Kavanagh, a tale

Salem Cuitions

OF WELL-KNOWN BOOKS,
With other Editions in similar style.

THE SCARLET LETTER. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

i8mo, 30 cents.
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. By HAWTHORNE.

i8mo, 30 cents.

TWICE-TOLD TALES. By HAWTHORNE. i8mo, 40 cents.
MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. By HAWTHORNE.

iSmo, 40 cents.

THE SNOW- 1 MAGE. By HAWTHORNE. i8mo, 30 cents.
A WONDER-BOOK. By HAWTHORNE. i8mo, 30 cents.

Portland

HYPERION: A Romance. By HENRY WAUSWORTH LONG

FELLOW. i8mo, 30 cents.

OUTRE-MER. By LONGFELLOW. iSmo, 30 cents.
KAVANAGH : A Tale. By LONGFELLOW. 181110, 30 cents.

<*£bition.

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
iSmo.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

KAVANAGH : A TALE

BY HENRY WADSWORTH
LONGFELLOW

PORTLAND EDITION

The House in Portland, Maine
where Longfellow was born

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

(€J;c tiiUccsidc press, £ambnb0c

1893

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872,

BV HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

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

TJu Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A,
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

LOAN STACK
GIFT

\n

/ •

KAVANAGH

A TALE

The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it

SHAKESPEARE

I 955

KAVANAGH

i.

REAT men stand like solitary towers
in the city of God, and secret passages
running deep beneath external nature give
their thoughts intercourse with higher intelli
gences, which strengthens and consoles them,
and of which the laborers on the surface do
not even dream !

Some such thought as this was floating
vaguely through the brain of Mr. Churchill,
as he closed his school-house door behind
him ; and if in any degree he applied it to
himself, it may perhaps be pardoned in a
dreamy, poetic man like him ; for we judge
ourselves by what we feel capable of doing,
while others judge us by what we have al
ready done. And moreover his wife consid
ered him equal to great things. To the people
in the village, he was the schoolmaster, and

8 Kavanagh

nothing more. They beheld in his form
and countenance no outward sign of the di
vinity within. They saw him daily moiling
and delving in the common path, like a bee
tle, and little thought that underneath that
hard and cold exterior, lay folded delicate
golden wings, wherewith, when the heat of
day was over, he soared and revelled in the
pleasant evening air.

To-day he was soaring and revelling be
fore the sun had set ; for it was Saturday.
With a feeling of infinite relief he left behind
him the empty school-house, into which the
hot sun of a September afternoon was pour
ing. All the bright young faces were gone ;
all the impatient little hearts were gone ; all
the fresh voices, shrill, but musical with the
melody of childhood were gone ; and the late
ly busy realm was given up to silence, and the
dusty sunshine, and the old gray flies, that
buzzed and bumped their heads against the
window-panes. The sound of the outer door,
creaking on its hebdomadal hinges, was like a
sentinel's challenge, to which the key growled
responsive in the lock ; and the master, cast
ing a furtive glance at the last caricature of
himself in red chalk on the wooden fence close

A Tale 9

V

by, entered with a light step the solemn av
enue of pines that led to the margin of the
river.

At first his step was quick and nervous ; and
he swung his cane as if aiming blows at some in
visible and retreating enemy. Though a meek
man, there were moments when he remembered
with bitterness the unjust reproaches of fathers
and their insulting words ; and then he fought
imaginary battles with people out of sight, and
struck them to the ground, and trampled upon
them ; for Mr. Churchill was not exempt from
the weakness of human nature, nor the cus
tomary vexations of a schoolmaster's life.
Unruly sons and unreasonable fathers did
sometimes embitter his else sweet days and
nights. But as he walked, his step grew
slower, and his heart calmer. The coolness
and shadows of the great trees comforted and
satisfied him, and he heard the voice of the
wind as it were the voice of spirits calling
around him in the air. So that when he
emerged from the black woodlands into the
meadows by the river's side, all his cares were
forgotten.

He lay down for a moment under a syca
more, and thought of the Roman Consul Li-

i o Kavanagh

cinius, passing a night with eighteen of his
followers in the hollow trunk of the great
Lycian plane-tree. From the branches over
head the falling seeds were wafted away
through the soft air on plumy tufts of down.
The continuous murmur of the leaves and of
the swift-running stream seemed rather to
deepen than disturb the pleasing solitude and
silence of the place ; and for a moment he
imagined himself far away in the broad prai
ries of the West, and lying beneath the luxu
riant trees that overhang the banks of the
Wabash and the Kaskaskia. He saw the
sturgeon leap from the river, and flash for
a moment in the sunshine. Then a flock of
wild-fowl flew across the sky towards the
sea-mist that was rising slowly in the east ;
and his soul seemed to float away on the riv
er's current, till he had glided far out into
the measureless sea, and the sound of the
wind among the leaves was no longer the
sound of the wind, but of the sea.

Nature had made Mr. Churchill a poet, but
destiny made him a schoolmaster. This pro
duced a discord between his outward and his
inward existence. Life presented itself to him
like the Sphinx, with its perpetual riddle of

A Tale i :

the real and the ideal. To the solution of this
dark problem he devoted his days and his
nights. He was forced to teach grammar
when he would fain have written poems ; and
from day to day, and from year to year, the
trivial things of life postponed the great de
signs, which he felt capable of accomplishing,
but never had the resolute courage to begin.
Thus he dallied with his thoughts and with
all things, and wasted his strength on trifles ;
like the lazy sea, that plays with the peb
bles on its beach, but under the inspiration of
the wind might lift great navies on its out
stretched palms, and toss them into the air
as playthings.

The evening came. The setting sun stretched
his celestial rods of light across the level land
scape, and, like the Hebrew in Egypt, smote
the rivers and the brooks and the ponds, and
they became as blood.

Mr. Churchill turned his steps homeward.
He climbed the hill with the old windmill on
its summit, and below him saw the lights of
the village ; and around him the great land
scape sinking deeper and deeper into the sea
of darkness. He passed an orchard. The air
was filled with the odor of the fallen fruit,

1 2 Kavanagh

which seemed to him as sweet as the fra
grance of the blossoms in June. A few steps
farther brought him to an old and neglected
graveyard ; and he paused a moment to look
at the white gleaming stone, under which
slumbered the old clergyman, who came into
the village in the time of the Indian wars,
and on which was recorded that for half a cen
tury he had been " a painful preacher of the
word." He entered the village street, and in
terchanged a few words with Mr. Pendexter,
the venerable divine, whom he found standing
at his gate. He met, also, an ill-looking man,
carrying so many old boots that he seemed
literally buried in them ; and at intervals en
countered a stream of strong tobacco smoke,
exhaled from the pipe of an Irish laborer, and
pervading the damp evening air. At length
he reached his own door.

A Tale 13

II.

WHEN Mr. Churchill entered his study,
he found the lamp lighted, and his wife
waiting for him. The wood fire was singing
on the hearth like a grasshopper in the heat
and silence of a summer noon; and to his
heart the chill autumnal evening became a
summer noon. His wife turned towards him
with looks of love in her joyous blue eyes ;
and in the serene expression of her face he
read the Divine beatitude, " Blessed are the
pure in heart."

No sooner had he seated himself by the fire
side than the door was swung wide open, and
on the threshold stood, with his legs apart, like
a miniature colossus, a lovely, golden boy,
about three years old, with long, light locks,
and very red cheeks. After a moment's pause,
he dashed forward into the room with a shout,
and established himself in a large arm-chair,
which he converted into a carrier's wagon, and
over the back of which he urged forward his

1 4 Kavanagh

imaginary horses. He was followed by Lucy,
the maid of all work, bearing in her arms the
baby, with large, round eyes, and no hair. In
his mouth he held an India-rubber ring, and
looked very much like a street-door knocker.
He came down to say good night, but after he
got down, could not say it ; not being able to
say anything but a kind of explosive " Papa ! "
He was then a good deal kissed and tormented
in various ways, and finally sent off to bed
blowing little bubbles with his mouth, — Lucy
blessing his little heart, and asseverating that
nobody could feed him in the night without
loving him ; and that if the flies bit him any
more she would pull out every tooth in their
heads !

Then came Master Alfred's hour of triumph
and sovereign sway. The fire-light gleamed
on his hard, red cheeks, and glanced from his
liquid eyes, and small, white teeth. He piled
his wagon full of books and papers, and dashed
off to town at the top of his speed ; he deliv
ered and received parcels and letters, and
played the post-boy's horn with his lips. Then
he climbed the back of the great chair, sang
" Sweep ho ! " as from the top of a very high
chimney, and, sliding down upon the cushion,

A Tale 1 5

pretended to fall asleep in a little white bed,
with white curtains ; from which imaginary
slumber his father awoke him by crying in his
ear, in mysterious tones, —

" What little boy is this ! "

Finally he sat down in his chair at his moth
er's knee, and listened very attentively, and for
the hundredth time, to the story of the dog
Jumper, which was no sooner ended, than vo
ciferously called for again and again. On the
fifth repetition, it was cut as short as the dog's
tail by Lucy, who, having put the baby to bed,
now came for Master Alfred. He seemed to
hope he had been forgotten, but was neverthe
less marched off without any particular regard
to his feelings, and disappeared in a kind of
abstracted mood, repeating softly to himself his
father's words, —

" Good night, Alfred ! "

His father looked fondly after him as he
went up stairs, holding Lucy by one hand,
and with the other rubbing the sleep out of
his eyes.

"Ah! these children, these children !" said
Mr. Churchill, as he sat down at the tea-table ;
"we ought to love them very much now, for
we shall not have them long with us ! "

1 6 Kavanagh

"Good heavens!" exclaimed his wife, "what
do you mean ? Does anything ail them ? Are
they going to die ? "

" I hope not. But they are going to grow
up, and be no longer children."

" O, you foolish man ! You gave me such a
fright ! "

" And yet it seems impossible that they
should ever grow to be men, and drag the
heavy artillery along the dusty roads of life."

" And I hope they never will. That is the
last thing I want either of them to do."

" O, I do not mean literally, only figurative
ly. By the way, speaking of growing up and
growing old, I saw Mr. Pendexter this evening,
as I came home."

" And what had he to say ? "

" He told me he should preach his farewell
sermon to-morrow."

" Poor old man ! I really pity him."

" So do I. But it must be confessed he is a
dull preacher ; and I dare say it is as dull
work for him as for his hearers."

" Why are they going to send him away ? "

"O, there are a great many reasons. He
does not give time and attention enough to his
sermons and to his parish. He is always at

A Tale 17

work on his farm ; always wants his salary
raised ; and insists upon his right to pasture
his horse in the parish fields."

" Hark ! " cried his wife, lifting up her face
in a listening attitude.

" What is the matter ? "

" I thought I heard the baby ! "

There was a short silence. Then Mr.
Churchill said, —

" It was only the cat in the cellar."

At this moment Lucy came in. She hesi
tated a little, and then, in a submissive voice,
asked leave to go down to the village to buy
some ribbon for her bonnet. Lucy was a girl
of fifteen, who had been taken a few years be
fore from an Orphan Asylum. Her dark eyes
had a gypsy look, and she wore her brown hair
twisted round her head after the manner of
some of Murillo's girls. She had Milesian
blood in her veins, and was impetuous and im
patient of contradiction.

When she had left the room, the school
master resumed the conversation by say
ing, —

"I do not like Lucy's going out so much
in the evening. I am afraid she will get into
trouble. She is really very pretty."

i8 Kavanagh

Then there was another pause, after which
he added, —

"My dear wife, one thing puzzles me ex
ceedingly. "

"And what is that?"

" It is to know what that man does with all
the old boots he picks up about the village.
I met him again this evening. He seemed to
have as many feet as Briareus had hands. He
is a kind of centipede."

" But what has that to do with Lucy ? "

"Nothing. It only occurred to me at the
moment ; and I never can imagine what he
does with so many old boots."

A Tale 19

III.

WHEN tea was over, Mr. Churchill walked
to and fro in his study, as his custom
was. And as he walked, he gazed with secret
rapture at the books, which lined the walls,
and thought how many bleeding hearts and
aching heads had found consolation for them
selves and imparted it to others, by writing
those pages. The books seemed to him al
most as living beings, so instinct were they
with human thoughts and sympathies. It was
as if the authors themselves were gazing at
him from the walls, with countenances neither
sorrowful nor glad, but full of calm indifference
to fate, like those of the poets who appeared to
Dante in his vision, walking together on the
dolorous shore. And then he dreamed of
fame, and thought that perhaps hereafter he
might be in some degree, and to some one,
what these men were to him ; and in the en
thusiasm of the moment he exclaimed aloud, —
"Would you have me be like these, dear
Mary?"

2O Kavanagh

" Like these what ? " asked his wife, not com
prehending him.

" Like these great and good men, — like
these scholars and poets, — the authors of all
these books ! "

She pressed his hand and said, in a soft, but
excited tone, —

" O, yes ! Like them, only perhaps better ! "
"Then I will write a Romance !"
"Write it!" said his wife, like the angel.
For she believed that then he would become
famous forever ; and that all the vexed and
busy world would stand still to hear him blow
his little trumpet, whose sound was to rend
the adamantine walls of time, and reach the
ears of a far-off and startled posterity.

A Tale 21

IV.

« T WAS thinking to-day," said Mr. Church-
A ill a few minutes afterwards, as he took
some papers from a drawer scented with a
quince, and arranged them on the study table,
while his wife as usual seated herself opposite
to him with her work in her hand, — "I was
thinking to-day how dull and prosaic the study
of mathematics is made in our school-books ;
as if the grand science of numbers had been
discovered and perfected merely to further the
purposes of trade."

" For my part," answered his wife, " I do not
see how you can make mathematics poetical.
There is no poetry in them."

" Ah, that is a very great mistake ! There
is something divine in the science of numbers.
Like God, it holds the sea in the hollow of its
hand. It measures the earth ; it weighs the
stars ; it illumines the universe ; it is law, it is
order, it is beauty. And yet we imagine —
that is, most of us — that its highest end and
culminating point is book-keeping by double

2 2 Kavanagh

entry. It is our way of teaching it that makes
it so prosaic."

So saying, he arose, and went to one of his
book-cases, from the shelf of which he took
down a little old quarto volume, and laid it
upon the table.

" Now here, " he continued, " is a book of
mathematics of quite a different stamp from
ours."

" It looks very old. What is it ? "

"It is the Lilawati of Bhascara Acharya,
translated from the Sanscrit."

"It is a pretty name. Pray what does it
mean?"

" Lilawati was the name of Bhascara's
daughter ; and the book was written to per
petuate it. Here is an account of the whole
matter."

He then opened the volume, and read as fol
lows : —

" It is said that the composing of Lilawati
was occasioned by the following circumstance.
Lilawati was the name of the author's daugh
ter, concerning whom it appeared, from the
qualities of the Ascendant at her birth, that
she was destined to pass her life unmarried,
and to remain without children. The father

A Tale 23

ascertained a lucky hour for contracting her
in marriage, that she might be firmly connect
ed, and have children. It is said that, when
that hour approached, he brought his daugh
ter and his intended son near him. He left
the hour-cup on the vessel of water, and kept
in attendance a time-knowing astrologer, in
order that, when the cup should subside in the
water, those two precious jewels should be uni
ted. But as the intended arrangement was
not according to destiny, it happened that the
girl, from a curiosity natural to children, looked
into the cup to observe the water coming in at
the hole ; when by chance a pearl separated
from her bridal dress, fell into the cup, and,
rolling down to the hole, stopped the influx of
the water. So the astrologer waited in expec
tation of the promised hour. When the ope
ration of the cup had thus been delayed beyond
all moderate time, the father was in consterna
tion, and examining, he found that a small
pearl had stopped the course of the water, and
the long-expected hour was passed. In short,
the father, thus disappointed, said to his un
fortunate daughter, I will write a book of your
name, which shall remain to the latest times,
— for a good name is a second life, and the
groundwork of eternal existence."

24 Kavanagh

As the schoolmaster read, the eyes of his
wife dilated and grew tender, and she said, —

"What a beautiful story! When did it
happen ? "

" Seven hundred years ago, among the Hin
doos."

" Why not write a poem about it ? "

"Because it is already a poem of itself, —
one of those things, of which the simplest state
ment is the best, and which lose by embellish
ment. The old Hindoo legend, brown with
age, would not please me so well if decked in
gay colors, and hung round with the tinkling
bells of rhyme. Now hear how the book be-
gins."

Again he read : —

"Salutation to the elephant-headed Being
who infuses joy into the minds of his worship
pers, who delivers from every difficulty those
that call upon him, and whose feet are rever
enced by the gods ! — Reverence to Ganesa,
who is beautiful as the pure purple lotos, and
around whose neck the black curling snake
winds itself in playful folds ! "

" That sounds rather mystical," said his wife.

" Yes, the book begins with a salutation to
the Hindoo deities, as the old Spanish Chron-

A Tale 25

icles begin in the name of God, and the Holy
Virgin. And now see how poetical some of
the examples are."

He then turned over the leaves slowly and
read, —

" One third of a collection of beautiful water-
lilies is offered to Mahadev, one fifth to Huri,
one sixth to the Sun, one fourth to Devi, and
six which remain are presented to the spirit
ual teacher. Required the whole number of
water-lilies."

" That is very pretty," said the wife, " and
would put it into the boys' heads to bring you
pond-lilies."

" Here is a prettier one still. One fifth of a
hive of bees flew to the Kadamba flower ; one
third flew to the Silandhara ; three times the
difference of these two numbers flew to an
arbor ; and one bee continued flying about,
attracted on each side by the fragrant Ketaki
and the Malati. What was the number of the
bees ? "

" I am sure I should never be able to tell."

"Ten times the square root of a flock of
geese "

Here Mrs. Churchill laughed aloud ; but he
continued very gravely, —

26 Kavanagh

"Ten times the square root of a flock of
geese, seeing the clouds collect, flew to the
Manus lake ; one eighth of the whole flew
from the edge of the water amongst a multi
tude of water-lilies ; and three couple were
observed playing in the water. Tell me, my
young girl with beautiful locks, what was the
whole number of geese ? "

" Well, what was it ? "

" What should you think ? "

" About twenty."

" No, one hundred and forty-four. Now try
another. The square root of half a number
of bees, and also eight ninths of the whole,
alighted on the jasmines, and a female bee
buzzed responsive to the hum of the male
enclosed at night in a water-lily. O, beautiful
damsel, tell me the number of bees."

" That is not there. You made it."

" No, indeed I did not. I wish I had made
it. Look and see."

He showed her the book, and she read it
herself. He then proposed some of the geo
metrical questions.

"In a lake the bud of a water-lily was
observed, one span above the water, and when
moved by the gentle breeze, it sank in the

A Tale 27

water at two cubits' distance. Required the
depth of the water."

"That is charming, but must be very diffi
cult. I could not answer it."

" A tree one hundred cubits high is distant
from a well two hundred cubits ; from this tree
one monkey descends and goes to the well ;
another monkey takes a leap upwards, and
then descends by the hypothenuse ; and both
pass over an equal space. Required the
height of the leap."

" I do not believe you can answer that
question yourself, without looking into the
book," said the laughing wife, laying her hand
over the solution. " Try it."

" With great pleasure, my dear child," cried
the confident schoolmaster, taking a pencil
and paper. After making a few figures and
calculations, he answered, —

" There, my young girl with beautiful locks,
there is the answer, — forty cubits."

His wife removed her hand from the book,
and then, clapping both in triumph, she ex
claimed, —

" No, you are wrong, you are wrong, my
beautiful youth with a bee in your bonnet. It
is fifty cubits ! "

28 Kavanagk

" Then I must have made some mistake."

" Of course you did. Your monkey did not
jump high enough."

She signalized his mortifying defeat as if it
had been a victory, by showering kisses, like
roses, upon his forehead and cheeks, as he
passed beneath the triumphal archway of her
arms, trying in vain to articulate, —

" My dearest Lilawati, what is the whole
number of the geese ? "

A Tale 29

V.

AFTER extricating himself from this pleas
ing dilemma, he said, —

"But I am now going to write. I must
really begin in sober earnest, or I shall never
get anything finished. And you know I have
so many things to do, so many books to write,
that really I do not know where to begin. I
think I will take up the Romance first."

" It will not make much difference, if you
only begin ! "

" That is true. I will not lose a moment."

"Did you answer Mr. Wainwright's letter
about the cottage bedstead ? "

" Dear me, no ! I forgot it entirely. That
must be done first, or he will make it all
wrong."

"And the young lady who sent you the
poetry to look over and criticise ? "

" No ; I have not had a single moment's
leisure. And there is Mr. Hanson, who wants
to know about the cooking-range. Confound
it ! there is always something interfering with

3<D Kavanagh

my Romance. However, I will despatch those
matters very speedily."

