devil's Advocate "
is thus imposed.

It must not be thought, however, that
the courts are always retroactive in la-
bor questions. In the most important
matters of all they have been very pro-
gressive. In fact, one may say that the
great reforms legalizing trades unions
and removing strikes from the law of
criminal conspiracy have been brought
about in this country by decisions of the
courts, while in England they were effect-
ed by acts of Parliament. Under the
common law as it existed in England,
until recently, trades unions were illegal ;
but this was set right in the United States
soon after the Revolution ; and the courts
have done all they can to further the
modern enlightened opinion that the best
way to handle labor disputes is to recog-
nize both sides in the law, and gain rea-
sonable adjustment of labor differences,
as well as the honest carrying out of such
adjustment when made, by the establish-
ment of responsible bodies of organized
labor, duly chartered by the state stat-
utes. Almost every State in the Union
has such statutes, authorizing the forma-
tion of labor unions, — Knights of La-
bor, Farmer's Alliances, and similar
bodies ; and in no State have the courts
questioned them. In fact, the earlier
statutes themselves but carried out the
decisions of our courts in the first part
of the century, when they fully vindicat-
ed the right of laboring men to organize
and even to act in concert for the bet-
tering of their own condition or the in-
crease of their wages, so long as they do
not interfere with other citizens or run
counter to federal laws.

The labor unions, however, have gone
further than this, and have sought to get

special protection of organized labor at
the hands of the State by having statutes
passed which restrain employers not only
from discharging men because they are
members of labor unions, but from re-
quiring as a condition that their work-
men should not join such unions ; or even
by the further step of preventing em-
ployers from making free choice in en-
gaging their help among non-union men ;
and while there is no legislation yet, bills
have been introduced by labor leaders
which in effect would put non-union
men at the actual mercy of the trades
unions, as by legalizing strikes or boy-
cotts against them. Such legislation is
probably unconstitutional, and has been
definitely so held already in the State
of Missouri ; and the courts of at least
four of the ten other States which have
tried it will probably follow the Missouri
decision. To make it a misdemeanor
for an employer to exercise his choice of
workmen would indeed seem to be going
further than the sentiment of a free coun-
try should permit.

Union labels — that is, the recognition
by statute of the right of union labor to
stamp its output with a trademark indi-
cating that it is made under union con-
ditions, or what is called " fair work "
— have been expressly recognized by the
legislation of nearly all our States, and
their infringement has been penalized, as
in case of the infringement of a patent
right. Twenty-four States have already
passed such statutes, and others are rap-
idly following. Legislation of this kind
is welcome, though it would seem that
the union thus acquiring a property right
should, in fairness, become legally or-
ganized itself ; but when labor interests
take the step of hindering fair relations
between employer and employed, and
insurance against accident, old age, or
disability, by making impossible the in-
stitution of those insurance or benefit
funds which have been successfully work-
ing for many years, in some States,
particularly in the case of the larger

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

615

railroads, it seems that they have their
faces set against progress once more.
Four States have passed statutes for-
bidding the institution of insurance or
benefit funds, even when the employees
make their contributions voluntarily, and
the corporation gives a large amount ;
while only two States have so far passed
statutes allowing it. Yet these insurance
and benevolent funds have been eagerly
desired by labor leaders in Europe ; Mr.
Chamberlain's bill, just enacted by a con-
servative ministry in England, evoked
criticism only because it was compulso-
ry ; and it may be remarked that three
of the four States referred to have al-
ready, through their courts, declared the
prohibition of such funds unconstitu-
tional.

We have left the great subject of
strikes to the last. Undoubtedly, our
radical labor unions will be glad of stat-
utes which make legal and proper any
kind of combination to strike, or to boy-
cott employers, or to control fellow work-
men. The British Parliament has re-
cently gone very far in this direction, by
making any combination in labor dis-
putes, of however many persons, and al-
though aimed specifically against other
persons, not an unlawful conspiracy un-
less the acts committed by the members
of the combination are criminal offenses
in themselves. This act applies only to
industrial labor, not to agricultural la-
bor, and still less to other matters than
labor disputes. It would consequently
be unconstitutional in this country, where
most of our written constitutions forbid
class legislation and special privileges.
Nevertheless, one State (Maryland) has
gone to the length of copying the Eng-
lish statute ; and there are seven others
which have amended the law of conspir-
acy by providing that there must be an
overt act, criminal and unlawful in it-
self, in all cases of combination, to make
the persons combining guilty of a con-
spiracy. This statute is not unconstitu-
tional where it applies, as it usually does,

to combinations of all classes of persons ;
but it is somewhat difficult to reconcile
it with the legislation against trusts,
which generally exists in the same States,
whereby any combination of employers
or manufacturers is made a criminal of-
fense, as even by setting a price for a
line of goods or a rate of transportation,
— which obviously any one person or
corporation for itself alone would neces-
sarily have the right to do, in any free
country.

Further and still more radical stat-
utes have been enacted in the direction
not only of legalizing strikes and boy-
cotts, but even of making it impossible to
prevent the disorder and destruction of
property which may result therefrom.
The State of Nebraska has passed a stat-
ute which practically wipes out all chan-
cery powers and all equity jurisdiction.
Under this statute, it would seem that if
a body of strikers go even to the length
of stopping railway trains and prevent-
ing interstate commerce, after an injunc-
tion has been obtained by the district
attorney or the railway, they cannot be
permanently detained for disobedience
of it, or restrained by any equity pro-
cess, at the time, but can only be once ar-
rested, and then immediately discharged,
under a common appeal-bond, to await
their trial as for a criminal action before
a jury many months after the riot has
ceased. Of similar intent is the provi-
sion inserted in the constitution of Colo-
rado, and enacted by statute in Missouri,
which in substance makes it a criminal
offense for any owner of property to em-
ploy watchmen, private police, or Pin-
kerton men to protect life or property
where the local authorities fail or refuse
to do so.

The enactment of these two statutes
side by side would paralyze the " re-
sources of civilization," the arm of the
law, and would make criminal that right
of self -protection which was inherent in.
Saxon freemen before modern law be-
gan. The fact that, through the bungling

616

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

of Congress, the judicial branch of the
government was led into the exercise of
power properly appertaining to the exec-
utive — if such were the fact — would be
no excuse for blind legislation like this.
It gives the desired pretext to Mr. Debs
to argue that we have lost our freedom ;
to say that he " was enjoined off the face
of the earth," when in fact he was en-
joined from trespassing on a particular
lot of private property. The Court of
Chancery is the only power, in English
civilization, which can compel a man af-
firmatively to carry out his contract or
abstain from wrong to others, — too es-
sential a power to any civilization to be
abandoned wholly, even when, for the
nonce, it is abused.

The reader may think that we have
about exhausted the legislation of recent
years upon the labor question. Such is
not the case, however ; and there is quite
a mass of it left untouched. It is neces-
sary only to mention the extraordinary
number of statutes which exist, seeking
to give special advantages, privileges,
preferences, peculiar political rights, or
peculiar educational rights to those en-
gaged in manual labor. (It is a curi-
ous thing, by the way, that the great
body of clerks, office employees, even
salesmen in stores, though nearly equal
to industrial laborers in number, have
hardly been considered by our legislation.
Except for a very few recent statutes in
a few States restricting the hours of la-
bor of saleswomen, and the law requir-
ing that they shall be furnished with
seats, our law-makers have not concerned
themselves with them any more than they
have with farm laborers, — possibly be-
cause the majority of the former are wo-
men and children not having votes, possi-
bly because they are not duly organized
into " knighthoods " or " federations.")

From these statutes we go on to the laws
giving wage creditors preference, some-
times even over farm laborers, clerks, or
domestic servants ; while, on the other
hand, in all States, wages themselves, to

a very considerable amount, are exempt
from execution or attachment by the
creditor of the laborer. The exemp-
tion has grown so large in some Western
States that practically no property is li-
able for debt except money invested in
stocks and bonds ; and the State of Wy-
oming, for instance, has found it neces-
sary to pass a law forbidding the assign-
ment of debts to creditors living out of
the State, — that being the only method
by which a claim can be collected against
any person not a millionaire, in that
honest commonwealth. This statute is
probably unconstitutional. Then there
are statutes providing that if a person
has a claim for manual services, he may
get special attorneys' fees from the de-
fendant, shall be entitled to a hearing of
his action before all other actions, shall
have no exemptions of property valid
against him even in the hands of persons
as poor as himself ; and in case the de-
fendant is a corporation, every individual
stockholder, although a widow or an or-
phan, shall be liable personally and alone
for the amount. No security for costs is
required of the happy plaintiff in labor
actions ; laws against trusts and combi-
nations do not apply to him ; his agri-
cultural products are entitled to special
rates on the railways, and he himself to
a free passage if he go with the cattle he
ships. I find about a dozen States with
such laws, recently passed, in four of
which, however, some of them have al-
ready been held unconstitutional by the
local courts.

Lastly, we have the efforts made by
laborers who are citizens to prevent
aliens from getting employment. Three
States (California, Nevada, and Idaho)
have passed statutes that no alien can
be employed by any corporation in the
State. The law was annulled in Cali-
fornia by the strong arm of the federal
court. Seven States have passed laws
that no alien can be employed on any
public work, or in any labor that the
State, county, city, or town is to pay

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

617

for ; and in two of them the courts have
already annulled the law. Three States
have attempted to pass laws, independ-
ently of the national government, forbid-
ding the immigration into the State, al-
though from another State, of persons
who are aliens and under contract to
labor therein. One may safely say that
this legislation will vanish when it first
appears in the federal court-room.

There are no less than twenty-three
States which seek specially to protect the
industrial laborer from undue influence
upon election days. He must be given
time to vote ; no threat of stopping the
mill, or hope of opening it, must be ex-
pressed by his employer ; nothing po-
litical must be printed on the envelope
in which he receives his wage-money ;
he must be allowed to be a candidate
himself without losing his place ; and va-
rious other safeguards are thrown round
him, all of which are fair enough, though
one would suppose that the mill operative
is as well able to look out for himself,
politically and industrially, as the domes-
tic servant or the farm laborer, yet unre-
cognized in our legislation.

Now what is the outcome of all this ?
We have run over a mass of legislation
which exists in every State of the Union,
and covers no less than 1639 laws, all of
which have been enacted during the past
ten years. The general characteristic
of all of them, though some are harm-
less enough, is that they seek —

(1.) To give the industrial laborer
special privileges ; or

(2.) To control his actions, or the
actions of his employers or of other em-
ployers, in his peculiar interest.

When in doing this they have clashed
with the old inherited freedom of the An-
glo-Saxon freeman the courts have been
• forced to hold them invalid ; and thus
we have this extraordinary result, which
perhaps justifies the superficial complaint
of the labor agitator that the courts are
against him. We have discussed some
thirty-five classes or kinds of legislation

essayed in the interest of the industrial
employee. Of these thirty-five classes,
in one or another State no less than nine-
teen have been held, as to one law or
several laws, inconsistent with the state
or federal constitution. If we assume
that each court decision was right, and
will be followed in other States, we find
that no less than fifty-six per cent of the
legislation has been annulled by the
courts. We cannot assume this, of course,
especially as in some of the States the
courts have taken a different view ; but
we may assume that where there are
more than one or two decisions on the
same kind of law in different States,
holding the law invalid, such is the gen-
eral constitutional law throughout the
Union. Even according to this test, an
immense amount of legislative activity
has been rendered idle and vain by the
judicial branch of our government.

But before drawing a moral, let us
for one moment consider what the legis-
latures have done in the other direction ;
that is, either in the direction of affirm-
ing liberty and protecting classes from
classes or individuals from individuals,
or in the still more hopeful direction of
bettering industrial conditions by positive
legislation of the beneficial sort, — legis-
lation which is constructive rather than
restrictive. The tale here is short enough.
Beyond the one great statute, now happily
adopted by nearly half our States, which
legalizes arbitration and conciliation in
labor disputes, and provides machinery
for it, the only legislation which we can
point to is that enacted by a dozen or
more States, expressly affirming or defin-
ing the right of the American citizen to
employment free from intimidation or
molestation. Such statutes, indeed, but
enact the common law ; nevertheless,
their existence is a hopeful sign. Thus,
we find in Maine and Massachusetts that
threats, intimidation, or coercion are for-
bidden both to the employer and to the
employee. In Massachusetts they are
specially forbidden as from labor unions

618

Democracy and the, Laboring Man.

to individual laborers, while in New Eng-
land, New York, and the Northern States
generally it is made a penal offense to
prevent any person from entering into
or continuing in the employment of any
other person, or to prevent the employer
from employing him, or to interfere in
any way with his lawful trade, his tools, or
his property, or to conspire to compel an-
other to employ or discharge any person,
or in any way alter his mode of business.
This last statute exists only in Oregon,
the Dakotas, and Oklahoma. It probably
was not passed by other States because
they were aware that it was already the
law of the land. New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and a few Western States
have statutes expressly permitting lawful
and peaceable strikes, but such statutes
are not necessary in our country, whatever
may once have, been the case in England ;
the same remarks apply to the statute ex-
isting in New York and the Northwest
against boycotting, — which, being a con-
spiracy to do a private wrong, has always
been " against the peace," whether of
kingdom or of republic. Many States
have statutes against blacklisting, which
is the same offense reversed ; that is, it
is a combination of employers to prevent
a discharged employee, or a number of
employees, from getting new employ-
ment. Georgia has gone to the length
of requiring a corporation discharging
an employee to furnish him with a writ-
ten analysis of the defects of character
which led to his discharge ; but, with
corresponding luminosity, the high court
of that State has declared that if the
right to free speech exists in the North,
there is a similar right in the South to
silence ; and that the free-born Ameri-
can may " shut up " about his own busi-
ness, and not be haled into court to dis-
cover how he manages it. But these
three classes of legislation are all ; name-
ly, provision for arbitration, prevention
of intimidation, prevention of boycot-
ting and blacklisting.

This legislation is in the line of reas-

serting individualism. As we have given
the number of restrictive laws, it may
be well also to enumerate laws which we
may call emancipative or protective ; that
is, those that assert common law princi-
ples of personal liberty. They number
in all ninety -nine, and exist in about
twenty States. A slight distinction may
be made between them and the statutes
of the constructive sort, such as acta le-
galizing labor unions and creating boards
of arbitration. There are about one hun-
dred and forty -two such acts, twenty-
three of which are concerned with state
boards of arbitration.

In the line of state socialism we find
very little. Despite Mr. Bellamy's pon-
derous romance, based upon the easy
fairyland expedient of calling the aver-
age production of a man four thousand
dollars when it is really about six hun-
dred, the American citizen is not yet a
socialist. Agricultural experiment sta-
tions have been established at the state
expense ; and agricultural lectures in the
West, evening lectures, with stereopticon
accompaniment, to industrial laborers in
the East, are also often provided for, as
well as local libraries and trade schools.
This is well enough. Then there are
farmers' institutes with appropriations ;
bounties for the destruction of a long list
of noxious animals, including English
sparrows, and of insects, weeds and this-
tles ; and laws subjecting private land to
the exploitation of local irrigation com-
panies, — all, perhaps, allowable.

We find provisions, beside, for state
aid to needy farmers in regions affected
by drought, and to sufferers from fire
or flood, — also appropriations for seed
grain, potatoes, or the seed of any crop ;
bonds are issued by counties or States, in
North Dakota even by townships, to pur-
chase seed for farmers. State bounties
for production are beginning to make
their appearance ; among the articles so
far favored are beet-root sugar, canaigre
leather, potato starch, silk cocoons, bind-
ing-twine, spinning-fibres, sorghum, and

Democracy and the Laboring Man.

619

chicory. The State of Nebraska, how-
ever, has given up the silk industry, and
last May passed an act authorizing the
executive to sell the plant already estab-
lished for what it might be worth, or to
give it to the United States government,
provided the latter would agree to run it,
while the state-paid specialists on silk,
who were to learn the business and give
free education to others, have apparently
"lost their job." All this would seem
to be in the nature either of class legisla-
tion, or of engaging the State in private
business.

Lastly, we are beginning to have em-
ployment bureaus conducted by the State,
whose duty it shall be to furnish the un-
employed with employment. Bills to this
end have been proposed in several States,
but only in Montana and Utah have
they yet been enacted ; though Massa-
chusetts created a commission to inquire
into the state of the " unemployed."
We seem to be on the verge of a general
legislative movement which will throw
upon the State the permanent duty of in-
quiring whether all its able-bodied citi-
zens are employed at satisfactory wages,
and if not, why not ; and of finding for
them, or such of them as are not satisfied,
positions suited to their tastes or abilities ;
or, if that prove impossible, of creating
for them some labor by "anticipation of
necessary public work." To those who
believe, with Thomas Jefferson, that in
such sad cases the duty of the State, as
such, ends with the distribution of bread
in forma pauperis, — that is, with alms-
houses and asylums, — the advance is a
far one indeed. But it is reassuring to
find these statutes so few in number.
Only thirty-six laws embodying a state
socialistic principle have been passed in
the whole forty-eight States and Territo-
ries of the Union in the last ten years, and
these are confined mainly to seven or
eight States in the extreme West. One

cannot deny, nevertheless, that they show
a tendency to grow in number, and it is
national legislation which has set the bad
example ; although obviously, under our
constitutional government, the federal au-
thorities may do many things, as, for in-
stance, the establishment of bounties and
the regulation of interstate commerce,
which the S.tates under their constitutions
probably cannot do,

But this is of the future ; let us return
to the present. What strikes us most
upon this consideration is that the charge
which our laboring people are beginning
to make, that our courts are unfavorable
to their interests, while justified by the
facts upon the surface, is unsustained by
a more careful study. It is our legisla-
tures that are at fault, — our legislatures,
playing politics. Some of their laws are
like the crude experiments of a schoolboy
constructing his scheme of remedies upon
a slate. Labor leaders distrust experi-
ence, socialists detest lucidity, and our
temporary law-makers desire to appear
" friendly to labor." Underlying all this
are the fundamental misconceptions of
the time : that the State, because it is a
democracy, may wisely tyrannize over its
members ; that a government, because
instituted by and for the people, has the
duty of bringing dollars to their private
pockets. Of the thirty-five classes of
edicts alluded to in this article, perhaps
a dozen are wise and proper for a free
people ; these will stand while the others
are winnowed away in the trial.

Yet, patience : they may have done us
high service in the disappearing ; we
have been taught thereby. And if it be
a court that blows the chaff away, blame
not the judiciary, our third estate, that
it acts openly, American-like, man-fash-
ion ; civic courage in a nation is what
moral courage is in an individual ; and
of such courage our nation stands in
greatest need.

F. J. Stimson.

620

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

PECULIARITIES OF AMERICAN MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT.

IN trying to deduce from American
examples some idea of the probable in-
fluence of modern democracy on city gov-
ernment, we have to bear in mind that
the municipal history of America differs
greatly from that of Europe. In Eu-
rope, as a general rule, municipalities
either existed before the state or grew
up in spite of the state ; that is, they
were fresh attempts to keep alive the
sparks of civilization in the Middle
Ages, before anything worthy of the
name of a state had been organized, or
else they sprang into being as a refuge
from or a protest against state despot-
ism. In either case they always had a
life of their own, and often a very vigor-
ous and active life. No European city
can be said to have owed its growth
to the care or authority of the central
power. Both kings and nobles looked on
cities with suspicion and jealousy ; char-
ters were granted, in the main, with re-
luctance, and often had to be maintained
or extorted by force of arms. These
classes recognized liberties or franchises
which already existed, rather than grant-
ed new privileges or powers. Municipal
life was either an inheritance from the
Roman Empire, or an attempt at social
reorganization in a period of general
anarchy.

American cities, on the contrary, are
without exception the creations of a
state ; they have grown up either under
state supervision or through state insti-
gation ; that is, they owe their origin and
constitution to the government. Their
charters have usually been devised or in-
fluenced by people who did not expect
to live in the cities, and who had no per-
Sonal knowledge of their special needs.
In other words, an American municipal
charter has been rather the embodiment
of an a priori view of the kind of thing
a city ought to be, than a legal recogni-

tion of preexisting wants and customs.
The complete predominance of the state
has been a leading idea in the construc-
tion of all American charters. No legis-
lature has been willing to encourage the
growth of an independent municipal life.
No charter has been looked on as a finali-
ty or as organic law. In fact, the modi-
fication or alteration of charters has been
a favorite occupation of all legislatures,
stimulated by the rapid growth of the
cities and by the absence of all historical
experience of municipal life.

The idea most prominent in American
municipal history is that cities are simply
places in which population is more than
usually concentrated. Down to the out-
break of the war this view worked fair-
ly well in most cases. The cities were
small, their wants were few, and the in-
habitants had little or no thought of any
organization differing much from ordi-
nary town government. .Gas, water, po-
lice, and street-cleaning had not become
distinct municipal needs. Pigs were
loose in the streets of New York until
1830, and Boston had no mayor until
1822. Generally, too, the government
was administered by local notables. Im-
migration had not begun to make itself
seriously felt until 1846, and down to
1830, at least, it was held an honor to be
a New York alderman. For the work
of governing cities or making charters
for them, the average country legislator
was considered abundantly competent.
It presented none of what we now call
" problems." The result was that new
or altered charters were very frequent.
The treatment of the city as a separate
entity, with wants and wishes of its own
and entitled to a voice in the manage-
ment of its own affairs, was something
unknown or unfamiliar. In 1857, when,
under the influence of the rising tide of
immigration, the affairs of New York as

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

621

a municipality seemed to become unman-
ageable, the only remedy thought of was
the appointment of state commissioners
to take into their own hands portions of
the city business, such as the police, the
construction of a pafk, and so on.

The crisis in the affairs of the city of
New York which is known as the Tweed
period was simply the complete break-
down of this old plan of managing the
affairs of the city through the legislature.
Tweed could hardly have succeeded in
his schemes if he had not had the state
legislature at his back, and had not been
able to procure such changes in the char-
ter as were necessary for his purpose.
He pushed his regime to its legitimate
consequences. In fact, his career is en-
titled to the credit of having first made
city government a question, or " pro-
blem," of American politics. I doubt
much whether, previous to his day, any
American had considered it as being, or
likely to become, a special difficulty of
universal suffrage. But his successful
rise and troublesome career now present-
ed to the public, in a new and startling
light, the impossibility of governing cities
effectively by treating them as merely
pieces of thickly peopled territory. Ever
since his time the municipal problem has
been before men's minds as something to
be dealt with somehow ; but for a long
time no one knew exactly how to deal
with it.

There was an American way, already
well known, of meeting other difficulties
of government, but the American way of
governing large cities under a pure de-
mocracy no one seemed to have consid-
ered. The American way of curing all
evils had hitherto been simply to turn
out the party in power, and try the other.
It had always been assumed that the
party in power would dread overthrow
sufficiently to make it " behave well;" or,
if it did not, that its overthrow would
act as a warning which would prevent
its successor's repeating its errors. This
system had always been applied success-

fully to federal and state affairs; why
should it not be applied to city affairs ?
Accordingly it was so applied to city
affairs, without a thought of any other
system, .down to 1870. But in 1870 it
began to dawn on people that party gov-
ernment of great cities would hardly do
any longer. City government, it was
seen, is in some sense a business enter-
prise, and must be carried out either by
the kind of men one would make direc-
tors of a bank or trustees of an estate,
or else by highly trained officials ; it is
like the conduct of an army or a ship.

The first of these methods is not sure
to be open any longer in America. One
can hardly say that the respect for nota-
bles no longer exists in American cities,
but it does not exist as a political force
or expedient. The habit of considering
conspicuous inhabitants as entitled to
leading municipal places must be regard-
ed as lost. In a large city conspicuous-
ness is rare, and widespread knowledge
of a man's character or fitness for any
particular office is difficult. Moreover,
among the class which has already made
proof of ability in other callings, readi-
ness to undertake onerous public duties is
not often to be met with. Consequently,
with few exceptions, the government of
successful modern cities has to be en-
trusted to trained experts, and to get
trained experts salaries must be large
and tenure permanent. A competent
professional man cannot, as a rule, be
induced to accept a poorly paid place
for a short term. Almost as soon as
public attention began to be turned to
the subject, the practice of seeking these
experts through party organizations was
recognized as the chief difficulty of the
municipal problem in America. In the
first place, the most important offices in
cities are elective, and the idea that any
elective office could be divorced from
party, or could be made non-partisan,
was wholly unfamiliar to the American
mind. Ever since the Union was estab-
lished, men had always filled offices, if

622

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

they could, with persons who agreed
with them, and with whom they were
in the habit of acting in federal affairs.
From the earliest times the Republicans
had doubted the fitness of the Federal-
ists, the Whigs that of the Democrats,
for any public trust. This feeling, too,
had been intensified by the habit, initi-
ated by Jackson, of treating these trusts
as rewards for special exertions in the
party service. Not only, therefore, in
each man's eyes, were members of the
opposite party unfit for office, but the
offices seemed to belong of right to the
members of his own party.

That city offices could be an exception
to this rule was an idea which, when
first produced twenty-five years ago, was
deemed ridiculous, and is even yet not
thoroughly established among the mass
of the voters. The belief that offices
were spoils or perquisites was, unfortu-
nately, most dominant during the years
of great immigration which preceded
and immediately followed the war, and
became imbedded in the minds of the
newcomers as peculiarly " American."
With this came, not unnaturally, the no-
tion that no one would serve faithfully,
in any official place, the party to which
he did not belong. Full party respon-
sibility, it was said, required that every
place under the government, down to the
lowest clerkship, should be filled by mem-
bers of the party in power. In no place
did this notion find readier acceptance
than in cities, because the offices in them
were so numerous, and the elections so
frequent, and the salaries, as compared
with those of the country, so high. The
possession of the city government, too,
meant the possibility of granting a large
number of illicit favors. For the la-
borer, there was sure employment and
easy work in the various public depart-
ments ; for the public-house keeper, there
was protection against the execution of
the liquor laws by the police ; for the
criminal classes, there was slack prose-
cution by the district attorney, or easy

" jury fixing " by the commissioner of
jurors ; for the contractor, there were
profitable jobs and much indulgence for
imperfect execution ; for the police, there
were easy discipline and impunity for cor-
rupt abuses of power. In fact, the cities
furnished a perfect field for the prac-
tice of the spoils system, and the growth
in them of rings and organizations like
Tammany was the natural and inevita-
ble consequence. No such organization
could be created for charitable purposes,
or for the mere diffusion of religious or
political opinions. It was made possible
in New York by the number of places
and benefits at its disposal. The effect
on the imagination of the newly arrived
emigrant, whether Irish or German, was
very great. It shut out from his view
both city and state as objects of his al-
legiance, and made recognition by the
" leader " of the district in which he lived
the first object of his ambition in his
new country.

What is true of New York is true,
mutatis mutandis, of all the other large
cities, — Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincin-
nati, St. Louis. They all have an or-
ganization resembling Tammany, creat-
ed and maintained by the same means ;
and at the head of the organization
there is a man, ignorant perhaps of all
other things, but gifted with unusual ca-
pacity for controlling the poor and de-
pendent, who has come since Tweed's
day to be known as a " boss." Indeed,
it may be laid down as a political axiom
that it requires considerable education
and strong traditions, for any large body
which proposes to exert power of any
kind towards a definite end, to remain
without a leader possessing and exer-
cising a good deal of ai'bitrary discre-
tion. He arises naturally as a condi-
tion of success, and if he has favors to
bestow he arises all the more rapidly.
The boss is, in short, the inevitable pro-
duct of the spoils system. He must
have sensible advantages to give away
in order to retain his power, and he is

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

623

necessary for their effective distribution.
There has to be some one to say decisive-
ly who is to have this or that office or
prize, who desei'ves it, and whose ser-
vices cannot be had without it. There
could hardly be a better proof and illus-
tration of this than the way in which
the boss system has spread all over the
country. In all cities and in many States
every political organization now has a
similar officer at its head. It remained
for some time after Tweed's day the re-
proach of the Democrats that they sub-
mitted to an arbitrary ruler of this kind,
but the Republicans are nearly every-
where imitating them. There are but
few States, and there is no large city,
in which the offices or nominations for
office are not parceled out by one man
acting in the name of an " organization."
Tweed's control of the city and legisla-
ture was not more complete than is Platt's
in New York or Quay's in Pennsylvania.
The system is evidently one which saves
trouble, and promotes efficiency in secur-
ing the blind obedience of large masses
of men. Its end is bad, but that it at-
tains this end there can be no doubt.

It can be easily seen, if all this be
true, that no American city has ever
been administered with reference to its
own interests. In not one, until our own
time, has there been even a pretense of
non-partisanship ; that is, the filling of
the offices solely with a view to efficiency
in the discharge of their duties. As a
rule, they have been filled with a view to
the promotion of opinions on some fed-
eral question, such as the tariff, or as a
reward for services rendered at federal
elections. The state of things thus pro-
duced in American cities closely resem-
bles the state of things produced in the
Middle Ages by religious intolerance,
when the main concern of governments
was not so much to promote the material
interests of their subjects as to maintain
right opinions with regard to the future
life. The filling of a city office by a
man simply because he holds certain

views regarding the tariff, or the cur-
rency, or the banks, is very like appoint-
ing him to an office of state because he
is a good Catholic or can conscientious-
ly sign the Thirty-Nine Articles; that
is to say, his fitness for his real duties
is not a consideration" of importance in
filling the place. No private business
could be carried on in this way, and it
is doubtful whether any attempt to carry
it on so was ever made. But the temp-
tation to resort to it under party govern-
ment and universal suffrage is strong, for
the reasons which I have tried to set
forth in treating of the nominating sys-
tem. The task of inducing large bodies
of men to vote in a particular way is such
that it is hardly wonderful that party
managers should use every means within
their reach for its performance.

One of the effects of the system, and
possibly the worst and most difficult to
deal with, is the veiling of the city from
the popular eye, as the main object of
allegiance and attention, by what is called
" the organization," namely, the club or
society, presided over by the boss, which
manages party affairs. The tendency
among men who take a strong interest
in politics to look upon the organization
as their real master, to boast of their
devotion to it as a political virtue, to call
themselves " organization men," and to
consider the interests of the organization
as paramount to those of the city at large
is an interesting development of party
government. All political parties origi-
nate in a belief that a certain idea can be
best spread, or a certain policy best pro-
moted, by the formation of an organiza-
tion for the purpose. The other belief,
that one's own party is fittest for power,
and deserves support even when it makes
mistakes, easily follows. This is very
nearly the condition of the public mind
about federal parties. A large number
of votes are cast at every federal election
merely to show confidence in the party,
rather than approval of its position with
regard to any specific question. There

624

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

is a still further stage in the growth of
party spirit, in which the voter supports
his party, right or wrong, no matter how
much he may condemn its policy or its
acts, on the ground that it is made up of
better material than the other party, and
that the latter, if in power, would be more
dangerous. The Republican party, in
particular, commands a great deal of sup-
port, especially from the professional and
educated classes throughout the country,
on these grounds. They vote for it as
the least wrong or least likely to be mis-
chievous, even if they feel unable to vote
for it as wise or pure.

But in the cities still another advance
has been made, and the parties have
really been separated from politics alto-
gether, and treated, without disguise, as
competitors for the disposal of a certain
number of offices and the handling of a
certain amount of money. The boss on
either side rarely pretends to have any
definite opinions on any federal ques-
tion, or to concern himself about them.
He proclaims openly that his side has the
best title to the offices, and the reason he
gives for this is, generally, that the other
side has made what he considers mis-
takes. He hardly ever pleads merits of
his own. In fact, few or none of the
bosses have ever been writers or speak-
ers, or have ever been called on to dis-
cuss public questions or have opinions
about them. The principal ones, Tweed,
Kelly, Croker, Platt, and Quay, have
been either silent or illiterate men, famed
for their reticence, and have plumed
themselves on their ability to do things
without talk. In New York, they have
succeeded in diffusing among the masses,
to a certain extent, the idea that a states-
man should not talk, but simply " fix
things," and vote the right way ; that is,
they have divorced discussion from poli-
tics. One of the boss's amusements, when
he is disposed to be humorous, is doing
something or saying something to show
how little influence' voters and writers
have on affairs. In the late senatorial

canvass in New York, a number of letters
commending one of the candidates, who
happened to be the Republican boss, were
published, most of them from young men,
and it was interesting to see how many
commended silence as one of the best at-
tributes of a Senator.

Consequently, nearly all discussions of
city affairs are discussions about places.
What place a particular man will get,
what place he is trying to get, and by
what disappointment about places he is
chagrined, or " disgruntled," as the term
is, form the staple topics of municipal
debates. The rising against Tammany
in 1894, which resulted in the elec-
tion of Mayor Strong, to some extent
failed to produce its due effect, owing
to his refusal to distribute places so as
to satisfy Mr. Platt, the Republican lead-
er ; or, in other words, to give Mr. Platt
the influence in distributing the patron-
age to which he held that he was en-
titled. This led to the frustration, or
long delay, of the legislation which was
necessary to make the overthrow of
Tammftny of much effect. Some of the
necessary bills the legislature, which was
controlled by Platt, refused to pass, and
others it was induced to pass only by
great effort and after long postponement.
No reason was ever assigned for this
hostility to Strong's proposals, except
failure in the proper distribution of of-
fices. No doubt a certain amount of dis-
cussion of plans for city improvement has
gone on, but it has gone on among a
class which has no connection with poli-
tics and possesses little political influ-
ence. The class of politicians, properly
so called, commonly refuses to interest it-
self in any such discussions, unless it can
be assured beforehand that the proposed
improvements will be carried out by cer-
tain persons of their own selection, who
are seldom fit for the work.

In addition to reliance on change of
parties for the improvement of city gov-
ernment, much dependence has been
placed on the old American theory that

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

625

when things get very bad, sufficient pop-
ular indignation will be roused to put
an end to them ; that the evil will be
eradicated by something in the nature
of a revolution, as in the case of Tweed
and of the Tammany abuses in 1894.
But this theory, as regards cities, has
to be received with much modification.
Popular indignation is excited by vio-
lent departures from popular standards ;
the popular conscience has to be shocked
by striking disregard of the tests estab-
lished by popular usage; in order that
this may happen, the popular conscience
has to be kept, if I may use the expres-
sion, in a state of training. Now, for
the mass of such voters as congregate in
great cities, training for the public con-
science consists largely in the spectacle
of good government. Their standards
depend largely on what they see. No-
thing, for instance, in fifty years has done
as much for street-cleaning in New York
as the sight of clean streets presented by
Colonel Waring. People must have a
certain familiarity with something better,
— that is, must either remember or see
it, — in order to be really discontented
with their present lot. The higher we
go in the social scale, the easier it is to
excite this discontent, because education
and reading raise political as well as other
standards. But when once the mass of
men have obtained liberty and security,
it becomes increasingly difficult to rouse
them into activity about matters of ap-
parently less consequence. In other
words, incompetence or corruption in the
work of administration being rarely vis-
ible to the public eye, the masses are
not as easily roused by it as they are by
bad legislation, or by such interferences
with personal liberty as liquor or other
sumptuary laws. Their notion of what
ought to be is largely shaped by what is.
The political education of the people in
a democracy, especially in large cities, is
to a considerable degree the work of the
government. The way in which they see
things done becomes in their eyes the way
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 40

in which they ought to be done ; the kind
of men they see in public office becomes
the kind of men they think fit for public
office ; and the work of rousing them into
demanding something better is one of the
great difficulties of the democratic re"-
gime. The part the actual government
plays in forming the political ideals of the
young is one of the neglected, but most
important topics of political discussion.
Our youth learn far more of the real
working of our institutions by observa-
tion of the men elected or appointed to
office, particularly to the judicial and le-
gislative offices, than from school-books
or newspapers. The election of a noto-
riously worthless or corrupt man as a
judge or member of the legislature makes
more impression on a young mind than
any chapter in a governmental manual
or any college lecture.

For this reason, the application of the
civil service rules to subordinate city of-
fices, which has now been in existence
in New York and Boston for many
years, is an extremely important contri-
bution to the work of reform, however
slow its operation may be. To make
known to the public that to get city
places a man must come up to the stan-
dard of fitness ascertained by competitive
examination is not simply a means of
improving the municipal service, but an
educative process of a high order. The
same thing may be said of such matters
as the expulsion from office of the Tam-
many police justices by the general re-
moval act, passed when Mr. Strong
came into office in 1895, in spite of all
the blemishes in its execution. It made
clear to the popular mind, as nothing
else could, that a certain degree of char-
acter and education was necessary to the
discharge of even minor judicial func-
tions, and that the Tammany standard
of " common sense " and familiar ac-
quaintance with the criminal classes was
not sufficient. The covert or open op-
position to what is called civil service
reform, on the part of nearly the whole

626

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

political class in cities, goes to confirm
this view. There could be no greater
blow to the existing system of political
management than the withdrawal of the
offices from arbitrary disposal by the
bosses. The offices have been for half
a century the chief or only means of re-
warding subordinate agents for political
work and activity.

One effect, and a marked one, of this
withdrawal has -been the introduction of
the practice of levying blackmail on cor-
porations, nominally for political pur-
poses. Nothing is known certainly about
the amounts levied in this way, but there
are two thousand corporations in New
York exposed to legislative attack, and
in the aggregate their contributions must
reach a very large sum. Since the boss has
obtained command of the legislature as
well as of the city, — that is, since Tweed's
time, — they are literally at the mercy of
the legislature, or, in other words, at his
mercy. Their taxes may be raised, or,
in the case of gas companies or railroad
companies, their charges lowered. The
favorite mode of bringing insurance com-
panies to terms is ordering an examina-
tion of their assets, which may be done
through the superintendent of insurance,
who is an appointee of the governor and
Senate, or, virtually, of the boss. This
examination has to be paid for by the
company, and, I am told, may be made to
cost $200,000 ; it is usually conducted by
politicians out of a job, of a very inferior
class. To protect themselves from an-
noyances of this sort, the corporations,
which it must be remembered are crea-
tions of the law, and increase in number
every year, are only too glad to meet the
demands of the boss. Any " campaign "
contribution, no matter how large, and it
is sometimes as high as $50,000 or even
$100,000, is small compared to the ex-
pense which he can»inflict on them by his
mere fiat. Of course this is corruption,
and the corporations know it. The of-
ficers, however high they may stand in
point of business character, submit to it,

or connive at it. In many cases, if not
in most, they even confess it. They de-
fend their compliance, too, on grounds
which carry one back a long way in the
history of settled government. That is,
they say that their first duty is to protect
the enormous amount of property com-
mitted to their charge, a large portion of
which belongs to widows and orphans ;
that if they have any duty at all in the
matter of reforming municipal and state
administration, it is a secondary and sub-
ordinate one, which should not be per-
formed at the cost of any damage to these
wards ; that, therefore, the sum they pay
to the boss may be properly considered
as given to avert injury against which
the law affords no protection. They
maintain that in all this matter they
are victims, not offenders, and that the
real culprit is the government of the
State, which fails to afford security to
property in the hands of a certain class
of owners.

I will not attempt to discuss here the
soundness of this view in point of mo-
rality. It is to be said, in extenuation
at least, that the practices of which the
corporations are accused prevail all over
the Union, in city and in country, East
and West. I have had more than one
admission made to me by officers of com-
panies that they kept an agent at the
state capital during sessions of the legis-
lature for the express purpose of shield-
ing them, by means of money, against
legislative attacks, and that without this
they could not carry on business. It has
been the custom, I am afraid, to a greater
or less extent, for corporations to keep
such agents at the state capitals ever
since corporations became at all numer-
ous and rich, — for fully fifty years.
What is peculiar and novel about the
present situation is that the boss has be-
come a general agent for all the compa-
nies, and saves them the trouble of keep-
ing one at their own cost, in Albany or
Harrisburg, or in any other state capital.
He receives what they wish or are ex-

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

627

pected to pay, and in return he guaran-
tees them the necessary protection. He
is thus the channel through which pass
all payments made by any one for " cam-
paign " purposes. If, his party is not
in office he receives very little, barely
enough to assure him of good will. When
his party is in power, as the power is his,
there need be practically no limit to his
demands.

If it be asked why the corporations
do not themselves revolt against this sys-
tem and stop it by exposure, the answer
is simple enough. In the first place,
most of the corporations have rivals,
and dread being placed at a disadvan-
tage by some sort of persecution from
which competitors may have bought ex-
emption. The thing which they dread
most is business failure or defeat. For
this they are sure to be held accountable
by stockholders or by the public ; for
submitting to extortion, they may not be
held accountable by anybody. In the
next place, the supervision exercised by
the state officers being lax or corrupt,
the corporations are likely to be law-
breakers in some of their practices, and
to dread exposure or inquiry. In many
cases, therefore, they are doubtless only
too glad to buy peace or impunity, and
this their oppressors probably know very
well. Last of all, and perhaps the most
powerful among the motives for submis-
sion, is the fear of vengeance in case
they should not succeed. A corporation

1 The history of this measure has been so
concisely written by Mr. J. B. Bishop that I
cannot avoid quoting him : —

" The most impressive demonstration of the
despotic power behind these decisions was
made in connection with the proposed charter
for Greater New York. This had been drawn
by the commission created by the act of 1896.
It had been prepared in secret, and only very
inadequate opportunity had been given for
public inspection of it before it was sent to
the legislature ; yet, in the brief time afforded,
it had been condemned in very strong terms by
what I may truthfully call the organized and
individual intelligence of the community. The
Bar Association, through a committee which

which undertook to set the boss at de-
fiance would enter on a most serious
contest, with little chance of success.
All the influences at his command, polit-
ical and judicial, would be brought into
play for its defeat. Witnesses would
disappear, or refuse to answer. Juries
would be " fixed ; " judges would be
technical and timid ; the press would be
bought up by money or advertising, or
by political influence ; other motives than
mere resistance to oppression would be
invented and imputed ; the private char-
acter of the officers would be assailed.
In short, the corporation would prdbably
fail, or appear to fail, in proving its case,
and would find itself substantially foiled
in its undertaking, after having expend-
ed a great deal of money, and having
excited the bitter enmity of the boss and
of all the active politicians among his
followers. It can hardly be expected
that a company would make such an at-
tempt without far stronger support than
it would receive from the public, owing
to the general belief that no corporation
would come into court with clean hands.
How little effect public support would
give in such a contest, as long as the
power of the boss over the legislators
and state officials continues, through the
present system of nomination, may be
inferred from what has happened in the
case of the enlargement of the city of
New York, known as the Greater New
York Bill.1

contained several of the leading lawyers of the
city, subjected it to expert legal examination,
and declared it to be so full of defects and
confusing provisions as to be ' deplorable,' and
to give rise, if made law, ' to mischiefs far
outweighing any benefits which might reason-
ably be expected to flow from it.' The Cham-
ber of Commerce, the Board of Trade, the
Clearing House Association, the City Club, the
Union League Club, the Reform Club, the
Real Estate Exchange, all the reputable ex-
mayors and other officials, expressed equally
strong condemnation, especially of certain
leading provisions of the instrument ; and the
legislature was formally requested to give more
time to the subject by postponing the date on

628

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

The subjection of the city to the per-
son who controls the legislature is se-
cured in part by the use of federal and
possibly city offices, and in part by the
extortion of money from property-hold-
ers, for purposes of corruption ; and all
remedy for this is impeded or wholly
hindered by the interest of city voters in
matters other than municipal.

The earliest remedy, — the substitu-
tion of one party in the city government
for another, — which has been employed
steadily by each party for the last half
century with singular acquiescence on
the part of the public, has been to some
degree supplanted, since the war, by an-
other, namely, the modification of the
charter, so as to secure greater concen-
tration of power in few hands. More
and more authority has been withdrawn
from the bodies elected for purposes of
legislation, and has been transferred to
the bodies elected for purposes of ad-
ministration. Before the late change in
the city charter, the New York board
of aldermen, by a process of depriva-
tion pursued through long years, was
bereft of all but the most insignificant
powers. The preparation of the city
estimates and the imposition of the city
taxes, two peculiarly legislative duties,

which the charter should become operative.
Not the slightest attention was paid at Albany
to any of these requests. The Bar Associa-
tion's objections were passed over in silence,
as indeed were all the protests. The charter,
excepting a few trifling changes, was passed
without amendment by both Houses of the
legislature by an overwhelming vote. Only
six of the one hundred and fourteen Republi-
can members voted against it in the Assembly,
and only one of the thirty-six Republican
members in the Senate. There was no debate
upon it in the Assembly. The men who voted
for the charter said not a word in its favor,
and not a word in explanation of their course
in voting against all proposals to amend it. In
the Senate, the charter's chief advocates de-
clared frankly their belief that it was a mea-
sure of ' political suicide,' since it was certain to
put the proposed enlarged city into the hands
of their opponents, the Democrats ; yet they
all voted for it because it had been made a

were transferred bodily to a small board
composed of the mayor and heads of
departments. Nearly every change in
charters has armed the mayor with more
jurisdiction. This movement has run
on lines visible in almost all democratic
communities. The rise of the boss is dis-
tinctly one of its results. There is every-
where a tendency to remit to a single per-
son the supreme direction of large bodies
of men animated with a common purpose
or bound together by common ideas. One
sees in this person dim outlines of the
democratic Caesar of the Napoleonic era,
but he differs in that he has to do his
work under the full glare of publicity,
has to be able to endure " exposure " and
denunciation by a thousand newspapers
and to bear overthrow by combinations
among his own followers with equanim-
ity, and has to rely implicitly on " man-
agement " rather than on force.

The difficulty of extracting from a
large democracy an expression of its real
will is, in fact, slowly becoming manifest.
It is due partly to the size of the body,
and partly to the large number of voters
it must necessarily contain who find it
troublesome to make up their minds, or
who fail to grasp current questions, or
who love and seek guidance in impor-

party measure, — that is, the despot had said it
must pass. After its first passage, it was sent,
for public hearings and approval, to the may-
ors of the three cities affected by its provi-
sions. The opposition developed at the hear-
ings in New York city was very impressive, —
so much so that Mayor Strong, who as an ex
officio member of the charter commission had
signed the report which had accompanied it
when it went to the legislature, was moved by
a ' strong sense of public duty ' to veto it be-
cause of ' serious and fundamental defects.'
When the charter, with his veto message, ar-
rived in Albany, the two Houses passed it again
by virtually the same vote as at first, and with-
out either reading the mayor's message, or more
than barely mentioning bia name. One of the
members who voted for it said privately, ' If it
were not for the fact that the " old man " wants
it, I doubt if the charter would get a dozei
votes in the legislature outside the Brooklj
and Long Island members.' ' '

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

629

tant transactions. On most of the great
national questions of our day, except in
exciting times, a large proportion of the
voters do not hold their opinions with
much firmness or tenacity or with much
distinctness. On one point in particular,
which has great importance in all modern
democracies, — the effect of any specific
measure on the party prospects, — the
number of men who have clear ideas is
very small. The mass to be influenced
is so large, and the susceptibilities of dif-
ferent localities differ so widely, that
fewer and fewer persons, except those
who "have their hand on the machine,"
venture on a confident prediction as to
the result of an election. The conse-
quence is that those who do hold clean-
cut opinions, and pronounce them with
courage, speedily acquire influence and
authority, almost in spite of themselves.
Indeed, almost every influence now in
operation, both in politics and in busi-
ness, tends to the concentration of power.
The disposition to combine several small
concerns into one large one, to consoli-
date corporations, and to convert private
partnerships into companies is but an ex-
pression of the general desire to remit
the work of management or administra-
tion to one man or to a very few men.
In all considerable bodies of men who
wish to act together for common objects,
the many are anxious to escape the re-
sponsibility of direction, and, naturally
enough, this has shown itself in city gov-
ernment as well as in party government.
The result is that there are, in nearly
every large city and in nearly every new
charter, signs of a desire for strong cen-
tralized management. This tendency has
been temporarily obscured in New York
by the consolidation of the suburbs into
what is called the Greater New York.
In order to secure this, that is, to obtain
the consent of " the politicians," it has
been found necessary to revive the old,
long-tried, and much-condemned plan of
a city legislature with two branches, a
number of boards, and a wide diffusion

of responsibility. There is about this
new machinery an appearance of local
representative self-government, but it is
only an appearance. The real power
of interference, change, or modification
still resides in the legislature at Albany,
and the habit of interference is already
formed and active. Moreover, the legis-
lature at Albany is still dominated by
the boss, and his rule over the city has
been rendered more remote by the new
charter, not destroyed or restricted. No
alteration in the city government can
be made without his consent, and any
alteration which he insists on must be
made. So that the one-man power in
the administration of city affairs is still
preserved. It is simply taken from the
mayor ; the change is merely one of
person or officer. It can hardly be
expected that as long as the boss con-
trols the state legislature he should not
also control all inferior legislatures cre-
ated by it. If he did not do so, he would
deprive himself of a considerable portion ,
of his power of reward and punishment. .
The complications of the new charter,
too, are so great that it is not likely that
persons interested in pushing schemes
through the city government will take
the trouble to put all the new machinery
in motion.

In all political arrangements, it is im-
possible to prevent persons who wish to
secure a benefit or favor from a govern-
mbnt from acting along the line of least
resistance ; that is, from attaining their
object with the least possible expenditure
of time and money. It will always be
possible and it will always be easy to
carry a measure of any kind, approved
by the boss, through the legislature at Al-
bany without debate and by three hasty
readings. Under these circumstances, to
expose it to the risk of the charter ma-
chinery would be a departure from what
is now established usage.

The municipal history of New York,
in short, and, mutatis mutandis, of all
the American cities in which there has

630

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

been any whispering of municipal re-
form, seems to indicate that the most
carefully formed opinion on the subject
of American municipal government runs
parallel with the popular sentiment, or
popular weakness, which has called the
boss into existence. In both cases, the
conclusion is inevitable that the large
masses of men who exercise the suf-
frage, both in city and in country, cannot
be influenced and managed and brought
to the polling-place for intelligent and
effective action without great concentra-
tion of authority and responsibility. The
popular will, it is becoming increasingly
plain, cannot be really expressed with-
out so diminishing the number of per-
sons who are to be its organs that the
ignorant men and the busy men, who
form the bulk of every community, can
learn at a glance the cause of every fail-
ure and shortcoming.

Nothing is clearer in the modern world
than that the more complicated govern-
mental administration becomes, the less
time has the community at large to at-
tend to it. The old days of dull agri-
cultural leisure, which the mass of every
nation enjoyed till the beginning of this
century, have passed away. The desire
to " rise in the world," — that is, to get
hold of more of the good things of civili-
zation, — which now prevails in every
country, tends more and more to make
administration a specialty, because of the
pressure of what are called " private af-
fairs." At the same time, the desire of
the masses to exercise some sort of con-
trol over it, or supervision of it, seems
also to grow in force every day. The
only way in which this desire can make
itself felt is by throwing the work of
transacting public affairs into fewer
hands. This is what the rise of the boss
means, and what the increasing forma-
tion of "trusts " and corporations means.
It is, too, what the tendency in cities to
give more power to the mayor and to re-
strict the number of his councilors means.
This tendency is so strong, and one so

stimulated by all the facts of modern
life, that the attempt made in the late
New York charter to run counter to it
throws doubt on either the honesty or the
intelligence of the persons engaged in it.
The creation of a vast complicated muni-
cipal system at the moment when there
is such a widespread cry for simplicity,
and of an unwieldy new legislature just
as all legislatures are falling into disre-
pute and surrendering their power, shows
an indifference to the signs of the times
which can hardly be ascribed altogether
to thoughtlessness. What modern mu-
nicipalities need, especially in America,
is a regime in which, without hesitation,
without study, without lawyers' or ex-
perts' opinions, the humblest laborer can
tell who is responsible for any defect he
may discover in the police of the streets,
in the education of his children, or in
the use and mode of his taxation.

To secure such a regime, however, the
control of state legislatures in America -
over cities must be either reduced or de-
stroyed, and this seems the task which,
above all, has first to be accomplished by
municipal reforms ; it is really the one
in which they are now engaged, though,
apparently, sometimes unconsciously.
The " hearings " of leading citizens by
legislative committees, which almost in-
variably accompany the passage by state
legislatures of measures affecting munici-
pal government, are in the nature of pro-
tests against legislative action, or asser-
tions of the incompetency of the legisla-
ture to deal with the matter in hand. The
contemptuous indifference with which
they are generally treated is simply an
assertion that, under no circumstances,
will the legislature surrender its power.
This has been curiously illustrated by
the recent complete refusal of the New
York legislature to pay any attention to
the power of veto given to the mayors of
New York cities by the late constitutional
convention. This provision has had so
little effect that a mayor's objections to
any particular piece of legislation are

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

631

not even discussed, much less answered.
It has seemed as if the legislature were
unwilling to allow it to be supposed that
it could ever be in any way influenced
by the criticism or suggestion of local no-
tables. All American legislatures have
long shown unwillingness to adopt sug-
gestions or submit to interference from
the outside. Few, if any, of the numer-
ous reports of commissions on taxation
or municipal government or other sub-
jects made during the last thirty years
have received any attention ; the same
thing is true of the reports of the Secre-
tary of the Treasury, though all these
documents contain a vast amount of val-
uable matter. It is not likely that re-
monstrances or criticism emanating from
municipal bodies hereafter will meet with
any better fate unless they have power-
ful popular support. To create this sup-
port is the first business which municipal
reformers have before them.

There is another reason why state
legislatures are unwilling to relinquish
their control of cities, and it is nearly
as potent as any ; that is, the accumula-
tion of wealth in the cities as compared
to the country. One of the peculiarities
of an agricultural population is the small
amount of cash it handles. Farmers, as
a general rule, live to some extent on
their own produce, wear old clothes, as
people are apt to do in the country, pay
no house-rent, very rarely divert them-
selves by " shopping," and seldom see
any large sum of money except at their
annual sales after harvest. In short, as
compared with an urban population, they
live with what seems great economy. The
temptations to small expenses which so
constantly- beset a city man seldom come
in their way. Their standard of living
in dress, food, clothing, and furniture is
much lower than that of a city population
of a corresponding class. The result is
that money has a much greater value in
their eyes than in those of the commer-
cial class. They part with a dollar more
reluctantly; they think it ought to go

farther. They look on a city man's no-
tion of salaries as utterly extravagant or
unreasonable, and to receive such sala-
ries seems to them almost immoral. City
life they consider marked throughout by
gross extravagance.

Moreover, the farmer finds it very
difficult to place a high value on labor
which is not done with the hands and
does not involve exposure to weather.
Difference of degree in value of such
labor it is hard, if not impossible, to
estimate. The expense of training for
an intellectual occupation, such as a law-
yer's or a doctor's, he is not willing to
take into account. One consequence of
this has been that, though almost all ser-
vants of the government — judges, se-
cretaries, collectors — live in cities or by
city standards, their salaries are fixed
not so much by the market value of
their services as by the farmer's notion
of what is reasonable ; for the farmer is
as yet the ruling power in America.
The salaries of the federal judges, for
instance, were fixed at the establishment
of the government by the largest annual
earnings of a lawyer of the highest stand-
ing of that day ; they are now about one
fourth of what such a lawyer earns, and
it would be difficult or impossible to in-
crease them. The farmer's inability, too,
to estimate degrees in the value of such
services leads him to suppose that what
they are worth is the sum for which any-
body will undertake to render them, and
'that if any member of the bar offered
to discharge the duties of a judge of the
Supreme Court for one thousand dollars
a year, it would be proper enough to ac-
cept his services at that rate. This great
difference has some important political
consequences also. It leads to agricul-
tural distrust of urban views on finance,
and produces in country districts a deep
impression of city recklessness and
greed. City exchanges, whether stock
or produce, are supposed by the farmer
to be the resorts of gamblers rather than
instruments of legitimate business.

632

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

In truth, the difference in needs and
interests and points of view between the
city and the country arises almost as
soon as anything which can be called a
city comes into existence. Close contact
with many other men, constant daily in-
tercourse with one's fellows, familiarity
with the business of exchanging commod-
ities, the necessity for frequent coopera-
tion, all help to convert the inhabitant
of cities into a new type of man. The
city man has always been a polished
or " urbane " man. The distinction be-
tween him and the " rustic," in mind
and manners, has in all ages been among
the commonplaces of literature. One
material effect of this difference is that
the urban man has been an object of
slight dislike or jealousy to the coun-
tryman. His greater alertness of mind,
which comes from much social inter-
course, and familiarity with trade and
commerce, makes him in some degree
an object of suspicion to the latter, who
constantly dreads being outwitted by
him. Cities, too, have always been to the
countryman resorts of -vice of one sort
or another, and all that he hears of the
temptations of city life fills him with a
sense of his own moral superiority. To
the poet and to the farmer the country
has been the seat of virtue, simplicity,
and purity ; the one moralist who prac-
ticed his own precepts was the rustic mor-
alist. It has been very natural, there-
fore, that in America, in which the
country has had the power before the
city, and not, as in Europe, the city be-
fore the country, the country should have
tried with peculiar care to retain its free
domination over the city.

This process has been made easy not
only by the fact that the city was gen-
erally created by the State, but by our
practice of selecting our state capitals,
not for judicial, or commercial, or his-
torical, but for topographical considera-
tions. No other people has been in the
habit, or has had the opportunity, of
choosing places for its political capitals

at all. In all other countries, if I am
not mistaken, the capitals were made by
trade, or commerce, or manufactures, or
some ancient drift of population. But
in many of our States the political capi-
tal is not the chief city in wealth or popu-
lation ; it owes its political preeminence
to the fact that it was within easy reach
from all parts of the State, in the days
when travel was slow and difficult, — a
circumstance now of no importance what-
ever. The site of the capital of the
Union was chosen for similar reasons. It
was placed in a swamp, chiefly because
the position was central, and it had to be
created from the beginning. Were cap-
itals selected with us by the agencies to
which they owe their existence in the Old
World, New York would be the capital
of the State of New York, Philadelphia
of Pennsylvania, Cincinnati of Ohio, Chi-
cago of Illinois, and Detroit of Michigan.
The present arrangement has proved
unfortunate in two ways : it has helped
to confirm the rural mind in a belief in
the inferiority and insignificance of cities
as compared to the country ; and it has
kept legislators, when in session, seclud-
ed from the observation of the most ac-
tive - minded portion of the population
and from intercourse with them, and has
deprived them of the information and the
new ideas which such intercourse brings
with it. Members of Congress and of
the state legislatures suffer seriously in
mind and character from our practice
of cutting them off, during their official
lives, from communion with the portion
of the population most immersed in af-
fairs, and of keeping them out of sight
of those who are most competent to un-
derstand their action and to criticise it.
No one who has paid much attention to
our political life can have helped observ-
ing the injurious effect on the legislative
mind of massing legislators together in
remote towns, in which they exchange
ideas only with one another, and get no
inkling of the real drift of public opin-
ion about a particular measure until it

Peculiarities of American Municipal Government.

633

has been irrevocably acted upon. There
is no question that this has been in all
parts of the country a powerful aid to
the boss in preserving his domination.
Nothing can suit his purpose better than
to get his nominees together in some re-
mote corner of the State, in which he
can instruct them in their duties and
watch their action without disturbance
from outside currents of criticism or sug-
gestion. Every legislature is the better,
and its tone is the healthier, for being
kept in close contact with the leading
centres of business in the community and
hearing daily or hourly from its men of
affairs. Much of the ignorance about
exchange, credit, and currency, and of
the suspicion of bankers and men of busi-
ness, which has shown itself in our legis-
lative capitals in late years, has been due
to the isolation of the rural legislator
from social intercourse with men engaged
in other pursuits than his own.

But the most serious drawback in the
practice of making political capitals to
order is undoubtedly its tendency to les-
sen the rural legislator's sense of the
importance of cities, and to increase his
readiness to interfere in their govern-
ment without any real knowledge of
their needs. This readiness is one of
the greatest difficulties of American mu-
nicipal government. It arises, as I have
said, partly from the historical antece-
dents of our cities ; partly from the coun-
tryman's sense of moral superiority, in
which the clergy and the poets try to
confirm him ; and partly from the fear
inspired by the rapid growth of the cities
in population, and the belief that their
interests are in some manner different
from those of the country. This belief
found expression in the provision of the
New York Constitution that the city or
county of New York should never be
represented by more than half the state
Senate. There is a vague fear diffused
through the rural districts that if the
cities should get the upper hand in the
state government, or should succeed in

achieving even a quasi - independence,
some serious consequence to the whole
community would follow. But to have
any fear on the subject is to question
the whole democratic theory. The sys-
tem of political division into states and
districts and counties,* with separate re-
presentation, is an admission that dif-
ferent localities have different interests,
of which other localities are not compe-
tent to take charge. It is on this idea
that local self-government is based. It
is the principal reason why New York
does not govern Massachusetts, or Buf-
falo govern New York.

In the case of cities this difference is
simply magnified, and the incompetency
of other districts or counties for the
work of their management is made more
than usually plain. To suppose that a
city is less fit to govern itself than are
more thinly peopled districts, or that its
political ascendency would contain dan-
ger to the State, is to abandon the demo-
cratic theory. In a democratic commu-
nity there is really no conflict of interests
between city and country ; the prosperity
of one makes the prosperity of the other.
Neither can grow rich by the impover-
ishment of the other. From the demo-
cratic point of view, a city is merely a
very large collection of people in one
spot, with many wants peculiar to such
large collections. To deny its fitness to
govern itself is to deny the majority
principle with strong emphasis. Never-
theless, the attempts hitherto made in
America to secure reform in the admin-
istration of cities have been almost ex-
clusively efforts to wrest greater powers
of local administration from the state
legislatures, which consist in the main of
farmers, who have no special interest in
cities whatever, but who are indomitable
champions of local self-government in
all other political divisions. In three
States only, as yet, Missouri, California,
and Washington, have the cities succeed-
ed in securing a constitutional right to
approve their own charters before they

634

Amid the Clamor of the Streets.

go into operation, which is the furthest
step in advance that has been made. In
twenty -three States they are constitu-
tionally secured against having special
charters made for them by the legis-
lature, with or without their consent.
Whatever sort of organic law is imposed
in one city in these States must be im-
posed in all. But in ten States the cities
are still at the mercy of the legislature,
which may govefn them by special legis-
lation, and make, amend, or annul char-
ters at its discretion, without pity or
remorse.

In looking at the history and condition
of municipalities in America, one consid-
eration meets us at every stage ; that is,
that in no other civilized country is mu-
nicipal government so completely within
the control of public opinion. Every-
where else there are deeply rooted tra-
ditions, long-established customs, much-
respected vested rights and cherished
prejudices, to be dealt with, before any
satisfactory framework of city govern-
ment can be set up. Here the whole
problem is absolutely at the disposal of
popular sentiment. Our cities, therefore,
might most easily have been the model
cities of the modern world. Birmingham
and Glasgow and Berlin, in other words,
ought to have been in America. It is we
who ought to have shown the Old World

how to live comfortably in great masses in
one place. We have no city walls to pull
down, or ghettos to clear out, or guilds
to buy up, or privileges to extinguish.
We have simply to provide health, com-
fort, and education, in our own way, ac-
cording to the latest experience in sci-
ence, for large bodies of free men in one
spot.

This is as much as saying that in talk-
ing of the municipal question we describe
a state of the popular mind, and not a
state of law. Charters are nowhere else
in the world an expression of popular
thought as much as in America. They
are merely what people believe or permit
at any given period. Very often they
are well adapted to our needs, like the
late New York charter, but fail to give
satisfaction, because, having provided the
charter, we take no pains to secure com-
petent officials. Finding that it does not
work well, we seek a remedy by making
a change in its provisions rather than in
the men who administer it. In this way
our municipal woes are perpetuated, and
we continue to write and talk of char-
ters as if they were self-acting machines
instead of certain ways of doing busi-
ness. No municipal reform will last long
or prove efficient without a strong and
healthy public spirit behind it. With this
almost any charter would prove efficient.
E. L. Godkin,

AMID THE CLAMOR OF THE STREETS.

AMID the clamor of the streets

The fancy often fills
With far-off thoughts; I live again

Among the streams and hills.

What happy scenes ! The very thought

A new contentment brings ;
It makes me feel the inner peace,

The hidden wealth of things.

William A. Dunn.

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

635

FORTY YEARS OF BACON-SHAKESPEARE FOLLY.

SOME time ago, while looking over a
wheelbarrow- load of rubbish written to
prove that such plays as King Lear and
The Merry Wives of Windsor emanated
from one of the least poetical and least
humorous minds of modern times, I was
reminded of a story which I heard when
a boy. I forget whether it was some
whimsical man of letters like Charles
Lamb, or some such professional wag as
Theodore Hook, who took it into his
head one day to stand still on a London
street, with face turned upward, gaz-
ing into the sky. Thereupon the next
person who came that way forthwith
stopped and did likewise, and then the
next and the next, until the road was
blocked by a dense crowd of men and
women, all standing as if rooted in the
ground, and with solemn skyward stare.
The enchantment was at last broken
when some one asked what they were
looking at, and nobody could tell. It
was simply an instance of a certain rem-
nant of primitive gregariousness of ac-
tion on the part of human beings, which
exhibits itself from time to time in sun-
dry queer fashions and fads.

So when Miss Delia Bacon, in the
year which saw the beginning of The
Atlantic Monthly, published a book pur-
porting to unfold the "philosophy" of
Shakespeare's dramas, it was not long
before other persons began staring in-
tently into the silliest mare's nest ever
devised by human dullness; the fruits
of so much staring appeared in divers
eccentric volumes, of which more spe-
cific mention will presently be made.
Neither in number nor in quality are
they such as to indicate that the Bacon-
Shakespeare folly has yet become fash-
ionable, and we shall presently observe
in it marked suicidal tendencies which
are likely to prevent its ever becoming
so ; but there are enough of the volumes
to illustrate the point of my anecdote.

Another fad, once really fashionable,
and in defense of which some plausible
arguments could be urged, was the
Wolfian theory of the Homeric poems,
which dazzled so many of our grand-
parents. It is worth our while to men-
tion it here, by way of prelude. The
theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are
mere aggregations of popular ballads,
collected and arranged in the _ time of
Pisistratus, was perhaps originally sug-
gested by the philosopher Vico, but first
attracted general attention in 1795,
when set forth by Friedrich August
Wolf, one of the most learned and bril-
liant of modern scholars. Thus emi-
nently respectable in its parentage and
quite reasonable on the surface, this bal-
lad theory came to be widely fashion-
able ; forty years ago it was accepted by
many able scholars, though usually with
large modifications.

The Wolfians urged that we know ab-
solutely nothing about the man Homer,
not even when or where he lived. His
existence is merely matter of tradition,
or of inference from the existence of the
poems. But as the poems know nothing
of Dorians in Peloponnesus, their date
can hardly be later than 1000 B. c.
What happened, then, when " an edition
of Homer " was made at Athens, about
530 B. c., by Pisistratus or under his
orders ? Did the editor simply edit two
great poems already five centuries old,
or did he make up two poems by piecing
together a miscellaneous lot of ancient
ballads? Wolf maintained the latter
alternative, chiefly because of the al-
leged impossibility of composing and
preserving such long poems in the al-
leged absence of the art of writing.
Having thus made a plausible start, the
Wolfians proceeded to pick the poems
to pieces, and to prove by "internal
evidence " that there was nothing like
"unity of design" in them, etc. ; and

636

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

so it went on till poor old Homer was
relegated to the world of myth. As a
schoolboy I used to hear the belief in
the existence of such a poet derided as
"uncritical" and "unscholarly."

In spite of these terrifying epithets,
the ballad theory never made any im-
pression upon me ; for it seemed to ig-
nore the most conspicuous and vital fact
about the poems, namely, the style, the
noble, rapid, simple, vivid, supremely
poetical style, — a style as individual
and unapproachable as that of Dante
or Keats. For an excellent characteri-
zation of it, read Matthew Arnold's
charming essays On Translating Ho-
mer. The style is the man, and to
suppose that this Homeric style ever
came from a democratic multitude of
minds, or from anything save one of
those supremely endowed individual na-
tures such as get born once or twice in
a millennium, is simply to suppose a
psychological impossibility. I remem-
ber once talking about this with George
Eliot, who had lately been reading
Frederick Paley's ingenious restate-
ment of the ballad theory, and was cap-
tivated by its ingenuity. I told her I
did not wonder that old dryasdust phi-
lologists should hold such views, but I
was indeed surprised to find such a lit-
erary artist as herself ignoring the im-
passable gulf between Homer's language
and that which any ballad theory neces-
sarily implies. She had no answer for
this except to say that she should have
supposed an evolutionist like me would
prefer to regard the Homeric poems as
gradually evolved rather than suddenly
created! A retort so clever and ami-
able most surely entitled her to the wo-
man's privilege of the last word.

The Wolfian theory may now be re-
garded as a thing of the past; it has
had its day and been flung aside. If
Wolf himself were living, he would be
the first to laugh at it. Its original
prop has been knocked away, since it
has become pretty clear that the art of
writing was practiced about the shores

of the Egean Sea long before 1000 B. c.
Probably even Wolf would now admit
that it might have been a real letter
that Bellerophon carried to the father
of Anteia.1 All attempts to show a lack
of unity in the design of the Iliad and
the Odyssey have failed irretrievably,
and the discussion has served only to
make more and more unmistakable the
work of the mighty master. The bal-
lad theory is dead and buried, and he
who would read its obituary may find
keen pleasure, as well as many a whole-
some lesson in sound criticism, in the
sensible and brilliant book by Andrew
Lang, on Homer and the Epic.

The Bacon - Shakespeare folly has
never been set forth by scholars of com-
manding authority, like Wolf and Lach-
mann, or even Niese and Wilamowitz
Moellendorff. Among Delia Bacon's
followers not one can by any permis-
sible laxity of speech be termed a scholar,
and their theory has found acceptance
with very few persons. Nevertheless, it
illustrates as well as the Wolfian theory
the way in which such notions grow.
It starts from a false premise, hazily
conceived, and it subsists upon argu-
ments in which trivial facts are assigned
higher value than facts of vital impor-
tance. Mr. Lang's remark upon cer-
tain learned Homeric commentators,
that "they pore over the hyssop on the
wall, but are blind to the cedar of Leba-
non, " applies with tenfold force to the
Bacon-Shakespeare sciolists. In them
we always miss the just sense of propor-
tion which is one of the abiding marks
of sanity. The unfortunate lady who
first brought their theory into public no-
toriety in 1857 was then sinking under
the cerebral disease of which she died
two years later, and her imitaters have
been chiefly weak minds of the sort that
thrive upon paradox, closely akin to the
circle-squarers and inventors of perpet-
ual motion. Underlying all the absurd-
ities, however, there is something that
deserves attention. Like many other
1 Iliad, vi. 168.

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

637

morbid phenomena, the Bacon-Shake-
speare folly has its natural history which
is instructive. The vagaries of Delia
Bacon and her followers originated in a
group of conditions which admit of be-
ing specified and described, and which
the historian of nineteenth-century lit-
erature will need to notice. In order
to understand the natural history of the
affair, it is necessary to examine the
Delia Bacon theory at greater length
than it would otherwise deserve. Let
us see how it is constructed.

It starts with a syllogism, of which
the major premise is that the dramas
ascribed to Shakespeare during his life-
time, and ever since believed to be his,
abound in evidences of extraordinary
book-learning. The minor premise is
that William Shakespeare of Stratford-
on- Avon could not have acquired or pos-
sessed so much book-learning. The con-
clusion is that he could not have written
those plays.

The question then arises, Which
of Shakespeare's contemporaries had
enough book- lore to have written them ?
No doubt Francis Bacon had enough.
The conclusion does not follow, how-
ever, that he wrote the plays ; for there
were other contemporaries with learn-
ing enough and to spare, as for example
George Chapman and Ben Jonson.
These two men, to judge from their ac-
knowledged works, were great poets,
whereas in Bacon's fifteen volumes
there is not a paragraph which betrays
poetical genius. Why not, then, as-
cribe the Shakespeare dramas to Chap-
man or Jonson? The Baconizers en-
deavor to support their assumption by
calling attention to similarities in
thought and phrase between Francis
Bacon and the writer of the dramas.
Up to this point their argument consists
of deductions from assumed premises;
here they adduce inductive evidence,
such as it is. We shall see specimens
of it by and by. At present we are
concerned with the initial syllogism.

And first, as to the major premise,

it must be met with a flat denial. The
Shakespeare plays do not abound with
evidences of scholarship or learning of
the sort that is gathered from profound
and accurate study of books. It is pre-
cisely in this respect that they are con-
spicuously different from many of the
plays contemporary with them, and
from other masterpieces of English lit-
erature. Such plays as Jonson 's Se-
janus and Catiline are the work of a
scholar deeply indoctrinated with the
views and mental habits of classic an-
tiquity; he has soaked himself in the
style of Lucan and Seneca, until their
mental peculiarities have become like a
second nature to him, and are uncon-
sciously betrayed alike in the general
handling of his story and in little turns
of expression. Or take Milton's Ly-
cidas : no one but a man saturated in
every fibre with Theocritus and Virgil
could have written such a poem. An
extremely foreign and artificial literary
form has been so completely mastered
and assimilated by Milton that he uses
it with as much ease as Theocritus him-
self, and has produced a work that
even the master of idyls had scarcely
equaled. After the terrific invective
against the clergy and the beautiful
invocation to the flowers, followed by
the triumphant hallelujah of Christian
faith, observe the sudden reversion to
pagan sentiment where Lycidas is ad-
dressed as the genius of the shore. Only
profound scholarship could have writ-
ten this wonderful poem, could have
brought forth the Christian thought as
if spontaneously through the medium
of the pagan form.

Now there is nothing of this sort in
Shakespeare. He uses classical mate-
rials or anything else under the sun that
suits his purpose. He takes a chroni-
cle from Holinshed, a biography from
North's translation of Plutarch, a le-
gend from Saxo Grammaticus through
Belief orest's French version, a novel of
Boccaccio, a miracle-play, — whatever
strikes his fancy; he chops up his ma-

638

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

terials and weaves them into a story
without much regard to classical mod-
els ; defying rules of order and unity,
and not always heeding probability, but
never forgetful of his abiding purpose,
to create live men and women. These
people may have Greek and Latin
names, and their scene of action may
be Rome or Mitylene, decorated with
scraps of classical knowledge such as a
bright man might pick up in miscella-
neous reading; but all this is the su-
perficial setting, the mere frame to the
picture. The living canvas is human
nature as Shakespeare saw it in London
and depicted with supreme poetic fac-
ulty. Among the new books within his
reach was Chapman's magnificent trans-
lation of the Iliad, which at a later day
inspired Keats to such a noble outburst
of encomium ; and in Troilus and Cres-
sida we have the Greek and Trojan
heroes set before us with an incisive
reality not surpassed by Homer himself.
This play shows how keenly Shakespeare
appreciated Homer, how delicately and
exquisitely he could supplement the pic-
ture; but there is nothing in its five
acts that shows him clothed in the gar-
ment of ancient thought as Milton wore
it. Shakespeare's freedom from such
lore is a great advantage to him; in
Troilus and Cressida there is a freedom
of treatment hardly possible to a pro-
fessional scholar. It is because of this
freedom that Shakespeare reaches a far
wider public of readers and listeners
than Milton or Dante, whose vast learn-
ing makes them in many places "ca-
viare to the general." Book-lore is a
great source of power, but one may
easily be hampered by it. What we
forever love in Homer is the freshness
that comes with lack of it, and in this
sort of freshness Shakespeare agrees
with Homer far more than with the
learned poets.

It is not for a moment to be denied
that Shakespeare's plays exhibit a re-
markable wealth of varied knowledge.
The writer was one of the keenest ob-

servers that ever lived. In the wood-
land or on the farm, in the printing-
shop or the alehouse, or up and down
the street, not the smallest detail es-
caped him. Microscopic accuracy, cu-
rious interest in all things, unlimited
power of assimilating knowledge, are
everywhere shown in the plays. These
are some of the marks of what we
call genius, something that we are far
from comprehending, but which experi-
ence has shown that books and univer-
sities cannot impart. All the colleges
on earth could not by combined effort
make the kind of man we call a genius,
but such a man may at any moment be
born into the world, and it is as likely
to be in a peasant's cottage as anywhere.
There is nothing in which men differ
more widely than in the capacity for
imbibing and assimilating knowledge.
The capacity is often exercised uncon-
sciously. When my eldest son, at the
age of six, was taught to read in the
course of a few weeks of daily instruc-
tion, it was suddenly discovered that
his four-year-old brother also could
read. Nobody could tell how it hap-
pened. Of course the younger boy
must have taken keen notice of what
the elder one was doing, but the pro-'
cess went on without attracting atten-
tion until the result appeared.

This capacity for unconscious learn-
ing is not at all uncommon. It is pos-
sessed to some extent by everybody ; but
a very high degree of it is one of the
marks of genius. I remember one even-
ing, many years ago, hearing Herbert
Spencer in a friendly discussion regard-
ing certain functions of the cerebellum.
Abstruse points of comparative ana-
tomy and questions of pathology were
involved. Spencer's three antagonists
were not violently opposed to him, but
were in various degrees unready to adopt
his views. The three were Huxley, one
of the greatest of comparative anato-
mists; Hughlings Jackson, a very emi-
nent authority on the pathology of
the nervous system ; and George Henry

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

639

Lewes, who, although more of an ama-
teur in such matters, had nevertheless
devoted years of study to neural phy-
siology and was thoroughly familiar
with the history of the subject. Spencer
more than held his ground against the
others. He met fact with fact, brought
up points in anatomy the significance
of which Huxley had overlooked, and
had more experiments and clinical cases
at his tongue's end than Jackson could
muster. It was quite evident that he
knew all they knew on that subject,
and more besides. Yet Spencer had
never been through a course of "regu-
lar training " in the studies concerned ;
nor had he ever studied at a university,
or even at a high school. Where did
he learn the wonderful mass of facts
which he poured forth that evening?
Whence came his tremendous grasp
upon the principles involved ? Proba-
bly he could not have told you. A
few days afterward I happened to be
talking with Spencer about history, a
subject of which he modestly said he
knew but little. I told him I had
often been struck with the aptness of
1;he historic illustrations cited in many
chapters of his Social Statics, written
when he was twenty-nine years old.
The references were not only always ac-
curate, but they showed an intelligence
and soundness of judgment unattain-
able, one would think, save by close
familiarity with history. Spencer as-
sured me that he had never read ex-
tensively in history. Whence, then,
this wealth of knowledge, — not smat-
tering, not sciolism, but solid, well-
digested knowledge ? Really, he did
not know, except that when his interest
was aroused in any subject he was
keenly alive to all facts bearing upon
it, and seemed to find them whichever
way he turned. When I mentioned
this to Lewes, while recalling the
discussion on the cerebellum, he ex-
claimed : " Oh, you can't account for it !
It 's his genius. Spencer has greater
instinctive power of observation and

assimilation than any man since Shake-
speare, and he is like Shakespeare for
hitting the bull's-eye every time he fires.
As for Darwin and Huxley, we can
follow their intellectual processes, but
Spencer is above and beyond all; he is
inspired! "

Those were Lewes 's exact words,
and they made a deep impression upon
me. The comparison with Shakespeare
struck me as a happy one, and I can
understand both Spencer and Shake-
speare the better for it. Concerning
Spencer one circumstance may be ob-
served. Since his early manhood he
has lived in London, and has had for
his daily associates men of vast attain-
ments in every department of science.
He has thus had rare opportunities for
absorbing an immense fund of know-
ledge unconsciously.

It is evident that the author of
Shakespeare's plays possessed an ex-
traordinary "instinctive power of ob-
servation and assimilation. " There was
nothing strange in such a genius grow-
ing up in a small Warwickshire town.
The difficulty is one which the Delia-
Baconians have created for themselves.
As it is their chief stock in trade, they
magnify it in every way they can think
of. Shakespeare's parents, they say,
were illiterate, and he did not know
how to spell his own name. It appears
as Shagspere, Shaxpur, Shaxberd, Chac-
sper, and so on through some thirty
forms, several of which William Shake-
speare himself used indifferently. The
implication is that such a man must
have been shockingly ignorant. The
real ignorance, however, is on the part
of those who use such an argument.
Apparently they do not know that in
Shakespeare's time such laxity in spell-
ing was common in all ranks of society
and in all grades of culture. The name
of Elizabeth's great Lord Treasurer,
Cecil, and his title", Burghley, were
both spelled in half a dozen ways.
The name of Raleigh occurs in more
than forty different forms, and Sir

640

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

Walter, one of the most accomplished
men of his time, wrote it Rauley, Raw-
ley ghe, Ralegh, and in yet other ways.
The talk of the Baconizers on this point
is simply ludicrous.

Equally silly is their talk about the
dirty streets of Stratford. They seem
to have just discovered that Elizabeth's
England was a badly drained country,
with heaps of garbage in the streets.
Shakespeare's father, they tell us, was
a butcher, and evidently from a butch-
er's son, living in an ill-swept town,
and careless about the spelling of his
name, not much in the way of intellectu-
al achievement was to be expected ! In
point of fact, Shakespeare's parents be-
longed to the middle class. His father
owned several houses in Stratford and
two or three farms in the neighbor-
hood. As a farmer in those days he
would naturally have cattle slaughtered
on his premises and would sell wool off
the backs of his own flocks, whence the
later tradition of his having been butch-
er and wool-dealer. That his social
position was good is shown by the facts
that he was chief alderman and high
bailiff of Stratford, and justice of the
peace, and was styled "Master John
Shakespeare," or (as we should say)
"Mr., " whereas had he been one of the
common folk, his style had been " Good-
man Shakespeare. " A visit to his home
in Henley Street, and to Anne Hatha-
way's cottage at Shottery, shows that
the two families were in eminently re-
spectable circumstances. The son of the
high bailiff would see the best people
in the neighborhood. There was in
the town a remarkably good free gram-
mar school, where he might have learned
the " small Latin and less Greek "
which his friend Ben Jonson assures us
he possessed. This expression, by the
way, is usually misunderstood, because
people do not pause to consider it.
Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say
that "small Latin and less Greek "
might fairly describe the amount of
those languages ordinarily possessed by

a member of the graduating class at
Harvard in good standing. It can
hardly imply less than the ability to
read Terence at sight, and perhaps Eu-
ripides less fluently. The author of the
plays, with his unerring accuracy of ob-
servation, knows Latin enough at least
to use the Latin part of English most
skillfully; at the same time, when he
has occasion to use Greek authors, such
as Homer or Plutarch, he usually pre-
fers an English translation. At all
events, Jonson 's remark informs us that
the man whom he addresses as "sweet
swan of Avon " knew some Latin and
some Greek, — a conclusion which is so
distasteful to one of our Baconizers,
Mr. Edwin Reed, that he will not ad-
mit it. Rather than do so, he has the
assurance to ask us to believe that by the
epithet "sweet swan of Avon " Jonson
really meant Francis Bacon ! Dear me,
Mr. Reed, do you really mean it ? And
how about the editor of Beaumont and
Fletcher in 1647, when, in his dedica-
tion to Shakespeare's friend, the Earl
of Pembroke, he speaks of " Sweet Swan
of Avon Shakespear " ? Was he, too,
a participator in the little scheme for
fooling posterity? Or was he one of
those who were fooled?

Whether Shakespeare had other
chances for book-lore than those which
the grammar school afforded, whether
there was any interesting parson at
hand, as often in small towns, to guide
and stimulate his unfolding thoughts,
— upon such points we have no infor-
mation. But there were things to be
learned in the country town quite out-
side of books and pedagogues. There,
while the poet listened to the "strain
of strutting chanticleer," and watched
the " sun-burn 'd sicklemen, of August
weary, " putting on their rye-straw hats
and making holiday with rustic nymphs,
he could rejoice in

" Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty ;
Vines with dust' ring bunches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing ; "

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

G41

there he could see the "unbacked colts "
prick their ears, advance their eyelids,
lift up their noses, as if they smelt
music; there he knew, doubtless, many
a bank where the wild thyme grew and
on which the moonlight sweetly slept ;
there he watched the coming of "vio-
lets dim, " "pale primroses, " flower-de-
luce, carnations, with "rosemary and
rue " to keep their " savour all the win-
ter long, "

" When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk conies frozen home in pail. ' '

Such lore as this no books nor college
could impart.

It was this that Milton had in mind
when he introduced Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson into his poem L' Allegro.
Milton was in his thirtieth year when
Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest
in Westminster Abbey ; he .was only a
boy of eight years when Shakespeare
died, but the beautiful sonnet, written
fourteen years later, shows how lovingly
he studied his works : —

" What needs my Shakespeare, for his hon-
oured bones," etc.

The poem L' Allegro and its fellow II
Penseroso describe the delights of Mil-
ton's life at his father's country house
near Windsor Castle. He used often
to ride into London to hear music or
pass an evening at the theatre, as in the
following lines : —

" Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild."

This accurate and happy contrast ex-
asperates the Baconizers, for it spoils
their stock in trade, and accordingly
they try their best to assure us that
Milton did not know what he was writ-
ing about. They asseverate with ve-
hemence that in all the seven-and-thirty
plays there is no such thing as a native
woodnote wild.

But before leaving the contrast we
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 41

may pause for a moment to ask, Where
did Ben Jonson get his learning? He
was, as he himself tells us, "poorly
brought up " by his stepfather, a brick-
layer. He went to Westminster School,
where he was taught by Camden, and he
may have spent a short time at Cam-
bridge, though this is doubtful. His
schooling was nipped in the bud, for he
had to go home and lay brick ; and when
he found such an existence insupportable
he went into the army and fought in the
Netherlands. At about the age of
twenty we find him back in London, and
there lose sight of him for five years,
when all at once his great comedy Every
Man in his Humour is performed and
makes him famous. Now, in such a life,
when did Jonson get the time for his im-
mense reading and his finished classical
scholarship ? Reasoning after the man-
ner of the Delia- Baconians, we may safe-
ly say that he could not possibly have ac-
cumulated the learning which is shown
in his plays : therefore he could not
have written those plays ; therefore Lord
Bacon must have written them ! There
are daring soarers in the empyrean who
do not shrink from this conclusion; a
doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has
published a pamphlet to prove, among
other things, that Bacon was the author
of the plays which were performed and
printed as Jonson's.

To return to Shakespeare. Some-
where about 1585, when he was one-
and-twenty, he went to London, leav-
ing his wife and three young children
at Stratford. His father had lost
money, and tlie fortunes of the family
were at the lowest ebb. In London we
lose sight of 'Shakespeare for a while,
just as we lose sight of Jonson, until
literary works appear. The work first
published is Venus and Adonis, one of
the most exquisite pieces of diction in
the English language. It was dedicat-
ed to Henry, Earl of Southampton, by
William Shakespeare, whose authorship
of the poem is asserted as distinctly
as the title-page of David Copperfield

642

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

proclaims that novel to be by Charles
Dickens, yet some precious critics as-
sure us that Shakespeare "could not "
have written the poem, and never knew
the Earl of Southampton. Some years
ago, Mr. Appleton Morgan, who does
not wish to be regarded as a Bacon-
izer, published an essay on the War-
wickshire dialect, in which he main-
tained that since no traces of that kind
of speech occur' in Venus and Adonis,
therefore it could not have been writ-
ten by a young man fresh from a small
Warwickshire town. This is a speci-
men of the loose kind of criticism which
prepares soil for Delia-Baconian weeds
to grow in. The poem was published in
1593, seven or eight years after Shake-
speare's coming to London; and we are
asked to believe that the world's great-
est genius, one of the most consummate
masters of speech that ever lived, could
tarry seven years in the city without
learning how to write what Hosea Big-
low calls " citified English " ! One can
only exclaim, with Gloster, "O mon-
strous fault, to harbour such a thought ! "
In those years Shakespeare surely
learned much else. It seems clear that
he had a good reading acquaintance
with French and Italian, though he
often uses translations, as for instance
Florio's version of Montaigne. In esti-
mating what Shakespeare "must have "
known or " could not have " known,
one needs to use more caution than some
of our critics display. For example, in
The Winter's Tale the statue of Her-
mione is called "apiece . . . now newly
performed by that rare Italian master,
Julio Romano." Now, since Romano is
known as a great painter, but not as a
sculptor, this has been cited as a blun-
der on Shakespeare's part. It appears,
however, that the first edition of Va-
sari's Lives of the Painters, published
in 1550 and never translated from its
original Italian, informs us that Romano
did work in sculpture. In Vasari's
second edition, published in 1568 and
translated into several languages, this

information is not given. From these
facts, the erudite German critic Dr.
Karl Elze, who is not a bit of a Delia-
Baconian, but only an occasional sufferer
from vesania commentatorum, intro-
duces us to a solemn dilemma: either
the author of The Winter's Tale must
have consulted the first edition of Va-
sari in the original Italian, or else he
must have traveled in Italy and gazed
upon statues by Romano. Ah ! prithee
not so fast, worthy doctor; be not so
lavish with these "musts." It is highly
improbable that Shakespeare ever saw
Italy except with the eyes of his impe-
rial fancy. On the other hand, there
are many indications that he could read
Italian, but among them we cannot at-
tach much importance to this one. Why
should he not have learned from hear-
say that Romano had made statues?
In the name of common sense, are
there no sources of knowledge save
books ? Or, since it was no unusual
thing for Italian painters in the six-
teenth century to excel in sculpture and
architecture, why should not Shake-
speare have assumed without verifica-
tion that it was so in Romano's case?
It was a tolerably safe assumption to
make, especially in an age utterly care-
less of historical accuracy, and in a
comedy which provides Bohemia with a
seacoast, and mixes up times and cus-
toms with as scant heed of probability
as a fairy tale.

In arguing about what Shakespeare
"must have" or "could not have"
known, we must not forget that at no
time or place since history began has
human thought fermented more briskly
than in London while he was living
there. The age of Drake and Raleigh
was an age of efflorescence in dramatic
poetry, such as had not been seen in the
twenty centuries since Euripides died.
Among Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen
were writers of such great and varied
endowments as Chapman, Marlowe,
Greene, Nash, Peele, Marston, Dekker,
Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

643

his earlier years in London Richard
Hooker was master of the Middle Tem-
ple, and there a little later Ford and
Beaumont were studying. The erudite
Camden was master' of Westminster
School ; among the lights of the age for
legal learning were Edward Coke and
Francis Bacon; at the same time, one
might have met in London the learned
architect Inigo Jones and the learned
poet John Donne, both of them excel-
lent classical scholars ; there one would
have found the divine poet Edmund
Spenser, just come over from Ireland
to see to the publication of his Faerie
Queene ; not long afterward came John
Fletcher from Cambridge, and the acute
philosopher Edward Herbert from Ox-
ford ; and one and all might listen to the
incomparable table-talk of that giant of
scholarship, John Selden. The delights
of the Mermaid Tavern, where these
rare wits were wont to assemble, still
live in tradition. As Keats says : —

" Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern.
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern ? "

It has always been believed that this
place was one of Shakespeare's favorite
haunts. By common consent of schol-
ars it has been accepted as the scene of
those contests of wit between Shake-
speare and Jonson of which Fuller tells
us when he compares Jonson to a Span-
ish galleon, built high with learning,
but slow in movement, while he likens
Shakespeare to an English cruiser, less
heavily weighted, but apt for victory
because of its nimbleness, — the same
kind of contrast, by the way, as that
which occurred to Milton.

But our Baconizing friends will not
allow that Shakespeare ever went to the
Mermaid or knew the people who met
there; at least none but a few fellow
dramatists. We have no documentary
proof that he ever met with Raleigh, or
Bacon, or Selden. Let us observe that
while these sapient critics are in some
cases ready to welcome the slightest cir-

cumstantial evidence, there are others
in which they will accept nothing short
of absolute demonstration. Did Shake-
speare ever see a maypole ? The word
occurs just once in his plays, namely, in
the Midsummer Night's Dream, where
little Hermia, quarreling with tall He-
lena, calls her a "painted maypole;"
but that proves nothing. I am not
aware that there is any absolute docu-
mentary proof that Shakespeare ever set
eyes on a maypole. It is nevertheless
certain that in England, at that time, no
boy could grow to manhood without see-
ing many a maypole. Common sense
has some rights which we are bound to
respect.

Now, Shakespeare's London was a
small city of from 150,000 to 200,000
souls, or about the size of Providence
or Minneapolis at the present time.
In cities of such size everybody of the
slightest eminence is known all over
town, and such persons are sure to be
more or less acquainted with one an-
other ; it is a very rare exception when
it is not so. Before his thirtieth year
Shakespeare was well known in London
as an actor, a writer of plays, and the
manager of a prominent theatre. It was
in that year that Spenser, in his Colin
Clout 's Come Home Again, alluding to
Shakespeare under the name of Action,
or "eagle-like," paid him this compli-
ment : —

" And there, though last, not least, is Action ;
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found ;
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth, like himself, heroically sound."

Four years after this, in 1598, Francis
Meres published his book entitled Pal-
ladis Tamia, a very interesting contri-
bution to literary history. The author,
who had been an instructor in rhetoric
in the University of Oxford, was then
living in London, near the Globe Thea-
tre. In this book Meres tells his readers
that " the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives
in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shake-
speare ; witness his Venus and Adonis,
his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among

644

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

his private friends, etc. . . .As Plau-
tus and Seneca are accounted the best
for comedy and tragedy among the Lat-
ins, so Shakespeare among the English
is the most excellent in both kinds for
the stage : for comedy, witness his Gen-
tlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's
Labour 's Lost, his Love's Labour 's
Wonne, Jhis Midsummer Night's Dream,
and his Merchant of Venice ; for trage-
dy, his Richard II., Richard III., Hen-
ry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus,
and his Romeo and Juliet. As Epius
Stolo said that the Muses would speak
with Plautus's tongue if they would
speak Latin, so I say that the Muses
would speak with Shakespeare's fine
filed phrase if they would speak Eng-
lish." In other passages Meres men-
tions Shakespeare's lyrical quality, for
which he likens him to Pindar and Ca-
tullus, and the glory of his style, for
which he places him along with Virgil
and Homer. It thus appears that at
the age of thirty-four this poet from
Stratford was already ranked by criti-
cal scholars by the side of the greatest
names of antiquity. Let us add that
the popularity of his plays was making
him a somewhat wealthy man, so that
he had relieved his father from pecuni-
ary troubles, and had just bought for
himself the Great House at Stratford
where the last years of his life were
spent. His income seems already to
have been equivalent to $10, 000 a year
in our modern money. His position had
come to be such that he could extend
patronage to others. It was in 1598
that through his influence Ben Jonson
obtained, after many rebuffs, his first
hearing before a London audience, when
Every Man in his Humour was brought
out at Blackfriars Theatre, with Shake-
speare acting one of the parts.

To suppose that such a man as this,
in a town the size of Minneapolis, con-
nected with a principal theatre, writer
of the most popular plays of the day, a

1 The comedy afterward developed into
All 's Well that Ends Well.

poet whom men were already coupling
with Homer and Pindar, — to suppose
that such a man was not known to all
the educated people in the town is
simply absurd. There were probably
very few men, women, or children in
London, between 1595 and 1610, who
did not know who Shakespeare was
when he passed them in the street ; and
as for such wits as drank ale and sack
at the Mermaid, as for Raleigh and Ba-
con and Selden and the rest, to suppose
that Shakespeare did not know them
well — nay, to suppose that he was not
the leading spirit and brightest wit of
those ambrosial nights — is about as
sensible as to suppose that he never saw
a maypole.

The facts thus far contemplated point
to one conclusion. The son of a well-
to-do magistrate in a small country town
is born with a genius which the world
has never seen surpassed. Coming to
London at the age of twenty- one, he
achieves such swift success that within
thirteen years he is recognized as one
of the chief glories of English litera-
ture. During this time he is living in
the midst of such a period of intellec-
tual ferment as the world has seldom
seen, and in a position which necessa-
rily brings him into frequent contact
with all the most cultivated men. Un-
der such circumstances, there is nothing
in the smallest degree strange or sur-
prising in his acquiring the varied know-
ledge which his plays exhibit. The
major premise of the Delia-Baconians
has, therefore, nothing in it whatever.
It is a mere bubble, an empty vagary,
— only this, and nothing more.

Before leaving this part of the sub-
ject, however, there are still one or two
points of interest to be mentioned.
Shakespeare shows a fondness for the
use of phrases and illustrations taken
from the law ; and on such grounds our
Delia-Baconians argue that the plays
must have been written by an eminent
lawyer, such as the Lord Chancellor
Bacon undoubtedly was. They feel

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

645

that this is a great point on their side.
One instance, cited by Nathaniel Holmes
and other Baconizers, is the celebrated
case of Sir James Hales, who committed
suicide by drowning,' and was accord-
ingly buried at the junction of cross-
roads, with a stake through his body,
while all his property was forfeited
to the Crown. Presently his widow
brought suit for an estate by survivor-
ship in joint-tenancy. Her case turned
upon the question whether the forfeit-
ure occurred during her late husband's
lifetime: if it did, he left no estate
which she could take; if it did not,
she took the estate by survivorship.
The lady's counsel argued that so long
as Sir James was alive he had not been
guilty of suicide, and the instant he died
the estate vested in his widow as joint-
tenant. But the opposing counsel ar-
gued that the instant Sir James volun-
tarily made the fatal plunge, and there-
fore before the breath had left his body,
the guilt of suicide was incurred and
the forfeiture took place. The court
decided in favor of this view, and the
widow got nothing.

There can be little doubt that this
decision is travestied in the conversa-
tion of the two clowns in Hamlet with
regard to Ophelia's right to Christian
burial. The first clown makes precise-
ly the point upon which the ingenious
counsel for the defendant had rested
his argument: "If I drown myself
wittingly, it argues an act, and an act
hath three branches ; it is to act, to do,
and to perform." In making this dis-
tinction the counsel had maintained that
the second branch, or the doing, was the
only thing for the law to consider. The
talk of the clowns brings out the humor
of the case with Shakespeare's inimita-
ble lightness of touch.

The report of the Hales case was pub-
lished in the volume of Plowden's Re-
ports which was issued in 1578 ; and
Judge Holmes informs us that "there
is not the slightest ground for a belief,
on the facts which we know, that Shake-

speare ever looked into Plowden's Re-
ports." This is one of the cases where
your stern Baconizer will not hear of
anything short of absolute demonstra-
tion. Mere considerations of human
probability might disturb the cogency
of a neat little pair- of syllogisms : —

(1.) The author of Hamlet must have
read Plowden. Shakespeare never read
Plowden. Therefore Shakespeare was
not the author of Hamlet.

(2.) The author of Hamlet must have
read Plowden. The lawyer, Bacon,
must have read Plowden. Therefore
Bacon wrote Hamlet.

With regard to the major premise
here, one may freely deny it. The au-
thor of Hamlet might easily have got all
the knowledge involved from an evening
chat with some legal friend at an ale-
house. Then as to the minor premise,
what earthly improbability is there in
Shakespeare's having dipped into Plow-
den? Can nobody but lawyers or law
students enjoy reading reports of law
cases? I remember that when I was
about ten years old, a favorite book with
me was one entitled Criminal Trials
of All Countries, by a Member of the
Philadelphia Bar. I read it and read
it, until forbidden to read such a grue-
some book, and then I read it all the
more. One of the most elaborate re-
ports in it was that of the famous case
of Captain Donellan, tried in 1780 on
a charge of poisoning ; and if I did not
forthwith write a play and take the oc-
casion to ridicule the judge's charge to
the jury, it was because I could not
write a play, not because I did not fully
appreciate the insult to law and common
sense which that unfortunate case in-
volved. In view of this and other ex-
periences, when I now read a play or a
novel that contains an intelligent allu-
sion to some law case, I am far from
feeling driven to the conclusion that it
must have been written by a lord chan-
cellor.