And he began to write with great haste.
For a while nothing was heard but the
scratching of his pen. Then he said, proba
bly in connection with the cooking-range, —

"One of the most convenient things in
housekeeping is a ham. It is always ready,
and always welcome. You can eat it with
anything and without anything. It reminds
me always of the great wild boar Scrimner,
in the Northern Mythology, who is killed
every day for the gods to feast on in Val
halla, and comes to life again every night."

" In that case, I should think the gods
would have the nightmare," said his wife.

" Perhaps they do."

And then another long silence, broken only
by the skating of the swift pen over the sheet.
Presently Mrs. Churchill said, — as if follow
ing out her own train of thought, while she
'reased plying her needle to bite off the
thread, which women will sometimes do in
spite of all that is said against it, —

"A man came here to-day, calling himself
the agent of an extensive house in the needle
trade. He left this sample, and said the drill

A Tale 31

of the eye was superior to any other, and they
are warranted not to cut the thread. He puts
them at the wholesale price ; and if I do not
like the sizes, he offers to exchange them for
others, either sharps or betweens."

To this remark the abstracted schoolmaster
vouchsafed no reply. He found his half-dozen
letters not so easily answered, particularly that
to the poetical young lady, and worked away
busily at them. Finally they were finished
and sealed ; and he looked up to his wife.
She turned her eyes dreamily upon him.
Slumber was hanging in their blue orbs, like
snow in the heavens, ready to fall. It was
quite late, and he said to her, —

" I am too tired, my charming Lilawati, and
you too sleepy, to sit here any longer to
night. And, as I do not wish to begin my Ro
mance without having you at my side, so that
I can read detached passages to you as I write,
I will put it off till to-morrow or the next day."

He watched his wife as she went up stairs
with the light. It was a picture always new
and always beautiful, and like a painting of
Gherardo della Notte. As he followed her, he
paused to look at the stars. The beauty of
the heavens made his soul overflow.

32 Kavanagh

" How absolute," he exclaimed, " how abso
lute and omnipotent is the silence of the
night ! And yet the stillness seems almost
audible ! From all the measureless depths of
air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whis
per, as if we could hear the crumbling and
falling away of earth and all created things,
in the great miracle of nature, decay and re
production, ever beginning, never ending, —
the gradual lapse and running of the sand in
the great hour-glass of Time ! "

In the night, Mr. Churchill had a singular
dream. He thought himself in school, where
he was reading Latin to his pupils. Suddenly
all the genitive cases of the first declension
began to make faces at him, and to laugh im
moderately ; and when he tried to lay hold of
them, they jumped down into the ablative, and
the circumflex accent assumed the form of a
great moustache. Then the little village school-
house was transformed into a vast and endless
school-house of the world, stretching forward,
form after form, through all the generations of
coming time ; and on all the forms sat young
men and old, reading and transcribing his Ro
mance, which now in his dream was completed,
and smiling and passing it onward from one

A Tale 33

to another, till at last the clock in the corner
struck twelve, and the weights ran down with a
strange, angry whirr, and the school broke up ;
and the schoolmaster awoke to find this vision
of fame only a dream, out of which his alarm-
clock had aroused him at an untimely hour.

34 Kavanagh

VI.

"IV /T E AN WHILE, a different scene was tak-
•LYA ing place at the parsonage. Mr. Pen-
dexter had retired to his study to finish his
farewell sermon. Silence reigned through the
house. Sunday had already commenced there.
The week ended with the setting of the sun,
and the evening and the morning were the
first day.

The clergyman was interrupted in his labors
by the old sexton, who called as usual for the
key of the church. He was gently rebuked
for coming so late, and excused himself by
saying that his wife was worse.

•' Poor woman ! " said Mr. Pendexter ; " has
she her mind ? "

" Yes," answered the sexton, " as much as
ever."

" She has been ill a long time," continued
the clergyman. " We have had prayers for
her a great many Sundays."

" It is very true, sir," replied the sexton,
mournfully ; " I have given you a great deal

A Tale 35

of trouble. But you need not pray for her
any more. It is of no use."

Mr. Pendexter's mind was in too fervid
a state to notice the extreme and hopeless
humility of his old parishioner, and the unin
tentional allusion to the inefficacy of his
prayers. He pressed the old man's hand
warmly, and said, with much emotion, —

"To-morrow is the last time that I shall
preach in this parish, where I have preached
for twenty-five years. But it is not the last
time I shall pray for you and your family."

The sexton retired also much moved ; and
the clergyman again resumed his task. His
heart glowed and burned within him. Often
his face flushed and his eyes filled with tears,
so that he could not go on. Often he rose
and paced the chamber to and fro, and wiped
away the large drops that stood on his red
and feverish forehead.

At length the sermon was finished. He
rose and looked out of the window. Slowly
the clock struck twelve. He had not heard it
strike before, since six. The moonlight sil
vered the distant hills, and lay, white almost
as snow, on the frosty roofs of the village. Not
a light could be seen at any window.

36 Kavanagh

" Ungrateful people ! Could you not watch
with me one hour ? " exclaimed he, in that
excited and bitter moment ; as if he had
thought that on that solemn night the whole
parish would have watched, while he was
writing his farewell discourse. He pressed
his hot brow against the window-pane to
allay its fever ; and across the tremulous
wavelets of the river the tranquil moon
sent towards him a silvery shaft of light, like
an angelic salutation. And the consoling
thought came to him that not only this
river, but all rivers and lakes, and the great
sea itself, were flashing with this heavenly
light, though he beheld it as a single ray
only ; and that what to him were the dark
waves were the dark providences of God,
luminous to others, and even to himself should
he change his position.

A Tale 37

VIL

THE morning came ; the dear, delicious,
silent Sunday ; to the weary workman,
both of brain and hand, the beloved day of
rest. When the first bell rang, like a brazen
mortar, it seemed from its gloomy fortress to
bombard the village with bursting shells of
sound, that exploded over the houses, shatter
ing 'the ears of all the parishioners and shak
ing the consciences of many.

Mr. Pendexter was to preach his farewell
sermon. The church was crowded, and only
one person came late. It was a modest, meek
girl, who stole silently up one of the side aisles,
— not so silently, however, but that the pew-
door creaked a little as she opened it ; and
straightway a hundred heads were turned in
that direction, although it was in the midst of
the prayer. Old Mrs. Fairfield did not turn
round, but she and her daughter looked at
each other, and their bonnets made a paren
thesis in the prayer, within which one asked
what that was, and the other replied, —

38 Kavanagh

"It is only Alice Archer. She always
comes late."

Finally the long prayer was ended, and the
congregation sat down, and the weary children
— who are always restless during prayers, and
had been for nearly half an hour twisting and
turning, and standing first on one foot and
then on the other, and hanging their heads
over the backs of the pews, like tired colts
looking into neighboring pastures — settled
suddenly down, and subsided into something
like rest.

The sermon began, — such a sermon as had
never been preached, or even heard of before.
It brought many tears into the eyes of the
pastor's friends, and made the stoutest hearts
among his foes quake with something like
remorse. As he announced the text, " Yea,
I think it meet as long as I am in this tab
ernacle to stir you up, by putting you in
remembrance," it seemed as if the apostle
Peter himself, from whose pen the words
first proceeded, were calling them to judg
ment.

He began by giving a minute sketch of his
ministry and the state of the parish, with all
its troubles and dissensions, social, political,

A Tale 39

and ecclesiastical. He concluded by thank
ing those ladies who had presented him with
a black silk gown, and had been kind to his
wife during her long illness ; — by apologizing
for having neglected his own business, which
was to study and preach, in order to attend to
that of the parish, which was to support its
minister, — stating that his own shortcomings
had been owing to theirs, which had driven
him into the woods in winter and into the
fields in summer ; — and finally by telling the
congregation in general that they were so
confirmed in their bad habits, that no refor
mation was to be expected in them under his
ministry, and that to produce one would re
quire a greater exercise of Divine power than
it did to create the world ; for in creating the
world there had been no opposition, whereas,
in their reformation, their own obstinacy and
evil propensities, and self-seeking, and worldly-
mindedness, were all to be overcome !

40 Kavanagk

VIII.

T17HEN Mr. Pendexter had finished his
* V discourse, and pronounced his last ben
ediction upon a congregation to whose spirit
ual Wants he had ministered for so many
years, his people, now his no more, returned
home in very various states of mind. Some
were exasperated, others mortified, and others
filled with pity.

Among the last was Alice Archer, — a fair,
delicate girl, whose whole life had been sad
dened by a too sensitive organization, and by
somewhat untoward circumstances. She had
a pale, transparent complexion, and large gray
eyes, that seemed to see visions. Her figure
was slight, almost fragile ; her hands white,
slender, diaphanous. With these external traits
her character was in unison. She was thought
ful, silent, susceptible ; often sad, often in tears,
often lost in reveries. She led a lonely life
with her mother, who was old, querulous, and
nearly blind. She had herself inherited a pre
disposition to blindness ; and in her disease

A Tale 41

there was this peculiarity, that she could see
in Summer, but in Winter the power of vision
failed her.

The old house they lived in, with its four
sickly Lombardy poplars in front, suggested
gloomy and mournful thoughts. It was one of
those houses that depress you as you enter, as
if many persons had died in it, — sombre, des
olate, silent. The very clock in the hall had a
dismal sound, gasping and catching its breath
at times, and striking the hour with a violent,
determined blow, reminding one of Jael driv
ing the nail into the head of Sisera.

One other inmate the house had, and only
one. This was Sally Manchester, or Miss Sal
ly Manchester, as she preferred to be called ;
an excellent chamber-maid and a very bad
cook, for she served in both capacities. She
was, indeed, an extraordinary woman, of large
frame and masculine features ; — one of those
who are born to work, and accept their in
heritance of toil as if it were play, and who
consequently, in the language of domestic rec
ommendations, are usually styled "a treasure,
if you can get her." A treasure she was to
this family ; for she did all the housework, and
in addition took care of the cow and the poul-

42 Kavanagh

try, — occasionally venturing into the field of
veterinary practice, and administering lamp-
oil to the cock, when she thought he crowed
hoarsely. She had on her forehead what is
sometimes denominated a " widow's peak," —
that is to say, her hair grew down to a point
in the middle ; and on Sundays she appeared
at church in a blue poplin gown, with a large
pink bow on what she called "the congre
gation side of her bonnet" Her mind was
strong, like her person ; her disposition not
sweet, but, as is sometimes said of apples by
way of recommendation, a pleasant sour.

Such were the inmates of the gloomy house,-
— from which the last-mentioned frequently
expressed her intention of retiring, being en
gaged to a travelling dentist, who, in filling
her teeth with amalgam, had seized the op
portunity to fill a soft place in her heart with
something still more dangerous and mercurial.
The wedding-day had been from time to time
postponed, and at length the family hoped and
believed it never would come, — a wish pro
phetic of its own fulfilment.

Almost the only sunshine that from without
shone into the dark mansion came from the
face of Cecilia Vaughan, the school-mate and

A Tale 43

bosom-friend of Alice Archer. They were
nearly of the same age, and had been drawn
together by that mysterious power which
discovers and selects friends for us in our
childhood. They sat together in school ; they
walked together after school ; they told each
other their manifold secrets ; they wrote long
and impassioned letters to each other in the
evening ; in a word, they were in love with
each other. It was, so to speak, a rehearsal
in girlhood of the great drama of woman's
life.

44 Kavanagh

IX.

golden tints of Autumn now bright-
ened the shrubbery around this melan
choly house, and took away something of
its gloom. The four poplar trees seemed all
ablaze, and flickered in the wind like huge
torches. The little border of box filled the air
with fragrance, and seemed to welcome the re
turn of Alice, as she ascended the steps, and
entered the house with a lighter heart than
usual. The brisk autumnal air had quickened
her pulse and given a glow to her cheek.

She found her mother alone in the parlor,
seated in her large arm-chair. The warm sun
streamed in at the uncurtained windows ; and
lights and shadows from the leaves lay upon
her face. She turned her head as Alice en
tered, and said, —

" Who is it ? Is it you, Alice ? "

" Yes, it is I, mother."

" Where have you been so long ? "

" I have been nowhere, dear mother. I
have come directly home from church."

A Tale 45

" How long it seems to me ! It is very late.
It is growing quite dark. I was just going to
call for the lights."

" Why, mother ! " exclaimed Alice, in a
startled tone ; " what do you mean ? The
sun is shining directly into your face ! "

"Impossible, my dear Alice. It is quite
dark. I cannot see you. Where are you ? "

She leaned over her mother and kissed her.
Both were silent, — both wept. They knew
that the hour, so long looked forward to with
dismay, had suddenly come. Mrs. Archer was
blind !

This scene of sorrow was interrupted by the
abrupt entrance of Sally Manchester. She,
too, was in tears ; but she was weeping for
her own affliction. In her hand she held an
open letter, which she gave to Alice, exclaim
ing amid sobs, —

" Read this, Miss Archer, and see how false
man can be ! Never trust any man ! They
are all alike ; they are all false — false — false ! "

Alice took the letter and read as follows : —

" It is with pleasure, Miss Manchester, I sit
down to write you a few lines. I esteem you
as highly as ever, but Providence has seemed
to order and direct my thoughts and affections

46 Kavanagk

to another, — one in my own neighborhood.
It was rather unexpected to me. Miss Man
chester, I suppose you are well aware that we,
as professed Christians, ought to be resigned
to our lot in this world. May God assist you,
so that we may be prepared to join the great
company in heaven. Your answer would be
very desirable. I respect your virtue, and re
gard you as a friend.

"MARTIN CHERRYFIELD.

" P. S. The society is generally pretty good
here, but the state of religion is quite low/'

" That is a cruel letter, Sally, " said Alice,
as she handed it back to her. " But we all
have our troubles. That man is unworthy of
you. Think no more about him."

" What is the matter ? " inquired Mrs. Archer,
hearing the counsel given and the sobs with
which it was received. " Sally, what is the
matter?"

Sally made no answer ; but Alice said, —

"Mr. Cherryfield has fallen in love with
somebody else."

" Is that all ? " said Mrs. Archer, evidently
relieved. "She ought to be very glad of it.
Why does she want to be married ? She had

A Tale 47

much better stay with us ; particularly now
that I am blind."

When Sally heard this last word, she looked
up in consternation. In a moment she forgot
her own grief to sympathize with Alice and
her mother. She wanted to do a thousand
things at once ; — to go here ; — to send there;
— to get this and that ; — and particularly to
call all the doctors in the neighborhood. Alice
assured her it would be of no avail, though she
finally consented that one should be sent for.

Sally went in search of him. On her way,
her thoughts reverted to herself; and, to use
her own phrase, "she curbed in like a stage-
horse," as she walked. This state of haughty
and offended pride continued for some hours
after her return home. Later in the day, she
assumed a decent composure, and requested
that the man — she scorned to name him —
might never again be mentioned in her hear
ing. Thus was her whole dream of felicity
swept away by the tide of fate, as the nest of a
ground-swallow by an inundation. It had been
built too low to be secure.

Some women, after a burst of passionate
tears, are soft, gentle, affectionate ; a warm
and genial air succeeds the rain. Others cleai

48 Kavanagh

up cold, and are breezy, bleak, and dismal.
Of the latter class was Sally Manchester.
She became embittered against all men on
account of one ; and was often heard to say
that she thought women were fools to be mar
ried, and that, for one, she would not marry
any man, let him be who he might, — not she !
The village doctor came. He was a large
man, of the cheerful kind ; vigorous, florid, en
couraging ; and pervaded by an indiscriminate
odor of drugs. Loud voice, large cane, thick
boots ; — everything about him synonymous
with noise. His presence in the sick-room
was like martial music, — inspiriting, but loud.
He seldom left it without saying to the pa
tient, " I hope you will feel more comfortable
to-morrow, " or, " When your fever leaves you,
you will be better." But, in this instance, he
could not go so far. Even his hopefulness
was not sufficient for the emergency. Mrs.
Archer was blind, — beyond remedy, beyond
hope, — irrevocably blind !

A Tale 49

X.

ON the following morning, very early, as
the schoolmaster stood at his door, in
haling the bright, wholesome air, and behold
ing the shadows of the rising sun, and the
flashing dew-drops on the red vine-leaves, he
heard the sound of wheels, and saw Mr. Pen-
dexter and his wife drive down the village
street in their old-fashioned chaise, known by
all the boys in town as " the ark." The old
white horse, that for so many years had
stamped at funerals, and gnawed the tops of
so many posts, and imagined he killed so
many flies because he wagged the stump of a
tail, and, finally, had been the cause of so much
discord in the parish, seemed now to make
common cause with his master, and stepped as
if endeavoring to shake the dust from his feet
as he passed out of the ungrateful village.
Under the axle-tree hung suspended a leather
trunk ; and in the chaise, between the two oc
cupants, was a large bandbox which forced
Mr. Pendexter to let his legs hang out of the

50 Kavanagk

vehicle, and gave him the air of imitating the
Scriptural behavior of his horse. Gravely and
from a distance he saluted the schoolmaster,
who saluted him in return, with a tear in his
eye, that no man saw, but which, nevertheless,
was not unseen.

" Farewell, poor old man ! " said the school
master within himself, as he shut out the cold
autumnal air, and entered his comfortable
study. "We are not worthy of thee, or we
should have had thee with us forever. Go
back again to the place of thy childhood, the
scene of thine early labors and thine early
love ; let thy days end where they began, and
like the emblem of eternity, let the serpent of
life coil itself round and take its tail into its
mouth, and be still from all its hissings for ev
ermore ! I would not call thee back ; for it is
better thou shouldst be where thou art, than
amid the angry contentions of this little town."

Not all took leave of the old clergyman in so
kindly a spirit. Indeed, there was a pretty
general feeling of relief in the village, as when
one gets rid of an ill-fitting garment, or old-
fashioned hat, which one neither wishes to
wear, nor is quite willing to throw away.

Thus Mr. Pendexter departed from the vil-

A Tale 51

lage. A few days afterwards he was seen at a
fall training, or general muster of the militia,
making a prayer on horseback, with his eyes
wide open ; a performance in which he took
evident delight, as it gave him an opportunity
of going quite at large into some of the blood
iest campaigns of the ancient Hebrews.

52 Kavanagk

XL

FOR a while the schoolmaster walked to
and fro, looking at the gleam of the sun
shine on the carpet, and revelling in his day
dreams of unwritten books, and literary fame.
With these day-dreams mingled confusedly the
pattering of little feet, and the murmuring and
cooing of his children overhead. His plans
that morning, could he have executed them,
would have filled a shelf in his library with po
ems and romances of his own creation. But
suddenly the vision vanished ; and another
from the actual world took its place. It was
the canvas-covered cart of the butcher, that,
like the flying wigwam of the Indian tale, flit
ted before his eyes. It drove up the yard and
stopped at the back door ; and the poet felt
that the sacred rest of Sunday, the God's-truce
with worldly cares, was once more at an end.
A dark hand passed between him and the land
of light. Suddenly closed the ivory gate of
dreams, and the horn gate of every-day life
opened, and he went forth to deal with the

anH hlnnrl

A Tale 53

"Alas ! " said he with a sigh ; " and must my
life, then, always be like the Sabbatical river of
the Jews, flowing in full stream only on the
seventh day, and sandy and arid all the rest ? "

Then he thought of his beautiful wife and
children, and added, half aloud, —

" No ; not so ! Rather let me look upon the
seven days of the week as the seven magic
rings of Jarchas, each inscribed with the name
of a separate planet, and each possessing a pe
culiar power ; — or, as the seven sacred and
mysterious stones which the pilgrims of Mecca
were forced to throw over their shoulders in
the valleys of Menah and Akbah, cursing the
devil and saying at each throw, ' God is
great!'"

He found Mr. Wilmerdings, the butcher,
standing beside his cart, and surrounded by
five cats, that had risen simultaneously on their
hind legs, to receive their quotidian morning's
meal. Mr. Wilmerdings not only supplied the
village with fresh provisions daily, but he like
wise weighed all the babies. There was hard
ly a child in town that had not hung beneath
his steelyards, tied in a silk handkerchief, the
movable weight above sliding along the notched
beam from eight pounds to twelve. He was a

54 Kavanagh

young man with a very fresh and rosy complex
ion, and every Monday morning he appeared
dressed in an exceedingly white frock. He
had lately married a milliner, who sold " Dun-
stable and eleven-braid, openwork and colored
straws," and their bridal tour had been to a
neighboring town to see a man hanged for
murdering his wife. A pair of huge ox-horns
branched from the gable of his slaughter
house ; and near it stood the great pits of the
tannery, which all the school-boys thought
were rilled with blood !