If Shakespeare's dramas are proved
by such internal evidence to have been

646

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

written by a lawyer, that lawyer, by
parity of reasoning, could hardly have
been Francis Bacon. For he was pre-
eminently a chancery lawyer, and chan-
cery phrases are in Shakespeare conspic-
uously absent. The word " injunctions "
occurs five times in the plays, once per-
haps with a reference to its legal use
(Merchant of Venice, II. ix.); but no-
where do we find any exhibition of a
knowledge of chancery law. His allu-
sions to the common law are often very
amusing, as when, in Love's Labour 's
Lost, at the end of a brisk punning-
match between Boyet and Maria, he
offers to kiss her, laughingly asking for
a grant of pasture on her lips, and she
replies, "Not so, my lips are no com-
mon, though several they be." Again,
in The Comedy of Errors, "Dromio
asserts that there is no time for a bald
man to recover his hair. This having
been written, the law phrase suggested
itself, and he was asked whether he
might not do it by fine and recovery,
and this suggested the efficiency of that
proceeding to bar heirs ; and this started
the conceit that thus the lost hair of an-
other man would be recovered." * In
such quaint allusions to the common
law and its proceedings Shakespeare
abounds, and we cannot help remember-
ing that Nash, in his prefatory epistle
to Greene's Meriaphon, printed about
1589, makes sneering mention of Shake-
speare as a man who had left the " trade
of Noverint, " whereunto he was born,
in order to' try his hand at tragedy.
The "trade of Noverint " was a slang
expression for the business of attorney,
and this passage has suggested that
Shakespeare may have spent some time
in a law office, as student or as clerk,
either before leaving Stratford, or per-
haps soon after his arrival in London.
This seems to me not improbable. On
the other hand, The Merchant of Venice

1 Davis, The Law' in Shakespeare, St. Paul,
1884.

2 There is reason for believing that this choice
•was an instance of the megalomania developed
by Miss Bacon's malady. She imagined a re-

contains such crazy law that it is hard
to imagine it coming even from a law-
yer's clerk. At all events, we may
safely say that the legal knowledge ex-
hibited in the plays is no more than
might readily have been acquired by a
man of assimilative genius associating
with lawyers. It simply shows the
range and accuracy of Shakespeare's
powers of observation.

Let us come now to the second part
of the Delia Bacon theory. Having
satisfied herself that William Shake-
speare could not have written the poems
and plays published under his name, she
jumped to the conclusion that Francis
Bacon was the author. Surely, a sin-
gular choice ! Of all men, why Francis
Bacon ? 2 Why not, as I said before,
George Chapman or Ben Jonson, men
who were at once learned scholars and
great poets? Chapman, like Marlowe,
could write the "mighty line." Jonson
had rare lyric power ; his verses sing,
as witness the wonderful " Do but look
on her eyes, " which Francis Bacon could
no more have written than he could have
jumped over the moon. To pitch upon
Bacon as the writer of Twelfth Night
or Romeo and Juliet is about as sensi-
ble as to assert that David Copperfield
must have been written by Charles Dar-
win. After a familiar acquaintance of
more than forty years with Shake-
speare's works, of nearly forty years
with Bacon's, the two men impress me
as simply antipodal one to the other. A
similar feeling was entertained by the
late Mr. Spedding, the biographer and
editor of Bacon ; and no one has more
happily hit off the vagaries of the Ba-
conizers than the foremost Bacon scholar
now living, Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his
recent address before the Shakespeare
Society at Weimar.8 I used to wonder
whether the Bacon-Shakespeare people
really knew anything about Bacon, and
mote kinship between herself and Lord Bacon.
Possibly there may have been such kinship.

3 Fischer, Shakespeare und die Bacon-
Mythen, Heidelberg, 1895.

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

647

now that chance has led me to read
their books I am quite sure they do not.
To their minds his works are simply a
storehouse of texts which serve them
for controversial missiles, very much as
scattered texts from the Bible used to
serve our uncritical grandfathers.

Francis Bacon was one of the most
interesting persons of his time, and, as
is often the case with such many-sided
characters, posterity has held various
opinions about him. On the one hand,
his fame has grown brighter with the
years ; on the other hand, it has come to
be more or less circumscribed and lim-
ited. Pope's famous verse, "The wis-
est,' brightest, meanest of mankind, "
may be disputed in all its three speci-
fications. Bacon's treatment of Essex,
which formerly called forth such bitter
condemnation, has been, I think, com-
pletely justified ; and as for the taking
of bribes, which led to his disgrace,-
there were circumstances which ought
largely to mitigate the severity of our
judgment. But if Bacon was far from
being a mean example of human na-
ture, it is surely an exaggeration to call
him the wisest and brightest of man-
kind. He was a scholar and critic of
vast accomplishments, a writer of noble
English prose, and a philosopher who
represented rather than inaugurated a
most beneficial revolution in the aims
and methods of scientific inquiry. He
is one of the real glories of English
literature, but he is also one of the most
overrated men of modern times. When
we find Macaulay saying that Bacon had
" the most exquisitely constructed intel-
lect that has ever been bestowed on any
of the children of men," we need not
be surprised to find that his elaborate
essay on Bacon is as false in its funda-
mental conception as it is inaccurate in
details. For a long time it was one
of the accepted commonplaces that Ba-
con inaugurated the method by which
modern discoveries in physical science
have been made. Early in the present
century such writers on the history of

science as Whewell began to show the
incorrectness of this notion, and it was
completely exploded by Stanley Jevons
in his Principles of Science, the most
profound treatise on method that has ap-
peared in the last fifty years. Jevons
writes: "It is wholly a mistake to say
that modern science is the result of the
Baconian philosophy ; it is the Newto-
nian philosophy and the Newtonian
method which have led to all the great
triumphs of physical science, and . . .
the Principia forms the true Novum
Organon." This statement of Jevons
is thoroughly sound. The great Har-
vey, who knew how scientific discoveries
are made, said with gentle sarcasm that
Bacon "wrote philosophy like a lord
chancellor; " yet Harvey would not
have denied that the chancellor was do-
ing noble service as the eloquent ex-
pounder of many sides of the scientific
movement that was then gathering
strength. Bacon's mind was eminently
sagacious and fertile in suggestions,
but the supreme creative faculty, the
power to lead men into new paths, was
precisely the thing which he did not
possess. His place is a very high one
among intellects of the second order;
to rank him with such godlike spirits as
Newton, Spinoza, and Leibnitz is sim-
ply absurd.

So much for Bacon himself. With
regard to him as possible author of the
Shakespeare poems and plays, it is
difficult to imagine so learned a scholar
making the kind of mistakes that abound
in those writings. Bacon would hardly
have introduced clocks into the Rome
of Julius Caesar; nor would he have
made Hector quote Aristotle, nor Ham-
let study at the University of Witten-
berg, founded five hundred years after
Hamlet's time; nor would he have put
pistols into the age of Henry IV., nor
cannon into the age of King John ; and
we may be pretty sure that he would
not have made one of the characters in
King Lear talk about Turks and Bed-
lam, In this severely realistic age of

648

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

ours, writers are more on their guard
against such anachronisms than they
were in Shakespeare's time; in his
works we cannot call them serious ble-
mishes, for they do not affect the artis-
tic character of the plays, but they are
certainly such mistakes as a scholar like
Bacon would not have committed.

Deeper down lies the contrast in-
volved in the fact that Bacon was in a
high degree a subjective writer, from
whom you are perpetually getting reve-
lations of his idiosyncrasies and moods,
whereas of all writers in the world
Shakespeare is the most completely ob-
jective, the most absorbed in the work
of creation. In the one writer you are
always reminded of the man Bacon ; in
the other the personality is never thrust
into sight. Bacon is highly self-con-
scious ; from Shakespeare self-conscious-
ness is absent.

The contrast is equally great in re-
spect of humor. I would not deny
that Bacon relished a joke, or could
perpetrate a pun; but the bubbling,
seething, frolicsome, irrepressible droll-
ery of Shakespeare is something quite
foreign to him. Read his essays, and
you get charming English, wide know-
ledge, deep thought, keen observation,
worldly wisdom, good humor, sweet se-
renity; but exuberant fun is not there.
In writing these essays Bacon was
following an example set by Montaigne,
but as contrasted with the delicate ef-
fervescent humor of the Frenchman his
style seems sober and almost insipid.
Only fancy such a man trying to write
The Merry "Wives of Windsor !

Both Shakespeare and Bacon were
sturdy and rapacious purloiners. They
seized upon other men's bright thoughts
and made them their own without com-
punction and without acknowledgment ;
and this may account for sundry simi-
larities which may be culled from the
plays and from Bacon's works, upon
which Baconizing text - mongers are
wont to lay great stress as proof of
common authorship. Some such re-

semblances may be due to borrowing
from common sources ; others are doubt-
less purely fanciful; others indicate
either that Shakespeare cribbed from
Bacon, or vice versa. Here are a few
miscellaneous instances.

Where Bacon says, "Be so true to
thyself as thou be not false to others "
(Essay of Wisdom), Shakespeare says :

" To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
(Hamlet, I. iii.)

This looks as if one writer might have
copied from the other. If so, it is Ba-
con who is the thief, for the lines occur
in the quarto Hamlet published in 1603,
whereas the Essay of Wisdom was first
published in 1612.

Again, where Bacon, in the Essay of
Gardens, says, "The breath of flowers
comes and goes like the warbling of
music," it reminds one strongly of the
exquisite passage in Twelfth Night
where the Duke exclaims : —

" That strain again ! it had a dying fall :
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."

I have little doubt that Bacon had
this passage in mind when he wrote the
Essay of Gardens, which was first pub-
lished in 1625, two years later than the
complete folio of Shakespeare. This
effectually disposes of the attempt to
cite these correspondences in evidence
that Bacon wrote the plays.

Another instance is from Richard
III. : -

" By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust
Ensuing danger ; as, by proof, we see
The waters swell before a boisterous storm."

Bacon, in the Essay of Sedition, writes,
"As there are . . . secret swellings of
seas before a tempest, so there are in
states." But this essay was not pub-
lished till 1625, so again we find him
copying Shakespeare. Many such "par-
allelisms," cited to prove that Bacon
wrote Shakespeare's works, do really
prove that he read them with great care

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

649

and remembered them well, or else took
notes from them.

An interesting illustration of the
helpless ignorance shown by Baconizers
is furnished by a remark of Sir Toby
Belch, in Twelfth Night. In his in-
structions to that dear old simpleton
Sir Andrew Aguecheek about the chal-
lenge, Sir Toby observes, "If thou
thou'st him some thrice, it shall not
be amiss." In Elizabethan English, to
address a man as " thou " was to treat
him as socially inferior ; such familiar-
ity was allowable only between members
of the same family or in speaking to
servants, just as you address your wife,
and likewise the cook and housemaid,
by their Christian names, while with the
ladies of your acquaintance such famil-
iarity would be rudeness. The same
rule for the pronoun survives to-day in
French and German, but has been for-
gotten in English. In the trial of Sir
Walter Raleigh in 1604, Justice Coke
insulted the prisoner by calling out,
"Thou viper! for I thou thee, thou
traitor! " Now, one of our Baconizers
thinks that his idol, in writing Twelfth
Night, introduced Sir Toby's suggestion
in order to recall to the audience Coke's
abusive remark. Once more a little
attention to dates would have prevent-
ed the making of a bad blunder. We
know from Manningham's Diary that
Twelfth Night had been on the stage
nearly two years before Raleigh's trial.
On the other hand, to say that the play
might have suggested to Coke his coarse
speech would be admissible, but idle,
inasmuch as the expression "to thou a
man " was an every-day phrase in that
age.

Here it naturally occurs to us to
mention the Promus, about which as
much fuss has been made as if it really
furnished evidence in support of the Ba-
con folly. There is in the British Mu-
seum a manuscript in Bacon's handwrit-
ing, entitled Promus of Formularies and
Elegancies. "Promus " means "store-
house " or " treasury. " A date at the

top of the first page shows that it was
begun in December, 1594 ; there is no-
thing, I believe, to show over how many
years it extended. It is a scrap-book
in which Bacon jotted down such sen-
tences, words, and phrases as struck his
fancy, such as might be utilized in his
writings. These neatly turned phrases,
these " formularies and elegancies, " are
gathered from all quarters, — from the
Bible, from Virgil and Horace, from
Ovid and Seneca, from Erasmus, from
collections of proverbs in various lan-
guages, etc. As there is apparently
nothing original in this scrap-bag, Mr.
Spedding did not think it worth while
to include it in his edition of Bacon's
works, but in the fourteenth volume he
gives a sufficient description of it, with
illustrative extracts. In 1883 Mrs.
Henry Pott published the whole of this
Promus manuscript, and swelled it by
comments and dissertations into a vol-
ume of 600 octavo pages. She had found
in it several hundred expressions which
reminded her of passages in Shakespeare,
and so it confirmed her in the opinion
which she already entertained, that Ba-
con was the author of Shakespeare's
works. Thus, when the Promus has a
verse from Ovid, which means, "And
the forced tongue begins to lisp the
sound commanded," it reminds Mrs.
Pott of divers lines in which Shake-
speare uses the word "lisp," as for ex-
ample in As You Like It, "you lisp, and
wear strange suits ; " and she jumps to
the conclusion that when Bacon jotted
down the verse from Ovid, it was as a
preparatory study toward As You Like
It and any other play that contains the
word " lisp : " therefore Bacon wrote all
those plays, Q. E. D. ! On the next
page we find Virgil's remark, "Thus
was I wont to compare great things with
small," made the father of Falstaff's
"base comparisons," and Fluellen's
"Macedon and Monmouth, " as well
as honest Dogberry's "comparisons are
odorous. " When one reads such things,
evidently printed in all seriousness, one

650

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

feels like asking Mrs. Pott, in the apt
words of Shakespeare's friend Fletcher,
"What mare's nest hast thou found? "
(Bonduca, V. ii.)

There are many phrases, however,
in the Promus, which undoubtedly agree
with phrases in the plays. They show
that Bacon heard or read the plays with
great interest, and culled from them his
"elegancies " with no stinted hand.
As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it
brings us so near to the final reductio
ad absurdum of the Bacon theory that
we hardly need spend many words upon
the gross improbabilities which that
theory involves. The plays of Shake-
speare were universally ascribed to him
by his contemporaries ; many of them
were published during his lifetime,
with his name upon the title-page as the
author ; all were collected and published
together by Hemminge and Condell,
two of his fellow actors, seven years
after his death ; and for more than two
centuries nobody ever dreamed of look-
ing for a different authorship or of as-
sociating the plays with Bacon. But
this Chimborazo of prima facie evidence
becomes a mere mole-hill in the hands
of your valiant Baconizer. It is all
clear to him. Bacon did not acknow-
ledge the authorship of these works, be-
cause such literature was deemed frivo-
lous, and current prejudices against
theatres and playwrights might injure
his hopes of advancement at the bar
and in political life. Therefore, by
some sort of private understanding with
the ignorant and sordid wretch Shake-
speare, 1 at whose theatre they were
brought out, their authorship was as-
cribed to him, the real author died with-
out revealing the secret, and the whole
world was deceived until the days of
Delia Bacon.

But there are questions which even
this ingenious hypothesis fails to an-
swer. Why should Bacon have taken
the time to write those thirty-seven

1 The Baconizers usually delight in berat-
ing poor Shakespeare, making much of the

plays, two poems, and one hundred and
fifty-four sonnets, if they were never
to be known as his works ? Not for
money, surely, for that grasping Shake-
speare seems to have got the money as
well as the fame ; Bacon died a poor
man. His principal aim in life was to
construct a new system of philosophy;
on this noble undertaking he spent such
time as he could save from the exactions
of his public career as member of Par-
liament, chancery lawyer, solicitor-gen-
eral, attorney-general, lord chancellor;
and he died with this work far from
finished. The volumes which he left
behind him were only fragments of the
mighty structure which he had planned.
We may well ask, Where did this over-
burdened writer find the time for doing
work of another kind voluminous enough
to fill a lifetime, and what motive had
he for doing it without recompense
in either fame or money? Baconizers
find it strange that Shakespeare's will
contains no reference to his plays as
literary property. The omission is cer-
tainly interesting, since it seems to in-
dicate that he had parted with his pe-
cuniary interest in them, — had perhaps
sold it out to the Globe Theatre. If
this omission can be held to show that
Shakespeare was lacking in fondness for
the productions of his own genius, what
shall be said of the notion that Bacon
spent half his life in writing works the
paternity of which he must forever dis-
own?

This question is answered by Mr.
Ignatius Donnelly, a writer who specu-
lates with equal infelicity on all sub-
jects, but never suffers for lack of bold-
ness. He published in 1887 a book
even bigger than that of Mrs. Pott,
for it has nearly 1000 pages. Its title
is The Great Cryptogram, and its thesis
is that Bacon did claim the authorship
of the Shakespeare plays. Only the
claim was made in a cipher, and if you
simply make some numbers mean some

deer-stealing business, the circumstances of
his marriage, etc.

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

651

words, and other words mean other num-
bers, and perform a good many sums in
addition and subtraction, you will be
able to read this claim between the
lines, along with much other wonderful
information. Thus does Mr. Donnelly
carry us quite a long stride nearer to
the reductio ad absurdum, or suicide
point, than we were left by Mrs. Pott.
But before we come to the jumping-
off place, let us pause for a moment and
take a retrospective glance at the nat-
ural history of the Bacon-Shakespeare
craze. What was it that first unlocked
the sluice-gates, and poured forth such
a deluge of foolishness upon a sorely
suffering world? It will hardly do to
lay the blame upon poor Delia Bacon.
Her suggestions would have borne no
fruit had they not found a public, al-
beit a narrow one, in some degree pre-
pared for them. Who, then, prepared
the soil for the seeds of this idiocy to
take root? Who but the race of fond
and foolish Shakespeare commentators,
with their absurd claims for their idol ?
During the eighteenth century Shake-
speare was generally underrated. Vol-
taire wondered how a nation that pos-
sessed such a noble tragedy as Addison's
Cato could endure such plays as Hamlet
and Othello. In the days of Scott and
Burns a reaction set in; and Shake-
speare-worship reached its height when
the Germans took it up, and, not satis-
fied with calling him the prince of poets,
began to discover in his works all sorts
of hidden philosophy and impossible
knowledge. Of the average German
mind Lowell good-naturedly says that
"it finds its keenest pleasure in divin-
ing a profound significance in the most
trifling things, and the number of
mare's nests that have been stared into
by the German Gelehrter through his
spectacles passes calculation." (Liter-
ary Essays, ii. 163.) But the Germans
are not the only sinners; let me cite

1 The Bankside Shakespeare, vol. xi. p. xi.

2 The writings of Hippocrates abound in
examples, as in his interesting explanation of

an instance from near home. In the
quarto Hamlet of 1603 we read : —

" Full forty years are past, their date is gone,
Since happy time joined both our hearts as

one :
And now the blood that filled my youthful

veins
Runs weakly in their pipes," etc.

Whereupon Mr. Edward Vining calls
upon us to observe how Shakespeare,
"to whom all human knowledge seems
to be but a matter of instinct, in [these
lines] asserts the circulation of the blood
in the veins and ' pipes, ' a truth which
Harvey probably did not even suspect
until at least thirteen years later, " etc.1
Does Mr. Vining really suppose that
what Harvey did was to discover that
blood runs in our veins ? A little fur-
ther study of history would have taught
him that even the ancients knew that
blood runs in the veins.2 About four-
teen hundred years before Hamlet was
written, Galen proved that it also runs
in the arteries. After Galen's time, it
was believed that the dark blood nour-
ishes such plebeian organs as the liver,
while the bright blood nourishes such
lordly organs as the brain, and that the
interchange takes place in the heart;
until the sixteenth century, when Vesa-
lius proved that the interchange does
not take place in the heart, and the
martyr Servetus proved that it does take
place in the lungs; and so on till 1619,
when Harvey discovered that dark blood
is brought by the veins to the right side
of the heart, and thence driven into the
lungs, where it becomes bright and flows
into the left side of the heart, thence
to be propelled throughout the body in
the arteries. That it then grows dark
and returns through the veins Harvey
believed, but no one could tell how un-
til, forty years later, Malpighi with his
microscope detected the capillaries.
Now, to talk about Shakespeare discern-
ing as if by instinct a truth which Har-

congestion, extravasation, etc. (De Ventis, x.),
to cite one instance out of a thousand.

652

Forty Years of Bacon- Shakespeare Folly.

vey afterward discovered is simply silly.
Instead of showing rare scientific know-
ledge, his remark about blood running
in the veins is one that anybody might
have made.

This is a fair specimen of the way in
which doting commentators have built
up an impossible Shakespeare, until at
last they have provoked a reaction.
Sooner or later the question was sure
to arise, Where did your Stratford boy
get all this abstruse scientific know-
ledge ? The key-note was perhaps first
sounded by August von Schlegel, who
persuaded himself that Shakespeare had
mastered "all the things and relations
of this world, " and then went on to de-
clare that the accepted account bf his
life must be a mere fable. Thus we
reach the point from which Delia Ba-
con started.

It may safely be said that all theories
of Shakespeare's plays which suppose
them to be attempts at teaching occult
philosophical doctrines, or which endow
them with any other meanings than
those which their words directly and
plainly convey, are a delusion and a
snare. Those plays were written, not
to teach philosophy, but to fill the
theatre and make money. They were
written by a practiced actor and man-
ager, the most consummate master of
dramatic effects that ever lived ; a poet
unsurpassed for fertility of invention,
unequaled for melody of language, un-
approached for delicacy of fancy, in-
exhaustible in humor, profoundest of
moralists ; a man who knew human na-
ture by intuition, as Mozart knew coun-
terpoint or as Chopin knew harmony.
The name of that writer was none other
than William Shakespeare of Strat-
ford-on-Avon.

It was inevitable that the Bacon
folly, after once adopting such methods
as those of Mrs. Pott and Mr. Donnel-
ly, should proceed to commit suicide
by piling up extravagances. By such
methods one can prove anything, and
accordingly we find these writers busy
in tracing Bacon's hand in the writ-
ings of Greene, Marlowe, Shirley, Mar-
ston, Massinger, Middleton, and Web-
ster. They are sure that he was the
author of Montaigne's Essays, which
were afterward translated into what we
have always supposed to be the French
original. Mr. Donnelly believes that
Bacon also wrote Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy. Next comes Dr. Orville
Owen with a new cipher, which proves
that Bacon was the son of Queen Eliza-
beth by Robert Dudley, and that he
was the author of the Faerie Queene
and other poems attributed to Edmund
Spenser. Finally we have Mr. J. E.
Roe, who does not mean to be outdone.
He asks us what we are to think of the
notion that an ignorant tinker, like
John Bunyan, could have written the
most perfect allegory in any language.
Perish the thought ! Nobody but Ba-
con could have done it. Of course Ba-
con had been more than fifty years in
his grave when Pilgrim's Progress was
published as Bunyan's. But your true
Baconizer is never stopped by trifles.
Mr. Roe assures us that Bacon wrote
that heavenly book, as well as Robinson
Crusoe and the Tale of a Tub; which
surely begins to make him seem ubiqui-
tous and everlasting. If things go on
at this rate, we shall presently have a
religious sect, holding as its first arti-
cle of faith that Francis Bacon created
the heavens and the earth in six days,
and rested on the seventh day.

John Fiske.

Caleb West.

653

CALEB WEST.

AUNTY BELL'S KITCHEN.

THE storm was still raging, the wind
beating in fierce gusts against the house
and rattling the window - panes, when
Sanford awoke in the low-ceiled room
always reserved for him at Captain Joe's.

" Terrible dirty, ain't it ? " the cap-
tain called, as he came in with a hearty
good-morning and threw open the green
blinds. " I guess she '11 scale off ; it 's
hauled a leetle s'uth'ard since daylight.
The glass is a-risin', too. Aunty Bell says
breakfas' 's ready jes' 's soon 's you be."

" All right, captain. Don't wait. I '11
come in ten minutes," replied Sanford,
picking up his big sponge.

Outside the little windows a wide-
armed tree swayed in the storm, its bud-
ding branches tapping the panes. San-
ford drew aside the white dimity curtains
and looked out. The garden was drip-
ping, and the plank walk that ran to the
swinging-gate was glistening in the driv-
ing rain.

These sudden changes in the weather
did not affect Sanford's plans. Bad days
were to be expected, and the loss of time
at an exposed site like that of the Ledge
was always considered in the original
estimate of the cost of the structure. If
the sea prevented the landing of stone for
a day or so, the sloop, as he knew, could
load a full cargo of blocks from the stone
wharf across the road, now hidden by the
bursting lilacs in the captain's garden ;
or the men could begin on the iron parts
of the new derricks, and if it cleared, as
Captain Joe predicted, they could trim
the masts and fit the bands. Sanford
turned cheerfully from the window, and
began dressing for the day.

The furniture and appointments about
him were of the plainest. There were

a bed, a wash-stand and a portable tub,
three chairs, and a small table littered
with drawing materials. Dimity curtains
hung at the windows, and the bureau was
covered with a freshly laundered white
Marseilles cover. On the walls were
tacked mechanical drawings, showing
cross-sections of the several courses of
masonry, — prospective views of the con-
crete base and details of the cisterns and
cellars of the lighthouse. Each of these
was labeled " Shark Ledge Lighthouse.
Henry Sanford, Contractor," and signed,
" W. A. Carleton, Asst. Supt. U. S. L.
Estb't." In one corner of the room rest-
ed a field level, and a pole with its red
and white target.

The cottage itself was on the main
shore road leading from the village to
Key port Light, and a little removed from
the highway. It was a two-story dou-
ble house, divided by a narrow hall with
rooms on either side. In the rear were
the dining-room and kitchen. Overlook-
ing the road in front was a wide portico
with sloping roof.

There were two outside doors belong-
ing to the house. These were always open.
They served two purposes, — to let in
the air and to let in the neighbors. The
neighbors included everybody who hap-
pened to be passing, from the doctor to
the tramp. This constant stream of visi-
tors always met in the kitchen, really the
cheeriest and cosiest room in the house,
— a low - ceiled, old - fashioned interior,
full of nooks and angles, that had for
years adapted itself to everybody's wants
and ministered to everybody's comfort.

The fittings and furnishings of this de-
lightful room were as simple as they were
convenient. On one side, opposite the
door, were the windows, looking out upon
the garden, their sills filled with plants
in winter. In the far corner stood a pine
dresser painted bright green, decorated

654

Caleb West.

with rows of plates and saucers set up
on edge, besides various dishes and plat-
ters, all glistening from the last touch of
Aunty Bell's hand polish. Next to the
dresser was a broad, low settle, also of
pine and also bright green, except where
countless pairs of overalls had worn the
paint away. There were chairs of all
kinds, — rockers for winter nights, and
more restful straight - backs for meal-
times. There was a huge table, with al-
ways a place for one more. There was
a mantel-rest for pipes and knick-knacks,
— never known to be without a box of
matches, — and a nautical almanac.
There were rows of hooks nailed to the
backs of the doors, especially adapted
to rubber coats and oilskins. And last
of all, there was a fresh, sweet-smelling,
brass-hooped cedar bucket, tucked away
in a corner under the stairs, with a co-
coanut dipper that had helped to cool
almost every throat from Keyport Village
to Keyport Light.

But it was the stove that made this
room unique : not an ordinary, common-
place cooking - machine, but a big, gen-
erous, roomy arrangement, pushed far
back out of everybody's way, with out-
riggers for broiling, and capacious ovens
for baking, and shelves for keeping
things hot, besides big and little openings
on top for pots and kettles and frying-
pans, of a pattern unknown to the modern
chef ; each and every one dearly prized
by the little woman who burnt her face
to a blazing red in its service. This
cast-iron embodiment of all the hospita-
ble virtues was the special pride of Aunty
Bell, the captain's wife, a neat, quick,
busy woman, about half the size of the
captain in height, width, and thickness.
Into its recesses she poured the warmth
of her heart, and from out of its capa-
cious receptacles she took the products of
her bounty. Every kettle sang to please
her, and every fire she built crackled and
laughed at her bidding.

When Sanford entered there was hard-
ly room enough to move. A damp, sweet

smell of fresh young grass came in at
an open window. Through the door
could be seen the wet graveled walks,
washed clean by the storm, over which
hopped one or more venturesome robins
in search of the early worm.

Carleton, the government inspector,
sat near the door, his chair tilted back.
In the doorway itself stood Miss Peebles,
the schoolmistress, an angular, thin, mild-
eyed woman, in a rain-varnished water-
proof. She was protesting that she was
too wet to come in, and could n't stop
a minute. Near the stove stooped Bill
Lacey, drying his jacket. Around the
walls and on the window-sills were other
waifs, temporarily homeless, — two from
the paraphernalia dock (regular boarders
these), and a third, the captain of the tug,
whose cook was drunk. On the door-mat
lay a dog that everybody stepped over,
and under the dresser sat a silent, con-
templative cat, with one eye on the table.

All about the place — now in the pan-
try, now in the kitchen, now with a big
dish, now with a pile of dishes or a pitch-
er of milk — bustled Aunty Bell, with a
smile of welcome and a cheery word for
every one who came.

Nobody, of course, had come to break-
fast,— that was seen from the way in
which everybody insisted he had just
dropped in for a moment out of the wet
to see the captain, hearing he was home
from the Ledge, and from the alacrity
with which everybody, one after another,
as the savory smells of fried fish and
soft clams filled the room, forgot his good
resolutions and drew up his chair to the
hospitable board.

Most of them told the truth about
wanting to see the captain. Since his
sojourn among them, and without any
effort of his own, he had filled the posi-
tion of adviser, protector, and banker to
about half the people along the shore. He
had fought Miss Peebles's battle, when
the school trustees wanted the girl from
Norwich to have her place. He had re-
commended the tug captain to the tow-

Caleb West.

655

ing company, and had coached him over-
night to insure his getting a license in the
morning. He had indorsed Caleb West's
note to make up the last payment on the
cabin he had bought to put his young
wife Betty in ; and when the new furni-
ture had come over from Westerly, he
had sent two of his men to unload it,
and had laid some of the carpets him-
self the Saturday Betty expected Caleb
in from the Ledge, and wanted to have
the house ready for his first Sunday at
home.

When Mrs. Bell announced breakfast,
Captain Joe, in his shirt-sleeves, took his
seat at the head of the table, and with a
hearty, welcoming wave of his hand in-
vited everybody to sit down, — Carleton
first, of course, he being the man of au-
thority, representing to the working man
that mysterious, intangible power known
as the " government."

Carleton generally stopped in at the
captain's if the morning were stormy ;
it was nearer his lodgings than the farm-
house where he took his meals — and then
breakfast at the captain's cost nothing !
He had come in on this particular day
ostensibly to protest about the sloop's
having gone to the Ledge without a noti-
fication to him. He had begun by say-
ing, with much bluster, that he did n't
know about the one stone that Caleb
West was reported to have set ; that no-
thing would be accepted unless he was
satisfied, and nothing paid for by the
department without his signature. But
he ended in great good humor when the
captain invited him to breakfast and
placed him at his own right hand. Carle-
ton liked little distinctions when made
in his favor ; he considered them due to
his position.

The superintendent was a type of his
class. His appointment at Shark Ledge
Light had been secured through the ef-
forts of a brother-in-law who was a cus-
tom-house inspector. Before his arrival
at Keyport he had never seen a stone
laid or a batch of concrete mixed. To

this ignorance of the ordinary methods
of construction was added an overpower-
ing sense of his own importance coupled
with the knowledge that the withholding
of a certificate — the superintendent
could choose his own time for giving it
— might embarrass everybody connected
with the work. He was not dishonest,
however, and had no faults more serious
than those of ignorance, self-importance,
and conceit. This last broke out in his
person : he wore a dyed mustache and
a yellow diamond shirt-pin, and — was
proud of his foot.

Captain Joe understood the superin-
tendent thoroughly. " Ain't it cur'us,"
he would sometimes say, " that a man 's
old 's him is willin' ter set round all day
knowin' he don't know nothin', never
larnin', an' yit allus afeard some un '11
find it out? " Then, as the helplessness
of the man rose in his mind, he would
add, "Well, poor critter, somebody 's got
ter support him ; guess the guv'ment 's
th' best paymaster fur him."

When breakfast was over, the skipper
of the Screamer dropped in to make his
first visit, shaking the water from his oil-
skins as he entered.

" Pleased to meet yer, Mis' Bell," he
said in his bluff, wholesome way, ac-
knowledging the captain's introduction
to Mrs. Bell, then casting his eyes about
for a seat, and finally taking a vacant
window-sill.

" Give me your hat an' coat, and do
have breakfast, Captain Brandt," said
Mrs. Bell in a tone as cheery as if it
were the first meal she had served that
day.

" No, thank ye, I had some 'board
sloop," replied Captain Brandt.

" Here, cap'n, take my seat," said
Captain Joe. " I 'm goin' out ter see
how the weather looks." He picked up
the first hat he came to, — as was his
custom, — and disappeared through the
open door, followed by nearly all the
seafaring men in the room.

As the men passed out, each one

656

Caleb West.

reached for his oilskin hanging behind
the wooden door, and waddling out like
penguins they stood huddled together in
the driving rain, their eyes turned sky-
ward. Each man diagnosed the weather
for himself. Six doctors over a patient
with a hidden disease are never so im-
pressive nor so obstinate as six seafaring
men over a probable change of wind.
The drift of the cloud-rack scudding in
from the sea, the clearness of the air, the
current of the upper clouds, were each
silently considered. No opinions were
given. It was for Captain Joe to say
what he thought of the weather. Clear-
ing weather meant one kind of work for
them, — fitting derricks, perhaps, — a
continued storm meant another.

If the captain arrived at any conclu-
sion, it was not expressed. He had
walked down to the gate and leaned
over the palings, looking up at the sky
across the harbor, and then behind him
toward the west. The rain trickled un-
heeded down his sou'wester and fell upon
his blue flannel shirt. He looked up and
down the road at the passers-by tramp-
ing along in the wet : the twice - a - day
postman, wearing an old army coat and
black rubber cape ; the little children
huddled together under one umbrella,
only the child in the middle keeping dry ;
and the butcher in the meat wagon with
its white canvas cover and swinging
scales. Suddenly he gave a quick cry,
swung back the gate with the gesture of
a rollicking boy, and opened both arms
wide in a mock attempt to catch a young
girl who sprang past him and dashed
up the broad walk with a merry ringing
laugh that brought every one to the outer
door.

" Well, if I live ! " exclaimed Mrs.
Bell. " Mary Peebles, you jes' come
here an' see Betty West. Ain't you got
no better sense, Betty, than to come
down in all this soakin' rain ? Caleb '11
be dreadful mad, an' I don't blame him
a mite. Come right in this minute and
take that shawl off."

"I ain't wet a bit, Aunty Bell,"
laughed Betty, entering the room. "I
got Caleb's high rubber boots on. Look
at 'em. Ain't they big ! " showing the
great soles with all the animation of a
child. " An' this shawl don't let no wa-
ter through nowhere. Oh, but didn't
it blow round my porch las' night ! "
Then turning to the captain, who had
followed close behind, " I think you 're
real mean, Cap'n Joe, to keep Caleb
out all night on the Ledge. I was that
dead lonely I could'er cried. Oh, is Mr.
Sanford here ? " she asked quickly, and
with a little shaded tone of deference in
her voice, as she caught sight of him in
the next room. " I thought he 'd gone
to New York. How do you do, Mr.
Sanford ? " with another laugh and a nod
of her head, which Sanford as kindly
returned.

" We come purty nigh leavin' every-
body on the Ledge las' night, Betty, an'
the sloop too," said Captain Joe, cock-
ing his eye at the skipper as he spoke.
Then in a more serious tone, "I lef ' Caleb
a-purpose, child. We got some stavin'
big derricks to set, an' Mr. Sanford
wants 'em up week arter next, an' there
ain't nobody kin fix the anchor sockets
but me an' Caleb. He 's at work on 'em
now, an' I had to come back to git th'
bands on 'em. He '11 be home for Sun-
day, little gal."

" Well, you jes' better, or I '11 lock
up my place an' come right down here
to Aunty Bell. Caleb warn't home but
two nights last week, and it 's only the
beginnin' of summer. I ain't like Aunty
Bell, — she can't get lonely. Don't make
no difference whether you 're home or
not, this place is so chuck-full of folks
you can't turn round in it ; but 'way up
where I live, you don't see a soul some-
times all day but a peddler. Oh, I jes'
can't stand it, an' I won't. Land sakes,
Aunty Bell, what a lot of folks you 've
had for breakfast ! "

Turning to the table, she picked up a
pile of plates and carried them into the

Caleb West.

657

pantiy to Miss Peebles, who was there
helping in the wash-up.

Lacey, who had stopped to look after
his coat when the men went out, watched
her slender, graceful figure, and bright,
cheery, joyous face, full of dimples and
color and sparkle, the hair in short curls
all over her head, the throat plump and
white, the little ears nestling and half
hidden.

She had been brought up in the next
village, two miles away, and had come
over every morning, when she was a girl,
to Miss Peebles's school. Almost every-
body knew her and loved her ; Captain
Joe cared for her as though she had been
his own child. When Caleb gave up the
light-ship Captain Joe established him
with Betty's mother as boarder, and that
was how the marriage came about.

When Betty returned to the room
again, Carleton and Lacey were stand-
ing.

" Take this seat ; you must be tired
walking down so far," said Carleton,
with a manner never seen in him except
when some pretty woman was about.

" No, I 'm not a bit tired, but I '11 set
down till I get these boots off. Aunty
Bell, can you lend me a pair of slippers ?
One of these plaguy boots leaks."

" I '11 take 'em off," offered Carleton,
with a gesture of gallantry.

" You '11 do nothin' of the kind ! "
she exclaimed, with a half-indignant toss
of her head. " I '11 take 'em off myself,"
and she turned her back, and slipped
the boots from under her dress. " But
you can take 'em to Aunty Bell an'
swap 'em for her slippers," she added,
with a merry laugh at the humor of her
making the immaculate Carleton carry
off Caleb's old boots. The slippers on,
she thanked him, with a toss of her curls,
and, turning her head, caught sight of
Lacey.

" What are you doing here, Bill La-
cey ? " she asked. " Why ain't you at
the Ledge ? "

Although the young rigger had been

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 42

but a short time on the captain's force,
he had lost no part of it before trying
to make himself agreeable, especially to
the wives of the men. His white teeth
flashed under the curling mustache.

" Captain wants me," he answered,
" to fit some bands round the new der-
ricks. We expect 'em over from Med-
ford to-day, if it clears up."

" An' there ain't no doubt but what
ye 11 get yer job, Billy," burst out the
captain ; " it 's breakin' now over Crotch
Island," and he bustled again out of the
open door, the men who had followed
him turning back after him.

Carleton waited until he became con-
vinced that no part of his personality
burdened Betty's mind, and then, a little
disconcerted by her evident preference
for Lacey, joined Sanford in the next
room. There he renewed his complaint
about the enrockment block having been
placed without a notification to him, and
he became pacified only when Sanford
invited him on the tug for a run to Med-
f ord to inspect Mrs. Leroy's new dining-
room.

As Mrs. Bell and the schoolmistress
were still in the pantry, a rattling of
china mai'king their progress, the kitch-
en was empty except for Lacey and
Betty. The young rigger, seeing no one
within hearing, crossed the room to Betty,
and, bending over her chair, said in a
low tone, " Why did n't you come down
to the dock yesterday when we was
a-hoistin' the stone on the Screamer?
'Most everybody 'longshore was there."

" Oh, I don't know," returned Betty
indifferently.

" Ye ought'er seen the old man," con-
tinued Lacey; "me an' him held the
guy, and he was a-blowin' like a por-
poise."

Betty did not answer. She knew how
old Caleb was.

" Had n't been for me it would'er laid
him out."

The girl started, and her eyes flashed.
" Bill Lacey, Caleb knows more in a

658

Caleb West.

minute than you ever will in your whole
life. You shan't talk that way about him,
neither."

" Well, who 's a-talkin' ? " said Lacey,
looking down at her, more occupied with
the curve of her throat than with his
reply.

" You are, an' you know it," she an-
swered sharply.

"I didn't mean nothin', Betty. I
ain't got nothin' agin him 'cept his git-
tin' you" Then in a lower tone, " You
need n't take my head off, if I did say
it."

"I ain't takin' your head off, Billy."
She looked into his eyes for the first time,
her voice softening. She was never an-
gry with any one for long ; besides, she
felt older than he, and a certain boyish-
ness in him appealed to her.

"You spoke awful cross," he said,
bending until his lips almost touched her
curls, " an' you know, Betty, there ain't a
girl, married or single, up 'n' down this
shore nor nowheres else, that I think as
much of as I do you, an' if " —

" Here, now, Bill Lacey ! " came a
quick, sharp voice.

The young rigger stepped back, and
turned his head.

Captain Joe was standing in the door-
way, with one hand on the frame, an
ugly, determined expression filling his
eyes.

" They want ye down ter the dock,
young feller, jes' 's quick 's ye kin get
there."

Lacey 's face was scarlet. He looked
at Captain Joe, picked up his hat, and
walked down the garden path without a
word.

Betty ran in to Aunty Bell.

When the two men reached the swing-
ing-gate, Captain Joe laid his hand on
Lacey's shoulder, whirled him round
suddenly, and said in a calm, decided
voice that carried conviction in every
tone, " I don't say nothin', an' maybe
ye don't mean nothin', but I 've been
a-watchin' ye lately, an' I don't like

yer ways, Bill Lacey. One thing, how-
somever, I '11 tell ye, an' I don't want ye
ter forgit it : if I ever ketch ye a-fool-
in' round Caleb West's lobster-pots, I '11
break yer damned head. Do ye hear ? "

VI.

A LITTLE DINNER FOB FIVE.

Sanford's apartments were in gala-
dress. The divans of the salon were gay
with new cushions of corn -yellow and
pale green. The big table was resplen-
dent in a new cloth, a piece of richly col-
ored Oriental stuff that had been packed
away and forgotten in an old wedding-
chest that stood near one window. All
the pipes, tobacco pouches, smoking-jack-
ets, slippers, canes, Indian clubs, dumb-
bells, and other bachelor belongings scat-
tered about the rooms had been tucked
out of sight, while books and magazines
that had lain for weeks heaped up on
chairs and low shelves, and unframed
prints and photographs that had rested
on the floor propped up against the wall
and furniture, had been hidden in dark
corners or hived in several portfolios.

On the table stood a brown' majolica
jar taller than the lamp, holding a great
mass of dogwood and apple blossoms,
their perfume filling the room. Every
vase, umbrella jar, jug, and bit of pottery
that could be pressed into service, was
doing duty as flower-holder, while over
the mantel and along the tops of the
bookcases, and even over the doors them-
selves, streamed festoons of blossoms in-
tertwined with smilax and trailing vines.

Against the tapestries covering the
walls of the dining - room hung big
wreaths of laurel tied with ribbons.
The centre of one wreath was studded
with violets, forming the initials H. S.
The mantel was a bank of flowers.
From the four antique silver church
lamps suspended in the four corners of
the room swung connecting festoons of

Caleb West.

659

smilax and blossoms. The dinner-table
itself was set with the best silver, glass,
and appointments that Sanf ord possessed.
Some painted shades he had never seen
before topped the tall wax candles.

Sanford smiled when he saw that
covers had been laid for but five. That
clever fellow Jack Hardy had been right
in suggesting that so delicate a question
as the choosing of the guests should be
left in the hands of Mrs. Leroy. Her
tact had been exquisite. Bock had been
omitted, there were no superfluous wo-
men, and Jack could have his tete-a-
tete with Helen undisturbed. With these
two young persons happy, the dinner was
sure to be a success.

Upon entering his office, he found that
the decorative raid had extended even
to this his most private domain. The
copper helmet of a diving-dress — one
he himself sometimes used when neces-
sity required — had been propped up
over his desk, the face-plate unscrewed,
and the hollow opening filled with blos-
soms, their leaves curling about the brass
buttons of the collar. The very draw-
ing-boards had been pushed against the
wall, and the rows of shelves holding
his charts and detailed plans had been
screened from sight by a piece of Vene-
tian silk exhumed from the capacious
interior of the old chest.

The corners of Sam's mouth touched
his ears, and every tooth was lined up
with a broad grin.

" Doan' ask me who done it, sah. I
ain't had nuffin to do wid it, — wid nuf-
firi but de table. I sot dat."

" Has Mrs. Leroy been here ? " San-
ford asked, coming into the dining-room,
and looking again at the initials on the
wall.

" Yaas 'r, an' Major Slocomb an' Mr.
Hardy done come too. De gen'lemen
bofe gone ober to de club. De major
say he comin' back soon 's ever you gets
here. But I ain't ter tell nuffin 'bout
de flowers, sah. Massa Jack say ef I
do he brek my neck, an' I 'spec's he will.

But Lord, sah, dese ain't no flowers.
Look at dis," he added, uncovering a
great bunch of American Beauties, —
" dat 's ter go 'longside de lady's plate.
An' dat ain't ha'f of 'em. I got mos' a
peck of dese yer rose-water roses in de
pantry. Massa Jack gwine ter ask yer
to sprinkle 'em all ober de table-cloth ;
says dat 's de way dey does in de fust
famblies South."

Sanford, not wishing to betray his
surprise further, turned towards the
sideboard to fill his best decanter.

" Have the flowers I ordered come ? "
he asked.

" Yaas 'r, got 'em in de ice-chest. But
Massa Jack say dese yere rose-water
roses on de table-cloth 's a extry touch ;
don't hab dese high-toned South'n ladies
ebery day, he say."

Sanford reentered the salon and looked
about. Every trace of its winter dress
had gone. Even the heavy curtains at
the windows had been replaced by some
of a thin yellow silk. A suggestion of
spring in all its brightness and promise
was everywhere.

" That 's so like Kate," he said to
himself. " She means that Helen and
Jack shall be happy, at any rate. She 's
missed it herself, poor girl. It 's an in-
fernal shame. Bring in the roses, Sam :
I '11 sprinkle them now before I dress.
Any letters except these ? " he added,
looking through a package on the table, a
shade of disappointment crossing his face
as he pushed them back unopened.

" Yaas 'r, one on yo' bureau dat 's jus'
come."

Sanford forgot his orders to Sam,
and with a quick movement of his hand
drew -the curtains of his bedroom and
disappeared inside. The letter was there,
but he had barely broken the seal when
the major's cheery, buoyant voice was
heard in the outside room. The next
instant the major pushed aside the cur-
tains and peered in.

" Where is he, Sam ? In here, did
you say ? "

660

Caleb West.

Not to have been able to violate the
seclusion of even Sanford's bedroom at
all times, night or day, would have griev-
ously wounded the sensibilities of the dis-
tinguished Pocomokian ; it would have
implied a reflection on the closeness of
their friendship. It was true he had met
Sanford but half a dozen times, and it
was equally true that he had never be-
fore crossed the threshold of this partic-
ular room. But these trifling formali-
ties, mere incidental stages in a rapidly
growing friendship, were immaterial to
him.

" My dear boy, but it does my heart
good to see you."

The major's arms, as he entered the
room, were wide open. He hugged San-
ford enthusiastically, patting his host's
back with his fat hands over the spot
where the suspenders crossed. Then he
held him for a moment at arm's length.

" Let me look at you. Splendid, by
gravy ! fresh as a rose, suh, handsome
as a picture ! Just a trace of care un-
der the eyes, though. I see the nights
of toil, the hours of suffering. I won-
der the brain of man can stand it. But
the building of a lighthouse, the illumin-
ing of a pathway in the sea for those
buffeting with the waves, — it is glori-
ously humane, suh ! "

Suddenly his manner changed, and in
a tone as grave and serious as if he were
full partner in the enterprise and re-
sponsible for its success, the major laid
his hand, this time confidingly, on San-
ford's shirt-sleeve, and said, " How are
we getting on at the Ledge, suh ? Last
time we talked it over, we were solving
the problem of a colossal mass of — of
— some stuff or other that " —

" Qoncrete," suggested Sanford, with
an air as serious as that of the major.
He loved to humor him.

" That 's it, — concrete ; the name had
for the moment escaped me, — concrete,
suh, that was to form the foundation of
the lighthouse."

Sanford assured the major that the

concrete was being properly amalga-
mated, and discussed the laying of the
mass in the same technical terms he
would have used to a brother engineer,
smiling meanwhile as the stream of the
Pocomokian's questions ran on. He liked
the major's glow and sparkle. He en-
joyed most of all the never ending en-
thusiasm of the man, — that spontaneous
outpouring which, like a bubbling spring,
flows unceasingly, and always with the
coolest and freshest water of the heart.

The major rippled on, new questions
of his host only varying the outlet.

" And how is Miss Shirley ? " asked
the young engineer, throwing the inquiry
into the shallows of the talk as a slight
temporary dam.

" Like a moss rosebud, suh, with the
dew on it. She and Jack have gone out
for a drive in Jack's cart. He left me
at the club, and I went over to his apart-
ments to dress. I am staying with Jack,
you know. Helen is with a school friend.
I know, of cou'se, that yo'r dinner is
not until eight o'clock, but I could not
wait longer to grasp yo'r hand. Do
you know, Sanford," with sudden ani-
mation and in a rising voice, " that the
more I see of you, the more I " —

" And so you are coming to New
York to live, major," said Sanford,
dropping another pebble at the right
moment into the very middle of the cur-
rent.

The major recovered, filled, and
broke through in a fresh place.

" Coming, suh ? I have come. I have
leased a po'tion of my estate to some
capitalists from Philadelphia who are
about embarking in a strawberry enter-
prise of very great magnitude. I want
to talk to you about it later." (He had
rented one half of it — the dry half, the
half a little higher than the salt-marsh
— to a huckster from Philadelphia,
who was trying to raise early vegetables,
and whose cash advances upon the rent
had paid the overdue interest on the
mortgage, leaving a margin hardly more

Caleb West.

661

than sufficient to pay for the suit of
clothes he stood in, and his traveling ex-
penses.)

By this time the constantly increas-
ing pressure of his Caller's enthusiasm
had seriously endangered the possibility
of Sanford's dressing for dinner. He
glanced several times uneasily at his
watch, lying open on the bureau before
him, and at last, with a hurried " Excuse
me, major," disappeared into his bath-
room, and closed its flood-gate of a door,
thus effectually shutting off the major's
overflow, now perilously near the danger-
line.

The Pocomokian paused for a mo-
ment, looked wistfully at the blank door,
and, recognizing the impossible, called
to Sam and suggested a cocktail as a
surprise for Sanford when he appeared
again. Sam brought the ingredients on
a tray, and stood by admiringly (Sam
always regarded him as a superior be-
ing) while the major mixed two com-
forting concoctions, — the one already
mentioned for Sanford, and the other
designed for the especial sustenance and
delectation of the distinguished Pocomo-
kian himself.

This done he took his leave, having in-
fused, in ten short minutes, more sparkle,
freshness, arid life into the apartment
than it had known since his last visit.

Sanford saw the cocktail on his bu-
reau when he entered the room again,
but forgot it in his search for the open
letter he had laid aside on the major's
entrance. Sam found the cocktail when
dinner was over, and immediately emp-
tied it into his own person.

" Please don't be cross, Henry, if you
can't find all your things," the letter
read. " Jack Hardy wanted me to
come over and help him arrange the
rooms as a surprise for the Maryland
girl. He says there 's nothing between
them, but I don't believe him. The
blossoms came from Newport. I hope
you had time to go to Medford and find
out about my dining-room, and that

everything is going on well at the Ledge.
I will see you to-night at eight.

K. P. L."

Sanford, with a smile of pleasure, shut
the letter in his bureau drawer, and en-
tering the dining-room, he picked up the
basket of roses and began those little
final touches about the room and table
which he never neglected. He lighted
the tapers in the antique lamps that
hung from the ceiling, readjusting the
ruby glass holders ; he kindled the wicks
in some quaint brackets over the side-
board ; he moved the Venetian flagons
and decanters nearer the centrepiece of
flowers, — those he had himself ordered
for his guests and their chaperon, — and
cutting the stems from the rose-water
roses sprinkled them over the snowy
linen.

With the soft glow of the candles the
room took on a mellow, subdued tone ;
the pink roses on the cloth, the rosebuds
on the candle-shades, and the mass of
Mermets in the centre being the distinc-
tive features, and giving the key-note of
color to the feast. To Sanford a dinner-
table with its encircling guests \vas al-
ways a palette. He knew just where the
stronger tones of black coats and white
shirt-fronts placed beside the softer tints
of fair shoulders and bright faces must
be relieved by blossoms in perfect har-
mony, and he understood to a nicety the
exact values of the minor shades in linen,
glass, and silver, in the making of the
picture.

The guests arrived within a few min-
utes of one another. Mrs. Leroy, in yel-
low satin and black bows, a string of
pearls about her throat, came first. It
was one of the nights when she looked
barely twenty-five, and seemed the fresh,
joyous girl Sanford had known before
her marriage. The ever present sad-
ness which her friends read in her face
had gone. She was all gayety and hap-
piness, and her eyes, under their long
lashes, were purple as the violets which
she wore. Helen Shirley was in white

662

Caleb West.

muslin, — not a jewel, — her fair cheeks
rosy with excitement. Jack, hovering
near her, was immaculate in white tie
and high collar, while the self-installed,
presiding genial of the feast, the major,
appeared in a suit of clothes that by its
ill-fitting wrinkles betrayed its pedigree,

— a velvet-collared coat that had lost its
dignity in the /ormer service of some
friend, and a shoestring cravat that
looked as if it had belonged to Major
Talbot himself (his dead wife's first hus-
band), and that was now so loosely tied
it had all it could do to keep its place.

While they awaited dinner, Jack,
eager to show Helen some of Sanford's
choicest bits, led her to the mantelpiece,
over which hung a sketch by Smearly,

— the original of his Academy picture ;
pointed out the famous wedding - chest
and some of the accoutrements over the
door ; and led her into the private office,
now lighted by half a dozen candles, one
illumining the copper diving-helmet with
its face-plate of flowers. Helen, who had
never been in a bachelor's apartment be-
fore, thought it another and an enchanted
world. Everything suggested a surprise
and a mystery.

When she entered the dining-room on
Sanford's arm, and saw on the wall the
initials H. S., she gave a little start, col-
ored, avoided Jack's gaze, then recover-
ing herself said, " I never saw anything
so charming. And H. S., — why, these
are your initials, Mr. Sanford," looking
up innocently into his eyes.

Sanford started, and a shade of cruel
disappointment crossed Jack's face.
Mrs. Leroy broke into a happy, conta-
gious laugh, and her eyes, often so im-
penetrable in their sadness, danced with
merriment.

The major watched them all with ill-
disguised delight, and, beginning to un-
derstand the varying expressions flitting
over his niece's face, said, with genuine
emotion, emphasizing his outburst by
kissing her rapturously on the cheek,
"You dear little girl, you, don't you

know your own name ? H. S. stands
for Helen Shirley, not Henry Sanford."

Helen blushed scarlet. She might
have known, she said to herself, that Jack
would do something lovely, just to sur-
prise her. Why did she betray herself
so easily ?

Sanford looked at Mrs. Leroy. " No
one would have thought of all this but
you, Kate," he said.

" Don't thank me, Henry. All I did,"
she answered, still laughing, " was to put
a few flowers about, and to have my
maid poke a lot of man-things under the
sofas and behind the chairs, and take
away those horrid old covers and cur-
tains. I know you '11 never forgive me
when you want something to-morrow
you can't find, but Jack begged so hard
I could n't help it. How do you like
the candle-shades ? I made them my-
self," she added, tipping her head on
one side like a wren.

Helen turned and looked again at the
wreath of violets on the wall. When, a
moment later, in removing her glove,
she brushed Jack's hand, lying on the
table-cloth beside her own, the slightest
possible pressure of her little finger con-
veyed her thanks.

Everybody was brimful of happiness :
Helen radiant with the inspiration of
new surroundings so unlike those of the
simple home she had left the day be-
fore ; Jack riding in a chariot of soap-
bubbles, with butterflies for leaders, and
drinking in every word that fell from
Helen's lips ; the major suave and unc-
tuous, with an old-time gallantry that
delighted his admirers, boasting now of
his ancestry, now of his horses, now of
his rare old wines at home ; Sanford
leading the distinguished Pocomokian
into still more airy flights, or engaging
him in assumed serious conversation
whenever that obtuse gentleman insisted
on dragging Jack down from his butter-
fly heights with Helen, to discuss with
him some prosaic features of the club-
house at Crab Island ; while Mrs. Leroy,

Caleb West.

663

happier than she had been in weeks,
watched Helen and Jack with undis-
guised pleasure, or laughed at the ma-
jor's good-natured egotism, his wonder-
ful reminiscences and harmless preten-
sions, listening between pauses to the
young engineer by her side, whose heart
was to her an open book.

Coffee was served on the balcony.
Mrs. Leroy sat on a low camp-stool with
her back to the railing, the warm tones
of the lamp falling upon her dainty fig-
ure. Her prematurely gray hair, piled
in fluffy waves upon her head and held
in place by a long jewel-tipped pin, gave
an indescribable softness and charm to
the rosy tints of her skin. Her blue-
gray eyes, now deep violet, flashed and
dimmed under the moving shutters of
the lids, as the light of her varying
emotions stirred their depths. About
her every movement was that air of dis-
tinction, of repose, and of grace which
never left her, and which never ceased
to have its fascination for her friends.
Added to this were a sprightliness and a
vivacity which, although often used as
a mask to hide a heavy heart, were to-
night inspired by her sincere enjoyment
of the pleasure she and the others had
given to the young Maryland girl and
her lover.

When Sam brought the coffee-tray she
insisted on filling the cups herself, drop-
ping in the sugar with a dainty move-
ment of her fingers that was bewitching,
laughing as merrily as if there had never
been a sorrow in her life. At no time
was she more fascinating to her admirers
than when at a task like this. The very
cup she handled was instantly invested
with a certain preciousness, and became
a thing to be touched as delicately and
as lightly as the fingers that had pre-
pared it.

The only one who for the time was
outside the spell of her influence was
Jack Hardy. He had taken a seat on
the floor of the balcony, with his back
next the wall — and Helen.

" Jack, you lazy fellow," said Mrs. Le-
roy, with mock indignation, as she rose
to her feet, " get out of my way, or I '11
spill the cup. Miss Shirley, why don't
you make him get up? He's awfully
in the way here."

One of Jack's favorite positions, when
Helen was near, was at her feet. He
had learned this one the summer before
at her house on Crab Island, when they
would sit for hours on the beach.

" I 'm not in anybody's way, my dear
Mrs. Leroy. My feet are tied in a Chi-
nese knot under me, and my back has
grown fast to the rain -spout. Major,
will you please say something nice to
Mrs. Leroy and coax her inside ? "

Sam had rolled a small table, holding
a flagon of cognac and some crushed ice,
beside the major, who sat half buried
in the cushions of one of Sanford's
divans. The Pocomokian struggled to
his feet.

" You must n't move, major," Mrs.
Leroy called. " I 'm not coming in.
I 'm going to stay out here in this lovely
moonlight, if one of these very polite
young gentlemen will bring me an arm-
chair." She looked with pretended dig-
nity at Jack and Sanford as she spoke,
and added, " Thank you, Henry," when
Sanford dragged one toward her.

"Take my seat," said Jack, with a
laugh, springing to his feet, suddenly
realizing Mrs. Leroy 's delicate but point-
ed suggestion. " Come, Miss Helen,"
thinking of a better and more retired
corner, " we won't stay where we are
abused. Let us join the major." With
an arm to Miss Shirley and a sweeping
bow to Mrs. Leroy, Jack walked straight
to the divan nearest the curtains.

When Helen and Jack were out of
hearing, Mrs. Leroy looked toward the
major, and, reassured of his entire ab-
sorption in his own personal comfort,
turned to Sanford, saying in low, ear-
nest tones, " Can the new sloop lay the
stones, Henry ? You have n't told me
a word yet of what you have been

664

Caleb West.

doing for the last few days at the
Ledge."

" I think so, Kate," replied Sanford,
all the gayety of his manner gone.
" We laid one yesterday before the east-
erly gale caught us. You got my tele-
gram, did n't you ? "

" Yes, but I was anxious for all that.
Ever since I had that talk with General
Barton I 've felt nervous over the lay-
ing of those stones. He frightened me
when he said no one of the Board at
Washington believed you could do it. It
would be so awful if your plan should
fail."

" But it 'ji not going to fail, Kate," he
answered, with a decided tone in his
voice, and that peculiar knitting of the
eyebrows in which one could read his
determination. " I can do it, and will.
All I wanted was a proper boat, and
I 've got that. I watched her day be-
fore yesterday. I was a little nervous
until I saw her lower the first stone.
Her captain is a plucky fellow, — Cap-
tain Joe likes him immensely. I wish
you could have been there to see how
cool he was, — not a bit flustered when
he saw the rocks under the bow of his
sloop."

Kate handed her empty coffee-cup to
Sanford, and going to the edge of the
balcony rested her elbows on the railing
and looked down on the treetops of the
£2£3,feV When he joined her again
she said, " C&leb West, of course, went
down with the first stone, did n't he ? "
She knew Caleb's name as she did those
of all the men in Sanford's employ.
There was no detail of tfie work he had
not explained to her. *And was the
sea-bottom as you expected to find it ? "
she added.

"Even better," he answered> eager to
discuss his anxieties with her. To San-
ford, as to many men, there werJ times
when the sympathy and understanding
of a woman, the generous faiU and
ready belief of one who listens orly to
encourage, became a necessity. To talk

to a man in this way would bore him,
and would perhaps arouse a suspicion
of Sanford's professional ability. He
went over with her again, as he had
done so many times before, all of his
plans for carrying on the work and the
difficulties that had threatened him. He
talked of his hopes and fears, of his
confidence in his men, his admiration
for them, and his love for the work
itself.

" Caleb says," he continued, " that as
soon as he gets the first row of enrock-
ment stones set, the others will lie up
like bricks. And it 's all coming out
exactly as we have planned it, too, Kate."
Sanford now spoke with renewed ener-
gy ; the comfort of his confidence and
her understanding had done its work.

" I wonder what General Barton will
think when he finds your plan succeeds ?
He says everywhere that you cannot do
it," she added, with increased animation,
a certain pride in her voice.

" I don't know and I don't care.
It 's hard to get these old-time engineers
to believe in anything new, and this foun-
dation is new. But all the same, I 'd
ratller pin my faith to Captain Joe than
to any one of them. What we are do-
ing at the Ledge requires mental pluck
and brute grit, — nothing else. Scien-
tific engineering won't help us ^ bit."

Sanford, his back to the balcony rail,
now stood erect, with face aglow and
kindling eyes. Every tone of his voice
showed a keen interest in the subject.

" And yet, after all, Kate, I realize
that my work is mere child's play. Just
see what other men have had to face.
At Minot's Ledge, you know, — the
light off Boston, — they had to chisel
down a submerged rock into steps, to
get a footing for the tower. But three
or four men could work at a time, and
then only at dead low water. They
got but one hundred and thirty hours'
work the first year. The whole Atlan-
tic rolled in on top of them, and there
was no shelter from the wind. Until

Caleb West.

665

they got the bottom courses of their
tower bolted to the steps they had cut
in the rock, they had no footing at all,
and had to do their work from a small
boat. Our artificial island helps us im-
mensely ; we have something to stand
on. And it was even worse at Tilla-
mook Rock, on the Pacific coast. There
the men were landed on the rock, — a
precipitous crag sticking up out of the
sea, — through the surf, in breeches
buoys slung to the masthead of a ves-
sel, and for weeks at a time the sea was
so rough that no one could reach them.
They were given up for dead once. All
that time they were lying in canvas
tents lashed down to the sides of the
crag to keep them from being blown
into rags. All they had to eat and drink
for days was raw salt pork and the rain-
water they caught from the tent covers.
And yet those fellows stuck to it day
and night until they had blasted off a
place large enough to put a shanty on.
Every bit of the material for that light-
house, excepting in the stillest weather,
was landed from the vessel that brought
it, by a line rigged from the masthead
to the top of the crag ; and all this time,
Kate, she was thrashing around under
steam, keeping as close to the crag as
she dared. Oh, I tell you, there is
something stunning to me in such a bat-
tle with the elements ! "

Kate's eyes kindled as Sanford talked
on. She was no longer the dainty wo-
man over the coffee-cups, nor the woman
of the world she had been a few mo-
ments before, eager for the pleasure of
assembled guests.

" When you tell me such things, Hen-
ry, I am all on fire." Her eyes flashed
with the intensity of her feelings. Then
she paused, and there settled over her
face a deepening shadow like that of
a coming cloud. " The world is full
of such great things to be done," she
sighed, " and I lead such a mean little
life, doing nothing, nothing at all."

Sanford, when she first spoke, had

looked at her in undisguised admira-
tion. Then, as he watched her, his
heart smote him. He had not intended
to wound her by his enthusiasm, nor to
awaken in her any sense of her own dis-
appointments ; he had only tried to allay
her anxieties over his' affairs. He knew
by the force of her outburst that he had
unconsciously stirred those deeper emo-
tions, the strength of which really made
her the help she was to him, but he did
not ever want them to cause her suffer-
ing.

These sudden transitions in her moods
were not new to him. She was an
April day in her temperament, and
could often laugh the sunniest of laughs
when the rain of her tears was falling.
These moods he loved. It was the pre-
sent frame of mind, however, that he
dreaded, and from which he always tried
to save her. It did not often show it-
self. She was too much a woman of
the world to wear her heart on her
sleeve, and too good and tactful a friend
to burden even Sanford with her sor-
row. He knew what inspired it. for
he had known her for years. He had
witnessed the long years of silent suf-
fering which she had borne so sweetly,
— even cheerfully at times, — had seen
with what restraint and self-control she
had cauterized by silence and patient
endurance every fresh wound, and had
watched day by day the slow coming of
the scars that drew all the tighter the
outside covering of her heart.

As he looked at her out of the corner
of his eye, — she leaning over the bal-
cony at his side, — he could see that the
tears had gathered under her lashes. It
was best to say nothing when she felt
like this. He recognized that to have
made her the more dissatisfied, even by
that sympathy which he longed to give,
would have hurt in her that which he
loved and honored most, — her silence,
and her patient loyalty to the man whose
name she bore. " She 's had a letter from
Leroy," he said to himself, " and he 's

666

Caleb West.

done some other disgraceful thing, I sup-
pose ; " but to Kate he made no reply.

Nothing had disturbed the other
guests. From the softly lighted room
where they sat came the clink of the
major's glass, and the intermittent gur-
gle of the rapidly ebbing decanter as
Sam supplied his wants. On the fore-
ordained divan, half hidden by a cur-
tain, Jack and Helen were studying the
contents of a portfolio, — some of the
drawings upside down. Now and then
their low talk was broken by a happy,
irrelevant laugh.

By this time the moon had risen over
the treetops, the tall buildings far across
the quadrangle breaking the sky-line.
Below could be seen the night life of
the Park. Miniature figures strolled
about under the trees, flashing in bril-
liant light or swallowed up in dense
shadow, as they passed through the
glare of the many lamps scattered
among the budding foliage and disap-
peared. Now it was a child romping
with a dog, and now a group of men, or
a belated woman wheeling a baby car-
riage home. The night was still, the
air soft and balmy ; only the hum of
the busy street a block away could be
heard where they stood.

Suddenly a figure darted across the
white patch of pavement below them.
Sanford leaned over the railing, a strange,
unreasoning dread in his heart.

" What is it, Henry ? " asked Mrs.
Leroy.

"Looks like a messenger," Sanford
answered.

Mrs. Leroy bent over the railing, and
watched a boy spring up the low steps
of the street door, ring the bell violently,
and beat an impatient tattoo with his
foot.

" Whom do you want ? " Sanford
asked gently.

The boy looked up, and, seeing the two
figures on the balcony, answered, " Death
message for Mr. Henry Sanford."

" A death message, did he say ? " asked

Mrs. Leroy. Her voice was almost a
whisper.

" Yes ; don't move," said Sanford to
her, and as he laid a hand on her arm
he pointed toward the group inside. He
felt a quick, sharp contraction in his
throat. " Sam," he called in a lowered
tone.

" Yaas 'r, — comin' direc'ly."

" Sam, there 's a boy at the outside
door with a telegram. He says it's a
death message. Get it, and tell the boy
to wait. Go quietly, now, and let no one
know. You will find me here."

Mrs. Leroy sank into a chair, her face
in her hands. Sanford bent over her,
the blood mounting to his face, his own
heart beating, his voice still calm.

" Don't give way, Kate ; we shall know
in a moment."

She grasped his hand and held on,
trembling. " Do you suppose it is Mor-
gan ? Will Sam never come ? "

Sam reentered the room, his breath
gone with the dash up and down three
flights of stairs. He walked slowly to-
ward the balcony and handed Sanford
a yellow envelope. Its contents were as
follows : —

" Screamer's boiler exploded 7.40 to-
night. Mate killed ; Lacey and three
men injured. JOSEPH BELL."

Sanford looked hurriedly at his watch,
forgetting, in the shock, to hand Mrs.
Leroy the telegram. For a moment he
leaned back against the balcony, ab-
sorbed in deep thought.

" Twenty-three minutes left," he said
to himself, consulting his watch again.
" I must go at once ; they will need me."

Mrs. Leroy put her hand on his arm.
" Tell me quick ! Who is it, Henry ? "

" Forgive me, dear Kate, but I was
so knocked out. It is no one who be-
longs to you. It is the boiler of the
Screamer that has burst. Three men are
hurt," reading the dispatch again me-
chanically. " I wonder who they are ? "
as if he expected to see their names add-
ed to its brief lines.

Caleb West.

667

She took the telegram from his hand.
" Oh, Henry, I am so sorry, — and the
boat, too, you counted upon. But look !
read it again. Do you see ? Captain
Joe signs it, — he 's not hurt ! "

Sanford patted her hand abstractedly,
and said, " Dear Kate," but without
looking at her or replying further. He
was calculating whether it would be pos-
sible for him to catch the midnight train
and go to the relief of his men.

" Yes, I can just make it," he said,
half aloud, to himself. Then turning to
Sam, his voice shaking in the effort to
control himself, he said in an under-
tone, " Sam, send that boy for a cab, and
get my bag ready. I will change these
clothes on the train. Ask Mr. Hardy
to step here ; not a word, remember,
about this telegram."

Jack came out laughing, and was about
to break into some raillery, when he saw
Mrs. Leroy's face.

Sanford touched his shoulder. " Jack,
there has been an explosion at the work,
and some of the men are badly hurt.
Say nothing to Helen until she gets
home. I leave immediately for Keyport.
Will you and the major please look after
Mrs. Leroy ? "

Sanford's guests followed him to the
door of the corridor : Helen radiant, her
eyes still dancing ; the major bland and
courteous, his face without a ruffle ; Jack
and Mrs. Leroy apparently unmoved.

" Oh, I 'm so sorry you must go ! "
exclaimed Helen, holding out her hands.
"Mr. Hardy says you do nothing but
live on the train. Thank you ever so
much, dear Mr. Sanford ; I 've had such
a lovely time."

" My dear suh," said the major, " this
is positively cruel ! This Hennessy "
— he was holding his glass — " is like
a nosegay ; I hoped you would enjoy
it with me. Let me go back and pour
you out a drop before you go."

" Why not wait until to-morrow ? This
night traveling will kill you, old man,"
said Jack in perfunctory tones, the sym-

pathetic pressure of his hand in Sanford's
belying their sincerity.

Sanford smiled as he returned the
pressure, and, with his eyes resting on
Helen's joyous face, replied meaningly,
" Thank you, Jack ; it 's all right, I
see." Helen's evening had not been
spoiled, at all events.

Once outside in the corridor, — Sam
down one flight of steps with Sanford's
bag and coat, — Mrs. Leroy half closed
the salon door, and laying her hand on
Sanford's shoulder said, with a force and
an earnestness that carried the keenest
comfort straight to his heart, " I shall
not worry, Henry, and neither will you.
I know it looks dark to you now, but it
will be brighter when you reach Keyport
and get all the facts. I 've seen you in
worse places than this ; you always get
through, and you will now. I am com-
ing up myself on the early morning train,
to see what can be done for the men."

VII.

BETTY'S FIRST PATIENT.

The wounded men lay in an empty
warehouse which in the whaling - days
had been used for the storing of oil, and
was now owned by a friend of Captain
Joe, an old whaler living back of the
village.

Captain Joe had not waited for per-
mission and a key when the accident oc-
curred and the wounded men lay about
him. He and Captain Brandt had broken
the locks with a crowbar, improvised
out of old barrels and planks an operat-
ing-table for the doctors, and dispatched
messengers up and down the shore to
pull mattresses from the nearest beds.

The room he had selected for the tem-
porary hospital was on the ground floor
of the building. It was lighted by four
big windows,, and protected by solid
wooden shutters, now slightly ajar.
Through the openings timid rays of

668

Caleb West.

sunlight, strangers here for years, stole
down leaning ladders of floating dust to
the grimy floor, where they lay trem-
bling, with eyes alert, ready for instant
retreat. From the overhead beams hung
long strings of abandoned cobwebs en-
crusted with black soot, which the bolder
breeze from the open door and windows
swayed back and forth, the startled soot
falling upon the white cots below. In
one corner was a heap of rusty hoops and
mouldy staves, unburied skeletons of old
whaling - days. But for the accumula-
tion of years of dust and grime the room
was well adapted to its present use.

Lacey's cot was nearest the door. His
head was bound with bandages ; only
one eye was free. He lay on his side,
breathing heavily. He had been blown
against the shrouds, and the iron foot-
rest had laid open his cheek and fore-
head. The doctor said that if he recov-
ered he would carry the scar the rest of
his life. It was feared, too, that he had
been injured internally.

Next to his cot were those of two of
the sloop's crew, — one man with ribs
and ankle broken, the other with dislo-
cated hip. Lonny Bowles, the quarry-
man, came next. He was sitting up in
bed, his arm in a sling, — Captain
Brandt was beside him ; he had escaped
with a gash in his arm.

Captain Joe was without coat or vest,
his sleeves rolled up above the elbows,
his big brawny arms black with dirt. He
had been up all night ; now bending over
one of the crew, lifting him in his arms
as if he had been a baby, to ease the
pain of his position, now helping Aunty
Bell with the beds.

Betty sat beside Lacey, fanning him.
Her eyes were red and heavy, her pretty
curls matted about her head. She and
Aunty Bell had not had their clothes off.
Their faces were smudged with the soot
and grime that kept falling from the ceil-
ing. Aunty Bell had taken charge of
the improvised stove, heating the water,
and Betty had assisted the doctors —

there were two — with the bandages and
lint.

" It ain't as bad as I thought when
I wired ye," said Captain Joe to San-
ford, stopping him as he edged a way
through the group of men outside. " It 's
turrible hard on th' poor mate, jes' been
married. Never died till he reached
th' dock. There warn't a square inch o'
flesh onto him, the doctor said, that
warn't scalded clean off. Poor fel-
ler," and his voice trembled, "he ain't
been married but three months ; she 's
a-comin' down on the express to-day.
Cap'n Bob 's goin' ter meet 'er. The other
boys is tore up some, but we 11 have 'em
crawlin' 'round in a week or so. Lacey 's
got th' worst crack. Doctor sez he kin
save his eye if he pulls through, but ye
kin lay yer three fingers in th' hole in
his face. He won't be as purty as he
was," with an effort at a smile, " but
maybe that '11 do him good. Now that
you 're here I '11 go 'board the sloop an'
see how she looks."

Sanford crossed at once to Lacey's
bed, and laid his hand tenderly on that
of the sufferer. The young fellow opened
his well eye, and a smile played for an
instant about his mouth, the white teeth
gleaming. Then it faded with the pain.
Betty bent over him still closer and ad-
justed the covering about his chest.

" Has he suffered much during the
night, Betty ? " asked Sanford.

" He did n't know a thing at first, sir.
He did n't come to himself till the doc-
tor got through. He 's been easier since
daylight." Then, with her head turned
toward Sanford, and with a significant
gesture, pointing to her own forehead
and cheek, she noiselessly described the
terrible wounds, burying her face in her
hands as the awful memory rose before
her. " Oh, Mr. Sanford, I never dreamed
anybody could suffer so."

" Where does he suffer most ? " asked
Sanford in a whisper.

Lacey opened his eye. " In my back,
Mr. Sanford."

Caleb West.

669

Betty laid her fingers on his hand.
" Don't talk, Billy ; doctor said ye were
n't to talk."

The eye shut again wearily, and the
brown, rough, scarred hand with the
blue tattoo marks under the skin closed
over the little fingers and held on.

Betty sat fanning him gently, looking
down upon his bruised face. As each
successive pain racked his helpless body
she would hold her breath until it passed,
tightening her fingers that he might
steady himself the better. All her heart
went out to him in his pain. Aunty Bell
watched her for a moment ; then going
to her side, she drew her hand with a
caressing stroke under the girl's chin, a
favorite love-touch of hers.

" Cap'n says we got to go home, child,
both of us. You 're tuckered out, an' I
got some chores to do. We can't do no
more good here. You come 'long an'
get washed up 'fore Caleb comes. You
don't want to let him see ye bunged up
like this, an' all smudged and dirty with
th' soot a-droppin' down. He '11 be here
in half an hour. They 've sent the tug
to the Ledge for him an' the men."

" I ain't a-goin' a step, Aunty Bell. I
ain't sleepy a bit. There ain't nobody
to change these cloths but me. Caleb
knows how to get along," she answered,
her eyes watching the quick, labored
breathing of the injured man.

The mention of Caleb's name brought
her back to herself. Since the moment
when she had left her cottage, the night
before, and in all her varying moods
since, she had not once thought of her
husband. At the sound of the explo-
sion she had run out of her house bare-
headed, and had kept on down the road,
overtaking Mrs. Bell and the neighbors.
She had not stopped even to lock her
door. She only knew that the men were
hurt, and that she had seen Captain Joe
and the others working on the sloop's
deck but an hour before. She remem-
bered now Lacey's ghastly face as the lan-
tern's light fell upon it, the limp body

carried on the barrow plank and laid
outside the warehouse door, and could
still hear the crash of Captain Joe's iron
bar when he forced off the lock. She
would not leave the sufferer now that he
had crawled back to life and needed her,
— not, at least, until he was out of all
danger. When Captain Joe passed with
a cup of coffee for one of the sufferers,
she was still by Lacey's side, fanning
gently. He seemed to be asleep.

" Come, little gal," the captain called
out, " you git along home. You done
fust-rate, an' the men won't forgit ye
for it. Caleb '11 be mighty proud when
I tell 'im how you stood by las' night
when they all piled in on top o' me.
You run 'long now after Aunty Bell, an'
git some sleep. I 'm goin' 'board the
sloop to see how badly she 's hurted."

Betty only shook her head. Then she
put her face against Captain Joe's strong
arm and said, " No, please don't, Captain
Joe. I can't go now."

She was still there, the fan moving
noiselessly, when Mrs. Leroy and her
maid and Major Slocomb entered the
hospital, some hours later. The major
had escorted Mrs. Leroy from New
York, greatly to Sanford's surprise, and
greatly to Mrs. Leroy's visible annoy-
ance. All her protests the night before
had only confirmed him in his deter-
mination to meet her at the train in the
morning.

" Did you suppose, my dear suh," he
said, in answer to Sanford's astonished
look, as he handed the lady from the
train on its arrival at Keyport, " that I
would permit a lady to come off alone
into a God-forsaken country like this,
that raises nothin' but rocks and scrub
pines ? "

Mrs. Leroy seemed stunned when she
saw the four cots upon which the men lay.
She advanced a step toward Lacey's
bed, and then, as she caught sight of the
bandages and the ghastly face upon the
blood-stained pillow, she stopped short
and grasped Sanford's arm, and said in

670

Caleb West.

a tremulous whisper, " Oh, Henry, is that
his poor wife sitting by him ? "

" No ; that 's the wife of Caleb West,
the master diver. That 's Lacey lying
there. He looks to be worse hurt than
he is, Kate," anxious to make the case
as light as possible.

Her eyes wandered over the room, up
at the cobwebbed ceiling and down to
the blackened floor.

" What an awfully dirty place ! Are
you going to keep them here ? "

" Yes, until they can get to work
again. The building is perfectly dry
and healthy, with plenty of ventilation.
We will have it cleaned up, — it needs
that."

Betty merely glanced at the group as
she sat fanning the sleeping man. Their
entrance had made but little impression
upon her ; she was too tired to move,
and too much absorbed in her charge to
offer the fine lady a chair.

Something in the girl's face touched
the visitor.

" Have you been here all the morn-
ing ? " asked Mrs. Leroy, crossing to
Betty's side of the cot, and laying a hand
on her shoulder.

Betty raised her eyes, the rims red
with her long vigil, and the whites all
the whiter because of the fine black dust
that had sifted down and discolored her
pale cheeks.

" I 've been here all night, ma'am,"
she said sweetly and gently, drawn in-
stinctively by her sympathetic face.

'* How tired you must be ! Can I do
anything to help you ? "

Betty shook her head.

After the first shock at the sight of
the wounded men, the major had crossed
over to the bed occupied by Lonny
Bowles, the big Noank quarryman, whose
arm was in a sling, and had sat down
on the bed. No one had yet thought of
bringing in chairs, except for those nurs-
ing the wounded. As the Pocomokian
looked into Bowles's bronzed, ruddy face,
at the wrinkles about his neck, as seamy

as those of a young bull, the great broad
hairy chest, and the arms and hands big
and strong, he was filled with astonish-
ment. Everything about the quarryman
seemed to be the exact opposite of what
he himself possessed. This almost racial
distinction was made clearer when, in the
kindness of his heart, he tried to com-
fort the unfortunate man.

" I 'm ve'y sorry," the major began,
" at finding you injured in this way, suh.
Has the night been a ve'y painful one ?
You seem better off than the others.
How did you feel at the time ? "

Bowles looked him all over with a
curious expression of countenance. He
was trying to decide in his mind, from
the major's white tie, whether he was
a minister, whose next remark would be
a request to kneel down and pray with
him, or a quack doctor who had come to
do a little business on his own account.
The evident sincerity and tenderness of
the speaker disconcerted him for the
moment. He hesitated for a while, and
formulated a reply in his mind that would
cover the case if his first surmise were
correct, and might at the same time result
in his being let alone.

" Wall, it was so damn' sudden," said
the quavryman. " Fust thing I knowed
I wuz in the water with th' wind knocked
out'er me, an' the next wuz when I
come to an' they hed me in here an' the
doctor a-fixin' me up. I 'm drier 'n a lime-
kiln. Say, cap," — he looked over to-
ward the water-bucket, and called to one
of the men standing near the door, —
" fetch me a dipper."

To call a man " cap " around Key-
port is to dignify him with a title which
he probably does not possess, but which
you think would please him if he did.

" Let me get you a drink," said the
major, rising from the bed. He dipped
the floating tin in the bucket and brought
it to the thirsty man.

Bowles drained the dipper to its last
drop. " He ain't no minister an' he ain't
no sawbones," he said to himself, as he

Caleb West.

671

returned the empty tin to Slocomb with
a " Thank ye, — much obleeged."

The reply satisfied the major, some-
how, far more than the most elaborately
prepared speech of thanks which he re-
membered ever to have received.

Then the two men continued to talk
with each other freely, the one act of
kindness having broken down the barrier
between them. The Pocomokian told
of his home on the Chesapeake, of his
acquaintance with Sanford, of his com-
ing up to look after Mrs. Leroy. " Could
n't leave a woman without protection,
you know," to which code of etiquette '
Bowles bobbed his head in reply. The
major's tone of voice was as natural and
commonplace as if he had been convers-
ing with himself alone. The quarryman,
in turn, talked about the Ledge, and what
a rotten season it had been, — nothing
but southeaster since work opened ; last
week the men only got three days' work.
It was terrible rough on the boss (the
boss was Sanford), paying out wages to
the men and getting so little back ; but
it was n't the men's fault, — they were
standing by day and night, catching the
lulls when they came ; they 'd make it
up before the season was over ; he and
Caleb West had been up all the night
before getting ready for the big derricks
that Captain -Joe was going to set up
as soon as they were ready ; did n't know
what they were going to do now with that
Screamer all tore up. He gave uncon-
sciously a record of danger, unselfish-
ness, loyalty, pluck, hard work, and a
sense of duty that was a complete reve-
lation to Slocomb, whose whole life had
been one prolonged period of loafing,
and whose ideas of the higher type of man
were somehow inseparably interwoven
with a veranda, a splint-bottomed chair, a
palm-leaf fan, and somebody within call
to administer to his personal wants.

When Captain Joe returned from an
inspection" of the sloop's injuries, Mrs.
Leroy was still talking to Sanford, sug-
gesting comforts for the men, and plan-

ning for mosquito nettings to be placed
over their cots. The maid, a severe-look-
ing woman in black, had taken a seat on
an empty nail-keg which somebody had
brought in, and which she had carefully
dusted with her handkerchief before oc-
cupying. There was .nothing she could
possibly do for anybody.

Captain Joe looked at the party for
a moment, noted Mrs. Leroy's traveling
costume of blue foulard, ran his eye over
the maid who was holding her mistress's
dressing-case, then glanced at the major,
in an alpaca coat, with white vest and
necktie and gray slouch hat, and said
in his calm, forceful, yet gentle way,
" It was very nice of ye to come an'
bring yer lady friend," pointing to the
maid, " an' any o' Mr. Sanford's folks is
allers welcome at any time ; but we be
a rough lot, an' the men 's rough, and ye
kin see for yerself we ain't fixed up fur
company. They '11 be all right in a week
or so. Ef ye don't mind now, I 'm goin'
to shet them shelters to keep the sun out
an' git th' men quiet, — some on 'em
ain't slep' any too much. The tug '11 be
here to take ye over to Medford when-
ever ye 're ready ; she 's been to th'
Ledge fur th' men. Mr. Sanford said
mebbe ye 'd be goin' over soon. Ye 're
goin' 'long, did n't I hear ye say, sir ? "
Then addressing Slocomb, whose title
he tried to remember, " We Ve done th'
best we could, colonel. It ain't like what
ye 're accustomed to, — kind'er ragged
place, — but we got th' men handy here
where we kin take care on 'em, an' still
look after th' work, an' we ain't got
no time to lose this season ; it 's been
back'ard, blowin' a gale half the time.
There 's the tug whistle now, ma'am,"
turning again to Mrs. Leroy.

Mrs. Leroy did not answer. She felt
the justice of the captain's evident want
of confidence in her, and realized at
once that all of her best impulses could
not save her from being an intrusion at
this time. None of her former experi-
ence had equipped her for a situation of

672

Caleb West.

such gravity as this. With a curious
feeling of half contempt for herself, she
thought, as she looked around upon the
great strong men suffering there silent-
ly, how little she had known of what
physical pain must be. She had once
read to a young blind girl in a hospital,
during a winter, and she had sent de-
licacies for years to a poor man with
some affliction- of the spine. She re-
membered that she had been quite satis-
fied with herself and her work at the
time; and so had the pretty nurses in
their caps, and the young doctors whom
she met, the head surgeon even escort-
ing her to her carriage. But what had
she done to prepare herself for a situa-
tion like this ? Here was the reality of
suffering, and yet with all her sympathy
she felt within herself a fierce repug-
nance to it.

As she turned to leave the building,
holding her dainty skirts in her hand to
avoid the dirt, the light of the open door
was shut out, and eight or ten great
strong fellows in rough jackets and boots,
headed by Caleb West, just landed by
a tug from the Ledge, walked hurried-
ly into the room, with an air as if they
belonged there and knew they had work
to do.

Caleb stood by Lacey's bed and looked
down on him. His cap was off, his
hands were clasped behind his back,
while his big beard fell over his chest.
He felt his eyes filling, and a great
lump rose in his throat. He never could
see suffering unmoved.

The young rigger opened his well eye,
and the pale cheek flushed scarlet as he
saw Caleb's face bending over him.

" Where did it hit ye, sonny ? " asked
Caleb, bending closer, and slipping one
hand into Betty's as he spoke.

Betty pointed to her own cheek.
Lacey, she said, was too weak to answer
for himself.

"I've been afeard o' that b'iler,"
Caleb said, turning to one of the men,
" ever sence I see it work."

Betty shook her head warningly, hold-
ing a finger to her lips. Caleb and the
men stopped talking.

" You been here all night, Betty ? "
whispered Caleb, putting his mouth close
to her ear, and one big hand on her
rounded shoulder.

Betty nodded her head.

" Ye ought'er be mighty proud o' her,
Caleb," said Captain Joe, joining .the
group, and speaking in a lowered tone.
"Ain't many older women 'longshore
would'er done any better. I tried ter
git 'er to go home with Aunty Bell two
hours ago, but she sez she won't."

Caleb's face was suffused with pride
and his heart gave a quick bound as he
listened to Captain Joe's praise of the
girl wife that was all his own. His
rough hand pressed Betty's shoulder the
closer. Now, as he thought to himself,
the men about him could see the strong
womanly qualities which had attracted
him. He had always known that the
first great sorrow or anxiety that came
into her life would develop all her na-
ture and make a woman of her.

" Lemme take hold now, Betty," said
Caleb, still whispering, and stooping over
her again. " Ye 're nigh beat out, little
woman."

He slipped his arm around her slender
waist as if to lift her from the chair.
Betty caught his fingers and loosened his
hand from its hold.

" I 'm all right, Caleb. You go home.
I '11 be 'long in a little while to get sup-
per."

Caleb looked at her curiously. Her
tone of voice was new to him. She had
never loosened his arm before, not when
she was tired and sick. She had al-
ways crept into his lap, and put her
pretty white arms around his neck, and
tucked her head down on his big beard.

" What 's the matter, child ? " he
asked anxiously. " Maybe it 's hungry
ye be ? "

" Yes, I guess I 'm hungry, Caleb,"
said Betty wearily.

Caleb West.

G73

" I '11 go out, Betty, an' git ye some
soup or somethin'. I '11 be back right
away, little woman." He tiptoed past
the cot, putting on his cap as he went.

Two of the men followed him with
their eyes and smiled'. One looked sig-
nificantly at Lacey and then toward the
retreating figure, and shook his head in
a knowing way.

Betty had not answered Caleb. She
did not even turn her head to follow his
movements. She saw only the bruised,
pale face before her as she listened to
the heavy breathing of the sufferer. She
would hav.e dropped from her chair with
fatigue and exhaustion but for some
new spirit within her which seemed to
hold her up, and to keep the fan still in
her hand.

When Sanford, after escorting Mrs.
Leroy to her home, returned to the im-
provised hospital, the lanterns had been
lighted, the doctor had dressed the men's
wounds, and had reported everybody on
the mend. At Betty's urgent request
he had made a careful examination of
Lacey, and pronounced him positively
out of danger. Only then had she left
her post and gone to her own cottage
with Caleb.

Captain Joe had followed Aunty Bell
home for a few hours' rest, and all the
watchers had been changed.

There was but one exception. Beside
the cot upon which lay the sailor with
the dislocated hip sat the major, with
hat and coat off, his shirt-cuffs rolled
up. He was feeding the sufferer from
a bowl of soup which he held in his
hand. He seemed to enjoy every phase
of his new experience. It might have
been that his sympathies were more
than usually aroused, or it might have
been that the spirit of vagabondage
within him fitted him for every condi-
tion in life, making him equally at home
among rich and poor, and equally agree-

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481.

able to both. Certainly no newly ap-
pointed young surgeon in a charity
hospital could have been more entirely
absorbed in the proper running of the
establishment than was Slocomb in the
case of these rough men.

" I 'm going to take charge here to-
night, major," said Sanford, going to-
ward him, realizing for the first time
that he had neglected his friend all day,
and with a sudden anxiety as to where
he should send him for the night. " Will
you go to the hotel and get a room, or
will you go to Captain Joe's .cottage?
You can have my bed. Mrs. Bell will
make you very comfortable for the
night."

The major turned to Sanford with an
expression of profound sympathy for
such misunderstanding in his face, hesi-
tated for a moment, and said firmly,
with a slight suggestion of wounded
dignity in his manner, " By gravy, suh,
you would n't talk about going to bed
if you 'd been yere 'most all day, as
I have, and seen what these po' men
suffer. My place is yere, suh, an' yere
I 'm going to stay."

Sanford had to look twice before he
could trust his own eyes and ears.
What was the matter with the Pocomo-
kian ?

" But, major," he continued in protest,
determining finally in his mind that some
quixotic whim had taken possession of
him, " there is n't a place for you to
lie down. You had better get a good
night's rest, and come back in the morn-
ing. There 's nothing you can do here.
I 'm going to sit up with the men to-
night."

The major did not even wait for San-
ford's reply. He placed the hot soup
carefully on the floor, slipped one hand
under the wounded man's head that he
might swallow more easily, and then
raised another spoonful to his lips.

F. Hopkinson Smith.
{To be continued.)

674

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF DEAN SWIFT.

in.

KHIGHTLEY CHETWODE, as has been
shown in my notes on an earlier letter,
had taken part in a Jacobite plot. The
Pretender, in spite of the failure of two
risings in Scotland, was still buoyed
up with hope. In the autumn of 1722,
in a foolish manifesto, he called upon
George I. to give up to him the throne
of his fathers, and undertook in return
to acknowledge him as king, instead of
elector of Hanover. By the order of the
two Houses of Parliament it was burnt
by the common hangman. The habeas
corpus act was suspended for a year, and
many arrests were made. Chetwode was
threatened with prosecution, as the next
letter and the six following show.

XXVI.

DUBLIN. Feb. 12th 1722-3.
SK, — Upon my Return last October,
after five months absence in the Coun-
try, I found a Letter of yours, which I
believe was then 2 months old ; it con-
tained no Business that I remember, and
being then out of Health and Humer, I
did not think an Answer worth your Re-
ceiving ; I had no other Letter from you
till last Friday, which I could not an-
swer on Saturday, that being a day when
the Bishop saw* no Company ; however
I was with him a few minutes in the
Morning about signing a Lease and then
I had onely time to say a little of your
Business, which he did not seem much
to enter into, but thought you had no
Reason to Stir in it, and that you ought
to stay till you are attacked, which I be-
lieve you never will be upon so foolish
an Accusation. On Sunday when I
usually see him, he was abroad against
his Custom, and yesterday engaged in
Business and Company. To-day he sees
no body it being one of the two days in

the week that he shuts himself up. I
look upon the Whig Party to be a little
colder in the Business of Prosecutions,
than they formerly were, nor will they
readily trouble a Gentleman who lyes
quiet and minds onely his Gardens and
Improvements. The Improbability of
your Accusers Story will never let it pass,
and the Judges have [having] been so
often shamed by such Rascals, are not so
greedy at swallowing Informations. I am
here in all their Teeth which they have
shewn often enough, and do no more.
And the Ch. Just. [Chief Justice] who
was as venomous as a Serpent was forced
to consent that a noli prosequi should
pass after he had layd his hand on his
Heart in open Court and Sworn, that I
designed to bring in the Pretender.

Do you find that your Trees thrive
and your drained Bog gets a new Coat ?
I know nothing so well worth the En-
quiry of an honest Man, as times run.
I am as busy in my little Spot of a Town
Garden, as ever I was in the grand
monde ; and if it were five or ten miles
from Dublin I doubt I should be as con-
stant a Country Gentleman as you. I
wish you good success in your Improve-
ments for as to Politicks I have long
forsworn them. I am sometimes con-
cerned for Persons, because they are my
Friends, but for Things never, because
they are desperate ; I always expect to-
morrow will be worse, but I enjoy today
as well as I can. This is my Philoso-
phy, and I think ought to be yours ; I
desire my humble Service to M™
and am very sincerely

Your most obedient

humble Serv*

J. S.

Swift had published in 1720 A Pro-
posal for the Universal Use of Irish
Manufacture, in which he said that " Ire-

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

675

land would never be happy till a law
were' made for burning everything that
came from England, except their people
and their coals." The government, not
being able to reach the author for want
of proof, prosecuted the printer. " The
jury," wrote Swift, " brought him in not
guilty, although they had been culled
with the utmost" industry. The Chief-
Justice sent them back nine times and
kept them eleven hours." Swift retali-
ated with satire. Among the bitter verses
he wrote on this unjust judge the follow-
ing are perhaps the bitterest : —

" In church your grandsire cut his throat ;

To do the job too long he tarried ;
He should have had my hearty vote
To cut his throat before he married."

XXVII.

SK, — I was yesterday with A. B
[Archbishop], who tells me that it was
not thought fit to hinder the Law from
proceeding in the common form, but that
particular Instructions were given that
you should be treated with all possible
Favor ; and I have some very good Rea-
sons to believe those Instructions will be
observed : neither in this do I speak by
Chance : which is all I can say — I am
yrs &c.

Feb 25th 1722-3.
Monday Mprn.

xxvni.

SK, — I sent a Messenger on Friday to
Mr Forbes's Lodging, who had orders if
he were not at home, to say that I should
be glad to see him — but I did not hear
of him, though I stayd at home on Sat-
urday till past two a Clock. I think all
yr Comfort lyes in your Innocence, your
Steddyness, and the Advice of yr Law-
yers. I am forced to leave the Town
sooner than I expected.

I heartily wish you good Success, and
am in hopes the Consequences will not
be so formidable as you are apt to fear.
You will find that Brutes are not to be
too much provoked ; they that most de-

serve Contempt are most angry at being
contemned ; I know it by Experience.
It is worse to need Friends, than not to
have them. Especially in Times when
it is so hard, even for cautious men to
keep out of harms way.

I hope when this Affair is over you
will make yr self more happy in yr Do-
mestick : that you may pass the rest of
yr Life in emproving the Scene and yr
Fortune, and exchanging yr Enemyes for
Friends.

I am &c.
June 2nd 1723.

Past twelve at night.

XXIX.

[Indorsed, " Swift without date abt my Pro-
secution and his sentiments on severall par-
ticulars abt it. K. C."]

SK, — I was just going out when I re-
ceived yr note ; these proceedings make
my head turn round ; I take it that the
Governments leave for you to move the
King's Bench must signify something,
or else instead of a Dilemma it is an
Absurdity. I thought you had put jn a
Memoriall, which I also thought would
have an Answer in form. I apprehend
they have a mind to evade a Request
which they cannot well refuse ; will not
yr lawyer advise you to move the King's
Bench ? and will he not say that it was
the Direction of the Government you
should do so ? and will the Government
own an advice or order that is evasive ?
I talk out of my Sphere. Surely the
Attorney cannot reconcile this. I ima-
gined yr request should [have] been of-
fered to the Justices in a Body not to
one and then to t'other, which was doing
nothing. I am wholly at a Loss what
to say further.

XXX.

SE, — I sd [said] all I possibly could
to Dr C and it is your Part to cul-
tivate it, and desire that he will make
the A. B. soften the Judge — you want
some strong credit with the L4 [Lord
Lieutenant] or proper methods with those

676

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

under him — As to putting you off, till
the L* goes ; I think that can do no hurt.
I suppose it is impossible for the Parl1
[Parliament] to rise till after Christmas,
since they are now begining Bills that
will pass with Difficulty, and if there be
an Indemnity, then there will be an End.
I believe all people agree with you, that
yr concern shocks you more than it does
others. I am sure I saw my best friends
very calm and easy when I was under
worse difficultyes than you. A few good
offices is all we can expect from others.

The calmness and easiness of Swift's
friends when he was under difficulties can
be justified by Johnson's reflection that
" life occupies us all too much to leave
us room for any care of others beyond
what duty enjoins ; and no duty enjoins
sorrow or anxiety that is at once trouble-
some and useless."

It was perhaps his " best friends " that
Swift had in mind when he wrote : —

" In all distresses of our friends
We first consult our private ends ;
While Nature kindly bent to ease us
Points out some circumstance to please us."

His false friends he goes on to attack in
the following lines : —

" By innocence and resolution
He bore continual persecution ;
While numbers to preferment rose
Whose merits were to be his foes ;
When ev'n his own familiar friends,
Intent upon their private ends,
Like renegadoes now he feels
Against him lifting up their heels."

XXXI.

SB, — I had not yr lettr [letter] till
I returned home and if I had I could
not have known what to do. I think
you should have attended the Bishop,
and pressed him to what I desired in my
letter, for I could not speak more ur-
gently nor could I am able [sic] to say
much more with him than what I wrote.
Mr Bernard is a favorite of the Times
and might have credit with the Attory
Gen1 [Attorney General] to agree that

the Thing should be granted, but he lyes
still, and onely leaves you to do that
which he can better do himself. I wd
[would] do six times more than you de-
sire even for a perfect stranger, if he
were in Distress, but I have turned the
Matf [Matter] a thousand times in my
Thoughts in vain. I believe yr wisest
friends will think as I *do, that the best
way will be to move the Sectry [Secre-
tary] in that manner he likes best — I
am this moment going to Prayers and so
remain yr8 &c.

Thursday mor. 9 o'clock.

The way in which the secretary of the
lord lieutenant liked best to be moved
was probably a bribe. An earlier secre-
tary, bribed by a thousand pounds, had
given to another man a deanery promised
to Swift.

xxxn.

DUBLIN. Jul. Uth 1724.
SR, — I had yours of Jun 27th and
have been hindred by a great variety of
Silly Business and Vexation from an-
swering you. I am over head and ears
in Mortar — and with a number of the
greatest Rogues in Ireld [Ireland] which
is a proud word ; But besides I am at
an uncertainty what to say to you on
the Affair you mention : what new Rea-
son you may have, or discovery you have
made of foul Play I cannot but be a
stranger to. All I know is, that any
one who talked of yr Prosecution while
you were here, unanimously condemned
it as villanous and unjust, which hath
made me think that it would be better to
lye in oblivion, for my Reason of agreeing
formerly that an Account of it would be
usefull, went onely on the Supposition,
that you would be tryed &c. But I pro-
test I am no fit Adviser in this matter,
and therefore I would entreat you to
consult other Friends, as I would do if
it were my own case. If you are ad-
vised to go on and pursue that Advice,
by drawing up the Account, pray do it
in Folio, with the Margin as wide as the

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

677

writing, and I shall add alter or correct
according to my best Judgment and
though you may not be advised to pub-
lish it, yet it may be some Amusement
in wet winter Evenings. I hope you
found yr Plantations answer what you
expected. You will hear that the Pri-
mate dyed yesterday at twelve o'Clock
which will set the expecting Clergy all
in a motion : and they say that Leving
the Chief Justice dyed about the same
Hour, but whether the Primate's death
swallows up the other I cannot tell ; for
either it is false or not regarded ; per-
haps I shall know before this is closed.
Ld [Lord] Oxford dyed like a great
man, received visits to the last, and then
2 minutes before his Death, turned from
his Friends, closed his own Eyes, and
expired : Mr Stopford is returned from
his Travells, the same Person he went,
onely more Experience ; he is the most
in all regards the most valuable young
Man of this Kingdom.

I am ever &c.
Leving is dead.

The Primate of Ireland was Lindsay,
Archbishop of Armagh. King, Arch-
bishop of Dublin, who had hoped to suc-
ceed him, was passed over on account 'of
his age. When the new Primate called
on him, he received him without rising
from his chair. " ' My Lord,' said he,
' I am certain your Grace will forgive me,
because you know I am too old to rise.' "
Swift's scorn of the bishops of the Irish
Church is shown in the lines where, in
the person of St. Patrick addressing Ire-
land, he likens them to magpies sent

"from the British soil

With restless beak thy blooming fruit to spoil ;
To din thine ears with unharmonious clack,
And haunt thy holy walls in white and black."

He wished to write the Earl of Ox-
ford's life. " I have already taken care,"
he had written to him a few years earlier,
" that you shall be represented to posteri-
ty as the ablest and f aithfullest minister,
and truest lover of your country that this

age has produced." Posterity has formed
its own judgment, and looks on his lord-
ship as a shifty, pitiful creature. Even
his colleague, Lord Chancellor Cowper,
wrote of him, " His humour is to love
tricks when not necessary, but from an
inward satisfaction in applauding his own
cunning."

" The most valuable young Man of
this Kingdom," whom Swift thus put be-
fore Berkeley, became a bishop. Lau-
rence Sterne was a boy of eleven. Burke
and Goldsmith were not yet born.

XXXIII.

Sr, — I have been above 7 weeks ill
of my old Deafness and am but just re-
covered. Yr Carrier has behaved him-
self very honorably, because you took
Care to seal the Cords. Yr Bergamot
Pears are excellent, and the Orange Ber-
gamots much best \_sic\ than those about
this Town. Your Apples are very fair
and good of their kind, and yr Peaches
and Nectarines as good as we could ex-
pect from the Year. But it is too great
a Journy for such nice Fruit, and they
are apt to take the Tast of the Moss.
Yr Cherry Brandy I depend on the good-
ness of, but would not suffer it to be
tasted till another Time. I could find
Fault with nothing but yr Paper, which
was so perfumed that the Company with
me could not bear it.

There is a Draper very popular, but
what is that to me — If Woods be dis-
appointed it is all we desire.

Ld : Carteret is coming suddenly
over.

I am yr &c.

The Irish carrier of Swift's day was
on the same level of honesty as are the
conductors on the Italian railways of our
time, against whose thievings the pru-
dent traveler guards himself by cording
his portmanteau and sealing the cord.

The "Draper" was the third of a
series of letters by which Swift roused
the Irish against the reception of a new

678

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

copper currency which one Wood (not
" Woods," as he calls him) had obtained
a patent to coin. The letters were signed
" M. B. Drapier."

Lord Carteret was coming over as
lord lieutenant. Swift once had a dis-
pute with him about the grievances of
Ireland. " Carteret replied with a mas-
tery and strength of reasoning, which
Swift, not well liking, cried out in a
violent passion : — ' What the vengeance
brought you among us ? Get you back,
get you back. Pray God Almighty send
us our boobies again.' " In some verses
written a few years later the dean de-
scribes him as not one of those

" Who owe their virtues to their stations,
And characters to dedications."

He concludes : —

" I do the most that friendship can,
I hate the viceroy, love the man."

XXXIV.

[Indorsed, " Ahout H. C. ye Method of Part-
ing, question of Allowance, Stopford and
other materiall difficulties."]

DUBLIN. Octr 1724.

SR, — I received your longer Letter,
and afterwards your shorter by Mr Jack-
mans. I am now relapsed into my old
Disease of Deafness, which so confounds
my Head, that I am ill qualifyed for
writing or thinking. I sent your Let-
ter sealed to Mr Stopford. He never
showed me any Letter of y" nor talked
of anything relating to you above once
in his Life and that was some years
ago, and so of [.sic] little consequence
that I have forgot it, and therefore I
sent your Letter sealed to him by a
common Messenger onely under the In-
spection of a discret Servant. I have
lived in good Friendship with him, but
not in such an Intimacy as to interfere
in his Business of any sort, and I am
sure I should not be fond of it, unless I
could be of Service — As to what you
mention of my Proposall at the Dean-
ery, as far as a confused Head will give
me leave to think ; I was always of

opinion that those who are sure they
cannot live well together, could not do a
better thing than to part. But the Quan-
tum of yr Allowance must be measured
by your Income and other Circumstances.
I am of opinion that this might be best
done by knowing fairly, what the Person
her self would think the lowest that would
be sufficient for what you propose, and
the Conditions of the Place to reside
in, wherein if you disapprove, you have
Liberty to refuse, and in this Mr Stop-
ford's Mediation would be most conven-
ient. I desire you will give some Al-
lowance to his Grief and Trouble in this
Matter. I solemnly protest he hath not
mentioned one Syllable of this to me,
and if he should begin, I think I would
interrupt him — It is a hard 'Thing to
convince others of our Opinion, and I
need not tell you how far a Brother may
be led by his Affections. I am likewise
of Opinion that such a thing as Parting,
if it be agreed on, may be done without
Noise, as if it were onely going to visit
a Friend, and the Absence may continue
by degrees, and little notice taken. As
to the Affair of your Son, I can not im-
agine why Mr Stopford hath not an-
swered yr Letter ; I do believe there is
some what in that Business of his
Amour, an Affair begun in much youth,
and kept up perhaps more out of De-
cency and Truth than Prudence. But
he is too wise to think of proceeding
further before he gets into some Settlem*
[Settlement] which may not probably be
in severall Years, and I prefer him as a
Tutor absolutely before any of his Age
or Standing at least. The Discipline in
Oxford is more remiss than here — and
since you design he shall live in this
Kingdom (where Mr Jackmans tells me
you are preparing so fine a Habitation
for him) I think it better to habituate
him to the Country where he must pass
his Life, especially since nlany charge-
able accidents have happened to you (be-
sides your Building) which will press
parsimony upon you, and 5011 a year will

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

679

maintain your Son a Commoner on which
Conditions you will place him, if you in-
tend he shall be good for Something.

You will allow for this confussed Pa-
per for I have the noise of seven Wa-
termills in my Ears and expect to con-
tinue so above a Month, but this sudden
Return hath quite discouraged me. I
mope at home and can bear no Company
but Trebles and countertenors.
I am ever &c.

Your Perfumed Paper hath been ready
to give me an Apoplexy either leave off
these Refinements or we will send you
to live on a mountain in Connaught.

So strong a disagreement had risen
between Chetwode and his wife — the
" Dame Plyant " of earlier letters, the
mistress of that " little fire - side " to
which Swift used to send kind messages
— that they were thinking of separating.
Stopford, as this letter shows, was her
brother.

The discipline of Oxford from the
Restoration onwards kept sinking and
sinking, till it reached its lowest depth
of degradation toward the close of the
eighteenth century, — a memorable in-
stance of the ruin that is brought on a
seat of learning when it is placed under
the government of a church. Swift once
asked a young clergyman if he smoked.
" Being answered that he did not, ' It is
a sign,' said he, 'you were not bred in
the University of Oxford, for drinking
and smoking are the first rudiments of
learning taught there ; and in these two
arts no university in Europe can outdo
them.' " Nevertheless, in his Essay on
Modern Education he says that though
he " could add some hundred examples
from his own observation of men who
learnt nothing more at Oxford than to
drink ale and smoke tobacco," there were
others who made good use of their time
there, " and were ready to celebrate and
defend that, course of education." In
his Essay on the Fates of Clergymen he
thus describes the course of an Oxford

student who was destined to rise high
in the Church : " He was never absent
from prayers or lecture, nor once out of
his college after Tom [the great Christ
Church bell] tolled. He spent every
day ten hours in his closet, in reading
his courses, dozing, clipping papers, or
darning his stockings ; which last he per-
formed to admiration. He could be so-
berly drunk at the expense of others with
college ale, and at those seasons was al-
ways most devout. He wore the same
gown five years withput dragling or tear-
ing. He never once looked into a play-
book or a poem. He never understood a
jest, or had the least conception of wit."

xxxv.

[Indorsed, " About James Stopford, and pla-
cing my son Vail : under his care in Coledge
of Dublin."]

DUBLIN. Deer 19th 1724.
SR, — The Fault of my Eyes the Con-
fusion of my Deafness and Giddyness of
my Head have made me commit a great
Blunder. I am just come from the
Country where I was about 3 weeks in
hopes to recover my Health ; thither yr
last Letter was sent me, with the two in-
closed, Mr Stopford's to you and yours
to him. In reading them, I mistook
and thought yrs to him had been onely a
Copy of what you had already sent to
him so I burned them both as contain-
ing Things between yrselves, but I pre-
served yrs to me to answer it, and now
reading it again since my Return, I find
my unlucky Error, which I hope you
will excuse on Account of my many In-
firmityes in Body and Mind. I very
much approve of putting yr Son under
Mr Stopford's Care, and I am confident
you need not apprehend his leaving the
College for some years, or if he should,
care may be taken to put the young Lad
into good Hands, particularly under Mr
King — I am utterly against his being
a Gentleman Commoner on other Re-
gards besides the Expence : and I be-
lieve 50U a Year (which is no small sum

680

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

to a Builder) will maintain him very
well a creditable Pensioner. I have not
seen the L' [Lord Lieutenant] yet, being
not in a Condition to converse with any
Body, for want of better Ears, and bet-
ter Health — I suppose you do not want
Correspondents- who send you the Pa-
pers Current of late in Prose and Verses
on Woods, the Juryes, the Drapier &c.
I think there is now a sort of Calm, ex-
cept a very few of the lowest Grubstreet
but there have been at least a Dozen
worth reading — And I hope you ap-
prove of the grand Juryes Proceedings,
and hardly thought such a Spirit could
ever rise over this whole Kingdom.
I am &c.

Swift, in writing of a gentleman com-
moner, is applying to Dublin the term
with which he had become familiar dur-
ing his short residence in Oxford. The
fellow commoner and pensioner of Dub-
lin correspond to the gentleman common-
er and commoner of the English univer-
sity. The gentleman commoner, whose
showy gown was very often seen in Ox-
ford in my undergraduate days, is as ex-
tinct as the dodo. " In Dublin," as I am
informed on high authority, " any one
who chooses to pay his money foolishly
can be a fellow commoner. He sits at
the fellows' table and is distinguished by
some points of college costume. Above
him in rank is the son of a peer." It
was as a gentleman commoner that Gib-
bon, about thirty years after the date of
Swift's letter, entered Magdalen College,
Oxford. He dined with the fellows, and
was privileged to share in their " dull
and deep potations," and to join in their
conversation " as it stagnated in a round
of college business, Tory politics, per-
sonal anecdotes, and private scandal."
At Christ Church, Oxford, in 1769, " the
expense of a commoner keeping the best
company was near £200 a year ; that of
a gentleman commoner, at least £250."
At other colleges a commoner could have
lived in decent comfort on £100.

Of the verses on Wood many were
written by Swift, — some of them brutal
enough.

The grand jury, having thrown out
the bill against the printer of the " Dra-
pier's Letters," was discharged by the
chief justice in a rage. A new one was
summoned, which made a presentment
drawn up by Swift against " the base
metal coined, commonly called Wood's
half-pence," of which they " had already
felt the dismal effects."

xxxvi.

[Indorsed, " With advice aht H. C. and how
to arrange our separation and her Residence."]

DUBLIN. Janr 18, 1724-5.
SB, — I answer yr two Letters with
the first opportunity of the Post. I have
already often told you my Opinion, and
after much Reflection — what I think it
will be most prudent for you to do — I
see nothing new in the case, but some dis-
pleasing Circumstances which you men-
tion, and which I look upon as probable
Consequences of that Scituation you are
in — What I would do in such a Case I
have told you more than once are : I
would give that Person such an Allow-
ance as was Suitable to my Ability, to
live at a distance, where no Noise would
be made. As to the Violences you ap-
prehend you may be drawn to, I think
nothing could be more unhappy for that
would be vous mettre dans votre tort ;
which a wise Man would certainly avoyd.
I do not wonder that you should see a
neglect of domestic Care when all Re-
conciliation is supposed impossible, every
body is encouraged or discouraged by Mo-
tives, and the meanest Servant will not
act his Part if he be convinced that it will
be impossible ever to please his Master.
I am sure I have been more than once
very particular in my Opinion upon this
Affair ; and have supposed any other
Friend to be in the same case. There
are many good Towns at a great dis-
tance from you, where People may board

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

681

reasonably, and have the Advantage of
a Church and a Neighbourhood —

But what Allowance you are content
to give must depend upon what you are
able. I think such a Thing may be con-
tinued without making much Noise, and
theN Person may be a good while absent
as upon Health or Visits, till the Thing
grows out of Observation or Discourse.
I entirely approve of yr Choice of a Tutor
for your Son, and he will consult Cheap-
ness as well as other Circumstances.

I have been out of Order about 5
months and am just getting out of a Cold
when my Deafness was mending — Send-
ing you Papers by the Post would be a
great Expence, and Sometimes the Post
master kept them. But if any Carrier
plyed between you and us, they might
be sent by Bundles. They say Cadogan
is to lose some of his Employmnt8, and
I am told, that next Pacquet will tell us
of Severall Changes — I was t'other day
well enough to see the Ld. L' and the
Town has a thousand foolish Storyes of
what passed between us ; which indeed
was nothing but old Friendship without
a Word of Politicks.

According to one of the " foolish Sto-
ryes," Swift, at a full levee, pushed his
way up to the > lord lieutenant, and in a
loud voice reproached him for issuing a
proclamation against the Draper, — " ' a
poor shop-keeper whose only crime is an
honest attempt to save his country from
ruin. I suppose you expect a statue of
copper will be erected to you for this
service done to Wood.' The whole as-
sembly were struck mute. The titled
slaves shrunk into their own littleness in
the presence of this man of virtue. For
some time a profound silence ensued,
when Lord Carteret made this fine reply
in a line of Virgil : —

' Res durse et regni novitas me talia cogunt
Moliri.'"

(" My cruel fate

And doubts attending an unsettled state
Force me." )

Lord Cadogan had succeeded Marlbor-
ough as commander-in-chief . " As the
great Duke reviewed us," writes Es-
mond, " riding along our lines with his
fine suite of prancing aides-de-camp and
generals, stopping here and there to
thank an officer with those eager smiles
and bows of which his Grace was always
lavish, scarce a huzzah could be got for
him, though Cadogan, with an oath, rode

up and cried, ' D you, why don't you

cheer ? ' '

XXXVII.

[Indorsed, "A little before H. C. and 1
parted."]

SR, — Your letter come this moment
to my Hand and the Messenger waits
and returns tomorrow. You describe
yourself as in a very uneasy way as to
Burr. I know it not but I believe it will
be hard to find any Place without some
Objections. To be permitted to live
among Relations, will have a fair face,
and be looked on as generous and good-
natured, and therefore I think you should
comply, neither do I apprehend any Con-
sequences from the Person if the rest of
the Family be discreet, and you say no-
thing against that — I think it would be
well if you had some Companions in your
House with whom to converse, or else
the Spleen will get the Better, at least
in long winter Evenings, when you can-
not be among your workmen nor allways
amuse yr self with reading.

We have had no new thing of any
Value since the second Letter from No-
body (as they call it) the Author of those
two Letters is sd to be a Lord's eldest
son — The Drapier's five Letters and
those two, and five or six Copyes of
Verses are all that I know of, and those
I suppose you have had.

The Talk now returns fresh that the
Ld. L* will soon leave us, and ye D
[Duke] of Newcastle succeed, and that
Horace Walpole will be Secry of State.
I am &c.

Jan 3<M 1724-5.

682

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

Swift's advice to Chetwode was like
that given nearly forty years later by Dr.
Johnson to a friend who had put away
his wife : " Your first care must be to
procure to yourself such diversions as
may preserve you from melancholy and
depression of mind, which is a greater
evil than a disobedient wife."

The talk that the lord lieutenant was
soon to leave was false. Some years
after he had left, he wrote to Swift,
" When people ask me how I governed
Ireland, I say that I pleased Dr Swift."

Horace Walpole was the brother of
Sir Robert Walpole, and uncle of the
famous letter-writer, — " old Horace,"
as he was called later on. His nephew
records how one day he left the House
of Commons to fight a duel, and at once
returned, " so little moved as to speak
immediately upon the Cambrick Bill,
which made Swinny say, ' That it was
a sign he was not ruffled.' " RuiHes,
then in fashion, were made of cambric.

XXXVIII.

[Indorsed, " About James Stopford's promise
to indemnify me for debts of H. C.'s con-
tracting."]

DUBLIN. Febr. 20th 1724-5.

SB, — I extracted the Articles you
sent me, and I sent them to Mr Stopford,
and this morning he shewed me a Letter
he intends for you to night, which I
think shews he is ready to do all in his
Power. That of contracting Debts he
will give Bonds ; for the others you can
not well expect more than his Word, and
you have the Remedy in your Power.
So I hope no Difficulty will remain. I
am very glad you are putting of your
Land, and I ho'pe you will contract things
into as narrow a Circle as can consist
with your Ease, since your Son and other
Children will now be an Addition to your
annuall Charge.

As soon as it is heard that I have been
with Folks in Power, they get twenty Sto-
ryes about the Town of what has passed,
but very little Truth. An English Pa-

per in print related a Passage of two
Lines writ on a Card, and the Answer,
of which Story four parts in five is false
— The Answer was writ by Sir W.
Fownes. The real Account is a Trifle,
and not worth the Time to relate. Thus
much for that Passage in yr Letter.

As to Company, I think you must
endeavor to cotton with the Neighbor-
ing Clergy and Squires. The days are
lengthening and you will have a long
Summer to prepare yrself for Winter.
'You should pass a month now and then
with some County Friends, and play at
whist for sixpence — I just steal this
Time to write that you may have my
Opinions at the same Time with Mr Stop-
ford's Letter. I do think by all means
he and you should be as well together as
the Situation of Things will admit, for
he has a most universal good reputation.
I think above any young man in the
Kingdom.

I am yr most obt &c. J. S.

Chetwode, who was to make his wife
an allowance, feared she might incur
debts for which the law would hold him
answerable. Her brother was willing to
give him bonds for repayment.

The " two Lines writ on a Card "
may be those which Swift is said to have
scratched on the window of the waiting-
room in the castle : —

" My very good Lord, 'tis a very hard task,
For a man to wait here who has nothing to
ask."

Under which Lord Carteret wrote : —

" My very good Dean, there are few who come

here,

But have something to ask or something to
fear. ' '

Swift used to keep a record of his
gains and losses at cards. " Whist " he
sometimes spelled " whish," as the fol-
lowing account shows : —

Won.

Nov 8th. Ombr. Percevl Barry . . . 5. 8.
" Ombr and whish. Raymd Mor-

gan

2.4.

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

683

XXXTX.

May 21th 1725.

SK, — The Place I am in is 8 miles
from the Post so it may be some days
before I have convenience of sending
this. I have recovered my hearing for
some time, at least recovered it so as not
to be troublesome to those I converse
with, but I shall never be famous for
acuteness in that Sense, and am in daily
dread of Relapses ; against which I pre-
pare my mind as well as I can ; and I
have too good a Reason to do so ; For
my eyes will not suffer me to read small
Prints; nor anything by Candlelight,
and if I grow blind, as -well as deaf, I
must needs become very grave, and wise,
and insignificant. The Weather has
been so unfavourable, and continues so,
that I have not been able to ride above
once ; and have been forced for Amuse-
m* to set Irish Fellows to work, and
to oversee them — I live in a Cabin and
in a very wild Country ; yet there are
some Agreeablenesses in it, or at least I
fancy so, and am levelling Mountains and
raising Stones, and fencing against incon-
veniencyes of a scanty Lodging, want of
vittalls, and a thievish Race of People.

I detest the world because I am grow-
ing wholly unfit for it, and could be
onely happy by never coming near Dub-
lin, nor hearing from it, or anything that
passes in the Publick.

I am sorry your Enemyes are so rest-
less to torment you, and truly against
the opinion of Philosophers I think, next
to Health a man's Fortune is the ten-
derest Point ; for life is a Trifle ; and
Reputation is supply'd by Innocence,
but the Ruin of a man's Fortune makes
him a Slave, which is infinitely worse
than loss of Life or Credit ; when a man
hath not deserved either ; and I repent
nothing so much, as my own want of
worldly wisdom, in squandring all I had
saved on a Cursed Wall; although I
had your Example to warn me, since I
had often ventured to railly you for your

Buildings ; which have hindred you from
that Command of money ; you might
otherwise have had. I have been told
that Lenders of money abound ; not
from the Riches of the Kingdom, but by
the want of Trade — but whether Chat-
ties be good security I can not tell. I
dare say Mr Lightburn will be able to
take up what he wants, upon the Secu-
rity of Land, by the Judgm* of the H.
[House] of Lords ; and I reckon he is
almost a Lawyer, and would make a very
good Solliciter. I can give you .no En-
couragement to go out of your way for
a visit to this dismal Place ; where we
have hardly room to turn our selves, and
where we send five miles round for a lean
sheep. I never thought I could battle
with so many Inconveniencyes, and make
use of so many Irish Expedients, much
less could I invite any Friend to share in
them ; and we are 8 miles from Kells,
the nearest habitable Place — These is
the State of Affairs here. But I should
be glad to know you had taken some
Method to lump your Debts. I could
have wished Mr Stopford had let me
know his Intentions of travelling with
Graham ; I know not the Conditions he
goes on, and there is but one Reason
why I should approve of such a Ramble ;
I know all young Travellers are eager
to travell again. But I doubt whether
he consults his Preferment, or whether
he will be able to do any Good to, un
Enfant gate", as Graham is. Pray de-
sire him to write to me. I had rather
your Son might have the Advantage of
his Care, than of his Chambers.

I read no Prints. I know not whe-
ther we have a new King, or the old :
much less any thing of Barber. I did
not receive any Packet from you.
I am ever yr &c.

The 6 months are over, so the Dis-
coverer of the Draper will not get the
30011 as I am told. I hope the Parlm*
will do as they ought, in that matter,
which is the onely publick thing, I have
in my mind.

684

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

I hope you like Dr Delany's country
Place and am glad to find you among
such Acquaintances, especially such a
Person as he.

Swift was staying in Dr. Sheridan's
country retreat, " in a bleak spot among
the wildest of the Cavan heaths," about
fifty miles northwest of Dublin. He
was, as he wrote to Pope, finishing his
Gulliver's Travels. " The chief end I
propose to myself in all my labours is to
vex the world rather than divert it ; and
if I could compass that design without
hurting my own person or fortune I
would be the most indefatigable writer
you have ever seen."

His sight had been long failing.
Twelve years earlier he had told how
Vanessa

" Imaginary charms can find
In eyes with reading almost blind."

In some pretty lines to Stella on her
birthday he said : —

' ' For nature always in the right
To your decay adapts my sight ;
And wrinkles undistinguished pass,
For I 'm ashamed to use a glass ;
And till I see them with these eyes,
Whoever says you have them, lies."

On another birthday he wrote to her :

" This day then let us not be told
That you are sick and I grown old ;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills."

He would not let art remedy the fail-
ings of nature ; " for, having by some
ridiculous resolution, or mad vow, deter-
mined never to wear spectacles, he could
make little use of books in his latter
years."

The work which he was overseeing
was some improvements, at his own ex-
pense, on his friend's land, with which
he hoped to surprise him. Sheridan had
heard of what was going on, and on his
arrival took not the slightest notice of the
changes. " ' Confound your stupidity ; '
said Swift, in a rage ; ' why, you block-

head, don't you see the great improve-
ments I have been making here ? ' ' Im-
provements ! Mr. Dean,' and then he
went on to make nothing of them."

Swift in this letter says that " next to
Health a man's Fortune is the tenderest
Point." Three years earlier he had writ-
ten to Vanessa, " Remember that riches
are nine parts in ten of all that is good
in life, and health is the tenth."

The " Cursed Wall " he had built, at
a cost of £600, round a piece of ground
he called Naboth's vineyard, close to the
deanery house. " When the masons
played the knave," he wrote, "nothing
delighted me so much as to stand by
while my servants threw down what was
amiss."

The judgment in the House of Lords
was in the case of the Rev. Stafford
Lightburne, against some of Swift's cou-
sins. It reversed certain decrees of the
Irish Exchequer Court, and affirmed
others. It seems to have confirmed land
to Lightburne. Swift wrote to him con-
gratulating him on his success.

To Mr. Stopford, in a letter dated,
" Wretched Dublin, in miserable Ire-
land, Nov. 26, 1725," he wrote, " Come
home by Switzerland ; whence travel
blindfold till you get here, which is the
only way to make Ireland tolerable."
It is clear that he placed Switzerland on
much the same level as Ireland.

On the publication of the Drapier's
Fourth Letter, dated October 23, 1724, a
reward of £300 was offered for the dis-
covery of the author.

To Dr. Delany Swift addressed some
lines which begin : —

" To you whose virtues, I must own
With shame, I have too lately known ;
To you by art and nature taught
To be the man I long have sought."

XL.

July 10th 1725.

SB,— I had yrfl of the 10th and yr
former of earlye date. Can you ima-
gine there is anything in this Scene to
furnish a Letter ? I came here for no

A Game of /Solitaire.

685

other Purpose but to forget and to be
forgotten. I detest all News or Know-
ledge of how the World passes. I am
again with a Fitt of Deafness. The
Weather is so bad and continues so be-
yond any Example in memory, that I
cannot have the Beneffit of riding and
I am forced to walk perpetually in a
great Coat to preserve me from Cold
and wett, while I amuse myself with em-
ploying and inspecting Laborers digging
up and breaking Stones building dry
Walls, and cutting thro Bogs, and when
I cannot stir out, reading some easy
Trash merely to divert me. But if the
Weather does not mend, I doubt I shall
change my Habitation to some more re-
mote and comfortable Place, and there
stay till ye Parlm* is over, unless it sits
very late.

I send this directed as the former, not
knowing how to do better but I won-
der how you can continue in that Dirty

Town. I am told there is very little
Fruit in the Kingdom, and that I have
but 20 Apples where I expected 500 —
I hear Sale expected Harrison's whole
Estate, and is much disappointed. Har-
rison's Life and Death were of a piece
and are an Instance. added to Millions
how ridiculous a Creature is Man.

You agree with all my Friends in
complaining I do not write to them, yet
this goes so far that my averseness from
it in this Place has made me neglect
even to write on Affairs of great Conse-
quence to my Self.

I am yr most obd* &c.

" How ridiculous a Creature is Man "
Swift was at this time doing his best to
show in his Gulliver's Travels. In this
same year he described himself as " sit-
ting like a toad in the corner of his great
house, with a perfect hatred of all pub-
lic actions and persons."

George Birkbeck Hill.

A GAME OF SOLITAIRE.

THE lamp was lit, and the table drawn
close to the fire. In Florence, when the
tooth of December is set against the late
roses, a fire is a good thing. Elizabeth,
being an artist, was indulging herself in
the damp luxury of living in an old pa-
lazzo, up five flights of stone stairs, and
she tended her fire as if it were a shrine.
Elizabeth's family had a slight inclina-
tion toward rheumatism, which justified
her in the seeming luxury of a blaze.

Naturally, when Josephine Bromley
tapped out a Spanish fandango-sort-of
summons on the door, it cost Elizabeth,
knowing immediately who it was, a mo-
ment of regret to be obliged to admit so
unlooked-for and flighty a factor into her
orderly evening.

"It rains," announced Phenie, shed-
ding her wraps from her shoulders to the
floor, as if they had been autumn leaves
or detachable bits of bark that she had
done with. " It rains, and it is as dark
as Egypt, and you are a dear, Eliza-
beth ! " she said, making straight to the
fire and spreading out her thin hands
before it.

" And you are a disgraceful tramp,"
responded Elizabeth, with more than a
show of sincerity in her tone. " And be-
sides that, you only call me ' a dear ' be-
cause I happen to have common sense,
and a fire for you to hover over."

"Yes, that's true; and whatever
should we poor good-for-nothings do if
it were not for you heaven-born worthy
ones to look after us ? " and Phenie,
dropping to her knees, leaned forward

686

A Game of Solitaire.

in rapturous delight toward the blaze.
" Yes, you are the dearest of dears,
Elizabeth ! "

The " dearest of dears " looked scorn-
fully at the pile of wet wraps that lay by
the door, and made no response to this
flattery, but said, " I suppose, of course,
your feet are wet ? "

" Of course," admitted Phenie prompt-
ly, as she rose and held up one slim foot
after the other, shaking her head with
a look of disapprobation in her face, as
if her feet had been guilty of an indis-
cretion against her own supervision.

" And your cough does n't get any
better ? "

" Not any better at all," assented
Phenie in an alien, pitying tone which
she often used toward herself.

" You ought to be sent to an asylum,
or home," said Elizabeth, with asper-
ity.

" I should like to go home," mur-
mured Phenie plaintively, " if only to
see my little great-grandmother once
more."

Elizabeth sniffed. She thought she
knew all of Phenie's wiles of manner,
but she had never before heard of this
little great-grandmother that was so dear.
" I never heard you speak of your great-
grandmother before." The tone seemed
to convey a challenge.

"No, maybe not," said Phenie sweet-
ly ; " but you know I must have had
one."

" I suppose so. I never gave the
matter a thought before. You do with-
out so many things that most people
consider essential, I did not know what
your ideas might be as to grandmo-
thers."

" My great-grandmother must have
been very much like me when she was
young," Phenie went on meditatively.

" I wonder, then, that she ever lived
to have great-grandchildren." This was
said vengefully.

" Oh, she did n't ! She only lived to
have children."

" Then what in the name of common
sense are you sentimentalizing over, with
all this nonsense about going home to
see her ? "

" Why, I always go and visit her when
I am at home. She lies in a sunny, cosy
little graveyard on a hill. I love to go
there. She must have been delightful
when she was alive ! "

" Like yourself, Phenie, as you men-
tioned a few minutes ago."

" Did I say that ? Well, I am sure
she must have been much like me. In
the first place, she looks like me ; there
is a picture of her cut in the gray slate
headstone. She is represented as lying
in a pretty-shaped narrow coffin, and on
her arm is the child that died with her.
The inscription reads : ' In memory of
Josephine, the wife of Adoniram Hinton,
who departed this life December twenty-
sixth, 1785, in the thirtieth year of her
age. On her left arm lieth the infant
which died with her.' Just at this sea-
son, Elizabeth ; and is n't that a pretty
thought, — she and her baby asleep all
these years together ? "

" You are cheerful to-night, Phenie,"
was Elizabeth's only reply.

Phenie held up her flexible hands and
moved them rapidly from side to side
before her face, " to make oak leaves
out of the flames," she explained to
Elizabeth. Then, rising abruptly, she
caught up the guitar and waved it to
and fro, Spanish fashion, brushing her
fingers across it as it swung, making a
sort of breathing harmony, to which she
hummed an accompaniment in a high
voice which was thin but vibrant. She
was slender, almost meagre ; her dark
hair hung in wisps as it had dried after
being wet by the rain. It gave her an
elfish look, but, with all her uncanny
thinness and unexpectedness, there was a
fascination about her that baffled Eliza-
beth even more than did Phenie's faults,
for it seemed to ward off criticism ; and
it vexed Elizabeth that she could not be
more vexed at this wayward thing.

A Game of Solitaire.

687

Phenie never waited for other people's
moods to set the pace. She was quite
absorbed in her own guitar-swinging till
the air reminded her of another Spanish
song ; then she threw herself into a crisp
and saucy attitude, and broke into a bo-
lero that ended in a high shrill note, which
seemed to fill the room with matadors,
sefioritas, mantillas, and pomegranates,
also with love and treason.

" Carmen," said Elizabeth grimly,
" will you please tend to the fire ? "

But Phenie did not stop her singing.
Elizabeth put a fresh stick on the coals.
From where she sat she could see that
Phenie's dress was drawing wet hiero-
glyphics on the waxed floor. The dress
was very shabby, — a beggar-skirt, —
but worn with picturesque style.

" I am going to be married," abruptly
announced Phenie, still thrumming on the
guitar. " Yes, I remember now that is
what I came in to tell you. I knew there
was something I meant to speak of."

" And that is why you were so keen
to go and see your little great-grand-
mother who lives in the churchyard and
is so like you ! "

" Perfectly natural in me. I was won-
dering how she felt when she was en-
gaged to be married, — before she was
the wife of Adoniram Hinton and had
earned her little epitaph ! "

" Don't tell me, Phenie, that you are
going to marry Smith, — the dismal
Smith who ought never to have come
over here to ruin canvas ! He ought to
be back to-day in Vermont, helping his
father on the farm. He never will earn
enough to buy a bushel of potatoes by
art."

" Smithy ? Little Smithy ? Oh no !
He 's gone, you know, — gone away, dis-
appeared, nobody knows where. Paid
all his debts and disappeared, — impro-
vident fellow ! "

" Do you sleep well nights, Phenie,
with all your moral responsibilities ? "

" No, I don't sleep very well. I have
nightmares." This, again, in her grieved

and pitying tone. She was busy building
up a vast and comfortable nest near the
fire, and she did not seem to notice the
air of disapprobation that radiated from
Elizabeth.

Phenie's accessories always favored
her. That was one reason why it was
so hard to attach any ethical obligation
to her. Even her atmosphere defied one
to attribute responsibilities. Elizabeth
was almost the only person who ever
tried to, and she failed. She watched
her now as she propped up the cushions
against the copper brocca. This prov-
ing insecure, the fire-screen was tilted
back, the cushions were heaped up, and
into them sank Phenie, with a contented
"There!"

"I suppose, then," remarked Eliza-
beth, after a pause, " that you are going
to throw yourself away on that count
who has been dangling round wherever
you have been this fall. He is, if possi-
ble, one degree worse than Smith. Smith
was respectable."

" No, I could n't bring myself to mar-
ry the count. I tried to ; really I d'd,"
replied Phenie, as if hoping that Eliza-
beth would condone her failure in view
of her efforts.

" The only other alternative is, then,
an old, rich man. You have sold your-
self."

" Never ! Elizabeth, I am pained.
This is an old friend of my mother's."

" I knew it," said Elizabeth deject-
edly. " I knew it would be, of course,
some one who was shiftless, bad, or rich
and old."

" An old friend of my mother's,"
went on Phenie undisturbedly. " I met
him years and years ago in America,
when mother was living. He came to
see us, and he took a great fancy to me.
I was only a child then ; besides, he had
a wife," added she, with one of her sud-
den smiles that always exasperated Eliz-
abeth ; they meant so much or so little,
according to the next remark. Phenie's
smile always left one feeling that how-

688

A Game of Solitaire.

ever it was construed, the opposite would
be found to be true.

" Now his wife is dead, and he wants
to marry me," continued Phenie.

" Where have you been seeing him ? "

"That's part of the fun of it. I
have n't been seeing much of him. We
have mostly corresponded."

" Oh ! " groaned Elizabeth.

" We shall be married in January,"
Phenie went on, " here in Florence. He
lives in London, but he will go to Amer-
ica to live if I want him to, — or any-
where else, for that matter. I am get-
ting my trousseau ready. I bought a
dear, delightful brass kettle to-day, —
big and so comfortable-looking."

Elizabeth laughed in spite of her in-
dignation. " I suppose you will have
towers and domes and frescoes in your
trousseau ; they would be so useful in
America."

" I did buy a Madonna to-day," said
Phenie impressively, raising herself and
clasping her knees with her thin, enthu-
siastic fingers, " a real old cracked Ma-
donna, with the loveliest little Christus
you ever saw. I cleaned it off with my
own fingers. I worked for hours over
it. I rubbed off all the old sticky var-
nish (Smithy taught me how just before
he disappeared, poor dear !), and then I
steamed it over an alcohol bath, and the
cracks all drew together, and then I
varnished it freshly, and now it is my
own beautiful Madonna, — all my own !
And I am going to buy a hundred-franc
frame for it. I paid — just think, Eliz-
abeth, and don't scold — I paid five hun-
dred francs for the picture alone. Oh,
is n't it glorious to be rich ! "

Elizabeth looked at the frayed bot-
tom of Josephine's dress, and her whole-
some common sense revolted against
this mothlike creature's burning its wings
in the awful to be.

" Phenie," said she, " either don't tell
me any more of your doings, or else let
me advise you. You will ruin yourself.
How dare you spend five hundred francs

for anything, — anything except actual
necessities ? And where are you to get
your bread and butter if this thing falls
through ? "

" ' This thing,' as you curiously call my
engagement, is not going to fall through ;
and besides, I never did care much for
bread and butter; and so, just for once
in my life, I am going to spend every
cent I have, or can get hold of, and I
am going to spend it for luxuries, and I
am going to enjoy it. Now to-morrow,"
said she, as she picked up her wet wraps
and surveyed them at arm's length with
loathing, " to-morrow I shall buy myself
a fur wrap, long, ample, and exclusive,
with a dash of the sumptuous to it. No,
Elizabeth, you may save your sermon ;
I am going now to be happy and look
rich. Later I shall be rich and look
happy."

A week later, Phenie's vivacious face
blossomed above a fur wrap whose col-
lar just revealed her pink ears. She
looked both rich and happy.

" Elizabeth," said Phenie, a few days
after she had announced her engagement,
" would you have dreamed that one
could actually buy and have and hold for-
ever, for one's very own, a great splen-
did cathedral lamp, that has been burn-
ing for nobody knows how many cen-
turies, before some saint ? Well, believe
it or not, I 've done it, and I am going
to try to live up to it, — in spiritual faith
and constancy, you know. I shall have
it hung right over my dressing-table when
I get settled in my new home in America.
I mean to put every scrap that I have
collected here in Italy in my own room,
so that I shall never forget how happy
I have been here, — here in the land of

joy!"

" When is your fiance* coming ? "
" Oh, to - morrow, or yesterday, or
some time. You see, he was to have come

A Game of Solitaire.

689

last week, but it fell through, all along o'
some sister of his. Elizabeth, he is rich,
actually rich ! It is almost ridiculous,
my marrying a rich man."

" Quite," was the short reply. " Do
y<5u love him ? "

" Of course I do ! What a question !
Only — well, I do not mind confiding to
you, dear, that I am just a little disap-
pointed to find he does n't seem to care
one bit about Madonnas. He says they
are all trash and bigotry, and I am
afraid he is too old to change. I wrote
to him yesterday that he must try to
look at Madonnas as purely decorative.
I am hoping that that will appeal to
him."

" Phenie, you are intolerable ! You
don't deserve to be happy. You are too
shallow for anything. I wish something
could make you serious ! "

" Why, Elizabeth ! I thought you,
of all people, would look on marriage as
serious. Why, my dear, just being en-
gaged has utterly changed me. I have
become conventional. I don't even think
of going out shopping without a maid,
and you must remember how I used to
roam about. The other day when I went
to meet Mr. Griffith, I took Adela along,
— truly I did."

" Meet him ? Meet Mr. Griffith ?
When and where have you been meet-
ing him ? "

" Why, I meant to tt-ti you that he was
to have been here last Friday. He wrote
that he would arrive by the eleven-thirty
train, — in the morning, you know. We
were all ready for him to breakfast with
us. Such a pretty salad ! — all green and
gold ; I arranged it myself in my old
majolica bowl, with lots of flowers and
fixings. Then came a telegram saying
that he must hurry right through Florence
on an earlier train, so as to meet his sis-
ter, who had been very ill somewhere
in Egypt, and was on her way to Naples.
He arranged it for me to meet him at
the train ; and then he begged me to go
on with him as far as that place with

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 44

the queer name, where they meet the in-
coming train from Rome, you know. Of
course I went. Sister Maggie could n't
go ; I would n't let her go to the station
with me, but I took Adela, and put her
in the second-class compartment. And
I did have a perfect dream of a time !
Oh, Elizabeth, is n't joy easy to bear ?
And I know I looked well in my fur
cloak ! "

" How old is Mr. Griffith ? "

" Oh, I am sure I don't know, — some
tedious age, I suppose ; there is nothing
so tedious as age. We ought 'to begin
at the other end and wind up as babies ;
I have always thought so."

" Some of us do."

" Oh, if you mean me — I am old,
old, old ! " Phenie did look a little with-
ered and tired for the moment.

This was on a Sunday afternoon near
the end of December. She had dropped
in to dine with Elizabeth, as was her
wont on Sundays. It was the habit of
the "boys," as they called the American
art students, to call for them later in the
afternoon and take them for long -.valks
or to the picture-galleries.

" Miss Josephine looks like a dove to-
day,"'remarked the tall Johnson to Eliza-
beth, as they strolled through the Boboli
Gardens.

" A dove ? " said Elizabeth question-
ingly. She was apt to see things in an
ethical light, and it was not without an
effort that she disassociated looking and
being.

" Yes. You see she has on all the
colors, graded from gray to soft fawn,
and capped by that iridescent thing
round her neck. Her head moves above
it just like a dove's head."

" Methinks it is a cat," said Steinway,
who prided himself on being rude.

Elizabeth, who was loyal, resented
this. " I wonder," said she, " how any
one dares to speak of a woman as if she
were a piece of bric-a-brac, a picture, or
an animal ? "

" Oh, now, Miss Dunning, don't be too

A Game, of Solitaire.

hard. We fellows don't mean anything,
you know. It is only so-called artistic
slang."

" And really," joined in Anderson,
" it is curious, Miss Elizabeth, but one
does get to looking even at one's friends
as if they were posing. Just see Miss Jo-
sephine now, — how she flattens out into
a fresco against that white wall, in full
sunlight. Why,, if I painted her so, the
donkeys who write the art criticisms would
say I had filched from the old frescoes.
But would n't it make a sensation in the
Salon if I could only hit it off ! " An-
derson was young.

" Do you know," drawled Spellman to
Elizabeth, " when Miss Bromley sings
with her guitar, Spanish fashion, I reg-
ularly fall deeply in love with — some
one else ! "

" I wonder who ? " thought Elizabeth.
She only said, " Let us walk faster,
please." That was almost the only
time she did not know exactly what she
wanted.

Bragdon, " the Baltimore Oriole," as
he was popularly called, — he was very
dashing, and inclined to a bit of flame-
color in his cravat, — was walking with
Phenie, and saying impressively : " I
don't know what I shall do for the dra-
matic element when you go away from
here. It will cost us fellows a heap of
money for theatre tickets, to keep us
amused then, and it won't be half so ar-
tistic."

" You can go to church for nothing,"
said the dove, with serenity.

Soon after this Sunday, Maggie,
Phenie's sister, came in for a long talk
with Elizabeth. She had been so busy
with all the shopping and the making
up of Josephine's wardrobe that she was
brimming over with bottled-up emotions.
Besides that, nobody who knew Elizabeth
ever considered any undertaking fully
begun or done without having had it out
with her.

" You never in all your life knew any
one so utterly generous as Phenie is,"

began Maggie ; " and what do you think
she has just done ? She says she will
have money enough after her marriage,
so she has not only made over to me her
half of the farm down in Kennebunk,
but she has actually sent over to the
savings - bank and drawn out all her
money, and has given me five hundred
dollars ! She won't have a cent left af-
ter she has paid for all her dresses and
for all those queer things she dotes on
so much. I tell her she is no Chris-
tian, but a perfect heathen in her tastes.
She only laughs ; she does nothing but
laugh and sing nowadays. Why, Eliza-
beth, the brass things alone that she has
bought would fill a ship, I should think ;
and they smell so brassy ! Besides that,
she has bought a lot of inlaid chairs and
tables and things. I really don't know
as I ought to tell you, if she has n't al-
ready ; but you know all about that Ital-
ian count who wanted to marry her ?
Well, he failed (he was a gambler ;
is n't it awful ?), he failed, and then shot
himself ; and now Phenie has gone and
bought up most of his old furniture at
auction or of some dealer. She says
that it has a sentiment for her, and that
she is so grateful to have had the dance
without paying the piper. I never half
understand her, and I can't imagine how
we ever came to be born in the same
family. But you must come over and see
Phenie's clothes. Every dress is copied
from some old picture, and she has no
end of old beads and jewelry. I feel
as if I were living in a dream. I almost
dread to wake up. And to think — in
a month it will all be over ! "

" I should suppose Mr. Griffith would
remember that you too are the daughter
of his old friend."

" Yes," assented Maggie vaguely ;
" but it is n't as if he had seen me."

" To be candid with you, Maggie "
(as if, given half a chance, Elizabeth
could ever have been anything but can-
did), "what puzzles me is that Mr. Grif-
fith dared to think of marrying so young

A Game of Solitaire.

691

a girl as Phenie. And if he wanted to,
why did n't he come down to Florence
and get acquainted with her first ? He
must be nearly twice as old as she."

" Do you know, Elizabeth, it seems
queer to me, but he does n't look so very
old. I know he must be ; he can't be
as young as he looks. I 've been over
it again and again in my mind, and he
can't be less than sixty, but he does n't
look thirty-five."

" Oh, you 've seen him, then ! " Eliz-
abeth had a momentary sense of relief,
immediately followed, however, by an
uncomfortable feeling that at last Phenie
was caught in a fib, for she certainly
had said several times that Maggie had
not seen Mr. Griffith.

Maggie hurried to say, " No, I have
n't seen him, but Phenie has his photo-
graph on her dressing-table. She puts
fresh violets before it every day. His
picture does not look old. Phenie is
twenty-three, you know, and I am twen-
ty-seven, and mother would have been
fifty-seven if she had lived." (Maggie
knew to a day just how old everybody
was ; that was her strong point, — al-
most her only one.) " Now if mother
would have been fifty-seven, he must be
older ; but he does n't look anything like
it. He is handsome, too."

A thousand little doubts were assail-
ing Elizabeth, each one so small that it
took a whole swarm of them to make a
cloud thick enough to be palpable ; but
the cloud was getting somehow like a
gray mist before her mind's eye.

" Miss Bromley has an aptitude for
her future role of great lady," said Spell-
man to Elizabeth one day. " Do you
know what she has just done ? She has
bought Bragdon's Arno by Moonlight,
and he is so grateful he cannot speak
of it without — well, doing what, if he
were a girl, we should call crying ; and
he is the most undemonstrative fellow
in the world. He means to stay over
here . for three more months of study.
It will be the making of him."

" Good Lord ! " said Elizabeth under
her breath. All at once she had a vi-
sion of Phenie as she had appeared that
night when she came in wet, nervous,
and willful, and announced her engage-
ment to Mr. Griffith, while she twanged
on her guitar, her shabby gown dripping
with rain ; and now, only a few weeks
later, she was buying pictures, playing
fairy godmother to Bragdon.

Elizabeth's face was a study. Spell-
man answered what he thought he read
in it, and said, " Oh, she 's all right.
She is going to marry money, is n't she ?
I don't mean, of course, marrying for
money. Marrying money and marrying
for money are very different things."

" Yes, it 's different from marrying
for money," assented Elizabeth gravely.

All the same, that night she took out
her bank-book, and made a long and
careful computation. " For," said she
aloud, as good people will who live much
alone, and whose imaginations need the
reinforcement of words, " for, as sure
as guns, I shall have to use something
soon for friendship's sake. I feel anaky
about Phenie. I can't help it, — I feel
very shaky."

III.

Phenie was ready to be married, —
gowns, brass kettles, Madonnas, and all.
She looked a trifle worn, but she was in
the gayest of spirits, and more full than
ever of her vagaries. She was either
exasperatingly gentle after doing the
most reprehensible things, or else sweet-
ly contrary ; always being of the opposite
mood, whatever was expected. She gave
teas and lunches at her rooms, where her
new artistic belongings created the im-
pression of the fifteenth century having
kaleidoscoped with the nineteenth.

Every day she had some new and gro-
tesquely inappropriate possession to ex-
ploit, ofttimes bemoaning her inability
to buy the little iron Devil that presided
over the market-place, — alas that it was

692

A Game of Solitaire.

not for sale ! That alone, she declared,
would be worth more to her than all her
Madonnas.

Josephine was quite the sensation of
Florence at this time, and it agreed won-
derfully well with her.

One night Elizabeth was summoned
suddenly by a wide-eyed Italian maid,
with more emotion than power of speech.
She brought a slip of paper from Jose-
phine's sister Maggie, saying, " Come at
once; Phenie is very ill." More than
this could not be gathered from the maid,
whose Neapolitan dialect was beyond
the range of Elizabeth's studies.

Maggie stood shivering by the door
when they reached her apartment. She
was haggard with distress. " Mr. Grif-
fith is dead," said she, "and I think
Phenie will die too ! What shall I do ?
She had a letter this afternoon from his
sister in London. He died suddenly,
and — Oh, Elizabeth, this is the awaken-
ing ! Phenie is almost crazy. She faint-
ed away when she read the letter. She
had been restless and excited all day, as
if she felt that something was going to
happen ; and she dropped down in a
heap on the floor with the letter in her
hand. Afterwards she laughed and cried
horribly. I was afraid of her. I sent
for the doctor, and he could n't do any-
thing with her till he gave her something
to put her to sleep ; and even now she
starts and calls out. I know she will
die ! What shall I do ? " And poor
Maggie laid her head on Elizabeth's
shoulder, and had the first cry that she
had found time for since the news had
come.

While Elizabeth tried to comfort her,
she herself was going through a certain
self-chastisement. She was blaming her-
self for not feeling the grief of the cir-
cumstances more sympathetically, more
spontaneously. She was sorry enough
for the sobbing Maggie, but there was
not that whole - souled oneness in her
sympathy for the two desolated sisters
that she felt there ought to be. " I won-

der," she thought, " if I have been or-
derly and methodical so long that I have
left no room for the expansions of pity."
And worse than the distrust of her capa-
city for sympathy was the black swarm of
doubts, which had increased so that they
made a cloud in her brain through which
Phenie and her dramatic troubles looked
farcical and unreal. She seemed to see
herself going through some grotesque
drama, at the bottom of which there was
no reality.

To Maggie, however, there was no un-
reality, either in Phenie's illness, called
by the doctor a " nervous collapse," or
in their financial position. The five
hundred dollars so generously bestowed
upon her by Phenie had long ago melted
down to less than a third ; and in the
days that followed, the remaining por-
tion melted like the snow on Monte Mo-
rello.

Life was very real to Maggie. Phenie's
health mended slowly, and their finances
not at all. Doctors' bills, tradesmen's
bills, and all the little luxuries of sickness
sucked their slender stream dry. One
new expense, as Phenie recovered, threat-
ened to bring them to utter and irretriev-
able ruin. Phenie was obliged to be out
for hours driving in the Cascine, where,
wrapped in her gray rabbits' fur cloak,
with roses tucked in near her pale face,
she received the admiring pity of the vol-
uble Italians who had followed in every
detail the poor signorina's drama.

It was now March, and Elizabeth
came to a decision. Action followed al-
ways immediately on her decisions. She
spent several hours in writing a letter.
This letter was addressed to Mr. J. C.
Griffith. After writing it she inclosed
it in another carefully worded letter to
her bankers in London, asking them to
forward it to Mr. J. C. Griffith, if it
were possible to obtain that gentleman's
address ; also asking them, as a favor,
to write a letter to him themselves, in-
troducing her, as she was consulting
him on/^ matter of importance, but had

A Game of Solitaire.

693

not the honor of an acquaintance with
him.

She received a letter in reply from
her bankers, stating that they had de-
livered the letter to J. C. Griffith, Esq.,
who happened to be well known to them,
having been for many years a customer
of theirs, so that there was no delay in
transmitting the letter, with one of intro-
duction as requested.

Then Elizabeth waited ; and while
she waited she tided over the affairs of
the two sisters in her usual orderly,
methodical, and practical manner ; but
she did not think it necessary to tell
them that she had written to J. C. Grif-
fith, Esq., and that she awaited with
deep interest a letter from him. Occa-
sionally she thanked Heaven devoutly
that she knew what she wanted, and was
practical enough to get it.

Her letter to Mr. Griffith had been a
plain and full statement of the affairs of
the two Bromley sisters, including all
she knew of Phenie's engagement. She
began by asking if the Mr. Griffith she
was now addressing was the Mr. J. C.
Griffith who had formerly been a friend
of Mrs. Bromley's in America, saying :
" If you are that friend, the following
circumstances are of importance to you.
Assuming that you are, I will give them
to you as I see them, and I hope that
you may help me in my efforts to send
the two daughters back to America."
She told him that early in the winter Jo-
sephine had announced her engagement
to a Mr. J. C. Griffith, an old friend of
her mother's, and that several weeks had
been passed in preparing for the mar-
riage ; also, that all the fortune of the two
girls had been spent. She explained to
him that in some adroit manner, either
by accident or by design, no one but Jo-
sephine had ever seen Mr. Griffith, and
the engagement had ostensibly been ar-
ranged by letter ; and that this engage-
ment had been suddenly and shockingly
broken off by the news of the death of
Mr. Griffith, communicated to Josephine

by the sister of the man, also by letter.
She went on to tell him how ill Josephine
had been and still was, and ended by
saying : " The whole affair is to me a
matter of confusion and, I frankly say,
mystery. It is, however, borne in upon
me that the Mr. Griffith to whom Jose-
phine was or was supposed to be engaged
was not the old friend of her mother's,
and, acting on that impression, I write
to put the matter in your hands. If
you are that friend, will you aid the
daughters on their way to America, and
may I let you know when they pass
through London ? As to what you may
think it is your duty to do in unraveling
the mystery that surrounds the use of
your name in the tragedy of Josephine's
life, that is a matter outside of my pow-
er to suggest. I need not tell you that
they do not know of my intercession with
you on their behalf. On the receipt of
your answer to this, I shall do as .circum-
stances dictate in the matter of making
known to them how I came into commu-
nication with you."

One day a letter came to Elizabeth
from J. C. Griffith. He avowed himself
to be the one who had been honored as
the friend of Mrs. Bromley, " the most
beautiful and fascinating woman I ever
met or expect to meet." He said that he
remembered Josephine as giving promise
to be much like her mother, and that
nothing in the world could exceed his
delight in putting himself at their (he
had fii'st written " her," and then sub-
stituted " their ") service. He added :
" Miss Josephine inspires me with great
interest. In her, evidently, a trace of
the mother lives, oven in the aptitude
of her feet for somewhat tangled paths.
I am proud to be of service to her."

" Good gracious ! " said Elizabeth,
" I 've fixed it now. The old fool will
marry Phenie. as sure as my name is
Elizabeth Dunning ! "

And he did marry Phenie Bromley in
just three months after he met her in
London.

694

The Coming Literary ^Revival.

It was a long time before Elizabeth
could make herself write to Josephine
after receiving an erratic little note from
her announcing her happy engagement
to Mr. J. C. Griffith, without a single
reference to the past, or a single expla-
nation of who this Mr. Griffith was.
And when Elizabeth did write, it could
hardly be called a congratulatory letter.
In fact, it read : — -

"Phenie Bromley, will you tell me

whose photograph you had standing on

your dressing-table here in Florence,

framed in old ivory and silver, before

which you put fresh violets every day ? "

And Phenie answered by return mail :

" Why, Elizabeth, you dear old thing,

that was only a card that I used in my

game of solitaire ! Yours,

PHENIE BROMLEY GRIFFITH."
Madelene Tale Wynne.

THE COMING LITERARY REVIVAL.

IT is said that the age of genius in
literature, like the age of miracles in re-
ligious history, is past. A daring Ger-
man critic of the last generation declared
that the world no longer required a great
poet after Goethe, and even ventured to
set up a system by which poetry of the
first order could be produced as if by
machinery. Another philosopher, a man
of wide fame, has maintained that the
process of reducing all human nature to
the level of comfortable mediocrity is
already so far advanced that a time can
be predicted when art will be for all men
what the stage farce of an evening is now
for the weary man of business. These
are doubtless extreme views, but they are
not without mild support in the words
that escape more cautious writers. They
indicate, at all events, that there is rea-
son for doubt as to the future of letters,
as well as room for the discussion of se-
rious questions.

These questions belong, perhaps, to
the domain of science rather than to that
of the literary essayist. Scientific men
have already shown interest in the matter
by their investigations concerning the he-
redity of genius, concerning the relation
between genius and insanity, and by
varied psychological studies. If these

aspects of the subject be left to those com-
petent to depict them, there still remain
problems of historical evolution, to solve
which may lead, not to the origin of
genius in the individual, but to a general
law governing its opportunities.

Grant to those who assert it that there
have been mute, inglorious Miltons, then
the alternative between genius silent and
genius vocal must be one of historical
necessity. The man of genius is the pro-
duct of an inevitable evolution. It is
easy to say this and to believe it in the
light of prevalent scientific opinions. It
is not so easy to illustrate it. There can
be, this side of Milton's chaos, nothing
more confused or meaningless than the
history of the world's literature estimated
as a gradual process, step by step, toward
perfection. The endless activity satirized
by the Hebrew maxim-maker is lighted
here and there by the glow of creative
power ; all the rest is a dull glimmer as
of subterranean gnomes or cabiri busy at
their forges. Criticism misleads because
there is a deceitful brilliance about the
achievements of one's own age. They
are too near to be properly viewed. This
lack of perspective may be corrected in
some degree by the effort to imagine
how contemporary or very recent writers
will look to people one hundred or three
hundred or a thousand years hence. In

The Coming Literary Revival.

695

this way the inind may forecast the ac-
tual processes of history similar to those
by which the settled literary verdicts of
the past have been reached.

There are some points in literary his-
tory about which there can be no dis-
pute. For example, the world has not
made a step forward in epic since the
time of Homer ; it has not improved
the drama since Shakespeare ceased to
write ; it has not bettered the novel, un-
less morally, since Fielding laid down
the pen ; it has not surpassed Chaucer in
humorous narrative verse, nor Petrarch
in sonnet, nor Dante in philosophic satire,
nor Milton in expressing the emotion of
the infinite, nor Goethe in the power of
impersonating an epoch. There is no
possibility of comparing these writers
among themselves, or of saying from the
purely literary criteria which they give
whether the world advanced from Homer
to Goethe, or went backward in that
long interval. Men of the highest genius
stand separate from one another. It
cannot be said of any one of these crea-
tive minds that he was greater than the
rest. The standard by which they are
to be measured is new in each case,
and there is no gradation from one to
the next. It is true of some, at least,
with whom history has made us familiar,
that they stand at the apex in a group
where the rise and fall in power of
thought and observation can be traced.
All that is decipherable in the way of
direct evolution in literature can be seen
most distinctly in the Elizabethan drama,
where there is a manifest increase of
skill and power from the rude, inchoate
mediaeval forms of histrionic art until
the climax is reached, followed by a de-
clension, with occasional sallies of bril-
liant wit and high technical skill ; and
this declension has lasted to the present
day, with no signs of a recurrence to any-
thing like the profound thought, the in-
sight into human nature, the deep origi-
nality of Shakespeare. The conditions,
national and international, which envi-

roned Shakespeare have often been de-
scribed. It took a world to make him, and
the forces of a world were really turned
upon the England of his time. But his
case is not solitary. It is noteworthy
that, with all the toil of the literary rank
and file of a race, the crowning genius
never emerges without an external shock
and pressure and strain which force him
to his place, and unite the nation as it
were under his feet. Whether this shock
be delivered in war, as has most frequent-
ly been the case in the past, or in less
violent ways, it is indispensable'. Look
over the lives of men of acknowledged
genius and see if there can be found one
who truly created his own opportunity.

Meanwhile, another line of instances
deserves inspection. Apparently a rela-
tion of antecedent and consequent, more
rarely of cause and effect, exists between
the rise of systems of philosophy and the
outbreak of national literary enthusiasm
in which genius becomes active. To
each age, to every century, belongs a
philosophy peculiar to itself. The ten-
dencies of one age, though they ^esult
from the thinking and doing of its prede-
cessors, are its own. They give rise to
new thoughts and to new problems, and
the first to attack the new problems or
to utter the new thoughts are the philo-
sophers of the new time. For this rea-
son, philosophy, like literature, moves to-
ward what must be deemed its ultimate
goal, not by a steady advance, but by ir-
regular approaches. It may even seem
to recede at times, and at other times to
be motionless and dead. It cannot tran-
scend the processes of civilization, and,
like literature again, it has for its back-
ground the general history of culture.
It has no other problems than those
which arouse and embarrass man and so-
ciety at a given time, and no material for
the solution of these problems except
what lies in the general consciousness of
the time. Scientific discovery, religious
awakening, artistic creativeness, social
and political unrest, are fruitful in new

696

The Coming Literary Revival.

impulses for philosophy, and they deter-
mine the outlines of its task, though not
of its achievement. Where the relation
between the various factors of human
life, individual, social, political, and the
philosophy to which they appeal is sim-
ple, the latter is just the expression of the
knowledge which the age has- of itself.
This was never better evinced than in
the eclecticism of Cicero, which was the
forerunner of the still more elegant lit-
erary eclecticism of Virgil and Horace.
On the other hand, an age in which
the forces of culture are divergent can
find its philosophic expression only in
the strife of opinions. In this case civ-
ilization fosters the growth of systems
of thought which, specious as they are
at first glance, are soon seen to be mere
makeshifts. But these sports of phi-
losophy are of the highest value in un-
raveling the history of literature, for it
is they that presage by their eccentrici-
ties the special phases of intuition and
fantasy for which mankind in general is
at the moment keeping the sharpest out-
look. The more permanent forms of
philosophy, since they are deeply imbued
with the individuality of their origina-
tors, or with some quality to which that
name is given for lack of a better, and
because they are effective in long reaches
of time, find little response in the hearts
of the contemporary multitude. In any
case, owing to the mutability of human
affairs, to the mere fact that men grow
old, the conditions in which a philoso-
phy germinates are not those surround-
ing it at its completion. Its own influ-
ence on its votaries and opponents has
precluded such uniformity. It has put
in words aspirations that were latent.
It has formulated thoughts that were
strange and foreign to the age just de-
parted, but which seem as familiar as
their own perceptions to men who have
grown to maturity with it. Tendencies
too slight for general observation a little
while ago have become dominant, and
because the philosopher felt them first,

he said, no doubt awkwardly and pedan-
tically, what others must say after him
with such smoothness as they can attain,
until final expression is reached in the
words of a master in literature. Or,
again, the tendencies in a philosophy,
becoming the tendencies of an age, pro-
duce results which imperatively demand
expression even in those forms of litera-
ture to which philosophy is abhorrent.
Thus the process is one in which the
thinker leads, and the poet follows ; and
this is fit, for after the true poet what is
there to say ? Study of the successive
revivals of the literary spirit in the his-
tory of the world — we are forbidden to
amass details — will show that philoso-
phy gropes first in the environment which
genius comes later to light up and to in-
habit.

In such a study of philosophical move-
ments care must be given to the limits of
the inference. There are cases, for ex-
ample that of Dante, where philosophical
development stands to a given literary
phenomenon as cause to effect. This is
not usual. Were it possible to prove so
much, it would not be necessary. What
is required is to show that in the whole
series of important literary instances
there was a significant philosophical fore-
running which presaged the advent of
genius. This anticipatory stir of minds,
however, is not a cause, but an effect of
conditions which prepared the way for
what was to come. It revealed the sen-
sitiveness of men of thought to obscure
tendencies which could become manifest
and clear only in the man of intuition,
the poet, the artist, the dramatist, or the
romancer. Now, the moment this effort
is made to trace the relationship between
philosophy and literature, it dawns upon
one that beneath and above the chaotic
perturbations, the renascence and deca-
dence of learning, there is, after all, a
unity in the aspirations of the highest
genius. Consciously or unconsciously, it
must strive to utter, not a mere individual
thought, nor the thought of a nation, but

The Coming Literary Revival.

697

the characteristic thought of humanity
at the time.

Since history hegan, this thought has
always been cleft in two. The East
thinks one way, the West another, and
no single mind has yet been able to grasp
this divided thought in its entirety and to
express it in its primeval oneness. Nev-
ertheless, all the great poets of the West
and nearly all the great philosophers have
felt themselves confronted by this pro-
foundest of all Eastern Questions. It is
the sole reason for the existence of Ho-
mer and Herodotus. It causes Virgil to
turn his epic into a romance. It is the
very crux in Dante's science of history
and in Milton's theology. It complicates
for Shakespeare the characters of Othello
and Shylock, and it adds one at least to
the puzzles in Goethe's Faust. It stirs in
the most significant myths of Plato. It
is exorcised by Aristotle with a Pecksnif-
fian wave of the hand toward his semi-
Oriental predecessors, only to return su-
preme in neo-Platonism. It furnishes the
problems on which -Scholasticism goes to
pieces. It answers Descartes with Spi-
noza, and Locke with Berkeley. At the
very last, it is conspicuous by its absence
from the aims of Kant. He stumbles
over it in the literature of thought which
it is his task to reduce to a critical unity,
but he ignores it. In short, he gives lit-
tle or no premonition, not even such as
is manifest in Goethe's West - Eastern
Divan, of phases of intellectual activity
that were to be of absorbing interest
within a few decades after his death.
This was all the more remarkable be-
cause the so-called Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century had unveiled once
for all the cosmopolitan character of lit-
erary and philosophical effort at its best.
But the Enlightenment was too artificial,
too much constrained by rule, to exem-
plify its own teaching. A reaction was
inevitable, and yet no reaction would
re to put the world back into the un-
consciousness that had once been broken.
Thenceforth genius must achieve what it

could, in the full knowledge that its task
was to recast the whole of the world's
thought.

The proclamation of this fact almost
in so many words, toward the close of
the eighteenth century, resounded arro-
gantly in Germany. Still, it was not ar-
rogance. It was the settled conviction
of men who knew themselves capable of
great achievement. Nevertheless, the lit-
erature which they produced was, taken
as a whole, mainly a presage of the fu-
ture. The Oriental side of civilization is
meagrely set forth by the best of them.
What they accomplished was to bring
all the literary motives, just as Kant
brought all the philosophical motives, of
the European past to clear presentation
on a single canvas, so to speak, with every-
thing in fair perspective. Greece, Rome,
the Middle Ages, and the beginnings of
modern life are seen in Faust; while
there is only a hint here and there of
the other phases of human activity be-
yond the horizon of Hellenism. The
most noteworthy instance is the charac-
ter of Lynceus in the Helena. There
the Orientalism is vivid enough, but it
is the Orientalism of those wild races
which almost destroyed antique culture
before they learned its value. In this
meagreness of conception as regards the
oldest and most stable aspects of hu-
manity lies the refutation of those who
say that after Goethe mankind no longer
requires a transcendent poetic genius.
When a voice as round and full as that
of Dante shall speak for all the earth
and all the ages, as Dante spoke for one
great period, then the hope of further
artistic and poetic achievement may be
abandoned.

A common, perhaps an incorrect opin-
ion is that the world is now passing
through one of the comparatively dull
periods in its literary history. The al-
leged decadence, it is said, pervades all
European civilization. Yet the age is
prolific enough. The censure is merely
that its productions never rise above

698

The Coming Literary Revival.

diocrity when measured in the scale of
genius, though to this censure is added
by some a curious array of pathologi-
cal conjectures. If this generation had
been the first to be criticised in this way,
the cry of decadence might fill one with
melancholy forebodings. The fact is
that these prosaic intervals are the rule,
and the visits of genius to the world the
rare exception. , For example, an acute
though academic critic has pointed out
that the drama has bloomed in perfection
only twice since history began to be re-
corded ; but this remark has nothing to
do with the fact that there are at this
moment more playwrights on earth than
ever before at any given time since Eu-
ripides retired to his cave.

The cavilers must acknowledge that
certain fields of literary endeavor were
never better cultivated than they are
now. Some of these lie in the realm
where profound learning, acute and pa-
tient observation, and minutely attentive
thought supply the place of genius. They
produce often works that deserve perma-
nent fame on account of excellence of
style. But usually style is a secondary
affair with specialists. The incessant
outpour of books, monographs, and arti-
cles on scientific topics which has been
in progress for many years, and bids fair
to continue for a long time to come, re-
sembles the deluge of theological and
philosophical treatises in the mediaeval
centuries and at the era of the Reforma-
tion. Deeply interesting as these tomes
were to the men for whom they were
written, they are now useless except to
a few investigators. A similar fate
awaits the scientific libraries of this day,
when results which are now the aim of
patient effort shall be part of the expe-
rience of humanity.

Not merely in this respect does mod-
ern life seem to have entered upon a
period mediaeval in its analogies. For
instance, fiction has been marvelously
compressed and shortened of late.
Looking back over literary history since

the first days of printing, one finds that
the abbreviating process has been very
gradual. The massive romances of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave
way slowly to the less heroic narrative
with more study of character in fewer
words, and this to something better and
shorter, and so on, until the short story

— one episode of life beautifully told,
every character clearly drawn, every
word fitly chosen, every sentence care-
fully modeled for its place with the rest

— has become the most charming of mod-
ern literary products. It is character-
istic of modern life — that is, since the
Enlightenment — that this result has
been attained by conscious effort, though
accompanied with an uneasy feeling that
the world will never see long novels
again as good as those of Fielding and
Thackeray. In less conscious fashion
and in ruder forms this alternation be-
tween the short story and the long novel
has been observed in past times, and the
short story has always been a marked
feature of an age that was looking out
for something larger than it had in hand,
and something at least different from
what it recognized as great in the past.
The age of the short story has also been
the age of the polished minor poet, whe-
ther he wrote social idyls in Alexandria,
Latin goliards in a mediaeval monastery,
songs of love in a Provencal castle, or
stanzas and sonnets for a modern maga-
zine.

There are short stories and little po-
ems which will live forever ; but, on the
whole, these two classes in literary art
lack seriousness, if considered as an end
in themselves. They are characteristic
of a tentative, a waiting age. The Mid-
dle Ages were a time of waiting for the
great work that was bound to come.
This work, when it came, was a revela-
tion of new form in poesy. The laws
of classic verse were broken and new
laws enforced by a triumphant example.
The present, too, is an age of waiting.
The recurrent question, Who is to write

The Coming Literary Revival.

699

the great American novel, or the great
American drama, or the great American
epic ? is one which has been asked and
answered with all degrees of uncertain-
ty. It may never be answered in terms.
The American who is to be reckoned the
peer of Dante and Shakespeare may have
to perfect a form of literature now un-
dreamed of, to which the novel as we
know it will be as foreign as the epic or
the drama. Besides, this much-desider-
ated American may never emerge from
the obscurity of mute, inglorious Milton-
hood, if the following tentative outline
of the opportunities of genius is approx-
imately correct : —

First. A literary revival is always a
local or national reaction to external
influences. It is perfectly good science
to say that no effect is ever produced by
a single cause acting alone. The infer-
ence here drawn excludes none of the
impulses attributed to heredity or to ab-
normal physiological or psychological
conditions. It does not conflict with
such facts of observation as the fertility
of ancient Attica or Renaissance Tus-
cany in men of mind, as compared with
regions hardly a day's march away from
Athens or Florence. It is merely a sup-
plemental necessity of the case.

Second. The greater the force applied
from without, the more important the
reaction within and the works that be-
long to it. This proposition may be
looked on as a corollary of the ordinary
scientific maxim that action and reac-
tion are equal. But it is impossible to
apply the rule in all its strictness to lit-
erature without the most minute and la-
borious investigation.

Third. No purely civil convulsion
ever evoked a transcendent genius in art
or poetry. A possible reason for this is
that such a disturbance implies just the
lack of that unity which is indispensable
to genius. For genius is not scattered,
it is concentrated effort.

Fourth. No nation incapable of an
original movement in philosophy has

ever produced imaginative genius of the
highest rank. The only possible excep-
tion to this is Homer, and Homer's an-
tecedents are unknown. The inference
does not traverse the instinctive preju-
dice of the artist against the uninspired,
plodding thinker. Everybody knows that
systematized aesthetic is like apples of
Sodom to the man of intuition. Never-
theless, the race that cannot rise to the
level where it may form and express its
own theory of beauty will never rise to
that higher level where in the works of
some master it must make its ideal of
beauty actual. No original philosopher,
no original genius. This is absolute.

Fifth. The progress of philosophy
often indicates the course of national
development which creates the environ-
ment appropriate to genius. It does
not follow, however, that because the
mould is ready the statue will be forth-
coming. There are contingencies inter-
vening which can be dealt with only by
students of heredity and psychology and
climate and habitat.

Sixth. The evolution of both philoso-
phy and literature is incidental to the
course of national life, and in the long
run, doubtless, to that of all humanity.
That is to say, neither grows up of its
own accord. The background of all
literary revivals lies in the history of
that universal culture to which literature
bears as transient a relation as that of
the foliage to the tree. The tree lives
long ; the leaves flourish and decay year
by year.

Seventh. But within itself the liter-
ary revival follows strictly the law of
growth ; or, if the phrase be more pleas-
ing, the law of evolution and devolution.
A noteworthy fact is, however, that
growth appears less gradual than decay.
The truth may be that much of the pro-
cess preliminary to the advent of genius
escapes observation. After the fact,
many presages are remembered which in
their own time passed unnoticed.

Eighth. The reaction passes away

700

The Coming Literary Revival.

without prevision of what is to follow.
Perhaps the most signal example of this
is the disappearance of the old Repub-
lican literature in Rome without a hint
of the outburst which heralded and at-
tended the Empire. But there is a chasm
equally great, in recent times, between
the older literature of America with its
colonial impulses and that of the period
of growing nationality from Irving to
Lowell, and in England between the
product of the disturbed Georgian pe-
riod culminating in Byron and the mild
melancholy of Tennyson and the group
to which he belonged.

Ninth. But the reaction often projects
itself upon other nations or localities,
causing a new reaction, and sometimes
creating new forms of literature. An
instance of this is the Chaucerian cycle
in England, affected as it was by mo-
tives which had just ceased to be ac-
tive in Italy and France. French ro-
manticism, the Dantean allegory, and
Boccaccio's novel take a form very dif-
ferent, under the hand of Chaucer, from
that which they wore originally. Ob-
serve, too, in a later time, what a meta-
morphosis is shown in the teachings of
Locke and the smooth humanity of
Pope after they have been transferred
to France by Voltaire.

The question remains whether these
dicta can be applied to conditions exist-
ing at the present day. As to the im-
pact of nation upon nation, even to the
point of conflict, it is hardly necessary to
say more than that no intelligent man
lives anywhere in the bounds of civiliza-
tion who fails to look " nights and morn-
ings " now for signs of war. There are
even some who seem to be afflicted with
visions of Armageddon. This aside, who
shall stand as philosopher of the age ?
That is an inquiry in which the estimate
the age puts upon itself cuts some figure.
Whether it is just to itself in adopting a
tone of self-depreciation is not important.
That the tone is to be heard, and that it is
only one signal of a turn of thought gen-

erally pessimistic, are significant facts.
Optimism can hardly be said to exist as
a philosophy at the present time. Evo-
lutionary theories based wholly on phy-
sical facts, with a mechanical formula
as the goal of the universe expressible
in the strictest mathematical way, have
driven it to the merely negative hope
that everything will turn out for the
best. Recent efforts at directing atten-
tion anew to Leibnitz attest the lack of
initiative among thinkers of optimist
preferences. Mr. Spencer's Synthetic
Philosophy is now a complete system,
and the amount of comfort it gives to
the world is very small. In fact, about
the only comfort it gives is that it is
open to criticism. The tendencies of
recent literature — Zola, Tolstoi, Kidd
in Social Evolution, Nordau in Degen-
eration— are so well known that it is
needless to specify them. All this has
really little value in practical life. Hu-
man nature never yet gave up a struggle
because of despair, nor ever deemed a
hope attained worth a fraction of the
unattainable. The true import of pessi-
mism lies in the hint it gives that, uncon-
sciously, mankind is reaching out toward
a future as different as possible from
the present and the past of which it is
weary. It is along this line on which
humanity seems to be moving toward
a phase of existence different from all,
if not better than any, through which it
has passed before, that search must be
made for philosophic presages of what is
to come.

To any one who looks over the sys-
tems offered to the present age, it must
be obvious that the promise of most of
them is very limited, or that it depends
on contingencies more or less remote.
Thus one sees little of the influence of
Herbart, strong thinker as he was, out
side of the methods of pedagogy. His
individual realism is expounded to deaf
ears in the midst of the socialist and
pantheistic tendencies of the time.
Lotze's remarkably penetrating thought

The Coming Literary Revival.

701

is just now in process of transmutation
through secondary minds. It has a long
future, but it may be a remote one, in
fee. Scottish philosophy is a mere sur-
vival. Besides, it has had its man of
genius. If it once proclaimed Rousseau
as its ally, it cannot deny Burns.

In America there are advocates of all
philosophies, but there is no philosophy.
This is not an individual opinion ; it
is the universal criticism on American
learning. America has had one original
metaphysician, and he belonged to the
time when the social unity of the colo-
nies had not yet given way to the chaos
of modern life in the United States.
This, again, is no individual dictum.
But his thought has already worked it-
self out in literature. Perhaps somebody
may be found to dispute the critical es-
timate of Hawthorne and Poe as the
truly creative American minds in the
field of imagination. Nevertheless, the
estimate is not at all eccentric. It is
based on much the same kind of reason-
ing as that which, according to a famil-
iar anecdote, established the political
and military primacy of Themistocles
among the Greeks. The intellectual an-
tecedents of many American men of
letters in past generations can be traced
largely to the Old World. This is not
true of Hawthorne and Poe. The for-
mer in particular carried his Puritan en-
vironment with him to Italy, as that
wonder-work The Marble Faun shows.
But the fatalism of these two men in
the study of character, a nemesis as un-
erring as that of the Greeks, is the ar-
tistic, emotional counterpart of the stern,
unswerving thought of Jonathan Ed-
wards. Whatever may be said of the
ethics of The Kaven or The Scarlet Let-
ter, it is certain that they never would

have emerged except from the culture
which also produced A Careful and Strict
Inquiry into the Modern Notion of Free-
Will.

If the hypothesis suggested in these
pages be correct, America needs to start
a new intellectual cycle ; and it is super-
fluous to say that the way to start is not
to rest in the boasted excellence of some
light form of literature, for example the
American short story. It will take larger
effort than this, and effort along lines ill-
beset, to bring out the American rival of
Homer and Dante and Virgil and Goethe
and Shakespeare. There is a deal of
meaning in the remark attributed to
Horace Greeley, that what the United
States needed was a sound thrashing, but
that, unfortunately, no other nation on
earth was big enough to give it to them.
The Old World is well - worn. It is
gradually approaching, from sheer wea-
riness, a social if not a political federal-
ism, in which America must be teacher,
not pupil. But the only lesson which
America is now teaching the wor1'1 in
the ideal realm is precisely the lesson
which von Hartmann has already put
in words, namely, that the literature of
the future is to be as the farce which the
Berlin business man goes to see of an
evening by way of recreation. It is do-
ing its best to prove that, after Goethe,
the role of transcendent genius is no
longer to be played. By way of bring-
ing about a new movement in letters, it
would be an excellent thing if some pro-
foundly one-sided thinker should arise
to shake to pieces the eminently respect-
able but fatally monotonous philosophy
of the American schools.

In another article we shall search for
our philosopher over a somewhat wider
area.

J. S. Tunison.

702

Penelope's Progress.

PENELOPE'S PROGRESS.

HER EXPERIENCES IN SCOTLAND.

PART FIRST. IN TOWN.

IV.

LIFE at Mrs. M'Collop's apartments
in 22 Breadalbane Terrace is about as
simple, comfortable, dignified, and de-
lightful as it well can be.

Mrs. M'Collop herself is neat, thrifty,
precise, tolerably genial, and " verra re-
leegious."

Her partner, who is also the cook, is
a person introduced to us as Miss Dig-
gity. We afterwards learned that this
is spelled Dalgety, but it is considered
rather vulgar, in Scotland, to pronounce
the names of persons and places as they
are written. When, therefore, I allude
to the cook, which will be as seldom as
possible, I shall speak of her as Miss
Diggity-Dalgety, so that I shall be pre-
senting her correctly both to the eye and
to the ear, and giving her at the same
time a hyphenated name, a thing which
is a secret object of aspiration in Great
Britain.

In selecting our own letters and par-
cels from the common stock on the hall
table, I perceive that most of our fellow
lodgers are hyphenated ladies, whose
visiting-cards diffuse the intelligence that
in their single persons two ancient fam-
ilies and fortunes are united. On the
ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-
Sciennes (pronounced Hebburn-Sheens);
on the floor above us are Miss Colqu-
houn (Cohoon) and her cousin Miss
Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler) . As
soon as the Hebburn-Sheens depart, Mrs.
M'Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of Kil-
conquhar, of whom we shall speak as
Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar. There is
not a man in the house ; even the Boots
is a girl, so that 22 Breadalbane Terrace

is as truly a castra puellarum as was
ever the Castle of Edinburgh with its
maiden princesses in the olden time.

We talked with Miss Diggity-Dalgety
on the evening of our first day at Mrs.
M'Collop's, when she came up to know
our commands. As Francesca and Sale-
mina were both in the room I determined
to be as Scotch as possible ; for it is Sale-
mina's proud boast that she is taken for
a native of every country she visits.

" We shall not be entertaining at pre-
sent, Miss Diggity," I said, " so you can
give us just the ordinary dishes, — no
doubt you are accustomed to them :
scones, baps or bannocks with marma-
lade, finnan-haddie or kippered herrings,
for breakfast, — tea, of course (we never
touch coffee in the morning), porridge,
and we like them well boiled, please "
(I hope she noted the plural pronoun ;
Salemina did, and blanched with envy) ;
" minced collops for luncheon, or a nice
little black - faced chop ; Scotch broth,
peas brose or cockyleekie soup, at din-
ner, and haggis now and then, with a cold
shape for dessert. That is about the sort
of thing we are accustomed to, — just
plain Scotch living."

I was impressing Miss Diggity-Dal-
gety,— I could see that clearly; but
Francesca spoiled the effect by inquiring,
maliciously, if we could sometimes have
a howtowdy wi' drappit eggs, or her fa-
vorite dish, wee grumphie wi' neeps.

Here Salemina was obliged to poke
the fire in order to conceal her smiles,
and the cook probably suspected that
Francesca found howtowdy in the Scotch
dictionary ; but we amused each other
vastly, and that is our principal object
in life.

Penelope's Progress.

Miss Diggity-Dalgety's forbears must
have been exposed to foreign influences,
for she interlards her culinary conversa-
tion with French terms, and we have
discovered that this is quite common. A
" jigget " of mutton is of course a ffigot,
and we have identified an " ashet " as
an assiette. The " petticoat tails " she
requested me to buy at the confectioner's
were somewhat more puzzling, but when
they were finally purchased by Susanna
Crum they appeared to be ordinary lit-
tle cakes ; perhaps, therefore, though in-
correctly, petites gatelles.

" That was a remarkable touch about
the black-faced chop," laughed Salemina,
when Miss Diggity-Dalgety had retired ;
" not that I believe they ever say it."

" I am sure they must," I asserted
stoutly, " for I passed a flesher's on my
way home, and saw a sign with ' Prime
Black-Faced Mutton ' printed on it. I
also saw ' Fed Veal,' but I forgot to
ask the cook for it."

" We ought really to have kept house
in Edinburgh," observed Francesca, look-
ing up from the Scotsman. " One can
get a ( self - contained residential flat '
for twenty pounds a month. We are
such an irrepressible trio that a self-
contained flat would be everything to
us ; and if it were not fully furnished,
here is a firm that wishes to sell a ' com-
posite bed ' for six, and a l gent's stuffed
easy ' for five pounds. Added to these
inducements there is somebody who ad-
vertises that parties who intend ' dis-
plenishing ' at the Whit Term would do
well to consult him, as he makes a spe-
cialty of second-handed furniture and
' cyclealities.' What are ' cyclealities,'
Susanna ? " (She had just come in with
coals.)

" I couldna say, mam."

" Thank you ; no, you need not ask
Mrs. M'Collop ; it is of no consequence."

Susanna Crum is a most estimable
young woman, clean, respectful, willing,
capable, and methodical, but as a Bureau
of Information she is painfully inade-

quate. Barring this single limitation she
seems to be a treasure-house of all good
practical qualities ; and being thus clad
and panoplied in virtue, why should she
be so timid and self-distrustful ?

She wears an expression which can
mean only one of two things : either
she has heard of the national tomahawk
and is afraid of violence on our part, or
else her mother was frightened before
she was born. This applies in general
to her walk and voice and manner, but
is it fear that prompts her eternal " I
couldna say," or is it perchance Scotch
caution and prudence ? Is she afraid
of projecting her personality too inde-
cently far ? 'Is it the influence of the
" catecheesm " on her early youth ? Is
it the indirect effect of heresy trials on
her imagination ? Does she remember
the thumb-screw of former generations ?
At all events, she will neither affirm nor
deny, and I am putting her to all sorts of
tests, hoping to discover finally whether
she is an accident, an exaggeration, or
a type.

Salemina thinks that our American ac-
cent may confuse her. Of course she
means Francesca's accent and mine, for
she has none ; although we have tem-
pered ours so much that we can scarcely
understand each other. As for Susan-
na's own accent, she comes from the
heart of Aberdeenshire, and her lan-
guage is beyond my power to reproduce.

We naturally wish to identify all the
national dishes ; so, " Is this cockle soup,
Susanna ? " I ask her, as she passes me
the plate at dinner.

" I couldna say."

" This vegetable is new to me, Susan-
na ; is it perhaps sea-kail ? "

" I canna say, mam."

Then finally, in despair, as she
handed me a boiled potato one day, I
fixed my searching Yankee brown eyes
on her blue-Presbyterian, non-commit-
tal ones and asked, " What is this vege-
table, Susanna ? "

In an instant she withdrew herself

704

Penelope's Progress.

her soul, her ego, so utterly that I felt
myself gazing at an inscrutable stone
image, as she replied, " I couldna say,
mam."

This was too much! Her mother
may have been frightened, very badly
frightened, but this was more than I
could endure without protest. The plain
boiled potato is practically universal.
It is not only common to all temperate
climates, but it has permeated all classes
of society. I am confident that the
plain boiled potato has been one of the
chief constituents in the building up of
that frame in which Susanna drum con-
ceals her opinions and emotions. I re-
marked, therefore, as an apparent after-
thought, " Why, it is a potato, is it not,
Susanna ? "

What do you think she replied, when
thus hunted into a corner, pushed against
a wall, driven to the very confines of
her personal and national liberty ? She
subjected the potato to a second careful
scrutiny, and answered, " I wouldna say
it 's no ! "

Now there is no inherited physical
terror in this. It is the concentrated es-
sence of intelligent reserve, caution, and
obstinacy ; it is a conscious intellectual
hedging ; it is a dogged and determined
attempt to build up barriers of defense
between the questioner and the ques-
tionee : it must be, therefore, the off-
spring of the catechism and the heresy
trial.

Once again, after establishing an
equally obvious fact, I succeeded in
wringing from her the reluctant admis-
sion " It depends," but she was so
shattered by the bulk and force of this
outgo, so fearful that in some way she
had imperiled her life or reputation, so
anxious concerning the effect that her
reluctant testimony might have upon un-
born generations, that she was of no real
service the rest of the day.

I wish that the Lord Advocate, or
some modern counterpart of Braxfield,
the hanging judge, would summon Su-

sanna Crum as a witness in an impor-
tant case. He would need his longest
plummet to sound the depths of her con-
sciousness.

I have had no legal experience, but I
can imagine the scene.

" Is the prisoner your father, Susanna
Crum ? "

" I couldna say, my lord."

" You have not understood the ques-
tion, Susanna. Is the prisoner your fa-
ther?"

" I couldna say, my lord."

" Come, come, my girl ! you must an-
swer the questions put you by the jcourt.
You have been an inmate of the prison-
er's household since your earliest con-
sciousness. He provided you with food,
lodging, and clothing during your in-
fancy and early youth. You have seen
him on annual visits to your home, and
watched him as he performed the usual
parental functions for your younger bro-
thers and sisters. I therefore repeat, is
the prisoner your father, Susanna
Crum ? "

" I wouldna say he 's no, my lord."

" This is really beyond credence !
What do you conceive to be the idea in-
volved in the word ' father,' Susanna
Crum ? "

" It depends, my lord."

And this, a few hundred years earlier,
would have been the natural and effective
moment for the thumb-screws.

I do not wish to be understood as de-
fending these uncomfortable appliances.
They would never have been needed to
elicit information from me, for I should
have spent my nights inventing matter
to confess in the daytime. I feel sure
that I should have poured out such
floods of confessions and retractations
that if all Scotland had been one listen-
ing ear it could not have heard my tale.
I am only wondering if, in the extracting
of testimony from the common mind,
the thumb-screw might not have been
more necessary with some nations than
with others.

Penelope's Progress.

705

We were on the eve of our first din-
ner-party ; for invitations had been pour-
ing in upon us since the delivery of our
letters of introduction. Francesca had
performed this task voluntarily, order-
ing a private victoria for the purpose,
and arraying herself in purple and fine
linen.

" Much depends upon the first im-
pression," she had said. " Miss Ham-
ilton's ' party ' may not be gifted, but it
is well dressed. My hope is that some
of the people will be looking from the
second-story front windows. If they
are, I can assure them in advance that I
shall be a national advertisement."

It is needless to remark that it began
to rain heavily as she was leaving the
house, and she was obliged to send back
the open carriage, and order, to save
time, one of the public cabs from the
stand in the Terrace.

" Would you mind having the lami-
ter, being first in line ? " asked Susanna
of Salemina, who had transmitted the
command.

When Salemina fails to understand
anything, the world is kept in complete
ignorance, — least of all would she stoop
to ask a humble maid servant to trans-
late her vernacular ; so she replied af-
fably, " Certainly, Susanna, that is the
kind we always prefer. I suppose it is
covered ? "

Francesca did not notice, until her
coachman alighted to deliver the first
letter and cards, that he had one club
foot and one wooden leg ; it was then
that the full significance of " lamiter "
came to her. He was covered, however,
as Salemina had supposed, and the oc-
currence gave us a precious opportunity
of chaffing that dungeon of learning.
He was tolerably alert and vigorous, too,
although he. certainly did not impart
elegance to a vehicle, and he knew every
street in the New Town, and every close

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 481. 45

and wynd in the Old Town. On this our
first meeting with him, he faltered only
when Francesca asked him last of all to
drive to " Kildonan House, Helmsdale ; "
supposing not unnaturally that it was as
well known an address as Morningside
House, Tipperlinn, whence she had just
come. The lamiter had never heard of
Kildonan House nor of Helmsdale, and
he had driven in the streets of Auld
Reekie for thirty years. None of the
drivers whom he consulted could supply
any information ; Susanna Crum couldna
say that she had ever heard of it, nor
could the M'Collop nor Miss Diggity-
Dalgety. It was reserved for Lady Baird
to explain that Helmsdale was two hun-
dred and eighty miles north, and that
Kildonan House was ten miles frem the
Helmsdale railway station, so that the
poor lamiter would have had a weary
drive even had he known the way. The
friends who had given us letters to Mr.
and Mrs. Jamison - Inglis (Jimmyson-
Ingals) must have expected us either to
visit John O'Groats on the northern
border, and drop in on Kildonan House
en route, or to send our note of introduc-
tion by post and await an invitation to
pass the summer. At all events, the an-
ecdote proved very pleasing to Edin-
burgh society. I hardly know whether,
if they should visit America, they would
enjoy tales of their own stupidity as huge-
ly as they did the tales of ours, but they
really were very appreciative in this
particular, and it is but justice to our-
selves to say that we gave them every
opportunity for enjoyment.

But I must go back to our first dinner-
party in Scotland. We were dressed at
quarter past seven, when, in looking at
the invitation again, we discovered that
the dinner-hour was eight o'clock, not
seven-thirty. Susanna did not happen
to know whether Fotheringay Crescent
was near or far, but the maiden Boots
affirmed that it was only two minutes'
drive, so we sat down in front of the fire
to chat.

706

Penelope's Progress.

It was Lady Baird's birthday feast
to which we had been bidden, and we
had done our best to honor the occasion.
We had prepared a large bouquet tied
with the Maclean tartan (Lady Baird is
of the Maclean family), and had printed
in gold letters on one of the ribbons
" Another for Hector," the battle-cry of
the clan. We each wore a sprig of holly,
because it is the " suaicheantas " or
badge of the Macleans, while I added a
girdle and shoulder-knot of tartan velvet
to my pale green gown, and borrowed
Francesca's emerald necklace, persuad-
ing her that she was too young to vrear
such jewels in the old country.

Francesca was miserably envious that
she had not thought of tartans first.
" Yo» may consider yourself ' gey and
fine,' all covered over with Scotch plaid,
but I would n't be so ' kenspeckle/ for
worlds ! " she said, using expressions
borrowed from the M'Collop ; " and as
for disguising your nationality, do not
flatter yourself that you look like any-
thing but an American. I forgot to tell
you the conversation I overheard in the
tram this morning, between a mother
and daughter, who were talking about
us, I dare say. ' Have they any proper
frocks for so large a party, Bella ? ' asked
the mother.

" ' I thought I explained in the be-
ginning, mamma, that they are Ameri-
cans.'

" ' Still, you know they are only travel-
ing, — just passing through, as it were ;
they may not be familiar with our cus-
toms, and we do want our party to be a
smart one.'

" ' Wait until you see them, mamma,
and you will probably feel like hiding
your diminished head ! It is my belief
that if an American lady takes a half-
hour journey in a tram she carries full
evening dress and a diamond necklace,
in case anything should happen on the
way. I am not in the least nervous
about their appearance. I only hope
that they will not be too exuberant ;

American girls are so frightfully viva-
cious and informal, I always feel as if
I were being taken by the throat ! ' '

" It does no harm to be perfectly
dressed," said Salemina consciously, put-
ting a steel embroidered slipper on the
fender and settling the holly in the silver
folds of her gown ; " then when they dis-
cover that we are all well bred, and that
one of us is intelligent, it will be all the
more credit to the country that gave us
birth."

" Of course it is impossible to tell
what country did give you birth," re-
torted Francesca, " but that will only be
to your advantage — away from home ! "

Francesca is inflexibly, almost aggres-
sively American, but Salemina is a citi-
zen of the world. If the United States
should be involved in a war, I am confi-
dent that Salemina would be in front
with the other Gatling guns, for in that
case a principle would be at stake ; but
in all lesser matters she is extremely un-
prejudiced. She prefers German music,
Italian climate, French dressmakers,
English tailors, Japanese manners, and
American — American something, — I
have forgotten just what ; it is either the
ice-cream soda or the form of govern-
ment, — I can't remember which.

" I wonder why they named it ' Foth-
eringay' Crescent," mused Francesca.
" Some association with Mary Stuart, of
course. Poor, poor, pretty lady ! A free
queen only six years, and think of the
number of beds she slept in, and the
number of trees she planted ; we have
seen, I am afraid to say how many al-
ready ! When did she govern, when
did she scheme, above all when did she
flirt, with all this racing and chasing
over the country ? Mrs. M'Collop calls
Anne of Denmark a ' sad scattercash '
and Mary an ' awfu' gadabout,' and I
am inclined to agree with her. By the
way, when she was making my bed this
morning, she told me that her mother
claimed descent from the Stewarts of
Appin, whoever they may be. She apolo-

Penelope's Progress.