Perhaps no two men could be more unlike
than Mr. Churchill and Mr. Wilmerdings.
Upon such a grating iron hinge opened the
door of his daily life ; — opened into the school
room, the theatre of those life-long labors, which
theoretically are the most noble, and practical
ly the most vexatious in the world. Toward
this, as soon as breakfast was over, and he had
played a while with his children, he directed
his steps. On his way, he had many glimpses
into the lovely realms of Nature, and one into
those of Art, through the medium of a placard
pasted against a wall. It was as follows : —

" The subscriber professes to take profiles,
plain and shaded, which, viewed at right-an-

A Tale 55

gles with the serious countenance, are war
ranted to be infallibly correct.

" No trouble of adorning or dressing the per
son is required. He takes infants and children
at sight, and has frames of all sizes to accom
modate.

"A profile is a delineated outline of the ex
terior form of any person's face and head, the
use of which when seen tends to vivify the af
fections of those whom we esteem or love.

WILLIAM BANTAM."

Erelong even this glimpse into the ideal
world had vanished ; and he felt himself bound
to the earth with a hundred invisible threads,
by which a hundred urchins were tugging and
tormenting him ; and it was only with consid
erable effort, and at intervals, that his mind
could soar to the moral dignity of his profes
sion.

Such was the schoolmaster's life; and a
dreary, weary life it would have been, had not
poetry from within gushed through every crack
and crevice in it. This transformed it, and
made it resemble a well, into which stones and
rubbish have been thrown ; but underneath is
a spring of fresh, pure water, which nothing
external can ever check or defile.

56 Kavanagh

XII.

MR. PENDEXTER had departed. Only
a few old and middle-aged people re
gretted him. To these few, something was
wanting in the service ever afterwards. They
missed the accounts of the Hebrew massacres,
and the wonderful tales of the Zumzummims ;
they missed the venerable gray hair, and the
voice that had spoken to them in childhood,
and forever preserved the memory of it in
their hearts, as in the Russian Church the old
hymns of the earliest centuries are still piously
retained.

The winter came, with all its affluence of
snows, and its many candidates for the vacant
pulpit. But the parish was difficult to please,
as all parishes are ; and talked of dividing it
self, and building a new church, and other
extravagances, as all parishes do. Finally it
concluded to remain as it was, and the choice
of a pastor was made.

The events of the winter were few in num
ber, and can be easily described. The follow-

A Tale 57

ing extract from a school-girl's letter to an
absent friend contains the most important : —

"At school, things have gone on pretty
much as usual. Jane Brown has grown very
pale. They say she is in a consumption ; but I
think it is because she eats so many slate-pen
cils. One of her shoulders has grown a good
deal higher than the other. Billy Wilmerdings
has been turned out of school for playing tru
ant. He promised his mother, if she would
not whip him, he would experience religion.
I am sure I wish he would ; for then he would
stop looking at me through the hole in the top
of his desk. Mr. Churchill is a very curious
man. To-day he gave us this question in
arithmetic : ' One fifth of a hive of bees flew
to the Kadamba flower ; one third flew to
the Silandhara ; three times the difference of
these two numbers flew to an arbor ; and one
bee continued flying about, attracted on each
side by the fragrant Ketaki and the Malati.
What was the number of bees ? ' Nobody
could do the sum.

" The church has been repaired, and we
have a new mahogany pulpit. Mr. Churchill
bought the old one, and had it put up in his
study. What a strange man he is ! A good

58 Kavanagh

many candidates have preached for us. The
only one we like is Mr. Kavanagh. Arthur
Kavanagh ! is not that a romantic name ? He
is tall, very pale, with beautiful black eyes and
hair ! Sally — Alice Archer's Sally — says ' he
is not a man ; he is a Thaddeus of Warsaw ! '
I think he is very handsome. And such ser
mons ! So beautifully written, so different
from old Mr. Pendexter's ! He has been in
vited to settle here ; but he cannot come till
Spring. Last Sunday he preached about the
ruling passion. He said that once a German
nobleman, when he was dying, had his hunt
ing-horn blown in his bed-room, and his
hounds let in, springing and howling about
him ; and that so it was with the ruling pas
sions of men ; even around the death-bed, at
the well-known signal, they howled and leaped
about those that had fostered them ! Beauti
ful, is it not ? and so original ! He said in
another sermon, that disappointments feed
and nourish us in the desert places of life,
as the ravens did the Prophet in the wilder
ness ; and that as, in Catholic countries, the
lamps lighted before the images of saints, in
narrow and dangerous streets, not only served
as offerings of devotion, but likewise as lights

A Tale 59

to those who passed, so, in the dark and dis
mal streets of the city of Unbelief, every good
thought, word, and deed of a man, not only
was an offering to heaven, but likewise served
to light him and others on their way home
ward ! I have taken a good many notes of
Mr. Kavanagh's sermons, which you shall see
when you come back.

" Last week we had a sleigh-ride, with six
white horses. We went like the wind over
the hollows in the snow ; — the driver called
them ' thank-you-ma'ams, ' because they made
everybody bow. And such a frantic ball as
we had at Beaverstock ! I wish you had been
there ! We did not get home till two o'clock
in the morning ; and the next day Hester
Green's minister asked her if she did not feel
the fire of a certain place growing hot under
her feet, while she was dancing !

" The new fashionable boarding-school be
gins next week. The prospectus has been
sent to .our house. One of the regulations
is, ' Young ladies are not allowed to cross
their benders in school ' ! Papa says he never
heard knees called so before. Old Mrs. Plain-
field is gone at last. Just before she died, her
Irish chamber-maid asked her if she wanted to

60 Kavanagh

be buried with her false teeth ! There has not
been a single new engagement since you went
away. But somebody asked me the other day
if you were engaged to Mr. Pillsbury. I was
very angry. Pillsbury, indeed ! He is old
enough to be your father !

" What a long, rambling letter I am writing
you ! — and only because you will be so naugh
ty as to stay away and leave me all alone. If
you could have seen the moon last night ! But
what a goose I am ! — as if you did not see it !
Was it not glorious? You cannot imagine,
dearest, how every hour in the day I wish you
were here with me. I know you would sym
pathize with all my feelings, which Hester
does not at all. For, if I admire the moon,
she says I am romantic, and, for her part, if
there is anything she despises, it is the moon !
and that she prefers a snug, warm bed (O, hor
rible !) to all the moons in the universe ! "

A Tale 61

XIII.

THE events mentioned in this letter were
the principal ones that occurred during
the winter. The case of Billy Wilmerdings
grew quite desperate. In vain did his father
threaten and the schoolmaster expostulate ;
he was only the more sullen and stubborn.
In vain did his mother represent to his weary
mind, that, if he did not study, the boys who
knew the dead languages would throw stones
at him in the street ; he only answered that he
should like to see them try it. Till, finally,
having lost many of his illusions, and having
even discovered that his father was not the
greatest man in the world, on the breaking up
of the ice in the river, to his own infinite re
lief and that of the whole village, he departed
on a coasting trip in a fore-and-aft schooner,
which constituted the entire navigation of Fair-
meadow.

Mr. Churchill had really put up in his study
the old white pulpit, shaped like a wine-glass.
It served as a play-house for his children, who,

62 Kavanagh

whether in it or out of it, daily preached to his
heart, and were a living illustration of the way
to enter into the kingdom of heaven. More
over, he himself made use of it externally as a
note-book, recording his many meditations with
a pencil on the white panels. The following
will serve as a specimen of this pulpit elo
quence : —

Morality without religion is only a kind of
dead-reckoning, — an endeavor to find our
place on a cloudy sea by measuring the dis
tance we have run, but without any observa
tion of the heavenly bodies.

Many readers judge of the power of a book
by the shock it gives their feelings, — as some
savage tribes determine the power of muskets
by their recoil ; that being considered best
which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

Men of genius are often dull and inert in
society ; as the blazing meteor, when it de
scends to earth, is only a stone.

The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic
idols may be worshipped for a while ; but at

A Tale 63

length they are overturned by the continual
and silent progress of Truth, as the grim stat
ues of Copan have been pushed from their
pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose
seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined
walls.

The every-day cares and duties, which men
call drudgery, are the weights and counter
poises of the clock of time, giving its pendu
lum a true vibration, and its hands a regular
motion ; and when they cease to hang upon
the wheels, the pendulum no longer swings,
the hands no longer move, the clock stands
still.

The same object, seen from the three differ
ent points of view, — the Past, the Present,
and the Future, — often exhibits three differ
ent faces to us ; like those sign-boards over
shop doors, which represent the face of a lion
as we approach, of a man when we are in
front, and of an ass when we have passed.

In character, in manners, in style, in all
things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

64 Kavanagh

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes
for affluence of thought; they mistake but
tercups in the grass for immeasurable gold
mines under ground.

The motives and purposes of authors are not
always so pure and high as, in the enthusiasm
of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many
the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn
to call them home, like laborers from the field,
at dinner-time ; and they think themselves
lucky to get the dinner.

The rays of happiness, like those of light,
are colorless when unbroken.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of
letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers
and reviews, to challenge every new author.

The country is lyric, — the town dramatic.
When mingled, they make the most perfect
musical drama.

Our passions never wholly die ; but in the
last cantos of life's romantic epos, they rise up
again and do battle, like some of Ariosto's he-

A Tale 65

roes, who have already been quietly interred,
and ought to be turned to dust.

This country is not priest-ridden, but press-
ridden.

Some critics have the habit of rowing up
the Heliconian rivers with their backs turned,
so as to see the landscape precisely as the
poet did not see it. Others see faults in a
book much larger than the book itself; as
Sancho Panza, with his eyes blinded, beheld
from his wooden horse the earth no larger
than a grain of mustard-seed, and the men
and women on it as large as hazel-nuts.

Like an inundation of the Indus is the
course of Time. We look for the homes of
our childhood, they are gone ; for the friends
of our childhood, they are gone. The loves
and animosities of youth, where are they ?
Swept away like the camps that had been
pitched in the sandy bed of the river.

As no saint can be canonized until thf
Devil's Advocate has exposed all his evi.
deeds, and showed why he should not b(

66 Kavanagh

made a saint, so no poet can take his station
among the gods until the critics have said all
that can be said against him.

It is curious to note the old sea-margins of
human thought ! Each subsiding century re
veals some new mystery ; we build where
monsters used to hide themselves.

A Tale 67

XIV.

AT length the Spring came, and brought
the birds, and the flowers, and Mr. Kav-
anagh, the new clergyman, who was ordained
with all the pomp and ceremony usual on such
occasions. The opening of the season fur
nished also the theme of his first discourse,
which some of the congregation thought very
beautiful, and others very incomprehensible.

Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the
Spring ! — the great annual miracle of the
blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myr
iads and myriads of branches ! — the gentle
progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees,
— gentle, and yet irrepressible, — which no
force can stay, no violence restrain, like love,
that wins its way and cannot be withstood by
any human power, because itself is divine pow
er. If Spring came but once a century, instead
of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of
an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder
and expectation would there be in all hearts to
behold the miraculous change !

68 Kavanagh

But now the silent succession suggests noth
ing but necessity. To most men, only the ces
sation of the miracle would be miraculous, and
the perpetual exercise of God's power seems
less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.
We are like children who are astonished and
delighted only by the second-hand of the clock,
not by the hour-hand.

Such was the train of thought with which
Kavanagh commenced his sermon. And then,
with deep solemnity and emotion, he proceeded
to speak of the Spring of the soul, as from its
cheerless wintry distance it turns nearer and
nearer to the great Sun, and clothes its dry
and withered branches anew with leaves and
blossoms, unfolded from within itself, beneath
the penetrating and irresistible influence.

While delivering the discourse, Kavanagh
had not succeeded so entirely in abstracting
himself from all outward things as not to note
in some degree its effect upon his hearers.
As in modern times no applause is permitted
in our churches, however moved the audience
may be, and, consequently, no one dares wave
his hat and shout, — " Orthodox Chrysostom !
Thirteenth Apostle ! Worthy the Priesthood ! "
-— as was done in the days of the Christian

A Tale 69

Fathers ; and, moreover, as no one after church
spoke to him of his sermon, or of anything else,
— he went home with rather a heavy heart,
and a feeling of discouragement One thing
had cheered and consoled him. It was the
pale countenance of a young girl, whose dark
eyes had been fixed upon him during the whole
discourse with unflagging interest and atten
tion. She sat alone in a pew near the pulpit.
It was Alice Archer. Ah ! could he have
known how deeply sank his words into that
simple heart, he might have shuddered with
another kind of fear than that of not moving
his audience sufficiently !

70 Kavanagh

XV.

ON the following morning Kavanagh sat
musing upon his worldly affairs, and
upon various little household arrangements
which it would be necessary for him to make.
To aid him in these, he had taken up the vil
lage paper, and was running over the columns
of advertisements, — those narrow and crowded
thoroughfares, in which the wants and wishes
of humanity display themselves like mendi
cants without disguise. His eye ran hastily
over the advantageous offers of the cheap
tailors and the dealers in patent medicines.
He wished neither to be clothed nor cured.
In one place he saw that a young lady, per
fectly competent, desired to form a class of
young mothers and nurses, and to instruct
them in the art of talking to infants so as
to interest and amuse them ; and in another,
that the firemen of Fairmeadow wished well
to those hostile editors who had called them
gamblers, drunkards, and rioters, and hoped
that they might be spared from that great

A Tale 71

fire which they were told could never be
extinguished ! Finally, his eye rested on the
advertisement of a carpet warehouse, in which
the one-price system was strictly adhered to.
It was farther stated that a discount would be
made " to clergymen on small salaries, feeble
churches, and charitable institutions." Think
ing that this was doubtless the place for one
who united in himself two of these qualifica
tions for a discount, with a smile on his lips,
he took his hat and sallied forth into the
street

A few days previous, Kavanagh had dis
covered in the tower of the church a vacant
room, which he had immediately determined
to take possession of, and to convert into a
study. From this retreat, through the four
oval windows, fronting the four corners of the
heavens, he could look down upon the streets,
the roofs and gardens of the village, — on the.
winding river, the meadows, the farms, the
distant blue mountains. Here he could sit
and meditate, in that peculiar sense of seclu
sion and spiritual elevation, that entire separa
tion from the world below, which a chamber
in a tower always gives. Here, uninterrupted
and aloof from all intrusion, he could pour his

72 Kavanagh

heart into those discourses, with which he
hoped to reach and move the hearts of his
parishioners.

It was to furnish this retreat, that he went
forth on the Monday morning after his first
sermon. He was not long in procuring the
few things needed, — the carpet, the table, the
chairs, the shelves for books ; and was return
ing thoughtfully homeward, when his eye was
caught by a sign-board on the corner of the
street, inscribed " Moses Merry weather, Dealer
in Singing Birds, foreign and domestic." He
saw also a whole chamber-window transformed
into a cage, in which sundry canary-birds, and
others of a gayer plumage, were jargoning to
gether, like people in the market-places of
foreign towns. At the sight of these old fa
vorites, a long slumbering passion awoke with
in him ; and he straightway ascended the dark
wooden staircase, with the intent of enlivening
his solitary room with the vivacity and songs
of these captive ballad-singers.

In a moment he found himself in a little
room hung round with cages, roof and walls ;
full of sunshine ; full of twitterings, cooings,
and flutterings ; full of downy odors, suggest
ing nests, and dovecots, and distant islands

A Tale 73

inhabited only by birds. The taxidermist —
the Selkirk of the sunny island — was not
there ; but a young lady of noble mien, who
was looking at an English goldfinch in a
square cage with a portico, turned upon him,
as he entered, a fair and beautiful face, shaded
by long light locks, in which the sunshine
seemed entangled, as among the boughs of
trees. That face he had never seen before,
and yet it seemed familiar to him ; and the
added light in her large, celestial eyes, and the
almost imperceptible expression that passed
over her face, showed that she knew who he
was.

At the same moment the taxidermist pre
sented himself, coming from an inner room ; —
a little man in gray, with spectacles upon his
nose, holding in his hands, with wings and
legs drawn close and smoothly together, like
the green husks of the maize ear, a beautiful
carrier-pigeon, who turned up first one bright
eye and then the other, as if asking, "What
are you going to do with me now ? " This si
lent inquiry was soon answered by Mr. Merry-
weather, who said to the young lady, —

" Here, Miss Vaughan, is the best carrier-
pigeon in my whole collection. The real Co-

4

74 Kavanagh

lumba Tabullaria. He is about three years
old, as you can see by his wattle."

" A very pretty bird, " said the lady ; " and
how shall I train it ? "

" O, that is very easy. You have only to
keep it shut up for a few days, well fed and
well treated. Then take it in an open cage to
the place you mean it to fly to, and do the
same thing there. Afterwards it will give you
no trouble ; it will always fly between those
two places."

" That, certainly, is not very difficult. At
all events, I will make the trial. You may
send the bird home to me. On what shall I
feed it ? "

" On any kind of grain, — barley and buck
wheat are best ; and remember to let it have
a plenty of gravel in the bottom of its cage."

" I will not forget. Send me the bird to
day, if possible."

With these words she departed, much too
soon for Kavanagh, who was charmed with
her form, her face, her voice ; and who, when
left alone with the little taxidermist, felt that
the momentary fascination of the place was
gone. He heard no longer the singing of the
birds ; he saw no longer their gay plumage ;

A Tale 75

and having speedily made the purchase of a
canary and a cage, he likewise departed, think
ing of the carrier-pigeons of Bagdad, and the
columbaries of Egypt, stationed at fixed inter
vals as relays and resting-places for the flying
post. With an indefinable feeling of sadness,
too, came wafted like a perfume through his
memory those tender, melancholy lines of Ma
ria del Occidente : —

" And as the dove, to far Palmyra flying,

From where her native founts of Antioch beam,
Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream ;

So many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring, —
Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed, —

Suffers, recoils, then, thirsty and despairing

Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught."

Meanwhile, Mr. Merryweather, left to him
self, walked about his aviary, musing, and
talking to his birds. Finally he paused before
the tin cage of a gray African parrot, between
which and himself there was a strong family
likeness, and, giving it his finger to peck and
perch upon, conversed with it in that peculiar
dialect with which it had often made vocal the
distant groves of Zanguebar. He then with
drew to the inner room, where he resumed his

76 Kavanagh

labor of stuffing a cardinal grossbeak, saying
to himself between whiles, —

"I wonder what Miss Cecilia Vaughan
means to do with a carrier-pigeon ! "

Some mysterious connection he had evi
dently established already between this pigeon
and Mr. Kavanagh ; for, continuing his rev-
ery, he said, half aloud, —

" Of course she would never think of marry
ing a poor clergyman ! "

A Tale 77

XVI.

THE old family mansion of the Vaughans
stood a little out of town, in the midst of
a pleasant farm. The county road was not
near enough to annoy ; and the rattling wheels
and little clouds of dust seemed like friendly
salutations from travellers as they passed.
They spoke of safety and companionship,
and took away all loneliness from the soli
tude.

On three sides, the farm was enclosed by
willow and alder hedges, and the flowing wall
of a river ; nearer the house were groves
clear of all underwood, with rocky knolls, and
breezy bowers of beech ; and afar off the blue
hills broke the horizon, creating secret long
ings for what lay beyond them, and filling the
mind with pleasant thoughts of Prince Ras-
selas and the Happy Valley.

The house was one of the few old houses
still standing in New England ; — a large,
square building, with a portico in front, whose
door in Summer time stood open from morn
ing until night. A pleasing stillness reigned

78 Kavanagk

about it ; and soft gusts of pine-embalmed air,
and distant cawings from the crow-haunted
mountains, filled its airy and ample halls.

In this old-fashioned house had Cecilia
Vaughan grown up to maidenhood. The trav
elling shadows of the clouds on the hillsides,
— the sudden Summer wind, that lifted the
languid leaves, and rushed from field to field,
from grove to grove, the forerunner of the
rain, — and, most of all, the mysterious moun
tain, whose coolness was a perpetual invitation
to her, and whose silence a perpetual fear, —
fostered her dreamy and poetic temperament.
Not less so did the reading of poetry and ro
mance in the long, silent, solitary winter even
ings. Her mother had been dead for many
years, and the memory of that mother had
become almost a religion to her. She recalled
it incessantly ; and the reverential love which
it inspired completely filled her soul with mel
ancholy delight. Her father was a kindly old
man ; a judge in one of the courts ; dignified,
affable, somewhat bent by his legal erudition,
as a shelf is by the weight of the books upon
it. His papers encumbered the study table ;
• — his law books, the study floor. They seemed
to shut out from his mind the lovely daughter,
who had grown up to womanhood by his side,

A Tale 79

but almost without his recognition. Always
affectionate, always indulgent, he left her to
walk alone, without his stronger thought and
firmer purpose to lean upon ; and though her
education had been, on this account, somewhat
desultory, and her imagination indulged in
many dreams and vagaries, yet, on the whole,
the result had been more favorable than in
many cases where the process of instruction
has been too diligently carried on, and where,
as sometimes on the roofs of farm-houses and
barns, the scaffolding has been left to deform
the building.