707

gized for Queen Mary's defects as if she
were a distant family connection. If so,
then the famous Stuart charm has been
lost somewhere, for Mrs. M'Collop cer-
tainly possesses no alluring curves of
temperament."

" I am going to select some distin-
guished ancestors this very minute, be-
fore I go to my first Edinburgh dinner,"
said I decidedly. " It seems hard that
they should have everything to do with
settling our nationality and our position
in life, and we not have a word to say.
How nice it would be to select one's own
after one had arrived at years of discre-
tion, or to adopt different ones according
to the country one chanced to be visiting !
I am going to do it ; it is unusual, but
there must be a pioneer in every good
movement. Let me think : do help me,
Salemina ! I am a Hamilton to begin
with ; I might be descended from the
logical Sir William himself , and thus be
the idol of the university set ! "

" He died only about thirty years ago,
and you would hav6 to be his daughter :
that would never do," said Salemina.
" Why don't you take Thomas Hamil-
ton, Earl of Melrose and Haddington ?
He was Secretary of State, King's Ad-
vocate, Lord President of the Court of
Sessions, and all sorts of splendid things.
He was the one King James used to call
'Tamo' the Cowgate.'"

" Perfectly delightful ! I don't care
so much about his other titles, but ' Tarn
o' the Cowgate ' is irresistible. I will
take him. He was my — what was he ? "

" He was at least your great - great-
great-great-grandfather ; that is a safe
distance. Then there 's that famous
Jenny Geddes who flung her fauld-stule
at the Dean in St. Giles's, — she was a
Hamilton, too, if you fancy her ! "

" Yes, I '11 take her with pleasure,"
I responded thankfully. " Of course I
don't know why she flung the stool, — it
may have been very reprehensible ; but
there is always good stuff in stool-Sing-
ers ; it 's the sort of spirit one likes to

inherit in diluted form. Now whom will
you take ? "

" I have n't even a peg on which to
hang a Scottish ancestor," said Salemina
disconsolately.

" Oh, nonsense ! think harder. Any-
body will do as a starting-point ; only
you must be honorable and really show
relationship, as I did with Jenny and
Tarn."

" My aunt Mary-Emma married a
Lindsay," ventured Salemina hesitat-
ingly-

" That will do," I answered delight-
edly.

" ' The Gordons gay in English blude
They wat their hose and shoon ;
The Lindsays flew like fire aboot
Till a' the fray was dune.'

You must be one of the famous ' licht
Lindsays,' and you can look up the par-
ticular ancestor in your big book. Now,
Francesca, it 's your turn ! "

" I am American to the backbone,"
she declared, with insufferable dignity.
" I do not desire any foreign ancestors."

" Francesca ! " I expostulated. " Do
you mean to fell me that you can dine
with a lineal descendant of Sir Fitzroy
Donald Maclean, Baronet, of Duart and
Morven, and not make any effort to
trace your genealogy back further than
your parents ? "

" If you goad me to desperation," she
answered, " I will wear an American flag
in my hair, declare that my father is a
railway conductor, and talk about the
superiority of our checking system and
hotels all the evening. I don't want to
go, anyway. It is sure to be stiff and
ceremonious, and the man who takes me
in will ask me the population of Chicago
and the amount of wheat we exported
last year, — he always does."

" I can't see why he should," said I.
" I am sure you don't look as if you
knew."

" My looks have thus far proved no
protection," she replied sadly. " Sale-
mina is so adaptable, and you are so dra-

708

Penelope's Progress.

matic, that you enter into all these ex-
periences with zest You already more
than half believe in that Tarn o' the Cow-
gate story. But there '11 be nothing for
me in Edinburgh society ; it will be all
clergymen " —

" Ministers," interjected Salemina.

— " all ministers and professors. My
Redf ern gown will be unappreciated, and
my Worth evening frocks worse than
wasted ! "

" There are a few thousand medical
students," I said encouragingly, " and
all the young advocates, and a sprinkling
of military men, — they know Worth
frocks."

" And," continued Salemina bitingly,
" there will always be, even in an intel-
lectual city like Edinburgh, a few men
who somehow escape all the developing
influences about them, and remain com-
monplace, conventional manikins, de-
voted to dancing and flirting. Never
fear, they will find you ! "

This sounds harsh, but nobody minds
Salemina, least of all Francesca, who well
knows she is the apple of that spinster's
eye. But at this moment Susanna an-
nounces the cab (in the same tone in
which she would announce a burglar) ;
we pick up our draperies, and are whirled
off by the lamiter to dine with the Scot-
tish nobility.

VI.

It was the Princess Dashkoff who said,
in the latter part of the eighteenth cen-
tury, that of all the societies of men of
talent she had met with in her travels,
Edinburgh's was the first in point of
abilities.

One might make the same remark to-
day, perhaps, and not depart widely from
the truth. One does not find, however,
as many noted names as are associated
with the annals of the Cape and Poker
Clubs or the Crochallan Fencibles, those
famous groups of famous men who met
for relaxation (and intoxication, I should

think) at the old Isle of Man Arms or
in Dawney's Tavern in the Anchor Close.
These groups included such shining lights
as Robert Fergusson, the poet, and Adam
Ferguson, the historian and philosopher,
Gavin Wilson, Sir Henry Raeburn, David
Hume, Erskine, Lords Newton, Gillies,
Monboddo, Hailes, and Kames, Henry
Mackenzie, and the ploughman poet him-
self, who has kept alive the memory of
the Crochallans in many a jovial verse
like that in which he describes Smellie,
the eccentric philosopher and printer :

" Shrewd Willie Smellie to Crochallan came,
The old cocked hat, the grey surtout the

same,

His bristling beard just rising in its might ;
'T was four long nights and days to shaving

night ; "

or the characteristic picture of William
Dunbar, a wit of the time, and the mer-
riest of the Fencibles : —

" As I cam by Crochallan

I cannily keekit ben ;
Rattlin', roarin' Willie

Was sitting at yon boord en' ;
Sitting at yon boord en',

And amang guid companie !
Rattlin', roarin' Willie,

Ye 're welcome hame to me I "

or the verses on Creech, Burns's pub-
lisher, who left Edinburgh for a time in
1789. The " Willies," by the way, seem
to be especially inspiring to the Scottish
balladists.

" Oh, Willie was a witty wight,
And had o' things an unco slight !
Auld Reekie aye he keepit tight

And trig and braw ;

But now they '11 busk her like a fright —
Willie 's awa' ! "

I think perhaps the gatherings of the
present time are neither quite as gay nor
quite as brilliant as those of Burns's day,
when

" Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
An' Rob an' Allan cam to pree ; "

but the ideal standard of those meetings
seems to be voiced in the lines : —

Penelope's Progress.

709

' Wha last beside his chair shall fa',
He is the king amang us three ! "

As they sit in their chairs nowadays to
the very end of the feast, there is doubt-
less joined with modern sobriety a soup-
gon of modern dullness and discretion.

To an American the great charm of
Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere :
" not the leisure of a village arising from
the deficiency of ideas and motives, but
the leisure of a city reposing grandly on
tradition and history; which has done
its work, and does not require to weave
its own clothing, to dig its own coals or
smelt its own iron."

We were reminded of this more than
once, and it never failed to depress us
properly. If one had ever lived in Pitts-
burg, Fall River, or Kansas City, I should
think it would be almost impossible to
maintain one's self-respect in a place like
Edinburgh, where the citizens " are re-
leased from the vulgarizing dominion of
the hour." Whenever one of Auld Reekie's
great men took this tone with me, I al-
ways felt as though I were the germ in
a half-hatched egg, and as if he were an
aged and lordly cock gazing at me pity-
ingly through my shell. He, lucky crea-
ture, had lived through all the struggles
which I was to undergo ; he, indeed, was
released from " the vulgarizing dominion
of the hour ; " but I, poor thing, must
grow and grow, and keep pecking at my
shell, in order to achieve existence.

Sydney Smith says in one of his let-
ters, " Never shall I forget the happy
days passed there [in Edinburgh], amidst
odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad
suppers, excellent hearts, and the most
enlightened and cultivated understand-
ings." His only criticism of the con-
versation of that day (1797-1802) con-
cerned itself with the prevalence of that
form of Scotch humor which was called
wut, and with the disputations and dia-
lectics. We were more fortunate than
Sydney Smith, because Edinburgh has
outgrown its odious smells, barbarous
sounds, and bad suppers, and, wonder-

ful to relate, has kept its excellent hearts
and its enlightened and cultivated un-
derstandings. As for mingled wut and
dialectics, where can one find a better
foundation for dinner-table conversation ?
The hospitable board itself presents
no striking differences from our own,
save the usual British customs of serving
sweets in soup-plates with dessert-spoons,
of a smaller number of forks on parade,
of the invariable fish-knife at each plate,
of the prevalent " savory " and " cold
shape," and the unusual grace and skill
with which the hostess carves. Even at
very large dinners one occasionally sees
a lady of high degree severing the joints
of chickens and birds most daintily,
while her lord looks on in happy idle-
ness, thinking, perhaps, how greatly cus-
toms have changed for the better since
the ages of strife and bloodshed, when
Scottish nobles

" Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
And drank their wine through helmets
barred."

The Scotch butler is not in the least
like an English one. No man could be
as respectable as he looks, not even an
elder of the kirk, whom he resembles
closely. He hands your plate as if it
were a contribution-box, and in his mo-
ments of ease, when he stands behind
the " maister," I am always expecting
him to pronounce a benediction. The
English butler, when he wishes to avoid
the appearance of listening to the con-
versation, gazes with level eye into va-
cancy ; the Scotch butler looks distinctly
heavenward, as if he were brooding on
the principle of coordinate jurisdiction
with mutual subordination. It would be
impossible for me to deny the key of
the wine-cellar to a being so steeped in
sanctity, but it has to be done, I am told,
in certain rare and isolated cases.

As for toilets, the men dress like all
other men (alas, and alas, that we should
say it, for we were continually hoping
for a kilt!), though there seems to be
no survival of the finical Lord Napier's

710

Penelope's Progress.

spirit. Perhaps you remember that Lord
and Lady Napier arrived at Castlemilk
in Lanarkshire with the intention of stay-
ing a week, but announced next morning
that a circumstance had occurred which
rendered it indispensable to return with-
out delay to their seat in Selkirkshire.
This was the only explanation given, but
it was afterwards discovered that Lord
Napier's valet had committed the griev-
ous mistake of packing up a set of neck-
cloths which did not correspond in point
of date with the shirts they accompanied!

The ladies of the " smart set " in
Edinburgh wear French fripperies and
chiffons as do their sisters everywhere,
but the other women of society dress a
trifle more staidly than their cousins
in London, Paris, or New York. The
sobriety of taste and severity of style
that characterize Scotswomen may be
due, like Susanna (Drum's dubieties, to
the haar, to the shorter catechism, or
perhaps in some degree to the presence
of three branches of the Presbyterian
church among them ; the society that
bears in its bosom three separate and
antagonistic kinds of Presbyterianism at
the same time must have its chilly mo-
ments.

In Lord Cockburn's day the " dames
of high and aristocratic breed " must
have been sufficiently awake to feminine
frivolities to be both gorgeously and ex-
travagantly arrayed. I do not know in
all literature a more delicious and life-
like word-portrait than Lord Cockburn
gives of Mrs. Rocheid, the Lady of In-
verleith, in the Memorials. It is quite
worthy to hang beside a Raeburn canvas;
one can scarce say more.

" Except Mrs. Siddons in some of her
displays of magnificent royalty, nobody
could sit down like the Lady of Inver-
leith. She would sail like a ship from
Tarshish, gorgeous in velvet or rustling
silk, done up in all the accompaniments
of fans, ear-rings and finger-rings, falling
sleeves, scent -bottle, embroidered bag,
hoop, and train ; managing all this seem-

ingly heavy rigging with as much ease
as a full-blown swan does its plumage.
She would take possession of the centre
of a large sofa, and at the same moment,
without the slightest visible exertion,
cover the whole of it with her bravery,
the graceful folds seeming to lay them-
selves over it, like summer waves. The
descent from her carriage, too, where she
sat like a nautilus in its shell, was a dis-
play which no one in these days could ac-
complish or even fancy. The mulberry-
colored coach, apparently not too large
for what it contained, though she alone
was in it ; the handsome, jolly coach-
man and his splendid hammer-cloth load-
ed with lace ; the two respectful liveried
footmen, one on each side of the rich-
ly carpeted step, — these were lost sight
of amidst the slow majesty with which
the Lady of Inverleith came down and
touched the earth."

My right - hand neighbor at Lady
Baird's dinner was surprised at my
quoting Lord Cockburn. One's attend-
ant squires are always surprised when
one knows anything ; but they are al-
ways delighted, too, so that the amaze-
ment is less trying. True, I had read
the Memorials only the week before, and
had never heard of them previous to that
time ; but that detail, according to my
theories, makes no real difference. The
woman who knows how and when to
" read up," who reads because she wants
to be in sympathy with a new envi-
ronment ; the woman who has wit and
perspective enough to be stimulated by
novel conditions and kindled by fresh in-
fluences, who is susceptible to the vibra-
tions of other people's history, is bound
to be fairly intelligent and extremely
agreeable, if only she is sufficiently mod-
est. I think my neighbor found me
thoroughly delightful after he discovered
my point of view. He was an earl ; and
it always takes an earl a certain length
of time to understand me. I scarcely
know why, for I certainly should not
think it courteous to interpose any bar-

Penelope's Progress.

Ill

tiers between the nobility and that por-
tion of the " masses " represented in my
humble person.

It seemed to me at first that he did
not apply himself to the study of my
national peculiarities with much assi-
duity, but wasted considerable time in
gazing at Francesca, who was opposite.
She is certainly very handsome, and I
never saw her lovelier than at that dinner;
her eyes were like stars, and her cheeks
and lips a splendid crimson, for she was
quarreling with her attendant cavalier
about the relative merits of Scotland and
America, and they ceased to speak to
each other after the salad.

When the earl had sufficiently piqued
me by his devotion to his dinner and his
glances at Francesca, I began a syste-
matic attempt to achieve his (transient)
subjugation. Of course I am ardently
attached to Willie Beresford, and prefer
him to any earl in Britain, but one's self-
respect demands something in the way
of food ! I could see Salemina at the
far end of the table-radiant with success,
the W. S. at her side bending ever and
anon to catch the pearls that dropped
from her lips. " Miss Hamilton appears
simple " (I thought I heard her say) ;
" but in reality she is as deep as the
Currie Brig ! " Now where did she
get that allusion ? And again, when the
W. S. asked her whither she was going
when she left Edinburgh, " I hardly
know," she replied pensively. " I am
waiting for the shade of Montrose to di-
rect me, as the Viscount Dundee said to
your Duke of Gordon." The entranced
Scotsman little knew that she had per-
fected this style of conversation by long
experience with the Q. C.'s of England.
Talk about my being as deep as the Cur-
rie Brig (whatever it may be) ; Salemina
is deeper than the Atlantic Ocean ! I
shall take pains to inform her Writer to
the Signet, after dinner, that she eats
sugar on her porridge every morning :
that will show him her nationality con-
clusively.

The earl took the greatest interest in
my new ancestors, and approved thor-
oughly of my choice. He thinks I must
have been named for Lady Penelope
Belhaven, who lived in Leven Lodge,
one of the country villas of the Earls of
Leven, from whom" he himself is de-
scended. "Does that make us rela-
tives ? " I asked. " Relatives, most as-
suredly," he replied, " but not too near
to destroy the charm of friendship."

He thought it a great deal nicer to
select one's own forbears than to allow
them all the responsibility, and said it
would save a world of trouble if the
method could be universally adopted.
He added that he should be glad to part
with a good many of his, but doubted
whether I would accept them, as they
were " rather a scratch lot." (I use his
own language, which I thought delight-
fully easy for a belted earl.) He was
charmed with the story of Francesca
and the lamiter, and offered to drive
me to Kildonan House, Helmsdale, on
the first fine day. I told him he was
quite safe in making the proposition, for
we had already had the fine day, and
we understood that the climate had ex-
hausted itself and retired for the sea-
son.

At this moment Lady Baird glanced
at me, and we all rose to go into the
drawing-room ; but on the way from my
chair to the door, whither the earl es-
corted me, he said gallantly, " I suppose
the men in your country do not take
champagne at dinner ? I cannot fancy
their craving it when dining beside an
American woman ! "

That was charming, though he did
pay my country a compliment at my ex-
pense !

When I remember that he offered me
his ancestors, asked me to drive two hun-
dred and eighty miles, and likened me
to champagne, I feel that, with my heart
already occupied and my hand promised,
I could hardly have accomplished more
in the course of a single dinner-hour.

712

Penelope's Progress.

VII.

Francesca's experiences were not so
fortunate ; indeed, I have never seen her
more out of sorts than she was during
our long chat over the fire, after our re-
turn to Breadalbane Terrace.

" How did you get on with your de-
lightful minister ? " inquired Salemina
of the young lady, as she flung her un-
offending wrap over the back of a chair.
" He was quite the handsomest man in
the room ; who is he ? "

" He is the Reverend Ronald Macdon-
ald, and the most disagreeable, conde-
scending, ill-tempered prig I ever met ! "

" Why, Francesca ! " I exclaimed.
" Lady Baird speaks of him as her fa-
vorite nephew, and says he is full of
charm."

" He is just as full of charm as he
was when I met him," returned the
young lady nonchalantly; "that is, he
parted with none of it this evening. He
was incorrigibly stiff and rude, and oh !
so Scotch ! I believe if one punctured
him with a hat-pin, oatmeal would fly
into the air ! "

" Doubtless you acquainted him, early
in the evening, with the immeasurable ad-
vantages of our sleeping-car system, the
superiority of our fast-running elevators,
and the height of our buildings ? " ob-
served Salemina.

" I mentioned them," Francesca an-
swered evasively.

" You naturally inveighed against the
Scotch climate ? "

" Oh, I alluded to it ; but only when
he said that our hot summers must be
insufferable."

" I suppose you repeated the remark
you made at luncheon, that the ladies
you had seen in Princes Street were ex-
cessively plain ? "

" Yes, I did ! " she replied hotly ; " but
that was because he said that Ameri-
can girls generally looked bloodless and
fraiL He asked if it were really true

that they ate chalk and slate pencils.
Was n't that unendurable ? I answered
that those were the chief solid articles of
food, but that after their complexions
were established, so to speak, their par-
ents often allowed them pickles and na-
tive claret."

" What did he say to that ? " I asked.

" Oh, he said, ' Quite so, quite so ; '
that was his invariable response to all
my witticisms. Then when I told him
casually that the shops looked very small
and dark and stuffy here, and that there
were not as many tartans and plaids in
the windows as we had expected, he re-
marked that as to the latter point, the
American season had not opened yet !
Presently he asserted that no royal city
in Europe could boast ten centuries of
such glorious and stirring history as
Edinburgh. I said it did not appear to
be stirring much at present, and that
everything in Scotland seemed a little
slow to an American ; that he could
have no idea of push or enterprise until
he visited a city like Chicago. He re-
torted that, happily, Edinburgh was
peculiarly free from the taint of the
ledger and the counting-house ; that it
was Weimar without a Goethe, Boston
without its twang ! "

" Incredible ! " cried Salemina, deeply
wounded in her local pride. " He never
could have said ' twang ' unless you had
tried him beyond measure ! "

" I dare say ; he is easily tried," re-
turned Francesca. "I asked him, sar-
castically, if he had ever been in Boston.
'No,' he said, 'it is not necessary to
go there ! And while we are discussing
these matters,' he went on, ' how is your
American dyspepsia these days, — have
you decided what is the cause of it ? '

" ' Yes,' said I, as quick as lightning,
'we have always taken in more foreign-
ers than we could assimilate ! ' I want-
ed to tell him that one Scotsman of his
type would upset the national digestion
anywhere, but I restrained myself. '

" I am glad you did restrain yourself

Penelope's Progress.

713

— once," exclaimed Salemina. " What a
tactful person the Reverend Ronald must
be, if you have reported him faithfully !
Why did n't you give him up, and turn
to your other neighbor ? "

" I did, as soon as I could with cour-
tesy ; but the man on my left was the
type that always haunts me at dinners ;
if the hostess has n't one on her visiting-
list, she imports one for the occasion.
He asked me at once of what material
the Brooklyn bridge is made. I told
him I really did n't know. Why should
I ? I seldom go over it. Then he asked
me whether it was a suspension bridge
or a cantilever. Of course I did n't
know ; I am not a bridge-builder."

" You are so tactlessly, needlessly can-
did," I expostulated. " Why did n't you
say boldly that the Brooklyn bridge is a
wooden cantilever ? He did n't know,
or he wouldn't have asked you. He
could n't find out until he reached home,
and you would never have seen him
again; and if you had, and he had
taunted you, you could have laughed
vivaciously and said you were chaffing.
That is my method, and it is the only
way to preserve life in a foreign country.
Even my earl, who did not thirst for in-
formation (fortunately), asked me the
population of the Yellowstone Park, and
I simply told him three hundred thou-
sand, at a venture."

" That would never have satisfied my
neighbor," said Francesca. " Finding
me in such a lamentable state of igno-
rance, he explained the principle of his
own stupid Forth bridge to me. When
I said I understood perfectly, the Rever-
end Ronald joined in the conversation,
and asked me to repeat the explanation to
him. Naturally I could n't, so the bridge
man (I don't know his name, and don't
care to know it) drew a diagram of the
Forth bridge. on his dinner-card and gave
a dull and elaborate lecture upon it. Here
is the card, and now that three hours
have intervened I cannot tell which way
to turn the drawing so as to make the

bridge right side up ; if there is anything
puzzling in the world, it is these plans
and diagrams. I am going to pin it to
the wall, and ask the Reverend Ronald
which way it goes."

" Will he call upon, us ? " we shrieked
in concert.

" He asked if he might come and con-
tinue our ' stimulating ' conversation, and
as Lady Baird was standing by I could
hardly say no. I am sure of one thing :
that before I finish with him I will widen
his horizon so that he will be able to see
something beside Scotland and his little
insignificant Fifeshire parish ! I told
him our country parishes in America
were ten times as large as his. He said
he had heard that they covered a good
deal of ground, and that the ministers'
salaries were sometimes paid in pork and
potatoes. That shows you the style of
his retorts ! "

" I really cannot decide which of you
was the more disagreeable," said Sale-
mina ; " if he calls, I shall not remain in
the room."

" I would n't gratify him by staying
out," retorted Francesca. "He is ex-
tremely good for the circulation ; I think
I was never so warm in my life as when
I talked with him ; as physical exercise
he is equal to bicycling. The bridge
man is coming to call, too. I gave him
a diagram of Breadalbane Terrace, and
a plan of the hall and staircase, on my
dinner-card. He does n't add percepti-
bly to the gayety of the nations, but he
is better than the Reverend Ronald. I
forgot to say that when I chanced to
be speaking of doughnuts that ' uncon-
quer'd Scot ' asked me if a doughnut re-
sembled a peanut ! Can you conceive
such ignorance ? "

" I think you were not only aggres-
sively American, but painfully provin-
cial," said Salemina, with some warmth.
"Why in the world should you drag
doughnuts into a dinner-table conversa-
tion in Edinburgh ? Why not select
topics of universal interest ? "

714

Penelope's Progress.

" Like the Currie Brig or the shade
of Montrose," I murmured slyly.

" To one who has ever eaten a dough-
nut, the subject is of transcendent inter-
est ; and as for one who has not — well,
he should be made to feel his limita-
tions," replied Francesca, with a yawn.
"Come, let us forget our troubles in
sleep ; it is after midnight."

About half an hour later she came to
my bedside, her dark hair hanging over
her white gown, her eyes still bright.

" Penelope," she said softly, " I did
not dare tell Salemina, and I should not
confess it to you save that I am afraid
Lady Baird will complain of me ; but I
was dreadfully rude to the Reverend
Ronald ! I could n't help it ; he roused
my worst passions. It all began with
his saying he thought international mar-
riages presented even more difficulties to
the imagination than (the other kind. /
had n't said anything about marriages
nor thought anything about marriages of
any sort, but I told him instantly I con-
sidered that every international mar-
riage involved two national suicides.
He said that he should n't have put it
quite so forcibly, but that he had n't
given much thought to the subject. I
said that / had, and I thought we had
gone on long enough filling the coffers
of the British nobility with American
gold."

" Frances ! " I interrupted. " Don't
tell me that you made that vulgar, cheap
newspaper assertion ! "

" I did," she said stoutly, " and at
the moment I only wished I could make
it stronger. Then he said the British
nobility merited and needed all the sup-
port it could get in these hard times,
and asked if we had not cherished some
intention in the States, lately, of bestow-
ing it in greenbacks instead of gold!
Then I threw all manners to the winds,
and said that there were no husbands in
the world like American men, and that

foreigners never seemed to have any
proper consideration for women. Now
were my remarks any worse than his,
after all, and what shall I do about it,
anyway ? "

" You should go to bed first," I said
sleepily ; " if you ever have an oppor-
tunity to make amends, which I doubt,
you should devote yourself to showing
the Reverend Ronald the breadth of your
own horizon instead of trying so hard
to broaden his. As you are extremely
pretty, you may be able to do it ; man is
human, and I dare say in a month you
will be advising him to love somebody
more worthy than yourself. (He could
easily do it !) Now don't kiss me again,
for I am displeased with you ; I hate in-
ternational bickering ! "

" So do I," said Francesca virtuously,
as she plaited her hair, " and there is
no spectacle so abhorrent to every sense
as a narrow-minded man who cannot see
anything outside of his own country. But
he is awfully good-looking, — I will say
that for him ; and if you don't explain
me to Lady Baird, I will write to Mr.
Beresford about the earl. There was no
bickering there ; it was looking at you
two that made us think of international
marriages."

" It must have suggested to you that
speech about filling the coffers of the
British nobility," I replied sarcastically,
" inasmuch as the earl has twenty thou-
sand pounds a year, probably, and I
could barely buy two gold hairpins to
pin on the coronet. There, do go away,
and leave me in peace ! "

" Good-night again, then," she said,
as she rose reluctantly from the foot of
the bed. "I doubt if I can sleep for
thinking what a pity it is that such an
egotistic, bumptious, pugnacious, preju-
diced, insular, bigoted person should be
so handsome ! And who wants to mar-
ry him, anyway, that he should be so dis-
tressed about international alliances ? "
Kate Douglas Wiggin.

(To be continued.}

The Contributors' Club.

715

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

THE DWARF GIANT.

I CANNOT help irreverently wondering
at times what the Folk-Lorelei of some
centuries hence will make out of the
fairy tales of Mr. Frank R. Stockton.
I willingly leave this bewildering spec-
ulation, however, to pay a debt of grati-
tude to Mr. Stockton, of many years'
standing, for one of his fairy stories has
helped me more than half the volumes
of philosophy I have read. It was writ-
ten in the most charming, whimsical
Stocktonese, and was all about Giant
Dwarfs, Ordinary People, and Dwarf
Giants.

It seems that the King of the Dwarfs
was considered a giant, and therefore
was much looked up to, as he was head
and shoulders taller than his countrymen.
Of course he was not a real giant ; for
though quite the largest and handsomest
person in the kingdom, he shared the
essential littleness of his people, and was,
instead, a Giant Dwarf.

Now, when his daughter had arrived
at the age of sixteen (she, too, was a
Giant Dwarf), the king decided that she
should devote a month or two to her
education. But as there was in his own
realm no institution of learning which
came up to his enlarged ideas, he deter-
mined to take the princess to a neigh-
boring kingdom where Ordinary People
lived, and enter her in the great univer-
sity which was devoted exclusively to the
education of the young prince of that
nation. So with the princess and a small
retinue of dwarfs he set out. When he
arrived at the capital, however, he found
to his intense chagrin that he, the Giant
Dwarf, was no taller than an Ordinary
Person, and that, far from receiving the
attention to which his rank entitled him,
he was looked upon as a traveling show-
man, and his daughter was refused per-

mission to enter the university. The rage
of the King of the Dwarfs can be ima-
gined. Day after day he strode through
the streets, telling his wrongs to every
one he met, and protesting that he was
not an Ordinary Person at all, but a Giant
Dwarf.

One lucky day he happened on an-
other foreigner, who at first looked no-
way different from an Ordinary Person,
but, on watching him closely, you grad-
ually became aware of several peculiari-
ties. In the first place, he had a habit of
unconsciously looking upward from time
to time ; and then there was a calmness
in his eyes when he gazed at the Ordi-
nary People about, a largeness of man-
ner and nobility of gesture, that under
the circumstances were almost grotesque.
He was, in reality, a Dwarf Giant, and
through his sympathetic aid the daughter
of the Giant Dwarf obtained permission
to spend a week at the young prince's
university; in the end, as happens in
'every well-regulated fairy tale, she mar-
ried the prince.

The moral of this story did not occur
to me when I read it ; and not till long
afterward, in a wholly unexpected fash-
ion, did I realize it with any distinctness,
— not, in fact, till Nicholas Boylston
made it all clear.

Every one liked Boylston, but I am
not quite sure that he returned the com-
pliment unreservedly. He was a rather
shy fellow, and in a noisy crowd always
the quietest. He detested the conven-
tions of society, and yet his own unas-
suming manners were the perfection of
good taste. The only way in which he
distressed those of us in whose particu-
lar circle he nominally belonged was by
constantly wandering about with queer-
looking people whom we did not know,
and who seemed to us hopelessly com-
monplace. If you took a country walk

716

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of a Sunday afternoon, you were sure
to find Boylston strolling along with one
of his odd fish, gravely discussing some
problem of Idealism ; or if you hap-
pened to row up the river, and shot into
an unexpected nook, there was Boylston
sprawled on the grassy bank, his hat
over his face, with some pale enthusiast
reading him manuscript verses.

One day, as he was about to start off
and was tucking a book in his pocket,
I complained bitterly. " Why on earth
do you prowl around with Thingabob ? "
I protested ; " he 's so confoundedly or-
dinary ! " (I think I wanted him to play
tennis with me.)

" My dear fellow," he replied, — his
voice was always very pleasant and
grave,' — " in the first place, you don't
know anything about Thingabob; and
in the second, I have the best of rea-
sons, — he 's a Dwarf Giant."

I could have hugged Boylston on the
spot. Not only had he given me, as
ho said, 'the best of reasons, but, by a
miracle of coincidence, for the phrase was
unmistakable, he too had read, when he
was a boy, the particular Stockton tale
I had once loved and almost forgotten.
Best of all, however, he had recovered
for me a term which was in itself a jus-
tification, if any were needed, for one or
two of my own friends. And since then,
oddly enough, the persons whom I have
most delighted in, although I could never,
like Boylston, feel quite at home with
them, have been Dwarf Giants.

Possibly you will not recognize a
Dwarf Giant when you first meet him,
for not until, by long practice, you have
obtained clearness of vision will you be
able to detect him among a crowd of
Ordinary People ; but in time you will
come to know him.

One evening I was in a front seat
at the Globe Theatre, waiting for the
curtain to rise. During the overture, a
flimsy, nondescript affair, I grew tired
of looking at the people as they rustled
in, and turned to watch the orchestra.

It was the usual theatre orchestra: a
group of ill-assorted men, indiscrimi-
nately clothed in shiny black, blowing
and fiddling in a perfunctorily blatant
fashion. But I soon picked out the
'cellist who sat directly in front of me.
He was over sixty, I should judge, and
although his shoulders stooped as he
leaned slightly forward in his chair, I
could see that he must be taller than the
others. His face was smoothly shaven,
clean-cut, and very white except where
an old scar traced a thin, even line across
one high cheek-bone, and his thick iron-
gray hair was brushed smoothly back
from his forehead. His black suit, al-
though very old, was immaculately
brushed, and hung about him loosely with
an air of reminiscent, almost forgotten
distinction. I soon differentiated the
sound of his 'cello from that of the other
instruments. His playing was not the
perfunctory performance of his compan-
ions ; there was a breadth and sweetness
in his tone, a suave cleanness and dignity
in his phrasing, that when you noticed
his share of it alone came near redeem-
ing the overture ; and yet you could see
that he did not care for what he was
obliged to play, but did it that way sim-
ply because he unconsciously could not
bring himself to do it differently.

After the curtain had fallen on the
first act, I leaned over and said to him,
" That orchestration was vile, — you
did n't care for it ? "

" Natilrlich ! " he answered, smiling
at me without the least surprise.

Then we had a long half-whispered
talk with each other across the railing,
and at last he told me much about
himself, although only that which con-
cerned his profession ; for there was a
fine reserve in his courtesy, and I was
far from feeling like committing an im-
pertinence. He told me that he had be-
gun with the 'cello when he was a boy ;
that years ago he had played for a little
while in the great Gewandhaus Orchestra
at Leipzig, but his health had broken

The Contributors' Club.

717

down (he looked like a man who had at
one time been nearly engulfed) ; that
once he had studied orchestration with
Robert Franz, and once he had met
and talked with Robert Schumann. He
spoke of them with deep respect, yet
quietly, as with a simple belief that,
after all, they were his own kinsmen.
We discussed many great moderns, — he
was very patient. I remember saying to
him, " And Wagner ? "

" Prachtig ! erstaunend ! pobelhaft ! "
he whispered back.

Then the leader rattled his baton, the
trivial music began again, and my friend
turned to his 'cello, smiling, — to me,
henceforth, a Dwarf Giant. A month
later, when I went again to the theatre,
he was gone, and a fat little man sat in
his chair, looking very vulgar and jolly.

Finally, I must pay my tribute to the
greatest Dwarf Giant I have ever had
the honor of meeting. I am willing to
do it only because I feel sure that he will
never see this. If he should, however,
it would not disturb' his high serenity ;
he would understand the motive which
prompts me, and with rare magnanimity
forgive the unwarranted liberty I take.

Several years ago, a friend came to
me asking if I knew any one who wished
to exchange lessons in English for in-
struction in Hebrew. The proposition
was so unusual that I could think of no
one, unless some enthusiast should turn
up who wished to read the book of Job
in the original. My friend told me that
he had learned of a little old man who
was trying to publish a book of philo-
sophy, over which he had spent many
years; but he wrote only in Hebrew,
and was too poor to pay for having his
work translated, — too poor even to pay
for lessons in English. To support him-
self he kept a little cobbler shop. The
picture thus called up was a strangely
discrepant one i'or our nineteenth - cen-
tury America, — it belonged more to an-
other world, another century ; he sh'ould
have lived in Rijnsburg, where in 1660

another philosopher of his great race,
Baruch Spinoza, was a polisher of lenses.
But as my friend and I could think of
no solution of the Hebrew-English pro-
blem, I soon drove the haunting figure
of the cobbler from my mind.

Fortunately he found other friends,
great-hearted men who, touched by his
lifelong devotion to the noblest of specu-
lations, his heroic self-sacrifice, and the
dignity of his claim, helped him finally
to publish his book. After that, he was
obliged to canvass for it himself ; and
among a list of names that were given
him of those who might perhaps pur-
chase his work was my own.

One morning there came a rap at my
door. At an impatient " Come in ! "
it opened softly, and a little old man
entered. I cannot quite tell why I was
at once sure who he was. I scarcely
noticed the long black frock coat but-
toned tightly about his shrunken figure ;
the queer silk hat, ancient and worn
and neat, which he held in a black-cot-
ton-gloved hand ; the small frayed Tthite
lawn cravat ; for his wonderful face
riveted my attention. It was aged and
hollow-cheeked ; his gray beard and hair
were very thin ; his Jewish nose was high-
arched and sensitive ; his eyes, however,
small and deep-set, were startlingly bril-
liant. His whole face was singularly
colorless ; the expression was a disquiet-
ing complexus of keen intellectuality,
unspeakable sadness, and calm nobility.
Without a single good feature, with a
face old and haggard and unearthly, he
yet seemed to me, at the moment, abso-
lutely beautiful.

He bowed and addressed me as " Herr
Doctor." Now, when some persons be-
stow on you a title you do not rightly
possess, you take a distorted, irritated
pleasure in promptly setting them right ;
when a very few others do it, however,
you instinctively feel that the question
involved is, not your dignity, but theirs.
So I accepted the phrase and bowed in
return. Our interview was short, and I

718

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cannot write about it: we found very
little to say to each other, — indeed,
these was really nothing to be said. I
purchased his book, and he thanked me
gently and with a rare simplicity, wholly
unconscious that I was the one who
should feel gratitude. Then the little old
philosopher went out, leaving me with an
impression which it is beyond me to de-
scribe.

Of his book, The Disclosure of the
Universal Mysteries, I am not qualified
to speak, but here are one or two com-
ments from men better fitted to judge.
" Much in it reminds me of Spinoza,"
writes Professor Duncan of Yale, " and
impresses one as being the production
' of a vigorous mind that has worked on
the profound questions of philosophy in
isolation from the general currents of
modern speculation. It is all the more
noteworthy from this fact." Professor
William James writes of the book to Pro-
fessor Seligman of Columbia : " There is
a spiritedness about his whole attempt, a
classic directness and simplicity in the
style of most of it, and a bold grandeur
in his whole outlook, that give it a very
high aesthetic quality ; " and then, to the
author himself : " You are really a first
cousin of Spinoza, and if you had written
your system then, it is very likely that I
might now be studying it with students,
just as Spinoza now is studied."

Here, then, is a Dwarf Giant of the
most perfect type, dwarfed solely through
an accident of birth, — in this case
through being born an anachronism. As
Nicholas Boylston once said of his queer
friends to me, " You set out to scoff,
and at last, with a heartache for them,
thank God you have known them."

But you will often find a Dwarf Giant
nearer home than you suspect, though
not so often as you will find Giant
Dwarfs. These last are a noisy people,
and usually to be avoided. But some
night a friend whom you think you
know well will come to your room and
sit in the firelight a long time silent.

Then, little by little, he will betray him-
self. He will tell you thoughts of his
that reveal a greater nature than you
imagined he had ; that reveal a soul so
much greater than your own that you
feel small and helpless beside him. His
face, however plain, will light up with
an unexpected nobility, a new and
larger beauty. And you will know that
you have entertained a Dwarf Giant
unawares.

ON AN OLD PLATE.

YEARS ago, in that misguided time
when every new little house with three
gables called itself " Queen Anne," we
rented a " Queen Anne villa " for a sum-
mer on the Straits of Fuca. Number
16 Bird-Cage Walk, James' Bay, Vic-
toria, B. C., was the address, and I re-
member we were quite vain of it, having
come from a place with " city " tacked
to its name, in the then Territory of
Idaho.

The cottage was new, and so was most
of its plenishing ; only now and then we
came upon some waif relic of old-coun-
try housekeeping, such as the lustre-
ware plate. Perhaps it should be called
a dish, the notion of a plate being some-
thing round ; for it was square, with a
wavy edge turned down, as a seamstress
says, by hand. Much of its distinction
of shape and coloring came from that
appealing fallibility of the human touch.

Miss Gowrie, our Scotch landlady,
thought so little of this plate that she did
not even mention it in the inventory, —
though her eyesight and memory were
both good, — when it came to drawing
up that document ; and I may say there
was little else she did not mention.

We were its discoverers, by accident,
while seeking quite another and poorer
thing. It did not answer the purpose
of the lemon-squeezer we were in search
of, but it made us forget about lemons
and eke squeezers when we came upon
it in the kitchen cupboard, where it had
taken a permanent back seat.

The Contributors' Club.

719

I have no shame in confessing that
I had never looked into that cupboard
before ; this was summer housekeeping,
and I was on very tender terms with my
little old English " maid," by courtesy
the cook. Her gray hairs, her fifty years,
and her manner of the upper servant
come down in life quite precluded any-
thing so paltry as prying into cupboards
or noticing a tendency to monotony in
the puddings.

To this day I can see Miss Gowrie's
face of amazement when she recognized
her old kitchen plate on the best parlor
table (the one with weak legs), doing duty
as a card-receiver. I will not say it was
piled with the cards of the resident gen-
try, but there may have been a name or
two, naturally on top, which Miss Gow-
rie knew and respected. It was evident
from her expression that the combina-
tion struck her as uncanonical, — or ra-
ther as unorthodox, for she was no giddy
Churchwoman.

We passed it off with praises of the
plate, and tried to beguile her of a story
as to its history ; but she would not en-
courage such morbid preferment. It
was against the established order of
things that kitchen plates should be seen
on parlor tables, displaying the names
of the local aristocracy as if they were
cold potatoes or slices of bacon. It was
in vain we called her attention to the
serious merits of the plate, — its individ-
uality, its " frankness," its lovely old cor-
ners blunted as if dog's-eared by use, the
rich burnish of its lustre border, the
charm of its' very lack-lustre where the
burnish in places seemed to have drib-
bled off the edge, the quality of its rare
old watery pink beneath the burnish,
and finally the heart-stirring patriotism
embodied in the legend in the centre of
the plate. It has a plain white centre,
old white, laced across with faint cracks,
— not contemplated in the design, —
like wrinkles in a clean old face. Upon
this field is done in bold black and white
the portrait of a frigate under full sail,

" from truck to taffrail dressed," carry-
ing thirteen guns on a side, and flying
the British naval ensign. Under the
picture, framed in horns of plenty and
handsome pen-and-ink scrollwork, is the
motto : —

" May Peace and Plenty
On our Nation Smile
And Trade with Commerce
Bless the British Isle."

Two small holes bored in the upper
rim of the plate show that its place was
on the wall of some loyal Briton's home.
Had the plate been silver, with a coat of
arms or an ancient guild-mark on it, or
porcelain, bearing some famous factor's
stamp, it is possible Miss Gowrie's mem-
ory might not have failed her so com-
pletely ; but, humble as it was, she knew
it not, she denied it, could not recall a
name or a place connected with its past.
Seeing us so foolish about it, she begged
us to call it our own, and washed her
hands there and then of all further com-
plicity in our use of it.

We carried it away with the re^t of
the summer's booty, and we have it still ;
though not a Christmas comes but we
think of some friend to whom we might
fitly send it, — one of those for whom it
is so difficult to choose a gift out of the
shops, since they " have everything ; "
but invariably we harden our hearts ; the
thing is at once too cheap and too dear.
To how many uses — without being ever
of the slightest use — has it been put,
in our rolling-stone housekeeping ! If
something is wanted to put something
on which nobody ever uses, like the im-
personal penholders on bedroom tables,
there is the old Victoria plate. If there
is a shelf that lacks character, or a cor-
ner where nothing else will " go," there
it is again! Its copper and pink and
strong black lines are always a welcome
note ; it is never too new or too smart ;
it has the double gift of adaptability and
sincerity, two very good qualities in an
old housemate.

We have one other piece of pottery

720

The Contributors1 Club.

that talks, but in how different a lan-
guage ! It is one of a pair of Guadala-
jara water-coolers, — tall, bottle-shaped
jars of unglazed clay, with necks just
large enough for the clasp of a woman's
hand. They are a pair, but not alike.
The chosen vessel to which the potter
confided his secret has a design of pas-
sion-flowers between stripes of terra
cotta and black 'running round the bilge.
In this band of color a space is left for
the inscription : —

HELP YOURSELF
DONA TOMASITA

The peasant potter had no skill of his
pen or brush ; he was better at thumbing
clay than writing dedications to the fair.
Two of his four words are abbreviated,
and the Spanish is barely legible, but it
is easy to read the language of love and
hospitality. The invitation is a pledge
full of the poetry of the South.

Some ruthless disillusionists have said
that water-jars inscribed to Tomasitas
and Juanitas and Emilitas are no more
personal, in the land where they grow,
than stone-china mugs on five-cent coun-
ters " For a Good Child." We scout the
sordid suggestion. Yet, granting that it
were true, and that the trail of Com-
merce is over our gentle Indian jar equal-
ly with our bold British plate, how dif-
ferent is the appeal, how typical of the
two races of buyers !

Public spirit, national pride, a touch
of private greed, perhaps, a pious wel-
come to Trade, with a battle-ship all
ready to persuade her if she be coy, and
the ship's guns to defend her when per-
suaded, — these are the sentiments to lure
coin out of stout British pockets. But
the Southern merchant pipes to custom
in a different key. He knows that he
must strike his victim a little higher than
the pocket ; yet he need not aim quite
so far as the country's need.

Guadalajara clay is of a peculiar, silky
fineness, and it takes a polish as smooth
and pallid as a girl's cheek blanched by

moonlight; its touch, when filled with
water, is as cool as her bare arm on the
fountain curb. His fountain is miles
away over dusty roads, but the jar goes
empty past a dozen wells of strangers.
It is for her to christen with her lips,
or reject and condemn it to perpetual
drought. He brings it safe to the brink ;
she is with him, and it is the moonlight
of his dreams. The pigeons are nestling,
lumps of sleepy feathers, on the Mission
wall ; the white-faced callas are awake,
— they crowd around the fountain and
rustle their cold leaves against her knees.
They peer in, framing her darker image
that floats inverted on the water. He
leans and dips where his own reflection
lies, but the ripples spread, and she laughs
to see herself dispersed by his reluctant
hand.

Did Tomasita help herself like a gen-
erous girl, and pledge her lover in his
" draught divine " ? — or did she drink
from the lips only, and mock his thirst ?

Her jar has been ours, by the vulgar
right of purchase, for more than twenty
years, and, counting time for what time
is worth in Mexico, Tomasita must be a
grandmother now, not without cost of a
few wrinkles ; but to us she is one of the
immortal maidens whose moon of love
shall never set. So much four words
scrawled on a clay bottle can do.

Whenever a craftsman has kneaded
a thought into his work, whether it be
woman or country, hospitality or gain,
it will go on speaking for him when his
own clay is dumb. His gift will continue
to praise the fair one long after he has
forgotten her ; his message will invigor-
ate or charm us when plates are empty
and bottles have gone dry.

This is what we say to our disillusion-
ist when he claims that all things are for
sale, in this world. It may be so ; but
we think that in every bargain something
is released that no price can limit, some-
thing passes from seller to buyer which
the one does not pay for nor the other
supply.

MESSRS. CURTIS y CAMERON, Boston, publishers or the COPLEY PRINTS,
will be glad to send their new Illustrated Christmas Catalogue to any. address
upon receipt of six cents in stamps. The above reproduction of Mr. George
De Forest Brush's "Mother and Child" is from one of the prints.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

iftaga^ne of literature, Science, art, anD

VOL. LXXX. — DECEMBER, 1897. — No. CCCCLXXXIL

THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL.

A VERY essential preliminary to the
consideration of the American historical
novel, in the light of either the achieve-
ments of the past or the possibilities of
the future, must be a decision as to ex-
actly what components go to constitute
historical fiction. Though the term is
one of common use, and in such use seems
sufficiently definite, analysis reveals that
it is a very loosely applied expression,
and that a satisfactory definition is by
no means a simple matter.

Superficially it is apparent that an his-
torical novel is one which grafts upon
a story actual incidents or persons well
enough known to be recognized as his-
torical elements. But this is inadequate
as a line of demarcation, for it is neces-
sarily based wholly on the reader's know-
ledge of history and thus cannot be ac-
cepted as a test, since it becomes solely
a matter of personal view. An old story
runs that a turfman bought a Life of
Petrarch, conceiving it to be a record of
his favorite race-horse, and was loud in
his complaints when, as he phrased it, the
book proved to be " all about a bloomin'
poet." Clearly to this gentleman a novel
which introduces Petrarch would not in-
herently be one founded on history. Is
Stevenson's Treasure Island historical,
in that we are somewhat concerned in
the doings of Blackboard and Flint, pi-
rates of much fame in their own day ?
Is Melville's Israel Potter historical, in
that it is elaborated from the old prison-
er's pamphlet autobiography which he
himself hawked about the country ? Yet

to most novel-readers Flint and Potter
are as absolutely fictitious characters as
any in romance. Thus an attempt to use
the knowledge of the reader as a test is
entirely inadequate.

Nor is the question of accuracy any
more serviceable, for the most correct
historical novels fall far short of what
can be called historical truth, and any
separation educed by this test becomes
admittedly one merely of degree and,
therefore, so wanting in exactness as to
be wholly inapplicable for classification.
The Pretender never came in disguise
to England, as Thackeray by his Henry
Esmond has made so many people be-
lieve, and the colonial laws of Massa-
chusetts decreed a totally different story
from that Hawthorne tells in The Scar-
let Letter.

Granting that we must include all sto-
ries involving actual events or characters,
even though no attempt is made to be
historically correct, we still have not es-
tablished a satisfactory limit, for another
range of books at once claim inclusion.
To most of its many thousand readers,
Mrs. Foster's famous old story of The
Coquette, or the History of Eliza Whar-
ton, is simply a piece of imagination,
ranking with Clarissa and Evelina, but
to the antiquarian the tale told by the
letters of Eliza Wharton and Major San-
ford is in truth the narrative of the in-
trigue of Sarah Whitman and Pierre-
pont Edwards. Whether Mrs. Rowson's
Charlotte Temple was really Charlotte
Stanley, or her betrayer, Colonel Mon-

722

The American Historical Novel.

treville, the Colonel Montresor whom stu-
dents of Revolutionary history know as
one of the engineers of the British army,
is still a matter of dispute. When the
truth of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
was challenged, she published in a vol-
ume her authorities, thus revealing the
strong historical basis the book had.
The giving of aliases to actual individ-
uals in putting them into novels is cer-
tainly but a piece of fictional license akin
to the twisting of events, and can scarce-
ly exclude the books in which such lib-
erties are taken from being fairly judged
historical.

Still more difficult of classification is
what may be termed the Novel of Man-
ners, or, perhaps, more descriptively, the
Novel of an Epoch. A book of this class,
though dealing with neither historical in-
cidents nor real people, may yet convey
a far truer picture of the time than the
most elaborate stories of the before-
mentioned kinds. An atmosphere can
be as historical as an occurrence, and a
created character can transmit a truer
sense of a generation than the most la-
bored biography of some actual person.
It is scarcely possible to obtain a more
vivid idea of the eighteenth-century life
and people than is to be found in Field-
ing's Tom Jones, and in this sense it is
the best of historical fiction. In the three
volumes of the Littlepage MSS. Cooper
took as his central theme the history of
the great land grants of New York ; Sa-
tanstoe relates the motives of state which
induced the granting of the patents, the
means taken to secure them, and the
struggle with the Indians for their pos-
session ; The Chainbearer carries the his-
tory one point further by showing the
method of settling these land grants,
and tells of the struggle for possession
between the owner and the squatters ;
and finally, the third of the series, The
Redskins, deals with the fierce " anti-
rent " war which broke out on the same
estates some fifty years later. It is ap-
parent, therefore, that these three books

are historical novels. In fact, however,
they are not more truly historical than
the early works of Bret Harte, and it is
a safe assertion to make that if the day
ever comes when his stories of California
are no longer held to be the classics of
the West, they will still be read as pic-
tures of the up-building of the Sierra
States, or as historical novels.

It appears doubly defective to limit the
historical novel to works describing oc-
currences that have passed out of the
realm of contemporaneity into that of his-
tory, for it is obvious that every decade
and every century must serve to make
the pictures less true to life. Possibly
it will be urged that time is needed to
gain the perspective requisite for his-
torical treatment ; that is, to be able to
write with breadth of view and without
party feeling. This is to overlook a fact
long since recognized in the writing of
true history : that partisan feeling is a
matter not of a generation, but of an
individual ; it is as rare to find history
written without a bias as it is to find
an unbiased man. In other words, par-
tisanship is a matter of personality, and
it is as easy for a fair - minded writer
to treat of contemporary events without
feeling as of those of a hundred years
ago. Furthermore, the introduction of
party feeling, or of bias, tends rather to
make a novel truer to life than if it is
written from a broader standpoint. In
reading Westward Ho ! few can fail
to be irritated at its intense and narrow-
minded anti - Romanism, yet no atmo-
sphere could be truer from the English
standpoint of the period of the Spanish
Armada. Uncle Tom's Cabin was al-
most a party platform, and therefore is
absolute truth from one point of view.
TourgeVs A Fool's Errand at the time
of its publication could be read as a
novel or as a contemporary essay on re-
construction problems in the South, and
eventually it should unquestionably rank
well up in historical fiction. Charles
Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn was

The American Historical Novel.

728

printed almost immediately after the
events described, but that does not pre-
vent its being the best description, in an
historical sense, of the Philadelphia pes-
tilence of 1793.

Nor is party feeling avoided by lapse
of years, tradition being as partisan as
the men who transmit it. Save in one
or two of Cooper's novels, it would be
well-nigh impossible to find a romance
dealing with Revolutionary history which
does not make the Whig of that war the
patriot, and the Tory the disloyal and,
usually, evil-acting man. Yet the stu-
dent of history knows that the loyalists,
if a minority, were largely composed of
the gentry and educated classes of the
country ; that they were the equivalent
of what to-day are termed the " better
element," and were superior in character
to many of the men who opposed them.
No American novelist has ventured to
write of John Hancock and Jonathan
Trumbull as men suspected of smug-
gling, or of Samuel Adams as a public
man who sought, as other officials have
done more recently, to vindicate him-
self from the charge of defalcation by
an appeal to the ballots of the masses.
Would any American author, striving to
write popular fiction, dare to picture one
signer of the Declaration as selling the
secrets of his country to the French Min-
istry for a paltry pension, or another
taking advantage of information of the
need of the Continental cause for wheat
to corner the supply at once so far as he
was able ? In one case alone have our
writers dared to draw an approximately
faithful portrait of a man who came to
the front in early Revolutionary days,
to describe the bounty-jumper, deserter,
smuggler, and drunkard, who, neverthe-
less, rose to high honor in the American
cause, and the reason for this exception
is explained when the name of the man
is given as Benedict Arnold.

This ability to see only one side of
the Revolution is the more extraordi-
nary since, in another respect, the Ameri-

can people, and the translators of their
thought, have shown for the most part a
very unusual fairness, and this distinc-
tion is in itself proof of the main point
contended for : that distance or lapse
of time has nothing to do with fairness
of view. Already we have a material
amount of romance dealing with the civil
war period, with scarcely an example that
does not take a broad and generous view
of both sides, while, as already noted, a
fair-minded Revolutionary novel is al-
most an unknown quantity. In fact, it
could be claimed without much exag-
geration that Thomas Nelson Page's Meh
Lady contains more that is irenic than
any ten novels treating of the Revolu-
tion. This distinction merely is proof,
it will be said, of the inherent alienage
towards Great Britain, and of the in-
herent nationalism of the American peo-
ple ; but the rancors of 1783 were little
more bitter than the rancors of 1865,
and that the first should find continuous
expression in historical fiction and the
other scarcely at all, though they are
equally valuable from the novelist's point
of view, illustrates the influence of popu-
lar view on the writers, and shows how
absolutely reflective they are of the opin-
ions and prejudices of their own genera-
tion. Still more it shows how little lapse
of time goes to make the historical novel,
and therefore how absurd it is to use the
most obvious line of demarcation as an
adequate limit.

No less absurd, however, would be
the inclusion of all stories of contempo-
rary life, for novels of manners do not
intrinsically contain the faintest histori-
cal suggestion. A host of popular nov-
elists of to-day are drawing for us the
life of New York or Boston without em-
bodying in their work the coloring which,
in the future, might give their romances
the quality of interest that we find in
some of the books already mentioned.
Yet these contemporary writers intend
to convey as true a picture of the partic-
ular life they are delineating as did Han-

724

The American Historical Novel.

nah Foster, Charles Brockden Brown,
or Bret Harte. It would be easy to pick
out from the novels of the last decade
one hundred dealing with the every-day
life of New Yorkers, most of them writ-
ten by indwellers of that city of consid-
erable literary reputation, but it would
be a bold prophet who should venture
to predict for one of these books that it
would be read fifty or one hundred years
hence for its description of New York
life and people.

Eecognition of these facts must force
the conclusion that a novel is historical
or unhistorical because it' embodies or
does not embody the real feelings and
tendencies of the age or generation it at-
tempts to depict, and in no sense because
the events it records have happened or
the people it describes have lived. That
is, the events and characters must be typ-
ical, not exceptional, to give it the at-
mosphere which, to another generation,
shall make it seem more than a mere
created fancy ; and just because it is so
much more difficult to draw a type than
a freak, and because the exception ap-
peals to the literary mind so much more
than the rule, we have in every decade
a great mass of romance nominally de-
scribing the life of the period, which, if
read a few years later, is so untrue to
the senses as really to seem caricature
rather than true drawing.

Viewing the historical novel from this
standpoint, it is obvious that two elements
go to constitute it : First, that it must
reflect a point of view either of a con-
temporary party, or else of a succeeding
generation, upon some subject which has
at one time been a matter of contro-
versy, if not of conflict. Second, that
some one or more characters in the
novel must be true expressions of the
period with which the book deals, or
must approximate to contemporary be-
lief of what the people of that period
were like. In both these senses the in-
accuracy of treatment which probably
results does not flow from the writer,

but rather from the reader. This pos-
sibly explains what at first thought seems
a curious fact in historical fiction. With
hardly an exception, true historians have
failed signally when they came to write
historical novels. In America, John
Lothrop Motley, Edward Eggleston, W.
Gilmore Simms, and J. Esten Cooke, all
of whom have won success in historical
writing, have essayed to turn their know-
ledge to use in historical fiction ; yet it
is to be questioned if the average read-
er of to-day has ever heard of Merry
Mount, Montezuma, or The Virginian
Comedians ; and if the works of Mr.
Simms have somewhat more repute, it is
scarcely because of their greater inter-
est, but because of their greater number.
Dr. Eggleston has, notwithstanding, quite
unconsciously given us in The Hoosier
Schoolmaster a novel which in its de-
scriptions of mid-western life deserves
in every sense a place as an historical
novel, and this in itself is proof that the
historian is not fundamentally incapable
of writing historical fiction.

All this tends to show that the great
historical novel in the past has not been
notable because of its use of historical
events and characters, but because of its
use of an historical atmosphere, such as
Scott created in his Ivanhoe and Thack-
eray in his Esmond. It is an actual fact
that Queen Anne's time stands out in
the latter book with far more clearness
than can be obtained from any history
of the same period, and a similar asser-
tion can be made almost as strongly of
the former. In neither case, however,
is it due to the introduction of real char-
acters, and the incidents in both books
are notoriously unhistorical. In Ivanhoe,
by the use of certain elemental moods
of mind, as by the struggle between
Norman and Saxon, by the universal
attitude towards the Jew, by outlaw and
Templar, the big feelings of the time of
Richard I. stand out clearly ; and the
book has satisfied the imagination of
millions of readers. So in Esmond we

The American Historical Novel.

725

have the contest between the Jacobite
and the Georgian, with its background
of religious conflict, but in place of the
tourney and the battlement as the means
to an end, we have the intrigue and
plotting which belong to the time of
Marlborough and Bolingbroke. Briefly,
in each case the atmosphere of the book
is correct, falsify or pervert history as
it may, and, therefore, as already said,
each satisfies the imagination of the
reader. For a like reason The Scarlet
Letter and The Deerslayer have done
the same. The reader breathes Puri-
tanism throughout the first. It is not
alone the descriptions of Massachusetts
life that give the story this wonderful
quality. Dimmesdale's conscience and
the intellectual cruelty of his tormentor
are truer historically than what in the
book purports to be reconstructed from
documentary sources. The Deerslayer
is a description of an isolated outpost
struggle between white and red — a se-
ries of adventures that Cooper might have
placed at almost any' date, and in almost
any spot in this country. Yet the world
over it has been accepted as the classic
of the wonderful two hundred and fifty
years' struggle between two races for
the possession of a continent.

There can be little question that the
historical novel has two advantages
which well-nigh make it preeminent in
interest. Foremost of these is the at-
mosphere of truth which is conveyed to
the mind of the reader by the mention
of real persons and places and events.
This is equivalent to proving that a part
of the book is based on fact, and, admit-
ting this as so, most people fail to make
the slightest distinction, but assume that
all that is told them is of the same credi-
bility. In other words, the whole story
is made more reasonable, that is, more
believable, to people, and therefore more
interesting. For in however intellect-
ual an attitude a romance is read, its
primary enjoyment is due to how far
the reader is made to accept the tale as

something that has happened or might
have happened.

The secondary advantage is but a de-
velopment of this first one. As most
people like or dislike a book because of
what is termed its " convincingness," so
a large number of readers seek to com-
bine with their fiction a certain amount
of instruction ; and this has made the
novel in our day a favorite means of
education in an historical sense: a tale
which would not be read as a story, and
which would be laughed out of court as
a history, may by the combination of the
two obtain a distinct success, much as an
inferior cordial and inferior spirits by
blending can be made to pass for a fair
brew of punch.

The chief advantage already dwelt
upon involves none the less two distinct
difficulties which seriously handicap his-
torical fiction. The lesser of these is
the rigidity of the events and conditions.
It will, perhaps, be answered that the
most glaring inaccuracies and twistings
have been condoned. This cannot be
denied, but it can be answered that any-
thing is pardoned in a book with merits
positive enough to balance its defects,
and that thousands of novels with good
in them, which have failed and been for-
gotten, fully offset the few which have
succeeded in spite of their faults. On
the contrary, even the most heedless
and uninformed writer who attempts to
use the materials of actual history must
at once become conscious of the enor-
mous hampering of pen freedom, though
incidents and character are seemingly
twisted at the will of the writer. The
knowledge that he is falsifying facts
gives to his work a resulting want of
verisimilitude in the treatment that ma-
terially injures the book. What is more,
the effect on the reader who detects this
untruthfulness is a most important if in-
tangible quantity. The writer can re-
member the little shock, and the result-
ing changed attitude of his own mood
towards a novel treating of Shakespeare's

726

The American Historical Novel.

life, upon coming to the statement of the
number of guineas paid the dramatist for
a play, simply because he happened to
know that the guinea was the coinage of
the East India Company, and was not
in use till Shakespeare had been many
years in his grave. So, too, the best
American historical novel of English
writing excited the utmost merriment
among its critics by a mere passing allu-
sion to maple-sugar making in October.
The greatest license is allowed the poet
as compared to the novelist, but it is
to be questioned if an American ever
read Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming
without a laugh over the " happy shep-
herd swain " who danced on the frontier
" with timbrels " and " lovely maidens
prankt with floweret new," while the
"flamingo disported like a meteor on
the lakes." Just because the novel pur-
ports to be historical, such slips are noted
with far closer attention, and to avoid
them is a task of great difficulty.

The second difficulty, and one is tempt-
ed to say the .inherent defect, is the de-
lineation of character — a difficulty so
strongly* marked that it extends not
merely to the historical characters em-
bodied, but often as well to the imagina-
tive ones. Few who have written fiction
have escaped the accusation of taking
their characters from living models, for
the lay reader apparently never realizes
how much more easy it is for the author
to imagine a type than to copy it. In the
one case the plot practically produces
the character : that is, your hero or he-
roine, your good man or your bad man,
must, to make your story, speak or be
silent at such a point ; must make a
sacrifice here, or draw back from one
there. If your plot is properly made,
if there are enough " things to be done,"
or " action," to use the playwright's
technical expression, your character is
really created ; and the only work left
for the writer is to fill in the minor de-
tails so that the character shall seem a
consistent whole. The task is quite dif-

ferent, however, when an attempt is made
to copy from life. Knowledge of any
one person is at best superficial, and in
conventional life is limited to little more
than an impression of drawing-room con-
duct, or what might be properly termed
the dress-parade moments of life. To
meet a woman at half a dozen teas, to
spend an hour in her opera-box, and to
sit on her right hand at a dinner or two,
is very far from knowing what her be-
havior would be in the exceptional mo-
ments of life, which is the concern of
romance. Inevitably an attempt to copy
from life must be but little better than
trying to sketch from a model who is
differently posed from the attitude you
are endeavoring to draw, and it must
necessarily produce a sense of unreality
in the character. Nor is it an answer
to say that as no living person is wholly
consistent, if an action of an imaginary
man or woman seems uncharacteristic
it is only the truer to life. This is to lose
sight of a law as fixed as that of per-
spective in painting. A character in a
novel, as in a play, is a failure unless there
is in it a distinct quality of fatalism.
Your audience in each case must be ab-
solutely prepared for the action taken in
the crisis or climax. The situation may
be original, there may be entire surprise ;
but the action of the character in that
situation must be as definite and as ex-
pected, or, in other words, as reasonable
(in accordance with the known qualities
of the person) as the movement of pawns
in a well-analyzed chess opening.

It will easily be conceived, then, with
what difficulty an historical personage is
transferred to the pages of a novel. The
character is definite while the conditions
are new, and unless the events are select-
ed to suit the man, that is, unless the
plot is built from the character, instead
of the character being evolved from the
plot, the result is almost hopelessly arti-
ficial. As an example, take the idea of
Washington as presented in The Virgin-
ians. How shadowy the drawing is, how

The American Historical Novel.

727

absolutely weak the personality, as com-
pared with those of George and Harry
Warrington ! Thackeray had studied
the conventional historical portrait of
the man and then transferred it as well
as could be to new surroundings. But
just because the man was so well known,
the author was all the more hampered
in his treatment of him, and painstak-
ingly as he sought to vivify him, the
portrait is at once colorless through its
attempted accuracy, yet defective in its
truth. Who in reading of the prim,
formal, sensible man of twenty-six in
the novel could infer from his reading
the reality ? — the gay young officer who
was over-fond of " fashionable " clothes ;
who held a good cue at billiards ; who
passed whole days winning or losing
money at cards ; who loved the theatre
and the cock-pit ; who could brew bowls
of arrack punch, and do his share in
drinking them; who could dance for
three hours without once resting ; and
who fell in and out of love so fiercely
and so easily. Nor" is this artificiality
due to a transatlantic point of view of
our greatest American. The portrait of
Washington as given by Cooper in The
Spy is equally absurd, though drawn by
an American writer who could have
talked with many who knew Washington
personally. In each case the attempt is
made to give us, not Major Washington of
the Virginia regiment, or General Wash-
ington of the Continental army, but the
sobered and aged President Washington
of tradition.

These restrictions and limitations have
produced their natural result, for in all
American historical fiction there cannot
be found a celebrated character who was
as well a real character. The assertion
might, indeed, be extended to English
literature, for if Scott's Louis XI. or
Shakespeare's innumerable characters
are cited, it can be said that these char-
acters are so absolutely the creation of
the writers that they fall really within
the imaginative rather than the histori-

cal class, and to this day the historian
finds one of his distinct difficulties to bo
the existence of preconceived ideas of
many historical characters, due solely
to the novelist and dramatist. If this
goes to prove that there has been no
great historical character in fiction, it
does not imply that historical fiction has
not given us its full share of people who
have passed into literature as types.
American historical fiction has done
even more, for it has created for us our
idea concerning two great races which,
it is probable, will remain through all
time. The character of the black as
delineated in Uncle Tom and in Topsy
for some reason satisfies the imagina-
tion, and however much one may know
and see of the negro in the South to
counteract this view, it remains the one
to which the mind recurs in thinking of
the negro in the abstract. Even more
remarkable is the second type, created
for us by one man. To Cooper alone
is due the accepted idea of the Ameri-
can Indian, and the application of the
adjective " noble " to his race. The his-
torian, or even the reader, who has sifted
the truth of the red man as told in the
early Jesuit Relations and the writings
of such voyagers and explorers as Car-
ver, Mackenzie, Lewis and Clark, and
Schoolcraf t, knows that the Indian ranks
low in the scale of man ; that he was
always so much inferior to the white in
intelligence and vigor that the frontiers-
man excelled him in woodcraft and phy-
sical endurance ; that he was something
of a coward ; and that he is practically in-
capable of romance, or even of kindness,
toward a woman. None the less, the
Indian Cooper created, typified in Chin-
gachgook and Uncas, will probably re-
main for all time the model from which
future draughtsmen will work. But the
historical novel of the past has done
more than this for American literature.
It has given us in Cooper and Haw-
thorne our two most famous novelists;
and in the best of their work, and in

728

Autumn.

Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur, we
have what to this day are the most posi-
tive successes of American fiction.

What a blending of history and ro-
mance may do as to the future it is idle
to attempt to prophesy. At the present
moment there seems a revival of inter-
est in American history, and the novel-
ist has been quickly responsive to it. In
the resulting literature, however, we find
as yet the same defects that appear in
much, one is tempted to say all, of our
contemporary fiction. That is, an en-
tire disregard of the big elements of
American life and an over-accentuation
of the untypical. In a general survey
of our fiction, one is struck with its al-
most universal silence on all that has
given us distinct nationality. Who in
reading American fiction has ever
brought away a sense of real glory in
his own country ? We are told that our
people are hopelessly occupied in money-
making, and that our politics are shame-
fully corrupt. Yet the joint product of
these forces has won, or is winning,
equality of man, religious liberty, the
right of asylum, freedom of the ocean,
arbitration of international disputes, and
universal education ; and this, too, while
these people were fighting a threefold
struggle with man, beast, and nature
across a vast continent.

Disregarding all this, the novelist has

turned to the petty in American life.
With the most homogeneous people in
both thought and language in the world,
American literature is overburdened with
dialect stories; with no true class dis-
tinctions, and with an essential resem-
blance in American life from the Atlan-
tic to the Pacific, the novel of locality
has been accepted as typical and not ex-
ceptional; with a people less absorbed
in and less influenced by so-called soci-
ety than any other great nation, we are
almost submerged with what may be
styled the Afternoon Tea Novel. It
may be good fictional material, for hu-
man nature should be after all the first
consideration of the novelist, but whales
are not caught in pails, nor are the great
purposes and passions of mankind usu-
ally to be found in the neighborhood of
" the cups that cheer but not inebriate."
And so our novelists may be likened to
the early miners of gold, who, overlook-
ing the vast mountain lodes of precious
metal, industriously sifted the river-bed
for the little shining particles that had
been washed down from the former.
American history and American life have
their rich lodes of gold-bearing quartz ;
and when our people produce as good
literary workers as mechanical engineers,
when the best of our imagination turns
from the practical to the ideal, there will
be no lack of an American fiction.

Paul Leicester Ford.

AUTUMN.

BROTHER, Time is a thing how slight!
Day lifts and falls, and it is night.
Rome stands an hour, and the green leaf
Buds into being bright and brief.
For us, God has at least in store
One shining moment (less or more).
Seize, then, what mellow sun we may,
To light us in the darker day.

P. H. Savage.

From a Mattress Grave.

729

FROM A MATTRESS GRAVE.

" I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy,
I am comedy, — Heraclitus and Democritus in
one ; a Greek, a Hebrew ; an adorer of despot-
ism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of
communism as embodied in Proudhon ; a Latin,
a Teuton ; a beast, a devil, a god."

THE carriage stopped, and the speck-
less footman, jumping down, inquired,
" Monsieur Heine ? "

The concierge, knitting beside the
porte-cochere, looked at him, looked at
the glittering victoria he represented
and at the grande dame who sat in it,
shielding herself with a parasol from the
glory of the Parisian sunlight ; then she
shook her head.

"But this is No. 3 Avenue Mati-
gnon ? "

" Yes, but monsieur receives only his
old friends. He is dying."

"Madame knows.' Take up her name."

The concierge glanced at the elegant
card. She saw " Lady " — which she
imagined meant an English duchesse —
and words scribbled on it in pencil.

" It is au cinquieme," she said, with
a sigh.

«' I will take it up."

Ere he returned madame descended,
and passed from the sparkling sunshine
into the gloom of the portico, with a
melancholy consciousness of the sym-
bolic ; for her spirit, too, had its poetic
intuitions and insights, and had been
trained by friendship with one of the
wittiest and tenderest women of her
time to some more than common appre-
hension of the greater spirit at whose
living tomb she was come to worship.
Hers was a fine face, wearing the triple
aristocracy of beauty, birth, and letters.
The complexion was of lustreless ivory,
the black hair wound round and round.
The stateliness of her figure completed
the impression of a Roman matron.

" Monsieur Heine begs that your lady-

ship will do him the honor of mounting,
and will forgive him the five stories for
the sake of the view."

Her ladyship's sadness was tinctured
by a faint smile at the message, which
the footman delivered without any sus-
picion that the view in question meant
the view of Heine himself. But then
that admirable menial had not the ad-
vantage of her comprehensive familiar-
ity with Heine's writings. She crossed
the blank stony courtyard and toiled up
the curving five flights, her mind astir
with pictures and emotions.

She had scribbled on her card a re-
minder of her identity ; but could he
remember, after all those years and in
his grievous sickness, the little girl of
twelve who had sat next to him at the
Boulogne table d'hote ? And she her-
self could scarcely realize at tim/*? that
the fat, good-natured, short-sighted little
man who had lounged with her daily at
the end of the pier, telling her stories,
was the most mordant wit in Europe,
"the German Aristophanes," and that
those nursery tales, grotesquely compact
of mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny
old French fiddler with a poodle that
diligently took three baths a day, were
the frolicsome improvisations of perhaps
the greatest lyric poet of his age. She
recalled their parting: "When you go
back to England, you can tell your
friends that you have seen Heinrich
Heine." To which the little girl, " And
who is Heinrich Heine ? " — a query
which had set the fat little man roaring
with laughter.

These things might be vivid still in
her own vision, — they colored all she
had read since from his magic pen : the
wonderful poems, interpreting with equal
magic the romance of the mediaeval
world, or the modern soul, naked and
unashamed, as if clothed in its own

730

From a Mattress Grave.

complexity; the humorous-tragic ques-
tionings of the universe ; the delicious
travel pictures and fantasies; the lucid
criticisms of art and politics and philo-
sophy, informed with malicious wisdom,
shimmering with poetry and wit. But
as for him, doubtless she and her ingen-
uous interrogation had long since faded
from his tumultuous life.

The odors of the sick-room recalled
her to the disagreeable present. In the
sombre light she stumbled against a
screen covered with paper painted to
look like lacquer-work, and as the slip-
shod old nurse in a serre-te"te motioned
her forwards she had a dismal sense
of a lodging-house interior, a bourgeois
barrenness enhanced by two engravings
after Leopold Robert, depressingly alien
from that dainty boudoir atmosphere of
the artist life she knew.

But this sordid impression was swal-
lowed up in the vast tragedy behind the
screen. Upon a pile of mattresses heaped
on the floor lay the poet. He had raised
himself a little on his pillows, amid
which showed a longish, pointed white
face, with high cheek-bones, a Grecian
nose, and a large pale mouth, wasted
from the sensualism she recollected in
it to a strange Christ-like beauty. The
outlines of the shriveled body beneath
the sheet seemed those of a child of ten,
and the legs looked curiously twisted.
One thin little hand, as of transparent
wax, delicately artistic, upheld a para-
lyzed eyelid, under which he peered at
her.

" Lucy liebchen ! " he piped joyously.
" So you have found out who Heinrich
Heine is ! "

He used the familiar German " du ; "
for him she was still his little friend.
But to her the moment was too poignant
for speech. The terrible passages in the
last writings of this greatest of autobio-
graphers, which she had hoped poetical-
ly colored, were then painfully, prosai-
cally true.

" Can it be that I still actually exist ?

My body is so shrunken that there is
hardly anything left of me but my voice,
and my bed makes me think of the me-
lodious grave of the enchanter Merlin,
which is in the forest of Broceliand, in
Brittany, under high oaks whose tops
shine like green flames to heaven. Oh,
I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin,
and their fresh waving ! For over my
mattress grave here in Paris no green
leaves rustle, and early and late I hear
nothing but the rattle of carriages, ham-
mering, scolding, and the jingle of pia-
nos. A grave without rest ; death with-
out the privileges of the departed, who
have no longer any need to spend money,
or to write letters, or to compose books."

And then she thought of that ghastly
comparison of himself to the ancient
German singer, — the poor clerk of the
Chronicle of Limburg, — whose sweet
songs were sung and whistled from
morning to night all through Germany,
while he himself, smitten with leprosy,
hooded and cloaked and carrying the
lazarus-clapper, moved through the shud-
dering city. Silently she held out her
hand, and he gave her his bloodless fin-
gers; she touched the, strangely satin
skin and felt the fever beneath.

" It cannot be my little .Lucy," he
said reproachfully. " She used to kiss
me. But even Lucy's kiss cannot thrill
my paralyzed lips."

She stooped and kissed his lips. His
little beard felt soft and weak as the
hair of a baby.

" Ah, I have made my peace with the
world and with God. Now he sends me
his death-angel."

She struggled with the lump in her
throat. " You must be indeed a prey
to illusions if you mistake an English-
woman for Azrael."

" Ach, why was I so bitter against
England ? I was only once in England,
years ago. I knew nobody, and London
seemed so full of fog and Englishmen.
And I wrote a ballet for your Mr. Lum-
ley, and it was never produced. Now

From a Mattress Grave.

781

England has avenged herself beautifully.
She sends me you. Others, too, mount
the hundred and five steps. I am an
annex to the Paris Exposition. Remains
of Heinrich Heine. A very pilgrimage
of the royal demimonde. A Russian
princess brings the hateful odor of her
pipe," he said, with scornful satisfaction ;
" an Italian princess babbles of her aches
and pains as if in competition with mine.
But the gold medal would fall to my
nerves, I am convinced, if they were on
view at the Exposition. No, no, don't
cry ; I meant you to laugh. Don't think
of me as you see me now ; pretend to
me I am as you first knew me. But
how fine and beautiful you have grown,
even to my fraction of an eye, which
sees the sunlight as through black gauze !
Fancy, little Lucy has a husband, a hus-
band — and the poodle still^ takes three
baths a day. Are you happy, darling,
are you happy ? "

She nodded. It seemed a sacrilege to
claim happiness.

" Das ist eigen ! Yes, you were al-
ways so merry. God be thanked ! How
refreshing to find one woman with a
heart, and that unseared ! Here the
women have a metronome under their
corsets, which beats time, but not music.
Himmel ! what a whiff of my youth
you bring me ! Does the sea still roll
green at the end of Boulogne pier, and
do the sea-gulls fly, while I lie here, a
Parisian Prometheus, chained to my bed-
post ? Ah, had I only the bliss of a
rock with the sky above me ! But I
must not complain. For six years be-
fore I moved here I had nothing but a
ceiling to defy. Now my balcony gives
sideways on the Champs Elyse'es, and
sometimes I dare to lie outside on a
sofa, and peer at beautiful, beautiful
Paris as. she sends up her soul in spar-
kling fountains, and incarnates herself
in pretty women who trip along like
dance-music. Look ! "

To please him she went to a window,
and saw upon the narrow iron-grilled

balcony a tent of striped chintz, like the
awning of a cafe", supported by a light
iron framework. Her eyes were blurred
by unshed tears, and she divined rather
than saw the far-stretching avenue palpi-
tating with the fevered life of the Great
Exposition year ; the intoxicating sun-
light ; the horse-chestnut trees dappling
with shade the leafy footways ; the white
fountain-spray and flaming flower-beds
of the Rond Point; the flashing, flicker-
ing stream of carriages flowing to the
Bois with their freight of beauty and
wealth and insolent vice.

" The first time I looked out of that
window," he said, " I seemed to myself
like Dante, at the end of the Divine
Comedy, when once again he beheld the
stars. You cannot know what I felt
when, after so many years, I saw the
world again with half an eye for ever so
little a space. I had my wife's opera-
glass in my hand, and I saw with in-
expressible pleasure a young vagrant
vender of pastry offering his goods to
two ladies in crinolines with a small dog.
I closed the glass : I could see no more,
for I envied the dog. The nurse car-
ried me back to bed, and gave me mor-
phia. That day I looked no more. For
me the Divine Comedy was far from
ended. The divine humorist has even
descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's
coffin ! I lie between the two Champs
filyse'es : the one where warm life pal-
pitates, and that other where the pale
ghosts flit."

Then it was not a momentary fantasy
of the pen, but an abiding mood that
had paid blasphemous homage to the
" Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had
it not always run through his work, this
conception of humor in the grotesqueries
of history, "the dream of an intoxicated
divinity " ? But his amusement thereat
had been genial. " Like a mad harle-
quin," he had written of Byron, " he
strikes a dagger into his own heart, to
sprinkle mockingly with the jetting black
blood the ladies and gentlemen around.

732

From a Mattress Grave.

. . . My blood is not so splenetically
black: my bitterness comes only from
the gall-apples of my ink." But now,
she thought, that bitter draught always
at his lips had worked into his blood at
last.

" Are you quite incurable ? " she said
gently, as she returned from the window
to seat herself at his side.

" No, I shall die some day, — Gruby
says very soon. But doctors are so in-
consistent. Last week, after I had had a
frightful attack of cramp in the throat and
chest, ' Pouvez-vous siffler ? ' he asked.
' Non, pas meme une come'die de Mon-
sieur Scribe,' I replied. So you may see
how bad I was. Well, even that, he said,
would n't hasten the end, and I should
go on living indefinitely ! I had to cau-
tion him not to tell my wife. Poor
Mathilde ! I have been unconscionably
long a-dying. And now he turns round
again and bids me order my coffin. But
I fear, despite his latest bulletin, I shall
go on some time yet increasing my know-
ledge of spinal disease. I read all the
books about it, as well as experiment
practically. What clinical lectures I will
give in heaven, demonstrating the igno-
rance of doctors ! "

She was glad to note the more genial
nuance of mockery. Raillery vibrated
almost in the very tones of his voice,
which had become clear and penetrating
under the stimulus of her presence ; but
it passed away in tenderness, and the
sarcastic wrinkles vanished from the cor-
ners of his mouth, as he made the pa-
thetic jest anent his wife.

" So you read as well as write ? " she
said.

" Oh well, Zichlinsky — a nice young
refugee — does both for me most times.
My mother, poor old soul, wrote the other
day to know why I only signed my let-
ters ; so I had to say my eyes pained
me, which was not so untrue as the rest
of the letter."

" Does n't she know ? "

" Know ? God bless her, of course

not. Dear old lady, dreaming so happily
at the Dammthor of Dusseldorf, too old
and wise to read newspapers, — no, she
does not know that she has a dying son ;
only that she has an undying ! Nicht
wahr ? "

He looked at her with a shade of anxi-
ety, — that tragic anxiety of the veteran
artist scenting from afar the sneers of
the new critics at his life-work, and mor-
bidly conscious of his hosts of enemies.
" As long as the German tongue lives."
" Dear old Germany ! " he said,
pleased. " Yes, it is true, —

' Nennt man die besten Namen,
So wird auch der meine genannt.' ''

She thought of the sequel —

" Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,

So wird auch der meine genannt " —
as he went on : —

" That was why, though the German
censorship forbade or mutilated my every
book, which was like sticking pins into
my soul, I would not become naturalized
here. Paris has been my new Jerusa-
lem, and I crossed my Jordan at the
Rhine, but as a French subject I should be
like those two-headed monstrosities they
show at the fairs. Besides, I hate French
poetry. What measured glitter ! Not
that German poetry has ever been to me
more than a divine plaything. A laurel
wreath on my grave place or withhold,
— I care not, — but lay on my coffin a
sword, for I was as brave a soldier as
your Canning in the liberation war of
humanity. But my thirty years' war is
over, and I die ' with sword unbroken
and a broken heart.' " His head fell
back in ineffable hopelessness. "Ah,"
he murmured, " it was ever my prayer,
' Lord, let me grow old in body, but let
my soul stay young ; let my voice quaver
and falter, but never my hope.' And this
is how I end."

" But your work does not end. Your
fight was not vain. You are the inspirer
of young Germany, and you are praised
and worshiped by all the world : is that
no pleasure ? "

From a Mattress Grave.

733

•' No, I am not le bon Dieu ! " He
chuckled, his spirits revived by the blas-
phemous mot. " Ah, what a fate ! To
have the homage only of the fools, a sort
of celestial Victor Cousin. One compli-
ment from Hegel now must be sweeter
than a churchful of psalms." A fearful
fit of coughing interrupted further elabo-
ration of the blasphemous fantasia. For
five minutes it rent and shook him, the
nurso bending fruitlessly over him, but
at its wildest he signed to his visitor not
to go, and when at last it lulled he went
on calmly : " Donizetti ended mad in a
gala-dress, but I end at least sane enough
to appreciate the joke, — a little long
drawn out and not entirely original, yet
replete with ingenious irony. Little
Lucy looks shocked, but I sometimes
think, little Lucy, the disrespect is with
the goody-goody folks, who, while laud-
ing their Deity's strength and hymning
his goodness, show no recognition at all
of his humor. Yet I am praised as a
wit as well as a poet. If I could take
up my bed and walk, I would preach a
new worship, — the worship of the Arch-
Humorist. I would draw up the Ritual
of the Ridiculous. Three times a day,
when the muezzin called from the
Bourse-top, all the faithful would laugh
devoutly at the gigantic joke of the
cosmos. How sublime, — the universal
laugh at sunrise, noon, and sunset ! Those
who did not laugh would be persecuted ;
they would laugh, if only on the wrong
side of the mouth. Delightful ! As
most people have no sense of humor,
they would swallow the school catechism
of the comic as stolidly as they now
swallow the spiritual. Yes, I see you
will not laugh. But why may I not, as
everybody else does, endow my Deity
with the quality which I possess or ad-
mire most ? "

She felt some truth in his apology.
He was mocking, not God, but the mag-
nified man of the popular creeds ; to
him it was a mere intellectual counter
with which his wit played, oblivious of

the sacred aura that clung round the
concept for the bulk of the world. Even
his famous picture of Jehovah dying, or
his suggestion that perhaps dieser Par-
venu des Himmels was angry with Israel
for reminding him of his former obscure
national relations, what was it but a live-
ly rendering of what German savants
said so unreadably about the evolution
of the God Idea ? But she felt also that
it would have been finer to bear unsmil-
ing the smileless destinies ; not to affront
with the tinkle of vain laughter the vast
imperturbable. She answered gently,
" You are talking nonsense."

" I always talked nonsense to you, lit-
tle Lucy, for

' My heart is wise and witty,
And it bleeds within my breast.'

Will you hear its melodious drip-drip,
my last poem ? My manuscript, Cath-
erine, and then you can go and take a
nap. I gave you little rest last night."

The old woman brought him some
folio sheets covered with great patheti-
cally sprawling letters ; and when she
had retired, he began : —

' ' How wearily time crawls along,
The hideous snail that hastens not "...

His voice went on, but after the first lines
the listener's brain was too troubled to
attend. It was agitated with whirling
memories of those earlier outcries throb-
bing with the passion of life, flaming
records of the days when every instant
held an eternity, not of ennui, but of sen-
sibility. " Red life boils in my veins.
. . . Every woman is to me the gift of
a world. ... I hear a thousand night-
ingales. ... I could eat all the ele-
phants of Hindostan, and pick my teeth
with the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.
. . . Life is the greatest of blessings, and
death the worst of evils." But the poet
was still reading ; she forced herself to
listen.

" Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes,
Old faded gods, this brain is full ;
Who, for their most unholy rites,
Have chosen a dead poet's skull."

734

From a Mattress Grave.

He broke off suddenly : " No, it is too
sad. A cry in the night from a man bur-
ied alive ; a new note in German poetry,
— was sage ich ? — in the poetry of the
world. No poet ever had such a lucky
chance before — voyez-vous — to survive
his own death, though many a one has
survived his own immortality. 'Nemi-
nem ante mortem miserum.' Call no
man wretched till he 's dead. 'T is not
till the journey is over that one can see
the perspective truthfully, and the tomb-
stones of one's hopes and illusions mark-
ing the weary miles. 'Tis not till one
is dead that the day of judgment can
dawn ; and when one is dead, one cannot
see or judge at all. An exquisite irony,
nicht wahr ? The wrecks in the Morgue,
what tales they could tell! But dead
men tell no tales. While there 's life
there 's hope, and so the worst cynicisms
have never been spoken. But I — I
alone have dodged the fates. I am the
dead-alive, the living -dead. I hover
over my racked body like a ghost, and
exist in an interregnum. And so I am
the first mortal in a position to demand
an explanation. Don't tell me I have
sinned and am in hell. Most sins are
sins of classification by bigots and poor
thinkers. Who can live without sinning,
or sin without living? All very well
for Kant to say, * Act so that your con-
duct may be a law for all men under
similar conditions.' But Kant overlooked
that you are part of the conditions. And
when you are a Heine, you may very
well concede that future Heines should
act just so. It is easy enough to be vir-
tuous when you are a professor of pure
reason, a regular, punctual mechanism,
a thing for the citizens of Konigsberg to
set their watches by. But if you happen
to be one of those fellows to whom all
the roses nod and all the stars wink —
I am for Schelling's principle : the
highest spirits are above the law. No,
no, the parson's explanation won't do.
Perhaps heaven holds different explana-
tions, graduated to rising intellects, from

parsons upwards. Moses Lump will be
satisfied with a gold chair, and the che-
rubim singing, ' Holy ! holy ! holy ! ' in
Hebrew, and will ask no further ques-
tions. Abdullah ben Osman's mouth will
be closed by the kisses of houris. Surely
Christ will not disappoint the poor old
grandmother's vision of Jerusalem the
Golden, seen through tear-dimmed spec-
tacles as she pores over the family Bible.
He will meet her at the gates of death
with a wonderful smile of love ; and as
she walks upon the heavenly Jordan's
shining waters hand in hand with him,
she will see her erst-wrinkled face re-
flected from them in angelic beauty.
Ah, but to tackle a Johann Wolfgang
Goethe or an Immanuel Kant, — what an
ordeal for the celestial professor of apolo-
getics ! Perhaps that 's what the Gospel
means, — only by becoming little chil-
dren can we enter the kingdom of heaven.
I told my little god-daughter yesterday
that heaven is so pure and magnificent
that they eat cakes there all day, — it
is only what the parson says translated
into child-language, — and that the little
cherubs wipe their mouths with their
white wings. 'That's very dirty,' said
the child. I fear that unless I become
a child myself I shall have severer criti-
cisms to bring against the cherubs. O
God," he broke off suddenly, letting fall
the sheets of manuscript and stretching
out his hands in prayer, "make me a
child again even before I die ; give me
'back the simple faith, the clear vision, of
the child that holds its father's hand!
Oh, little Lucy, it takes me like that
sometimes, and I have to cry for mercy.
I dreamt I was a child, the other night,
and saw my dear father again. He was
putting on his wig, and I saw him as
through a cloud of powder. I rushed
joyfully to embrace him, but as I ap-
proached him everything seemed chan-
ging in the mist. I wished to kiss his
hands, but I recoiled with mortal cold.
The fingers were withered branches, my
father himself a leafless tree which the

From a Mattress Grave.

735

winter had covered with hoar frost. Ah,
Lucy, Lucy, my brain is full of madness
and my heart of sorrow. Sing me the
ballad of the lady who took only one
spoonful of gruel, ' with sugar and spices
so rich.' "

Astonished at his memory, she repeat-
ed the song of Lady Alice and Giles
Collins, the poet laughing immoderately
till at the end,

" The parson licked up the rest,"

in his effort to repeat the line that so
tickled him he fell into a fearful spasm,
which tore and twisted him till his
child's body lay curved like a bow. Her
tears fell at the sight.

" Don't pity me too much," he gasped,
trying to smile with his eyes. " I bend,
but I do not break."

But she, terrified, rang the bell for aid.
A jovial-looking woman — ' tall and well-
shaped — came in, holding a shirt she
was sewing. Her eyes and hair were
black, and her oval face had the rude
coloring of health. ' She brought into the
death-chamber at once a whiff of ozone
and a suggestion of tragic incongruity.
Nodding pleasantly to the visitor, she
advanced quickly to the bedside and laid
her hand upon the forehead sweating
with agony.

" Mathilde," he said, when the spasm
abated, "this is little Lucy, of whom 1
have never spoken to you, and to whom
I wrote a poem about her brown eyes,
which you have never read."

Mathilde smiled amiably at the Ro-
man matron.

" No, I have never read it," she said.
" They tell me that Heine is a very clever
man and writes very fine books, but I
know nothing about it, and must content
myself with trusting to their word."

" Is n't she adorable ? " cried Heine
delightedly. " I have only two consola-
tions that sit at my bedside, my French
wife and my German nurse, and they
are not on speaking terms ! But it has
its compensations, for she is unable also

to read what my enemies in Germany
say about me, and so she continues to
love me."

" How can he have enemies ? " said
Mathilde, smoothing his hair. " He is
so good to everybody. He has only two
thoughts, — to hide 'his illness from his
mother, and to earn enough for my fu-
ture. And as for having enemies in
Germany, how can that be, when he is
so kind to every poor German that passes
through Paris ? "

It moved the hearer to tears, — this
wifely faith. Surely the saint that lay
behind the Mephistopheles in his face
must have as real an existence, if the wo-
man who knew him only as man, undaz-
zled by the glitter of his fame, unwearied
by his long sickness, found him thus
without flaw or stain.

" Delicious creature ! " said. Heine
fondly. " Not only thinks me good, but
thinks that goodness keeps off enemies.
What ignorance of life she crams into a
dozen words ! As for those poor coun-
trymen of mine, they are just the people
who carry back to Germany all the aw-
ful tales of my goings-on. Do you know
there was once a poor devil of a musician
who had set my Zwei Grenadiere, and to
whom I gave no end of help and advice
when he wanted to make an opera on the
legend of the flying Dutchman which I
had treated in one of my books. Now
he curses me and all the Jews together,
and his name is Richard Wagner."

Mathilde smiled on vaguely. " You
would eat those cutlets," she said reprov-
ingly.

" Well, I was weary of the chopped
grass cook calls spinach. I don't want
seven years of Nebuchadnezzardom."

" Cook is angry when you don't eat
her things, che'ri. I find it difficult to
get on with her since you praised her
dainty style. One would think she was
the mistress, and I the servant."

" Ah, Nonotte, you don't understand
the artistic temperament. ' ' Then a twitch
passed over his face. " You must give me

736

From a Mattress Grave.

a double dose of morphia to-night, dar-
ling."

" No, no, the doctor forbids."

" One would think he were the em-
ployer, and I the employee," he grum-
bled smilingly. " But I dare say he is
right. Already I spend five hundred
francs a year on morphia ; I must really
retrench. So run away, dearest. I have
a good friend here to cheer me up."

She stooped down and kissed him.

" Ah, madame," she said, " it is very
good of you to come and cheer him up.
It is as good as a new dress to me to see
a new face coming in, for the old ones
begin to drop off. Not the dresses ; the
friends," she added gayly, as she disap-
peared.

" Is n't she divine ? " cried Heine en-
thusiastically.

" I am glad you love her," his visitor
replied simply.

"You mean you are astonished.
Love ? What is love ? I have never
loved."

" You ! " And all the stories those
countrymen of his had spread abroad,
all his own love-poems, were in that ex-
clamation.

" No, — never mortal women ; only
statues and the beautiful dead dream-
women, vanished with the neiges d'an-
tan. What did it matter whom I mar-
ried ? Perhaps you would have had me
aspire higher than a grisette ? To a
tradesman's daughter ? Or a demoiselle
in society ? ' Explain my position ' —
a poor exile's position — to some double-
chinned bourgeois papa, who can only
see that my immortal books are worth ex-
actly two thousand marks banco ? Yes,
that 's the most I can wring out of those
scoundrels in wicked Hamburg. And to
think that if I had only done my writ-
ing in ledgers, the 'prentice millionaire
might have become the master million-
aire, ungalled by avuncular advice and
chary checks. Ah, dearest Lucy, you
can never understand what we others suf-
fer, — you into whose mouths the larks

drop roasted. Should I marry Fashion
and be stifled ? Or Money and be pat-
ronized ? And lose the exquisite plea-
sure of toiling to buy my wife new dresses
and knick - knacks ? Apres tout, Ma-
thilde is quite as intelligent as any other
daughter of Eve, — whose first thought,
when she came to reflective conscious-
ness, was a new dress. All great men
are mateless; 'tis only their own ribs
they fall in love with. A more cultured
woman would only have misunderstood
me more pretentiously. Not that I did
n't, in a weak moment, try to give her
a little polish. I sent her to a board-
ing-school to learn to read and write,
my child of nature among all the little
schoolgirls, — ha ! ha ! ha ! — and I only
visited her on Sundays; and she could
rattle off the Egyptian kings better than
I, and once she told me with great ex-
citement the story of Lucretia, which she
had heard for the first time. Dear No-
notte ! You should have seen her dan-
cing at the school ball, — as graceful and
maidenly as the smallest shrimp of them
all. What gaiete* de co3ur ! What good
humor ! What mother wit ! And such
a faithful chum ! Ah, the French wo-
men are wonderful. We have been
married fifteen years, and still when I
hear her laugh come through that door
my soul turns from the gates of death
and remembers the sun. Oh, how I love
to see her go off to mass every morn-
ing, with her toilette nicely adjusted and
her dainty prayer - book in her neatly
gloved hand ! — for she 's adorably reli-
gious, is my little Nonotte. You look
surprised ; did you then think religious
people shock me ? "

She smiled a little. " But don't you
shock her? "

" I would n't for worlds utter a blas-
phemy she could understand. Do you
think Shakespeare explained himself to
Anne Hathaway ? But she doubtless
served well enough as artist's model, —
raw material to be worked up into Imo-
gens and Rosalinds. Enchanting crea-

From a Mattress Grave.

737

tures ! How your foggy islanders could
have begotten Shakespeare ! The mira-
cle of miracles. And Sterne ! Mais
non, an Irishman like Swift. Ca s'ex-
plique. Is Sterne read ? "

" No, he is only a classic."

" Barbarians ! Have you read my
book on Shakespeare's heroines ? It is
good, nicht wahr ? "

" Admirable."

" Then why should n't you translate
it into English ? "

" It is an idea."

" It is an inspiration. Nay, why
should n't you translate all my books ?
You shall, you must. You know how
the French edition fait fureur. French,
— that is the European hall-mark, for
Paris is Athens. But English will mean
fame in Ultima Thule, — the isles of
the sea, as the Bible says.. It is n't for
the gold-pieces, though God knows Ma-
thilde needs more friends, as we call
them. Heaven preserve you from the
irony of having to earn your living on
your death - bed ! Ach, my publisher
Campe has built himself a new estab-
lishment, — what a monument to me !
Why should not some English publisher
build me a monument in London ? The
Jew's books — like the Jew — should be
spread abroad, so that in them all the
nations of the earth shall be blessed.
For the Jew peddles not only old clo',
but new ideas. I began life — tell it
not in Gath — as a commission agent for
English goods, and I end it as an in-
termediary between France and Ger-
many, trying to make two great nations
understand each other. To that not un-
worthy aim has all my later work been
devoted."

" So you really consider yourself a
Jew still?"

" Mein Gott ! have I ever been any-
thing else but an enemy of the Philis-
tines ? "

She smiled. " Yes, but religiously ? "

" Religiously ! What was my whole
fight to rouse Hodge out of his thousand

VOL. T.XXX. — NO. 482,. 47

years' sleep in his hole ? Why did I
edit a newspaper, and plague myself
with our time and its interests ? Goethe
has created glorious Greek statues ; but
statues cannot have children. My words
should find issue in deeds. I am no
true Hellenist. Like my ancestor Da-
vid, I have been not only a singer, I
have slung my smooth little pebbles at
the forehead of Goliath."

•l But have n't you turned Catholic ? "

" Catholic ! " he roared like a roused
lion. " They say that again ! Has the
myth of death-bed conversion already
arisen about me ? How they jump, the
fools, at the idea of a man's coming
round to their views when his brain
grows weak ! "

" No, not death-bed conversion. Quite
an old history. I was assured you had
married in a Catholic church."

"To please Mathilde ! Without that
the poor creature would n't have thought
herself married in a manner sufficiently
pleasing to God. It is true we had been
living together without any church bless-
ing at all, but que voulez-vous ? Women
are like that. For my part, I should
have been satisfied to go on as we were.
I understand by a wife something no-
bler than a married woman chained to
me by money-brokers and parsons, and I
deemed my faux manage far firmer than
many a ' true ' one. But since I was
to be married, I could not be the cause
of any disquiet to my beloved Nonotte.
We even invited a number of Bohemian
couples to the wedding-feast, and bade
them follow our example in daring the
last step of all. Ha ! ha ! There is
nothing like a convert's zeal, you see.
But convert to Catholicism ! That 's an-
other pair of sleeves. If your right eye
offend you, pluck it out ; if your right
hand offend you, cut it off ; and if your
reason offend you, become a Catholic !
No, no, Lucy, a Jew I have always been."

" Despite your baptism ? "

The sufferer groaned, but not from
physical pain.

738

From a Mattress Grave.

" Ah, cruel little Lucy, don't remind
me of my youthful folly. Thank your
stars you were born an Englishwoman.
I was born under the fearful conjunction '
of Christian bigotry and Jewish, in the
Judenstrasse. In my cradle lay my line
of life marked out from beginning to
end. My God, what a life ! You know
how Germany treated her Jews, — like
pariahs and wild beasts : at Frankfort,
for centuries the most venerable rabbi
had to take off his hat if the smallest
gamin cried, ' Jude, mach mores ! '
Ah, as I have always said, Judaism is
not a religion, but a misfortune. And
to be born a Jew and a genius ! What
a double curse ! Believe me, Lucy, a
certificate of baptism was a necessary
card of admission to European culture.
And yet, no sooner had I taken the dip
than a great horror came over me.
Many a time I got up at night and
looked in the glass and cursed myself for
my want of backbone ! Alas, my curses
were more potent than those of the rab-
bis against Spinoza, and this disease was
sent me to destroy such backbone as I
had. No wonder the doctors do not un-
derstand it. I learnt in the Ghetto that
if I did n't twine the holy phylacteries
round my arm, serpents would be found
coiled round the arm of my corpse.
Alas, serpents have never failed to coil
themselves round my sins. The Inqui-
sition could not have tortured me more
had I been a Jew of Spain. If I had
known how much easier moral pain is
to bear than physical, I would have
saved my curses for my enemies, and put
up with my conscience - twinges. Ah,
truly said your divine Shakespeare that
the wisest philosopher is not proof
against a toothache. When was any
spasm of pleasure so sustained as pain ?
Certain of our bones, I learn from my
anatomy books, manifest their existence
only when they are injured. Happy
are the bones that have no history.
Ugh ! how mine are coming through the
skin, like ugly truth through fair ro-

mance ! I shall have to apologize to the
worms for offering them nothing but
bones. Alas, how ugly-bitter it is to
die ! How sweet and snugly we can live
in this snug, sweet nest of earth ! What
nice words ! I must start a poem with
them. Yes, sooner than die I would live
over again my miserable boyhood in
my uncle Solomon's office, miscalculating
in his ledgers like a trinitarian while I
scribbled poems for the Hamburg Wach-
ter. Yes, I would even rather learn
Latin again at the Franciscan cloister
and grind law at Gottingen. For after
all, I should n't have to work very
hard ; a pretty girl passes, and to the
deuce with the Pandects ! Ah, those
wild university days, when we used to
go and sup at the Landwehr, and the
rosy young Kellnerin who brought us
our goose mit Apfelkompot kissed me
before all the other Herren Studenten,
because I was a poet, and already as fa-
mous as the professors ! And then, after
I should be reexpelled from Gottingen,
there would be Berlin over again, and
dear Rahel Levin and her Salon, and the
Tuesdays at Elise von Hohenhausen's
(at which I would read my Lyrical In-
termezzo), and the mad literary nights
with the poets in the Behrenstrasse.
And balls, theatres, operas, masquerades !
Shall I ever forget the ball where Sir
Walter Scott's son appeared as a Scotch
Highlander, just when all Berlin was
mad about the Waverley novels ? I, too,
should read them over again for the
first time, those wonderful romances ;
yes, and I should write my own early
books over again, — oh, the divine joy
of early creation ! — and I should set
out again with bounding pulses on my
Harzreise ; and the first night of Frei-
schtitz would come once more, and I
should be whistling the Jungfern, and
sipping punch in the Casino with Lott-
chen filling up my glass." His eyes
oozed tears ; suddenly he stretched out
his arms, seized her hand and pressed
it frantically, his face and body con-

From a Mattress Grave.

739

vulsed, his paralyzed eyelids dropping.
" No, no ! " he pleaded in a hoarse, hol-
low voice, as she strove to withdraw it.
" I hear the footsteps of death. I must
cling on to life, — I must, I must. Oh,
the warmth and the scent of it ! "

She shuddered ; for an instant he
seemed a vampire, with shut eyes, suck-
ing at her life-blood to sustain his ; and
when that horrible fantasy passed, there
remained the overwhelming tragedy of
a dead man lusting for life. Not this
the ghost who, as Berlioz put it, stood
at the window of his grave regarding
and mocking the world in which he had
no further part. But his fury waned ; he
fell back as in a stupor, and lay silent, lit-
tle twitches passing over his sightless face.

She bent over him, terribly distressed.
Should she go ? Should she ring again ?
Presently words came from his lips at
intervals, abrupt, disconnected, and now
a ribald laugh, and now a tearful sigh.
And then he was a student humming,

" Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dam sumus,"

and his death-mask lit up with the wild
joys of living. Then earlier memories
still — of his childhood in Dilsseldorf

— seemed to flow through his comatose
brain : his mother and brothers and sis-
ters ; the dancing-master he threw out
of the window ; the emancipation of the
Jewry by the French conquerors ; the joy-
ous drummer who taught him French ;
the passing of Napoleon on his white
horse ; the atheist schoolboy friend with
whom he studied Spinoza on the sly.
And suddenly he came to himself, raised
his eyelid with his forefinger and looked
at her.

" Catholic ! " he cried angrily. " I
never returned to Judaism, because I
never left it. My baptism was a mere
wetting. I have never put ' Heinrich '

— only ' H.' — in my books, and never
have I ceased to write ' Harry ' to my
mother. Though the Jews hate me even
more than the Christians, yet I was al-
ways on the side of my brethren."

" I know, I know," she said soothing-
ly. " I am sorry I hurt you. I re-
member well the passage in which you
say that your becoming a Christian was
the fault of the Saxons who changed
sides suddenly at Leipzig ; or else of
Napoleon, who had no need to go to
Russia, ; or else of his schoolmaster who
gave him instruction at Brienne in geo-
graphy, and did not tell him that it was
very cold at Moscow in winter."

" Very well, then," he said, pacified.
" Let them not say either that I have
been converted to Judaism on my death-
bed. Was not my first poem based on
one in the Passover night Hagadah ?
Was not my first tragedy — Almansor

— really the tragedy of downtrodden
Israel, that great race which from the
ruins of its second temple knew to save,
not the gold and the precious stones, but
the real treasure, the Bible, a gift to
the world that would make the tourist
traverse oceans to see a Jew if there
were only one left alive ? The onJy peo-
ple that preserved freedom of thought
through the Middle Ages, they have
now to preserve God against the free-
thought of the modern world. We are
the Swiss Guards of Deism. God was
always the beginning and end of my
thought. When I hear his existence
questioned, I feel as I felt once in your
Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly
forlornness in a mad world. Is not my
best work — The Rabbi of Baccharach

— devoted to expressing the ' vast Jew-
ish sorrow,' as Borne calls it ? "

" But you never finished it ! "
" I was a fool to be persuaded by
Moser. Or was it Gans ? Ah, will not
Jehovah count it to me for righteousness,
that New Jerusalem Brotherhood with
them in the days when I dreamt of re-
conciling Jew and Greek, the goodness of
beauty with the beauty of goodness ! Oh,
those days of youthful dream whose win-
ters are warmer than the summers of the
after-years ! How they tried to crush
us, the rabbis and the state alike! O

740

From a Mattress Grave.

the brave Moser, the lofty-souled, the
pure-hearted, who passed from counting-
house to laboratory and studied Sanscrit
for recreation, moriturus te saluto. And
thou, too, Markus, with thy boy's body
and thy old man's look, and thy ency-
clopaedic, inorganic mind ; and thou,
O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian
hocus-pocus ! Yes, the rabbis were right,
and the baptismal font had us at last ;
but surely God counts the Will to Do,
and is more pleased with great-hearted
dreams than with the deeds of the white-
hearted burghers of virtue, whose good-
ness is essence of gendarmerie. And
where, indeed, if not in Judaism, broad-
ened by Hellenism, shall one find the
religion of the future ? Be sure of this,
anyhow, — that only a Jew will find it.
We have the gift of religion, the wisdom
of the ages. You others — young races
fresh from staining your bodies with woad
— have never yet got as far as Moses.
Moses, that giant figure, who dwarfs Si-
nai when lie stands upon it : the great
artist in life, who, as I point out in my
Confessions, built human pyramids ; who
created Israel ; who took a poor shepherd
family and created a nation from it, —
a great, eternal, holy people, a people of
God, destined to outlive the centuries,
and to serve as a pattern to all other
nations : a statesman, not a dreamer, who
did not deny the world and the flesh, but
sanctified it. Happiness, — is it not im-
plied in the very aspiration of the Chris-
tian for post-mundane bliss ? And yet
' the man Moses was very meek,' the most
humble and lovable of men. He too —
though it is always ignored — was ready
to die for the sins of others, praying,
when his people had sinned, that his
name might be blotted out instead ; and
though God offered to make of him a
great nation, yet did he prefer the great-
ness of his people. He led them to Pal-
estine, but his own foot never touched
the promised land. What a glorious,
Godlike figure, and yet so prone to wrath
and error, so lovably human ! How he

is modeled all round like a Rembrandt,
while your starveling monks have made
your Christ a mere decorative figure with
a gold halo ! O Moshd Rabbenu, Moses
our teacher indeed ! No, Christ was not
the first nor the last of our race to wear
a crown of thorns. What was Spinoza
but Christ in the key of meditation ? "

" Wherever a great soul speaks out
his thoughts, there is Golgotha," quoted
the listener.

" Ah, you know every word I have writ-
ten," he said, childishly pleased. " De-
cidedly, you must translate me. You
shall be my apostle to the heathen. You
are good apostles, you English. You
turned Jews under Cromwell, and now
your missionaries are planting our Pal-
estinian doctrines in the South Seas or
amid the josses and pagodas of the East,
and your young men are colonizing un-
known continents on the basis of the
Decalogue of Moses. You are founding
a world-wide Palestine. The law goes
forth from Zion, but by way of Liver-
pool and Southampton. Perhaps you are
indeed the lost Ten Tribes."

" Then you would make me a Jew,
too," she laughed.

" Jew or Greek, there are only two
religious possibilities, — fetish - dances
and spinning dervishes don't count. The
Renaissance meant the revival of these
two influences, and since the sixteenth
century they have both been increasing
steadily. Luther was a child of the Old
Testament. Since the exodus Freedom
has always spoken with a Hebrew ac-
cent ! Christianity is Judaism run divinely
mad : a religion without a drainage sys-
tem, a beautiful dream dissevered from
life, soul cut adrift from body and sent
floating through the empyrean, when at
best it can be only a captive balloon.
At the same time, don't take your idea
of Judaism from the Jews. It is only
an apostolic succession of great souls that
understands anything in this world. The
Jewish mission will never be over till
the Christians are converted to the re-

From a Mattress Grave.

741

ligion of Christ. Lassalle is a better
pupil of the Master than the priests who
denounce socialism. You have met Las-
salle ? No ? You' shall meet him here,
one day. A marvel. Me plus Will. He
knows everything, feels everything, yet
is a sledge-hammer to act. He may yet
be the Messiah of the nineteenth century.
Ah, when every man is a Spinoza and
does good for the love of good, when the
world is ruled by Justice and Brother-
hood, Reason and Humor, then the Jews
may shut up shop, for it will be the holy
Sabbath. Did you mark. Lucy, I said
Reason and Humor ? Nothing will sur-
vive in the long run but what satisfies
the sense of Logic and the sense of Hu-
mor ! Logic and Laughter, — the two
trumps of doom ! Put not your trust in
princes ; the really great of the earth are
always simple. Pomp and ceremonial,
popes and kings, are toys for children.
Christ rode on an ass ; now the ass rides
on Christ."

" And how long do you give your
trumps to sound before your millenni-
um dawns ? " said " little Lucy," feeling
strangely old and cynical beside this in-
corrigible idealist.

" Alas, perhaps I am only another
Dreamer of the Ghetto ; perhaps I have
fought in vain. A Jewish woman once
came weeping to her rabbi with her son,
and complained that the boy, instead of
going respectably into business like his
sires, had developed religion, and insisted
on training for a rabbi. Would not the
rabbi dissuade him ? ' But,' said the rab-
bi, chagrined, ' why are you so distressed
about it ? Am I not a rabbi ? ' ' Yes,'
replied the woman, ' but this little fool
takes it seriously.' Ach, every now and
again arises a dreamer who takes the
world's lip-faith seriously, and the world
tramples on another fool. Perhaps there
is no resurrection for humanity. If so,
if there 's no world's Saviour coming by
the railway, let us keep the figure of that
sublime Dreamer whose blood is balsam
to the poor and the suffering."

Marveling at the mental lucidity, the
spiritual loftiness, of his changed mood,
his visitor wished to take leave of him
with this image in her memory ; but just
then a half-paralyzed Jewish graybeard
made his appearance, and Heine's instant
dismissal of him on her account made it
difficult not to linger a little longer.

" My chef de police ! " he said, smil-
ing. " He lives on me, and I live on his
reports of the great world. He tells me
what my enemies are up to. But I have
them in there," and he pointed to an
ebony box on a chest of drawers and
asked her to hand it to him.

" Pardon me before I forget," he
said, and seizing a pencil like a dagger
he made a sprawling note, laughing ven-
omously. " I have them here ! " he re-
peated. " They will try to stop the pub-
lication of my Memoirs, but I will out-
wit them yet. I hold them ! Dead or
alive, they shall not escape me. Woe to
him who shall read these lines, if he has
dared attack me ! Heine does tot die
like the first comer. The tiger's claws
will survive the tiger. When I die, it
will be for them the day of judgment."

It was a reminder of the long fighting
life of the free-lance ; of all the stories
she had heard of his sordid quarrels, of
his blackmailing his relatives and besting
his uncle. She asked herself his own
question : " Is genius, like the pearl in
the oyster, only a splendid disease ? "

Aloud she said, " I hope you are done
with Borne."

" Borne ? " he said, softening. " Ach,
what have I against Bflrne ? Two bap-
tized German Jews exiled in Paris should
forgive each other in death. My book
was misunderstood. I wish to Heaven
I had n't written it. I always admired
Borne, even if I could not keep up the
ardor of my St. Simonian days when
my spiritual Egeria was Rahel Varnha-
gen. I had three beautiful days with
him in Frankfort, when he was full of
Jewish wit and had n't yet shrunk to a
mere politician. He was a brave soldier

742

From a Mattress Grave.

of humanity, but he had no sense of art,
and I could not stand the dirty moh
around him, with its atmosphere of filthy
German tobacco and vulgar tirades
against tyrants. The last time I saw
him he was almost deaf and worn to a
skeleton by consumption : he dwelt in a
vast bright silk dressing-gown, and said
that if an emperor shook his hand, he
would cut it off.' I said, if a workman
shook mine, I should wash it. And so
we parted ; and he fell to denouncing me
as a traitor and a persifleur, who would
preach monarchy or republicanism ac-
cording to which sounded better in the
sentence. Poor Lob Baruch ! Perhaps
he was wiser than I in his idea that his
brother Jews should sink themselves in
the nations. He was born, by the way,
in the veiy year of old Mendelssohn's
death. What an irony ! But I am sorry
for those insinuations against Madame
Strauss. I have withdrawn them from
the new edition, although, as you may
know, I had already satisfied her hus-
band's sense of justice by allowing him
to shoot at me, whilst I fired in the air.
What can I more ? "

" I am glad you have withdrawn
them," she said, moved.

"Yes ; I have no Napoleonic grip, you
see. A morsel of conventional conscience
clings to me."

" Therefore I could never understand
your worship of Napoleon."

" There speaks the Englishwoman.
You Pharisees — forgive me ! — do not
understand great men, you and your
Wellington ! Napoleon was not of the
wood of which kings are made, but of
the marble of the gods. Let me tell you
the Code Napoleon carried light not only
into the Ghettos, but into many another
noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The
world wants earthquakes and thunder-
storms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant.
This Paris needs a scourge of God, and
the moment France gives Germany a
pretext there will be sackcloth and ashes,
or prophecy has died out of Israel."

" Qui vivra verra," ran heedlessly off
her tongue. Then, blushing painfully,
she said quickly, " But how do you wor-
ship Napoleon and Moses in the same
breath ? "

" Ah, my dear Lucy, if your soul were
like an Aladdin's palace with a thousand
windows opening on the human spec-
tacle ! Self-contradiction the fools call
it, if you will riot shut your eyes to half
the show. I love the people, yet I hate
their stupidity and mistrust their lead-
ers. I hate the aristocrats, yet I love
the lilies that toil not, neither do they
spin, and sometimes bring their perfume
and their white robes into a sick man's
chamber. Who would harden with work
the white fingers of Corysande, or sacri-
fice one rustle of Lalage's silken skirts ?
Let the poor starve ; I '11 have no pota-
toes on Parnassus. My socialism is not
barracks and brown bread, but purple
robes, music, and comedies.

" Yes, I was born for paradox. A
German Parisian, a Jewish German, a
political exile who yearns for dear home-
ly old Germany, a skeptical sufferer
with a Christian patience, a romantic
poet expressing in classic form the mod-
ern spirit, a Jew and poor, — think you
I do not see myself as lucidly as I see
the world ? ' My mind to me a king-
dom is ' sang your old poet. Mine is a
republic, and all moods are free, equal,
and fraternal, as befits a child of light.
Or if there is a despot, 'tis the king's
jester, who laughs at the king as well
as all his subjects. But am I not near-
er truth for not being caged in a creed
or a clan ? Who dares to think truth
frozen, on this phantasmagorical planet,
that whirls in beginningless time through
endless space ! Let us trust, for the
honor of God, that the contradictory
creeds for which men have died are all
true. Perhaps humor — your right He-
gelian touchstone to which everything
yields up its latent negation — passing on
to its own contradiction gives truer lights
and shades than your pedantic Philistin'

From a Mattress Grave.

743

ism. Is truth really in the cold white
light, or in the shimmering interplay of
the rainbow tints that fuse in it ? Bah !
Your Philistine critic will sum me up,
after I am dead, in a phrase ; or he will
take my character to pieces and show
how they contradict one another, and ad-
judge me, like a schoolmaster, so many
good marks for this quality, and so many
bad marks for that. Biographers will
weigh me grocer-wise, as Kant weighed
the Deity. Ugh ! You can be judged
only by your peers or by your superi-
ors, — by the minds that circumscribe
youi's, not by those that are smaller than
yours. I tell you that when they have
written three tons about me, they shall
as little understand me as the cosmos I
reflect. Does the pine contradict the
rose, or the lotus-land the iceberg ? I am
Spain, I am Persia, I am the North Sea,
I am the beautiful gods of old Greece,
I am Brahma brooding over the sun-
lands, I am Egypt, I am the Sphinx!
But oh, dear Lucy, the tragedy of the
modern, all-mirroring consciousness that
dares to look on God face to face ; not
content with Moses to see the back parts,
nor with the Israelites to gaze on Mo-
ses ! Ach, why was I not made four-
square like old Moses Mendelssohn, or
sublimely one-sided like Savonarola ? I,
too, could die to save humanity, if I did
not at the same time suspect human-
ity was not worth saving. To be Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, —
what a tragedy ! No, your limited in-
tellects are happier, — those that see life
in some one noble way, and in unity find
strength. I should have loved to be a
Milton, like one of your English cathe-
drals, austere, breathing sacred memo-
ries, resonant with the roll of a great
organ, with painted windows on which
the shadows of the green boughs outside
wave and flicker and just hint of na-
ture. Or one of your aristocrats, with a
stately^home in the country, and dogs and
horses, and a beautiful wife, — in short,
I should like to be your husband. Or

failing that, my own wife, — a simple,
loving creature whose idea of culture is
cabbages. Ach, why was my soul wider
than the Ghetto I was born in, why did
I not mate with my kind ? " He broke
into a fit of coughing, and " little Lucy "
thought suddenly of" the story that all his
life-sadness and song-sadness were due
to his rejection by a Jewish girl in his
own family circle.

" I tire you," she said. " Do not talk
to me. I will sit here a little longer."

" Nay, I have tired you. I could not
but tell you my thoughts, for you are
at once a child who loves and a woman
who understands me. And to be un-
derstood is rarer than to be loved. My
very parents never understood me. Nay,
were they my parents, the mild man of
business, the clever, clear-headed Dutch-
woman, God bless her ? No : my fa-
ther was Germany, my mother was the
Ghetto. The brooding spirit of Israel
breathes through me, that engendered the
tender humor of her sages, the celestial
fantasies of her saints. Perhaps I should
have been happier had I married the
first black - eyed Jewess whose father
would put up with a penniless poet ! I
might have kept a kitchen with double
crockery, and munched Passover cakes
at Easter. Every Friday night I should
have come home from the labors of the
week, and found the table-cloth shining
like my wife's face, and the Sabbath
candles burning, and the angels of peace
sitting hidden beneath their great invisi-
ble wings ; and my wife, piously conscious
of having thrown the dough on the fire,
would have kissed me tenderly, and I
should have recited in an ancient melo-
dy, ' A virtuous woman, who can find
her ? Her price is far above rubies ! '
There would have been little children
with great candid eyes, on whose inno-
cent heads I should have laid my hands
in blessing, praying that God might
make them like Ephraim and Manasseh,
Rachel and Leah, — persons of dubious
exemplariness ; and we should have sat

744

From a Mattress Grave.

down and eaten Schalet, which is the
divinest dish in the world, pending the
Leviathan that awaits the blessed at Mes-
siah's table. And instead of singing of
cocottes and mermaids, I should have
sung, like Jehuda HaleVi, of my Herz-
ensdarne, Jerusalem. Perhaps — who
knows ? — my Hebrew verses would have
been incorporated in the festival liturgy,
and pious old men would have snuffled
them helter-skelter through their noses !
The letters of my name would have run
acrostic-wise adown the verses, and the
last verse would have inspired the cantor
to jubilant roulades or tremolo wails,
while the choir boomed in ' Porn ! ' and
perhaps my uncle Solomon, the banker,
to whom my present poems made so lit-
tle appeal, would have wept and beaten
his breast and taken snuff to the words
of them. And I should have been buried
honorably in the House of Life, and my
son would have said ' Kaddish.' Ah me,
it is after all so much better to be stupid
and walk in the old laid-out, well-trimmed
paths than to wander after the desires of
your own heart and your own eyes over
the blue hills. True, there are glorious
vistas to explore, and streams of living
silver to bathe in, and wild horses to
catch by the mane, but you are in a
chartless land without stars and compass.
One false step, and you are over a pre-
cipice or up to your neck in a slough.
Ah, it is perilous to throw over the old
surveyors. I see Moses ben Amram,
with his measuring-chain and his graving-
tools, marking on those stone tables of
his the deepest abysses and the muddiest
morasses. When I kept swine-with the
Hegelians I used to say, — alas, I still
say, for I cannot suppress what I have
once published, — ' Teach man he 's di-
vine : the knowledge of his divinity will
inspire him to manifest it.' Ah me, I
see now that our divinity is like old Ju-
piter's, who made a beast of himself as

soon as he saw pretty Europa. No, no,
humanity is too weak and too miserable.
We must have faith — we cannot live
without faith — in the old simple things,
the personal God, the dear old Bible, a
life beyond the grave."

Fascinated by his talk, which seemed
to play like lightning round a cliff at
midnight, revealing not only measureless
heights and soundless depths, but the
greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of
a picnic, the listener had an intuition
that Heine's mind did indeed — as he
claimed — reflect, or rather refract, the
All. Only not sublimely blurred as in
Spinoza's, but specifically colored and
infinitely interrelated, so that he might
pass from the sublime to the ridiculous
with an equal sense of its value in the
cosmic scheme. It was the Jewish ar-
tist's proclamation of the Unity, the hu-
morist's " Hear, O Israel."

" Will it never end, this battle of Jew
and Greek ? " he said, half to himself,
so that she did not know whether he
meant it personally or generally. Then,
as she tore herself away, " I fear I have
shocked you," he said tenderly. " But
one thing I have never blasphemed, —
Life. Is not enjoyment an implicit
prayer, a latent grace ? After all, God
is our Father, not our drill-master. He
is not so dull and solemn as the parsons
make out. He made the kitten to chase
its tail, and my Nonotte to laugh and
dance. Come again, dear child, for my
friends have grown used to my dying,
and expect me to die forever, an invert-
ed immortality. But one day they will
find the puppet-show shut up and the
jester packed in his box. Good-by. God
bless you, little Lucy, God bless you."

The puppet-show was shut up sooner
than he expected, but the jester had kept
his most wonderful mot for the last.

" Dieu me pardonnera," he said.
"C'est son me'tier."

/. Zangwill.

Belated Feudalism in America.

745

BELATED FEUDALISM IN AMERICA.

IT is easy to see that at the time of
the American Revolution, the bulk of the
American people and most of their lead-
ers took it for granted that they could
discard political inequality, and still keep
the remainder of the English social and
ethical ideas intact. Political inequal-
ity, as exemplified in arbitrary taxation,
was what they particularly objected to,
as Pyrn or Hampden might have object-
ed to it ; religious freedom they had, and
as they were, for the most part, very Eng-
lish in .their habits of thought, the rest of
the old theories suited them well enough.

There were, it is true, two men, Jef-
ferson and Franklin, who saw further
into the millstone that had been hanged
about the neck of our people than any
o?ie else in the country. Franklin was
the embodiment of the colonial experi-
ence of independence ; Jefferson was this,
and the prophet of a new order of ideas
as well. He saw that between aristocra-
cy and democracy there was some great
intrinsic difference, much deeper than a
mere difference in the form of govern-
ment. He did his practical work as it
came to hand : he disestablished the
Church in Virginia, put the government
of his State in working order, represent-
ed his country abroad, governed it at
home, and tried to abolish slavery ; but
he wanted to do more than this. What
he feared was, not England, but aristo-
cracy ; and he feared it, not as a form of
government, but as an attitude of mind
opposed to reason. In arguing for his
code, he says that he would have it form
" a system by which every fibre would
be eradicated of ancient and future aris-
tocracy " " Now that we have no coun-
cils, governors, or kings to restrain us
from doing right," let us correct our
code, " in all its parts, with a single eye

to reason, and the good of those for whose
government it was framed." In a word,
he wanted to make Americans at once
into anti-feudal creatures like himself.

It is no wonder that while his con-
temporaries made great use of him and
applauded his work, many of them looked
at him askance, and, failing to under-
stand him, regarded him as a great but
somewhat diabolical intelligence. For
the foundation of English society was
then and still is feudal, and consequent-
ly the mental attitude of men towards
one another, towards literature, towards
art, towards religion, was then and still
is full of feudal notions. When we dis-
carded political inequality, what we real-
ly did, though we may not have realized
it, was to pull the foundation from un-
der this whole system of feudal thinking ;
and though the old edifice did not fall
immediately, every part of it has shifted
its place or split under the new strain,
till it ought to be evident now that it
should be condemned and abandoned.

From the start two parties have been
engaged in this work : on one side the
learned and the literary, who have al-
ways upheld the traditional view, and
have urged us by precept and example
to stick to what we got from Europe ; -
and against them men and women of
life and action, who have gone ahead in
spite of their teachers, trying this, dis-
carding that, and steadily creating a new
moral and intellectual habitation of their
own. In every phase of life we have
had to deal not only with the legitimate
remnants of European tradition, but with
the misguided efforts of academic pro-
vincialism to keep it artificially alive.

The chief obstacle to the growth of
a clear-cut American conception of life
was New England, her literary men and
divines, and the early tremendous pro-
slavery influence. Auguste Laugel, writ-

746

Belated Feudalism in America.

ing of Massachusetts after the war of the
Rebellion, says, " This State will long re-
main the guide and, so to speak, the in-
tellectual protector of the country." The
description was true enough, and the re-
sult of that intellectual protectorate may
now be understood. It kept us a depend-
ency of Europe, and we held our rights
as to what we should think and how we
should say it in fee from Europe under
the Lieutenancy of Massachusetts.

She was our self-constituted Academy
to condemn what offended her tastes and
beliefs, and she exercised her authority
blandly in the serene conviction that she
was a producer of intellect, and not a
dealer in intellectual wares. Yet one
morning Dr. Holmes woke up and found
that he and all American poets were sing-
ing about skylarks and primroses and a
host of other birds and flowers that they
had never come across outside the covers
of an English book. This practical ex-
ample is symbolic of our thinking. To
know about thought, not to think ; to
speak in terms of thinking, not with ideas,
was the gist and pith of her intellectuality.

The work of New England could not
have been different. To speak of it in
this way is not to blame ; it is only to
refuse undeserved praise. We restate
the results, and say that she kept us from
thinking our own thoughts and from ex-
pressing them in our own way. That is
the function of intellectual protectors.
The story of the early struggles of New
England for intellectual food (there was
a time when one copy of Goethe had to
suffice for Cambridge, if not for Massa-
chusetts) is a pathetic one. Scraps of
European genius in the shape of books
and prints went from hand to hand, like
the newspaper in a lighthouse or a school-
boy's orange. When these rare trea-
sures were obtained, they imposed them-
selves on starving minds, and created the
awe and reverence that make a cult.

But awe and reverence create nothing ;
they simply enjoy. They are the multi-
tude which takes pleasure in the works

of genius, and gives them a value with
critics as the go-between. The real maker
of thought and art does not deal with
the world at second-hand. He is not a
disciple, nor a wonderer, nor a critic.
He fastens on life itself, and executes
his own achievement. Emerson alone
was inspired, not dominated by the new
learning. It would not have been won-
derful if he had never appeared at all.

This experience of America is not
unique. The same thing took place on
a larger scale over the whole of Europe
after the rediscovery of the classics. The
parallel must not be pushed too far ; for
the first effect of the Renaissance was to
inspire each country as it was reached,
and only later did the reverence for an
alien form bring native methods into con-
tempt, and cramp originality and the
spontaneous expression of feeling. New
England skipped the valuable period,
and plunged at once into the stage of
imitation ; and just as every Frenchman
between Malherbe and Hugo, and every
Englishman between Waller and Byron,
wrote as though Aristotle or one of the
Muses had been looking over his shoul-
der, so all but half a dozen Americans
have written under the imaginary super-
vision of the great spirits of Europe. We
are to be congratulated that Emerson,
Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Lanier, Whit-
man, and The Biglow Papers escaped.

This influence of foreign literature has
befuddled the brains of our professional
critics. We live on an American plan,
but our standard authors have written on
a European plan. Our canons of criti-
cism are all in the air. In estimating
intellectual work, our critics do not know
what is polite and what is coarse, what
is decent and what vulgar, what is nat-
ural and what artificial, what artistic
and what fantastic, what solid flesh and
what bombast. Europe consistently rates
every thing by European weights and mea-
sures, and her judgments are relatively
correct, while we dignify our criticism
with a smack of Europe by measuring

Belated Feudalism in America.

747

calico with a yardstick marked off into
centimetres, and we never know the ex-
act amount of our purchase.

One result is that we undervalue much
good American work. America can never
create a literature of her own which shall
differ from English literature as much
as the literature of Provence differed
from that of Paris, for with us the lan-
guage is the same and it is fixed. An
idea once launched in good shape be-
longs to both countries. But we can
have a literature as different from that
of England as the literature of the nine-
teenth century is from that of the eigh-
teenth. What is more, we have the ac-
tual makings of it ; but we must know
what we want. There is no use in try-
ing to manufacture a literature which
England will consider equal to her own.
If we stick to her standards, we shall
have to imitate ; and if we discard them,
we shall never please her. The better
we are, the less she will like it. We have
given a fair trial to imitation, and have
not been successful ; for we have had no
English writer of the first class except
Hawthorne. As to relying on our own
standards, it requires more courage than
the Europeanized man of letters has, and
more latitude of thought and expression
than the cultivated American will toler-
ate. And yet it is the only way.

Cultivated people do not like the'writ-
ing that represents American literature,
and up to this time they have been able
to keep it under. They repudiate it, not
because it is not true, but because they
will not accept the truth in that shape.
They are ashamed of it, not because it
is not human, but because it is rough
and coarse compared to the polished
form of Europe. They have put it into
a sub-literary class, and refused to re-
cognize it, not because it does not get
to the point, but because it does not go
there in that roundabout way which they
learned from Europe, where there are so
many corners to be turned.

Garrison and Phillips descended to it

in their fighting-times, and it offended
the cultivated ears of Boston quite as
much as the sentiments it was used to
convey. It is not " nobly censorious,"
as Jonson calls the language of Bacon.
It is not made up of many and great-
swelling words, like' the speeches of
Thersites and Daniel Webster, if Phil-
lips is to be believed. It is what Garri-
son calls his own language, " as harsh
as truth, and as uncompromising as jus-
tice ; " and our smooth-eared critics like
it so little that it turns them away from
the point of its argument. They shut
the book of any one who uses it unchas-
tened, and range him up with Milton as
a foul-mouthed controversialist.

Yet America's good writing must come
out of this way of dealing with words
and thoughts, and not from England. It
need not be ribald or offensive in the
hands of any one who has " the art to
cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the
style of a rousing sermon." When made
to keep a civil tongue, it becomes the
best way of expressing clear ideas, as
Professor Sumner has shown by adopt-
ing it, somewhat "licked into shape,"
in his book What Social Classes Owe to
Each Other. Novels can be written in
it which will not have to keep a long
way from nature to produce the illusion
of reality. From this vulgar idiom could
arise an American drama more Shake-
spearean than anything since Shake-
speare's day. Hoyt and Hart and Har-
rigan are its present representatives. We
waste these vigorous beginnings by re-
pudiating their influence.

The influence of the churches has
been much less powerful in keeping alive
tradition than the influence of letters.
Americans like cultivation, but they do
not like ecclesiasticism. They will do
a great deal for anything that is volun-
tary, but they will not put up with what
savors of authority. Boston is the only
place I have ever heard spoken of as
priest-ridden, but for the last seventy
years, at least, this criticism has been

748

Belated Feudalism in America.

only half deserved. Lyman Beecher,
" who held the orthodoxy of Boston in
his right hand," and Channing, who said,
" I ought to have spoken before," were
among Boston's most influential priests,
and yet each of them made a fair share
of his earthly pilgrimage with Boston on
his back.

Nevertheless, the clergy of all-denom-
inations have steadily enjoined, without
looking into them, rules of conduct that
had their origin in feudal times, and
views of life and duty that do not apply to
our conditions. As it was with the sky-
lark, so it has been with the catechism.
Whatever was found set down had to be
taught, whether it corresponded to con-
ditions or not. The common law, too, is
a stronghold of anachronisms. How do
we handle these matters ?

The best service of America to hu-
manity is to clear ^he minds of men from
useless Asiatic, Hebraic, Grecian, Ro-
man, and European superstitions ; yet it
is not always possible to tell which of
our social and moral possessions are val-
uable, and which are not. A man values
what he thinks. He cannot separate
good from bad by mere inspection, as
one separates black beans from white, for
good and bad are often indistinguishable.
What is wanted is a process, a situation,
that shall teach us what we cannot think
out for ourselves ; that shall save what is
useful, and reject what is worthless, as
mercury separates gold - dust from the
sweepings of a factory.

Any society affords some such process
for the natural selection of ideas, but un-
less the conditions of that society are nat-
ural the selection will be false. In this
country the conditions are more nearly
natural than any that have existed else
where since men began to make slaves
and vassals of one another. Wherever
human relations are based on mistakes of
fact, historical traditions, religious doc-
trines, or a priori reasonings, the general
ideas of the people will be as crooked
as the particular absurdities with which

they have to cope, and will differ from
ideas founded on plain present necessi-
ty. By saying that the conditions of this
country are more natural than those of
any other, I mean that we have fewer
arbitrary and imaginary facts to deal
with than anybody else.

All societies where one set of men
gets a permanent advantage over another
from generation to generation become
societies of imaginary facts. For ex-
ample : An hereditary nobility upsets
men's ideas as to the nature of the uni-
verse, because such a nobility recognizes
duties founded on status, and plays the
part of Providence to the lower orders.
The peasant finds outside of himself
some one who considers it a duty to look
after him. That being the case, he keeps
alive perfectly unfounded notions as to
the part played by a Providence alto-
gether outside of human affairs, and he
remains a peasant.

It is very important to know how
much trust can be put in the supernatu-
ral, and anything that tends to obscure
this question is an evil. The catechism
which Nicholas of Russia made for the
Poles, in which he told them that Christ
is next below God, and the Emperor of
all the Russias next below Christ, must
ruin all true views of life in the mind of
any one who believes it, and any system
that retains traces of such teaching must
be injurious. Where, however, as in this
country, every man relies on his own ex-
ertions and is able to follow out the re-
sults of his own behavior, he will soon
get a good idea of what assistance is to
be got from another world, and what
kind of help it will be.

Again, in a society where it makes no
difference to the best people whether
they are vicious or virtuous, where their
credit, incomes, and social position de-
pend on who they are, not on what they
do, virtue remains a mere theory. Po-
ets and philosophers, moralists and di-
vines, will teach that virtue itself is
either a divine command or an opinion

Belated Feudalism in America.

749

to be thought out on a priori principles.
They will not readily admit that virtue
is a thing to be discovered. The most
absurd and even the most damaging be-
havior will get the name of virtue, and
have itself imposed on a people. This
has happened an untold number of times,
for the most part under the auspices of
ecclesiastical authority. But in a socie-
ty like ours,, where even the most fash-
ionable and the richest are liable to suf-
fer the legitimate results of their beha-
vior, every one soon finds that virtue is
a practical thing, and morality a matter
of business. All arbitrary theories of
right and wrong which cannot be ration-
ally justified drop out in practice. Vir-
tues and vices establish and explain
themselves on the basis of their results,
and every antiquated creed or catechism
stands out for what it is worth.

What we did when we discarded the
political basis of European society was
to give notice to all the inhabitants of
this country that thenceforth each one of
them was at liberty to.consider his inter-
ests more important than those of any
one else. It was a frank surrender to
whatever it is in civilized life that repre-
sents the struggle for existence. Thig
surrender involved a looser form of gov-
ernment than any former people had ever
been able to stand. We have managed
to handle it so far, and while it lasts it
affords precisely the kind of process hu-
manity wants for winnowing good from
evil. Just what will be taken and what
will be left cannot be foretold, but the
process is one that can be trusted, and
it may safely be predicted that its imme-
diate effect will be to destroy all those
ideas and beliefs which, without our
knowing it, were tinged with useless tra-
ditions. Some of these traditions are still
cherished by many, and they will outlive
more than one generation.

Our first good piece of work was to
overhaul European morality from top
to bottom, and put traditional ideas of
right and wrong to a new test. Men

who escaped from the influence of New
England, and, better still, those who got
beyond the reach of the law, proceeded,
with a singularly free conscience, to test
the validity of every injunction. There
is not a law of God or man that has not
somewhere in this country been made
an open question during the last hun-
dred years. We have had Mormonism
with its polygamy, human slavery, free-
love, lynch law, the Ku-Klux, organized
murder, organized robbery, and organ-
ized corruption. We have had govern-
ments within governments, clans, tribes,
brotherhoods, and socialist experiments,
more than twenty. Every sort of rela-
tionship between man and woman, even
to the abolition of childbirth, has been
tried by a sect ; not as a vice, but as an
experiment. Every kind of relation be-
tween man and man has been tried, arid
almost every relation, in the way of reli-
gious and spiritualistic beliefs, between
man and the universe. Even New Eng-
land produced a crop or two of protest-
ants against traditional virtue.

Very often the experimenters in new
moralities were brought roughly back to
understand that they had been gnawing
some hard old file ; but that was inevita-
ble among people who would not follow
any tradition on authority, nor take any
custom for granted. Yet if most of the
Decalogue has stood the test, there are
many other rules for conduct that have
not come out as well. My duty towards
my neighbor was thoroughly revised long
before the evolutionaiy moralists began
to draw upon their theory for a ration-
al system of ethics. Having got our in-
terests into our own hands, with no one
to fall back on, we soon saw that we were
under no obligation to love our neighbor
as ourselves. We thought little about
the matter, and wrote nothing ; but the
paternal and altruistic morality, invented
by a mediaeval priesthood to meet the re-
quirements of lords and vassals, was sim-
ply dropped when it came to action. If
the clergy have succeeded in preserving

T50

Belated Feudalism in America.

the semblance of acquiescence, they have
not greatly restrained behavior. They
have had to be practical themselves, and
it is not in New England alone that
they have had to "take the stock list
for their text." In this respect our lai-
ty have behaved like nobles. Not since
Innocent's excommunication failed to
impress the Frankish lords who sacked
Zara have religious scruples prevented
European aristocrats from doing what
they liked. Only the common people
have been kept in order by them. Here
we too have done as we liked. We
have declined to submit ourselves to our
spiritual pastors and masters. We are
doing what the Church has declared to
be impossible ; we are inventing an ex-
tra-theological morality which not only
works well, but is getting recognition on
paper. To it the clergy conform. They
no longer base their advice on the sole
ground that what they counsel is the will
of God. They try to make their argu-
ments good, and they do not arbitrarily
dictate the right thing to do.

All this warfare against usage shocks
moralists of the old school. It seems to
them useless and wasteful, but above all
wicked. There has been much less moral
turpitude in it than they imagine. ' Mor-
alists are far too parsimonious in their
ideas of the cost at which good things
are bought. They think a little paper
and ink and a little cogitation will push
the world ahead ; but such things very
seldom stir it. Men's minds are hard to
move, and abstract arguments make no
headway against actual interests. Blood
and sweat and dollars are what reach
the brain of the average man, — not ink.
Wrong to established right, wickedness
to accepted virtue, outrage to beloved
sanctity, are all on the conservative pro-
gramme of progress. There was need of
just such an indiscriminate mad rush to
try everything that was not authorized,
in order to break down the authorized
version of life. The recklessness of these
ethical pioneers paved the way for the

enfranchisement of proper boldness. We
have in it an example for those who de-
termine to make a radical and at the
same time a reasonable attack on any
existing institution. The power of cus-
tom is enormous, and the custom of do-
ing the customary thing is the strongest
of all. We do -not realize how thorough-
ly the power of senseless custom has
been broken in America. One must go
to Germany, or even to England, to un-
derstand how far ahead of them we are
in this respect. It is not an advance
that was to be had for the asking. It
requires a great shaking up to establish
the custom of trying experiments, and
we owe a debt of gratitude to those who
helped us to do it. If in doing it they
explored many a road which a child could
have told them would prove to be a
cul-de-sac, we should not, for all that,
underestimate their service. Not all of
us have courage enough to taste the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, but somebody must do it, and
find out whether in the day that he eats
thereof he will surely die. Often the
serpent who denies this threat will be
found to speak the truth.

In public affairs this iconoclastic ac-
tivity has now settled down to a more or
less regulated latitude of action, coupled
with a great willingness to experiment
with the laws. We have nearly half
a hundred legislative machines, which
thousands of cliques are trying to use to
further their own interests or to put their
special theories to the test. We com-
plain of over-legislation, and are, put out
by changes of equilibrium, as a rich man
. might be annoyed at the rolling of his
yacht ; but we must bear with the dis-
comforts of our advantages. Over-legis-
lation is bad, but it is better than to rot
at ease, moored to the lethe wharf of an
old custom.

In private affairs we are working out
a morality based absolutely on pure ego-
tism. Any departures from that basis are
either departures in appearance only, or

Belated Feudalism in America.

751

they are deliberate and voluntary excep-
tions. Many philosophers have seen that
such a system was the only sensible one,
if not the only possible one, for this world,
but it has remained for us to get it into
thoroughgoing operation. Philosophical
treatises have had nothing to do with its
establishment. We have it because we
have had a chance to try the experiment.
The fight against it is all on paper, and
comes under the head of literature, for
the thing itself is a fact.

We say the fewer laws the better, but
there are many things that must be pro-
vided for, and the question is how to
provide for them in the best way. In
most cases the only way to discover this
best way is by experiment, and hundreds
of legitimate experiments are getting a
trial. It is fortunate that they are not
tried on the whole nation at once. Quick
divorces, woman suffrage, the single tax,
may be good things, but better than any
of them is the chance to watch all these
experiments going on in different parts
of the country. If there is a limit to
profitable disturbance, that too must be
found by experiment.

All this lack of restraint goes to-
gether with a change of moral attitude,
and this has brought down upon Ameri-
cans a number of charges, all of which
may be summed up in the accusation
that we lack individual moral courage.
De Tocqueville was the first to make the
accusation ; Wendell Phillips repeated
it ; Charles Follen, a foreigner who made
this. country his home, corroborated it;
and Mr. Bryce, after sixty years, goes so
far as to say that our public men " do not
aspire to the function of forming opin-
ion. They are like the eastern slave who
says, ' I hear and I obey.' "

The best explanation I can give of
this charge is that every American feels
that his neighbors may some day be of
use to him. No one can afford to make
enemies. We are all one another's law-
yers, tailors, butchers, bakers, and can-
dlestick-makers, and we cannot risk the

loss of any trade or custom. So we keep
our mouths shut about one another's
shortcomings. Very good. But how
about Europeans ? Examine the out-
spoken foreigner, English, French, or
German, whose behavior is taken to re-
present the moral tone of his country.
You will find that he relies on the fact
that what he says will have no effect on
his fortunes. He may appear to have
no regard for consequences, but the truth
is that there will be no disastrous conse-
quences in his case. As a rule, he is bol-
stered up by some establishment, estate,
title, class, church, social position, acade-
my coterie or clique, which exercises an
authoritative and feudal influence over
the minds of his fellow citizens. He is
part of some institution which, by its
prestige, protects him from personal re-
sponsibility. To the outsider who does
not appreciate these protective influences,
or to the native who is unconscious of
them, the boldness of these men seems
absolute, but in reality it is confined to
those points of the compass at which
they are defended. They are but brave
nor'-nor'east. When the wind is souther-
ly, they know a hawk from a hand-saw,
and run to cover. Their courage is re-
lative. Take them in the rear, try to
make them speak boldly about some
superior on whom they depend, and who
can get them into trouble, and you will
• find that moral independence is no com-
moner in Europe than it is among Amer-
icans who are not protected from the
consequences of what they do and say.

But there is another aspect to this mat-
ter, and here it is that any one who tries
to deal with American evils on feudal
principles will come to grief. Let us
admit that a prudent self-interest makes
men careful as to how they attack one
another ; is there nothing to be said in
favor of that result ? It is not necessa-
rily immoral, for the social duty of the
class-protected aristocrat may be no duty
at all for the self-protected citizen of a
republic. The ideas of what are and

752

Belated Feudalism in America.

what are not the public duties of pri-
vate citizens are among the very things
that are undergoing a change. New-
conditions make new virtues, and it may
well happen that a quality shall set sail
from Dublin as virtue, and land an ab-
surdity in New York or Chicago.

Is it not true that if people have rea-
son to think twice before they indulge
in a free attack upon .their neighbors,
much worthless criticism will be pre-
vented ? You may call this restraint of
interference by any disagreeable name
you choose ; it is nevertheless a good
thing. It adds to the freedom of action
as much as it takes away from the free-
dom of speech, and workers have rights
as well as talkers. Unless it can be
shown that real abuses go permanently
free, no harm is done. It is true that
the correction of some evils is delayed.
We let our neighbors go their gait until
they begin to injure us in some tangi-
ble way. When that happens, we grow
bold enough to defend ourselves both in
speech and in action. Our method has
this advantage, that reform can never
begin under the dangerous guidance of
moral enthusiasm. Vice is attacked be-
cause it does harm, not because it is
sinful. Thievery of officials is checked
because we need our own money, not
because they are immoral to take it.
We are slow to anger and justice is
delayed, but when it comes, it comes on
solid principles, about which there can
be no question whatever, and not on
mere excitement and enthusiasm. This
toleration of wrong-doing is offset by
a corresponding toleration of new activ-
ities. Innovations which are thought
wrong have a chance to live and prove
themselves harmless and even beneficial.
They are not suppressed by a priori and
irresponsible moralizers before their good
points can be seen. Unless we belong to
the army of American cranks, we do not
rebel against our neighbors on any theo-
retical provocation. When we condemn

anybody, our judgment is a responsible
one ; that is, it is a judgment which it
may cost us money — and not inherited
money, but earned money — to maintain.
It is a real protest based on a real in-
jury, not on an injury to some prejudice
or superstition, such as can get a man
into trouble in Europe, nor on arbitrary
and theoretical objections, such as one
still hears from the pulpit.

The man who does not grasp this situ-
ation goes about his reforms in what is
really a priestly way, and he is aston-
ished and disappointed to find how little
effect he produces. He adopts the time-
worn plan of making an appeal to con-
science by a sweeping condemnation of
abuses on moral grounds, and he gets
little or no response. This angers him,
and he denounces the most respectable
people as selfish and spiritless cowards.
The trouble is that his standard of duty
no longer exists except on paper. Any
one who wishes to accomplish actual re-
forms will waste his time if he relies on
mere appeals to conscience. He must
bring out facts and figures, and show the
abuse he is after as a definite and tangi-
ble injury. He must then prove it, and
set the machinery of the law to work at
some actual point, and accomplish some
practical improvement. Then the people
will believe him and stand behind him.
Otherwise they are probably too busy
with their own affairs to attend to homi-
letic discourses. It is a long road, but
it is the right road. Cross-cuts to right-
eousness are artificial survivals. Lincoln
and Grant did their duty and dealt with
their victories in this spirit, and in great
matters it offers the most impressive ex-
hibition of great morality. It is not un-
kind, but when it descends upon obliqui-
ty it is absolute. It is like the fall of
night.

All these changes in the way of look-
ing at things go to make up our theory
of life, our view of the universe, our

philosophy.

Henry G- Chapman.

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

753

LITERARY LONDON TWENTY YEARS AGO.

No day in an American's recollection
can easily be more cheerful than that in
which he first found himself within reach
of London, prepared, as Willis said half
a century ago, to see whole shelves of
his library walking about in coats and
gowns. This event did not happen to me
for the first time until I was forty-eight
years old, and had been immersed at
home in an atmosphere of tolerably culti-
vated men and women ; but the charm
of the new experience was none the less
great, and I inspected my little parcel of
introductory letters as if each were a key
to unlock a world unknown. Looking
back, I cannot regret that I did not have
this experience earlier in life. Valentine,
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, says
that homekeeping youth have ever home-
ly wits ; yet it is something to have wits
at all, and perhaps there is more chance
for this if one is not transplanted too
soon. Our young people are now apt to
be sent too early to Europe, and there-
fore do not approach it with their own
individualities sufficiently matured ; but
in those days foreign travel was much
more of an enterprise, and no one could
accuse me, on my arrival, of being un-
reasonably young.

I visited London in 1872, and again in
1878, and some recollections based on
the letters and diaries of those two years
will be combined in this paper. The Lon-
don atmosphere and dramatis personce
had changed little within the interval,
but the whole period was separated by
a distinct literary cycle from that on
which Emerson looked back in 1843. He
then wrote that Europe had already lost
ground ; that it was not " as in the golden
days when the same town would show
the traveler the noble heads of Scott,
of Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Cuvier, and Humboldt." Yet I scarcely
missed even these heads, nearly thirty

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 48

years later, in the prospect of seeing
Carlyle, Darwin, Tennyson, Browning,
Tyndall, Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and
Froude, with many minor yet interest-
ing personalities. Since the day when
I met these distinguished men another
cycle has passed, and they have all dis-
appeared. Of those whom I met twenty-
five years ago at the Athenaeum Club,
there remain only Herbert Spencer and
the delightful Irish poet Aubrey de Vere ;
and though the Club now holds on its lists
the names of a newer generation, Besant
and Hardy, Lang and Haggard, I can-
not think that what has been added quite
replaces what has been lost. Yet the
younger generation itself may think oth-
erwise ; and my task at present deals
with the past alone. It deals with the
older London group, and I may write
of this the more freely inasmuch as I
did not write during the lifetime of the
men described ; nor do I propose, even
at this day, to speak of interviews with
any persons now living.

My first duty in England was, of
course, to ascertain my proper position
as an American, and to know what was
thought of us. This was easier twen-
ty-five years ago than it now is, since
the English ignorance of Americans was
then even greater than it is to-day, and
was perhaps yet more frankly expressed.
One of the first houses where I spent an
evening was the very hospitable home of
a distinguished scholar, then the presi-
dent of the Philological Society, and the
highest authority on the various dialects
of the English language ; but I was led to
think that his sweet and kindly wife had
not fully profited by his learning. She
said to me, " Is it not rather strange that
you Americans, who seem such a friend-
ly and cordial race, should invariably
address a newcomer as ' stranger,' while
we English, who are thought to be cold

754

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

and distant, are more likely to say ' my
friend ' ? " She would scarcely credit it
when I told her that I had hardly ever
in my life been greeted by the word she
thought so universal ; and then she add-
ed, " I have been told that Americans be-
gin every sentence with ' Well, stranger,
I guess.' " I was compelled to plead
guilty to the national use of two of these
words, but still demurred as to the
"stranger." Then she sought for more
general information, and asked if it were
really true, as she had been told, that
railway trains in America were often
stopped for the purpose of driving cattle
off the track. I admitted to her that in
some regions of the far West, where cat-
tle abounded and fencing material was
scarce, this might still be done ; and I
did not think it necessary to say that I
had seen it done, in my youth, within
twenty miles of Boston. But I explained
that we Americans, being a very inven-
tive race, had devised a little apparatus
to be placed in front of the locomotive
in order to turn aside all obstructions ;
and I told her that this excellent in-
vention was called a cow-catcher. She
heard this with interest, and then her
kindly face grew anxious, and she said
hesitatingly, " But is n't it rather danger-
ous for the boy ? " I said wonderingly,
" What boy ? " and she reiterated, " For
the boy, don't you know, — the cow-catch-
er." Her motherly fancy had depicted
an unfortunate youth balanced on the new
contrivance, probably holding on with
one arm, and dispersing dangerous herds
with the other.

One had also to meet, at that time,
sharp questions as to one's origin, and
sometimes unexpected sympathy when
this was Ascertained. A man of educat-
ed appearance was then often asked, —
and indeed is still liable to be asked, —
on his alluding to America, how much
time he had spent there. This question
was put to me, in 1878, by a very lively
young maiden at the table of a clergy-
man who was my host at Reading ; she

went on to inform me that I spoke
English differently from any Americans
she had ever seen, and she had known
" heaps of them " in Florence. When I
had told her that I spoke the language
just as I had done for about half a cen-
tury, and as my father and mother had
spoken it before me, she caught at some
other remark of mine, and asked with
hearty surprise, " But you do not mean
that you really like being an American,
do you ? " When I said that I should
be very sorry not to be, she replied, " I
can only say that I never thought of such
a thing ; I supposed that you were all
Americans because you could n't help it ; "
and I assured her that we had this rea-
son, also. She sung, later in the evening,
with a dramatic power I never heard
surpassed, Kingsley's thrilling ballad of
Lorraine, of which the heroine is a
jockey's wife, who is compelled by her
husband to ride a steeple-chase, at which
she meets her death. The young singer
had set the ballad to music, and it was
one of those coincidences stranger than
any fiction that she herself was killed by
a runaway horse but a few months later.
An American had also to accustom
himself, in those days, to the surprise
which might be expressed at his know-
ing the commonplaces of English history,
and especially of English legend. On
first crossing the border into Scotland, I
was asked suddenly by my only railway
companion, a thin, keen man with high
cheek-bones, who had hitherto kept si-
lence, " Did ye ever hear of Yarrow ? "
I felt inclined to answer, like a young
American girl of my acquaintance when
asked by a young man if she liked
flowers, " What a silly question ! " Re-
straining myself, I explained to him that
every educated American was familiar
with any name mentioned by Burns,
by Scott, or in the Border Minstrelsy.
Set free by this, he showed me many
things and places which I was glad to
see, — passes by which the Highland
raiders came down, valleys where they

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

755

hid the cattle they had lifted ; he showed
me where their fastnesses were, and
where " Tintock tap " was, on which a
lassie might doubtless still be wooed if
she had siller enough. By degrees we
came to literature in general, and my
companion proved to be the late Princi-
pal Shairp, professor of poetry at Ox-
ford, and author of books well known in
America.

I encountered still another instance of
the curious social enigma then afforded
by the American in England, when I
was asked, soon after my arrival, to
breakfast with Mr. Froude, the histori-
an. As I approached the house I saw a
lady speaking to some children at the
door, and she went in before I reached
it. Being admitted, I saw another lady
glance at me from the region of the
breakfast parlor, and was also dimly
aware of a man who looked over the stair-
way. After I had been cordially received
and was seated at the breakfast-table,
it gradually came out that the first lady
was Mrs. Froude's sister, the second was
Mrs. Froude herself, while it was her
husband who had looked over the stairs ;
and I learned furthermore that they had
severally decided that, whoever I was, I
could not be the American gentleman
who was expected at breakfast. What
was their conception of an American, —
what tomahawk and scalping-knife were
looked for, what bearskin or bareskin, or
whether it was that I had omitted the
customary war-whoop, — this never was
explained. Perhaps it was as in Irving's
case, who thought his kind reception in
England due to the fact that he used a
goose-quill in his hand instead of stick-
ing it in his hair, — a distinction which
lost all its value, however, with the ad-
vent of steel pens. At any rate, my re-
ception was as kind as possible, though
my interest in Froude, being based whol-
ly on his early book, The Nemesis of
Faith, was somewhat impaired by the
fact that he treated that work as merely
an indiscretion of boyhood, and was more

interested in himself as the author of a
history, which, unluckily, I had not then
read. We met better upon a common
interest in Carlyle, a few days later, and
he took me to see that eminent author,
and to join the afternoon walk of the
two in Hyde Park.v Long ago, in The
Atlantic Monthly, I described this occa-
sion, and dwelt on the peculiar quality of
Carlyle's laugh, which, whenever it burst
out in its full volume, had the effect of
dissolving all the clouds of his apparent
cynicism and leaving clear sky behind.
Whatever seeming ungraciousness had
preceded, his laugh revealed the genuine
humorist at last, so that he almost seemed
to have been playing with himself in the
fierce things he had said. When he
laughed, he appeared instantly to follow
Emerson's counsel and to write upon the
lintels of his doorpost " Whim ! " I was
especially impressed with this peculiar
quality during our walk in the park.

Nothing could well be more curious
than the look and costume of Carlyle.
He had been living in London nearly
forty years, yet he had the untamed
aspect of one just arrived from Eccle-
fechan. He wore " an old experienced
coat," such as Thoreau attributes to his
Scotch fisherman, — one having that un-
reasonably high collar of other days, in
which the head was sunk ; his hair was
coarse and stood up at its own will ; his
bushy whiskers were thrust into promi-
nence by one of those stiff collars which
the German students call" father-killers,"
from a tradition that the sharp points
once pierced the jugular vein of a parent
during an affectionate embrace. In this
guise, with a fur cap and a stout walk-
ing-stick, he accompanied Froude and
myself on our walk. I observed that
near his Chelsea home the passers-by
regarded him with a sort of familiar
interest, farther off with undisguised cu-
riosity, and at Hyde Park, again, with a
sort of recognition, as of an accustomed
figure. At one point on our way some
poor children were playing on a bit of

756

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

rough ground lately included in a park,
and they timidly stopped their frolic as
we drew near. The oldest boy, looking
from one to another of us, selected Car-
lyle as the least formidable, and said,
" I say, mister, may we roll on this here
grass ? " Carlyle stopped, leaning on
his staff, and said in his homeliest ac-
cents, " Yes, my little fellow, ye may
r-r-roll at discretion ; " upon which the
children resumed their play, one little
girl repeating his answer audibly, as if in
a vain effort to take in the whole mean-
ing of the long word.

One of my pleasantest London din-
ners was at the ever hospitable house
of the late Sir Frederick Pollock ; the
other persons present being Lady Pollock,
with her eldest son, the present wearer
of the title, and two most agreeable
men, — Mr. Venable, for many years the
editor of the annual summary of events
in the London Times, and Mr. Newton,
of the British Museum. The latter was
an encyclopaedia of art and antiquities,
and Mr. Venable of all the social gossip
of a century ; it was like talking with
Horace Walpole. Of one subject alone
I knew more than they did, namely,
Gilbert Stuart's pictures, one of which,
called The Skater, had just been un-
earthed in London, and was much ad-
mired. " Why don't they inquire about
the artist ? " said Sir Frederick Pollock.
" He might have done something else."
They would hardly believe that his pic-
tures were well known in America, and
that his daughter was still a conspicu-
ous person in society. Much of the
talk fell upon lawyers and clergymen.
They told a story of Lord Chief Justice
Cockburn, that he had actually evaded
payment of his tailor's bill on the ground
that it had not been presented for six
years, which in England is the legal
limit. They vied with one another in
tales of the eccentricities of English
clergymen : of one who was eighteen
years incumbent of an important parish,
and lived in France all the time; of an-

other who did not conduct service in the
afternoon, as that was the time when it
was necessary for him to take his span-
iels out ; of another who practiced his
hawks in the church ; of another who,
being a layman, became master of Caius
College (pronounced Keys) at Oxford,
had a church living at his disposal, and
presented it to himself, taking orders
for the purpose. After officiating for the
first time he said to the sexton, " Do
you know, that 's a very good service of
your church ? " He had literally never
heard it before ! But all agreed that
these tales were of the past, and that
the tribe of traditional fox-hunting and
hoi-se-racing parsons was almost extinct.
I can testify, however, to having actually
encountered one of the latter class this
very year.

I met Matthew Arnold one day by
appointment at the Athenaeum, in 1878,
and expressed some surprise that he
had not been present at the meeting of
the Association Litte'raire Internationale
which I had just attended in Paris. He
said that he had declined because such
things were always managed with a sole
view to the glorification of France ; yet
he admitted that France was the only na-
tion which really held literature in honor,
as was to be seen in its copyright laws,
— England and America caring far less
for it, he thought. He told me that his
late address on Equality was well enough
received by all the audience except the
Duke of Northumberland, the presiding
officer, and in general better by the
higher class, which well knew that it was
materialized, than by the middle class,
which did not know that it was vulgar-
ized. Lord William Russell, whom I
found talking with him as I came up, had
said to him, with amusement, " There
was I sitting on the very front seat, dur-
ing the lecture, in the character of the
Wicked Lord." Arnold fully agreed with
a remark which I quoted to him from
Mrs. George Bancroft, who had been fa-
miliar with two courts, to the effect that

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

757

there was far more sycophancy to rank
among literary men in London than in
Berlin. She said that she had never
known an English scholar who, if he had
chanced to dine witlv a nobleman, would
not speak of it to everybody, whereas
no German savant would think of men-
tioning such a thing. "Very true," re-
plied Arnold, " but the German would be
less likely to be invited to the dinner."
He thought that rank was far more ex-
clusive and narrow in Germany, as seen
in the fact that there men of rank did
not marry out of their circle, a thing
which frequently took place in England.
He also pointed out that the word me-
salliance was not English, nor was there
any word in our language to take its
place. Arnold seemed to me, personal-
ly, as he had always seemed in literature,
a keen but by no means judicial critic,
and in no proper sense a poet. That he
is held to be such is due, in my judgment,
only to the fact that he has represented
the passing attitude of mind in many cul-
tivated persons.

I visited Darwin twice in his own
house at an interval of six years, once
passing the night there. On both occa-
sions I found him the same, but with
health a little impaired after the inter-
val, — always the same simple, noble,
absolutely truthful soul. Without the
fascinating and boyish eagerness of Agas-
siz, he was also utterly free from the
vehement partisanship which this quality
brings with it, and he showed a mind
ever humble and open to new truth.
Tall and flexible, with the overhanging
brow and long features best seen in Mrs.
Cameron's photograph, he either lay
half reclined on the sofa or sat on high
cushions, obliged continually to guard
against the cruel digestive trouble that
haunted his whole life. I remember that
at my first visit, in 1872, I was telling
him of an address before the Philologi-
cal Society by Dr. Andrew J. Ellis, in
which he had quoted from Alice in the
Looking-Glass the description of what

were called portmanteau words, into
which various meanings were crammed.
As I spoke, Mrs. Darwin glided quietly
away, got the book, and looked up the
passage. " Read it out, my dear," said
her husband ; and as she read the amus-
ing page, he laid his head back and
laughed heartily. Here was the man
who had revolutionized the science of
the world giving himself wholly to the
enjoyment of Alice and her pretty non-
sense. Akin to this was his hearty en-
joyment of Mark Twain, who. then had
hardly begun to be regarded as above
the Josh Billings grade of humorist ; but
Darwin was amazed that I had not read
The Jumping Frog, and said that he
always kept it by his bedside for mid-
night amusement. I recall with a differ-
ent kind of pleasure the interest he took
in my experience with the colored race,
and the faith which he expressed in the
negroes. This he afterward stated more
fully in a letter to me, which may be
found in his published memoirs. It is
worth recording that even the incredu-
lous Carlyle had asked eagerly about the
colored soldiers, and had drawn the con-
clusion, of his own accord, that in their
case the negroes should be enfranchised.
" You could do no less," he said, " for
the men who had stood by you."

Darwin's house at Beckenham was
approached from Orpington station by a
delightful drive through lanes, among
whose tufted hedges I saw the rare
spectacle of two American elms, adding
those waving and graceful lines which
we their fellow countrymen are apt to
miss in England. Within the grounds
there were masses of American rhodo-
dendrons, which grow so rapidly in Eng-
land, and these served as a background
to flower-beds more gorgeous than our
drier climate can usually show.

At my second visit Darwin was full
of interest in the Peabody Museum at
Yale College, and quoted with approval
what Huxley had told him, that there
was more to be learned from that one

758

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

collection than from all the museums of
Europe. But for his chronic seasick-
ness, he said, he would visit America
to see it. He went to bed early that
night, I remember, and the next morn-
ing I saw him, soon after seven, appar-
ently returning from a walk through the
grounds, — an odd figure, with white
beard, and with a short cape wrapped
round his shoulders, striding swiftly
with his long legs. He said that he
always went out before breakfast, — be-
sides breakfasting at the very un-Eng-
lish hour of half past seven, — and that
he was also watching some little exper-
iments. His son added reproachfully,
" There it is : he pretends not to be at
work, but he is always watching some of
his little experiments, as he calls them,
and gets up in the sight to see them."
Nothing could be more delightful than
the home relations of the Darwin fam-
ily ; and the happy father once quoted
to me a prediction made by some theolo-
gical authority that his sons would show
the terrible effects of such unrighteous
training, and added, looking round at
them, " I do not think I have much rea-
son to be ashamed."

I think it was on that very day that I
passed from Darwin to Browning, meet-
ing the latter at the Athenaeum Club.
It seemed strange to ask a page to find
Mr. Browning for me, and it reminded
me of the time when the little daughter
of a certain poetess quietly asked at the
dinner-table, between two bites of an
apple, " Mamma, did I ever see Mr.
Shakespeare ? " The page spoke to a
rather short and strongly built man who
sat in a window-seat, and who jumped up
and grasped my hand so cordially that
it might have suggested the remark of
Madame Navarro (Mary Anderson)
about him, — made, however, at a later
day, — that he did not appear like a poet,
but rather " like one of our agreeable
Southern gentlemen." He seemed a
man of every day, or like the typical
poet of his own How It Strikes a Con-

temporary. In all this he was, as will be
seen later, the very antipodes of Tenny-
son. He had a large head of German
shape, broadening behind, with light and
thin gray hair and whitish beard ; he
had blue eyes, and the most kindly heart.
It seemed wholly appropriate that he
should turn aside presently to consult
Anthony Trollope about some poor au-
thor for whom they held funds. He ex-
pressed pleasure at finding in me an early
subscriber to his Bells and Pomegran-
ates, and told me how he published that
series in the original cheap form in order
to save his father's money, and that sin-
gle numbers now sold for ten or fifteen
pounds. He was amused at my wrath
over some changes which he had made in
later editions of those very poems, and
readily admitted, on my suggesting it,
that they were merely a concession to
obtuse readers ; he promised, indeed, to
alter some of the verses back again, but
— as is the wont of poets — failed to do
so. I was especially struck with the way
in which he spoke about his son, whose
career as an artist had well begun, he
said ; but it was an obstacle that people
expected too much of him, as having had
such a remarkable mother. It was told
in the simplest way, as if there were no-
thing on the paternal side worth consid-
ering.

The most attractive literary head-
quarters in London, in those days, of
course, was the Athenaeum Club. It used
to be said that no man could have any
question to ask which he could not find
somebody to answer the same after-
noon, between five and six o'clock, at
that Club. The Savile Club and Cos-
mopolitan Club were also attractive.
The most agreeable private receptions of
poets and artists were then to be found,
I think, at the house of William Ros-
setti, where one not merely had the as-
sociations and atmosphere of a brilliant
family, — which had already lost, how-
ever, its most gifted member, — but also
encountered the younger set of writers,

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

759

who were all preraphaelites in art, and
who read Morris, Swinburne, and for a
time, at least, Whitman and even Joaquin
Miller. There one met Mrs. Rossetti,
who was the daughter of Madox Brown,
and herself an artist; also Alma Tadema,
just returned from his wedding journey
to Italy with his beautiful wife. One
found there men and women then com-
ing forward' into literature, but now
much better known, — Edmund Gosse,
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Cayley, the trans-
lator of Dante, and Miss Robinson, now
Madame Darmesteter. Sometimes I
went to the receptions of our fellow coun-
trywoman, Mrs. Moulton, then just be-
ginning, but already promising the flat-
tering success they have since attained.
Once I dined with Professor Tyndall at
the Royal Society, where I saw men
whose names had long been familiar in
the world of science, and found myself
sitting next to a man of the most eccen-
tric manners, who turned out to be Lord
Lyttelton, well known to me by name
as the Latin translator of Lord Hough-
ton's poems. I amazed him, I remem-
ber, by repeating the opening verses of
one of his translations.

I met Du Maurier once at a dinner
party, before he had added literary to
artistic successes. Som'e one had told
me that he was probably the most bored
man in London, dining out daily, and
being tired to death of it. This I could
easily believe when I glanced at him,
after the ladies had retired, lounging
back in his chair with his hands in his
pockets, and looking as if the one favor
he besought of everybody was to let him
alone. This mute defiance was rather
stimulating, and as he sat next to me I
was moved to disregard the implied pro-
hibition ; for after all, one does not go to
a dinner party in order to achieve si-
lence ; one can do that at home. I ven-
tured, therefore, to put to him the bold
question how he could justify himself in
representing the English people as so
much handsomer than they or any other

modern race — as I considerately added
— really are. This roused him, as was
intended; he took my remark very good-
humoredly, and pleaded guilty at once,
but said that he pursued this course
because it was much pleasanter to draw
beauty than ugliness) and, moreover, be-
cause it paid better. " There is Keene,"
said he, " who is one of the greatest ar-
tists now living, but people do not like
his pictures as well as mine, because he
paints people as they really are." I then
asked him where he got the situations
and mottoes for his charming pictures of
children in the London parks. He had
an especial group, about that time, who
were always walking with a great dog
and making delightful childish observa-
tions. He replied that his own children
provided him with clever sayings for
some time; and now that they had grown
too old to utter them, his friends kept
him supplied from their nurseries. I told
him that he might imitate a lady I once
knew in America, who, when her children
were invited to any neighboring house
to play, used to send by the maid who
accompanied them a notebook and pen-
cil, with the request that the lady of the
house would jot down anything remark-
able which they might say during the
afternoon. He seemed amused at this ;
and a month or two later, when I took
up a new London Punch at Zermatt, I
found my veritable tale worked up into a
picture : a fat, pudgy little mother hand-
ing a notebook to a rather stately and
defiant young governess ; while the chil-
dren clustering round, and all looking
just like the mother, suggested to the.
observer a doubt whether their combined
intellects could furnish one line for the
record. It was my scene, though with a
distinct improvement ; and this was my
first and only appearance, even by depu-
ty, in the pages of Punch.

It was in 1872, on my first visit to
England, that I saw Tennyson. That visit
was a very brief one, and it curiously
happened that in the choice which often

760

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

forces itself upon the hurried traveler,
between meeting a great man and see-
ing an historic building, I was compelled
to sacrifice Salisbury Cathedral to this
poet as I had previously given up York
Minster for Darwin. Both sacrifices
were made on the deliberate ground,
which years have vindicated, that the
building would probably last for my life-
time, while the man might not. I had
brought no letter to Tennyson, and in-
deed my friend James T. Fields had
volunteered a refusal of any, so strong
was the impression that the poet disliked
to be bored by Americans ; but when two
ladies whom I had met in London, Lady
Pollock and Miss Anne Thackeray, —
afterwards Mrs. Ritdiie, — had kindly
offered to introduce me, and to -write in
advance that I was coming, it was not
in human nature, at least in American
nature, to decline. I spent the night at
Cowes, and was driven eight miles from
the hotel to Farringford by a very intel-
ligent young groom who had never heard
of Tennyson ; and when we reached the
door of the house, the place before me
seemed such a haven of peace and re-
tirement that I actually shrank from
disturbing those who dwelt therein, and
even found myself recalling a tale of
Tennyson and his wife, who were sitting
beneath a tree and talking unreserved-
ly, when they discovered, by a rustling
in the boughs overhead, that two New
York reporters had taken position in
the branches and were putting down the
conversation. Fortunately, I saw on the
drawing-room table an open letter from
one of the ladies just mentioned, an-
nouncing my approach, and it lay near
a window, through which, as I had been
told, the master of the house did not
hesitate to climb, by way of escape from
any unwelcome visitor.

I therefore sent up my name. Pre-
sently I heard a rather heavy step in
the adjoining room, and there stood in
the doorway the most un-English looking
man I had ever seen. He was tall and

high-shouldered, careless in dress, and
while he had a high and domed fore-
head, yet his brilliant eyes and tangled
hair and beard gave him rather the air
of a partially reformed Corsican bandit,
or else an imperfectly secularized Carmel-
ite monk, than of a decorous and well-
groomed Englishman. He greeted me
shyly, gave me his hand, which was in
those days a good deal for an English-
man, and then sidled up to the mantel-
piece, leaned on it, and said, with tne air
of an aggrieved schoolboy, "I am rather
afraid of you Americans ; your country-
men do not treat me very well. There
was Bayard Taylor" — and then he went
into a long narration of some grievance
incurred through an indiscreet letter of
that well-known journalist. Strange to
say, the effect of this curious attack was
to put me perfectly at my ease. It was
as if I had visited Shakespeare, and had
found him in a pet because some one of
my fellow countrymen had spelled his
name wrong. I knew myself to be whol-
ly innocent and to have no journalistic
designs, nor did I ever during Tenny-
son's lifetime describe the interview. He
perhaps recognized my good intentions,
and took me to his study, then to his
garden, where the roses were advanced
beyond any I had yet seen in England. I
was struck, in his conversation, with that
accuracy of outdoor knowledge which
one sees in his poems ; he pointed out,
for instance, which ferns were American,
and which had been attempted in this
country, but had refused to grow. He
talked freely about his own books, and it
seemed to me that he must be like Words-
worth, as we find him in the descriptions
of contemporaries, — a little too isolated
in his daily life, and too much absorbed
in the creations of his own fancy. Lord
Houghton, his lifelong friend, said to me
afterwards, "Tennyson likes unmixed
flattery." This I should not venture to
say, but I noticed that when he was speak-
ing of other men, he mentioned as an im-
portant trait in their character whether

Literary London Twenty Years Ago.

761

they liked his poems or not ; Lowell, he
evidently thought, did not. Perhaps this
is a habit of all authors, and it was only
that Tennyson spoke out, like a child,
what others might have concealed.

He soon offered, to my great delight,
to take me to the house of Mrs. Cameron,
the celebrated amateur photographer,
who lived close by. We at once came
upon Mr. Cameron, a very picturesque
figure, having fine white hair and beard,
and wearing a dressing-gown of pale blue
with large black velvet buttons, and a
heavy gold chain. I had heard it said
that Mrs. Cameron selected her house-
maids for their profiles, that she might
use them for saints and madonnas in her
photographic groups ; and it turned out
that all these damsels were upstairs,
watching round the sick-bed of the young-
est, who was a great favorite in the Ten-
nyson family. We were ushered into
the chamber, where a beautiful child lay
unconscious upon the bed, with weeping
girls around ; and I shall never forget
the scene when Tennyson bent over the
pillow, with his sombre Italian look,
and laid his hand on the unconscious
forehead ; it was like a picture by Ribe-
ra or Zamacois. The child, as I after-
wards heard, never recovered conscious-
ness, and died within a few days. Pre-
sently Mrs. Cameron led us downstairs
again, and opened chests of photographs
for me to choose among. I chose one,
The Two Angels at the Sepulchre, for
which one of the maid servants had
stood as a model ; another of Tennyson's
Eleanore, for which Mrs. Stillman (Miss
Spartalis) had posed ; and three large
photographs of Darwin, Carlyle, and
Tennyson himself, — the last of these
being one which he had christened The
Dirty Monk, and of which he wrote, at
Mrs. Cameron's request, in my presence,
a certificate that it was the best likeness
ever" taken of him. I have always felt
glad to have seen Tennyson not merely
in contact with a stranger like myself,

but as he appeared among these friend-
ly people, and under the influence of a
real emotion of sympathy, showing the
deeper nature of the man.

No one knows better than myself how
slight and fragmentary are the recol-
lections here recorded, yet even such
glimpses occasionally suggest some as-
pect of character which formal biogra-
phers have missed. A clever woman once
said to me that she did not know which
really gave the more knowledge of a
noted person, — to have read all he had
written and watched all he had done,
or, on the other hand, to have taken one
moment's glance at his face. As we
grow older, we rely more and more on
this first glance. I never felt for an in-
stant that I had really encountered in
England men of greater calibre than I
had met before, — for was I not the fel-
low countryman of Emerson and Haw-
thorne, of Webster and Phillips ? — yet,
after all, the ocean lends a glamour to the
unseen world beyond it, and I was «lad
to have had a sight of that world, also.
I was kindly dismissed from it, after my
first brief visit, by a reception given me
at the rooms of the Anglo-American
Club, where Thomas Hughes — whom I
had first known at Newport, Rhode
Island — presided, and where Lord
Houghton moved some too flattering re-
solutions, which were seconded by the
present Sir Frederick Pollock. Return-
ing to my American home, I read, af-
ter a few days, in the local newspaper
(the Newport Mercury), that I was re-
ported to have enjoyed myself greatly
in England, and to have been kindly re-
ceived, " especially among servants and
rascals." An investigation by the indig-
nant editor revealed the fact that the
scrap had been copied from another news-
paper ; and that a felicitous misprint
had substituted the offending words for
the original designation of my English,
friends as savants and radicals.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson*

762

The Greatest of These.

THE GREATEST OF THESE.

YES, I think I may say that in gen-
eral my portraits are rather well thought
of. By " my portraits " I mean, not
those that other people paint of me, but
those that I paint of them. Stanhope,
too, shares the common opinion, though
what we artists think of an opinion that
is purely literary everybody knows. He
is constantly referring to my " art." I
seldom refer to his. That piques him.
But I do not acknowledge that literature
is an art, except, perhaps, in some sec-
ondary, subsidiary sense ; for of late, it
is true, " we others " have rather favored
that metier. But we must frame our
pictures.

My portraits, yes. My Trois Vieilles
Femmes received honorable mention at
the last Salon ; my Woman of a Certain
Age is just now causing considerable com-
ment at Burlington House.

All accounts agree ; all strike the
same note : it is always and ever my
" eye for character." The unified voice
of appreciation never falls below " pene-
tration," and often enough it rises even
to "divination." Stanhope, in his " art,"
tries for the same things, but he wastes
a great many words, for his medium is
wholly wrong. Sometimes I " probe a
complicated nature to its depths ; " some-
times I "throw a flood of light upon
the " — And so forth, and so forth.

Very well : let them keep it up ; let
them employ their " art " to glorify mine.

I became acquainted with Madame
Skjelderup-Brandt rather suddenly. But
that is the way things go in Sicily, espe-
cially at Girgenti, where people feel as
if they had about reached the Ultima
Thule of the South, and where there
exists, therefore, something of a dispo-
sition to hang together. Perhaps this
comes from those last few hours m the
train, where everybody seems to carry a

gun or a revolver as a matter of course ;
perhaps from the necessity of huddling
together through the evening in the ho-
tel, from which no one thinks of issuing
to the town on the hill above, or even
to the humpy and betufted environs of
the house itself ; perhaps from the fact
that there is a single well-established
route through the island for travelers,
one and all, and from the feeling that it is
better to make one's acquaintances near
the beginning of it than near the end.

I made the acquaintance of Madame
Skjelderup - Brandt near the beginning
(not that I learned her name till I met her
again, months afterward, at Florence).
She came in to dinner, sat down beside
me at table, and within three minutes
we were on the best of terms. I saw at
once that she had character ; my finger-
tips tingled for a pencil ; I was almost
for " getting " her on the table - cloth.
Her prompt friendliness was most op-
portune, for the Dutch baron, across the
table, had just turned me down. In re-
sponse to my modest salutation he had
dropped his cold eye to his plate, and I
thought I saw him communicating to that
chill and self-sufficing utensil a sulky,
even a dogged determination not to let
me know him. Yet how was I to have
apprehended that he was Dutch, and a
baron, and proud of his family, and away
from home for the first time ?

"Leave him alone," mumbled Stan-
hope at my elbow.

" I 'm going to," I responded. " So
are the rest," I added, for there was a
vacant seat on each side of him.

Madame Brandt leaned a little my
way, as she busied herself in a review of
her forks and spoons.

" That young man has a good deal to
learn," she said to me under her voice.
She crinkled up her dark eyes with a
kind of suppressed joviality, and drew

The Greatest of These.

763

her mouth down at one corner by a sort
of half-protestant grimace. Did her ac-
cent produce the grimace, or did her
grimace produce the accent ? It was the
slightest accent in the world. Was it
Hungarian ? I wondered. Then she said
something — perhaps the same thing over
again — to a pair of young girls on the
other side of her.

" He has indeed," I rejoined expres-
sively. Whereupon she crinkled those
dusky eyes of hers for me once more,
and I felt that we might easily become
friends.

I put Madame Brandt down for about
forty-three. She ran to the plump, the
robust, the durable, and she was dressed
in a way that achieved elegance with
little sacrifice of individuality. Her dark
hair was slightly grizzled ; her shrewd
eyes still twinkled merrily under their
fine black brows at a discomfiture that I
was unable altogether to conceal ; and
her sturdy little hands (they had ever so
many rings, yet they contrived to ex-
press as few hands do- a combination of
good sense, good nature, and thorough-
going competence) still busied themselves
with the forks and the spoons, as her
straight, decided lips made a second
shadowy grimace, the comment of a wide
traveler on provincial pride wandering
abroad for the first time.

Our menu promised great things. The
house was "of the first rank," and the
dinner was to be of corresponding state.
There were difficulties : the milk had to
come sterilized from Palermo, and the
meats were sent down all the way from
Lombardy ; yet we got through the eight
courses that our rank demanded. As the
fish came on, our number was increased
by one : a middle-aged lady entered and
sat down on the baron's right. She
was a quiet little body, with a pale face
and eyes of a timid and appealing blue.
She seemed embarrassed, distressed, de-
tached. Stanhope figured her (a little
later on, after allowing himself a due
margin of time to get his literary en-

ginery into play) as some faded water-
bloom, rudely uprooted, and floating away
who could say whither? This poetical
analogy made no great impression upon
me ; her face was far from offering itself
with any particular degree of usefulness.
However, we both agreed that she did
look detached. •

" Decidedly so," affirmed Stanhope.
" And if nobody speaks to her, I '11 do
it myself."

But Madame Brandt greeted her very
kindly, with a sort of unceremonious
good nature, — as if for the tenth or
twentieth time, — and yet with a deli-
cate shade of consideration and concern.

" Your turn', now," I said to the baron,
— inaudibly, it is true. " Don't go on
fussing over that fish-bone ; it 's only a
pretense. Look up, I say."

He must have heard me. He raised
his eyes. His glance, though cool, was
civil, and he gave her a word of conven-
tional greeting.

" That 's better," I commented. The
little lady appeared to become a trifle
more self-assured, more animated.

" Something might be done with her,
after all," I thought. My revolt against
the jeune fille has carried me to great
lengths.

" What is such a type doing in a
hotel," questioned Stanhope, " and in a
hotel so far away from home at that?
A domestic body, if ever I saw one ;
she does n't even know how to take her
place at a public table. She has cleared
the entire distance between her own
home and this hotel in a single jump.
Did you ever see anybody so timid, so
deprecatory, so propitiatory, so " —

" Your language ! " I sighed. Then,
" Why should she be frightened ? We
are only a dozen all told."

Stanhope ran his eye round the table.
" She makes us thirteen."

" I am not superstitious," I declared.

" Nor I. But what can have brought
her so far, and have hurried her along
so fast ? " he proceeded.

764

The Greatest of These.

"So far? So fast? "I repeated. "Oh,
you literati will never take a thing as
it is ; you will never be satisfied with
a moment of arrested motion. Action,
movement, progression, — you must al-
ways have your little story going on."

" But you will agree that she is from
the far North. Don't you see the Baltic
in her complexion ? Don't you see the
— h'm — the Teutonic sky in her eyes ? "

" What I see is that you are coming
round to my way. Bravo ! It 's surpris-
ing how seldom you do get my point of
view."

" Don't think I 'm trying to invade
your province," he rejoined. " You
won't mind if I wonder whether she is
an invalid ? "

" She hardly looks ill," I replied.
"Worried, if you like, anxious, under
some severe strain."

" Undoubtedly. Now, there ; what
did the lady on your right say to her ? "

For Madame Brandt had addressed to
the newcomer what seemed to be a few
words of sympathetic inquiry, employing
certain specific vocal lilts and inflections
that she had already employed in ad-
dressing the two young girls just beyond.

" How do / know ? " I asked rather
pettishly. " Tell me what language the
lady on my right was speaking in. Tell
me what country the lady on my right
is a native of. Tell me the name, coun-
try, rank, and title of the individual op-
posite who has undertaken to be silent
in all the languages. Tell me the na-
tionality of that high-shouldered youth
behind the dpergne, — the one with those
saffron eyes and that shock of snuff-
brown hair. Give me the origins of the
elderly ringleted female up at the head
who has staked out her poodle at the
table-leg. I know abbe's and lieuten-
ants and curates, especially English ones ;
there 's nothing else I 'm sure of. Oh
dear, what is that poor woman trying
to tell the waiter ? He speaks Italian,
English, and French ; won't any of the
three sferve her? "

The little lady from the North was
looking up from her plate of belated soup
into the waiter's face with an expression
of perplexed appeal.

" Can't you help her ? " growled Stan-
hope.

I made some advance in French, but
uselessly. Madame Brandt came to her
aid in her own special idiom, and then
communicated with the waiter in Ger-
man.

" Ah, you speak everything ! ." I said
to her, with an abrupt informality not
unlike her own.

"Oh, we who come from the little
countries ! " she returned, with a careless
good humor. " But there are greater
linguists than I in the house," and she
pointed toward the chair opposite that
still remained vacant.

Just before the removal of the entre'e
this chair came to be occupied.

" Fourteen at last ! " breathed Stan-
hope.

Another woman entered, and the sor-
rowful little creature from the Northland,
after a word passed with the newcomer
in the only language of which she herself
seemed to have a command, accomplished
a depressed and inconspicuous exit.

" Thirteen again ! " sighed Stanhope.

" Don't twang that string any longer,"
I remonstrated.

The new arrival, who had come on
with much directness and self-assurance,
and had seated herself with all the self-
possession in the world, gave the waiter
a hint about the smoking lamp in Italian,
favored the company with a brief but
comprehensive salutation in French, un-
folded her napkin, and achieved a swift
and easy dominance of place, people, and
occasion.

It was one more "woman of a cer-
tain age." I trod on Stanhope's foot.
" What do you think of this ? " was my
meaning. My pressure was full of im-
plication, even of insinuation. He made
no response, — he whose intuitions are
his constant boast.

The Greatest of These.

765

Of a certain age, yes. But what
age ? Thirty-five ? Thirty-seven — thirty-
eight ? Single ? Married ? Widowed ?
Divorced ? A lady or — not ?

Once more I trod on Stanhope's foot.
This time his foot pushed mine away.
" Work it out for yourself," — that was
plainly what he meant.

Well, then, a woman of thirty-seven ;
rather tall than not ; neither stout nor
thin, yet noticeably big - boned ; and
dressed in black brocaded silk. Of ro-
bust constitution, perhaps, yet not in ro-
bust health. Her face pale, worn; not
haggard, yet full of lines ; weathered,
apparently, by a long and open exposure
to the storms of life. Her hair (none
too carefully arranged) already turning
gray. Her cheek - bones high-set and
wonderfully assertive, — what was her
race ? Her eyes (of a bright, bold, hard
blue) most markedly oblique, — what
was her lineage ? Her wrists thick ; her
hands large and rather bony, yet white
(even blanched) and well kept ; her nails
carefully trimmed, but one or two of her
finger-tips discolored as if by some liquid,
not ink, — what were her interests, what
was her occupation ? Her chin firm, de-
cided, aggressive —

(Artichokes ? Stewed in something or
other ? No, thank you. Artichokes have
no raison d'etre beyond the pleasure
they give one in picking them apart leaf
by leaf, and for that they must be dry.
I will wait for the roast.)

— firm, decided, aggressive. Her
mouth — if I may express myself so —
open ; I mean large, frank, without pre-
tense, guiltless of subterfuge. No diffi-
culty there. But those eyes, those cheek-
bones ! They puzzled me, fascinated me.
They threw my thoughts forward to some
new country that I had never seen, to
some new people that I had never min-
gled with, to some new life broadly, irre-
concilably at variance with our own. The
face they helped to form prompted me
to the sketching ou.t of some novel career
altogether unique and individual, chal-

lenged me to reconstruct the chain of
experiences that had led this singular wo-
man over what rigors of unknown seas
and mountains to the mild joys of this
blooming Sicilian spring. " She has
lived," I thought ; " she has looked out
for herself ; she has 'character, capacity.
But she is so worn, so hard, so brusque,
so bold. Is she — is she " — and I said
it to myself in a whisper's whisper — " is
she — respectable ? "

I appealed to the table ; how were
my commensals receiving her ? Just as
they would receive anybody else, appar-
ently. Yet, was she accepted, or did she
impose herself ? For she took the ini-
tiative from the start. She knew every-
body. Stanhope and I were the only
new arrivals of the day. She greeted
Madame Skjelderup-Brandt, — well and
good. She greeted the two gray doves
by madame's side, and they modestly
responded, — better and better. She a'c-
costed the baron in German, and extract-
ed a whole sentence from him in reply,
— best of all. She had a word for
Toto tied to the table-leg, and received
acknowledgments in some unclassified
jargon from Toto's mistress, — highly
satisfactory. But the English curate,
he of the lank limbs and the underdone
countenance ? Ah, he is not cordial.
(How long has he been in the house ?)
And the curate's lady, with her desiccat-
ed physiognomy, is coldly mute. (How
much does she know of the world ?)
And the head waiter himself, — is his
attitude that of friendly good will, or
that of careless, open disrespect ?

I felt Stanhope's foot against mine.
I started. "I — I beg pardon ! "

" I was only saying," said the voice of
the object of my conjectures, with her
look partly on my face and partly on
the label of my wine-bottle, "that you
would have done better to select some
local growth; our Tempi j, for example.
Marsala is generally fortified beyond all
reason."

I glanced at Stanhope. I decided

The Greatest of These.

that her advances must have begun with
him, and have reached me by a subse-
quent stage. But I found them abrupt
and irregular, all the same.

" Marsala is a local growth, according
to most people's notions of Sicily, is n't
it ? " I asked.

" Poor Marsala, — after they have fin-
ished with it ! " she observed, taking her
own bottle in hand.

I shall not say that her voice was
harsh or rough, though her vocal chords
must have had their own peculiar ad-
justment. I shall not insist that her
English had an accent ; least of all shall
1 insist upon what particular accent it
may have been.

She pushed her bottle across toward
me.

" Try it, anyway. It is nothing re-
markable, but you will see a difference."

" Dear me," I thought, " this is most
singular. I never saw such directness ;
I never met such — h'm. She breaks
down all barriers ; she dispenses with all
conventions ; really, she lets in quite a
different air ; what quarter does it blow
from ? " I felt the eye of the curate's
wife upon me, and would rather have
had things different.

" It . is better," I acknowledged.
" My next bottle shall be the same as
yours." I am not sure that I should
have put it just in that way with every-
body.

" You stay long enough, then, for a
second ? " Why should she want to
know ? Why should she make her want
known so badly ?

"A day or two," responded Stan-
hope. " We see the temples, and then
move on — to other temples."

" Like all the rest," she said.

" Are they ? " I asked. « We hoped
they might be different."

" You are like all the rest. Nobody
stops long enough."

" You stay longer ? " I remembered
her reference to " our tempij."

She looked thoughtfully into her glass.

" Yes," she replied in an altered tone, a
tone of great quietness and restraint;
" I have been here some time." And
she became silent.

After a short lapse the conversation
became general, and she reentered it.
Travel-talk : we exchanged feeble no-
things about routes and accommoda-
tions ; we praised here, and we con-
demned there, — all from the strict
standpoint of personal experience. My
Enigma touched on the hotels at Corfu,
on the steamer for Tunis, on the express
for Constantinople. She seemed to have
been everywhere, to have seen every-
thing, to have met everybody. She
evoked responses, more or less in kind,
from every quarter. Madame Brandt
grew restive under all this indifferent
discourse ; I could see that she felt her-
self capable of handling better mate-
rial. She veered off toward politics ;
she had her own ideas on everything
and a policy for everybody. Her " lit-
tle country " was evidently outside the
circle of great things ; hers was a broad,
external vision, and embraced all powers
and potentates in its easy and masterful
sweep. Politics was her hobby ; so she
mounted her steed and swung round the
track finely ; she kicked up a tremen-
dous lot of dust, and took every hurdle
without blinking an eyelash.

But this demonstration led to no
counter-demonstration from our neigh-
bor over the way. To all other leads
she would respond, but not to the lead
political. She who appeared to know
so much on every other subject was
dumb on the subject of statecraft. At
the first opportunity she gave the talk a
strong twist in the direction of art and
literature. She was better acquainted
with the new men in Paris than I was
myself, and she made easy casual refer-
ences to men of the North whose names
I had never even heard. She had a
good deal to say about the later lights in
Italian literature, — especially some of
the more dubious ones, whom she ap-

The Greatest of These.

767

peared to have met personally ; and she
commented with an unceremonious frank-
ness on a few of the more fragrant prac-
titioners of present-day French fiction.
Stanhope became completely engrossed.
She gave him intimate details about au-
thors he was already familiar with ; she
made suggestions for readings in new au-
thors whose names he had barely heard ;
she launched him bodily upon all the cur-
rents and cross-currents and counter-cur-
rents of Continental fiction, — she almost
swamped him. She led him on from
fact to theory, and from theory to prac-
tice, and from practice to ethics. Those
strong white hands of hers took a firm
grip upon the trunk of the tree of know-
ledge of good and evil, and made a
mighty rustle overhead among its leaves.
There was one moment when I thought
I almost saw things as they were, —
all things save the speaker's self. She
involved the whole table : the baron
warmed to life ; the curate flamed in
protest ; the saffron - eyed young man
(who turned out to be a Croat) clamored
against her assumptions and conclusions ;
until Madame Brandt, who was as deep-
ly involved as anybody (and whose ex-
pressions showed at once a wide toler-
ance and a generous idealism), became
suddenly conscious of the presence of
her offspring. These two young crea-
tures sat there side by side, with down-
cast eyes and attentive ears, — rather
disconcerted by an interchange of ideas
that had never before come within their
ken. Their mother, returning to her-
self, gave a shrug, laid her own hand
upon the trunk of the tree, and quieted
down its agitated foliage before too many
leaves had detached themselves and
come fluttering down in the wrong di-
rection.

The situation had been most promis-
ing, most inspiring. Ah, these young
girls, these tedious young girls, — how
much they have to answer for !

We were at the fruit. The disputant-
in-chief stopped the waiter, looked over

his offerings with a leisurely yet critical
eye, made her choice, called for an ex-
tra plate, arranged her pears and grapes
upon it, rose unceremoniously, bade us
all a brusque yet good-tempered bon soir,
and walked out of the room.

I looked after heV, — with a certain
intentness, perhaps. Then, turning back,
I detected Madame Brandt looking with
a like intentness at me. I smiled ; but
she turned away without any change of
expression. How long had her observa-
tions been going on ?

I followed Stanhope into the smoking-
room. We had it to ourselves.

" Well ? " said I.

" Well ? " said he.

" What is she ? " I asked.

" Make your own guess. I thought
at the beginning that she might be one
of those Baltic Germans."

" She is n't."

"A Dane, then? A Finn? A Croat,
— another of them ? Or a — a " —

I did not wait for further conjecture.
" Time will show, perhaps. She »s a
' linguist,' remember ; she will lapse into
her own tongue in due course. I 'm
sure she has n't done so yet. When she
does, may we be able to recognize it."

" She spoke to the dog," submitted
Stanhope.

" Humph ! " said I. Then, " What
is she doing here ? " I added.

" She is a companion," he replied.
" That black figured silk — her one good
gown."

" If you are going to be farcical ! "
I exclaimed. " Companion ! Did you
ever meet any one less secondary, less
subordinate ? "

" She is a nurse, then ; or a female
courier, — she knows everything."

" ' Female courier ' ? ' Female free-
lance ' would be better. Couriers and
such have their own dining-room here.
She is an adventuress."

" Don't be too hasty," said Stan-
hope.

" Well, then, a grass widow, waiting

768

The Greatest of These.

for the husband — or the remittance —
that never comes. She 's been here some
time, it seems."

" Don't be so uncharitable," said Stan-
hope.

"How she talked before those chil-
dren ! "

" She said what all thinking persons
must believe."

" That does ri't help. Come, come,
what is she, then ? "

" A political agent, perhaps. She fol-
lowed every other lead."

" Would politics lead her to Girgen-
ti?"