Cecilia's bosom-friend at school was Alice
Archer ; and, after they left school, the love
between them, and consequently the letters,
rather increased than diminished. These two
young hearts found not only a delight, but a
necessity, in pouring forth their thoughts and
feelings to each other ; and it was to facilitate
this intercommunication, for whose exigencies
the ordinary methods were now found inade
quate, that the carrier-pigeon had been pur
chased. He was to be the flying post ; their
bedrooms the dove-cots, the pure and friendly
columbaria.

Endowed with youth, beauty, talent, fortune,
and, moreover, with that indefinable fascina-

8o Kavanagh

tion which has no name, Cecilia Vaughan was
not without lovers, avowed and unavowed ; —
young men, who made an ostentatious display
of their affection ; — boys, who treasured it in
their bosoms, as something indescribably sweet
and precious, perfuming all the chambers of
the heart with its celestial fragrance. When
ever she returned from a visit to the city, some
unknown youth of elegant manners and var
nished leather boots was sure to hover round
the village inn for a few days, — was known to
visit the Vaughans assiduously, and then si
lently to disappear, and be seen no more. Of
course, nothing could be known of the secret
history of such individuals ; but shrewd sur
mises were formed as to their designs and
their destinies ; till finally, any well-dressed
stranger, lingering in the village without os
tensible business, was set down as "one of Miss
Vaughan's lovers."

In all this, what a contrast was there be
tween the two young friends ! The wealth of
one and the poverty of the other were not so
strikingly at variance, as this affluence and
refluence of love. To the one, so much was
given that she became regardless of the gift ;
from the other, so much withheld, that, if pos
sible, she exaggerated its importance.

A Tale 81

XVII.

IN addition to these transient lovers, who
were but birds of passage, winging their
way, in an incredibly short space of time, from
the torrid to the frigid zone, there was in the
village a domestic and resident adorer, whose
love for himself, for Miss Vaughan, and for the
beautiful, had transformed his name from Hi
ram A. Hawkins to H. Adolphus Hawkins.
He was a dealer in English linens and car
pets ; — a profession which of itself fills the
mind with ideas of domestic comfort. His
waistcoats were made like Lord Melbourne's
in the illustrated English papers, and his shiny
hair went off to the left in a superb sweep, like
the hand-rail of a banister. He wore many
rings on his fingers, and several breastpins and
gold chains disposed about his person. On all
his bland physiognomy was stamped, as on
some of his linens, " Soft finish for family use."
Everything about him spoke the lady's man.
He was, in fact, a perfect ring-dove ; and, like
the rest of his species, always walked up to the
4* F

82 Kavanagh

female, and, bowing his head, swelled out his
white crop, and uttered a very plaintive mur
mur.

Moreover, Mr. H. Adolphus Hawkins was a
poet, — so much a poet, that, as his sister fre
quently remarked, he " spoke blank verse in
the bosom of his family." The general tone
of his productions was sad, desponding, per
haps slightly morbid. How could it be other
wise with the writings of one who had never
been the world's friend, nor the world his ?
who looked upon himself as "a pyramid of
mind on the dark desert of despair"? and
who, at the age of twenty-five, had drunk the
bitter draught of life to the dregs, and dashed
the goblet down ? His productions were pub
lished in the Poet's Corner of the Fairmeadow
Advertiser ; and it was a relief to know, that,
in private life, as his sister remarked, he was
" by no means the censorious and moody per
son some of his writings might imply."

Such was the personage who assumed to
himself the perilous position of Miss Vaughan's
permanent lover. He imagined that it was
impossible for any woman to look upon him
and not love him. Accordingly, he paraded
himself at his shop-door as she passed ; he pa-

A Tale 83

raded himself at the corners of the streets ; he
paraded himself at the church-steps on Sun
day. He spied her from the window ; he sal
lied from the door ; he followed her with his
eyes ; he followed her with his whole august
person ; he passed her and repassed her, and
turned back to gaze ; he lay in wait with de
jected countenance and desponding air ; he
persecuted her with his looks ; he pretended
that their souls could comprehend each other
without words ; and whenever her lovers were
alluded to in his presence, he gravely declared,
as one who had reason to know, that, if Miss
Vaughan ever married, it would be some one of
gigantic intellect !

Of these persecutions Cecilia was for a long
time the unconscious victim. She saw this
individual, with rings and strange waistcoats,
performing his gyrations before her, but did
not suspect that she was the centre of attrac
tion, — not imagining that any man would be
gin his wooing with such outrages. Gradually
the truth dawned upon her, and became the
source of indescribable annoyance, which was
augmented by a series of anonymous letters,
written in a female hand, and setting forth the
excellences of a certain mysterious relative, — -

84 Kavanagh

his modesty, his reserve, his extreme delicacy,
his talent for poetry, — rendered authentic by
extracts from his papers, made, of course, with
out the slightest knowledge or suspicion on
his part. Whence came these sibylline leaves ?
At first Cecilia could not divine ; but, erelong,
her woman's instinct traced them to the thin
and nervous hand of the poet's sister. This
surmise was confirmed by her maid, who asked
the boy that brought them.

It was with one of these missives in her
hand that Cecilia entered Mrs. Archer's house,
after purchasing the carrier-pigeon. Unan
nounced she entered, and walked up the nar
row and imperfectly lighted stairs to Alice's
bedroom, — that little sanctuary draped with
white, — that columbarium lined with warmth,
and softness, and silence. Alice was not there ;
but the chair by the window, the open volume
of Tennyson's poems on the table, the note to
Cecilia by its side, and the ink not yet dry in
the pen, were like the vibration of a bough,
when the bird has just left it, — -like the rising
of the grass, when the foot has just pressed it.
In a moment she returned. She had been
down to her mother, who sat talking, talking,
talking, with an old friend in the parlor below,

A Tale 85

even as these young friends were talking to
gether, in the bedroom above. Ah, how dif
ferent were their themes ! Death and Love,
— apples of Sodom, that crumble to ashes at
a touch, — golden fruits of the Hesperides, —
golden fruits of Paradise, fragrant, ambrosia],
perennial !

"I have just been writing to you," said
Alice ; " I wanted so much to see you this
morning !"

"Why this morning in particular? Has
anything happened ? "

" Nothing, only I had such a longing to see
you!"

And, seating herself in a low chair by Ce
cilia's side, she laid her head upon the shoul
der of her friend, who, taking one of her pale,
thin hands in both her own, silently kissed her
forehead again and again.

Alice was not aware, that, in the words she
uttered, there was the slightest shadow of un
truth. And yet had nothing happened ? Was
it nothing, that among her thoughts a new
thought had risen, like a star, whose pale
effulgence, mingled with the common daylight,
was not yet distinctly visible even to herself,
but would grow brighter as the sun grew lower,

86 Kavanagk

and the rosy twilight darker ? Was it noth
ing, that a new fountain of affection had sud
denly sprung up within her, which she mistook
for the freshening and overflowing of the old
fountain of friendship, that hitherto had kept
the lowland landscape of her life so green, but
now, being flooded by more affection, was not
to cease, but only to disappear in the greater
tide, and flow unseen beneath it ? Yet so it
was ; and this stronger yearning — this unap
peasable desire for her friend — was only the
tumultuous swelling of a heart, that as yet
knows not its own secret.

" I am so glad to see you, Cecilia ! " she con
tinued. " You are so beautiful ! I love so
much to sit and look at you ! Ah, how I wish
Heaven had made me as tall, and strong, and
beautiful as you are ! "

" You little flatterer ! What an affectionate,
lover-like friend you are ! What have you
been doing all the morning ? "

" Looking out of the window, thinking of
you, and writing you this letter, to beg you
to come and see me."

" And I have been buying a carrier-pigeon,
to fly between us, and carry all our letters."

" That will be delightful."

A Tale 87

" He is to be sent home to-day ; and after
he gets accustomed to my room, I shall send
him here, to get acquainted with yours ; — an
lachimo in my Imogen's bedchamber, to spy
out its secrets."

" If he sees Cleopatra in these white cur
tains, and silver Cupids in these andirons, he
will have your imagination."

" He will see the book with the leaf turned
down, and you asleep, and tell me all about
you."

" A carrier-pigeon ! What a charming idea !
and how like you to think of it ! "

" But to-day I have been obliged to bring
my own letters. I have some more sibylline
leaves from my anonymous correspondent, in
laud and exaltation of her modest relative, who
speaks blank verse in the bosom of his family.
I have brought them to read you some ex
tracts, and to take your advice ; for, really and
seriously, this must be stopped. It has grown
too annoying."

" How much love you have offered you ! "
said Alice, sighing.

" Yes, quite too much of this kind. On my
way here, I saw the modest relative, standing
at the corner of the street, hanging his head in
this way."

88 Kavanagh

And she imitated the melancholy Hiram
Adolphus, and the young friends laughed.

" I hope you did not notice him ? " resumed
Alice.

" Certainly not. But what do you suppose
he did ? As soon as he saw me, he began to
walk backward down the street only a short
distance in front of me, staring at me most
impertinently. Of course, I took no notice
of this strange conduct. I felt myself blush
ing to the eyes with indignation, and yet
could hardly suppress my desire to laugh."

" If you had laughed, he would have taken
it for an encouragement ; and I have no doubt
it would have brought on the catastrophe."

" And that would have ended the matter. I
half wish I had laughed."

" But think of the immortal glory of marry
ing a poet ! "

" And of inscribing on my cards, Mrs. H.
Adolphus Hawkins ! "

" A few days ago, I went to buy something
at his shop ; and, leaning over the counter,
he asked me if I had seen the sun set the
evening before, — adding, that it was gorgeous,
and that the grass and trees were of a beauti
ful Paris green ! "

A Tale 89

And again the young friends gave way to
their mirth.

" One thing, dear Alice, you must consent
to do for me. You must write to Miss Mar
tha Amelia, the author of all these epistles, and
tell her very plainly how indelicate her con
duct is, and how utterly useless all such pro
ceedings will prove in effecting her purpose."

" I will write this very day. You shall be no
longer persecuted."

" And now let me give you a few extracts
from these wonderful epistles."

So saying, Cecilia drew forth a small pack
age of three-cornered billets, tied with a bit of
pink ribbon. Taking one of them at random,
she was on the point of beginning, but paused,
as if her attention had been attracted by some
thing out of doors. The sound of passing foot
steps was heard on the gravel walk.

" There goes Mr. Kavanagh," said she, in a
half-whisper.

Alice rose suddenly from her low chair at
Cecilia's side, and the young friends looked
from the window to see the clergyman pass.

" How handsome he is ! " said Alice, invol
untarily.

" He is, indeed."

QO Kavanagk

At that moment Alice started back from
the window. Kavanagh had looked up in
passing, as if his eye had been drawn by some
secret magnetism. A bright color flushed the
cheek of Alice ; her eyes fell ; but Cecilia con
tinued to look steadily into the street. Kav-
anagh passed on, and in a few moments was
out of sight.

The two friends stood silent, side by side.

A Tale 91

XVIII.

A RTHUR KAVANAGH was descended
f\ from an ancient Catholic family. His
ancestors had purchased from the Baron Vic
tor of St. Castine a portion of his vast estates,
lying upon that wild and wonderful sea-coast
of Maine, which, even upon the map, attracts
the eye by its singular and picturesque inden
tations, and fills the heart of the beholder with
something of that delight which throbbed in
the veins of Pierre du Cast, when, with a royal
charter of the land from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, he sailed down the coast in all the
pride of one who is to be prince of such a vast
domain. Here, in the bosom of the solemn
forests, they continued the practice of that
faith which had first been planted there by
Rasle and St. Castine ; and the little church
where they worshipped is still standing, though
now as closed and silent as the graves which
surround it, and in which the dust of the Kav-
anaghs lies buried.

In these solitudes, in this faith, was Kava-

92 Kavanagh

nagh born, and grew to childhood, a feeble, deli
cate boy, watched over by a grave and taciturn
father, and a mother who looked upon him
with infinite tenderness, as upon a treasure she
should not long retain. She walked with him
by the seaside, and spake to him of God, and
the* mysterious majesty of the ocean, with its
tides and tempests. She sat with him on the
carpet of golden threads beneath the aromatic
pines, and, as the perpetual melancholy sound
ran along the rattling boughs, his soul seemed
to rise and fall, with a motion and a whisper
like those in the branches over him. She
taught him his letters from the Lives of the
Saints, — a volume full of wondrous legends,
and illustrated with engravings 'from pictures
by the old masters, which opened to him at
once the world of spirits and the world of art ;
and both were beautiful. She explained to
him the pictures ; she read to him the legends,
— the lives of holy men and women, full of
faith and good works, — things which ever
afterward remained associated together in his
mind. Thus holiness of life, and self-renuncia
tion, and devotion to duty, were early im
pressed upon his soul. To his quick imagina
tion, the spiritual world became real ; the

A Tale 93

holy company of the saints stood round about
the solitary boy ; his guardian angels led him
by the hand by day, and sat by his pillow at
night. At times, even, he wished to die, that
he might see them and talk with them, and
return no more to his weak and weary body.

Of all the legends of the mysterious book,
that which most delighted and most deeply
impressed him was the legend of St. Christo
pher. The picture was from a painting of
Paolo Farinato, representing a figure of gi
gantic strength and stature, leaning upon a
staff, and bearing the infant Christ on his
bending shoulders across the rushing river.
The legend related, that St. Christopher, be
ing of huge proportions and immense strength,
wandered long about the world before his con
version, seeking for the greatest king, and wil
ling to obey no other. After serving various
masters, whom he in turn deserted, because
each recognized by some word or sign another
greater than himself, he heard by chance of
Christ, the king of heaven and earth, and
asked of a holy hermit where he might be
found, and how he might serve him. The
hermit told him he must fast and pray ; but
the giant replied that if he fasted he should

94 Kavanagh

lose his strength, and that he did not know
how to pray. Then the hermit told him to
take up his abode on the banks of a danger
ous mountain torrent, where travellers were
often drowned in crossing, and to rescue any
that might be in peril. The giant obeyed ;
and tearing up a palm-tree by the roots for a
staff, he took his station by the river's side,
and saved many lives. And the Lord looked
down from heaven and said, " Behold this
strong man, who knows not yet the way to
worship, but has found the way to serve me ! "
And one night he heard the voice of a child,
crying in the darkness and saying, " Christo
pher ! come and bear me over the river ! "
And he went out, and found the child sitting
alone on the margin of the stream ; and taking
him upon his shoulders, he waded into the wa
ter. Then the wind began to roar, and the
waves to rise higher and higher about him,
and his little burden, which at first had
seemed so light, grew heavier and heavier
as he advanced, and bent his huge shoulders
down, and put his life in peril ; so that, when
he reached the shore, he said, "Who art thou,
O child, that hast weighed upon me with a
Veight, as if I had borne the whole world

A Tale 95

upon my shoulders ? " And the little child
answered, " Thou hast borne the whole world
upon thy shoulders, and Him who created it.
I am Christ, whom thou by thy deeds of char
ity wouldst serve. Thou and thy service are
accepted. Plant thy staff in the ground, and
it shall blossom and bear fruit ! " With these
words, the child vanished away.

There was something in this beautiful le
gend that entirely captivated the heart of the
boy, and a vague sense of its hidden meaning
seemed at times to seize him and control him.
Later in life it became more and more evident
to him, and remained forever in his mind as a
lovely allegory of active charity and a willing
ness to serve. Like the giant's staff, it blos
somed and bore fruit.

But the time at length came, when his
father decreed that he must be sent away to
school. It was not meet that his son should
be educated as a girl. He must go to the
Jesuit college in Canada. Accordingly, one
bright summer morning, he departed with his
father, on horseback, through those majestic
forests that stretch with almost unbroken shad
ows from the sea to the St. Lawrence, leaving
behind him all the endearments of home, and a

96 KavanagH

wound in his mother's heart that never ceased
to ache, — a longing, unsatisfied and insati
able, for her absent Arthur, who had gone
from her perhaps forever.

At college he distinguished himself by his
zeal for study, by the docility, gentleness, and
generosity of his nature. There he was thor
oughly trained in the classics, and in the dog
mas of that august faith, whose turrets gleam
with such crystalline light, and whose dun
geons are so deep, and dark, and terrible.
The study of philosophy and theology was
congenial to his mind. Indeed, he often laid
aside Homer for Parmenides, and turned from
the odes of Pindar and Horace to the mystic
hymns of Cleanthes and Synesius.

The uniformity of college life was broken
only by the annual visit home in the summer
vacation ; the joyous meeting, the bitter part
ing ; the long journey to and fro through the
grand, solitary, mysterious forest. To his moth
er these visits were even more precious than to
himself ; for ever more and more they added to
her boundless affection the feeling of pride and
confidence and satisfaction, — the joy and beau
ty of a youth unspotted from the world, and
glowing with the enthusiasm of virtue.

A Tale 97

At length his college days were ended. He
returned home full of youth, full of joy and
hope ; but it was only to receive the dying
blessings of his mother, who expired in peace,
having seen his face once more. Then the
house became empty to him. Solitary was
the sea-shore, solitary were the woodland
walks. But the spiritual world seemed near
er and more real. For affairs he had no apti
tude ; and he betook himself again to his
philosophic and theological studies. He pon
dered with fond enthusiasm on the rapturous
pages of Molinos and Madame Guyon ; and in
a spirit akin to that which wrote, he read the
writings of Santa Theresa, which he found
among his mother's books, — the Meditations,
the Road to Perfection, and the Moradas, or
Castle of the Soul. She, too, had lingered
over those pages with delight, and there were
many passages marked by her own hand.
Among them was this, which he often re
peated to himself in his lonely walks : " O,
Life, Life ! how canst thou sustain thyself,
being absent from thy Life ? In so great a
solitude, in what shalt thou employ thyself?
What shalt thou do, since all thy deeds are
faulty and imperfect ? "

98 Kavanagh

In such meditations passed many weeks and
months. But mingled with them, continually
and ever with more distinctness, arose in his
memory from the days of childhood the old
tradition of Saint Christopher, — the beauti
ful allegory of humility and labor. He and his
service had been accepted, though he would
not fast, and had not learned to pray ! It be
came more and more clear to him, that the life
of man consists not in seeing visions, and in
dreaming dreams, but in active charity and
willing service.

Moreover, the study of ecclesiastical history
awoke within him many strange and dubious
thoughts. The books taught him more than
their writers meant to teach. It was impossi
ble to read of Athanasius without reading also
of Arius ; it was impossible to hear of Calvin
without hearing of Servetus. Reason began
more energetically to vindicate itself; that
Reason, which is a light in darkness, not that
which is " a thorn in Revelation's side." The
search after Truth and Freedom, both intel
lectual and spiritual, became a passion in his
soul ; and he pursued it until he had left far
behind him many dusky dogmas, many antique
superstitions, many time-honored observances,

A Tale 99

which the lips of her alone, who first taught
them to him in his childhood, had invested
with solemnity and sanctity.

By slow degrees, and not by violent spiritual
conflicts, he became a Protestant. He had but
passed from one chapel to another in the same
vast cathedral. He was still beneath the same
ample roof, still heard the same divine service
chanted in a different dialect of the same univer
sal language. Out of his old faith he brought
with him all he had found in it that was holy
and pure and of good report. Not its bigotry,
and fanaticism, and intolerance ; but its zeal,
its self-devotion, its heavenly aspirations, its
human sympathies, its endless deeds of charity.
Not till after his father's death, however, did
he become a clergyman. Then his vocation
was manifest to him. He no longer hesitated,
but entered upon its many duties and respon
sibilities, its many trials and discouragements,
with the zeal of Peter and the gentleness of
John.

ioo Kavanagh

XIX.

A WEEK later, and Kavanagh was in
stalled in his little room in the church-
tower. A week 'later, and the carrier-pigeon
was on the wing. A week later, and Martha
Amelia's anonymous epistolary eulogies of her
relative had ceased forever.

Swiftly and silently the summer advanced,
and the following announcement in the Fair-
meadow Advertiser proclaimed the hot weath
er and its alleviations : —

" I have the pleasure of announcing to the
Ladies and Gentlemen of Fairmeadow and its
vicinity, that my Bath House is now com
pleted, and ready for the reception of those
who are disposed to regale themselves in a
luxury peculiar to the once polished Greek
and noble Roman.