" This province is certainly a political
factor ; those sulphur - mines, all these
communal disturbances " —

" Nonsense."

" Well, then, she is a " —

" A what ? " I demanded.

" A cosmopolite."

" I see you are at the end of your
string," I said.

Girgenti sits whity-gray on its high
hilltop and looks out upon two worlds :
landward, into the Inferno of the sul-
phur-mines ; seaward, over the Paradiso
of the almond-groves. The two worlds
were before us, where to choose : should
we take the miseries of the sulphur-
workers, evidenced by the dismal piles
of refuse that disfigured the stripped
and glaring hillsides of the interior, or
should we follow that long and suave
slope water ward, where bands of sing-
ing peasantry ply their mattocks under
the tangled shade of vine and almond
and olive, and where, on the last crest
of the descending terraces, the yellow
and battered temples of the old Greek
day look out upon the blueness of the
sea and up into the blueness of the sky ?
We chose as artists, not as philanthro-
pists, not as humanitarians : we took the
groves, the vineyards, the temples.

We were well into the latter half of
February, — the spring had fully de-
clared itself. We stepped from the

coffee-room out upon the terrace, to take
a comprehensive glance over the field of
our coming labors. The morning was
cloudless ; the air was fresh, yet mild ;
groups of cypress-trees rose straight and
dark through the pink cloud-blooms of
the almond-trees ; and the sea and the
sky met in one high, clear, uncompro-
mising line that ran from the tossing
hilltops on our left to the long, heaving
promontory on our right.

" Here lies our day's work before
us ! " I cried, — " map and panorama all
in one. There 's the first of our tem-
ples down on the ridge just behind that
olive - grove, and over yonder are two
or three more. Where is the one they
make all those models and photographs
of, I wonder, — the one with the three
or four columns and the bit of entabla-
ture ? "

"More to the right," said Stanhope.
'* Yes, everything is laid out before us,
truly. And what have you ever seen
more Greek than this landscape, — more
marked by repose, moderation, symme-
try, suavity ? And how can we see it
better than by continuing to stand pre-
cisely where we are ? "

" You are right," I returned. " This
is one of the loveliest landscapes in the
world, so that our duty toward it is
perfectly clear : we must trample on it,
we must jump into the midst of it, we
must violate it ; we must do everything
but leave well enough alone. Come, the
road down leads to the left."

So, partly by means of the highroad,
partly by following a rocky little foot-
way that took its willful course between
ragged old stone walls through bean-beds,
barley-fields, and olive-groves, we passed
down to the temple of Juno.

The temple stands on a sandstone
ledge, close to the mossy ruins of the
old town walls ; we seemed as high
above the sea as ever. There was an
empty carriage waiting under a gnarled
old olive near one corner of the struc-
ture. Within the cella we saw the two

The Greatest of These.

769

daughters of Madame Brandt clamber-
ing over the vast broken blocks that
strewed the pavement, and on the steps
outside, with her back comfortably fitted
into the fluting of one of the worn and
weathered columns of yellow sandstone,
sat Madame Brandt herself.

" You are early," she said, rising.
" But we are .earlier. Let me welcome
you, let me guide you, let me introduce
you," with a genial wave of the hand
over the whole lovely prospect. Away
above us was the Rock of Athena, which
we might climb for the view ; away be-
low us was Porto Empedocle with its
shipping, best seen from a distance. In
the midst of the landscape — the heart
of the rose, she called it — was the old
church of San Nicola with its gardens.
" Take everything," she added ; " take
even this beautiful air, if you have a
page in your sketch-book for anything
like that." She became suddenly pen-
sive. " Such a day, such an air," she
went on presently, " would make a sick
man well, if anything could." She
seemed to look back toward the hotel.

" Oh," said I, fingering my sketch-
book, as it stuck half out of my pocket,
" I don't know that I shall do anything
in particular. Landscape, architecture,
all very nice, but no human interest.
Good background, of course, but some-
thing more needed for the actual sub-
ject."

" There is human interest everywhere,"
she replied in the same pensive tone.
" What else has kept me here ? " she
added, half beneath her breath. Then
she shook herself, and her old brusque
gayety came uppermost again. " I 'm
human ; I 'm interesting. So are my
girls ; make something out of them."

" Nothing better, I 'm sure," said Stan-
hope. He began to climb up into the
cella ; the two doves were to be sum-
moned forthwith. The division of labor
begun in the hotel drawing-room on the
previous evening was to continue, then :
he had entertained the daughters with

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 49

the last battle of flowers at Palermo,
while I had listened to the mother on
the policy of Russia in Central Asia.
Stanhope thinks the young girl indispen-
sable ; he drags her into all his stories,
and is always trying to force her into
my pictures.

" Don't let me disturb your daugh-
ters," I hastened to say. " You are here
yourself ; you 're in the foreground ;
you 're practically posed already."

" But my girls are thought rather pret-
ty," insisted Madame Brandt stoutly,
from the length of battered cornice on
which she had seated herself.

" H'm," said I in return ; " the prin-
cipal thing is n't prettiness, nor even
beauty. The principal interest is in
expression ; and expression comes from
experience, and experience follows on
participation in life."

" Well, I have participated," she re-
joined ; " I 'm not insipid, if my poor
girls do seem so. I have n't vegetated ;
I have — I have — banged about con-
siderable. Is that the way you say if, —
' banged about considerable ' ? I am so
fond of using those expressions, though
I have n't kept up my English as I
should. But do you consider me very
much battered and defaced ? "

" I would n't have you the least
changed, — unless you choose to change
the slant of your head the merest shade
to the left."

" Very well." Then, "You need n't
come, children. Run and pick some
flowers; let the gentleman help you.
Only don't go very far."

" There," I said, " now I have every-
thing I want, — you, and the temple, and
a bit of the town wall, and some of the
tombs in the wall (you said they were
tombs, I think), and a stretch of the
sea-line — No, it 's too much ; move
back to your column, please ; I shall
take you just for yourself."

" Very well." She moved back. " But
I 'm not sure," she went on, with a lit-
tle air of close scrutiny, " that I like to

770

The Greatest of These.

find a man under thirty preferring old
women to younger ones."

" Character is the great thing," I in-
sisted. " You are to pass on me, not as
a man, but as an artist."

" There is a difference," she observed.
" You will go to Florence ? " she asked
presently, with an effect of absentness.
4 ' It is full of pensions, and the pensions
are full of dear old ladies."

" Life - histories, and all that," I ad-
mitted. " But I find the same thing
here," I said, with intention.

" Here ? Ah, I see," she replied, as
she glanced upward at the weatherworn
stretch of entablature that still bridged
over spaces here and there between the
columns ; " one old ruin reposing in the
shadow of another ! " She gave a quiz-
zical squeeze and twinkle to those dark
eyes of hers.

" Of course I don't mean you ! "

" Do you mean yourself ? Are you
really so world-worn ? And I thought
you seemed such a good young man ! "

I suppose I am a good young man,
when you come to it ; but why throw it in
my face ? " No, I don't mean myself,"
I protested.

" Oh, I know what you would say,"
she went on, with a shrug. " It is sim-
ply that you are fond of reading human
documents, — is that the way you ex-
press it ? — fond of reading human docu-
ments, provided they have n't come too
lately from the press."

" Precisely. Gothic, black letter, un-
cials, hieroglyphs, — anything, in fact,
with sufficient age and character to make
it interesting."

" And you rather like to puzzle things
out for yourself ? "

" I don't like to be helped too much,
of course."

" And you generally decipher your
manuscript in the end ? "

" Why, yes, generally."

She rubbed a forefinger over the face
of her column, and detached a tiny sea-
shell or two from its bed in the yellow

mass. " Well, the hotel library is full
of old things ; some of them fall to pieces
in your hands."

" And others are so strongly and stiff-
ly bound that you can hardly force them
to lie open. But I shall read them yet."

" Only don't take hold of them upside
down ; you would injure your own eyes
and do injustice to the author's text."
She fixed her eye on my pencil. " How
far have you got with me ? "

" I have finished. But I think I shall
put in the water-line and a bit of the
coast, after all, to remind you that you
are four hundred feet above the sea."

" What is four hundred ? I am used
to four thousand," she declared reck-
lessly.

" Four thousand ? "

" Yes. I tramp over the mountains.
I love them. They do me good." Then,
" Well, if you have finished, I may move,
I suppose. I must have those children
back."

" Here they come," I said. " Their
hands are full of flowers."

So were Stanhope's. The pains he is
capable of taking with chits of sixteen
and eighteen ! He makes himself absurd.
" Come, girls," cried Madame Brandt
joyfully, " come and see what has hap-
pened to your mother ! "

The girls came up with shy smiles of
decorous expectation.

" Yes, here I am, true enough," de-
clared Madame Brandt, as she looked
over the drawing. " Only " — and she
stopped.

Only what ? What did she find amiss,
in Heaven's name ? It was but a rapid
impromptu, — not fifty strokes all told,
— yet I had caught the woman unmis-
takably.

" Only you have n't exactly made a
Norwegian of me, after alt."

She was a Norwegian, then ? I should
never have guessed it. It is easy enough
now to descant upon Madame Skjelde-
rup-Brandt's out-of-door quality, to talk
about the high, clear atmosphere of the

The Greatest of These.

Ill

North, to dwell on the fresh tang of the
breezes from across the fjords. . . . Es-
prit d'escalier.

I must have seemed a bit crestfallen.
I must have looked 'as if I expected to
be told that I had simply worked my
own nationality into the portrait, — most
odious of all comments. I think she saw
that she must make amends.

" No, you have not made a good Nor-
wegian of me ; but that may be because
I am not a good Norwegian. You look
into me and see me for what I am. You
make me an American."

There, she had said it, after all, and
said it as bluntly as you please.

" Why, really " — I began protest-
ingly.

" You see more than the mere me," she '
went on quickly. " You see my hopes,
my aspirations ; you detect my secret and
cherished preferences ; you " —

" Why, really " — I began again, puz-
zled.

" It is a real piece of divination ! " she
cried, — her actual words, I assure you.
" How could you know that I have a son
in Milwaukee ? He has been over there
two years, and he is making his everlast-
ing fortune, — or so I hope. ' Everlast-
ing fortune,' — is that well said ? Ah,
thanks. And how could you know that I
have a sister-in-law in Minnesota ? She
has been over there six. She likes it ;
she won't come back, except every third
summer for a few weeks. And how
could you know that it has been the
dream of my life to go over there, too ?
I think of nothing else ; I read their
papers ; I even allow my daughters to
go picking flowers round ruined temples
with new young men. . . . Oh, how you
see through me, how you understand me,
how you frighten me ! "

" Why, really " — I began once more,
half flattered ; while Stanhope gave me
a curious glance as if to ask, " What has
been going on here ? What is the wo-
man trying to bring about ? "

" But whatever in the world am I do-

ing," proceeded Madame Brandt, " with
a Greek temple and a Mediterranean
horizon behind me ? Your background
should have been quite a different one.
You should have stood me in front of an
elevator," — she threw out her plump
arms to indicate a capacity of a million
bushels, — "or else in front of a sky-
scraper. Ah, what a lovely, picturesque
word, ' sky-scraper ' ! I 'in so glad to
have a chance to use it ! "

I reached out for the drawing. " I
will change it," I volunteered.

" Yes," said Stanhope ; " change it
from a souvenir to a prophecy."

" No," responded Madame Brandt ;
" let it stay as it is, a souvenir and a
prophecy combined."

So Madame Brandt remained Graeco-
American, to the exclusion of her native
Norway, — that was the " little coun-
try." And if she were Norwegian, why
might not the other two ladies be Nor-
wegian as well?

" You are not without compatriots
here ? " I was feeble enough to remark.

" By no means," she assented.

" The little lady who sat opposite us at
dinner last night may be one of them ? "

" Yes."

" And the other lady who sat opposite
us might be one of them, too ? "

" No."

She concentrated her attention on the
sketch. " You are so clever," she said, —
her precise words : " you see into every-
thing ; there are no secrets from you ;
everything is an open book to you, — or
will be, in the end." And, " No help
from me," — were those the words she
barely saved herself from saying ? "I
shall value this," she went on. " I shall
lay it at the top of my trunk ; it will be
the first thing I unpack and put up in
place at Syracuse."

Stanhope and the two daughters were
seated on a wrecked and prostrate col-
umn, busy with the innocent blooms of
the springtide.

" You go so soon ? "

772

The Greatest of These.

" Almost at once. The carriage wait-
ing there under the tree will take us
straight to the station."

" Oh, fie ! " said I, myself casting
about for some floral offering that would
suitably grace this departure ; "one might
tax you with seeing Girgenti between
trains ! "

" Quite the contrary. We have been
here a long time, — much longer than
I could have foreseen. This is the last
of my visits to the ruins, my farewell.
But I think I may go now with a good
conscience. My girls " —

" I see. Quite right. The question
is whether you can stay with a good con-
science. I am no more an advocate than
you yourself of overplain speaking at a
public dinner-table. You are right in
wishing to remove your daughters beyond
the range of — beyond the range of " —

" Beyond the range of Greek art.
Precisely. They are almost too young
for temples — after the first fortnight."

" The lady who is not Norwegian,"
I began, — " it may be that you do not
altogether approve of her ? "

Madame Brandt looked at me with
quite a new expression ; was it a smile,
was it a frown, or was it a combination
of the two ?

" The question is whether she will al-
together approve of me."

" What charming humility ! " I cried.
" But I should never have charged you
with affectation."

" Affectation is my sole fault," she
said dryly. " I must do the best I can
to remedy it." She summoned her girls.
" Yes, we must go, but I hope that you
will be in no hurry to leave ; there is a
great deal of interest here."

" There will be less," I said gallantly.

"Oh, youth, youth!" I thought I
heard her murmur, " how far is it to be
depended upon ? "

We saw Madame Brandt off for Cata-
nia and Syracuse, and then went on with
our temples. We passed hither and thi-

ther, through lane and grove and field
and orchard, and took those entrancing
old ruins one after another in all their dis-
persedness and variety. Some of them
still stood upright on their stocky old
legs, and lifted their battered foreheads
manfully into the blue ; others had frank-
ly collapsed, and lay there, so many futile
and mortifying heaps of loose bones,
amidst the self - renewing and indomi-
table greenery of the spring. The last
temple of all consisted, as Stanhope put
it, of nothing but a pair of legs and a
jaw-bone. We found this scanty relic
in a farmyard that stood high up on
the sheer edge of a deep watercourse,
— a winding chasm, whose sides were
densely muffled with almonds and shim-
mering olives, and whose bottom was
paved with groves of orange-trees in the
last glowing stages of fruition. Nothing
was left of the temple but a pair of
broken, stumpy columns, and a bit of
sculptured cornice (in the egg-and-dart
pattern) which lay buried in the ground
before the farmhouse door, — that was
the jaw-bone. Through the velvety cleft
of the waterway we looked up to the
town high above on its hilltop, and pre-
sently we began the ascent to the hotel,
passing through one of those steep and
rugged and curious sandstone channel-
ings that so abound in the environs of
Girgenti, and that might pass either as
the work of the artificers of the old Greek
days, or — equally well — as the work of
Nature herself, the oldest artificer of all.
At lunch we found the places of Ma-
dame Brandt and her two daughters oc-
cupied by a French marquis, an abbe*
(his companion), and a missionary bish-
op from Arizona. The Dutch baron
was again in isolation, as neither of the
two Norwegian ladies (so I called them
for convenience' sake) appeared at table.
However, he conversed amicably with
the marquis, — on the basis of the Al-
manach de Gotha, I suppose. But their
talk had no interest for me ; the ab-
sence of the three ladies of the evening

The Greatest of These.

773

before (I am not referring in any way
to the two girls) robbed the meal of all
its flavor. Just before the arrival of the
cheese the bishop began on the cowboys
and the Chinese, but I am not at all sure
that I gave him due attention. After
lunch the bishop and the curate drew to-
gether for a confab, the marquis and his
abbe" settled down in the drawing-room
for a game of piquet, and Stanhope and
I tramped up to the town to get the
cathedral off our minds.

The cathedral was dull, the towns-
people were exasperating, and the views,
however magnificent, no longer possessed
complete novelty. We clattered through
a good many streets and squares with a
pack of dirty and mannerless little boys
at our heels, until the homicidal spirit
that is said to be in the air of the place
began to stir dangerously in our own
breasts.

"This won't do," said Stanhope, at
last. " We 've seen about everything
there is, and I don't want to fill up the
remaining hours with murder. What
shall we do ? Where shall we go ? "

" That church we were told about,"
I suggested, — " the one with the gar-
dens."

"It must be down under that group
of stone-pines. Come, it 's only half a
mile ; let 's try it."

We descended toward the church —
the old church of San Nicola — that had
been so pointedly commended by Ma-
dame Brandt. Behind the church there
is a little old disused monastery, with bits
of dog-tooth and zigzag mouldings about
its Norman doors and windows ; below
the monastery there is a garden with an
orange-grove and a long pillared walk
under grapevines ; above the garden
there is a mossy and neglected terrace
that lies under the shadow of a spread-
ing pine-tree ; and seated upon the ter-
race, with a book in her hand, we en-
countered the amazon of y ester-eve's din-
ner-table.

" Dear me ! " said Stanhope, — rather

blankly, as I felt. I thought, too, that
I detected displeasure in his tone, — re-
pugnance, possibly.

The lady sat in a rude wooden chair ;
she had a drooping and dejected aspect.
The book looked like a volume of poetry,
and she held it with' a peculiar twist of
her thick, peasant-like wrist, upon which
she wore a silver chain bracelet, whose
links were larger and clumsier than they
need have been. She was still in black,
and if her face had seemed lined and
worn in the tempered light of the dinner-
table lamp, how much more so did it
seem in the searching light of day !

" She is absolutely haggard," I mur-
mured, " and as pale as you please.
This is sad, sad indeed."

She looked up with the complete self-
possession that I had already assigned
to her as her special attribute, and gave
us a kind of wan smile that had, how-
ever, its own tinge of the informal and
the familiar. It really amounted to a
summons to approach, or — if I may use
another law term — to a piece of special
pleading.

So I shall state it, at least, — though,
to tell the truth, her peculiar physiogno-
my complicated the problem consider-
ably. Her prominent cheek-bones quite
brought confusion into any established
scheme of values ; and the singular ob-
liquity of her eyes added another diffi-
culty to the precise reading and render-
ing of her expression. Above all, she
called for a background of her own. She
was not the woman of the night before,
but that cry was just as acute and in-
sistent now as then. No Sicilian gar-
den, no still and shimmering sea, could
fill in the frame ; she called for some-
thing broader, bleaker, ruggeder, than
either imagination or memory was able
to supply.

" They set out this chair whenever
they see me coming," she said. " I will
ask them to bring two more."

" You come here frequently, then ? "
asked Stanhope.

774

The Greatest of These.

" I have come here three or four times
a week for the last month or more."

The woman who had admitted us ap-
peared again from the range of disused
convent offices on the far side of the
church. They seemed to serve at once as
homestead, stableyard, storehouse, and
playground for an abundant progeny.
She held her baby on one arm, and with
the other she 'worked a second heavy
chair across the jolting irregularities of
the terrace. She made some apologetic
remark in her native Sicilian.

" This is the other one," said our self-
appointed hostess, interpreting, " the last
one. There is no third. One of you
must stand."

" I will," said Stanhope promptly.
" Never mind me, anyway ; I will move
about a bit. There seems to be plenty
to see." I made no doubt of his will-
ingness to escape from such a milieu.

The woman retired with her baby,
and Stanhope followed her to see the
rarities of the place.

" You are fond of this spot ? " I said
to my companion.

" Very," she acquiesced. " This is the
part of Girgenti that wears the best and
the longest. And I have made friends
with the people. What companionship
is there in all those cold, empty tem-
ples?"

Not an archaeological student, evident-
ly, nor one of those trifling sketchers.

" The longest," — I carried these words
over and lingered on them with a marked
emphasis. "You count time by the
month here."

" To me a month is a month, — yes.
There are others to whom each month
is a year."

I was not ready yet to ask her in so
many words what kept her here ; that
would come later. " And you are fond
of poetry, too," I observed, with an eye
on her book.

She placed the volume on the balus-
trade of the terrace : it was Leopardi.
Stanhope himself might easily have

found a place there, had he but chosen.
Sometimes I think him overchoice, over-
careful. His very profession should de-
mand, if not more tolerance, at least a
greater catholicity of taste.

She turned the book over, so that it
lay face downward. " I should have
brought something different," she said.

" You are sad enough as it is ? " I
ventured.

" This is not the world that it was
meant to be," she returned.

"Things do go awry," I admitted.
" We ourselves are warped, wronged,
twisted. Our natural rights " —

I paused. It was on the subject of
natural rights that she had been most
vehement the evening before : the dis-
cussion had involved the right to die,
the right to live, even the right to slay.
I was hoping for a fuller utterance from
her.

" I am afraid I am thinking, not of
natural rights," she replied, " but of un-
natural wrongs. I have been down into
the sulphur-mines once more."

Was Stanhope right ? Was she a po-
litical agitator ? She was clever, I saw,
and might be dangerous, I felt certain.

" Yes," said I, " things are desperate-
ly bad hereabouts, I know. Could it
be in any other land than Italy that
such " —

She glanced at me with a new expres-
sion. It was covert, it was fleeting ; but
I had never seen it before, either on her
face or on another's.

" In my country," I went on, " some-
thing would be done. But the Italian —
when it comes to practical affairs, you
know. Can you imagine that we in
America would for a moment allow " —

" I am not sure of the utility or of
the justice of international comparisons,"
she broke in. " There is always the
tendency to compare the foreign reality,
not with our own reality, but with our
own local ideal."

" But in your country ? " I urged.

She was silent for a moment. A

The Greatest of These.

775

shadow of that strange new expression
stole over her face. " I have no coun-
try. Or, better, all countries are my
country, now."

I was to learn little, I saw. " They
are the most wretched of the wretched,"
I said, turning back.

" I should be glad to help them."

" Can nothing be done ? " I asked.

" By me? By one poor alien woman,
when government, when the collective
intelligence of the race, fails to solve the
problem ? No, I have renounced gener-
al beneficence, along with general ideas.
I have one or two families that I help,"
she added simply.

This, then, was her cue : she was
turning from rights to duties. A more
obtuse observer than I would not have
failed to perceive penitence in her atti-
tude, regret, even remorse, in her voice.
Instinctively I put a bit of drapery about
her, and made her the genius of Repa-
ration, of Expiation.

I determined not to make my disap-
proval of her too manifest, but I had no
idea of permitting the duties of to-day to
crowd out the rights of yesterday.

" You give the poor creatures the right
to die," I suggested. " You do not deny
the right of suicide to the wretched, the
downtrodden, any more than to the in-
delibly disgraced, the hopelessly crippled,
the mortally ill, the " —

It was this doctrine that had brought
the curate to his feet in protest. Do not
consider me • over-insistent ; I am sure
that I was but justifiably interested.

" The mortally ill ! " she sighed. She
looked across the garden, and through
the high flat tufts of the pines, and up
the hill slope beyond ; I fancied for a
moment that her eye rested on the ter-
race of the hotel. " They have only to
wait ! " she breathed.

She half rose, and as she settled back
into her chair she shook out the folds of
her skirt. I was conscious of some faint
perfume — was it sweet, was it pungent ?
— that seemed to emanate from her. I

instantly figured her as less of a culprit
and more of a victim, — though a victim
to herself, indeed. A varied catalogue
of drugs, stimulants, anodynes, passed
through my mind. For two or three
moments I saw her own course of life as
one long, slow suicide.

Stanhope passed below us, personal-
ly conducted through the garden. He
paused over three or four children who
were engaged in weeding out a vegeta-
ble bed, and I saw him stop for a mo-
ment before a donkey tethered to a
medlar-tree. He took out his notebook,
— for the children's aprons and the don-
key's ears, I suppose : such details ap-
pear necessary, to him.

" But there is the right to kill," I in-
sisted softly, — " the right of indigent
and overburdened relatives to relieve at
once the strain upon themselves and upon
a hopeless and agonizing victim ; the
right, too, of a deceived and outraged
husband to " —

I seemed to see the brown volume on
the balustrade stamped with a new title :
Tue-la !

It was this last right that she had
most vigorously denied and combated
the night before. The baron from Ley-
den had pleased himself by opposing
her ; he appeared to hold (or to have
adopted forthe nonce) the old-established
notion of woman as property, — a doc-
trine that struck sparks from her mind
and from her eyes as instantaneously as
a blow strikes sparks from a flint.

Would a spark be struck now ? Do
not consider me indiscreet ; I am sure
that I was but properly curious.

But no further spark was struck. She
looked at me a little doubtfully, I thought,
and began to arrange a bit of ruching
at her neck with one of those large,
blanched, bony hands. And I noticed
just behind her ear a very perceptible
scar.

" That is a literary question, after
all," she observed merely. But it was
more than a literary question ; for I saw

776

The Greatest of These.

in a flash a woman at variance with her
husband, and subject (perhaps justifi-
ably) to his violence.

I had another glimpse of Stanhope,
still following the mother and babe ; he
was making the circuit of a vast tank that
was half filled with brown water. He
slipped along over its broad, smooth stone
borders, and leaned over its unprotected
edge to count the pipes that crossed its
bottom and that were brought to sight
by the slanting sunbeams. I wondered
how many children had been drowned
there. I saw him make another entry in
his notebook, — the number, perhaps.

"The right to live and to love, — is
that a literary question, too ? " I insinu-
ated smoothly ; " the right of those to
whom fortune never comes, yet from
whom youth and spirit are day by day
departing ; the right of her who has wait-
ed, waited, yet before whom no wooer
has ever appeared " —

I looked at the book once more ; it
now seemed stamped with still another
title, — Les Demi-Vierges, a work that
my companion had herself cited the even-
ing before.

Do not consider me indelicate ; I am
sure that I was only — only — But I
can trust to your kind discernment to
find the word.

I shall not say that she had expressed
too pointed an opinion on this last mat-
ter, which had been approached but re-
motely, of course, and indeed very largely
by implication. Nobody had been too
definite about it, except the saffron-eyed
young Croat ; though why should so very
young a man have entered into the thing
at all ?

My companion moved a little uneasily,
and her glance, which had hitherto been
bold and frank enough in all conscience,
fell to the pavement with something that
resembled modesty, — an offended mod-
esty, if you will.

" Whether it is a literary question or
not," she responded, "it is a question
that need not be discussed too freely."

She rose, and reached out for her book,
as if to move away. Yet I saw her as
a woman who had taken much more
than a mere book or so into her own
hands.

She did move away, but at the head
of the steps she paused. She gave me a
perfectly inexplicable glance out of those
slanting eyes of hers. " Ah," she said,
" you are a man, — a young man."

" Yes," I rejoined very steadily, " I
am a young man. And you," I hastened
to add, " you are a' woman, and an un-
happy woman." I still felt a large mea-
sure of distaste for her, but distaste did
not altogether bar the way to pity.

" You are wrong," she replied. " I
am seldom unhappy unless I stop to
think, and I seldom stop to think unless
I am idle. I have been idle, I acknow-
ledge."

She glanced back over the terrace :
there, she made it plain, was the scene
of her idleness. I was not sorry to have
happened along and to have brought her
idle hour to an end. Then she trans-
ferred her glance to me. Could she have
meant to imply that the time passed in
conversation with a clever young man of
the world was simply — But, no ; no.

" Yes, you are young," she went on ;
" and the great gifts of the gods are
yours to enjoy, — strength, youth, free-
dom."

Freedom ? Was she viewing me as a
bachelor or as an American ? No mat-
ter ; I was equally free from matrimo-
nial entanglements and from social and
political oppression.

We descended into the garden, and she
began to walk toward the gate at the bot-
tom of it.

" I leave you here," she said. " I have
a key to the gate ; I shall go up by a
shorter path."

" You will find it rough, I 'm afraid."

" Most paths are rough." She paused,
and looked at me for the last time. " Yes,
you have youth and freedom."

I declare ! She was insisting on my

The Greatest of These.

Ill

youth just as the other woman had in-
sisted on my goodness. Why annoy
one so ?

" Youth and freedom," she repeated.
"May you learn to -use the one before
you have outgrown the other," and she
walked rapidly away.

Of course I shall outgrow my youth.
But had I misused my freedom ?

Stanhope returned, as I stood there in
speculation. " Come with me," he said.
" I have found off there an old Roman
sanctuary made over into a Norman
chapel ; and I dare say there will be
some good things to see in the church it-
self."

He looked after the retreating figure
on its way to the foot of the garden.
The woman, though she was not mov-
ing slowly, seemed to have a thoughtful,
even a mournful droop of the head.

"What is the matter?" asked Stan-
hope. " Is she hurt ? "

" Hurt ? " I echoed. " By what ? "

" Is she offended ? "

" Offended ? With whom ? "

We passed through some beds of peas
and radishes to the sanctuary. It was
a square Roman erection to which an
early Gothic vaulting had been added.
Through the broken pavement we caught
sight of a burial-chamber beneath, with
some remains of bones.

" Well," said Stanhope, as we viewed
together a few leg-bones and some thin
broken segments of human skulls, "I
suppose you know now all that you want-
ed to know ; you have cracked the co-
coanut and drained the milk. Certainly
I gave you the opportunity, — almost
made it ; openly, shamelessly, it might
have been said."

I was silent. He looked at me quiz-
zically.

" Come, what is her country ? Is she
Finn, Swede, Servian, Icelandic, Mon-
tenegrin, Bashi-Bazouk ? "

"I — I don't know," I replied.

" Then, what is she doing here ? "
he went on. " Companion, governess,

nurse, courier, student, author, reform-
er, exile ? "

"I — I don't think she said," I mur-
mured.

" Well, then, what is her status ? " he
proceeded. " Maid, wife, widow ? "

"I — I was just coming to that,"
I responded, " when — when she went
away."

" Well," observed Stanhope, frilling
the leaves of his notebook, " I, at least,
have something to show for the after-
noon."

He looked across over the back wall
of the garden and up along the olive
slopes that rose behind. A black figure,
walking up to the hotel with little change
in bearing, had just passed in front of
the inclosing walls of a farmyard. Then
he looked back suddenly at me.

" Yes, I left you alone with her," he
said, with an expression not easy to fa-
thom, " but perhaps I should have done
better by staying there with you."

We left Girgenti early the next morn-
ing. I had no further converse with the
sphinx of the garden. She had come
down to dinner the evening before, as
had her companion ; and they might
have sat together had they chosen, for
the Dutch baron had slipped away dur-
ing the afternoon. But they did not ap-
pear over-desirous of the public avowal
of some hidden and secret tie ; for the
lady who was Norwegian held her place
and kept her eyes on her plate, while
the lady who was not Norwegian moved
down to the other end of the table —
and kept her eyes on hers. A change
had come, and other changes seemed
impending.

We took our early coffee, and then
stepped out on the terrace for one final
look over the site of old Agrigentum,
" the most beautiful city of mortals."
The morning sun touched up our foun-
tain, our flower-pots, and our box-hedges,
and drove slantingly across the long,
many-windowed front of the house itself.

778

The Greatest of These.,

I heard a slight cough overhead. I
turned, and saw a young man at one of
the upper windows. I started ; I shud-
dered. Never had I beheld such pallor,
such emaciation. His light, long, thin
hair fell over temples absolutely color-
less, and his bright blue eyes burned and
stared with an unnatural largeness and
brilliancy. He coughed once more, and
again ; he caught at his breast with his
slender, bony, bloodless hand. But an-
other hand was clutching at him, — the
very hand of Death.

Presently, at the window next be-
yond, appeared the figure of the little
lady from the North. Her own eyes
were as blue as his ; her own face was
almost as colorless. She passed and re-
passed the window several times, and I
saw the various objects that she carried
in her hands, — flasks, brushes, slippers,
pieces of underclothing. I found my-
self wondering whether the two windows
belonged to the same room, and whether
the window next beyond lighted the room
of the other woman.

The head waiter came to tell us that
the bus was ready to leave.

" There is more to know than ever,"
I murmured, as I followed Stanhope
through the house.

" You are entitled to know about
her, at least," he conceded. " Ask the
waiter."

" As if I would ! " I returned, with
pride, and with some pique.

We were passing through the wide
hallway that led across the middle of the
house to the front.

" Look at the register, then. I Ve
seen a sort of guest-book lying about here
somewhere, I believe."

"Here it is, now," I rejoined, step-
ping toward a small table. " Bah ! it 's
only a fortnight old ! "

" Fatality ! " commented Stanhope.
" Have you got the sticks and umbrellas ?
Come along, then."

We left the problem unsolved, and
joined the general stream of travel east-

ward. New types presented themselves
at new places, and Girgenti and its den-
izens ceased to occupy my thoughts. At
Syracuse, for example, we met an in-
teresting group from New Orleans, who
added their Southern accent to the soft
and melting tones of Sicily ; and we
studied the four officers who came in to
dinner every evening, and made more
noise at their own little table than the
whole forty tourists did at their big one ;
and we took a solid pleasure in the head
waiter, who looked like a brigand, if
anybody ever did, but who was as good-
natured and painstaking as you please.
At Catania we came across the baron
from Leyden, as sepulchrally silent as
ever ; and we parleyed through one long
dinner with a large family group from
England, all brothers and sisters, all
bachelors and spinsters, who were doing
the island amicably in a body, — a com-
pact and sturdy little English hamlet on
the move. Perhaps their thatch was
more or less out of repair, and their
chimney-pots were a bit broken and bat-
tered, and their windows stuffed here
and there with wisps of old straw ; but
they were one and all keeping wind and
weather out most gallantly, and all
seemed capable of holding together for
many years to come. At Taormina we
became rather ecclesiastical again. We
met the missionary bishop in the Greek
theatre, and we grazed the curate and
his wife in one of the Gothic palaces.
But principally we delighted in our own
Hungarian prince, a tall, slender, ethe-
real person, who submitted to the crude
wines of the house with a touching pa-
tience, and who kept a bald-headed valet
busy half the day in brushing trousers
on the promenade below our windows.

But we did not meet Madame Skjel-
derup-Brandt and those two inevitable
daughters ; we did not meet the pathetic
little lady from the North ; we did not
meet the problematical person from
Everywhere and Nowhere ; nor did we
receive the slightest sign or token of

The Greatest of These.

779

that hopeless young consumptive upon
whom the hand of Death was already
laid.

Nothing occurred to bring this group
to mind — it was a' group, I felt perfect-
ly convinced — until we reached Messina.

The clientele at the Hotel Trinacria,
there, is largely native — professional
and commercial — and largely masculine.
The guests dine at two long tables.
Ours had a sprinkling of ladies ; the
other was filled with lawyers and mer-
chants, for a guess ; only one vacant
seat was left there. I sat facing the
door at the nearer of the tables. My
vis-a-vis was a Calabrian marquis, they
told me, who had come over from the
mainland to spend his substance in
riotous living, and whose manipulation
of macaroni was riotous enough, in all
conscience. But never mind him : the
lady from Everywhere oame in, passed
us by, went on to the other table, and
took that one vacant seat.

She was her earlier self once more.
She wore the figur'ed black silk dress
and the silver bracelet. She made her
entree with easy self-possession, and
sat down among all those men with as
much assurance as you please. As she
passed by she recognized us. She gave
us a bow and a faint, tired smile.

" She has forgiven you," said Stan-
hope.

" Forgiven me ? For what ? "

" She is a . noble, generous, broad-
minded creature, I am sure," said he.

" Humph ! " said I.

Though I could not keep her in view,
because I sat with my back to the other
table, I was conscious enough of her
presence among that incongruous crowd
of nondescripts. " ' Group ! ' I should
think it was a group ! "

She was conversing freely in Italian
with her neighbors, right and left. But
the room was crowded and noisy, and
her talk was difficult to overhear. I
could see her face only now and then,
by turning. But what I did see and

hear in that room was the last of her.
I left in the morning for Naples. I
never met her again. I did not even
think of her until months afterward in
Florence.

We followed the spring northward.
It was a spring of springs : the spring
of Sicily in February ; the spring of the
Bay of Naples in March ; the spring of
Rome in April; and the spring of the
Val d' Arno in May, — the last of them
the loveliest and best.

The heart of the Florentine spring
discloses itself in the Cascine, — most
noble and unaffected of parks, — with
Monte Morello looming up big on one
side, and the Arno slipping smoothly
past its poplars on the other. And the
heart of the Cascine is the wide Piazzale,
where the band comes to play just be-
fore sunset, and where the carabiniere in
blue and black sits stiff on his tall horse
to turn the tide of landaus and cabs and
victorias and four-in-hands backward to
the city. On one side of the Piazzale
people assemble under the arcades of
the Casino to eat their ices and to gos-
sip ; on the other side they sit on stone
benches round the big fountain-basin to
listen to the music and to watch the
world pass by.

I had enjoyed a long and intimate
acquaintance with the arcades, so this
time I chose the fountain. Upon one
of the benches, close by a bed of cinera-
ria, a lady was seated, alone. I recog-
nized at once the grizzled hair, the dark
eyes that crinkled up in welcome, and
the chubby little hand that motioned me
to take the place beside her. It was
Madame Skjelderup-Brandt.

I was heartily glad to see her. The
intervening months dropped out instant-
ly ; it was like the forcing together of
the two ends of an accordion : Syracuse,
Taormina, Sorrento, and Rome all is-
sued forth in a single tumultuous, re-
sounding concord, and nothing was left
between Girgenti and Florence.

" Well, I have decided to go."

780

The Greatest of These.

This she said without one syllable of
introduction.

" What! " I cried. "Just as I come ? "

She laughed. " I mean that I have
decided to go to America. Next month."

" Good ! " I cried again. " They will
like you."

" I hope so," she responded. " I want
to like America, and I want America to
like me. I am qualifying for the trip,
you see."

She gave a sort of humorous pat to the
blue stone slab on which we were seated,
and cast an indulgent smile over such of
the middle public as sat on other benches
and surveyed the passing of the great.

" I should have expected to see you
on wheels," I observed.

"I think I do as well here on this
bench as I should in one of those odious
cabs with a big green umbrella strapped
on behind, and a bundle of hay stowed
away under the driver's legs. Yes, I
am mingling with the populace ; I am
catching the true spirit of democracy."

" Do you need to qualify for demo-
cracy? Norway itself is democratic.
You have no titled nobility."

Madame Brandt drew herself up.
" We have our old families."

And I saw that she herself belonged
to one of the oldest and best of them.
She let herself down again almost im-
mediately.

" My girls are qualifying, too." She
waved her hand in a general way to-
ward the arcades of the Casino, where,
through the lined-up carriages and above
the heads of the crowd that hemmed in
the band, we saw people busy over their
ices and syrups at the little round iron
tables. " They have gone off with some
young man or other."

" Poor children ! " I sighed. " You
are putting them through a course that is
fairly heroic ; it will be make or break,
I fear. You compel them to eat ices
with strange men in Florence ; you force
them to overhear dubious table-talk at
Girgenti " —

Madame Brandt looked at me with a
slow seriousness ; then, without further
preamble, " The poor young man died,"
she said.

"Hem?" said I.

" That poor young consumptive in Si-
cily. He died, after all. His mother
has gone back to Christiania."

" Ah ! " I exclaimed. " His mother,
to be sure ! Poor little woman ! "

" Yes, it was hard for her, and for all
the rest of us. I knew what was coming,
but there was no need of my remaining
longer. There were others quite as will-
ing and far more able."

" There was one other, perhaps you
mean." I threw out this in a fine burst
of intuition.

"One other, then. You didn't like
her," added Madame Brandt, eying me
narrowly.

" I never understood her."

" Yet you are clever ; you claim a good
deal for yourself. You understood me."

" Not at first. Even your nationality
was a puzzle to me."

" Was hers ? "

" It is yet."

" Is there so much difference, then,
between a Norwegian and a Russian ? "

" A Russian ! " I jumped to my feet.
" A Russian ! — I see, I see ! A Rus-
sian, — a Calmuck, a Cossack, a Tartar !
Yes, yes ; it is as plain as day ! "

Here was the key at last. I saw the
woman now in the right light and with
the proper background.

" I see ! " I cried again. " I under-
stand. I 've got the landscape that she
needs. There is a big plain behind
her, one of those immense steppes," — I
threw out my arms to indicate the wide
flat reaches of mid-Russia, — " and it 's
covered with snow breast-deep, and the
wind goes raging across the " —

Madame Brandt touched my arm.
" Sit down, please ; people are begin-
ning to notice you."

I took my place once more on that
cold blue slab. " The wind goes raging

The Greatest of These.

781

across that bare, unbroken stretch ; and
upon the horizon there is a town with
those bulbous domes on all its church-
towers ; and in the middle distance there
is a forlorn wooden village, with peasants
in boots and blouses, and their hair cut
square just above their shoulders ; and
through the village there is a train of
sledges moving along on the way to Si-
beria ; and there is a company of sol-
diers with " —

" Siberia," repeated Madame Brandt
in a low, pitying tone. " You may well
say Siberia."

" Hein ? " I ejaculated again.

" The mines," said Madame Brandt
simply.

" Was she in them ? "

" No, he was ; he died of consumption,
too, poor young man."

« He ? Her lover ? "

" Her husband. He was young when
they took him away. He was old enough
when they brought him back."

" Her husband ! " I had another burst
of insight. " I know, I know ; I have
read their books. He was a student,
and she was a student, and they made
a student marriage. Then they con-
spired ; they were apprehended ; they
were put on trial ; they were " —

I was rising to my feet once more, but
Madame Brandt held me down.

" I do not know," she said. " He was
a minor government official, I believe,
and she was a merchant's daughter from
the far southeast. He was in the mines
eight years. He died six months after
his return, — less than a year ago. She
did everything in the world to save his
life, and went everywhere in the world
with him ; and after his death she came
back to the South for rest, change,
study " —

" She went into the mines, too," I sug-
gested, " at Girgenti. How could she
bear to do it ? "

" She is a woman of rock, of iron,"
replied Madame Brandt, " and she has
her own ideas of duty."

Madame Brandt brought out this last
word with a singular emphasis, and
looked me long and steadily straight in
the face.

" Duty ? "

" Duty, I said, — duty, duty."

" I understand you, I think."

" You do not," she ejaculated brusque-
ly. " You do not," she repeated, in
answer to my look of protesting sur-
prise. " You have densely, willfully mis-
understood all along. Why do you sup-
pose that woman spent six weeks in such
a place as Girgenti ? To sketch the
ruins ? To break blossoms from the alm-
ond-trees ? Not at all ; she was there
to help the young man's mother keep her
son alive."

" It was fortunate that his mother
could bring so experienced a nurse."

" Bring ? Nurse ? " Madame Brandt
tapped her foot smartly on the gravel.
" They met in Sicily itself."

" It was fortunate, then, that she en-
countered so trustworthy an acquaint-
ance."

" Acquaintance ? " Madame Brandt's
eyes snapped, and she tugged viciously
at the tips of her gloves. " They met
at Girgenti for the first time."

" It was fortunate, then, that " —

" Understand me," said Madame
Brandt sharply. " They were total stran-
gers ; they were thrown together by the
mere chance of travel, and held together
by that noble creature's sympathetic
heart and sense of duty. Why did she
look so pale, so haggard ? Because she
had yielded up ungrudgingly the last
traces of her youthful good looks, be-
cause she had made herself live through
all those dreadful days once more, in her
efforts to spare another woman the sor-
row that had been her own."

I poked among the cineraria with my
stick. "" But why was she so blunt, so
bold ? "

" Why was / so blunt, so bold ? You
were nonplused by my directness, I could
see. I was simply a person of age and

782

The Greatest of These.

experience welcoming a person much
younger, — an habitude giving greeting
to a stranger just arrived."

" She was certainly a woman of expe-
rience," I conceded, " and as surely an
habitude." »

" Experience ! " cried Madame Brandt
in a strident tone. " You have not
heard the half. They had waited too
long with that poor boy. At the last
hour they hurried him south as fast as
they could. He was doomed. I saw it ;
she saw it ; the hotel - keepers saw it.
Toward the end, no house would take
him in for more than a night. At one
place they were turned away from the
very door, on the first sight of the poor
boy's dying face. She went with them,
fought for them, took charge of every-
thing, — for the young man was almost
past speech, and his mother had nothing
but her own native Norwegian ; until,
at Messina — at Messina he had to be
taken to the hospital. She went with
him, nursed him, stayed with him till he
died. She paid his doctors and attend-
ants ; she saw his body prepared for the
return home ; she herself accompanied
that poor mother ac; far back as Venice.
She is an angel, if ever " —

Madame Brandt sat there rigid on her
seat. Her lips were trembling, but her
words came out in a new tone, as if she
had set her throat in a vise and did not
dare to move it. A tear had started in
each of her blinking eyes, her nostrils
were inflated, and a tremor seemed to be
running through the arms that she held
tight against her sides. I remembered
two or three other women who had
reached this same effect before my eyes,
— yet never except under the influence
of some strong suppressed indignation.
But what had Madame Brandt to be in-
dignant about ?

She turned full on me, quite oblivious
to the holiday crowd around.

" And you, you doubted her, you dis-
paraged her, you disrespected her ! And
I — I let you ; I was to blame, too ! But

you seemed so clever, so experienced ;
you claimed to read character and to
know the world. I thought I could trust
her to you ; I felt that nothing could as-
sail her " —

She gave a gurgling sob, twitched her
handkerchief out of her pocket, and burst
into tears.

By this time we had attracted the at-
tention of the crowd most finely. I tried
as best I might to quiet the poor woman
down ; but I was none too successful.

I was relieved to see the coming of
her two daughters ; they cleared the last
of the standing carriages, and came slow-
ly across the intervening stretch of fine
gravel. There was a man with them : it
was Stanhope, as I might have divined.
He came along with a new and pecu-
liar air ; if there had been only one girl,
I should have said that he was approach-
ing to ask the maternal blessing.

The sight of Madame Brandt in tears
— or rather, the sight of that handker-
chief before her face — made them
quicken their steps. She did not lower
her handkerchief to the solicitous inquir-
ies of the girls ; she rose, pushed them
along before her, felt round in the dark
for Stanhope's hand, which, when found,
she gripped firmly and gave a long, vig-
orous shake, and then she walked away
and took the girls with her. Her pre-
cise form of adieu to me — well, I am
not quite sure that I determined it.

" These Russians," I said thoughtfully
to Stanhope, as we passed through one
of those avenues of lindens and beeches
back to the city.

"What about them?"

" They are a study, — a study. For
example, there was the young fellow we
met last summer in Bedford Place : he
had come over to London to learn Eng-
lish."

" I remember," said Stanhope. " He
was so na'if , so good-natured, so uncouth,
so confiding, so disposed to assume a
general friendliness on all sides, like a

The Greatest of These.

783

big Newfoundland puppy. He had the
sweetest smile I ever saw, and the most
appealing eyes. He was as frank and
simple and direct as the frankest and
simplest and most direct of our own peo-
ple could have been ; and yet there was
something more, something beyond " —

" Yes, there ,was something beyond ;
we did n't get it."

" And there was the Russian prince
who — Have you been meeting any
Russians to-day ? " he asked suddenly.

" No, not to-day."

— " the Russian prince who was lec-
turing at Geneva on his country's histo-
ry and literature. He was as brilliant
and polished as a Frenchman, as sym-
pathetic and informal as an American ;
but behind all that " —

" Behind all that there was the ' some-
thing more ' ? "

" Yes. I did n't pay the best atten-
tion to his lecture, perhaps ; but he him-
self gave me the man-to-man feeling as
no man ever did before."

" And there was the Russian lady,"
I went on, " whom we met last month
in Rome at the Farnesina. I took her
for an American at first, — she was so
alert, so competent, so enthusiastic, so
unconscious of self ; but " —

" The ' something more,' again ? I
know what it was in this case, at least ;
it was earnestness and solidity of tem-
perament. Although she had the showy
surface of a woman in society, her tex-
ture was altogether without the sleazy,
flimsy " —

" Take care," said I, dabbing at the
shrubbery with my stick. " There may.
be some Americans passing along be-
hind this hedge."

" Let them pass," he said ; " there are
other temperaments that I admire more."

"And there was even the pension-

keeper we met day before yesterday,"
I went on, " in the Via Landino ; what
was that wonderful consonantal spree on
her door-plate ? You remember her ? —
that great, broad, pink-and-white human
cliff ; and with what a cosmic stare her
old blue eyes blazed upon us from under
those straight yellow brows ! An inter-
view of two minutes, — she had no quar-
ters for us, — but one of a striking inti-
macy and directness. She dismissed us
with a sort of gruff, brusque kindness ;
but for that two minutes there seemed
to be nothing between us, — she almost
abolished the atmosphere ! "

" The Russians, yes," said Stanhope.
" The breadth of life is theirs, and the
belief in themselves, and all clearness of
vision. They face the great realities, and
see them for what they are ; they come
up close to us and blow the fresh young
breath of the near future into our faces.
We are young, too ; and our youth re-
sponds to theirs — or should."

" ' Or should.' We ought to visit
them at home."

" So we ought."

" Will you go there with me this com-
ing summer ? "

" I am going the other way."

" To America ? " I inquired.

" To America ; with Madame Brandt
and her — her party."

" I understand she has a fondness for
America."

" America will develop a fondness for
her."

I snatched a branch of laurel from the
hedge, and stripped its leaves off one by
one as we moved on.

" H'm," said I ; " I hope so, I am
sure. She is something of a character
in her way ; and character is the first of
things, — except, you understand, the
penetrative portrayal of it."

Henry J3. fuller.

784

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Sunft.

SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF DEAN SWIFT.

IV.

WE have now reached the last batch
of Swift's letters. The correspondence
which opened so briskly has grown slug-
gish with the lapse of time. In the be-
ginning of their acquaintance Swift wrote
more frequently to Chetwode in ten
months than we now find him writing
in five or six years. For a while his at-
tention was drawn away from his friends
in Ireland by two visits which he paid
to England, and by the hopes raised in
him by the accession of a new king.
His health, moreover, was failing, and
the attacks of giddiness and deafness,
from which he had suffered much in late
years, returned oftener and lasted long-
er. His thoughts were narrowed, finding
their centre in his own misery. Never-
theless, he is still ready to help his friend
with his counsel for some time, till at
last neglect on his part, or perhaps only
the suspicion of neglect, leads to a quar-
rel. They close their correspondence
with bandying insults.

XLI.

[Indorsed, " Dr Swift from London in answer
to a Letter I wrote him concerning Cadenus
and Vanessa." Sent by hand.]

LONDON. Apr 19th 1726.
SR, — I have the Favor of yr Lettr of
the 7th instant. As to the Poem you men-
tion, I know severall Copyes of it have
been given about, and Ld. Ll [Lord
Lieutenant] told me he had one. It
was written written [sic] at Windsor
near 14 years ago, and dated : It was a
Task performed on a Frolick among
some Ladyes, and she it was addresst
to dyed some time ago in Dublin, and
on her Death the Copy shewn by her
Executor. I am very indifferent what
is done with it, for printing cannot make
it more common than it is ; and for my

own Part, I forget what is in it, but be-
lieve it to be onely a cavalier Business,
and they who will not give allowances
may chuse, and if they intend it ma-
liciously, they will be disappointed, for
it was what I expected, long before I
left Ireld — Therefore what you advise
me, about printing it my self is impos-
sible, for I never saw it since I writ it,
neither if I had, would I use shifts or
Arts, let People think of me as they'
please. Neither do I believe the gravest
Character is answerable for a Private
humersome thing which by an accident
inevitable, and the Baseness of partic-
ular Malice is made publick. I have
borne a great deal more, and those who
will like me less, upon seeing me capa-
ble of having writ such a Trifle so many
years ago, may think as they please,
neither is it agreeable to me to be trou-
bled with such Accounts, when there is
no Remedy and onely gives me the un-
gratefull Task of reflecting on the Base-
ness of Mankind, which I knew suffi-
ciently before.

I know not yr Reasons for coming
hither. Mine were onely to see some
old Friends before my Death, and some
other little Affairs, that related to my
former Course of Life here. But I de-
sign to return by the End of Summer.
I should be glad to be settled here, but
the inconvenience and Charge of onely
being a Passenger, is not so easy, as an
Indifferent home ; and the Stir people
make with me, gives me neither Pride
nor Pleasure. I have sd enough and re-
main Sr yrs dec.

" The Poem " was Cadenus and Van-
essa. Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), to
whom it was addressed, on her death in
1720 left directions for its publication.
I infer from this letter that it was not
printed till 1726. The " Copyes given

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

785

about " were in manuscript. The earli-
est edition in the British Museum is of
that year, — " published and sold by
Allan Ramsay, at his shop at the East
end of the Lucken-booths [Edinburgh],
price sixpence." It is interesting to find
the Scotch poet thus connected with Ca-
denus and Vanessa. Mr. Craik, in his
Life of Swift, says that the author re-
vised the poem some years after it was
written. The evidence for this state-
ment is not strong enough to give the
lie to the dean's assertion that he had
never seen it since he wrote it. The " ac-
cident inevitable " by which it was made
public was, no doubt, Vanessa's death ;
whose was " the Baseness " is doubtful.
It was printed, it is said, by her two ex-
ecutors, one of whom was Berkeley. If
Swift aimed at him, he would not have
assented to the praise bestowed on the
bishop by Pope : —

" Manners with candour are to Benson given ;
To Berkeley, every virtue under heaven."

The stir people made with Swift in
London was foretold by Dr. Arbuthnot,
who wrote to him, " I know of near half
a year's dinners where you are already
bespoke."

XLII.

DUBLIN. Octr 24th 1726.
SR, — Since I came to Ireland to the
time that I guess you went out of Town,
I was as you observe much in the Coun-
try, partly to enure my self gradually to
the Air of this place and partly to see
a Lady of my old Acquaintance who
was extremely ill. I am now going on
the old way having much to do of little
consequence, and taking all advantages
of fair weather to keep my Health by
walking. I look upon you as no very
warm Planter who could be eighteen
months absent from it, and amusing yr
self in so wretched a Town as this, nei-
ther can I think any man prudent who
hath planting or building going on in his
absence.

I believe our discoursing of Friends
VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 50

in Engld would be very short, for I
hardly imagine you and I can have three
of the same Acquaintance there, Death
and Exil having so diminished the num-
ber; and as for Occurences, I had as
little to do with them as possible, my
Opinions pleasing very few ; and there-
fore the life I led there was most in the
Country, and seeing onely those who
were content to visit me, and receive my
Visits, without regard to Party or Poli-
ticks. One thing I have onely con-
firmed my self in, which I knew long
ago, that it is a very idle thing for any
man to go for England without great
Business, unless he were in a way to pass
his Life there, which was not my Case,
and if it be yours, I shall think you
happy.

I am as always an utter Stranger
to Persons and occurences here — and
therefore can entertain you with neithr,
but wish you Success in this season of
planting, and remain

Yr most faithfull &c.

"Lady Carteret, wife of the lord-
lieutenant, said to Swift, ' The air of
this country is good.' He fell down on
his knees. ' For -God's sake, madam,
don't say so in England ; they will cer-
tainly tax it.' "

Swift wished much to be settled in
England. During the visit there, de-
scribed in the above letter, he wrote to
a friend : " This is the first time I was
ever weary of England, and longed to
be in Ireland ; but it is because go I
must ; for I do not love Ireland better,
nor England, as England, worse ; in short
you all live in a wretched, dirty doghole
and prison, but it is a place good enough
to die in." Three years later he wrote
from Dublin: "You think, as I ought
to think, that it is time for me to have
done with the world ; and so I would,
if I could get into a better, before I
was called into the best, and not die
here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a
hole."

786

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

XLIII.

DUBLIN. Feb 14tf 1726-7.

SE, — I should have sooner answei-ed
yr Lettr [your Letter] if my time had
not been taken up with many imperti-
nences, in Spight of my Monkish way of
living ; and particularly of late — with
my preparing a hundred little affairs
which must he- dispatched before I go
for England, as I intend to do in a very
short time, and I believe it will be the
last Journey I shall ever take thither.
But the omission of some Matters last
summer, by the absence of certain peo-
ple hath made it necessary. As to Captn
Gulliver, I find his book is very much
censured in this Kingdom which abounds
in excellent Judges ; but in Engld I hear
it hath made a bookseller almost rich
enough to be an Alderman. In my
Judgment I should think it hath been
mangled in the press, for in some parts
it doth not seem of a piece, but I shall
hear more when I am in England. I am
glad you are got into a new Tast of your
Improvements, and I know no thing I
should more desire than some Spot upon
which I could spend the rest of my life
in improving. But I shall live and dye
friendless, and a sorry Dublin inhabit-
ant ; and yet I have Spirit still left to
keep a clutter about my little garden,
where I pretend to have the finest para-
dise Stockes of their age in Ireland. But
I grow so old, that I despond, and think
nothing worth my Care except ease and
indolence, and walking to keep my
Health.

I can send you no news, because I
never read any, nor suffer any person
to inform me. I am sure whatever it is
it cannot please me. The Archbp of
Dublin is just recovered after having
been despaired of, and by that means
hath disappointed some hopers.
I am Sr yr &c.

Swift's " Monkish way of living " was
thus described by him a few years later :

" I am as mere a monk as any in Spain.
I eat my morsel alone like a king, and
am constantly at home when I am not
riding or walking, which I do often and
always alone."

Arbuthnot had written on November
8, J726: "Gulliver is in everybody's
hand. -I lent the book to an old gentle-
man who \rent immediately to his map
to search ilor Lilliput." Gay wrote a
few days latei- : " The whole impression
sold in a week. From the highest to
the lowest it is universally read, from the
cabinet council to Uie nursery." Swift
used to leave the prolSts of his writings
to the booksellers. In ^-1735 he wrote :
" I never got a farthing by anything I
writ, except one about eiyrht years ago,
and that was by Mr Pope's ? prudent man-
agement for me." The tiifne of publica-
tion renders it almost certain that this
one book was Gulliver's Travels. He is
said to have received £300. jBy the Irish
edition, published in 1727, hi,3 made no-
thing. " Dublin booksellers, -'/ he wrote,
" have not the least notion of paying for
copy." If the book was "numgledin
the press," it was owing to the^ timid-
ity of its London publisher, Bevijamin
Motte, who may have feared a pr osecu-
tion for libel. Swift, keeping u^> the
mystery of authorship, wrote to P^ope,
" I read the book over, and in the second
volume observed several passages wlaich
appear to be patched and altered." r He
added, " A bishop here said that book
was full of improbable lies, and f(-jr his
part he hardly believed a word < >f it."
Mr. Craik argues with great probability
that the suggestion of garbling w^as " a
loophole for disclaiming what Sw ift or
his friends might afterwards condemn."

XLFV.

DUBLIN. Novr 23rd 172*7.
SR, — I have yours of the 15th in*
stant, wherein you tell me that upon
my last leaving Ireland, you supposed I
would return no more, which was proba-
ble enough, for I was nine weeks very

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

787

ill in England, both of Giddyness and
Deafness, which latter being an uncon-
versable disorder I thought it better to
come to a place of my own, than be
troublesome to my Friends, or live in
a lodging ; and this hastened me over,
and by a hard Journy I recovered both
my Aylments. But if you imagined me
to have any favor at Court you were
much mistaken or misinformed. It is
quite otherwise at least among the Min-
istry. Neither did I ever go to Court,
except when I was sent for and not al-
ways then. Besides my illness gave me
too good an excuse the last two months.

As to Politicks ; in Engld it is hard
to keep out of them, and here it is a
shame to be in them, unless by way
of Laughf [Laughter] and ridicule, for
both which my tast is gone. I suppose
there will be as much mischief as Inter-
est, folly, ambition and Faction can bring
about, but let those who are younger than
I look to the consequences. The pub-
lick is an old tattred House but may last
as long as my lease in it, and therefore
like a true Irish tenant I shall consider
no further.

I wish I had some Retirement two or
three miles from this Town, to amuse
my self, as you do, with planting much,
but not as you do, for I would build very
little. But I cannot think of a remote
Journey in such a miserable country,
such a Clymat, and such roads, and
such uncertainty of Health. I would
never if possible be above an hour dis-
tant from home — nor be caught by a
Deafness and Giddyness out of my own
precincts, where I can do or not do,
what I please ; and see or not see, whom
I please. But if I had a home a hun-
dred miles off I never would see this
Town again, which I believe is the most
disagreeable Place in Europe, at least
to any but those who have been accos-
tomed to it from their youth, and in such
a Case I suppose a Jayl might be toler-
able. But my best comfort is, that I
lead here, the life of a monk, as I have

always done ; I am vexed whenever I
hear a knocking at the door, especially
the Raps of quality, and I see none but
those who come on foot. This is too
much at once.

I am yr &c.

Of his illness in England Swift wrote
from Pope's house, where he was stay-
ing, "Cyder and champaign and fruit
have been the cause." "I have," he
said, " a hundred oceans rolling in my
ears, into which no sense has been poured
this fortnight." On his return home he
wrote to Pope : " Two sick friends never
did well together; such an office [the
care of a sick friend] is fitter for ser-
vants and humble companions, to whom
it is wholly indifferent whether we give
them trouble or not. I have a race of
orderly, elderly people of both sexes at
command, who are of no consequence,
and have gifts proper for attending us;
who can bawl when I am deaf, and tread
softly when I am only giddy and would
sleep."

His " hard Journy " was the long
ride from London to Holyhead, in Wales,
where he was kept some days by con-
trary winds, " in a scurvy unprovided
comfortless place without one compan-
ion," as he wrote in his journal. " I can-
not read at night, and I have no books
to read in the day. I am afraid of
joining with passengers for fear of get-
ting acquaintance with Irish. I should
be glad to converse with farmers or shop-
keepers, but none of them speak English.
A dog is better company than the vicar,
for I remember him of old."

His taste for ridicule of Irish politi-
cians was not wholly gone. A few years
later he attacked them in the lines be-
ginning, —

" Ye paltry underlings of state,
Ye senators, who love to prate ;
Ye rascals of inferior note,
Who for a dinner sell a vote ;
Ye pack of pensionary peers,
Whose fingers itch for poets' ears ;

788

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

Ye bishops far removed from saints,

Why all this rage ? why these complaints ? "

The life he led in Dublin he thus de-
scribed to Pope : " I keep humble com-
pany, who are happy to come when they
can get a bottle of wine without paying
for it. I gave my vicar a supper and
his wife a shilling to play with me an
hour at backgammon once a fortnight.
To all people of quality and especially
of titles I am not within ; or at least am
deaf a week or two after I am well."

XLV.
DUBLIN. Decbr 12th 1727.

SR, — I thought to have seen your
Son, or to have spoken to his Tutor.
But I am in a condition to see nobody ;
my old disorder of Deafness being re-
turned upon me, so that I am forced to
keep at home and see no company ; and
this disorder seldom leaves me under
two months.

I do not understand your son's fancy
of leaving the University to study Law
under a Teacher. I doubt he is weary
of his Studyes, and wants to be in a new
Scene ; I heard of a fellow some years
ago who followed that practice of read-
ing Law, but I believe it was to Lads,
who had never been at a University ; I
am ignorant of these Scheams, and you
must advise with some who are acquaint-
ed with them. I only know the old road
of getting some good learning in a uni-
versity and when young men are well
grounded then going to the Inns of
Court. This is all I can say in the mat-
ter, my Head being too much confused
by my present Disorder.

I am yr obd' &c.

Swift in his Letter to a Young Clergy-
man says : " What a violent run there
is among too many weak people against
university education : be firmly assured
that the whole cry is made up by those
who were either never sent to a college,
or, through their irregularities and stu-

pidity, never made the least improve-
ment while they were there."

The students of Dublin University he
thus mentions in a letter to Pope : " You
are as much known here as in England,
and the university lads will crowd to kiss
the hem of your garments."

Wherever young Chetwode studied
law, he would have had to learn law
Latin. For four years longer it was to
remain the language of the records in
the law courts. Blackstone in his Com-
mentaries sighs over the change that was
made, when, by act of Parliament, Eng-
lish alone was to be thenceforth used.
The common people, he said, were as
ignorant in matters of law as before,
whi-le clerks and attorneys were now
found who could not understand the old
records. Owing, moreover, to the ver-
bosity of English, more words were used
in legal documents, to the great increase
of the cost.

XLVI.
DUBLIN. Mar. 15th 1728-9.

SR, — I had the favor of yours of the
5th instant, when I had not been above
a fortnight recovered from a disorder
of giddyness and Deafness, which hard-
ly leaves me a month together. Since
my last return from Engld I never had
but one Letter from you while I was in
the Country, and that was during a time
of the same vexatious ailment, when I
could neither give my self the trouble to
write or to read. I shall think very
unwise in such a world as this, to leave
planting of trees, and making walks, to
come into it — I wish my fortune had
thrown me any where rather than into
this Town and no Town, where I have
not three acquaintances, nor know any
Person whom I care to visit. But I
must now take up with a solitary life
from necessity as well as Inclination, for
yesterday I relapsed again, and am now
so deaf that I shall not be able to dine
with my Chapter on our onely festival
in the year, I mean St. Patrick's Day.
As to any Scurrilityes published against

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

789

me, I have no other Remedy, than to
desire never to hear of them and then
the authors will be disappointed, at least
it will be the same thing to me as if they
had never been writ. For I will not
imagine that any friend I esteem, can
value me the less, upon the Malice of
Fools, and knaves, against whose Repub-
lick I have always been at open War.
Every man is safe from Evil tongues,
who can be content to be obscure, and
men must take Distinction as they do
Land, cum onere.

I wish you happy in your Retreat,
and hope you will enjoy it long and am
your &c.

A little later Swift wrote : " I have
in twenty years drawn above one thou-
sand scurrilous libels on myself, without
any other recompense than the love of
the Irish vulgar, and two or three dozen
signposts of the Drapier in this city, be-
sides those that are scattered in country
towns ; and even these are half worn
out."

His war against the republic of fools
and knaves he thus speaks of in his
Lines on the Death of Dr. Swift : —

" As with a moral view designed
To cure the vices of mankind,
His vein ironically grave
Exposed the fool and lashed the knave."

The safety from evil tongues that is
found in obscurity he has thus expressed :
" Censure is the tax a man pays to the
public for being eminent."

XLVH.

DUBLIN. May 11th 1729.
SR, — That I did not answer your for-
mer Letter, was because I did not know
it required any, and being seldom in a
tolerable humor by the frequent returns
or dreads of Deafness, I am grown a very
bad correspondent. As to the passage
you mentioned in that former Letter, and
desired my opinion, I did not understand
the meaning, and that Letf being mis-
layd, I cannot recollect it, tho' you refer

to it in your last. I shall not make the
usuall excusses on the subject of lending
money, but as I have not been master of
3011 for thirty days this thirty years, so
I have actually borrowed several small
Sums for thesse two or three years past
for board-wages to my Servu [Servants]
and common expences. I have within
these ten days borrowd the very poor
money lodged in my hands, to buy
Cloaths for rny Servants, and left my
note in the bag in case of my Death.
These pinches are not peculiar to me,
but to all men in this Kingdom, who
live upon Tythes or rack [?] rents, for,
as we have been on the high road to ruin
these dozen years, so we have now got
almost to our Journey's End : And truly
I do expect and am determined in a short
time to pawn my little plate, or sell it,
for subsistance. I have had the same
request you make me, from severall oth-
ers, and have desired the same favor
from others, without Success ; and I be-
lieve there are hardly three men of any
figure in Ireld, whose affairs are so bad
as mine, who now pay Interest for a
thousd pounds of other peoples money
(which I undertook to manage) without
receiving one farthing my self, but en-
gaged seven years in a law suit to re-
cover it. This is the fairest side of my
Circumstances for they are worse than I
care to think of, much less to tell, and
if the universall complaints and despair
of all people have not reacht you, you
have yet a vexation to come. I am in
ten times a worse state than you, having
a law suit on which my whole fortune
depends, and put to shifts for money
which I thought would never fall to my
lot. I have been lately amazed as well
grieved [sic] at some intimate friends,
who have desired to borrow money of
me, and whom I could not oblige but ra-
ther expected the same kindness from
them.

Such is the condition of the Kingdom,
and such is mine.

I am yr &c.

790

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

Swift in his letters often complains of
the want of ready money. " Money," he
once wrote, "is not to be had, except
they will make me a bishop, or a judge,
or a colonel, or a commissioner of the re-
venues." Nevertheless, on his death, ten
years after this was written, he left more
than £11,000. It is not true that he had
" not been master of 3011 for thirty days
this thirty years." In 1712 he had £400
in the hands of a friend ; in 1725 he lost
£1250 by another friend's ruin. His ser-
vants he always kept on board-wages.
Their staying long in his service showed
that he was not a bad master. " He was
served in plate, and used to say that he
was the poorest gentleman in Ireland that
ate upon plate, and the richest that lived
without a coach."

His lawsuit, whatever it was, went on
troubling him. Two years later he wrote
to Gay : " I thought I had done with my
lawsuit, and so did all my lawyers ; but
my adversary, after being in appearance
a Protestant these twenty years, has de-
clared he was always a Papist, and con-
sequently by the law here cannot buy,
nor, I think, sell ; so that I am at sea
again for almost all I am worth."

XLVIII.

Aug. 9th 1729.

SR, — Your Lett1 of July 30th I did
not receive till this day. I am near 60
miles from Dublin, and have been so
these 10 weeks. I am heartily sorry for
the two ocassions of the Difficultyes you
are under. I knew Mrs Chetwode from
her Child-hood, and knew her mother
and Sisters, and although I saw her but
few times in my life, being in a differ-
ent Kingdom, I had an old friendship
for her, without entring into differences
between you, and cannot but regret her
death. As to Mr Jackman I have known
him many years, he was a good natured
generous and gentlemanly person ; and
a long time ago, having a little money
of my own, and being likewise concerned
for a friend, I was inclined to trust him

with the management of both but re-
ceived some hints that his affairs were
even then not in a condition so as to
make it safe to have any dealings of that
kind with him. For these 14 years past,
he was always looked on as a gone man,
for which I was sorry, because I had a
'personal inclination towards himself, but
seldom saw him of late years ; because I
was onely a generall acquaintance, and
not of intimacy enough to advise him,
or meddle with his affairs, nor able to
assist him. I therefore withdrew, rather
than put my Shoulders to a falling wall,
which I had no call to do. This day
upon reading yrLettr I asked a Gentleman
just come from Dublin, who told me the
Report was true, of Jackman's being gone
off. Now Sr I desire to know, how it is
possible I can give you Advice being no
Lawyer, not knowing how much you
stand engaged for, nor the Situation of
your own Affairs. I presume the other
Security is a responsible person, and I
hope Mr Jackman's arrears cannot be so
much as to endanger your sinking under
them. It is to be supposed that Mr Shir-
ley will give time, considering the case. I
think there is a fatality in some people to
embroyl themselves by their good nature.
I know what I would do in the like con-
dition ; It would be, upon being pressed,
to be as open as possible, and to offer
all in my power to give Satisfaction, pro-
vided I could have the allowance of time.
I know all fair Creditors love free and
open dealings, and that staving off by the
arts of Lawyers makes all things worse
at the end. I will write to Mr Stopford
by the next post, in as pressing a man-
ner as I can ; he is as honest and bene-
volent a person as ever I knew. If it be
necessary for you to retrench in your
way of living, I should advise, upon sup-
posing that you can put your affairs in
some Settlement here under the con-
duct of your Son assisted by some other
friends, that you should retire to some
town in England in a good country and
far from London, where you may live as

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

791

cheap as you please, and not uncomfort-
ably, till this present Storrn shall blow
over. This is all I can think of after
three times reading your Letter. I pray
God direct you ;

I am ever &c.

xiix.

Aug. 80tk 1729.

SB, — I received your Lettr by a man
that came from Dublin with some things
for me. This is the first post since ; I
come now to answer yr questions. First
whether you shall marry. I answer that
if it may be done with advantage to your
fortune, to a person where the friend-"
ship and good usage will be reciprocall,
and without loss to yr present children,
I suppose all yr friends, as I, would ap-
prove it. As to the affair of Lettr of
Licence &c. I profess I am not master
of it. I understand it is to be given by
all the Creditors before the Debtor can
be secure ; why it is desired of you, I
know not, unless as a Creditor, and how
you are a Creditor, unless as being bound
for him, I am as ignorant, and how
Jackman in his condition can be able to
indemnify you is as hard to conceive ;
I doubt his rich friends will hardly do
it. This is all I can see after half blind-
ing my self with reading yr Clerks
Copyes. As to yr leaving Ireld, doubt-
less yr first step should be to London
for a final answer from the Lady ; if
that fayls, I think you can live more
conveniently in some distant southern
county of Engld, tho' perhaps cheap1 in
France. To make a conveyance of yr
estate etc. there must I suppose be ad-
vice of good Lawyers. Mr Stopford will
be a very proper person, but you judge
ill in thinking on me who am so old and
crazy, that for severall years I have re-
fused so much as to be Executor to three
or four of my best and nearest friends
both here and in Engld. I know not
whether Mr Stopford received my Let-
ter : but I will write to him again. You
cannot well blame him for some tenderr

ness to so near a Relation, but I think
you are a little too nice and punctilious
for a man of this world, and expect
more from human race, than their Cor-
ruptions can afford. I apprehend that
whatever the debt you are engaged for
shall amount to, any unsettled part of
your estate will be lyable to it, and it
will be wise to reckon upon no assistance
from Jackman, and if you shall be forced
to raise money and pay Interest, you
must look onely towards how much is
left, and either retrieve by marriage or
live retired in a l^hrifty way. No man
can advise otherwise than as he follows
himself. Every farthing of any tempo-
rall fortune I have is upon the balance
to be lost. The turn I take is to look
on what is left, and my Wisdom can
reach no higher. But as you ill bear
publick Mortifications it will be best to
retire to some othr Country where none
will insult you on account of your living
in an humbler manner. In the Country
of England one may live with repute,
and keep the best company for 10011 a
year. I can think of no more at pre-
sent. I shall soon leave this place, the
weather being cold, and an Irish winter
country is what I cannot support.
I am Sr yr most &c.

Swift's assertion that " no man can
advise otherwise than as he follows him-
self " would have brought on him the
reproach from Johnson that he was
" grossly ignorant of human nature."
When it was objected that a certain
medical author did not practice what he
taught, Johnson replied : " That does
not make his book the worse. People
are influenced more by what a man says,
if his practice is suitable to it, because
they are blockheads."

That a man living by himself could,
in those days, on £100 a year (nearly
$500), keep the best company in the
country parts of England is confirmed
by a curious statement published by Bos-
well of Peregrine Langton, who on £200

792

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

a year had done much more than this,
for he had kept up a house with four
servants, a post-chaise and three horses.

DUBLIN. Feby 12th 17ff .
SR, — I did not come to town till Oc-
tober, and I solemnly protest that I writ
to you since I came, with the opinion I
was able to give 'on the affairs you con-
sulted me about ; indeed I grow every
day an ill retainer of memory even in
my own affairs, and consequently much
more of other peoples, especially where
I can be of little or no Service. I find
you are a great Intelligencer, and charge
me at a venture with twenty things which
never came into my head. It is true I
have amused my self sometimes both
formerly and of late, and have suffered
from it by indiscretion of people. But
I believe that matter is at an end ; For I
would see all the little rascals of Ireland
hanged rather than give them any plea-
sure at the expence of disgusting one
judicious friend. — I have seen Mr Jack-
man twice in the Green and therefore
suppose there hath been some expedient
found for an interval of liberty : but I
cannot learn the state of his affairs. As
to changing your Single life, it is im-
possible to advise without knowing all
circumstances both of you and the Per-
son. A. Bp Sheldon advised a young
Lord to be sure to get money with a wife
because he would then be at least pos-
sessed of one good thing. For the rest,
you are the onely judge of Person, tem-
per and understanding. And, those who
have been marryed may form juster ideas
of that estate than I can pretend to do.
I am Sr your most obd* &c.

Of a lord who, acting on Archbishop
Sheldon's advice, had married for money,
Johnson said, " Now has that fellow at
length obtained a certainty of three
meals a day, and for that certainty, like
his brother dog in the fable, he will get
his neck galled for life with a collar."

Swift, in the last lines of his letterj
implies that he had never been married.
That he had been married to Stella the
evidence is very strong, though not con-
clusive.

LI.
DUBLIN. June 24tk 1730.

SB, — I had yours but it came a little
later than usuall ; you are misinformed ;
I have neither amused my self with op-
posing or defending any body. I live
wholly within my self ; most people have
dropt me, and I have nothing to do, but
fence against the evils of age and sick-
ness as much as I can, by riding and
walking ; neither have I been above 6
miles out of this town this 9 months ;
except once at the Bishps [Bishop's] vis-
itation in Trim. Neither have I any
thought of a Villa eithr near or far off ;
having neither money, youth, nor inclina-
tion for such an atchievement. I do not
think the Country of Ireland a habita-
ble scene without long preparation, and
great expence. I am glad your trees
thrive so well. It is usuall when good
care is taken, that they will at last settle
to the ground.

I cannot imagine how you procure
enemyes, since one great use of retire-
ment is to lose them, or else a man is no
thorow retirer. If I mistake you not,
by your 60 friends, you mean enemies ;
I knew not Webb. — As to your infor-
mation of passages in private life, it is
a thing I never did nor shall pursue ;
nor can envy you or any man for k no-
ledge in it ; because it must be lyable to
great mistakes, and consequently wrong
Judgments. This I say, though I lovo
the world as little, and think as ill of it
as most people. . . . Mr Cusack dyed
a week after I left Trim ; and is much
lamented by all Partyes. What embroyl-
ments you had with him I know not ;
but I always saw him act the part of a
generous, honest, good natured, reason-
able, obliging man. I find you intended
to treat of a marriage by Proxy in Eng-
ld and the lady is dead. I think you have

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

793

as ill luck with burying your friends, as
good with burying your enemyes ; I did
expect that would be the event when I
heard of it first from you. I know not
what advertisements you read of any
Libels or Storyes against me, for I read
no news ; nor any man tells me of such
things, which is the onely way of dis-
appointing such obscure Slaunderers.
About 3 years ago I was shewn an ad-
vertisem' to some such purpose, but I
thought the Person who told me had bet-
ter let it alone. I do not know but they
will write Memoirs of my actions in
War ; These are naturall consequences
that fall upon people who have wri-
tings layd to their charge, whether true
or not —

I am just going out of town, to stay
no where long, but go from house to
house, whether Inns or friends, for five
or six weeks mearly for exercise.
.1 am Sr your most obedient &c.

I direct to Maryborow by guess, never
remembering whether that or Mountme-
lick be right.

LIT.

[Knightley Chetwode to Dean Swift.]

[No date.]

Sr, — I came to Towne ye 12th of
Decr and leave it the 12th of March, and
could never see you but in ye streete, the
last time I met you I merryly thought
of Horace's 9th Satire, and upon it pur-
sued you to yr next house tho' not " prope
Caesaris hortos." — I had a desire to
catch you by yr best ear for halfe an
hour and something to tell you, wh I
imagined wd surprize and please you,
but with the cunning of experienced
Courtiers, grown old in politicks, you
put me off with a I '11 send to you ; wh
probably you never intended. I am now
returning to Wodebrook from an amour
wh has proved little profitable to myselfe
— Business here I Ve none but with
women ; those pleasures have not (with
me) as yet [? lost] their charms and
tho' when I am at home I do not like
my neighbourhood and shall therefore

probably seldom stir beyond the limits
of my gardens and Plantations, wh. are
full big enough for my purse, or what is
even more insatiable my ambition, yet if
my amusements there are scanty my
thoughts are unmolested. I see not ye
prosperity of Rascalls, I hear not ye
Complaints of the worthy — I enjoy the
sun and fresh air without paying a fruit-
less attendance upon his Eminence of St.
Patricks, my fruit will bloom, my Herbs
be fragrant, my flowers smile tho' the
Deane frowns, and looks gloomy, take
this as some sort of returne for ye great-
est neglect of me, I 've mett since my
last coming to this Towne, many ill of-
fices, and what is far more extraor-
dinary wth halfe a dozen Females who
have cleared up the truth of it to a math-
ematicall demonstration ; this causes me
to reflect upon the Jewishe method for-
merly to make Proselytes wh I think St.
Ambrose well expresses in ye following
words " Hi arte immiscent se homini-
bus, Domos perietrant, ingrediuntur Prae-
toria, aures judicum et publica inquie-
tant, et ideo magis prsevalent quo magis
impudenter." I saw you pass last fri-
day by my windowe like a Lady to take
horse, with yr handcirchief e and whipp in
yr hand together ; yr petticoats were of
ye shortest, and you wanted a black capp
or I might have thought of Lady Har-
riett Harley now Lady Oxford.

LHI.

[Knightley Chetwode to Dean Swift.]
SB, — I am truly concerned at yr hav-
ing been so long lame which you say I
can't see you, tho' I imputed it to your
having taken something amiss in my last
letter, wherein when I thought I was
only plaine perhaps I Ve been blunt, and
y* is a fault for I am of opinion with
my old friend Wycherly, that some de-
gree of ceremony shd [should] be pre-
served in the strictest friendship. How-
ever I write again to you, upon my old
maxim y* he who forbears to write be-
cause his last letter is unanswered shews

794

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift.

more regard to forms and punctillios
than to friendship. I 've mett you hand-
ed about in print and as the Coffey Houses
will have it of your owne doing — I am
afraid yr using yr legg too soon will not
let it be too soon well, the very shaking
of a chair tho' yo had a stole under it,
I believe harm'd you for you see by yr
accident at ye A'p's visitation how small
a thing throws you back. Beware I pray
you of this hurt in time, for if a swell-
ing shd fix in yr leggs an access of a
Dropsy may be apprehended — I shd be
glad to see you if it were conven1 and
agreeable to you and not else, tho' I am
yr well wisher and humble Serv*

K. C.

LIV.
[Dean Swift to Knightley Chetwode.]

[Indorsed, " A very extraordinary lettr de-
signed I suppose to mortifie me — within this
letter are coppies of some lettrs of mine to
him."]

DUBLIN. May Sth 1731 [? 1732].
SE, — Your letter hath layen by me
without acknowledging it, much longer
than I intended, or rather this is my
third time of writing to you, but the two
former I burned in an hour after I had
finished them, because they contained
some passages which I apprehended one
of your pique might possibly dislike, for
I have heard you approve of one prin-
ciple in your nature, that no man had
ever offended you, against whom you
did not find some opportunity to make
him regret it, although perhaps no of-
fence were ever designed. This per-
haps, and the other art you are pleased
with, of knowing the secrets of f amilyes,
which as you have told me was so won-
derfull that some people thought you
dealt with old Nick, hath made many
families so cautious of you. And to say
the truth, your whole scheme of thinking,
conversing, and living, differ in every
point from mine. I have utterly done
with all great names and titles of Princes
and Lords and Ladyes and Ministers of
State? because I conceive they do me

not the least honor ; wherein I look upon
myself to be a prouder man than you,
who expect that the people here should
think more honorably of you by putting
them in mind of your high acquaintance,
whereas the Spirits of our Irish folks are
so low and little, and malicious, that
they seldom believe a syllable of what
we say on these occasions, but score it
all up to vanity ; as I have known by
Experience, whenever by great chance
I blabbed out some great name beyond
one or two intimate friends. For which
reason I thank God that I am not ac-
quainted with one person of title in this
whole Kingdom, nor could I tell how to
behave myself before persons of such
sublime quality — Half a dozen midling
Clergymen, and one or two midling lay-
men make up the whole circle of my
acquaintance — That you returned from
an amour without profit, I do not won-
der, nor that it was more pleasurable, if
the Lady as I am told be sixty, unless
her literal and metaphorical talents were
very great ; yet I think it impossible for
any woman of her age, who is both wise
and rich, to think of matrimony in ear-
nest. However I easily believe what
you say that women have not yet lost
all their charms with you — who could
find them in a Sybel. I am sorry for
what you say that your ambition is un-
satiated, because I think there are few
men alive so little circumstanced to grati-
fy it. You made one little essay in a
desperate Cause much to the disadvan-
tage of your fortune, and which would
have done you little good if it had suc-
ceeded ; and I think you have no merit
with the present folks, though some af-
fect to believe it to your disadvantage.

I cannot allow you my disciple ; for
you never followed any one rule I gave
you — I confess the Qu's [Queen's] death
cured all ambition in me, for which I
am heartily glad, because I think it lit-
tle consists either with ease or with con-
science.

I cannot imagine what any people can

Some Unpublished Letters of Dean /Swift.

795

propose by attempts against you, who
are a private country Gentleman, who
can never expect any Employment or
power. I am wondering how you came
acquainted with Horace or St. Ambrose,
since neither Latin nor Divinity have
been your Studyes ; it seems a miracle
to me. I agree with that Gentleman
(whoever he is) that said to answer let-
ters was a part of good breeding, but he
would agree with me, that nothing re-
quires more caution, from the ill uses
that have been often made of them, es-
pecially of letters without common busi-
ness. They are a standing witness against
a man, which is confirmed by a Latin
saying — For words pass but Letters re-
main. You hint I think that you in-
tend for England. I shall not enquire
into your motives, my correspondence
there is but with a few old friends, and
of these but one who is in Employm4,
and he hath lately dropt me too, and he
is in right ; for it is said I am out of
favor ; at least, what I like as well, I am
forgotten, for I know not any one who
thinks it worth the pains to be my enemy ;
and it is meer charity in those who still
continue my friends, of which however
not one is in Power, nor will ever be —
during my life — I am ashamed of this
long letter, and desire your Pardon.
I am, Sr yr &c.

There is a difficulty about the date of
this letter which I cannot clear up. The
lameness from which Swift suffered,
spoken of by Chetwode in his second let-
ter, to which this is an answer, is men-
tioned at least six times in the dean's
published correspondence for 1732. On
February 19 of that year, he wrote, " I
have been above a fortnight confined by
an accidental strain, and can neither
ride nor walk, nor easily write." In a
letter written in the autumn of that year
he says, " I have been tied by 'the leg
(without being married) for ten months
past, by an unlucky strain." Had it not
been for his lameness, he would have

gone, he said, to London in November,
to see the Lord Mayor's show of his
friend and printer, Alderman Barber.
I at first assumed that he had misdated
his letter to Chetwode by a year, but in
his works there is a letter addressed,
« To Ventoso," dated April 28, 1731,
which was clearly meant for Chetwode,
and most likely is one of the two which
Swift said he had burned. It is strange
that on April 28, and again on May 8,
he should have made a mistake in the
year. There is a further difficulty :
Chetwode seems to imply in his second
letter that he was writing on the day he
was leaving town, March 12. If that
was the case, it was on a Friday in March
that he saw the dean going to take
horse. According to Swift's own account
it was in the first days of February that
he was lamed. The following passages
in the letter to Ventoso are worth com-
paring with those which were substituted
for them : —

" You would be glad to be thought a
proud man, and yet there is not a grain
of pride in you ; for you are pleased
that people should know you have been
acquainted with persons of great names
and titles, whereby you confess that you
take it for an honour ; which a proud
man never does : and besides you run
the hazard of not being believed."

" The reputation (if there be any) of
having been acquainted with princes and
other great persons arises from its being
generally known to others ; but never
once mentioned by ourselves, if it can
possibly be avoided."

" I am glad your country life has
taught you Latin, of which you were al-
together ignorant when I knew you first ;
and I am astonished how you came to
recover it. Your new friend Horace will
teach you many lessons agreeable to
what I have said."

Swift perhaps had a hit at Chetwode
in the lines, —

" But laughed to hear an idiot quote
A verse from Horace learned by rote."

796 The Freeman.

Chetwode's " one little essay in a de- became the son of a dean and bishop

sperate Cause " was taking part in a Jac- elect. The books he bought on his for-

obite conspiracy, mentioned in an ear- eign travels, which are still to be seen

Her letter. He replied to Swift at great in the library at Woodbrooke, show that

length, quoting Horace again and Virgil, he was not indifferent to literature,

and distinguishing between " honour in Swift's taunt was perhaps without justi-

the concrete and honour in the abstract ;" fication. Be that as it may, the corre-

" to show you," he continues, " that I spondence which had spread over seven-

nnderstand a little Logick as well as teen or eighteen years was brought to a

Lattin [sic} and Divinity," as indeed close with mocks and gibes.

George Birkbeck Hill.

THE FREEMAN.

"Hope is a slave; Despair is a freeman."

A VAGABOND between the East and West,

Careless I greet the scourging and the rod ;
I fear no terror any man may bring,
Nor any god.

The clankless chains that bound me I have rent,

No more a slave to Hope I cringe or cry;
Captives to Fate men rear their prison walls,
But free am I.

I tread where arrows press upon my path,
I smile to see the danger and the dart;
My breast is bared to meet the slings of Hate,
But not my heart.

I face the thunder and I face the rain,

I lift my head, defiance far I fling, —
My feet are set, I face the autumn as
I face the spring.

Around me on the battlefields of life,

I see men fight and fail and crouch in prayer ;
Aloft I stand unfettered, for I know
The freedom of despair.

Ellen Glasgow.

The Coming Literary Revival.

797

COMING LITERARY REVIVAL.

II.

A FAIR warning was given at the out-
set that the question of literary revivals
and of the advent of genius is one for the
man of science rather than for the liter-
ary essayist. This warning may he re-
newed now in the presence of the harsh-
est aspects of the problem. Reaspns
more or less cogent have been adduced
why the world should not look for genius
of the highest order without a conflict,
and why it should not look for it at all
in a nation which, like the United States,
gives no adequate thought to philosophy.

It has been suggested that the most
obvious task for the great poet of the
future is the fusion of Eastern and West-
ern thought in a well - balanced unity.
If to be in touch with the Orient were
all that is necessary, the United States
would have an advantage over all the
other Western nations except England.
But England's position at the head of
an Oriental empire has not yet put her
in sympathy with the philosophy of the
East. She hardly understands her own
language from the pen of Max Miiller,
contenting herself rather with what its
academic votaries are pleased to call neo-
Kantianism, a beautifully rounded pro-
duct with the hall-mark of Hegel upon
it. In its shapeliness and in its smug
perfection this is an admirable counter-
part to the literature of the Victorian
era. The critical verdict on both a cen-
tury hence may be very different from
the one pronounced to-day. It were too
curious to speculate on the possibilities
three hundred years hence, but the fear
is upon us that the poets of the middle
Victorian period will be represented in
England and America by In Memoriam,
The Biglow Papers, and Hiawatha, and
this for reasons apart from all questions
of technical excellence.

The slow criticism of years is a dif-
ferent thing from the criticism of con-
temporaries. It is above all eminently
practical. We know, however each of
us may wander in some favorite by-path
of old literature, that we read, as a rule,
what we are obliged to by the tradition
of the ages. The men of the future will
have no other rule than this same prac-
tical one to guide them. For example,
they will not have recourse to the books
of the nineteenth century for what they
can do better than the nineteenth cen-
tury has done. Hence the mark of neg-
lect, if not of oblivion, may be drawn
through everything of classical — includ-
ing the present writer's own dearest fa-
vorites — or mediaeval inspiration. The
cherished Idylls of the King are not ex-
empt from this peril. Conceding will-
ingly all that has been said in praise of
these poems, and more that can be said,
one finds against them the criticism
which cannot be made good against any
of the long - accepted mastei'pieces of
European literature, namely, that they
are fragments which, even when joined
together, do not make a whole. A later
poet, overcoming this defect, though oth-
erwise he should make a poem merely
of equal merit, would stand the chance
of supplanting Tennyson, just as Tenny-
son himself has caused forgetfulness to
fall upon his predecessors in Arthurian
romance.

In fact, Tennyson has illustrated in
another domain — a domain of special
concern to this writing — what changes
come over the aspects of a literary pro-
blem attacked by a succession of poets
from time to time. No one incident in
the history of modern literature has been
more effective than the translation of The
Arabian Nights Entertainments. The
work has tyrannized over the mind of the
West in all things pertaining to the Ori-

798

Coming Literary Revival.

ent. Its reign began in England with
Addison's version of the story of Alnas-
char for The Spectator, and culminated
in the excessive popularity of Moore's
Lalla Rookh and Beckford's Vathek.
Southey's Thalaba and various other
pieces marked a turn of the tide toward
other literatures of the East besides the
Arabian and its parent Persian. The
momentary success of this new vein of
poetry in all its branches was such that
Byron, whose muse rarely ventured be-
yond the Levant, satirized the " Grecian,
Syrian, or Assyrian " tales, in which
were

" mixed with western sentimentalism
Some samples of the finest Orientalism."

In later days this sentimentalism gave
place to religion, and the world has been
treated to wisdom from the Orient in
almost every stage of maturity or the
lack of it. Fortunately, the translation
of the more serious literature of the East
has at the same time furnished a crite-
rion by which to judge the imaginings
of the poets and romancers. Tennyson
marked the change that occurred in his
lifetime, first by his early poem on Ha-
roun al Raschid, and in his last days
by Akbar's Dream. The one is full of
the romance of Byron's day ; the other
recognizes the graver aspects of recent
thought about the East. In both there
is a suggestive brevity which implies that
the field really belongs to coming poets,
and that now it is possible only to mark
the tendencies of the age. If it were
needed, the Akbar might well be cited —
not only for what it says, but especially
for what it avoids — as proof of how lit-
tle permanence there can be in any ima-
ginative work upon the East until the
material is more fully gathered and di-
gested. It is conceivable — in the light of
new knowledge already in hand — that,
in the mind of coming genius, Tenny-
son's favorite legend of Arthur may be-
come the means of uniting the thought
of East and West, just as the legend of
Faust enabled Goethe to link classical and

mediaeval with modern life. And in gen-
eral it only requires a glance over the
literature of the last generation to see
how much of the work of even the fore-
most poets must give way to the merely
mechanical processes of improvement, or
to radical changes in the aspect of the
distant past as it must appear to the ima-
gination of the future. The poets of the
nineteenth century may content them-
selves with knowing that they have con-
tributed more than any who went before
them to that completed ideal of classic
life and modes of thought which will
be within the grasp of their successors ;
that they have helped to correct the su-
perstitious animosity toward the Middle
Ages, and have given new directions to
popular curiosity about the East.

Another field in which the long poem
of the Victorian period has luxuriated
is that of contemporary life and man-
ners. It is here that the melancholy of
the poets, overwhelmed by the prosperity
and peace and gross materialism of the
times, has received its most marked ex-
pression. From Locksley Hall to Locks-
ley Hall's sequel there is a lifetime filled
with the gradual decay of a hope which
at its best was rendered brittle by impa-
tience. The poet legitimately and just-
ly made his consciousness of defeat as
to his loftiest aims the consciousness of
a world distracted by a million cares and
idle thoughts, and untouched by any of
those things which make life sublime.
There is something pathetic — and it will
seem more pathetic as the age falls into
its proper place in the long perspective
of history — in the efforts of the poets
to find grandeur in a life that was only
comfortable and prosperous, to waken
their own muse by transient and infre-
quent episodes of heroism, to make out
for national life a unity which did not
exist. They reflected as in a mirror all
those introspective miseries which hu-
man nature turns to when it has no great-
er difficulties. Themes which in times
better for poets had been left to the

The Coming Literary Revival.

799

prosaic hand of the moralist were now
expanded in beautiful verse. Good po-
etry has been for years nearer the level
of the prose essay than, it is to be hoped,
it will ever be again.

There is no need of quarreling with
the tendencies of the time, with social-
ism and utopianism and what not. They
must work out to their allotted conclu-
sion, whatever that may be. But it should
be obvious now, after a half-century of
experience, that the world is not large
enough to hold these absorbing yet dis-
tracting influences, and to have a great
poet at the same time. If they are to
help in the making of genius, it must be
by bequest ; for while they are pressing
and active, even the born poet falls short
of his rightful heritage. This has liter-
ally happened to the three masters of
Victorian verse in England. When the
world of the future comes to look back
from a suitable distance upon their work
and their surroundings, it will also grad-
ually begin the task of choosing the one
work of theirs which gives fullest ex-
pression to the dismay and doubt and
difficulties by which they were hampered.
Indeed, this process is already begun,
and it is by observation of it that one
singles out In Memoriam as the elabo-
rate poem by which the age will be re-
cognized a few centuries hence. There
are other poems which give a better view
of parts of the main theme, but there is
not one which so well suggests the whole
of it, and makes it a thing to be felt and
to be understood in feeling as well as in
the clear light of the intellect.

It was characteristic of English poet-
ry on both sides of the Atlantic that it
dealt, disguised or openly, with the most
intimate thoughts of the time. Some of
the poets felt more for other nations
than for their own. Interesting as their
verse may have been to their contempo-
raries, it has the defects of exotic study.
The fate of poetry of this sort, no mat-
ter what its artistic merit, has been too
often exemplified in the past to leave

any doubt as to the future. Even the
great theme of Italian unity cannot save
the poems written upon it by those to
whom it was only a matter of romantic
sympathy. We imagine that our reader
of three hundred years hence — not by
any means so unlikely a character as
Macaulay's New Zealander — will be as
oblivious of them as if they had never
been written, unless he can be convinced
that they are of broader scope than they
seem to be ; that under the cover of a
minor struggle of humanity they convey
a deeper thought, one that concerns the
race at all times. But from that point
of view they seem to betray aspiration
rather than achievement, a consciousness
of the highest function of poetry without
the capacity of fulfilling it.

In the light of these things The Big-
low Papers deserve to be considered.
They were not exotic. They grew right
out of the soil upon which the struggle
culminated that had absorbed the activ-
ities of the whole English-speaking race.
They are as real to one member of that
race as to another. Just for the reason
that in the midst of a civil conflict with
its factional and dispersive tendencies the
highest flights of poesy were impossible,
the poet was artistically right in turning
back to the ways and language of com-
mon life. He has given the passion as
well as the humor of his time. He en-
ables his readers to live over again a
period which, when it can be seen in
its entirety, without the distractions that
were merely incidental to it, will stand
out as the characteristic part of the nine-
teenth century, embodying in its results
all those individual and national aspi-
rations which were hardly more than
words when the century began. Who-
ever returns to the study of that period
will find the details wherever he may,
but he can always vitalize them with the
breath of Lowell's poem.

Again, while learning is apt to shorten
rather than to extend the life of an elab-
orate poem, the case is different when

800

The Coming Literary Revival.

the position of the poem gives it a unique
value, when even greater talent cannot
replace it. This is possibly the case with
Hiawatha. It will always be easy to
deal with Indian character as it appears
to the ordinary white man, in romantic
sympathy or malignant hatred. But in
most cases the Indian will be only an
impersonation of the ideas of his creator.

An illustration on a large scale is not
wanting to show by contrast precisely the
value of Longfellow's poem. Southey
was doubtless his peer in verse-making
skill, and we have the expert testimony
of Mr. E. B. Tylor that Southey knew
a great deal about savages. Madoc itself
attests his learning. But well as that
poem is constructed, it has no aboriginal
quality. Its savages are devoid of racial
character. They might as well be called
ancient Gauls or Britons, save for some
external features of rites and customs.
What was impossible for Southey once
on a time is now impossible for every-
body. In spite of daily additions to the
knowledge of Indian lore, the Indian of
the forest, as he was, has forever escaped
from his conquerors. Nevertheless, the
world will always turn back to the figure
of the North American wild man with
curiosity. It will dwell on the pathos of
the Indian's defeat in the struggle for
existence, and muse with melancholy in-
terest on what he might have become.
This is the opportunity of Hiawatha. It
happened to Longfellow to depict the In-
dian at a time when it was still possible
to know him as he had been at his best ;
to realize that he was capable of fine
ideals, and that these were not wholly
impracticable. Thus he has done what
can never be done by anybody else.