" To the Ladies I will say, that Tuesday of
each week will be appropriated to their exclu
sive benefit ; the white flag will be the signal ;
and I assure the Ladies, that due respect shall

A Tale 101

be scrupulously observed, and that they shall
be guarded from each vagrant foot and each
licentious eye.

"EDWARD DIMPLE."

Moreover, the village was enlivened by the
usual travelling shows, — the wax-work figures
representing Eliza Wharton and the Salem
Tragedy, to which clergymen and their fami
lies were " respectfully invited, free on present
ing their cards"; a stuffed shark, that had
eaten the exhibitor's father in Lynn Bay ; the
menagerie, with its loud music and its roars of
rage ; the circus, with its tan and tinsel, — its
faded Columbine and melancholy Clown ; and,
finally, the standard drama, in which Elder
Evans, like an ancient Spanish Bululu, imper
sonated all the principal male characters, and
was particularly imposing in lago and the
Moor, having half his face lamp-blacked, and
turning now the luminous, now the eclipsed
side to the audience, as the exigencies of the
dialogue demanded.

There was also a great Temperance Jubilee,
with a procession, in which was conspicuous a
large horse, whose shaven tail was adorned
with gay ribbons, and whose rider bore a ban-

IO2 Kavanagh

ner with the device, " Shaved in the Cause ! "
Moreover, the Grand Junction Railroad was
opened through the town, running in one di
rection to the city, and in the other into un
known northern regions, stringing the white
villages like pearls upon its black thread. By
this, the town lost much of its rural quiet and
seclusion. The inhabitants became restless
and ambitious. They were in constant ex
citement and alarm, like children in story
books hidden away somewhere by an ogre,
who visits them regularly every day and night,
and occasionally devours one of them for a
meal.

Nevertheless, most of the inhabitants con
sidered the railroad a great advantage to the
village. Several ladies were heard to say that
Fairmeadow had grown quite metropolitan ;
and Mrs. Wilmerdings, who suffered under a
chronic suspension of the mental faculties, had
a vague notion, probably connected with the
profession of her son, that it was soon to be
come a seaport.

In the fields and woods, meanwhile, there
were other signs and signals of the summer.
The darkening foliage ; the embrowning grain ;
the golden dragon-fly haunting the blackberry-

A Tale 103

bushes ; the cawing crows, that looked down
from the mountain on the cornfield, and wait
ed day after day for the scarecrow to finish his
work and depart ; and the smoke of far-off
burning woods, that pervaded the air and
hung in purple haze about the summits of
the mountains, — these were the vaunt-cou
riers and attendants of the hot August.

Kavanagh had now completed the first
great cycle of parochial visits. He had seen
the Vaughans, the Archers, the Churchills, and
also the Hawkinses and the Wilmerdingses,
and many more. With Mr. Churchill he had
become intimate. They had many points of
contact and sympathy. They walked togeth
er on leisure afternoons ; they sat together
through long summer evenings ; they dis
coursed with friendly zeal on various topics
of literature, religion, and morals.

Moreover, he worked assiduously at his ser
mons. He preached the doctrines of Christ.
He preached holiness, self-denial, love ; and
his hearers remarked that he almost invaria
bly took his texts from the Evangelists, as
much as possible from the words of Christ,
and seldom from Paul, or the Old Testa
ment. He did not so much denounce vice,

IO4 Kavanagh

as inculcate virtue ; he did not deny, but af
firm ; he did not lacerate the hearts of his
hearers with doubt and disbelief, but con
soled, and comforted, and healed them with
faith.

The only danger was that he might advance
too far, and leave his congregation behind
him ; as a piping shepherd, who, charmed
with his own music, walks over the flowery
mead, not perceiving that his tardy flock is
lingering far behind, more intent upon crop
ping the thymy food around them, than upon
listening to the celestial harmonies that are
gradually dying away in the distance.

His words were always kindly ; he brought
no railing accusation against any man ; he
dealt in no exaggerations nor over-statements.
But while he was gentle, he was firm. He
did not refrain from reprobating intemper
ance because one of his deacons owned a
distillery ; nor war, because another had a
contract for supplying the army with mus
kets ; nor slavery, because one of the great
men of the village slammed his pew-door, and
left the church with a grand air, as much as
to say, that all that sort of thing would not do,
and the clergy had better confine themselves

A Tale 105

to abusing the sins of the Hindoos, and let our
domestic institutions alone.

In affairs ecclesiastical he had not sug
gested many changes. One that he had
much at heart was, that the partition wall
between parish and church should be quietly
taken down, so that all should sit together at
the Supper of the Lord. He also desired that
the organist should relinquish the old and
pernicious habit of preluding with triumphal
marches, and running his fingers at random
over the keys of his instrument, playing scraps
of secular music very slowly to make them
sacred, and substitute instead some of the
beautiful symphonies of Pergolesi, Palestrina,
and Sebastian Bach.

He held that sacred melodies were becom
ing to sacred themes ; and did not wish, that,
in his church, as in some of the French Cana
dian churches, the holy profession of religion
should be sung to the air of " When one is
dead 'tis for a long time," — the command
ments, aspirations for heaven, and the neces
sity of thinking of one's salvation, to " The
Follies of Spain," " Louisa was sleeping in a
grove," or a grand " March of the French Cav
alry."

5*

io6 Kavanagh

The study in the tower was delightful.
There sat the young apostle, and meditated
the great design and purpose of his life, the
removal of all prejudice, and uncharitableness,
and persecution, and the union of all sects in
to one church universal. Sects themselves he
would not destroy, but sectarianism ; for sects
were to him only as separate converging roads,
leading all to the same celestial city of peace.
As he sat alone, and thought of these things,
he heard the great bell boom above him, and
remembered the ages when in all Christendom
there was but one Church ; when bells were
anointed, baptized, and prayed for, that, where
soever those holy bells should sound, all deceits
of Satan, all danger of whirlwinds, thunders,
lightnings, and tempests might be driven away,
— that devotion might increase in every Chris
tian when he heard them, — and that the Lord
would sanctify them with his Holy Spirit, and
infuse into them the heavenly dew of the Holy
Ghost. He thought of the great bell Guthlac,
which an abbot of Croyland gave to his monas
tery, and of the six others given by his succes
sor, — so musical, that, when they all rang
together, as Ingulphus affirms, there was no
ringing in England equal to it. As he lis-

A Tale 107

tened, the bell seemed to breathe upon the
air such clangorous sentences as,

" Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum,
Defunctos ploro, nimbum fugo, festaque honoro."

Possibly, also, at times, it interrupted his stud
ies and meditations with other words than
these. Possibly it sang into his ears, as did
the bells of Varennes into the ears of Panurge,
— " Marry thee, marry thee, marry, marry ;
if thou shouldst marry, marry, marry, thou
shalt find good therein, therein, therein, so
marry, marry."

From this tower of contemplation he looked
down with mingled emotions of joy and sorrow
on the toiling world below. The wide pros
pect seemed to enlarge his sympathies and his
charities ; and he often thought of the words
of Plato : "When we consider human life, we
should view as from a high tower all things
terrestrial ; such as herds, armies, men em
ployed in agriculture, in marriages, divorces,
births, deaths; the tumults of courts of jus
tice ; desolate lands ; various barbarous na
tions ; feasts, wailings, markets ; a medley of
all things, in a system adorned by contrarie
ties."

io8 Kavanagh

On the outside of the door Kavanagh had
written the vigorous line of Dante,

' ' Think that To-day will never dawn again ! "

that it might always serve as a salutation and
memento to him as he entered. On the inside,
the no less striking lines of a more modern
bard, —

"Lose this day loitering, 't will be the same story
To-morrow, and the next more dilatory ;
For indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost, lamenting o'er lost days.
Are you in earnest ? Seize this very minute !
What you can do or think you can, begin it !
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it !
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated :
Begin it, and the work will be completed. "

Once, as he sat in this retreat near noon,
enjoying the silence, and the fresh air that
visited him through the oval windows, his
attention was arrested by a cloud of dust, roll
ing along the road, out of which soon emerged
a white horse, and then a very singular, round-
shouldered, old-fashioned chaise, containing an
elderly couple, both in black. What particu
larly struck him was the gait of the horse, who
had a very disdainful fling to his hind legs.
The slow equipage passed, and would have

A Tale 109

been forever forgotten, had not Kavanagh
seen it again at sunset, stationary at Mr.
Churchill's door, towards which he was di
recting his steps.

As he entered, he met Mr. Churchill, just
taking leave of an elderly lady and gentleman
in black, whom he recognized as the travellers
in the old chaise. Mr. Churchill looked a lit
tle flushed and disturbed, and bade his guests
farewell with a constrained air. On seeing
Kavanagh, he saluted him, and called him by
name ; whereupon the lady pursed up her
mouth, and, after a quick glance, turned away
her face ; and the gentleman passed with a
lofty look, in which curiosity, reproof, and
pious indignation were strangely mingled.
They got into the chaise, with some such
feelings as Noah and his wife may be sup
posed to have had on entering the ark ; the
whip descended upon the old horse with un
usual vigor, accompanied by a jerk of the
reins that caused him to say within himself,
"What is the matter now?" He then moved
off at his usual pace, and with that peculiar
motion of the hind legs which Kavanagh had
perceived in the morning.

Kavanagh found his friend not a little dis-

i IO Kavanagh

turbed, and evidently by the conversation of
the departed guests.

" That old gentleman," said Mr. Churchill,
"is your predecessor, Mr. Pendexter. He
thinks we are in a bad way since he left us.
He considers your liberality as nothing better
than rank Arianism and infidelity. The fact
is, the old gentleman is a little soured ; the
vinous fermentation in his veins is now over,
and the acetous has commenced."

Kavanagh smiled, but made no answer.

" I, of course, defended you stoutly," contin
ued Mr. Churchill ; " but if he goes about the
village sowing such seed, there will be tares
growing with the wheat."

"I have no fears," said Kavanagh, very
quietly.

Mr. Churchill's apprehensions were not,
however, groundless ; for in the course of
the week it came out that doubts, surmises,
and suspicions of Kavanagh's orthodoxy were
springing up in many weak but worthy minds.
And it was ever after observed, that, when
ever that fatal, apocalyptic white horse and
antediluvian chaise appeared in town, many
parishioners were harassed with doubts and
perplexed with theological difficulties and un
certainties.

A Tale in

Nevertheless, the main current of opinion
was with him ; and the parish showed their
grateful acknowledgment of his zeal and sym
pathy, by requesting him to sit for his portrait
to a great artist from the city, who was pass
ing the summer months in the village for
recreation, using his pencil only on rarest
occasions and as a particular favor. To this
martyrdom the meek Kavanagh submitted
without a murmur. During the progress of
this work of art, he was seldom left alone ;
some one of his parishioners was there to
enliven him ; and most frequently it was Miss
Martha Amelia Hawkins, who had become
very devout of late, being zealous in the
Sunday School, and requesting her relative
not to walk between churches any more.
She took a very lively interest in the portrait,
and favored with many suggestions the distin
guished artist, who found it difficult to obtain
an expression which would satisfy the parish,
some wishing to have it grave, if not severe,
and others with "Mr. Kavanagh's peculiar
smile." Kavanagh himself was quite indif
ferent about the matter, and met his fate
with Christian fortitude, in a white cravat
and sacerdotal robes, with one hand hanging

H2 Kavanagh

down from the back of his chair, and the other
holding a large book with the fore-finger be
tween its leaves, reminding Mr. Churchill of
Milo with his fingers in the oak. The expres
sion of the face was exceedingly bland and re
signed ; perhaps a little wanting in strength,
but on the whole satisfactory to the parish.
So was the artist's price ; nay, it was even
held by some persons to be cheap, consid
ering the quantity of background he had
put in.

A Tale 113

XX.

MEANWHILE, things had gone on
very quietly and monotonously in Mr.
Churchill's family. Only one event, and that
a mysterious one, had disturbed its serenity.
It was the sudden disappearance of Lucy, the
pretty orphan girl ; and, as the booted centi
pede, who had so much excited Mr. Churchill's
curiosity, disappeared at the same time, there
was little doubt that they had gone away to
gether. But whither gone, and wherefore, re
mained a mystery.

Mr. Churchill, also, had had his profile, and
those of his wife and children, taken, in a very
humble style, by Mr. Bantam, whose advertise
ment he had noticed on his way to school near
ly a year before. His own was considered the
best, as a work of art. The face was cut out
entirely ; the collar of the coat velvet ; the shirt-
collar very high and white ; and the top of his
head ornamented with a crest of hair turning
up in front, though his own turned down, —
which slight deviation from nature was ex-

ii4 Kavanagh

plained and justified by the painter as a li
cense allowable in art.

One evening, as he was sitting down to be
gin, for at least the hundredth time, the great
Romance, — subject of so many resolves and
so much remorse, so often determined upon
but never begun, — a loud knock at the street-
door, which stood wide open, announced a vis
itor. Unluckily, the study-door was likewise
open ; and consequently, being in full view,
he found it impossible to refuse himself; nor,
in fact, would he have done so, had all the
doors been shut and bolted, — the art of refus
ing one's self being at that time but imperfect
ly understood in Fairmeadow. Accordingly,
the visitor was shown in.

He announced himself as Mr. Hathaway.
Passing through the village, he could not deny
himself the pleasure of calling on Mr. Church
ill, whom he knew by his writings in the peri
odicals, though not personally. He wished,
moreover, to secure the co-operation of one,
already so favorably known to the literary
world, in a new Magazine he was about to
establish, in order to raise the character of
American literature, which, in his opinion,
the existing reviews and magazines had en'

A Tale 1 1 5

tirely failed to accomplish. A daily increas
ing want of something better was felt by the
public ; and the time had come for the estab
lishment of such a periodical as he proposed.
After explaining, in rather a florid and exu
berant manner, his plan and prospects, he
entered more at large into the subject of
American literature, which it was his design
to foster and patronize.

" I think, Mr. Churchill," said he, " that we
want a national literature commensurate with
our mountains and rivers, — commensurate
with Niagara, and the Alleghanies, and the
Great Lakes ! "

" Oh ! "

" We want a national epic that shall corre
spond to the size of the country ; that shall be
to all other epics what Banvard's Panorama of
the Mississippi is to all other paintings, — the
largest in the world ! "

"Ah!"

" We want a national drama in which scope
enough shall be given to our gigantic ideas,
and to the unparalleled activity and progress
of our people ! "

" Of course."

" In a word, we want a national literature

1 1 6 Kavanagh

altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall
shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thun
dering over the prairies ! "

" Precisely," interrupted Mr. Churchill ; " but
excuse me ! — are you not confounding things
that have no analogy ? Great has a very dif
ferent meaning when applied to a river, and
when applied to a literature. Large and shal
low may perhaps be applied to both. Litera
ture is rather an image of the spiritual world,
than of the physical, is it not ? — of the inter
nal, rather than the external. Mountains,
lakes, and rivers are, after all, only its scenery
and decorations, not its substance and essence.
A man will not necessarily be a great poet
because he lives near a great mountain. Nor,
being a poet, will he necessarily write better
poems than another, because he lives nearer
Niagara."

" But, Mr. Churchill, you do not certainly
mean to deny the influence of scenery on the
mind ? "

" No, (\nly to deny that it can create genius.
At best, it can only develop it. Switzerland
has produced no extraordinary poet; nor, as
far as I know, have the Andes, or the Him
alaya mountains, or the Mountains of the Moon
in Afrir.a ."

A Tale 117

" But, at all events," urged Mr. Hathaway,
" let us have our literature national. If it is
not national, it is nothing."

" On the contrary, it may be a great deal
Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent,
but universality is better. All that is best in
the great poets of all countries is not what is
national in them, but what is universal. Their
roots are in their native soil ; but their branch
es wave in the unpatriotic air, that speaks the
same language unto all men, and their leaves
shine with the illimitable light that pervades
all lands. Let us throw all the windows open ;
let us admit the light and air on all sides ; that
we may look towards the four corners of the
heavens, and not always in the same direction."

"But you admit nationality to be a good
thing ? "

" Yes, if not carried too far ; still, I con
fess, it rather limits one's views of truth.
I prefer what is natural. Mere nationality is
often ridiculous. Every one smiles when he
hears the Icelandic proverb, ' Iceland is the
best land the sun shines upon.' Let us be
natural, and we shall be national enough.
Besides, our literature can be strictly national
only so far as our character and modes of

1 1 8 T*Kavanagh

thought differ from those of other nations.
Now, as we are very like the English, — are,
in fact, English under a different sky, — I do
not see how our literature can be very differ
ent from theirs. Westward from hand to hand
we pass the lighted torch, but it was lighted
at the old domestic fireside of England."

" Then you think our literature is never to
be anything but an imitation of the English ? "

" Not at all. It is not an imitation, but, as
some one has said, a continuation."

" It seems to me that you take a very nar
row view of the subject." .

" On the contrary, a very broad one. No
literature is complete until the language in
which it is written is dead. We may well be
proud of our task and of our position. Let us
see if we can build in any way worthy of our
forefathers."

" But I insist upon originality."

" Yes ; but without spasms and convulsions.
Authors must not, like Chinese soldiers, ex
pect to win victories by turning somersets in
the air."

" Well, really, the prospect from your point
of view is not very brilliant. Pray, what do
you think of our national literature ? "

A Tale ug

"Simply, that a national literature is not
the growth of a day. Centuries must contrib
ute their dew and sunshine to it. Our own is
growing slowly but surely, striking its roots
downward, and its branches upward, as is
natural ; and I do not wish, for the sake of
what some people call originality, to invert
it, and try to make it grow with its roots in
the air. And as for having it so savage and
wild as you want it, I have only to say, that all
literature, as well as all art, is the result of cul
ture and intellectual refinement."

"Ah ! we do not want art and refinement ; we
want genius, — untutored, wild, original, free."

"But, if this genius is to find any expression,
it must employ art ; for art is the external ex
pression of our thoughts. Many have genius,
but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two
must go together to form the great poet,
painter, or sculptor."

" In that sense, very well."

" I was about to say also that I thought our
literature would finally not be wanting in a
kind of universality. As the blood of all na
tions is mingling with our own, so will their
thoughts and feelings finally mingle in our
literature. We shall draw from the Germans,

1 20 Kavanagh

tenderness ; from the Spaniards, passion ; from
the French, vivacity, — to mingle more and
more with our English solid sense. And this
will give us universality, so much to be desired."

" If that is your way of thinking," inter
rupted the visitor, "you will like the work I
am now engaged upon."

"What is it?"

" A great national drama, the scene of which
is laid in New Mexico. It is entitled Don Se-
rafin, or the Marquis of the Seven Churches.
The principal characters are Don Serafin, an
old Spanish hidalgo ; his daughter Deseada ;
and Fra Serapion, the Curate. The play opens
with Fra Serapion at breakfast ; on the table
a game-cock, tied by the leg, sharing his mas
ter's meal. Then follows a scene at the cock
pit, where the Marquis stakes the remnant of
his fortune — his herds and hacienda — on a
favorite cock, and loses."

"But what do you know about cock-fight
ing ? " demanded, rather than asked, the aston
ished and half-laughing schoolmaster.

" I am not very well informed on that sub
ject, and I was going to ask you if you could
not recommend some work."

"The only work I am acquainted with,"

A Tale 121

replied Mr. Churchill, "is the Reverend Mr.
Pegge's Essay on Cock-fighting among the
Ancients ; and I hardly see how you could
apply that to the Mexicans."

"Why, they are a kind of ancients, you
know. I certainly will hunt up the essay you
mention, and see what I can do with it."

"And all I know about the matter itself,"
continued Mr. Churchill, "is, that Mark An
tony was a patron of the pit, and that his
cocks were always beaten by Caesar's ; and
that, when Themistocles the Athenian gen
eral was marching against the Persians, he
halted his army to see a cock-fight, and made
a speech to his soldiery, to the effect, that
those animals fought, not for the gods of their
country, nor for the monuments of their ances
tors, nor for glory, nor for freedom, nor for
their children, but only for the sake of victory.
On his return to Athens, he established cock
fights in that capital. But how this is to help
you in Mexico I do not see, unless you intro
duce Santa Anna, and compare him to Caesar
and Themistocles."

" That is it ; I will do so. It will give his
toric interest to the play. I thank you for the
suggestion."

6

122 Kavanagh

"The subject is certainly very original ; but
it does not strike me as particularly national."

" Prospective, you see ! " said Mr. Hathaway,
with a penetrating look.