But it will be said that this is no
estimate of the writings of Tennyson or
Lowell or Longfellow as poetry in the
highest sense of the word. The fact is
that there is no room for any such es-
timate, if the poets are to be put in
comparison with the greatest writers of
the past. The works which have been

named as candidates for immortality are
such, not by reason of their rank in the
scale of genius, but simply because they
fill a place that can never be filled with-
out them. A higher opportunity must
have been met by a greater work.

It was not accidental that what has
sometimes been called the Victorian Re-
naissance ran its course parallel to the
exotic Hegelianism of the English uni-
versities ; for Hegel's system was from
the outset the counterpart in philosophy
of the political movement that followed
the disturbances at the close of the eigh-
teenth century. The era of disorgani-
zation, having violently wrought its own
cure in the form of revolution, was fol-
lowed by restoration everywhere except
in America, and in America the result
was nearer restoration than was thought
at the time. It was, in fact, restoration
with the mere accident of royalty, and
so of personal loyalty to king or queen,
left out. But restoration after a tem-
pest so vast was necessarily conciliatory
and peaceful. It required material pro-
sperity in order to maintain itself. In
England only were the conditions fully
realized. The placid restfulness after
Napoleon's exit has hardly been dis-
turbed by such minor episodes as Chart-
ism, the distant Mutiny, or the hardly
less remote Crimea. Two generations of
English poets have been treated to a
steady stream of peace, prosperity, and
dullness. The result is obvious in their
works. A gradual decay of hopefulness
is to be seen in the poets of the last gen-
eration, marked also by the fierce out-
burst of Lord Tennyson in his old age.
The progress of science, with its doctrine
of long life to the strong and speedy
death to the weak, did not retard this
movement of the poets toward pessimism
any more than the scattering vagueness
in religion, or the changes in philosophy
from the first throbs of neo-Kantianism
under Coleridge's waistcoat to the full
bloom of Huxley's agnosticism.

As unfolded by Mr. Spencer, this evo-

The Coming Literary Revival.

801

lutionary agnosticism, vast as it is in
its survey of details, seems morally and
metaphysically only a chapter in a scheme
which was unfolded earlier in Germany
by Schiller and Schelling and Schopen-
hauer. For an outlook on the world as
it is, and as it is likely to be in the next
age, commend us to these three men, not,
perhaps, the greatest thinkers of their
time, but far and away the most sensi-
tive to the hidden currents of life in the
nineteenth century. It is in Schopen-
hauer that the most significant thought
of Schiller and Schelling is wrought out
as part of a system, which, transient as
it must be, since it is only transitional,
is still of very wide import. It is not
necessary to discuss the question whether
Schopenhauer was right in his philoso-
phy or not. It may even be granted
that he was wrong. The repute of the
Frankfort sage does not hang upon his
infallibility, but upon the accuracy with
which he impersonates the age to which
he belongs, and upon the attractiveness
of his writings in point of style.

Not so long ago people were horrified
by Schopenhauer's pessimism. To-day
the only question about anybody is what
particular shade of pessimism he affects,
and the attempt is gravely made to clas-
sify whole populations by this criterion
alone. Even the professed optimist is
more addicted to telling how things
ought to be than to congratulating him-
self on their actual condition. There
have been moments of factitious or real
contentment in the life of every nation
since Schopenhauer's time. These mo-
ments of satisfaction only serve to em-
phasize the fact that, on the whole, the
modern world has realized Schopen-
hauer's anticipations. Pessimism was
merely a secondary aspect of his system,
inevitable in the historical development
of his main thought, which, it must be
observed, was not his own by right of dis-
covery. Long before, in the mysticism
of Boehme, the declaration was made
that nothing has reality except the will,

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 51

and this was reiterated by Fichte, and
far more decidedly by Schelling. But
until the notion was brought into contact
with modern materialism it was hardly
a fruitful one. It happened to Scho-
penhauer's teacher, Bouterwek, to bridge
this chasm. For him the old antithesis
of mind and matter, subject and object,
became that of will and resistance. Prac-
tically, this was a mere restatement of
the mechanical doctrine of force ; meta-
physically, an important addition is made
by the use of the word " will," with its
double physical and mental connotation.
Interpret this in the light of Fichte's
identification of Me and Not -Me (an
identification which Goethe chuckled over
when students broke Fichte's windows,
but which always must be reckoned with
in thoroughgoing idealism), and you have
a glimpse of Schopenhauer's universal
will forthwith. With this principle Scho-
penhauer anticipated modern monism,
the farthest reaching of all devices at the
present day for a materialist solution of
the universe. His phrases are adopted
by the monists, frequently with an apolo-
gy for using them. But they are adopt-
ed also by the antagonists of monism.
In short, the world is gradually becoming
reconciled to the conception of itself as
will, and it finds in this the simplest ex-
pression of its complex activities. The
truth of the conception does not concern
us here. What interests us is merely the
fact that the prevalence of pessimism in
popular thinking, and of monism in the
more recondite thought, is precisely what
Schopenhauer anticipated.

A confessed advantage of Schopen-
hauer's monism was that it could be ex-
plained in the language of common life
without borrowing a word from the stilt-
ed jargon of the schools. But its affin-
ity to materialism was shown by his defi-
nition — and he a professed idealist —
of the world as " phenomenon of brain."
Such an expression was novel in his time,
but it has become so common since that
it may almost be called a characteristic

802

The Coming Literary Revival.

of the nineteenth century. The confu-
sion of thought which it indicates belongs
no more to him than to the age of which
he is the philosophical interpreter, and it
was unavoidable for the man who sought
not to think out a system so much as to
weave one from the threads of life as he
saw it. Not only was his irrationalism
part of his own experience ; it had also
an historic background. Mankind once
believed in what are now called myths.
They looked upon their own struggles as
really the conflicts of supernatural pow-
ers. But these powers, when investigated,
were found to have no reality outside of
their names. Schelling merely reversed
the process of this mythical humanism
to discover in the working out of men's
ideas about deity the real evolution of
deity. It is needless to point out how
this one thought has moulded all the the-
ories of mythological science from that
day to this. A step beyond Schelling
in another direction relieved Schopen-
hauer at once from the task of account-
ing for the divine existence. His ideal-
ism left only an obscure potency, which in
its persistent, unconscious effort to mani-
fest itself became for him the will to live,
purposeless striving, that, as soon as it
attained self-knowledge, was convicted
of its own misery. This notion, besides
its vogue as a philosopheme, has tinged
a large field of lighter literature. It fell
in harmoniously with all those sad reflec-
tions on the struggle for life which were
an obvious result from the theory of evo-
lution. Nature red in tooth and claw ;
the gloomy yet grotesque forebodings of
those who saw man become bald, tooth-
less, the victim of intellectual develop-
ment ; the cruel prodigality with which
life is wasted, — all these fancies of re-
cent times were latent or expressed in
the peculiar atheism of Schopenhauer.

The modern naturalist has his own an-
swer to these misgivings. He amuses us,
for instance, by explaining that the prey
of a carnivore feels no such pain as we
imagine. It satisfied Kant to know that

all the progress of the species was made
at the expense of the individual. But
the modern man, as a rule, is farther
from the self-sacrificing spirit of Kant
than from the self-indulgent sestheticism
of Schiller. Here again Schopenhauer
is the prototype of modern life. Almost
the only work of Kant with which Scho-
penhauer did not find fault, after he had
completed his own system, was the Tran-
scendental ^Esthetic. His searching,
and one may say militant criticism of
Kant, filled though it be with notes of ad-
miration, is a psychological failure, since
it never attains Kant's own outlook. In
the light of this negative fact, it is fair
to think that Schopenhauer, above all an
adherent of Goethe even when Goethe
was wrong, could have really understood
Kant only on the side which a supremely
artistic nature — that of Schiller, who
also idealized Goethe — made plain to
him in a way suited to his own purpose.
It was in the nature of things that Schil-
ler should take as a centre what was only
a corner in Kant's scheme ; but having
planted himself on Kant's aesthetics, he
found it easy to describe a new circle
in which all philosophy was figured in
Kantian outlines on the horizon of a poet.
Kant stopped, with the scruples of a Puri-
tan, at the antithesis between inclination
and duty. Schiller, with the self-indul-
gent morality of Shaf tesbury to read, and
the self-indulgent personality of Goethe
as a living model, solved this problem.
Ideal human nature is for him a work
of art ; when it is perfectly proportioned
as viewed from the aesthetic centre, it
will also be ethically perfect. This ideal
human nature is free just because it is
in harmony with the law of its own ex-
istence. It plays, said Schiller. It is
relieved from the dominance of the ever
hungry will, said Schopenhauer. Thus
the highest moments of life, for the lat-
ter, bordered closely on the ascetic de-
nial of the will to live which he praised
as the only worthy aspect of religion.
In this he was at one with important

Tht Coming Literary jRevival.

808

tendencies of life around him. It is
not easy to see any difference between
his aesthetic asceticism and the sensuous
asceticism which actuates modern efforts
to restore mediaeval religion, not in pain-
ful torture of mind and body, but in tra-
ditional observances and expanded rit-
ual, symbols of a self-denial which has
departed. His ideas receive stage pre-
sence and a voice in the musical drama
of Parsifal. His censures upon sleek,
well-fed, optimistic Protestantism can be
read in words not his from books less ob-
noxious than his to a conservative taste.
A glimpse of the history of Schopen-
hauer's work will help to ascertain the
environment to which he belongs. His
thought was awakened by the Napole-
onic upheaval. But it lay for decades
unheeded. In his old age Schopenhauer
suddenly found himself the most popu-
lar philosopher in Europe. A new gen-
eration of revolutionists looked upon his
system as contrived especially for them.
This belated popularity is the best evi-
dence that could be given of the antici-
patory quality of his thinking. Those
years in which his books gathered the
dust of neglect were marked by the rise
of modern naturalism, particularly the
science of biology. Schopenhauer was
one of the first among metaphysicians
to see the revolution of thought that was
impending. Advancing science helped
him to rid himself once for all of the
notion of design in nature, and he in
turn developed his conception of the
universal will, until his system presup-
posed all those phrases about natural se-
lection and survival of the fittest favored
at a later day. A perusal of the histo-
ries of philosophy shows that even with
observers to whom he is hateful he has
already taken his place as the indispen-
sable link between Kant and Darwin.
This happened because, in addition to
the transcendentalism in which he had
been trained, he aimed to see the world
just as it is. The phrases which he
used have flown in all directions, and are

hospitably entertained by the philoso-
pher, the scientist, and the writer of pop-
ular fiction. His doctrines are echoed
by men of the world and by men of the
study, — not merely professed disciples,
but also men who claim to be theists or
monists or positivists, — by the realists
in fiction, by anthropologists and exper-
imental psychologists; they confessedly
furnished inspiration to the creative spirit
of Wagner, and so must be reckoned as
an important factor in modern music ;
while modern socialism, so far as it is a
denial of individuality, — and most of it
is a denial of individuality in fact, if not
in name, — is Schopenhauerism pure and
simple.

Though these particulars show the in-
fluence of Schopenhauer, or rather his
susceptibility to influences that were only
latent in his lifetime, they afford no apo-
logy for his opinions. No pretense is
made here of defending him. If he is
wrong from that absolute point of view
which was ridiculed by Pilate in the mock-
ing inquiry, What is truth ? then the sup-
port he gives to the present argument
is all the stronger ; for it shows that, in
spite of the dictates of genuine philoso-
phy, there has been an overwhelming ten-
dency in the direction which he indicated.
Some features of the environment which
he outlined have been mentioned, but
there is no doubt that one could go fur-
ther, and from a base-line in the analysis
of his writings could make out a plau-
sible scheme for the historical develop-
ment of the last three quarters of a cen-
tury. If philosophy in any form is an
index to the growth of an environment
suitable to genius, such a portent as Scho-
penhauer must have its significance.
Now, it is to be added to all that has been
said that Schopenhauer anticipated the
work of the nineteenth and probably of
the twentieth century in a field which for
literature is more important than any be-
fore mentioned. This, too, is just the
field where, as has been remarked, Kant
failed to penetrate. The case stands ex-

804

The Coming Literary Revival.

actly as if Schopenhauer had set himself
consciously to fill the gap in Kant's sys-
tem ; yet that was certainly the last thing
in his thoughts. Schopenhauer knew all
that was to be known in his time about
the religions and the wisdom of the Ori-
ent. What is still more remarkable is
that his original thought, apart from
books, had an Oriental cast. When he
became conscious of this, he exaggerated
it, but without giving up his claim to the
first outline as purely his own.

A glance at the last half - century
shows how prophetic his instinct was.
Schelling, also, in his later years, felt the
same tendency, the philosopher's pre-
monition of coming things. Von Hart-
mann, Schopenhauer's most popular dis-
ciple, has predicted — one must think
him fanciful — a syncretism of Christi-
anity and Hindooism in the religion of
the future ; but, with his sardonic antici-
pations for literature, he has abandoned
the lines which, as a child of his age,
he should have defended. In circles
learned and unlearned the awakening to
Oriental ideas has been a remarkable
incident in a remarkable century. One
only need recall to memory what has
happened in the field of Indo-European
languages and literatures since the days
of Sir William Jones, what has been
achieved in the Euphrates Valley since
the explorations of Layard, what has
been done in Egypt since the time of
Champollion, to be convinced that the
world is moving toward an awakening of
learning and genius similar to the greatest
literary revivals of the past, but of more
magnificent promise than any. Look
back to the time when the treasured Greek
manuscripts of Constantinople were car-
ried to western Europe by the men of
letters who fled from the Turks. Pic-
ture the vivid pleasure of the few who
could read those manuscripts, and the ea-
gerness with which they pored over each
one in the hope of recovering the litera-
ture of ancient Hellas in its entirety for
the modern world. Remember, also, the

unexpected and far-reaching effects of
their activity.

Their hopes in too many cases have
been dispelled by the certainty of irre-
parable loss. But these hopes once ex-
isted, and now they revive in another
realm of learning. The discoveries in
Mesopotamia and Egypt have as yet,
and are likely to have for many years to
come, the charm of constant expectancy.
If the latter has only new additions to
make to a list of works in art and letters
already classified, the former still gives
promise of a library more valuable to the
historian of human ideas and institutions
than the manuscripts acquired by the
scholars of the Renaissance. Sanscrit and
its literary monuments are already felt
to be classical because of their direct re-
lation to Greek and Latin. The litera-
tures of the Pali language, — rich in a
religious sense, at least, — of the Tamils,
the Bengalese, the Arabs, the Chinese,
the Japanese, even the treasured lore of
those races that transmit their romance
and their wisdom by word of mouth, are
rapidly becoming familiar to the West-
ern world. To those who live while the
work of editing, translating, explaining,
and publishing these books of the East
is going on, the process seems slow. But
there will come a time when, the task
nearing completion, men will contem-
plate the results as if they had all been
achieved at once. The whole body of
Asiatic literature in all its languages will
be accessible to a single mind. It is
easy to imagine that the present years
of labor will then stand forth like the
epoch of the Renaissance. It will be pos-
sible to estimate the effect of these East-
ern records on Western civilization. If
they influence letters and philosophy as
much in the next century as they have
influenced the last generation of thinking
men, then surely Europe and America
will have reached a new era in the histo-
ry of thought. The world was once Hel-
lenized. Is it now to be Orientalized ?

The tendency of what, after Goethe and

The Coming Literary Revival.

805

Herder, may be called world-literature
must be in the other direction. We are
beginning to know what the books of the
East are, and have ascertained that what-
ever else they may teach, they cannot give
any grace of style. The lesson of form,
of exactness in word and thought, of mod-
eration, — the /AT/Sev ayav of Theognis,
— which the ancient Greeks taught, has
sunk deeply into the Western mind ; all
the more deeply since it was enforced by
the legal and military precision of the Ro-
man rule and the Latin language. The
world cannot go back to the chaotic mys-
ticism, the limitless exaggeration, the irre-
pressible loquacity, of Oriental literature.
It will take what is good, the practical
meaning hidden in a cloud of words, the
happy turns of thought and expression
which are sure to intervene with Eastern
writers in moments of self-forgetfulness.
The West has to some extent been op-
pressed by the thought that a profound
mystery underlies the magniloquence of
the East. Perhaps it looks for an answer
to the enigma of religion. One suspects
this on seeing some Oriental platitude
on parade in pretentious Western books.
Schopenhauer, in his old age, descended
to this twaddle. His Tat twam asi is
almost as wearisome as the creak of a
Thibetan praying-machine, or the inces-
sant om — om of the prayers themselves.
But this disposition of mind cannot last
even with the half - educated. Human
nature, the real mystery at the bottom
of all the artifices of mysticism, will be
revealed on lines where the raw mate-
rial of Eastern thought and fancy can be
made amenable to the precision of West-
ern literary forms. At the same time,
the Eastern mind will see how to put
new life into Western forms without de-
stroying them.

The open question is whether the gen-
ius to accomplish this task will be na-
tive to the East or to the West. The
case of Japan makes the student of lit-
erature and literary possibilities pause.
Compare the situation of this empire
with that of England in the time of the
Tudor sovereigns. The likeness is note-
worthy. All the influences of civiliza-
tion from West and East are focused, so
to speak, upon a political and social or-
ganism which is not only wonderfully
receptive, but which also displays the
capacity of reaction in its own original
elements. Looking back at the history
of genius, and seeing how largely it be-
longs to the people as distinguished from
what may somewhat irreverently be
called the blooded stock of a nation, one
feels like inquiring how deeply into the
substrate of human life in Japan the
alien influences have penetrated. When
these reach the depths where folk tradi-
tion lurks and the popular imagination
slumbers, then the world may well look
for a reaction in which the nation will
show all that it is capable of in litera-
ture. Meanwhile, observe, by way of
presage, that two of the most striking lit-
erary phenomena of the present day are
Rudyard Kipling, with his overlay of
Hindooism on English human nature,
and Lafcadio Hearn, with his varied
experience, patiently inquisitive about
everything Japanese. Finally, whether
the successor of Dante and Goethe rises
from Asia or from the West, all the light
of the past shows that he will speak, not
the thoughts of a nation, but of a world-
wide cultui'e ; that he will at last unite
the divided thought of humanity, and
combine in one view two civilizations that
have been in antagonism for thousands
of years.

J. S. Tunison.

806

Caleb West.

CALEB WEST.

VIII.

THE " HEAVE HO " OF LONNY BOWLES.

THE accident>to the Screamer had de-
layed work at the Ledge but a few days.
Other men had taken the place of those
injured, and renewed efforts had been
made by Sanford and Captain Joe to
complete to low-water mark the huge
concrete disk, forming a bedstone sixty
feet in diameter and twelve feet thick,
on which the superstructure was to rest.
This had been accomplished after three
weeks of work, and the men stood in
readiness to begin the masonry of the su-
perstructure itself so soon as the four
great derricks required in lifting and set-
ting the cut stone of the masonry could
be erected. They were only waiting for
Mr. Carleton's acceptance of the concrete
disk, the first section of the contract.
The superintendent's certificate of ap-
proval was important, one rule of the
Department being that no new section
should be begun until the preceding one
was officially approved.

Carleton, however, declined to give it.
His ostensible reason was that the engi-
neer-in-chief was expected daily at Key-
port, and should therefore pass upon the
work himself. His real reason was a
desire to settle a score with Captain Joe
by impeding the progress of the work.

This animosity to Captain Joe had
grown out of an article — very flatter-
ing to the superintendent — published
in the Medford Journal, in which great
credit had been given to Carleton for
his " heroism and his prompt efficiency
in providing a hospital for the wounded
men." The day after its publication,
the Noank Times, a political rival, sent
to make an investigation of its own, in
the course of which the reporter encoun-
tered Captain Joe. The captain had

not seen the Journal article until it was
shown him by the reporter. He there-
upon gave the exact facts in regard to
the accident and the subsequent care of
the wounded men, generously exonerat-
ing the government superintendent from
all responsibility for the notice ; adding
with decided emphasis that " Mr. Carle-
ton could n't 'a' said no such thing 'bout
havin' provided the hospital himself,
'cause he was over to Medford to a
circus the night the accident happened,
and did n't git home till daylight next
mornin', when everything was over an'
the men was in their beds." The result
of this interview was a double - leaded
column in the next issue of the Noank
Times, which not only ridiculed its rival
for the manufactured news, but read a
lesson on veracity to Carleton himself.

The denial made by the Times was
the thrust that had rankled deepest ; for
Carleton, unfortunately for himself, had
inclosed the eulogistic article from the
Medford Journal in his official report of
the accident to the Department, and had
become the proud possessor of a letter
from the engineer-in-chief commending
his " promptness and efficiency."

So far the captain had kept his tem-
per, ignoring both the obstacles Carleton
had thrown in his way and the ill-natnred
speeches the superintendent was con-
stantly making. No open rupture had
taken place. Those, however, who knew
the captain's explosive temperament con-
fidently expected that he would break
out upon the superintendent, in answer
to some brutal thrust, in a dialect so im-
pregnated with fulminates that the effect
would be fatal. But they were never
gratified. " 'T ain't no use answerin'
back," was all he said. " He don't know
no better, poor critter."

Indeed, it was only when a great per-
sonal danger threatened his men that th»

Caleb West,

807

captain's every -day, conventional Eng-
lish seemed inadequate. On such occa-
sions, when the slightest error on the
part of his working force might result
in the instant death or the maiming of
one of them, certain harmless because un-
intentional outbursts of profanity, soar-
ing into crescendos and ending in for-
tissimos, would often escape from the
captain's lips with a vim and a rush that
would have raised the hair of his Puri-
tan ancestors, — rockets of oaths, that
kindled with splutters of dissatisfaction,
flamed into showers of abuse, and burst
into blasphemies which cleared the at-
mosphere like a thunderclap. For these
delinquencies he never made any apology.
In the roar of the sea they seemed some-
times the only ammunition he 'could de-
pend upon. " Somebody '11 git hurted
round here, if ye ain't careful ; somehow
I can't make ye understand no other
way," he would say. This was as near
as he ever came to apologizing for his
sinfulness. But he never wasted any of
these explosives on such men as Carle-
ton.

As the superintendent persisted in his
refusal to give the certificate of accept-
ance, and as each day was precious, San-
ford, whose confidence in the stability
and correctness of the work which he
and Captain Joe had done was unshaken,
determined to begin the erection of the
four derricks at once. He accordingly
gave orders to clear away the mixing-
boards and tools ; thus burning his
bridges behind him, should the inspec-
tion of the engineer-in-chief necessitate
any additional work 'on the concrete disk.

The derricks, with their winches and
chain guys, were now lying on the jagged
rocks of the Ledge, where they had been
landed the day before by Captain Brandt
with the boom of the Screamer, — once
more stanch and sound, a new engine
and boiler on her deck. They were de-
signed to lift and set the cut-stone mason-
ry of the superstructure, — the top course
at a height of fifty-eight feet above the

water-line. These stones weighed from
six to thirteen tons each.

During the delay that followed the ac-
cident the weather had been unusually
fine. Day after day the sun had risen
on a sea of silver reflecting the blue of
a cloudless sky, with wavy tide-lines en-
graved on its polished surface. At dawn
Crotch Island had been an emerald, and
at sunset an amethyst.

With the beginning of the dogdays,
however, the weather had changed. Dull
leaden fog-banks on the distant horizon
had blended into a pearly-white sky.
Restless, wandering winds sulked in dead
calms, or broke in fitful, peevish blasts.
Opal -tinted clouds showed at sunrise,
and prismatic rings of light surrounded
the moon, — all sure signs of a coming
storm.

Captain Joe redoubled his efforts on
the lines of the watch-tackles at which
the men were tugging, pulling the der-
ricks to their places, and watched the
changing sky where hour by hour were
placarded the manifestoes of the impend-
ing outbreak.

By ten o'clock on the 15th of August,
three of the four derricks, their tops
connected by heavy wire rope, had been
stepped in their sockets and raised erect,
and their seaward guys had been made
fast, Caleb securing the ends himself.
By noon, the last derrick — the fourth
leg of the chair, as it were — was also
nearly perpendicular, the men tugging
ten deep on the line of the watch-tackles.
This derrick, being the last of the whole
system and the most difficult to handle,
was under the immediate charge of Cap-
tain Joe. On account of its position,
which necessitated a bearing of its own
strain and that of the other three derricks
as well, its outboard seaward guy was as
heavy as that of a ship's anchor-chain.
The final drawing taut of this chain, some
sixty feet in length, stretching, as did the
smaller ones, from the top of the derrick-
mast down to the enrockment block, and
the fastening of its sea end in the block,

808

Caleb West.

would not only complete the system of
the four erected derricks, but would make
them permanent and strong enough to re-
sist either sea action or any weight that
they might be required to lift. The
failure to secure this chain guy to the
anchoring enrockment block, or any sud-
den break in the other guys, would result
not only in instantly toppling over the
fourth derrick itself, but in dragging the
three erect derricks with it. This might
mean, too, the crushing to death of some
of the men ; for the slimy, ooze-covered
rocks and concrete disk on which they
had to stand and work made hurried es-
cape impossible.

To insure an easier connection be-
tween this last chain and the enrockment
block, Caleb had fastened "below water,
into the " Lewis " hole of the block, a
long iron hook. Captain Joe's problem,
which he was now about to solve, was to
catch this hook into a steel ring which
was attached to the end of the chain guy.
The drawing together of the hook and
the ring was done by means of a watch-
tackle, which tightened the chain guy
inch by inch, the gang of men standing
in line while Captain Joe, ring in hand,
waited to slip it into the hook. A stage
manager stretching a tight-rope support-
ed on saw-horses, with a similar tackle,
solves, on a smaller scale, just such a
problem every night.

Carleton, who never ran any risks,
sat on the platform, out of harm's way,
sneering at the men's struggles, and pro-
testing that it was impossible to put up
the four derricks at once. Sanford was
across the disk, some fifty feet from
Captain Joe, studying the effect of the
increased strain on the outboard guys of
the three derricks already placed.

The steady rhythmic movement of the
men, ankle-deep in the water, swaying
in unison, close-stepped, tugging at the
tackle-line, like a file of soldiers, keep-
ing time to Lonny Bowles's " Heave ho,"
had brought the hook and the ring with-
in six feet of each other, when the foot

of one of the men slipped on the slimy
ooze and tripped up the man next him.
In an instant the whole gang were floun-
dering among the rocks and in the wa-
ter, the big fourth derrick swaying un-
easily, like a tree that was doomed.

" Every man o' ye as ye were ! " shout-
ed Captain Joe, without even a look at
the superintendent, who had laughed out-
right at their fall. While he was shout-
ing he had twisted a safety-line around
a projecting rock to hold the strain until
the men could regain their feet. The
great derrick tottered for a moment,
steadied itself like a drunken man, and
remained still. The other three quiv-
ered, their top connecting guys sagging
loose.

" Now "make fast, an' two 'r three of
ye come here ! " called the captain again.
In the easing of the strain caused by
the slipping of the men, the six feet of
space between hook and ring had gone
back to ten.

Two men scrambled like huge crabs
over the slippery rocks, and relieved
Captain Joe of the end of the safety-
line. The others stood firm and held taut
the tug-lines of the watch-tackle. The
slow, rhythmic movement of the gang
to the steady " Heave ho " began again.
The slack of the tackle was taken up,
and the ten feet between the hook and
the ring were reduced to five. Half an
hour more, and the four great derricks
would be anchored safe against any con-
tingency.

The strain on the whole system be-
came once more intense. The seaward
guy of the opposite derrick — the one
across the concrete disk — shook omi-
nously under the enormous tension.
Loud creaks could be heard as the links
of the chain untwisted and the derricks
turned on their rusty pintles.

Then a sound like a pistol-shot rang
out clear and sharp.

Captain Joe heard Sanford's warning
ciy, but before the men could ease the
strain one of the seaward guys that fas-

Caleb West.

809

tened the top of its derrick to the en-
rock ment-block anchorage snapped with
a springing jerk, writhed like a snake in
the air, and fell in a swirl across the disk
of concrete, barely missing the men.

The gang at the tug-line turned their
heads, and the bravest of them grew
pale. The opposite derrick, fifty feet
away, was held upright by but a single
safety-rope. If this should break, all the
four derricks, with their tons of chain
guys and wire rope, would be down upon
the men.

Carleton ran to the end of the plat-
form, ready to leap. Sanford ordered
him back. Two of the men, in the un-
certainty of the moment, slackened their
hold. A third, a newcomer, turned to
run towards the concrete, as the safer
place, when Caleb's vise-like hand grasped
his shoulder and threw him back in line.

There was but one chance left, — to
steady the imperiled derrick with a tem-
porary guy strong enough to stand the
strain.

" Stand by on that watch-tackle, every

man o' ye ! Don't one o' ye

move ! " shouted Captain Joe in a voice
that drowned all other sounds.

The men leaped into line and stood
together in dogged determination.

" Take a man, Caleb, as quick 's
God '11 let ye, an' run a wire guy out
on that derrick." The order was given
in a low voice that showed the gravity
of the situation.

Caleb and Lonny Bowles stepped from
the line, leaped over the slippery rocks,
splashed across the concrete disk, now a
shallow lake with the rising tide, and
picked up another tackle as they plunged
along to where Sanford stood, the water
over his rubber boots. They dragged a
new guy towards the imperiled derrick.
Lonny Bowles, in his eagerness to catch
the dangling end of the parted guy,
began to scale the derrick-mast itself,
climbing by the foot-rests, when Captain
Joe's crescendo voice overhauled him.
He knew the danger better than Bowles.

" Come down out'er that, Lonny ! "
(Gentle oaths.) "Come down, I tell
ye ! " (Oaths crescendo.) " Don't ye
know no better 'n to " — (Oaths for-
tissimo.) " Do ye want to pull that
derrick clean over? " (Oaths fortissi-
misso.)

Bowles slid from the mast just as
Sanford's warning cry scattered the men
below him. There came a sudden jerk ;
the opposite derrick trembled, staggered
for a moment, and whirled through the
air towards the men, dragging in its
fall the two side derricks with all their
chains and guys.

" Down between the rocks, heads un-
der, every man o' ye!" shouted the
captain.

The captain sprang last, crouching up
to his neck in the sea, his head below
the jagged points of two rough stones,
as the huge fourth derrick, under which
he had stood, lunged wildly, and fell with
a ringing blow across the captain's shel-
ter and within three feet of his head,
its great anchor-chain guy twisting like
a cobra over the slimy rocks.

When all was still, Sanford's head
rose cautiously from behind a protecting
rock near where the first derrick had
struck. There came a cheer of safety
from Caleb and Bowles, answered by
another from Captain Joe, and the men
crawled out of their holes, and clambered
upon the rocks, the water dripping from
their clothing.

Not a man had been hurt !

" What did I tell you ? " called out
Carleton sneeringly, more to hide his
alarm than anything else.

"That's too bad, Mr. Sanford, but
we can't help it," said Captain Joe in
his customary voice, paying no more at-
tention to Carleton's talk than if it had
been the slop of the waves at his feet.
"All hands, now, on these derricks.
We got 'er git 'em up, boys, if it takes
all night."

Again the men sprang to his orders,
and again and again the crescendos of

810

Caleb West.

oaths culminated in fortissimos of pro-
fanity as the risks for the men increased.
For five consecutive hours they worked
without a pause. Slowly and surely the
whole system, beginning with the two
side derricks, whose guys had held their
anchorage, was raised upright, Sanford
still watching the opposite derrick, a new
outward guy having replaced the broken
one.

It was six o'clock when the four der-
ricks were again fairly erect. The same
gang was tugging at the watch - tackle,
and the distance between the hook and
the ring was once more reduced to five
feet. The hook gained inch by inch to-
wards its anchorage. Captain Joe's eyes
gleamed with suppressed satisfaction.

All this time the tide had been rising.
Most of the rough, above-water rocks
were submerged, and fully three feet of
water washed over the concrete disk.
Only the tops "of the stones upon which
Sanford stood, and the platform where
Carleton sat, out of all danger from der-
ricks or sea, were clear of the incoming
wash.

The Screamer's life-boat — the only
means the men had that day of leav-
ing the Ledge and boarding the sloop,
moored in the lee of the Ledge — had
broken from her moorings, and lay dan-
gerously near the rocks. The wind had
changed to the east. With it came a
long, rolling swell that broke on the
eastern derrick, — the fourth one, the
key-note of the system, the one Captain
Joe and the men were tightening up.

Suddenly a window was opened some-
where in the heavens, and a blast of wet
air heaped the sea into white caps, and
sent it bowling along towards the Ledge
and the Screamer lying in the eddy.

Captain Joe, as he stood with the hook
in his hand, watched the sea's careful-
ly planned attack, and calculated how
many minutes were left before it would
smother the Ledge in a froth and end
all work. He could see, too, the Scream-
er's mast rocking ominously in tha ris-

ing sea. If the wind and tide increased,
she must soon shift her position to the
eddy on the other side of the Ledge.
But not a shade of anxiety betrayed
him.

The steady movement of the tugging
men continued, Lonny's " Heave ho "
ringing out cheerily in perfect time. Four
of the gang, for better foothold, stood
on the concrete, their feet braced to the
iron mould band, the water up to their
pockets. The others clung with their
feet to the slippery rocks.

The hook was now within two feet of
the steel ring, Captain Joe standing on
a rock at a lower level than the others,
nearly waist-deep in the sea, getting
ready for the final clinch.

Sanford from his rock had also been
watching the sea. As he scanned the
horizon, his quick eye caught to the east-
ward a huge roller pushed ahead of the
increasing wind, piling higher as it
swept on.

" Look out for that sea, Cap'n Joe !
Hold fast, men, — hold fast ! " he shout-
ed, springing to a higher rock.

Hardly bad his voice ceased, when a
huge green curling wave threw itself
headlong at the Ledge, wetting the men
to their armpits. Captain Joe had raised
his eyes for an instant, grasped the chain
as a brace, and taken its full force on his
broad back. When his head emerged,
his cap was gone, his shirt clung to the
muscles of his big chest, and the water
streamed from his hair and mouth.

Shaking his head like a big water-
dog, he waved his hand, with a laugh, to
Sanford, volleyed out another rattling
fire of orders, and then held on with the
clutch of a devil-fish as the next green
roller raced over him. It made no more
impression upon him than if he had
been an offshore buoy.

The fight now lay between the rising
sea and the men tugging at the watch-
tackle. After each wave ran by the
men gained an inch on the tightening
line. Every moment tha wind blew

Caleb West.

811

harder, and every moment the sea^rose
higher. Bowles was twice washed from
the rock on which he stood, and the
newcomer, who was unused to the slime
and ooze, had been thrown bodily into
a water-hole. Sanford held to a rock
a few feet above Captain Joe, watching
his every movement. His anxiety for
the safe erection of the system had been
forgotten in his admiration for the su-
perb pluck and masterful skill of the
surf-drenched sea-titan below him.

Captain Joe now moved to the edge of
the anchor enrockment block, one hand
holding the hook, the other the ring. Six
inches more and the closure would be
complete.

In heavy strains like these the last
six inches gajn slowly.

" Give it to 'er, men — all hands now
— give it to 'er! Pull, Caleb! Pull,

you ! " (Air full of Greek fire.)

"Once more — all together ! "

(Sky-bombs bursting.) "All to—"

Again the sea buried him out of sight,
quenching the explosives struggling to
escape from his throat.

The wind and tide increased. The
water swirled about the men, the spray
flew over their heads, but the steady pull
went on.

A voice from the platform now called
out, — it was that of Nickles, the cook :
" Life-boat 's a-poundin' bad, sir ! She
can't stan' it much longer."

Carleton's voice shouting to Sanford
from the platform came next : " I 'm not
going to stay here all night and get wet.
I 'm going to Keyport in the Screamer.
Send some men to catch this life-boat."

The captain raised his head and looked
at Nickles ; Carleton he never saw.

" Let 'r pound an' be d to 'er !

Go on, Caleb, with that tackle. Pull,
ye " — Another wave went over him,
and another red-hot explosive lost its life.

With the breaking of the next roller
the captain uttered no sound. The sit-
uation was too grave for explosives.
Whenever his profanity stopped short

the men grew nervous : they knew then
that a crisis had arrived, one that even
Captain Joe feared.

The captain bent over the chain, one
arm clinging to the anchorage, his feet
braced against a rock, the hook in his
hand within an inch of the ring.

" Hold hard! " he shouted.

Caleb raised his hand in warning, and
the rhythmic movement ceased. The
men stood still. Every eye was fixed
on the captain.

" LET GO ! "

The big derrick quivered for an in-
stant as the line slackened, stood still,
and a slight shiver ran through the guys.
The hook had slipped into the ring !

The system of four derricks, with all
their guys and chains, stood as taut and
firm as a suspension bridge !

Captain Joe turned his head calmly
towards the platform, and said quietly,
"There, Mr. Carleton, they'll stand
now till hell freezes over."

As the cheering of the men subsid-
ed, the captain sprang to Sanford's rock,
grasped his outstretched hand, and,
squeezing the water from his hair and
beard with a quick rasp of his fingers,
called out to Caleb, in a firm, cheery
voice that had not a trace of fatigue in
it after twelve hours of battling with sea
and derricks, " All 'er you men what 's
goin' in the Screamer with Mr. Carleton
to Keyport for Sunday 'd better look out
for that life-boat. Come, Lonny Bowles,
pick up them tackles an' git to the
shanty. It '11 be awful soapy round here
'fore mornin'."

IX.

WHAT THE BUTCHER SAW.

Caleb sat on the deck of the Screamer,
his face turned towards Keyport Light,
beyond which lay his little cabin. His
eyes glistened, and there came a chok-
ing in his throat as he thought of meet-

812

Caleb West.

ing Betty. He could even feel her hand
slipped into his, and could hear the very
tones of her cheery welcome when she
met him at the gate and they walked to-
gether up the garden path to the porch.

Most of the men who had stood to the
watch-tackles in the rolling surf sat be-
side him on the sloop. Those who were
still wet had gone helow into the cabin,
out of the cutting wind. Those who, like
Caleb, had changed their clothes sat on
the after - deck. Captain Joe, against
Sanford's earnest protest, had remained
on the Ledge for the night. He wanted,
he said, to see how the derricks would
stand the coming storm.

It had been a busy month for the
diver. Since the explosion he had been
almost constantly in his rubber dress,
not only working his regular four hours
under water, — all that an ordinary man
could stand, — but taking another's place
for an hour or two when some piece
of submarine work required his more
skillful eye and hand. He had set some
fifty or more of the big enrockment
blocks in thirty feet of water, each block
being lowered into position by the
Screamer's boom, and he had prepared
the anchor sockets in which to step the
four great derricks. Twice he had been
Bwept from his hold by the racing cur-
rent, and once his helmet had struck a
projecting rock with such force that he
was deaf for days. His hands, too, had
begun to blister from the salt water and
hot sun. Betty, on his last Sunday at
home, had split up one of her own little
gloves for plasters, and tried to heal his
blisters with some salve. But it had not
done them much good, he thought to
himself, as he probed with his stub of a
thumb the deeper cracks in his tough,
leathery palms.

Betty's skill with the wounded man had
only increased Caleb's love and his pride
in her. Now that the man was convales-
cent he gloried more and more in her en-
ergy and capacity. To relieve a wound-
ed man, serve him night and day, and

by skill, tenderness, and self-sacrifice get
him once more well and sound and on
his legs, able to do a day's work and
earn a day's pay, — this, to Caleb, was
something to glory in. But for her nurs-
ing, he would often say, poor Billy would
now be among the tombstones on the hill
back of Keyport Light.

Caleb's estimate of Betty's efforts
was not exaggerated. Lacey had been
her patient from the first, and she had
never neglected him an hour since the
fatal night when she helped the doctor
wind his bandages. When on the third
day fever had set in, she had taken her
seat by his bedside until the delirium had
passed. Mrs. Bell and Miss Peebles, the
schoolmistress, had relieved each other
in the care of the other wounded men,
— all of them, strange to say, were
single men, and all of them away from
home ; but Betty's patient had been the
most severely injured, and her task had
therefore been longer and more severe.

She would go home for an hour each
day, but as soon as her work was done
she would pull down the shades, lock the
house door, and, with a sunbonnet on
her head and some little delicacy in her
hand, hurry down the shore road to the
warehouse hospital. This had been the
first real responsibility ever given her,
the first time in which anything had been
expected of her apart from the endless
cooking of three meals a day, and the
washing up and sweeping out that fol-
lowed.

There were no more lonely hours now.
A new tenderness, too, had been aroused
in her nature because of the boy whose
feeble, hot fingers clutched her own.
The love which this curly-headed young
rigger had once avowed for her, when
there were strength and ruggedness in
every sinew of his body, when his red
lips were parted over the white teeth
and his eyes shone with pride, had been
quite forgotten as she watched by his
bed. It was his helplessness that was
ever present in her mind, his suffering.

Caleb West.

813

She realized that the prostrate young
fellow before her was dependent on her
for his very life and sustenance, as a
child might have been. It was for her
he waited in the morning, refusing to
touch his breakfast until she gave it to
him, — unable at first, reluctant after-
ward. It was for her last touch on his
pillow that he waited at night before he
went to sleep. It was she alone who
could bring back the smiles to his face,
inspire him with a courage he had al-
most lost when the pain racked him and
he thought he might never be able to
do a day's work again.

The accident left its mark on Lacey.
He was a mere outline of himself the
first day he was able to sit in the sun-
shine at the warehouse door. The cut
on his cheek and frontal bone, dividing
his eyebrow like a sabre slash, had been
deep and ugly and slow to heal; and
the bruise on his back had developed
into a wound that in its progress had
sapped his youthful strength. His hands
were white, and his face was bleached by
long confinement. When he had gained
a little strength, Captain Joe had given
him light duties about the wharf, the doc-
tor refusing to let him go to the Ledge.
But even after he was walking about,
Betty felt him still under her care,
and prepared dainty delicacies for him.
When she took them to him, she saw,
with a strange sinking of ner heart, that
he was yet weak and ill enough to need
a woman's care.

The story of her nursing and of the
doctor's constant tribute to her skill was
well known, and Caleb, usually so reti-
cent, would talk of it again and again.
Most of the men liked to humor his pride
in her, for Betty's blithesome, cheery na-
ture made her a favorite wherever she
was known.

" I kind'er wish Cap'n Joe had come
ashore to-night," Caleb said, turning to
Captain Brandt, who stood beside him,
his hand on the tiller. " He 's been sor,k-
in' wet all day, an' he won't put nothin'

dry on ef I ain't with him. 'T warn't
for Betty I 'd 'a' stayed, but the little
gal 's so lonesome 't ain't right to leave
her. I don' know what Lacey 'd done
but for Betty. Did ye see 'er, Lonny,
when she come in that night ? " All the
little by-paths of Caleb's talk led to Betty.

It was the same old question, but
Lonny, seated on the other side of the
deck, fell in willingly with Caleb's mood.

" See 'er ? Wall, I guess ! I thought
she 'd keel over when the doctor washed
Billy's face. He did look ragged, an'
no mistake, Caleb ; but she held on an'
never give in a mite."

Carleton sat close enough to hear what
Lonny said.

" Why should n't she ? " he sneered,
behind his hand, to the man next him.
" Lacey 's a blamed sight better looking
fellow than what she's got. The girl
knows a good thing when she sees it.
If it was me, I 'd " —

He never finished the sentence. Caleb
overheard the remark, and rose from
his seat, with a look in his eyes that
could not be misunderstood. Sanford,
watching the group, and not knowing the
cause of Caleb's sudden anger, said af-
terwards that the diver looked like an
old gray wolf gathering himself for a
spring, as he stood over Carleton with
hands tightly clenched.

The superintendent made some sort
of half apology to Caleb, and the diver
took his seat again, but did not forgive
him ; neither did the older men, who
had seen Betty grow up, and who always
spoke of her somehow as if she belonged
to them.

" 'T ain't decent," said Lonny Bowles
to Sanford when he had joined him later
in the cabin of the Screamer and had re-
peated Carleton's remark, " for a man
to speak agin a woman ; such fellers
ain't no better 'n rattlesnakes an' ought'er
be trompled on, if they is in guv'ment
pay."

When the sloop reached Keyport har-
bor, the men were landed as near as pos-

814

Caleb West.

sible to their several homes. Caleb, in
his kindly voice, bade good -night to
Sanf ord, to Captain Brandt, to the crew,
and to the working gang. To Carle-
ton he said nothing. He would have
forgiven him or any other man an af-
front put upon himself, but not one upon
Betty.

" She ain't got nobody but an oV fel-
ler like me," he often said to Captain
Joe, — " no chillen nor nothin', poor lit-
tle gal. I got to make it up to her some
way."

As he walked up the path he was so
engrossed with Carleton's flippant re-
mark, conning it over in his mind to tell
Betty, — he knew she did not like him,
— that he forgot for the moment that
she was not at the garden gate.

" She ain't sick, is she ? " he said to
himself, hurrying his steps, and noticing
that the shades were pulled down on
the garden side of the house. " I guess
nussin' Lacey 's been too much for her.
I ought' er knowed she 'd break down.
'Pears to me she did look peaked when
I bid her good-by las' Monday."

" Ye ain't sick, little woman, be ye ? "
he called out as he opened the door.

There was no response. He walked
quickly through the kitchen, passed into
the small hall, calling her as he went,
mounted the narrow stairs, and opened
the bedroom door softly, thinking she
might be asleep. The shutters were
closed ; the room was in perfect order.
The bed was empty ; the sheet and cov-
ering were turned neatly on his side of
it. He stooped mechanically, still won-
dering why Betty had turned the sheet,
his mind relieved now that she was not
ill.

He noticed that the bedding was clean
and had not been slept in. At the foot
of the bed, within reach of his hand, lay
the big carpet slippers that she had made
for him. Then he remembered that it
was not yet dark, and that, on account
of the coming storm, he was an hour
earlier than usual in getting home. Hi«

face lightened. He saw it all now : Bet-
ty had not expected him so soon, and
would be home in a little while. He
would " clean up " right away, so as to
be ready for her.

When he entered the kitchen again
he saw the table. There was but one
plate laid, with the knife and fork beside
it. This was covered by a big china
bowl. Under it was some cold meat
with the bread and butter. Near the
table, by the stove, a freshly ironed shirt
hung over a chair.

He understood it all. She had put
his supper and his shirt where he would
find them, and was not coming home till
late.

When he had washed, dressed himself
in his house clothes, and combed his big
beard, he dragged a chair out on the
front porch, to watch for her up and
down the road.

The men going home, carrying their
dinner-pails, nodded to him as they
passed, and one stopped and leaned over
the gate long enough to wonder whether
the big August storm would break that
night. " We generally has a blow 'bout
this time."

The butcher stopped to leave the week-
ly piece of meat for Sunday, — the itiner-
ant country butcher, with his shop in one
of the neighboring villages, and his cus-
tomers up and down all the roads that
led out of it"; supplies for every house-
hold in his wagon, and the gossip of
every family on his lips.

His wagon had sides of canvas painted
white, with " Fish, Meat and Poultry "
in a half-moon of black letters arching
over the owner's name, and was drawn
by a horse that halted and moved on,
not by the touch of the lines, — they
were always caught to a hook in the roof
of the wagon, — but by a word from the
butcher, who stood at the tail-board,
where the scales dangled, sorting fish,
hacking off pieces of red meat, or weigh-
ing scraggly chickens proportionate to
the wants and means of his various cu*-

Caleb West.

815

tomers. He was busying himself at this
tail-board, the dripping of the ice pock-
marking the dusty road below, when he
caught sight of Caleb.

" Wall, I kind'er hoped somebody 'd
be hum," he said to himself, wrapping
the six-pound roast in a piece of yellow
paper. Giving a tuck to his blue over-
sleeves, he swung open the gate. " So
ye did n't go 'long, Caleb, with Mis'
West? I see it begin to blow heavy,
and was wond'rin' whether you 'd get in
— best cut, you see," opening the pa-
per for Caleb's inspection, " and I broke
them ribs jes' 's Mis' West allers wants
'em. Then I wondered agin how ye
could leave the Ledge at all to-day.
Mis' Bell toP me yesterday the cap'n
was goin' to set them derricks. I see
'em a-layin' on the dock 'fore that Cape
Ann sloop loaded 'em,, an' they was
monstrous, an' no mistake. Have some
butter ? She did n't order none this
mornin', but I got some come in this
forenoon, sweet 's a nut, — four pounds
for a dollar, an' " —

Caleb looked at him curiously. " Where
did the wife say she was a-goin' ? " he
interrupted.

" Wall, she did n't say, 'cause I did n't
ketch up to her. I was coinin' down
Nollins Hill over to Noank, when I see
her ahead, walkin' down all in her Sun-
day rig, carry in' a little bag like. I
tho't maybe she was over to see the
Nollins folks, till I left seven pounds
fresh mackerel nex' door to Stubbins's,
an' some Delaware eggs. Then I see
my stock of ice was nigh gone, so I dxuv
down to the steamboat dock, an' there
I catched sight of 'er agin jes' goin'
aboard. I knowed then, of course, she
was off for Greenport an' New York,
an' was jes' sayin' to myself, Wall, I '11
stop an' see if anybody 's ter hum, an'
if they 're all gone I won't leave the
meat, but " —

" Put the meat in the kitchen," said
Caleb, without rising from his chair.

When the butcher drove off, the diver

had not moved. His gaze was fixed on
the turn of the road. Beads of sweat
stood out on his forehead ; a faint sick-
ness unnerved him when he thought that
Betty had gone without telling him. Had
he been cross or impatient with her the
last time he was at •home, that she should
serve him so ? Then a surge of anxiety
filled him. Why should she walk all
the way to Noank and take the boat
across the Sound, twenty miles away, if
she wanted to go to New York ? The
station was nearer and the fare through
was cheaper. He would have taken her
himself, if he had only known she want-
ed to go. He would have asked Captain
Joe to give him a couple of days off, and
would have gone with her, if she had
asked him. If she had only left some
message, or sent some word by the men
to the Ledge ! Then, as his thoughts
traveled in a circle, catching at straws,
his brain whirling, his eye fell upon the
clump of trees shading Captain Joe's
cottage. Aunty Bell would know, of
course ; why had he not thought of that
before ? Betty told Aunty Bell every-
thing.

The cheery little woman sat on the
porch shelling peas, as Caleb came up
the board walk.

" Why, ye need n't 'er give yerself
the trouble, Caleb, to come all the way
down ! " she called out as he came within
hearing. " Lonny Bowles 's jest been
here and told me cap'n ain't comin'
home till Monday. I 'm 'mazin' glad
them derricks is up. He ain't done no-
thin' but worrit about 'em since spring
opened, 'fraid somebody 'd get hurted
when he set 'em. Took a lantern, here,
night 'fore last, jest as we was goin' to
bed, after he 'd been loadin' 'em aboard
the Screamer all day, an' went down to
the dock to see if Bill Lacey 'd shrunk
them collars on tight enough. Guess
Betty 's glad ye 're home. I ain't see her
to-day, but I don't lay it up agin her. I
knowed she was busy cleanin' up 'gin ya

816

Caleb West.

Caleb's heart leaped into his throat.
If Betty had not told Aunty Bell, there
was no one else who would know her
movements. It was on his lips to tell her
what the butcher had seen, when some-
thing in his heart choked his utterance.
If Betty had not wanted any one to
know, there was no use in his talking
about it.

A man of d.ifferent; temperament, a
nervous or easily alarmed or suspicious
man, would have caught at every clue
and followed it to the end. * Caleb wait-
ed and kept still. She would telegraph
or write him and explain it all, he said
to himself, or send some one to see him
before bedtime. So he merely said he
was glad Aunty Bell knew about Captain
Joe, nodded good-night, and passed slow-
ly down the board walk and up the road,
his head on his chest, his big beard blow-
ing about his neck in the rising wind.

It was dark when he reached home*.
He lit the kerosene lamp and pulled
down the shades. He did not want pass-
ers-by to know he was alone. For an
hour or more he strode up and down the
kitchen, his thumbs in his suspenders,
his supper untouched. Now and then
he would stop as if listening for a foot-
fall, or fix his eye minutes at a time on
some crack in the floor or other object,
gazing abstractedly at it, his thoughts
far away. Once he drew the lamp close
and picked up the evening paper, adjust-
ing his big glasses ; reading the same
lines over and over, until the paper fell
of itself from his hands. Soon, worn
out with the hard fight of the day, he
fell asleep in his chair, awaking some
hours after, his mind torn with anxiety.
He took off his shoes and crept upstairs
in his stocking feet, holding to the bal-
ustrade as a tired man will do, entered
the bedroom, and dropped into a chair.

All through the night he slept fitfully ;
waking with sudden starts, roused by
the feeling that some horrible shadow
had settled upon him, that something he
could not name to himself was standing

behind him — always there. He was
afraid to turn and look. When he was
quite awake, and saw the dim outlines
of the untouched bed with its smooth
white pillows, the fear would take shape,
and he would say as if convincing him-
self, " Yes, I know, Betty's gone." Then,
overcome with fatigue, he would doze
again.

When the day broke, he sprang from
his chair, half dazed, threw up the nar-
row sash to feel the touch of the cool,
real world, and peered between the slats
of the shutters, listening to the wind
outside, now blowing a gale and dashing
against the house.

All at once he turned and tiptoed
downstairs. With nervous, trembling
fingers he took a suit of tarpaulins and
a sou'wester from a hook behind the
porch door, and walked down to the
dock. Some early lobstermen, bailing
a skiff, saw him stand for a moment,
look about him, and spring aboard a flat-
bottomed sharpie, the only boat near by,
— a good harbor boat, but dangerous in
rough weather. To their astonishment,
he raised the three-cornered sail and
headed for the open sea.

" Guess Caleb must be crazy," said
one man, resting his scoop involuntarily,
as he watched the boat dip almost bow
under. " The sharpie ain't no more fit-
tin' for thet slop sea 'n ever was. What
do ye s'pose ails him, anyhow? Gosh
A'mighty ! see her take them rollers. If
it was anybody else but him he would n't
git to the P'int. Don't make no differ-
ence, tho', to him. He kin git along un-
der water jes' 's well 's on top."

As the boat flew past Keyport Light
and Caleb laid his course to the Ledge,
the keeper, now that the dawn had come,
was in the lantern putting out the light
and drawing down the shades. Seeing
Caleb's boat tossing below him, he took
down his glass.

" What blamed fool is that tryin' to
get himself measured for a coffin ? " he
said half aloud to himself.

Caleb West.

817

The men were still asleep when Caleb
reached the Ledge and threw open the
door of the shanty, — all but Nickles,
who was preparing breakfast. He looked
at Caleb as if he had been an appari-
tion, and followed him to the door of Cap-
tain Joe's cabin, a little room by itself.
He wanted to hear what dreadful news
he brought. Unless some one was dead
or dying no man would risk such a sea
alone, — not even an old sailor like the
diver.

Caleb closed the door of the captain's
room tight behind him, without a word
to the cook. The captain lay asleep in
his bunk, his big arm under his head, his
short curly hair matted close.

" Cap'n Joe," said Caleb, laying his
hand on the sleeping man's shoulder and
shaking him gently, — " Cap'n Joe, it 's
me, Caleb."

The captain raised his head and
stared at him. Then he sat upright,
trying to collect his thoughts.

" Cap'n, I had to come for ye, — I
want ye."

" It ain't Aunty Bell, is it ? " said Cap-
tain Joe, springing to the floor. The
early hour, the sough of the wind and
beating of the rain on the roof of the
shanty, Caleb dripping wet, with white
drawn face, standing over him, told him
in a flash the gravity of the visit.

" No, it 's my Betty. She 's gone, —
gone without a word."

" Gone ! Who with ? "

Caleb sunk on Captain Joe's sea-chest,
and buried his face in his blistered hands.
He dared not trust himself to answer at
once.

" I don't know — I don't know " —
The broken words came between his
rough fingers. Big tears rolled down
his beard.

" Who says so ? How do you know
she 's gone ? "

"The butcher seen 'er goin' 'board
the boat at Noank yesterday mornin'.
She fixed everythin' at home 'fore she
went. I ain't been to bed all night. I

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 52

don't know what ye kin do, but I had
to come. I thought maybe you 'd go
home with me."

The captain did not answer. Little
scraps of gossip that he had heard now
and then among the men floated through
his memory. He had never paid any
attention to them, except once when he
had rebuked Nickles for repeating some
slurring remark that Carleton had made
one night at table. But even as he
thought of them Betty's face rose before
him, — her sweet, girlish face with its
dimples.

" It 's a dirty lie, Caleb, whoever said
it. I would n't believe it if I see it
myself. Ain't no better gal 'n Betty
ever breathed. Go with you ! Course I
will 's soon 's I get my clo'es on." He
dressed hurriedly, caught up his oilskins,
flung wide the shanty door, and made
his way over the platforms towards the
wharf.

When they reached the little cove in
the rocks below, where the smaller boats
were always sheltered, and he saw the
sharpie, he stopped short.

" You ain't come out here in that, Ca-
leb ? " he asked in astonishment.

" It was all I could get ; there warn't
nothin' else handy, Cap'n Joe."

The captain looked the frail sharpie
over from stem to stern, and then called
to Nickles : " Bring down one 'er them
empty ker'sene five-gallon cans ; we got
some bailin' to do, I tell ye, 'fore we
make Keyport Light. No, there ain't
nothin' up," noticing Nickles's anxious
face. " Caleb wants me to Keyport, —
that 's all. Get breakfast, and tell the
men, when they turn out, that I '11 be
back to-morrow in the Screamer, if it
smooths down."

Caleb took his seat on the windward
side of the tossing boat, holding the
sheet. The captain sat in the stern, one
hand on the tiller. The kerosene-can
lay at their feet. The knees of the two
men touched.

No better sailors ever guided a boat,

818

Caleb West.

and none ever realized more clearly the
dangers of their position.

The captain settled himself in his
seat in silence, his eyes on every wave
that raced by, and laid his course to-
wards the white tower five miles away,
its black band blurred gray in the driv-
ing rain. Caleb held the sheet, his face
turned towards the long, low line of hills
where his cabin lay. As he hauled the
sheet closer a heavy sigh broke from
him. It was the first time since he had
known Betty that he had set his face
homeward without a thrill of delight
filling his heart. Captain Joe heard the
smothered sigh, and, without turning his
head, laid his great hand with its stiff
tholepin fingers tenderly on Caleb's wrist.
These two men knew each other.

'' I would n't worry, Caleb," he said,
after a little. " That butcher sees too
much, an' sometimes he don't know no-
thin'. He 's allers got some cock-an'-
bull story 'bout somebody 'r other. Only
las' we«k he come inter Gardiner's drug
store with a yarn 'bout the old man
bein' pisened, when it warn't nothin'
but cramps. Ease a little, Caleb — s-o.
Seems to me it 's bnwin' harder."

As he spoke, a quiciv slash of the cruel
wind cut the top from & pursuing wave
and flung it straight at Caleb's face.
The diver combed the dripping spray
from his beard with his stiffei^d fingers,
and without a word drew his tivpaulins
closer. Captain Joe continued : _

" Wust 'r them huckster fell>rs is
they ain't got no better sense 'i^ to
peddle everythin' they know 'long yjth
their stuff. Take in — take in, Caleb r "
in a quick voice. " That was a soake^."
The big wave that had broken withii, a
foot of the rail had drenched them f ro^
head to foot. " Butcher did n't say n,.
body was with Betty, did he ? " h»
asked, with a cant of his sou'wester t<
free it from sea-water.

Caleb shook his head.

" No, and there warn't nobody. J
tell ye this thing '11 straighten itself out.

Ye can't tell what comes inter women's
heads sometimes. She might'er gone
over to Greenport to git some fixin's for
Sunday, an' would'er come back in the
afternoon boat, but it blowed so. Does
she know anybody over there ? "

Caleb did not answer. Somehow since
he had seen Captain Joe the little hope
that had flickered in his heart had gone
out. He had understood but too clearly
the doubting question that had escaped
the captain's lips, as he sprang from the
bed and looked into his eyes. Caleb was
not a coward ; he had faced without a
quiver many dangers in his time ; more
than once he had cut his air-hose, the last
desperate chance of a diver when his
lines are fouled. But his legs had shaken
as he listened to Captain Joe. There
was something in the tone of his voice
that had unmanned him.

For a mile or more the two men did
not speak again. Wave after wave pur-
sued them and tossed its angry spray
after them. Captain Joe now managed
the sail with one hand, and steered with
the other. Caleb bailed incessantly.

When they ran under the lee of the
lighthouse the keeper hailed them. He
had recognized Captain Joe. Indeed,
he had followed the sharpie with his
glass until it reached the Ledge, and
had watched its return, " with two fools
instead of one," he said.

" Anybody sick ? " he shouted.

Captain Joe shook his head, and the
sharpie plunged on and rounded the
Point into the perfect calm of the pro-
tecting shore.

The captain sprang out, and when
Caleb had made fast the boat they both
hurried up the garden walk to the cabin
door.

There was no change in the house.
The white china bowl still lay over the
supper, the newspaper on the floor ; no
one had entered since Caleb had left.

The captain began a close search
through the rooms : inside the clock, all
over the mantelpiece, and on the sitting-

Caleb West.

819

room table. No scrap of writing could
he find that shed a ray of light on Bet-
ty's movements. Then he walked up-
stairs, Caleb following him, and opened
the bedroom closet door. Her dresses
hung in their usual places, — all but the
one she wore and her cloak, Caleb said.

" She ain't gone for long," declared
the captain thoughtfully, looking into the
closet. " You wait here, Caleb, and git
yerself some breakfast. I may be gone
two hours, I may be gone all day.
When I find out for sure I '11 come
back. I 'm goin' to Noank fust, to see
them hands aboard the boat. It 's Sun-
day, an' she ain't a-runnin'."

Hour after hour went by. Caleb sat
by the fireless stove and waited. Now
and then he would open the front door
and peer down the road, trying to make
out the captain's burly, hurrying form.
When it grew dark he put a light in
the window, and raised one shade on the
kitchen side of the house, that the cap-
tain might know he was still at home and
waiting.

About nine o'clock Caleb heard the
whistle of a tug, and a voice calling for
some one to catch a line. He opened
the kitchen door and looked out on the
gloom, broken here and there by the
masthead lights rocking in the wind.
Then he recognized one of the big Med-
ford tugs lying off the dock below his
garden ; the hands were making fast to
a dock spile. Captain Joe sprang
ashore, and the tug steamed off.

The captain opened the garden gate
and walked slowly towards the porch.
He entered the kitchen without a word,
and sank heavily into a chair. Caleb
made no sound ; he stood beside him,
waiting, one hand grasping the table.

" She 's gone, ain't she ? "

The captain nodded his head.

" Gone ! Who with ? " asked Caleb,
unconsciously repeating the words that
had rung in his ears all day.

" Bill Lacey," said the captain, with
choking voice.

STRAINS FROM BOCK'S 'CELLO.

Midsummer in New York, to those
who know its possibilities, is by far its
most delightful season. Then one can
sleep from four to six in the afternoon
without a ring at the bell, or dine at
any hour one sees fit, and at home, with-
out a waiting cab and a hurried depar-
ture at the bidding of somebody else.
Then is the eleven o'clock morning lec-
turer silent, the afternoon tea a memory,
and the ten -course dinner a forgotten
plague. Then thin toilettes prevail, cool
mattings and chintz-covered divans and
lounges. Then, for those who know and
can, begin long days and short nights,
— long days and short nights of utter
idleness, great content, and blessed peace
of mind.

If we could impress the reality of
these truths upon all the friends we love,
and they, and only they, could tiptoe
back into their houses, keep their blinds
closed and their servants hidden, and so
delude the balance of the world — those
they do not love, the uncongenial, the
tiresome, the bumptious, and the aggres-
sive — into believing that they had fled ;
if this little trick could be played on the
world every June, and those we do love
could for three long happy months spread
themselves over space and eat their lotus
in peace (and with their fingers, if they
so pleased), then would each one dis-
cover that New York in summer could
indeed be made the Eldorado of one's
dreams.

Mrs. Leroy had long since recognized
these possibilities. Her front door on
Gramercy Park was never barricaded in
summer, nor was her house dismantled.
She changed its dress in May and put it
into charming summer attire, making it
a rare and refreshing retreat ; and more
than half her time she spent within
its walls, running down from Medford

820

Caleb West.

whenever the cares of that establishment
seemed onerous, or a change of mood
made a change of scene desirable.

While the men were at work on her
new dining-room she remained in town,
and since the visit when Captain Joe had
dismissed her with his thanks from the
warehouse hospital at Key port she had
not left New York again.

The major had been a constant vis-
itor, and Jack Hardy and his fiance'e,
Helen Shirley, had on more than one
occasion hidden themselves, on moon-
light nights, in the shadows of the big
palms fringing her balcony overlooking
the Park. Sanford had not seen her as
often as he wished. He had spent a
night at her house in Medford, but the
work on the Ledge kept him at Keyport,
and allowed him but little time in the
city.

With the setting of the derricks, how-
ever, he felt himself at liberty for a
holiday, and he had looked forward with
a feeling of almost boyish enthusiasm —
which he never quite outgrew — to a few
days' leisure in town, and a morning or
two with Mrs. Leroy.

She was at her desk when the maid
brought up his card. The little boudoir
in which she sat, with its heaps of silk
cushions, its disorder of books, and its
windows filled with mignonette and red
geraniums, looked straight into the trees
of the Park. Here the sun shone in
winter, and the moonlight traced the
outlines of bare branches upon her win-
dow-shades, and here in summer the
coolest of shadows fell.

"Why, I expected you yesterday,
Henry," she said, holding out her hand,
seating Sanford upon the divan, and
drawing up a chair beside him. " What
happened ? "

" Nothing more serious than an elope-
ment."

" Not Jack and Helen Shirley ? " she
said, laughing.

" No ; I wish it were ; they would go
on loving each other ; but this elopement

brings misery. It 's Caleb West's wife.
Captain Joe is half crazy about it, and
poor Caleb is heartbroken. She has
gone off with that young fellow she was
nursing the day you came up with the
major."

" Eloped ! Pretty doings, I must say.
Yes, I remember her, — a trim little wo-
man with short curly hair. I saw Caleb,
too, as he came in from the Ledge. He
looked years older than she. What had
he done to her ? "

" Nothing, so far as I know, except
love her and take care of her. Poor
Caleb ! He is one of the best men in
the gang. I think the world of him."

" What did he let her go for, then ?
I 'm sorry for the old diver, but it was
his fault, somewhere. That girl had as
good a face as I ever looked into. She
never left her husband without some
cause, poor child. He beat her, no
doubt, when nobody could see, and she
has run away because she was ashamed
to let anybody know. What else has
happened at Keyport ? "

"Kate, don't talk so. Caleb could
n't be brutal to any human being. I
know, too, that he loves this girl dearly.
They 've only been married two years.
She 's treated him shamefully."

Mrs. Leroy bent her head and looked
out under the awnings for a moment in
a thoughtful way. " Only two years ? "
she said, with some bitterness. "The
poor child was impatient. When she
had tried it for fifteen she would have
become accustomed to it. Don't blame
her altogether, Henry. It is the same
old story, I suppose. We hear it every
day. He ugly and old and selfish, never
thinking of what she would like and
what she longed for, keeping her shut
up to sing for him when she wanted now
and then to sing for herself ; and then
she found the door of the cage open, and
out she flew. Poor little soul ! I pity
her. She had better have borne it ; it is
a poor place outside for a tired foot;
and she 's nothing but a child." Then

Caleb West.

821

musing, patting her slipper impatiently,
"What sort of a man has she gone
with ? I could n't see him that morning,
she hung over him so close ; his head
was so bandaged."

"I don't know much about him. I
have n't known him long," replied San-
ford carelessly.

" Good-looking, is n't he, and alive,
and with something human and manlike
about him ? " she said, leaning forward
eagerly, her hands in her lap.

" Yes, I suppose so. He could climb
like a cat, anyway," said Sanford.

"Yes, I know, Henry. I see it all.
I knew it was the same old story. She
wanted something fresh and young, —
some one just to play with, child as she
is, some one nearer her own age to love.
Don't hate her. She was lonely. No-
thing for her to do but sit down and
wait for him to come home. Poor child,"
with a sigh, " her misery only begins
now. But what else have you to tell
me?"

" Nothing, except that all of the der-
ricks tumbled. I wired you about it.
They are all up now, thank goodness."
He knew her interest was only perfunc-
tory. Her mind, evidently, was still on
Betty, but he went on with his story:
" Everybody got soaking wet. Captain
Joe was in the water for hours. But we
stuck to it. Narrowest escape the men
have had this summer, Kate, except the
Screamer's. It 's a great mercy nobody
was hurt. I expected every minute some
one would get crushed. No one but Cap-
tain Joe could have got them up that
afternoon. It blew a gale for three days.
When did you get here ? I thought you
had gone back to Medford until Sam
brought me your note."

" No, I am still here, and shall be
here for a week. Now, don't tell me
your 're going back to-night ? "

" No, I 'm not, but I can't say how
soon ; not before the masonry begins,
anyhow. Jack Hardy is coming to-mor-
row night to my rooms. I have asked

a few fellows to meet him, — Smearly,
and Curran, and old Bock with his 'cello,
and some others. Since Jack's engage-
ment he 's the happiest fellow alive."

" They all are at first, Henry," said
Mrs. Leroy, laughing, her head thrown
back. The memory of Jack and Helen
was still so fresh and happy a one that
it instantly changed her mood.

They talked of Helen's future, of the
change in Jack's life, of his new house-
keeping, and of the thousand and one
things that interested them both, — the
kind of talk that two such friends in-
dulge in who have been parted for a
week or more, and who, in the first ten
minutes, run lightly over their individ-
ual experiences, so that they may start
fresh again with nothing hidden in either
life. When he rose to go, she kept him
standing while she pinned in his button-
hole a sprig of mignonette picked from
her window-box, and said, with the deep-
est interest, " I can't get that poor child
out of my mind. Don't be too hard on
her, Henry ; she 's the one who will suf-
fer most."

When Sanford reached his rooms
again, Sam had arranged the most de-
lightful of luncheons : cucumbers sliced
lengthwise and smothered in ice, soft-
shell crabs, and a roll of cream cheese
with a dash of Kirsch and sugar. " Oh,
these days off ! " he sighed contentedly,
sinking into his chair.

The appointments of his own apart-
ments seemed never so satisfying and
so welcome as when he had spent a
week with his men, taking his share of
the exposure with all the discomforts
that it brought. His early life had fit-
ted him for these changes, and a certain
cosmopolitan spirit in the man, a sort of
underlying stratum of Bohemianism, had
made it easy for him to adapt himself
to his surroundings, whatever they might
be. Not that his restless spirit could
long have endured any life that repeat-
ed itself day after day. He could idle
with the idlest, but he must also work

822

Caleb West.

when the necessity came, and that with
all his might.

" Major 's done been hyar 'mos' ebery
day you been gone, sah," said Sam, when
he had drawn out Sanford's chair and
announced luncheon as served. " How
is it, sah, — am I to mix a cocktail ebery
time he comes ? An' dat box ob yo' big
cigars am putty nigh gone ; ain't no
more 'n fo'r 'r five 'r 'em lef ' ." The ma-
jor, Sam forgot to mention, was only part-
ly to blame for these two shrinkages in
Sanford's stores.

"What does he come so often for,
Sam ? " asked Sanford, laughing.

" Dat 's mor' 'an I know, sah, 'cept
he so anxious to git you back, he says.
He come twice a day to see if you 're
yere. Co'se dere ain't nuffin cooked, an'
so he don't git nuffin to eat ; but golly !
he 's powerful on jewlips. I done tole
him yesterday you would n't be back
till to-morrow night. Dat whiskey 's all
gin out ; he saw der empty bottle hisse'f ;
he ain't been yere agin to-day," with a
chuckle.

" Always give the major whatever he
wants, Sam," said Sanford. " By the
bye, a few gentlemen will be here to sup-
per to-morrow night. Remind me in the
morning to make a list of what you will
want," dipping the long slices of cucum-
ber into the salt.

The morning came : the list was made
out, and a very toothsome and cooling
!st it was, — a frozen melon tapped and

Sd with a pint of Pommery sec, by
wa% of beginning. The evening came :
1 flt- a'ng lanterns and silver lamps
were lighted, ,n the trays and small ta-
bles with their pip,s and smokables were
brought out, a musi,stand was opened
and set up near a convenient shaded can-
dle, and the lid of the ^ano was ilfted
and propped up rabbit-tra^ fashion.
^ With the early -rising ^on came
bmearly in white flannels and flaming tie,
just from his studio, where he had been
at work on a ceiling for a millionaire's
salon ; and Jack in correct evening dress ;

and Curran from his office, in a business
suit ; and the major in a nondescript
combination of yellow nankeen and black
bombazine, that made him an admirable
model for a poster in two tints. He was
still full of his experiences at the ware-
house hospital after the accident to the
Screamer. Every visitor at his down-
town office had listened to them by the
hour. To-night, however, the major had
a new audience, and a new audience al-
ways added fuel to the fire of his elo-
quence.

When the subject of the work at the
Ledge came up, and the*, sympathy of
everybody was expressed to Sanford over
the calamity to the Screamer, the major
broke out : —

" You ought to have gone with us,
my dear Jack." (To have been the only
eye-witness at the front, except Sanford
himself, gave the major great scope.)
" Giants, suh, — every man of 'em ; a
race, suh, that would do credit to the
Vikings ; bifurcated walruses, suh ; am-
phibious titans, that can work as well in
water as out of it. No wonder our dear
Henry " (this term of affection was not
unusual with the major) " accomplishes
such wonders. I can readily understand
why you never see such fellows any-
where else : they dive under water when
the season closes," he continued, laugh-
ing, and, leaning over Curran's shoulder,
helped himself to one of the cigars Sam
was just bringing in. His little trip to
Keyport as acting escort to Mrs. Leroy
had not only opened his eyes to a class of
working men of whose existence he had
never dreamed, but it had also furnished
him with a new and inexhaustible topic
of conversation.

" And the major outdid himself, that
day, in nursing them," interrupted San-
ford. " You would have been surprised,
Jack, to see him take hold. When I
turned in for the night, he was giving
one of the derrickmen a sponge bath."

" Learned it in the army," said Cur-
ran, with a sly look at Smearly. Both

Caleb West.

823

of them knew the origin of the major's
military title.

The major's chin was upturned in the
air ; his head was wreathed in smoke, the
match, still aflame, held aloft with out-
stretched hand. He always lighted his
cigars in this lordly way.

" Many years ago, gentlemen," the
major replied, distending his chest, throw-
ing away the match, and accepting the
compliment in perfect good faith ; " but
these are things one never forgets." The
major had never seen the inside of a camp
hospital in his life.

The guests now distributed them-
selves, each after the manner of his
likes: Curran full length on a divan,
the afternoon paper in his hand ; Jack
on the floor, his back to the wall, a
cushion behind his head ; Smearly in an
armchair ; and the major bolt upright on
a camp-stool near a table which held a
select collection of drinkables, presided
over by a bottle of seltzer in a silver
holder. Sam moved about like a rest-
less shadow, obedient to the slightest lift-
ing of Sanford's eyebrows, when a glass
needed filling or a pipe replenishing.

At ten o'clock, lugging in his great
'cello, came Bock, — a short, round, oily
Dane, with a red face that beamed
with good humor, and puffy hands that
wrinkled in pleats when he was using his
bow. A man with a perpetually moist
forehead, across which was pasted a lock
of black hair. A greasy man, if you
please, with a threadbare coat spattered
with spots, baggy black trousers, and a
four-button brown holland vest, never
clean. A man with a collar so much
ashamed of the condition of its com-
panion shirt-front that it barely showed
its face over a black stock that was held
together by a spring. A man with the
kindly, loyal nature of a St. Bernard
dog, who loved all his kind, spoke six
languages, wrote for the Encyclopaedia,
and made a 'cello sing like an angel.

To Sanford this man's heart was
dearer than his genius.

" Why, Bock, old man, we did n't ex-
pect you till eleven."

" Yes, I know, Henri, but ze first wio-
lin, he take my place. Zey will not know
7.e difference." One fat hand was held
up deprecatingly, the fingers outspread.
" Everybody fan and drink ze beer. Ah,
Meester Hardy, I have hear ze news ;
so you will leave ze brotherhood. And
I hear," lowering his voice and laying
his other fat hand affectionately on
Jack's, " zat she ees most lofely. Ah, it
ees ze best zing," his voice rising again.
" When ve get old and ugly like old
Bock, and so heels over head wiz all
sorts of big zings to build like Mr. San-
ford, or like poor Smearly paint, paint,
all ze time paint, it ees too late to zink
of ze settle down. Ees it not so, you
man Curran over zere, wiz your news-
paper over your head ? " This time his
voice was flung straight at the recum-
bent editor as a climax to his breezy
salutation.

" Yes, you 're right, Bock ; you 're ugly
enough to crowd a dime museum, but
I '11 forgive you everything if you '11
put some life into your strings. I heard
your orchestra the other night, and the
first and second violins ruined the over-
ture. What the devil do you keep a lot
of" —

"What ees ze matter wiz ze overture,
Meester Ole Bull ? " said Bock, pitching
his voice in a high key, squeezing down
on the divan beside Curran, and pinch-
ing his arm.

" Everything was the matter. The
brass drowned the strings, and Reynier
might have had hair-oil on his bow for
all the sound you heard. Then the tempo
was a beat too slow."

" Henri Sanford, do you hear zis crazy
man zat does not know one zing, and lie
flat on his back and talk such nonsense ?
Ze wiolin, Meester Musical Editor Cur-
ran, must be pianissimo, — only ze leetle.
ze ve'y leetle, you hear. Ze aria is car-
ried by ze reeds."

" Carried by your grandmother ! " said

824

Caleb West.

Curran, springing from the divan.
" Here, Sam, put a light on the piano.
Now listen, you pagan," running his fin-
gers over the keys. " Beethoven would
get out of his grave if he could hear
you murder his music. The three bars
are so," touching the keys, " not so ! "
And thus the argument went on.

Out on the balcony, Smearly and
Quigley, the marine painter, who had
just come in, were talking about the row
at the Academy over the rejection of
Morley's picture, while the major was
in full swing with Hardy, Sanford, and
some of the later arrivals, including old
Professor Max Shutters, the biologist,
who had been so impressively introduced
by Curran to the distinguished Poco-
mokian that the professor had at once
mistaken the major for a brother sci-
entist.

" And you say, Professor Slocomb,"
said the savant, his hand forming a
sounding-board behind his ear, " that the
terrapin, now practically extinct, was
really plentiful in your day ? "

" My learned suh, I have gone down
to the edge of my lawn, overlooking the
salt-marsh, and seen 'em crawling around
like potato bugs. The niggahs could n't
walk the shore at night without tram-
pling on 'em. This craze of yo'r million-
aire epicures for one of the commonest
shell-fish we have is " —

"Amphibia," said the professor, as if
he had recognized a mere slip of the
tongue. " I presume you are referring
to the Malaclemmys palustris, — the
diamond-back species."

" You are right, suh," said the major.
" I had forgotten the classification for the
moment," with an air of being perfect-
ly at home on the subject. " The craze
for the palustris, my dear suh, is one of
the unaccountable signs of the times ; it
is the beginning of the fall of our in-
stitutions, suh. We cannot forget the
dishes of peacock tongues in the old
Roman days, — a thousand peacocks at a
cou'se, suh."

The major would have continued down
through Gibbon and Macaulay if Cur-
ran had not shouted out, "Keep still,
every soul of you! Bock is going to
give us the Serenade."

The men crowded about the piano.
Despite his frowziness, everybody who
knew Bock liked him ; those who heard
him play loved him. There was a pa-
thos, a tender sympathetic quality in his
touch, that one never forgot : it always
seemed as if, somehow, ready tears lin-
gered under his bow. " With a tone like
Bock's " was the highest Compliment one
could pay a musician.

Bock had uncovered the 'cello and was
holding it between his knees, one of his
fat hands resting lightly on the strings.
As Curran, with a foot on the pedal of
the piano, passed his hand rapidly over
the keys, Bock's head sank to the level
of his shoulders, his straggling hair fell
over his coat collar, his raised fingers bal-
anced for a moment the short bow, and
then Schubert's masterpiece poured out
its heart.

A profound hush, broken only by the
music, fell on the room. The old pro-
fessor leaned forward, both hands cupped
behind his ears. Sanford and Jack
smoked on, their eyes half closed, and
even the major withheld his hand from
the well-appointed tray and looked into
his empty glass.

At a time when the spell was deepest
and the listeners held their breath, the
perfect harmony was broken by a dis-
cordant ring at the outer door. Curran
turned his head angrily, and Sanford
looked at Sam, who glided to the door
with a catlike tread, opening it without
a sound, and closing it gently behind
him. The symphony continued, the
music rising in interest, and the listen-
ers forgot the threatened interruption.

Then the door opened again, and Sam,
making a wide detour, bent over San-
ford and whispered in his ear. Sanford
started, as if annoyed, arose from his
seat, and again the knob was noiselessly

Caleb West.

825

turned and the door as noiselessly closed,
shutting him into the corridor.

Seated in a chair under the old swing-
ing lantern was a woman wrapped in a
long cloak. Her face was buried in her
hands.

" Do you wish to see me, madam ? "
he asked, crossing to where she sat, won-
dering at the visit at such an hour, and
from a stranger too.

The woman turned her head towards
him without raising her eyelids.

" And you don't know me any more,
Mr. Sanford ? I 'm Betty West."

" You here ! " said Sanford, looking
in astonishment at the half-crouching fig-
ure before him.

" I had to come, sir. The druggist
at the corner told me where you lived.
I was a-waitin' outside in the street be-
low, hopin' to see you come in. Then
I heard the music and knew you were
home." The voice shook with every
word. The young dimpled face was
drawn and pale, the pretty curly hair
in disorder about her forehead. She
had the air of one who had been hunted
and had just found shelter.

"Does Lacey know you are here?"
said Sanford, a dim suspicion rising in
his mind. It was Caleb's face of agony
that came before him.

Betty shivered slightly, as if the name
had hurt her. "No, sir. I left him
two nights ago. I got away while he was
asleep. All I want now is a place for
to-night, and then perhaps to-morrow I
can get work."

" And you have no money ? "

Betty shook her head. " I had a little
of my own, but it 's all gone, and I 'm so
tired, and — the city frightens me so —
when the night comes." The head
dropped lower, the sobs choking her.
After a little she went on, drying her
eyes with her handkerchief, rolled tight
in one hand, and resting her cheek on
the bent fingers : " I did n't know nobody
but you, Mr. Sanford. I can pay ft
back." The voice was scarcely audible.

- Sanford stood looking down upon her
bowed head. The tired eyelids were half
closed, the tears glistening in the light
of the overhanging lamp, the shadows of
her black curls flecking her face. The
cloak hung loosely about her, the curve
of her pretty shoulders outlined in its
folds. Then she lifted her head, and,
looking Sanford in the eyes for the first
time, said in a broken, halting voice.
" Did you — did you — see — Caleb —
Mr. Sanford?"

Sanford nodded slowly in answer. He
was trying to make up his mind what
he should do with a woman who had
broken the heart of a man like Caleb.
Through the closed door could be heard
the strains of Bock's 'cello, the notes vi-
brating plaintively.

"Betty," he said, leaning over her,
" how could you do it ? "

The girl covered her face with her
hands and shrank within her cloak.
Sanford went on, his sense of Caleb's
wrongs overpowering him : " What could
Lacey do for you ? If you could once
see Caleb's face you would never for-
give yourself. No woman has a right
to leave a man who was as good to her
as your husband was to you. And now
what has it all come to ? You 've ruined
yourself, and broken his heart."

The girl trembled and bent her head,
cowering under the pitiless words ; then,
in a half-dazed way, she rose from her
seat, and, without looking at Sanford,
said in a tired, hopeless voice, as if every
word brought a pain, " I think I '11 go,
Mr. Sanford."

She drew her cloak about her and
turned to the door. Sanford watched her
silently. The pathos of the shrinking
girlish figure overcame him. He be-
gan to wonder if there were something
under it all that even Captain Joe did
not know of. Then he remembered
the tones of compassion in Mrs. Leroy's
voice when her heart had gone out to
this girl the morning before, as she said
to him, " Poor child, her misery only be-

826

State Universities and Church Colleges.

gins now ; it is a poor place outside for
a tired foot."

For an instant he stood irresolute.
" Wait a moment," he said at last.

Sanf ord paused in deep thought, with
averted eyes.

" Betty," he said in a softened voice,
" you can't go out like this alone. I '11

Betty stood still, without raising her take you, child, where you will be safe

head.

for the night."

(To be continued.)

F. Hopkinson Smith.

STATE UNIVERSITIES AND CHURCH COLLEGES.

THE growth of state universities, es-
pecially in the West and South, within
recent years, is one of the most note-
worthy facts in the progress of higher
education in our country. The nujnber
of students in eight representative West-
ern state universities — those of Califor-
nia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan,
Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin —
in 1885 was 4230 ; in 1895 it was 13,500.
This was an increase of more than three-
fold. During the same period the in-
crease in the number of students in eight
representative "denominational" colleges
(colleges under church control) in Mich-
igan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa
was less than fifteen per cent. The in-
crease during the same decade in the
attendance at eight New England col-
leges and universities (which are not state
schools nor under direct church control)
was twenty per cent. At all the state
universities, last year, there were nearly
twenty thousand students.

Quite as remarkable as the increased
attendance at these institutions have been
the large appropriations made for them
by the States. In Illinois, for instance,
large sums have been appropriated for
buildings and permanent improvements ;
in Michigan and Wisconsin, the univer-
sities receive every year, without special
enactment, the income of a tax bearing
a fixed ratio to the wealth of the State.
From other sources than the State they

have received donations which in the
aggregate already exceed three and one
half millions of dollars.

I do not propose to discuss the causes
which have contributed to the growth of
the state university, but a mere glance
at the subject will convince any one that
this growth is in keeping with our na-
tional development. Under existing con-
ditions, it is hardly possible to imagine
that these causes will become inopera-
tive. On the contrary, every indication
points to still further increase in the
size and influence of the educational in-
stitutions maintained by the States ; and
their rapid development involves a re-
adjustment of the state university, as an
educational type, to its environment. It
would be easy to point out results of f ai'-
reaching importance that are directly due
to the commanding position which some
of these institutions have reached, as the
capstone of the system of state educa-
tion ; but at present no change of the
old relations is more important than the
changing relation of the state university
and the great religious sects. The pe-
culiar conditions of our life, when the
need of higher education first began to
be generally felt in the United States,
naturally caused schools and colleges to
be established either directly under the
control of the religious bodies, or under
the inspiration of their teachings ; and
it seemed then as if our higher educa-

State Universities and Church Colleges.

827

tion were to be left almost entirely to
privately endowed universities, most of
which would be immediately susceptible
to denominational influence.

Even now it is frequently assumed
that, under ordinary circumstances, stu-
dents from families identified with a par-
ticular religious denomination will pur-
sue their advanced studies in a denomi-
national institution ; that the attendance
at the state universities must come main-
ly from those families which are with-
out religious convictions ; and that the
absence of denominational control in a
state institution implies indifference to
religious matters. Indeed, it is believed
by many that the influence of a state
university must be inimical to religion.

The moral and religious atmosphere
of every university is determined to a
great degree by its students. The char-
acter and convictions of the student
body play the most important part in
giving tone to the religious life of any
college. At the beginning of the colle-
giate year 1896-97, President Angell, of
the University of Michigan, invited the
presidents of the different state univer-
sities to cooperate with him in taking a
religious census of the students. The
response was prompt and cordial, and
statistics have been obtained for sixteen
state universities. A fund of informa-
tion has thus been collected which seems
valuable and convincing.1

We will first examine the distribution,
among the religious denominations, of
the students in a group of five state uni-
versities, selected as representative in
regard to size and geographical distribu-
tion, — the universities of Indiana, Kan-
sas, Michigan, Washington, and West
Virginia.

1 It is to be regretted that President Angell's
duties as Minister to Turkey have made it im-
possible that he should discuss this " census "
himself. The statistical tables will be pub-
lished in full in a pamphlet, copies of which
may be obtained by addressing the Secretary
of the Students' Christian Association, Arin
Arbor, Michigan.

The total enrollment of these five in-
stitutions was 5173. There were 211
students, counted as " unreached," whose
religious status was not ascertained ; a
considerable number of these were absent.
Of the 4962 whose, ecclesiastical status
was ascertained, 4407 placed themselves
on record as affiliated, by membership or
attendance, with some religious body ;
and 2851 (fifty-five per cent of the whole
number enrolled) were church members.
Among them, the Methodist Episcopal
church had 1098 members and adher-
enfe ; the Presbyterian church, 854 ; the
Congregational church, 612 ; the Epis-
copal church, 484 ; the Baptist church,
352 ; the Church of Christ, or Disciples,
227 ; the Unitarian church, 166 ; and the
Roman Catholic church, 165. 2

In point of numerical representation,
the eight denominations just mentioned
bear nearly the same relation to one an-
other, if we extend the comparison to all
the state universities in which a religious
census was taken. In the sixteen state
universities, with a total attendance of
14,637 students, 10,517, or a little more
than seventy per cent, were church mem-
bers or adherents, as follows : the Meth-
odist Episcopal church was credited with
2659 members and adherents, the Pres-
byterian with 2284, the Congregational
with 1730, the Episcopal with 1215, the
Baptist with 1063, the Church of Christ
with 607, the Roman Catholic with 528,
and the Unitarian with 431. In these
universities, taken together, every sixth
student belongs, by membership or affil-
iation, to the Methodist church, every
seventh to the Presbyterian, and every
ninth to the* Congregational church.
About one half of all the students
reached by the census were reported as

2 The other denominations represented were :
English Lutheran, 63 ; Friends, 57 ; Jewish, 44 ;
German Lutheran, 43 ; Seventh Day Advent,
35; Universalist, 24; Reformed Church, 22;
Latter Day Saints, 6 ; Dunkard. 5 ; and miscel-
laneous sects, 150.

828

State Universities and Church Colleges.

members of the so-called evangelical
churches.

Among women who are students the
proportion of church communicants is
everywhere greater than among men.
The difference varies from twelve to
twenty-five per cent : for example, at the
University of Indiana, fifty-two per cent
of the men and seventy-four per cent of
the women are members of churches ; at-
the University of Michigan, fifty-two per
cent of the men and seventy per cent of
the women.1

It is important to notice that in the
same university the proportion of church
members is often somewhat greater in
the collegiate department than in the pro-
fessional schools ; but at the University
of Michigan the percentage of commu-
nicants is higher in the department of
medicine and surgery than in any other
department.

It would be interesting to make a com-
parison of the number of students of each
of the larger religious denominations in
attendance at the state universities and
at the denominational colleges. It must
be remembered that more state colleges
than denominational colleges have pro-
fessional schools ; but in them all the
collegiate is far the largest department,
and in some cases the number of profes-
sional students is so small that they hard-
ly need to be* taken into consideration.
I have selected the Presbyterian church
as representative, partly because of the
large number and wide distribution of its
colleges, and partly because of their gen-
erally broad curricula and high standard.
For these reasons even the smaller Pres-
byterian colleges may properly be com-
pared with the state universities.

In the United States, at the present
time, there are thirty-seven Presbyterian
institutions of advanced education, in

1 The total number of male students at the
University of Michigan, at the time the cen-
sus was taken, was 2263. Of these, 1185 we*B
church members, 718 church adherents, 298 '
not adherents ; leaving 62 unreached. Of the

which 3679 students of collegiate rank
were enrolled in 1896-97 ; Princeton
University heading the list with a total
registration of 1045 students. Eight of
these institutions are for men only, the
attendance of two being restricted to col-
ored men ; seven are women's colleges ;
and twenty-two are open to both men and
women. In these thirty-seven colleges,
with the exception of one (Lincoln Uni-
versity), a religious census was taken
contemporaneously with the census of the
state universities. The returns (including
a fair estimate for Lincoln) give a total
of 2388 Presbyterian students in attend-
ance. Of this number, more than three
fourths were members of the church, and
the rest were " adherents." In sixteen
state universities there were enrolled
2284 Presbyterian students ; in all the
colleges under the control of the Pres-
byterian denomination there were at
the same time only 2388. We are thus
brought face to face with the fact that
the majority of Presbyterian students of
collegiate rank in the United States are
no longer in Presbyterian institutions.
If we take into account the 150 mem-
bers and adherents of this church re-
ported at the University of California,
there are in seventeen state universities
more Presbyterian students than in the
thirty-seven Presbyterian colleges taken
together.

Is the spiritual welfare of the Presby-
terian students at state universities less
a matter of concern to the Presbyterian
church than the spiritual welfare of the
students at church colleges ? The aver-
age number of Presbyterian students in
each of the denominational colleges is
a fraction less than 65 ; if we exclude
Princeton University from the reckon-
ing, 49. The average number of Pres-
byterian students in the sixteen state uni-

total number of women students (662), 461 were
church members, 168 church adherents, 31 not
adherents. The percentage of church members
among the male students, therefore, was 52.3 ;
women students, 69.6.

State Universities and Church Colleges.

829

versities is a trifle above 142 ; or, leaving
out of consideration the six state uni-
versities having less than one hundred
Presbyterian students each, we may look
upon the remaining ten as containing ten
Presbyterian colleges with an average of
205 students each. At the University
of Michigan alone, last year, there were
more than three fourths as many Pres-
byterian students as at Princeton, and
exactly fifteen times as many as in the
Presbyterian college in Michigan. At
the state universities of Indiana and Illi-
nois there were more than twice as many
Presbyterian students as at the four Pres-
byterian colleges in the two States ; at the
University of Iowa, more than in the five
Presbyterian colleges in the same State.
The case of Ohio is exceptional : there
were nearly twice as many Presbyterian
students in the church colleges as in the
state university.

The religious statistics of Princeton
University are worthy of special consid-
eration. The religious denominations
represented are almost as numerous as
in the larger state universities ; but only
two churches, the Presbyterian and the
Episcopal, can claim more than a hun-
dred students each. The percentage of
Princeton students who are church mem-
bers is about the same as that of the Uni-
versity of Kansas (fifty-five per cent), but
less than in the University of Michigan
(fifty -six per cent) and several of the
smaller state universities.1

The service which the Presbyterian
colleges have rendered, and are render-
ing, to higher education is of incalcu-
lable value. They are placed, for the
most part, at " strategic points," and
most of them have been generously sup-
ported. Especially have the newer in-
stitutions been wisely planted with refer-

1 The students of Princeton University are
divided among the denominations as follows :
Presbyterian (374 members, 240 adherents),
614 ; Episcopal (115 members, 108 adherents),
223 ; Baptist (19 members, 27 adherents), 46 ,
Methodist (28 members, 9 adherents), 37 ; Con-

ence to the future development of the
States in which they are situated. Last
year the Presbyterian Board of Aid for
Colleges and Academies reported more
than $70,000 given to its aided institu-
tions, mostly for their current expenses ;
sixteen of them being small colleges, the
rest academies. The endowments of the
older Presbyterian institutions compare
favorably with the endowments of the
colleges of any other denomination. It
is possible for a Presbyterian student, in
anjk of the sixteen States in which the
state universities of our list are situated,
easily to reach a college either of the
Presbyterian denomination or of some
church holding substantially the same
creed.

Why, then, do Presbyterian students
attend the state universities ? A certain
proportion go because some state univer-
sities possess departments wholly lacking
in the denominational schools, but most
of them because they are attracted by
the wider range of studies and the bet-
ter equipment of the state institutions.
To equip and to maintain ten colleges
which should provide for the 2053 Pres-
byterian students, in the ten state uni-
versities having more than one hundred
each, educational facilities approximate-
ly as extensive as they have at the state
universities, would require, at the lowest
estimate, an investment of twenty-seven
millions of dollars, or $2,700,000 for
each institution. If the Presbyterian
students were thus to be segregated in
small schools, they would still lose much,
for only universities with large numbers
of students can afford to make provision
for work in the more minute subdivisions
of the special fields into which true uni-
versity instruction is now everywhere
divided. Students do not choose their

gregational (13 members, 14 adherents), 27 ; Re-
formed Church (13 members, 7 adherents), 20 ;
Roman Catholic, 12 ; Jewish, 8 ; German Lu-
theran, 8; Friends, English Lutheran, and
Universalist, each 3 ; other denominations, 9 ;
not adherents, 14.

830

State Universities and Church Colleges.

colleges aimlessly. Many of them obtain
information about a number of univer-
sities, and parents in most cases consult
the wishes of their children in regard to
the choice of a college. In those States
in which the high school system is fully
developed, it is natural to pass from a
high school maintained by the town to a
university maintained by the State. It
is to be expected that most students for
the ministry will attend denominational
institutions, both by preference and be-
cause of the substantial assistance usual-
ly offered by these schools. But the num-
ber of students in the state universities
who are studying for the ministry is
greater than one would be likely to guess.
In the half-century ending in 1894 the
University of Michigan sent out 301
clergymen and missionaries, an average
of six for every graduating class.1 Of
252 ministers 40 belonged to the Pres-
byterian church. Within the past few
years the number of students preparing
for the Presbyterian ministry who have
entered the University of Michigan has
shown a decided increase.

What has been said of the Presbyterian
colleges in relation to the state universi-
ties is true, in a greater or less degree, of
the higher educational institutions of the
other religious denominations as well.
If the young men and women of any
particular sect attended only the profes-
sional departments of the state univer-
sities, we should be justified in assuming
that denominational preference played
a much more important part in the se-
lection of a college than it does play.
But there is still another fact to be taken
into consideration. Most of the larger
and stronger universities, including those
maintained by endowment as well as
those maintained by the States, are rap-
idly growing larger. Many of the small-
er colleges find it increasingly difficult
to hold their patronage. In some cases

1 The statistics are given in my pamphlet on
The Presbyterian Church and the University
of Michigan, pages 11, 37-39.

their falling back is due not so much to a
lack of resources as to a lack of students.
In much of their work the state univer-
sity and the denominational college are
brought into competition by force of cir-
cumstances, particularly in the Western
States. At present the state universities
are gaining. No one can for a moment
doubt that the denominational schools
have a mission of the highest importance
to society ; but " there is no hope that
the State will ever withdraw from so crit-
ical and extensive a portion of the edu-
cational field as that occupied by colle-
giate education." It would be the part
of wisdom for all concerned to waste
no more time in fruitless discussion, but
rather, facing the facts as they stand, to
make serious effort to solve the problem
how these apparently conflicting inter-
ests may be reconciled to the greatest
good of those for whom all our institu-
tions of advanced education have been
established.

Most of the state universities are in
the Western States ; their student life has
the freshness and vigor of the West. The
standard of conduct is high. The free-
dom of life stimulates religious effort on
the part of the students. The earliest Stu-
dents' Christian Association was founded
at the University of Michigan ; the sec-
ond, at the University of Virginia. As-
sociations for religious work flourish in
the state universities, directed and sup-
ported in large measure by the members
of the faculties. As President Draper
well says, " The fact doubtless is that
there is no place where there is a more
tolerant spirit, or freer discussion of
religious questions, or a stronger, more
unrestrained, and healthier»religious life
than in the state universities." At all
institutions of higher education, small as
well as great, there will be found some
weak or vicious young men who will go
astray ; in most cases their evil ten-
dencies are settled — often without the
knowledge of their parents — before they
enter college. On the other hand, it is

State Universities and Church Colleges.

831

the testimony of those who have a direct
knowledge of the facts that the state
universities have sent forth a consider-
able proportion of the students stronger
morally and religiously, as well as intel-
lectually, than when they entered.

Notwithstanding the large contribu-
tions which the religious denominations
are making to the student body of the
state universities, it has often been as-
serted that these institutions are irreli-
gious in the character of their instruc-
tion. This subject was so fully discussed
by President Angell in the Andover
Review for April, 1890, that it will be
sufficient here to make reference to his
paper, quoting one paragraph in which
he presents certain facts regarding the
religious status of professors and instruc-
tors : —

" In twenty of the state institutions
— all from which I have facts on this
point — - it appears that seventy-one per
cent of the teachers are members of
churches, and not a few of the others
are earnestly and even actively religious
men who have not formally joined any
communion. When we remember that
colleges not under state control — cer-
tainly this is true of the larger ones — do
not now always insist on church mem-
bership as the condition of an appoint-
ment to a place in the faculties, and that
no board of regents or trustees of any
state university will knowingly appoint
to a chair of instruction a man who is not
supposed to be of elevated moral charac-
ter, it must be conceded that the pupils
in the state institutions are not exposed
to much peril from their teachers. That
a few men whose influence was calcu-
lated to disturb or weaken the Chris-
tian faith of students have found their
way into the faculties of the state institu-
tions is true. But it is also true that such
men have been, and still are, I fear, mem-
bers of faculties of other colleges. Men
appointed in denominational colleges
have, after taking office, changed their
faith or lost their faith, and retained their

positions. No doubt, however, in the fac-
ulties of such institutions, a somewhat
larger percentage of church members is
likely to be found than in the state uni-
versities. But the great majority of men
who choose teaching as their profession
always have been, and are likely to be,
reverent, earnest, even religious men.
So it lias come to pass that seven or eight
of every ten men in the corps of teach-
ers in the state universities are members
of Christian churches. And if you go
to %he cities where those universities are
planted, you will find a good proportion
of these teachers superintending Sunday-
schools, conducting Bible classes, some-
times supplying pulpits, engaged in every
kind of Christian work, and by example
and word stimulating their pupils to a
Christian life."

It is not enough that the standard of
conduct, the moral tone of our universi-
ties, should be high. The chief danger
to student life in the collegiate and uni-
versity period lies, not, as is so often as-
sumed, in the tendency of those natural-
ly weak or wayward to be led astray by
evil companions, but rather in the fact
that the highest and best minds, the
most earnest and candid souls, are, from
their devotion to the pursuit of know-
ledge, likely to suffer a deadening of the
spiritual consciousness. Some students
who have great capacity for large ser-
vice to humanity may thus go forth with
the highest part of their natures un-
developed, lacking that spiritual force
which multiplies tenfold the influence of
every kind of ability for good work in
the world. Intensity of intellectual life,
from the very friction of minds interest-
ed in many fields of thought, but all
bent upon like ends, increases with the
size of universities. The opportunities
for specialization afforded by the devel-
opment of the elective system in the
larger universities permit the more ad-
vanced student to devote himself wholly
to that branch or subject in which he
is interested. But surely no one would

832

State Universities and Church Colleges.

affirm that students in great institutions
of private endowment are less subject to
this atrophy of the spiritual nature than
those in state universities of the same
size.

Denominational control of state uni-
versities is not possible nor desirable,
but they need the vitalizing touch of
spiritual forces, y which can be assured
only by contact with the living church.
At all great centres of learning there
should be a concentration of spiritual
light, a gathering of the forces that
make for righteousness. Cant and time-
serving ecclesiastical connections are not
likely to be encouraged in the atmo-
sphere of freedom and frankness in a
state university, but no class of students
anywhere are more open-hearted or more
ready to respond to the quickening and
uplifting influence of the highest moral
and spiritual ideals.

The churches have a duty toward the
state universities. It grows out of the
general duty of the churches as guardians
of the highest interests of society. Do
not Christian people pay taxes ? Even
if it were granted that the state uni-
versities have an irreligious atmosphere,
to whom should we look to change it ?
Should the churches approach the state
universities in a spirit of criticism, or
with a deep feeling of responsibility and
a willingness to cooperate in the promo-
tion of the supreme interests of youth ?
At the very least, it is reasonable to ask
that the religious bodies see to it that
men of marked spiritual and intellectual
power be placed in the pulpits of uni-

versity towns. But in more than one
university town churches fail to keep
their footing, not because of an unfavor-
able environment, but because the work
is left in charge of men who are not
equal to it.

The most vital interests of the churches
are at stake in the state universities.
These are strategic points. The greater
part of their students come from the re-
ligious denominations. Is it expedient
for a church to give attention to the
spiritual welfare of those only who are
affiliated with it in the denominational
schools, and to neglect perhaps a far
greater number of members and adher-
ents in a state university ? If students
come from the churches to the great
universities, and are there weaned from
the tilings of the spirit, and through an
unsymmetrical development permit the
training of intellect to choke out the spir-
itual life, who shall justify the churches
for their indifference and neglect ? In
the class-rooms of a state university
sectarian instruction can have no place.
Thomas Jefferson " thought that it was
the duty of each sect," at the University
of Virginia, " to provide its own theologi-
cal teaching in a special school, to which
students might go for special instruction
as they did to their various denomina-
tional churches." 1 But this subject is
too large to enter upon here. The first
condition of a solution of the problem
must lie in the willingness of the churches
themselves to consider the matter. From
the nature of the case the initiative must
be taken by them.

Francis W. Kelsey.

1 H. B. Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, page 91.

Penelope's Progress.

833

PENELOPE'S PROGRESS.

HER EXPERIENCES IN SCOTLAND.

PART FIRST. IN TOWN.

VIII.

Two or three days ago we noted an
unusual though subdued air of excite-
ment at 22 Breadalbane Terrace, where
for a week we have been the sole lodgers.
Mrs. Mingess has returned to Kinyuk-
kar ; Miss Coburn-Sinkler has purchased
her wedding outfit and gone back to
Inverness ; the Hebburn-Sheens will be
leaving to-morrow ; and the sound of the
scrubbing-brush is heard in the land. In
corners where all was clean and spotless
before, Mrs. M'Collop is digging with the
broom, and the maiden Boots is following
her with a damp cloth. The stair carpets
are hanging on lines in the baek garden,
and Susanna, with her cap rakishly on
one side, is always to be seen polishing
the stair rods. Whenever we traverse
the halls we are obliged to leap over
pails of suds, and. Miss Diggity-Dalgety
has given us two dinners which bore a
curious resemblance to washing-day re-
pasts in suburban America.

" Is it spring house-cleaning ? " I ask
the M'Collop.

" Na, na," she replies hurriedly ; " it 's
the meenisters."

On the 19th of May we are a maiden
castle no longer. Black coats and hats
ring at the bell, and pass in and out of
the different apartments. The hall table
is sprinkled with letters, visiting-cards,
and programmes which seem to have
had the alphabet shaken out upon them,
for they bear the names of professors,
doctors, reverends, and very reverends,
and fairly bristle with A. M.'s, M. A.'s,
A. B.'s, D. D.'s, and LL. D.'s. The
voice of prayer is lifted up from the
dining-room floor, and paraphrases of the

VOL. LXXX. — NO. 482. 53

Psalms float down the stairs from above.
Their Graces the Lord High Commis-
sioner and the Marchioness of Heather-
dale will arrive to-day at Holyrood Pal-
ace>, there to reside during the sittings of
the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland, and to-morrow the Royal Stan-
dard will be hoisted at Edinburgh Castle
from reveille to retreat. His Grace will
hold a levee at eleven. Directly His
Grace leaves the palace after the levee,
the guard of honor will proceed by the
Canongate to receive him on his arri-
val at St. Giles' Church, and will then
proceed to Assembly Hall to receive him
on his arrival there. The 6th Innis-
killing Dragoons and the 1st Battalion
Royal Scots will be in attendance, and
there will be unicorns, carricks, pursui-
vants, heralds, mace-bearers, ushers, and
pages, together with the Purse -Bearer
and the Lyon King-of-Arms and the na-
tional anthem and the royal salute ; for
the palace has awakened and is " mimick-
ing its past."

In such manner enters His Grace the
Lord High Commissioner to open the
General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland ; and on the same day there
arrives by the railway (but traveling first
class) the Moderator of the Church of
Scotland, Free, to convene its separate
Supreme Courts in Edinburgh. He will
have no Union Jacks, Royal Standards,
Dragoons, bands, or pipers ; he will bear
his own purse and stay at a hotel ; but
when the final procession of all comes,
he will probably march beside His Grace
the Lord High Commissioner, and they
will talk together, not of dead-and-gone
kingdoms, but of the one at hand, where
there are no more divisions in the ranks,

834

Penelope's Progress.

and where all the soldiers are simply
" king's men," marching to victory under
the inspiration of a common watchword.

It is a matter of regret to us that the
U. P.'s, the third branch of Scottish
Presbyterianism, could not be holding
an Assembly during this same week, so
that we could the more easily decide in
which flock we really belong. 22 Bread-
albane Terrace'now represents all shades
of religious opinion within the bounds of
Presbyterianism. We have an Elder, a
Professor of Biblical Criticism, a Majes-
ty's Chaplain, and even an ex-Modera-
tor under our roof, and they are equally
divided between the Free and the Estab-
lished bodies.

Mrs. M'Collop herself is a pillar of
the Free Kirk, but she has no prejudice
in lodgers, and says so long as she " mak's
her rent she doesna care aboot their re-
leegious principles." Miss Diggity-Dal-
gety is the sole representative of United
Presbyterianism in the household, and
she is somewhat gloomy in Assembly
time. To belong to a dissenting body,
and yet to cook early and late for the
purpose of fattening one's religious ri-
vals, is doubtless trying to the temper ;
and then she asserts that " meenisters
are aye toom [empty]."

" You must put away your Scottish
ballads and histories now, Salemina, and
keep your Concordance and your um-
brella constantly at hand."

This I said as we stood on George
IV. Bridge and saw the ministers gloom-
ing down from the Mound in a dense
Assembly fog. As the presence of any
considerable number of priests on an
ocean steamer is supposed to bring rough
weather, so the addition of a few hun-
dred parsons to the population of Edin-
burgh is believed to induce rain, — or
perhaps I should say, more rain.

" Our first duty, both to ourselves and
to the community," I continued to Sale-
mina, "is to learn how there can be
three distinct kinds of proper Presbyte-

rianism. Perhaps it would be a grace-
ful act on our part if we should each
espouse a different kind; then there
would be no feeling among our Edin-
burgh friends. And again, what is the
Union of which we hear murmurs ? Is
it religious or political ? Is it an echo
of the 1707 Union you explained to us
last week, or is it a new one ? What is
Disestablishment ? What is Disruption ?
Are they the same thing ? What is the
Sustentation Fund ? What was the Non-
Intrusion Party ? What was the Dundas
Despotism ? What is the argument at
present going on about taking the Short-
er Catechism out of the schools ? What
is the Shorter Catechism, anyway, — or
at least, what have they left out of the
Longer Catechism to make it shorter, —
and is the length of the Catechism one of
the points of difference ? Then when we
have looked up Chalmers and Candlish,
we can ask the ex-Moderator and the
Professor of Biblical Criticism to tea;
separately, of course, lest there should be
ecclesiastical quarrels."

Salemina and Francesca both incline
to the Established Church, I lean in-
stinctively toward the Free ; but that does
not mean that we have any knowledge of
the differences that separate them. Sa-
lemina is a conservative in all things ; she
loves law, order, historic associations, old
customs ; and so when there is a regular-
ly established national church, — or for
that matter, a regularly established any-
thing, — she gravitates to it by the law
of her being. Francesca's religious con-
victions, when she is away from her own
minister and native land, are inclined
to be flexible. The church that enters
Edinburgh with a marquis and a mar-
chioness representing the Crown, the
church that opens its Assembly with
splendid processions and dignified pa-
geants, the chui'ch that dispenses gener-
ous hospitality from Holyrood Palace,
— above all, the church that escorts its
Lord High Commissioner from place to
place with bands and pipers, — that is

Penelope's Progress.

835

the church to which she pledges her con-
stant presence and enthusiastic support.

As for me, I believe I am a born
protestant, or " come-outer," as they used
to call dissenters in the early days of
New England. I have not yet had time
to study the question, but as I lack all
knowledge of the other two branches of
Presbyterianism, I am enabled to say
unhesitatingly that I belong to the Free
Kirk. To begin with, the very word
" free " has a fascination for the citizen
of a republic ; and then my theological
training was begun this morning by a
certain gifted young minister of Edin-
burgh whom we call the Friar, because
the first time we saw him in his gown
and bands (the little spot of sheer white-
ness beneath the chin that lends such
added spirituality to a spiritual face) we
fancied that he looked like some pale
brother of the Church in the olden time.
His pallor, in a land of rosy redness and
milky whiteness ; his smooth, fair hair,
which in the light from the stained-glass
window above the pulpit looked reddish
gold ; the Southern heat of passionate
conviction that colored his slow Northern
speech ; the remoteness of his personal-
ity ; the weariness of his deep-set eyes,
that bespoke such fastings and vigils as
he probably never practiced, — all this
led to our choice of the name.

As we walked toward St. Andrew's
Church and Tanfield Hall, where he
insisted on taking me to get the '^proper
historical background," he told me about
the great Disruption movement. He was
extremely eloquent, — so eloquent that
the image of Willie Beresford tottered
continually on its throne, and I found not
the slightest difficulty in giving an un-
swerving allegiance to the principles such
an orator represents.

We went first to St. Andrew's, where
the General Assembly met in 1843, and
where the famous exodus of the Free
Protesting Church took place, — one of
» the most important events in the mod-
ern history of the United Kingdom.

The movement was mainly promoted by
the great Dr. Chalmers to put an end
to the connection of church and state ;
and as I am not accustomed to seeing
them united, I could sympathize the
more cordially with the tale of their
disruption. The Friar took me into a
particularly chilly historic corner, and,
leaning against a damp stone pillar,
painted the scene in St. Andrew's when
the Assembly met in the presence of a
great body of spectators, while a vast
throng gathered without, breathlessly
awaiting the result. No one believed
that any large number of ministers
would relinquish livings and stipends
and cast their bread upon the waters
for what many thought a " fantastic
principle." Yet when the Moderator left
his place, after reading a formal protest
signed by one hundred and twenty min-
isters and seventy-two elders, he was fol-
lowed first by Dr. Chalmers, and then
by four hundred and seventy men, who
marched in a body to Tanfield Hall,
where they formed themselves into the
General Assembly of the Church of Scot-
land, Free. When Lord Jeffrey was told
of it an hour later, he exclaimed, " Thank
God for Scotland ! There is not another
country on earth where such a deed could
be done ! " And the Friar reminded me
proudly of Macaulay's saying that the
Scots had made sacrifices for the sake
of religious opinion for which there was
no parallel in the annals of 'England. I
said " Yea " most heartily, for the spirit
of Jenny Geddes stirred within me that
morning, and I positively gloried in the
valiant achievements of the Free Church,
under the spell of the Friar's kindling
eye and eloquent voice. When he left
me in Breadalbane Terrace, I was at
heart a member of his parish in good
(and irregular) standing, ready to teach
in his Sunday-school, sing in his choir,
visit his aged and sick poor, and espe-
cially to stand between him and a too
admiring feminine constituency.

When I entered the drawing-room,

836

Penelope's Progress.

I found that Salemina had just enjoyed
an hour's conversation with the ex-Mod-
erator of the opposite church wing.

"Oh, my dear," she sighed, "you
have missed such a treat ! You have no
conception of these Scottish ministers of
the Establishment, — such culture, such
courtliness of manner, such scholarship,
such spirituality, such wise benignity of
opinion ! I asted the doctor to explain
the Disruption movement to me, and he
was most interesting and lucid, and most
affecting, too, when he described the mis-
understandings and misconceptions that
the Church suffered in those terrible days
of 1843, when its very life-blood, as well
as its integrity and unity, was threatened
by the foes in its own household ; when
breaches of faith and trust occurred on
all sides, and dissents and disloyalties
shook it to its very foundation ! You
see, Penelope, I have never fully under-
stood the disagreement about the matter
of state control before, but here is the
whole matter in a nut-sh — "

" My dear Salemina," I interposed,
with dignity, " you will pardon me, I am
sure, when I tell you that any discussion
on this point would be intensely painful
to me, as I now belong to the Free Kirk."

" Where have you been this morn-
ing ? " she asked, with a piercing glance.

" To St. Andrew's and Tanfield Hall."

" With whom ? "

" With the Friar."

" I see ! Happy the missionary to
whom you incline your ear, first / " —
which I thought rather inconsistent of
Salemina, as she had been converted by
precisely the same methods and in pre-
cisely the same length of time as had I,
the only difference being in the ages of
our respective missionaries, one being
about five and thirty, the other five and

IX.

Religion in Edinburgh is a theory, a
convention, a fashion (both humble and

aristocratic), a sensation, an intellectual
conviction, an emotion, a dissipation, a
sweet habit of the blood ; in fact, it is, it
seems to me, every sort of thing it can
be to the human spirit.

When we had finished our church toi-
lettes, and came into the drawing-room,
on the first Sunday morning, I remem-
ber that we found Francesca at the win-
dow.

" There is a battle, murder, or sudden
death going on in the square below,"
she said. " I am going to ask Susanna
to ask Mrs. M'Collop what it means.
Never have I seen such a crowd moving
peacefully, with no excitement or confu-
sion, in one direction. Where can the
people be going ? Do you suppose it is
a fire ? Why, I believe ... it cannot
be possible . . . yes, they certainly are
disappearing in that big church on the
corner ; and millions, simply millions
and trillions, are coming in the other
direction, — toward St. Knox's."

Impressive as was this morning church-
going, a still greater surprise awaited us
at seven o'clock in the evening, when the
crowd blocked the streets on two sides
of a church near Breadalbane Terrace ;
and though it was quite ten minutes be-
fore service when we entered, Salemina
and I only secured the last two seats in
the aisle, and Francesca was obliged to
sit on the steps of the pulpit or seek a
sermon elsewhere.

It amused me greatly to see Fran-
cesca sitting on pulpit steps, her Redfern
gown and smart toque in close juxtaposi-
tion to the rusty bonnet and bombazine
dress of a respectable elderly trades-
woman. The church officer entered first,
bearing the great Bible and hymn-book,
which he reverently placed on the pulpit
cushions ; and close behind him, to our
entire astonishment, came the Reverend
Ronald Macdonald, who was exchanging
with the regular minister of the parish,
whom we had come especially to hear.
I pitied Francesca's confusion and em-
barrassment, but I was too far from her

Penelope's Progress.

837

to offer an exchange of seats, and through
the long service she sat there at the feet
of her foe, so near that she could have
touched the hem of his gown as he knelt
devoutly for his first silent prayer.

Perhaps she was thinking of her last
interview with him, when she descanted
at length on that superfluity of naughti-
ness and Biblical pedantry which, she as-
serted, made Scottish ministers preach
from out-of-the-way texts.

" I 've never been able to find my
place in the Bible since I arrived," she
complained to Salemina, when she was
quite sure that Mr. Macdonald was lis-
tening to her ; and this he generally
was, in my opinion, no matter who
chanced to be talking. " What with
their skipping and hopping about from
Haggai to Philemon, Habakkuk to Jude,
and Micah to Titus, in their readings,
and then settling on seventh Nahum,
sixth Zephaniah, or second Calathumpi-
ans for the sermon, I do nothing but
search the Scriptures in the Edinburgh
churches, — search, search, search, until
some Christian by my side or in the
pew behind me notices my hapless plight,
and hands me a Bible opened at the
text. Last Sunday it was Obadiah first,
fifteenth, ' For the day of the Lord is
near upon all the heathen.' It chanced
to be a returned missionary who was
preaching on that occasion ; but the Bible
is full of heathen, and why need he have
chosen a text from Obadiah, poor little
Obadiah one page long, slipped in be-
tween Amos and Jonah where nobody but
a deacon could find him ? " If Fran-
cesca had not seen with delight the Re-
verend Ronald's expression of anxiety,
she would never have spoken of second
Calathumpians ; but of course he has no
means of knowing how unlike herself
she is when in his company.

To go back to our first Sunday wor-
ship in Edinburgh. The church officer
closed the door of the pulpit on the Re-
verend Ronald, and I thought I heard the
clicking of a lock ; at all events, he re-

turned at the close of the services to lib-
erate him and escort him back to the
vestry ; for the entrances and exits of
this beadle, or " minister's man," as the
church officer is called in the country
districts, form an impressive part of the
ceremonies. If he did lock the minister
into the pulpit, it is probably only another
national custom like the occasional lock-
ing in of the passengers in a railway train,
and may be positively necessary in the
case of such magnetic and popular preach-
ers as Mr. Macdonald or the Friar.

I have never seen such attention, such
concentration, as in these great congre-
gations of the Edinburgh churches. As
nearly as I can judge, it is intellectual
rather than emotional ; but it is not a
tribute paid to eloquence alone ; it is
habitual and universal, and is yielded
loyally to insufferable dullness when oc-
casion demands.

When the text is announced, there is
an indescribable rhythmic movement for-
ward, followed by a concerted rustle of
Bible leaves ; not the rustle of a few
Bibles in a few pious pews, but the rustle
of all the Bibles in all the pews, — and
there are more Bibles in an Edinburgh
Presbyterian church than one ever sees
anywhere else, unless it be in the ware-
houses of the Bible Societies.

The text is read twice clearly, and an-
other rhythmic movement follows when
the Bibles are replaced on the shelves.
Then there is a delightful settling back
of the entire congregation, a snuggling
comfortably into corners and a fitting of
shoulders to the pews, — not to sleep,
however ; an older generation may have
done that under the strain of a two-hour
" wearifu' dreich " sermon, but these
church-goers are not to be caught nap-
ping. They wear, on the contrary, a
keen, expectant, critical look, which must
be inexpressibly encouraging to the min-
ister, if he has anything to say. If he
has not (and this is a possibility in Ed-
inburgh as it is everywhere else), then I
am sure it is wisdom for the beadle to

838

Penelope's Progress.

lock him in, lest he flee when he meets
those searching eyes.

The organ is finding its way rapidly
into the Scottish kirks (how can the
shade of John Knox endure a " kist o'
whistles " in old St. Giles' ?), but it is not
used yet in some of those we attend
most frequently. There is a certain
quaint solemnity, a beautiful austerity,
in the unaccompanied singing of hymns
that touches me profoundly. I am of-
ten carried very high on the waves of
splendid church music, when the organ's
thunder rolls " through vaulted aisles "
and the angelic voices of a trained choir
chant the aspirations of my soul for me ;
but when an Edinburgh congregation
stands, and the precentor leads in the
second paraphrase of the Psalms, that
splendid

" God of our fathers, be the God
Of their succeeding race," j

there is a certain ascetic fervor in it that
seems to me the perfection of worship.
It may be that my Puritan ancestors
are mainly responsible for this feeling,
or perhaps my recently adopted Jenny
Geddes is a factor in it ; of course, if
she were in the habit of flinging fauld-
stules at Deans, she was probably the
friend of truth and the foe of beauty so
far as it was in her power to separate
them.

There is no music during the offerto-
ry in these churches, and this too pleases
my sense of the fitness of things. It
cannot soften the woe of the people who
are disinclined to the giving away of
money, and the cheerful givers need no
encouragement. For my part, I like to
sit, quite undistracted by soprano solos,
and listen to the refined tinkle of the
sixpences and shillings, and the vulgar
chink of the pennies and ha'pennies,
in the contribution-boxes. Country min-
isters, I am told, develop such an acute
sense of hearing that they can estimate
the amount of the collection before it is
counted. There is often a huge pew-
ter plate just within the church door, in

which the offerings are placed as the
worshipers enter or leave ; and one al-
ways notes the preponderance of silver
at the morning, and of copper at the
evening services. It is perhaps needless
to say that before Francesca had been
in Edinburgh,, a fortnight she asked Mr.
Macdonald if it were true that the Scots
continued coining the farthing for years
and years, merely to have a coin service-
able for church offerings !

As to social differences in the congre-
gations we are somewhat at sea. We
tried to arrive at a conclusion by the
hats and bonnets, than which there is
usually no more infallible test. On our
first Sunday we attended the Free Kirk
in the morning, and the Established in
the evening. The bonnets of the Free
Kirk were so much the more elegant
that we said to one another, "This is
evidently the church of society, though
the adjective ' Free ' should by rights at-
tract the masses." On the second Sun-
day we reversed the order of things,
and found the Established bonnets much
finer than the Free bonnets, which was
a source of mystification to us, until
we discovered that it was a question of
morning or evening service, not of the
form of Presbyterianism. We think, on
the whole, that, taking town and coun-
try congregations together, millinery has
not flourished under Presbyterianism, —
it seems to thrive better in the Romish
atmosphere of France ; but the Disrup-
tion, at least, has had nothing to answer
for in the matter, as it seems simply to
have parted the bonnets of Scotland in
twain, as Moses divided the Red Sea, and
left good and evil on both sides.

I can never forget our first military
service at St. Giles'. We left Breadal-
bane Terrace before nine in the morning,
and walked along the beautiful curve of
street that sweeps around the base of
Castle Rock, — walked on through the
poverty and squalor of the High Street,
keeping in view the beautiful lantern
tower as a guiding star, till we heard

Penelope's Progress

839

" The murmur of the city crowd ;
And, from his steeple, jingling loud,
St. Giles's mingling din."

We joined the throng outside the ven-
erable church, and awaited the approach
of the soldiers from the Castle parade-
ground ; for it is from there they march
in detachments to the church of their
choice. A religion they must have, and
if, when called up and questioned about
it, they have forgotten to provide them-
selves, or have no preference as to form
of worship, they are assigned to one
by the person in authority. When the
regiments are assembled on the parade-
ground of a Sunday morning, the offi-
cer's first command is, " Church of Scot-
land, right about face, quick march J"
— the bodies of men belonging to other
denominations standing fast until their
turn comes to move. It is said that a
new sergeant once gave the command,
" Church of Scotland, right about face,
quick march ! Fancy releegions stay
where ye are ! "

Just as we were being told this story by
an attendant squire, there was a burst of
scarlet and a blare of music, and down
into Parliament Square marched hun-
dreds of redcoats, the Highland pipers
(otherwise the Olympian gods) swinging
in front, leaving the American female
heart prostrate beneath their victorious
tread. The strains "of music that in the
distance sounded so martial and trium-
phant we recognized in a moment as
"Abide with me," and never did the
fine old tune seem more majestic than
when it marked a measure for the -steady
tramp, tramp, tramp, of those soldierly
feet. As The March of the Cameron
Men, piped from the green steeps of
Castle Hill, had aroused in us thoughts
of splendid victories on the battlefield,
so did this simple hymn seem to breathe
the spirit of the church militant; a no
less stern, but more spiritual soldier-
ship, in which " the fruit of righteous-
ness is sown in peace of them that make'
peace."

Even at this time of Assemblies, when
the atmosphere is almost exclusively
clerical and ecclesiastical, the two great
church armies represented here certainly
conceal from the casual observer all rival-
ries and jealousies, if indeed they cherish
any. As for the two dissenting bodies,
the Church of the Disruption and the
Church of the Secession have been keep-
ing'company, so to speak, for some years,
with a distant eye to an eventual union.

Since Scottish hospitality is well-nigh
inexhaustible, it is not strange that from
the moment Edinburgh streets began to
be crowded with ministers, our drawing-
room table began to bear shoals of en-
graved invitations of every conceivable
sort, all equally unfamiliar to our Ameri-
can eyes.

" The Purse-Bearer is commanded by
the Lord High Commissioner and the
Marchioness of Heatherdale to invite
Miss Hamilton to a Garden Party at
the Palace of Holyrood House, on the
27th of May. Weather permitting."

" The General Assembly of the Free
Church of Scotland admits Miss Hamil-
ton to any gallery on any day."

" The Marchioness of Heatherdale is
At Home on the 26th of May from a
quarter past nine in the evening. Palace
of Holyrood House."

" The Moderator of the General As-
sembly of the Free Church of Scotland
is At Home in the Library of the New
College on Saturday, the 22d May, from
eight to ten in the evening."

" The Moderator asks the pleasure of
Miss Hamilton's presence at a Breakfast
to be given on the morning of the 25th
of May at Dunedin Hotel."

We determined to go to all these func-
tions impartially, tracking thus the Pres-
byterian lion to its very lair, and observ-
ing its home as well as its company man-
ners. In everything that related to the
distinctively religious side of the pro-

840

Penelope's Progress.

ceedings we sought advice from Mrs.
M'Collop, while we went to Lady Baird
for definite information on secular mat-
ters. We also found an unexpected ally
in the person of our own ex-Modera-
tor's niece, Miss Jean Dalziel (Deeyell).
She had been educated in Paris, but she
must always have been a delightfully
breezy person, quite too irrepressible to
be affected by Scottish haar or theology.
" Go to the Assemblies, by all means,"
she said, " and be sure and get places
for the heresy case. These are no longer
what they once were, — we are getting
lamentably weak and gelatinous in our
beliefs, — but there is an unusually nice
one this year ; the heretic is very young
and handsome, and quite wicked, as min-
isters go. Don't fail to be presented at
the Marchioness's court at Holyrood,
for it is a capital preparation for the
ordeal of Her Majesty and Buckingham
Palace. ' Nothing fit to wear ' ? You
have never seen the people who go, or
you would n't say that ! I even ad-
vise you to attend one of the breakfasts ;
it can't do you any serious or permanent
injury so long as you eat something be-
fore you go. Oh no, it does n't matter,
— whichever one you choose, you will
cheerfully omit the other ; for I avow as
a Scottish spinster, and the niece of an
ex -Moderator, that to a stranger and a
foreigner the breakfasts are worse than
Arctic explorations."

It is to Mrs. M'Collop that we owe
our chief insight into technical church
matters, although we seldom agree with
her " opeenions " after we gain our own
experience* She never misses hearing
one sermon on a Sabbath, and oftener
she listens to two or three. Neither does
she confine herself to the ministrations
of a single preacher, but roves from one
sanctuary to another, seeking the bread
of life ; often, however, according to her
own account, getting a particularly indi-
gestible " stane."

She is thus a complete guide to the
Edinburgh pulpit, and when she is mak-

ing a bed in the morning she dispenses
criticism in so large and impartial a man-
ner that it would make the flesh of the
" meenistry " creep did they overhear
it. I used to think Ian Maclaren's ser-
mon-taster a possible exaggeration of an
existent type, but I now see that she is
truth itself.

" Ye '11 be tryin' anither kirk the
morn ? " suggests Mrs. M'Collop, spread-
ing the clean Sunday sheet over the mat-
tress. " Wha did ye hear the Sawbath
that 's bye ? Dr. A ? Ay, I ken him
ower weel ; he 's been there for fifteen
years an' mair. Ay, he 's a gifted mon
— off an' on ! " with an emphasis show-
ing clearly that, in her estimation, the
times when he is " off " outnumber those
when he is " on." ..." Ye have na
heard auld Dr. B yet ? " (Here she
tucks in the upper sheet tidily at the
foot.) " He 's a graund strachtforrit
mon, is Dr. B, forbye he 's growin' maist
awf u' dreich in his sermons, though when
he 's that wearisome a body canna heed
him wi'oot takin' peppermints to the
kirk, he 's nane the less, at seeventy-sax,
a better mon than the new asseestant.
Div ye ken the new asseestant ? He 's
a wee-bit, finger-fed mannie, too sma'
maist to wear a goon ! I canna thole
him, wi' his lang-nebbit words, explain-
in' an' expoundin' the gude Book as if
it had jist come oot ! The auld doctor
gies us fu' meesure, pressed doun an' rin-
nin' over, nae bit-pickin's like the haver-
in' asseestant ; it 's my opeenion he 's no
soond ! . . . Mr. C ? " (Now comes the
shaking and straightening and smooth-
ing of the first blanket.) " Ay, he 's weel
eneuch ! I mind ance he prayed for our
Free Assembly, an' then he turned roun'
an' prayed for the Established, maist
in the same breath, — he 's a broad,
leeberal mon is Mr. C ! . . . Mr. D ?
Ay, I ken him tine ; he micht be waur,
but he reads his sermon from the paper,
an' it 's an auld sayin', ' If a meenister
canna mind [remember] his ain dis-
coorse, nae mair can the congregation be

Penelope's Progress.

841

expectit to mind it.' ... Mr. E? He 's
my ain meenister." (She has a pillow
in her mouth now, but though she is
shaking it as a terrier would a rat, and
drawing on the linen slip at the same
time, she is still intelligible between the
jerks.) " Susanna says his sermon is
like claith made o' soond 'oo [wool] wi'
a gude twined thread, an' wairpit an'
weftit wi' doctrine. Susanna kens her
Bible weel, but she 's never gaed forrit."
(To " gang forrit " is to take the commun-
ion.) " Dr. F? I ca' him the greetin'
doctor ! He 's aye dingin' the dust oot
o' the poopit cushions, an' greetin' ower
the sins o' the human race, an' eespecial-
ly of his congregation. He 's waur syne
his last wife sickened an' slippit awa'.
'T was a chastenin' he 'd put up wi'
twice afore, but he grat nane the less.
She. was a bonnie bit-body, was the thurd
Mistress F ! E'nbro could 'a' better
spared the greetin' doctor than her, I 'm
thinkin'."

"The Lord giveth and the. Lord tak-
eth away, according to his good will and
pleasure," I ventured piously, as Mrs.
M'Collop beat the bolster and laid it in
place.

"Ou ay," responded that good wo-
man, as she spread the counterpane over
the pillows in the way I particularly dis-
like, — " ou ay, but I sometimes think
it 's a peety he couldna be guided ! ;>

XI.

We were to make our bow to the
Lord High Commissioner and the Mar-
chioness of Heatherdale in the evening,
and we were in a state of republican
excitement at 22 Breadalbane Terrace.

Francesca had surprised us by refus-
ing to be presented at this semi-royal
Scottish court. " Not I," she said. "The
Marchioness represents the Queen ; we
may discover, when we arrive, that she
has raised the standards of admission,
and requires us to 'back out' of the

throne-room. I don't propose to do
that without London training. Besides,
I hate crowds, and I never go to my
own President's receptions ; and I have
a headache, anyway, and don't feel like
coping with the Reverend Ronald to-
night ! " (Lady Baird was to take us
under her wing, and her nephew was to
escort us, Sir Robert being in Inveraray.)

"Sally, my dear," I said, as Fran-
cesca left the room with a bottle of
smelling-salts somewhat ostentatiously
in 'evidence, " methinks the damsel doth
protest too much. In other words, she
devotes a good deal of time and discus-
sion to a gentleman whom she heartily
dislikes. As she is under your care, I
will direct your attention to the follow-
ing points : —

" Ronald Macdonald is a Scotsman ;
Francesca disapproves of international
alliances.

" He is a Presbyterian ; she is a Swe-
denborgian.

" His father was a famous old school
doctor ; Francesca is a honuEopathist.

" He is serious ; Francesca is gay.

" I think, under all the circumstances,
their acquaintance will bear watching.
Two persons so utterly dissimilar, and,
so far as superficial observation goes, so
entirely unsuited to each other, are quite
liable to drift into marriage unless di-
verted by watchful philanthropists."

" Nonsense ! " returned Salemina
brusquely. " You think because you are
under the spell of the tender passion
yourself that other people are in con-
stant danger. Francesca detests him."

" Who told you so ? "

" She herself," triumphantly.

" Salemina," I said pityingly, " I have
always believed you a spinster from
choice ; don't lead me to think that you
have never had any experience in these
matters ! The Reverend Ronald has
also intimated to me as plainly as he
dared that he cannot bear the sight of
Francesca. What do I gather from this
statement ? The general conclusion that

842

Penelope's Progress.

if it be true, it is curious that he looks
at her incessantly."

" Francesca would never live in Scot-
land," remarked Salemina feebly.

" Not unless she were asked, of
course," I replied.

" He would never ask her."

"Not unless he thought he had a
chance of an affirmative answer."

" Her father would never allow it."

" Her father allows what she permits
him to allow. You know that perfectly
well."

" What shall I do about it, then ? "

" Consult me."

" What shall we do about it ? "

" Let Nature have her own way."

"I don't believe in Nature."

"Don't be profane, Salemina, and
don't be unromantic, which is worse ;
but if you insist, trust in Providence."

"I would rather trust Francesca's
hard heart."

" The hardest hearts melt if sufficient
heat be applied. I think Mr. Macdon-
ald is a volcano."

" I wish he were extinct," said Sale-
mina petulantly, " and I wish you would
n't make me nervous."

" If you had any faculty of premoni-
tion, you would n't have waited for me
to make you nervous."

" Some people are singularly omni-
scient."

" Others are singularly deficient " —
And at this moment Susanna came in
to announce Miss Jean Deeyell, who had
come to see sights with us.

It was our almost daily practice to
walk through the Old Town, and we
were now familiar with every street and
close in that densely crowded quarter.
Our quest for the sites of ancient land-
marks never grew monotonous, and we
were always reconstructing, in imagina-
tion, the Cowgate, the Canongate, the
Lawnmarket, and the High Street, un-
til we could see Auld Reekie as it was
in bygone centuries. Every corner bris-
tles with memories. Here is the Stamp

Office Close, from which the lovely Su-
sanna, Countess of Eglinton, was wont
to issue on Assembly nights; she, six
feet in height, with a brilliantly fair
complexion apd a "face of the maist be-
witching loveliness." Her seven daugh-
ters and stepdaughters were all conspic-
uously handsome, and it was deemed a
goodly sight to watch the long procession
of eight gilded sedan-chairs pass from
the Stamp Office Close, bearing her and
her stately brood to the Assembly Room,
amid a crowd that was " hushed with
respect and admiration to behold their
lofty and graceful figures step from the
chairs on the pavement."

Here itself is the site of those old
Assemblies presided over at on.-, time
by the famous Miss Nicky Murray, a
directress of society affairs, who seems
to have been a feminine premonition of
Count d'Orsay and our own McAllister.
Rather dull they must have been, those
old Scotch balls, where Goldsmith saw
the ladies and gentlemen in two dismal
groups divided by the length of the
room.

" The Assembly Close received the fair —
Order and elegance presided there —
Each gay Right Honourable had her place,
To walk a minuet with becoming grace.
No racing to the dance with rival hurry,
Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky
Murray ! "

It was half past nine in the evening
when Salemina and I drove to Holyrood,
our humble cab-horse jogging faithfully
behind Lady Baird's brougham, and it
was the new experience of seeing Auld
Reekie by lamplight that called up these
gay visions of other days, — visions and
days so thoroughly our mental property
that we resented the fact that women
were hanging washing from the Countess
of Eglinton's former windows, and pop-
ping their unkempt heads out of the
Duchess of Gordon's old doorway.

The Reverend Ronald is so kind!
He enters so fully into our spirit of
inquiry, and takes such pleasure in our

Penelope's Progress.

843

enthusiasms ! He even sprang lightly
out of Lady Baird's carriage and called
to our " lamiter " to halt while he showed
us the site of the Black Turnpike, from
whose windows Queen Mary saw the last
of her kingdom's capital.

" Here was the Black Turnpike, Miss
Hamilton ! " he cried ; " and from here
Mary went to Loch Leven, where you
Hamiltons and the Setons came gallant-
ly to her help. Don't you remember
the ' far ride to the Solway sands ' ? "

I looked with interest, though I was
in such a state of delicious excitement
that I could scarce keep my seat.

" Only a few minutes more, Sale-
mina," I sighed, " and we shall be in
the palace courtyard; then a probable
half -hour in crowded dressing-rooms,
with another half-hour in line, and then,
then we shall be making our best repub-
lican bow in the Gallery of the Kings !
How I wish Mr. Beresford and Fran-
cesca were with us ! What do you sup-
pose was her real reason for staying
away ? Some petty disagreement with
our young minister, I am sure. Do you
think the dampness is taking the curl out
of our hair ? Do you suppose our gowns
will be torn to ribbons before the Mar-
chioness sees them ? Do you believe
we shall look as well as anybody ? Pri-
vately, I think we must look better than
anybody ; but I always think that on my
way to a party, never after I arrive."

Mrs. M'Collop had asserted that I
was " bonnie eneuch for ony court," and
I could not help wishing that " mine ain
dear Somebody " might see me in my
French frock embroidered with silver
thistles, and my " shower bouquet " of
Scottish bluebells tied loosely together.
Salemina wore pinky-purple velvet ; a
real heather color it was, though the
Lord High Commissioner would proba-
bly never note the fact.

When we had presented our cards of
invitation at the palace doors, we joined
the throng and patiently made our way
up the splendid staircases, past powdered

lackeys without number, and, divested
of our wraps, joined another throng on
our way to the throne-room, Salemina and
I pressing those cards with our names
" legibly written on them " close to our
palpitating breasts. .

At last the moment came when, Lady
Baird having preceded me, I handed my
bit of pasteboard to the usher ; and hear-
ing " Miss Hamilton " called in stentorian
accents, I went forward in my turn, and
executed a graceful and elegant but not
too* profound curtsy, carefully arranged
to suit the semi-royal, semi-ecclesiastical
occasion. I had not divulged the fact
even to Salemina, but I had worn Mrs.
M'Collop's carpet quite threadbare in
front of the long mirror, and had curt-
sied to myself so many times in its crys-
tal surface that I had developed a sort
of fictitious reverence for my reflected
image. I had only begun my well-prac-
ticed obeisance when Her Grace the
Marchioness, to my mingled surprise and
embarrassment, extended a gracious
hand and murmured my name in a par-
ticularly kind voice. She is fond of Lady
Baird, and perhaps chose this method of
showing her friendship ; or it may be that
she noticed my silver thistles and Sale-
mina's heather - colored velvet, — they
certainly deserved special recognition ;
or it may be that I was too beautiful to
pass over in silence, — in my state of ex-
altation I was quite equal to the belief.

The presentation over, we wandered
through the beautiful apartments ; lean-
ing from the open windows to hear the
music of the band playing in the court-
yard below, looking 'at the royal por-
traits, and chatting with groups of friends
who appeared and reappeared in the
throng. Finally Lady Baird sent for us
to join her in a knot of personages more
and less distinguished, who had dined
at the palace, and who were standing be-
hind the receiving party in a sort of
sacred group. This indeed was a ground
of vantage, and one could have stood
there for hours, watching all sorts and

844

conditions of men and women bowing
before the Lord High Commissioner and
the Marchioness, who, with her Cleopa-
tra-like beauty and scarlet gown, looked
like a gorgeous cardinal-flower.

Salemina and I watched the curtsy-
ing narrowly, with the view at first of
improving our own obeisances for Buck-
ingham Palace ; but truth to say we got
no added light, and plainly most of the
people had not worn threadbare the car-
pets in front of their dressing-mirrors.

Suddenly we heard a familiar name
announced, " Lord Colquhoun," a dis-
tinguished judge who had lately been
raised to the peerage, and whom we
often met at dinners ; then " Miss Rowena
Colquhoun ; " and then, in the midst, we
fancied, of an unusual stir at the entrance
door — " Miss Francesca Van Buren
Monroe." I almost fainted against the
Reverend Ronald's shoulder in my as-
tonishment, while Salemina lifted her
tortoise-shell lorgnette, and we gazed si-
lently at our recreant charge.

After presentation, each person has
fifteen or twenty feet of awful space to
traverse in solitary and defenseless ma-
jesty ; scanned meanwhile by the maids
of honor (who, if they were truly hon-
orable, would turn their eyes another
way), ladies-in-waiting, Purse -Bearer
(who, be it known, bears no trace of
purse in public, but keeps it in his upper
bureau drawer at home), and the sacred
group in the rear. Some of the victims
waddle, some hurry ; some look up and
down nervously, others glance over the
shoulder as if dreading to be apprehend-
ed ; some turn red, others pale, according
to complexion and temperament ; some
swing their arms, others trip on their
gowns ; some twitch the buttons of a
glove, or tweak a flower or a jewel.
Francesca rose superior to all these
weaknesses, and I doubt if the Gallery
of the Kings ever served as a back-
ground for anything lovelier or more
high-bred than that untitled slip of a girl
from " the States." Her trailing gown

Penelope's Progress.

of dead white satin fell in unbroken lus-
trous folds behind her. Her beautiful
throat and shoulders rose in statuesque
whiteness from the shimmering drapery
that encircled them. Her dark hair
showed a moonbeam parting that rested
the eye, weary from the contemplation
of waves and frizzes. Her mother's
pearls hung in ropes from neck to waist,
and the one spot of color about her was
the single American Beauty rose she
carried. There is a patriotic florist in
Paris who grows this long - stemmed
empress of the rose - garden, and Mr.
Beresford sends one to me every week.
Francesca had taken the flower without
permission, and I must say she was as
worthy of it as it was of her.

She curtsied deeply, with no exagger-
ated ceremony, but with a sort of in-
nocent and childlike gravity, while the
satin of her gown spread itself like a
great lily over the floor. Her head was
bowed until the dark lashes swept her
crimson cheeks ; then she rose again
from the heart of the satin lily, with the
one splendid flower glowing against all
her dazzling whiteness, and floated slow-
ly across the dreaded space to the door
of exit as if she were preceded by in-
visible heralds and followed by invisible
train-bearers.

" Who is she ? " we heard whispered
here and there. " Look at the rose ! "
" Look at the pearls ! Is she a princess
or only an American ? "

I glanced at the Reverend Ronald. I
imagined he looked pale ; at any rate,
he was gnawing his mustache, and I be-
lieve he was in fancy laying his serious,
Scottish, allopathic, Presbyterian heart
at Francesca's gay, American, homoeo-
pathic, Swedenborgian feet.

" It is a pity Miss Monroe is such an
ardent republican," he said ; " otherwise
she ought to be a duchess. I never saw
a head that better suited a coronet, nor
one that contained more caprices."

"It is true she flatly refused to ac-
company us here," I allowed, " but per-

Penelope's Progress.

845

haps she has some explanation more or
less silly and serviceable ; meantime, I
defy you to say she is n't a beauty, and
I implore you to say nothing about its
being only skin-deep. Give me a beauti-
ful exterior, say I, and I will spend my
life in making the hidden things of mind
and soul conform with it ; but deliver
me from all forlorn attempts to make
my beauty of character speak through
a large mouth, breathe through a fat
nose, and look at my neighbor through
crossed eyes ! "

Mr. Macdonald agreed with me, with
some few ministerial reservations. He
always agrees with me, and why he is not
tortured at the thought of my being the
promised bride of another, but continues
to squander his affections upon a quarrel-
some girl, is more than I can comprehend.

Francesca appeared presently in our
group, and Salemina. did not even at-
tempt to scold her. One cannot scold
an imperious young beauty in white satin
and ropes of pearls.

It seems that shortly after our depar-
ture (we had dined with Lady Baird)
Lord Colquhoun had sent a note to me,
requiring an answer. Francesca had
opened it, and found that he offered an
extra card of invitation to one of us, and
said that he and his sister would gladly
serve as escort to Holyrood, if desired.
She had had an hour or two of solitude by
this time, and was well weary of it, and
the last vestige of headache disappeared
under the temptation of appearing at
court with all the dclat of unexpectedness.
She dispatched a note of acceptance to
Lord Colquhoun, called Mrs. M'Collop,
Susanna, and the maiden Boots to her as-
sistance, spread the trays of her Sara-
toga trunks about our three bedrooms,
grouped all our candles on her dressing-
table, and borrowed any little elegance
of toilette which we chanced to have left
behind. Her own store of adornments
was much greater than ours, but we pos-

sessed certain articles for which she had
a childlike admiration : my white satin
slippers embroidered with seed pearls,
Salemina's pearl-topped comb, my rose,
Salemina's Valenciennes handkerchief
and diamond belt-clasp, my pearl frog
with ruby eyes. We identified our pro-
perty on her impertinent young person,
and the list of her borrowings so amused
the Reverend Ronald that he forgot his
injuries.

" It is really an ordeal, that presenta-
tion, no matter how strong one's sense
of humor may be, nor how well rooted
one's democracy," chattered Francesca
to a serried rank of officers who sur-
rounded her to the total routing of the
ministry. " It is especially trying if one
has come unexpectedly and has no idea
of what is to happen. I was flustered
at the most supreme moment, because,
at the entrance of the throne-room, I had
just shaken hands reverently with a
splendid person who proved to be a foot-
man. I took him for the Commander
of the Queen's Guards, or the Keeper
of the Dungeon Keys, or the Most No-
ble Custodian of the Royal Moats, Draw-
bridges, and Portcullises. When he put
out his hand I had no idea it was simply
to waft me onward, and so naturally I
shook it, — it 's a mercy that I did n't
kiss it ! Then I curtsied to the Royal
Usher, and overlooked the Lord High
Commissioner, having no eyes for any
one but the beautiful scarlet Marchion-
ess ; I hope they were too busy to notice
my mistakes ! Did you see the child of
ten who was next to me in line ? She is
Mrs. Macstronachlacher ; at least that
was the name on the card she carried,
and she was thus announced. As they
tell us the Purse-Bearer is most rigorous
in arranging these functions and issuing
the invitations, I presume she must be
Mrs. Macstronachlacher ; but if so, they
marry very young in Scotland, and her
skirts should really have been longer ! "
Kate Douglas Wiggin.

(To be continued.)

846

Notable Recent Novels.

NOTABLE RECENT NOVELS.

WITH the publication of St. Ives the

catalogue of Stevenson's im-
Mr. sloven- . . . .

son'sSt portant writings has closed.

In truth it closed several years
ago, — in 1891, to be exact, — when
Catriona was published. Nothing which
has appeared since that date can modify
to any great extent the best critical es-
timate of his novels. Neither Weir of
Hermiston nor St. Ives affects the mat-
ter. You may throw them into the scales
with his other works, and then you may
take them out ; beyond a mere trembling
the balance is not disturbed. But sup-
pose you were to take out Kidnapped,
or Treasure Island, or The Master of
Ballantrae, the loss would be felt at once
and seriously. And unless he has left be-
hind him, hidden away among his loose
papers, some rare and perfect sketch,
some letter to posterity which shall be to
his reputation what Neil Faraday's lost
novel in The Death of the Lion might
have been to his, St. Ives may be re-
garded as the epilogue.

Stevenson's death and the publication
of this last effort of his fine genius may
tend to draw away a measure of public
interest from that type of novel which
he, his imitators, and his rivals have so
abundantly produced. This may be the
close of a " period " such as we read
about in histories of literature.

If the truth be told, has not our gen-
eration had enough of duels, hair-breadth
escapes, post-chaises, and highwaymen,
mysterious strangers muffled in great-
coats, and pistols which always miss
fire when they should n't ? To say posi-
tively that we have done with all this
might appear extravagant in the light
of the popularity of certain modern he-
roic novels. But it might not be too
radical a view if one were to maintain
that these books are the expression of
something temporary and accidental, that

they sustain a chronological relation to
modern literature rather than an essen-
tial one.

Matthew Arnold spoke of Heine as a
sardonic smile on the face of the Zeit-
geist. Let us say that these modern
stories in the heroic vein are a mere
heightening of color on the cheeks of
that interesting young lady, the Genius
of the modern novel — a heightening of
color on the cheeks, for the color comes
from without and not from within. It
is a matter of no moment. Artificial red
does no harm for once, and looks well
under gaslight.

These novels of adventure which we
buy so cheerfully, read with such plea-
sure, and make such a good-natured fuss
over, are for the greater part an expres-
sion of something altogether foreign to
the deeper spirit of modern fiction. Sure-
ly the true modern novel is the one
which reflects the life of to-day. And
life to-day is easy, familiar, rich in ma-
terial comforts, and on the whole with-
out painfully striking contrasts and thrill-
ing episodes. People have enough to eat,
reasonable liberty, and a degree of pa-
tience with one another which suggests
indifference. A man may shout aloud
in the market-place the most revolution-
ary opinions, and hardly be taken to
task for it ; and then on the other hand
we have got our rulers pretty well under
control. This paragraph, however, is not
the peroration of a eulogy upon " our
unrivaled happiness." It attempts mere-
ly to lay stress on such facts as these,
that it is not now possible to hang a
clergyman of the Church of England
for forgery, as was done in 1765 ; that
a man may not be deprived of the cus-
tody of his own children because he
holds heterodox religious opinions, as
happened in 1816. There is widespread
toleration ; and civilization in the sense

r -\

Notable Recent Novels.

847

in which Ruskin uses the word has much
increased. Now it is possible for a Jew
to become Prime Minister, and for a Ro-
man Catholic to become England's Poet
Laureate.

If, then, life is familiar, comfortable,
unrestrained, and easy, as it certainly
seems to be, how are we to account for
the rise of this semi-historic, heroic lit-
erature ? It is almost grotesque, the con-
trast between the books themselves and
the manner in which they are produced.
One may picture the incongruous ele-
ments of the situation — a young society
man going up to his suite in a hand-
some modern apartment house, and dic-
tating romance to a type-writer. In the
evening he dines at his club, and the
day after the happy launching of his
novel he is interviewed by the represen-
tative of a newspaper syndicate, to whom
he explains his literary method, while
the interviewer makes a note of his
dress and a comment on the decoration
of his mantelpiece.

Surely romance written in this way —
and we have not grossly exaggerated the
way — bears no relation to modern lit-
erature other than a chronological one.
The Prisoner of Zenda and A Gentle-
man of France, to mention two happy
and pleasing examples of this type of
novel, are not modern in the sense
that they express any deep feeling or
any vital characteristic of to-day. They
are not instinct with the spirit of the
times. One might say that these stories
represent the novel in its theatrical
mood. It is the novel masquerading.
Just as a respectable bookkeeper likes
to go into private theatricals, wear a wig
with curls, a slouch hat with ostrich
feathers, a sword and ruffles, and play a
part to tear a cat in, so -does the novel
like to do the same. The day after the
performance the whole artificial equip-
ment drops away and disappears. The
bookkeeper becomes a bookkeeper ouce
more and a natural man. The hour be-
fore the footlights has done him no harm.

True, he forgot his lines at one place,
but what is a prompter for if not to act
in such an emergency ? Now that it is
over the affair may be pronounced a
success — particularly in the light of the
gratifying statement that a clear profit
has been realized towards paying for the
new organ.

This is a not unfair comparison of the
part played by these books in modern
fiction. The public likes them, buys
tb^em, reads them ; and there is no rea-
son why the public should not. In pro-
portion to the demand for color, action,
posturing, and excessive gesticulation,
these books have a financial success ; in
proportion to the conscientiousness of
the artist who creates them they have a
literary vitality. But they bear to the
actual modern novel a relation not un-
like that which The Castle of Otranto
bears to Tom Jones — making allowance
of course for the chronological discre-
pancy.

From one point the heroic novel is a
protest against the commonplace and
stupid elements of modern life. Accord-
ing to Mr. Frederic Harrison there is no
romance left in us. Life is stale and
flat ; yet even Mr. Harrison would hard-
ly go to the length of declaring that it is
also commercially unprofitable. The ar-
tificial apartment-house romance is one
expression of the revolt against the duller
elements in our civilization ; and as has
often been pointed out, the novel of psy-
chological horrors is another expression.

There are a few men, however, whose
work is not accounted for by saying that
they love theatrical pomp and glitter for
its own sake, or that they write fiction
as a protest against the times in which
they live. Stevenson was of this num-
ber. He was an adventurer by inherit-
ance and by practice. He came of a
race of adventurers, adventurers who
built lighthouses and fought with that
bold outlaw, the Sea. He himself honest-
ly loved, and in a measure lived, a wild
life. There is no truer touch of nature

848

Notable Recent Novels.

than in the scene where St. Ives tells the
boy Rowley that he is a hunted fugitive
with a price set upon his head, and then
enjoys the tragic astonishment depicted
in the lad's face.

Rowley " had a high sense of romance
and a secret cultus for all soldiers and
criminals. His traveling library con-
sisted of a chap-book life of Wallace,
and some sixpenny parts of the Old
Bailey Sessions Papers ; . . . and the
choice depicts his character to a hair.
You can imagine how his new prospects
brightened on a boy of this disposition.
To be the servant and companion of
a fugitive, a soldier, and a murderer,
rolled in one — to live by stratagems,
disguises, and false names, in an atmo-
sphere of midnight and mystery so thick
that you could cut it with a knife — was
really, I believe, more dear to him than
his meals, though he was a great trench-
er-man and something of a glutton be-
sides. For myself, as the peg by which
all this romantic business hung, I was
simply idolized from that moment ; and
he would rather have sacrificed his hand
than surrendered the privilege of serv-
ing me."

One can believe that Stevenson was a
boy with tastes and ambitions like Row-
ley. But for that matter Rowley stands
for universal boy-nature.

Criticism of St. Ives becomes both
easy and difficult by reason of the fact
that we know so much about the book
from the author's point of view. He
wrote it in trying circumstances, and
never completed it ; the last six chapters
are from the pen of a practiced story-
teller, wh& follows the author's known
scheme of events. Stevenson was almost
too severe in his comment upon his book.
He says of St. Ives : —

" It is a mere tissue of adventures ;
the central figure not very well or very
sharply drawn ; no philosophy, no des-
tiny, to it ; some of the happenings
very good in themselves, I believe, but
none of them bildende, none of them

constructive, except in so far perhaps as
they make up a kind of sham picture of
the tim%, all in italics, and all out of
drawing. Here and there, I think, it is
well written ; and here and there it 's
not. ... If it has a merit to it, I should
say it was a sort of deliberation and
swing to the style, which seems to me to
suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises
with which it sounds all through. 'T is
my most prosaic book."

One must remember that this is epis-
tolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly
to be looked upon in the nature of an
" advance notice." Still more confiden-
tial and epistolary is the humorous and
reckless affirmation that St. Ives is " a
rudderless hulk." " It 's a pagoda,"
says Stevenson in a letter dated Septem-
ber, 1894, " and you can just feel — or
I can feel — - that it might have been a
pleasant story if it had only been blessed
at baptism."

He had to rewrite portions of it in
consequence of having received what Dr.
Johnson would have called " a large ac-
cession of new ideas." The ideas were
historical. The first five chapters de-
scribe the experiences of French pri-
soners of war in Edinburgh Castle. St.
Ives was the only " gentleman " among
them, the only man with ancestors and
a right to the " particle." He suffered
less from ill treatment than from the
sense of being made ridiculous. The
prisoners were dressed in uniform —
"jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a
sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt
of blue-and-white striped cotton." St.
Ives thought that " some malignant gen-
ius had found his masterpiece of irony
in that dress." So much is made of
this point that one reads with unusual
interest the letter in which Stevenson
bewails his " miserable luck " with St.
Ives; for he was halfway through it
when a book, which he had ordered six
months before, arrived, upsetting all his
previous notions of how the prisoners
were cared for. Now he must change

Notable Recent Novels.

849

the thing from top to bottom, "How
could I have dreamed the French pri-
soners were watched over like a female
charity school, kept in a grotesque liv-
ery, and shaved twice a week ? " All
his points had been made on the idea
that they were " unshaved and clothed
anyhow." He welcomes the new matter,
however, in spite of the labor it entails.
And it is easy to see how he has enriched
the earlier chapters by accentuating St.
Ives's disgust and mortification over his
hideous dress and stubbly chin.

The book has a light-hearted note in
it as a romance of the road should have.
The events take place in 1813; they
might have occurred fifty or seventy-five
years earlier. For the book lacks that
convincing something which fastens a
story immovably within certain chrono-
logical limits. It is the effect which
Thomas Hardy has so wonderfully pro-
duced in that little tale describing Na-
poleon's night-time visit to the coast of
England ; the effect which Stevenson
himself was equally happy in making
when he wrote the piece called A- Lodg-
ing for a Night.

St. Ives has plenty of good romantic
stuff in it, though on the whole it is ro-
mance of the conventional sort. It is
too well bred, let us say too observant
of the forms and customs which one has
learned to expect in a novel of the road.
There is an escape from the castle in
the sixth chapter, a flight in the dark-
ness towards the cottage of the lady-
love in the seventh chapter, an appeal
to the generosity of the lady-love's aunt,
a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses,
in the ninth chapter. And so on. We
would not imply that all this is lacking
in distinction, but it seems to want that
high distinction which Stevenson could
give to his work. Ought one to look for
it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory
to its author, and a book which was left
incomplete ?

There is a pretty account of the first
meeting between St. Ives and Flora.

VOL. i/xxx. — NX>. 482. 54

One naturally compares it with the scene
in which David Balfour describes his sen-
sations and emotions when the spell of
Catriona's beauty came upon him. Says
David : —

"There is no greater wonder than the
way the face of a young woman fits in
a man's mind and stays there, and he
could never tell you why ; it just seems
it was the thing he wanted."

This is quite perfect, and in admi-
ra,ble keeping with the genuine simpli-
city of David's character : —

" She had wonderful bright eyes like
stars ; . . . and whatever was the cause,
I stood there staring like a fool."

This is more concise than St. Ives's
description of Flora; but St. Ives was
a man of the world who had read books,
and knew how to compare the young
Scotch beauty to Diana : —

" As I saw her standing, her lips
parted, a divine trouble in her eyes, I
could have clapped my hands in ap-
plause, and was ready to acclaim her a
genuine daughter of the winds."

The account of the meeting with Wal-
ter Scott and his daughter on the moors
does not have the touch of reality in it
that one would like. Here was an op-
portunity however of the author's own
making.

There are flashes of humor, as when
St. Ives found himself locked in the
poultry-house " alone with half a dozen
sitting hens. In the twilight of the
place all fixed their eyes on me severely,
and seemed to upbraid me with some
crying impropriety."

There are sentences in which, after
Stevenson's own manner, real insight is
combined with felicitous expression. St.
Ives is commenting upon the fact that
he has done a thing which most men
learned in the wisdom of this world
would have pronounced absurd ; he has
" made a confidant of a boy in his teens
and positively smelling of the nursery."
But he had no cause to repent it.
" There is none so apt as a boy to be

850

Notable Recent Novels.

the adviser of any man in difficulties
like mine. To the beginnings of virile
common sense he adds the last lights of
the child's imagination."

Men have been known to thank God
when certain authors died — not because
they bore the slightest personal ill will,
but because they knew that as long as
the authors lived nothing could prevent
them from writing. In thinking of Ste-
venson, however, one cannot tell whether
he experiences the more a feeling of per-
sonal or of literary loss, whether he la-
ments chiefly the man or the author.
It is not possible to separate the various
cords of love, admiration, and gratitude
which bind us to this man. He had a
multitude of friends. He appealed to
a wider audience than he knew. He
himself said that he was read by journal-
ists, by his fellow novelists, and by boys.
Envious admiration might prompt a less
successful writer to exclaim, " Well, is
n't that enough ? " No, for to be truly
blest one must have women among one's
readers. And there are elect ladies not
a few who know Stevenson's novels ;
yet it is a question whether he has
readied the great mass of female novel-
readers. Certainly he is not well known
in that circle of fashionable maidens and
young matrons which justly prides itself
upon an acquaintance with Van Bibber.
And we can hardly think he is a familiar
name to that vast and not fashionable
constituency which battens upon the ro-
mances of Marie Corelli under the im-
pression that it is perusing literature,
while he offers no comfort whatever to
that type of reader who prefers that a
novel shall be filled with hard thinking,
with social riddles, theological problems,
and " sexual theorems." Stevenson was
happy with his journalists and boys.
Among all modern British men of let-
ters he was in many ways the most
highly blest ; and his career was entirely
picturesque and interesting. Other men
have been more talked about, but the
one thing which he did not lack was dis-

criminating praise from those who sit in
high critical places.

He wijs prosperous, too, though not
grossly prosperous. It is no new fact
that the sales of his books were small in
proportion to the magnitude of his con-
temporary fame. People praised him
tremendously, but paid their dollars for
entertainment of another quality than
that supplied by his fine gifts. An In-
land Voyage has never been as popular
as Three Men in a Boat, nor Treasure
Island and Kidnapped as King Solo-
mon's Mines. While The Black Arrow,
which Mr. Lang does not like, and
which Professor Saintsbury insists is " a
wonderfully good story," has not met a
wide public favor at all. Travels with
a Donkey, which came out in 1879, had
only reached its sixth English edition in
1887. Perhaps that is good for a book -
so entirely virtuous in a literary way,
but it was not a success to keep a man
awake nights.

We have been told that it is wrong to
admire Jekyll and Hyde, that the story
is " coarse," an " outrage upon the grand
allegories of the same motive," and sev-
eral other things ; nay, it is even hinted
that this popular tale is evidence of a
morbid strain in the author's nature.
Rather than dispute the point it is a
temptation to urge upon the critic that
he is not radical enough, for in Steven-
son's opinion all literature might be only
a " morbid secretion."

The critics, however, agree in allowing
us to admire without stint those smaller
works in which his characteristic gifts
displayed themselves at the best. Thrawn
Janet is one of these, and the story of
Tod Lapraik, told by Andie Dale in Ca-
triona, is another. Stevenson himself de-
clared that if he had never written any-
thing except these two stories he would
still have been a writer. We hope that
there would be votes cast for Will o' the
Mill, which is a lovely bit of literary
workmanship. And there are a dozen
besides these.

Notable Recent Novels.

851

He was an artist of undoubted gifts,
but he was an artist in small literary
forms. His longest good novels are af-
ter all little books. When he attempted
a large canvas he seemed not perfect-
ly in command of his materials, though
he could use those materials as they
could have been used by no other artist.
There is nothing in his books akin to that
large and massive treatment which may
be felt in a novel like Rhoda Fleming
or in a tragedy like Tess of the D'Ur-
bervilles.

Andrew Lang was right when he said
of Stevenson : He is a " Little Master,"
but of the Little Masters the most per-
fect and delightful.

The interest always attaching to a
Mr duM - Postnumous publication is en-

rier's The hanced in the case of George
Martian. , ,_ . , ,_ .. ,

du Mauner s Martian by the

peculiar circumstances which have at-
tended his brief and brilliant literary ca-
reer. Suddenly, late in life, an" artist
of established reputation turns author,
and uses the pen with exactly the same
ease and distinction with which he had
previously used the pencil. He associ-
ates the two arts as they have never
quite been associated before, illustrating
either by the other with equal facility.
Thackeray had done something of the
kind, but in Thackeray the literary fac-
ulty was so transcendent, and so very
superior to the pictorial, that the latter
acquired, by comparison, a certain air of
burlesque. With Du Maurier the im-
plement seems absolutely indifferent ;
the characteristic and, to many, irresisti-
bly fascinating style is always the same.
It is not invariably true that the style is
the man. There is a kind of preoccu-
pation with style, which may have very
fine and even exquisite results, but which
spoils it as a transcript of character, just
as effectually as an over-stately pose or
studied expression spoils the likeness in
a portrait. In Du Maurier's case, how-
ever, the style was the man. Some hap-
py instinct taught him, what would never

have come by observation, how to be him-
self in his writings ; that he was capable
of no better achievement than this, and
that this would prove enough for his fame.
It came near indeed to proving quite too
much. For all the charm of his person-
ality, Du Maurier was not formed by na-
ture to be the idol of the masses ; and
the one great popular success which he
achieved by a species of fluke obscured
his happiness, and unquestionably short-
en£ d his life. It is a strange and rather
pathetic story.

To the few who perfectly understood
him, there has been nothing more novel
and moving and altogether delightful in
recent literature than that gay and ten-
der tale of a French boyhood with which
Peter Ibbetson began. The very poly-
glot which Mr. du Maurier half uncon-
sciously employed, and which would have
been insupportable in anybody else, ap-
peared a natural and graceful form of
expression in him, and the twofold na-
tionality of the man, French by affection
and tradition, English by habit and con-
viction, seemed to multiply instead of
dividing his sympathies, and gave a won-
derful sort of stereoscopic roundness and
relief to the subjects of his delineation.
The obstinate " lands intersected by a
narrow frith " had hardly ever found so
impartial and persuasive a mutual inter-
preter.

Even the " esoteric " part of Peter
Ibbetson — the fantastic theory that the
soul may relive, in dreams, its own and
the entire life of its race in time, and
anticipate both in eternity — appealed to
the imagination by the simple fervor with
which it was set forth, and melted the
heart by a sweet if deceitful glimpse of
consoling and compensating possibilities.
Peter Ibbetson was the sort of book which
one reads and decides to keep, and does
not lend to everybody.

And it was followed by — Trilby !
Well, there is happily no need to say
much about Trilby. Every possible com-
ment, wise and unwise, fair and unfair,

852

Notable Recent Novels.

has already been made upon that ubiqui-
tous book by critics competent and in-
competent. Those who had become en-
amored of the author through the medium
of his first ingenuous and dreamy tale
still saw his chivalric likeness in this
transcript of his more purely Bohemian
experience, and heard his generous and
manly accents ; but the million readers
were caught, it 'is to be feared, by col-
lateral and less legitimate attractions.
One excellent use the book may well
have, in the way of exposing the more
offensive side of hypnotism, which has
put on scientific airs and taken a high
tone of late, but which is really only a
genteel disguise for what was long since
tabooed under its uglier though more de-
scriptive name of animal magnetism. A
greater novelist than Du Maurier and
a complete Frenchman had treated the
same risque theme a generation before
his day in a book called Joseph Balsamo,
and once was really enough. The uni-
versal vogue of Trilby was deeply de-
pressing to its author, than whom no
man ever lived more intolerant of essen-
tial vulgarity, and one is almost glad
that he had passed beyond the sphere of
the illustrated newspaper before a Trilby
exhibition of young ladies' feet was or-
ganized, to repair the tottering finances
of a so-called religious society !

It has been a source of sorrowful plea-
sure to every sincere Du Maurian to find
him returning, in his third and last novel,
to the theme which he had treated so
delicately in his first, and to discover
how far he was from having exhausted
its interest and charm. To have been a
schoolboy in Paris in the forties ! — there
will be a glamour about that thought
forevermore, and Tom Brown has a
formidable rival in a most unexpected
quarter. Du Maurier has done nothing
more masterly with the pen which he
wielded for so short a time than the de-
scriptions of the Institution F. Brossard
in the last days of the citizen-king (whose
own sons were not sent to so grand a

school !) and of the joyous summer va-
cation in the Department of La Sarthe.
Let us make room for one sunny, racy
page of the author's own, in which he
sketches the household of his provincial
host M. Laf erte* : —

" It was the strangest country house-
hold I have ever seen, in France or any-
where else. They were evidently very
well off, yet they preferred to eat their
midday meal in the kitchen, which was
immense ; and so was the midday meal
— and of a succulency !

" An old wolf-hound always lay by the
huge log-fire ; often with two or three
fidgety cats fighting for the soft places
on him, and making him growl ; five or
six other dogs, non-sporting, were always
about at meal-time.

" The servants, three or four peasant
women who waited on us, talked all the
time, and were tutoyees by the family.
Farm laborers came in and discussed
agricultural matters, manures, etc., quite
informally, squeezing their bonnets de
coton in their hands. The postman sat
by the fire and drank a glass of cider and
smoked his pipe up the chimney while
the letters were read — most of them
out loud — and were commented upon
by everybody in the most friendly spirit.
All this made the meal last a long time.

" M. Laferte* always wore his blouse,
except in the evening, and then he wore
a brown woolen vareuse or jersey ; un-
less there were guests, when he wore his
Sunday morning best. He nearly always
spoke like a peasant, although he was real-
ly a decently educated man — or should
have been.

"His old mother, who was of good
family and eighty years of age, lived in
a quite humble cottage, in a small street
in La Tremblaye, with two little peasant
girls to wait on her ; and the La Trem-
blayes, with whom M. Laferte" was not
on speaking terms, were always coming
into the village to see her, and bring her
fruit and flowers and game. She was a
most accomplished old lady, and an ex-

Notable Recent Novels.

853

cellent musician, and had known Mon-
sieur de Lafayette."

There, once for all, is the perfect man-
ner for a story-teller ; the manner which
each one of us knows, theoretically, to
be the very best, but which the vast ma-
jority are too self-conscious, or too am-
bitious, or too careful and troubled about
effect ever properly to attain. And the
Belgian scenes are almost equally good ;
especially the picture of life in the high,
clerical circle of stately and sleepy old
Malines, so simple and immaculate, so
graceful in its quiet detachment ; so re-
fined and so resigned !

But if the qualities of Du Maurier
never shone brighter than in some pages
of The Martian, his limitations also are
here most clearly and conclusively de-
fined. He could never, by any possibil-
ity, have constructed a plot, or developed
a character by scientific methods ; and
this tale has even less of coherence and
plausibility than its predecessors. Barty
Josselin, the hero, so engaging in his
brilliant boyhood and more or less vaga-
bond youth, becomes a mere abstraction
from the moment his being is invaded
and his brain utilized by his invisible
Egeria. The very list of the books which
he wrote under the inspiration of the
magnetic lady from Mars fills us with un-
speakable ennui, and we rejoice as one
who awaketh from a nightmare at the
recollection that we can never be con-
strained to read those books, — not even
by the domineering insistence of the most
infatuated clique. Something in his own
experience of the sudden discovery of an
unrealized faculty doubtless led to Du
Maurier's inveterate preoccupation by
the weird fancy of exchangeable person-
alities, and the working within us of a
will not our own. It is evident, more-
over, that the " possessed " Barty Josse-
lin is to be regarded less as a unique
individual than as a type of the coming
race, and we learn from the descriptions
of life at Marsfield what sort of folk Du
Maurier hoped that the children of the

millennial state might be. First, and
most important, they are to average taller,
by a foot, than we, their miserable for-
bears, and to be all supremely handsome.
They will have beautiful, though uncon-
ventional manners, and talk a kind of
glorified slang. They will be wealthy
without effort, and witty without spleen ;
musical and athletic ; healthy, of course,
and happy in their home affections, free
from social prejudices and all manner of
can* and unencumbered by book-learning.

It is not at all a bad ideal ; and among
the many Utopias which have, of late,
been handed in for competition, who
would not prefer Du Maurier's to Bul-
wer's or Bellamy's, or even the amiable
and shadowy Nowhere of the late Wil-
liam Morris ? We have already seen
this one foreshadowed in the pages of
Punch, where the elegant and debonair
creatures who lounge under the palms
or descend the palace stair are well-nigh
impossible, anatomically, just at present,
but may not be so in the good time com-
ing. One need not be abnormally clever
to perceive that the elements of Du Mau-
rier's ideal state are derived in about
equal proportions from the only two pro-
vinces of our manifold modern life,
which, to him, were worth inhabiting —
from Bohemia and Belgravia. He found
his physical types in the latter, and his
moral types, to the scandal of all outly-
ing Philistia, chiefly in the former. But
his heart embraced the whole ; and in
his resolute assertion of the comparative
impotence of exact science, and the gross
inadequacy to the needs of man of any
merely material scheme of things, there
was the essence of true religion.

And so we say our ave atque vale to
one whose very whims and imperfections
endeared him the more to those who
cared for him at all ; who did something,
while he stayed with us, toward assuag-
ing by sympathy and promise the trouble
of the world and our own ; and whose
like — take him for all in all — we shall
not soon look upon again.

854

Notable Recent Novels.

There is a peculiarly happy, mellow

quality in Dr. S. Weir Mitch-

eir'sHuglr ell's latest novel, Hugh Wynne,

Wynne. Free Quaker> a stoly of the

American Revolution. It purports to
be the memoirs of its chief character,
written many years after the events he
describes, and the sense of old age is
admirably conveyed. Even in descrip-
tions of the thick of the melde at Ger-
mantown, or of the charge over the re-
doubts at Yorktown, one is conscious of
the flow of the tranquil pen of the nar-
rator rather than of the waving sword
of the actor. It is much as if the old
Quaker virus, temporarily neutralized
by the hot blood of youth, wei'e once
more in the ascendant ; and though we
have endless incidents, duels, battles,
captures, escapes, plots, and counter-
plots, there is never the sense of excite-
ment, scarcely of suspense, that such a
succession of incidents presupposes. And
Dr. Mitchell's style, perfected for this
particular book by a choice of enough
of the vernacular of the time, is so well
suited to the task that it is difficult to
realize that it is not the autobiography
of the Free Quaker.

Another reason for this lack of inten-
sity is undoubtedly a structural defect.
Hugh Wynne, his cousin Arthur, and his
dearest friend Jack all love the same
girl, and the story is the usual one. In
addition, the three lovers all fight in the
Revolution, and we have much to do with
the movements of Washington's army and
of the war in general. There is really
no connection, however, between the love
and the fighting, and page after page of
description might be cut out without loss
to the story as a story ; not that these
very pages are uninteresting, for they
make delightful reading as glimpses of
the war, whether military or social ; but
they are not germane, and try as the au-
thor has, he cannot make them knit into
his work or seem a part of it.

The use of too many such incidents
has led to many slips of fact, which,

however unimportant, are regrettable
because needless. It seems almost as if
the auihor had gone out of his way to
bring in the first Congress, in order that
he might introduce as members men
who were not elected to it. He makes
the Conway cabal collapse because of
Lee's capture, which occurred a full year
before the cabal was heard of ; he puts
Washington into uniform when there
were no troops yet thought of ; and he
embodies a military force in Pennsylva-
nia before the battle of Lexington was
fought. If these and many other errors
and perversions were necessary, or even
advantageous to the tale, no objection
would be made to them, but they are as
gratuitous and unessential as well could
be. In short, in the endeavor to give
a quality of truthfulness by the use of
irrelevant minutiae, the author has in-
jured his story in a technical sense, with-
out obtaining the " atmosphere " for
which he strove. Probably Henry Es-
mond and The Virginians were the mod-
els, but Thackeray never made this mis-
take with his material.

There is a second distant resemblance
to the novels of Thackeray, for in Hugh
Wynne we have a voluntary resignation
of English estates to a younger branch of
the family, and an emigration to Amer-
ica of the elder one. Then we have the
scoundrelly cadet — a deep intriguer who
gains the hand of the heroine, the for-
tune of the father, and almost the life
of the hero ; a most scoundrelly British
villain, indeed, patriotically to contrast
with his American cousins. Here, too, is
a Damon and Pythias affection between
Hugh Wynne and Jack that approxi-
mates to the relations between George
and Harry, and Hugh tells the tale of
both, much as George did. Finally, we
have Washington, Lafayette, and the
other like accessories, the former ad-
mirably drawn and far excelling in ac-
curacy and humanness the portrait in
The Virginians.

Neither Hugh nor Jack wins the read-

Notable Recent Novels.

855

er very strongly. Yet it is not alto-
gether easy to say why they do not, for
both are meant to be sympathetic, and
the contrast of character between the
two is well done. The best character is
Darthea, whose capricious liking of all
men and resolute good faith to the worst
man really make the story. Scarcely
less good is the conception of Gainor
Wynne, though we are required to revise
our impressions of old-time views of
spinsterhood before accepting her as a
possibility of the last century. Nor is
her liking for cards and all that they
imply so much typical of the Whigs as
of the Tories, the partisans of the Revo-
lution for the most part disapproving of
all frivolity.

It is as a picture that the book achieves
its greatest success — an essay, as it
were, on the old-time life that centred
in the city of brotherly love, in the days
when that desirable and Christian feel-
ing was sadly embarrassed by party, re-
ligious, and personal rancor ; the break-
ing up of the old society, the disruption
of families, the waning of old faiths, old
ties, and old methods. Few spots were
so shaken and torn by the stress of those
years as the old Quaker city, and this
fact is most admirably brought out.

Viewed as a novel, the story lacks
structure. From the beginning to the
end one is never in doubt that all is not
to be as it should be : that Hugh is to
win Darthea ; that Jack, the friend and
lover, is to let his love fade into a proper
emotion for his Damon's wife ; and final-
ly, that Arthur Wynne, a most proper
villain, is to receive a proper punishment
at the proper moment. But as a picture
of eighteenth-century life the book has
at once value and charm.

The story of Mr. Kipling's Captains

Courageous is one of those
Mr. Kipling's . . ° .
Captains simple, vigorous conceptions
ourageous. wm-ch we nave conie to ex-
pect from him, and the motive is one to
which we are all ready to respond. Re-
demption by a strong hand pleases our

willful philanthropy. To drag a putty-
faced, impudent fifteen - year - old heir
to thirty millions away, by the winds of
heaven and the deep sea, from his devil
of indulgence, though the devil be in
this instance also his mother, and by the
same winds and sea to instill manliness
into him, is a grim and delicious idea.
The gorgeous simplicity of it would befit
the Arabian Nights. A big, soft-armed
wave picks the boy from the deck of an
ocean steamer, and drops him into a dory
which happens with fairy-tale appro-
priateness to come by, and this con-
venient conveyance delivers him over to
a crew of stern-faced, laconic fishermen,
who knock the nonsense out of him and
put him in the way of learning the two
lessons that in Mr. Kipling's eyes make
up the chief duty of man — to work
and not to be afraid. This is the whole
story. The task, to be sure, requires nine
months, and the account of it stretches
over three hundred and twenty pages, but
after the first twenty pages there is no
plot, no development, no surprise. It
awakens neither suspense nor hope nor
fear. Everybody is reasonably safe, and
the redemptive process apparent from
the first goes on without check or hin-
drance.

The theme, however, gives an oppor-
tunity for dealing with a phase of life
which Mr. Kipling has never before at-
tempted to portray, and we have as
a result the most vivid and picturesque
treatment of New England fishermen
that has yet been made. The atmo-
sphere is unlike that in any other of
Mr. Kipling's books ; it is sober almost
to sombreness, for the New England
fisherman does not countenance hilarity
or undue mirth. From the doleful chan-
tey of Disko Troop in the cabin of the
We 're Here to the funereal Memorial
Day at Gloucester and Mrs. Troop's de-
spairing plaint of the sea, the tone of the
book is never thoroughly merry. Neither
is the movement of it ever swift, for the
story is of men to whom time is seldom

856

Notable Recent Novels.

pressing, and whose lives are ruled by
the moods of the unhasting sea. Perhaps
it is by reason of this that there is in
the book greater restraint and serenity
of language than in much of Mr. Kip-
ling's earlier writing. There is less pro-
digality of words and of figures than in
some earlier work, and the charm is that
of fitness rather than form. These good
things there are in Captains Courageous :
a theme that is healthy and satisfying, a
mood and an atmosphere that fit the oc-
casions, and a measure of that serenity
of manner which many of Mr. Kipling's
critics have missed and almost despaired
of. Yet this last excellence is paid for
with a great price. Though it may bring
relief from the go-fever and insistence
of the earlier work, it is relief procured *
at the cost of life. We miss here th<?
throb of impatient power that made the
Light that Failed and The Man who
Would be King intoxicants.

Two incidents arouse a perceptible
degree of excitement — the rush over the
mountains in the private car, and the
weeping of the widows of Gloucester.
But these have nothing to do with the
story proper, and are manifestly dragged
in. For the rest, the slow words are
most unlike the tense sentences that the
maker of Mulvaney was used to write.

The characters of the book are hardly
less disappointing. To be sure the boy
Harvey has disadvantages as a hero. He
has not the plasticity of Wee Willie
Winkie to be moulded into a child
knight-errant, nor the hardness of Dick
Heldar to be hammered into fierce hero-
ism. He is just an ordinary boy at the
hobbledehoy stage, and it is due him to
say that he appears as he is.

Most of the characters with the ex-
ception of Disko Troop are mere out-
lines, distinguishable by Dickens-like
tags. Tom Platt was on the Ohio and
Long Jack is from East Boston. What
the inner natures of these men are,
whether they have like passions with the
men we know, is a matter of assump-

tion. Disko Troop, however, is more
than an outline. Though the workings
of hfe heart are curiously concealed
through three hundred pages we come
to feel that he has a certain individual-
ity, as of a mingling of the wiliness of
the much-enduring Ulysses with a stern,
Puritan sense of justice. Manuel and
Salters are little more than dummy fig-
ures, and Mrs. Troop is hardly more
than a voice that complains against the
sea. At the end of The Courting of
Dinah Shadd we knew Mulvaney as we
know none of the characters of Cap-
tains Courageous.

The essence of the book is to be
found, apart from the healthy, masculine
notion of it, in its exploitation of the
Grand Bankers. We can understand
that these toilers of the deep, holding a
part of the ocean almost to themselves
and living lives separate and full of
peril, must have appealed powerfully to
Mr. Kipling's imagination. And he has
laid bare the conditions of their toil and
the fog-wrapped wastes in which it falls
as no other writer has done, as perhaps
no other writer could have done. Few
other n.en, indeed, know the sea as he
knows it, and in describing it he discov-
ers always some of his peculiar witchery
of probing words, some of his familiar
and expected thrust of phrase.

The first dressing-down on the tilting
decks of the We 're Here and her run
home when her hold was full, — " when
the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low
stars " and " she cuddled her lee-rail
down to the crashing blue " in a pace
that is joyous to every one who loves the
lift and slide of a ship at sea, — these
remain like the flavor of a well-known
wine. Such passages, however, are all
too rare. The style of this book is not as
the style of the others. Some measure
of beauty it retains, but it is not the
bloom that we have known. Nowhere
between its covers is there a passage to
match the description of the sleeping
city in The City of Dreadful Night

Notable Recent Novels.

857

Yet there are bits that are thoroughly
good, like this about an iceberg : " A
whiteness moved in the whiteness of the
fog with a breath like the breath of the
grave, and there was a roaring, a plun-
ging and spouting ; " and this about a
ship : " Now a bark is feminine beyond
all other daughters of the sea, and this
tall, hesitating creature, with her white
and gilt figurehead, looked just like a
bewildered woman half lifting her skirts
to cross a muddy street under the jeers
of bad little boys." One looks and listens
in vain, however, for language chaste and
rhythmic like the style of The Spring
Running, or for the melancholy grace
of words that made Without Benefit of
Clergy half-intoxicating and all pitiful.

Captains Courageous has not the
sweep of power that of right belongs to
the handiwork of its maker, — the old-
time rush and energy, the straining pace
of syllables doubly laden, the silences
that come where words fail for weak-
ness. One misses the eager thrill of
phrases like this from The Light that
Failed, " the I — I — I's flashing through
the records as telegraph-poles fly past
the traveler." There is an almost in-
credible lack of significance in parts of
it, as if it were a steamer under-engined
for its length. Some chapters are float-
ed by mere description, and go crippled
like an ocean-liner relying on its sails.
It is matter of doubt whether in all Mr.
Kipling's other books together one could
find so many barren pages as are here.
Page after page drags on after the story
is told, like the latter joints of a scotched
snake. Some of Mr. Kipling's early
short stories, The Courting of Dinah
Shadd, Love 0' Women, and Beyond the
Pale, have greater wealth of human in-
terest, more import of life, death, and
destiny, than this whole volume carries.
The power of humor in The Incarna-
tion of Krishna Mulvaney, the glare
of race feeling in The Man who Was,
and the splendid reaches of imagination
in The Man who Would be King are

all lacking here. Captains Courageous
awakens no hot emulation to make one
up and tread the floor like the Nilghai's
choruses in The Light that Failed, nor
any grim joy of fight to endanger table-
tops as Ortheris's fight with the captain
in His Private Honor does, nor any gulp
of suspense to catch your throat such as
rises at the charge at Silver's Theatre
in With the Main Guard.

We take Mr. Kipling very seriously,
for he is the greatest creative mind that
we now have : he has the devouring eye
and the portraying hand. And Cap-
tains Courageous is badly wrought and
is less than the measure of his power.
It may be when he sent it out some
words of his own had been forgotten —
words with which he dedicated one of
his earliest books, —

" For I have wrought them for Thy sake
And breathed in them mine agonies."

It seems to us to lack this sort of inspi-
ration.

A good way to judge the structure of

Ml Wil- a storv *s to examme it as if
kins'sJe- you intended turning it into
rome. J . „ , ° ,

a play. lo do so is to ask

about it two very searching questions :
Is it well constructed ? Is its theme
strongly based upon the verities of hu-
man nature ? Looking upon the story
with the eye of the dramatist, you will
see all its superfluities fade away, — all
the "analysis of character," all the au-
thor's wise or humorous reflections, all
the episodical incidents. Everything by
which writers of novels are enabled to
blind their readers to the structural
weakness of their productions, or to the
essential improbability or triviality of
their themes, seems to detach itself and
vanish, leaving the substance and the
form naked to the eye.

It is interesting to apply this test,
which seems fair, although severe, to
Miss Wilkins's latest story, Jerome.
The plot, reduced to its simplest terms,
is this : Jerome, a poor young man who
is not likely ever to have any property

858

Notable Recent Novels.

to call his own, promises that he will
give away to the poor of the town all
his wealth if he ever becomes rich. Two
incredulous rich men, taunted and stung
thereto by the gibes of the company,
declare that if, within ten years, Jerome
receives and gives away as much as ten
thousand dollars, they on their side will
give away to the poor one fourth of their
property. Jerome becomes possessed of
a fortune, and does with it as he had
promised to do. The two rich men
thereupon fulfill their agreements.

This is the keystone of the novel, the
central fact of the story which supports
the whole structure. All that precedes
is preparatory, all that follows is ex-
planatory.

Now, to revert to the test of a play,
this is not an idea upon which a serious
drama could be founded. That such a
bargain should be made and kept may
be within the possibilities of human na-
ture ; few things, indeed, lie outside the
possibilities of human nature. But it is
not within the probabilities. Any seri-
ous play which should be based upon it
would inevitably seem artificial. It is
an idea for a farce, or, on a higher level,
for a satirical comedy ; for each of these
species of composition may be based upon
an absurdity, if, when once started, it is
developed naturally and logically. A
serious play, however, if it is not to miss
its effect, must treat a serious theme ;
one of which no spectator for an instant
will question the reality. By such a test
as this Miss Wilkins's novel fails be-
cause its theme lacks probability and
dignity.

The theme, in fact, is of the right pro-
portion for a short story, and this, indeed,
is what Miss Wilkins has made ; but she
has prefixed to it a series of short sto-
ries and sketches dealing with preced-
ing events, and has added another series
of short stories and sketches dealing with
subsequent events. These are all rather
loosely bound together, and the result is
that the reader, thinking over the story,

does not have an idea of it as a unit;
he thinks now of one part, now of an-
other ; *and by the mere fact of his so
thinking of it he confesses that he has not
found it a good novel, but a bad novel
by a good writer of short stories. Miss
Wilkins employs in Jerome her short-
story methods, and has not mastered the
technique of a larger structure. She is,
as it were, Meissonier trying to paint a
large, bold canvas.

The mention of Meissonier calls to
mind the merits of the story, which, as
any reader of her work may guess, are
neither few nor small. There are many
admirable human portraits in the book,
many excellently dramatic bits of action,
much strong, nervous, natural dialogue.
Always the work is that of a keenly
observant eye, and of the brooding type
of mind that is most surely dowered with
the creative imagination. A single excel-
lent passage will illustrate our meaning.
Jerome's mother is speaking to him of
the report that he has given away his
wealth : —

" ' I want to know if it 's true,' she
said.

" ' Yes, mother, it is.'

" ' You 've given it all away ? '

" ' Yes, mother.'

" ' Your own folks won't get none of
it?'

"Jerome shook his head. . . .

" Ann Edwards looked at her son,
with a face of pale recrimination and
awe. She opened her mouth to speak,
then closed it without a word. '/ never
had a black silk dress in my life,' said
she finally, in a shaking voice, and that
was all the reproach which she offered."

The longer you consider Ann Ed-
wards's comment, the more admirable
you must think it.

One tendency shows itself in this lat-
est novel by Miss Wilkins which should
not pass without mention, and which
must be lamented by every reader who
wishes well to the literary art. The
hook, as may be guessed even from this

Notable Recent Novels.

859

brief synopsis of its plot, is a weak at-
tempt to question the present economic
system. It sets off the wickedness or
the selfishness of the rich against the
virtue and helplessness of the poor after
the manner of the sentimental socialist.
A brief literary criticism is hardly the
place to treat of economics, but one may
pause to remark how odd it is that the
novelist, since his business is particular-
ly the study of human nature, and his
capital a knowledge of it, should not per-
ceive that the economic trouble lies, not
in the present system of property, but in
human nature itself.

Mr. Howells has been for a long pe-
Mr. How- Tiod so anxiously and almost
Open-Eyed morbidly preoccupied with
Conspiracy. American types and social
portents and problems that it is a great
pleasure to find him, in An Open-Eyed
Conspiracy, dropping into something
like the gay and engaging manner of
former days. We are glad to meet Mr.
and Mrs. March again upon their sum-
mer travels, and to perceive how lightly,
after all, that worthy pair have been
touched by the twenty-five years or so
that have intervened since they kindly
took Kitty Ellison to Canada, and made,
to that good girl's temporary cost, the
chance acquaintance of the fade and fu-
tile Mr. Avbuton.

We know now that Mrs. March, at
least, will never grow old ; and that we
should find her after another quarter
century, were any of us to live so long,
as defiantly impulsive and illogical, as
inconsistently concerned, and as incura-
bly sympathetic with youthful romance,
as ever. There is an accent of deep
conviction underlying the final bonmot
with which Mr. March concludes the
Saratoga Idyl : " The girlhood passes,
but the girl remains." Yet it is rather
base of him to say it plaintively, when
the results, in his own wife's case, have
been so charming ; and Mr. March ap-
pears to us upon the whole not quite as
clearly unspotted from the world as his

constructively mundane consort. He
was ever prone, beneath his outward bon-
homie, to fix a somewhat too sad and
haggard eye upon those contrasts of ma-
terial condition in our American life,
which hardly desei'ye to be called social
distinctions. Both the Marches ought
to have known, by the present decade,
that two such clear-headed and final-sec-
ular young persons as Miss Gage and Mr.
Kendrick would assuredly arrange their
owh little affairs, and work out unassisted
their own salvation or the reverse. The
scenery of the beautiful but no longer
fashionable spa where the idyl takes
place is portrayed with photographic
precision, and a disdain of the methods
of mere impressionism which warms
one's heart ; while the fatal occasion of
the hop at the Grand Union Hotel and
the conspicuously ineffectual chaperon-
age of Mr. March are described with a
deal of quaint humor, quite in the irre-
sistible manner of the author's best peri-
od. The Saratoga Idyl is as light as
those unattached gossamers which float
about in the warm air on dreamy Oc-
tober days, and are sometimes called
Virgin's Thread. But like them it
seems a true though slight product of
the " season of rest and mellow fruitful-
ness," and the leisurely reader will find
it haunted by all the peculiar and pene-
trating charm of the alienis mensibus
cestas.

The cause for the success of Mr.

Richard Harding Davis's Sol-
Mr. Davis's &.
Soldiers of diers ot r ortune is not far to
Fortune. , T, . . ,

seek. It is a story of brave

action, performed by persons at once
beautiful and young. To prove that they
are beautiful, we have Mr. Davis's word
and our own opinion, but chiefly Mr.
Gibson's most suitable illustrations. That
they are young, there can be no doubt
upon any ground. It were pitiful if
these two qualities of youth and beauty
did not touch at least forty thousand of
the great public. To all this it must
be added that Mr. Davis has an excel-

860

Notable Recent Novels.

lent gift of narrative, and speaks a lan-
guage which is especially grateful to
many ears, whether by custom or through
curiosity, for it is the language of the
world of which Mr. Davis's own Van
Bibber is the recognized type.

How strong this appeal must be one
realizes when the book's elements of
weakness, through unreality and a fail-
ure to convince, are considered even for
a moment. It is needful only to look at
the central figure, a hero such as " never
was on sea or land." He is defined as
" a tall broad-shouldered youth," and
surely he cannot be far beyond thirty at
the utmost. At sixteen he embarked at
New Orleans as a sailor before the mast.
From the diamond fields of South Africa,
where he landed from his first voyage,
he went on to Madagascar, Egypt, and
Algiers. It must have been in this pe-
riod of his life that he was an officer in
the English army, " when they were
short of officers " in the Soudan, received
a medal from the Sultan of Zanzibar,
since " he was out of cigars the day I
called," and won the Legion of Honor
while fighting as a Chasseur d'Afrique
against the Arabs. It was presumably
later that he built a harbor fort at Rio,
and, because it was successfully repro-
duced on the Baltic, was created a Ger-
man baron. In a later year, possibly, he
was president of an International Con-
gress of Engineers at Madrid ; but in his
casual accounts of himself it is a little
difficult to keep track of the years, and
to know just where he had time for his
visits to Chili and Peru, and incidental-
ly for his experiences as a cowboy oa
our own plains, and as the builder of the
Jalisco and Mexican Railroad. When
a youth has done all these things, there
is no reason why he should not take the
further steps, in which we follow him, as
the head of an enormous mining enter-
prise in South America, the temporary,
and of course successful, commander in
a revolution at Olancho, and the perfect-
ly " turned out " man of the world, who

soon discovers the superiority of his em-
ployer's younger daughter, and wins her
hand without having to ask for it.

It should be said in justice to this
Admirable Crichton that he defines some
of his own actions as " gallery plays."
In like manner, when the cloud of the
revolution is about to burst, the hero-
ine appears on the scene, protesting, " I
always ride over to polo alone at New-
port, at least with James ; " her bro-
ther says, " It reminds me of a foot-
ball match, when the teams run on the
field ; " and the hero himself likens it to
a scene in a play. When a revolution
begins on this wise, with such partici-
pants, one is well prepared to see it go
forward somewhat like a performance of
amateur theatricals, in which the play-
ers enjoy themselves exceedingly, but
make very timid and incipient approaches
to reality. Indeed, for all of Mr. Davis's
brave and familiar habit of speech, as if
from the very core of things, the real
scene of the revolution seems to be the
author's study-table, and the merit of the
book grows sensibly less as the fight pro-
ceeds.

The inherent elements of its struc-
ture, already mentioned, go far to re-
deem the book. But not only by their
means has Mr. Davis shown his strength.
In the sisters, Alice and Hope Langham,
he has made two excellent types of the
girl spoiled and unspoiled by the world.
In Mac Williams, with his " barber-shop
chords " and his good vulgarity, he has
drawn a picture admirably true to life.
In the vivid reproduction of scenes, in
none more notably than that of the
killing of Stuart and the leaving of his
dead body in the empty room, he has
sometimes shown the hand almost of a
master in description.

It is no disheartening sign of the times
that such a book is read, for youth and
beauty and prowess march across its
pages, and behind them one feels the
creator's honest sympathy with these
things.

BINDING SECT. MAR 7 -1968

v.80

The Atlantic monthly

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