"Ah, yes ; I perceive you fish with a heavy
sinker, — down, far down in the future, —
among posterity, as it were,"

" You have seized the idea. Besides, I ob
viate your objection, by introducing an Ameri
can circus company from the United States,
which enables me to bring horses on the stage
and produce great scenic effect."

" That is a bold design. The critics will be
out upon you without fail."

" Never fear that. I know the critics root
and branch, — out and out, — have summered
them, and wintered them, — in fact, am one of
them myself. Very good fellows are the crit
ics, are they not ? "

" O, yes ; only they have such a pleasant
way of talking down upon authors."

" If they did not talk down upon them, they
would show no superiority ; and, of course,
that would never do."

" Nor is it to be wondered at, that authors
are sometimes a little irritable. I often recall
the poet in the Spanish fable, whose manu-

A Tale 123

scripts were devoured by mice, till at length
he put some corrosive sublimate into his ink,
and was never troubled again."

"Why don't you try it yourself?" said Mr.
Hathaway, rather sharply.

"O," answered Mr. Churchill," with a smile
of humility, " I and my writings are too insig
nificant. They may gnaw and welcome. I do
not like to have poison about, even for such
purposes."

" By, the way, Mr. Churchill," said the vis
itor, adroitly changing the subject, " do you
know Honeywell ? "

" No, I do not. Who is he ? "

" Honeywell the poet, I mean."

" No, I never even heard of him. There are
so many poets now-a-days ! "

" That is very strange indeed ! Why, I con
sider Honeywell one of the finest writers in
the country, — quite in the front rank of
American authors. He is a real poet, and
no mistake. Nature made him with her shirt
sleeves rolled up."

" What has he published ? "

" He has not published anything yet, except
in the newspapers. But, this autumn, he is
going to bring out a volume of poems. I could

124 Kavanagh

not help having my joke with him about it. I
told him he had better print it on cartridge-
paper."

" Why so ? "

" Why, to make it go off better ; don't you
understand ? "

" O, yes ; now that you explain it. Very
good."

" Honeywell is going to write for the Maga
zine ; he is to furnish a poem for every num
ber ; and as he succeeds equally well in the
plaintive and didactic style of Wordsworth,
and the more vehement and impassioned style
of Byron, I think we shall do very well."

"And what do you mean to call the new
Magazine ? " inquired Mr. Churchill.

" We think of calling it The Niagara."

" Why, that is the name of our fire-engine !
Why not call it the Extinguisher ? "

" That is also a good name ; but I prefer
The Niagara, as more national. And I hope,
Mr. ChurchilV, you will let us count upon you.
We shouldTme to have an article from your
pen for every number."

" Do you mean to pay your contributors ? "

" Not the first year, I am sorry to say. But
after that, if the work succeeds, we shall pay

A Tale 125

handsomely. And, of course, it will succeed,
for we mean it shall ; and we never say fail.
There is no such word in our dictionary. Be
fore the year is out, we mean to print fifty
thousand copies ; and fifty thousand copies will
give us, at least, one hundred and fifty thou
sand readers ; and, with such an audience, any
author might be satisfied."

He had touched at length the right strings
in Mr. Churchill's bosom ; and they vibrated
to the touch with pleasant harmonies. Liter
ary vanity ! — literary ambition ! The editor
perceived it ; and so cunningly did he play
upon these chords, that, before he departed,
Mr. Churchill had promised to write for him
a series of papers on Obscure Martyrs, — a
kind of tragic history of the unrecorded and
life-long sufferings of women, which hitherto
had found no historian, save now and then a
novelist.

Notwithstanding the certainty of success, —
notwithstanding the fifty thousand subscribers
and the one hundred and fifty thousand read
ers, — the Magazine never went into opera
tion. Still the dream was enough to occupy
Mr. Churchill's thoughts, and to withdraw
them entirely from his Romance for many
weeks together.

126 Kavanagk

XXI.

EVERY State, and almost every county, of
New England, has its Roaring Brook, —
a mountain streamlet, overhung by woods, im
peded by a mill, encumbered by fallen trees,
but ever racing, rushing, roaring down through
gurgling gullies, and filling the forest with its
delicious sound and freshness ; the drinking-
place of home-returning herds ; the mysteri
ous haunt of squirrels and blue-jays ; the
sylvan retreat of school-girls, who frequent
it on summer holidays, and mingle their rest
less thoughts, their overflowing fancies, their
fair imaginings, with its restless, exuberant,
and rejoicing stream.

Fairmeadow had no Roaring Brook. As
its name indicates, it was too level a land for
that. But the neighboring town of Westwood,
lying more inland, and among the hills, had
one of the fairest and fullest of all the brooks
that roar. It was the boast of the neighbor
hood. Not to have seen it, was to have seen
no brook, no waterfall, no mountain ravine.

A Tale 127

And, consequently, to behold it and admire,
was Kavanagh taken by Mr. Churchill as soon
as the summer vacation gave leisure and op
portunity. The party consisted of Mr. and
Mrs. Churchill, and Alfred, in a one-horse
chaise ; and Cecilia, Alice, and Kavanagh, in
a caryall, — the fourth seat in which was occu
pied by a large basket, containing what the
Squire of the Grove, in Don Quixote, called
his " fiambreras," — that magniloquent Cas-
tilian word for cold collation. Over warm
uplands, smelling of clover and mint ; through
cool glades, still wet with the rain of yester
day ; along the river ; across the rattling and
tilting planks of wooden bridges ; by or
chards ; by the gates of fields, with the tall
mullen growing at the bars ; by stone walls
overrun with privet and barberries ; in sun
and heat, in shadow and coolness, — forward
drove the happy party on that pleasant sum
mer morning.

At length they reached the Roaring Brook.
From a gorge in the mountains, through a
long, winding gallery of birch, and beech, and
pine, leaped the bright, brown waters of the
jubilant streamlet ; out of the woods, across
the plain, under the rude bridge of logs, into

128 Kavanagh

the woods again, — a day between two nights.
With it went a song that made the heart sing
likewise ; a song of joy, and exultation, and
freedom ; a continuous and unbroken song of
life, and pleasure, and perpetual youth. Like
the old Icelandic Scald, the streamlet seemed
to say, —

" I am possessed of songs such as neither
the spouse of a king, or any son of man, can
repeat ; one of them is called the Helper ; it
will help thee at thy need, in sickness, grief,
and all adversity."

The little party left their carriages at a farm
house by the bridge, and followed the rough
road on foot along the brook ; now close upon
it, now shut out by intervening trees. Mr.
Churchill, bearing the basket on his arm,
walked in front with his wife and Alfred.
Kavanagh came behind with Cecilia and
Alice. The music of the brook silenced all
conversation ; only occasional exclamations of
delight were uttered, — the irrepressible ap
plause of fresh and sensitive natures, in a
scene so lovely. Presently, turning off from
the road, which led directly to the mill, and
was rough with the tracks of heavy wheels,
they went down to the margin of the brook.

A Tale 129

" How indescribably beautiful this brown
water is ! " exclaimed Kavanagh. " It is like
wine, or the nectar of the gods of Olympus ;
as if the falling Hebe had poured it from her
goblet."

" More like the mead or metheglin of the
northern gods," said Mr. Churchill, " spilled
from the drinking-horns of Valhalla."

But all the ladies thought Kavanagh's com
parison the better of the two, and in fact the
best that could be made ; and Mr. Churchill
was obliged to retract and apologize for his
allusion to the celestial ale-house of Odin.

Erelong they were forced to cross the
brook, stepping from stone to stone, over the
little rapids and cascades. All crossed lightly,
easily, safely ; even " the sumpter mule," as
Mr. Churchill called himself, on account of the
pannier. Only Cecilia lingered behind, as if
afraid to cross. Cecilia, who had crossed at
that same place a hundred times before, — •
Cecilia, who had the surest foot, and the firm
est nerves, of all the village maidens, — she
now stood irresolute, seized with a sudden
tremor ; blushing, and laughing at her own
timidity, and yet unable to advance. Kavan
agh saw her embarrassment and hastened
6* i

1 30 Kavanagh

back to help her. Her hand trembled in his ;
she thanked him with a gentle look and word.
His whole soul was softened within him. His
attitude, his countenance, his voice, were alike
submissive and subdued. He was as one pen
etrated with tenderest emotions.

It is difficult to know at what moment
love begins ; it is less difficult to know that
it has begun. A thousand heralds proclaim
it to the listening air ; a thousand ministers
and messengers betray it to the eye. Tone,
act, attitude and look, — the signals upon
the countenance, — the electric telegraph of
touch ; all these betray the yielding citadel
before the word itself is uttered, which, like
the key surrendered, opens every avenue and
gate of entrance, and makes retreat impos
sible !

The day passed delightfully with all. They
sat upon the stones and the roots of trees.
Cecilia read, from a volume she had brought
with her, poems that rhymed with the run
ning water. The others listened and com
mented. Little Alfred waded in the stream,
with his bare white feet, and launched boats
over the falls. Noon had been fixed upon for
dining ; but they anticipated it by at least an

A Tale 131

hour. The great basket was opened ; endless
sandwiches were drawn forth, and a cold pas
try, as large as that of the Squire of the Grove.
During the repast, Mr. Churchill slipped into
the brook, while in the act of handing a sand
wich to his wife, which caused unbounded
mirth ; and Kavanagh sat down on a mossy
trunk, that gave way beneath him, and crum
bled into powder. This, also, was received
with great merriment.

After dinner, they ascended the brook still
farther, — indeed, quite to the mill, which was
not going. It had been stopped in the midst
of its work. The saw still held its hungry
teeth fixed in the heart of a pine. Mr.
Churchill took occasion to make known to
the company his long cherished purpose of
writing a poem called " The Song of the Saw-
Mill/' and enlarged on the beautiful associa
tions of flood and forest connected with the
theme. He delighted himself and his audience
with the fine fancies he meant to weave into
his poem, and wondered nobody had thought
of the subject before. Kavanagh said it had
been thought of before ; and cited Kerner's
little poem, so charmingly translated by Bry
ant. Mr. Churchill had not seen it. Kavan-

132 Kavanagh

agh looked into his pocket-book for it, but it
was not to be found ; still he was sure that
there was such a poem. Mr. Churchill aban
doned his design. He had spoken, — and the
treasure, just as he had touched it with his
hand, was gone forever.

The party returned home as it came, all
tired and happy, excepting little Alfred, who
was tired and cross, and sat sleepy and sag
ging on his father's knee, with his hat cocked
rather fiercely over his eyes.

A Tale 133

XXII.

THE brown autumn came. Out of doors,
it brought to the fields the prodigality
of the golden harvest, — to the forest, revela
tions of light, — and to the sky, the sharp air,
the morning mist, the red clouds at evening.
Within doors, the sense of seclusion, the still
ness of closed and curtained windows, mus
ings by the fireside, books, friends, conversa
tion, and the long, meditative evenings. To
the farmer, it brought surcease of toil, — to
the scholar, that sweet delirium of the brain
which changes toil to pleasure. It brought
the wild duck back to the reedy marshes of
the south ; it brought the wild song back to
the fervid brain of the poet. Without, the
village street was paved with gold ; the river
ran red with the reflection of the leaves.
Within, the faces of friends brightened the
gloomy walls ; the returning footsteps of the
long-absent gladdened the threshold ; and all
the sweet amenities of social life again re
sumed their interrupted reign.

1 34 Kavanagh

Kavanagh preached a sermon on the com
ing of autumn. He chose his text from
Isaiah, — " Who is this that cometh from
Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ?
this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling
in the greatness of his strength ? Wherefore
art thou red in thine apparel, and thy gar
ments like him that treadeth in the wine-
vat ? "

To Mr. Churchill, this beloved season — this
Joseph with his coat of many colors, as he was
fond of calling it — brought an unexpected
guest, the forlorn, forsaken Lucy. The sur
mises of the family were too true. She had
wandered away with the Briareus of boots.
She returned alone, in destitution and de
spair ; and often, in the grief of a broken
heart and a bewildered brain, was heard to
say,—

" O, how I wish I were a Christian ! If I
were only a Christian, I would not live any
longer ; I would kill myself ! I am too wretch,
ed!"

A few days afterwards, a gloomy-looking
man rode through the town on horseback,
stopping at every corner, and crying into
every street, with a loud and solemn voice, — *

A Tale 135

" Prepare ! prepare ! prepare to meet the
living God ! "

It was one of that fanatical sect, who be
lieved the end of the world was imminent,
and had prepared their ascension robes to be
lifted up in clouds of glory, while the worn-
out, weary world was to burn with fire be
neath them, and a new and fairer earth to be
prepared for their inheritance. The appear
ance of this forerunner of the end of the world
was followed by numerous camp-meetings, held
in the woods near the village, to whose white
tents and leafy chapels many went for conso
lation and found despair.

136 Kavanagh

XXIII.

AGAIN the two crumbly old women sat
and talked together in the little parlor of
the gloomy house under the poplars, and the
two girls sat above, holding each other by the
hand, thoughtful, and speaking only at inter
vals.

Alice was unusually sad and silent. The
mists were already gathering over her vis
ion, — those mists that were to deepen and
darken as the season advanced, until the ex
ternal world should be shrouded and finally
shut from her view. Already the landscape
began to wear a pale and sickly hue, as if the
sun were withdrawing farther and farther, and
were soon wholly to disappear, as in a north
ern winter. But to brighten this northern
winter there now arose within her a soft, au
roral light. Yes, the auroral light of love,
blushing through the whole heaven of her
thoughts. She had not breathed that word to
herself, nor did she recognize any thrill of pas
sion in the new emotion she experienced. But

A Talc 137

love it was ; and it lifted her soul into a region,
which she at once felt was native to it, — into
a subtler ether, which seemed its natural ele
ment.

This feeling, however, was not all exhilara
tion. It brought with it its own peculiar lan
guor and sadness, its fluctuations and swift
vicissitudes of excitement and depression. To
this the trivial circumstances of life contrib
uted. Kavanagh had met her in the street,
and had passed her without recognition ; and,
in the bitterness of the moment, she forgot that
she wore a thick veil, which entirely concealed
her face. At an evening party at Mr. Church
ill's, by a kind of fatality, Kavanagh had stood
very near her for a long time, but with his back
turned, conversing with Miss Hawkins, from
whose toils, he was, in fact, though vainly,
struggling to extricate himself; and, in the
irritation of supposed neglect, Alice had said
to herself, —

"This is the kind of woman which most
fascinates men ! "

But these cruel moments of pain were few
and short, while those of delight were many
and lasting. In a life so lonely, and with so
little to enliven and embellish it as hers, the

138 Kavanagh

guest in disguise was welcomed with ardor,
and entertained without fear or suspicion.
Had he been feared or suspected, he would
have been no longer dangerous. He came as
friendship, where friendship was most needed ;
he came as devotion, where her holy ministra
tions were always welcome.

Somewhat differently had the same passion
come to the heart of Cecilia ; for as the heart
is, so is love to the heart. It partakes of its
strength or weakness, its health or disease. In
Cecilia, it but heightened the keen sensation
of life. To all eyes, she became more beauti
ful, more radiant, more lovely, though they
knew not why. When she and Kavanagh
first met, it was hardly as strangers meet,
but rather as friends long separated. When
they first spoke to each other, it seemed but
as the renewal of some previous interrupted
conversation. Their souls flowed together at
once, without turbulence or agitation, like wa
ters on the same level. As they found each
other without seeking, so their intercourse
was without affectation and without embar
rassment.

Thus, while Alice, unconsciously to herself,
desired the love of Kavanagh, Cecilia, as un-

A Tale 139

consciously, assumed it as already her own.
Alice keenly felt her own unworthiness ; Ce
cilia made no comparison of merit. When
Kavanagh was present, Alice was happy, but
embarrassed; Cecilia, joyous and natural. The
former feared she might displease ; the latter
divined from the first that she already pleased.
In both, this was the intuition of the heart.

So sat the friends together, as they had done
so many times before. But now, for the first
time, each cherished a secret, which she did
not confide to the other. Daily, for many
weeks, the feathered courier had come and
gone from window to window, but this secret
had never been intrusted to his keeping. Al
most daily the friends had met and talked to
gether, but this secret had not been told.
That could not be confided to another, which
had not been confided to themselves ; that
could not be fashioned into words, which was
not yet fashioned into thoughts, but was still
floating, vague and formless, through the
mind. Nay, had it been stated in words,
each, perhaps, would have denied it. The
distinct apparition of this fair spirit, in a vis
ible form, would have startled them ; though,
while it haunted all the chambers of their

140 Kavanagk

souls as an invisible presence, it gave them
only solace and delight.

" How very feverish your hand is, dearest ! "
said Cecilia. " What is the matter ? Are you
unwell ? "

" Those are the very words my mother said
to me this morning, " replied Alice. " I feel
rather languid and tired, that is all. I could
not sleep last night ; I never can, when it
rains."

" Did it rain last night ? I did not hear
it."

" Yes ; about midnight, quite hard. I lis
tened to it for hours. I love to lie awake,
and hear the drops fall on the roof, and on
the leaves. It throws me into a delicious,
dreamy state, which I like much better than
sleep."

Cecilia looked tenderly at her pale face.
Her eyes were very bright, and on each cheek
was a crimson signal, the sight of which would
have given her mother so much anguish, that,
perhaps, it was better for her to be blind than
to see.

" When you enter the land of dreams, Alice,
you come into my peculiar realm. I am the
queen of that country, you know. But, of

A Tale 141

late, I have thought of resigning my throne.
These endless reveries are really a great waste
of time and strength."

" Do you think so ? "

" Yes ; and Mr. Kavanagh thinks so, too.
We talked about it the other evening ; and
afterwards, upon reflection, I thought he was
right."

And the friends resolved, half in jest and
half in earnest, that, from that day forth, the
gate of their day-dreams should be closed.
And closed it was, erelong ; — for one, by the
Angel of Life ; for the other, by the Angel of
Death !

142 Kavanagh

XXIV.

r I ^HE project of the new Magazine being
•*• heard of no more, and Mr. Churchill
being consequently deprived of his one hun
dred and fifty thousand readers, he laid aside
the few notes he had made for his papers on
the Obscure Martyrs, and turned his thoughts
again to the great Romance. A whole leisure
Saturday afternoon was before him, — pure
gold, without alloy. Ere beginning his task,
he stepped forth into his garden to inhale the
sunny air, and let his thoughts recede a little,
in order to leap farther. When he returned,
glowing and radiant with poetic fancies, he
found, to his unspeakable dismay, an un
known damsel sitting in his arm-chair. She
was rather gayly yet elegantly dressed, and
wore a veil, which she raised as Mr. Churchill
entered, fixing upon him the full, liquid orbs of
her large eyes.

" Mr. Churchill, I suppose ? " said she, ris
ing, and stepping forward-

A Tale 143

" The same," replied the schoolmaster, with
dignified courtesy.

" And will you permit me," she continued,
not without a certain serene self-possession,
" to introduce myself, for want of a better per
son to do it for me ? My name is Cartwright,
— Clarissa Cartwright."

This announcement did not produce that
powerful and instantaneous effect on Mr.
Churchill which the speaker seemed to an
ticipate, or at least to hope. His eye did not
brighten with any quick recognition, nor did
he suddenly exclaim, —

" What ! Are you Miss Cartwright, the
poetess, whose delightful effusions I have seen
in all the magazines ? "

On the contrary, he looked rather blank
and expectant, and only said, —

" I am very glad to see you ; pray sit down."

So that the young lady herself was obliged
to communicate the literary intelligence above
alluded to, which she did very gracefully, and
then added, —

" I have come to ask a great favor of you,
Mr. Churchill, which I hope you will not deny
me. By the advice of some friends, I have
collected my poems together," — and here she

144 Kavanagh

drew forth from a paper a large, thin manu
script, bound in crimson velvet, — " and think
of publishing them in a volume. Now, would
you do me the favor to look them over, and
give me your candid opinion, whether they are
worth publishing ? I should value your advice
so highly ! "

This simultaneous appeal to his vanity and
his gallantry from a fair young girl, standing
on the verge of that broad, dangerous ocean,
in which so many have perished, and looking
wistfully over its flashing waters to the shores
of the green Isle of Palms, — such an appeal,
from such a person, it was impossible for Mr.
Churchill to resist. He made, however, a
faint show of resistance, — a feeble grasping
after some excuse for refusal, — and then
yielded. He received from Clarissa's del
icate, trembling hand the precious volume,
and from her eyes a still more precious look
of thanks, and then said, —

"What name do you propose to give the
volume ? "

" Symphonies of the Soul, and other Poems,"
said the young lady ; " and, if you like them,
and it would not be asking too much, I should
be delighted to have you write a Preface, to

A Tale 145

introduce the work to the public. The pub
lisher says it would increase the sale very con
siderably."

" Ah, the publisher ! yes, but that is not
very complimentary to yourself," suggested
Mr. Churchill. " I can already see your Po
ems rebelling against the intrusion of my Pre
face, and rising like so many nuns in a convent
to expel the audacious foot that has dared to
invade their sacred precincts."

But it was all in vain, this pale effort at pleas
antry. Objection was useless ; and the soft
hearted schoolmaster a second time yielded
gracefully to his fate, and promised the Pre
face. The young lady took her leave with a
profusion of thanks and blushes; and the
dainty manuscript, with its delicate chirog-
raphy and crimson cover, remained in the
hands of Mr. Churchill, who gazed at it less
as a Paradise of Dainty Devices than as a deed
or mortgage of so many precious hours of his
own scanty inheritance of time.

Afterwards, when he complained a little of
this to his wife, — who, during the interview,
had peeped in at the door, and, seeing how he
was occupied, had immediately withdrawn, —
she said that nobody was to blame but him-

146 Kavanagh

self ; that he should learn to say " No ! " and
not do just as every romantic girl from the
Academy wanted him to do ; adding, as a
final aggravation and climax of reproof, that
she really believed he never would, and never
meant to, begin his Romance !

A Tale 147

XXV.

NOT long afterwards, Kavanagh and Mr.
Churchill took a stroll together across
the fields, and down green lanes, walking all
the bright, brief afternoon. From the sum
mit of the hill, beside the old windmill, they
saw the sun set ; and, opposite, the full moon
rise, dewy, large, and red. As they descend
ed, they felt the heavy dampness of the air,
like water, rising to meet them, — bathing
with coolness first their feet, then their hands,
then their faces, till they were submerged in
that sea of dew. As they skirted the wood
land on their homeward way, trampling the
golden leaves underfoot, they heard voices at
a distance, singing ; and then saw the lights
of the camp-meeting gleaming through the
trees, and, drawing nearer, distinguished a
portion of the hymn : —

" Don't you hear the Lord a-coming
To the old churchyards,
With a band of music,
With a band of music,

1 48 Kavanagh

With a band of music,
Sounding through the air ? "

These words, at once awful and ludicrous,
rose on the still twilight air from a hundred
voices, thrilling with emotion, and from as
many beating, fluttering, struggling hearts.
High above them all was heard one voice,
clear and musical as a clarion.

"I know that voice," said Mr. Churchill; "it
is Elder Evans's."

" Ah ! " exclaimed Kavanagh, — for only the
impression of awe was upon him, — " he never
acted in a deeper tragedy than this ! How
terrible it is ! Let us pass on."

They hurried away, Kavanagh trembling in
every fibre. Silently they walked, the music
fading into softest vibrations behind them.

" How strange is this fanaticism ! " at length
said Mr. Churchill, rather as a relief to his
own thoughts, than for the purpose of reviv
ing the conversation. " These people really
believe that the end of the world is close at
hand."

"And to thousands," answered Kavanagh,
"this is no fiction, — no illusion of an over
heated imagination. To-day, to-morrow, every
day, to thousands, the end of the world is close

A Tale 1 49

at hand. And why should we fear it ? We
walk here as it were in the crypts of life ; at
times, from the great cathedral above us,
we can hear the organ and the chanting of
the choir ; we see the light stream through
the open door, when some friend goes up be
fore us ; and shall we fear to mount the nar
row staircase of the grave, that leads us out of
this uncertain twilight into the serene man
sions of the life eternal ? "

They reached the wooden bridge over the
river, which the moonlight converted into a
river of light. Their footsteps sounded on the
planks ; they passed without perceiving a fe
male figure that stood in the shadow below on
the brink of the stream, watching wistfully the
steady flow of the current. It was Lucy ! Her
bonnet and shawl were lying at her feet ; and
when they had passed, she waded far out into
the shallow stream, laid herself gently down in
its deeper waves, and floated slowly away into
the moonlight, among the golden leaves that
were faded and fallen like herself, — among
the water-lilies, whose fragrant white blossoms
had been broken off and polluted long ago.
Without a struggle, without a sigh, without a
sound, she floated downward, downward, and

7*

150 Kavanagh

silently sank into the silent river. Far off,
faint, and indistinct, was heard the startling
hymn, with its wild and peculiar melody, —

" O, there will be mourning, mourning, mourning, mourn
ing, —

O, there will be mourning, at the judgment-seat of
Christ!"

Kavanagh's heart was full of sadness. He
left Mr. Churchill at his door, and proceeded
homeward. On passing his church, he could
not resist the temptation to go in. He climbed
to his chamber in the tower, lighted by the
moon. He sat for a long time gazing from
the window, and watching a distant and fee
ble candle, whose rays scarcely reached him
across the brilliant moon-lighted air. Gentler
thoughts stole over him ; an invisible presence
soothed him ; an invisible hand was laid upon
his head, and the trouble and unrest of his
spirit were changed to peace.

" Answer me, thou mysterious future ! " ex
claimed he ; " tell me, — shall these things be
according to my desires ? "

And the mysterious future, interpreted by
those desires, replied, —

" Soon thou shalt know all. It shall be well
with thee ! "

A Tale 151

XXVI.

ON the following morning, Kavanagh sat
as usual in his study in the tower. No
traces were left of the heaviness and sadness
of the preceding night. It was a bright, warm
morning ; and the window, open towards the
south, let in the genial sunshine. The odor of
decaying leaves scented the air ; far off flashed
the hazy river.

Kavanagh's heart, however, was not at rest.
At times he rose from his books, and paced
up and down his little study ; then took up
his hat as if to go out ; then laid it down
again, and again resumed his books. At
length he arose, and, leaning on the window-
sill, gazed for a long time on the scene before
him. Some thought was laboring in his bo
som, some doubt or fear, which alternated
with hope, but thwarted any fixed resolve.

Ah, how pleasantly that fair autumnal land
scape smiled upon him ! The great golden
elms that marked the line of the village street,
and under whose shadows no beggars sat ;

I -5 2 Kavanagh

the air of comfort and plenty, of neatness,
thrift, and equality, visible everywhere ; and
from far-off farms the sound of flails, beating
the triumphal march of Ceres through the
land; — these were the sights and sounds that
greeted him as he looked. Silently the yel
low leaves fell upon the graves in the church
yard ; and the dew glistened in the grass,
which was still long and green.

Presently his attention was arrested by a
dove, pursued by a little king-bird, who con
stantly endeavored to soar above it, in order
to attack it at greater advantage. The flight
of the birds, thus shooting through the air at
arrowy speed, was beautiful. When they were
opposite the tower, the dove suddenly wheeled,
and darted in at the open window, while the
pursuer held on his way with a long sweep,
and was out of sight in a moment.

At the first glance, Kavanagh recognized
the dove, which lay panting on the floor. It
was the same he had seen Cecilia buy of the
little man in gray. He took it in his hands.
Its heart was beating violently. About its
neck was a silken band ; beneath its wing a
billet, upon which was a single word, " Cecilia."
The bird, then, was on its way to Cecilia

A Tale 153

Vaughan. He hailed the omen as auspicious,
and, immediately closing the window, seated
himself at his table, and wrote a few hurried
words, which, being carefully folded and sealed,
he fastened to the band, and then hastily, as if
afraid his purpose might be changed by delay,
opened the window and set the bird at liberty.
It sailed once or twice round the tower, appa
rently uncertain and bewildered, or still in fear
of its pursuer. Then, instead of holding its
way over the fields to Cecilia Vaughan, it
darted over the roofs of the village, and
alighted at the window of Alice Archer.

Having written that morning to Cecilia
something urgent and confidential, she was
already waiting the answer ; and, not doubt
ing that the bird had brought it, she hastily
untied the silken band, and, without looking
at the superscription, opened the first note
that fell on the table. It was very brief;
only a few lines, and not a name mentioned
in it ; an impulse, an ejaculation of love ;
every line quivering with electric fire, — every
word a pulsation of the writer's heart. It was
signed " Arthur Kavanagh."

Overwhelmed by the suddenness and vio
lence of her emotions, Alice sat for a long
7*

154 Kavanagh

time motionless, holding the open letter in her
hand. Then she read it again, and then re
lapsed into her dream of joy and wonder. It
would be difficult to say which of the two
emotions was the greater, — her joy that her
prayer for love should be answered, and so an
swered, — her wonder that Kavanagh should
have selected her ! In the tumult of her sen
sations, and hardly conscious of what she was
doing, she folded the note and replaced it in
its envelope. Then, for the first time, her eye
fell on the superscription. It was " Cecilia
Vaughan." Alice fainted.

On recovering her senses, her first act was
one of heroism. She sealed the note, attached
it to the neck of the pigeon, and sent the mes
senger rejoicing on his journey. Then her
feelings had way, and she wept long and bit
terly. Then, with a desperate calmness, she
reproved her own weakness and selfishness,
and felt that she ought to rejoice in the hap
piness of her friend, and sacrifice her affection,
even her life, to her. Her heart exculpated
Kavanagh from all blame. He had not de
luded her ; she had deluded herself. She
alono was in fault ; and in deep humiliation,
with wounded pride and wounded love, and

A Tale 155

utter self-abasement, she bowed her head and
prayed for consolation and fortitude.

One consolation she already had. The se
cret was her own. She had not revealed it
even to Cecilia. Kavanagh did not suspect
it. Public curiosity, public pity, she would
not have to undergo.

She was resigned. She made the heroic
sacrifice of self, leaving her sorrow to the
great physician, Time, — the nurse of care,
the healer of all smarts, the soother and con
soler of all sorrows. And, thenceforward, she
became unto Kavanagh what the moon is to
the sun, forever following, forever separated,
forever sad !

As a traveller, about to start upon his jour
ney, resolved and yet irresolute, watches the
clouds, and notes the struggle between the
sunshine and the showers, and says, " It will
be fair ; I will go," — and again says, " Ah,
no, not yet ; the rain is not yet over," — so at
this same hour sat Cecilia Vaughan, resolved
and yet irresolute, longing to depart upon the
fair journey before her, and yet lingering on
the paternal threshold, as if she wished both to
stay and to go, seeing the sky was not without
its clouds, nor the road without its dangers.

156 Kavanagh

It was a beautiful picture, as she sat there
with sweet perplexity in her face, and above it
an immortal radiance streaming from her brow.
She was like Guercino's Sibyl, with the scroll
of fate and the uplifted pen ; and the scroll she
held contained but three words, — three words
that controlled the destiny of a man, and, by
their soft impulsion, directed forevermore the
current of his thoughts. They were, —

" Come to me ! "

The magic syllables brought Kavanagh to
her side. The full soul is silent. Only the
rising and falling tides rush murmuring
through their channels. So sat the lovers,
hand in hand ; but for a long time neither
spake, — neither had need of speech !

A Tale 157

XXVII.

IN the afternoon, Cecilia went to communi
cate the news to Alice with her own lips,
thinking it too important to be intrusted to the
wings of the carrier-pigeon. As she entered
the door, the cheerful doctor was coming out ;
but this was no unusual apparition, and ex
cited no alarm. Mrs. Archer, too, according
to custom, was sitting in the little parlor with
her decrepit old neighbor, who seemed almost
to have taken up her abode under that roof,
so many hours of every day did she pass there.

With a light, elastic step, Cecilia bounded
up to Alice's room. She found her reclining
in her large chair, flushed and excited. Sit
ting down by her side, and taking both her
hands, she said, with great emotion in the
tones of her voice, —

" Dearest Alice, I have brought you some
news that I am sure will make you well. For
my sake, you will be no longer ill when you
hear it. I am engaged to Mr. Kavanagh ! "

Alice feigned no surprise at this announce-

158 Kavanagh

ment. She returned the warm pressure of
Cecilia's hand, and, looking affectionately in
her face, said very calmly, —

" I knew it would be so. I knew that he
loved you, and that you would love him."

" How could I help it ? " said Cecilia, her
eyes beaming with dewy light ; " could any
one help loving him ? "

" No," answered Alice, throwing her arms
around Cecilia's neck, and laying her head
upon her shoulder ; " at least, no one whom
he loved. But when did this happen ? Tell
me all about it, dearest ! "

Cecilia was surprised, and perhaps a little
hurt, at the quiet, almost impassive manner
in which her friend received this great intel
ligence. She had expected exclamations of
wonder and delight, and such a glow of ex
citement as that with which she was sure
she should have hailed the announcement of
Alice's engagement. But this momentary an
noyance was soon swept away by the tide of
her own joyous sensations, as she proceeded
to recall to the recollection of her friend the
thousand little circumstances that had marked
the progress of her love and Kavanagh's ;
things which she must have noticed, which

A Tale 159

she could not have forgotten ; with questions
interspersed at intervals, such as, "Do you
recollect when ? " and " I am sure you have
not forgotten, have you ? " and dreamy little
pauses of silence, and intercalated sighs. She
related to her, also, the perilous adventure of
the carrier-pigeon ; how it had been pursued
by the cruel kingfisher ; how it had taken ref
uge in Kavanagh's tower, and had been the
bearer of his letter, as well as her own. When
she had finished, she felt her bosom wet with
the tears of Alice, who was suffering martyr
dom on that soft breast, so full of happiness.
Tears of bitterness, — tears of blood ! And
Cecilia, in the exultant temper of her soul at
the moment, thought them tears of joy, and
pressed Alice closer to her heart, and kissed
and caressed her.

" Ah, how very happy you are, Cecilia ! "
at length sighed the poor sufferer, in that
slightly querulous tone to which Cecilia was
not unaccustomed ; " how very happy you are,
and how very wretched am I ! You have all
the joy of life, I all its loneliness. How little
you will think of me now ! How little you
will need me ! I shall be nothing to you, —
you will forget me."

1 60 Kavanagh

"Never, dearest!" exclaimed Cecilia, with
much warmth and sincerity. " I shall love
you only the more. We shall both love you.
You will now have two friends instead of one."

" Yes ; but both will not be equal to the one
I lose. No, Cecilia ; let us not make to our
selves any illusions. I do not. You cannot
now be with me so much and so often as you
have been. Even if you were, your thoughts
would be elsewhere. Ah, I have lost my
friend, when most I needed her ! "

Cecilia protested ardently and earnestly, and
dilated with eagerness on her little plan of life,
in which their romantic friendship was to gain
only new strength and beauty from the more
romantic love. She was interrupted by a
knock at the street door ; on hearing which,
she paused a moment, and then said, —

" It is Arthur. He was to call for me."

Ah, what glimpses of home, and fireside,
and a whole life of happiness for Cecilia, were
revealed by that one word of love and inti
macy, " Arthur " ! and for Alice, what a sen
tence of doom ! what sorrow without a name !
what an endless struggle of love and friend
ship, of duty and inclination ! A little quiver
of the eyelids and the hands, a hasty motion

A Tale 161

to raise her head from Cecilia's shoulder, — .
these were the only outward signs of emotion.
But a terrible pang went to' her heart ; her
blood rushed eddying to her brain ; and when
Cecilia had taken leave of her with the tri
umphant look of love beaming upon her brow,
and an elevation in her whole attitude and
bearing, as if borne up by attendant angels,
she sank back into her chair, exhausted, faint
ing, fearing, longing, hoping to die.

And below sat the two old women, talking
of moths, and cheap furniture, and what was
the best remedy for rheumatism ; and from
the door went forth two happy hearts, beating
side by side with the pulse of youth and hope
and joy, and within them and around them
was a new heaven and a new earth !

Only those who have lived in a small town
can really know how great an event therein is
a new engagement. From tongue to tongue
passes the swift countersign ; from eye to eye
flashes the illumination of joy, or the bale-fire
of alarm ; the streets and houses ring with it,
as with the penetrating^ all-pervading sound
of the village bell ; the whole community feels
a thrill ,of sympathy, and seems to congratu
late itself that all the great events are by no

K

1 6 2 Kavanagk

means confined to the great towns. As Ce
cilia and Kavanagh passed arm in arm through
the village, many curious eyes watched them
from the windows, many hearts grown cold or
careless rekindled their household fires of love
from the golden altar of God, borne through
the streets by those pure and holy hands !

The intelligence of the engagement, how
ever, was received very differently by different
persons. Mrs. Wilmerdings wondered, for her
part, why anybody wanted to get married at
all. The little taxidermist said he knew it
would be so from the very first day they had
met at his aviary. Miss Hawkins lost sudden
ly much of her piety and all her patience, and
laughed rather hysterically. Mr. Hawkins said
it was impossible, but went in secret to consult
a friend, an old bachelor, on the best remedy
for love ; and the old bachelor, as one well
versed in such affairs, gravely advised him to
think of the lady as a beautiful statue !

Once more the indefatigable school-girl took
up her pen, and wrote to her foreign corre
spondent a letter that might rival the famous
epistle of Madame de Sevigne to her daughter,
announcing the engagement of Mademoiselle
Montpensier. Through the whole of the first

A Tale 163

page, she told her to guess who the lady was ;
through the whole of the second, who the gen
tleman was ; the third was devoted to what
was said about it in the village ; and on the
fourth there were two postscripts, one at the
top and the other at the bottom, the first stat
ing that they were to be married in the Spring,
and to go to Italy immediately afterwards, and
the last, that Alice Archer was dangerously ill
with a fever.

As for the Churchills, they could find no
words powerful enough to express their de
light, but gave vent to it in a banquet on
Thanksgiving-day, in which the wife had all
the trouble and the husband all the pleasure.
In order that the entertainment might be
worthy of the occasion, Mr. Churchill wrote
to the city for the best cookery-book ; and the
bookseller, executing the order in all its ampli
tude, sent him the Practical Guide to the Cu
linary Art in all its Branches, by Frascatelli,
pupil of the celebrated Careme, and Chief
Cook to Her Majesty the Queen, — a pon
derous volume, illustrated with numerous en
gravings, and furnished with bills of fare for
every month in the year, and any number of
persons. This great work was duly studied,

1 64 Kavanagh

evening after evening ; and Mr. Churchill
confessed to his wife, that, although at first
startled by the size of the book, he had really
enjoyed it very highly, and had been much
pleased to be present in imagination at so
many grand entertainments, and to sit oppo
site the Queen without having to change his
dress or the general style of his conversation.

The dinner hour, as well as the dinner itself,
was duly debated. Mr. Churchill was in favor
of the usual hour of one ; but his wife thought
it should be an hour later. Whereupon he re
marked, —

" King Henry the Eighth dined at ten
o'clock and supped at four. His queen's maids
of honor had a gallon of ale and a chine of
beef for their breakfast."

To which his wife answered, —

" I hope we shall have something a little
more refined than that."

The day on which the banquet should take
place was next discussed, and both agreed that
no day could be so appropriate as Thanksgiv
ing-day ; for, as Mrs. Churchill very truly re
marked, it was really a day of thanksgiving to
Kavanagh. She then said, —

" How very solemnly he read the Governor's

A Tale 165

Proclamation yesterday ! particularly the words
* God save the Commonwealth of Massachu
setts ! ' And what a Proclamation it was !
When he spread it out on the pulpit, it looked
like a table-cloth ! "

Mr. Churchill then asked,

" What day of the week is the first of De
cember ? Let me see, —

'At Dover dwells George Brown, Esquire,
Good Christopher Finch and Daniel Friar ! '

Thursday."

" I could have told you that," said his wife,
" by a shorter process than your old rhyme.
Thanksgiving-day always comes on Thurs
day."

These preliminaries being duly settled, the
dinner was given.

There being only six guests, and the dinner
being modelled upon one for twenty-four per
sons, Russian style in November, it was very
abundant. It began with a Colbert soup, and
ended with a Nesselrode pudding ; but as no
allusion was made in the course of the repast
to the French names of the dishes, and the
mutton, and turnips, and pancakes were all
called by their English patronymics, the din
ner appeared less magnificent in reality than

1 66 Kavanagh

in the bill of fare, and the guests did not fully
appreciate how superb a banquet they were
enjoying. The hilarity of the occasion was
not marred by any untoward accident ; though
once or twice Mr. Churchill was much annoyed,
and the company much amused, by Master Al
fred, who was allowed to be present at the
festivities, and audibly proclaimed what was
coming, long before it made its appearance.
When the dinner was over, several of the
guests remembered brilliant and appropriate
things they might have said, and wondered
they were so dull as not to think of them in
season ; and when they were all gone, Mr.
Churchill remarked to his wife that he had
enjoyed himself very much, and that he should
like to ask his friends to just such a dinner
every week !

A Tale 167

I
XXVIII.

first snow came. How beautiful it
J- was, falling so silently, all day long, all
night long, on the mountains, on the meadows,
on the roofs of the living, on the graves of the
dead ! All white save the river, that marked
its course by a winding black line across the
landscape ; and the leafless trees, that against
the leaden sky now revealed more fully the
wonderful beauty and intricacy of their branch
es !

What silence, too, came with the snow, and
what seclusion ! Every sound was muffled,
every noise changed to something soft and
musical. No more trampling hoofs, — no more
rattling wheels ! Only the chiming sleigh-
bells, beating as swift and merrily as the
hearts of children.

All day long, all night long, the snow fell
on the village and on the churchyard ; on the
happy home of Cecilia Vaughan, on the lonely
grave of Alice Archer ! Yes ; for before the
winter came she had gone to that land where

1 68 Kavanagh

winter never comes. Her long domestic trage
dy was ended. She was dead ; and with her
had died her secret sorrow and her secret love.
Kavanagh never knew what wealth of affection
for him faded from the world when she depart
ed ; Cecilia never knew what fidelity of friend
ship, what delicate regard, what gentle magna
nimity, what angelic patience, had gone with
her into the grave ; Mr. Churchill never knew,
that, while he was exploring the Past for rec
ords of obscure and unknown martyrs, in his
own village, near his own door, before his own
eyes, one of that silent sisterhood had passed
away into oblivion, unnoticed and unknown.

How often, ah, how often, between the de
sire of the heart and its fulfilment, lies only
the briefest space of time and distance, and
yet the desire remains forever unfulfilled ! It
is so near that we can touch it with the hand,
and yet so far away that the eye cannot per
ceive it. What Mr. Churchill most desired
was before him. The Romance he was long
ing to find and record had really occurred in
his neighborhood, among his own friends. It
had been set like a picture into the frame-work
of his life, enclosed within his own experience.
But he could not see it as an object apart from

A Tale 169

himself ; and as he was gazing at what was re
mote and strange and indistinct, the nearer in
cidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped
him. They were too near to be clothed by the
imagination with the golden vapors of romance ;
for the familiar seems trivial, and only the dis
tant and unknown completely fill and satisfy
the mind.

The winter did not pass without its peculiar
delights and recreations. The singing of the
great wood fires ; the blowing of the wind
over the chimney-tops, as if they were organ
pipes ; the splendor of the spotless snow ; the
purple wall built round the horizon at sunset ;
the sea-suggesting pines, with the moan of the
billows in their branches, on which the snows
were furled like sails ; the northern lights ;
the stars of steel ; the transcendent moon
light, and the lovely shadows of the leafless
trees upon the snow ; — these things did not
pass unnoticed nor unremembered. Every
one of them made its record upon the heart
of Mr. Churchill.

His twilight walks, his long Saturday after
noon rambles, had again become solitary ; for
Kavanagh was lost to him for such purposes,
and his wife was one of those women who
8

1 70 Kavanagh

never walk. Sometimes he went down to the
banks of the frozen river, and saw the farmers
crossing it with their heavy-laden sleds, and
the Fairmeadow schooner imbedded in the
ice; and thought of Lapland sledges, and
the song of Kulnasatz, and the dismantled,
ice-locked vessels of the explorers in the Arc
tic Ocean. Sometimes he went to the neigh
boring lake, and saw the skaters wheeling
round their fire, and speeding away before the
wind ; and in his imagination arose images of
the Norwegian Skate-Runners, bearing the
tidings of King Charles's death from Fred-
erickshall to Drontheim, and of the retreat
ing Swedish army, frozen to death in its
fireless tents among the mountains. And
then he would watch the cutting of the ice
with ploughs, and the horses dragging the
huge blocks to the storehouses, and contrast
them with the Grecian mules, bearing the
snows of Mount Parnassus to the markets of
Athens, in panniers, protected from the sun
by boughs of oleander and rhododendron.

The rest of his leisure hours were employed
in anything and everything save in writing his
Romance. A great deal of time was daily con
sumed in reading the newspapers, because it

A Tale 171

was necessary, he said, to keep up with the
times ; and a great deal more in writing a
Lyceum Lecture, on " What Lady Macbeth
might have been, had her energies been prop
erly directed." He also made some little pro
gress in a poetical arithmetic, founded on
Bhascara's, but relinquished it, because the
school committee thought it was not practical
enough, and more than hinted that he had
better adhere to the old system. And still
the vision of the great Romance moved before
his mind, august and glorious, a beautiful
mirage of the desert.

i? 2 Kavanagh

XXIX.

r I ^HE wedding did not take place till
•*• spring. And then Kavanagh and his
Cecilia departed on their journey to Italy and
the East, — a sacred mission, a visit like the
Apostle's to the Seven Churches, nay, to all
the Churches of Christendom ; he hoping by
some means to sow in many devout hearts
the desire and prophecy that filled his own, —
the union of all sects into one universal
Church of Christ. They intended to be ab
sent one year only ; they were gone three.
It seemed to their friends that they never
would return. But at length they came, —
the long absent, the long looked for, the long
desired, — bearing with them that delicious
perfume of travel, that genial, sunny atmos
phere, and soft, Ausonian air, which returning
travellers always bring about them.

It was night when they reached the village,
and they could not see what changes had
taken place in it during their absence. How
it had dilated and magnified itself, — how it

A Tale 173

had puffed itself up, and bedizened itself with
flaunting, ostentatious signs, — how it stood,
rotund and rubicund with brick, like a portly
man, with his back to the fire and both hands
in his pockets, warm, expansive, apoplectic,
and entertaining a very favorable opinion of
himself, — all this they did not see, for the
darkness ; but Kavanagh beheld it all, and
more, when he went forth on the following
morning.

How Cecilia's heart beat as they drove up
the avenue to the old house ! The piny odors
in the night air, the solitary light at her fa
ther's window, the familiar bark of the dog
Major at the sound of the wheels, awakened
feelings at once new and old. A sweet per
plexity of thought, a strange familiarity, a no
less pleasing strangeness ! The lifting of the
heavy brass latch, and the jarring of the heavy
brass knocker as the door closed, were echoes
from her childhood. Mr. Vaughan they found,
as usual, among his papers in the study ; — the
same bland, white-haired man, hardly a day
older than when they left him there. To Ce
cilia the whole long absence in Italy became a
dream, and vanished away. Even Kavanagh
was for the moment forgotten. She was a

1 74 Kavanagh

daughter, not a wife ; — she had not been
married, she had not been in Italy !

In the morning, Kavanagh sallied forth to
find the Fairmeadow of his memory, but found
it not. The railroad had completely trans
formed it. The simple village had become a
very precocious town. New .shops, with new
names over the doors ; new streets, with new
forms and faces in them ; the whole town
seemed to have been taken and occupied by a
besieging army of strangers. Nothing was
permanent but the workhouse, standing alone
in the pasture by the river ; and, at the end of
the street, the school-house, that other work
house, where in childhood we twist and un
twist the cordage of the brain, that, later
in life, we may not be obliged to pull to
pieces the more material cordage of old
ships.

Kavanagh soon turned in despair from the
main street into a little green lane, where
there were few houses, and where the bar
berry still nodded over the old stone wall ; —
a place he had much loved in the olden time
for its silence and seclusion. He seemed to
have entered his ancient realm of dreams
again, and was walking with his hat drawn a

A Tale 175

little over his eyes. He had not proceeded
far, when he was startled by a woman's voice,
quite sharp and loud, crying from the oppo
site side of the lane. Looking up, he beheld
a small cottage, against the wall of which
rested a ladder, and on this ladder stood the
woman from whom the voice came. Her face
was nearly concealed by a spacious gingham
sun-bonnet, and in her right hand she held
extended a large brush, with which she was
painting the front of her cottage, when inter
rupted by the approach of Kavanagh, who,
thinking she was calling to him, but not
understanding what she said, made haste to
cross over to her assistance. At this move
ment her tone became louder and more per
emptory ; and he could now understand that
her cry was rather a warning than an invita
tion.

" Go away ! " she said, flourishing her brush.
" Go away ! What are you coming down here
for, when I am on the ladder, painting my
house ? If you don't go right about your busi
ness, I will come down and "

"Why, Miss Manchester !" exclaimed Kav
anagh ; "how could I know that you would be
going up the ladder just as I came down the
lane?"

1 76 Kavanagh

"Well, I declare! If it is not Mr. Kav
anagh ! "

And she scrambled down the ladder back
wards with as much grace as the circumstances
permitted. She, too, like the rest of his friends
in the village, showed symptoms of growing
older. The passing years had drunk a por
tion of the light from her eyes, and left their
traces on her cheeks, as birds that drink at
lakes leave their footprints on the margin.
But the pleasant smile remained, and remind
ed him of the bygone days, when she used to
open for him the door of the gloomy house
under the poplars.

Many things had she to ask, and many to
tell ; and for full half an hour Kavanagh stood
leaning over the paling, while she remained
among the hollyhocks, as stately and red as
the plants themselves. At parting, she gave
him one of the flowers for his wife ; and, when
he was fairly out of sight, again climbed the
perilous ladder, and resumed her fresco paint
ing.

Through all the vicissitudes of these later
years, Sally had remained true to her princi
ples and resolution. At Mrs. Archer's death,
which occurred soon after Kavanagh's wed-

A Tale 177

ding, she had retired to this little cottage,
bought and paid for by her own savings.
Though often urged by Mr. Vaughan's man,
Silas, who breathed his soul out upon the air
of summer evenings through a keyed bugle,
she resolutely refused to marry. In vain did
he send her letters written with his own blood,
— going barefooted into the brook to be bit
ten by leeches, and then using his feet as ink
stands : she refused again and again. Was it
that in some blue chamber, or some little
warm back parlor, of her heart, the portrait of
the inconstant dentist was still hanging ?
Alas, no ! But as to some hearts it is given
in youth to blossom with the fragrant blooms
of young desire, so others are doomed by a
mysterious destiny to be checked in Spring by
chill winds, blowing over the bleak common
of the world. So had it been with her desires
and thoughts of love. Fear now predomi
nated over hope ; and to die unmarried had
become to her a fatality which she dared not
resist.

In the course of his long conversation with
Miss Manchester, Kavanagh learned many
things about the inhabitants of the town.
Mrs. Wilmerdings was still carrying on her

1 78 Kavanagh

labors in the " Dunstable and eleven -braid,
open-work and colored straws." Her hus
band had taken to the tavern, and often came
home very late, "with a brick in his hat," as
Sally expressed it. Their son and heir was
far away in the Pacific, on board a whale-ship.
Miss Amelia Hawkins remained unmarried,
though possessing a talent for matrimony
which amounted almost to genius. Her broth
er, the poet, was no more. Finding it impos
sible to follow the old bachelor's advice, and
look upon Miss Vaughan as a beautiful statue,
he made one or two attempts, but in vain, to
throw himself away on unworthy objects, and
then died. At this event, two elderly maidens
went into mourning simultaneously, each think
ing herself engaged to him ; and suddenly went
out of it again, mutually indignant with each
other, and mortified with themselves. The lit
tle taxidermist was still hopping about in his
aviary, looking more than ever like his gray
African parrot. Mrs. Archer's house was un
inhabited.

A Tale 179

XXX.

TV^AVANAGH continued his walk in the
J~ V. direction of Mr. Churchill's residence.
This, at least, was unchanged, — quite un
changed. The same white front; the same
brass knocker ; the same old wooden gate,
with its chain and ball ; the same damask
roses under the windows ; the same sunshine
without and within. The outer door and study
door were both open, as usual in the warm
weather ; and at the table sat Mr. Churchill,
writing. Over each ear was a black and inky
stump of a pen, which, like the two ravens
perched on Odin's shoulders, seemed to whis
per to him all that passed in heaven and on
earth. On this occasion, their revelations
were of the earth. He was correcting school
exercises.

The joyful welcome of Mr. Churchill, as
Kavanagh entered, and the cheerful sound of
their voices, soon brought Mrs. Churchill to
the study, — her eyes bluer than ever, her
.cheeks fairer, her form more round and full.

1 80 Kavanagh

The children came in also, — Alfred grown to
boy's estate and exalted into a jacket ; and the
baby that was, less than two years behind him,
and catching all his falling mantles, and all his
tricks and maladies.

Kavanagh found Mr. Churchill precisely
where he left him. He had not advanced
one step, — not one. The same dreams, the
same longings, the same aspirations, the same
indecision. A thousand things had been
planned, and none completed. His imagin
ation seemed still to exhaust itself in running,
before it tried to leap the ditch. While he
mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other
hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He
freely used his good ideas in conversation, and
in letters ; and they were straightway wrought
into the texture of other men's books, and so
lost to him forever. His work on Obscure
Martyrs was anticipated by Mr. Hathaway,
who, catching the idea from him, wrote and
published a series of papers on Unknown
Saints, before Mr. Churchill had fairly ar
ranged his materials. Before he had written

o

a chapter of his great Romance, another
friend and novelist had published one on
the same subject.

A Tale 181

Poor Mr. Churchill ! So far as fame and
external success were concerned, his life cer
tainly was a failure. He was, perhaps, too
deeply freighted, too much laden by the
head, to ride the waves gracefully. Every
sea broke over him, — he was half the time
under water !

All his defects and mortifications he attrib
uted to the outward circumstances of his life, .
the exigencies of his profession, the accidents
of chance. But, in reality, they lay much
deeper than this. They were within himself.
He wanted the all-controlling; all-subduing
will. He wanted the fixed purpose that
sways and bends all circumstances to its
uses, as the wind bends the reeds and rushes
beneath it.

In a few minutes, and in that broad style of
handling, in which nothing is distinctly de
fined, but everything clearly suggested, Kav-
anagh sketched to his friends his three years'
life in Italy and the East. And then, turning
to Mr. Churchill, he said, —

" And you, my friend, — what have you
been doing all this while ? You have written
to me so rarely that I have hardly kept pace
with you. But I have thought of you con-

1 82 Kavanagh

stantly. In all the old cathedrals ; in all the
lovely landscapes, among the Alps and Apen
nines ; in looking down on Duomo d'Ossola ;
at the Inn of Baveno ; at Gaeta ; at Naples ; in
old and mouldy Rome ; in older Egypt ; in the
Holy Land ; in all galleries and churches and
ruins ; in our rural retirement at Fiesoli ; —
whenever I have seen anything beautiful, I
have thought of you, and of how much you
would have enjoyed it ! "

Mr. Churchill sighed ; and then, as if, with
a touch as masterly, he would draw a picture
that should define nothing, but suggest every
thing, he said, —

" You have no children, Kavanagh ; we have
five."

" Ah, so many already ! " exclaimed Kav
anagh, " A living Pentateuch ! A beautiful
Pentapylon, or five-gated temple of Life ! A.
charming number ! "

" Yes"," answered Mr. Churchill ; " a beauti
ful number ; Juno's own ; the wedding of the
first even and first uneven numbers ; the num
ber sacred to marriage, but having no reference,
direct or indirect, to the Pythagorean novitiate
of five years of silence."

"No; it certainly is not the vocation of chil-

A Tale 183

dren to be silent/' said Kavanagh, laughing.
" That would be out of nature ; saving always
the children of the brain, which do not often
make so much noise in the world as we desire.
I hope a still larger family of these has grown
up around you during my absence."

" Quite otherwise," answered the schoolmas
ter, sadly. "My brain has been almost barren
of songs. I have only been trifling ; and I am
afraid, that, if I play any longer with Apollo,
the untoward winds will blow the discus of the
god against my forehead, and strike me dead
with it, as they did Hyacinth of old."

"And your Romance, — have you been more
successful with that ? I hope it is finished, or
nearly finished ? "

"Not yet begun," said Mr. Churchill. "The
plan and characters still remain vague and in
definite in my mind. I have not even found a
name for it."

" That you can determine after the book is
written," suggested Kavanagh. "You can
name it, for instance, as the old Heimskringla
was named, from the initial word of the first
chapter."

" Ah ! that was very well in the olden time,
and in Iceland, when there were no quarter-

1 84 Kavanagh

ly reviews. It would be called affectation
now."

" I see you still stand a little in awe of opin
ion. Never fear that. The strength of criti
cism lies only in the weakness of the thing
criticised."

" That is the truth, Kavanagh ; and I am
more afraid of deserving criticism than of re
ceiving it. I stand in awe of my own opin
ion. The secret demerits of which we alone,
perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult
to bear than those which have been publicly
censured in us, and thus in some degree
atoned for. "

" I will not say, " replied Kavanagh, " that
humility is the only road to excellence, but
I am sure that it is one road."

"Yes, humility; but not humiliation," sighed
Mr. Churchill, despondingly. " As for excel
lence, I can only desire it and dream of it ; I
cannot attain to it ; it lies too far from me ; I
cannot reach it. These very books about me
here, that once stimulated me to action, have
now become my accusers. They are my Eu-
menides, and drive me to despair."

" My friend," said Kavanagh, after a short
pause, during which he had taken note of Mr.

A Tale 185

Churchill's sadness, " that is not always exccl-
ent which lies far away from us. What is
remote and difficult of access we are apt to
overrate ; what is really best for us lies always
within our reach, though often overlooked.
To speak frankly, I am afraid this is the case
with your Romance. You are evidently grasp
ing at something which lies beyond the con
fines of your own experience, and which,
consequently, is only a play of shadows in
the realm of fancy. The figures have no vi
tality ; they are only outward shows, wanting
inward life. We can give to others only what
we have."

" And if we have nothing worth giving ? "
interrupted Mr. Churchill.

" No man is so poor as that. As well
might the mountain streamlets say they have
nothing worth giving to the sea, because they
are not rivers. Give what you have. To
some one, it may be better than you dare to
think. If you had looked nearer for the ma
terials of your Romance, and had set about it
in earnest, it would now have been finished. "

" And burned, perhaps, " interposed Mr.
Churchill ; " or sunk with the books of Simon
Magus to the bottom of the Dead Sea. "

1 86 Kavanagh

"At all events, you would have had the
pleasure of writing it. I remember one of
the old traditions of Art, from which you
may perhaps draw a moral. When Raphael
desired to paint his Holy Family, for a long
time he strove in vain to express the idea that
filled and possessed his soul. One morning,
as he walked beyond the city gates, meditat
ing the sacred theme, he beheld, sitting be
neath a vine at her cottage door, a peasant
woman, holding a boy in her arms, while
another leaned upon her knee, and gazed at
the approaching stranger. The painter found
here, in real life, what he had so long sought
for in vain in the realms of his imagination ;
and quickly, with his chalk pencil, he sketched,
upon the head of a wine-cask that stood near
them, the lovely group, which afterwards, when
brought into full perfection, became the tran
scendent Madonna della Seggiola."

"All this is true," replied Mr. Churchill,
" but it gives me no consolation. I now de
spair of writing anything excellent. I have no
time to devote to meditation and study. My
life is given to others, and to this destiny I
submit without a murmur ; for I have the sat
isfaction of having labored faithfully in my

A Tale 187

calling, and of having perhaps trained and
incited others to do what I shall never do.
Life is still precious to me for its many uses,
of which the writing of books is but one.
I do not complain, but accept this destiny,
and say, with that pleasant author, Marcus
Antoninus, 'Whatever is agreeable to thee
shall be agreeable to me, O graceful Uni
verse ! nothing shall be to me too early or
too late, which is seasonable to thee ! What
ever thy seasons bear shall be joyful fruit to
me, O Nature ! from thee are all things ;
in thee they subsist ; to thee they return.
Could one say, Thou dearly beloved city of
Cecrops ? and wilt thou not say, Thou dearly
beloved city of God ? ' '

" Amen ! " said Kavanagh. " And, to fol
low your quotation with another, ' The gale
that blows from God we must endure, toiling
but not repining. ' '

Here Mrs. Churchill, who had something of
Martha in her, as well as of Mary, and had
left the room when the conversation took a
literary turn, came back to announce that din
ner was ready, and Kavanagh, though warmly
urged to stay, took his leave, having first ob
tained from the Churchills the promise of a
visit to Cecilia during the evening:.

1 88 Kavanagh

" Nothing done ! nothing done ! " exclaimed
he, as he wended his way homeward, musing
and meditating. "And shall all these lofty
aspirations end in nothing ? Shall the arms
be thus stretched forth to encircle the uni
verse, and come back empty against a bleed
ing, aching breast ? "

And the words of the poet came into his
mind, and he thought them worthy to be writ
ten in letters of gold, and placed above every
door in every house, as a warning, a sugges
tion, an incitement : —

" Stay, stay the present instant !
Imprint the marks of wisdom on its wings !
O, let it not elude thy grasp, but like
The good old patriarch upon record,
Hold the fleet angel fast until he bl««s thee 1 "